Isra, oil-slicked and drowning “We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
By the time the night has reached it's lowest hour, just as the sky is dark enough to sing, Isra (as if she is the night-sky) has started to bend low before her own exhalations. Every drop of magic in her bones has turned to dust and rust and it feels like sharp, scaled beasts are swimming through the seas of her blood. Her eyes are desert dry and the whites of them, when she looks at the stars with sorrow, are shot through with crimson bolts of blood-lightning.
And in her weakness even the dull-throb of aging teeth marks at her throat feels like nothing more than a needle in a wave of knives.
The tall, prairie grass tickling the pale scales on her belly are just grass, nothing else. Although she does, when she looks towards the mountains and remembers that look in Acton's eyes, imagine that the hill would be almost lovely covered in rapier blades as tall as trees. All her magic can do is turn one blade out of the hundred to steel that is bendable, dull and weak.
She should be afraid to be so dead in the ocean of grass. She should be cautious of the heavy darkness and the fading stars (winking out one by one, like fireflies). But that hum of Fable's dreams in the brightest corner of her mind only makes her brave. She forgets that she's nearly alone in the twisted, melting remains of her maze.
Isra's long since lost track of time as the stars sink around her and the skies darken to something blacker than black. Her eyes flutter behind in her lid, in and out of dreaming and nightmare and reality. The pattern of her lungs ebbs and crests like a tide. It's not until it peaks and she's ready to bed down in the meadow like wild-thing instead of a queen that a colt joins the cicadas in breaking the silence.
It feels like floating through oil to lift open her eyes and smile. Perhaps if he was older he would have seen the cracks in her gaze, the prints of heartbreak not yet healed, a glow of love that still shines brighter than her scales in the moonlight, or the way she tucks her nose to hide the wounds and dirt coating her neck like satin.
“Perhaps you could bring me some water?” Isra offers when the colt asks her if she needs anything. When she watches him go she begs her magic to rise like a river in her blood again so that she might make a stone into a meal for him. Because even though her bones feel like water and glass Isra still isn't content with the way the world is.
Nothing happens and the night still ticks onward, careless of the unicorn drowning in darkness.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
From out of the bleak the colt comes to him. The boy is black as a raven’s wing – a true Crow in colour and all. He has been nourished by wing and beak and claw and his eyes are like black pearls – did the Night Queen see that too-shiny glimmer in his young gaze?
“She wants water.” And now the colt is nervous energy, even the air crackles and trembles in his presence.
“Run.” Raum commands of the orphan and the child nods frantically, wheeling away as his long limbs carry him into a run. The Ghost watches the boy go, knowing he would burn out fast, that the run and ragged breath would disguise all the nervousness that ripples from him.
Slowly he returns his gaze to the queen as she lies. About her, her fabricated world begins to crumble. Her weakness is blood he tastes and he makes no move to go to her. Not when her magic is so broken, not before he needs to.
How long was it until the boy returns? He comes rushing, his breath a torrent, a rasp that rises into the dark night. It is abrasive in the silence, but the boy is exhausted too, his nervousness less. About him hangs a flask of water Raum’s gaze studies the colt and his pitcher and quickly the colt bleats boldly, “It is done.”
In silence the elder Crow merely nods to the colt and he skitters off back to their resting queen. Adorned in a skin that is not his own (for it is blacker than pitch) the Ghost fades back into the night to wait.
He stands within the dark, upon the fringes of the maze, like Charon. And like the boatman he waits. Soon the colt returns his eyes growing wilder the closer he comes. “You may wish to leave Novus.” Raum says slowly, regarding the orphan before him. “There is a family waiting to take you away. Go with them if you wish. Speak nothing of the Crows again.”
With that Raum is alone. His skull tips up the moon that shines, until a cloud passes over it. Then he looks into the eternal black of the night sky. He waits and he waits. Denocte’s Ghost waits until the poison would have started its work and then he slips like night into the Queen’s crumbling maze.
@Isra - It Begins.
