A stiff breeze whips down the corridors of Solterra, scouring the pathways of sand and debris. It is an echo of Elif’s own mood, jittery and half-feral; if it weren’t for the girl beside her the pegasus might spread her wings, might ride that wind until she was wrung-out and slick with sweat.
As it is she glances back at O, her green eyes too wide and bright in her narrow face. Around them the bazaar bustles on as normal, but there is a tension like a coiled snake running through them all. Even the rugs flapping in the wind seemed only to urge them on into savage frenzy.
Seraphina has fallen, a murderer once again rules the desert kingdom, and anxious energy runs like molten gold through Elif’s veins.
It is a perfect time to purchase a weapon.
“How did you come by that, anyway?” she says, voice low, and indicates O’s hurlbat with a flick of her dark tail. Her gaze never leaves the crowd around them, each face reflecting her own tension and suspicion. Where was Solis now?
She pauses alongside a table of scimitars, each glint a promise and a warning. Their curves make her think of the sickle moon, cool silver; it spurs nothing in the begging of her blood. A row of slim whips catches her eye next, and she sidles over, red-shouldered wings tucking more tightly to her sides.
Before she can get a good look at them a walking shadow makes her lift her head, and Elif’s green eyes narrow like a desert cat’s as they fall upon Caine.
“It’s you,” she says, and her sharp voice manages to make it sound like an accusation - but then, Elif is a naturally suspicious creature, anyway, haughty and wary as a hawk.
Besides, there is some part of her (though of course she feels shameful for it) that leaps at any chance for a fight. The beat of the sun, the snarl of the wind, the covert stares among the crowd - today’s is the kind of tension that can only be lessened by a blood offering.
O is not really one for sympathy. The worry in her heart is not one for Seraphim’s health, or the good of the commonwealth, or how her mother will fare with being ousted from a years-long position she’s held onto with an iron grip. It is a worry for how Raum will ruin the desert. What will happen to the little collection of coral and bleach-white teeth O keeps on her windowsill. Whether or not she will ever get a chance to really use the hurlbat at her hip, and whether she can ever call it justified.
She sniffs a little. The wind that roars through Solterra seems an accurate enough reflection of the desert’s state, one of complete and wild unrest. From the corner of her eye O watches Elif slink through the alleys like a tomcat, narrow, sharp-edged, and when Elif’s green eyes catch hers all O offers is a little white smile, bright as the sting of sand against their legs.
Hm, she says. Well - and thinks for a minute about it, watching her hooves on the cobblestone. She’s had the axe strapped to her hip so long it feels almost foreign to think of a time she was not in possession of it. The dark curve is hers, the sharpness of the edge-blade, the handle freckled with mica, all hers: her pulse spikes a little bit as she tries to wonder what she would look like without it. It is not a pleasant thought.
I found it, washed up from the oasis. Flecked with pearl-white foam, in a wet half-moon in the sand, and it had called to her like a songbird calls to one of its own. She presses the blade a little closer to her skin, like wrapping herself in a blanket. And then brushes her muzzle against Elif’s narrow shoulder as they turn a sharp corner into the heart of the market, darkly suspicious, teeming with a hot, wet kind of fear.
She’s easily and completely distracted by the wares of the weapons market for the next few minutes, poring over knives with bright handles, slightly curved swords, the stand of whips she’s not surprised (almost amused) to see Elif watching with intent. The world goes quiet for a little while while the girls stand shoulder-to-shoulder in comfortable silence. Until Elif’s voice sounds. And she lifts her head to look at whoever it is and is already bristling in defense when she sees him.
Tall, too tall, and dark dark dark, and even from here she can see the bright orange of his eyes like pouring amber. O steps forward and presses her shoulder to the narrow slat of Elif’s ribs, and instantly, too quickly, slashes the hurlbat out from her side and sends it spinning in the air at her side, right between her and Elif and the stranger. It whines a little. Who? she asks, bitter as it is accusatory. And the hurlbat whines a little louder.
is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
H
e visits the markets at the first light of dawn.
It is a habit of Caine's, whenever his mind aches with unanswered questions and mistaken calculations. The aimless wandering offers him a reprieve he desperately seeks.
He weaves slowly through the maze of canopied stalls, stopping every so often to gaze curiously at the wares being peddled — a bolt of cloth brighter than gold, a necklace of pearls from the depths of the deep, a sword that still bleeds every time it is polished.
The satchel of coins slung heavy at his hip begs to be spent. Caine ignores it, though the temptation certainly lingers. There are better things to be found, he consoles himself, the deeper you wander towards the market’s heart.
It has been a little over a year since his arrival to the kingdom of sun and sand and blood. He has never regretted his decision — there is nothing left for him in Vectaeryn. A flash of pain courses through Caine’s forehead when he recounts bitterly his return to the familiar smoking coasts, just a week before. Has there ever been? Something left for me?
The stall of glimmering weapons calls to him before he reaches an answer.
The ornate silver dagger tucked securely in its sheath, worn just behind his wing joints, reminds Caine that he does not need another weapon. None will ever be as light, as sharp, as much an extension of himself as the Taeryn-forged blade is. Agenor had made sure of it. It was the only gift he had ever bestowed upon the boy. Well, Caine corrects, none too fondly, the only pleasant one.
He strides, silver eyes shadowed, towards a table boasting a whole armory’s worth of bows and unstrung arrows. He skims its offerings distractedly, not knowing what he is looking for. Fia’s jewel-bright, mismatched eyes stir in his memories, along with a recollection of the steel arrow she had wielded like a spear.
Caine remembers his oath to her, sworn on the blade of his dagger, and almost smiles. I wonder where she got that arrow from. Solterran steel is rare to come by.
"It’s you,” comes a familiar, feminine voice to his right.
He wishes he can say that he’s heard those very words spat at him (in the same accusatory way) many a time before — but he hasn’t. No one ever recognizes Caine for what he is, ever calls out to him when he passes. At least, they never had.
He turns to his right, wary, and is greeted by the sight of a spinning ax.
“Who?” comes another voice, equally sharp, equally accusatory, before he can even blink.
Isn’t that, Caine thinks with a hint of indignation, something I should be asking? The blade spins unnervingly near. Caine sweeps the ends of his hair away from its bloodthirsty tip and withholds a sigh.
He sidesteps the ax easily, and with his path clear, finally sees her. Them. Elif, the girl with eyes as green as spring grass. And right besides her, glowering, stands Apolonia. Acton’s young daughter. His gaze darkens for half a heartbeat when he remembers the death of the magician.
"Elif,” he greets, a half smile — bordering dangerously close to a smirk — fluttering across his lips. "And Apolonia.” He aims a cursory glance down at the weapons they stand in front of.
"A pleasure,” he offers with a tip of the head, even when it truly isn’t. At least, not to them. He ignores Apolonia’s hurlbat (he knows it is hers, because he has met the girl once before; he wonders if she remembers — he had been masked at the time) and strides casually towards the shorter of the two.
"Picking a weapon?” He looks thoughtfully at Elif. Considers her lean frame and hawkish gaze. "Have you given daggers a thought?” He picks up a silver stiletto from the table — sleek and simple and wickedly sharp — and tests the heft of it in his grasp.
"They’re light, agile. Deadlier than swords, in the right hands.”
“Of course you did,” Elif says, and snorts like a Thoroughbred, but she says it admiringly, almost lovingly, the way so many words to O seem to fall out of her mouth. She is not sorry for it; the girl has had countless comrades over her years running like sunlight along Solterra’s sandy streets, but very few friends. For all she knows this is how everyone feels about theirs - lucky and protective and just a little jealous.
Of course a weapon would never just come to Elif. But as she looks over them now, still with the memory of O’s white nose against her dark shoulder, she waits for some sort of spark, willing one of the glinting blades to shine just a little fiercer than the others as if to say choose me, choose me, we belong together. It seems like a thing out of fairy tales, which is not a world they are living in at all, and every killing thing lies silent on the tables.
