[P] strange bird

[Septimus]

I DON'T BELIEVE IN LIFE
and I won't believe in death until I die

In the winter, the meadow feels like a wasteland.

He is alone in the center of it, a spark of rich, warm brown against a landscape of dead grey; in the spring, Septimus knows that this place will be emerald green and ruby red, but now it is miserably cold and monotonous, rolling waves upon waves of tall grass that died in fall but remain upright regardless. Still, if he looks closely enough, he can find some creatures still alive – the little brown-grey field mouse, taking refuge from the winter wind in a matted nest of grass and sprigs of cotton likely stolen from the court, and some sort of little finch perched atop an especially tall leaf of grass, gripping tight to the dead stem in spite of the wind, which blew both bird and grass back and forth with an ease that made them appear entirely insignificant.

This is his first full winter like this, and it is enough to make him ache with longing. In the back of his mind lies endless green. Septimus had forgotten how to miss his homeland, before winter; he had even longed for cold, empty lands, for they were so unlike the endless forests that were so familiar to him. Now he knows that all of that – all of that was not winter. He never knew what winter was, before it came creeping in at the end of his first year mortal. He saw it without understanding it, and that very realization leaves him on the precipice of something very ugly and gaping-

In all his years of studies, has Septimus ever understood anything?

There is no use, he supposes, in thinking too deeply about it. The past is inflexible; what he needs to do now is discover how to reinstate his magic and immortality, rather than wandering Novus aimlessly in search of what creatures and things it might have to offer. At first, he had thought that one might lead to the other – after all, in his godless and wild homeland, magic is intertwined with the landscape and the beings that inhabit it. There is no end to magic. Nothing is without it. Every leaf, every blade of grass, each curling vine…and every strange creature that wanders the woods, born there or otherwise.

That is the danger of entering the forest, why those few mortals that try always disappear or are swallowed up entirely – the magic will find a home inside of everything it touches. There is no choice. The choice was entering at all.

He did not think that it worked in reverse, that what you were could be taken and unraveled, that, once the magic took root in your soul, it could be dug out cruelly, like a weed in a flowerbed – but it could. And he knew it now. And he ached for the weeds, the overgrown vines, the Queen-Anne’s-lace and unnamed little blue flowers that would find their way into places they didn’t belong and grow and grow regardless.

Were it another day, and were he thinking other thoughts, Septimus might have been more observant. He might have been more guided, or he might have been more persistent – more like himself, always searching. But today he was quiet, and the only thing that he was watching was the grey, cloud-covered sky as it rolled over the hilltops, promising winter winds and snow.

---

@Thana || <3

"Speech!" 

@

[Thana]

"Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,"
In the winter, with diamond-dust frost on her lashes and whiteness stretching out miles in all directions, the meadow feels like home. Her hooves creak though the snow and ice and her tail drags silent wounds through the ends of her shadow. The white, endless nothingness, makes her eyes ache when the snow reflects off it like fire. Thana blinks back the pain even as something inside her, that terrible something, screams at her to look.

And look.

She opens her eyes because she must, because all the white is calling home to each glacier sliding through her soul. A breeze whispers through her mane and she shivers when it cuts against the lighting marks running jagged beneath her gnarled horn. If she could smile at all, if she knew the way to curl her lips like a young girl looking a the stars, she would have smiled for the moaning wind reminding her that the leaves will sing again come the spring. But it's another one of the things Thana does not know (like the sound of unfinished poem) and so she only walks on, and on, and on through the snow with a wolfish hunger gnawing.

At first when she spots him he looks like a spot of life in the home wasteland. She remembers his crown of bone and the way each inch of him moved in the island jungle, all sinew and jewels and feathers. There had been this same ache in her chest to look at him then. It feels like the wind, like snow falling on pines, like spring is never going to come.

It feels like yearning, like she could pull the secret of how to not be a wanting thing from the spaces between his feathers.

He does not notice as she approaches, but no one ever does, not until she's lowing at them like a wolf at moonlight. Thana does not nicker at him, or low, or do anything but trace her nose across the lowest of his tines. “I remember you.” She breathes the words against a jewel, wondering briefly as it swings like her voice is the winter wind instead of language.

When she  pulls away it is only to turn her head towards the gray sky, and the fat clouds dissolving into the bleakness. The glance lasts a moment, no more than another blink of her aching, burning eyes. Look, that terrible thing says, look.  “I remember the flowers too.”  Thana glances back at him and the frost on her lashes makes the edges of him shine like a moon.

Her tail never stops dragging wounds through the snow, and ice, and home.






"And death shall have no dominion"

art
@Septimus

[Septimus]

SO MAYBE DEATH IS A GIRL
and she's only one dance away

There is the sound of someone approaching. At first, he could mistake it for the wind – if not for the crunch of snow beneath her hooves and the serpentine drag of her tail. It is a risk that he does not turn to look at her as she approaches. Still, his gaze remains trained on that grey, grey sky, with only the flick of one of his ears to suggest that he notices her approach. It is as though he cannot quite bear to tear his eyes away.

