Seawater lapped at Senna’s hooves as he walked along the strip of worn beach clinging like bits of flesh to the Praistigia Cliffs’ jagged skeleton. Silvery half-moons marked the uneven path he left in the sand, hoofprints filled in by briny tide.
A waning moon hung low and drowsy in the haze of Terrastellan twilight.
There’s no one here, came Nestor’s sharp voice, cutting through whatever thought he’d been trying to form. The falcon was little more than a black speck against a swirl of powdery clouds. Always ahead. Always watching.
Few visit the cliffs. Even fewer to the location we are trying to reach, he reminded her, as he tugged his hood further over his eyes to shield from the frigid spray of a crashing wave. Her unease, though customary, was not unfounded. Even now—briny wind in his mane, sea salt in his eyes—doubt clung like cobwebs in the shadowy corners of Senna's mind.
The symbol carved into the granite grave marker had been cryptic, to say the least. The message, even more so. Senna’s candle had burned well into the early hours of dawn as he’d puzzled over his findings, the floor of his lodgings sullied now by a path of gravedirt.
A path marking the route he’d paced through the small room, books with cracked leather spines suspended midair as he’d gone from one to the next, then back to the first. A quill scribbling in a journal upon his desk. Snatches of sleep, the soft rustling of Nestor’s feathers as she’d dozed. The passing of a day, gone in less than a blink.
The wave and the chain and the shackle. It hadn’t come to him until he’d decided to spread a map of Novus out atop his bedsheets. Smoothing out the corners, he’d found his gaze snagging upon a curious land formation between the territories of Dusk and Night. Easy to miss, strange to behold.
A circular chain of islands, seeming to rise straight from the depths of the sea.
The Ager—the Halcyon’s old headquarters—had been situated on an island, and even that fact had proved tricky to confirm. Information about the Halcyon unit ever since the disappearance of Prudence half a century ago was frustratingly difficult to procure. He’d had to resort to tracking down a series of decades-old manuscripts from the collection of a swaybacked, senile librarian who hadn’t been senile enough to forget how to barter. (And barter fiercely. His silk traveling purse had shed half its weight overnight.)
Yet suppose the Halcyon’s preference for locating things on islands held. What, then, was the island chain’s connection to the accompanying riddle?
Juliet and morning. If the first line was indeed referring to the tale he knew of, then it could’ve referred to two scenes: Juliet’s awakening the morning after she drank the poison that mimicked death, only to find Romeo dead besides her (he’d always thought the tale ridiculous)—or the balcony scene, where Juliet insisted the song of a lark as that of a nightingale’s to keep her dear lover from departing.
And… lovers leaping from wards? Wards of a castle, or a watchtower upon treacherous cliffs? Lovers leaping together into death, like the tragic star-crossed lovers of Verona? Black scrawls of ink, crosses and circles and arrows, had turned the pages of his journal into a forest of intangible lines.
The writer of the riddle was vexingly vague. Only the last line had suggested anything concrete. Just as it divides sea and city. What separated the sea from the city of Terrastella were the Praistigia Cliffs.
The strange island chain was located off of the cliffs—and that, such scant support, had been the tenuous connection Senna seized upon. Why he stood here now, upon the sand of a misty shore, fervor burning like an eternal flame in his eyes.
Do you doubt yourself? I am not accustomed to feeling it from you.
“Decades Prudence has slept, Nestor” he whispered to the listening waves, pausing to stare into the red face of the setting sun. “Whoever hid her, hid her well.”
@redandblack | "senna" nestor | notes: open to anyone!
Above her, the moon is a waning crescent, the tiniest offering of light for those who sought what the tide had hidden. Or perhaps not the tide -- time, and negligence, and something far more sinister had hidden away Prudence, had robbed the Halcyon of their greatest gift, had perhaps even directly contributed to their lackluster history since then. They had been mighty, once, and they might still be mighty again; but oh, they were sorely in need of what they had once possessed, their armor and their ager and all the secrets that the commanders of old had hidden with them when they passed.
Her wings cut through the air like a knife -- silent, deadly, powerful -- and the smell of salt burns at her nostrils. Just as it divides sea and city. What else divided such, except for the cliffs that towered so grandly over the crashing waves, shadowed like hungry teeth? It is, perhaps, the only clue that makes sense to her -- she had never been told the tale of the star-crossed lovers of Verona, had no such frame of reference for Juliet and her sorrow.
She has not slept, has not returned to her room since the first clue had become posted, but she is aware that she had been assigned a new roommate. Briefly, she wonders where Nyl had gone, whether he had finally failed out of the cadet training (she’d never seen a cadet miss a target at 5 feet before, and then she’d met him) and then decides she doesn’t really care enough to ask, should she get the opportunity.
Either way, she’d been warned of her new roommate, had been told that she was to mind her manners because he wasn’t Halcyon recruit, he was a guest. Perhaps she might have missed the guest’s hoofprints in the sand, half-washed away by the surf already, except she had been looking for him just as much as she had been looking for some hint of Prudence, had been scenting the air for smoke overlaying salt.
