Into ranks. Into people. Things. Clothes. Weapons. Noise. Color. What has he known but the darkness of his home and the redness of the ring, oh, the first time he heard all that shouting he almost died, and he wasn’t the one with a horn through his throat, oh no, he wasn’t.
There is no option save victory.
El Rey stands in the crowd with a black ball of twine unraveling in his head. Think of the cellar. The cellar. The cellar. How quiet, how silent and still and comforting.
And the market —
It isn’t as bad as you think.
But he cannot move and in his height he is a great divider in the center of the crowd. Too much smell. Too much taste. Too much sound. Too much touch.
He came here for a reason.
I am hungry. Yes. Hungry.
Instead of lurching into motion as a great beast he peers over the crowd for something appetizing but the spices and variety of this world are too much and he resolves to either stop panicking or starve. Neither will happen soon enough, and so everyone will keep walking into him.
Hers are a people of peace and prosperity, of love and unions so pure that the bonds between each individual shines more brightly and intricately than the individual soul. The Priestesses of Vespera teach love and devotion just as the heart teaches itself to beat; they gather round and share their bodies at night, they reach for another's warmth just as much as they reach for their smile.
Juniper was taught to love far before she was taught to hate.
Orphans are not so lucky as her, not so free as the girl who looks like pale light streaming into a darkened room, who moves like liquid silk over midnight skin, who laughs and loves as deeply and desperately as the last man on earth. Maybe they are the same in the way they wonder, and briefly Juniper thinks that the winds might talk to their souls, too. She is here for the winds, but also the art. Without her sisters, her lovers, her caretakers to dance and twin about, without the swamp trees to brush against her wings and soak her in as water upon a sponge, she feels empty. Rumors say that Denocte is the home of art and stories. Jun could use a story now.
Crowds seem a commonplace thing between Terrastella and Denocte, something that ruffles her feathers. Still, she's too small to see everything unless in the sky, and right now her feet are firmly on the ground. Pale liquid silver gaze slides from being to being, running along lengthy spines and short ones, brushing upon birds that eye her as though she's kin (so she throws a feral smile, an avian tilt to her head), and the woman from the swamps at last settles on a great beast of black and gold.
Stress runs through his every muscle, muscles that are pulled tighter than the strings Sinafay coaxes melodies from. That avian smile turns absolutely terrifying, absolutely predatory, and she stalks forward as a storm. Long, skinny legs are quick to dart between moving obstacles, and before he can blink again she's brushing along El Rey's stomach, gently soothing the tension from him with a sweet stroke of phantom hands along his neck, down his spine, and at last she's beside his face. Juniper smiles as sunlight breaks through clouds, smiles as though it's the only thing she knows how to do and she does it damn well. She is not meek nor mild, she is as wild as a summer storm and looks as devastatingly stunning as one with those long lashes fluttering down, that grin curving upon dark lips.
"Breathe," she offers as a whisper, a prayer. "I don't like them either, the crowds. Up there," an upward glance to the floating clouds and glimpses of expansive blue, "none of this matters. Not you, not me. Only the sky and the breeze and her songs."
He flinches at the soft touch against him, resisting the urge to gore, that is not allowed here, oh no, but when he sees the young winged thing that trails feathers down his rigid form he relaxes, enough, closing his eyes for a moment before she whispers to him to look up, up, up. Great black orbs take in the great wide blue. ”None of this matters. Not you, not me. Only the sky and the breeze and her songs.” He breathes into her words like there is no other air for him to drink. The black king yearns to nest among her feathers like a hatchling in a nest or a newborn swathed in blankets. A shiver runs down his spine, recalling her touch, already, and he looks down to her, so pale and shining and small. His affect is dull and blank but El Rey says, ”Thank you.”
His gaze does not part from her. She is all the comforts of his nurse, for all her wild grinning he can only think of her as maternal and something of her brings him back to the cellar.
He would rather be huddled in darkness than lost in the sky above. But he is darkness, and she is light, so light. ”You are very soft,” he says, though the statement does little to encapsulate the sensation of being huddled in a mother’s arms and just as strangely in the arms of something he does not quite understand. ”Your wings are lovely, also. Like a bird’s,” for El Rey’s greatest love in this new world above are the creatures and plants that flourish within it.
