take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Hyaline had not always been ruled by Kensa (and that it no longer is, well, there is something to be said.) It was once the place of Lost Boys and children. It was a domain for youth, with their Peter Pan hearts and invigorated smiles. Amet had taken his boys there and there they had ruled, with wooden swords and shields made of paper. It had been a place for the lost boys, for the children.
Elea thought about this later when she learned of it, and maybe that is why Hyaline had called to her so, because it had once belonged to the hearts of orphans.
Of course, even orphans grow up.
Hyaline grew with the surrounding atmosphere, changed and developed. Soon the lost children were forgotten. But the legend still breathed, in distant tales and quiet whispers. It leaped from mountain peak to mountain peak, and weaved through canyons.
Elena has always loved a good story. Despite everything Elena has faced, there is still a singing in her heart (of old hymns and gentle lullabies.)
She has come to see the grand tree.
The day is rainy, holding a chill that makes Elena’s bones ache. The clouds hang like forlorn photographs of forgotten grays and bruised whites against the mottled canvas of the veiled sky. A growling storm murmurs below the still of the oddly muffled silence. She feels the gloom of this lonely day as if she drowns in it, beneath the sluggish lull of gray and listless clouds. Her silver blue eyes reflect the drizzle of the rain. The glass drops tremble down her golden skin, clinging to those graceful curves and soft muscle. Her eyes are quiet, glimmering with a soft, icy light. It smells like something she recognizes for a moment. Lavender, river, sunshine. Out here. A faint smile tugs at her lips.
“Hello there,” she says with something soft clutched in her lungs. Blue eyes look up at the beauty of it all, and for a moment she is taken back to Hyaline, on a clear starry night, with Lilli clutched closely to her. And she is swept away in the gold that sits at her feet and is amongst a golden meadow, Marcelo placing a reassuring touch upon her shoulder. The flowers are not against the tree, but are being lovingly placed in the silver mane of her cousin. And the way the glass shines, she thinks she can see the great waterfalls of Windskeep, and her family, swimming in the sparkling depths of the lake.
“Can I please go swimming?”
“Ask your mother.”
“Mommy, can I go swimming?”
“Together, we’ll go together.”
These moments of happiness collide together and Elena’s hearts spills over like ocean against a ship. She bows her head and closes her eyes. “Thank you for coming.”
And the clouds part.
There is sun.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
he day when she encountered the tree was a day like every other. Autumn was in full force now, leaves blowing in the blustering wind, the sun a shade duller, the clouds a shade colder. Mephisto soars in the skies, enjoying the crispness to the air, a crispness that reminded her of harvest spirits. Of ciders and mums, of bonfire nights and spicy scented herbs in the air. It was a peaceful time, and one she’d relished in over the last several weeks, sampling each of the courts’ festival wares and drinking in the gladness that comes in peace times.
But today, she soars over the common lands. She might have soared right over the tree, were it not for a strange glint of sun against stained glass, casting a kaleidoscope which was visible even from her heavens. And so, Mephisto has to investigate, curious and wanting to know more of the source, even as she lands nearby and hikes her way to the tree on foot, not sure of what she might encounter.
The beauty of the tree is enough to take even her breath away, for the magic which stains it gold and colorful is a beautiful sort. Wind tinkles in the metallic leaves, creating a melodious sort of cacophony, and sunlight glints from each serrated edge. Other gather near, drawn forth either by the mystery or the stories. Some touch the tree, others offer prayers, while others still simply peer on curiously. For her part, the dark warg stays in the shadows, simply enjoying the way the sun licked against the colored panes, not entirely trusting of the magic even as she appreciated its beauty.
And as the sun began to set, she too turned to leave the tree behind, with only a pleasant memory to remind her of the spectacle.
