The island is Antiope's longing. It is her siren, calling for her every moment of the day. She has ignored it for so long. For so long, and yet now there are even more tales told of it. The strangeness and wildness is like kinship to her. When she walks that long lonely bridge and takes her first steps onto the island, it is something like coming home. Like being full of magic that is uncontrollable and unexplainable and dangerous.
When the island doesn't sleep, when Antiope finds that first equine spouting theories and stories enough to keep grown adults awake at night, she keeps going. There is something inside her, dark and hungry and wanting, and she wonders if this place can fill her. She keeps her axe close and her sea blue eyes sharp and with every moment that should pass but seemingly doesn't, she grows hotter and hotter and hotter. The island is wrong and yet somehow so right, to her.
She does not leave.
She does not sleep.
The island is inside her and all around her and, by the time she's lost track of time, it has also become her.
Eulalie does not trust the island. Oh, her curiosity is a great and untamable thing, but she would not trust her children upon it alone, nor any of the ones she holds dear to her heart. At first it had seemed fun. A little magical, a little mystical. Filled with all manner of strange flora and fauna
But then, the stories had begun. Passed from one equine on the island to three, and from them to any they pass on the street. Until the stories infiltrate every moment. She can scarcely walk the markets without hearing others talking about it. So, she decides to go see for herself. The sun, stopped on only the island? She cannot believe it. And yet when she arrives, she waits. And waits.
She waits until it is impossible to say the sun has moved, and she sees for herself that it is so. Eulalie does not trust the island, but her curiosity will not let it go.
Fiona's interest in the island rests entirely in its plant-life. Every bizarre bloom and leafy growth catches her eye. She wonders if any have medicinal properties or other uses. Soaks, teas, some are simply so beautiful to look at she wishes that they decorated her house. But when she goes exploring, with her journals and her pens to study, collect and catalogue, she had not been expecting everything to go wrong.
Time slips from between her fingers without moving at all, and she watches as a bush she describes in her book dies, suddenly, but no more than 30 seconds later is rebudding and full and green. Something is not right here. Something is not right at all, and Fiona is not certain she wants to stick around and find out what else is going on when she turns for the beach, and bridge, and home.
Samaira is by the ocean, looking out over the water, letting herself be lulled by the waves, when Alaunus speaks up across their bond.
"Samaira… Samaira the sun is wrong." She turns toward him, brow drawn. "What?" she asks, too caught off guard by the strange sentence to process what he has said. "Look at the sky, look at the sun. It has not moved since we got here, if not before."
The pair have been on the island for a few hours now. At first they had mostly passed over it from above, looking down into its shadowed canopies from the sky. Then they had found a quiet place to rest by the water. Samaira looks up, squinting against the bright light. But she knows he is right.
It should be later in the day, if not nearly sunset. Something is certainly not right. "You don't think this has something to do with the statue, with the relic everyone was talking about?" News about the island travels quickly, like wildfire. It is the hot topic everyone seems to want to talk about, so even when she is not thinking about it herself, someone else is surely bringing it to her attention.
This place is the strangest magic she has ever seen, even when compared to wings make of darkness and shadows that somehow still worked.
Tell everybody I'm on my way
New friends and new places to see
With blue skies ahead
Yes, I'm on my way
Charlie doesn't like that the sun won't move.
Actually, to be honest she likes that it makes her feel like she has all the time in the world to explore and nobody to tell her it's too late to go out with Indy.
She doesn't like that when she tries to sleep everything is too bright and light and very not night-time.
She might not know what is wrong with the sun, or how to fix it, but she certainly intends to use all the time she seemingly has now to figure it out. And there's only one place she can think to do that.
(It doesn't hurt that all the adults won't stop talking about the island, like it's a curse. Like a real bad thing.)
