always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Life was a terrible tangle, but it was not as bad as the tangle in Florentine’s hair. The mess had occurred when she stopped to watch the dawn sun rising upon Denocte’s horizon. The flower girl had ascended to the highest heights of the citadel turrets, the place where the mountain winds blew fierce. There, she spread her one good wing, the feathers rippling with the rush of air. Oh how that wild wind tugged her! Oh how tempted she was to throw herself from the citadel heights and fall until her two wings caught her - it would not have been the first time…
Florentine was made for falling: into life, into death, into love, into tangles…
But there would be no catching her now. She bore a broken wing and it hung, a twisted, wrong thing at her slim side. So the gilded-girl stood atop the citadel wall (a safe distance behind the wall) and watched the sun rise as the wind continued its relentless appeal. It tugged and tugged and toyed with her mane. It plucked petals from their nests of golden hair and threw tendrils across her eyes. All the while the flower-girl did not sway. Not until the sun had risen above the mountain crown, lighting their edges like jewels upon a diadem, did Florentine turn away.
And when she did turn, and step inside the still of the citadel, removed from the wind’s toying grasp, only then did she realise the terrible tangle of her hair. For a girl with so much hair and flowers woven in at every turn, a tangle was an inevitable, every day risk.
Slender limbs carried her along the flagstone halls, her feet echoing in the still of the early morning. All the dark corners of the citadel whispered of its missing queen and Florentine’s heart ached with Isra’s absence. There was no part of the castle that was not touched by the dream-girl’s magic. Every hidden corner was wrapped in the beauty and mystery only a storyteller could imagine. Florentine walked like a dream-girl borrowed, her eyes shut tight, the tangle of her mane falling down her throat as her chin tipped up and she tasted the wonder of magic here.
Ah, for a sweet–sorrow moment she missed her dagger so. But she missed it’s wearer more. Lysander was gone and with it her magic, no longer was Time whispering in her ears, no longer were hidden worlds warming the metal of her dagger. It was gone, to find blood and war, not the whimsical worlds dreamed up by a girl of gold and flowers…
Slipping through another door the girl entered the bathrooms and before a gilded mirror she stopped. Within the mirror’s reflection stood a girl with amethyst eyes bright with dawn’s first light and skin gilded with the haze of the morning sun. Her face was delicate beauty, her shoulders slimly carved, but her hair was a wild thing, a tangle like a phoenix’s nest. Slowly Florentine began to pick at the tangles and the girl in the mirror followed suit.
A door clicked and opened and a second girl appeared in the mirror. This girl was fireborn. If Florentine was the gold of a licking flame, this other girl was it’s burning, crimson heat. Her wings were broad and perfect and oh how it made the flower-girl’s twisted wing ache with longing! Amethyst eyes met glowing gold within the mirror and a smile curled the Dusk girl’s lips.
“Moira Tonnerre,” the once queen hums, the name put upon her lips by her brother’s confessions. “A pleasure to meet you at last.” Flora’s dusk eyes glitter, the twilight of a thousand stars warring both day and night. “I am Florentine. I am not sure whether my brother ever mentioned me...?” Her lips curl into a smile as gold as the lavish frames about each mirror. Her voice echoes in songs and bells upon each tiled wall of the ornate room.
It is always interesting who you meet in a trip to the girls’ bathroom…
there is sorrow in a smile there are secrets in her eyes
T
angles in the golden woman's hair are reflected in the phoenix' heart, twisting and twining and tugging her down, down, down beneath the briny waves of the ocean, down into a tumultuous sea, down until that treasure of her love, her life, her passion is hidden. Down until she is a ship lost at sea. There are no ports in sight in the storms that swirl within, building faster and higher than ever before. The glory of the lightning is dwarfed by the threat of the darkness.
Such darkness should have been an old friend.
It never will be in the flaming heart of the fire-girl.
Hollow steps ring through hollow halls. This palace is a rotting corpse. With Isra gone, all Moira can feel is the howling in her ribs, the wind whipping through corridors and rooms in search of a queen it will not find. Even the people seem less themselves, quieter, more cautions. One of their own murdered beneath their very noses, it is only a matter of time before the other shoe falls, before the guillotine blades descend, before the noose is pulled tight about their throat.
