The four were strangely silent as they left Solterra in the night, the moon hidden in the naked sky and stardust not daring to shine in the darkness. Clouds blotted out what little stardust might have lit their way, leaving an eerie sort of blackness that fell over the land. Each walked in a single file line, not daring to speak, not daring to make a sound. Even Rufio had left his chains at home (mind you, not because Targwyn had suggested it, but because it just made sense). Thinking of the bitterly rude mare, he sniffed a bit in disdain, but pressed forward, saying nothing.
It was easy enough to find the caravan, blending seamlessly among the throng of others and going unnoticed in their presence. Without the gold which made him remarkable, Rufio was simply a dark creature in the dusk – perhaps a bit peculiar with the red of his mane and the zebra stripes along his legs, but otherwise as anonymous as they came (particularly when he kept his mouth shut). They mindlessly followed the group as they neared the borders of Denocte, and as Abel motioned them forward, the four peeled off into a small and hidden alcove in the woods.
Here, they would make their entrance to Denocte, a place which was foreign to the boy, and yet strangely comforting and different from the desert. Even if they failed, he was happy to be away from the golden sands and the blistering heat. Mountain air cleared his mind, and he breathed it deep, relishing in the peace for the briefest of moments as his heart beat so loudly in his chest, he knew the others must hear it. If there is fear and nerves within the boy though, he does his best to mask them, biting the inside of his cheek until the sanguine taste of blood meets his tongue, to keep from idly chatting or giving away their position.
They wait for the changing of the guard, and just as Abel had predicted, the shift change came with the passing of the hour. As backs were turned, the bay gave the signal. Rufio simply nodded and pressed onward – alone, as they had planned.
The path that he’d been assigned was clear to the dark prince, as he picked his way through the quiet wilds of Denocte, unnoticed and ignored. It was strange, he puzzled, that the residents weren’t on high alert. After all, if rumors were true, the king of Solterra had stolen their queen away – murdered one of their citizens. While he personally didn’t find Raum to be some sort of boogieman, he knew better than the question the pale regent with the basilisk. Only a fool would miss the hint of danger under Raum’s haughty exterior. Though he hadn’t quite come around to being a loyal subject, Rufio had a begrudging respect for the male. A respect that drove him to follow the raven, and to do the pale king’s bidding on this fateful night.
His mind reels over all that had happened, even as he finds his way to the stores. Ahead of him, they stand unguarded like a beacon in the night. Strange, he puzzled, that the Denoctians slept while their nightmares were coming to fruition. But Rufio couldn’t bother himself with such things for now. Keeping the task at mind, he fished in a well-worn bag to gather his flint. Saying a quiet prayer for his safety, the boy struck the stones, flicking glowing sparks onto the stores of dried grasses, and watching with a quiet satisfaction as the pile roared up in flames.
His was the first to burn, the glow hot and bright against the night. And as smoke begins to billow into the dark sky, Rufio makes his exit, slipping unnoticed into the shadows as he makes his way back toward the canyon, unknowing if the rest would be successful in their efforts as the fire rages on in his wake.
She had been sent to watch him. She had been sent to watch all of them, the four who carried a fire in their hearts and would soon spread it around them, too, out into Denocte and send the swelling smoke up to kiss the moon hanging above. She had been sent to take notes, to observe and make sure all had gone according to plan; he instructed her, the sharp-toothed girl with claws that dug deep into prey, and she listened to him like desperation listened to hope.
It was her first mission since she went back, appearing out of hiding after months of finding all the hard-to-reach places Novus had to offer. Her last 'outing' had gone awry, someone sold her out for what she couldn't imagine to be more than a piece of copper (the same chilled, red-splattered color as her flesh) and she wondered if she would ever find out who... but that night was no night for pondering how to exact revenge; she was lurking in the shadows beneath the glow of the moon, something she did best. Her twig crown upon her brow activated its magic, and she was but a blurred-out figure among all the finer details. None of her was recognizable, her splattered body was grayed and her silver hair seemed nonexistent; her jewelry too--her most prized possessions--were simply blended into the ghostliness of her.
She saw them as they slinked into the Night Court territory, picking him to follow first. As he moved himself into position, she stayed several paces behind and curled herself around every crevice to avoid the sights of anyone (not that they would know it was her anyway, the one with rage scrawled across her hide). He waited, and she waited in turn, never wavering from their individual goals. Raum was trusting her, put her first when asking for favors, and she would have rather died than let him down.
