the song of tomorrow

[Rhoswen]

Rhoswen ►

 Summer was a beast she loved: it did not question nor beseech her, did not feather the darkness with deceit and disappointment and upon a cloud of blistering heat it had not once failed to gild her dreams in gold leaf. Rhoswen was aureate beneath the burning eye of the sun; it suited the woman - this incandescence. Her body rolled and coiled in waves of amber, silver, red and the earth cracked beneath her feet. It was not happiness, it was not Solterra, but it was something: a nameless, faceless sensation in the hollow space between her lungs that breathed with them too and split a smile behind her own when she turned to face the sky. Was this the end? The beginning? The part where she clutched the climax of her story with a firm grasp and ripped victory from the jaws of defeat? It was not Solis to whom she turned for answers, but herself. She was the architect of her own future, and like all great artists she intended to draw blood.  

Rhoswen could not tell if she was imagining the clamouring taste of ash in her throat, still, for perhaps the memory of it remained too strong to shake. That blue fire upon the mountain - it wasn't an easy sight to forget. Her own fire still raged within; it had not been quelled by the distance that stretched on with each step they made toward Delumine and away from Denocte, if anything it had been stoked. She had been a volcano laid dormant within the borders of Night, bubbling and hissing, but latent beneath a cloak of despair that had sheltered her for too long. A thousand questions to consider - a lifetime of choices to catch and dismember with a rusted scalpel. Loyalty, family, betrayal, forgiveness: what was life without such conditions? But what, then, did her heart desire? Such a fickle thing it was, to snarl like a lioness and howl like a wolf, with nothing but the pull of the wind to guide her due north.

Finally, she knew: it desired the truth, and the truth was not Raum. 

One, two, three, four - the sound of her hooves against the earth, a warbeat to hail the fray. Rhoswen had been leading them for hours now, cutting ahead like an arrow through flesh, her skin set alight like a house on fire beneath Solis golden gift; she was not alone now, He was watching his prodigal daughter through molten eyes. Behind the red woman trailed a small travelling party - three shadows cast behind her flame - and to them now she looked (a brief glance, sharp and torrid). Sabine seemed to grow every time she looked away: her daughter's willowy legs had already begun to curve into femininity, her roseate narrow hips deviating between child and woman - it would not be long now before she would hook the eyes of men. Sabine's horns glinted in the white light, casting specks of aquamarine against her adjacent father's skin. Raum, in perfect step with Acton. Rhoswen's chest burned, and back to the path her cheek turned. 

Words unsaid, thoughts unfurled - a volcano cannot lie dormant forever.


@Raum

[Raum]

 

The shadows of Denocte are behind him. He feels their creeping. They grope for him and cry out in the darkness. Occassionally he looks back, when Rhoswen and his daughter are not looking.
 
His mercury skin grows tight, drying beneath the sun. He knows what it is to live beneath the sun to be far from Caligo’s dark. Idly he wonders what his god might think, that he fell into bed with a girl who denounced her. That he loved a girl who Solis blessed and lured away. And, above all, he was the one to follow her out of the Night Court.
 
Already he considers what offering he might lay at her altar, what apologies he might make for the choices his heart, his soul had made.
 
To look back at that mountain pass is salvation and destruction. Smoke still billows, even now, days after the event. Denocte has become the cry of dragons and with cutting ire, the Crow wonders where the song of a gypsy had gone.
 
Did Reichenbach mean for his niece to see corpses leaving Denocte? She had seen things Raum never wished her eyes to witness. Not yet. She would have seen them all but not yet.
 
This child of his was Crow born. It was in her blood. To fight, to survive, to grow – it was all in her make up. It is why he taught her to fight, why he made her learn from Acton and she does. His daughter had grown nimble as a dancer and she would be deadly upon her long limbs if she ever chose to be. Sabine possesses her dam’s swan grace, her father’s cunning. She would make a wonderful assassin.
 
Sabine. Oh small, quiet, beautiful Sabine, her horns refract broken light across his torso. She lights him up in a way he let no other, not even her mother and she had fire enough for all of them. The Ghost keeps close to his daughter, those eyes watching, ears forever listening to the secrets of the world they passed.
 
Mountains turn to a flat plain, open and sparse. They had reached the Steppes. They step between ghosts of war, he feels a shiver rock through Sabine’s body and his lips smooth along the fine curve of her nape.
 
