Caligo knows the way to the lake by heart. Once, several centuries ago, she had walked it herself, not only once, but many times over. It had been her own sweet pilgrimage, isolated in the southeastern corner of the court with only the stars and the moon to keep her company. Before horses had arrived to Novus, she had lived here within a Court of dreams, and she had been the dreamer.
She had been gone too, she supposed. She wasn’t the only dreamer here anymore - there was a Court full of dreamers now, and as much as she thought she knew them, perhaps she didn’t understand them quite as well as she thought she did.
For a while she is silent, watching the stars glow and twinkle above them. Finally she sighs, rolling a stone with her hoof. “Does anyone have an idea?” she asks quietly. She knows that half of them want bloodshed - and she would be lying to say that there wasn’t a small part of her that wanted the same.
But this was her Court. Her anger was reserved for others.
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After the meeting at the beach, Caligo turns for the lake to deal with the thunderbirds that have invaded the Night Court. You follow along, not yet sure what the outcome will be - and perhaps the demigoddess herself does not yet know.
But you have a choice.
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The night settled and Katniss couldn’t help but find herself a place beneath the stars. For so long she had lived beneath the starlight, looking towards the moon for her guidance through the night. The twinkling stars made her think of Metaphor, of her lost daughters, and her lost homes. This place was new and strange, but she had met some friendly faces. She thinks about the kindness of Asterion’s heart and she cannot help but wonder how someone as kind as he found himself in such a tight spot. It was all relative, she supposed, because her own journey here could be considered one of those figurative tight spots. She was a stranger here for all intents and purposes.
She hears the calling of another and she looks towards the voice. She’s never seen this being before and doesn’t yet know this is a Goddess, her Goddess. She already has mixed feelings about how they could allow for such destruction to happen, and yet, she holds most of her comments to herself.
Her steps take her closer, her mind wandering on just what she might be referring to. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to…but I’m here to help with whatever might be needed.” Not only was she tall and strong, she had a kind heart to back it all up. Katniss might not admit it, but she was the whole package. She had kindness and strength, a willing to love and a willingness to fight. Perhaps her full potential had yet to be reached, but it would be reached in time.
Isra the fool heart
'the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.” '
The lake is the one part of the court that Isra is not intimately familiar with and perhaps that is why she is struck with the beauty of it. Everything is gilded in silver and glitter where the stars dance like many sisters overheard. Even the shores, littered with glass-like feathers and bones and charred out holes, is as lovely as it is eerie under the moonlight. The weapons strewn about seem nothing more than relics of an older-time, a time where blood-lust and rage reigned and moonlight was nothing more than a dream.
It's hard in the lovely moonlight to glide her gaze over the warriors that have joined them, to dive deep into the heartbreak she feels to see their flesh so sinned upon. Perhaps that is why, as she steps into a ray of silver-light where a star reflects strangely off the point of her horn, Isra feels as if she sheds a skin.
In the moonlight it feels as if her unicorn skin and sea-scales flake off like rust from a sword. And she becomes something else, something new, something made of ink and paper and leather. “Faith, This new Isra says and her eyes dance like paper-thin vellum in a storm as she looks to Caligo and Katniss and all the others (all the ones she loves, all the ones she would die for).
“We must have faith.” Inside her something blooms beneath the night-lights. A yawning universes churns inside her and meteors lash against her bones and she thinks that she might explode in ink and moonbeams and stardust if she doesn't move right now.
And so move she does.
She pulls away from the others. Under her hooves the strange feathers bend and sometimes crack and she thinks perhaps that not-to-far-away eyes turn to that unicorn (who feels like something else) who walks across their battle-field and their grave-yard. Each step brings that universe inside her closer and closer to her skin, closer to the air, closer to life.
Isra remembers reading once in a book that had no title, that monsters loved stories as much a children do. For what dreaming soul takes the time to look at a beast and say, you are lovely, you are worthy? Who braves the darkest caves in the world to whisper fables to creatures who hardly know how to dream? At the time she though it a brave thing to do, foolish but brave. What, she remembers thinking, is the point in telling the story that will be your last?
