[AW] CIRCUS CHILD ,

[Rhoswen]

A scarlet wraith was she - drifting aimlessly, without purpose nor design, and to the mouth of the ocean she had sailed upon a high northern wind. She was absent of heart; it lay dormant, a sleeping dragon hidden within the cavernous hallowed hall of her ribcage. Who was she - the volcanic daughter of a merchant, embroidered with pretty scars, owned by the past and by a spectral man shrouded in her own ash and ruin - to wake it? Once more, Rhoswen had departed Solterra and only now had she begun to feel the waves reverberating from the desert - whispers and echoes of Maxence's death kissed her heels. She could not say she was surprised - he had been ambitious, but arrogant; a dangerous concoction in a world such as this. An absentee of the court, Rhos had chosen the open road over the weight of obligation, finding solace in the silence, in the freedom. But one cannot wander forever lest they wish to lose themselves to oblivion, and the girl was not ready for such finality yet. There was something, someone, tearing her back; ripping at her wanderlust until it lay only between her hands, broken and bloodstained - obsolete. So to Novus she had returned - sweeping by the sea as she journeyed north toward the arid kingdom of her house. The salt licked at her auburn curls, whipping them into a sanguine cyclone that danced above her forehead - she was a memory of her mother, a figment of the past if you did not look close enough. Rhoswen sighed, gazing out over the endless blue until the great nothingness of the ocean was all she could feel. 

OPEN: rhos returns. she's all in her feels and shiz, open to anyone<3 

[Eik]

Eik came here to say goodbye. He is not a man of funeral pyres, especially crowded ones. No, as soon as he sees the bones, he leaves to pay his respects alone and in the places of his old gods. His gods, the ones that are no longer here. He started in the desert, naturally. Then to the great mountain, the crown of Novus. From there, through the forests to the ocean. Along the way he thinks of the fallen commander, he pushes his memories deep into sand, stone, mud, and now- the sea.

Maxence is not all he thinks about. The two men only knew each other so well, after all. On Eik's pilgrimage, he thinks of the creatures he's met in his short stay in Novus. The desert rose, the woman of steel, the boy who reminds him of the color turquoise. These are the first to come to mind, but the rest soon follow, as imagery and snippets of conversation and details. Like he is spying on his own life in bits and pieces. Sunrise, snake, eagle, twilight. Black velvet and a basket and the drip drop of molten gold. He tries to imagine where he fits in with all these deconstructed characters and finds he cannot. There is no real place, no stage large enough for his vast... vastness. Loneliness. Oddity.. We ramble and rant and secretly hope to find something left among the ashes.

And when we don't, well... we look up and see her. The desert mirage. Eik hasn't attracted her attention yet and takes this moment to look her over, to match the sight before him to his memory of that day among the dunes. He wants to leave before he is seen (he knows how sweet it can be, alone with your thoughts) but she turns her head and there is no graceful escape for him.

He sighs and comes closer. "I did not think I would see you again," he says. It made me a little sad almost rises to his lips but he swallows it down. Too childish. Feelings are so much more complicated than happy and sad, more nuanced than he has words for. I wanted to swallow the clouds is more accurate, but too... dramatic.

(We'll save that one for a lover we will, if we ever love anyone more than solitude and sifting through ashes and the stillness of a winter morning on the tundra and)

His thoughts are tangled and complicated, but it is this simple: she went her way and he went his, and now their ways meet again.

He steps forward to stand beside her on the bluff. "Is this where you've been? The sea?" She seems so at place in the desert that he has a hard time seeing her truly at peace here, amidst all this blue and green. This is his type of place, vast and lonesome.

---

@Rhoswen I couldn't resist, hope you don't mind! 

[Rhoswen]

She had felt only infinitesimal once, laid before a flood plain of uncertainty and wraith; an amalgamation of the heart's darkest desire and a virulently-known anger. And under the stretching fingers of the sun she had cauterised, ever bone and hair set alight before those crystalline-blue eyes. It mattered not - for she was tall again, risen high on statuesque limbs that loomed over the mire of insecurity beneath. For now she had cast aside the self-directed questions surrounding the strength of her loyalty for a court that had welcomed her despite her unbreakable tie to the moon, for now she simply breathed.

