'Come, come my friend, for I trust only you on this journey to Night.' Katre'el whispered in the night to Dalmatia once she'd heard her old friend had returned. The woman she'd found, however, was a far cry from that which she remembered. Still fearless, still fierce, in those respects Dalmatia was the same... Although, in many other respects, her girlhood friend had disappeared.
In her shoes stands a woman of sinew and bone, wrought with tension and unease. There are worries creasing the magpie's eyes and ghosts that sit upon her slender shoulders. Years passed, Katre'el should not have expected time to be kind to the warrior. Time often never was. Still, she implored this of the ex-Vicarious, and Dalmatia could no more deny Katre'el than she could her dear heart. Once, it would have been much less of a thought-over decision. Now, there is a pensive crease to her brow, a thoughtful tilt of her lips that turn them ever downward, further than the almost constant frown of before.
"Fine," the warrior agrees.
Together they set off for Denocte, and on the road just outside of the city itself Dalmatia left Katre'el to tend to her business. Now, she's found herself by a reflection pool, or rather a lake to which would drown her if she so much as stepped foot in it. Once, she would have charged in, reckless with youth, and laughed as her Flight followed suit. They would have shed their armor like snake skins, submerging themselves in the coolness of summer, enjoying nothing less than the laughter of friends and the bonds forged by more than silver and gold, but by trust and countless battles side by side.
They were hers to protect.
They were hers.
Now, she is nothing to them. Marisol freed her, yes, but she does not ask why Dalmatia was imprisoned in the first place. She learned long ago that the woman would fall into a silence so pure and so deep that only time would draw her out of it again. No amount of plying or prying could break her shell, her armored exterior.
The woman who stares back is not wholly unpleasant, and it is the only woman, the only being that the soldier knows she can rely upon. Petty words of others mean nothing. Offers of friendship, of freedom, all of it crumbles, falls through her fingers like sand, when put to the test. Bitterness is a poison in her heart, and its hold is strong, stronger than it ever should have grown to be. But stronger than that, sharper, more urgent, is the demand for the Truth, the need for Vengeance, the thirst for Revenge.
Cicero would pay.
Everyone who took away her childhood, her Flight, her Halcyon, would dream in colors of fear and sweat when they looked into Dalmatia's eyes. She hopes they would never know peace again. Long ago, she learned to stop hoping.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
@Warset | I hope this goes well c': I'm looking forward to writing with you again my friend!
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
For hours, she has been watching the horizon for the first hint of a blood riddled sunset. Her secret heart, her bit of buried softness that still feels like it's choking on the thickness of blood, has already start to cry a tragic poem (a eulogy) to all the bits of the day she knows she'll never remember. Already those parts feel like sparks, like embers, bared and naked to the air.
Spark. Flash. Dead.
She wonders what will be left, when all the light chews itself out of her like she's another hole to be dug, torn, and shredded like a paper wish. Will there be anything at all? Or will it be darkness that she must learn the weight, flavor, and feel of?
And for a moment, for a single moment, she closes her eyes and tears them from the heavens like a bit of dirt found an open wound.
For a moment she lives in the darkness and calls it eternity, peace, and the-end-of-the-last-war.
For a moment she's a star again, opening her eyes to the black cosmos and dreaming colors and constellations to paint across that endless, hollow expanse. Her tongue is heavy with song, and war-cries, and sorrows that crash to the earth in meteor showers and wish-falls. Warset doesn't feel like a burned-up-thing, a chewed-up-thing, a torn-out-thing when she opens her eyes to the placid lake.
Instead she feels like a girl, a newborn star learning the language of galaxy dust, when she traces the glittering curves of this fragile form racing towards death. The water ripples like rings around a planet when she steps into it. Seven rings. She counts.
She's become nothing more than a watery reflection with seven rings and eyes of moonlight trapped and dulling by the day. She's becoming--
Mortal.
And perhaps she's looking for anything, anything at all, to distract her from the horror of it all (and of the blood blooming like spring petals on the horizon). Perhaps she's only looking for someone's song to sing instead of her own when she turns to the other mare by the water.
