This keening soul;
This night the nightmares are worse. Sea chokes her, swells up inside her lungs, her veins and no amount of starfire burns it out. Leto flees the swamp, she flees the sodden earth that was her pillow and the blanket of darkness that covered her.
It is Bellum Steppe she finds, where stars watch the meadow below. Flowers glitter in the moonlight, they turn toward the moon as they might toward the sun and Leto stops where she stands.
Flowers sway and beckon her in with chinking petals that sound like bones on china. They are teeth clacking, and a foreboding creeps and crawls its way up the star-girl’s spine. Why did she stray from the borders of the swamp? Why was she cursed enough not to sleep well anymore…
Slowly she steps into the flowers, and their bodies are solid against her limbs. They tap at her legs, they ring like bells and join a symphony of song that echoes through the Steppe. There is something wrong when a land of violence suddenly turns to beauty and tranquility. Eeriness laughs in the croner of this place. Darkness has a million eyes and they watch her like the gem-flowers catch light.
A flower whispers to her, wrong, wrong, wrong. It beckons her lips down and they go. