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 whispers of gods accompany their every stride up and up and up. Verenor ascends, a sword set to pierce the sky and Raum climbs its side like light along its hilt.
Do the gods lay wicked words upon him? Are they there in the hiss of the wind – in its wild howls as it corners the mountain and throws from it leaves and rocks that fall and fall into darkness and despair. If they were, Raum had long ago learned that the gods cared little for the deeds of individuals. So onwards he ascends, until the stars reach down to him and the moon trembles as clouds flee before it. The Ghost climbs until the sky is a ceiling, brought low enough to brush his silver crown.
Days had drifted idly by since he stole the Denoctian queen. Stars had fallen and suns had risen and moons had hung in lament. Their eerie light pooled like tears. It drowned Raum in poison mercury and as a fish he swam through the grim midnight.
Abel was ever a shadow beside him, his body helping to bear the limp torso of a bested queen. Long ago the skies had fallen silent and the wail of a dragon swallowed up by silence and distance. The sight, or cry, of such a monster should have filled him with terror, but how long had it been since the Crow felt any amount of fear or trembling at the sight of such a beast? Distaste was all he felt and it had been as bitter as ash as he watched dragons burn Denocte’s Mountain Pass. Was that the day that turned his heart as cold and firm as stone?
The place he brings Isra to is old and forgotten. It’s stone mouth is crumbled and partially shut. Inside its weathered maw is darkness upon darkness. Silence reigns and only silence speaks. Shadows keep their secrets here and they are old as time. A forgotten altar is cleaved in two, exposed bones tumbling forth, strung together by dusted cobwebs, heavy and thick.
Raum lets Denocte’s queen go and she falls to the cold stone, her body, black as ink, pouring out like a libation before the ruptured altar. The moon peers in through the small hole at the cave’s entrance and its light reaches for the poisoned unicorn. But if it found her, Raum wonders, who would come to the call of the moon?
The wind begins to roar and from the mountain’s peak, where Calligo’s altar rests, the Crow wonders if he hears her vehemence as her appointed queen lies broken and still at his feet.
In silence Raum moves to where Isra lies so still. Upon her lips he tips a vial, purple and potent. It is an antidote to the poison that laughs and sings in her veins. No longer will it numb her mind but fall away like clouds before the sun. Raum waits beside her, his electric gaze steady as a knife upon her skin. He waits for Denocte’s queen to rouse, like the sun after eternal night.
Isra who is changing
“The dull rumble would rise in pitch to a swishing, lashing exultation”
This is the not the first time she has been Isra who is running, running though the dark. Once she ran through the dark sea of her own thoughts with Eik at her side. She sailed a ship that bumped and twisted anchors with another.
She also traveled down, down, down into the pit of her that held at its core, like a volcano, a molten pool of magic.
It's to her magic that she travels now, running through the dark of her own, almost dead body. The magic blooms across the back of her eyelids like lightning cleaving a dark sky in two. She thinks that it was a lie, how it felt as cool as the sea when she first found it. Now it feels like salt in grit against her hardening heart. It's no calm sea that meets her when she comes looking for it, but a pillar of water rising up, and up, and up to drown her. It pools in each crack in her heart and it fills all her bones with fury instead of marrow.
I need you. She tells her magic.
I know, I know. It replies in a voice that speaks in aches instead of words. It hurts. Let me free. It rises and licks at all raw edges of her like a wolf at a lamb.
Isra opens up the cage and it swells like a new organ inside her. It still hurts but she welcomes it, even as she thinks, this is not what you were supposed to be. I wanted wonder. But the magic is not longer listening and it's swelling and oozing out like blood from all the wounds in her heart. Soon there is no where left for it to go.
Later she would wonder how Raum could have been foolish enough to pour something down her throat that drags her through the dark and into the moonlight. Now she's only glad to be rushing through the dark into the light. Her magic is leading the way-- white, and hot, and molten. It blazes the path up from the darkness and it rides upon the ghost of Acton that was running with her heart through the dark places the poison took her.