A monster among men, a giant in a world of dwarves. El Rey is a dark lighthouse, a beacon of shadows that draws her in just like the setting sun pulls her to the skies. Juniper does not mind the way he stares - openly, boldly, without knowing if it is right or wrong entirely to look down upon her as he does. She is rather fond of honest things, of curious things, of learning things. So the Pegasus lets him look, flexes her wings proudly and thrusts her chin high, winking before being sucked back into those depthless eyes once more.
Even they are dark like him.
Large, doe-eyes stare into eyes to black they swallow the sun and every reflection that should be there. “You're very beautiful," she says simply, not one to know how poetry should roll on the tongue. Juniper enjoys touch more than talk, has always been one to sooth and calm others just as she does ignite and burn with them. Art does not walk with her soul, but she is a masterpiece when in the skies.
Grounded as they are, she is just another girl with just another boy. A boy who would light up her world if he just smiled, just once. “Would you like to touch them? I don't think I'll bite. Just don't pull my feathers, you only do that if you like me." Tinkling laughter follows in an unending pattering of pale light, light that roars brighter with that dawning smile she offers only to him this time.
Fearlessly she extends her wings, lets them reach for the sky, lets herself unfurl into a pale statue upon the ground. Then, without hesitation one dips, falling ever downward until it brushes along his spine as her phantom hands had done moments before, and settles neatly beside his face. “Go on then, it's okay."
Something of a smile plays on his lips as she flexes her wings and holds her chin high and winks; she is so beautiful, so soft, so fragile. He wants to hold her and keep her and watch her and write her and crawl down to the cellar and hide away with her, in the quiet and the dark and the warmth (and if it is cold, then they shall make the warmth from each other’s bodies.)
”You’re very beautiful.” He stares at her blankly for a moment. ”No one has ever said that to me before.” He is not certain if it is a thing to be thankful for, but she says it with no malice. No one has ever told him whether “beautiful” was a good or bad thing. ”Is that a good thing?”
She asks if he wishes to touch her feathered lovely wings and he everything in him says yes and he says ”Yes.” Her wings stretch so far and long and high that even he has to look up, for something so light must be large to carry such a strange bird. All it takes is her encouragement and he reaches out, snuffling his nose in the soft down of her wings. The feathers tickle his nose and a grin pulls at his cheeks and
he laughs.
It is an odd sound, perhaps; stuttering and choking with disuse but genuine nonetheless. It does not rattle his chest, but it - really - is a giggle. El Rey does not stop, though; he keeps at rubbing his nose in the feathers until they send an itch up his snout and he stumbles back to let loose a mighty achoo! He looks up at the pretty mare, momentarily disoriented and fuzzy-nosed.
His smile could steal the sun from the sky, could hide the darkness from the world - but without darkness her sweet Vespera would never come. And still...Juniper lets herself get lost in the sharp, glistening parts of it, the killer parts that are new and old, the gentle parts that would protect if only they knew how. She is a blooming daisy, a girl again with green stains on her knees and swampy water soaking her hair, and she is grinning at the ghost of Na'eemha who wears that Cheshire smile just as El Rey does. They blur together until he talks.
And that grass-stained girl still stands before him lost in thought.
"It depends, I suppose; where I am from, there is much beauty and many who offend such beauty. The world is bright with splendors untold, with secrets unhinged, with life so ready to be lived. There, something beautiful is dangerous and lovely and tempting." How she blushes! Because he is all of those things and he is there and he is before her.
And then his face is in her feathers that beckon him nearer, his laughter is a new light in the world, a magic being born. Juniper would drown in it. So her feathers ruffle, back and forth and back and forth. They slide over his face and his huffing breath is like the freedom of the skies.
Green eyes are closed when his sneeze bursts forth, she jumps, pressing herself against him and ducking slightly to look at the world from her short vantage point. Only when his fuzzy face comes back to peek at her as she peeks at him does she dare look flustered and embarrassed. "That was only you," the dove whispers, looking to the grounds with a slight hiccup of a laugh. "You scared me."
@El Rey | "speaks" | notes: ;dlfkas I CAN'T HANDLE THEM
She talks to him as the sun slipping over the horizon or the sun slipping under the horizon as a drowned creature submitting to the water in its lungs. Peacefully and with grace. He likes the sound of her words and wants only to have written them himself; this outside world has done great things for his prose but suddenly he cannot compare.
She is so much more than what he knows.
He asks, ”Where are you from?” because it sounds like a place he would like to stay.