Now she understands---
A cloud shifts overhead and Isra folds herself into a bed of strange feathers. And when the cloud shifts again the moonlight glints off her and her nest of feathers until she is the brightest thing by the lake. “Once there was a dragon and there was a lion in a world where the trees bleed not sap but gold,” Her voice rings out, louder than the wind. Louder and louder and louder until she's calling all those distant eyes.
“That world was as lovely as it was dangerous. The swamps were wild with sharks, and the seas were wild with birds. Everything in this world was broken, made strange by some sickness that had long ago sunk into the soil and the ocean and the sky. All of the world was tainted.” Overhead the moon still glows and Isra still shimmers and she's a lovely sort of fool.
“Everything was tainted exceptt for the dragon and the lion. They were both very lonely in their sick world, so lonely they thought they could die,” Isra pauses, looks back to the others, hoping that perhaps they understand both the story and the idea of faith.
Faith in themselves and in the mortality of monsters who might be as foolish as horses, unicorns and gods and can sometimes be.
It’s all he could think as he watched her go out beneath that dark and foreboding sky and that glass-looking lake over ground still marred by blood and gouge-marks and bodies. It was not, he thought, so very different than the seafloor once all the water had retreated, which was to say it was wrong.
But they were all a little mad, anyway - maybe they always had been, in Denocte. A touch of derangement like a shimmer of starlight over all of them. And besides, Caligo was standing right there, and surely she would let nothing happen to the queen she had so recently chosen to lead her people. (Not that he knows, lately, just what to think of their goddess - not that he ever has thought much of her at all).
Still he watched the unicorn walk out to the midst of that battleground with something strange, something like worry, twisting in his gut. He did not care for the feeling, foreign and sour like a stranger’s wine, and the buckskin took a few steps out after her, until he stood between the queen and the rest of the group, waiting for whatever would come next.
Half of him is attuned to her story, one ear twisting, almost wistful, toward her - but his match-light eyes are watching the sky, wondering what the hell he’ll do when/if the birds came, and when/if they struck.
All he had were his illusions and a pocketful of magic tricks, and those had never done much when it came to real trouble. Acton would use them if he must -
but first he’d see how this bizarre evening began to unspool, like one of Isra’s stories made real.
He licked his teeth and wondered if this one would have a happy ending.
Calliope “I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”
Calliope is already pacing along the lake when they arrive. Violence rolls of her in waves of sweat and spark. Each step of her hooves is a statement of war for she cracks feathers and bones beneath her, hoping that perhaps the sound of it travels out to wherever the thunder-birds are licking their wounds. The horn above her head sighs like hungry steel when she turns and canters towards the others, watching their foolish queen bed herself down like an offering.
Part of Calliope wants to laugh for that innocent, stupid hopefulness of the other unicorn. Another part of it is ready to die to protect the fragile, innocent things of the world from the depravity of monsters.
For now she doesn't follow, only turns to the other mare and answers. “There are thunder-birds somewhere in the distance. And we are here to see if they will try to kill us or befriend us.” And when her eyes turn towards Caligo the moon glints off the battle-wounds on her neck still crusted with blood. Her eyes are not silver-blue anymore. They are rolling pits of sparks, sometimes weak but always furious.
The stallion puts something in Calliope on edge and her gaze when it settles on him is not unlike how a lion might look at a jackal. His feet never take another step towards their queen and Calliope judges him for the way he stands in the between, neither on one side or the other.
“If nothing else Isra has given them a target and us an easy way to judge what sort of monsters the birds will be today.” Her voice is thick with emotion and memory and her skin is alive with white-light that licks across her spine is hisses of a lash. Calliope says nothing else as she brushes past the other mare, past the goddess and pass the stallion to stand guard a few feet from the queen.
And where one unicorn beckons the beasts with story and hope the other calls to them with the low charge of a storm that is nothing to the boiling tornado of hate in her eyes. Calliope in that moment doesn't feel like a unicorn at all
She feels like an empty battle-field waiting for the drums and the trumpets.
11-02-2018, 02:15 PM
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Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29 Signos: 1,315
The road from there to here had done nothing to assuage Raymond's misgivings, either spoken or unspoken. Their goddess led them like cattle to what could as easily be a slaughterhouse as a verdant field and offered no support, no strength, no words that they mortals could not have produced alone. He wasn't sure yet whether that threatened to put him at ease or justify his atheism.
