[P] Does it still hurt

[Raum]

 


The rain drives in across the plain, thrown from a sky bleak and dark. Stems of grasses bow beneath the sheeting downpour. The meadow ripples as winds rush before the oncoming clouds.
 
A storm grumbles out at sea, crying out as if it were a monster, lured in by the power of the gods. Ahead of it, flagged by the charging winds, the Crow stalks through the plain. Verenor is little more than a black peak rising toward the monstrous cloud. Lightning splits the sky and lights the jagged face of the mountain.
 
The Crow does not return to Delumine, but neither does he return to the open gates of Denocte. Rather he stalks, his skin lit by the electric glow of the crashing storm. The meadow is alive with static, it prickles along is silvered skin, and threatens him with the might of the wild.
 
Slowly Raum’s skull turns, those blue eyes glinting in the haphazard light. There, beside him, her body a shadow, made angular by the spear at her side, is Avdotya. Even in his dreams he would know this girl; a creature with sand in her bones and sunfire in her blood.
 
His dagger sings with the presence of her spear, and he wonders how much it thirsts for violence. Raum wonders if it hungers for a taste of her skin, her blood. He wonders if he does too. The girl was an enigma, a rebel. Disgraced, fallen from her position, she stalks with pride, with malevolence licking at her heels. Curious his eyes are as they behold this blackened girl, made more frightening by the storm that rushes to embroil them both.
 
In the silence between them (the spaces where the storm does not cry its thunderous call) he drinks in the snake of Solterra. He knows what it is to carve a solitary path, to seek vengeance and retribution. Maybe that is why he does not move to rile her, to caw like the crow he is, across the distance between them.
 
No, Raum merely offers her a simple, “Avdotya” that purrs like the thunder and cuts like a blade.
 
Again he wonders how they both might bleed; in black, in gold.

@Avdotya

 

[Avdotya]

She reveled in the violence of the storm; every surge of lightning and each roar that thundered overhead. Avdotya had grown accustomed arid kiss of the desert, so much so that the sensation of rain pelting against her hide all of the sudden felt foreign and new. It was invigorating, truly, the way the sky swelled and so relentlessly poured its rage onto the world below... and it was perhaps the only thing worth this trip to the Summit. The viper nearly scoffed aloud at the thought of her visit. How fitting that the weather reflected her mood so well. In spite of her roiling emotions, however, the mare found her focus unintentionally drifting elsewhere- with every languid step, a pale figure came closer and closer. Each flash of bright light nearly seemed to create a glowing halo around it, but it had more importantly drawn her blazing eye to a very particular piece of blue cloth. She had seen it before, seen him before. He was once a member of Day Court, a citizen she took little note of in her time as Regent for no reason other than the fact that he’d never caught her attention. And for a reason. Oh, if only she knew that she was not the only snake in the grass here. She stopped when he spoke her name, not so much surprised that he knew her name, but somewhat caught off guard that he would so comfortably acknowledged her. Yet her head did not turn to face him, nor did the stagnant expression on her face alter in the slightest when she addressed him in return. ”You never suited the desert.” Though the rain poured, Avdotya always knew the smell of her home and his pretty, porcelain skin lacked any trace of it. For a moment, she wondered what replaced it, where he made his home when the sands no longer welcomed him in their embrace. But then, she did not care. Without thought, the viper slithered onward, tossing an expectant glance over her glistening shoulder while lightning struck so ominously in the sky ahead. She had places to be, as she was sure he did; they could walk and talk. @Raum image © pacificdash

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Hair clings to the slick damp of their skin. It lies in tendrils against their throats, tight against the swell of muscles there. They gleam and glow with each terrible flash of light and rip of thunder. The air pulses with the heart of the storm, throbbing in their ears and vibrating in their feet as the earth rattles, rattles, rattles.
 
The storm rolls in, a beast hunting across the plain. It snarls in every dimly lit corner. Trees become monsters, their gnarled arms reaching out like claws, thirsting for blood and flesh. They creak in the wind that howls and snatches.
 
