IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE she arrived in Denocte, Locust stood just outside of a bloody tidepool, hooves grinding into the wet, grey sand, surrounded by a crescent-moon of variably nauseated pirates. “Uhh, capt’n,” stammers out one of the younger ones (Four or five, she thinks, but she hadn’t even bothered to memorize his name, because she knew he didn’t have the guts to make it as a pirate. Damned kid was just in it expecting to get rich, or find adventures, or to sleep around at every port – she’d suspected he’d be gone at the next one, and she was right), “Are yah…are yah sure he’s dead?”
When she sighed, the sound almost seemed bored.“I don’t know what you’ve heard about water horses, kid,” she says, grimly, still staring down at the bloodied corpse, “but I’ll teach you a valuable lesson about piracy, right here and now. See, most things tend to die when you gut ‘em like you’d gut a fish, but, if you really ain’t so sure…” The obsidian knife lashes out, and, with surgical precision and enough quickness to be a blur, slashes open the dead kelpie’s throat. Blood begins to drip out of the newly-opened wound, staining the kelpie’s dark coat violent red. “…this’ll usually do the trick. Any questions?” The boy gulps audibly and shakes his head. She smiles too-warmly, a wisp of her white hair, buffeted by the salty breeze, drifting across her sweat-stained brow; it itches something awful, and she makes a mental note to retie her hair when she finished with this bloody business. “Good boy.” The words slide off her tongue, low and silky and distantly threatening. “Now, as payment for this demonstration, you’ll be cleaning the pelt, once I’m done carving it up.” The boy looks horrified, but she just continues to smile. “That won’t be a problem, will it?” “N-no, capt’n,” he manages, his voice catching pathetically, and looks away. One of the others, another youngster (albeit one in possession of a slightly stronger stomach), nudges him gently. Locust barely notices. Her eyes are on the dead kelpie. Its toothy jaw hangs open, unhinged in preparation to bite; its tongue, already swollen, flapped uselessly with each rolling wave. She’d carved a neat line from the beast’s sternum to about halfway down its belly, when it was fool enough to rear up. (Entrails hang halfway out, bobbing in the shallow water.) Dark blood, already half-crusted from heat and wind, covers her forelegs and her chest, drips down her jaw; and her dagger hangs boredly in the air at her side, dribbling a thin line of red. Her stare is impassive, glazed and dark – in the light, the teal of her eyes gleams like sunshine through the shallows, but here, it is the color of a storm. The sort that drags ships under. “Good, good,” she says, her voice dipping to a murmur, and adds, expectantly, “now. Where is my carving knife?”
SEA BIRDS cry out, but their voices are nearly lost to the wind, even as they circle in the shallows bordering the shoreline. It’s high tide, and the water has rolled all the way up to the rocky cliffs that rise up from the beach, coating them in a dangerous layer of slick saltwater and foam. The water is choppy and grey, but, if you dip close enough to it, the color might seem closer to a milk-green, crested with the occasional ridge of off-white. Either way, you can’t see much in it, partially because it is so murky and partially because the sky is heavy with a thick layer of dark clouds. On the distant horizon, far out in the open sea, it is raining. You can smell it on the wind – a sweet cleanliness against the sharp tang of salt water and sand.
Denocte’s pier hangs out in the open water, extending several hundreds of feet out into the water. It is a dark strip against the choppy sea, which froths up against the sturdy old wood like it poses any sort of threat; but the pier has long stood the test of time, and the ocean’s efforts to overtake it have led to nothing more than a thin sheen of water on the wood and thick growths of barnacles on the wooden legs that dig deep into the (presently submerged) sand bar below. Few ships are out in this weather, docked at the port; fewer ships still than usual, with the news of trouble in Denocte. The Dark Strider docks at the pier, imposing itself on the small fishing boats and merchants’ ships that already bob in the water. It isn’t the largest ship there, by any means – that honor belongs to a huge passenger ship, which seems rather low on passengers, followed by an assortment of cargo ships -, but there is something uniquely intimidating about the smaller vessel. The dark wood (from no tree on Novus) creaks and heaves as it bobs in the water, weighted down with sailors darting about the deck. Black waves, ornate and curling, are painted onto the sides of the ship, and, for all the time that it clearly spends at sea, the paint job is neat – from enchantment or meticulous repainting, though which one is unclear. An ink-black flag flies from the mast, billowing in the salty wind; a white horse’s skull, surrounded by a circle of knives, has been stitched onto the fabric. The ship’s figurehead is equally skeletal. The carved figure, some kind of hippocampus (or kelpie) is half-alive, but the skin around its chest splits, revealing the ribs. It thrashes back against the boat, carved hair a sea of wild tangles, eyes rolled back to the whites. The figurehead is unpainted, and the texture of the wood suggests that it has never been painted.
Dockhands stare at it uneasily as they pass, but they don’t dare say what it is, or repeat the name. There is a silent truce in place - if you don’t mention it, you don’t have to deal with it.
The boarding ramp collides with the pier with a sharp clatter, and the first figure off the boat is a woman.