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
01-27-2019, 07:49 AM - This post was last modified: 01-27-2019, 09:33 AM by Raum
Isra, fading fast
"Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind."
When the boy returns she sees only the flare of his slat-sides and the flash of moonlight dancing a waltz across the blackness of his eyes. It's her hope that looks at him and smiles brightly and gives a simple “Thank you.” Isra's about to ask him to linger a while and join her back to the citadel kitchens, but the colt is already slipping back into the night before she can find the words.
Some primal part of her laments his absence when the night never rises once more in cricket and star song.
Maybe later she'll tell herself that if she wasn't so tired the water would never have slaked her magic-fever. Later Isra might recall how sweetly bitter the water tasted, as if it was raw sap on her lips instead of lake water. For now all she can taste is moonlight on her tongue when she drinks.
She thinks the ache in her belly nothing more than dehydration.
But soon, too soon, the stars blend together and multiply when she looks up to the sky. Her bones start to feel weary with more than exhaustion. This feels like drowning, she thinks as she starts to slip under the darkness. The grass feels not like earth at her sides but a million needles too sharp for her defend against.
All of her hurts.
Her sight is the last to fade. It holds on long enough to see a shadow thicker than the blackness around it peel from the hedges and start towards her. Isra is still herself enough to know that it's no shadow but a ghost that creeps closer and closer like a reaper. Fury burns through her then. It's hot, hot, hot but not hot enough to burn out the poison running like thick ichor through her body.
She tries to say, I will have your bones, and then, I will turn your blood into soil and your skin into roses. All that comes out it a sob, too soft to sound furious. But maybe, just maybe the hate and rage is in her eyes when she meets his gaze and blinks back as much of the poison as she can manage.
Isra could light bonfires with all the heat in her eyes even as they start to dim.
It was not the shed-star seer that led him to the maze. Nothing so grand, so strange, as that.
Acton was always listening to the world around him, an ear out for an easy mark - but especially tonight, with a Ghost on the hunt. The two Solterran citizens he overheard weren’t talking about Raum; they were talking about the maze, and who they had seen enter, and who they thought might win.
How odd it was, to hear a stranger say his daughter’s name. His heart gave a little jolt, a false start in a race, a hungry jump of spark toward fuel. He had forgotten entirely about the maze, but now he pictured it as it was built - towering hedgerows, crooked pathways, shadows on shadows and a hundred dead ends. There was magic in it, too; Acton didn’t know what, but he could take a guess. Isra had been shaping the world like a potter in recent days. But it was not magic that he was worried about.
He could not remember it ever taking so long to get to the prairie. Ages for the bonfires to fade to sparks and distant smoke behind him, hours for the chaotic music of voices and instruments and laughter to fade, years for the night to fade to darkness and silence and late-summer heat. There was only one living thing he saw - a boy, small and dark, who moved hurriedly and did not look up when Acton called out to him. Kids these days, he thought, and grinned.
At last he stood before the entrance to the maze, alone. The hedges were only hedges, the Benevolent had moved on, taking the crowds with them. Only scents lingered like ghosts - the sharp copper tang of magic, the sweet waft of popcorn and hotcakes, and beneath it all the deep heady green-and-growing smell of the maze itself. Of course O was not here; nobody was here. Not even crickets. Only stars above and shadows below.
But Acton did not return to the city. His heart was no calmer than it had been in the market square; it was beating out a fast tattoo against his ribs. For a moment he stood, head cocked like a fox, so still that no one who knew him would believe it of him. He wondered what the boy had been doing at a place so clearly abandoned; he dropped his nose to the trampled earth, a jumble of hoof prints and scents too numerous to make sense of. As though it were waiting there in the soil the memory of ambushing Lysander came to him - and it seemed like a dream, now, all the thick and silent snow and the scent of pine and his family beside him, hangman grins and gleaming knives. He surprised himself by shivering, shocked himself by feeling sorry for the poor bastard.
Maybe Raum was right, he thought, and stepped into the maze.
