In the beginning there was naught but She, the ocean. And in the end She prevailed; cold, wet, dark. Ossian slowly woke from the everlong black with a head that spun like a bottletop and a body immersed in throbbing pain, blinking thrice to chase away a faint fog clouding his vision. Memories of a recent past formed lazily, as though reluctant to reveal themselves to their disorientated architect and as he struggled to piece together both past and present, his vision finally began to return. A breath; weak lungs gratefully hoarding salt-drenched oxygen until at last, finally, the boy opened his wide eyes.
Jagged pale earth and rock soared skyward - looming over him with hulking shoulders, casting spectral shadows over the sand upon which he found himself sprawled. The cliffs eyed him and he eyed them right back, ebony lips parting to offer a greeting only to find his throat constricted and cracked with sandy brine. Where was he? What had happened here?
Ossian closed his vast eyes, fighting away the opaque confusion with a trembling hand, lunging through the recesses of his head until at last the memories began to assemble. Images of himself wandering hopelessly upon his childhood shores played on and on, watching the tears staining his soft sable skin until with one final stumble across the bay he unearthed an alien discovery: a small old boat, buried beneath the grey sand. The boy recalled wondering just who this little vessel had belonged to, and why they had abandoned it so? He had felt a dull pang of sadness; what a melancholy tale this ship might have endured following the loss of its creator and master. And then that star-haired child had made a choice, one that would change everything, or perhaps nothing at all.
With only a (now lost) threadbare bag filled with a precious assortment of shells he and Ama had collected over the years to accompany him, Ossian had set sail. Where all else had failed he knew that it was to the ocean he could turn to for deliverance, be it in death or life. And my, he had come close to losing both. The sea had raged; tossing and shattering his brittle raft until he was tossed into her blue murky depths. The final memory came in the form of pressure, salt, and a gentle ebbing darkness fading to black. Yet, still she had spared him - for here he lay, on this foreign shore with tangled limbs and a quivering ribcage. His charcoal coat was wet through, and it began to dawn on the young man just how cold he truly was. On thin uncertain legs Osi rose; as a child Ama had once called him bambi on ice and as it was, the saying had never been more true.
At last, Ossian stood. A brilliant chromatic sunset had begun to douse the horizon as he gazed out over the ocean back to a life that no longer existed and in that moment he felt quite tremendously lost. The metres of his endless bleach-white hair shook as he turned away from the sea, blinking away the terrible sting of emotion. This strange wild land leered at the boy, and Ossian thought he had never felt so alone as he did right here and now.
NOTES: ok this is so subpar but he's a totally new boyo for me and i struggle with first threads ;-; open to any Duskians that will initiate and recruit this little lost bean c:
He will never, it seems, be able to stay his feet from the sea.
When he sleeps there is a part of his mind, fitful and restless, that cannot be soothed so far from the murmur of the tide. It is difficult to dream, so distant from the waves; when the moon rises and the frost silvers the plain he wonders why he had traded the beach for anything, even a tower full of wonders, even a sister. Asterion had spent the last year of his youth in a quiet fight to escape the saltwater in his veins. Now his power is lost – his lifelong tie broken – but the ghost of it haunts him.
And so, ghostlike himself, he drifts once more for the coast. Above him the constellations turn, still unfamiliar, and he gives his own names and stories to them as the moon sets. He is well-enough acquainted with this path that he half-sleeps as the sun rises, as the frost burns away, as what winter-birds there are begin their singing.
The sun does not linger, in this season; it arcs, low and feeble, and sinks into a scarlet sunset just as the calling, crying gulls make his ears flick forward, his head lift. When he breathes in, it tastes of salt; the bay smiles, tosses his head, presses himself into a lope to shake out weary muscles.
Almost immediately he draws again to a halt, flinging sand, tucking his dark chin toward his chest. There stands a figure, overlooking the glinting waves, visible only by the color the sunset threw onto long, star-colored hair. Asterion is too far to see him tremble, but the wind is a fierce, hungry thing even on his own dry coat.
Curiosity starts him forward just as the boy turns, eyes flashing the burnished orange of the setting sun. Their gazes meet and the bay pauses, caught by the stark vision of the colt, just as dark but very different from the sea-slick rocks that jutted up from the beach around him. It is a lonely scene, and lovely.
And then he closes the distance between them, brows first rising then furrowing as he sees the stranger is soaked to the skin. This time of year, it’s a wonder their breaths aren’t mist already. “You must be freezing,” he says, and wishes for the first time that he could control fire.