Old blood has stained grasses red and in silence he walks on as if they were not walking upon the bones of an ancient battle field. He does not give his daughter time to think until they are clear of the deep, ancient circle, set aside for duels. Then, and only then, his lips reach for her shoulder. A small gesture to catch his child’s attention, “I am going to join your mother for a while, stay with Acton.”
 
And he moves faster for Rhoswen is ahead, always. She leads the charge away from Denocte with fire licking every corner of her being. His girl is fierce and resplendent beneath the light. It is not such a wound to see her beneath the sun’s glow now – not when he sees how she shines. When he thinks he might enjoy the way it turns her bright as a flame. Solis has blessed her and Raum can never deny it.
 
Raum is Caligo’s curse upon Rhoswen like Rhoswen is Solis’ upon him. The gods play a wicked game, but his thoughts are far from them, for anger burns within his Solterran girl and it is aimed at him.
 
His shoulder brushes her hip as he moves himself close. Then his lips touch her shoulder. Even Raum is not sure if they were kisses, but what he knows is that they are a test. He is forever a spark to her gasoline and he wants to know how hot she will burn this day. Hot enough to burn him? Or just enough to stave off the cold that Denocte had left in their bones.
 
“Sabine will tire soon. Will you not slow down, Rose?”
 
Being this close, he can smell the jasmine that clings to her skin. It makes him ache, for the brother they both left behind, entombed within his own court. The Crows were split and Raum had chosen family. Yet even family, he knew, would not be an easy road to walk.
 
He waits for her to turn those eyes upon him and set his world alight.

 

[Rhoswen]

Rhoswen ►

She felt sick. Nausea was a whirlpool in her gut swimming round and round and round with the vigour of a drunkard left to drown. She knew anger: it was an old friend with wrinkles around its sick black smile, but this was something transcendental, something alien and unearthly. It possessed her neurons and took hostage of her synapses, reconfiguring and remastering her veins from flesh into magma. Basalt rolled and slipped on her tongue to fill her mouth with all that had been left unsaid, building a tower of liquid anticipation that tore into the air like a viper set among mice. 

From the moment she had set foot through that mountain pass Rhoswen had choked on her own silence. Perhaps it was shock, perhaps it was for Sabine - who gave a fuck? Upon the night their daughter was born Seraphina had cast light on the violation her man had performed (a dance of blood and rock and blade) and from then, nothing would ever be the same. It wasn't just about the two of them anymore, for now their responsibilities ran into Sabine - their little bird - and not a day passed when Rhoswen did not question Raum's reasoning. Had he considered their child when he had slunk to the canyon under her God's sun and left Bexley for dead; had he not thought of the consequences? Of the savage, pitiless debts they would owe under the law of the Solterran court? It made her skin hiss and steam above the heat of her caustic blood. 

So lost in her musing, she shivered when the familiar touch of Raum's lips brushed against her skin. Could he feel the heat, ultra-violet and cancerous, rolling from her in waves? Rhoswen inhaled slowly, glancing over her shoulder once more at her daughter, and loosely straightened her mask. It was too easy to lose herself in the maddening high of her handmade rage, it was not yet time; the zenith of this moment would come and she would be ready. "We can rest soon, there is a copse not far from here." Her voice is grit and satin and grit again; an amalgamation of subtle power and wild abandon. "We need to talk."

Such a fool she had been to lose sight of what she knew: she knew she was Solterran, she knew Solis was her truth, she knew her blood was made of sunlight and twenty-four carat gold. There was nothing to see in the rivers of Denoctian moonlight, nothing but a lifetime of questions left unanswered by a goddess who couldn't bear to love the phoenix in her crow's nest. And Raum had stolen this knowing from her like the thief that he was; a grey grim reaper to ransack and plunder her heart until the life had been sucked from every chamber. Their love was a cruelty: a mistake made by the sun and the moon, and after every mistake there comes the aftermath. Sent away from the only place Rhoswen knew to be home, she had rocked between guilt and fury, unable to decide whether it was her fault or his. Of course, the answer was both, but you see - Rhoswen had paid for her sins: in the darkness with the shadows molesting her flesh with their dirty dirty hands; left to rot in the past's invisible chains, entombed within her memories and her regret. What, then, had Raum lost?

In a way, the dragon and it's arrogant blue flame had been the red woman's salvation: though her anger for Reich lived on, Rhoswen knew it had set events into motion that would have otherwise remained stone still. Now it was time for Raum to pay. 