But oh, the lion-hearted girl stands tall in the face of adversity, raises those golden eyes in defiance and refuses to crash without first burning everything in her wake to ashes, to smoldering cinders, leaving only dust and memories in the beautiful disaster that is her. This court will not fall, these people will cry no longer, and Novus will know that Denocte stands strong, stands tall, stands true when all is said and done.
A warrior-heart cannot always pound its beating drum, cannot always grin like a barbarian ready for a brawl, cannot always scream like a Berserker plunging head-first into the fray only to find spears and arrows aimed for their heart. She walks as a ghost along the halls, a twisting and reviling sourness pooling in her stomach, growing day by day. The phoenix knows she should eat more, knows that the hollows of her ribs are not holy temples to worship in anger and hatred, to be washed with the names of the dead and the faces of the stolen. The Tonnerre girl knows she should sleep more, as she should now, curled warm and safe next to her beloved Neerja in their pillow fortress and land of dreams. But how can one rest, how can one sleep, when there is such an emptiness, an abyss deeper and darker, that thirsts for not only her blood, but the blood of all those she holds so dear?
If you ask, she will not tell you how they hold her heart in their hands, but they do all the same.
So she stalks through the castle halls, Neerja pacing restlessly behind her as only she can as a guardian and protector of this winged cub with no sense in her head. The tiger follows as a fretting mother, a loving friend. Their hearts are one, she knows this to be true. Their dreams are shared, and as such, their nightmares too. She has seen the horrors that haunt her girl's sleep, has slain the beasts that rear their heads to take Moira's in her dreams, has watched those that made the phoenix' breath catch in her heart be lost in so many awful ways. Neerja has felt the loss as a blow to her own heart, as the pang of having lost her own brother when but a cub herself to a pack of wolves. She grieves as the phoenix does not know how to, and she is the shadow with golden eyes ready to destroy anything threatening the woman that now slips down a side hall.
Another door opens, and together they go in. Mirrors line a wall, ladies line the mirrors. A sunrise girl looks between the two with wide eyes, but quickly moves past when she sees Neerja eyeing her as a meal. Only then do the gentle words of Florentine, the golden girl whose sharp eyes rake down the Pegasus' soul, plunge into her sinking heart, and miss nothing of the way she straightens, words hit her like a freight train.
Is there a similarity between this drop of sun and any others she know - a man, a brother. Perhaps in the curve of their jaw, the shape of those eyes. Realization sparks brightly in honeyed gaze, a brief nod casting her face in shadows as messy, curled hair slips down from its nightly braid onto her cheeks, over her eyes and those devastatingly long lashes. She is a walking heartbreak, a moving masterpiece. If angel blood ran through any, it ran through the two women here with cutting angles and curling soft edges. It paints her as a rival to the sun and the moon and the light of the stars. "Florentine," the smoky voice comes at last.
"Forgive me, there is much that keeps my mind busy this day. You are...Asterion's sister, no?" How she softens at the name, how tension flows from her body and seeps into nothingness at the mention of the star-bright boy that stole her first kiss.
How she wishes he were here instead of his sister. So many apologies are scribbled in paintings, so much confusion is splashed over her chamber walls. "Please, the pleasure is mine, and long overdue. I saw you in the crowd, you came when the bells sang. Thank you," and tears line pale eyes, sad eyes, lost eyes, as she meets amethyst in a sea of gold. Neerja pulls herself forward, feeling the distress on the tip of Moira's tongue. How swiftly she comes between the two, easily brushing along the phoenix until her wings quake no longer, her breathing steadies, and her heart does not echo the staccato rhythm of a rabbit's ready to burst.
Together, as one, the duo moves to the mirrors artfully placed so that all angles can be seen, observed, and attended one by one. "Many sleep at this hour, but you look as wind blown as the sea. Are you restless, too?" Carefully she begins to unplait the braids along her neck, letting loose waves of ebon hair that fall like sins upon her neck. Inch by inch she is covered until the white of her shoulder, the white of her wing, is blanketed in her riotous hair. She plucks up a comb from the counter, kept often for times just like this, and carefully begins to brush through the tangles until they are none. Only then, when it cascades like a waterfall instead, does she look to the woman who could break her heart with just her words, and offer that secret, sweet smile. "Hair can be so unfortunate," and it is as though a secret between them is shared, an amusing bit of gossip she dare not say again, an olive branch for peace, for flowers of friendship to spring up beneath the heavy snows of winter when they thaw at last.