She is a little gratified to hear the now-familiar whine of O’s hurlbat, even as she flicks out a wing to settle her back. “I know him,” she says, just as the man in question speaks.
She is less delighted to see the little creep of smile (she knows already what it leads to) when he says her name, but nonetheless she feels a little less like a hunch-backed and spitting cat and more like a young woman. She is not sure she’s pleased with the change, especially when he acts so courteously. Her gaze sparks at him, even as she dips her own head in response (ever a nobleman’s daughter, even with said nobleman gone and the country overtaken). “Caine,” she replies, but it’s O her gaze darts to then, trying to read how the two of them met. She does not say It’s O, not Apolonia - but she expects it to be said.
Elif shifts beneath her gaze on him, stepping away from the other girl, wanting him to be impressed with whatever he sees in her. The desire is irritating, like a mad itch or an insect bite; it is not a thing she can scratch at so she focuses her attention on the daggers instead. “I have,” she answers, managing to make her voice sound cool, as though this is a conversation she’s had before and not just one she’s dreamed of. Still her mouth tugs down as her eyes run over the little weapon, sharp as a prick, and even as she lifts it she knows it is not for her. “It looks like a letter opener.” There is a curl to her voice if not her lip, yet she still gives it a little experimental jab, making the man behind the table startle and glare.
Carelessly she tosses it back to Caine and shakes her head, though her mane is too short to do anything but bristle indignantly. “I’m not so good in close quarters,” she says, sour at having to admit it, and her gaze slides to the next table. “Maybe something with a little more reach.”
Anyone else’s wing against her chest, as a rope, a warning, would have sent O into an indignant rage. Still now feels a ghost of affront twist in her chest.
But the wing is Elif’s, Elif, sharp-eyed and beautiful, and so the girl merely grits her teeth and leans a little back, though the hurlbat does not stop its feral spin against her shoulder.
Sunlight turns Caine’s silver eyes to a strange yellow amber; O frowns as she catches sight of the glyphs that sear their dark lines into his forehead, curious, suspicious, and then almost wants to smile as she thinks of what rests, winking, on her own forehead, hidden behind a deep, dark curl.
It watches, as always, but he would never know.
And then her two visible eyes narrow and glower as he says her name, or tries to - It’s O, she half-snarls, and the hurlbat picks up speed for a millisecond before dashing back to its container at her hip. Oh, her blood has always been so easy to boil. He should know better. He should see it in her eyes - in the bare of her teeth, the curl of her lip as she lets the syllable finally drop. Dark hair shimmers against her neck as she tilts her head at him, canine and dissatisfied. Yet she does not even think of how he might know of her - Solterra is a small enough island that strangers are hard to come by.
What is bothersome is the confidence with which he calls her by a dangerously wrong name.
And wha is worse than that, even, is that O is discounted from their conversation within the next minute. Caine throws Elif a dagger and waxes poetic about the thing like it isn’t the size of a toothpick, and as instantly as she is wont to appear O is suddenly outcast from the pair, from the conversation, watching with hawk-eyes both worried and jealous.
Oh, there are things she could say - get away from her - a spear would fit you - but the jealousy that rises against the inside of her chest is so bitter she can’t quite find a way to speak around it, watching them play together like old friends on an empty battlefield. Breathing through a slightly clenched jaw, O stands stoic and uncertain just behind Elif, tilted away like a dune of sand by the wind.
As Elif launches the dagger back at Caine, O locks onto it. Her lips curl into a lazy sneer. The blade goes tumbling through the air and with nothing more than a blink O shifts the air around it, and suddenly it is half a foot longer, a foot, two feet now, no longer a dagger but a sword in its entirety, no more than a centimeter from scraping at Caine’s chest -
She blinks again. Before it can hit him the weapon shrinks back to normal instantaneously, lands with a clatter on the wares table.
O does not look at either of them. Instead she turns her gaze innocuously to the weapons array, no more than a bystander.
is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
“C
aine.”