The world was quiet as the minutes ticked by, and then the striped boy made his move.
The birth of the flame was the only sound to break through the otherwise still, silent night. There was no one around, save her, save him, save the fire that grew twicefold with every second passing, growling and stretching as it came to life. She was enamored by it, the reds and oranges consuming everything they touched (like her? She didn't know) and then the storage space was nothing more than a mass of searing, hot light. He turned to leave, seemingly satisfied, and Manon let him go without anymore observance; both of their tasks were done.
manon was tasked with 'checking in' on their progress. this is just a little side reply, no one should be able to see her or even know that she was there <3
She remembers reading stories about how souls 'become'. Her tongue has known the way 'rise' and 'change' taste sharp and sweet. Metamorphosis. She knows the word, but she's never considered how it feels to break down and reform between a cage of skin.
But she knows now.
The building where Fable left her groans beneath the lash of her magic. The wall becomes steep stairs and she barely lets her magic finish before she's running down the stone staircase. Each stair looks slick with blood and red-light as the fire roars like a lion before her. Isra drapes that sound across her heart and embeds her soul in soot. Each organ waits there, like caterpillars beneath cocoons. Her rage grows, and grows, and grows. It grows wings.
Soon it's embers and ash meeting her hooves as she rushes to the fire. She feels both hot and cold, like she's the sun and the night is winter kissing along her spine. Everything is black around the fire. It's sucked up each inch of light in Denocte, as if it's set to call the moon to battle. Firelight turns her horn to a lit blade upon her brow. It's hard to image that she has ever been anything like the sea. Tonight her eyes blaze like that fire. She blazes like wildfire and she's ready to consume the world.
Isra already knows Raum is behind this. It drives another nail into his coffin and presses another stone down on him. She'll let the world swallow him whole in the end. She will swallow him whole.
Her magic is humming like hornets in her bones and the noise it makes as it gathers sounds like another roaring inferno. She thinks the moon is forcing itself out of her skin, cold and silver, a stone in a black lake. Magic sings like a coyote at that moon when it lunges out of her skin towards that spire of flames reaching out for all the gods who has forsaken each of them. Every inch of wood around her turns to marble laced with mica. Each inch of cloth turns to ore, heavy and weighed. Isra's magic consumes everything the fire can eat.
She will starve the fire and make a specter out of it.
Tonight a ghost of hate will die.
Around her horses are staring, both at the fire and at their lost queen returned. Something in Isra breaks a little more to have no smiles for them. Only the inferno of rage breaking free to fly greets them when she turns her eyes towards the crowd. “We need water from the wells. I can only starve it slowly.” Horse start to run, shaken loose from their thoughts by the hollow ring of her voice. How different, they must think, from their story-telling queen with stars in her eyes. Each inch of her is stone now, dull and gray moon-stone.
Isra walks closer to the fire and her skin heats like a wax ready to melt. She wonders what will break through when this shell is done burning.
"And each stroke ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world,"
@Moira @Valefor @Runaveig & anyone else who wants to join
04-30-2019, 10:19 PM
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It all seemed to happen so fast. On moment Runaveig was enjoying a nice song and dance around one of Denocte’s many bonfires, smiling prettily towards the onlookers while her heart fluttered in her chest like a hummingbird’s wings, and in the next madness itself seemed to unfold around them. The world crashed and burned, quite literally, around their very shoulders, and the crowds shifted and parted like churning waves within the great seas, crashing at the cliffsides with frantic might.
The young bard spun, her eyes widening, the notes of her song ending when screams rise up to overcome it. ’Fire! There’s a fire!’ There was a moment within her, a brief touch of indecisiveness. Should she run for safety like so many others? Or go to help?
In hundreds of other lifetimes she would have made only one choice. Perhaps it was fate that she unknowingly made the same one.
“Umbra!” She shouted, pale golden eyes rolling upwards to see the descending black dragon. “Hurry!” They had to help. Denocte was burning and the fire would not put itself out. Scooping up the nearest bucket, the dusk colored maiden tore through the crowds and into the alleys. She caught sight of a looming, massive frame through the darkness of the night sky, a winged shape that resembled Umbra’s own draconic body only vastly larger. A name from a passing citizen caught her ear.
Fable. The Queen’s dragon? Runaveig did not know Isra, the Sovereign of Denocte or her dragon, but she knew of them. Everyone did. Just as well she knew that there had been a relentless search to bring their missing Queen home. Did this mean…? Dare she hope? Dare she pray?
