they got drinks in their hands and the room's a bust—
A SOCIAL PARTY
GOOD MUSIC -- REFRESHMENTS SERVED
The invitation in the shape of a playing card is rendered so artistically, a touch of old glamour here, a stroke of bold new money there—that for a moment Caine merely admires the feel of the card in his grasp, the grains of the paper, the artificially aged edges (or perhaps it was real—it didn't smell like tea, for one), the family crest heat-pressed into its back.
He does not often come across such fine artistry in the sand dunes of Solterra.
It reminds him, first achingly and then sharply painful, a viper sinking its fangs into him for his treachery, of Vectaeryn, and his room in the Selwyn manor, and the rolls of paper he had kept stacked beneath a glass paperweight to fold, two for every sleepless night, into cranes and bears and wolves and then an entire city, captured at a precise, thimble-sized scale.
He had kept his little city on his desk, and when it had outgrown that, had it spill across the black carpet until it climbed like ivy into his bed (that he so rarely slept in) and across his windowsill.
He wonders if it is still there.
The invitation had been left on the counter of Caine's favourite haunt, dropped, probably, from the pockets of a minor noble none of them had recognised. He'd paid the find no mind, sipping distractedly at his cup until it had been slid under his nose by Rudolph, one of the few spies he'd kept contact with after—everything.
They rubbed shoulders in the same leaky taverns, and for Caine that was enough to count as camaraderie.
Sometimes, when the mood struck him, Ru would toss a coin towards a particularly rowdy group of men (with women at their sides like feathered backdrops) and saunter towards them with a toast on his lips and malice seeded deep in his smile.
Caine joined Ru at his games because it amused him greatly, and because, as a former spy, there was no greater indulgence than a secret plied like spun sugar from drunken lips.
"This seems like the sort of thing you'd be good at," came Ru's chirpy voice at his ear. Pocketing a sigh, Caine held the card up to catch the filmy light.
"And why is that?" His cup, half emptied, clinked down on the grainy table. Various stains of various origins peppered across it like dapples; he'd given thought, once, to how quickly this whole place would burn down if one only put a match to alchohol-soaked wood, and his conclusion had been nearly sobering.
Slowly he arched a brow towards the spy to say and why not you?, though without the effort, and in return Rudolph swiped his glass over and emptied its contents down his throat.
"You're the only one of us pretty enough for it." The table exploded in a chorus of laughter. Caine moved a giggling girl's head from his shoulder and apologised with a smile that cut. "Bet you clean up well."
"You don't say," Caine drawled, pushing back the long, sleek lengths of his hair and frowning when he caught the smell of liquor tangled up in it. "I take it you won't be going." His gaze swept callously over the painted women—and men—with their heads tilted adoringly towards the spy draped in silks of red.
"Well, I'll think about it." Something to do, at least. He was losing his damned mind doing the same thing over and over again like his life ran on some sort of clockwork. Being drunk all the time, he thought, was rusting away its appeal.
He'd tossed his cloak over his shoulders without a goodbye and stepped back into shadow, and cold, and blessed emptiness.
* * *
Caine is not yet inside when he thinks he sees a flash of carmine red between the hedgerows, and stops to wonder why it is affecting him so.
A disgruntled noblemen jostles his shoulder and Caine wonders, this time sourly, why he is the one apologising. It seems like the sort of thing you'd be good at. Sometimes, Caine wants to sock Ru in the throat for the things he says. Mostly because, in some mutated way, they are always right.
He shakes his head before subjecting himself back to the pull of the crowd. He shows his invite at the door but the guard, dressed all in black, seems barely to care, grunting before waving him inside. Caine pockets the card, happy they hadn't taken it, and swivels left at the first bend he sees.
Isn't it some sort of irony, he thinks, as he cuts through the crowd nimbly—with the confidence of a sleepwalker in an endless dream—that it's taken me this long to attend a Solterran party? When he had been sent here in Isorath's wake. When attending parties was as much apart of his job description as keeping his blade edges sharp and gleaming on a diet of arterial blood.
There is red again at the edge of his vision, and this time Caine snaps his head around to follow after it.
He cannot shake the feeling that it is someone he knows, but they are but a dark head now bobbing in a blur of faces, swept along with as much ease as he cuts.
Caine swipes a wineglass off a passing tray—mostly for appearances—and scans the room again for red.
