If first impressions are the most lasting, then he knew he would certainly not forget this moment he was assaulted by the sweltering heat and a despairing sight that was his first impression of Novus. No, this was not what a wearied man would hope to see after crossing the ocean—desert, as seemingly vast as the sea but half as pleasant on the eyes. His saving grace was that a city lie along the shoreline that he traced alone, where occasionally he was cooled by an errant wave that lurched upon his legs. For too long it looked just like a mirage. So much, that he wouldn’t allow himself to believe his eyes until he was walking among the crowds within where his other senses could be satisfied.
He traded glances with a few market patrons, but mostly everyone saw through him as they mulled about paying mind to their business. Blyse was plagued with discomfort as he looked at their faces, each one as unfamiliar to him as the last. He never realized how much he took for granted the familiarity with his clan. The only thing here that remotely resounded with his past was the slow, steady wail of a blacksmith’s hammer and a single scent which played in the air like a musical note that was hard to discern from the rest. These were not his people. He had no people,he needed reminded. Blyse had given that up on what most might perceive as a whim.
The overwhelming road ahead was just beginning to dawn on him. He needed to find his people. He needed a plan. He needed to strategize just how he was going to find his way in to a position of safety in a land he knew nothing about, but where to even start? That mare, Celeste, she called herself. She was the soothsayer that brought him here, the mare with the gift of Vision who saw a truth that so resonated with him he would betray his own people to follow her.
But then, of course, she left him in the desert.
How sweet. She did part with some cryptic instructions to a place called Denocte and that was the only known value to him in this entire equation. Blyse pushed through the crowd and stole the first alley that took him away from these strange faces. What he found on the other side was a shrine of sorts. Head-high walls of stone stood before him, worn and cracked with barely legible inscriptions. Flowers, trinkets, and other small tokens of love were strewn at the base and idols as unfamiliar to him as the equine of this land stood upon pedestals. He had a guess as to who the idols were for.
“Solis.”
He murmured that name, trying it out for the first time. He had only heard it in the Soothsayer’s rambles. She spoke about the Gods a lot in their brief time together. Mostly she spoke about her own. Rarely she spoke of his, which was a strange concept to him—belonging to a God he was not yet sure he believed in.
throw the ashes to the wind sun sinking like a stone
At nightfall, they burn candles and incense in the markets – it is a business strategy as much as it is a matter of illumination, though the moon is swollen and brilliant in the darkness of the cloudless sky above.
Seraphina wanders the maze-like streets aimlessly, though she moves with the confidence of someone with some pressing directive. Sand scatters beneath her hooves, and her lungs catch on the dry air and heavy perfume, but she is as grateful for the renewed heat as she is for the bustle of activity it has brought with it. Now that they are no longer confined indoors, and now that they have had more than enough time to recover from the Davke attack, – more than a year ago, now – the market is beginning to bloom again. (She remembers pacing through it as a child, keeping close to Viceroy’s heels. The slave auctions were the worst, and she is quick to push the memory of them out of mind.) This is…different. This is smoke and silk and gleaming jewels, fineries imported from foreign shores, well-crafted weapons and gleaming armor, wine and candy and rare, sweet pastries, flowers…charms and idols. Pretty things, surrounded by the trappings for war. It’s dazzling, and she is simply a shadow against the brightness; unless you knew her, you would never think her the queen of Solterra.
She ducks off the street and finds herself in a shadowed alleyway. As her eyes readjust to the candlelit darkness, she realizes that she has stepped into small, simple shrine; various offerings were strewn about it, strangely pretty things for the worn, warlike harshness of the desert, but things that she thinks that the god would like nevertheless. (She recalls him glancing at his reflection in the metallic sheen of his own hide with a hint of something that is almost - almost - akin to amusement, but Seraphina is not an easily amused creature, if she is one that can be amused at all.) She quickly realizes, too, that she is not alone. Down the alley, in front of the shrine, stands a stranger. He cannot be too much taller than she, and she can barely make out his features in the hazy darkness, but she notes that he is in possession of a pair of gigantic wings; if he spread them, she imagines that the alley would not be wide enough to accommodate their bulk. She exhales the heavy scent of perfume and breathes in his, and she does not recognize where he hails – the desert sand and sweat and the salt of the terminus sea are there, certainly, and the thick incense of the market, but, beneath it all, she finds something…unfamiliar. A traveler, perhaps, or a passing stranger. She turns to leave him to his business, but then he speaks, but not to her, and her ears flick towards him to catch the hushed murmur of his voice, barely audible over the distant hum of the marketplace they have just left behind. Solis.