If Raum had not been his brother (once, before everything crumbled away) he would never have found them. Oh, but Acton knew that scent - knew it in blood and smoke, knew it in the twisted darkness of Denocte’s alleyways and the dust and sun of Solterra’s canyons. Knew it at the god’s mountain and knew it most recently, most intimately, in a dank cave with the summer fireflies outside and another sort of knife to his throat. If his heart was a drumbeat before now his body was a symphony - each nerve alight, each scent awake. For likely the first time in his life he was glad he’d had nothing to drink, and that old adrenaline-spell came down over him like god’s oldest blessing.
He felt like fire and brimstone as he walked through the narrow hallways, except for the fear - that was a new thing, this worry for others, a load he’d never carried before. But still his eyes were matchlight-bright, still his blood felt hot as stars. Yet there was still nothing - no sound but the whisper of leaves like an echo of his own breathing.
Then he turned a corner, and there they were.
It was hard, at first, to see them - Isra a crumpled heap in the corner, a dim dull brown with her spiraling horn like the pointed finger of a dying tree. Raum, who he would recognize in any skin, any shape. Raum, whose intent was clear - and for a moment Acton only stood there, one foot still poised, his mind wheeling.
“It worked, then.” His voice was loud and level, calm as a closed fist; he drew forward with that old familiar swagger. “You were always the best of us, Raum - well done, again.” His grin did not look like a skeleton’s grin; it looked like a showman’s, it looked like a king’s. Acton forced himself to look at Isra, even as he continued toward Raum. He schooled his expression into arrogant distaste and turned away from the murder-and-death in her gaze.
“Let me help you end this,” he said, low, and prayed to any god that might be listening that he could put on a perfect performance one last time.
02-11-2019, 10:45 AM
Played by
Obsidian [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 16 Signos: 0
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
He is smoke within the midnight maze. His skin is the surface of the moon, bright and shadowed. The Ghost is as any spook might be. He glows, unearthly bright, stepping silent as a nightmare.
The shrub walls whisper as they watch him pass. They reach out with long gnarled fingers that drip as melting wax. Magic is fading here and for a moment it is as if Raum is the most real thing. For every labored breath the crumpled queen inhales and releases, her make-believe world melts a little bit more.
Corporeal and as real as she, Raum finds her in her shadowed corner. He looks at her, as if he can hear – can see- the poison lacing through her veins. The darkness cradles Isra (and oh how it fans his ire), shadows swim over her and pull her into the darkness – much like the drug that pulls the girl deeper into unconsciousness.
There is no rush in him as he moves to her side, unaffected and as cold as night. The Crow’s gaze meet hers and the Queen’s eyes hiss the words her tongue cannot. Raum feels her threat as a whip upon his skin. I will have your bones, I will turn your blood into soil and your skin into roses..
Such promises!
Yet there is no sting from the bite of a whip. No, all that escapes the Night Court Queen is a tearful sob that echoes in the night.
How the maze trembles at the sound! How the magic quakes at the undoing of its maker!
Raum slips to Isra, pouring through her maze. He is quicksilver, here to drown the world in metal and poison. Closer, closer, he moves. Close, close, until his ankle is a hair’s breadth from hers. Then, down he leans, until their eyes meet, until their stance is an intimate thing. Only then does Raum utter softly, as though Isra were his daughter and this was any quiet night he might gently urge Sabine to sleep, “I am sorry, my Queen, I could not hear you.” Soft as a raven’s wing, he smooths down the tangle of her fringe.
A spark flares in the corner of Raum’s eye. It is bright enough to never be extinguished in the blue of his gaze. His attention drifts from the fallen queen. The song of her sobs, her labored breaths, joins with the birds of the night, as he now watches his brother in silence.
It is with slow regard that the Ghost watches his Magician, that he studies the black curve of his performer’s smile. Acton’s flattery is a fan breathing cold kisses upon Raum’s skin.
