Rhoswen ►
The weak lay hand on what the strong have done ,
At the stagnant pace of a woman slowed by dread it had taken almost a week for Rhoswen to reach the foothills of Veneror, and further days still to ascend through the cloud and the murk toward Novus' cathedral hallowed on high. A heavy fog, born of apprehension and self-loathing, had shadowed her like a lost child, cooing to her through the dark as though in a warped sense it was trying to console her tattered mind. It achieved quite the opposite.
As a child, Rhoswen had dreamed of greatness. Her fantasies had been painted by Aurelian hands that carved and designed an ornate world that was pushed to the edge of excess; narrated by swollen mountains of rhinestone and ruby, halls with tapestries to honour her long bloodred hair, her granite-grey eyes, and armies to raid nations upon her every whim. These utopian dreams had ruled her every waking moment (a salvation from the taunting silence of a goddess supposed to love and guide her) and with everything that she had, Rhoswen once hoped they would come true. With age, came life, and life was nothing like a dream. Life was the aftermath of war: shells of hollow men and caskets for the dead. Life was a long night wrapped in solitude, tied by black ribbon and left at her doorstep - a twisted gift from Caligo to mock her isolation. Life was the grey of a bleak winter sky above a scene she knew so well; an act featuring two thespians (one auburn, one silver) to thunder at each other behind walls of pain and loss and rage.
All so long ago, now.
Rhoswen was not that child anymore. She was not even the woman she had been but two moons ago. From the ashes, the phoenix had not yet risen; her feathers singed, her faith scattered. Everything had changed. If asked just who she might be, Rhoswen did not think she could reply -- for where was the hurricane in her heart, or the blistering forestfire to carry her through the dark? Through the years, the sanguine girl had defined herself by the sunlight that coursed violently through her veins, forever seeking solace from the knowledge that her place in this world did not lie in the tomb of Denocte's ancient crypt. Beyond that, she had realised that it mattered not whether Caligo loved her, for she was loved by a God far superior - in the swell of the desert He had waited to shepherd her home. But the hands of time had revealed a truth that, still, threatened to shatter all that had come before: Solis was not her only love.
Raum. Rhoswen could not bear to think of him, could not bear to look into the crow's eyes and see only the reflection of her failure staring back. He was the chink in her armour, the glacier-ocean to extinguish her fire. Oh, she hated him, hated him so. What a cruel game it was for life to play with her heart in this way; to dangle happiness inches from her grasp only to mutate it into something obscene before her very eyes.
So she had come to the chapel, run to the church, because to stay in that den of shadows a moment longer without hope of redemption was to cast herself in madness, and Rhoswen was not ready to give up yet. The sound of her porcelain hooves against the ancient anointed stone was a hymn to depict her fear: would Solis be waiting to smite her dead? Or, worse still, would she be met with the aching silence that haunted her nightmares, again? As she drew up before the statue of the Sun God, the girl slowed, her fine angular body trembling with the weight of her incandescent emotion. Swirling smoke-filled eyes flashed in the dark, her auburn curls quivering as she dipped her head in reverence. Rhoswen knew her betrayal of Solterra had not been in honour of Denocte -- she was not married to the darkness, or secretly in love with the moon -- no, her treason was named by one man, one man alone, and on this night, Rhoswen vowed to denounce that name forever.
"Solis, I am yours."
worship thread <3