The tree looked different in darkness. In the moonlight, a thousand stars glowed against the dark panes of glass. What would be color in the daylight was muted now, but no less beautiful. The glass was cold to the touch, and Azrael’s lips traveled over each piece, as if he could feel the soul of the magic within them. He wondered if he’d seen this place before in a dream – but couldn’t be sure… for the magic was far too grand to be something he’d imagined. Believing it to be a sign from the gods, the Magician has to wonder what it means.
In the daylight, crowds had been gathered around the gemstone monument, but now it stands abandoned with no one but the stallion and his owl to look upon it. Noctua stands on a leather harness which Azrael fashioned for her, blinking slowly at the sight, taking it in with eyes which were far more accustomed to the night than his. Though she was still injured, her wing was healing now, and she’d grown quite adept at standing atop her rescuer for protection. Where he led, she had followed – to lands as grand and vast as the night sky.
She shivers quietly in the moonlight, knowing that this was not a thing of nature, respecting the strange magic even as she failed to understand it. It could be dangerous… Her voice echoes in Azrael’s mind, as he sighs and pulls himself back a bit, harnessing his curiosity as he nods slowly to her words. She was right – after all, the stallion knew that magic could be both beautiful and dark… but it didn’t feel dark. Still, the stargazer takes caution as he stands beneath it’s metallic leaves, listening to the autumn wind caress them for a while, before deciding to return to his mountain home, left to wonder all the while what it meant.
At first, it was too much. Too much pain. Too much thought. Too much physicality. Too much noise. It had been the pounding of a heart and the guzzling of a throat and the mind-numbing buzzing of all else that couldn't be bothered to stop. And at once it was full with a craving for silence and sustenance and sense that mania had yet to even define the manner of depravity that befalls a newborn – to be given unto this world, your skin too tight and your throat too dry, lungs aching for stardust, stomach pitted with loathing. It was too much to feel nothing and then all at once, each thing collapsing into another menace with shallow breaths grasping at each hollowed nightmare that glares greedily; such was the founding of mortal flesh and the grief of its' weight. Atlas bears it with beauty.
Erasmus, (or what now is) only now learned that beauty of labor, with each ticking breath of time.
It clambers now to recall what was, and struggles over comets and rifts and mirror sands with jagged rocks that sing to long charted heavens left empty; it confuses them with crows and dragons, oceans, diamonds, and the bell chime from a burning tower. The great crater that was once The Wilds, as so dull named (it thought), did not sing to the blue skies or even share their image in the rolling red sands scarred with meteorite chips and discarded bones. But at least, at least, it made more sense than this world. It was unchallenged, fixed, deadened and bare but beautiful in its own desolate manner. Yet this place hummed with life, with underground veins full of potency and muffled hymns; the trees were not shards of iridescent glass gleaming with looking glass eyes at the nether reaches of their universe. The stones did not rise with the first sun nor buckle at a third, neither had there been gaseous lakes of indiscernible whirring or the flutter of scaled things that leapt to die to soon. This and more, more or less – this world was too much of its own not to be hostile to a thing such as it, as he, so it constantly reminded itself.
His mind sat unpacked like a cracked open chest of forgotten treasures, and it pried through every gem. Every name, every face, every item, every landmark was eventually suited in its own place, though their own contexts were lost in translation. Even a step, at one point, had been difficult enough. But here he was now, quite the unraveled likeness of an Erasmus if he could say so himself, a wolfish boy, a selfish thing, a hungry thing, somewhere beneath the dust. He was unaware of how certain movements were too fast, and others too slow, and every gesture in between had now-and-then twitched with an uncertainty that came with a learning curve. Little did the know how unnerving those minute details were – the way his lips stretched a little too broadly at times in a smile, or the too rhythmic beats of his hooves against the wet pavement that hitched, but for a second, before alternating their tide, as if they could not synchronize their proper gait.
Perhaps that was why he found himself here.