Or perhaps she is only as lonely as a siren when she whispers a greeting of feathers from ankle deep in the water. Her reflection becomes monstrous with the span of her wings-- a delicate, monstrous thing. “It is a warm day for the autumn.” She smiles, blinks slow as a leopard, and wonders if the woman likes a shattered reflection or a glass-smooth one.
So few bodies mill about the woman thought she would be undisturbed, left to brooding and silence and thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, all allowed to blur together until the time she would be needed again. Dalmatia should know better than to think such thoughts. Since her freedom was regained, released from that dim, grimy prison Dalmatia has found herself endlessly bombarded by body after body, face after face, voice after voice.
They never leave her alone.
The soft, star-studded voice of the girl next to her is no different. Silver splatters upon skin that is as equally as dark as it is light. She is far more lovely and equally as wild as Dalmatia will ever be. Where one screams of the heavens, the other shows ties to the earth just as strongly from the green of her eyes like the green of the trees in the snow. Even her skin, of similar colors in a different pattern, is more akin to a bird made to scavenge, made to survive than a star made only to live and fall and die.
In the end, they would all die alone. From the heavens or hell, it makes no difference. Dalmatia knows this as much as she knows the taste of blood in her mouth and the color of it heavy and wet upon her wings.
It is nothing like the cool water that stares at her, and at last, it is interrupted by one, two, three, four...she counts, it continues, until it hits seven. Seven rings distort her face. Seven circles of hell await the woman who failed so many. She knows, she has always known, that she is the woman who will not fail again.
So Dalmatia lifts her head, her brooding eyes, to peer into the otherworldy eyes of Warset - a woman who, in all respects, looks so much more elegant, much more gentle and refined and stretched out and ethereal, than the warrior will ever be, and is still latter despite the curvature of her that is as fragile and spun glass. Rough, cut from stone, shreds of a life once lived, it is the sound of her voice that rumbles out, cool as the lapping waves at their ankles.
"The mountains make everything colder by night," she replies, stoic, as though it's some secret code used in days of yore. It is not. She is nothing special. Not now. Not anymore. What more is there to say? In some ways, the Pegasus has forgotten what it is to talk with another, for silence and dripping water and mold had been her only companion for three long, dark years. It may still be the only thing she craves just as much as she does justice.
Even if she were a shooting star falling, Dalmatia would not know the line between vigilante and justice if she were to crash face first into it.
Even if she were falling, she wouldn't put out her wings to stop it, only hope that the crater she leaves behind leaves a big enough mark to mean something...
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
@Warset | <3
08-17-2020, 12:19 AM - This post was last modified: 08-17-2020, 12:19 AM by Dalmatia
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
It still seems strange to flutter her wings like an uncertain frond in the water and speak in sentences instead of ballads. There is no eternal music here in the water, and the willows, and the strange stained glass tree in the distance. Warset thinks there should be more this silence and the dark judgment in their gazes as they look across the shimmer reflections of their forms.
This feels like war, like the quiet in the center of it when all the blood has been spilled and the drums haven’t started humming again. And she smiles into the cold middle of war when she settles her wings at her sides and steps though the water. Her eyes do not strain to the ripples of her form and the way the black of her turns feline in feral in the curl of her hip. She wonders if the mare will see the war-quiet, the smile, or the reflection beneath her bellow.
Warset tilts an ear, one as curled as the reflection staring at her across the water, towards the mare in an instinctual sign of curiosity. Her nostrils flare as she tries to name the myriad location hanging to the mare (and she’s hoping to smell cosmic dust, and starlight, and silver steel moonlight). But Warset has no name for the weeds tangling in her hair, and the trees reaching hungry towards the water, and the refractions of sunlight making art in the ripples. There are a million constellation names, and a galaxy of planets on her tongue, but still she stumbles over the words of-- “I do not know anything about the mountains and the night.”
The water makes a hissing sound as she steps close enough to touch through the reeds and the muck. Light catches the droplets falling from her wings and turns them to diamonds and star-shards. She reaches out her nose in greeting as her smile waivers between folly, and fear, and something dark as wanting. “Is that why you cling to the shore instead of the depths? And the way her eyes shine, like silver fish-scales in the noon, promises that even the night could not cool all the things slumbering in her skin.
