One moment, he is stepping into a magic circle on the forest floor, drawn in red ink that gleams like licks of flame. The next-
He’s falling.
For Septimus, that is an unusual sensation, to say the least. It isn’t as though he doesn’t have wings, and, though he seems to spend far more time on the ground than in the air, he certainly knows how to use them. He is flipped on his back, wings trailing up at his sides, and it strikes him, as he stares up at the dull gleam of pink-orange light through the cloud cover, that it is a very beautiful sunrise, inhibited as it is by the clouds. This is followed immediately by the observation that he is falling down toward spirits-know-what at a significant enough speed to break his spine should he crash, and he should likely catch himself before that becomes a problem. (The situation is too sudden for his sense of urgency or panic to kick in.)
His wings snap out – great, birdlike things, struggling against the buffet of cold currents –, and he writhes in the air, fighting the wind to flip himself over. His hooves paw at air, but he manages to turn onto his stomach, and, though he wobbles for a moment, wholly disoriented, tangles of mane flying in his face, he manages to straighten out, blinking at the landscape. He is flying above the sea. (And, silently, he thanks the steady fastenings on his satchel; if his materials had fallen into the water, there would be no fishing them out. And he’d been clever enough to leave his glasses in his bag while travelling – one too many close calls with cracked lenses had taught him the virtue of precaution.) Below him, the water is frothing and dark, and, above him, the sky is overcast – he smells rain in the distance. To the west, he thinks that he can make out the shape of dark, rocky cliffs rising from the sea. His wings shift, and he banks towards land.
By the time Septimus lights on the edge of a great, frost-crusted prairie, his wings are aching from the strong sea winds, and, though sweat runs rivulets down his sides – tangling in his dark fur and plastering his mane to his neck, mingled with sea-foam and salt – he is shaking from the cold, teeth chattering incessantly. Wherever he’s landed, it seems like it is in their equivalent of winter. (Or perhaps this is a land where it was always cold; he’d been to a few of those before.) Well. A few quick spells, and he’ll reorient himself and be on his way, though he thinks that perhaps he’ll explore a while first. It all depends on where he’s landed. He shakes his head, and pulls his satchel off, grimacing at the damp leather; his notebooks have remained blissfully dry in spite of it all, however, and he is soon flipping through his most recent one, frowning at the spell that brought him here.
A mistake with the coordinates. Of course. Well, never matter. Where is that navigation spell he spent so long on? He dog-eared it…
(He’s dog-eared half of the pages in his notebook.)
After a moment of fruitless searching, he realizes that he is looking through the wrong notebook and replaces it with another. And there it is, just a few yellowed pages in. (Goodness, how many years ago had he written it?) He closes his eyes, focuses on his earrings, and murmurs the words – just as he always does.
Nothing happens. Septimus’s eyes snap open, gleaming bright green, and he feels a sudden jolt of ice run down his limbs, quick and rattling as a jolt of electricity. He grimaces and tries again.
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing…
And worse, he feels nothing. It is as though half of his bloodline has gone horribly silent, his fae-blood dormant and cold inside of his soul – his earrings feel dead, and he feels…
…mortal.
This revelation is processed dully, like the distant throb of a gaping wound; he immediately reassures himself that this can be righted, he needs only find the solution, and perhaps he is simply drained from that transportation spell anyways. (Though the aching silence says otherwise; his magic has always been so loud.) He stares up at the sunrise, barely visible through the clouds save for a dull hint of pastel at their furthest, palest edges. He needs to figure out where he is. And hope that the native population isn’t hostile. That should be his first order of business, shouldn’t it? But, for the moment, he is frozen in place, shell-shocked and freezing, unable to do anything more than stare at the sunrise and attempt to appreciate it. “It seems,” he observes, unable to suppress a shudder of melancholy and sudden nausea, “that I have made a miscalculation.”
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
The prairie grasses brush against her ankles. Their touch is not soft with summer, but scratchy with winter’s chill. They sway in a fierce tide, pushed and pulled by the winds that howl in off the sea. The grasses care not for the girl who stands in their midst, a rock, unmovable, even in the sea-storm brewing. Salt clings to her skin, it is bold upon her tongue. She thirsts, for more than just water to wash away the crystals upon her tongue and lips.
The wind that pushes the grasses, tugs too at her mane. It trails behind her, rippling like a banner, bright as a beacon upon the sea edge. Her skin is stone and Minya builds herself as hard as rock. About her that wild mane dances, pink as bubblegum and sharp as acid.
Her lips part and the wind steals it with a howling laugh that pulls the gems hanging from her crimson antlers. Her tail laps at her hooves like the hem of a dress. It tugs out to sea, pulling, pulling. Waves rise, reaching, clawing up the Cliffside for her. Minya watches their groping, listens to their desperate hiss and does not move. Stone, that is what she is and that is how she stands. Unmoved, except… except for the shadow in the wind.
