How long has it been since he has found himself in Solterra? Since his hooves have graced the sands of a land he's called home?
Leviathan feels the grains slide under him, the shift of his colossal weight as he steps into the Court at last. His gaze scans for an old run down shack on the outskirts, sand scattered across tiles and hanging cobwebs blowing in the hot breeze. The old blacksmith's shed has seen better days ( it's been too long since he's squeezed into its doors ). So now he does it again, horn catching webs and tearing the delicate strands down as he wiggles into the structure, sweeping a large feathered leg forward to brush dust and sand away.
It's been far too long.
The old champion leans his head down, brushing his nose against an ancient grinding wheel before drawing up, releasing a soft sigh. Whoever rules over Solterra now ... he'll have to talk to them. Perhaps make an arrangement to have this place back and remake the armor and weapons he had been so passionate about. But that depends on who rules; he's seen so many hierarchies rise and fall in his lifetime, so this would be yet another to add into his memory.
Snorting, Leviathan draws away from the forge, squeezing himself back out an old wooden doorframe and shaking himself from head to hoof, sending up dust and sand, as well as a few cobwebs here and there. This is still home, no matter how much it has changed, and he wonders .... oh, he wonders if Torstein is still here. So he can dig at him a little and tease the other with a smirk on his lips.
For now, he settles on stepping away from the shack and exploring the Court once more, hooves thundering on the tiles with every step he takes.
in a blink & in one motion rope constricts / rips her towards the ocean
Sabrina watches the hustle and bustle of current events and numbs herself with drink. Normally, she would avoid such chaos of the populace like the plague, but such a gathering like this increases the chances of someone who knows something. She hangs around the drunks and bargoers listening for loose lips and watches the fireworks, sees the artists making their many depictions of Adonai and thinks the Solterrans must be grateful to have another asshole to put on the banners.
That whole Solis thing was wild-- and to make it worse, she’d just missed it. The God-king, or whatever. She didn’t really think Solis was a god. In her homeland, anyone with strong enough magic could style themselves a God, and anyone who could tell half the difference would be zapped into oblivion.
If a not-god-king-wizard fells a nonbeliever in the forest, do they make a sound?
(Delph could’ve been a god.)
So she drinks her whiskey and fake stumbles out the door, pretending to be more intoxicated than she actually is (she isn’t.)
Her eyes catch some shadowy figure heading the opposite direction of all the rest, and her brain (not drunk, but… smoothed?) thinks yeah, that guy looks up to something. So she ducks her head and forces her way through the crowd, almost impaling some poor onlooker on her useless, golden horn (maybe it’s not that useless. Maybe she could use it as a knife. Or, like, to make gyro meat?)
She follows a bit back of the shifty guy, all gray and striped and the color of thunderclouds at sunset. She cuts down a side alley and when she doesn’t find him walking on the other side, doubles back-- he’s gone, but there’s an old building there, decrepit, abandoned, and the door is open. It’s been opened for the first time in a long time, Sabrina realizes, because she can see the dust and sand buildup on the floor, an outline of the door’s movement, whereas something open and shut regularly wouldn’t have near as much.
She hears Delphine’s voice in her head. It’s just a three week long junior detective’s summer camp, Beans!
Before the big guy re-emerges, Sabrina shifts around the shack, listening for his hoofbeats to fade. Then, she takes a turn, expecting to find… well, meathooks with skeletons on them, or some poor, emaciated victim chained up and dead in a corner. Instead, it just smells like dust and old metal. There’s an anvil here, she realizes, buried under a metric fuckton of dust; a bellows, a rusted old grinding wheel. Coals so old they turn to grit when you breathe on them.
It’s an old forge. A boring, old forge.
Used to disappointments by now, Sabrina doesn’t even heave a sigh-- just exits the building on the trail of the man she followed and heads back towards the places with the alcohol.
She catches up to him halfway through the return trip. “That your old forge back there?” she asks, voice low, and slightly husky from drink. “Or, like, a family thing?”
Despite his bulk and his blind eye, Leviathan has become all too aware of his surroundings over the many years of his existence, over the on and off of his immortality, forever etching him in stone and no longer allowing him to age. He comes off as simply a bulky warrior, but he has too many years notched under his belt to be so foolish to not notice when someone is following him.
It isn't as if she's being terribly sneaky, either.
His hooves beat the solid ground with steady clicks, sounds that echo heavier than those around him just due to his vast size, and his ears swivel, rotating back to catch the sound of hoofbeats running up on him. He knows Solterra is a war driven herd, but no one attacks one another out of nowhere. So he doesn't even tense up, he only puffs out the snort of a breath as he hears a voice following him, and wrinkles his nose just a little bit.