For so long, the silver Crow says nothing at all, but feels the bite of Isra’s gaze and studies the way his brother watches their queen – a girl downed like a bird from the sky.
Acton is a lick of flame, rippling as a fire before him and Raum knows that fire as well as he knows his own skin. He studies the curve of his brother’s black lips and hums, gently, considering, “You have changed your tune, Acton. And I do not think it is because of the breath I choked from your lungs…”
Raum’s voice is so dangerously soft. His look a wicked thing. The blade upon his forelimb laughs. It is broken in part and knows the blood of a once-god. Does it now thirst for the blood of a Magician?
“I know you are changeable, Acton,” His voice is the soft rumble of thunder, the stirring of a sky to chaos and fright. Silently the Ghost invites his brother closer as the blade frees itself from its brace. Raum offers it openly, holding it above the curve of Isra’s throat. It is close enough for Raum to strike the queen as she lays and close enough for Acton to take…
“So, come then, brother. Finish it for us.” Slowly Raum turns blue eyes upon Acton and now they are bluer then the sea, deep enough to drown any spark, deep enough to drown an infernal sun. Such challenge lies in that invitation, one as great as death.
In silence Raum waits and the silence knows he is no fool.
Isra who loved a dragon
“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
Each step Raum takes brings a dragon of fury rising up inside her bones. It's sea of hate that courses through her like a tsunami. It wipes clean every inch of innocence left in her. Gone are the tender shards of hope and empathy running like pollen and barbs though her.
All she feels is anger when he touches her. And the anger, hotter than the sun, awakens a little bit of dead magic in her blood. The poison in her veins turns to salt water and blood, running through her veins like winter. It's enough to chase back some of the dimness from her gaze.
When he calls her queen she wants to turn every inch of his skin into glass. She wants to shatter him to dust with one strike of her horn. She wants to let Fable drag him down to the bottom of the sea until he is more salt than flesh.
Isra wants death.
Raum's death is fire on her tongue.
She can taste it in the grass creeping between her lips. She can feel it in the moonlight hanging silver and cold around them. Everything around her feels like a graveyard and she cannot stop the thought that her bones might be gravestones from making her shiver.
Acton at first is nothing more than a shift of golden in the moonlight, bright enough to make her think of sunlight. She cries in her head for Eik, and behind her clenched teeth she can taste clover. But when Acton comes closer her hope is dashed.
She remembers how he came to her, and how he knew that the ghost wasn't done with her yet. She remembers how they talked of death. Isra remembers how he didn't fight to stay. That's the last betrayal she thinks of when she watches, helpless as a seal on the beach, as they lift the knife over her.
Isra wonders if she will become an altar or a sacrifice.
Fable. The cry runs through her bones like a current in that sea of hate. It feels like ice and snow and stardust. It doesn't feel like ink at all. There is no story here, only tragedy. Her dragon, her friend, her bonded is the last name she thinks of as she watches the blade of the ghost eclipse the moon in her gaze.
Somewhere in the city a dragon is ripped from his dreams, coldly and cruelly. And when he takes to the sky he roars, and roars, and roars.
It was a wonder the scene before him did not douse all his fire in fear, in horror.
Maybe the most terrible part was this: it was far from the worst thing he had seen Raum do. He had done as gruesome acts himself, and never once thought himself mad - but madness was all he could see, now, as he studied the silver Ghost.
Perhaps the maze was a part of it, the way the hedges seemed to lean in over them, blocking light and noise save for the distant staring moon. There was the taste of used-up magic on the air, caustic and strange. But Acton knew it was really only Isra - the way he could not see her without seeing the creature she had been, cowering in shadows, stealing to live, heedless of the weapon on her brow.
This might have been a fitting end for a girl like that - but never for a unicorn. It was a distinction he’d never understood before.
Raum’s voice was velvet, so soft he had to strain to hear. The wind whispered more loudly, the moon possessed a warmer gaze than the Ghost.