Perhaps it was the need for something familiar while the world around him burned like a whirling vortex – perhaps it was the way the tree sparkled in the distance, the midday light swelling its boughs with prisms of kaleidoscope hues. The way it resembled, in that distance, those hallowed titans of phosphorous glass and quartz shards. The way the insects tested its constellation leaves like fluttering scaled cells, or the ebb and flow of golden grasses that reminded him of swirling gaseous oceans.
Indeed, this is why he stood at the base of the crystalline giant, catching the shattered colors of the sunset that revealed itself at once in waves of brilliance – like diamonds, he mused, or like the spark rushed from the bowels of a furied star. He pondered its celestial leaflets that dripped with glistening moonlight, and the way cardinal buds danced at its base, foreign and gleeful. And in the dune-grass he swayed solemnly with the breeze that hummed, and closed his eyes.
He dreamed of spiraling black night as far as the eye can see, speckled in each year by a burning, snarling red star. Dreams that sang with towers of graphite casting shadows from one end to another, of mercurial stretches of clouding vapors whose hunger far underestimated its depth. But when he opened his eyes, there was only the tree and its leaves and its flowers and its tall, gold grasses that had begun to turn shades of purple and pink as the horizon devoured the sun.
And he understood none of it.
@Random Events
***STAFF EDIT
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When he learned of it, overheard chatter in a dim drinking hall, at first he wanted to scoff. Every detail sounded false, every piece like something from a story made real. A myth for children - except they were not children who spoke of it. And there was nothing childlike in their speculation, and awe, and fear when they spoke of its leaves and trunk and the grass that surrounded it and most of all what it meant.
The gods in this world, it seemed, were not so quiet (so dead) as his own.
The unicorn listened to their conversation until his drink was empty and his head was certain. Every feature, so fabulous and strange, whispered of her, her, her. When he slipped from the bar it was evening, still heavy and warm from the day, and he turned north and began to walk. There was a long way to go.
Days have passed when he at last reaches the prairie. His legs ache, but he is no stranger to a many-days march. Sometimes he walked beside others, speaking only enough to be considered friendly, listening much. Sometimes he bedded down in groves of aspen or spruce, beside a lake or a brook or a meandering river. And over and over his hooves struck to the same rhythm, Isra, Isra, Isra.
Dawn is going to day when he walks the final meters to the glittering trunk, and the shadow of the crown falls over him like water-light. It is both very beautiful, and very strange - a cathedral full of ghosts. The grass is as golden as those two men had said, and the flowers as blood-red. Neither betray that others have been there before, though there are paths worn through the rest of the prairie already, a great web that leads here.
But she is not.
There is nothing in him but a new weariness, and that new hollow ache. The bay stallion tilts back his head and looks up at the branches, where no bird has dared to land. Garlands of leaves tumble like windchimes, and the wind sings softly through them and the grass. Bruise-blue shadows shift and twist and become dazzling light. It all screams of Isra - sand turned to glass, nature to godhood, story to story to story unending. It should open his heart but it remains closed as tightly as a fist, a heavy bit of flint in his chest, waiting for the right time to burn.
He knows she was here.
He does not know that he is following her ghost when he, too, lies down in the golden grass, and presses his cheek against the twilight bark. It is cold, like glass, and rough-textured like any natural, gnarled oak. And he presses harder and harder against those edges until he cuts himself, and bleeds.
the salt is on the briar rose,
the fog is in the fir trees;
He has heard the story, or pieces of it. Of a river that ran beneath everything, and eventually fed the sea (this to him makes sense. It’s not hard to imagine that everything feeds the sea, eventually.
But it got conflated with the new-rivers made from the Flood just before he was born, when the gods came back and showed their displeasure with disasters all across Novus. And anyway, the old-mothers were full of such stories, and they all had dreadfully boring morals. No matter how interesting they began - a great wolf in the mountains, or a spider who spun the stars - they all ended with so that’s why it’s important to share or see what becomes of children who don’t listen to their parents?
