[P] at once I knew I was not magnificent

[Septimus]

SEE? ALL THESE YEARS / MY BRANCHES SANG WITH BIRDS
and my leaves drank sunlight - I haven't missed much.

❃

It’s summer, Septimus thinks, but summer with a bit of a draft – summer with a storm rolling in, and all the wind that accompanies it, which has left the coastline pleasantly cool but humid, so thick with moisture and salt that it is nearly hard to breathe. He stands with his hooves halfway buried in a fine layer of dirty grey sand, watching a seagull circle over the white foam crest of a distant wave; here and there, it dives, much to the irritation of the pelicans who are bobbing in the dark froth below. He doesn’t know how much time he spends watching them in silence – only, he thinks, that his glasses have fogged up by the time that the seagull is gone and he has pulled himself away.

He hasn’t been able to put his finger on what he’s been feeling lately. It’s not melancholy, exactly, though he tends to dismiss that as too mortal an emotion for him anyways. He doesn’t know what it is instead.

All he knows is that he woke up this morning to the furious, buzzing songs of cicadas and the distinct sense that the world was changing in ways that he’s not sure that he’s comfortable with, because he’s very well used to the world changing, but he’s never grown accustomed to having to be a part of it as it does. He’d strode out into the pale blush of dawn and looked at the dew on the grass, and he’d been struck with the somewhat awful realization that the morning wouldn’t last forever, or very long at all, and it hadn’t mattered, once, but now it did. So he’d gone to the sea. So he was at the sea. And so nothing had really come of it – he wasn’t sure that he’d learned anything that approached an understanding from the incident, which, he supposed, was how mortals felt all the time. It was awful. Normally he could think about it until he understood it, turn it over and over and around in his head until all of the pieces fit together into a perfect image, but now-

Now he stretches out his wings, feels the harsh fingers of the wind thread through his feathers, tucks his glasses neatly into his satchel, and jumps into the air without a second thought.

He’s not unaccustomed to flying in a storm, and it’s not quite storming yet besides; the wind is harsh and tastes like rain, and he can see the dark clouds gathered on the edge of the horizon, nearly indistinguishable from the black waves. He’s not sure that it will come to the coast, but he can see lightning, sharp bright arcs cut through the clouds; he can’t hear the thunder.

He flies near the surface of the sea, close enough for his pinions to hit the surface; they send up a spray of salt water that catches on his skin, even as he dips low enough to drag one hoof across the water. There is the occasional silver gleam of a fish or dark, lashing tail of a ray, the curved spine of a dolphin or the sharp hook-fin of a shark; as he flies out farther and farther, he thinks that he sees the fin of a whale break the surface, some kind of baleen one, but he snaps out his wings and turns back towards the coast before he can get a good look at it, because he’s gone far enough and the winds are growing stronger, and he has no magic to protect him here.

(But – when his magic was at its strongest and wildest, he didn’t know what a sea was. There are bargains. Always bargains.)

Septimus circles back towards a dark outcropping of cliffs, flying up the face of them almost too close to the ragged surface of the stone; it is only when he is suspended well above them that he catches sight of the woman on the cliffs, with her fantastic, star-strewn flanks and pale face. He blinks, hovering a moment, and then quickly descends down towards the stretch of cliff where she stands.

His hooves clatter down against the seaswept stone with a rhythmic, half-stumbled clatter and the musical clink of the ornaments strewn about his antlers. “Kassandra?” He comes to a flighty pause in front of her, his wings outstretched to their fullest length and feathers displaced by the wind, like a bird just come in from a thunderstorm, and smooths them – and his forelock, which threatens to fall into his eyes – back into place.

---

@Kassandra || it's been too long! <3 || billy collins, "days"
Speech  

@

[Kassandra]

When I lived in Tundraland We'd have to guess before the hand
Of winter's tide, How many'd die, and dig them graves before the ground was ice.

After being locked in a tower for most of her youth, Kassandra has come to appreciate much of the things found on this fine earth: she likes the feel of dirt on her coat and the worms that crawl in it; she likes the gross heavy smell of rotting leaves in the fall, wet with mildew and infested with creepy, crawly things; she likes the feeling of ice frozen on her whiskers and the sharp pain in her lungs that frigid temperatures bring; she even likes sneezing through yellow clouds of pollen in the spring as the flowers bob their heads in gentle breezes and Oculus tries to eat the bees and regrets it.