Maybe, he wanted to say, someone should walk up to them, and if they tear that horse's head off we'll know they don't want to be friends, because comedy was always a great way to fill the spaces between actions. But Isra stepped forward with newfound conviction and spoke of faith, and it took a great deal of the strength the red stallion had left to restrict the upwelling wave of displeasure to a slow tilt of his eyes down and away, toward Calliope.
Faith had almost ruined him. It festered in the wounds of crumbling edifices, disguising itself like golden kintsugi until the day the weight of its rot grew too great.
Faith was no friend to Raymond.
If nothing else, Isra has given them a target, Calliope said. The red stallion would have happily agreed with her, but for the fact that the neck stretched so prettily for the guillotine would be an absolute bitch to bury later. And if the night queen wanted to risk her life for faith, then her regent would have to risk his to keep her safe.
With a sigh into pursed lips, Raymond stepped forward to join Isra, wearing the black-glass stillness of the lake before sunrise. He moved like he was untouchable - not because he had faith, but because he knew exactly what he wanted and exactly what he was capable of - and his eyes were neither entranced by Isra's story nor frightened by the Thunderbirds.
He offered not the barest hint of antagonism beyond the weight of his own self-assurance, but heaven help bird or beast that dared to threaten the night queen in that moment.
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
11-10-2018, 12:01 AM - This post was last modified: 11-10-2018, 12:03 AM by Raymond
The thunderbirds gather overhead, circling like vultures above the lake. The water casts their reflection almost perfectly, nary a ripple present to distort the silvery image, so it seems as if there are two battles to fight, instead of only one.
But will it be a battle of hoof and talon, or stories and secrets? Will it be remembered in the history of Denocte, in the lore of all of Novus, or will it be forgotten by the morning? Only time would tell.
Caligo nods to Katniss as she joins them, offering a tight-lipped smile to the newcomer. “We may need all the help we can get,” she tells her, but quickly falls silent after. She is oblivious to the others, to their fury and cunning and roiling emotions. She has eyes and ears only for Isra and the beasts.
A target indeed.
The birds swoop lower and lower, laughter rolling from their beaks in their foreign tongue. They watch Isra as only a predator could, their eyes beady and hungry. Their double wings beat in unison, creating gales that buffet at the equines as lightning crackles between their talons. All things considered, it seems Calliope might soon get the fight she so hungers for.
One of the beasts lands at last, his beak snapping together defiantly. He takes a tentative step closer to her, pawing at the soft lake soil.
But he does not attack - not yet. His head tilts to one side as if in contemplation, listening to Isra’s story. And when she pauses, his many tails whip from side to side and he seems to almost nod, as if encouraging her to continue.
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Isra the unicorn
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. "
She can see the violence in their gazes and the uncertainty in the way all their eyes seem unsure of where exactly to fall. All it if echoes in her, deep below the clarion call of that gaping universe churning in bottom of her lungs. Each of her words hides a fine tremble. The marrow of her bones feels weaker than gold-dust and sharper than the edges of diamond-dust.
Were is not for that story, for the lion roaring and scrapping it's claws down the backs of her teeth, she would quiver and disintegrate into shadow. If a dragon wasn't circling (not unlike a thunderbird) around and around in the thick blackness of her eyelids each time she blinks Isra would turn away and beg the warriors to show her the way of violence instead of faith.
But the words refuse to stop and the lion and the dragon roar as they battle on the mountain of her tongue. And so she looks only to the others, smiles weakly as if to say, I know, I know how foolish faith can seem, and continues onward-- ever and always onward.
“But the dragon was not just lonely and the lion thought about many more things that death. Each had a vice, a hunger for things that was not so much hunger as a black and bottomless pit that lived in each of their bellies. They were only beasts in a broken world, after all, and we all know how beasts and mortals want and want and want until the world is nothing more than fire and ice.” And the moment she says 'beasts' the thunderbird's drown out the wind with laughter and her voice sounds as thin as a dandelion seeds in a storm when their wings drum up tornadoes with each uplift and downward push.
And then one lands and her trembling rises from the marrow of her bones to every inch of her skin. It's almost impossible for her to look away from that clacking beak and continue her story. The words almost drift away from her like small school fish before a great white shark. Isra's eyes catch though on the way the thunderbird pauses, head-tilted and twitching tail, like a lion waiting for a hunger to be filled.