Anyway, bits of the story are buried in his subconscious like a shell under a decade of silt. And they and every other story are forgotten when he sees the tree.
He and Benvolio had come with a group of friends and cousins, a ragtag band of Terrastellans that made the trek (a pilgrimage, really) together to see this wonder everyone was talking about. But the boy and the bat were alone, now, as the group had decided (without really discussing it) to set up camp a half-mile away and come to the tree singly or in pairs. It wasn’t their intent to treat it like something holy, but it felt right.
And Caspian was glad, as he stood below the multicolored shadows of its canopy. This was different than the arch along the pathway to Denocte; that had been beautiful, masterful work, but this was miraculous. There were no birds about, but there was singing in the air anyway, from the wind moving through those glittering glass leaves. He parts a trail in the golden, blowing grasses and walks a careful circle around the tree, saying nothing, not even in his mind. Benvolio is likewise silent, though he’s departed from where he clings to Caspian’s mane to investigate on his own terms; the boy watches the bat swoop and rise among the branches, though he never seems to touch.
It makes his heart hurt, looking at it, though there is nothing sad about it. It makes his pulse run a little quicker, though there is nothing scary, either. It makes him buoyant with wonder, and quiet with longing, and a hundred other things he can’t put name to. Briefly he considers taking a leaf, or a poppy, or some piece for himself (or for selling). But, uncharacteristically, he doesn’t. The memory of the gods is too close, here, and anyway it’s too…too…precious.
At last (though for over an hour he keeps glancing back, finding a new angle, a new shine) he turns away, back to the thin trail of smoke that marks their fire, and the other campfires from other pilgrims beyond it. Benvolio flutters back down to his shoulders.
Wow, says the bat, and Caspian agrees, “Wow.” And they step softly into the growing, ordinary night.
since there is always north of north – go far enough
you’ll find yourself back where you began –
The dream is on my tongue like the recollection of my first breath.
It is something I will never remember, but instead will always know. That punishing gasp for air, straight from the womb. The way that everything transitioned from stable, sane, warm to brazen, bright, cold. I was born in winter. My first breath was punishing; all crisp, frozen air, the kind that burns to breathe.
The dream is on my tongue like the first taste of blood, the hard flavour that tastes like copper smells.
It is something that escapes me even as I grasp for it; illusionary, ephemeral. Made of smoke and mirrors. My mother is in it, I believe, and Capella. There is a sky like lead full of the eyes of dead gods; they stagnate, as corpses’ do, and I am left with the heavy weight of them in my mind. The dead never unsee. The dead never stop seeing. In the dream, I know, there is a monster.
But when I am awake and remembering, I do not remember him.
The rumour reminds me of my dream. The rumour finds me with a crow’s soft wings; it envelopes me; it consumes me. Until I am compelled to discover it. So I search. I listen to the rumours, and then:
I arrive.
The poet in me is a tactile learner; the poet in me breathes via feeling. It comes awake as I step into the meadow.
The dream is on my mind like my mother’s first story. There is a river unlike any other river in the world, that flows beneath us—“
I don’t remember the rest.
The languid heat is cooling; the sun dips, not quite setting and not yet brilliant. It hangs like a tired eye; it hangs, waiting, in a too-blue and cloudless sky. The tree, at first, seems transparent. It is glass and starlight; twilight and magic. A god-thing. It clenches my jaw. A god-thing, in my homeland, in Novus—
And what is the worth of Novus? I ask myself.
But the answer is a lash to my self-deprecating center. It’s where my sister is buried.
There are others, in the meadow, admiring the golden grass and the refracting light that passes through the twilight trunk. The tree is alive, more alive than myself, more alive than the season; the tree is eternal, and larger than anything I will ever be. The leaves dance like the North-farther-than-North, like the night sky where I sold pieces of my soul to survive. A god-thing. I am sure those surveying it at a closer distance are full of wonder. How beautiful, they must be saying, of this impossible tree, this impossible gift! I sneer.
