[AW] by tomorrow we'll be lost amongst the leaves

[Seraphina]

YOU MAKE THE WORLD BY WHISPERS, SECOND BY SECOND
whether you make it to a grave or a garden of roses is not the point

Wind rustles through the pines. Though the branches are covered in needles, the sounds they make as they brush against each other – dull, rhythmic clapping – suggest that they might as well have been bare. Disregarding Ereshkigal, who is leaned over her shoulder like some pale, red-eyed shadow, there are no birds in this stretch of woods, and the thatching of needles is so thick and dark that it might as well be night. (It could be night – time passes strangely here, and she does not know how long she’s been walking besides.) There is a chill in the air that seems unnatural on a tropical island, inland though she may be, and it sends a shudder crawling up her spine. The world is a mesh of dark green and murky brown, with what little light can find its way to the forest floor so dull that it is barely light at all; she has to squint to see clearly.

When the wind halts abruptly, Seraphina is left only with the sound of her hooves against the dead, dry needles.

A distant, looming sense of danger has been building inside of her chest since the volcano erupted; it is loudest here, practically a crescendo, with only her thoughts (a black, tainted growth of grief twisted out-of-shape into a rage that does not resemble her at all, a rage that eats) and her own presence (small and uncertain, among the trees) to block it out. Some part of her can’t shake the feeling that she is in the maze again – trapped on all sides by narrow, winding paths that she didn’t know how to navigate. As she draws further into the forest, the trees grow closer together; she can barely continue walking without brushing up against them. Her movements feel stiff and awkward, here, among all these trees.

Seraphina is a desert creature. She has never felt comfortable in enclosed spaces or forests, much less those that are so lush that she cannot see the sky to navigate.

It is too cramped and too dark. Her mind reaches out for Ereshkigal, who, sensing her thoughts, shifts. “Fly up – see if we’re still going the right way.” The vulture, for once, does not argue, and, with a flap of her wings, springs out of the canopy; Seraphina lets her hooves dig into the soil and waits for her return.

Several moments pass. A gust of wind curls through the trees, and then the world is silent again. Seraphina fidgets, staring into the darkness of the woods. The trees cast long shadows, and the faded patches of light barely make any distinction to their dark forms, leaving the lines fuzzy and indistinct. “Ereshkigal?” The word is out of her mouth before she realizes it; Seraphina leans up against a tree, her gaze trained suspiciously on the distant stretches of wood. She cannot tell if the shadows are trees or something else entirely.

She tells herself to remain calm, but the foliage is too dense to use Alshamtueur for a light. She feels trapped.

No response comes from the vulture. She tries again, over their mental link. “Ereshkigal? Come back.”

“I can’t,” comes the vulture’s reply – it sounds fuzzy and distorted between her ears, and Seraphina cannot tell if she is playing with the sound of her voice again or if something far stranger is at play here. “I tried to fly back down to you, but it wasn’t the same place – I don’t see you.”

They’d been separated, Seraphina realizes, with a shudder. “Are you sure that it was the same place?”

“Yes.” Ereshkigal’s voice comes out as an irritated hiss, but it is still distractingly distorted. “I flew straight up, then back down.”

The forest had separated them. She casts an uneasy look at the line of trees in front of her, shifting her weight from one hoof to another. “Keep flying towards the center of the island,” she says, her ears flattening against her skull. “We’ll meet there.”

(She isn’t sure that she’s walking in the right direction anymore. It was north from where she started – but what direction was north in this perpetual, murky darkness?)

Still she draws forward into the woods, with every gust of wind through the branches enough to make her glance over her shoulder; she does not pull it from its sheath, but her mind holds a vicegrip around the hilt of Alshamtueur, as though the sword could do anything against the strangeness of a god’s magic. She had been the hunter, hadn’t she? A once-queen hunting a madman who took everything from her, or a raven who’d betrayed her fragile trust, or a god who she might have believed in – she had been the hunter, and the vulture her hound. But Seraphina didn’t feel much like the hunter now, prodded by branches at every side, unable to shake the feeling that she was being watched by something. In the desert, in the light of day, she was a predator. Here, she was another scared girl, sinking in dark water because she could not swim – another girl, lost in a maze, who, when she managed to crawl out, bloody and bruised and just a bit heartbroken – because she could handle rejection from most anything she didn’t believe in, but she’d never had the skin to survive those things that she did -, would wonder if she was the same creature who’d stepped into the endless tangle of green or if she’d ever really escaped it.

The shadows make her think of that bulbous ink-monster and his dripping mouth – and he could be out there, and she would not know.

She swallows her tongue and keeps walking. Seraphina is accustomed to being alone, or she is resigned to it.

She wishes that she weren’t alone now.

As she continues into the woods, deeper and deeper, darker and darker, the trees become more widely-spaced – and larger. Soon, she finds herself standing amidst trees that seem impossibly gargantuan; they are still pines, but too ancient, too oversized; it takes her two strides to clear their roots. The wind is silent again, and her steps are still crackling against the indistinct brown shapes of needles that are arger than her hooves. At least, she tells herself, as she moves uneasily through the trees, there is more space here.

But she smells blood.

Seraphina doesn’t mean to find the dead bird. In fact, she tries to avoid it; as a rule of thumb, when one smells blood in a strange place, they try to avoid the source, to avoid the thing that caused the bloodshed in the first place. However, though she attempts to walk in an entirely different direction from the source of the smell, she finds it growing stronger and stronger, and finally she finds herself staring at a massive old tree. Cradled in its roots is the body of one of the strange birds she’s seen in other places on the island, but it has been brutally dismembers; its organs, bright red, are spilled out and tangled across the roots, its wings have nearly been severed from its body, and its eyes threaten to bulge out of its skull, though she struggles to make out the details in the dull light. Uneasily, she wonders what killed it. One of the small wildcats, perhaps – she’s seen plenty of them in the woods, dark shadows among the branches…

(She hopes it was a wildcat.)

(She has seen no other living things – besides the trees – for miles.)

Taking a deep breath, Seraphina reaches for Ereshkigal again. “Where are you?”

A moment passes with no reply. Seraphina freezes – she can’t feel the movement of her mind against her own at all. “Ereshkigal?”

Again, she is met with silence.

Seraphina backs away from the dead bird, a dull hint of animalistic panic igniting in her chest; perhaps the vulture is just ignoring her, or pretending like something is wrong. That must be it. Nothing hurts. Ereshkigal can’t be dead - she’d feel it.

Instead, it feels like – nothing. Like she is alone in her head again.

She glances out into the darkness again, then down at the dead bird, and stares out into the dark, unable to discern where she came from. Her mind grasps at Alshamtueur, and she knows that she should use the sword to light her way, now that there is space for it, but instead-

She wonders if that won’t just draw more attention.

---

@ || the first open with sera in,,, a while. a tense little post? || grendel john gardner

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Pravda]

PRAVDA
perhaps we're not afraid of death,
but our names plucked from the air.

The dark, gnarled innards of the forest were terrifying. Terrifying in a primordial, haunting way which which Pravda was intimately familiar. In a strange way, the fear brought him an accompanying peace. Pravda could accept, in the oppressive darkness, his own mortality. Pravda could accept his vulnerability. There were creatures out there that he knew nothing of, and the aching heartbeat of the island felt like a dull thrum beneath his hooves. It begged his curiosity. But… perhaps that was illy thought. It did not beg. It demanded; and in comparison, Pravda’s will was weak.