Isra hopes it's words that will fill the beast, words sweeter than the fury of fearful blood coursing in tidal waves though her veins.
She inhales and shoves down all that fear and worry with a violence that could make any general envious. “The dragon lived on a mountain made of gold that caught on the sunlight and the moonlight like a mirror. His mountain could have lit an entire sea for no shadow was cast from that gold peak the moment the sun or the moon crested the horizon. He forgot how to sleep because his world was always alive with light.” Her words are as fine as paper and ink. She feels almost as if she's yelling to be louder than the wind of their wings. “The lion lived in forest with a canopy thicker than a the deepest pit of quicksand. No light lived in that forest of darkness and dampness and rot. The lion forgot the name of any color but black and his eyes glowed white and blind from lack of light. And so the lion was envious of the light and the dragon wanted to drown himself in darkness.”
Isra gathers up the last dregs of her courage and reminds herself that she is a religion of wonders and dreams. She tells herself that she is a unicorn and that there is a universe inside her not unlike the storms inside the bellies of these thunderbirds. She gathers up her courage like a shroud and lifts her eyes to meet that one bird who dared to land.
They meet like the sea and a storm.
“If you kill me you'll never know how the story ends.” This she whispers like a wave whispers over the shore when the wind refuses to blow.
One look around those gathered was enough to make Acton wonder what the hell he was doing there.
He had never involved himself in the affairs of the kingdom. Even as one of Reichenbach’s closest confidants, a brother in all but blood, he had been only a shadow around the palace for the duration of the former king’s reign. Acton’s business had been elsewhere, and so had his heart - Denocte as a whole had never held much interest to him.
The buckskin wondered just when that had changed.
He could feel the gaze of the unicorn - the other one, the dark one - on him, but Acton had eyes only for their queen. That, and the bird just beyond her. There was something familiar in the sound of his beak when it snapped shut, something that made his blood jump below his skin.
But it did not attack, and Isra only kept talking.
At first it was subconscious, the way he took a step forward to better listen even as the wind of a hundred wings drug its fingers through his mane. Then, as her voice continued as soft and undeniable as a wave on the shore, Acton began to close the distance between them. He never looked once at Raymond, and by now he’d decided not to look at the bird again, either - he worried it might see the bright challenge in his eyes. If it was anything like him, that was all the encouragement it would need to strike.
His magic was a livewire beneath his skin, too, by the time he reached them, but there was no help he could see for illusions here. If he needed them, if it came to it, he would find a way for them to matter. Until then he would wait, but patience had never come easy to Acton and it cost him now. Maybe it was her words that kept him from speaking, the easy rise and fall of her voice like one of the gypsy singers in the Night Market. Maybe he was like the bird in that way, too.
Whatever it was, it kept him quiet, though the line of his mouth was nowhere near to laughing. And when Acton reached Isra he lay down, too, and even in the darkness and the storm he looked like nothing more than a boy at the feet of a storyteller, hungry for the ending.
Calliope “ and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye,"
Everything in Calliope roars inside the cage of her skin the moment the birds gather and circle overhead. Each beat of their wings and each clack of their beaks is echoed with a crack of lightning in the hollow of her spine. Her muscles are alive with electricity, alive and enraged.
When a lone monster lands it takes every ounce of her will-power not to leap over the resting queen and latch her teeth onto the bird's jugular like a lion. Calliope, when she blinks, can still remember how Shrike looked swinging like a noose from the talons of a thunderbird. It's only the queen, sprawled like a fool on a bed of feathers that holds all her muscles coiled like a spring that hasn't yet been loosed.
The stallion joins her and Calli shakes her horn like a wolf when she watches the lambs bed down on their faith. Faith, she thinks, is for queens and golden-boys and not for black-as-night unicorns.
Black unicorns are made for violence, for freedom, for blood-letting the world until all the monsters and the sinner are nothing more than dust. And so she watches, says nothing and refuses to look at Raymond to see the censure in his gaze. Calliope has always been ready to die for her 'blood-letting'. She was created for it.
But for all the tight, silence of her lips the lightning licking around her skin like forked, snake tongues sings a eulogy to the metronome of the monsters, swinging tail.
The thunderbird waits for words and Calliope waits for violence, and for a moment she's not sure which of them might 'want' more.