She is small and silver-sleek, her coat streaked with sweat and stray saltwater, and her white hair has been pulled back, to keep it out of her eyes. She moves with such a cheerful sway that you could almost say that she is prancing – each measured stride long and graceful, in spite of the bobbing of the ship in the water and the quivering unsteadiness of the ramp. She surveys the pier with a rudimentary glance in either direction, locking eyes with a couple of dockhands in the process.
Locust smiles, all pretty and nonthreatening. They turn away as quickly as possible, swallowing their tongues.
Her hooves clatter down onto the pier, and she grimaces as a thin wash of salt water dips around their dark curves; strange, for a pirate captain. She seems to shake it, though, turning her blue-eyed stare towards the kingdom that sprawls out on the other end of the pier, and takes a step forward, when- “W-what do we do now, Capt’n?”
She throws a look over her shoulder and lets it fall on a boy with a scarred-up face. Scarface. They’d sure been creative when figuring out what to call him. (Not that her father had ever been much better, but she liked to pride herself on being superior to him in almost every regard.) “I don’t care,” she says, succinctly, smirking, “as long as you fuck off and leave me alone. I’ve got business to attend to, and y’ain’t invited, Scarface.” There’s a spring in her step that suggests that she’s being playful, but the snarl in her voice also suggests that it might be better not to question her. And, truth is, she really doesn’t give a damn what they do – she doesn’t care for a single soul on that ship, and, well, if they decide to go disappearing into Denocte’s winding back alleys or tantalizing bars, it’s no concern of hers. She’s sure that she can find some intrepid young soul willing to take their place.
The boy stares at her, slack-jawed. “B-but Capt’n, you don’t have any of the cargo?” It’s not a question, but his tone implies one. She smiles at him icily, pausing, and turns to stare over her shoulder at him. “It isn’t that kind of business,” she says, her voice dipping low – a threat lingers on the tip of her tongue, begging to come rolling off. “You know, kid, I don’t keep you around to ask questions. I’d hate for us to have to repeat what happened to Jameson, wouldn’t you?” The boy goes stock-still, his eyes bulging, and he might have choked, but she couldn’t hear it over the wind. (She wouldn’t do to him what she did to Jameson, not really. A curious youth and some old man who thought he could pull off a mutiny on her ship were two entirely different threats – but she had a reputation to uphold, and if the thought of getting thrown to a circling mass of ravenous sharks was enough to convince the boy to hold his tongue, all the better.) He nods limply, and she allows her smile to warm a fraction, her gaze to soften. “Good. Do try and enjoy yourself…Denocte is full of interesting sights, and I’d say we’ll be at sea for a few months after we leave.”
She turns on her heel and departs for the shore before she can let anymore kindness slip.
If the boy happens to be around the age her daughter would have been, if she were alive, then so be it.
By the time she reaches the markets, night has fallen.
It’s a dark one – particularly murky. The storm hasn’t broken over land yet, but, if the clouds that block out the moon and the stars above are any kind of indication, it will start raining sometime tomorrow morning. At the moment, that’s no concern of Locust’s.
The streets are so luminous that they might as well have been engulfed in daylight, if daylight were a kaleidoscope of otherworldly hues. Ornate, cast-iron lanterns hang from balconies and awnings, from lampposts; a magician juggles little orbs of light between his antlers; light pours from the interiors of small shops, casting their patrons as odd shadows; occasionally something glowing darts down the streets, moving too quickly to be discernable. She smells candied apples and roasted nuts, sticky-sweet pastries and fine wine…and something with berries. Red ones.
They feel different from when she last visited, more otherworldly. She’s not sure that she likes the change, but Locust has always been superstitious.
Something lights between her shoulders, and she whirls, turning to stare into deep blue, reptilian eyes. “Well, you’re…new.” Locust blinks at the jewel-tone dragon, which gives a soft whirr in response. It crosses her mind that dragonskin would probably fetch a pretty penny, in that nice of a shade of pearlescent white, but the thought is gone as quickly as it came – the creature is too small to be worth the trouble, and, besides, it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. “Where did you come from?” She’s heard stories of Denocte’s new queen, and her dragon. Perhaps they have something to do with that.
The dragon, of course, does not answer, but it does give a knowing chirp before it flies off again, landing somewhere in the exposed rafters of a nearby building; she thinks that she sees a few others with it, flashes of bloodred and emerald green scales shifting in the spotty darkness, but she doesn’t linger to pick them out.
The Scarab is just a few streets down, she thinks, so she could easily go and conduct some actual business, for productivity’s sake, but, for tonight, she just wants to walk. Go find the person who’s selling those candied apples and grab one, perhaps – gods know that they can’t keep sugared treats on the ship. They never last and attract flies in droves.
She doesn’t, though. She just leans back against one of the stone walls of one building or another, pulls her knife from its holster, and flips it in the air in front of her, all the while watching passerby on the street.
It’s been too long, she thinks, since she’s seen some faces she doesn’t recognize.
@open || well, this is....long. anyways. the girl is here. chronologically, this is pre-island, since I intend to throw her in that direction. || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
HER HEART WEARS WISDOM SKIN AND WIT WARMED SPLENDOR, THE ECHOES OF A WAR CRY HOLDING IT'S FOUR CHAMBERS TOGETHER.