She eyes his dark silhouette, illuminated by a halo of golden candlelight, for a moment longer, and then she steps forward. “…do you seek the god, traveler?” Her voice – low and lilting and thickly accented like the rolling dunes of the desert she calls home - emerges from flickering candlelight and shadow a fraction of a second before she does, the dull, dark silver of her coat mimicking the darkness; as she steps into the light, it gleams as though she is made of the metal wrapped around her throat. She watches him with dark, quiet eyes that take in each and every detail of his muscular frame and massive wings with a certain wariness, in spite of the certainty in her long strides and the vaguely commanding air of her raised chin. And what if he does seek her god? It is not as though she can call Solis – he does not bend to her command, or the command of any other, and he comes and goes with the rise and the fall of the sun. Now that the snow has been dealt with, gods (very literally) only know what he will do; perhaps he will return to his perch on high for another hundred years, and she will never see him again. (Either way, she will manage, but she wonders how she would tolerate his prolonged abandonment if he left his people to their own devices again. She remembers how that went – she remembers it like the sear of flame against her hips, the weight of metal around her throat, the taste of ash on her lips.)
But she does not think of Solis, now; her mind loops around itself like a snake and finds its attention again on this strange ghost in the night who whispers the name of her people’s god.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
11-10-2018, 06:30 PM - This post was last modified: 11-11-2018, 03:18 PM by Seraphina
The smooth, archaic eyes of idols stared down at him with stilted wrath permanently imprinted upon their faces. It was as if the day they were molded they knew he would one day walk upon their holy grounds with the dirt of his godless lands still dusting his hooves and swearing no fealty to their monarchs. He wondered what provoked these desert people to craft such elaborate effigies of their God. Did they think that divine beings who could create practically anything they desired from the nothingness in the world might actually hold intrinsic value in their carvings? Or, and more realistically he thought, were the idols just for the people themselves? Tangible instruments with which they could relay their unrequited love so that all that ceremony and worship felt more meaningful and real.
For Blyse, a God had always just been a thing on the outer edges of his life. A concept that small-minded men elevated when they wished to find a reason to parcel out their accountability or justify an immoral action. Now while that notion couldn’t entirely be discarded, the happenings of the prior weeks did convince him that divinity was something more incarnate than he had once thought. But there was still so much that stood to baffle him.
Could she see that? The mare who, in his intense absorption, he had not even noticed until she woke him with her dulcet voice. He certainly must have looked like a lost boy to her (which was not a far cry from the truth), so he swallowed his confusion and turned his attention to her. He would not have believed that she was made from this desert. Even in near- darkness, her form looked glacial when compared to the sand-washed cityscape behind her and if smoke rolled from her icy breath he would not have wondered how. But her eyes did this strange thing as they defied the darkness, reflecting the firelight in a striking display of contradiction. One eye portrayed the flames as whiskey-fed fire, the other for cold smoke. The only common thing they shared was the occupation of their focus: Blyse, who so returned his focus that he let the silence hang between them until it was deafening.
“He intrigues me…” He finally offered. “…but he is not the one I seek.” Blyse spoke with a surprising softness. The commander that normally carried his voice like a torch was wearied and begging for rest. Duty denied him. “I’m not sure he’d want to be sought, anyhow.” He added sotto voce.
And at the risk of sounding foolish, he posed to her a question of his own. "Where are the other Gods? I only see the one."
keep about your wits man, keep about your wits know yourself and who you came in with
The moon dances down her spine, and, though Seraphina does not hate it yet, she will. But, for now, she is drowned in a patchwork of silver light and shadow, half of her skin ablaze with moon and the other half obscured in darkness from the canopies above. For now, she is a queen, albeit one without a crown, and her kingdom is recovering - rebuilding – from a months-long snowfall.