Pravda could not help, but wander. He felt at any moment he might stumble across Prigovora, as though it were his creatures will that had produced the magic of the island. Of course, Pravda did not. It did not matter, however. It continued to search—for what, he did not know—with an aching in his heart that felt like tears at the precipice, just waiting to spill.

In his mind, there was a beach. It was a long beach, a white beach, draped erratically by the large palms of tropical trees. He could almost smell it… and the water, deep cyan, glimmered and throbbed. There was a horse running, alone. She was the gold of the sun.

Before him now, all gold was gone. The forest only deepened as he progressed, ducking his head under branches, shouldering through brambles. Jewel-bright birds followed him, eerily quiet, and he cast his own jewel-bright eyes upon them now and again.  They would scatter, then, and ascend to the reaches of the forest he could not ascend. Pravda’s body betrayed his fear in a way his mind did not. His limbs trembled now and again; each sharp snap in the near distance caused him to tense, and swivel his ears. Each time he reacted so, Pravda mentally chastised himself against his fears. This is the very thing the Priests taught you, he would remind himself. You were told, so long ago, that nature is the very essence of true justice…

As if in agreement, the forest began to smell of blood. Perhaps it had smelled that way all along, and Pravda had merely been distracted. The metallic odour was now strong in his flaring nostrils. The whites of his eyes showed and the stallion’s heart began to beat frantically in his chest. For no reason, Pravda thought in exasperation.

Unbeknownst to him, another equine sought to escape the scent. Unbeknownst to him, the fear he felt was reflected in another. But Pravda refused to allow his body’s instinctual responses to get the best of him; no. Begrudgingly, forcefully, he began to push toward the cloying odour of death. How many times, long ago, had he smelled the same thing? The deeper he trekked, the more malevolent the forest became. Pravda thought it was Prigovora’s soul, manifested. It was the primordial, the ecstatic dawn of life, that gaped at him through the heavy darkness. His body struggled to breath. But his mind soured with the familiarity, the intriguing pull of terror and… and, did he feel guilt?

If sin were a colour, were a shape, it would be twisting trees. Malicious, shaped like clawed hands, twitching in the stagnant air. It would be the dusky darkness that manifested beneath their boughs, as though no sky existed, anywhere, and this time was the only time in history. There was no before, no after, and if Pravda were to ever write of a World it would be the one he existed ephemerally in that very moment. It would be a world risen up from a cracked sea, with jewel-birds and gleaming, metallic wildcats. It would be a forest that yawned, and gaped, and threatened to devour him whole—

The intimacy he experienced, the sheer weight of pure solitude, broke abruptly. The scent of blood had become strong now, stronger than it had been before—and he shouldered through a low-hanging bough. Pravda saw her then, Fia the Crownless, the Outcasted Queen. He did not know who he saw, only that they were brought together by the forest’s call, by the smell of blood, by the magics or the fates of the World he inhabited.

Pravda had never been one to challenge such things. He cleared his throat, quietly, drawing her attention. Then he stepped forward, nondescript, ordinary. “You look like you could use a companion,” his voice cracked the silence. His smile offered warmth against the chilling apathy of the island’s heart.

And his eyes were drawn toward the mangled corpse, and in his mind he saw—

A creature in the sand. A creature with gleaming-black scales, feasting upon the corpse of a horse. She was gold.

His heart still beat quickly. He asked, aloud, “Have you been here long? I’m Pravda." 

@Pravda "speaks"

rallidae

@Seraphina I loved the creepy post ;__;

[Caine]

i'm the one who strived for nothing, i'm the one who stood in rain

A chorus of birdsong exploded from somewhere below the forest’s canopy. Rum on the island! Ram on the island! They continued like this, a mournful pause between syllables, an alternating verb each round, for seven rounds. 

Caine stilled. A moss-covered branch caught at a spill of gauzy black fabric draped across his withers, but the fabric was too slippery to be snared. The branch snapped sadly away with a soft woosh, like the fluttering of moth wings.

Seven. A memory sparked in his mind at the number, and the chanting of the birds fanned the flames. 

One for sorrow. Two for joy. The crinkling of rotting parchment as memory-Caine rolled line by line of the rhyme out into the lamplight. A magpie sitting in the tree outside his window.

Five for silver. Six for gold. Sweat beading down his back from an unusually hot July.

Seven for a secret, never to be told. He smiled ruefully. So that’s what it was. After all his anticipation at unearthing an ancient scroll from the depths of the Garde’s library, it had turned out to be little more than a nursery rhyme. A few lines of clever alliteration sang to children before bed.

He hadn’t thought he still remembered. 

Caine’s ears swivelled drowsily about his head. Beads of humidity pooled down the slope of his shoulders and traced silver streaks down his ribs. It was hot, but pleasantly so. Not like the hungry heat of the desert, which demanded every drop of water until all that was left of the weary traveller was skin and marrowless bones.

This heat demanded nothing but to be felt. 

His thoughts ran in quiet circles, content to weave through the forest of trailing vines and whispering streams until, with a reluctant sigh, he called them home. Exploration was all fine and well -- it was what he had come for, and had found in surprising abundance -- but a pair of three-lidded birds and a night-black panther was warning enough. The island reminded him, in every step and every breath, that he was far from the most dangerous thing it held in its palm.

He supposed the birds had been trying to say “Raum.” And like water through a mill, once this conclusion was drawn with pragmatic acceptance, his thoughts tumbled easily on to the next point of consideration. Because strange as the birds were, Caine knew they were little more than mimics. They must have picked up the king’s name from snatches of conversation, thrown around by worried Denoctians or Solterrans or  -- Novusians -- dearly afraid that a cobra had slithered in under the bedsheets.

This amused him, if anything. To Caine, Raum had just as much reason to be on the island as anyone, which was to say: no reason at all. 

So, yes, it was likely the king was here. 

The possibility of the blood king (his blood king, he reminded himself with a rare, indulgent grimace) being on the same volcanic landform as him did not trouble Caine as much as it should have. He had left the consequences of his actions behind when he’d stepped from bone-white beach to shadow-touched forest, and he would take the flock of king-calling birds as a welcome reprieve from reality. Even if it meant he was only delaying the inevitable.

He looked up. Rain dripped rhythmically down from the canopy, and if he narrowed his eyes through the drizzle he could just make out the curl of a monkey’s tail as it sheltered under the leaves of two slippery, lichen covered trees. He looked up, further.

Three hulking shadows watched him from one drooping branch. The flock of mimics had really been only three. Exhaling, Caine counted five lidless eyes where there should have been six, decided he would rather not find out what had taken that sixth eye, and promptly forged a path in the other direction.

What is it, he thought, as he cut through the dense underbrush, with birds and this damn island? 

---
If it was meant to be symbolic, then it was a bit much.

Caine held his breath as he bent over the disemboweled creature left messily at the foot of the tree trunk -- he was familiar with fresh death, not rotting death -- and nearly cursed when he discovered that the poor animal, which he’d thought an abnormally large squirrel, was instead the same species of blacker-than-a-raven bird he had encountered on the beach. 