That night Boudika danced. She, in front of her stranger-crowd. She, fire-lit and golden. Only the most dedicated of the audience might notice that her usual fury was absent, replaced with a poignant, exquisite sadness. Boudika's war-drums, tonight, had been replaced by a sobbing violin, a violin that threw its pitch this way and that like a sinking ship in tall, tall waves. There was a crescendo, somewhere, perhaps. And the golden ribbons she tied in her too-short mane—or so the manager said—were tossed to meet it, and her head rose, and fell, rose, and fell. Each time Boudika threw it back, her mind was painted with the image of it slit and bleeding red, although she could not quite say why. Perhaps it was because she wore war-paint, and none of the audience knew the nature, the morbidity, of her flashing, brazen colours.
That, to Boudika, was tragic. Tragic in a way that an unmarked grave was. To them it glimmered and shone gorgeously in the dim firelight, and the air smelled of sweet liquor and the smoke of thick, flavoured cigars. Boudika wore her people’s war-colours in a way that made her feel dirty, and forgotten. She wore her people’s war-colours in a desperate attempt to cross the sea or… even more sharply, to scorn them, to scorn everything she had ever been taught.
The violin wailed a Khashran song, one Orestes had hummed between prison bars and sang gently, gently, so gently that Boudika could barely see the glint of his shark’s teeth in the darkness of the cell that neighboured hers. And he would lean hard against the bars that separated them, so that the metal burned his flesh, and he would sing to her in his siren’s song and Boudika would lean back. At first, Orestes would gnash his teeth against the burning bars—and Boudika never flinched, wanting a warrior’s end, lusting for his teeth more than his song. But then, over a matter of weeks, the violence ebbed and became, instead, an intimacy of sorrow. Their fates would forever be entwined. And they both leaned, so hard, against the bars--feeling the warmth of forbidden flesh, knowing the closeness among those who experience a very specific, unique type of pain together. And still, he sang--he sang and sang, and it was the last thing Boudika remembered of him, as they sank in the sea before she arrived at Novus.
Listening to his song as she danced, Boudika felt the infuriating pinpricks of tears.
After the dance, Boudika left. She washed the gold from her skin and tore the ribbons from her mane, and began to haunt the streets of Denocte, as she often did when restless. The docks, at first, enticed her—but she drew away from them, toward the statue of Caligo and the glimmer of moonstones on the streets. Staring at the statue, she remembered a similar one in Oresziah’s city square. A stallion, massive and wrought of the black stone from the cliffs. The stallion had been rearing, and thrusting a trident into the stomach of a twisting beast. The beast was a Khashran in the midst of transformation, with the rear end of a horse and the front of a shark.
The Caligo statue was very different, Boudika thought, and turned away. Both images: the one of Caligo behind her and the dark one of her memory, were a far cry from the tragedy of the violin. However, her skin crawled with the feeling of being watched; with something seeing through her. Boudika had shrugged off the urge to pray more often than once, but that did not change the statue’s cold-hard stare creeping at the nape of her neck. But Boudika knew only how to shrug it away, and continue into the darkness of the Night Court. There were jugglers and street-dancers, vendors, children running painted in the streets. Dragons fluttered above her and below her, both, and occasionally she glimpsed a bright-eyed alley-cat. Nothing held her interest, however, because within her cried the sea.
There was a chasm inside her. A chasm that ached and pulled and caused her to walk circles in the city of Denocte, dark and alive with magic. Dark and enticing, seductive, safe, where there was no threat of flesh-eating horses that would emerge from the sea and wage war upon them. A war we began, Boudika remembered.
Orestes came to her again and again, in her mind, a torturous image that she could not escape. What would he think of Denocte Intrinsically, Boudika knew he would belong far better than she. He, with his raw heart and aching songs. He, with the eyes older than the land, as old as the sea. He, with that genuine laugh, sharp like a gull’s cry. And she. Sharp in a way that was not becoming. Restless as a tiger in a cage. Directionless. Alone. But what must he feel?
And the perpetual conclusion, of her tortured thoughts: he was dead. The sooner Boudika accepted that fact, the better off she would be.
A glinting knife caught her warrior’s eye. Boudika stopped mid-step; her head shot sharply in the direction of the flash, her muscled coiled to react. There was a silver mare leaning against the wall, in the darkness. Spiralling a knife. The gesture would have been threatening, if not so rhythmic, if not so mindless. Boudika approached and everything in her bristled, everything in her lusted for a fight—blood, she knew, would ease the tension of her guilt. It would clear her mind. It would restore her to violent, intense purpose.
What is a tiger hunter, her father had asked. Without the tiger?
The echo in her mind: nothing, nothing, nothing.