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: I am so thrilled to write with you ! ;u; let the harassment interrogation begin <3
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
The girl beside her is smoke rising slowly from a fire. She is heat that scolds and light that shatters darkness. In the mirror, adorned in crimson and gold, Florentine watches Moira as her lips form each syllable of her name. Never has Flora’s name been so richly spoken, so woven by curling smoke.
In just a name, a simple murmur of Moira’s voice, Asterion’s sister can see why her brother eye’s were so irrevocably drawn. A smile dances at the corner of the Dusk girl’s lips. It draws her mouth up, up to the stars that shine bruised and bright. But that smile is fleeting, for Moira’s gilt gaze is so full of a simmering pain. It pours like a river between them, a river that cries with grief and babbles of its stress. A shiver rocks down florentine’s spine and she smoothes her hair down, working tangles free, slowly, slowly.
Each golden thread of hair she unfurls is a spool unwinding in Moira’s heart. Ah, just one look in that mirror of truth before them, and Florentine knows how Moira’s heart might ache. The flower girl’s own heart is bound together by thread and twine, it knits with each day, with each look Lysander gives her, with each touch. Yet she remembers the ache, she remembers how her heart felt to lie in tatters at Reichenbach’s feet. There is no place for her smile here.
Asterion’s name is as soft as the stars that litter his skin. It is woven in something heavy, something broken and something whole. Her breath is stolen in her lungs and oh how they ache, but how can she breathe when the girl’s pain is a palpable thing. It is a throbbing heart singing into their ears, pouring its crimson hurt into the golden river that continues to weave between them.
“I am his sister.” Florentine confirms, though there is no need. Beneath the wash of golden lashes she sets her bruised gaze upon the sunset red of Moira Tonnerre. “He has told me much about you.” A smile creeps back, slowly, mischievously, sweetly. Florentine is a girl of secrets, of unbridled love and fierce protection. She is the wildflower growing toward the sun, spreading roots to nuture those she loves. Her soul is a garden for all she loves and Asterion is there, his garden a meadow of stardust flowers twinkling beneath a twilight sky. Florentine knows what it is to love the boys of her family.
Slowly, slowly that smile turns from playful to plaintive. Her lips as soft as the sea that brushes the shore, tugging forlornly at the land, begging it out to sea. The girl listens in silence as Moira speaks, she lets the smoke of the fire-girl curl around her, lets her flames lick against her skin, her soul, her heart. It might melt those threads she used to bind her heart, she might unravel… But Florentine was a queen once, she ached for her court, she bled for her court and she wove her heart together with a thread that knows fire, ice, wind and darkness. She offers Moira a little piece of her thread.
“When I ruled Dusk,” Florentine confides, still picking carefully, slowly through each wild tangle. “I would have been lost without, Asterion. He was my regent, a friend and a confidant. He was so much more than a brother. He held me together when I did not think I could hold myself or reconcile the pieces I had broken into…” Tears glimmer upon Moira’s gilded lashes and Florentine does not look away. She watches their trail, slipping away from Moira’s gaze as streams of heartache running forth. “I hope you have someone you can confide in, who can hold you together while you bear the weight of Denocte.” Florentine’s eyes are the bright of suns, they glow with knowing, with love, with compassion. “Isra will return.” Florentine says, as assured in this as she is that the sun will rise. “You just have to hold on a little longer, bind yourself a little tighter.”
Then Florentine’s smile returns true and bright and beautiful. Her eyes close as she recalls the winds that toyed their way through her mane. When her eyes open, Moira’s hair is a waterfall at her shoulder. “It can, and the wind is a merciless imp twining it into tangles.”
A pause, as Florentine drinks in the feline eyes of the tiger beside Moira. Oh her mind is full of memories and they twist her stomach like serpents. Thoughts of her parents run like electricity in her veins and steal her breath from her lungs once again. “I was raised by a tiger. My mother never named her, but she guarded me when I could not guard myself.” A secret smile tugs her lips and turns her heart so achingly raw. “What is your tiger called?”
thousand days under the summer sun could never do justice to the warrior goddess, the golden girl that would rival Solus and Tempus and Time itself for the crown of light they spew. She is a living statue, a walking canvas of sparkling splendor that has aureate eyes fixed in the mirror. Oh, the phoenix could not look away from that slender smile if she tried, she is transfixed by the beauty given form, the light beneath her flesh and the sparkle in Florentine's eyes.