The sound of gulls singing and flying overhead besieged Ossian's hearing, soothing his ears with their enchanting song. To many the shrieks of a seabird were irksome, but to the star-haired boy they were home. They were the tonic to his troubles, the calm beneath the storm - his chest did not hitch so violently and his bones did not rattle where he stood on this strange shore with stranger scents beyond. They were a memoir to his mother's chaotic peace with their cries and their triumph high above the waves, and Ossian felt, mostly certainly, that these were the very same birds that had bore witness to the tumbleweed tale that was his life back across the wide blue. Even if it were not true the thought pacified him temporarily and the deep furrow of his brow straightened ever so slightly.
A brittle ocean-wind swept over his angular irriguous body, whipping and lashing his frame - the earth would show no mercy, orphan or not, Osi knew that much. His home itself had been treacherous; he remembered how the sea would scream at night with a ferocity that redefined his understanding of fear; he, small and paperthin. Only, as he had grown from boy to man, that oceanic savagery had become a hymn he could recite in the everlong dark, for Ama had taught him the words. The memory of his mother pulled Ossian into the present once more - flicking twisted strands of bleached hair from his eyes, glancing over his shoulder in a sudden swell of sadness. His bag, his compass - lost to Poseidon? Perhaps it was fitting that his most precious belongings should have been cast overboard; fated to drift perpetually across the world's oceans, forever chasing Ama's soul across glittering tides and open skies.
"You must be freezing."
A bullet ruptured his chest. Imploding, exploding. And Ossian convulsed, snatching his head toward the sound as though following a trail of smoke leading to the gun. Shock detonated deep within him, painful tremors racing up from his feet blinding everything; was this what it felt like to die? How had he been so careless? Eyes as iridescent as a wild winter sun flared, latching onto the sight of a man standing but a few feet away. Like a child watching the magic of fire for the first time Ossian drank in every detail of him. Fascinated, obsessed. It was not the first encounter with another of his kind since the death of Ama, for he had watched them from afar, tracing their kitelike tails and oaken bodies; what mysteries the world had concealed from him until now. None, however, had spoken to him - and Ossian could not help the replay of this man's words whirring back and forth until they did not sound like words at all, but instead abstract alien sounds.
Instinctively, Ossian tries to replicate those sounds, "Y-y-yes." The syllables feel like ice on his tongue, slippery and dangerous. "Where...?" It's all he can manage, before breaking his stare with the dark stranger to gaze up once more at the backdrop of majesty and greatness looming up behind them both. What was this place?
Asterion is unused to being looked at so searchingly, much less by eyes that burned like flame in a face so dark. The effect makes him feel off-balance, and he thinks that this is how he must have looked at Aislinn, the first time he met her beneath the moonlight last summer. Still, he makes himself hold the stranger’s gaze until he responds.
He thinks nothing of the way the stranger stutters, attributing it to the cold. Asterion had come from a place bordering on tropical; it was a wonder to him the colt was standing at all, much less speaking.
“This is Novus,” he answers, soft as the sweep of sea-foam over sand, and searches the boy’s face a moment longer before following his gaze to the cathedral of stone behind them. “More particularly, you’ve found yourself on the cliffs at the border of the Dusk Court.” The name of it still sounds strange in his mouth, as airy and pretend as a sand castle.
Courts and kings and queens, festivals and elegance – maybe he should have found it romantic. Maybe it should have appealed to the part of him that has always loved stories of knights.
He does not wonder what a hero would do, here; he already knows what must be done. “We must get you dry,” he says, turning his attention back to the boy, unable to keep his eyes from wandering once more over the seafoam-colored hair. I reminds him once more of Aislinn, and quickly he pulls his gaze to the burnished eyes instead, startlingly bright in his dark face. “If you think you can make it, my home is a few hours’ walk, and is sheltered and warm. There are healers, there. Otherwise there’s a cave just down the beach – we could at least get out of the wind.”
As he waits for a reply, it is his turn to drink in details, to search him the way one would a wonder – even in this land of armor and weapons, scarves and necklaces of coins, wings and horns and scales, he has never seen anyone quite like this. For the first time, he wonders just how the boy had arrived on these shores in midwinter. “Did you – did you swim here?”
@Ossian sorry this took so long! forgot how to write.
Novus. Dusk Court. Ossian tenderly reached out for the names, handling them with the care of a tentative child. Novus. It sound exotic and astral, like the lands in Ama's moonlit novels that had enchanted him from the youngest of ages. In those long-loved tales he had followed his mother's voice into the night, behind closed lids he had visualised white-walled castles and burning gold skies stretching before his own sunfire eyes. Would Novus behold such fairytale wonders? Ossian's dreams had always been brimming: too full, too doused with a love for the ethereal - perhaps at last his dreams might yet come true. The boy lost himself within the chasmic library of his mind for a moment, tracing fine fingers along the memories of his beautiful oceanic youth; wandering the great halls of the past. A final flash of Ama's smile - it had always reminded him of sunlight reflecting upon water: blinding, stainless, pure.
And then, once more, into the present. Time was for the now.