Beneath the splitting skies the Crow turns his gaze upon his companion. She is shadow - an angular thing, lethal. The skull upon her spine laughs in the light and snarls in the dark. Its teeth are bathed ivory white, sharp as daggers that promise to rip and consume. Its sightless eyes watch the Crow, a lion surveying its feast. Yet the beast Avdotya wears is long dead, its head now a prize now placed upon her slender spine.
 
Raum turns away, his skin turning black as night, black as pitch. He douses himself with Caligo’s magic and is no longer silver. The Ghost is corvid now, all teeth and claws and coarse feathers. He prowls like a panther and watches like a hawk. Avdotya speaks and his skull tilts, avian and dangerous, toward her. He turns his electric eyes upon her too but when they reach her, they are blue no more. Those eyes are pearl and ink, black as the deepest reaches of the earth. He is a darkness that knows no light.
 
The thunder laughs and splits the sky.
 
“No.” He muses with a voice cuts like a knife through silk. There is coarseness too and it grates as sand and gravel might. Had the Mors left a token of sand and dust forever embedded within the Night Court soldier?
 
Through leonine eyes he looks upon her, setting gold to clash with serpentine red. Avdotya and Raum are blood and gold, splattered across the plain. They are the betrayers, the wreckers. Blood stains their souls as war scars their bodies. They have tasted the blood of Solterra.
 
The serpent’s scars are stark slashes pulled tight over the ridge and furrow of her ribs. The Crow wonders how it might feel to be split, as Avdotya once was, by wanton claws. In silence the Crow studies her, a predator carefully regarding a fellow hunter.
 
“Rather like a serpent that never suited climbing so high. Snakes are made to be on their belly in the dust and the dirt.” They were made to bite the ankles of their foe and bring them to their knees. Avdotya had done just that. If he were any other man he would have smiled for her then, but there is only a ghost of a smile left, haunting the corners of his quicksilver lips.
 
“Solterra was poison, even before you bit her.” He looks away, into the grey of the savage plain. He looks through the slanting rain, hard as needles and the winds that howl in his ears. He is aloof enough to contrast the congratulations that slip, surprisingly, past his lips. “Now she is crippled and poisoned. Well done, by the way.”

---

@Avdotya

[Avdotya]

There was a subtle change in her gaze in the moment Raum shed his pale complexion for that of the black night. His once stark silhouette melted away into the violence of the storm with fluid ease, lighting up only as haphazard bolts of electricity raced across the sky. Upon witnessing this, her mind began to churn with thought and even intrigue - how easy it would be to simply disguise oneself in a second skin and spread havoc without regard for the consequences... but where was the glory in that? Avdotya had come to enjoy her infamy. It forced the Davke name back into the mouths of Solterrans, effectively erasing all of Zolin’s efforts to bury them beneath the sands. When he then responded, she nearly smirked; so Raum was capable of honesty, then. While the viper had tasted a bitterness upon her tongue having known that a Crow so easily flew beneath the nation’s radar, she could not help but remind herself of her own acts of betrayal against it. Or, perhaps more specifically, its regime. Were the two really so different? Indeed, Raum may have been a Crow, but he bore the scales of a serpent just as well. ”Sometimes it takes stepping out of where one belongs to get where one needs to be,” she purred back to him, ”as I’m sure you know.” The result was all the more sweeter. She glanced over her shoulder at his remarks about Solterra. They were soaked in truth. The desert pulsed with venom long before Avdotya ever came along, she simply saturated it further, and she was surprised to hear his praise for it. Raum did not strike her as the type to offer such a thing. "I simply returned a long-owed... favour." She had accomplished her desires, but she could not help but wonder where Raum's motivations lie - and why he even sought to walk with her on this chaotic evening. "What of you, Crow? Have you the knife to press against its throat?" The Davke stopped then, curling her neck around to look into those beady avian eyes. Just what had he dug up on the desert nation. @Raum i'm sorry, it's been so long since i've written and i am r u s t y image © pacificdash

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Raum is a shadow beside Avdotya. Still they track across the plain, side by side as the the Serpent and the Crow. Crows were canny things and serpents sly, maybe that is why, as they walk upon common ground, ravaged by a storm, they find their own common ground too. And oh it is a place of blood and scars and both are easy here, both are welcome.
 