"I never asked you about Bexley," she began, slow as a snake, "because it hurt too fucking much," there was pain behind her eyes, melting with her violence, "I trusted you Raum, I let you into my court, my new world, and you crushed it all like that canyon crushed her." The pain faded beneath the saturation of her bitterness, her voice thickening into blinding white lava, "why?"

[Raum]

 


Raum feels her shiver, the air hot and humid and dusty. Rhoswen shivers, not from the heat, not from the arc of the sun or the caustic blast of sand blowing in from Solterra. No, she shivers for his touch. He might has smiled, were he any other man. He might have touched her again if he did not feel the black rolling off her crimson skin.
 
It billows like smoke and swallows like the dark of a cave. Idly his mind drifts to the specters he left in the bowels of Solterra’s canyon. It is ironic, for it is where his girl’s anger lies too. But she was always angry with him, wasn’t she? Her gaze was always a blade upon his skin, her words teeth in his throat, her legs running and running and running, trampling his heart. Raum wears the scars she inflicts upon him like tattoos. He cares not who sees the way they hurt each other.
 
Oh Rhoswen and Raum were made for destruction and they would take the world down with them.
 
A copse and a chance to talk… His gaze follows hers like a smoke signal back to the only creature that might ever stop them from ripping apart (only to collide again like planets); Sabine. In silence he turns back, his electric eyes upon the copse.
 
They reach the copse at last. Leaves cast them in shadows and the air is cool. Trees press in, tight, as the moon and his sun weave their silent path deeper into the woodland. He is not even still before her words come like a blade in the dark.
 
Each word pierces him with a dagger’s art; The Crow does not even flinch. He does not bleed, there is nothing in the set of his jaw, he is solid, though his skin is mercury. In deep water he douses her flame, snuffing her anger out as it strikes him. He is ice to the scolding heat of his lover.
 
The Ghost regards her with avian eyes and a tilt of his corvid head. There is no spark of surprise, before her eyes – even away from the walls of Denocte – he becomes more staggeringly Crow. Quiet violence simmers, at bay, held down with a metal hand. It is choked, it is drowned, but it is there, wild beneath the surface as it thrashes for release.
 
“You let me into your Court, Rhoswen?” The Ghost asks, soft as a silk scarf wrapping about her throat and pulling tight, then tighter still. Raum would have made a home in Solterra, whether she let him in or not. Yet he is comfortable in knowing she would never have betrayed him – for Rhoswen was too wound up in love, in affection. Ah he had played her love like a fiddle and it was easy, more so when his own heart also drove him forward. He fell more in love with her, forever questioning how he may silence her should she ever betray him.
 
Yet here his lover stands, fierce and wild and again, proving her Crow right. Even now she had said not a word to any other, not even to him… until now. Still she keeps his sins locked in her heart. They would bear them together.
 
Through the dappled shadows the Ghost steps towards his flame. “Do you really need to ask?” He asks of her, those blue eyes impassive as they douse every inch of her fire with water and ice. “Were you ready to love a Crow, my love?” He whispers into the hair behind her ear; fire scolding his nose, his lips.
 
“You were never going to stop me completing my mission for Reich, whether we fell into bed or not.” Intimate, close, he keeps himself beside her, silver skin pressed tight against the red of her. Raum reminds her who they are, what he is: an assassin, a Crow.
 
Finally, with a devil’s kiss left to laugh upon her jaw, he steps away. A shrug pours from his mercurial body, “You know why, Rose.” His gasoline voice says with a sigh of indifference, “Bexley found out about me when I was with Acton. It was her or us, we chose Crows.”
 
A beat of a heart and then another, “Besides, Acton and Bexley seem quite taken with one another.” Again, that indifferent corvid gaze pierces as he regards his sun girl, “What is it with Solterran girls and their love of Crows?”
 
With his lips impassive, with ice in his veins, he waits for the power of her, the heat of her. She is the spark and he the gasoline, with a thrill in his veins he craves her infernal retribution.

@Rhoswen

 

[Rhoswen]

Rhoswen ►

The trees watched this fated ritual with ancient impervious eyes, knowing the beginning and the end of a story as twisted as theirs. As her words fell onto the tight air, born of acid and anguish, she broke away from the sight of Raum to gaze up at the boughs that leaned in as though craning to listen to the storm that was brewing between the sun and her moon. They considered her and she considered them right back, closing her eyes momentarily as a cool breeze swept her fine auburn curls from the planes of her face, breathing in the scent of early autumn baited by anticipation. Rhoswen was not a woman laid bare beneath the sun for her armour glinted in the light to seal herself away from prying eyes and probing hands. She was not often vulnerable, but -- she felt it now. And when she opened those flints of steel and ash, they still did not flicker upon Raum, but instead gazed on at the trees, her expression dark and nebulous. Tell me, how does our tale end?