The bones of the old cracked, altar start to turn into flowers, and vines of ivy that tangle together like snakes. Inside that pile of foliage and beauty all the mites, and worms, and ants that once picked clean all those bones are starting to change too. The flowers start to hum and flutter in a barely there breeze.
Isra opens her eyes and in them there is hate enough to drown the world.
He does not speak as they make their slow way up and up and up, to the place that once belonged to the gods and now must surely belong to nothing.
What is there to say? They carry their burden between them and they are each as silent as she is, nothing but breathing and the occasional scrabble of hoof on stone. Abel does not concern himself with what the gods must think, for if they have ever thought of him before it has only been to punish him.
Eventually the moon comes out, and they are all limned in silver, save for the places where blood marks them like an offering. There is only the wind to speak, and to Abel it shivers and wails and moans and he wonders if the queen can hear it singing, in her slumber. He hopes she cannot. He hopes there is only blackness, wherever it is she drifts.
Abel does not hesitate at the mouth of the cave. From moonlight to shadow he steps and the light bars his skin like the stripes he wears and then is gone, extinguished, as they are born into darkness. It smells musty, a womb of cobwebs and grave dust where nothing can be born, but his face is still blank as they lower the queen (him easing, almost gentle, even as Raum simply sheds her weight like a purple robe).
The boy does not look at the shattered altar, and does not look at the fallen queen whose horn looks so crooked and broken and not magic at all. He only watches Raum as the man tips liquid between dry lips. He only waits to be told what must happen next.
Until the altar begins to change. Only then does he step back, and cast his good-dog gaze to bones that begin to shift and sprout, to go green and limber, to bloom. Something in his heart changes, as well, as if her magic can touch his body, too - but it does not bloom and grow.
As her eyes open Abel feels his heart twist and harden and replace those old and withered bones.
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 knew she would awake more splendid and righteous than she was before. No girl could drown in hate the way she did and not rise renewed and altered.
Bones, bleached and broken, begin to change. They glow and blossom, flourishing as if they had waited an eternity for now. Flowers. Yes, Isra is surely awakening. The girl of seasalt rises through slumber, pulled up and up by her wayward magic. It pulls her along, a train to which she is tethered and she has no chance to alter its path, to stop its relentless momentum. It is wild and it is rising, bursting forth and Isra is no dam to hold it back.
Magic ripples from her as a wave and Raum knows the taste of it. It is salt upon his tongue, it is a wave billowing in off the sea. It rises and it swells and it lays sea-salt upon his tongue. Isra lays devastation within his bones and the bones of the altar. But Raum was not made to be destroyed by the sea, he was not made to be strangled by flowers. He is the stone around which it will twist, dark and black and unbreakable.
Bones turn to viperous, slithering ivy and tangling roots, flowers begin to hum, bright and beautiful and utterly wrong. Ah, the Night queen makes the cave sing with its wildness. And through it all the Crow drinks it in.
The boy beside him steps back, his obedient gaze slipping to the fractured altar and its wild bed of meadow flowers and sprawling vines. “She can alter, beyond your perception, everything you see here.” Raum says to Abel, the loyal boy ever his shadow. “Take nothing for granted.” After he speaks, he keeps his gaze a moment longer upon the orphan. Through his electric eyes Raum looks for weakness, for Abel’s stare to blanch, for his torso to tremble (with fear, with guilt, with regret – and each would be a death sentence).
Slow your heart, Abel, hold fast your fear.
There is a heavy beat of Raum’s heart, a heavy thundering that worries and tastes of apprehension. Acton’s spark, so freshly snuffed out, still echoes its smoke in Raum’s soul. To kill another, so soon, would be tragic indeed.
So, he watches a moment longer, then returns his gaze to Isra and her wide, hateful eyes. Her spiral horn twists in wonder – nothing about her is as it should be. Isra is everything normal, changed. “Welcome, Isra,” The Crow murmurs to his once-queen, his voice rising like a song above the rumbling of her magic.