The mysteries at the corners of her mouth draw the Pegasus in ever more.
Every breath is calculated and careful for fear that she would find them too shallow, too quick, too this or that should she not pay close enough attention. Every move, the conscientious winding and curling of her hair, is thought out as every band is placed back into it one by one. Meticulous. Precise. The movements of a surgeon, of a girl cultivated in a world where flaws were frowned upon and those with too many were tossed out. The culmination of another world mixing in the heart and blood of a phoenix ready to rise and burn once more.
Even the sorrow of her, the beauty of her brokenness, is a pale comparison to the splendor of the other winged woman. They are day and night, the burning gold desert skies and the red-hot sunsets over distant islands.
And yet... Between them there is a bridge, a boy, a man, a connection unfurling as fresh as a morning flower slowly opening before the dawn's gentle light. Dewdrops that could be tears glisten there. Words that could be roots reach out, reach for the phoenix as only one girl to another could.
There, between the stuttering of her heartbeat and the whisper of Neerja's skin pressed into her own, Moira Tonnerre finds Florentine's calming staccato movements coalescing with her words, evening out until it is a symphony of comfort and concinnity of comradery. The brush is between them on the counter as the healer finished the final weave in her waterfall braid. Dark hair is pulled away from her face, revealing those sharp cheek bones and expressive eyes, unveiling raindrop ears that tip and tilt toward the golden girl.
Between them, the silence is a soothing stand of darkness weaving them together. As Moira finished, her body turns so that she can face Florentine, so that Neerja can step forward, whiskers twitching, ears laying within gloriously rich orange fur. White around her eyes narrows with the narrowing of her brows, widens with the opening of her eyes. She sniffs the other - the newcomer - and huffs back to her companion.
"I will not ask for what I am not ready to hear... But I did have someone, once. Estelle," that midnight prayer, that litany on her lips, a rosary and balm to so many hollow nights. A single name should not be filled with such sorrow and heartbreak, a single name should not turn her knees to jelly and remind her of all she's likely lost.
Yet it does.
Quickly the tiger retreats, twining her tail around Moira's hind leg, playing with the anklet faithfully worth about her ankles. "Those days have gone now, but I have Neerja." And it is another answer, the answering jungle song that plays quietly between the two, their endless refrains sung back and forth where only their hearts can hear and dance and rejoice. "Tell me of your tiger, and I will show you how roses may come of your hair where no flower need ever die for us." Boldly she steps forward, lifting the brush once more. Tears are gone, but the shadow of sadness remains.
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: ;u; they will be good friends
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
Estelle.
The name hangs as heavy as a prayer between them. Though she does not speak it, for in this moment it is only appropriate for Moira to speak such a name, Florentine does feel its weight upon her tongue. She feels how the name rolls, how soft its ending is, like birds alighting. A wing upon the air, a brush of paint over a blank canvas… how can a name convey so many things with only a few letters?
Lysander.
Asterion. Florentine tries each and oh how they hold such weight too. How they draw for her images so perfect, so vivid, so painful and yet so utterly wonderful. Upon her lips is a private smile, it plays along the gold of her. It dances in the low light of the bathroom and presses her gilded lashes down toward her cheek. Florentine thinks, if Moira’s feelings are anything like hers, that she might know what it is to love Estelle too.
Her gaze tips up from that secret place it went to. It rises to behold Moira once again, but no longer is it through a mirror where glass can obscure, make dull or taint. No, the Dusk girl beholds Moira with her own eyes. She drinks in the phoenix of her, the crimson of burning feathers, the gold of a flame hotter than the sun and the slivering black of the ashes.
“You are a phoenix, Moira Tonnerre.” Florentine says - as if Moira did not know! But, as she steps closer, as she lets the Night girl begin to plait her hair Flora asks quite softly, “Are you due to be reborn, or have you already?” And there is no shame in her question, not for Moira to feel and not for her. Florentine is a phoenix by any other name. Ah, she has died already (so many times Florentine hears Time whisper) and been reborn to touch her father’s ice flowers grown at her burial site and seen herself cremated by her mothers flames. So Florentine knows too what it is to be a creature like a phoenix and that is why she no longer cares to see Moira through glass, not any more.
