It was late morning and the snow glittered beneath the sun’s sleepy touch. Even though we could not have been the first horses to walk the bridge that day, the path appeared to be untouched. Only after I crossed the bridge did I turn to look behind me, convinced that my trail would vanish by some strange magic. But my hoofprints remained; little half moons in a determined line straight across the bridge. The first mystery of the day.
Did you follow me on purpose? Or were you drawn to them too?
The sunflowers were in a snowy clearing. I don’t remember how far I walked until I found them-- I was distracted by the trees, and the way beams of sunlight seemed to float in the cold air, and the immense quiet of it all. I knew there were birds on the island, for they left little forking tracks in the snow and tiny nests far above my reach. But the groves were completely silent except for the quiet crunch underfoot. On more than one occasion I stopped and held my breath and felt the perfect stillness of the world around me. I wished sister was with me. I also wished to be completely alone. It was one of those strange still places where I could be two things at once.
But the sunflowers. I did not realize that was my destination until I saw them, bright yellow through the trees like a beacon. The way they swayed in the winter wind, it almost looked like they were waving me closer. And the nature of my magic was such that I could not be sure they weren’t.
I approached slow and steady, as was my way. When I brought my lips to the boldly colored flowers, a tittering laughter filled the clearing. High-pitched and bright. I felt it ringing in my bones like a bell. Then I laughed too, for the sound was infectious. Deep belly laughs, like laughter was the most important thing in the world. Furfur bristled at my side, uncertain.
And then you were there, and the sunflowers and I stopped laughing at the same time.
But it was no longer silent. The birds had returned, and their warm song filled the space between us. I smiled with my lips still pressed to the golden flower.
“Can you hear them too?”
I wanted to hear your voice before I turned to face you. I wanted to paint a picture of you without seeing what you looked like, and then compare my imagination to reality to see which prevailed. It was a childish game, one I could only lose (for reality would never prevail), but I didn’t care. I was a bored and lonely girl, and I had to get my entertainment somewhere.
a s p a r a
Open to any! The fairies are appearing to Aspara as a patch of sunflowers <3
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
He’d come here for the island.
The tales he’d heard had been difficult to believe, even to a man who had traveled a dozen countries and seen a hundred strange things. Fever-dreams, they sounded like, yet the sailors were emphatic.
The island had shown up one day in a cloud of black smoke, visible for miles -
A god had made it, and had sacrificed kings on it -
Birds spoke in languages they could understand, creatures were formed of sand and leaves that blinked and walked -
It was a blessing, it was a curse -
Sarkan had smiled then as he smiled now.
It did not seem that the island was as intriguing for the people of Novus themselves; there were only two sets of tracks on the snow-laden bridge. A child’s small half-moon’s, and a wolf’s.
Sarkan had paused to smell the tracks, considering them a long while, wishing he could tell how near together they’d been made. Certainly it seemed that the wolf was following the child, the way the imprints would sometimes wander but always return, and the thought of it made the winter wind nip a little harder at him. He began to lope, then, an unmissable figure running down the bridge, his coat as mottled white and gray as the sky and his eyes as dark blue as the cold cold sea. When he reached the island he stopped only to draw on his cloak, though he left the hood down, long streams of silver blowing from his nostrils.
It was quiet, amid the trees. The birches watched him with their thousand black eyes, and the pine trees shifted, near-black against the snow, and sometimes when he looked up he could swear the trees had switched places. He heard no other sound but the wind in the branches and the shush of the sea.
He did not see the sunflowers. But he heard the laughter.
A child’s laughter, deep and full. After the first moment, when his head had lifted, ears twisting, nostrils flaring in surprise, he breathed out a long sigh of relief. Still alive, then, and close. Now, as he stepped toward the source of the noise, he was cautious. When the birds began to sing, he realized he recognized none of them. And when he saw the child - a girl-child, a unicorn (and here his gut did give an uncomfortable twist; perhaps he felt guilty after all), and the white wolf beside her, he fell completely still.