For now, she is still a reserved thing, still a composed thing – for now, she lets her softer edges linger, and she watches him with something that is not quiet, but almost, kindness.
He admits that Solis is intriguing, but he is not the god that the man is searching for. “Which god do you seek?” she inquires, though she thinks you will not find them here. He asks, then, where the others are, and she blinks at him, as though it takes her a moment to understand what he is asking. “He is the only one that most people worship, here.” Seraphina tilts her head, examining the dark man thoroughly with those two-toned eyes; his accent suggested that he was a foreigner, and his question confirmed it. “Solis – the sun god. Our patron.” She supposes that she can call him that again, now. Her faith in Solis was fractured when the Davke culled her fledgling efforts to rebuild her struggling nation, and, even now, it is a thing that stumbles along on three legs. But he’d come for them, when the snow had come, and he’d been kinder to the Solterrans than the other gods, save perhaps Oriens; she’d still heard little news of Caligo’s behavior, but Vespera had been cruel.
Solis had come, all gleaming glory and fire, and he’d teased her – as though they were even friends. There was certainly something less godly to him than the others, in the way that he spoke to his mortals or even the way that he carried himself, to his simple solution to the snow. Whatever others might say of Solis and his mercilessness, his arrogance, she is not so sure that any of the others would be so willing to so simply aid their mortal followers, to run alongside them in battle.
The others made requests – they left the fate of the courts in the hands of their mortals.
Solis was not the same.
But debating the nature of the gods was not the point. Seraphina shakes her theological inquiry, still regarding this stranger thoughtfully. “The others guard each of our sister courts, but few in Novus worship a god that is not their own. The gods are rivals, and most do not care much for mortals from other regions.” This much is true. She has always respected the other gods, but her worship has always been reserved for Solis – save, on occasion, for Tempus, who is a god of all. “You might occasionally find people who worship Vespera or Oriens, here, the goddess and god of Dusk and Dawn, but you will probably never see Caligo – demigoddess of the night. There is little love lost between them.”
That is probably a mild way of describing the intense animosity between the two deities.
(It has been little help to the young queen’s efforts to resolve their conflict with Night diplomatically.)
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
She preached her faith unto him, dissecting the motives of the Gods who rivaled against one another by withholding their affections from those who did not worship them. He was rather amused by this. How…ungod-like to behave as petty Kings fighting for absolute rule. It would seem that no one was truly immune to the desire for sovereignty. Although even Blyse would argue that the notion of a unified people was indeed a noble (and ultimately necessary) one. He would surely fight for it, if the battle cry was loud and righteous enough. Never mind how ironic the concept of fighting for peace may be. We don’t get to choose how the world works, we simply play our part in it to achieve what means we believe in most. But that was a topic far removed from their current conversation—faith was far more complex than war could ever be.
So he set those thoughts aside to better hear the gospel in her, mostly names that were just more unfamiliar words clothed in the vague context of time—which seemed to be their ruling element. Not fire, not earth—but the motion of the sun and the moon. That was from where the deities reigned. This did piece together the things that Celeste had told him, in the cryptic way she spoke it was hard to tell a fact from an analogy coming from her peculiar vantage. One of those names, however, was quite familiar. Caligo—demigoddess of the night. In that moment, he supposed he should have felt like a rebel upon enemy lands with rivals at each side of him. But he didn’t. That was just the depth of his disconnect with this Goddess; bearing a fledgling desire to belong to her but as far from it as one could be. He also did not feel the need to hide his loyalties, as infant and precariously founded though they were.
“Then I suppose you’ll be disappointed to find that she is the one I’m searching for, this Caligo.” He took a step toward her as he spoke, letting his weight shift away from his weary leg and on to one that was…less weary. Fatigue could only be ignored so long before it demanded attention, yet he fought to deny it as long as he could. His voice betrayed this, slow and indiscernibly soft compared to his usual commanding bellow. “Is there little love lost between your people and hers as well then?” It was much less a question of curiosity and more of a way to guage his welcome here.