When she is done drinking in Moira (her gold, her red, her vitality) the Time-girl’s gaze shifts to Neerja. Her lips lower, just to brush the orange hair and starling black lines, just to be reminded of her childhood and another tiger that waits for her return. Florentine’s smile is full of delight and only the barest shadow of sorrow when she speaks. “Oh, my mother’s tiger was a fierce creature, but I was a rebellious girl. I did not stay where my parents told me to, I got myself in trouble more than I should. I died because I did not listen to them – though it was right, though Fate commanded it, like it has and will and will again and again for all of eternity. Florentine does not say.
“My mother’s tiger could turn things into gold with just a look… I think she did it to my father’s legs once, much to his displeasure.” In her voice is laughter. It rings out through each word that tumbles like a novel from her lips. “He walked strangely for days afterwards.”
The girl’s amethyst eyes close as she feels Moira’s comb within her hair. “Roses,” She whispers thoughtfully. “I have never had roses in my hair. Only these amethyst flowers that grow and die forever here. Shedding petals is a nightmare. One day I might charm a broom to follow me around. Or a hoover.” Then she pauses and tilts her head as she regards Moira. “You may not know what a hoover is… Sorry, throwback from a previous life. Heh.”
She steps closer to the phoenix girl, feeling the heat of her skin, the press of her unblemished wing against Florentine’s broken one. It might be time, she thinks, to go home to the Dusk healers….
“What braid have you made?” Florentine asks as her eyes pour like water down Moira’s hair. “I should like roses in my hair too.”
our hearts tell a tale that the world may never know
A
ll is quiet, all that she knows is the beating of three hearts, the breathing of three bodies, the sighing of three girls. These moments of quietude are memories pressed like petals in a book, immortalized forever in the annals of time. One day, time may see fit for them to find their way onto pages, into journals the Moira keeps stashed in her room, onto canvases that are burned less and less. Someday, these moments will be told to children around a fire: moments of friendships born and bridges built, of the hollowing of hearts and their filling, too. But for now, the phoenix meets the eyes of her not-quite-lover's sister, looks into purple pools as endless as Asterion's.
How it hurts to see such honesty!
Words spear her as knives, remind her of who she is, what she is, and all the Tonnerre girl can do is grin that barbaric grin. "A phoenix never stops burning itself to ash," is her simple reply. And the truth in that dusky voice, that husky voice, the truth that matches the primitive smile that paints a candid shade of red even brighter and harsher, it is the unleashing of a dam. A phoenix is almost always ready to burn, almost always ready to die for a cause it believes in.
Would love ever be that cause? It makes her turn her head away, makes that grin disappear and lets Florentine's head dip down to brush along Neerja's. Somewhere, Neerja rumbles her unhappiness into Moira's head. But lips do not peel from teeth as the Pegasus lets her beloved be caressed, not when she can see the peace it brings to the Time-girl before her. Easy, she soothes instead, moving her hips nearer to Neerja until they brush skin on skin. This one will not harm us, let her remember what it is to be happy until I can do so for us both.
With a huff the tiger settles, eyeing her strange cub and the other winged woman (with a wing that does not work as Moira's should). She listens to the cadence of Flora's voice and wonders as Moira does of the magic tigers might have.
"You sound much bolder that I," the phoenix says, wondering how quickly she would have been stripped of her Tonnerre name should she have acted out. If she'd been as Estelle was, committing such treachery, sinning as her sweet cousin did, much harsher punishment would have been exacted so much sooner than Estelle's had been. "Your hair is like a newborn babe's, it is silk and it is a disaster." She laughs as the comb moves through golden strands. Tangles are undone from the ends to the top, gently pulling until they are gone, until Flora's wild hair are stocks of wheat swaying in the wind. "There are many things I do not know, but I am willing to learn should you wish to teach me," for she is a student - always a student devout to the pursuit of knowledge and the truth and healing.
And so she begins to braid the golden girl's hair, gently plaiting it and pulling it loose. It curls like a snake about the center, like a croissant being buttered before a feast. The dandelion yellow, the sun-bright gold, the stalks of maize - colors begin to pop and glimmer as they are curled round and round. Moira pulls a tie from her own hair and fastens the first rose tight near Florentine's ears. As she begins another, she tells of the styles they wear. "A waterfall braid is in mine - they are simple but effective. With curls, it can be much harder to tame and groom so I try to keep my hair up and braided as much as possible. It's simply easier to work with it out of the way. Yours, yours we are braiding and twisting until flowers are born. They look lovely in gold and complement your amethyst petals well. You look as a queen does," a shy smile is there at last.