Her hooves pounding against the earth like war drums and the young entertainer scooped up the first bucket she spotted with a quick, ”I’m sorry!” to the vendor who had it tucked beside his stall. With Umbra leading the way, soaring over the heads of gathering and fleeing equines, they arrived at the scene, and it looked like a nightmare. Even from a distance Runa could feel the powerful, raw heat billowing off of the flames, churning towards the dark heavens like deadly claws. The flames cast the alleys in light and dancing shadows, but it was the figure standing in front of the flames that stole Runaveig’s gaze entirely.
The dark body, the scales, the sharp twist of her horn. Oh. The Queen turned and gave them all a shout, and Runaveig immediately acted. She stole away, clutching the ‘borrowed’ bucket tight, and fled to the nearest well source. It wasn’t far, thank the Gods, and heaving the bucket back towards the site of the burning building, Runaveig pushed closer to her Queen with a feeling of determination unlike she had ever experienced before. Strangely enough, there was no fear that beat within her heart. Her home was in danger, and while not a warrior, she had to protect it.
“Isra!” She called amidst the sound of crumbling wood and crackling flames. Runaveig did not smile for there was nothing to smile about, not yet, but she did offer her Sovereign a nod before hefting the bucket and tossing the water onto the flames. It immediately hissed and puttered and vapor ascended into the air, the water immediately boiling away by the sheer heat of the flames. Already sweat clung to her brow, her face sticky and stained with soot and ash.
Umbra, bless him, took up position above Runaveig’s shoulder while still in the air. The pygmy dragon let out a small sound of rage before inhaling deeply, and unleashed a mouthful of freezing, icy air at the base of the flames. Even as Runa turned about to go and fetch more water, Umbra remained to assist in the only way he could, the rainbow sheen of his scales almost glittering against the firelight.
now the dark begins to rise, save your breath (it's far from over)
Sleep is but a phantom now, as escapable as death and defamation of the Tonnerre girl. She is a beacon, a smile in the dark when those of her court dance about their merry fires and tell tales by the moonlight. While Isra is gone, Moira can do no other than encourage them and reassure them that their unicorn, their sovereign, their friend will be home. Soon, her heart begs to tell them as she drifts from fire to fire, face to face.
She cannot tell the time when that war will be reined in and spring blossoms will pour from dark lips once more.
Instead, she laughs with her people and shares their bread by night, she brings around supplies to bandage wounds for those returning from their missions and those being sent off once more. So many faces turn like a wheel in the sky, a dizzying amount circling. Always circling.
Golden eyes do not expect a flame so bright so near, she is not ready for the denizens to scream and flee in terror. Denocte is under attack in the dead of night, during their witching hour which they treasure so dearly. This is their time. This is Caligo's hour. And she will not back away as her people run screaming, as they rush for buckets of water.
Neerja is the first beside her as the dragon comes overhead. Fable sweeps over them all as a giant sea-shadow from the heavens, dropping his unicorn from his claws and flying higher, higher, higher... Toward another fire that has sprung up and the sounds of running feet too and fro. There are snarls on their faces and a yowl in the tiger's throat. White jowls are pulled back and ugly, ready for a fight, ready for a meal, ready to devour whoever disturbed the peace in fair Denocte.
Moira lets Neerja free, watches as her slender form stalks into the shadows, listens as she disappears. Then, only when there is a silence howling in her veins like the flames crackling merrily before them, only then does the phoenix move. If Isra is fire and a story, and Runa is a dancer and a dreamer, then Moira is the water that flows between them all and the cosmos in their veins. She is stardust. She is a thought sprinting over the wind from body to body.
Red skin matches the red, red flames, oh but it is hot. Already Isra demands water and buckets are being filled. Runaveig, the sweet bird who offered to heal whoever she could when the worst is upon them, rises with her ice-filled dragon and they attack.
Moira Tonnerre remembers the lick of flames up her feathers, along her sides. She knows that heat like a lover, like a slave. Quick the phoenix is as her world burns, quick to run to a faucet and fetch a pale. Quicker to fill it and heave it back.
She has given up on tears when her heart went to Terrastella to mend itself. There is a calmness, a fierceness, a protective gleam claiming all of Night as hers. Her brothers and sisters and children. Each one as precious as a breathing star.
With the fury of her thundering heart, and with that echoing silence in her blood, the pale of water is tipped to the edges, tipped past her unicorn (her sister, her not-quite-blood), tipped into those flames that hiss and sizzle.