Isra humming with a hateful flood
“...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...”
Each inch of her feels like it's not with skin but glass, sharp and barely held together. The poison is not gentle as it leaves her body, it burns like star-fire (bright and cold and without end). Her magic serenades the pain before it devours it. It sings for more-- more pain, more fury, more hate. It takes and takes until it's bloated. It takes until Isra is starting to rise.
The flowers hum in a rising pitch that turns into a dark melody, like oil. It's not flowers that are singing but all those little mites and worms that are no longer mites or worms. The first hornet rises from the petals and the silken leaf trembles when the second climbs out after him. Their wings are trembling with a small fury.
It's only a small fury until more and more hornets climb out from the ivy and the pollen. The hum and they rise like Isra's magic. They swarm and and the hive mind takes over. They are angry. They are not made to be hornets and their bones were not supposed to turn into flowers. Isra his no control over them but she cannot find it into herself to care. Not when she is suffering alone and a ghost is still running through her heart in a loop that has no end.
The hornets fly up like smoke. Isra trembles on fawn legs that feel fragile and weak. They fully rise together, the wobbling queen and her shroud of insects full of rage.
The humming intensives. They all start to dive in a swarm and for a moment she does not know who's rage is thrumming like a heartbeat in her ears. It's all she can hear, this song of wings and rage. Even her magic throbs with that melody and it's still adding the words, yes, yes, yes.
Isra cares little that the magic in her feels like a war she's loosing. It lurches against her bones like a beast in a cage. It wants out of her skin and she wants tear herself open and let it free. The hornets are stinging her even as they dive for the two stallions foolish enough to watch her (as if she is the monster here instead of them). The pain of those stingers only fuels her and pushes out any drops of poison left in her blood.
“Raum.” The way she says his name is the way his knives cut through Acton (quick and headless). Her teeth flash white and sharp in the gloom of the cave when she smiles. It's not a kind smile; it's the smile a shovel makes as they toss dirt over a casket. It's steel and iron, hollow and hungry.
Isra is hungry. A dragon is too when he catches the break in the darkness of their bond.
She drops her horn to point at Raum's heart. The point of it whistles through the humming and it says, mine..
And the hornets are still pouring from the ivy like water.
For there he reads all the things that have come to be familiar to him in the past months, the only net he has left to hang onto as the flood that has become Novus tries its best to wash him away. In that fathomless blue there is power and righteousness and not a speck of fear or of doubt.
Still he is glad when the man turns his attention away again. And he looks back at the unicorn like a frail foal on the ground and wonders what the Ghost means by beyond your perception. As if these things were only illusions, as if they could not hurt you if only you told yourself they could not.
But Abel has seen the blood drawn from flowers that turned to barbed wire. He has seen the gold and the glitz - such wealth! made from bones and stones and dust! - and now it is a wary eye he casts on those spilling vines and petals. He swallows when they begin to buzz and swishes his tail uneasily against his haunches and watches Raum, wondering if his master’s mouth will become a lion’s again.
He hears the whine of the first hornet as it trembles into the air, but he does not see it, for Isra is rising.
The unicorn queen is rising and Abel wants to run away, to hide in the shadows like a boy too small for the fight in his alley. He is nothing, he has no magic, and here are these two giants in a cave too small, full of old and watching bones that are bones no longer but hornets, hornets that have all the anger and all the wisdom of holy bones and poisoned unicorns.
It is not a place for an orphan with nothing but a name.
A name not even spoken, not like the names of kings and queens like anchors - Isra, says Raum, and Raum, says Isra, and even as he shuffles toward the wall and kicks dust and swats his dark tail against the coming onslaught Abel is thinking of old stories of the gods. The way they chased each other through eternity, neither winning, neither yielding, neither mindful of the blood and broken things in their wake.