'I'm coming with,' is the soft purr in her head, a rumble like thunder that brushes lovingly along the edges of her crystal clear thoughts. Golden eyes flash, falling sideways to meet the startling blue that she always drowns in so easily when Neerja looks at her. Moira shakes her head. "No," she murmurs almost sadly, but mostly it's determination in the soft sweep of her voice, "this is for diplomacy into Solterra, I can't very well have a tiger, as beloved and gentle as I'm sure you would make yourself towards the guests, frightening them all away. They'd probably think you a pet or entertainment and step on your tail." There is a yowl of protest. "I said no, Neerja, and that's that."
Moira is loath to tell her bonded no, to deny her anything, really, now that they're talking again, but it's hard to say yes when she doesn't quite know the situation they'd be walking into. Of course, the Ieshan name was spoken of in Denocte, but so were many other families. Ieshan was as common as Foster or de Clare or so many other old houses of this land. They were simply another family chalked full of money looking for a quick thrill and a laugh at the expense of those they thought lesser than them. Oh, but Moira tries not to be disgusted before she even shows up. She tries and tries as she paints kohl over her waterlines, as she dons the golden jewels that drape over her brow and across her naked back, places another in the curl of her tail that falls like rushing water behind her. The makeup, of course, would be redone and her hair tidied once she reaches Solterra - it wouldn't survive the journey northward. Artfully, she'd already drawn up her hair into a waterfall braid, a new favorite, and tucked strands back so that they looped as art upon her sparkling skin.
The Ieshan's were renowned for their collection of art and beautiful old things, and although this might be a diplomatic mission, the Emissary wants nothing more than to see their galleries both stone and painted. A yearning in her heart reaches towards paintbrushes abandoned for months in the corner of her room.
How long has it been since she's picked them up?
She doesn't know.
It doesn't matter, not as she walks out the door, letting her irascible companion stalk ahead of her, tail swishing angrily from side to side. More often than not, it seems that Moira only upset Neerja now more than ever.
Maybe that's how healing works.
·̩̩̥͙＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚ ˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊·̩̩̥͙
The escort leaves her, a man from Denocte assigned to accompany the emissary who shows the invitation at the door. They both enter, and quickly her guide is lost. It doesn't bother her, he'd made for a lousy traveling companion after all. What does bother her is the chance that he could make a mess of Denocte's image, she only hopes that he behaves himself as well as could be expected. After Raum, things, for a time, had been so terribly tense in her little corner of the world. Shoulders were still tight with tension, many wondered when the other shoe would fall, and Isra never truly returned to them.
Antiope filled the void that needed filling. Moira Tonnerre would continue on as her court's Emissary as long as she was needed. It does not bother her now nearly so much as it had when she'd first begun. Those were the days when Raymond had been present, when his beloved Ruth towered like a mountain in the city. Those were the days when a girl with storms in her skin screamed at strange birds the gods sent to punish them all and won.
Those were the days that are gone.
Quietly, she shutters those memories, pulls the blinds down and latches the shades so that she can't peek into them, not now when so much is before her. Already, her senses are on fire. This is so unlike the flower festival where she'd danced with Asterion and shared cake with Bexley Briar. This is much, much different and much, much larger.
Faces from all of Novus are here, many she does not know, and none of them seem to care who the others are. Of course, being raised at the Estate, Moira knows that someone always cares who shows their face here and just how they act. She's careful to smile, careful to nod when someone passes her by. Then, she's on a balcony looking down and over the rest of the people coming, away, for a moment, from the crowds that threatened to pull her under. They were tall and boisterous and everything she is not.
It is in the oncoming people that she finds him. The phoenix would know the crow anywhere. He is dark, like the gaps between the stars (they are gaps she knows well because they are Tenebrae's shadows, they are the light she cannot pull, they are something she can hardly begin to touch and still she tries) and he is moving like a tidal wave in her direction. Moira wonders if she should forget how to breathe because he's so damn beautiful her heart could stop if she stared too long. But she doesn't, stare long that is, and instead turns from her vantage point on high. The girl sweeps through the little door she'd found, disregarding whoever's room it had been or still was, and glides over the steps beneath her feet. They're hardly there with the way she walks - more like a skater on ice, she's graceful in only the way a ballerina on ice could be: stunning, beautiful, wholly the same and different than the girl he'd known.
Already, she imagines, he's through the doors and following the flow of people. They both hated people, yet they find themselves forced around them no matter what they do. So she, too, turns right from the stairs instead of left, entering from the opposite side as the crow, and weaves expertly through the crowds. Moira is an enchantress with how she moves - so slowly, so swiftly, like water pooling beneath another's feet and gone before they ever know how wet it is.
