The wild things have more sense of it than any equine, it seems. They’ve all packed up house and fled back a ways, distancing themselves from the almost mystical line in the sand drawn by where the waves used to touch the shore. There were those, of course, who had the untimely luck to be connected to an equine, of course, which is where Oculos found himself now, pacing back and forth barely beyond where the tide would fall normally, and even that was too deep for his own sensibility. He panted with an almost uncontrollable anxiety, picking his way on graceful legs amongst the bare and drying tidal pools, back and forth and back and forth, drawing his own line in the sand— perhaps not as permanent as that left by the sea, but certainly more relevant now.
Outwards, beyond the drying, cracked, dark brown earth and its rapidly dissipating lakes of water, which was all now but the remnants of dry seafoam, like some rabid beast had stumbled here, Kassandra trekked outwards. She picked her way carefully amongst the dying ammonites and clumps of seaweed, cringing visibly when she stepped on a starfish and crushed it into a sandy paste with one hoof. Her star-blessed, silverite eyes were filled with worry and concern.
Kassandra spent her entire life, thus far, locked in a tower, save for the brief moments she was lost and dying in the desert. Now, here, was something completely alien to her. The sea, of course, was a desert with its life underwater, and the great, blue abyss above was merely a disguise. But what was more barren than a desert? What was more barren than the sea, when the sea was not there?
She would be the first to admit that a terrible curiosity was what brought her out here, even despite the warnings of her finer senses and her companion, Oculos. She wanted to see what mysteries the sea held when the blue sheet of the world was pulled back? What mysteries rested beneath?
She was so taken in by the strangeness of the occasion that she didn’t realize there were others horses in the vicinity until she almost bumbled into them, their voices falling to the back of her conscience like the constant whispers of her visions. The roan with the glimmering stars speckling on her rump took pause and lifted her head, ears alert, watching the gathering some bit away, too nervous to approach further.
words 414 notes drops this here in a big hurry cause i gotta GO but i wanted to get this out at least. tagged @isra @acton @Raum and everyone else
The sound of the sob - half cry of sorrow, half of rage - made him startle anew, and it was a blessing of the highest order that Isra could not read his thoughts. That she did not know him well enough to see the guilt that tugged once at his mouth then fled behind his eyes, his black mask. Only Raum was left of those who knew him so well - and only Raum would scoff at him, and understand why the guilt was there at all.
He could be a new man, if he wanted; there was no one left who knew what he had been save for a Ghost.
But Acton could never think further than the end of the day - to a stiff drink, and a laugh rough as a crow’s call, and gold a heavy, sure weight at his side.
He was aware of the unicorn standing there during the course of his conversation with the paint, though his gaze never strayed to her; her eyes burned on his back, and when the wind picked up and made all the dried seaweed moan it sounded a little like that cry, even though it shouldn’t have.
Acton knew nothing of unicorns.
He looked her way only when she neared again, and twitched an ear at her words. Isn’t it? he wants to say, half-flippant, but something about the way she looked at him - an expression he’d never imagined on her face, and one that made it easy to see her as his queen - stilled his tongue.
“If this isn’t a miracle, then what is it?” he said at last, more softly than was usual for him, and looked out to sea.
Or what would have been the sea - but now it is still receded, gone to the horizon, leaving them all behind. If it was not a miracle, he thought, then it was the end of the world - and he wasn’t ready for that.
A flicker from the corner of his eye caught his gaze then, and he lifted his head to see a stranger - one who, at least, wore a much more suitably worried expression than the earlier paint stallion had. With a last glance at Isra he gestured with his pale muzzle toward her, and raised his voice to speak, though it still fell strangely flat against the strange and barren ground.
“Hey-” almost, almost, he told her that she ought to head back, that it wasn’t safe. But it seemed awfully hypocritical, with the two of them standing there, and so instead he continued, with a ghost of a grin, “find anything interesting?”
Where the water receeded from the shore, the ground was a gray mush, as though a storm cloud had fallen to earth and taken nest amongst the landwalkers, instead of hanging out with those blessed with flight. Kassandra thought if she had ever met a storm cloud they would be rather haughty, and carry with them the same kind of troublesome, hectic energy that came along with the sea simply vanishing from the world. Dark brown hillocks of rock, porous and smelling heavily of salt and silt, rose like terrible shadows out of the gloom, their crowns drinking greedily of air they may not feel under normal conditions.
A gentle lip of foam brushed gently against her hocks as the saturated sand sucked at her hooves as she snorted from the acrid air invading her nostrils, somehow dry and yet suffocatingly wet at the same time. Far up the shore, Oculos continued to pace his frenzied line in the sand, tongue held tight to anxiously taught lips, massive, curved canines flashing white. Kassandra, watching her companion with curious, perpetually startled eyes, thought his teeth reminded her of stars. She cast her gaze skyward and wondered if those celestial, blinking lights, which tormented her so, had any terrible words of wisdom in store for her.
But the heavens had been silent ever since the vision in the desert, the one that reminded her of her heinous curse— the one that reminded her of her place, as a tool, a slave to the astral plane, and brought fresh to light the perpetual nature of her curse. As was their usual, when they could have been the most helpful, their tongues were stone in their invisible mouths.