The wind, saturated with brine and wilderness, whipped at her tight hips, her silver-saturn pelt shimmering beneath an autumnal sunset. The beach was swathed, quite suddenly, in colour,  a beautiful watercolour featuring she; a rose, a woman alone. Wrong. Rhoswen's slender ears swivelled as the scent of a man of vague significance flushed her lungs, snatching her head east to drink in his vision. A ghost, a ghoul - an unexpected companion, once more. "Eik," she breathes, nothing more than a whisper lost to the ocean's gale. The memory of their last meeting splashed chaotically against the halls of her mind; feeling the heat of the desert and those dark hollow eyes - what kind of soul lay within those windows? His presence, here, now, is almost welcome, terminal respite from her private rumination. His words bring a barren smile to her wolven lips, dying instantly, leaving a space between them both that gapes and contorts leaving her feeling compelled to close it. She does not. 

Rhoswen tilts her head, grey eyes of smoke and tornado considered Eik with a piercing gaze, filled with the death of a fire; though her body was gold and flame and incandescence, the girl's eyes held a sad remnant of all that came after the embers had died. Woodsmoke and cascading ash. Hot still. "I do not believe you," she murmurs obscurely, "I think you knew I would return." You of all people, she might have continued. Her gaze broke away from his, sending the ashes out to sea, the beautiful vicious sea. "I have been many places, but yes, the sea, too." A silent laugh, "Don't fear, I haven't yet lost myself to the tide."

Rhos looked back, "do you condemn me for leaving?"

@Eik <333 ahghghhg yes i love them

[Eik]

In the brilliant sunset her gaze has the sharpness of a cleaver, with the slightest hint of the fires it was forged in. It makes him wonder what worlds lie in her past and future, and how his own story overlaps. The ocean breeze seems to love the way she breathes his name, for it carries the sound away from him. It does not matter. Isn't that what he said the last time they met? The first time? He is not sure how much he trusts his memories, for they seem slightly different each time he looks back, certain details standing out more and more while others slowly fade. Words and phrases change, sometimes erase themselves entirely. And the more he looks back the less he can commit the present to memory. The bittersweet conundrum of being.

Her voice seems different than what he remembers. He thinks, though, that this is not due to his pockmarked memory but because they are both different than the last time they met. But he will ponder these differences far later, in hindsight.

"I would not lie to you, Rhoswen," he protests, half teasing, but the truth of her words hit him hard. For so long he has wandered the corridors of his thoughts, assuming he knew most every twist, assuming he knew himself. But as he thinks on her words he realizes that perhaps what he had mistaken for hope was in fact a deep knowing, a knowledge so subliminal he was afraid to trust in it. Perhaps. It makes him feel like two sides of a coin, going in two directions as it is flipped in the air. Not possible in this reality, and isn't that why he always feels just a little insane?

Still, you can't tell someone it isn't possible to feel what they're feeling. What it comes down to is this: Can you both hope for something and know that it will come to pass?

Or is knowledge just hope (or dread) come to fruition?

"but maybe you're right." Even as he says this he wonders if you can really know anything, or is it all just belief, disguised as fact. Again, two sides of the same coin, going in two directions. Its been less than a minute with her and he's already questioning his beliefs, splitting himself in two. He's delighted and tormented all in one, poor soul.

(Faraway, there is a buzzing sound, coming suddenly into focus as a symphony of instruments and voices he's never heard before-- music? Nothing's ever for certain, until the levy breaks down-- but the curtain drops again)

Do you condemn me for leaving?

A bark of laughter, rare for the somber grey, bursts from his chest. And a vague feeling of... not happiness but something similar- anticipation? Anticipation follows his laughter, filling in some of the holes in his rusted chest. She makes conversation feel like dancing (at least, the way he imagines dancing should feel, if you can do it right). "Of course not," he says, incredulous that she would ask such a thing. He does not need nor particularly want to touch her, but his warm voice envelops her like a hug.