Boudika did not expect to recognise the mare. But she did, in a way that she recognized people she heard spoken of, and in a way that she reocgnized those who frequented Denocte's docks. Her morning runs often ended there, where she would stare forlornly at the ships and imagine passage to her home that was no longer a home. This mare, however, was different than most. She was a blade, personified--hard and silver and, somehow, seductively mysterious. The words came out before she could help herself. “You’re the captain with the gutted kelpie on her ship.” A statement, devoid of emotion. And Boudika's face was her warrior’s face. And Boudika's eyes were her demon’s eyes, glinting red in a bald face. It would not be difficult to see Boudika for what she once was; for what she would always be, no matter how-guilt ridden, how pacifistic.
"Copperhead" knew how to gut a water horse, from stem to stern. She knew how to pin their throat with a trident in such a way that it did not kill them, but pinched the blood of the jugular so that darkness overtook them, swift and inevitable. Was that not how she had captured Orestes? She knew what their hot breath felt like against her skin. She knew the lust of their songs. But she also knew their love.
Their beauty.
And thinking of it, the image of the ship in her mind, Boudika felt irritated. You have no right to display them as such hideous things. For water horses were many things; but even in their death throes they were beautiful.
SHE RISES LIKE ATHENA ON A NIGHT OF VICTORY DANCING. SHE RISES LIKE THE BLOOD MOON IN A SKY OF A THOUSAND STARS BURSTING
HOW WE FORGET tomb came from swell,swell from the rise of sea - a wake from an opening in ice. A ship - lit by a canopy of clouds under the cupol of night - appears perpetually in the act of changing course.
From what Locust knows, there are two ways to deal with loss. Anger – a burn that drags down your throat and collects somewhere in your stomach – and apathy – which feels like so much anger that it empties you out, a process reminiscent of carving a bowl. Locust would rather be angry, but more often she thinks that she is apathetic. Anger would feel better, when she slides her knife along the sternum of those dark-eyed, sharp-toothed things; anger would feel better, because anger would feel right, instead of the dull, useless ringing that comes with hollowing out a bowl – slicing off thin layer after thin layer of wood, until there is no bowl left to carve into. Her insides feel like fruitless chipping. Heart an empty space, left somewhere in the sea. Just jutting ribs, curving downwards, as she chipped away at what was supposed to be inside of them.
But sometimes she is angry, and it is always when she stares down at the dull-marble eyes of a dead one, and she thinks, with sparks of fury, you should have put up more of a fight than that, you shouldn’t have died so easily, you should have been harder, hurt me more- because it makes her think that she could have done something. If she’d just fought a little harder. If she’d pulled her knife on them, instead of floundering helplessly at the merciless crash of the surf.
She can’t do anything about that now, so she just drives the knife a little bit deeper into something that’s already dead – and twists it – and maybe it makes her feel a little bit less helpless, and that’s enough to put off the troubled stirring in her gut for a few more days, when she’s not staring at the dull film growing over the dead thing’s eyes, when she can wash it down with one thing or another. But it always comes back. Always.
Mooneye would tell her stories, sometimes, about vengeful creatures from the deepest crevasses in the ocean floor. Creatures that were born from blood spilt on the waves. That they’d come after the unjust with raking claws and oil-black eyes, eyes that let no light through – that they had sharp teeth, sharper than any shark or water horse. Bat wings. Or fins. Demons, or something like it, but demons that only went after those that committed the worst sort of crimes, so they couldn’t be demons, could they? Not really.
She wonders if she is like them, or if she’s someone they would hunt down.
(She finds that she doesn’t care about the answer.)
When the woman emerges from the crowd, she is leonine. Locust watches her with something that isn’t quite wariness, her eyes narrowing a fraction; there is a tension in her posture that suggests aggression, a curl of her lip that suggests anger. She is taller than her by nearly three hands, and far more powerfully built, with a shorn mane and a pair of curling, intimidating dark horns. All red and black, stripes on her flank that look more like they could be bloodied claw marks, a tail that lashes about her hooves. A soldier, perhaps. Or a guard. Either way, something about her suggests trouble, or that she is looking for it.
Locust thinks that she can be cohesive to either, but then the woman has the nerve to open her mouth.
Her eyes burn like hot coals, but Locust does not stir beneath them, like the guilty might shift under the knowing stare of a juror; instead, she meets them with her sharp teal stare, as blue as the woman’s eyes are red, and it is unconcerned. “You’re the captain with the gutted kelpie on her ship.” Her words run circles inside of her head, jarringly cold and accusatory, and that is enough to provoke the silver’s temper. But she has always had a smiling rage. Her lips twitch at the edges, threatening to curve up, and her eyes continue to stare into her own, as mad and as dark as the sea in a storm. She relaxes against the stone wall, fluid and silver, and continues to twirl the knife; over and over again, senselessly repetitive, perfectly dark material catching in the light and clicking every single time it completes a rotation.
Finally, after a silence that feels suffocatingly long, she smiles, but it is a smile that belongs on an crocodile – when Locust smiles, she smiles like a predator, in a way that reminds you that she has teeth. It never reaches her eyes, just lingers on her charcoal lips. A suggestion of depth – a cold, dark thing, a trench carved into the outline of her face. “Seems my reputation precedes me,” the silver woman says smoothly; her eyes gleam with an emotion that is difficult to describe, but seems to suggest dangerous waters, the still of the tides before the break of a storm. “I suppose you mean the figurehead? I like to think of it as a warning.” Or a promise, she thought, if they weren’t clever enough to avoid a woman who pinned their death to the front of her ship. (Locust hopes that she does not mean the kelpie-skin, below deck; she prefers to keep those goods quiet, and, if one of her sailors was fool enough to let it slip, she’d have to slit his throat, something that she would prefer not to do. Messy business, killing her own, and terrible for morale.)
