[Quest] every storm runs out of rain

[Random Events]

“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.” 

For days or even weeks, Theodosia may feel nothing at all out of the ordinary. The swirling, pink-purple potion is a strange, awful mixture of sweet and savory on the way down, like honey laced with salt; but past the initial unpleasant backwash, there are no symptoms to follow. Everything is perfectly normal.

Until the storm shows up.

Spring in Terrastella is often wet, but not like this. The sky is clear, a perfect blue, and sun shines down from a place too far to fathom. The breeze is calm and warm; it almost feels like summer. But there is one cloud out of the ordinary. One cloud that threatens the whole atmosphere. Huge and slick and black, bloated almost to bursting with the threat of rain, the lonesome cloud hovers over Tinea, its edges cut in sun a way that they seem to exactly match the edges of the swamp.

It beckons Theodosia, if a little bit threateningly. Come here, come here, Stormsinger - the humming of the lightning as it thrashes inside is almost like a drumbeat. It is a creature of its own will entirely, and if the Champion should try to touch it with her own magic, try to alter it in any way, it will simply refuse to budge. It hangs stubbornly in the hot air and glares down at her with warm, dark eyes, roiling with just contained lightning and thunder, resplendent with both beauty and danger, almost like Theodosia herself.

Whenever the Champion decides to step close, the pull of the cloud will grow stronger, as will its morbid, humming song. It might ring between her ears like a bell. As the space between the girl and the storm closes, they become one: the cloud drops fast as a rock to flood Theodosia in a coat of black vapor, and for a few long moments it swirls around her, tumultuous, gnashing its rain-teeth, the pitch of its song growing higher and higher until it’s almost unbearably loud and shrill—

Then it stops, and the whole cloud disappears abruptly. When the dark haze sloughs away, Theodosia may feel a new weight on her antlers as the first of many new crystals starts to grow in.
 

---

@Theodosia once she has finally stopped tasting the potion might find herself wandering in the swamp, wondering if her god was full of only empty promises. But then, over the swamp everything starts looking 'darker' as if a great bird has decided to blot out the sun. If she looks up she'll find the cloud, whispering in a way that clouds should not whisper. Is it words, or is it only the sound of weighted raindrops waiting to fall that she's hearing? 

The cloud falls, and falls, and falls. And then--
Theodosia is not the same anymore. 


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Enjoy! This lovely quest was written by @redandblack

[Theodosia]

let our eyes show the 
fire in our hearts tonight

That potion may have been the weirdest thing she had ever tasted -- it lingers for what seems like days, coating her taste buds in a strangely familiar combination that makes her want to gag and comforts her at the same time. It tasted like the ocean-salt that clings to Terrastella’s shoreline, like the citrus fruit that weighed down the branches of the courtyard trees, like the musty earth deep in the swamp when she breathed in deeply, like the crackling ozone taste whenever the sparks began to roll from her feathers and into the air around her.

She thinks, maybe, despite the strange taste, she would be willing to label it as tasting like a home she had never quite known before, like she has been accepted as a child of Terrastella and not as the foreigner she has once been. Perhaps she might even begin to consider Vespera as… not entirely a friend, not entirely someone she could trust just yet, but at the very least, the potion hadn’t ended up poisoning her despite the way she had spoken to the goddess, so perhaps a tentative sort of acceptance?

Despite her reticence with the goddess, she thinks Terrastella truly is home now -- she can’t imagine being anywhere else, in Novus or elsewhere, and being able to say that she belonged there. She had certainly never felt this way back in Caeleste, back in Dead Horse Ridge where her selfish father lorded over his mortals and her siblings squabbled over the crumbs of power and attention he deigned to scatter amongst them.

When she turns her attention to the sky, to the way the wind whispers as it smoothes over her feathers, she notices the cloud immediately. How could she not, when it sits so dark, so angry, against an otherwise bright blue sky? It calls to her, Storm-singer, Lightning-child, in a way that is not a voice and is not silent, either, ringing in her ears, beckoning her forward and forward until her hooves begin to tread over the muddy grounds of the swamp. It almost sounds like the voice of her dam when she had been a child, the way he had sung to her to sleep, but yet the voice is utterly alien to her, sending shivers down her spine as it begins to increase in volume.

The cloud descends, suddenly, filling the spaces between the trees until all she can see is a black vapor swirling around her, rumbling out discontent, and she can feel the way every hair on her body seems to stand on edge as the static electricity washes over her. The cloud grows louder, biting into her ears with each and every shrill note, ringing between them until suddenly the entire swamp grows silent, the cloud disappearing into thin air without a trace that it ever existed.

When she breathes out, there is a new weight upon her head, a magic stirring she had lost upon her entrance to Novus, one that she had thought she would never have again -- a magic that bound her to her dam, the way her storms bound her to her sire, a connection she had thought severed.

“Thank you,” She murmurs to whoever might have been listening, and turns to resume her normal patrols.

credits

@Random Events hey look its only like six months overdue