He looked at its nearly severed wings and winced. Under the dull light, it looked like a miniature version of his own --

“Ereshkigal?”

He stilled, and for a fragile moment did nothing except watch his breath stream out in condensing fogs of white. If he’d had the wits for it, he would have laughed. Because of course, of course -- if Raum had no reason to be here, than neither did Fia.

The forest was stitched out of shadows. So it was as easy as stepping behind a tree, closing his eyes, and bidding for them to come. 

But the cloak could not smother sound, so Caine bit down on his tongue as he willed for his heartbeat to slow. The clearing was too silent. Could she hear it? The thud thud thud of his frantic heart. Too late, he remembered her demon. 

She would hear. Demons always heard. But, he told himself, she had been calling her name. The demon is probably not here.

And yet, before he had time to scrounge for a more reassuring thought, someone else was. 

Caine stiffened when he heard the snapping of twigs and dead leaves, only to slacken again when he remembered. Demons -- or whatever unnatural specimen of beast this island housed -- would not have had the courtesy to make a sound. 

“You look like you could use a companion.” 

The intruder was not a demon nor a beast. But the relief did not come. Caine did not move, even when the stallion’s sudden appearance had given him the perfect chance to escape. Instead, a rush of irritation coursed through his veins and pooled at the corner of his slow-forming sneer. 

“Have you been here long? I’m Pravda." 

He realized that he’d had quite enough of escaping. 

Hadn’t he left the consequences of his actions behind when he’d stepped from bone-white beach to shadow-touched forest? 

“Excuse me for the intrusion.” He had scattered the shadows with a jerk of his head before stepping out, yet still he did not emerge unarmored. And the armor he had chosen, with careful consideration, was contempt worn in the trappings of a smile. 

“Three’s a crowd in most situations, but when death lingers so close,” he skimmed his gaze lightly over the carcass, before raising it to rest on Fia. “It makes you appreciate the company.”

Perhaps the island would allow him to escape his consequences. But what the island would not allow, was for him to discard his own identity. Don’t you dare, it crooned in his ear, like a mother crooned to her child, forget what you are.

And what he was, was a traitor.

@Seraphina @Pravda | "speaks" | notes: forgive me this was SO long ;__; but the excitement is real!!

rallidae

[Seraphina]

O & IN THESE DREAMS I'M RUTHLESS
what if i told you i've imagined everyone i've ever loved dying. i've imagined all the ways to leave a hole in the world. i can tell you which parts of me would wither. in my dreams there are so many corpses. & i am still there. shouting.

The dead bird lies in front of her hooves, and, though she wants to look away, she can’t seem to drag her gaze away from the mutilated corpse. What could have done such a thing? It isn’t the work of a common predator; the bird hasn’t been eaten, in whole or in part. Instead, the poor creature (unnatural as it was, and unnerving) seems to have been tortured. The wings are almost severed, but not entirely; the legs are broken, but they are not torn off; and the sheer number of wounds suggests that whatever had killed it had not wanted to make the process clean or quick, like any good predator. Teryrs, sandwyrms, jackals, snakes – they all bit in the most vulnerable places, and then they devoured the corpse. Whatever had killed the bird wanted the creature to suffer before it died, and it hadn’t killed it for a reason…

She swallows down a shudder, the copper-scent of blood gnawing at her lungs. She takes a step back, and-

“You look like you could use a companion.”

Ashamed as she’d be to admit it, the appearance of the boy nearly makes Seraphina jump – but only nearly. Instead, she whips to face him, her mind twisting around the arrow buried beneath her golden scarf, but, as her eyes come to a rest on his own (large, as blue and gold as her own, and young in a way that is not young at all – strange) and find them warm, her grip around the arrow relaxes. A companion. He’s young, perhaps three, and smiling in a manner that is too warm for a place like this; nevertheless, there is a rigidity to his posture that suggests that he is as uncomfortable in the dark forest as she is. His coat is a patchwork of black and white, though, like her hair, the brightest portions are reduced to a dull grey in the darkness. She can hardly give him as scientific a look as she’d like, but he is built like an athlete – not a soldier, because he is unscarred, but an athlete, for his muscular, unforgiving physique. He would make a fine Solterran, she thinks, but she’s glad that he isn’t one. The last thing that she could stand to see in this forest, on this damned island, was another starving child.

(He isn’t a child. She must have been around his age, when she took the throne. But she was still a girl then, wasn’t she? A girl, but old enough to be accountable – for all of the blood…)

She shakes her thoughts aside. They’ll do her no good, now; at least she has some company, in Ereshkigal’s absence. “Two sets of eyes are better than one, in a place like this,” she says lightly, with a ghost of a friendly smile, “so I’d certainly appreciate the company.”

“Have you been here long? I’m Pravda." There is something in his voice that suggests he is speaking to fill the silence. She is grateful for it; the quiet was stifling, and she’d rather think about something other than the trees and the shadows, the way they seemed to flow and curve inward, like a snake, slowly constricting her...

“Not long,” Seraphina admits, returning her gaze to the bloodied corpse of the bird; her lips curve distastefully. “Not long enough to see what did this, at any rate.” She looks back up at him, forcing her stare away from the little dead creature, the splatter of blood on the roots. “Pravda.” She repeats his name, rolls it around on her tongue – it’s foreign, and she isn’t sure that she’s pronouncing it correctly. (Either way, her thick accent changes the sound.) “A pleasure to meet you. I’m F-“

And then a shadow emerges from the woods.

She knows him before she knows that he is there; she has seen him in her nightmares, midnight and void given form, with those moon-silver eyes-

“Excuse me for the intrusion.”

Almost instantaneously, she turns, putting herself between the youth and the shadowed assassin, with a curt murmur of “Stay behind me.” Her jewel-bright eyes are like little pyres, burning with a flame that hadn’t existed a moment before. Dark lips curl up, and her mouth is all snarling teeth, brute violence against that contemptuous smirk – if she had the time, or her mind would have allowed it, she might have cursed herself for never seeing it before. He might notice that she is gaunter than she was when they met, that her eyes are dark-rimmed and red from sleeplessness - he might notice the way that she is uncontained, with all of her careful composure lost to shuddering rage. If he does, she doesn’t care. All she cares about is that the boy is behind her, and that he will have to go through her to get to him; all she cares about is her teeth around his throat, a threat she’d make good on-

“Three’s a crowd in most situations, but when death lingers so close…” He has the nerve to look at her, those cold, cold silver eyes coming to a rest on the sharp embers of her own.

Her fury is a rampant, white thing, building up behind her eyes; it is bright enough to be blinding, and she can barely see through it, much less think.

“It makes you appreciate the company.” She hates his voice, the unbearably smug curl of his lips; she hates his eyes, and she hates to think that she thought they were beautiful, once. She hates him, and she’s not sure where the personal, raw hatred of betrayal ends and where her vehement loathing for his employer begins-

Her magic flares.

It is no smoothly-flowing river, no gentle tide – it rushes out of her as a maelstrom, like a wind that bites. In the canopy above, the branches rattle furiously, as though they are wracked by some tempestuous gale, but the air is quiet and still; needles fall to the ground in heaps. Roots drag themselves part of the way from the earth, scrunching up against the trunks of trees and clinging to the earth with little more than thin, pale tangles.  Pravda is behind her, shielded from it, but it snaps at Caine like a hungry dog, raking through his feathers and tearing at his hair – like a mass of fingers, jerking at whatever they can find, or an overwhelming pressure.