A voice, haunting and strange in it’s solid presence— for what walked where even the sea had abandoned but the ghosts, and the imminently ghostly?— and stirred her from her celestial concerns. Her shimmering, silver eyes ducked nervously, not yet used to real, actual social interaction with individuals not ordered to take care of her in her ivory tower, and cleared her throat. She tried to speak and found her voice a ghost; there was no point in yelling, and she had a feeling her shouting voice would shatter some fragile, invisible peace. She trotted her way closer to the golden stranger, struck a bit by his handsome countenance, and ducked her head. “It’s more of what I’m not finding, to be honest,” she said, quiet and shy. She looked from him to the strange, horned equine, deep as the lovely night and scattered with serpentine stars.
When she laid eyes on Isra, a strange feeling trembled through her, as though… she was missing something. She seemed to zone out for a few moments before she realized she had raised her head and was staring. Kassandra shook herself out of her bizarre stupor— hoping desperately that she wouldn’t be taken by a prophetic fit, and scare away these new equines-- and asked, in all earnestly, "Does this happen often?"
Isra of the clarion call
' like a sleep without dreams '
“It is an ending.” Isra says with all the sureness of her unicorn bones and her story-teller soul. When she looks at the weeds made brittle by the sun she sees only an end. The crushed clams and belly-up fish are also nothing more than an end. Everything around them is bones and dust where their hooves have crushed fragile shells. Only the end surrounds them and when the sea sweeps back in they will all be nothing more than the dusty pages of a book upon the deck of a sunken ship.
And she has no intentions of being forgotten. Unicorns are for legends, she tells herself, when Acton looks at her with that dark thing she's only just learning about in his eyes. He's suddenly hard too look at when sun glints off him and turns his gold coat to something that almost looks bone white. When she looks away the shadows of carrion birds flying overhead are no more comforting and everything about this dead, water-less sea seems ominous.
Only the arrival of the new mare allows her any focus at all past that sorrow and almost-fear in her soul. Isra focuses on her like a life-line. She paints constellation lines between the pricks of starlight ton her blue coat and wonder what stories each star-pattern might whisper when the moon sinks below the horizon. The sea though, is not made for stars or skies and Isra step closer to her with a warning rising her tight and worried lips. “The sea seems darker without all the water doesn't it?” Her bones tremble at her to run and the wet ground feels almost like porcelain under her hooves instead of mud. “We shouldn't stay much longer.” The words feel heavy under the stare of the star mare and Isra feels like a prophet when she meets her gaze and thinks that they look at each other not like mares but pages.
Where all the vowels of Isra fold and turn she can feel the vowels of the other mare fill up the spaces of her. The space between them feels like revelations and despite the fear running wild through her bones she reaches out her lips in welcome.
“Will you walk with us,” Isra spares a glance for Acton and she's more a queen than a story-teller when she silently tells him in no uncertain terms that the time to leave has come. He could learn about unicorns from the blue fierceness of that gaze that hides all her fear. “and tell us who you are?”
Before she turns to walk away she calls to all the others wandering out towards the horizon and the sea-that-is-not-there. Her call is a bell, a clarion call of death and warning and demand. As the horses start to trickle by them in small groups Isra beckons to Acton and the star-mare. Her horn glitters in the sun like a torch and the shadows in her spiraling bone grow longer and deeper in noon light.
Follow me, follow me. That horn seems to say betwee the slow and steady chime of her old, rusted slave-chain. And Isra's smile seems to promise something nameless and deep when she turns back and waits for them to join her.
Acton did not care much for endings. Even his performances (when he had given them) had always closed with the crowd chanting more, more, more, and with the promise of yet more mysteries to come. He had never cared much for finality; treacherous, crooked Crow he was, he loved doubling back, loopholes, stories that wove in and out and around again.
So he did not care for what she said, or the way she said it - a thing too heavy, too dense to echo as it should have.
He blew out a breath, then, and might have said something further, were it not for the stranger. She was a welcome interruption, and Acton watched her draw near, her expression dazed with the strangeness the way he imagined his own must surely be. Once she reached them he was surprised at how tall she was, how strongly made; it seemed at odd with her soft dreamer’s face.
Acton was learning not to underestimate dreamers.
It’s more of what I’m not finding, to be honest, she answered, and his lips quirked up before he could stop them. “Like water?” he said, and huffed a breath that was not quite a laugh. His spark-bright eyes slipped between the mare and the unicorn, and uneasiness twisted in him again like seaweed in a low tide.
“It shouldn’t happen at all,” he answered the stranger, but the two mares seemed to be having some silent conversation, their eyes all silver and sea-green, and Acton wasn’t sure whether they’d even heard.
He was not sorry at Isra’s suggestion they return; yet again, slick as a shining fish, the day had changed for the buckskin. He did not care for the dry sighing of sea-grass, the low hum of flies that should never be this far from shore.
Still, he told himself it was nothing but the strangeness of it that made him hold his tongue as they turned back to the city, that made him twist his ears at the clear ringing of the queen’s command.
With only a last glance at the bright slash where the true-sea waited on the horizon, Acton made to follow the unicorn and the star-mare, just behind them and before the horses who joined them. He tried not to wonder what would happen if the water chose this moment to return.