"He will not leave our borders, and she is unsure if it is a whisper or a scream that comes from her mouth to match that silent promise in her eyes. The Pegasus girl looks to the unicorns with matching horns and matching hearts. They were born for art, they were not born for this war.
She turns away and follows into the shadows her tiger heart that hunts even now. There is blood on her tongue and blood she is ready to have on her red, red lips.
He awakes to the sound of screaming: for once, it is not his own.
He had been dreaming, he remembers, of the ballroom, decked out in gold and jewels as nobility had circled around the dance floor. He had been dreaming of Winifred’s face, all curves of laughter and dark, dark eyes, so-serious as she had agreed to the magic-imbued suggestion, as she had sealed her own fate, as he had doomed her to her death --
He shakes the edges of sleep off like a tattered cloak, his amber eyes peering through the darkness of his room until he realizes the screaming is not in his proximity -- the words are muffled through the layers of the scarab, a cacophony of panic outside his door, and he rolls to his feet with his tail whipping through the air for balance.
Fire!
He charges from the crowded halls of the Scarab as quickly as he can get his feet to move, unable to turn away from the fires that lick at the star-strewn sky: these are not the nightly bonfires that chase away the winter chill, no, these are something darker, born of malice, and it sends a chill down his spine even as he grabs for the closest bit of fabric with his telekinesis.
He ends up with a canvas, large enough to beat the fires out, and he is quick to race to a well and douse the heavy fabric until it is almost too weighty to carry, drip-drip-dripping water with every frantic step he takes. He does not notice the Queen, nor her Emissary stalking off into the shadows -- all of his focus in on the flames before him, of lifting the fabric and trying to smother the flames beneath it every time he brings it down, his tail swishing behind him like an angry cat.
Even though there is mostly fury unspooling in her chest, when her citizens start to join her pride starts to chill the edges of all her flicking fire. Each time they look at her it feels like winter is falling across her spine instead of ash. But they bring with them fear too. Their faces are quickly becoming smeared with soot that looks to her, in the moonlight, like thick blood beneath a flash of lightning.
The marble spreading out from her turn turns black and shining as her magic is laced with a poisonous worry. It rises like ivy across the walls of every building in the vicinity. The fire looks brighter against all that black but when bits of it start to turn to pearls, it trembles. It looks like the night has fallen across the mortal coil, black as ore and endless as space.
Isra turns more and more marble to pearls and they clatter to the hard stone like hail. Lines of pearls are running through the black stone. The remaining marble trembles and starts to collapse upon itself. The earth groans and the fire hisses. Yet all Isra can hear is each heavy exhale of air through her city's lungs, and the frantic voices of each brave soul who has faced danger.
She does not think of all the food lost. She cannot suffer that yet.
Tears start to shine in the corners of her eyes and she wonders if she could cry enough of them to drown each fire in Denocte. She wonders if she could cry enough tears to drown Raum in suffering, until he is bloated with sorrow. Soon there will be tracks of it running down her face, through the soot, like a map to the place where the world will be right again.
A small mare runs by her with a bucket. There is winter blowing from the lips of a small dragon. Moira has already run by with a tiger, tracking whatever monster they might be able to find. A stallion as bright as a flame is fighting back the fire with a canvas. Isra looks at each of them and the winter gathering in inches along her spine cools the last of her fire.
All she feels now is determination. It's easier, she thinks, than that coil of hate that wants to track down the monster who dared to attack her home. Hope feels cooler than the need to gut each monster left in the world. So it's to hope she turns to when she moves towards the unicorn, and the stallion, and the shadow left by Moira.
“I think the rest of the fire will burn itself out beneath a coffin of stone.” A glint in her eyes promises that there are many other things in this world she will bury in stone and stuff with pearls. It look like the sea is waiting and gathering in a cage made of unicorn skin. “But we should wait to make sure and look for stray embers that might catch.”
Isra swallows beneath that map of sorrow running down her face. “I'm sorry I was gone for so long. But I promise you all that whoever did this will be brought to justice.” The sea gathering in her eyes crashes against its cage of bone. Over and over Raum has brought war to her. Now he has brought it to her city and she has never been so sure that she will be the one to drown him.
Isra was forged a weapon by him and now--
Now she is unleashed.
"your heart is a weapon the size of your fist."
@Moira @Valefor @Runaveig & anyone else who wants to join