He did not see sunflowers. But a field of twisting thorns, their barbs long and cruelly hooked, black and green and crimson. Sarkan’s gaze shifted back to the girl, and then to the wolf.
“What do they sound like to you?” he said, and gave no sign he heard nothing at all.
I tried to feel his voice. I don’t know how else to describe it. I tried to identify the flow of his tone, the extent of his accent. What experiences made him speak like that? And then, physically, how were the sounds formed in his throat? I pictured him with a kind, open face. An average-sized roan, with a blaze and alert little ears. Smart ears. His smiles would be hard-won and fleeting. That excited me-- I liked a challenge.
I didn’t turn to look at him yet. Instead I shifted my attention to his actual words. He answered my question with another question, and I really hated when adults did that to me. I could feel a frown forming, an instinct beyond my control. Furfur bristled and glared at the tall stranger. The picture of him changed in my mind. He grew skinny and long-nosed.
“They’re laughing, don’t you hear? They sound like girls. Sisters, maybe?” There was something else, too… something deeper than the laughter… something almost like language… I cocked my head and closed my eyes to listen to the flowers. My frown turned introspective, softer. I was told I had a very serious face, particularly when focused on something. Did they want me to smile more, laugh politely, curtsy and dance like a good little princess? Well. I couldn’t help my skinned knees and tangled hair and serious face. I didn’t know how to be any other way. Worse, for them, I didn’t want to.
The sunflowers laughed at my stubborn nature. A petal reached against all natural laws to brush softly against my temple, to the left of my horn. Then they whispered to me with a quiet rustling sound, like ground snakes slipping through the tall grass.
“They say I cast a long shadow. And you see knives where there are flowers. What do you think that means?”
I finally turned to look at the stranger.
He was big. Huge, even. In some ways he was similar to papa, with his dapples and his scars and his easy way of being. Like when he moved the world quietly adjusted to fit around him. But mostly I noticed the way he was different: his eyes, blue and not so sad. Not so haunted. And his cloak, simple but well made, hiding most of his body.
Of course, he was completely different from what I thought he would look like. It didn’t matter. I was not afraid of him. I was not afraid of anything. At least, that is what I told myself, over and over, until it became almost-true.
So when I angled myself with my horn pointed at him, delicate and deadly, it was a matter of precaution and not fear. Never fear. My voice was still bright and curious. I did not necessarily trust the blue-eyed stranger, but I assumed he knew more about the world than I did. “Do flowers always talk in riddles?” And then, because I was a child with more questions than I knew what to do with, I asked “How did you get those scars?”
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
For a long time after he spoke the filly didn’t turn. But the wolf - the wolf stared at him, ruff bristling, teeth white with youth, and Sarkan stared back. It was clear now that the animal was not a threat to the girl but a companion, and it was unclear to Sarkan that it was anything other than a young arctic wolf, still gangly with puppyhood, and so the Percheron’s interest dulled into something more genial.
Still, he didn’t avert his gaze from the animal until the unicorn spoke again. Then his brow furrowed and his blue eyes flicked up, studying the clearing for clues like he would any other patch of wild. But it held its mysteries close, betraying not so much as a track, and nothing in his ears but the whisper of wind.
It did not sound like laughter. Maybe the rattle of seeds inside a dry dead pod. Maybe the scrape of vine against vine. Sarkan’s mouth drew a line downward.
She still hadn’t turned; he didn’t see the frown that nearly matched his own. Neither did he speak again as they both strained the listen, because the only things he would have said - Sisters? They? were the sort of thing he knew from experience would cede no satisfactory answers.
The clouds overhead shifted; the light changed, shadows appearing beneath the vines, shadows at the foot of the ring of conifers. Blue shadows in the bottom of their tracks. A vine leaned toward the unicorn and Sarkan stepped forward, his thoughts touching the handle of his knife they way a hand might brush it, thoughtless, habitual.