The clicking stops. The knife, suspended, hangs in the air between them, downturned; not obviously aggressive, but wary, certainly wary. She leans forward a fraction, still smiling, still gleaming, still terrible -
And she asks, her voice still unfettered, “I’m curious, stranger – what do you want from me?” Passage on her ship? Certainly not. To hunt a kelpie? No, unlikely. Her rage wasn’t at the gutted carving, though it was clearly because of it; it was at her.
She wonders, if she pries open this woman’s mouth, if she’ll find teeth like little rows of needles, or if she is simply the fool that Locust was, as a girl – that would see the dark ridges of fins on the horizon, cracking through the smooth curves of the waves, and she would know that they had teeth but forget that they could bite.
(Or maybe it is worse, but she doesn’t think of that. Maybe it is something more like love. But water-horses can’t love. Water-horses are death and tide, like the sea, and the sea can’t love anything – no matter how much you love it, and no matter how much it wants to love you.)
@Boudika || t e n s i o n || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
HERE IS WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU: ICARUS LAUGHED AS HE FELL. THREW HIS HEAD BACK AND YELLED INTO THE WINDS, ARMS SPREAD WIDE, TEETH BARED TO THE WORLD. (THERE IS A BITTER TRIUMPH IN CRASHING WHEN YOU SHOULD BE SOARING.)
The silence would have unnerved her if it were not a tactic Boudika had used herself, in the past. Certainly. She would have been squirming beneath the silver woman’s gaze; uncomfortable as the silence grew, and grew. For those eyes bore into her, and they were glacial; eyes that belonged not to the sea but to stone, unmoving, unamused. There was a predatory smile to accompany the stare. All teeth and, also, ghastly—not unlike the creature her ship depicted with so little tact. Boudika’s anger simmered; but anger was, perhaps, the wrong word. Was it disgust? Was it intrigue? The emotion rolled within her stomach, and more than anything, it seemed a little righteous. But Boudika could not be righteous; Boudika knew this, more intimately than any other truth. You have no right to feel this rage.
“An interesting reputation you keep, Silver Captain.” But Boudika had not heard of her reputation. The word “captain” was spoken with the tight regard of a soldier for a general, with no intonation or expression to suggest sarcasm. Merely a straight face, apathetic—or—murderous? Boudika did not know the woman’s name. She knew nothing else about her—and yet, what Boudika knew was enough. The ghastly carving remained in her mind and it soiled her trips to the docks; to Boudika, the silver captain was a much a part of the myth as the ship itself. She did not need a name, or an identity; the carving preceded all of that, spoke louder than any words the woman might share. Explained. Reckoned.
The knife hung in the air.
Her eyes settled on it, in the way water would before a storm; so, so still. What existed within her then was something primordial; something feral. It was years and years of seeing knives or fangs and knowing that survival could hinge on a nanosecond reaction, on a reaction that was not thought but pure, visceral physicality. And so her eyes were indifferent but burning; her eyes were a tiger’s eyes.
There was nothing more violent than a knife suspended, a knife ready to sentence. You have no right to feel this rage.
But Boudika was not afraid. There was little left in the world that would unsettle her; unnerve her. Only the sea in a storm. Only the sea on a calm day, beseeching. The woman was smiling in a way that should have been terrible. She was smiling in a way that ought to have evoked something in Boudika; but the huntress cocked her head, and a lion paced behind her eyes. The Captain's expression was one of ugly cruelties, and perhaps that only emphasised Boudika's dislike. She disdained cheap smiles; malevolent smiles; and the thought drew Amoraq to her briefly, violently, but it was not the same.
Boudika returned the trick; a long silence, a rotting silence that ended with a vague answer. “I don’t want anything.”I want to burn your ship. I want to never share my love for them; my hate for them. But those were things she could not say. And to see the anger in her eyes as hate would be a mistake; it was jealousy, insipid and unsuited for such a proud creature. Possessive, disgusted. “I think there are better ways to show a myth, or a story, or a killing. That’s all.”
Her voice came out light, airy; and now the biting tone was there, in full. “There is no tact.” For a moment, brief and pure, Boudika wondered if the captain saw her as a pacifist. A naive and ignorant girl. It would not be a lie, in the moment—but if her entire life had been stretched out, observed, it would certainly be misleading. She had finished a genocide. She had slaughtered—by her hand or not—the everlasting Prince of a Thousand Tides and somewhere, in the dark sea, she imagined he rotted at the ocean floor bound in iron chains and covered in gold. An entire species of water horse; forever condemned; forever dead. She knew the ones that remained were Bound in slavery far from the sea, with muzzles of gleaming metal.