She can see what she can do to him, in her mind’s eye-- she can see him thrown back against a tree, spine snapped against the trunk; she can see that Solterran steel arrow buried between his ears, a thin trickle of red; she can see Alshamtueur run along his throat; she can see him choking, suspended in air, legs kicking-

She wants to kill him. She desperately wants to kill him. If she had time to think about it, the idea of - wanting - to kill might have nauseated her. That is not Seraphina; she has always met the burden of her duty as a solemn, bitter necessity. She does not like to hurt. She does not like to kill - but she has, many times, because it has been necessary. The only option. A cold, cruel inevitability. Seraphina has survived by holding herself at a distance – from her history, from other people, from her own actions. Viceroy drained her until she was empty, and she thought that she could stay that way: impassive and frigid, like a marble statue, with neither love nor hate to drive her.

It isn’t so simple. It hasn’t been so simple in years, since Maxence, or since the gods returned, or since Raum killed her. (Maybe she can take some comfort in the knowledge that Seraphina is dead – why else would Ereshkigal have come for her? Fia remains. Fia remains, and her sins – black and gnawing, growing across her skin like mold on rot – are her own. The girl who bled out in that field is not her, just a carcass; she was fragile and desperate and all too mortal. She tried. If she didn’t hate her, Fia would pity her. She is not fragile, though she is desperate, and she isn’t sure that she’s mortal, anymore – and what she does know is that her thoughts have teeth. She’d envied Isra, with her creation magic, but, if she can’t make the world she wanted, at least she can tear apart what grew up in its place; if she has to be this burning, bloody thing, at least she is in control of it.)

She wants to kill him, and she knows that she could do it. He’s been foolish, showing his hand, with that damned smirk that makes her grind her teeth; she knows that she could kill him. It wouldn’t even be difficult. She’d barely have to think about it.

But blood might draw whatever had killed the bird – and the boy is right there, soft-eyed and warm. She forces her magic to heel, though the pressure of her telekinesis likely lingers for a moment against the assassin’s chest, like standing against a stone wall. She does not straighten, however, and her body remains tense as a cat ready to pounce.

“Caine.” His name is a snarl – a rabid thing on her tongue. It tastes like those bitter weeds she’d had to take when she was younger, some medicine that the Viceroy forced down her throat. (Hadn’t she said it lightly, once? Hadn’t she been kind? But he’d asked a high price of her, and, for his betrayal, she would be sure that she took from him what she was owed.) “You are certainly lucky that there are three of us, aren’t you?” In spite of her thinly-veiled threat, her heart pounds wildly against her chest, strained from the sudden outpouring of magic – and the slow, dawning realization that he had been there, and she hadn’t realized it until he’d elected to reveal himself. (It doesn’t occur to her that his behavior is strange – why would an assassin show himself to a potential target? Surely Raum would pay a pretty price for her head.) He could have caught her, killed her – she hadn’t been careful enough.

Perhaps it was because of Pravda. No use in killing her with witnesses, and strength in numbers, in such a strange place.

(She remains close to the youth, her mind wrapping itself, white-knuckled, around Alshamtueur’s hilt.)

“Why are you here? This place hardly seems safe for birds.” This warrants a haphazard, pointed glance back at the dead bird, though she is quick to look back at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion; regardless of his answer, she doesn’t think that she’ll believe him.

She’d trusted him once – and, as she’d told him before, she preferred not to make the same mistake twice.

---

@Pravda @Caine || she's #angry and this is even longer || [once i was feral] maggie woodward

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Pravda]

PRAVDA
well, what's a monster, anyway?

The forest was not so different, he imagined, then the cell that had contained Prigovora. Yes. A cell he had spent many days in, many years ago. A lifetime ago. A cell that was dank and heavy with the odour of old meat. A cell that was impregnable; dark; cave-like. The trees hung overhead, not so unlike the ceiling of a cavern. The darkness laid heavy upon them, oppressive, so that the mare’s silver nearly seemed black. Even the bird, mutilated though it were, drew his eyes like something familiar would have, with the apathy of seeing holiday decorations erected a few weeks early. Oh my, his expression seemed to say. How strange. But he lacked the concern of someone who genuinely felt threatened by death, or concerned, merely vaguely curious. Vaguely bewildered. What on earth could have done that? a twitching eyebrow asked, when his lips did not.

In a place like this… The boy cocked his head, intrigued. He shaped the words on his mouth. A place like this. Did she mean Novus? Pravda was frustrated by the process it took him, sometimes, to draw connections—like the dusting of library books. No, she didn’t mean Novus. She meant this and his eyes fell heavy upon the bird again. “I’m not sure how much help mine will be,” he offered with another smile, genuine and bashful. She spoke of the bird then, and it occurred to Pravda that it looked like a sacrifice.

He knew of sacrifices, in the opaque way he knew of many things… What was it, Pravda wondered, he knew of sacrifices? She began to introduce herself, got so far as the F and following syllable, the way the F was taking on the upturned sound of ee—and then gone. Nothing. His bi-coloured eyes flicked upon the next arrival, a dark man, a man not so unlike the bird at their feat. Perhaps it was a sacrifice. The runes screamed out at Pravda, before anything else, and what World were those from, he wondered. Before he could ask, with the impulsive curiosity he found quite embarrassing, the silver mare demanded sharply, Get behind me.

It was the sharpness of the command, the brittle way it sounded, that had him move so quickly. Pravda’s eyes went wide,, his curled Marwari ears twitching toward their new “guest”. The animosity that existed between the silver mare and black stallion became immediately apparent for him. The forest began to shake, as though with a storm. The sky far above remained crystalline blue, undisturbed, but leaves rained down upon him. He twitched at the sound, at the raw display of power, as the force buffeted the stallion and the mare’s anger became palpable. It was an eruption of sentiment too strong for him to identify with, for him to understand, and that too warranted a distant question of why? Pravda did not ask it.

Pravda found his mind groping into the darkness of his own thoughts, seeking that bond that had been severed since Novus. Prigovora? he inquired, shouting internally. Nothing came back to him, besides the hollow beat of his heart, more erratic than he would have liked. Pravda was shaken, his pulse rapid, his breath fast, and he did not know why. He did not think he was afraid; but his young body seemed to betray him, once again, with a fear of violence and death his mind no longer felt.

Caine, she spat.

Acidic. Loathing was too light a word. It burned.

In his mind there was a colosseum full of red sand. There was a black horse. Why did you lie, Pravda had asked. And the horse had said, I loved her. But it was not enough of a reason. There was never enough of a reason. The sand became redder.

Pravda’s eyes narrowed with an intelligent that was not suited for a boy so young, and it turned his face to stone. The warmth fled abruptly, and he wondered what kind of justice was needed here. He wondered about it, in a way that was not soft. But hard. Metallic. His tongue felt thick when he spoke again. “It isn’t safe for anyone, here,” he reminded the silver mare.

Caine, as she called him, had not seemed so terrible when he spoke. Perhaps Pravda seen a sneer, or was that merely the mare’s anger influencing him?. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps now isn’t the time for revisiting old trespasses.” And in him, twisting, was a creature.