“I’ve always been a crooked bastard,” he said, and licked his teeth. His gaze did not leave the searing, frigid blue of Raum’s; he did not trust himself to look at his queen. “You think a crow could so easily become a dove?” Acton laughed a black dog’s laugh, one that covered like soot the sound of the blade sliding free. Oh, what a familiar summons that was, how many times had he answered its clarion call.
Like each time before the flash of silver drew his eye; his gaze fell to the knife, his mind to the memories held by its gleaming, savage grin. How many times had he hefted the blade? He wasn’t sure whether it was the same one he’d used to carve the scar down Bexley’s face but there was something intimately familiar about the curve of the handle. He didn’t need to test it to know its sharpness; Raum tended to his knives with the care of a lover. He was always so attentive - it’s what made him deadly.
Oh, Acton’s heart was a wiser thing than his head - it beat like fists against his ribs, it begged him away. Back into the pathways of the maze, not so different from those dim and winding streets, the markets and alleys of the city he so loved. Nobody would know he’d been there; it would not be so difficult, to claim ignorance on a night as chaotic as this. But he had never been a coward. Sometimes a madman, sometimes a fool, and never anything more than a back-alley criminal.
Of all of these and more, Acton thought a hero was the most ill-fitting role he’d ever played. For the briefest of moments his gaze found Isra’s, and he wondered if someday she would tell the story of tonight. He liked the idea of it, a starring role in one of her tales. But there was nothing but bright hate in her gaze, and it forced his own away.
Finish it, Raum was saying, and Acton thought Yes. It is finally time.
“For you, brother, anything,” he said, and met that drowning stare. Was there something there of the man he loved, buried in the fathomless blue? Would it matter if there were?
Even now he was flush with adrenaline, almost eagerness. For the magician had always, always wondered which of the two of them was faster.
In one swift motion Acton seized the knife and drove it for Raum’s throat.
02-18-2019, 12:15 AM
Played by
Obsidian [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 16 Signos: 0
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
The blade drips with moonlight as it drives toward Raum’s flesh and it is answer enough.
They are brethren Crows no more.
Time is a slow thing. It draws out, languid and idle. It drags and drags until Raum can feel the tick of every millisecond passing him by like a minute. But Raum is no magician and time is not really slow. But foresight is learned and Raum has learned so many things about his brother lately. He knew Acton would not take the blade, not with that bright fire smile he wore, not with the white-hot ire he directed at Raum in the caves.
Acton had been changing for some time now. He bore no more Crow feathers, his skin was not black and sleek. His allegiance had shifted and so the Ghost was ready: He was ready to see Isra’s blood spill like a fountain. He was ready to see Acton secret away the blade and appeal for a truce. And above all, Raum was ready to see his blade directed back upon himself.
And it comes, glinting bright, it singing with laughter as it cuts the air like butter. It thirsts for its master’s skin and its master expects nothing less of it.
But, to expect his brother’s betrayal and to experience it, nothing could prepare Raum for that. Rage rises within him like the dragon that stirs from slumber upon Denocte’s borders. It is electricity along his nerves and turns his skin red as blood. Before even the blade has touched his skin, the Ghost is no longer quicksilver, but crimson pooling in the moonlight. The blade cries for him, but Raum knows his brother and he knows his blade (for he has watched both all of his life). Though the blade bites his skin and cuts along its throat – for it always strikes true – the Ghost deftly dodges its culling blow.
Already magic is turning his teeth sharp. Fangs are forming, wicked and gleaming as his maw parts. Then he lunges, as he had within Denocte’s caves, but this time, it is not a hooked wing that presses upon Acton’s throat. Instead, it is a lion’s maw that clamps about Acton’s firebright neck. And it holds, it holds and squeezes and pours every ounce of bitter betrayal into that one savage, world-ending bite.
Leonine and cold, Raum pulls them down in a flurry of rent flesh and hot blood. The earth baptizes them in mud, blood and water of Isra’s tears. There Raum holds, until there is nothing between his jaws, until air is still within the Magician and his spark is gone. Only then does the Ghost rise, silver and cold once more. Blood adorns him, thick as mud and not enough to ever tie him to his brother’s lifeless body again.
