THE ARCHIATER.
It is near-dawn when Mari leaves the festival. Overhead the sky is awash with gauzy pinks and purples, stained with beginning color and only the earliest warmth of the rising sun, and against the low-slung outline of the Dawn Court, Mari is simply a dark feline figure stalking through the streets. The blunt cut of her hair is off-putting against the softness of everything else - the way she walks, predatory and mechanical, makes her stand out like a sore thumb. Delumine is not made for a girl like her, she knows. Is not made for someone so much a soldier.
Still she slinks past stained-glass windows and ribbons floating in the wind, past cobblestone buildings and gilded wooden doors. The world is utterly quiet around her. Most of Delumine is fast asleep or fighting a hangover - either way, they’re deadly silent. Mari can hear her own breath, her own blood, her own steps on the pavement. It is utterly fascinating. Terrastella is hardly ever this dead, at least at the times that Marisol patrols; even in the early morning she’s likely to come across Florentine or Asterion deep in thought and wandering the streets, never mind their caretakers, stumbling out of hospitals and herbalist shops only as the sun comes up. The deepest, strangest parts of her are comforted by this sudden aloneness, and she has to force herself not to read too far into it.
A bird coos overhead, soft and musical. Mari’s ear flicks. Her gaze snaps upward for a half-second, just catching the last beats of its wings as it disippates, and something warm and off-putting - something near to appreciation - hits her in a moment, then disappears the next. She quashes it.
Marisol turns the next corner absent-mindedly, then stops in her tracks, wings flaring in surprise: at the other end of the street, a silhouette looms, black against the watery sun, moving at a militaristic click. The Commander’s gray eyes narrow. With only a moment of pause, she pushes her wings to slick back against her ribs and starts to move forward, head tilted upward, strides contracted and composure steely.
Greetings.
@tieran