It is always a bit of a novelty for him to hear his name fall from the lips of another. Though he offers it freely, it is rarely uttered back to him – he does have an abundance of aliases – yet every time it is, a curl of something like satisfaction flickers to life in the boy’s chest. Caine – he savors the way she says it, in that rolling Solterran accent.
The way she gives life to it, in a way he never can.
He watches, only half interested, as Elif whispers something in Apolonia’s golden ear. Flick out a wing to settle the snarling girl back. (But her ax is still there, still spinning and whining, and Caine glances witheringly at it once again before side-stepping its hungry blade completely.)
“It’s O,” Acton’s daughter spits, and Caine wants to retort with a satin-smooth “I know it is.” (Even though he doesn’t know why she insists on shortening her – quite lovely, and more importantly, lovingly given – name to a single letter.) But then he considers her blade and his lack of appetite for shortening already short tempers, and settles for an obliging “O,” instead.
And then he turns to the weapons, because they lack the lips to scowl.
On a whim he offers the stiletto blade to Elif, wondering if she’ll take it. He has always pitied the stiletto – frequently underestimated as it is. The blade’s modest, sleek beauty is lost on those without the knowledge – or the need – to appreciate it.
Even when he knows with just a cursory glance that neither of the girls have ever come close to pressing blades against whimpering throats.
When she does take it – hesitantly, like he is offering her a sewing needle – Caine watches Elif’s reaction with raven-like curiosity. In the right hands, it is deadly.
“It looks like a letter opener.”
The boy resists the urge to laugh – one day you will learn that even a letter opener is long enough to pierce a heart, he wants to say – though he is pleased when she still tests it anyways, lunging forwards with it to sink the sharp little stiletto into the neck of the shop owner.
Which she doesn’t do, of course.
“I’m not so good in close quarters,” she admits with an indignant shake of her head, tossing the blade back towards him. “Maybe something with a little more reach.”
“Perhaps.” He reaches for the blade without looking, and that is his second mistake.
His first mistake is in forgetting about the girl with the hurlbat and Acton’s magic running like fuel through her veins.
The blade never reaches Caine’s awaiting grasp, and when he finally glances up to figure out why, he is greeted with the blinding silver of a flying sword.
Its formless edge pierces centimeters shy of his heart, but his startled silver eyes never stray from the shining blue and yellow glare (a bit like Fia’s, he thinks, though the silver mare’s had been more true to either shade) of O.
Silence holds between them for one slow blink, the reverted stiletto clattering ungracefully to the wooden table.
“You are also an illusionist,” is all he says to her, neither affronted nor particularly affected, before he shuts his silver eyes –
And opens them, flaming.
“Just like your father.” And just like me. His scars burn like an inferno in his forehead, furious at being invoked, and with a resigned sigh Caine lets his magic fade again into the roiling blackness it calls home.
But he is not like them. Because while both of their magics come when called, demanding nothing but the chance to be freed –
His magic demands nightmares, and pain, and blood.
So if O thinks she is alone in her devouring, burning jealousy, oh – how wrong she is.
It’s O, says her friend, just as Elif had known she would, and she smiles a little because at least this is something right, something natural.
Not like everything else going on, not like their dead queen’s body missing from the battlefield, not like the memory of snow cold against her legs.
She settles back when Caine corrects himself, does nothing to hide her sharp curiosity watching him watch the weapons; he does it with the same ease with which she tests the breeze each morning, or assesses the clouds and what they mean for flying. Oh, to be so at ease with a weapon! Elif’s only tools for fighting are her sharp tongue and teeth and hooves, and she is always too quick to wield them. So it is a relief to hold the weapon and test its weight like someone experienced, to give it back without cutting anything but air.
But then!
Elif’s eyes widen in shock as the dagger becomes a sword, wavering like a mirage in the heat above the sand. At first her mind tumbles in the bare moments before it reaches Caine, thinks what did I do? - and then she remembers O, mysterious, three-eyed O, and their talk of illusions after the maze.