But then, of course, her brief tranquility was broken. The sound of his rasping feathered voice defiled her ears to pose a question that disturbed all the mud and debris that lay at the pit of her loch-like stomach, clouding the clarity into an opaque brown sludge that ignited something new within. Incredulous, her eyes at last shot back to the ghost at her side, spearing him with their hostility. Seven short words to break a bond that had, already, thinned to a few weak fibres. Perhaps moments ago she might have been softer, lighter, but in a heartbeat, that small mercy is dead and cold beneath the ground. How dare he desecrate the trust and safety she had offered him during a time that had almost broken her, a time when he had plagued her every waking moment with guilt and uncertainty. As she listened to him move on through words that felt like a bullets to her head, Rhoswen burned from the inside out: born again under the baptism of her own fire. 

"Your arrogance is synonymous with stupidity," she wanted to laugh, to scream, "one word. That's all it would have taken to end your mission." For the first time in a long time, Rhoswen felt alive, "I should have watched Maxence string you up by your neck when I had the chance," a sickening disgust swelled as his silver skin pressed against her own, though she did not flinch - did not lean away - not this time. "and this is how you repay me?" She was a thousand forestfires under a veil of cocaine-fuelled justice, her eyes assaulting him over and over again with holy loathing. Blistering, she lifted her chin in defiance; feral and metal and controlled. "Your beloved Crows," she spat, grinning and bloodied by macabre amusement, "where's your loyalty now, Ghost? For here you stand, miles from Denocte, having left your precious King of Thieves to rot in the shadow of a dragon."

[Raum]

 



They stand together, alone in the copse of trees. Sabine and the rest of their party are far out of earshot. It is only the trees who will be their jury this day. Trees have prying eyes and ears that listen forever, but Raum knows his and Rhoswen’s transgressions will die upon bark lips, never to be heard.
 
He is too safe here, they both are. So it is with brazen eyes that he settles his gaze upon his Solterran girl and pierces her skin with the ferocity of his ice-hewn demeanour. “These are all should haves and would haves,” the Crow says with a dismissive shrug. “The fact is, Rose, that you never did any of those things. I am still alive because you wanted me alive.”
 
The Ghost cannot help the way his eyes trail over her crimson skin. The way he knows how every part of her feels to his touch. He thinks he might know her body better than his own. He certainly knows her mind and coils her tight, pulling her in tighter, tighter. Rhoswen is the girl he loves to love, and to destroy.  He riles her only to watch her spit like a cat and remind him of his despicable nature. None could bring him so low as she. He would turn her into a goddess for it. Renounce Caligo for her – ah, such dangerous, blasphemous thoughts!
 
The curve of her ear upon his lips is salvation and he curses her for it with hurtful words and contrasting touches. Only when she peels herself from him does he feel the sting of her absence. Each time she leaves him, she rips away a part of him; by the gods he hates her.
 
The sun watches her moon with incredulous eyes. Were he Acton, he might have smiled at her, might have shrugged his shoulder with indifference, again. But the Ghost is not The Magician, and instead he stands with drowning eyes that threaten to turn her fire into sodden ash.
 
Rhoswen takes his bait, as she always has – will his lover never learn? She explodes with all the grandeur and splendor of a star and in silence he sits before the flames of her, letting her firelight-ire dance across his skin. His eyes glimmer malevolently as he stands fast. “You will have to try harder to ever be rid of me.” Again that silken voice comes, low like rumbling thunder and soft as the silken scarf about his throat.
 
At last her vitriolic words strike true when she mentions her brother. His ears fall like crumbling spires (so many things he has desecrated – she is right). Her chin his lifted with defiance, but his ire is a viper in the grass she does not watch.  Raum closes the distance she makes between them, loosening the scarf about his throat all the while. It is about her throat in a blink, soft and light as air. Her lover possesses a dancer’s grace and a murderer’s speed. That is all Raum is, along with his mercury skin, poisonous and bright: a murderer and a dancer. Ominously he tightens the scarf about her throat; a reminder of who he is.
 
