Novus
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Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

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August
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#1

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved


Normally, autumn is his favorite time in Denocte, which is his favorite place in the world, which means fall is a near-constant festival of delights large and small. 

Normally, he would be waking just before the sun (growing more sluggish as the solstice neared) to go on his morning run, then swing by the market to buy bread from Talan to share with his cadre at the Scarab. Some of the girls (Minya) always had an easier time with mornings when there were fresh carbs to greet them. After that would be a morning meeting with Charon, a check-in with some of the more influential (and demanding) patrons, a lesson in swordsmanship with Aghavni, and then a brief lunch before it was time to discuss the evening ahead. 

Today he wakes alone, in a cramped room he rents by the night, and has no more money for. When he leaves he takes only his father’s sword and a small bag with a few belongings and the last of his coins. The air still smells the same as every autumn, salt and cedar-smoke and leaves crisp and bright, unaware they are dying, that they are already dead. But there is none of the old buoyancy with it, and the frost that still lays in the shadows does not look like diamonds when the sunlight touches it just before it melts away. 

 August goes down to the water, because what else is there to do? He turns away from the merchant docks, with their masts and gulls and broad-shouldered, noisy commerce; something about all those billowing sails make his heart ache with want and shame. He walks along the shore for a long while, until the city is only a suggestion behind him and the only line of tracks in the sand is his own. 

Then, just when he thinks he might turn around, the palomino spots a curious thing. 

There is a man, a pegasus, dark as a shadow and tall and slim. He is throwing something into the water, and when August draws near enough he thinks that the objects - at least one of them, anyway - are knives.

August decides not to come near enough to be really sure. Not yet, anyway. 

“You, ah, figuring on getting those back?” he calls, unable to suppress his curiosity. There is something in him that identifies at once with the concept of it - because there is something in him that feels just as sharp, and just as useless, as a knife thrown into the sea. 



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@Caine I did it









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Caine
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upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty.


He thought of it as a sort of—liberation. Every knife in the sea, a piece of history ripped off like dead skin.

"Saint Ismene." A forest of snakes writhed around a hollow whalebone handle, mouths snapping at tails. The smiling blade, curved to the skies, was a fang torn from a basilisk's mouth; half of it was stained a gruesome shade of pink. Old blood. He had never managed to buff it out.

Ismene had been a particularly cruel Saint. Caine had always suspected that the village that had Sainted her had done so only to avoid the coils of her dearly beloved familiar. It was a brittle blade, besides. He had used it unhappily and sparingly.

Saint Ismene, lost to the seas.

Caine loved them, his knives, but as one by one left his grasp in a spinning, spitting arc, as metal and bone and gem flipped handle over blade into a mass that was not him, not anyone, he felt he could have given them no better end. 

It was wonderfully poetic, for one, and wholly perverse, for another. He had not even prised the rubies from the handles, because that would be maiming, and Caine had always disparaged such spiteful work.

Poetry and perversity. Really, he had outdone himself.

Their blades were going dull, anyway.

"Saint Gaheara." Three raw rubies winked like three bulbous eyes. A sheath of scarred bronze sealed away an edge battered by shaky, inexperienced cuts. Gaheara had been the patron Saint of children. Her troubled, solemn bust, three-eyed yet strangely beautiful, kept vigil over all orphanages in Vectaeryn. There had been no Saint more fitting for his very first blade.

Saint Gaheara, sunk to the sand.

Far overhead, a black-breasted gull screeched its troubles to the sun. Caine lifted his head and let the weight of his braids drag it back, back, back, until black throat curved like Ismene's fang, until silver eyes winked like Gaheara's rubies.

The third knife trembled in the air. "Saint Vol—"

“You, ah, figuring on getting those back?”

Saint Volta would cry blasphemy at finding himself face-down in murky, foreign surf. His exploits had been legendary in a land made flesh from legends; a princeling's first words was not 'Father,' but 'Volta.' Darkly, Caine figured he had not yet put enough distance between himself and his Saints to test their divine ire so.