Isra is wild and beautiful and as endless as the ocean (as immortal as the waves that always come back again). Asterion is soft like the night, but he is strong like the sea that comes and goes. Caine is hard and dark - an obsidian mound with molten lava that still melts within. Eik… Eik is cheese - he simply gets better the longer she knows him. Somewhere, thoughts of Bexley glimmer and she thinks that Flora would like the wildness of that woman. The woman who has lost her lover - lost Acton as Denocte has lost him. Does her soul ache?
But Bexley would make a beautiful queen.
And Florentine would shine just as brightly beside them all, just as brilliantly. Moira cannot help but grin at the thought of it. What beautiful paintings they would be! "Your tiger, she sounds like a lovely companion. Neerja cannot turn things to gold, if she could I fear half of Denocte would never move again." Laughter falls like starlight, bright and soft and pure. Neerja rumbles her agreement, glaring for but a moment at Flora to confirm she would be one of the first victims for being too near. "What happened to your wing?" she asks at last, finishing another small flower and moving to the next. Down Flora's neck, a trail of flowers begin to take shape, soft waving hair fall lightly below them only to be looped back up, arching carefully over her neck, and put into the next braid, the next rose.
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: i simply adore these girls thank you
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
A phoenix never stops burning itself to ash. Those words. That smile… Florentine looks at both and does not smile in answer. No, she looks upon Moira and knows what it is to burn as a phoenix and rise from the ashes. How many times has she died now? She is the girl who time cycles again and again. She remembers a world so far from Novus, the one where her parents still live, where she died a child in the midst of a battle… She knows what it feels like to die, to have life slowly eek out, for the dim dark to set in… to slowly lose feeling of her limbs, her torso…
Florentine knows what it is to die, she will die over and over for an eternity. She will be reborn for an eternity more. She is the time-traveller girl, a creature of a thousand worlds. Nothing is abnormal to her, monotony is not within her bones. Her magic stirs in answer, it slips through her veins like ichor. It is as gold as she, it glows brighter than the sun as it cleaves its way from one world into the next. It rises in answer and she feels the press of universes whispering to open.
Her lips reach forward and the air shimmers, it feels heavy and hot. When was the last time she opened a new world? Was it when she stood upon Denocte’s cliff side and drowned the world in foreign sunlight? Or was it when she took Raymond to find his monster Ruth? All she knows is that each was too long ago. Her Time-born blood is restless and it calls out in song to the world that press in upon this existence.
Slowly the time-girl turns her head from the ripple of air and sets her sights upon Moira. “And sometimes that is the most right thing it could ever do.” Heavy lashes close, pressing down upon the cut of her fine cheek. Her lashes are gold dust, upon them a thousand wishes for all the worlds she has and has not visited. “Each time it is reborn, it is to something different, something new. Each chapter more wondrous and more painful than the last.” Florentine muses, her voice a song of ages lost and not yet come. “If you are a phoenix, Moira Tonnerre, then you are blessed, no matter the trials.”
You sound much bolder than I.
“Do I?” Florentine muses as she lets her lips slide over the tiger’s silken coat. Upon its rumble, a disgruntled warning that has even the air trembling for mercy, Flora lifts her lips from the creature’s back. Still the brush of gold and black ghosts like whispers over her lips. “Are we not all bold, just in different ways?”
The tug of her hair is a lullaby. Each pull like the sway of a song, the rise and fall, the rocking of a boat. The comb works through each golden snarl of hair. ‘Hmm,” Florentine agrees with a smile, “I am not sure it has ever been brushed. Even as queen I was more inclined to turn up to a meeting covered in mud and twigs than in silks and pearls.” Her gaze is the warmth of Denocte’s bonfires when she turns it back upon the girl beside her. “I am not made for the lavishness of courts. I enjoy adventures far too much.” I am heir to a wild-magic land more inclined to kill you than exalt you.
Her heart is full of Riftmagic. She is sewn together with time and wicked wonder. Her petals fall to the cold stone floor and for a moment it is as if they tumble through universes yet unknown.