She would keep an eye on their guest, she had decided, and if he were to be the one to find the armor, well --
He wouldn’t be the one to return with it, not without a fight.
She’s sure that he knows of her approach even before her hooves touch the damp sand, her wings folding over her armor, but even so she allows the scuffle of her hooves across a rock, allows her movements to be telegraphed as though she is simply being careless about her stealth until she is close enough to see the way his eyes gleam beneath the weak moonlight.
“Lord Senna,” She murmurs, allowing the barest curve of a smile to hint at her lips, allows her face to settle into an expression of polite interest despite the way she wishes to snarl at him, to send him running back home to Denocte. “I trust you have been comfortable during your stay so far?”
The ocean roars and spits up foam as if in protest of the people who have flocked to its shores. The sand is dark and wet, and the wind is awfully loud, roaring forward like a lion. Those who are brave enough to follow the narrow, winding path that leads down to the beach from the edges of the bluffs, its steps cut awkwardly into the rock, will be among the lucky few to find the next clue.
There are many caves carved into the side of the cliffs. Some have been etched out by hands and tools, others by the beating of the waves and the song of the wind. Some are wide and shallow, some narrow and deep, but one in particular stands out for its crushingly narrow though obviously man-made entrance. If you squeeze inside, you’ll find that after a few meters it opens up into...
A prison.
The dust and ash on the floor has been recently disturbed by two sets of hoofprints, leading out of the cave. Otherwise it lacks any sign of life. The air is stale and the bars of the cells have dwindled to the thinnest of pillars after years of erosion.
Written in some dark liquid on the inside of the last cell at the back of the cave is another message.
One great eye gazes out from the ocean. Laid to waste by that which eats but has no mouth, Always hungry, fed by those black of heart. Roman greensward west by south.
This is a place that may only be accessed by flight or a magic that offers a similar transportational ability. Feel free to work with other characters to get there! Please PM me (RB) here or on Discord if you’ve got any questions.
Strange, thought Senna, as he turned his head into the glare of the dying sun.
Who in Terrastella—who in Novus, except perhaps his own well-taught daughter—would address him by title? It wasn't the young Commander. He would recognize her voice. Out of habit, Senna nodded curtly to the slender backlit figure and brought a wing up to shield his eyes from the light. He couldn't make out the shape of her features enough to recognize her, though logic told him anyone who wandered here was likely Halcyon.
How Terrastella grows on me by the hour, he thought wryly, as the stranger came to a halt steps away from the lapping tide. Perhaps he would purchase an estate in Vespera's gentle court someday, when the Scarab earned back its debt. Gift it to Sol as a birthday present, a place for her to retreat to whenever she wanted. Permitting she allowed him use of it as well, of course.
How he tired, sometimes, of politics. But... such thoughts were dangerously persistent once entertained. Fell the hydra's head, and from its neck sprouts two more.
Nestor's gravelly intrusion, alarming any other time, saved him from journeying farther down the forbidden tunnel.
Who is it? She was but a black speck hovering above the glittering waves a league and a half away, too far, even with her falcon sight, to see the girl any better than Senna could. Stay where you are, he bade her, teeth clamping down on his tongue.
Ever since the fiasco in Solterra, Nestor had been a strung wire aching for an excuse to snap—and snap savagely. She would screech in bloodcurdling abandon whenever anyone got within perceived striking distance of him, and if they were foolish enough to disregard her warning, he would have to knock her from the air with his wing or the hilt of his scimitar before she could dive down and rip out the fellow's jugular.
He hadn't allowed her to remain within a league of him since, to her unspeakable fury and hurt.
She is not a threat. She was considerate enough to make sound when approaching, he placated, though he doubted it would have any effect. There came no reply. The speck above the water remained hovering. He breathed out a weary breath.
“I trust you have been comfortable during your stay so far?”
He stepped back from the water and allowed a thin, glancing smile to settle upon his lips. "I have. I had not expected to be given accommodations for joining the search," he said. "Commander Marisol is generous."
He glanced upwards when the sun slipped silently behind a stormy cloud, blanketing them in a sudden, relieving dark. The girl's pale coat glowed like a second moon in the newfound night. Ivory antlers sprouted from her forehead. He found himself staring into a pair of white-lashed lavender eyes, as keen—if not more so—than his own.
"Your presence here," he began slowly, moving his gaze back out to sea, back out to the circle of black rocks rising out of the water like a wicked faerie ring. "Means that my guess came closer than I dared believe. Forgive me, for I do not know the proper title to address you by."
The waning light of the moon glazed Senna's eyes in a sheen of silver when he turned it back to hers. "Good evening, Theodosia."
@Theodosia | "senna" nestor | notes: addressing senna by title adds an immediate 10 points to his impression of you apparently ;D