"Have you been well?" Eik knows she is far stronger and sharper than she seems at first glance, but he is concerned for her nonetheless.

---

@Rhoswen :')

[Rhoswen]

"I would not lie to you, Rhoswen."

The redhead considered this, mulling Eik's baritone syllables over and over until they felt distorted and barren on her tongue. Could anyone be trusted implicitly? We all have reasons to lie, this, ironically, was an inherent truth. Her stomach is filled with lead, her heart overflowing with carbon - what does she believe in these days; the sun? the truth? raum? 

They stand quietly, undulating and yet unyielding, still. The ocean air encases them in its indiscriminate absoluteness, holding them firm upon the sand. Two ghosts: one burning, one burnt. Rhoswen's scalding skin cools against Eik's placid presence, and she breathes easier - longer. She turns a tumultuous gaze to the man's open face, watching words tumble and melt from lips of soot; his laugh was unexpected, teeming into the salt. Her shoulders lower, eyelashes grazing against highset cheekbones carved from marble and rubies. Of course he didn't; he was a spectre, not a jury. 

"Have you been well?"

The question attaches itself to the marrow in her bones - sinking, submerging, settling. For once, Rhos doesn't quite know how to answer. But she does anyway, a sudden tightness to her voice  - "Does it matter?"  Saying yes, or no, would change nothing - irritation runs red in her bleeding veins, perhaps not so much at her companion but at the melodrama she has been entertaining for too long. She stares at Eik, her creased brow relaxing, "Well enough to return, I suppose."

A pause, "Is it true? What they are saying about Maxence?"


@Eik this is trash, sorry b

[Eik]

She comes in and out of focus as his thoughts sharpen and then fade in time with the waves of the sea. For he is always coming and going, both here and elsewhere, that endless dark place where thoughts live before words shape them, tease them into something that isn't quite right but maybe, someday, if you try hard enough you'll find the perfect words. Isn't that what keeps us all moving-? Isn't that divinity?

(When will you realize you are neither insane nor alone, and everyone has their own gold-flecked hamster wheels to walk-- yours is just a little rusty---

ah, but marvel at the bits of gold you find, and hold your breath as though they won't come round again)

Or are we just bashing our heads for the sake of semantics?

(Doesn't it feel sometimes as though you belong in the world the way it was a thousand years ago, and you got spit out here by some drunken god telling drunken jokes and eating with his mouth open?)

'Does it matter?'

Now that's the question at the heart of it all, the whole shebang. He wants to say no, but gets distracted. Every time his attention narrows in on her again, he is half-surprised she is still there, gleaming, red, gold, fire- marvelous and untouchable. She tightens and relaxes again, he could only ponder the depth of feeling that flows through her, how one moment it snaps like a whip made of flame, and the next relaxes to embers.

He wants to say no, 

that you are who you are and the path before does not concern itself with the path behind. That is what he feels- that time touches you but doesn't move you, and the past doesn't change the future. And how you've been doesn't change how you are or will be, not really. But he doubts himself, sometimes. Often. Luckily she surges forward before he can untangle an answer. It is for the best that we don't divulge our philosophies out loud, crude and unrefined as they are. We keep them in that other place for now, the place without words.

"Aye." The backcountry mannerism slips out, followed by a tired sigh. There are a lot of things he could say that he does not- there was nothing to be done/he was plucked from the sky by a giant bird/I saw his bones/how the babies screamed when they were pummeled to death. It was such a rotten and ugly thing. Of course, in his escape he has run right back to it. Oh rusty hamster wheel... bless the day we simply stop running.

He wonders if and how her return is linked to Maxence's departure. Sometimes coincidence is just the end of a very long chain reaction that started before we can remember. "Did you know him well?" He asks, sensing that nothing could be pried from her, and god help the man who tried, but perhaps she could be persuaded to give bits and pieces away, if asked in the right way.