So many thoughts fill Moira’s mind and in each of them Florentine would agree. But Bexley. Oh, Bexley Briar. For how long will Florentine’s heart continue to break over her girl of gilded gold and glorious smiles? Maybe it is better Moira does not put voice unto her thoughts for it would surely lose Florentine to memories of Bexley Briar and she, lost in lust’s first reckoning.
Flowers wind through the weaves of her hair, each one placed and twined by Moira’s artful talent. She smells the sweet scent of each, the way they hand heavy from the slender curve of her throat. Her hair feels tight and different, like her broken wing… “I was swatted out of the sky by Raymond’s once-cat… It is a lesson in thinking twice about whether you take a friend to another dimension in order to find their pet. Time-travel has a way of changing those who dare to travel through time. Ruth became a titanic beast, let that be a lesson to you.”
With a sigh she lets her gaze settle upon the bound wing. “I think it might be time to go home and have it healed. Will you join me? It may be another chance to meet my brother.” The smile curling her lips is small and sweet and so utterly devious.
and let it come to a close with a whisper or a yell
T
ogether, they pirouette around words like ballerinas on display, pushed and pulled by forces neither can command, but trying to perform their best despite the faults in their stage. There is a frown now that mars golden lips, pulls them down, and the artist in Moira Tonnerre cannot help but to think how beautiful she is when she looks so pensive and so sad. If rain falls outside, if Florentine just stands in it, if she seems so distant in that it would have been breathtaking. But, everything about Flora is stunning, even when she stands still and the world turns about her.
Round and around they go, circling one another with words and thoughts and ideas, gentle phantom hands pulling strand after strand just like the thoughts that swirl on phantom breezes between them. Both are drawn into their own worlds, floating within their own stormy clouds that make it so hard to see the world at times. Then, in a sudden flash of lightning everything is clear and the shadow and smile of another is bright and, for a brief moment, they are not so terribly alone. In one of those lighting flashes, the phoenix sees galaxies between them, sees the glimmer of magic on the once-queen's breath, sees endless opportunities and wishes and hopes and dreams. Then, in the blink of an eye it vanishes and the golden girl exhales words instead of worlds. "Blessed," the healer echoes in wonder, trying to figure out if that were truly so.
Again questions are raised, and the Tonnerre girl is not entirely sure she has an answer. Silence becomes her, passes on her skin like the summer storm that tangled Florentine's hair. It permeates the air, allows thoughts to scream into the void between them. "Must all meetings be done in silk and pearls?" She implores at last, thinking back to the Tonnerre Estate, to the clandestine meetings, the secret rendezvous behind curtains and in deep alcoves. They never dressed well for those, Moira noticed as a girl; actually, they hardly dressed at all for many. Prim and proper and well-pressed for the masses, but so many meetings where actual talks of power and exchanges of ideals happened behind closed doors (behind closed eyes). It makes her think, as she has not done in a very long time, of a time when the world was much simpler in grand swaths of black and white.
Here, now, nothing is as it was before. Estelle is gone and her black and white has become a horridly mottled mess of grey. Despite that, in spite of all that has changed, the Pegasus back is unbroken, her will is a blazing sword of light and determination, she will not break so easily when the rug is pulled from under her feet time and time again. Neerja find's the healer's head bobbing up and down in response to the broken cub's words, watches with blue eyes as smoky breath spools out in a slew of words. "That sounds like quite the adventure. I shall see to your wing then and visit Dusk after your return to be certain of your quick recovery."
She does not tell Florentine that part of this is for selfish reasons, just to see him again. No amount of anger or confusion can keep them from colliding, from being two black holes trying so desperately to grow and swallow each other hole. There is a bone-deep hunger, a soul-deep craving that only the sea and stars he offers can fill. And at last, the Time-girl mentions Asterion with a terribly devious smile, but the Emissary cannot help but mirror a shy one of her own. "Who's to say I want to see him so soon?" Upturned lips warble on a laugh withheld. She sets down the comb and Neerja rises, going forth to push through the door that Moira catches and holds for her companion. "Nevertheless, Flora, I shall accompany you and assure myself you get home safely. I cannot have you hurt, and Asterion would be devastated if his sister came back anything less than whole, I am sure." With that, the woman of fire and starlight and the splendors of the Night Court walks through a door with the girl who fell out of Time and landed in a fairytale. The swishing of tails is seen as the bathroom door closes, a single comb left on the counter with golden strands between its teeth and silence its only company remained.
@Florentine | "speaks" | notes: a quick, late closer <3