If Caligo had drawn him here just to be struck dead, then she had no purpose for him after all and the fate was just as well. It wasn’t as if he could return from where he had come from. Still, he studied her once he said this, searching for an emotion that he imagined might take place when he said this. Carefully, he played himself naïve (or betrayed the fact, since he was indeed naïve to her world’s customs). “I don’t come from a place that knows much of worship or prayer, but I’m told that is what I need to do if I’m to continue down this path I’ve started. It’s hardly motivating. What gives you faith in all of this?” Once he asked her this question, the need to hear the answer drew him more awake.
sometimes what a stranger might call sacrifice is embracing the thankless bramble
The dark man tells her that he seeks Caligo, and he expects that she will be disappointed. She isn’t, save in the abstract – she always likes to seek new blood for her own court. “I suppose that depends on why you seek Caligo.” It isn’t a question, but it has the upward-curving intonation of one. She doesn’t press. Gods know, she has secrets of her own to keep from him; but, if he comes from a foreign land to seek a goddess he knows nothing of, she suspects there is a story behind it. His inquiries then turn to international relations, and her expression darkens momentarily, the troubling events of the past few months returning anew to her thoughts. They often occupied them, particularly when she was trying to sleep... “Historically, yes.” She nods. No use in hiding the truth from him; he would likely find it soon enough, and she would rather he heard it from her lips than anyone else’s, because she knew the truth. (It was not always kind, particularly to Solterra, but when was history a kind thing?) “For many years, we were at war. Our people were…primarily the aggressors. Our previous monarchy was extremely violent and corrupt, and Solterran culture values glory.” There is far more to it than that, of course, but she does not bother to linger on the rest. “Fool king after fool king thought to take the Night Kingdom. None succeeded. The last war was recent enough to be within memory – many people on both sides fought in it.”She fought in it, as a girl, but she does not say that. Most of her history is an open secret, because of the collar wrapped like a noose around the slender girth of her throat, and she craves the rare occasion where someone does not know what it signifies. “Now, though…Solterra’s first king, after the monarchy fell, suspected a citizen who left for Denocte of being a spy, and he had him captured and imprisoned, but he soon released him without bloodshed. His suspicions were not entirely unfounded; the Night King had sent spies to our court, and, eventually, two of them would attack one of the Champions of our nation, now the Regent. The Denoctian Regime was…hardly diplomatic about it, but we could not retaliate, because we had recently suffered some…internal strife.” She does not elaborate on the Davke attack, though she feels a spreading sensation of renewed shame curling up in her stomach. She shakes it off and continues. “But our current Queen has no wish for war with Denocte – she was a soldier herself – and the new Queen of Denocte seems to have no desire for war either. Things seem to be calm, for now.” It is always strange, speaking of herself in the third person, but she often forces herself to do it anyways, when she walks the streets undercover. Sometimes, she simply wishes to escape being queen, but there are liars and assassins everywhere in the sun kingdom…and she has more enemies than she would like to count.
He asks, then, what inspires her faith, and a wry smile curves the expanse of her lips. “What gives me faith?” she echoes, her eyes gleaming with something – something like fire, but fire tamed. A burn subdued, or an old ache. “I’m sure that this will sound strange to you, traveler, if you come from a land without much religion…” She trails off, aware that strange is probably mild. Insane might be more accurate. “…but our gods sometimes choose to take a physical form, and they interact with us personally. Just recently, the Time God, Tempus, led a summit with the leaders of each nation, and the gods of each court came to deal with…certain troubles that had befallen each of their patron states.” She thinks of Solis, burning and golden; she thinks of the sound of his voice, the look of his eyes, how beautiful and horrible it was to behold him. How painful. “I believe in them because I have seen them, and I cannot deny what I have seen with my own eyes. But gods are not always good, and they are not always kind, and perhaps it is even crueler, because we know that they are there, that they do not always listen to our prayers.” She doesn’t know how to explain faith to the faithless. She doesn’t know how to explain why you should put your faith and your prayers in something that might never answer. After all, she has prayed to the silence many times, and she is not sure that she is better for it.
Still. Believing was not blindness. Believing was faith, even in the face of failure, and she is not sure that there are words for that part of it; it was something that must be earned.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