The stranger spoke once more, and this time Ossian truly listened - calmer, steadier - to the inflection of this man's voice. It was like the gentle flush of ocean spray; cool and assuring, yet foreign all the same. Wide eyes grew wider still at the mention of an invitation - his thoughts glittered and scattered like stars across a dark dark sky - radiant glimmers of excitement, of anxiety, of hope. It seemed he had found himself washed up on the shores of a world full of life. To think, also, that this dark stranger was offering him respite within that world made Ossian's chest bloom and his head spin; gratitude bleeding from his pores. It was overwhelming, clogging his every sense, and as a cold wind whipped once more around his damp black skin Ossian could not help but find sanctuary in the man's utterance of nearby caves. He had lived his entire life within them, after all. "I - Ah, the cave will be perfect I'm sure." His own words are fluctuant; a salt-licked throat struggling to deflect the shyness that clawed at him insistently. As a child that had been raised with only the company of his mother, conversation with anyone else did not come naturally.
"Did you - did you swim here?"
For the first time, Ossian smiled. And it was a remarkable thing from a boy so untouched.
"No, gosh," he shook his wet white hair, glancing once more over his shoulder at the rolling sea, "A boat - I found it, I tried... it broke." His smile faded, frustrated at his inability to convey such a simple story. Or perhaps it was anything but simple.
Ossian tried again. "What is your calling? Ama called me Ossian."
How similar they were, if only they’d known. Asterion had always been too much a dreamer, chasing down fairy tales, watchful for knights and monsters both. He had found neither of them, so far. As for Novus – yes, it has castles, and courts, and lovers and queens.
But to him, imagination always outpacing him, Novus is no greater a story than a star-haired boy, shipwrecked on a beach, with a smile that caches and keeps.
“A boat! You’re brave. And lucky that it didn’t break earlier,” he says, turning serious at the last before shaking his head as if to drive the thought away. Asterion cannot bring himself, in that moment, to look back out to sea and imagine being in the midst of it, lost and alone, and then to have –
ah. No; he is too young, yet, to consider such tragedy.
He is glad for the question, then, and to focus again on the cold. “Ossian,” he repeats, and smiles back at him. He likes the sound of the name, which to him is like the sea-foam rushing up onto the sand, retreating again in the same breath. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I am Asterion.” A good name for a dreamer; his mother had been so in love with the stars she’d worn them on her skin.
Another breeze sweeps in off the sea and it reminds him he has a task other than standing here, thinking of foolish things like names of foam and stars. He jerks his chin, indicating the cliffside up the beach, speckled with nesting birds and striped with layers of rock. As they make their way toward the rough shelter, a small colony of sea lions eyes them with bobbing heads. Asterion remembers when they and the sea gulls made up his pretend enemies in a long-ago colthood, and he huffs a good-natured snort their direction.
He wonders if they recognize him at all; surely he is a more familiar site than the striking, star-haired boy he’s with.
The last of the sunset is fading, now, and it’s dark this near to the base of the cliffs; the best light there is comes from Ossian. Asterion is almost lost in the dim, save for the small star on his forehead, but his new companion looks like the outline of a ghost with his burning eyes and corona of hair. The bay slips between a cleft in the rock, and immediately the wind dies away. Even the noise from the sea is hushed, here, and though the split continues back into a proper cavern, Asterion stops just a few steps into the mouth, careful to leave room for the boy.
“Well,” he says, and for a moment can think of nothing more. He is unused to rescues; more often he is the one to be found. But his mind is always full of questions, and he softly asks the first. “Did you know it was here you were headed?”
The boy of sea and stars cannot fathom the lives of those he should come to encounter, certainly not the life of the sable-skinned man before his very eyes. How could he? His head ran only to the glittering, wet horizon where the sky melted like glossy paint into the enormity of the ocean, and his thoughts were stained by hues of gold, of green, of blue: all the colours of the shoreline. But beyond that - there was only imagination, and fantasy; his hands had, once, grasped for a handful of reality on a cool autumnal eve, venturing beyond the border Ama had drawn, only to find himself stopping short in the face of fear and uncertainty. Ossian had turned for home, never looking back. Now, however, there was no choice: beyond that border he had been forced to creep; colourless tears honouring the death of his mother, and into night's embrace he had sailed. A lonely ship in the dark.
Alone, no more.
The stranger introduces himself as Asterion, and to Ossian the name seems to hang in the brine-licked air like a spell cast from soft, stygian lips. What magic there must be in the world. And as the pair glide forward, lead by the older man, they move with an ease that sings of the oceanborne: their hooves silent against the sand and the bitter eastern wind singing in their ears; oh, Ossian knows this song, this dark soporific lullaby. As the cliffs loomed close overhead the boy heaved an abyssal sigh, as though it were the first time he had truly breathed in days - he could not help the relief that washed over him as he slipped into the murky darkness behind Asterion. Second to water, Ossian was never more at home than under the colossal weight of damp, mossy rock. At last, peace. The echo of droplets splashing from roof to floor sound from deeper within the cave, and catch Ossian's attention momentarily, before it is turned back quickly to Asterion's voice. A slow shake of his elegant angular head, spiderleg eyelashes sweeping across a highset cheekbone.