What she said then was enough to startle him. He did not draw the knife, but unease slipped through him like an oil-slick, mingling with adrenaline. None of the sailors had said faerie. None of them had said it spoke.
“I think it means they’re lying to one or both of us.” It was almost a relief to have the unicorn studying him; there was something far more uncanny about her face turned away, bent toward what she claimed were flowers, and what he saw were not. Sarkan stood with a hip cocked, relaxed beneath her carefully measuring gaze, his own marking her as curiously. He tucked his chin to hide his smile when she angled her horn at him.
“I’ve never known them to talk at all,” he admitted, then lifted his head to scrutinize the clearing again. The sun was still out, too bright off the snow, making him squint a little. He wondered if “they” spoke more like a parrot or a sphinx. “But I suppose we can hardly expect them to talk like you or I.” He said it musingly, with a shrug of one broad shoulder. When she asked about his scars the smile he wore didn't falter. If anything it broadened; Sarkan generally liked children, and this was far from the first time he'd heard the question. They were far quicker than adults to ask.
“A different moment of stupidity for each of them,” he said, and laughed. “This one,” he said, and traced his nose across one that arced over the left side of his chest like a smile, “is from a manticore’s tail. Luckily it was young, and not yet venomous. This one,” he said, and indicated an ugly, deep pucker just above his knee, “is from a stake I blundered into in the dark. Not so exciting.” Especially since he’d sharpened and placed it himself the day before, then blunted his memory with a large amount of ale. That was early, years ago - back when ignorance often overlapped with mistakes. “The important thing is,” he said, glancing up again to meet her eye, “I learned a lesson from them all, and get fewer each year.” Sarkan winked, then straightened, looking over the unicorn girl and her wolf pup and out across the clearing. “Do you consider this place safe?” he asked, letting the question sound like it was more for his benefit than her own, because he knew how any child would respond to what any adult really wanted to know: should you be out here alone?
@Aspara <3 (those friends you haven't seen in a decade who have really let themselves go? heh)
01-12-2020, 05:35 PM
Played by
Rae [PM] Posts: 118 — Threads: 19 Signos: 20
I could tell the stranger was on edge and it made me on edge. But why was he so unnerved? There was nothing in the clearing but a girl, a wolf, and a heaping dose of magic. And sunflowers. They laughed and reached for me playfully. Their petals were soft and warm against my skin. It made me think of a comfortable dream, the sort you grasped for upon waking, the sort you didn’t want to end.
I listened thoughtfully when he claimed the flowers were lying. I didn’t think he was right. But I also didn’t think he was trying to deceive me. He just didn’t understand, and there was something about that which softened me to him. “Hmm…” I murmured, clearly unconvinced. “Other things talk, you know. Like you and me, it’s just no one else can hear them.” I eye his cloak, wondering what tales it could tell me. “It’s only people that lie.” And maybe fairies-- I couldn’t be sure. My experience lay in the realm of what others considered “unliving”. Tables, walls, carpets. Earth, rock, water.
I was happy to listen to the other man. I liked listening more than talking. And I was genuinely interested in his stories. Papa didn’t like to talk about his scars. Sister and I could tell it hurt to remember, so we had long ago stopped asking about them. We learned from mom that most of his scars were from other people. Some of them were even from friends. Like Seraphina and Asterion-- these names brought a smile to his face. I think there were some memories he was grateful to wear on his skin, even if no one else knew what they meant. Knowing well the parts of myself that came from him, the deeper the secret the more personal the story.
So I listened to the tall man’s tales with something close to reverence. I breathed in sharply with awe at the word “manticore,” and I laughed softly at the tale of blundering into a stake. The only scars I had were from skinned knees and scraped shins. I fell down, hard and often, whenever I spent too much time inside. But I never learned a thing from it, except that it was safer for me outside where there were less things greedy for my magic.
