[P] if you don't believe, you better get superstitious -

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

The old gods were singing again, and it was not a pleasant song.

It broke hearts and molted feathers. It was smog in the lungs, an icy ringing in the ears. It lilted through Terrastella’s streets as omnipresently as  the blackguard hum of a swarm of bees, or the sound of flutes so often swirling from the citadel: no matter where Marisol looked she found their ire in the sharp corners of the citadel, the cracked cobblestones under her feet, the way rain still silvered the sidewalks days after their storm had passed. And they were not the only ones. Smoke poured from Delumine, snow from Solterra - that song of blood and bone and death carried through all of Novus as easily as it ever would.

It blares in Mari’s ears days later as she stalks the court in endless circles, prowling with all the angry grace of a predator. Lights are still snuffed out. Windows are still shattered and doors still boarded up. The streets are empty but for the regime and a few dead-eyed, dedicated warriors, and even those don’t for very long, muted and depressed by the state of their city. The world is deadly-dark and quiet. Shoulders hunched and hair newly shorn in what might even be a measure of grievance (or, perhaps, just a renewed dedication to her duties), Marisol is little but a shadow with teeth in the gloom of the capitol, stony-eyed as ever and unwavering in her watchful patrol. Bruises silver her skin. Still-healing scabs line her shoulders. And no matter how many citizens she might have saved - well, it isn’t enough.

Still her people have died. Still they suffer by the hands of the gods. Still they lay sick and weary at the mercy of the world around them, and all the blood in Marisol’s body would not be enough a sacrifice to save them.

It is in this brooding state that she stumbles into the twins. Quiet as the city is it’s easy to follow the footsteps on the cobblestone, and although Marisol is pleasantly surprised to find that it’s Ard and Erd waiting around the corner, her face would never show it: dark lips downturned and gray eyes steely in the dim light, she acknowledges them with only a quick flick of the ears upon their meeting in the street. 

Hail Vespera, comes the greeting, dull and simple, and Marisol squares her legs perfectly underneath her. 

She watches the boys with something like sorrow. There is a strange hint of mortality in those endless gray eyes. 

If only any of them could know what is coming.

@Ard @Erd