It was a grave day when Night and Day united through mutual darkness and despair.
 
Steam curls from his slick skin and still the rain beats down through the mist about him. His  body is not like lava, his soul as frigid as the deepest ice. The Crow is liquid beside Avdotya,. He is the shadow that swallows all – that moves in silence and strikes with nary a whisper. Only this girl, this creature beside him, he thinks, no, he knows now, could ever come close.
 
How long has it been since he saw his brother Acton? How long since they shared the flare of wings the bite of a crow’s beak? The warrior beside him dashes every thought of Crows and bothers from his mind. When did the lion become malleable? He thinks. With a corvid tilt of his skull, his eyes, black as pearl, draw upon her. They linger upon the glint of pallid teeth, sharp and ready of the skull resting upon her back. It maw is parted in an eternal laugh and Raum does not flinch with its ferocity.
 
Then those eyes, blue like sparks, are upon the curl of her lips. She moves to smile, but never does. Ah, just like him – for what is it to smile here? Slowly his gaze peels from her and he longs to take a piece of her soul, to know if it is as wretched as his own. Is it black with mould, red with shed blood and ragged as though claws had torn it apart. Raum thinks it might be.
 
His attention returns to her, slow, slow, slow. He regards her in silence, as sharp as daggers, as soft as wings. Does he have the knives to press against its throat? Her words ask him, prying like needles, slick like serpents coiling about his limbs, his throat. Through it all the Crow does not flinch, he does not cow away from the attentions of the serpent before him. He holds red in black and in will, he knows now, for an eternity. “If the time comes, maybe.”
 
Oh so easily he discards her question, so simply he dismisses it. There was not even room for a beat of his heart in the time it takes for him to answer her. Raum is too calm, he is to unfussed by her question. That, is answer alone. If the time comes, he would. Raum would never fear even to hold a dagger against the end of the world and then let the blood flow.
 
“But even you know, Avdotya, that it does not have to be a knife. It never has to be just that.” And then he looks over her with a pointed stare. Raum draws attention to her scars made by claws, the teeth of the skeleton upon her back, the gleaming blade of her spear. Avdotya is a weapon herself, forged from sand and slavery and wicked, wicked instruments of war.

---

@Avdotya

[Avdotya]

Oh, if only he knew how vile every sinew of her being was; that the small shred of Avdotya’s soul he sought to taste may very well have been all that was left of it after years of misdeeds and blackened sin. She was a king-slayer, a ferocious woman who damn near brought a nation to its knees with vengeance coursing through her veins. The viper bore no guilt and no morals, she shed no tears for the skeletons that were left in her bloody wake and lost no sleep despairing over the lives she had torn from them. She was raised to be a weapon glinting beneath the fire of Solis’ blazing sun, shaped into a harbinger of destruction while Zolin strangled the life from Solterra... many would be hard-pressed to deny her that title.  Indeed, Avdotya had built herself a throne dripping red, and even though her ultimate purpose had been served, she was now a consequence of circumstance left for the world to live with. But she did not see it that way - in her mind she was simply a bringer of what that world deserved. As she walked stride-for-stride alongside Raum, she wondered about his own purpose. She knew hers (and she knew it well), but did a crow ever act with anything but mischief in the slick of their feathers? The ease with which he shrugged her question off seemed to credit that thought. And then he moved on. ”No, it does not.” She agreed, her eyes still fixed upon the electric horizon. It was the blade of her spear that quite literally slit the throat of Solterra’s boy-king, but she could imagine the taste of his blood on her lips had she been forced to use her own teeth. How sweet it would have been, yet the taint of that same blood upon her holy tongue was nothing short of an insult to the Davke. It was not worthy. Avdotya did, once more, look over to him with a newfound curiosity blooming from within her mind. She called him crow, but was there even such a thing any longer? Their beloved Reichenbach was little more than a memory now, drowned out by a new queen who sat at Night’s helm. Along with him went a great many of his crew... leaving Raum to remain as a dying breed within the borders of Denocte (she clearly did not recall the likes of Acton). ”Tell me, Raum: why call yourself a crow when your king left you for dead?”  Perhaps he held more loyalty in his heart than she gave him credit for. @Raum image © pacificdash

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

The rain does not relent and the storm prowls on overhead. Each rumble of thunder is a mighty beast whose roar rattles the stones of the earth and has the stems of the field trembling.
 
