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.
The dance of dark hooves against cobblestone.
The back alleys of Denocte weren’t pretty. That was the wrong word. If Locust had to pick one, she might call them tantalizing, in the way that most dangerous things had a strange sort of attraction to them. They were dark and serpentine, with each winding street leading into three others and crossing over a few more, and, compared to the brightness of the markets and the more hospitable parts of the court, at night they were almost too dark, if primarily because the awnings and overhangs and balconies blocked out a decent portion of the sky, and the stars were muted in cities anyways. The moon hangs somewhere above her, pale and terrible, coated in a fine layer of hazy clouds; it looked sickly, like that, and blurred. Out on the water, she could see it well enough to make out the dark indentations of its craters. Now, it looked like a dull reflection of itself, peeking out from behind the jagged spires of tall buildings.
Locust and her pearls, which glimmer and catch in their smooth and subtle way whenever she passes through a segment of dappled light, are more than a bit out of place here. (A rat skitters across the alleyway in front of her, pausing momentarily to sit up on its haunches; it stares at her, gives a soft squeak, and disappears into a pile of discarded crates, which have been thrown haphazardly in a pile alongside a bent-up gutter pipe.) Despite her rugged occupation, she has always been in possession of more than a streak of vanity, and so she’s never much looked like a pirate – even now, when it’s probably dangerous to attract attention, she is clean (from the first proper bath she’s taken in months, complete with plenty of sweetly-scented soap and oil), the troublesome coils of her hair had been tamed into neat curls and braids, and she walked with a sort of attention-seeking deliberation, the sort that came from either boredom or ignorance, and she liked to think that she wasn’t much of the ignorant type. A sway of her hips, a toss of her hair – to make those pearls clink, or the knife at her shoulder – a serpentine momentum that catches the light on her metallic coat.
It’s been harder coming back than she thought. (Of course, she knew that, even before she arrived; it hasn’t been easy coming to Denocte since before the accident, but somehow that pit in her stomach that opened wide whenever she returned to the Night Kingdom, the only land she’d ever called a home for any substantial period beyond the vast expanse of the seas, felt like it was growing wider and deeper with each visit.)
She turns a corner, and she finds herself staring at her destination; it’s closer than she remembered, but she supposes that it has been a while. (Locust racks her brain, for a moment. She hasn’t visited this one in a while, and she thinks that it might be because she couldn’t bear to go back. Was it before….?)
The bar’s a dive, but a pretty one – all dim, dark lights and strange, cheap decorations, bottles filled with little lights that hung on strings from the ceilings. Plants she’d never seen before. Wood carvings, crystals…
And she still remembers the bartender, who turns to her with a knowing smile and odd white eyes. (They’ve always unnerved her.) The rest of him is a collection of blacks and violets, like something out of the night sky. “Locust.” He greets her pleasantly, and his voice – still sounds strange. She used to think it was the alcohol, but there was something about the man’s presence that had always felt off to her, like it belonged to something otherworldly.
A mage, or something. She didn’t know. Or care. Denocte was full of things like that, and it wasn’t her job or her business to worry about them. “Hey, Jeremy.”Jeremy. Such a subtle name for such a strange figure. He regards her with a warmth that she doesn’t know she’s missed until it’s focused on her, and she supposes that’s one of the things that makes him a good bartender. Always good at listening. Caring. Or pretending to, at least. He inclines his head, looking behind her expectantly.
When he doesn’t see anyone, he looks back at her, blinking. Locust looks away, with a faint shake of her head, her eyes flickering momentarily to the wooden floorboards. “You’re alone tonight? That’s unusual.” “Not alone all night, I hope,” she mutters, with a curl of her lip. If she stumbled upon some interesting stranger, and one thing led to another, she’d hardly complain – she could use a distraction. She looks back up at Jeremy, dragging in a long breath, and adds, “You know how the sea can be, Jeremy, for people like us…”
He nods, slowly, a flicker of understanding in those empty white eyes. “Tell you what. I think I remember what you like – let me make something special for you. On the house.”
She looks at him skeptically, but finally concedes with a somewhat suspicious nod, provoking a soft chuckle from the dark man. “Thanks, Jeremy.”
For the moment, Locust goes to linger by the window, watching passer-by and glittering pygmy dragons; there are a few other patrons, here and there, murmuring between themselves. One of them is reading a book. There are cushions and blankets that look tantalizingly comfortable, but Locust is far too jittery to use them. In the near-silence, she can hear the faint hum of music from somewhere in the back, but who or what is playing is beyond her; it doesn’t sound much like anything she’s ever heard before, and she’s heard lots of music on her travels. There’s something about it that makes her think of rain, dancing along the ridges of a tin roof.