I want to cut it down.
No.
No.
More than that.
I want to watch the damned thing burn.
Rhiaan
***STAFF EDIT
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Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
It is the soldier in him that, when he flies, looks down at the vast countryside as if it is virginal.
In the best and worst way. From altitude, the land below opens, an offering both cruel and sweet. He is a god from the skies, swift and terrible, lightening and storm. He could take it all, once. In another life, he’d have bent the will of the land to his own, and that will was and will forever be war, war, war, like a battlecry, like a chant, like a heartbeat. Perhaps that is the one thing that has remained consistent; Solis rests at Zayir’s shoulder, a brilliant beacon, and for the first time (in longer than he cares to remember) Zayir does not feel so far from his god. However, it has taken longer than he would have liked to reacclimatise to exercise; but Zayir had, through meticulous practice. His journey to the mystic tree is his longest flight since emerging from the catacombs.
Below him pass rivers and valleys, forests and meadows. The Arma Mountains are a distant blip on the horizon; Veneror peak ruts agains the sky like a blade. Far, far away he can see the ocean; and if he spins to look behind him, or twists his neck just so, Solterra is an endless golden stretch on the other horizon.
He might have missed the tree altogether, if the rumours had not been so accurate even in their inaccuracy. The tree caught the sun like nothing Zayir had ever seen before. He tucked his wings and began to descend at a rapid dive, cutting up only at the end to slow his descent. Zayir takes to the ground in a run, which slows to a lope, then a trot, and then a languid walk. He does not shy from the center of the scene, but walks directly to the tree. The grass below seems Midas-blessed; the tree itself something of a fable, or a dream, or even a nightmare.
It had been the prince of Inebu-Hedij that had once read to Zayir, from a book of poems, for beauty is but the beginning of terror—
Zayir presses closer, to feel the waft of the grasses underfoot. There is something stirring in his breast, a feeling not unlike awe.
which we are barely able to endure, it amazes us so—
Closer, and closer still, Zayir begins to admire the small intricacies that from afar seem implausible. The trunk of the tree, although erected with the perfect anatomy of a true tree, shimmers as glass does; it seems there are pieces of sky trapped in the center of the towering tree. The leaves, too, gleam with the omnipotence of stars—stars trapped, perhaps, in mortal form.
Because it serenely disdains to destroy us—
In the catacombs, he had once dreamed of Solis descending from the sky as a man. He had been too bright to look at; a white stallion that radiated gold so pure, so brilliant, it burned. In the dream, Solis had stripped Zayir of his magic and left him bloodied, beaten, desperate. The god had said nothing—because what kind of god would he be, if he gave an explanation to a mortal for his actions? A justification? Of course, it had only been a dream. Zayir steps closer; he pressed his forehead into the bark, and—
Every angel is terrible.
He pulls away.
The bark feels just as bark would. The tree’s leaves shift and shimmer with a strange magic, but they sound as leaves do. Zayir looks for a long moment at the blood-red flowers, and for some reason his mind is drawn to Cairo. What would his companion think of the strange scene? Zayir’s mouth is dry—he regrets having come alone.
But the majesty of it, the tree’s connection with magic and otherness is too much for Zayir. He turns away and leaves with the same promptness he had arrived.
Still, it is strange to see the bird of prey so far from a large water source. Still, it is strange to see it so fearless in its approach of something so inherently magical. Perhaps it is because it is magical, and it is not an osprey but a woman, a monster, a myth.
Boudika comes to see the tree not because of curiosity; but because she remembers the Island, and the magic, and being close enough to touch the relic of Tempus and yet—so far from actually grasping it. She sand, the bear with bejewelled eyes, the mad chase. All of these things belonged to a woman of a different era, to Boudika before she had been Made. And yet—
They hold the power of a revelation.