It was a black and white creature. A creature with eyes that saw through stone, and flesh, and lies. A creature with long teeth and sharp clothes. A creature that was sickened by sins, and wore a silken red cloak, and thirsted for a repayment of sins. All sins. Betrayal. Lies. Murder. A creature that feasted on such discontent. A black and white creature. A creature he too often called justice. But those bi-coloured eyes of his, one pale blue, one the yellow of the sun… they were sharp and clear as glass and cut through the center of the tension between them. He found his mind aching for Prigovora. He found his mind aching for knowing and so he said, with the tongue of the creature:

“What have you done?” Pravda’s voice, thickly accented, sounded older than the young stallion that had spoken earlier.  It was a question the he ought to have addressed to the silver mare, he supposed. Instead Pravda’s eyes searched out Caine’s—and caught, he hoped, on the silver there. He was looking over the mare's shoulder, into the darkness, tall and slim and black and white. What have you done, he wondered, and the dead bird was a bright splash of red and black at the edge of his vision, an accusatory death. The whole forest, perhaps, had taken on the sense of a purgatory; of a timeless tomb; and it was so easy for him to imagine the primordial scales of justice with teeth in the trees. 

@Pravda "speaks"

rallidae @Caine @Seraphina

[Caine]

i'm the one who's out of touch, i'm the one inflicting pain

Caine’s eyes flickered momentarily to the black and white boy when Fia stepped in front of him, lips twisting, eyes blazing. “Get behind me,” she said, though that was entirely unnecessary. He never killed with an audience, and perhaps more importantly, would never so much as touch a hair on someone’s head without proper reason. Premeditation. All of the best assassins knew to worship it like religion — and Agenor had never kept anything but the best.

The boy was merely an unfortunate bystander. Caine paid him little mind. His attention was reserved solely for the girl in front of him.

Her fury — he could only describe it as alive. As demon-flesh as her missing demon, a creature of nightmares and grave bones and fire. Her magic raged, animating her hair to coil around her head like white snakes, demanding to be unleashed. It was long past the point of begging. He knew what was coming. 

Caine had been on the receiving end of fury enough times to chisel a portrait of it into marble. The constriction of the pupils. The pinning of the ears. The volatility given flesh and howling soul. (The physical pain that was sure to come in secret lashings or hidden knives.) Every time it sought him, he never failed to watch and wait and bear it — a cliff unmoved against the thunderous sea. 

But Caine had forgotten how to be unmoved. His jaw clenched as Fia’s magic ripped through him, tearing his mane from their braids, feasting upon his wings, whipping branches and leaves into his face — and instead of an icy calm, an answering wave of anger rumbled deep in the marrow of his bones. Was that all?

Was that all she would do? As quickly as her magic came the quicker still it died, and Caine was left disheveled but wholly intact. None the worse for wear. He could not understand. Like in their spar, still she refused to draw blood, to wound him — and he could not understand. What was the reason for justice, for punishment, if it was not carried out to the bitter end? All of his life he had abided by such laws. He failed in his tasks. He knew what would come. He succeeded in his tasks. He knew what would come.

His entire life he had always known what and how and when and why, and perhaps his anger was because he was slowly realizing that without this order, this self-justification, then all of it — the curses, the Garde, the killings — were not borne from a man’s devotion to duty, but from a man’s fondness of cruelty. Unreasonable, unjustifiable cruelty.

Yet he had hated the Garde because they had abandoned him, not for what they had done to him. He had joined the Rebellion because he did not know how to live without being sworn to something. How pathetic they are, he’d always scoffed, if they can not stand on their own. He had never once stood on his own. 

What made things incomparably worse, however, was that somewhere between Fia’s bandages and their spar and his utterly convincing betrayal — he had lost the ability to stay unmoved. 

Her scorching, mismatched eyes dug accusingly, poisonously, righteously into Caine, and it took all of his anger, all of his heartlessness, to keep his gaze tempered in steel. His jaw worked. His chest ached. But he hadn’t lost the ability to wear his expressions like masks, nor the resolve to see a job through to the bitter end. 

Just before he’d departed for Denocte he had finally managed to copy down a significant amount of intelligence to pass into Resistance hands. It had taken months of risky work. There could be no doubt, from either Raum or Fia, about where his loyalties lay if he wanted to pull the ruse off.

They needed to remain convinced that his loyalties lay only with himself.

“Caine.”

He dragged strands of loose hair from his eyes and stretched the stiffness from his wings . “Why are you here?” Felt the press of his dagger along his spine. “This place hardly seems safe for birds.” Lifted a cool brow, curbed his scathing smile.

“I came here of my own accord. The king did not send me, if that’s what you were wondering.” He moved delicately closer, picking a leaf from his mane as he did it. Caution disguised as carelessness. Vexation itched to sour Caine’s expression — he detested nothing more than his hair in a mess — until he looked down at the de-winged bird. The sight was sobering. “Though I do hear that he’s somewhere on the island.” 

The words left his mouth before he finished contemplating the danger of speaking them. “You should be careful.” He will surely kill you — for good, this time — if he sees you.

Queen Seraphina.

He supposed it had always nagged at him, the reason behind Fia’s vendetta against Raum. Caine didn’t think himself particularly skilled at grasping emotions, at least fundamentally, but even to him her anger had felt personal. It was not until he accidentally witnessed her dreams the night he snuck back into the hideout, that things fell into place. Her scars. Her past as a child soldier. The fallen queen’s missing body. They had called Seraphina the Silver Queen, and Fia was silver from mane to tail. Even her name — Phina. Fia. He had found his own ignorance astonishing.

Nothing had really changed though, once he’d realized. To him she was Fia, the revolutionary, and her history as the queen was not one he was privy to, nor wished to dig too much into. Deception was a practical strategy — one he was intimately familiar with — and besides, he had never much cared for honesty. It was difficult to take creative liberties with.

“What did you do?” Caine blinked. He had forgotten the boy was still there. A barb of annoyance once again worked its way into his chest, though compared to Fia’s fury it was trivial enough to ignore. He narrowed his eyes and pretended to consider. 

It was a question with too many answers, and Caine felt disinclined to give even one to him, this Pravda. “Fia and I,” he took care to thicken his learned Solterran accent, mostly out of habit but also out of spite, “have unsettled business. Neither of us wanted to see the other, so you can see how disagreeable this encounter is for everyone.” His brow furrowed in convincing concern.

Convincing, because the mutilated bird and the eerily silent forest concerned him a fair bit when he began to clear his vision — and half of his mind — of the seething girl. Pravda’s earlier comment echoed through his head. None of them were safe here.

“We should probably —” but Caine never finished his sentence, because between one breath and the next he saw it. 

Glowing red eyes in the dark between the trees, affixed to a shadow moving at breakneck speed towards Pravda — and Fia’s — backs. 

His dagger was out before his thoughts could finish processing. The rubies glinted dully in the light, like drops of dried blood. “Behind you!” But they would never see it in time.

So with a downward sweep of his wings, Caine lunged forwards into the air and collided with a hissing mass of fur and teeth.

@Seraphina @Pravda | "speaks" | notes: BEAST ALERT

rallidae

[NPC Account]

seven for a secret, never to be told

It looked like a jaguar. Midnight black and sleek as oil, darker than even the pegasus that had rushed so foolishly to meet it. It knew what pegasus’ were, because it had killed one oh so long ago, when the world was young and blood still tasted like elixir.