Against the endless grey of a moody sky, the shadow weaves and dips and loops; It is a bird against the wind fighting the feline air. Minya watches the creature struggle and loom larger, larger. Soon it is no bird shadowed black, but as Pegasus with a satchel bag clinging against its breast. The cliff rises to meet it as it descends. She is moving, with trinkets clinking. Her eyes do not sway from the creature as her walk turns into a trot and then a canter and a gallop. Suddenly Minya is flying and the salty air abrades her lungs. Ah! The ache, the vibrant throb that reminds her she is alive…
She slows as he lands, as she climbs to him. He is trembling and the air tastes of sweat and sea salt. Heat curls lazily from his flesh, it dances like silver flames – it is a dance she knows. There is a memory of smoke upon her lips, within her soul. She breathes and silver smoke oozes past her lips. An ice dragon girl stands before this stranger and he is shivering with cold, with heat, with the bite of winter not yet softened by spring’s awakening touch. Yet he does not see her like she does him. Minya stands, waiting and windswept, as he studies and scribbles in a worn notepad.
I seem to have made a miscalculation For a moment the wind pauses to better hear his misfortune, it howls its laughter across the sea and its shore. But there is no smile upon Minya’s grey lips. Her eyes silver and bright as lightning, drink him in with silent regard. “Haven’t we all.” She drawls, dry and yet soft as silk. Minya was made for the hazy warmth of luxurious clubs, for the lights of the stage. She brings glamour to the rugged prairie, her hair continues a dance, caught by the winds. “You will catch your death out here.” She says as she drinks in his slick skin and wide emerald eyes. “There is a fire not far from here. Come, get warm, and you can tell me just how badly you have miscalculated.”
Like a dancer she turns, her hair reaching for him, beckoning him. Minya does not look back for the stranger, she does not wait for him to fall in step. She expects him to, or if he doesn’t, it is his loss.
He is so lost in thought that he barely notices the winter wind, or the crystals collecting like little diamonds in the dark cover of his coat and the wild, salt-strewn tangles of his hair; he barely notices the way that his breath comes out as a thick, trailing cloud of white, a clear sign of the cold. He barely notices the way that he shivers, the way that the feathers on his great wings ruffle persistently and try to cover every inch of his bare skin that they can, paltry a shield against the cold as they are. It was cold, sometimes, in the woods, and he has been to many a northern nation before, but he has rarely been so…unprepared for the cold, much less the cold when it is accompanied by the turbulent winds which border the sea and a fine sheen of salt water clinging to his fur and freezing.
Septimus is far too lost in his thoughts, his desperate calculations as he attempts to get his bearings, to notice the cold.
What he does notice, however, is the woman. There is the sound of hooves against dry, crystalline glance, which is enough to make him turn and look over his shoulder; and there she is. If he said that she was not a beautiful creature, he would have been lying. She is the portrait of delicate grace, with a slender build and a dancer’s stride, and her coat is like polished metal, which gleams in ripples when it catches the light. Her hair is tumultuously long and vibrant pink, like fresh flowers’ first bloom in early spring, and adorned with little trinkets; she has antlers, too, but not like his own. Rather than bone, they resemble red gemstones, curved up to blunt edges, where his are sharp as spears – they seem more to him like adornment than anything, particularly as they drip little clinking gems of their own.
(Then again, his are also populated with dangling green stones.)
It is her eyes, most of all, that capture his attention. They are quicksilver and hard enough to cut, and, when he stares into them, they send a chill up his spine that touches him far more deeply than the winter wind. She does not smile. “Haven’t we all.” Her voice is a smooth, succinct drawl, but it isn’t pleasant. He wouldn’t call it that at all. (Apparently, she’d overheard him – the wind loud enough to mask her arrival.) “You will catch your death out here.” Those silver eyes burn into him, intense enough to make him wonder what she hopes to find, to make him wonder if they could peel back his skin and find what is inside. It strikes him, then, that he is cold, but only because she told him; the revelation (of chattering teeth and trembling sides) is accompanied by a faint flush of embarrassment, burning white-hot in his chest. “There is a fire not far from here. Come, get warm, and you can tell me just how badly you have miscalculated.”
It is a kindness he does not expect from her, this winter-girl. When she turns, she turns without looking back, impassive and lovely as fallen snow, and she does not wait for him to follow. But he does. He is a stranger in a strange land; he is in no place to reject kindness if it is offered, no matter who might be offering it. He falls into step at her side, forcing his disorientation back into line, and allows an easy, gentle smile – even a warm one – to curl across his dark lips. Even if she won’t smile, it doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t try to return kindness with a subtle one of his own. “Thank you, Miss…?”