The osprey lands upon a lower branch and stops. In an osprey’s eyes, everything seems magnified a thousand-fold; she perceives colours unimaginable, and detail that belongs not to the natural world but something synthetic; to microscopes; to telescopes; to stars and dreams. Yet here Boudika is, with her osprey eyes, staring at a tree that does not seem as if it can be real. The bark underfoot feels as if it is real; an oak, or an elm. But her eyes perceive the thousand shades of twilight dancing in the transparent glass.
Boudika does not know how long she remains perched there, in the branches; it is long enough to watch the comings and goings of many equines. It is enough that she finds herself waiting for one, in particular.
Tenebrae.
His silhouette mounts a distant hill; he walks steadily, as if there to worship. She admires her with her too-bright eyes, from her alcove in the star-like leaves. Is it sacrilegious she wonders, to roost in this tree? It has not yet shed her from its branches, and so she does not leave them. Besides, the magic of it breathes in to Boudika the wonders of life; she feels the pulsation of it, the endless circle of tree-to-earth-to-sky-to-sea and hopes it is not imaginary.
Tenebrae’s lips move. He does not come near enough for her to touch; only stands at a respectful distance. She wonders if he is praying. There is something humbled about him when he turns to go. The osprey launches from the branches with a characteristic, high-pitched keen. And then she is gone, borne back toward the sea.
Hoofbeats ricocheted off the walls of the tavern as everyone stomped their approval. The last entertainer had told a story of a great battle long ago that had divided a nation thrice and the one warrior who stood between the Kingdoms and drew them back together. Radek had joined in the applause, his face lit with joy as he heard his father's story told by another voice. For that was the true beauty of the bardic arts, stories are retold time and again and shifted and modified and lost and remembered.
He flicked his head, letting his snow-white hair cascade across his neck. The few feathers that naturally adorned his mane lay delicately nestled between the perfectly placed hairs. As he stepped up onto the stage, there were overdramatic sighs from a group of young fillies as they pushed their way to the front of the room, desperate to be closer to him, to breathe in his presence. He flashed them a smile that lit up the musty tavern and one of them nearly fainted.
There is a river beneath our hooves. His voice was low but strong and there was suddenly not another sound in the room. With only a few words he had captivated his audience. There is a river that flows beneath our homes and our gardens. Beneath the streets of our cities and below the trails that lead us through the wilderness. But this river flows not with water but with the Blood of the Gods. And it does not run toward the sea as water does, but toward the mountains and the sky, toward our Gods who call back to them the shattered past that drove them apart.
When he paused for dramatic effect, a heavy breathing could be heard from the corner as the barkeep stopped what he had been doing and listened intently. Radek was not smiling now. His face was somber as was his tone, telling the story - not just with his words - but with his entire being. It had been generations since anyone had heard this story. But Bards exist to keep these stories alive. And while others had forgotten, the Entertainers of the lands never forgot. The story had been passed through his family and through his father's friends to ensure that when Novus was ready to hear it again, the story would be told.
And now the Gods have succeeded. For in the Eluetheria Pains has risen a tree, an unnatural being created not of wood and leaf but of glass and stars. But this tree did not grow, for there are none who can claim to have seen a sapling, but it rose in full form, reaching toward the sky. This tree is a gift from our Gods, a chance to rekindle our lost past and bring together families torn apart in the history of our world. So for those that can, I challenge you - travel to the tree, witness this miracle for yourself and help us heal our world. But take this task up with a heavy heart and not with one of a skeptic. For in these small miracles do we gain the ability to appreciate the larger ones. We must be ready to welcome them home when we are deemed worthy.
Radek dipped his head and flicked his tail, emphasizing the end of his story. He had yet to see the tree himself but had heard of it from another. He had decided that it would be his next stop on his journey, to see the tree for himself. But for now, he could tell the story of its origin and of the river below that had once been on every horse's mind and had now faded into a distant memory. It was his task to bring those memories back.
***STAFF EDIT
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