To see the carving was to see a tiger cartooned; to see a beast brought low, disrespectfully, ignorantly, and her people had always accomplished such feats only through the glory of hard-wrought metal and the blood of their own children. To see it shown so cheaply was a disgrace. “And what is it you captain, Captain? Where do you sail, on your pirate ship?” A hope, iridescent and foolish, rose in her: Oresziah? and already Boudika knew she did not want a woman such as this anywhere near her homeland, as traitorous as it may have been. At the thought of Oresziah, her anger deflated--the twisting monster of her jealousy was slain.
Perhaps Boudika felt so strongly because she saw herself in the woman's cool eyes. They are monsters, she had believed for so very long. There is nothing beautiful about them, except in death.
And then there was Orestes. Orestes, with a soul larger than life could contain. Orestes, with his reincarnations, with his old, old heart. Orestes, who was the sea. Orestes, who had forgiven her. Orestes, who she had loved when he sang. And in her mind was the last song, the lost song, as her head fell below the waves and her world went dark. In her mind, was the song that lead her to Novus. And her stomach twisted because once, once, she had hated them too.
THE WAX SCORCHED HIS SKIN, RAN BLAZING TRAILS DOWN HIS BACK, HIS THIGHS, HIS ANKLES, HIS FEET. FEATHERS FLOATED LIKE PRAYERS PAST HIS FINGERS, CLOSE ENOUGH TO SNATCH BACK. DEATH BREATHED BURNING KISSES AGAINST HIS SHOULDERS, WHERE HIS WINGS JOINED THE HARNESS. THE SUN PAINTED EVERYTHING IN SHADES OF GOLD. (THERE IS A CERTAIN BEAUTY IN SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE AND WATCHING FROM THE CENTRE OF THE FLAMES.)
AT NIGHT, IN BED, MY LIES EMERGE AS PEARLS The first, in midwinter, Tahitian gray and silver, cold against my throat, was born a foreign object, perilous inside my chest. I slept all night to ease the pain, and while I did, I made it round, lustrous.
Sometimes, though not often, Locust thinks of her father, the bastard. She hates Morgan, now, but she hadn’t hated him in the earliest moments of her girlhood, but, even in her hatred, she had to admit that she’d learned from him. Her weaknesses, primarily – her fondness for alcohol came from him, as did her sharp temper and her cutting tongue, as did her abject carelessness, the way that she would hurt without meaning it, as did her restless wandering, as did the way that she could not seem to love in the ways that other people did, as did the way that she threw away every chance she’d had at love for fickle, meaningless affairs, as did the violent, spastic way that she hurt, the way that she would draw blood for every wound dragged across the fragile surface of her heart. But there were a few good things, and one was the fact that she was unshakable, even when she was met with loathing, or something like it. Before he tried to marry her off to a son of a friend, to be a broodmare, she did not love her father, but she did trust him, in the way that you had to trust anyone who was in charge of a vessel that you were on; any mistakes, and it went down.
When her father struck her flanks with a broken bottle, she didn’t even flinch. She watched him the entire time, right in the eyes, and she hoped that he felt it.
The red-eyed woman does not back down from her stare, and she does not back down from hers, so they continue to watch each other, like snakes, waiting to see who would bite first. “An interesting reputation you keep, Silver Captain.” She is not sure that she cares for her term of address, much less that she cannot discern what it means; her voice drips not emotion but apathy, and Locust knows that apathy is far more dangerous than emotion. Apathy is a clean cut. Apathy can kill. An emotional man makes mistakes, but one who does not care does not stumble.
She doesn’t stumble, either. Nothing shakes that thin, angry veneer of a smile. “In my line of work,” Locust drawls, sweetly – succinctly, “an interesting reputation is a necessity.” And she means it. Locust is many things, but she’s never been much of a liar. Near the haunts of the Nzarah, pirates were notoriously sexist; further out, it varied. Sometimes, they even favored women. Neither mattered to her. She’d learned, early on, that if one wanted to be respected (or, better yet, feared) in her particular occupation, they needed to cultivate a reputation.
Often, it wasn’t a pretty one.
Her eyes, finally, flicker from Locust’s to the knife that hangs in the air between them. They all but crackle with tension, though there is the meticulous, strategic emptiness of a soldier in their depths as they watch the blade, prepared for her to use it. She doesn’t intend to, though she knows that she could – she didn’t come looking for a fight tonight. She is silent, unafraid. And Locust is waiting, with a thick coil of tension spiraling the length of her spine.
The silence drags on. She watches her, unmoving, all but unblinking. She holds the knife steady, though it begins to strain at her telekinesis; she curses the weakness of her telekinetic magic in these lands all over again.
Finally, she speaks, but her answer comes out vague. “I don’t want anything.”
It strikes her that something in her tone is possessive. She doesn’t know why, can’t understand why - why, why, why. Her gaze isn’t hateful; it burns with something that is closer to disgust, but she can almost mistake it for jealousy.
Disgust, at least, she can understand. “I think there are better ways to show a myth, or a story, or a killing. That’s all.” The lightness of her tone prepares her for the hit, even before it comes. “There is no tact.” Locust tilts her head at her, gaze darkening, and that too-sharp smile pulls a little bit harder at the edges of her lips. Hadn’t she told her that it was a warning?