It could not taste anything anymore, not after it had awoken from its slumber. It did not know how long it had slept, only that it was long enough. Long enough for carcasses to taste like leaves in its mouth, long enough for intruders to enter its beloved island.

It was not a jaguar. It had the head of one, and perhaps the front half of it looked vaguely jaguar-like, but that was where all similarities firmly ended. A jaguar did not attack three full grown prey animals, even if it was starving. It had always thought its distant cousins pitiful.

Draconian wings snapped out from the not-jaguar’s shoulders as it clawed viciously at the pegasus, but the pegasus was sly enough to snap his head back before he lost it. It only managed to leave one shallow gouge in his chest, which was already starting to bleed.

A barbed, reptilian tail writhed in the dirt when the pegasus drove something sharp and cold and hurting into its ribs. It did not scream. It’s bloody red eyes, pupil-less and perfectly spherical, merely narrowed.

The pegasus’ wings — two pairs — snapped out, as if he was trying to prevent the not-jaguar from noticing the thing — two things — behind him. The not-jaguar had never liked meals that fought too much back. Especially meals that jammed painful things between its ribs.

So it dove gracefully below the pegasus’ wings and sauntered into the weak filtered light, its spherical eyes flicking from the silver mare to the black and white stallion to the black pegasus who had decided to stay when he should have run. The bird it had killed earlier rotted grotesquely where it had left it.

It could not taste anything anymore, but oh — did it hunger.

[Seraphina]

THIS WAS MY WAR:
I did not shrink to fit remarks landing around me, in me, fire almost out when fury came, the seam rip of thunder, a rush of mothers howled through my mouth burst wide.

He seems a gentle thing, like a creature out of a poem, so she does not think that he belongs here. (Much less in Solterra – he is built with a warrior’s grace, but none of the harshness of the desert kingdom.) The realms of the gods are cruel and unforgiving, and they punish – they blame - all those who intrude upon them, regardless of their motivations or their guilt. If he is here for simple curiosity, she pities him, but only because she has learned better.

Questioning the gods only leads you to things that you never wanted to know.

He smiles in a nervous, bashful way, and he says, “I’m not sure how much help mine will be.” She eyes him with a certain gentleness, one she generally reserves for those who are younger than herself. It is unlike her; more and more, her kindness feels wrong, and she wonders if, once all of this is over, she will be able to be able to call herself a good woman, if she will be allowed to have any warmth of her own. The way that Seraphina sees it, there are two paths, and they lead to two doors, and there is a riddle about which one she should go through.

She doesn’t remember how it goes, but she knows that one door leads to Fia, who will not let her live – and Seraphina is behind the other, and she is weeping.

But she has no time for doors, and less time for riddles – save for the one before her. Her voice comes out as warmly as she can muster, though it feels wrong when it spills from her lips. “I’m sure you’ll be plenty of help - just tell me if you see something that seems unusual.”

But then there is Caine, and that warmth is gone, replaced with a magic that sings a war song in her bones and a rage that cannot be soothed; when the boy speaks again, she is so possessed by her own fury that she nearly misses his words. Her ears twitch back. “It isn’t safe for anyone, here.” There is another tone in his voice, now, and she isn’t sure if she likes it – but she doesn’t have time to focus on it, so long as Caine is there.

(All she thinks, now, is that the boy would be terrible in a shakedown.)

“Safer for some than others,” comes her soft, bland remark; she does not so much as glance over her shoulder at him. Her narrowed eyes remain on Caine, meticulously observing his every move. The assassin has shown no signs of aggression, but her body is tensed, her hooves hovering several inches over the leaf-strewn forest floor. (She has made a mess of things, but she barely notices.)

“I came here of my own accord. The king did not send me, if that’s what you were wondering.” He steps closer, and she steps back, brushing up against Pravda; he plucks a leaf from his hair, a look of irritation curling across his features, and she thinks that she accomplished something, although she could hardly do what she wished with the boy around. “Though I do hear that he’s somewhere on the island.”

“Hmmm.” Her tone suggests that she does not believe him. Seraphina knows that Raum is on the island, but she is unwilling to confirm his suggestions – if she does, Caine might decide to find Raum, and it might end poorly for her (and her hunting) if the Blood King knew of her presence. But Seraphina does not doubt that she could kill Raum, now, with her fire-tipped sword and the magic that lies beneath her skin; she still has not searched it deep enough to find where it ends.

(But she knows, even without knowing where it ends, that there is magic enough in her to kill.)

Then, unexpected – “You should be careful.”

“Careful?” A harsh sound escapes her lips, not quite a laugh. “If I didn’t know better, Caine, I’d accuse you of being concerned.” But, even if he were concerned – and the notion seemed laughable –, Seraphina would not care. Whether she lives or dies is inconsequential; all that matters is stopping Raum.

It is all that she can allow to matter.

Behind her, Pravda clears his throat, and that edge is there again – but she does not think much of it yet. “Perhaps now isn’t the time for revisiting old trespasses.” She manages a glance over her shoulder, at his patched form, and fixes him with her mismatched, burning stare. The corners of her lips twitch awkwardly, something like a bittersweet, aching smile pulling at her mouth, and her brow furrows. When she was younger, she might have agreed. When the stakes were lower, she might have agreed. But now, now…now, when her people were dying, and more would die from her inaction-

“You’re right,” she says, quietly, her voice lowering in resignation, “but I’m not sure that I have the virtue of time on my side.” She does not say anything more.

“What have you done?”

When Pravda speaks, he does not speak with the voice of some bashful, reserved boy. There is something else in his voice, something that is almost familiar. (She does not know if it reminds her of something inside of herself or Viceroy and his unyielding, righteous presence.) She looks at him, over her shoulder, and lets her eyes fall on a mirror of her own, gold and blue. His gaze is not warm. It is cold and hard; his eyes could have been hewn in marble and she is not sure that she would notice the difference. For a moment, she looks at him, and she thinks that she sees a snake.

Maybe he would make a better Solterran than his gentle demeanor had suggested. To be like the sun – scalding-bright and illuminating.

Before she can speak, Caine opens his mouth. “Fia and I have unsettled business. Neither of us wanted to see the other, so you can see how disagreeable this encounter is for anyone.” She snorts, her brow furrowing; she is not sure if she is more irritated at the annoyance with which he addresses the boy, who is entirely uninvolved in their troubles, or the way that his voice changes, false Solterran accent dripping over his words like honey. (Or some golden, oozing lookalike.)

When she was Queen, Seraphina would spend long hours in the library, studying the history of her people – many accounts were written in Ancient Solterran. The old native tongue of the land was a well-guarded secret. She did not know much of the language, as a child, and she’d struggled to learn it as an adult, but she knew it. (Well enough to wield Alshamtueur, at any rate.)

“Syzh gir emes eehn deh anwe,” runs circles around her head, but she stops herself before the words can pass her mouth; she doesn’t want to explain them.

You are not one of us.