"I knew nothing of any world beyond the bay, only stories my mother told me. After..." he paused, his jaw clenching and his brilliant orange eyes clouding, "I had to leave, you see." Another sigh, sadder this time. It never occurred to him that, perhaps, he should not trust this man - that a stranger could easily turn innocence into terror - and so, he leaned closer, his voice all but a whisper. Trusting, trusting. "I do not want to be alone, Asterion"
The words, soft as they are, are like a slap across his cheek. They are like someone taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, because they are so familiar.
A life on a quiet inlet, safe and lonesome (though at the time he regretted the former and did not know it as the latter), fed by stories and starshine. But for Asterion’s twin, they might have been the same. A thousand questions crowd his mouth, a thousand more stir in the dim quiet places of his heart, his mind, and if the bay were still the boy he had been he might have asked them all.
Instead, he considers Ossian, still damp. How uncertain he must be, how weary. He is in no condition to be pressed for a past that has literally come crashing to an end, and so Asterion only nods, somber. “I do see.”
He is not so much a seeker of touch – not like either of his sisters, who were free in seeking and sharing comfort – but at that soft second sigh he steps nearer, pressing his shoulder to the boy’s. Still he wonders if he should have, until Ossian speaks again.
“I don’t want to, either,” he answers softly, and turns his eyes out to the crevice in the rock, where the last of the sunlight is fading on the sea. A trail of fire burnt down to darkness. “But it took me a very long time to figure that out.” He thinks, then, of his years of wandering; of the searching that left him unsatisfied, because he had no idea what it was he was looking for.
He still isn’t sure if he’s found it. But if feels closer, and maybe that is enough.
Asterion blows out a breath that stirs the dark hair of his forelock as he looks back to the colt, and a smile turns up the corners of his mouth. “But neither of us are alone now, Ossian.”
The world begins to soften at the edges around them as Vespera breathed dusk air over the water and the sand so that the bay was swathed in a deep purpled hue. Ossian felt the adrenalin begin to drain like air escaping through a tear in his resolve, and his muscles sang in relief as they slowly sank lower and quieter. It had been a long day, one that would remain forever etched into the halls of his memory as the day his whole world changed. The universe worked in mysterious ways, Ama had always said so, and Ossi wondered whether Fate had dealt him such a hand in the knowledge that something beautiful and untold would come of it. Or, perhaps, this was simply a chapter yet unwritten by his own unsteady quill. In, out - his breath drifted into a rhythmic pattern as he decided that it did not matter, life would wander where it wished and he was naught but a passenger.
Asterion murmured gentle, round syllables and edged nearer to press a guardian's shoulder against the drying skin of a lonely, lost child. Ossian stiffened, unused and unaccustomed to touch; even Ama had rarely embraced the star-haired boy past the first months of his life, but still, instinctively, the gesture seemed to chase away the cobwebs of angst lingering in every corner of his body. With a vernal look blessing his stark, fluid features the ocean's son smiled as though he had almost forgotten the sadness of moments ago. Wherever Ama was now, she was watching over him - he knew this with the certainty of all grief-stricken souls, and it was enough for him, for now. His lids began to droop with slumber, the exertion of the day finally taking hold, and as he listened tenderly to each word from Asterion's lips, Ossian felt more and more hopeful that everything would be okay.
“But neither of us are alone now, Ossian.”
Asterion: guardian, and very first friend. "Thank you..." came the soft whisper before sleep enveloped him into her arms.
@asterion close thread? thanks for saving him, they'll have to meet again now Mr A is REGENT! <33
The tide is coming in, now, slow murmurs over the sand. Asterion can hear it as well as he can hear the way Ossian’s breathing begin to settle; he matches his own to that whisper of water, and wonders if he always has.
When the boy stiffens against his touch he eases away, his shoulder an offer but not a demand. It is too dark to see the smile that blooms on the boy’s black mouth, but not too dark to see the way his shoulder ease, the line of his neck softens beneath his pale cloud of starlight hair.
He says nothing at the soft words, heavy with sleep; only smiles as the hush of the waves and the echoing reply of their breathing become the only sounds. When he closes his own eyes, the familiar noises carry him back, back, to his own colthood on a faraway shore. To safety and to love.
In the morning they would make their way to a new understanding of home.
ugh poop post but wanted to wrap it. Ossian is a dreamboat and I look forward to their next meeting!