She turns at once, even as the blade becomes just what it always was and clatters like a collapsing star to the table. Her mouth is open to speak (to praise? to rebuke? she hasn’t even gotten there yet) but Caine does first. Also, he says, Just like your father, and all at once it is Elif who is cut from the conversation by a phantom blade.
Her eyes flash, fierce, on O before she looks back to the boy, and finds herself shocked for the second time in a handful of moments. His eyes are aflame, the runes carved along the fine bones of his face alight; he does not look like a boy but a god and Elif steps back, bumping into the table of knives without noticing. They clatter and gnash like teeth and are still, but her eyes never leave Caine’s, although it almost hurts to look, how bright they are, how strange.
Yet sharper and more terrible than that hurt is the one that bites at her to be so excluded, made all the worse for how childish she knows it is and how little she can do to stop it. How wrong, she thinks, to feel this way knowing that O’s father is so recently dead -
“And what are your illusions?” she asks, bright and brash, telling herself she only wants to steer the conversation away from such a new wound.
At the same time, the weapons-merchant has decided he’s finally had enough; he stands, barrel-chested, slit-eyed. “Leave,” he hisses, “or I shall call the guards on you, and I promise their swords are very real.”
And Elif twists back her ears and glances between her companions (and oh, they seem so strange now, so apart from her, when only moments ago they’d seemed as knowable as her own shadow), and wishes she already had something keen and hungry strapped to her side. Maybe then she would not feel so small.
She cannot - or chooses not to - disguise her almost-childish satisfaction at seeing Caine flinch. It almost makes her smile. He startles, his silver eyes widen; she smashes the illusion the bits just as it threatens his heart (if he has one) and watches the thing clatter to the table. Her gaze turns slowly to his. She is bizarrely pleased to find him watching her: for all her secrecy O is desperate to be known. To be recognized. Not to be just someone’s daughter -
And so when he says that, just like your father, something like indignance blazes furiously in her mismatched eyes instantly. Almost she wants to open her mouth to respond (she can feel a scathing quip filling the back of her mouth like saltwater) but does not quite have time to shape the words before Caine lights himself on fire.
What use are words, then?
His steel eyes turn to bright, molten lava. The impressions that dent his forehead burn with light, as if they are being illuminated by something deep inside his skull, pouring out; she watches the flames dance over his cheekbones, and just as quickly as it came, just as quickly as O sheather her own powers, his magic disappears. He lets out a heavy sigh, and for a moment O is not immune to wondering why he seems so unhappy about it.
But she is like her father, and like him: she knows that power can hurt. She knows how it drains you from the very core. Even now she feels a little woozy, though that might be the narcotic glare of the sun.
O grins. It is surprisingly, honestly real, and it changes her face into something unironically young and sweet. Just like my father, she repeats, equal parts maudlin and amused. Her smile twists into a wry, lopsided smirk. She and him are overlapping circles, at least in sorcery, and that she can respect. It is not fear but understanding that has overcome her. (If there is some part of her that hurts at hearing about her father when his body has not yet faded to bones, when her mother is still drowning in her own tears - well, no one would ever know.)
She is not surprised to hear the hiss of the salesman. Some part of her wonders what kind of business he is running that he did not evict them sooner. She cuts her gaze at him sideways with a look of dry bemusement, but does not argue - instead she nods at Elif and twists her head back to the alley behind them, where more stalls await to be looked at. Either she does not notice the older girl’s discontent or does not care to address it; her only response is to bump her shoulder against Elif’s affectionately, but still her gaze remains on Caine.
Don’t ever talk about my father again, she says, and despite her usual seriousness, the words are followed by a laugh. She flashes him a wry little phantom-smile, and even he could not think she was really offended by it.
Though it does not make the warning any less dangerous.
aine shudders as the heatless flames seep back into his eyes, one lick at a time. It is always draining, cutting the flow of his magic before it is allowed to unleash the full extent of its pent-up fury.
Like slipping a muzzle over a starving dragon.