She just looks out, occasionally locking glances with a passing stranger, and sighs.
To not take part in the same delights as other creatures would be both characteristic and overtly animal. He writes, he works, and he, most certainly, loves. The anonymity of soldierly duties allows the black bull a certain flexibility of presence; he can shift between the courts at the behest of his true superiors and gain what is needed. He can also indulge.
El Rey has seen the effects of alcohol on others - not his father, he thinks, wound tighter than a coiled adder, but others these days; fellow citizens of Denocte, the affluent of Solterra. He has not tried such a thing, and he wonders if it will make him violent or joyous. There is only one way to find out. He will venture to: A Bar.
He had seen in it passing on patrol or otherwise sneaking about the city - though “sneak” was the wrong word for his type of monster - and curiosity had finally taken its hold on El Rey. He was between shifts, so to speak, no one to kill and no one to guard (he was meant to be sleeping, actually), but that, he had heard, was The Point. There was something more alive about him these days; it was Juniper and Raum and Denocte and Solterra, a full belly and the sun on his back and a lover at his side. He knew more about the world now than he knew was there to learn, and every day he approached it with wonderment and the same stoic violence that had earned him his status.
He was still naive.
El Rey entered slowly, but not cautiously; rather like cattle testing the strength of a fence out of sheer boredom, or perhaps to reach the grass on the other side (it was greener). His presence is undeniable but he finds it forgettable. The bar - strange. Smelly. Oddly decorated. He wanted to poke about and identify the plants, and in a way the close darkness of the place reminded him of his before-home. His now-home was…a multitude of places. He liked it here.
The bull found no one recognizable among the scattered patrons, so he lumbered to the counter, finding a space beside a silvery mare. His empty dark gaze fell over her, a silent moment gone by before he turned to meet the bartender’s stark white one. It was then that he realized he did not know what to do. It seemed that every utterance of “it was just one beer, one shot, one something” was drained from his mind in that exact second that he opened his mouth to speak. He tried to recall the drinks of Raum’s court to no avail. It had never been important to him, and so, it had dissipated. Not possessing of the anxieties that plagued many - that perhaps plagued a pale cousin, courts away - he simply stood there, dumbly, and stared, not accounting for how unnerving his presence might be.
@Locust ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
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.
When the man took a seat beside of her, Locust spared him a glance, but little more; he was massive and horned and dark, and there was something to the look of his glossy black eyes that suggested any kind of engagement with him would be more trouble than it would be worth. She doesn’t know what it is. Those eyes are too blank for her, in their void-blackness, as uncomfortably empty as they were full of something she did not understand or recognize. When he looked at her, she could feel his stare. She didn’t much care for it.
It wasn’t enough to make her move, though. Locust – small, delicate, silver-bright Locust – had rubbed shoulders with the lowest of the low for her entire life, and she spent her time hunting down hungry, fanged water-monsters that would devour her quite happily if she gave them half a chance. (She was not in the habit of giving them half a chance.) Even if she weren’t virtually impossible to intimidate, with Jeremy right there, her pride wouldn’t allow her to skulk off.
They were two strangers in a bar. There was nothing unusual in that.
And it wouldn’t have become unusual, had the man not sat there in blank, unnatural silence, those river-stones of eyes trained on Jeremy, who fidgeted, occasionally, under the growing weight of his stare. The man did not speak. Jeremy could not work. The minutes dragged on, almost unbearably long and awkward, with neither man opting to break the silence. Locust looked down the counter, out the window, back at the other patrons in the bar, unwilling to insert herself into whatever this was; she had no interest in trouble tonight.
A prickle, honed in on the side of her neck, suggests that it might not be her decision to make.
Jeremy was looking at her, now, and the glint in his eyes tells her that she has one of two options – deal with the man at the counter or pay for whatever kind of (most certainly expensive) concoction he was mixing for her. Locust does not want to deal with the man at the counter, who is easily three hands taller than her, considerably more bulky, and in possession of a rather demonic set of horns…but she has dealt with worse, and she’d prefer not to deal with whatever outrageous fee Jeremy was bound to force upon her if she left him out to dry.
Oh, hell.
Locust turned, her eyes the dangerous undertone of the sea at storm, and she flashes a grin at the man; it is all teeth. (This is, she thinks, one of the few occasions where she envies her cannibalistic prey.) “You planning to order something?” she inquires, and it isn’t quite a threat – but there is a hard edge to her voice, like being pressed up against a brick wall.
So much, she thinks, for a simple night off…but this too can serve as a distraction, so she wonders if she is qualified to complain about it. Anything to take her mind off the sea.