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
Salt clings to her lashes, making them tacky and salt-slick. They gather as if painted with the darkest mascara, though the diamonds there gleam, caught by the moonlight.
Each movement of her body is a symphony of sound. The jewels that hang from her antlers glitter like fairies and chime like musical instruments. Every step of her dancer’s limbs is the beat of a drum – an accompaniment to her voice, her heart, her symphony of dance.
If she is the grace of dance, the softness of undulating flame, he is the sharp of a finely honed blade. Her eyes trail, bright as starlight, up, up up to the sharpened tips of his pronged antlers. The reach up like weapons, set to pierce the stars, to cast the sun down from its perch. No part of Minya is carved for fighting, every inch of her is the softness of silk, the gleam of gossamer. She is the dew strung spider’s web, beautiful, beautiful, a trap, a trap.
Her eyes rest upon the gems that hang like rain soaked blades of grass. Like gathering raindrops they bead and glitter from the cradle of his antlers. Ever the magpie her silver eyes hold them, wonderingly, consideringly. But then she turns – for what does Minya need of his gems when her own antlers are a tree overladen with the fruit of glittering trinkets and jewels. Each one is a gift, each one sent to her in adoration of the Scarab girl able to dance with fire.
Her tail reaches for him as she moves ahead. Ah the wind howls, stealing away the sound of his chattering teeth, stealing away the breath that ripples in a silver plume from her glossy lips. She does not look to him, does not hold him in the silk of her spider’s web gaze. Rather she cuts a path down the mountain, stepping with grace, dancing like the stones that skip and skitter before her – heralds for the girl who deigns to descend her mountain.
Her hair is wild whips. Its tendrils rise in the wind, serpents ready to strike and like a whip the descend to crack across her cheek, her throat. In pink threads they tangle in her lashes and between their dance, beneath the wild sway of her hair, she finally glances back as his voice carries to her at last.
Her name. Her name. He asks her for her name.
Minya slows, like the moon before the sun. She waits for him to draw level, though her eyes are far from his, from the boy who fell out of the sky and is plain where she is lavish. At last she turns to him, this boy of forest brown and canopy green. She wonders where he shed his leaves – were they in the gems that hang brightly from the boughs of his reaching antlers. He is the whip of a branch, the soft of grasses and she smiles at him, the beauty of a doe, the venom of a spider.
But oh, aren’t all spiders just trying to survive?
What name to give? That of the wealthy Lord who took her in as his daughter or the mother she killed? No, no, it was not Minya who plotted and schemed, but it was she who gave them the poison to drink. Her mouth is dry, but how schooled she now is in becoming the serpent all fangs and venom and wicked-wonderful smiles. She hides the soft of her, the ache of her soul and the ravages of her heart. She conceals them and breathes and says, “Tannous. Miss Tannous.”
That fire burns a little brighter, it starts as a spark reflected within her quicksilver gaze and grows brighter, brighter. The flames laugh and spit, she can hear their voices carried upon the wind. They are close, but the wind is closer and she moves beside the sky borne stranger. She lets the warmth of their bodies meld and heat their windswept skin. “Before I let you by the fire, you should tell me your name too.”
She is a little slip of dark against the pallor of the landscape, save for the bubblegum pink of her hair and the bright silver of her eyes. If she is beautiful, and he thinks that she is, she is beautiful in a way that is strange – a collection of parts made alluring at least in part by the way that she moves. He watches her long strides, hears the sharp click of those jewels, and he wonders – perhaps she is a dancer, of sorts? An entertainer? She moves like something meant to draw the eyes.
(But he does not watch her in a way that one watches an entertainer, with eyes that capture and admire – Septimus’s stare is, as always, scientific. What can he pry from her simply by watching? It is always best to know a stranger before you follow them off into the unknown, after all, and he is too old to be a fool, caught up in some spider’s web.)
She looks at him, then away, pressing forward, and does not slow until he asks for her name. He catches up to her, and she does not meet his eyes. Her silence lasts for what feels like a long time, and he wonders, at first, if she did not hear the question – but then she looks at him, finds his eyes, and she smiles.
Septimus is not sure that it is a smile. If it is, it is a dangerous thing, even with those doe-eyes; nearly predatory, behind sweet trappings. The fire is before them, dancing metallic against her skin, and, when he smiles back, for a flash – quick enough to be a trick of the light – perhaps his lips are pulled far enough to reveal the pinpricks of his teeth. But then they are gone, quick enough to wonder if they were ever there in the first place, and his lips are closed, though still smiling. The arch of his brow, however, suggests a certain, fae mischief, a hint of his wildling blood – which will not allow him to be so easily enraptured, like a captive beast.