They were gods, after all. They could just repair them again. If it pleased them.
But nothing good ever came of the mortals who walked in their shadows.
Abel wishes he were a boy made of mud. Then the hornets would ignore him, would fly past with the hum of their wings and out into the world, where they might find other victims for their unnatural rage. But he is flesh and blood and bone and all his skin is quivering as he stomps and snaps and shivers, as he kicks cave-dust toward the altar like it might be enough to smother them, like the queen could not just turn the dust to something hurtful or lovely or both as easily as thinking.
As they sting him, as little bright sparks of maddening pain erupt like fireworks all along him, he stumbles toward the unicorn whose horn is lowered at Raum (as if anything could pierce the heart of a Ghost!) and he notices how their little bodies crawl all over her, too.
He wants to hiss or maybe to beg stop that, you will kill all three of us but he wonders as a madness of chaos and pain settles on him if that is not what she intends. And so he says nothing, only shuts his eyes tight and grits his teeth and stomps his hooves over and over, a dance upon the ivy-turned-to-insects, until the cave is full of a sound like mad drumming and the shivering, shallow breath of a boy trying to shut down his brain so that he might keep control of his body.
Eventually, he knows, the pain will be over. He will live or he will die but the pain will end, and he repeats it like a litany until it’s the only thing he knows.
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.
They rise. They rise from the flower, their fury a hum that rattles the cave walls. Dust descends, landing upon their wings and bodies, fuelling their ire. They fly shedding dust as rain. They are bright and wild, their fury like Acton’s hot sparks. Does he send them now beyond the grave?
As that swarm of hornets fly, amassing as a cloud, flying for Isra, for him, for Abel, Raum feels a sharp spike of respect for Isra. The insects land upon silver and brown and press their poisoned needles deep.
Raum’s skin is a livewire. His eyes may be the blue of electricity, yet it is nothing to the white-hot burn that blazes through his nerves. The hornets crawl like black ants, their wings glinting silver, their needles press, press, pressing. Poison flows like blood and within him his magic swells, it fights wild and savage. It pushes against the bards of his resolve and shivers like sparks out out across his silver skin. Yet still Raum does not allow it to change.
Abel thrashes and Raum hears the stamp of feet, the gusts of air with each new sting, yet still the colt stands by, still his eyes blaze with loyalty and bravery. The boy shivers and dances, clouds plume at his feet, his eyes press tightly shut.
“You kill us.” Raum says to Isra. His eyes are bright and alive with pain as he watches the Night Queen. What insanity had he inspired within her? His words were statement, but maybe Raum is the only one prepared to die here, this day. Did he expect the same of Abel? The Crow would stand and succumb to every sting so long as Isra did too. Maybe he is a madman after all.
Isra rises, standing with her hornets, with her wild magic that surges and stings and runs its destructive cloud through the cave. Raum is watching her, through the hornets that tangle in his hair, through their black bodies crawling in fury over his face and eyes.
His skin is rough with bumps, angry mounds that weep with poison. Ah, that wicked substance slips like an elixir through his veins and oh how his magic stirs! Oh how it rises from him to meet hers like a leviathan reaching for the surface of this poison sea.
His name upon her lips is a baptism of fury. It bathes him in wild fire and he wonders if her tongue burns with the speaking of it. “Run,” Raum hisses to Abel an offering for a colt who should not die here. He does not lend the boy any more attention, for Isra’s horn, long and spiraling, arches down, crying for justice as it slices through the air. It is not the first time a dagger has aimed for his heart the last few days. Still Acton’s lunge haunts him and so Raum is ready, he knows of wild anger and seen the impulse to kill him.
She dives fast, as fast as her hornets that hum like voices beyond the pale. But Raum is fast too, and his magic, the monster that has been savaging his veins, rises too. He meets her horn with one of his own, long and sharp as a narwhal’s. The meeting of their antlers is a song of metal that cries above the buzz of riled hornets. Raum twists his skull to parry her horn before a lattice of antlers bloom from his forehead as winter branches atop a tree. Then he plunges back toward her, his twisted antlers aiming for her throat. “Then let us die together.”
