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 sea is grey today, greyer than even the clouds that hang heavy and too-full in every inch of the midday sky; when she wakes tomorrow morning, Locust suspects that she will find Denocte covered in a thick, white blanket. It makes her all the more determined to finish the work ahead of her before nightfall. She was raised in tropical seas, and did not even see snow until she was much older and willing to traverse far waters, where chunks of ice jutted from a sea that was no longer crystalline with clarity and blue, radiant blue. She still dislikes the cold, and she likes the snow even less, so, though she has to grit her teeth to keep them from chattering, she is out on the docks, moving cargo. She doesn’t know why she has lingered so long in Novus, and, despite appearances, she isn’t leaving yet; the boxes of supplies are bound for Solterra, and it is the idea of spending a few days in the desert’s warmth that keeps her moving. Fortunately, very little of what she plans to transport to the desert kingdom is contraband, and nothing that she is moving today should cause problems, if the guards decide to do anything more invasive than greeting her with suspicious stares whenever she passes.
(She flashes them a devil-may-care grin whenever she passes. They might not like it, but Denocte’s always had a thriving underbelly – they know when it is wisest to turn a blind eye. The captain of the Dark Strider is always more trouble than she is worth.)
Cold water coats the dock in a thin sheen, washed up by the waves; the tide is high, and the water is especially temperamental today. The Strider is rocking something terrible whenever she crosses up onto the deck. It isn’t anything near the worst she’s ever seen, but she hates the way that it makes her think of what it feels like to be trapped on a boat during a storm at sea-
She hates that it makes her think of the water, and how it is not the serene blue of her girlhood but something black and hungry, with a maw crafted from the crests of waves, foam like a mass of dripping teeth. She knew, even before the Sea Star went down, that the sea was not a kind mistress. She knew that she was a dog who could bite; but she had never expected to be the one who was bitten. But there is no use in fighting the sea. She cannot do that any more than she can fight the wind or the sky.
Perhaps that is why she hates the water-horses. They are the only tangible thing to blame.
She is checking the dock lines when she stops short, her ears twitching back, and straightens.
Locust smells him, first, a certain bite of something to interrupt the salty air. Come crawling back to find her, did he? She doesn’t know what he could want – she doesn’t know what he wanted, beyond the blood of water-horses, and that is why she tolerates his presence. (Frankly, quietly, she is not sure that he is much better than the creatures that he hunts; but, then, is she? She supposes that it doesn’t matter. You devour or you are devoured, and that is the way of things. She knows it as well as any land-creature that spends her life on the sea – life is precarious, and delicate, and survival is so often dependent on who is willing to draw the most blood.) She snorts, tossing her head to stare at him over her shoulder. Vercingtorix – blue-eyed, gold-plated in all the ways that she is silver, deceptively elegant were it not for the scarred character of his hide. Locust’s eyes are slits of sea, and her lips curve up in the trappings of a smile. She is not smiling. “So,” she says, her tone flat, “you killed that grey bastard.” What Locust wants to say is I hope you had the good sense to skin him, when you were seeing red; he would have fetched a pretty penny. What Locust says instead is, “Was it painful?” If Locust were a better person, or at least the same Locust who’d captained the Sea Star, the Locust who had swam with sharks and delighted in the rush of adrenaline that came from dancing within range of their jagged teeth – that Locust might have felt something (but not pity) at the thought of the kelpie's death. But this Locust is prone to think of a kelpie like a tiger that has developed a taste for a particular kind of flesh. You have to hunt it down, lest it hunt you, and, if you have a scrap of good sense, you’ll wear its skin around your shoulders; what tiger would hunt a tiger-hunter?
@Vercingtorix|| <3 || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
tell me about the dream where we pull bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again, how it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget they are horses
I do not belong here.
I feel like a predator, transferred; a lion might survive in a tiger’s territory, but that does not mean it belongs. This is what I think of Denocte with the bonfire and incense; the stars and moon; the dark nights full of moonstones and their Queen’s strange, turbulent magic. I do not like the dragon that haunts the shore, another beast dredged up from the sea. I do not want to be walking along the docks next to a grey sea, searching for a silver woman, during an afternoon that smells of storm. People watch me as I pass them by; their eyes follow my foreigner’s build, the line of my horns, the scars that decorate my flanks. I dislike the attention, but have no counter, no way to dissuade it. There is nearly a sick satisfaction in knowing the knowledge will return to her, packaged on the lips of her own people.
(The thought itself fills my stomach with vinegar; fills my soul with bitterness. Are we so easily replaceable?)
I turn onto the docks, eyeing the masts as they tremble in the turbulent winter air. Wind gusts through them; and deckhands scramble to and fro as they prepare last-minute goods. Many are locking hatches, securing masts. I do not know what to expect from a snowstorm; I have only seen two in my life, and neither threaten with the same chill or depth as the one that looms above Novus.
Yes, storm; it is there in the angry, blank greyness of the sky. I have spent too long by the sea to not understand it, and I know, today someone would die. That is how it goes. Somewhere there are water horses emerging from the sea with teeth long and bellies famished; the storm chases them from their kelp gardens and rocky alcoves. Even if I doubted it, I feel it in my bones; I feel it in the chronic, resonate pain of my leg. There will be a storm, and it comes with the creeping chill that turns my breath opaque. Wing snags and whips at my mane; it draws water from my eyes; nearly takes the breath from my lungs. But I dismiss it with a shake of my head.