Slowly Raum breathes, drinking in the air, feeling the ache of his lungs, the throb of his jaw and the river of blood that oozes from his own cut. Ah, that stinging cut, the final wound Acton could ever lay upon him. The Crow studies the lifeless body before him, the other Crow, now broken; a magician with no tricks left to play.
Blood seeps from his maw, the taste a horrific thing that twists and convulses within the shell of his soul. Doused in death, he stands, as still as a silver statue, every part of him stone, every part of him untouched by his sin, but for his eyes. Oh his eyes… they are a maelstrom, a storm broiling out at sea - screaming.
Then he turns that gaze upon Isra, upon the fire of her hatred. She lies like a dragon tethered, savage but subdued by wicked poison. In the distance a true dragon screams, Raum’s skull tilts to hear it. His gaze watches Isra, corvid, wild, soulless. “We had better go before your dragon comes.” Ragged is that voice and one might dream it is all rent flesh and bruised hearts, but he is detached, a ghost, and with every step towards Isra, his soul dies a little more.
From the darkness a stranger looms, an orphan once, the promise of money, of food, keeping his deeds blacker than black. He skirts the dead and moves to stand before Raum and his queen, ready.
@Isra @Acton
[Public Service Announcement: Acton is dead, I am sorry Novus. Just to let you know that: Griff made me do this. IT'S ALL HER FAULT. Blame her.
RB - Bexley and Raum thread, ya? End of Public Service Announcement]
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
02-18-2019, 11:41 AM - This post was last modified: 02-18-2019, 11:54 AM by Raum
Isra who becomes the reaper
“Upon him I will visit famine and a fire, till all around him desolation rings”
At first she can only see a shaft of moonlight reflected off the blade when it moves. That silver-light burns her eyes but she refuses to look away. Isra starts to count, moments ticked off like clock-gears by the beat of her heart and each inch that moonlight coated spear moves.
Beat by beat, light by light, she counts.
One. The blade almost whistles through the air. She's sure she can hear the darkness sigh as it's rendered in two separate pieces, each as dark as that depth-less black space between two forked flames.
Two. She expects to feel that blade in her heart. She's holding her breath waiting for it. Even her heart skips a beat and her blood feels like a glacier in her veins (frozen and beyond the reign of time). She wonders if she'll wake up in the bottom of the sea. She wonder if death will peel back her skin with a scythe and remake her in another body, another form. This time she hopes death gives her wings. Isra wants to fly.
Three. Pain never comes. Nothing comes. She's still trapped in her own skin with only her mind and her fury running, running, running like a dragon across a storm-cloud. Now she can see the blade moving towards Raum, she can see him turn to fire and blood and all the things red like gore. Her heart beats again then, trembles and it rejoices in her rib-cage for the boy that fed her when she wore spiderwebs and dust instead of starlight.
Four. Raum doesn't die and the blade lands close enough to her that she can smell the metallic tang to the blood on it. It smells caustic and rotten. Isra knows she'll dream of that smell for years to come. Something lights in her then, like a newborn universe. It's locked in her by the poison (like heaven and light and epiphany) but it's there and it is bright.
Six. Her heart skipped a beat again. It's weak now, trembling and aching with the toxins running through. She stops counting
But then Raum lunges and his mouth isn't full of flat teeth but fangs. Isra starts to count them instead of her heartbeat to fight back the darkness. The blackness is coming quicker now-- quicker, and quicker, and quicker. It's rushing up to meet her like a falling star, like a comet might meet a planet.
When the first drop of blood hits her it's like darkness in her eyes, vicious and black and too thick to blink away quickly. Suddenly it's not darkness colliding with her but gore and realization. It rushes through her like fire and each drop of blood feels like a cut on her skin. Her weak magic in her blood is radiant then as if it is consuming, through her pores, every drop of magic that Acton is loosing through his blood.