Isra with the metal teeth
“Confront them with annihilation, ”
Every sting of a hornet makes her thinks of a lash dipped in metal and acid. There are a hundred stinging wounds on her body that are swelling quickly. But she has known a thousand lashes in her life, and chains ground down to sharp points instead of smooth turns. This pain is nothing. She has died for more pain than this.
When the hornet fly out of the cave towards fresh air and flowers Isra misses the pain of their stingers.
She smiles bright and hot and lifts her gaze to the colt and the ghost. There is an ocean in her gaze, a storm-sea. Gone is the night queen full of stories, gone is the unicorn who loved the stars fiercely. They have made a siren of her, a sea-serpent that's coiling at the bottom of the sea waiting to strike.
They have made her a monster and then they cut the chains. Foolish boys.
Raum makes himself a horn, pale as bone, and she almost laughs. “I have died before. Have you?” Her laughter is manic, cold and cruel. Some part of her, buried deep, cries for the harshness she's growing to love. It's a part that's being buried deeper and deeper with each clanging clash of their horns as they battle.
The ghost tell his boy to run and Isra's magic is there, hateful and wild. She almost makes a cage from the mouth of the cage. She wants to trap him here with them. She wants to see what death tastes like on her tongue. Would it taste like brine this time? Would it taste like blood? The urge to know festers inside her like boiling oil.
Raum lunges again with a crown of antlers and she's distracted enough to let the boy run for this freedom. But she won't forget him, she will not. The poison has left her weaker than she should be and where it not for that beast of magic she would be dead already, dashed to gore beneath those tines. Isra thinks of Fable while she dives backward to avoid the points of bone. A tine catches on her nose as she pulls away. Blood starts to drip from her like ruby tears. She keeps moving backward until she can feel the cool wall at her hocks.
Her dragon is still coming for her and he's showing her images of Raum hanging from his jaws like seaweed. His roar echoes like distant thunder outside, he's furious. But he's also showing her an image of a gray stallion running below him.
The image of Eik cools her rage and turns it to panic. Raum would kill Eik too, if she gave him the chance.
Isra is done playing this game of death.
Her magic cracks out like a lash from her and she almost sighs with the relief she feels to let it out, out, out. All the stalagmites and stalactites around them turn to metal pillars, shining silver and bright in the dim light. Each rock tumbling around their hooves turn to sharp blades. A large rock to her left turns into metal pointed towards Raum's rib-cage. But it's the pillars of metal that she pours most of her magic into. They cage him in like metal teeth hanging from mouth of a black, hungry beast.
The ceiling of the cave starts to tremble as she turns every loose stone that was waiting to fall to a blade. She makes each blade look like the one he had before she turned it to a daisy. Isra makes flowers out of the stone too, Acton's flower.
She smiles and it looks almost sad. “It won't be you that kills me Raum.”. Outside Fable lands on the mountain outside the cave. He's shaking his head back and forth like a rabid dog at the throat of a rabbit. The cave is too small to hold him. He roars and the cave moans with a dragon's fury.
Then the cave starts to rain on Raum, a storm of flowers and blades.
The last time Eik moved like this, the world was on fire and he was running for his life.
The world never stopped burning, not for those with eyes to see it, but eventually he stopped running. You learn to live with fire, with the scent (that ash and smoke and cooked-meat smell) and the sound (the sound! like an unholy beast thrashing with an ancient, endless hunger, swallowing the screams) and most noticeably the heat of it, the flames of a devilish sunset always at your hocks.
He is running again, the the way he ran for his life, but
of course
this time it isn't his life he runs for.