It only feeds them. Like wood instead of darkness.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
The magpie girl is quiet as she drinks in the whole of Warset. Silver and black and white. Beautiful as stardust splashed haphazardly into skin. Water on her sides, in her hair, dripping from dark, splashed wings looks as diamonds would upon her throat: breathtaking. But Dalmatia is not one to be moved by how another looks. Cicero, after all, looks as though his heart would bleed for his whole life.
That is a lie.
He is not a bleeding heart but a coldblooded killer, a criminal. She knows better than to fall for petty tricks and pretty faces. Perhaps the magpie girl is too old to be fond just because of a smile, a soft word. Love is not something she knows any longer. Kindness is not a practice she’s been privy to in a long time.
No.
No.
The dark, the damp, the earth pressed her from coal to diamond: unbreakable.
It takes time for words to come again to the lips of the other. They are curled at the edge. Silent. Assessing just as she does. And Dalmatia knows that little grin, the calmness that steals over her not-quite-companion and lets her come closer still. All of this she knows, just as she recognizes she is a bomb waiting to detonate. There is a timer set on just how long she will stay, will live, will let herself be drawn into the foray of civility before returning to a hungering beast once more.
Holly eyes trace ebon lips as they speak of what they do not know.
There are many things that Dalmatia does not know.
She does not know the taste of starlight on her skin, she has forgotten the press of dawn into her wings. These little things life once offered are now fruitless, lost to her. These little things she does not say.
Instead, the quiet continues until it does not.
And they break it together as Warset reaches out her sharp tongue, her silken maw. ”The ocean stole my heart,” she offers to the star after what seems like an eternity. Perhaps, to Warset, the time of silence is only a fraction of forever to a star come to earth. ”I do not think I want it back,” she admits. It is something that the warrioress has not said to another. Such words have never dared leave her mouth, nor will they leave again.
Dalmatia reaches then. Her grey and muddied flesh presses softly, softer than it has been in a great while (not since she was a girl, not since...him), to the curve of Warset’s nose. There, she feels the hum of battle, of loss, of longing, all etched in the lines of her mouth. ”Would you want back what makes you weak?” She asks, unmoving, still like the eye of a hurricane.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
Her body feels so heavy. It feels heavy as a stone tied to her bird-hollow wings. It feels like a sea tied to the sky of her, dragging each lingering cloud of her lost hope down, down, down past the horizon. She feels like the moon carved out into sickles, a star carved out into darkness, a comet tossed into the atmosphere to crash through a forest. And when she looks at the mare, and feels the touch of her nose like another stone kiss tied to a cluster of her feathers, Warset wonders if anything in this world feels light as a will-o-the-wisp.
Warset tilts her head at the mare and there is no ‘horse’ in the look, no mortal, no thing that knows the taste of the sea. Although she thinks (perhaps between one blink and the next) of the brined taste of a black knot between her lips when she plucked seaweed from it-- but can cannot imagine such a thing stealing a single thing from a star.
The sea, Warset thinks, is only a thing to spit out and swim in. Tides are for watching and she cannot imagine a world but this one, as full as it is with heavy things, in which a pegasus might be unable to shake the salt from her wings and fly from any cage the dark-waters might create. “Perhaps then,” she speaks as steps close enough to drop down to tilt an ear to the mare’s heart beating in her chest, “you should take the heart from the sea to replace the one that you lost.”
Because she wonders, when she lifts her head back up once the mare’s heartbeat is ringing in her ears like a sea caught in the cage of a pegasus, how anything can live without a heart. They are not stars, she thinks, and so these frail and mortal forms need hearts to fill the hole fire has left behind.
“I have lost everything that made me not weak. There is nothing of this that I would miss if it was gone.” And when she lifts her wings, wide enough that the sun halos around them as she blots out the light, even those prayers of light seem so frail and fragile a thing. This flight, her look says, is the flight of clouds with stones in their mist bellies.
It is no flight, no freedom, to regret the loss of.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
'Come, come my friend, for I trust only you on this journey to Night.' Katre'el whispered in the night to Dalmatia once she'd heard her old friend had returned. The woman she'd found, however, was a far cry from that which she remembered. Still fearless, still fierce, in those respects Dalmatia was the same... Although, in many other respects, her girlhood friend had disappeared. 