The night outside is soft and cool, and Apolonia sheds it as soon as she steps inside the keep, overwhelmed by the bodies, the music, the warmth.
She is in a room that sparkles everywhere she looks. Blown-glass balls, overflowing with baby’s breath, hang from the ceiling and shed glittering light on the bardiglio floor. Curled ribbons woven from scarlet and gold drape staircases and marble pillars. A violin, a string quartet, wails a bright, sad song from somewhere Apolonia can’t quite see the source of the noise, and it’s that hot whine that plays and rattles in her ear as she drifts to the table of masks and picks one up.
It is a delicate thing, carved from opal, that shimmers and twists in the waning light. It might be gold, it might be silver - Apolonia thinks it might be different depending on which angle you see it from, how much you’ve had to drink. A delicate rose gold filigree lines the outside of the mask, studded in places with black feathers, and from the bottom drip a line of white diamonds that make a carpet, a curtain against her jaw and high cheekbones. She lays it against her forehead, where it covers her third eye easily, and disappears into the crowd of people.
She is slim and fits easily into the packed room, wearing her way like a silverfish through groups of dancers, poets mumbling under their breath, couples pressed up against the walls. She wonders vaguely if her father is here, and what he would think of her like this - pretending to be Decoction, pretending to belong.
12-05-2018, 02:11 PM - This post was last modified: 12-05-2018, 02:11 PM by Apolonia
the divine beasts "It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be."
The mask Veer chooses is simple only in that is it made with only two things-- ore and diamonds. It was of course both the brightest and most simply made mask on the table. He chooses it because tonight he wishes to seem gaudy and shallow, another easy mark for smugglers and crows to look at and whisper to each other, that one, he seems rich and foolish enough to steal from.
Because at night, he knows, it's so easy to want to dissolve into the shadows and rise as something too violent and feral for walls and glittering orbs full of flowers. And so he dawns the mask with a smile and is careful to walk only in the places where the light reflects from the walls like star-shine and is softer than moonlight.
Perhaps that is why he notices Apolonia right away, for the way she moves between the others, like a fish instead of a shark. Veer, of course, knows who her mother is and remembers from the hunt that she could move like a shark if she wanted too. The memory of it makes him smile still. He was young and hungry once.
Now he's only hungry.
The tides of horses part before him (mostly though it's for Najjad who walks fearlessly between the horses and snaps at their tails just because he can). Their eyes catch on him and if they whisper anything at all he's glad to hear it, gladder still to make a secret note of those who whisper dark intents. Later. Veer promises Najjad as the gryphon flicks his feathers restlessly, Later I will let you lead me to them.
“You shouldn't try to blend in so.” He whispers (like a subconscious devil) when he's close enough to lower his lips towards her ear. “You are no more a star than I am a moon.” His smile is bright and dangerous and it glows between his dark lips like a sickle moon.
We are made to be golden. That almost sinister smile seems to say as it reaches up to crease the skin around his golden eyes (that catch the glittering diamond light). Deep in that tunnel between then Najjad adds, golden things are made to burn.
At his side his feathers rustle louder than any whispered secrets in the entire room. Even the soft violin seems like a breeze underneath the sound of his wings.
She feels his presence in the room like a rabbit feels a fox. Pure lucid evil.
They have crossed paths before. At the hunt, where he circled above in the hungry halos of a vulture; sometimes in passing throughout Solterra, brushing through the markets, the inner court, never exchanging more than a glance or a greeting. He has never quite made her feel safe. Something about how tall he towers over her or the heat in the gold of his eyes.
But Apolonia is more gun than girl and she makes herself feel safe when needed.
Over the heads of the crowd she sees the dark shine of Veer’s wings and the handsome curve of his head and slips her hurlbat from her sheath as easily as she would take a step or calculate a strike. There is no effort in it. There is no pause in her stride and no faltering in the path she marks. The weapon comes out smooth as water, twirls in a gentle circle at her side in a motion she’s practiced a million times before. She pulls her shoulders in, narrower and narrower until she might very well be a ghost, and watches carefully as he comes up next to her.
When he speaks she can’t help but grin a little, a bright dead thing.
Moon you aren’t, she answers dryly, and turns her eyes up to him with a look of wan disport. The dark lashes flutter like butterfly wings. Under the white opal of the mask and the dim light sighing down from overhead her gaze is a million meters deep - might be blue, might be yellow, might be black and totally endless. Maybe a black hole?
Her expression falls again to stone, though there is something easy about it, almost relaxed. She spins the hurlbat at her side like the orbit of a little sun and it cuts through the air with the casual sound of warning.
12-21-2018, 10:02 PM - This post was last modified: 12-21-2018, 10:03 PM by Apolonia
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you?