Perhaps she thought it a sailor’s warning, given to enemy ships – not the warning of a hunter to prey who thought that they were the ones with teeth, from the rabbit to the wolf she’d skin. “Not a myth,” she says, her voice all but a hum, “or a story.” The third option is the closest, for she has killed water horses before, and that is certainly what the figurehead implies, but it isn’t quite true, either. She doesn’t need them to know that she has killed, and it was not glorious enough to be memorialized anyways. (No – for all that she is doing, Locust knows that it is not glorious work. It is painful, ugly, disgusting. Even evil. Nothing worth a monument on the front of her ship.) She just needs them to know that she will kill them, if they give her a reason, and she’s very good at finding reasons. “Not a killing, either – just a warning, but not to sailors.” She wonders how the woman will react to that, the gleam in her eyes neither gleeful nor particularly angry; if anything, it is curious. A sharp, bitter laugh escapes Locust’s throat, then. “And I’m a pirate. I don’t care much for tact.”
And she still watches her, like a tiger watches something that she has not yet decided whether or not to eat. Locust regards her, perfectly calm, still smiling. “And what is it you captain, Captain? Where do you sail, on your pirate ship?” There is something different in her tone, at the end of her inquiries, but it is such a subtle transition that she barely notices – more obvious is the way that she stands somewhat less tense, as though something has sucked away some fragment of that anger, or something like it, but Locust pays that little mind.
She doesn’t mind to indulge her that. “The Dark Strider. Once, The Sea Star, before my…” Her voice wavers, almost imperceptibly, and, for a moment, that smile falters; what lies beneath is visible, in flickers. Something gleams in Locust’s eyes, and it is ugly, but not in the way that her crocodile smile and feigned pleasantry is ugly; for a moment, there is a flash of grief in her eyes. It is not a kind grief. It is a grief that has festered, year after year, and gangrened, a grief that should have been amputated and left behind long ago. But she couldn’t cut it off. She couldn’t let it go, so it followed, phantom-limb, and consumed, until nothing was left untouched. But she has never told the truth before, not to people who deserved it far more (not to August, or his mother, or the innumerable others that her dead left behind), and she certainly won’t tell it to her.“…before she went down in a storm, with the rest of my crew.” The rest of her sentence is short. Flat. Even dismissive. She does not let herself linger on it, and, as soon as the words have passed her lip, that cold-eyed crocodile smile returns in its entirety, as though it had never left. “I sail wherever the winds and interesting rumors take me – we rarely follow set routes, and we seek what we can find.”
She pauses. “I simply harbor a certain fondness for Denocte, so I visit Novus more often than most lands...and stay longer when I do.” And how couldn’t she? This was where she’d given birth to her daughter, where she’d raised her in the precious months that they’d had together. This was where August was, the last little scrap of Golden that existed, one of the few things she had left to protect. But she doesn’t speak of her daughter, or of August, or of Golden. There is no part of her heart that she would bare willingly, least of all to a stranger, no precious thing that she is willing to mention enough to risk. Instead, her tone remains light, and shifts to an inquiry of her own. “Do you seek something? Passage, perhaps? Rumors?”
She knows that the other woman isn’t looking for any of those things from her, but with that strange, indiscernible emotion passed, she doesn’t know what to think.
@Boudika || locust continues to be awful dot jpeg || "mother-of-pearl," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
HERE IS WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU: ICARUS LAUGHED AS HE FELL. THREW HIS HEAD BACK AND YELLED INTO THE WINDS, ARMS SPREAD WIDE, TEETH BARED TO THE WORLD. (THERE IS A BITTER TRIUMPH IN CRASHING WHEN YOU SHOULD BE SOARING.)
Her reflection wavers, nearly imperceptibly, in the gleam of the knife.
And Boudika experiences something strange, in that nearly undetectable glimmer of light and colour. We are not so different. Wasn’t that clear from their locked stares, the meeting of an unmovable object and unstoppable force? Wasn’t there a battle of equal wills, in their stretched silences, in the cruel humour of the silver captain’s smile, or the apathy of the tiger’s eyes? Was there not something to be said for Boudika’s jealousy, her anger, her emotions that for one moment were directed at this creature she recognized as the same and utterly different? I hate them too, her throat closed around the words, around tears, around a scream. Because that was untrue. I love them.
All because of a carving. All because of how intimately Boudika knows what it feels like to drown.
An interesting reputation is necessary.
In her mind: locks of her crimson hair falling to her father’s short, strokes of a knife. You cannot give them a reason to doubt you. The whispers, of the boys at the academy: didn’t you hear, her father, the general—when Bondike was a colt, the general took him to the sea and pushed him under the waves, and left him for hours, for th—the Khashran… and they came out of the sea, but didn’t take him? Vercingtorix, almost smiling, in the way that he did, when she drew blood in a long line on his cheek during a spar: you’ll always be faster than me. Her father, after the capture of Orestes, staring at her with respect for the first time in her life: you dove off the cliff, after them—and Boudika, not knowing to say whether it was out of fear of failure or love.