She's just barely at the edge of his vision, watching as he watches out for her.
Perhaps she would be laughing if she weren't so thrilled to see him. Instead, the Tonnerre girl turns, turns away from the second man she's ever known here, and skitters into the crown behind him. Vanishing like a flame snuffed out. Before he can press the glass to his lips, light curls around its stem, pulled from the blazing lanterns and many chandeliers above them, to draw it slowly, sweetly to her mouth. With a gentle pull, she swirls the red liquid, then slowly, so slowly, Moira swallows it down in one gulp.
"I thought I'd never see you again."
08-04-2020, 01:45 AM - This post was last modified: 08-04-2020, 01:46 AM by Moira
boy meets girl where the beat goes on / stitched up tight, can't shake free
Red weaves and spins and dances, always at the edge of sight.
Caine sweeps past a corner, and red is disappearing around the next. He wades through waves and waves of guests, and red floats above them all, a candle flame across a sea.
It has become a chase, but rendered in slanted calligraphy and set to ballroom-step: Caine the dark pursuer, Red the rose-wreathed temptress.
At the beginning he had thought it a garment. Red silk, as fluid as wine, a robe clasped to collarbones like wings. But then red lingers a bit too long in the crowd, and he gets a bit too close, and Caine's lips part in a wisp of a laugh when he sees that it is a girl.
The red is apart of her, and just as the answer to the riddle he has not known he was solving touches upon his tongue, she is gone. A light winking out to shadow.
But he says her name anyway. A whisper, softly panting, his breath streaming out in white. "Moira." Raggedly Caine drags through his hair, loosening the interlocking braids he has not worn for months. Fire opals cling to his face and neck like looping pearl strands, finery he has not donned in seasons.
He looks down as a girl, but not the one he is looking for, touches his shoulder and asks him sweetly if he is lost. Sorry, no, he says, smiling briefly (will it lessen the sting? he has always wondered. and then he wonders if he does it because it is polite, or because he cares.) before ducking past her and striding forwards until the holly-wreathed room is spread out in front of him like a map, dewey chandeliers sparkling like tears, violin song ebbing and flowing, a thousand nameless faces, a thousand beating hearts.
Caine spins slowly in place as he searches for her again. It cannot be this difficult to find one girl of flame in an ocean of gold—
And then a tendril of light curls around the stem of his wineglass and Caine blinks twice in muted surprise.
He is startled, so much so that he lets go of his glass without a struggle (though he wouldn't have, anyway—he is not the sort to struggle). The teary chandeliers and bobbing black lanterns above him dim, and dim, and dim.
She is standing in front of him. His wineglass, still full, is raised to her painted lips and he watches as she drinks it all, her throat bobbing, until there is nothing left but dregs.
"I thought I'd never see you again," Moira Tonnerre says, and Caine thinks: She hasn't changed at all. Skin redder than wine; pools of gold for eyes; dished head; hair shot through with star-silver; kohl lashes; kohl lined.
The Phoenix.
The magic, however, is certainly new.
He can't quite believe she is here.
"Moira," Caine says simply, before letting his voice fall to silence as he quickly re-orchestrates his expression: tucking away sharp corners, dull edges, the gleam of liquor, the thump of felled wings, the hunger of a magic that refused to be anything but red. Then he looks at her and the lanterns wash gently over them and the chandeliers fade only to candles and the world, he thinks, slows down to the beat of his heart.
He wears his wings like a cape, and black feathers fall away like ink drops.
When he smiles—that is genuine. It begins small and then spreads wide, and the warmth in it is new. That, he is proud of. It has taken him a long time to learn how.
There is something teasing to it, too: an echo of someone he used to be, half-remembered, half-revived. "Would you like me to fill your glass, Lady Emissary?"