“Never assume you are not as sinful as me, Rhoswen.” The Crow snarls into the space between them – such little he leaves, so that his every word may be an emblazoned tattoo upon her skin, may she forever remember them. “How many times have you abandoned your brother?” Raum lets the question hang, lets all the times she left fall like piercing, ringing swords between them.
 
It was one of Raum’s daggers that cut Bexley’s face, but the Ghost does not need it now to carve into his own girl’s skin. His eyes do worse than a blade can ever do. “I chose you and Sabine that night. Reichenbach respected that decision for he chose his lover over his Crows too.”
 
Oh his voice drops so low then, a menace of thunder upon the distance, trembling, rattling bones with its coming. “You left your brother to rot that night too. We are both drowning in sin. Never forget that.” She is just drowning more in his, than he in hers.

@Rhoswen - :o :o :o 

 

[Rhoswen]

Rhoswen ►

"I am still alive because you wanted me alive.”  She hates him for he is right, and oh what a blade it is against her skin: not sharp like the silver upon his leg but blunt and dense like a cleaver sent buried into her flesh. What was loyalty when it was severed in two? Two houses to call home: one a man, another the sun. It was an impossible choice, one that had reduced her to bone and nerve; for no decision would not desecrate the tender equilibrium she had fought so hard to create. Time and time again Rhos had played the scenes over in her mind, walking new avenues, brushing through different doors, only to find herself at the same destination over and over: heartbreak. And she was through with it -- enough. Suddenly the choice did not seem so impossible anymore.

Rhoswen knows Raum's game, knows it well, and like a mirror she deflects his glacial demeanour with a turn of her sharp red shoulders to face him square. She flared crimson, rupturing red and in his shadow, shed her skin threefold to rid herself from the memory of his touch. Crows are vicious creatures; antagonistic and sly, but even they are afraid of fire. She holds his stare with blinding ferocity, knowing how her own eyes swallow him whole: cracking his blackened heart. And finally her loathing strikes true. Perhaps, then, she should have expected what would follow; and perhaps she did, but in truth none of that mattered when her sight blurred silver and a blue noose slid tight round her throat. Rhoswen had felt many things in her life: rage, agony, misery and joy -- but nothing quite like this. As she tensed against his grip, Rhos saw time slow around them both, as though it were detaching itself to watch this spectacle unfold before its very eyes. Raum's scent was almost as asphyxiating as the cloth about her gullet, mocking her with its intensity, bleeding into her pores and assaulting her every living thought. She was drowning in him: her heart slamming against her ribs in a four-beat rhythm that knocked the last whispers of breath from her lungs: THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD--Never assume you are not as sinful as me, Rhoswen.

 It was all she needed to find the live wire within her chest, jump-starting the punching virility between her teeth and in a turn of cataclysmic speed Rhoswen snapped her hind leg up and out to crack, slam, or puncture Raum's underbelly or limb, using the precious moment following her impact to slip like gasoline from his grip. She gasped in the free air as she spun away from the Ghost, whirling round to face him with an expression that was as nebulous as the violation that had just passed. Thoughts smashed into each other as she stood, chest concaving, watching the man she loved; the man who had crushed her throat and barricaded her lungs, the man who had offered protection - only to choke her under a summer sun and a canopy of speechless trees. "You are going to regret that." Her voice was nothing but a vitriolic whisper, a rustle on the leaves, and behind a bloodred wall and a Gladiatorial snarl, Rhoswen felt something inside shake and rattle in virginal grief.

 It might have been a second, it might have been an hour (she neither knows or cares) and he is speaking again, but the words drift over her head like dust and air; thin, hollow, skeletal. She stares at him as though he were the only that had ever existed on earth, overwhelming intensity flooding like a monsoon from her ashen gaze, questioning how she had found herself here, with him, with bruises blooming about her neck and a heart shattered into unrecognition. She had given him everything: a child, a court, a life - and in that moment, Rhoswen vowed never to give him anything again. All talk of her brother and events passed felt idle now on her tongue; suddenly obsolete and lost to the shaking of her heart. "Oh, Raum. You chose wrong, didn’t you learn from my mistake?" Again her tone is but a murmur on the hot air; ominous and impenentrable, for her entire being has melted into something pale and unsettling. It is with an incredulous glint in her smokehewn eyes that she stares on and on at the Crow, a sick sad smile threatening to break like wildfire across her lips. The mania in her head has ended, and in its wake burns a single thought that flickers and licks in the dark: with three haunting strides she closes the gap between them for the final, ruinous time.

"When I am finished with you, you will rue the day we met." 

@Raum