Each strike of the storm was a dramatic moment, filled with white light and then swallowing darkness. Trees become frightful with their looming shadows and fixed bodies, each one frozen by every illuminating flash of lightning.
 
Raum might afford a lone ear to twitch with a strike, enough to watch as all that is hidden becomes exposed for one brief moment. But then the rain drives ever harder and his skull lowers against the brunt of the wind.
 
Rain trickles as tears down his face, falling silver and bright from his muzzle, tangling his forelock into chaos. Their every stride, if they could hear it above the lupine winds that howl, begin to squelch as the sated earth begins to drown and weep.
 
The grasses are a sea of waves that roll wherever the wind takes them. They crash against Avdotya and Raum’s limbs, their stems sharp as whips in the fickle wind.
 
No longer does he watch the Day girl. No longer does he need to. Raum knows her weapons now, he knows the potential of her forked tongue, the blood red of her eyes and the roll of her muscles beneath slick, serpentine skin. He knows how her potent blood hums, its silent whispering to which he listens. He can even feel the bite of her skull’s leonine teeth upon his spine.
 
Avdotya talks of Crows and his mind fills with blood and betrayal. Ah! At last he smiles. But Raum is forever silver and those lips of his are wolfish and hungry. There is no ounce of joy in that rictus that splits his face. It is poison to behold: a dangerous, beautiful thing of ruin and rapture.
 
“A Crow is who I am.” Raum says as easily as the rain that pours from his spine. He casts the words away as if they were a mere comment upon the obviousness of the weather. The wind rattles the barley at their feet and laughs its roar in their ears. “Their betrayal does not change that.”
 
And which of his brethren Crows was not a sinner? “It turned our was brotherhood is not as tight as I once thought.” Such weakness he exposes so casually, before his voice lowers to silk – the rich warm of whisky enough to numb the nerves and incapacitate the mind. “Yet you know as well as I, that betrayals happen everywhere and Novus’ sin runs deeper than Rapax River.” Such blithe acceptance is a whip across Novus’ back and Raum does not smile as he holds its handle tight.

---

@Avdotya

[Avdotya]

She furrowed a single, sharp-edged brow at the ease with which he shrugged off his brothers’ perfidy. He smiled, even, pointed as it was. If anything, she noted, Raum was true to his oil-slick roots. Avdotya herself - a once proud Solterran - had long since stripped her name of its wretched touch when it no longer suited her, left only as a Davke and Solis’ greatest daughter. She may have haunted Day Court’s vast deserts, but they held no claim to any shred of her existence. It was fascinating, really, how quickly the mighty could fall. How swift Reichenbach’s empire had met its end, lost to his foolishness and cowardice when faced by the mistakes of his own fickle heart. The feral woman nearly laughed at the thought. “No,” she agreed, “that is why I learned a long time ago to rely only upon myself.” Brotherhoods and tribes were all quite nice… until they weren’t. One could pour every last ounce of their loyalty into their faction, but they’d be damned if they trusted it to always have their back when it came down to it. Raum seemed to know that, yet here he was, still a man dressed in the satin feathers of a crow. Now, as the pair swept deeper into the electric chaos of the plains, Novus’ own sin wove its way into their conversation. It suited the situation well; two of the continent’s most beloved children waltzing so casually through utter calamity, as if it were but another warm and sunshiny day, now talking about betrayal and sin. As if they were not the very definition of it. “And would you wish for it to be any other way?” Avdotya finally cooed. The viper may not have accepted treachery when it was brought to her doorstep, but she damn well wore its colours flawlessly when it rested upon her own serpentine hide. @Raum image © pacificdash