---

@Rhoswen nonsense! <3

[Rhoswen]

Eik was so present, so laconically tangible, as unwavering as an anchor buried in the very sand beneath their feet; yet somehow, paradoxically, there was a remoteness to his gaze that rattled Rhoswen ( a girl not easily rattled by anything ). His eyes seemed to undulate with that perpetual blackness, as though entire worlds existed in the hollow of his skull, and every minute he spent here was also spent exploring those hidden spheres. A crackle of envy flared in the red girl's chest; who was to say she didn't want her own little slice of escape? Perhaps, though, it was not freedom nor galaxies he harboured in that pale head but instead a ceaseless catacomb that he could not rid himself of. The mind could be a gruesome coffin and perhaps the distance in Eik's gaze was owed to this macabre truth. 

There was a sense of oblivion surrounding this man that saturated the very air embalming them - it both calmed and intoxicated her, drawing her heartbeat closer to a heady meridian. Eik. 

"Aye. - did you know him well?"

Rhoswen stares quite coldly now, unusually emotionless. Her mind battered and bruised the thought of Maxence, a man whom she had met only a handful of times in all of her time in Solterra; she was a fleeting girl, not one to hang at the heels of her superiors. Her initial, and lasting, impression of the man had been one of faint contempt: his arrogance, his crude loftiness, and of course his derision of her brother. Reichenbach would always hold a special place in her heart - no matter the court, the title. Heat rose in her throat, cauterising the arsenic dancing on her tongue, "no."

"I had no desire to, either. He was a fool." Her father had always said it was wrong to speak ill of the dead, but Rhoswen was not afraid of ghosts. She burned, unleashing her incandescent curiosity onto him "you are no native of Novus, what made you choose Solterra over the other courts?"

@Eik <3

[Eik]

Eik leafs through his memories of Maxence carefully, and together they seem like a dream come and gone- dark water, dancing a silver dance with the moon. What was it Vadim had said? Ah yes, His choices will echo through history for generations.   There are many ways to measure a man while he's alive, but once he's gone all you're left with is memories.

So what is the point of it all anyway, if in the end we're just memories-- and even those fade. Nothing truly lasts; stories fade, culture evolves, the earth keeps turning, oblivious to the struggle and strife of those who call it home.

And yet certain things- like a beautiful woman- they matter. He tries his hardest to not be swayed by it, but time and time again he is drawn in, moth to flame. And so he can't help but hang off every word Rhoswen says. If he could he would drown himself in them, it would be a lovely way to die. She calls Maxence a fool and he unconsciously flicks an ear at her response, curious but not wanting to pry. Eik thinks they're all fools, himself included. No better than chickens, mindlessly strutting about. When she turns her attention to him he burns

my god, you're a forest fire aren't you? Why aren't I afraid?

and it takes him a moment to reply. His eyes rest on the sea as he thinks, feeling once again how the waves somehow straighten him out. He chooses his words carefully- he always does, but especially so now.  "The sun." He says finally, after some deliberation. Not Solis but the sun, the heat of the desert. "I never wanted to be cold again." Of course, now he craves snow and the old-lichen smell of the tundra and the way the cold presses to your skin like a knife. The grass is always greener, etc.

"And I was told that is where warriors go." He gives his feelings away grudgingly (because what is the point of feeling at all) so there is an odd tone in his voice, something like regret. There is perhaps a third reason, something hard to describe and so he does not try to, at least not out loud. He is not gifted with words like others he knows. We can only sum it up as magnetism, a sense of rightness if not belonging.

"To be honest, I don't understand it all. How everyone here is divided." He looks to her in earnest, hoping for an explanation that makes sense (and yet not expecting one). There is a pause, and after- "Do you worship Solis?" His gaze has mostly rested on the sea, and that faraway place, but he peers at her now in curiosity--

It pleases and intrigues him how many layers there are to every living being.

---

@Rhoswen :')