Sand rained out of the dagger's vine-like grooves as Caine swivelled haltingly towards the suggestion of a boy blurred blue-bruise-red by the dying sun. 

"Not particularly," he called back, letting the sea-winds carry his voice, twirling Volta in swinging arcs as he watched the boy’s long shadow with half-lidded intrigue. He could make out little else of him save for a swathe of white hair, for he had not come close enough for seeing.

Caine had yet to decide if that was flattering or not.

"I have entirely too many of them," he explained instead, gesturing loosely towards the satchel staked with handles in varying shades and hefts. 

The lantern-lights of the Night Markets flickered like fireflies above them, the merry symphony of drums and laughter, and the occasional cymbal crash of a shattering wineglass, filling the gaps between words. 

His mouth dipped like a crow's wing. Volta spun tidily to a halt, roman nose clean down. “Here.” Sunset glanced off the dagger's lively silver carvings. Dragons and their foolish boy-heroes. “Saint Volta.”

And then he merely waited, his offer sealed with a smile.

How his Saints would love him like this.
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August
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#3

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved


It was not perhaps his best instinct that led him to surprise a man looking to fling a few knives, though it could be argued he’d made poorer choices of late. There was everything that had passed in the desert, for instance; when he thinks of Warset, guilt like a bruise covers his heart, and when he thinks of Orestes - well, there’s no shame there. Instead he regrets not staying, forcing the man to recant what he said, maybe muddying that pretty hide before getting disemboweled by his lion.

There is a difference, he is sure, between having a death wish and simply having nothing to live for. August knows which side of the line he walks, even if it’s an increasingly closer thing.

He catches the first response on the brine-tasting breeze, and feels his lips shape a lazy curve; a few of the following words are snatched away or transmuted to nonsense, but he doesn’t miss the gesture to the satchel. Meanwhile the stranger’s blade twirls, cutting like a swallow through the air, singing softly as it waits for a target. Probably that should be a warning, but August is already coming closer, near enough to notice a flash of silver eyes from the man, and silver tooling, handles and blades from the knives.

“That is quite a collection,” he says, admiring, even as he touches his thoughts to the grip of his father’s sword as if in reassurance. “But too many? I’m not sure that exists.”

His gaze follows the dagger until it stops, and then lifts to the man. It’s strange to see eyes the same silver as his own set in so dark a face, something half-familiar. Has he seen him before at the Scarab? Perhaps the island?

Saint Volta.

He studies the proffered handle, the intricate carvings, boys and beasts. When he takes it, it’s as live as a warm thing in his grip; he tilts it and a bead of red sunset-light slides down the blade. August has a dozen questions but he keeps them all behind his teeth for now. “Beautiful,” he murmurs, and holds it as lightly as a bird in his palm; then he flings it, end-over-end, into the surf. Watching it vanish makes him feel both satisfied and sorry, and he sighs before looking back to the stranger, the corner of his mouth hooked in a grin. “Should I expect to be cursed now?”




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@Caine I did it









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Caine
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his rifle, his boots full of rocks / oh, and this one is for bravery / and this one is for me / and everything's a dollar / in this box


Surprisingly—or perhaps not—the pale stranger approaches, and in the receding tide his hooves leave behind clean prints like crescent moons.

Saint Volta buzzes like a live wire in Caine's grasp as he settles back, eyes slit against the deepening dusk, and waits.

In the homeland, the most valuable daggers—of which any of Volta's was sure to be, or risk the Saint's fiery wrath—were cleverly magicked. Words of power muttered over the ore as it smelted; every hammer strike to the strict beat of a hearth dragon's snore; etchings in ancient tongue chiseled minutely between carvings of knights and thorny roses. The memory is fleeting, but as the boy ambles closer, Caine remembers what this dagger's enchantment had been.

Snaking out from every cut the blade kissed open, a tangle of vines animalistic in its hunger for blood and leaking decay. Nothing of the victim would be left for the family to grieve over, except for a thicket of vibrant bougainvillea.