Suffice to say he's moving fast, eating up the distance hungrily. You could not call it flying, not with a dragon above and before you. They cross the field and then it's up the mountain, up and up and up. And eventually-- Eik feels them with his magic, and suddenly he's not following the dragon or the crooked path but scrambling directly up the mountain, faster and faster towards towards the queen slick with magic and blood.
"Isra." He is there in her mind, easing his way between the pieces she rips herself into, running his touch over their edges (I'm coming--) like thumbing at shards of broken glass to better understand the way the shapes once fit together-- or how they might be rearranged. (It does not matter how glass can cut even a feather's touch, not when you love everything about it, from the way it gleams to the way it breaks.)
He feels it when blood spills from her nose and he cries out but only the mountain, and maybe the dragon, hears. Panic gives him wings and Up the rocky slope he rises until he finds himself panting beside Fable's quaking form.
(--I'm here)
In that moment, he could have picked up a rock-turned-blade and plunged it into Raum's heart.
He could have lunged and bit and kicked, and between the three of them, they would have made an altar of the cave, and a lamb of the wolf.
All these could's and might's and maybes stretch like flecks of foam on the raging ocean. But there is only one eventuality. So Eik slips past the dragon and the villain and the knives, hateful knives, so many knives until-- there-- her breath on his skin like its just the two of them at the start again, hearts trembling beneath the falling snow (why did we ever leave) with the dreams of bison pulled like a blanket over them.
Eik does not have time to sigh. He turns to angle himself between Isra and the mouth of the cave and lowers his head as though he had a horn poised to run through Raum, through the boy long gone, through anything and anyone that would dare to come between him and his salvation. His eyes are without depth as his magic thickens and spreads across the holy mountain, plunging him into a sea of thoughts and memories.
He does not blink.
"I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE AFRAID OF."
It is both his voice and not his voice, for it is deeper and, despite its silence, far louder than any sound he could produce with his throat. The message booms in the mind of every living thing in his magic's furious range, sending dark flocks of birds bursting from the trees.
IT WENT DOWN INTO DEEPER, DARKER PLACES
@Raum @Isra @Abel (?)
ahh this is such an epic thread, I feel unworthy of joining but here we are
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 dragon arrives and how the mountain trembles before it. The roar ricochets through the cave, deafening all. Yet Raum has no care for dragons, not when rain comes, abnormal and wrong. It starts as water and changes, so fast, so rapidly into knives that fall and clatter everywhere, over all. Flowers fall amid them, soft and soundless yet the fall limp as bodies and he might count them each and wonder if they match his tally or corpses.
Yet, the cave is changing and Raum knows to expect nothing less from the Night Court Queen. Rocks meld and change and suddenly a line of jagged pillars appear between him and Isra. The light of the cave shifts, rippling with the dragon that stalks outside.
A light glimmers in the mouth of the cave, it moves like a star and Raum’s gave shifts to follow it and there Eik is, moving bright and fierce. He and Isra are magnets uniting, as Eik lowers his horn in challenge. It descends like a blade pointing for the silver Crow.
Like a lion Raum prowls along the pillared wall. He watches Eik even as the blades still clatter down and as they fall they cut his skin, they laugh in metal and bite like monsters.
Then (for so much happens so fast, so viscerally), Eik’s magic booms and the cave judders again. No longer is it just filled with dragon cries but magic too. His ears fall to his skull, better to dull the cry of the Solterran man. Oh the cave is trembling trembling and then it moans and trembles again. Dust falls from the walls, from the ceiling and Raum knows the cry of a cave about to collapse.
His eyes swing from the ceiling and the walls, back to Isra and her love. His lips twist, and his maw parts, a raw ripping from his leonine throat. Then the stallion turns and runs like a dream skittering through thoughts as fast as a blinking eye. The black of a tunnel yawns wide for him, like an artery leading away from the throbbing cave’s heart. Raum follows it, his feet sure, memory guiding his every step. He runs until the stale air grows fresh, until shadows give way to light and the world begins to reappear and a dragon’s cry is hidden by a mountain’s range.
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