A long, hissing breath escapes her lips, barely prodding through her gritted teeth. Why he would play at being a native Solterran was beyond her; in spite of their xenophobic history, the borders had been open for years, and ability determined respect in most of Solterran society. (The nobility, of course, cared primarily for blood.) Was it to lend himself legitimacy? Was it to provoke her? If that was the goal, he had certainly succeeded.

She shakes her disgruntlement and narrows her eyes at him sharply. “You’re still pronouncing the r wrong.” To his comments, she offers no real response; instead, she eyes Pravda, her mismatched gaze softening fractionally. “I’d tell you,” Seraphina says, and her tone is almost apologetic, “but I don’t want to involve you in Solterra’s affairs, right now. Let’s say that Caine and I hold two very different views of our king.” Oh, but that does not even stroke the surface of her fury, of his betrayal - she longs for her prior impassivity. Seraphina longs to be the weapon that Viceroy made of her, sharp and silver and cold. Even if she could explain it to the boy, even if that didn’t chance involving him in the brewing civil war, she is not sure that she has the words to explain why she hurts. Her rage is voiceless, and often she forces herself to believe that it is anger.

More realistically, it is anguish.

It feels better to burn.

“We should probably-“ She braces herself for whatever Caine is about to say.

He never finishes his sentence.

At first, when he moves, Seraphina thinks that it was a clever ploy, pretending to speak; Alshamtueur, as though ignited by her anger alone, gives a high-pitched sizzle. But, when he moves past them, dagger unsheathed, and cries out “Behind you!”, Seraphina is quick to whirl, and her eyes widen at the sight behind them.

A cat, of course – what else would hunt a bird? What else would approach so craftily, so silently, that she did not notice it at all? Her magic flares, whirling through her serpentine coils of hair, and finds her sword, drawing it from its scabbard so swiftly that it is all but a silver blur.

The jaguar-creature drags its claws into Caine, leaving a shallow gash across his chest, though he manages to dig that bejeweled dagger of his into its ribs; the damnable creature nearly lost his head, she thinks, furrowing her brow. She does not have time to contemplate why he dove into the fray, instead of running. She does not have time to contemplate his posture, the way that his wings are outstretched – like some fragile barrier between herself and the boy and the jaguar-thing.

She eyes its wings.

“Stay back,” she whispers to the boy, though she is not sure that she expects him to listen. “You’re unarmed.”

And then she is moving – a dash of silver, cascading forward with easy, even strides, as though she is utterly unconcerned by the fantastical beast in front of her. “What in the Solis’s name are you doing?” Her voice is hardly grateful; it comes out as a hiss. She does not risk a look at Caine, though her words are clearly directed at him.

She dives past the pegasus gracefully, unaccustomed as she is to fighting on the forest floor. “Alshamtueur,” she snarls, and the sword screams to life and burns, red-hot flames leaping down the sides of the blade.

She slashes at the cat loosely, but she does not quite desire to strike it – she wants to distract it, to draw it back. Her focus does not linger on her blade.

The creature has a dragon’s wings, full of little bones. Visible bones. She focuses her energy on the delicate humerus of one wing, Alshamtueur still dancing the distance between them – and she jerks, her mind straining against the weight, the force of her concentration

If she can break the bone, she can ground it, though there is little room for it to fly. But a broken wing will throw it off balance, hinder its movement...

Hunt it like a teryr, she tells herself, and tries to ignore its teeth.

---

@Pravda @Caine || she's still #angery || "orbit," victoria chang

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Pravda]

PRAVDA
the world has a place for you today
this war has adopted you

The king did not send him. Those were Caine’s words. The king did not send him and everything Pravda had ever learned of kings was that monarchies were flawed. Too personal. Selfish. And the air, thick with tension he could identify but not understand, he wondered at that word. King. He had known Novus was a land of kings and queens and wondered to which king Caine referenced.

But Pravda did not ask. He was wise enough to recognise his place in this interaction; as a bystander, as unlucky as that may have been. After all, the palpable tension was one that not only tugged at his curiosity, but his sense of obligation. It was against Pravda's nature, to remain indifferent. If he were a more prideful man, Pravda would have been outraged at Caine’s dismissal and Seraphina’s protective disinterest—although her awkward smile stuck with him, and he was grateful for it. But Pravda knew what he was to them. He was a child and his body betrayed it; the nervous tremble of his limbs, the way his voice caught, sometimes, as he spoke. And even in the way that it betrayed his frustration in the welling of slight, barely perceptible tears. Angry tears, his body demanded, and he did not have enough control over it to reel them in.

But Pravda was not angry, because he was not prideful. And he was not angry, and he was not prideful, because he was not a child. In fact, his heart tinged with a bit of pity—I could help them. It was not a thought, or a contemplation. He could help them. He had sat on Trials of every imaginable transgression or disagreement. He was the arbitrator. He knew Justice more intimately than a lover; and more significantly, he knew disagreements. 

I’d tell you, but I don’t want to involve you in Solterra’s affairs right now. Let’s say Caine and I hold two very different opinions of our king. 

And Pravda could not help if he did not know the reason for the disagreement.

Now he knew the reason. He would have commented, first to express his gratefulness at her willingness to share at least that much—now he knew the identity of the king, and with it was a rush of rumours, the Blood King—but there was no more time to speak.

Caine was saying something, to which he cut off. Behind you! The black stallion lunged toward them, and Pravda flinched back—damn this young body!—in order to collide with a large, writhing cat. There was no yowl of pain to accompany the distinguished sound of a blade piercing flesh, a wet thud that made his stomach writhe. 

Pravda knew enough of the primordial, the visceral, to know their backs had been to the beast. His nostrils flared with the dead bird’s blood and his mind flashed with how easily it could have been him, were it not for Caine’s interference. His first instinct was to thank the black stallion, and his second one was that now is not the time for that, you idiot. Pravda drew back, momentarily heeding Seraphina’s command. It was true. He was unarmed. But that did not mean he was incapable.

What had he learned as an arbitrator? A man could kill with anything. Slowly, so slowly, he reached out a telepathic hand—groping the ground nearby, searching, searching…

He ensured he remained behind Seraphina and Caine, but circled so the draconic, demonic jaguar remained in view. Yet, if he could guess at anything, it was that their partnership in combat would go about as well as their conversation thus far had. He cringed at the thought, but--there. It was not a glowing sword with a magic name, but it was something. Pravda had discovered a grouping of rocks on the jungle floor, and began to tug at them with his mundane telekinesis… 

One of the stones removed itself from the rotting earth, roughly the size of a softball. Jagged at the edges. Perfect. He spiralled it in the air, testing the weight, and waited patiently for a break in the action. Then, with precision and force, he tossed the rock toward the largest target of the creature: its wings. He reached for another rock… circling, circling, eyes wide and watchful. His legs were shaking, although he tried to tell himself they were not. They trembled like a fawn’s and the fear was rampant in his blood. 

Pravda, however, did not identify with the trembling. If anything, it frustrated him, and that frustration welled again at his eyes. Why did he feel such fear? The young stallion shook his head, and snorted, pawing at the earth. Perhaps the fear was not because of his mortality; but the idea that he could not help them. The creature were a mere distraction. Already, his mind was moving back toward the problem at hand—toward their sins.

“Near death experiences,” he quipped over the fray. “Are an excellent opportunity to make new resolutions and amendments. Perhaps you could reach an agreement over unsettled business?” It might of been funny, if his voice did not possess the dutiful purpose of a preacher at sermon. He cleared his throat, and fighting against his trembling, threw another rock toward the beast.