V
eer watches her come alive and bare her metaphorical teeth at him, and something in him grows dark and almost bitter. Beneath all his glitter and gold he feels like a wolf who has just discovered that all the rabbits in the world have shriveled up and died. Najjad growls low as the strange feeling spirals between them and the rumble echoes like a storm in the hollows of his beak.
He tries to swallow it down and smile as wickedly as the world expects a god to smile.
“I'm not in the habit of gutting children.” There's something uneasy in the way he settles his feathers at his side and the way his eyes shift darkly behind his mask. It's as if he's trying to whittle down the sharpest of his edges to something only as dangerous as the dull blade of a well used guillotine. “But perhaps,” His molten gaze catches on the closeness of her shoulders and then the steady whirl of the bat her side. “you are in the habit of bashing in the skulls of men.”.
When he laughs then it falls like a taunt and echoes sharply in the hall. Around them a few eyes snag on the golden stallion covered in jewels and he smiles at those wandering gazes (of course they stare at a universe of a stallion).
Veer is not a bright dead thing. He is brightest of all the living things-- brighter than a deity and their ancient religions.
But she is a clever girl, and he smiles to see something dangerous spark behind her mask. A stone, he knows, is a deadly thing when it's wielded like a blunt, heavy blade. “Care for a drink?” Each of his teeth flash like diamonds in his smile when he flicks his tail towards the table piled with sweets and drinks that surely, by now, have been spiked.
“Or are you afraid of where a black hole might lead if you were foolish enough to fall into one?” Veer can't help but want to see how sharp the edges of all her cold stone could be.
She was not raised to be afraid of men, tall and dark and overbearing though they might be.
She watches him with heavy lids and a smile so faint it is almost phantom riding over the soot of her lips, directed mostly to the gryphon at his side - it could be said she is more interested in him than in Veer, how he sparkles in the dim light, the sharp curve of his beak. It reminds her a little of the honed edge of her own blade. Not bash, she corrects him, and tilts her head, dog-like.
An empty space follows where she could announce any sort of phrase - something to make him laugh, or a more truthful telling of how she would take him apart, not with clubs and rocks but with the discipline and exactness of a surgeon - but instead her smile widens slightly, and the glimmer in her eyes flares to a peak, and she only watches him with a little more humor.
His laugh almost matches the way mirth glitters like mica against the mottled blue-yellow of her gaze, but not quite.
A drink, O repeats. She is not quite foolish enough to expect that it could really be just a drink. You forget my age. It seems stupid, improbable, even, that a girl with all her sharp teeth and edges could still be young enough to find herself incapacitated by a drink, but the truth is that she is still a child, nevermind all the ways O fights against the ministrations of her youth.
And even if she weren’t a child, she would not be foolish enough to take a drink from the likes of him.
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you?
H
ow different they are. She makes Veer feel like he's from another Solterra, one where only violent, wild things survive. He is a feral throw-back to the time where blood was money and war was nothing more than an art form and a religion. For a moment he misses his black ink, his feathers that were nothing more than another empty hole in the night sky.
He turns from her, tucking away his disappointment. His gaze snags briefly on a stallion dressed black, walking through the center of the room as if he is a god. And suddenly this ballroom is too bright form him.
Veer wants to paint the walls in sin, he wants violence and fire and explosions. He wants chaos.
This time when he looks back at her there is pity in his gaze, something that looks broken to see the state of this world. “I had no idea the youth of the desert were so bound by rules.” The gold of his eyes flashes wicked as he remembers his youth being so very, very different than balls and glitz.
He is made of the sand, of gold and ore melted and poured into skin like masks of war. Veer's skin itches to think of it and he knows he should feel guilty. He knows he should feel remorse that day by day his home no longer feels like home but a cage. Most days he feels like a lion surrounded by sheep and wolves.
Najjad growls in agreement and a passing stranger spooks, drunk and foolish.
“Forgive me.” Nothing in his tone sounds like it's asking to repent, to be anything but the beast that he is. Still, he doesn't ask her again to be anything but a stone and a bright dead thing. “Where shall the night take a tame child then?” Already he knows where midnight will take him and where the morning will find him.
There is very little that he leaves to chance and very little that he does not plan to take. After-all there is no church in the wild but him-- no church, no god. Little by little it's only the wilds are are starting to feel like home, only chaos.
Maybe Veer really is a black hole, hollow and raw and wanting.
Someday there will be nothing left for him to consume.
@Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: I forgot how to write him and I'm so sorry
The look of pity in his eyes makes nausea roil in Apolonia’s stomach, but you could never tell from the oak-strong stance of her body, nor the cool blackness of her eyes. She is her mother’s daughter, truly - practiced in politics as much as in violent arts. The space that stretches between them is both endless and infinitesimal, so tiny she knows it would only take a breath to cross physically, and yet the effort, the vulnerability required, is insurmountable.
Not that she would want to, anyway.
Forgive me. She won’t. He knows it. And it makes her smile, just a little savagely. In the dark it could be want, or sin, or humor. Either way it is not really meant for him to consume, as much as it is for her to hold over him.
Ha! O turns away from him and angles her small, bright head toward the dancers in the center of the room. She wonders a little if her mother is here, or her father. If they’re together. What they might be wearing. She wishes she didn’t care, that it wouldn’t matter so much to her - but then, for all her savagery, Apolonia is still a young thing in every sense, and she aches to feel a normal kind of content. But you would never know from the glimmer in her eyes and the way she stacks her shoulders when she turns to look at him - Wouldn’t you like to know. It’s confidential.
She winks at him then, brash and brazen as anyone can be in the face of someone dark as death. The dancers whirl and whirl like tornadoes around the length of the ballroom, unceasingly, hauntingly pretty. Veer, continues O somberly, after a little lapse in conversation filled only partially by the lonely sounds of violins singing against stone. Has anyone ever told you you come off a little creepy? She cuts her eyes at him sideways, blinks easy, like a child who does not know, yet, how to be afraid.
02-18-2019, 12:04 AM - This post was last modified: 02-18-2019, 12:04 AM by Apolonia
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you?
H
e wonders what she would say if he dove into that sea of dancers like a shark and consumed all their innocence with a smile. If he devoured the music and reshaped it, in the black hole of him, into something sung on rib-bones on a floor lined with bloody diamonds. He wonders if she would still seems like a dead thing, and if darkness would still dance in her eyes.
The thought hits him hard and Najjad flicks a wing against a horse who has wandered too close to him again. We could you know. Most of them are too drunk to run very fast. And oh how he wants to coat himself in ink and ash and watch the world dissolve into chaos and fear in the walls of his shadow.
But then he looks back at Apolonia and remembers that while he is a monster, he is not always a monster. At least not when it suits him.
So he only tries to smile when she turns away and looks back out the dancers. He tries not to think of violence and that black stallion walking along the far wall. He tries to think of anything besides how few secrets are hidden from him in this world and how she's too young, too innocent despite the way she stacks her shoulders like a stone.
Veer is not the right sort of stallion to deal with children.
Already he's starting to pull away and Najjad is already starting to look at the crowd with a spark in his eagle eyes. “No one alive.” In the end it cannot be said that he lied to her. Nor can it be said that there was anything but dark gold in his gaze when he meets that of the girl who is pretending to be a lamb. “And to think I thought you more clever than that.” The room seems a little darker when his smile fades and his feathers sing a little sweeter than the band when they start to drag across the marble floor.
He leaves without another word and turns his lion's hunger towards other things less dead, and less innocent. As Najjad pointed out not many of them can run very fast with all the liquor running through their veins.
It's not very sporting of him, but he also has never pretended to be kind.
@Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: I really do hate him
There is only one moment in their conversation in which O starts to doubt her appraisal.
The moment when the whine of the violin swells to its loudest, trembling pitch, and she turns her head to hear him speak in that awful, deep voice, and the dim light turns all his edges to amber, and the dark gold pitch of his eyes turns so dark it almost seems black: when he says no one alive, that is when her confidence wavers, and her gaze narrows, and she longs to reach for the blade at her hip.
But the moment of fear is quicker than a blink, and O realizes, almost with a sense of humor, that words are just words. She could as easily tell him that she eats lions for breakfast. That she has not slept since the night she came crawling out onto the sand like a snake. Or that she’s never had a chance to use her weapon like she wants to. And he would never know if she were lying or not -
It soothes her. She smiles blankly.
Disinterested, suddenly, she gazes at Najjad. The phoenix stands almost as tall as she does, and even in the dark of the room seems to shine like a flame. Oh, to have a companion like that - O wonders briefly if they really are companions, or if Veer owns him like she owns her axe. She is not sure which would be worse for the poor soul to end up on Veer’s hitlist.
And to think I thought you more clever than that.
Ah, and she grins at that, a real grin for the first time, wolfish and dark as he turns from her. Any other night it might have rubbed her the wrong way - O is, after all, her mother’s daughter, and not the most cool-headed even of Solterran girls - yet she is somehow amused by his utter lack of observance, takes it more as a joke than an insult. It is uncommon for her. Perhaps even a sign of disrespect. But who’s to say?
![[Image: apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/4a1e/f/2018/265/e/7/apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png)