I remember you, she says; it is close enough for him to feel her breath. He recognizes her, too, when she speaks. The strange cadence of her voice. He wonders what she is doing here. Septimus cannot quite place her in Delumine, among the flowers and the city streets. She belongs somewhere far wilder, in the depths of some overgrown forest or the black and skeletal darkness of some tar-filled bog. He does not have to look at her to know who she is. She feels as unnatural as he does (somewhere deep, deep, deep on the inside – somewhere he is forgetting how to reach), here.

“And I remember you,” he says, his voice as faint as a passing breeze; how could he forget her, with her halo of dead fireflies and wilting grasses? If she were not so rich a color, he thought, she could be the winter itself, with the world withering away in her wake. She is close, and he can feel it, but he does not look at her yet. Her breath disturbs one of the jewels dribbling from his antlers, sending it clinking against the bone. He suppresses the urge to shiver, but he does not dare move. He thinks he might be holding his breath.

She is an unusual creature, he thinks. He is not sure what words he could use to describe her presence, the way that she looks, the way that she moves. Those amethyst eyes, and the jewel on her forehead, and her wild tangles of red hair – but the scythe of her tail, and the point of her horn. His gaze drifts to her, out of the corner of his eye. Against the stark white of the snow, she is so red. He cannot decide if that is a horrible thing or not.

He turns his head, finally. I remember the flowers, too, she says, and he is caught between the white of the snow in her hair and on her lashes and the memory of the island, the flowers tall enough to get lost in. The memory nearly burns; he wishes that the strange land had never fallen back into the sea. There is nothing like it here.

“Yes. The flowers,” he repeats, his gaze drifting back to the barren wasteland before them. “Do you miss them, this time of year?” He wonders. He wonders if she aches for spring, just as he does, or if this winter comforts her, in its cold and slumbering way.

(He wonders if he will ever become so mortal that this winter – the push and pull of the seasons, of passing time - becomes comfortable, not because of what it means, but because it is familiar.)

---

@Thana || <3

"Speech!" 

@

[Thana]

"Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,"
With so much nothing stretching out around her there is something in her that aches to be standing still. A beast in her is howling above a distant corpse buried in the brush. And the beast is hungry, and fuming, and wanting all at once. Thana quivers with the feeling of it all, of the way her knees are trembling like rusty cogs beneath her flesh. She wonders if he can see it, the way all the bits are her are trying to crawl their way to outside.

She does not ask him, but it's there in the wild blaze in her purple eyes.

Sometimes she thinks she's a thing not 'made' but one still being formed. Over and over pieces of her are being cracked wide and reforged into something harder, something hollow, something that wants, and wants, and wants. And when she cocks an ear back at the forest it's like she's straining to hear the call of the something only she can find.

That ear turns back to him when he whispers. Each inch of her body strains to hear it, to see if there is anything in the sound of him that echoes that distant, primordial call of the forest. And if there is, she tries to catch it by holding her nose in the space between them full of sound, wind and winter. It's the gesture of both the doe and the wolf. It's ancient, a throwback to the world when the world was wild, and reckless, and walls were only the space between nightmares and dreams. In the space between them, when she inhales his words, there is the suggestion of pine-trees, and birch, and magic.

Thana wants to ask him what he's waiting for. She wants to ask him how he can stand so still when every inch of her is screaming to run, run, run until she finds the end of winter and the beginnings of spring. She exhales and tries so very hard not to make it sound like a sigh, like she's pulling one of her sharp pieces loose. “I shouldn't.” The words come out like a sigh anyway. Like the sigh on the winter wind hanging to a snow-coated pine. Or maybe it's only like the sigh of death, the knell of it, and shje just wants to imagine it sounds like something else.

The snow crunches under her weight when she starts to pace. Her body is still telling her to run, but he's strange enough (almost as strange as her) that she wants to linger a little longer before she listens to the aching of her rusty cog knees. “I've always like the endless of winter. We could run forever through the snow and see nothing slumber and death.” We comes out as easy as breathing. Each day it's easier  and easier to pretend all her edges aren't fraying and her magic isn't screaming for desolation.

Each day it's easier to think of flowers.

“But I miss them now, even though I should not.” There is that weight in her eyes again, like she's waiting for him to turn his ear to the woods and head the call too. Like she's praying he might tell her to run, run, run and never stop. Even when her heart gives out, don't stop.

She should run. She should leave.

And yet she moves closer to him, brushes her rib-cage against his feathers. She tells her magic and her aching, hush, hush, hush. “Do you?” Another sigh, another knell, because she wants to pretend for a little bit longer.





"And death shall have no dominion"

art
@Septimus