He feels both of their startled gazes fly to him, hovering somewhere between his glowing scars and the fire dripping like tears from his eyes. Not knowing which of the two promises a quicker danger. (When they should really be watching his dagger.)
Still, he is just a bit pleased that his theatrics — parlor tricks, really — warrant such raptured attention. He is almost regretful when he drags the curtains closed before the show can properly start.
“Just like my father,” O says, and Caine’s restored silver eyes slit doubtfully at her accompanying grin. It is almost too sweet, like black cherries in summer, and he is unexpectedly reminded of her tender age. No older than a child, really — and already she is fatherless. He knows that he ought to feel sorry for her, but he isn’t, and she doesn’t look like she wants his sorry anyways.
Sorry has never brought back the dead.
He mulls over a proper reply, keen to settle for no reply at all, when Elif’s voice pierces through the lull.
“And what are your illusions?” she asks. And like a cat torn between two equally distracting canaries in separate cages, Caine turns an eye thoughtfully towards the hawk-winged, jewel-eyed girl.
“Ah, but that is a trade secret,” he clucks, flashing her a smile. He lets Elif imagine for herself (for themselves — he does not forget to include O this time, and turns his smile into a tilted smirk to match the one she still wears like rouge) what trade he is referring to. Better they content themselves with their imaginations, however skewed, than knowing that the magic-less Elif has more in common with O than he ever will.
He is deprived from hearing their replies (both cutting, he expects) because the sullen shopkeeper chooses this exact moment to start caring for the welfare of his business.
Swallowing a sigh, Caine slides a silver coin across the table and manages to school his expression into something passable as apologetic. Unwise, he reminds himself, to make enemies of the one who sharpens your knife. “My apologies. I hope that is enough to make up for the business we have driven away.” It is more than enough, and the shopkeeper knows it. His purse also knows it, but alas.
Caine leaves the disgruntled man with a tilt of the head, and turns back to Elif and O.
“I know of another booth a little further in. The merchant keeps a far better stock.” He has visited it a handful of times, leaving always with new blades and far rarer wares to add to his arsenal. Wares he is only shown because he suspects that the young shopkeeper has taken a fancy to him.
He smiles when Apolonia leans forward, just a little, to slip her cherry-sweet threat down his throat. He nods once obligingly, though the lingering corvid smile promises of anything but.
“Care to follow?” The question dangles before them like a blood-soaked rose.
@Elif @Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: the shopping trip must go on
In that brief moment, that quick exchange between the boy and girl beside her, Elif feels something shift.
Perhaps it is all in her head (it would not be the first time), but that is the power of illusions, anyway - they could only hurt you if you let them. It is with uncharacteristic silence that she watches the rest of the exchange - appeasing fathers and shopkeepers, smiles sharp as daggers that become swords. (She has been jealous enough, in her life, that she ought to recognize the feeling now - though this is tempered by something else, an itch almost like fear.)
Elif wants friends, but she isn’t sure how to have them - and right now O and Caine don’t feel much like friends, anyway. They are in this moment too Other, similar not to her but to one another in their strangeness, their separateness from the life of simple sun and shadow that she lives. Elif has magic, too, but nothing like theirs - nothing to reshape the world, nothing that can tell lies.
It is with clear reluctance that the girl shakes her head, the sharp green of her eyes cutting to the side as she turns her gaze away. Back to the table of whips in the sweltering, heavy sun, away from the illusionists and their eyes that spark and burn.
“Later, maybe,” she says, her words clipped and short in an effort to keep emotion out of her voice. “I still want to look at these.” And with a snap of her sparse black tail - and without a glance back - she stalks over to the table and pointedly studies the wares. There they lie, coiled and easy as sleeping snakes, simple and strong from handle to fall. Elif longs to pick one up, but she waits - she can feel the eyes of the stall-keeper on her, and other eyes, keener yet.
Oh, to be a weapon, too, dangerous and strange.
“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”
@Apolonia @Caine Ilu but I'm trying to cull my threads D: but I require a thread with each of them again soon!
![[Image: apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/4a1e/f/2018/265/e/7/apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png)