She ruffles her feathers and he can only laugh more, though his untimely sneeze frightens her - he thinks - and for the first time in his life he does not wish to frighten. The way she presses against him feels like home and he leans into her.
”You scared me.”
The words -
sting.
El Rey dips his head to look up at her sheepishly. ”I’m sorry,” his voice warbles with concern as a lonesome bird. ”I didn’t mean to.” He looks away, gaze trailing the ground.
Fear is a tool for making someone leave.
It is the last thing he wants right now.
@Juniper | Big Big Blood ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
He looks at her like a drowned man waking, like a sailor welcoming the sea into his lungs, like she is all he wants to know as the presence of her washes away his every sin. Slowly he asks where she's from, he looks away and apologizes.
Shame is not a color he should wear.
Juniper decides she likes this gentle giant, this sweet man of night's cloth and swampy secrets. So she lifts his chin, raises it to her own eye level, and gently brushes her nose along his. Chaste is the touch, gentle is the touch. Lips do not do as palms do and kiss, but she almost blushes all the same were she not raised to touch and love so freely.
"Apologies are shredded flowers in my hands: useless as just words. Sweet earthling, you need never apologize to me"
Hushed are the words against his cheek, light in his ear like the feathers on her skin. She's wrapped her wings about him so they are in their own cocoon. Eye to eye. Heart to heart. "I'm from the sky and from the ground and from somewhere no one knows. I'm from dusk and dying light. I'm from the heart of every lover and every poem." It seems a simple explanation and clarifies nothing. As mysterious as the girl flush against him, shameless in her own skin and shy in her sweet, slow smiles.
The green of her eyes shares secrets, secrets saying that she'll stay. She looks at him the way you look at a dying star when it flares bright: like he's the only one in her world.
He wonders if she hates him she hates him oh,, darkness, she hates him. He is too much violence wrapped up with too little thread. She is not the type of thing he is meant to be near oh no oh no she just is
n
o
t
the type of thing to be found in the type of life he has and leads and ends but the way she lifts his chin, no, it does not welcome a slap but her nose brushes softly against him, feather light and soft as the rest of her, this bird held between his fangs.
Everything she says is poetry to him, but he does not know if he is forgiven. He thinks so, maybe, perhaps. She is not frightened? He would ask but she is speaking again, telling him what he asked of her and the thread tightens around the bloody beating muscle and veins of violence. El Rey understands very little of her. El Rey wants more of her all the same.
It is then that a stranger shoves against them and he is suddenly and painfully aware of the world around them, the throng of bodies passing through the narrow road, market, noise, color - his lungs roll up flat and his eyes shiver, back and forth and back and forth where is there to go -
”Do you…do you know any place like that? A place like you…from where you…go...” Panic drags cold fingers down his everything and he tries to think about the softness of her everything instead but he cannot for much longer.
@Juniper | ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
drunk on dandelion wishes and your sweet, midnight wine
H
ush now, hush now” she soothes and sings, letting her phantom hands play along his spine, brush gently his hair from his face, and smile as they move over gold and black horns. El Rey is handsome and strong, he is tall where she is not, he is fierce where she is flighty, he is something she wants very much to hold on to.
So the goddess girl nods, earnestly, eagerly, and stretches a wing about him once more. It does not cover him from the world, cannot even reach his other side so easily with the height of him, but it presses her side against his own. Shoulder to shoulder, she begins to walk, begins to lead, begins to steer. The pegasus hums gently, letting the vibrations sink through her skin and into his own, letting the world hum alongside her own melodious, bright tones.
"I will take you somewhere quiet, somewhere that is just you and I and the green of my jungle sky.” Earnest are green eyes that reach up, up, up into the towering blacks of him, the shining golds that wink and play with her. Charmed. Simply charmed, Juniper blushes again at her feminine peeking, demurely glancing up to see if he watches her as well. "It’s noisy here for me, too. Where I’m from, things are either soft or sharp or trying to eat you. There is skin against skin so intimately you’d think two bodies were one. I cannot take you to my sisters, but I can take you to something magical, something wonderful. You might like it, you just might.”
With that, her humming resumes, a song of heat and misty leaves, of canopies kissed by dawn’s first light, of dusky evenings when fireflies awaken and rejoice at the coming of the night. Through it all, Juniper hums of happiness and love. "Come now, come.”
@El Rey | "speaks" | notes: at long last, a soft closer to flee the city!