He asked me if I considered this place safe. I had a feeling there was something else he was trying to get at, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. So I considered the question for a long time before shrugging. “Safer than most strangers, don’t you think?” I tried to hide the proud smile that rose at my own cleverness. Of course, I failed miserably. I admired stoicism greatly, in no small part because of how terrible I was at it. Furfur huffed softly, unimpressed by whatever it was I found so funny.
I relaxed then, although my wolf didn’t. I probably would not have been so carefree as a girl if I didn’t have a wolf always by my side. “I’m Aspara. Are there really manticores in Novus?” I was skeptical, but deeply curious. And, because I was cursed with an overabundance of trust, I believed everything the stranger said. I thought they were mythical creatures, although my parents had ingrained in me a deep-seated belief in the unbelievable.
I had almost forgotten about the sunflowers, which began to sway as though there was a breeze. But around us the air was cold and still as death.
- - -
@Sarkan psh. like beloved, sorely-missed friends <3
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
Other things talk, she said, matter of factly, as though no one had ever disagreed with her. Perhaps they hadn’t. Maybe in Novus everything had a mind, and all the rocks spoke at a decibel Sarkan just couldn’t hear. That would be terrible, given his line of work.
He nodded obligingly, the way a grandfather would. In his mind, anything that could speak could also lie - but he wasn’t going to the one to pass the lesson on to this blue-eyed girl. That’s what parents were for. Assuming she had them, and not just the wolf, both like and unlike any wolf Sarkan had seen before.
Maybe the tales of the island had grown bigger than the truth of it, if this yearling was exploring it alone. And that was the way of sailor’s stories. Yet the Percheron was still straining to hear a voice from the thorns, like he was Moses.
She listened attentively, as good an audience as any story-teller could want, and this charmed him. At her answer (and the wolf’s answering huff, which he found interesting) he quirked a brow, catching her eye. “Not from the stories I was told. I heard it’s taken lives.” Though in the stories it had been a jungle, humid and close. Then his expression softened, a smile turning up the corner of his scruffy cheek. “As for strangers, I’m glad you have your friend here. Though I’ve met far more good people than bad.”
When she gave her name he dipped his head as though introduced to a princess. “Sarkan,” he offered solemnly in return, before shaking his head at her question. “I’m not sure, but you should hope not. My run-in was a continent away, in a land called Rukh-” he might have gone on then, since she seemed to enjoy his stories; but all of a sudden color began to bleed into the thorns, and they began to straighten, and shed their razor edges, and turn soft-petaled and golden. And though he swore he watched the change, the time between the thorns and sunflowers was less than a heartbeat, as though the former had never been. Still silent, they swayed like a giant hand was passing over them.
Sarkan was not often speechless, but he found nothing on his tongue now but cold, clear air that tasted of ice. A moment later and he’d stepped forward, until he was just in front of the unicorn, his telekinesis nudging her behind him like a hand on her shoulder. On his other side, his knife was out, white-bladed in the reflection of the flat winter light.
“If you can talk to them,” he said calmly, not yet taking his eyes off the riot of color, “can you ask them what they want?”
“If you can talk to them, can you ask them what they want?”
My attention narrowed on a single word: if.
If I could talk to them. If I was telling the truth. My eyes bored into the stallion for a long moment. It was a cold, indignant, measuring stare. He moved to stand in front of me, and I rolled my eyes at this dramatic gesture. Like I was a babe in need of protecting. Furfur didn’t notice-- his eyes were pressed to the flowers and his hackles had begun to rise..
I frowned at this but didn’t think much of it. How foolish I was! I turned to the sunflowers and lowered my head respectfully. “Excuse me flowers. My name is Aspara. Um, what exactly is it you want?”
A silence fell upon us. It was the kind that makes you feel cold, somehow. Like it isn’t just a silence but an emptiness, and beneath its oppressive weight all the heat of life is smothered. Then the flowers twitched in the silent breeze and-- how do I describe it?-- the soil beneath us suddenly felt... funny. Tense. “we want magic,” they whispered, and this time when they began to laugh there was a sharp edge to the sound. Some vile wanting that came from deep, deep within the earth.