Before the lands of Novus had devoured every magical mote from its polished silver depths, of course, as it had done to him. Caine's mouth twitches when the dagger seems to grow warm in his grasp. He wants nothing more than to toss it, end over end over end, into the black mouth of the sea.

"That is quite a collection." 

As much as he knows how desperately he should break the habit, praise of any variety always pleases Caine. His smile creeps thinly over his lips and almost manages to touch his eyes. "You speak like a collector yourself." He blinks slowly, dragging his gaze away from the frothing waves to settle it on ice-white hair and eyes a near mirror of his own. The boy, now comfortably close, is lithe yet not at the expense of muscle; built wiry and agile like a cheetah, or a creature more accustomed to the chase than the actual hunt.

A little like himself.

"But too many? I'm not sure that exists."

"Once, surely, I believed the same. But now—" Caine shrugs, and if he is aware of how closely he himself is being examined, he shows no sign of it, "—now they are dead weight." Leisurely he relinquishes the weapon; leisurely he surveys how it is taken up again, quickly and expertly.

Caine watches, almost in wonder, as Saint Volta quickens under another's grasp; one who knows nothing of it except that is a weapon, and that it is beautiful. Volta's blade shines like mercury beneath ribbons of moonlight, and already he is forgetting its weight in his grasp.

In a way, it is more rewarding than tossing the thing into something amorphous.

At least he has something interesting to watch.

"Should I expect to be cursed now?"

He is in the midst of leaning down to withdraw another knife—wood-handled, bone-bladed, the tragic Saint Rheya—when he snorts, before plucking Saint Rheya out nimbly and spinning her around and around until he is no longer in front of the stranger but besides him, a trick of the night, the scimitar's fragile dulled edge resting lightly along a pale and moon-dappled neck.

A grin flashes across Caine's mouth, quicksilver sleek, before the scimitar is lowered and thrown (into the sea), leaving nothing behind but a half-second memory of presence, and then absence, and then whole, eternal disappearance.

"You should have asked that earlier. It used to be, but if there is any curse left in its metal than, rest assured, I have just taken care of it for you."
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August
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I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved


The stranger’s skin is too dark - surely in this evening light, but likely in any other - to see where his smile does or does not go. But his words, those travel easily enough now that there is little distance between them. When August catches them he twists an ear, dips his muzzle in something that could be a nod.

“I was, once.” His sigh is small, light as the froth that vanishes into the pebbles of the beach. “But on behalf of someone else. None of it truly belonged to me.” All those riches, those velvet rooms, the fine meals, the wine decanted in cut-glass pitchers - it seems very long ago, it seems to have belonged to someone else. A dream he had, the kind that repeats. Now, he has the sword at his side and a head full of outdated secrets. The only thing he’s added this year is scars.

And so he can understand, as the black pegasus continues. August knows better than he ever has the meaning of dead weight.

Even as he speaks of being cursed, he’s beginning to relax in the other man’s presence. His comment had been facetious, but there is nothing hyperbolic about the crescent he finds against his neck; even something as little as his exhale presses his skin against the cool blade. The grin the stranger wears is just as sharp, and then both are gone, the weapon with a whine as it cuts nothing more than air before being buried at sea.

August closes his eyes long enough to swallow his sudden, hot anger. He was, after all, intruding. And the man was, clearly, well armed and (perhaps) not quite sane. He’s lucky to have nothing more than the memory of a sword at his neck.

“What a relief,” he says, opening his eyes, urging his heartbeat to take its tempo from the slow, steady roll of the sea. He doesn’t step away, though neither does he care for the way the other man’s nearness, and sharpness, and wings makes him feel smaller. He has never had trouble navigating a world of creatures who are more than him.

“Will you keep any of them?” He manages to keep his voice nonchalant, as though his blood might not be even now mingling with the foam at their feet. “I’d hate to go without a weapon, times being what they are.”




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