When Moira blinks, the wineglass, lighter by degrees, will be back in Caine's possession. "By which I mean," he says, holding the glass so it refracts her light, "I am glad you found me—" slyly he casts a glance towards the nearest attendee, her ears perked to casually attentive, "—before I started turning over their hems to find you."
you can't fathom why i'd gobble your kisses but duck your attention, please. understand -
He is a black star falling and he is beautiful, she knows this, she's always known this from the very first moment they met in a dark library where she'd been caught sleeping next to a text dug up from the bowels of the shelves in the room. Still, Caine makes her pause, takes her breath before giving it back, and what throws her for a spin the most is the missing wings. Once, she shied away from him so completely that her body had been set a-quivering at the mere sight and thought of flying, of launching into the unknown high above. Now, there is a morbid curiosity that haunts her as he does over where the second pair went. Despite the lack of the double set that he told her he hadn't always had, she still cannot deny how beautiful the man looks with his hair in its twists and braids, with the fire opals winking at her from his neck, with those dark, swarthy wings set as an even darker cape about his back.
She wonders, briefly, if she looks like a living flame sweeping over the floor with the way her own are luxuriously draped atop her back - no longer so tight against her sides that it would take a crowbar to pry them away, but relaxed and more comfortable than Caine ever would have seen her with them.
There is no time to let herself ponder no her own appearance for she knows she could still be a belle of the ball. Every Tonnerre had turned their heads when she debuted among them, watching as the spritely girl seemed to float down their staircase, presented before the family not as a disgrace, but as a Tonnerre to her people. God, it had been horrid. She likes to think that she's grown since then.
The confidence she wears is also new, still learning its place in the fibers of her skin, the nooks, and crannies of her face, the depths of her eyes. Moira is never so confident to be cocky, she wouldn't say that about anything of herself save for her practicing medicine and her drawings that she hates less now, but enough that she seems to glow as only a bonfire can: from the inside out, she burns for him.
Once, perhaps, there would have been jealousy to see another brushing against him, cooing softly as she might have had she been bolder before. Now, there is only the tilting of those dark lips as he apologizes and goes back to his hunt. A beast on the prowl is always an entertaining thing to her lately, and perhaps she's picked up that amusement, that focus, from Neerja. So often does the tigress fall into her own silent stalking, leaving the phoenix behind so that she could be wild if only for a few hours. Moira does not mind, she never minds the pleasure her companion gains, and so lets her run freely in the arms of the Arma Mountains where she might feel at ease outside of the court. When she is gone, the woman returns to her façade of the Emissary, walking among the people and figuring out the next olive branch to send.
She's sent so few lately, this is one she cannot fail at.
At last, she appears before him not as a phantom, nor memory, nor an illusion, but as her star-studded self redolent of her mother's people who swoop through the sky on wings of red and green and pink and blue, with such joy and complete belief in themselves that it is too impossible to ever consider they might fall.
Moira does not fall now.
"Caine," she purrs with a slow smile, licking the wine from the corner of her mouth. The roar of the crowd, of the men bustling past and women that look over toward the unlikely duo with vague interest while pretending not to listen, fades away when he smiles. She's nearly knocked off her feet, but she's learned so well how to not stumble when eyes are upon her. So instead, Moira offers her own flash of teeth, ignoring the way her heart does skip a beat when he looks at her like that.
It doesn't matter. That smile doesn't matter. She tells herself this over and over, even as she continues. Gold glad feet slide forward, she moves like a snake to get closer, smooth as satin, smoother than silk until they are near chest to chest. It doesn't bother her so much that she has to tilt her chin back to look up upon his face now, not when she smirks and says "That depends, Little Crow," and her words are soft, they are velvet, they are his illusions come to life. Moira Tonnerre tells herself it's the first glass of wine that makes her slightly dizzy and not Caine. She repeats it internally when that amused tone enters her voice "Do you intend to see me drunk?" There is teasing there, but there is a true question.
Moira has only really been drunk with Michael. In those moments, she demanded his time and took him away from the crowds. Truly, she doesn't know how she is around others when inebriated.
Tonight, she can't afford to find out.
Instead of voicing these concerns, she laughs at his words. Head tilts back, lips part, and the chiming of her laughter is like smoke drifting into the dark clouds. Golden eyes follow the glass he steals back from her, watch as the light plays on its surface. Magic reaches for it, strains for those refractions, begs to pull it down, down, down even as he talks. She would weave between them a gameboard, chess, perhaps, to see who would finally win this battle. This does not happen, no. Now, the woman places that smile (oh it's so true, so genuine just as his is,) and shakes her head for the benefit of the golden woman that peers more closely their way. "Perhaps I should have hidden longer, do you know what they would say of a man under a woman's dress?" How she teases him, like they are old friends - but aren't they? Aren't they old friends? It's only fair, it's alright.
08-04-2020, 02:49 PM - This post was last modified: 08-04-2020, 02:56 PM by Moira
