made in the projects
slave to my progress
slave to my progress
O is not surprised when the card reaches her.
The name touches something in the back of her head, a memory that has gone buried, a bell rung just barely. White Scarab. The signa is familiar enough it feels like a long-lost friend, and O sears it into her brain again and again.
It reaches her on a warm wind as she plods around the abandoned forges at the edge of the court. They are stale with disuse and covered in fine amber dust; their fires have long gone out, and surplus tools lay half-buried in the sand - sickles warped into waning moons, chunks of mottled ore, wire brushes encrusted with old rust. O shuffles her hooves through the bright sand, winds tightening circles around the forges and ovens. She tosses the hurlbat in so many casual arcs, comforted by the weight of the steel in her telekinetic grasp, and wonders absent-mindedly if this is where it was forged, before it ended up in the oasis and then in her hands.
If someone forged it, or something. A deity, an ousted king, an old god.
Anyway, it hums just like her heart.
She is poring over a particularly damaged poker when the card hits her shoulder. She startles, and turns to look; already it has been partially obscured by the ever-shifting sand, and she has to dig it out with a small, dark hoof to look more closely. It is round-edged and perfectly black, and the scarab in the middle gleams bright against the dark and the sand, and when O sees the text that reads follow the signs she almost, almost smiles.
The card zips up from the sand, nestles in the pocket that usually holds her axe. The hurlbat follows.
She twists her hair away from her face and turns toward the Arma mountains.
-
By the time she finds her way into the markets it is blackest, deepest night. Lamplight kisses skin. Tall buildings blot out the tiny twinkles of stars. Hoofsteps click on the cobblestone and murmurs are passed between mouths and O slinks like a coyote between the crush of bodies, narrow hips and shoulders shifting to fit, eyes roving watchfully. The card is still tucked against her side. She almost feels it burning -
It burns hotter and hotter and hotter, until she wants to scrape it away, but she turns a corner and there it is, and it’s worth it, when she sees the building.
It rises like a little moon over the spires of Denocte. Grand and bright and pale, O wonders how she hasn’t noticed it before; she is not well-versed in the streets of the Night Court, but could not possibly be dense enough to forget something like this. It glimmers like a pearl, shines like a fire. A little palace, strange as it is to call it that, against all the grime and dark of Denocte. Her step slows. Lanterns shudder from their scones. In the dim light O shimmers in and out of visibility like she is no more than one of her father’s card tricks.
The door is inset with a little onyx scarab. O draws to a stop and stares at it, at the little beady eyes, the too-detailed wings. For a moment she pauses, as if in deliberation of whether or not to knock. But she is merely gathering focus: she magicks a gauzy cloak around her shoulders and neck, glittering like sunlight on water, insubstantial as gossamer. It seems to make her skin twist and shift from gold to black and back again, a mirage in the dark, and when O finally does push her way through the wide doors anyone who looks at her would see not a girl but a conglomerate of shifting colors and parts, only vaguely yearling-shaped. The hurlbat at her hip turns briefly into a branch of hemlock.
For all her courage, O takes her time to adjust.
It is dark. Dark enough she has to blink to see properly, that the pattern on the lavish carpets seems to twist and bite like so many serpents. It smells faintly of jasmine, smoke, something similarly dark and bitter.
O raises her head; no one has noticed her entrance, or if they have they’re too distracted to say anything about the girl who shimmers and twists like an optical illusion.
@aghavni | "speech" | notes: <3