So to the island she goes. Charlie isn't a stranger to it, of course. She's been to it before and saw some really cool things and some part of her knows she shouldn't be there with all the bad stuff everyone keeps mentioning, but if that's not all the more reason to get to the bottom of what's going on, she doesn't know what is.
The filly sets out with her best-mate to search the island from top to bottom (or as high as she can reach, anyway). And she doesn't think it takes her long to get there, even if she can't tell with the very still sun, but once she sets foot off the bridge and onto the beach, nothing and nobody can hope to stop her.
The sun won't move and she has all the day in the world to discover.
"Speaking."
STAFF EDIT***
@Charlotte has rolled a 4! She has been awarded +200 signos.
Isra who does not want to go ““She didn't need to understand the meaning of life; it was enough to find someone who did,”
It
is not something she wants to hear, go home, even though she understands why. And even though her magic understands that there are two things inside Isra it must protect, it wants to hear those words even less. So at first when Eik brushes the words to her skin, and brushes her mind with love, it lashes out like a snake.
All the sand around them becomes ore and the trees become swords jutting out of the sand like spires made for some god of war. Isra wants to tell Eik that he should go home, that between the two of them she is the most dangerous, the most wild. She wants to tell him that she will fight tooth and claw, and with magic and dragon until this broken world decides to settle back into a lamb instead of a broken, rabid lion.
But then she feels a kick at her belly-- one of her wild, primordial stars telling their mother not to be so violent and full of rage. They remind her that it's love she wants to live for not vengeance. Isra listens even though she doesn't want to and her magic settles back into the bottom of its sea (although the ore and the sword-trees remain).
“I know.” She says. I don't want to, but I will Her mind says to Eik's heart, because she knows that is always is listening to everything she says (and all the things she will never say). Isra knows he can feel the way each inch of her, her ocean soul and her endless fury, is railing against this tether of love. In some deep part of her she wonders if it will always hold her, or is that's nothing more than another chain she will learn to break.
Before she turns to go she brushes their lips together and Fable lands next to them at the same time. All the ground shakes with the weight of him. Isra though, will always think that it's only the touch between them that rattled the core of the world. “Fable will stay with you, and drag you home if he must.” Her eyes flash and Fable's eyes looks as fierce as they ever have. Even a dragon can sense that something is so very wrong with the world when the sun stops in the sky.
“Promise me you'll protect everyone from our cities, even if they do not want you to.”Isra does not pause to listen to his answer, because her heart already knows it. Forever, I promise, he will say and she will smile and pretend that it is not breaking her heart. And even though she wants to linger, and look back at her dragon and her heart, Isra only looks towards Denocte as her legs kick up into a run.
Fable watches her go, and smiles a toothy grin to see the way she's leaving weapons (swords and whips, steel and arrow) behind each time she passes a rock or a small outcropping of weeds. But when he turns to Eik his eyes grow serious, and a little too wild, and he says in that language only Eik can hear, I am ready.
@Eik | "speaks" | notes: here you go, have a dragon
Lucinda did not think that the island could become a stranger place, but it was starting to.
She is not sure if it's someone's illusionary magic at work or the gods' doing. She saw a flower sprout, bloom and die right in front of her eyes within minutes. There were stories of the forest going through all the seasons at once and foals being eaten by holes in the ground.
The biggest change of all is the sun and how it refuses to set. It was as if someone had stopped time, not only on the island, but all across Novus. She looks up at the sky, squinting from the bright light. The motive behind all this is not clear, but perhaps it's connected to the relic somehow. Had someone found it and used it to stop time everywhere? It might explain why she has yet to find the item herself.
Just when she thinks she's feeling bored by the land, it manages to think up something to make her want to stay. Lucinda wonders if that's the point of its existence- to lure others in and never let them leave. She feels confident in not being put under its spell as she already has plans to leave in the morning (whatever morning was anymore).
For now she set off to find something to eat and thinks of her plan to head back to Solterra soon.
(Don't mind me, just bringing these threads back from the dead for xp lmao)
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