It does not take me long to find her. Locust is aware of me before I am of her; this annoys me. She looks at me over a shoulder, dismissively, and I follow.
So, she begins. You killed that grey bastard.”
I raise my brows in mock surprise. “Hello to you, too, Locust.” Does she see them as trophies, I wonder? As anything other than fodder? I know hatred; I know how personal it can become. But mine is cold. Mine is the seeping hatred that, I like to think, mimics the sea itself. After all, they are not worth their own fucking skins.
I smile for her, but the expression is as flat and voided as her tone. “Death is always painful.”
I thought it was a stupid question.
What did she want to hear?
That I know how to gut a man with the pointed end of my horns? The exact angle, the way it is not so difficult to puncture the soft skin of the belly? The way they don’t die fast that way?
Or did she want to hear how I can rip out a throat and let the arterial blood, bright and throbbing, drip from them as it would a faucet?
His death is one of too many.
His death is one that is indistinguishable from the rest, aside,
aside,
aside from
her.
The thought comes back as briefly, as fiercely, as an attack. “You’re dying because you touched her. You’re dying because—
I snort, and gestures toward the loaded ship. “Are you leaving?”
It was the only reason I am here. I do not particularly care for the silver pirate. She is playing a man’s game with all the fierce bravado of one. But I trust her vessel more than the others; most are too naive; too trusting.
There is only one way through the world, however, and that is with a whetted blade. Such is Locust's ship, in the sea.
@Locust
look at the light through the windowpane. that means it's noon. that means we're inconsolable
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.
At his expression – and his greeting – Locust snorts. Better, she supposes, that his disdain is obvious, and it has been obvious since she met him. (It isn’t as though she feels any differently.) On the sea, the worst kind of crew that you can have is a crew that you do not know. Better a group of traitors or mutineers, for you know that they will be traitors and mutineers, and you can plan accordingly; between a man like Vercingtorix and a man who seemed loyal, she would choose Vercingtorix every time. She knew exactly what he wanted from her, and he knew exactly what she wanted from him. The rest was irrelevant. Death is always painful, he says, with a smile and a tone that strikes her as patronizing. The response strikes her as foolish. Maybe the question was, too – what did it matter if it was painful or not? Dead was dead was dead, and if it meant that he would be given no more opportunities to turn people against their will, all the better. It wasn’t as though their singular interaction, on the shores of that strange island, had been enough to grow a grudge. (She does wonder what the kelpie did to make Vercingtorix kill him in such a way that she’d already heard about it – what was the point in making a statement of his death?) But she does want to know his answer, and not for anything good. Grim self-satisfaction, at best, and something worse, darker and deeper and sharper, at worst. “How would you or I know that?” Locust knows enough about pain to know that it only matters if it persists. Death is death; it is finite, not continuous, and that, she suspects, is why it is sometimes considered preferable to living. She tosses her head, looking back at the crates. She hopes it was quick. But she knows, of course, that it wasn’t, that he is too full of something with just as sharp of teeth as a kelpie’s to ever do it quick, and at least she can take some small solace in feeling like she is better than him over it. She might cut them up for parts, but she has never been able to stomach drawing out the kill. Even for the ones she’s hated the most. Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps if she ever finds that opalescent little fish who stole her daughter away from her – perhaps she would hate that one enough to make it painful.
(That was the one she wanted to ruin. All the others were only symptoms; but that little, pale fish with the scales that gleamed every shade of the rainbow, even in storm-dark waters, that was the one who’d ruined her. All of the others were pitiful grasping at something she couldn’t quite touch.)
She still isn’t looking at him. “Why’d you go after him, anyways?” She couldn’t complain, no matter the answer. The grey was dangerous, and it was better for everyone that he was dead, and Vercingtorix hated kelpies as much as she did. Still, he was hardly charitable – and still, she couldn’t think of a good reason why she’d heard about the death of one particular kelpie when they seemed to be showing up in Novus in droves lately.
He asks her if she’s leaving, gesturing towards the crates. Locust shakes her head, a thick strand of her white hair falling loose from its pearl-wrapped bounds and threatening to fall into her eyes. (She tucks it back up absently with a flick of her telekinesis.) “Only for Solterra,” she says, simply, tracing his stare towards the crates, “and not for long. Just making some deliveries.” And then she is looking at him again, ocean-dark eyes narrowing by fractions. “Why? Trying to go somewhere, Vercingtorix?” He’d hardly seek her out because he wanted to – he disdained her, and she disdained him, and that was fine with Locust -, so his presence here probably meant that he needed something.
Locust couldn’t say why he trusted her ship to carry him where he needed to go; his dislike for her was clear enough, and a pirate was hardly trustworthy company besides. Perhaps it was simply their shared hatred of kelpies, shallow as it was – a murderer finding company with a fellow murderer. (Hunter would be kinder, but Locust was neither naïve nor foolish enough to delude herself into believing herself to simply be a hunter in any convincing manner.) Still, so long as he needed her, she could tolerate him. So long as he paid. And so long as he helped her deal with any sort of trouble they met along the way.
@Vercingtorix|| <3 || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