Did the stallion hear them this time? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t particularly want to translate the message. I had magic. A bounty of it. But it was mine.
“I think we should go.” My voice was hushed, but level and even. An eerie sort of calm had seized me. (Later I would wonder at that calm and how easy it came to me. I felt like a counterbalance to the world around me-- I was wild when the world was placid, and placid when the world was wild.) I raised my voice to say “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much, flowers.”
A few things happened very quickly as soon as I took a step backward.
First, the earth trembled. Furfur seemed to double in size even as he hunched low low low, a bone-rumbling growl bursting from behind snarled teeth.
Second, the sunflowers were no longer sunflowers. They wilted and died and then their brown, brittle limbs transformed. Knifelike thorns erupted from their sides, and between them strange brown eyes took shape. Their roots grew huge and gnarled and ugly, bursting through the skin of the earth like veins. A frantic sound caught in my throat, a sound I’d never made before.
Third, there were vines-- no, roots-- which shot up from the ground beneath us and snaked around my hind legs. Furfur instantly latched his teeth to one and I was slicing at the other with the sharp curl of my horn. I was not paying much attention to the stallion next to me, but from my periphery I saw more roots rising and a slim blade slashing.
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
Maybe he should have said since.
But Sarkan had been ignorant of the meaning she took from it, as ignorant as he was of her stare and the way it pressed into him as though wishing her horn was instead. There may have been a burn at his back (the kind from ice, not fire), but the only true threat was the witch-grass before them, and that held the bulk of the stallion’s attention.
He didn’t think they would do anything - but he wanted to be ready if they did.
A gray ear twisted toward Aspara as she spoke, and to his credit his lip didn’t twitch at the Excuse me. For a moment his gaze shifted to touch on the unicorn, and then the wolf, and he felt the change as they did - the feeling of it, if not the words or the laughter. It might have been better, that he didn’t hear what they wanted. Sarkan had no magic of his own.
Although -
It only occurred to him when she said I think we should go that maybe she was speaking to the flowers (or the fairies) and he simply hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen the change, because of his cloak. As she thanked them he tugged it swiftly off, and then the girl took a step backward.
Sarkan did not crouch quite as the wolf did when the ground shuddered beneath them and the flowers all dipped, in what the stallion took as a bow until they began to melt and brown and die. He did shift his weight, and raise his knife, and turn his head so that he spoke over his shoulder.
“That’s a very good idea-“ He got no further than that before the thorns came, and worse than them the eyes. His grunt came at the same time as Aspara’s cry.
Sarkan generally kept his head well in such invigorating moments. But at the end of the day, his quarry was only animals with animal thoughts - to eat, to mate, to rear young, and all the behaviors allowing these - and not spirits. He could not anticipate their actions or their desires. Though at the moment they were not unclear.
Happily, neither was how best to handle them.
At once he knife was flashing, near humming in his grip as it hewed through sinuous wood like it was simple twine. Now he heard the meadow seem to cry out in loamy voices, and he smiled to himself. The arms withdrew and Sarkan whirled toward the girl and her wolf.
A gesture of his mind and the blade was falling hungry on the roots. “As soon as you can,” he said over the saw of it, “run.”
And he, he thought, gritting his teeth as the blade snapped through one root and turned to another, would be right behind. This was no entity that had anything he could use.
You know, I normally wouldn’t have been bothered at all to stumble upon a sinister, violent plant hell-bent on stealing my magic. (And by extension, I garnered, my life.) The unnatural, the magical, it didn’t phase me; if anything the opposite; I felt at ease among oddity. But those deceitful sunflowers… I had trusted them, and their betrayal shocked me. It was personal. It hurt.
It made me very angry.
And oh, the last thing I wanted to do was run. I was angry-- no, I was enraged. Enflamed. In that moment I so envied aunty Morr’s magic-- all I wanted was to set the entire island on fire. I could picture it after my rage had its way, a charred and crumbled smear on the map.