Tannous, she says. Miss Tannous. He wonders if it is a first name or a last name (he has no other name of his own, because that is not the way of the Wilds, but he has been to many lands where it is normal to have more than one, and he does not yet know the etiquette of this place), or perhaps an alias; he wouldn’t blame her for it. There are some places where he would not tell his name to strangers, too. (It was always a danger in the Wilds. But, of course, Septimus is not his true name, and he would not make the mistake of giving that to one of the fae anyways. Names were only dangerous if they had weight. He wonders, then, if her does.)
She asks, then, for his name – a secret for a secret. The flames continue to dance in front of them, and she moves to stand at his side, her dark-iron hide just brushing the pinions of his wing. Little embers. He could imagine her as one too, almost, were she not such a cold thing; in the way that she moves, with a grace that seems so like a flame, and in the sound of her, each clink of the jewels which adorn her slender frame nearly a crackle, like the spit of a spark. Septimus lets the heat soak his skin, then looks at her, green eyes coming to linger on the bright silver of her own; his stare is a sincere thing, somehow, unbothered by her beauty or by her coldness.
One of those pleasant, courteous smiles continues to curl comfortably at the edges of his lips, though it never stretches far enough to show his teeth. (No need to spook her – though he is not sure that she is a girl who spooks.) He dips his head. “Septimus,” he says, simply – offers it up obediently. “My name is Septimus. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Tannous.” And, so far, he means it; although she is nearly as cold as the wind, she has aided him, a perfect stranger. Not all would be so kind.
His head tilts, dark hair falling into his eyes. “Where are we? I meant to travel to Svarstell – a land of eternal ice and snow – but this place…does not seem to be it.” It is cold, but there is no snow on the ground, so this cannot be Svarstell.
Pity. He’d thought that he could help.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
His gaze is different. Minya feels the warmth of it, so apart from the looks she is accustomed to. That gaze, those green eyes, take apart each piece of her they rest upon, he inspects, surveys and not for a moment is it desiring. Not for a moment does he watch her as if she is a jewel or enchantment as if he desires anything more than to simply know how she is made. There is no soft darkness in his gaze – there is nothing of the Scarab here. Not where the wind prowls off the mountainside and laughs as it whispers through her mane and into his.
She moves beneath his stare, she feels all the ways it is different and then, when her gaze returns to his, he smiles. Ebony lips pull back and teeth gleam like a flash of prongs. Oh.. It is fast, almost unseen, but Minya has grown up with tricks and lights. Her eyes are hawk-fast and she misses nothing.
The firegirl’s gaze lingers on his mouth. They slide along the curve of his lips and there is no part of her that trips into anxiety. Not when his smile curves and his eyebrow lifts and suddenly the woods are so alive in his gaze. At once she wishes to be amidst the whispering willows, to feel, not the gaze of admirers, but the brush of a weeping willow. She would dance and the only light was that of the silver moon. She would dance in its spotlight with only her moonshadow for a companion.
“Your teeth.” She murmurs, still in that woodland he takes her to. “Are sharp.” Firelight glitters along her lashes, dancing over the crushed gems that lie as fine as dust. Wildling the fire crackle, but she does not hear what they whisper, for she does not know what a wildling is. But over and over those tongues of fire betray him. Over and over they laugh and stutter and billow up in smoke.
He moves closer to the fire and the woodland is gone. She leans in, toward him, toward the fire, desperate to see that woodland again, but she does not step closer. Remembering herself she looks away, stepping closer to the flames that reach, desperate to lick along her skin.
Septimus.
His name hangs and she might have missed it, for he is smiling again and she is waiting but never does he smile enough to show his teeth again. She takes a breath, slow, slow, slow and the smell of incense rises from her skin, caught in the air. Oh the Scarab is never far from her.
His head tilts and she watches the hair that tumbles forward to hide his eyes. “You are far from Svarstell.” Minya says shortly, her words ice that not even her fireblood can melt. “This is world is Novus, this nation Denocte. The Court of Night.”
She trails off and the flames gleam in those silver eyes. She does not lift them from his own, the flames glitter within them, they challenge, challenge. “Unless you can fly home, you might be stuck here a while…” Her forelock tangles in her eyelashes, they cling to the gloss of her lips and along her flesh the fire illuminates her bright as embers. They make their dancer warm and welcoming.
They do what she cannot.
“Your teeth,” she says again not a fire-dancer, not the Scarab’s most prized performer, not the desire of Denocte men, but simply a girl in love with intrigue and desperate for a life she once lead as a gypsy girl, wooing eclectic audiences from worlds she can never begin to imagine. “Tell me what boy it is who comes here with the teeth of a predator, the eyes of wild-woods and yet the poorest sense of direction?” Her voice is whiskey and shadow. It is gilded gold pouring from her lips like champagne. She smiles and renders that champagne poor for her smile is diamonds and magic and the darkest beauty of the earth.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