@Pravda "speaks"

rallidae @Caine @Seraphina

[Caine]

footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened

Fate had a funny way of spinning her threads. Why here? He wanted to ask her. On a saints forsaken island. Why now? Awareness — of his decisions, his miscalculations, his refusing-to-calm drumbeat palpitations — poured over Caine like a brook. Not the spring kind, clear waters swelled with snowmelt. The summer-storm kind. Raging. Muddy. Unforgiving. The black brook that ate spring fawns and covered the nostrils of alligators. 

“If I didn’t know better, Caine, I’d accuse you of being concerned.” Was he? Concerned? The better question was (avoiding his feelings like always; typical, typical) did she really think him so heartless? A broken twig, pointed side turned viciously inward, stabbed into his shoulder. He swatted it out with a stymied frown. A betrayal was a betrayal, sure, but decency was completely separate. Granted, he hadn’t had much practice at “decency” for the first four years of his life, and he still wasn’t sure he was doing it right, but he’d assumed that it was one of those things like “compassion” that could smooth over any mortal hurt. Completely useless in context, but completely useful when taken out. 

Like a mother’s kiss on a screaming child’s brow.

Growing a conscience was a little like growing a second pair of wings, he thought. Worse, even. He had to do it all himself. And before he was even sure he deserved one.

He left her comment unanswered, even when words pressed insistently at his tongue. He shouldn’t have warned her to be careful, hoped for her to see him as something more than the role he was knee-deep stuck in acting. It was unfair — and fairness, the impassivity it allowed, was a subject Caine knew leagues more about than decency. 

Better she think him heartless, than for him to make her believe it. 

(“You’re still pronouncing the r wrong,” she said. A pleased smile spread over Caine’s lips before he could twist it into a self-entitled smirk. “Raum isn’t the best teacher.” He made sure to roll the ‘r’ as he dowsed the Denoctian Crow’s name in a vat of Solterran gold. He’d like that, wouldn’t he, the sun-hating king.)

Like Fia — Seraphina — he regarded the shift in the monochrome boy’s tone with guarded interest. A skin branded ‘authority’ wrapped around his youngish voice and instilled an old, forgotten dread deep in Caine’s chest. Who was this boy, he thought, and was he really just a boy? 

But unlike Fia — Seraphina — he made no reply. Not out of rudeness (a tentacle of guilt had started to wrap its feelers around his leg), but out of the sheer fact that his mouth was suddenly busy shouting the words: behind you!

How Fate laughed at them all.

He met the black hissing shadow in midair, and went down hard with it trapped between his front legs, head jerking back just as four gleaming claws swiped soundlessly at his jugular vein. Missing it by precious seconds. He couldn’t recall jabbing his dagger hilt-deep into the side of the thing (a jaguar, he realized, as he sprang backwards from it and into the light — but then he saw the draconian wings, and almost found the breath to gasp), but an assassin’s reflexes were quite literally the first bullet point on a contract that kept them employable, and he’d been employable for a good many years. 

The not-jaguar slipped below his outstretched wings like he were a curtain and it the closing act, and only then did Caine feel the cut it had kissed into his chest. Shallow, by the hornet-sting of it. Deeper cuts, ones that dove below the muscle, felt like someone closing their mouth around it and trying their absolute hardest to suck his heart right out. Not so much painful, as organ-threatening nauseating. 

Blood welled out like tears along the angry red line, dripped down the front of his chest and dove into the folds of his elbow. Bled too much. Surface wounds were apt to be dramatic. 

“What in the Solis’s name are you doing?” was the first thing Caine heard after wiping the blood on his dagger off onto his shoulder (it shone there like a priest’s anointing, black as oil) and moving back into the clearing. The appearance of the not-jaguar seemed to have sunk the forest into a silence more absolute than its prior sullen quietude. 

“Saving you both,” he wanted to say, but he’d been careless enough as it was. Here stood a once-queen who had slayed teryrs and sandwyrms. Survived the culling of a blood-crazed king. To imply she wouldn’t have saved herself, and then the boy (not him, perhaps — they didn’t need to be doing favors like that to each other, he reminded himself) was an insult to her honor. “Neutralizing a threat,” he said instead. It was an assassin’s favored phrase.

“And it has not — yet — been neutralized.” His dagger thrummed with anticipation as Seraphina dived towards the veiny wings of the creature, flaming Alshamtueur in tow. A rock sailed through the air and struck its mark true, right in the breakable humerus, and Caine aimed a glance of approval towards the thrower. Not just a boy, and not a helpless one either.

“It wants an easy target. If we drive into its skull the fact that we’re far from easy, it just might slink away.” We, he said, carefully. Inclusive. The boy — Pravda — included. A balm for his earlier prickliness, never mind his chosen time for delivery. (An unfortunate side effect when he inflated his arrogance was that he couldn’t yet finetune who was swept up in the tide.)

“Can you guard our backs, Pravda? And watch out, yourself. It’s a fast devil,” he said, eyes never straying from the violent dance unfolding between silver Seraphina and black beast. A dull thud tapped against the inside of his skull, laughably polite, his curse come at last to call. Lured like the cat creature by the promise of violence; he’d wondered when it would show itself. Valiantly, he ignored it. It was still too weak to be much of a distraction, and the cut in his chest was keeping it full, for now.

Eyes back to the battle — the dance was reaching an interlude, and Caine took it as the signal to pounce. Inserted himself neatly besides Fia, dagger swiping down at a fragile wing so unlike his own. Like Pravda’s throw his swing met the mark, and his lips dipped down in a disgusted grimace when more black blood sprayed onto his skin. 

The rip in the wing membrane he’d left was small — the cat was damn fast — but he could see an edge of flinty wariness seeping into those bloody eyes. It opened its jaw and hissed, then backed up a few paces until its back pressed into the bark of a tree. Gathering its anger, Caine knew. The fight was not yet over.
 
“Near death experiences are an excellent opportunity to make new resolutions and amendments. Perhaps you could reach an agreement over unsettled business?”

Caine didn’t turn, but the edge of his right eye swam in silver. He remembered their battle, then, moons and moons ago, and wondered when the tentacle of guilt had multiplied into four. Half of an octopus. What would he do when two halves became a whole? (Nothing. Everything.)

His right eye took in her hollow face, the suggestion of ribs beneath her sword’s leather sheath. Like the children lining the streets, ribs picked bone-white clean by fat vultures. He’d stopped counting the bodies after a month. Started dropping whatever bread he could, uncaring, like a gold-draped noble who lost a coin. What was one coin to a man with thousands?

He thought of the ration carts he’d left to be found by the Resistance. He hadn’t stayed to see them claimed — someone could’ve gotten to it first. 

Could he begrudge them if they did? Could anyone? His eyes hardened. To steel, to symbolic silver spoons.

“A leader should stay strong for her people. Perhaps,” he murmured, “you should stop letting yourself waste away.” His velvet-soft voice belied no emotion, his words a string of flat monotone. It was the only way he could let himself speak them; because what a dangerous game he was playing. One misstep, and —

Checkmate.

@Seraphina @Pravda | "speaks" | notes: caine? morally conflicted? what a revelation

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