But before I could fight, I had to free myself. I struggled against the vines with a furious, desperate groan. My horn, and Furfur’s teeth, and Sarkan’s blade, working in frantic union. It was a kind of organized chaos that stuck out vividly in my memories.
I probably would have died that day if Sarkan was not there. Because when he told me to run as soon as I could, I listened. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I was completely panicking. I had the distant awareness that all logic had fled my mind, and his words, his direction, gave me something to hold on to as the world around me spun out of control.
My heart lept as the vines were cut. My legs soon followed, whirling me about so that the hateful flowers were at my back. “Go!” Was all I said, and I’m sure even that was superfluous. I was already running, legs pounding, heart hammering. I sensed Furfur wanted a fight, but not so much he would leave my side. He sprinted silently alongside me, a long low growl growing in him like a demon.
Behind us I heard the ground being ripped open by thick, violent roots. I so wanted to look back, but I didn’t dare. Not until we were across the bridge, back on Novus proper, where normal birds perched in normal trees and sang normal songs across a normal landscape. But the island looked normal from here. Peaceful. Enticing, even-- I found myself drawn to it, even knowing the wicked magic that lay in wait.
My lungs were burning, my sides were streaked with sweat. I wanted to cry, but it was very important to me that I did not do so in front of Sarkan. The farther we got, the more upset I became that he told me to run. The coward! We could have laid waste to those treacherous sunflowers. (I would continue to think of them-- it?-- as flowers for a long time to come, even knowing that is not really what they were)
I would always regret the way I left things. I would often think of Sarkan, with his cape and his knife, and I would wonder where he was, what he was doing. Did I become one of the stories he told? And if so, I wondered if he told it with a smile or a roll of the eyes.
But in that moment I felt unusually angry at him, even though he saved my life. I felt angry at the world. I suppose I don’t handle stress the way a normal person does. Or rather-- I didn't handle it at all. I didn't yet know how to, without my sister to lean against. ”Thank you, Sarkan,” I said grudgingly, with a heavy sigh. And because I didn’t feel like talking more, because I needed to be alone to process what in the world had just happened, I turned and I began to walk home. I tossed a few departing words over my shoulder: "See you around, yeah?"
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
The magic was not used to such manhandling. Sarkan did not know how new it was, and how hungry, but he could sense its anger, the way the vines and roots hissed as they temporarily withdrew.
He was relieved when the filly listened to him, fleeing like a hare with her wolf beside her. For a moment his silver knife lay still, and he stood a moment longer staring at the clearing, his sides heaving and pulse thundering like a river, as if to fix it in his memory, or challenge it further. It would be beyond foolish to stay, but Sarkan hated a draw like this; if there had been any prize at the end of it he might not have left, might have died alone on the island.
But there was nothing in it save a story, and he already had that. There was only a breath’s moment when the faeries receded, and as soon as the roots began to stir and reach again Sarkan turned and ran, too, the unicorn a flash of white ahead of him through the trees, across the bridge, and at last on the far shore.
He was also foam-flecked, blowing out long breaths when they at last stopped. Quickly he passed a practiced eye over Aspara, searching for injury - though of course she couldn’t have run so far so quickly if she were badly wounded. He had a few bracelets of scratches from thorns and rough roots around his legs, a pattern of marks down one shoulder, but he thought they’d come out better than the plants had. Sarkan faced the island with a frown, one that vanished when the unicorn spoke.
“Thank you,” he said, his earlier smile resurfacing. “I wouldn’t have wanted to meet them alone, or without a translator.” His wink was not meant to be mocking, but he wondered if she took it so when she turned and began to walk away. He watched her, still catching his breath, and a part of him wished she would stay, or wondered whether he should accompany her home, or if he should remind her to be careful in the future.
But she was not his daughter, and if she was he’d be too proud of her bravery to scold her. So he only called, “See you around,” and turned again to the island. For a long while he stood there, wondering.