Isra's magic consumes and consumes. It eats like a beast until Isra watches Acton collapse dead beside her. It stops. It breathes.
It shatters.
It explodes and she's the comet rushing up to meet a planet. She's the star running through the darkness and the dragon in a storm-cloud. If she wasn't tamed by the poison in her blood the world would have turned to a sea of stars and molten gold deep enough to drown them and melt the flesh from their bones. She would have buried them in treasure. Raum would have died then and she would have dropped her horn across Acton's cooling check and welcomed the gold, and the stars, and death.
Isra would have been happy to die then, tangled with the golden boy with kerosene in his blood.
But the toxic chains are too strong for her magic to break completely and so it runs free and shatters without her. It runs and runs until the bright thing in her body is burned out.
Each drop of Acton's blood on her body becomes a flower. The petals are slick golden and the pollen dusting them like tears is soot-black. There are petals in her eyes, petals in her chain, and flowers sprouting from her flesh like disease. And under them all there are two flowers made of metal and barbs.
She hopes Raum sees them as they promise they are, the pledge that she will come for more than his knives and his flesh. Isra will consume his soul. Dead or not she will consume him. She is the sea, she is a unicorn.
There is a universe inside of her and it wants Raum.
Isra's last thoughts are of Eik, and Acton, and retribution. Fable roars in the distance and the blackness rises up to meet her. There is only blackness to guide the dragon now and he shifts his flight path to find one of the horses that repeat across his mind like a dream.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
There is blood upon his tongue – metal and sweet and full of rust and murder. He wonders if it tastes the same as his own, for Acton and he were brethren Crows after all... Fresh blood, Raum’s blood, pours idly down from the gash at his throat, bathing his silver skin red, red, red.
The moment that Raum rose, ascending from the blood and mud like some glorious god of death, was filled with wicked delight and the deepest, darkest regret. Something, oh something terrible within the last surviving Crow is weeping and its tears are Acton bright and Acton black. The Ghost is a soul splitting, shattering like a star and his gaze is the black hole it leaves. Those fathomless eyes consume everything that chance a look his way.
The only ones, this night, who dare look to him, are the unseeing eyes of Acton. They are vacant already, brown marble succumbing to a glazing death. And Isra. Isra’s eyes posses, not the softness and light that rumours whisper of, but rather the flare of stars at night, draconic and wild. He might hear the stars scream if he looked at her a little closer, but Raum is a man without a care for the whims of far-flung constellations or fading queens.
The Ghost feels a ripple of magic, the smallest piece of Isra that fights the tide of his poison. The sea of that drug comes rising within her, relentless wave after relentless wave. It is a calm sea, the drug that Raum chose, yet it pulls and coaxes and lulls the queen with siren song deep, deep into the depths of nothingness. Though she fights, oh how she fights! The Night Court Queen is a girl drowning, her reaching fingers breaking that still, still surface of poison. Upon her, from those fighting fingers, magic blossoms and flowers bloom from where Acton’s blood lies bright against her skin.
Such flowers they are, beautiful and bright, as everything about Isra always is. Their pollen is as black as Raum’s sin. Their gilded petals are as bright as the sun of Solterra (that he despises so). But then, then emerges the twin flowers of barbs and blades. They are all sharp edges and violent promises. Raum’s blood falls upon them like tears, weeping from the wound Acton made – the last thing he ever did.
The Ghost knows the promise those flowers vow. He can feel their cuts along his skin. Isra’s flowers are fate as well as promise, and this is their decree: Raum will fall. But for now, yes, for now, Raum is the victor and the power and he will take that, until ash is his food and blood his water. Therefore, unmoved, as if a ghost was not haunting his heart with its Magician’s laugh, Raum turns to the boy beside him. “Abel. Help me take her.”
And between them they bear Denocte’s queen away, stepping through the pools of her melted magic that once formed her glorious maze. Isra hangs, limp and light, as they carry her away to the song of dragons and the shouting, lightless gaze of a Magician’s corpse that watches their every step.
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