But gods does she hate the heat. She hates the way it lays across her shoulders like a heavy blanket, and she hates that there's no escaping it! You can only take so many layers off before you were just skin on top of muscle. She hates the way it makes her feel ungainly and large, even though she is a bit… oddly proportioned; and as much as she loves the opportunity to be blinded by the sun at any point in the sky-- for when she was a child she had a roof over her head and could only see it at a certain time when it would stream through the silver bars on her window-- at some point in the endless days of brightness and heat she does feel a little bit like a digging a grave for herself to crawl into because, oh, wouldn't the touch of deep, cold, wet, earth just be so sweet?

So when she sees the sky above smothered with clouds she is hopeful, for a brief moment. Then she feels the humidity in the air and her mane sticks to her skin and she's so sick of it she wants for weeping. The air is thick with the smell of storms and moisture, begging for release, and somethings somewhere has to give. “You know what I think we need, Oculos?” she says to her companion, her tone of forced positivity the chilliest thing in the vicinity, “A break. We need a break.”

you can swear, Kas, Oculos chides, eyebrows waggling, it will make you feel better.

“A trip to the beach would do nicely, I think.”

i’d chase a seagull, he says in the way a bar patron would say I’d have a beer.

The day is gray and her mood is gray and she’s crotchety for no good reason besides the heat. The relief she’d hoped to find has eluded her once again, but she’s not entirely sure it’s from the temperature. She hadn’t had a vision in weeks-- not a single dream, asleep or awake. Perhaps they were finally gone and she was free of the curse that had hounded her since her youth-- but that thought no longer comforts her as it once had. What was she without her visions? A silly little star-crossed girl with nothing special about her, that’s what.

Of course, her nights of silent, black sleep and unbothered days could be a portent of something else, something sinister. Some horrendous nightmare waiting in the wings, preparing to pounce, and there was nothing she could do but sit, and wait, and not know.

She plunges herself into the foamy white pre-storm surf before her thoughts could blacken like the sky in the distance, and the sea is cooler than the air as it crashes against her indigo chest. Nearby, Oculos has flopped in the khaki sand, pink tongue lolling and eyes half-open. At his feet lay a scattering of tail feathers snatched from his unsuspecting prey.

Kassandra ducks her head into the black waves and lets them crash over her neck, fingers of foam sluicing across her shoulders; she throws her head back with a mighty breath and inhales salt and heavy air and fights back a scream. She repeats the motion until her chest hurts from the clench in it.

She comes out of the water, hair dripping and plastered to her neck, and looks over her shoulder at the distant lightning that could have been her eyes playing tricks on her. Oculos comes to his feet with a languid stretch. what’s eatin ya, chief?

“Nothing,” Kassandra grumbles, walking past him, “and I think that’s the problem.”

the problem is… there’s no problem?

“Hush.” She trudges on towards the cliffs. “Let’s go watch the storm roll in.”

She finds a path cut into the sodden gold rock that’s wide enough for her bulky heft and lowers her head into the quickening wind. The crowns of the clifftops are covered in flowering phlox, the dark olive moss peppered with pink flowers, and they would at the very least make a comfortable bed to lay down in and watch the storm in, if not die.

She sees him before she hears him, in the way someone recognizes motion without understanding the source; but his voice, familiar and foreign all in one timbre, makes her heart freeze-- not with cold but in a warm, mushy sort of style that makes her stomach queasy. It’s hope that peaks in her bones and makes the muscles in her shoulders quiver. And she knows it’s him and she knows she’s staring and her voice comes out ragged and salt-licked from dousing herself in the sea: “Septimus?”

And all at once she’s a little girl again and she wants to run and throw herself against him and laugh and grin and screech a little with glee but she holds herself back with a grinding of her tongue against her teeth because he’s refined and she should try to be refined, she's not a little girl anymore and maybe he'll like me now no that's stupid I'm stupid. And it’s been many years since she’d seen him, since she’d first seen him, and how funny all the things she’d forgotten between then and now but this tragic breathlessness was not one of them.

At her heels, Oculos licks his lips. ah great, he groans, this tool again.

She resists the urge to kick him off the cliff.

@Septimus | :') babie's first crush | "Speech." | oculos speech