Of course he would find himself somewhat bothered. It isn't as if the shack is all that discreet; no one has touched it in ages, so it draws attention when someone has big as him slips into it ( he remembers a time where the doorway actually caught on his bulk ) and then back out.
"I don't have any family, kid. But yeah, it's mine. Or used to be." He supposes he can still call it his, once he uncovers the old Teryr bones and skull, places it as decoration once again. Deep down, Leviathan is still a warrior, born and bred to fight, but making weapons is better than pittering around with nothing else to do than get into hotheaded fights.
He feels too old for that shit most days. "And who're you?"
in a blink & in one motion rope constricts / rips her towards the ocean
It isn’t as if she was trying to be sneaky.
She had no secrets. She was just curious. So sue her for being curious.
Sometimes when you’re on a quest and you’re looking for something (or someone, in her case) and you’re kind of desperate and it seems a little bit like the world is falling down around you, you do stupid things like follow some big rock-brained dumb-dumb out of an old dusted out serial killer-esque shack and then ask for his opinion on shit you don’t really care about because you think maybe for a hot second he possesses more conversational skills than a turd hot out the end of something that’s highest mental function is don’t get eaten.
She was wrong, in this case.
Sabrina regarded him flatly, immediately regretting speaking to him at all. “First of all, I’m two years younger than you, so go easy on the ‘kid’ bit, big guy,” her voice borders on sarcastic, a fake sort of friendly. Nasally and sharp. “Second, I’m looking for someone. My family. She’s about my height, a bit shorter, with skin the color of pearls, and magenta hair, with a pink horn. Like mine.”But useful, she didn’t say. A gaudy pale gold bauble of crap smack dab in the middle of her forehead.
Maybe they both had more in common with shit than they realized.
Who are you.“I’m just looking for my sister, is all,” she said, realizing with the kind of desperate and sad twisting of her heart that looking for Delph really was a total summation of her being, nowadays.
There's a small snort from the titan, eyeing her smaller form with a lazy glance and a small smile that bares sharp, golden teeth on either side. Amusement bubbles within him, because in all his years, no one has changed a goddamn bit. The young are still feisty and still think of themselves as kings and queens of the world, as if they're the best thing on any amount of legs and they're due some sort of respect that Levi doesn't even give the actual rulers or gods.
As if they're all entitled.
A swivel of his large ears is given, his head lazily lifting, muscles and scars all pulling tight under the greys of his hair. "You magically know my age then? I'll call you kid, and not give a good goddamn what you call me, because you are a kid." His eye lacks amusement, his tone falling a little more flat as he snorts. "I'm immortal, and I've seen a lot over the hundreds of years I've been on this little plane of existence than you could ever dream of. Don't assume anything."
He's just managed to be frozen at ten years of age, sometimes aging a little older in looks when that immortality falls away. He had never expected to actually have it given back to him after losing it the second time. Deities and higher powers are fickle things, however, and he's learned to just accept things as they happen.
A massive shrug shakes his colossal body, and Leviathan turns his head away, already finding himself in the realm of not really caring. Why offer to help anyone that treats someone else like trash? He's already hard pressed to help regardless, it isn't a part of his nature. "Haven't seen anyone like that. Might as well try another part of the Court. Or another Court." Novus is a big place, after all.
in a blink & in one motion rope constricts / rips her towards the ocean
He’s got golden teeth, she realizes with disgust, stuck somewhere between rolling her eyes and vomiting all over the sandy cobblestones. The combination of feelings result in her pulling a face which probably looks a bit like a fish out of water.
The wind is hot on her neck and the sweat pooling beneath her tainted wings makes her feel damp and soggy and, overall, unpleasant. The whiskey isn’t sitting nicely in her gut and makes hurling seem all the more likely. A slow smile creeps across her face for no discernible outwardly reason-- nothing this dickhead has said would bring a grin to her lips-- but it’s because she’s secretly thinking about puking on him and how satisfying that would be. Watch him gnash his golden teeth and zap lightning out of his flea-infested ears.
She’s no queen but he’s certainly no ruler either, otherwise it would be his face being painted on all the banners. He’s no better than her, just another nobody who feels wronged by the world, like their suffering is more important than everyone else’s.
He acts like he’s entitled but he ain’t even entitled to the air she burps up.
His outrage makes her roll her eyes and puking on him seems much more satisfying. “Look, if you want to be an old fuck so bad, I won’t argue with you.”
He rattles on about immortality and that makes her laugh in his face.
Who gives a fuck about immortality?
Who wants to be on this shit earth forever?
“That sounds like the worst punishment ever derived by gods or men,” Sabrina says, feeling bad for the guy; and for the first time, her concern is genuine.