What is reputation? The academy, again, when she was punished for speaking out against an instructor—the weight of the rock sled as she dragged it, inch by inch, across the courtyard. The spectators as they watched, cheered, celebrated. She was the first of her class to complete the task. The only one who had not collapsed from exhaustion, to be dragged to the infirmary covered in sweat. Years later, her father: you took the Prince of a Thousand Seas, you took him by yourself— days, weeks, months later: walking down the Main Street of the city, as those she had fought so hard to defend threw rocks and stinging copper coins, screaming, betrayer, betrayer. The weight of the iron on her back could have been a cross. The way Orestes had first looked at her with the hateful apathy of a shark. The way he had later sung to her, the way he said, always said, it is in your nature.
It must be a novelty, Boudika thinks, to have the consistency to keep a reputation. Reputations mean nothing to her, a mare who had been first a savour, then a betrayer. A warrior who had been a general’s son, and later Oresziah’s banished daughter. Reputations were illy fit words, transient, unreliable. Perception, after all, was the only reality that matters. And reputation could never survive to perception, whatever it was. The only thing that had ever changed, Boudika thought. Was that I revealed myself as a daughter instead of a son. That was all it had taken, to skin her deeds of their meaning and bleed them dry.
Then there were the silver captain’s words, following Boudika’s deflated sense of anger, of righteousness. Her realisation, that they were not so different. Not a myth, or a story. Not a killing, either—just a warning, but not to sailors. And I’m a pirate. I don’t care much for tact. The Dark Strider. Once, the Sea Star, before my… before she went down in a storm, with the rest of my crew. I sail wherever the winds and interesting rumours take me—we rarely follow a set routes, and we seek what we can find. The story comes together between the aching silences, the stretching tension. It comes together in bits and pieces, just barely, and Boudika’s expression does not change. She knows she is too intense. She knows her eyes are too hard, too unwavering. Yet there is an honestly to the other woman that Boudika respects, that she appreciates.
Boudika wouldn’t have caught the nearly unnoticeable shift, the pause, if not for her intensity. The other woman states: once, the Sea Star, before my… the trailing off, the changing of thoughts, the shift of the sharp smile to something raw, jagged, wounded. Boudika would not have caught it, if not for her stubborn, predatory intensity. To someone else, the threads may not connect so easily. But it is a familiar patchwork to Boudika, a tapestry, where the story of a ship sunk in a storm to a mass of water horses weaves itself. Boudika sees them in her mind's eye, with gleaming skin and bright, predatory eyes. A feeding frenzy, like sharks overtop one another. It is too easy for her to see a horse gutted, and blood blooming like so many roses in the water. It is too easy to remember what it is like to drown, lightening and waves swelling large, mountainous, crashing overhead. Perhaps this is why the woman needed such a reputation.
Yes. Boudika understands this, more than any other thing. And perhaps she is overthinking; perhaps she is connecting constellations that do not exist, inventing a story she wants rather than knows. But her heart longs to feel not-alone, and in the brief, raw hurt of the other woman’s grief—that ephemeral, nearly imaginary shift, like light on water—Boudika thinks she understands. She knows what it feels like to rot inside.
She only asks, “Do you still love the sea?”
And waits.
And waits.
Boudika is too afraid to share her own truths. Passage. Rumours. Neither. A soul who knows my hurt. But the image of the carving remains fresh in Boudika’s mind, and she knows this woman does not yet understand how to love something she hates and, maybe, fears. So Boudika steels herself, and gives a truth. “I don’t know.” And in giving it, the rest comes. “I’m from an island that kills them. The water horses. An island with black cliffs and rock beaches, rain, fog. We’ve fought them for centuries. There aren’t any here, not really. Not like they are out at sea.” But how does she also say, I miss hearing them sing, at night, from the village. I miss their ghostly cries on the beach, and seeing them run in the shape of water, moving into the shape of something else? How does she say: without them, I don’t know who I am?
The huntress stares at the other huntress. She stares, and she knows, and doesn’t know. And her throat is tight and her eyes are steely, and she hates and loves this woman in the way she hates and loves everything that reminds her of the past. The aching in her is a hollow ring, the feeling of glass shattering, the sound of it beautiful even as it breaks. She at last moves, breaking the stalemate that has erected itself between them. Boudika shifts, her muscles slack with the leonine grace of something that can kill or laze, and leans against the wall a foot or so from the other woman. The Night Court is alive around them but Boudika feels as though, for a moment, they share a grave.
THE WAX SCORCHED HIS SKIN, RAN BLAZING TRAILS DOWN HIS BACK, HIS THIGHS, HIS ANKLES, HIS FEET. FEATHERS FLOATED LIKE PRAYERS PAST HIS FINGERS, CLOSE ENOUGH TO SNATCH BACK. DEATH BREATHED BURNING KISSES AGAINST HIS SHOULDERS, WHERE HIS WINGS JOINED THE HARNESS. THE SUN PAINTED EVERYTHING IN SHADES OF GOLD. (THERE IS A CERTAIN BEAUTY IN SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE AND WATCHING FROM THE CENTRE OF THE FLAMES.)
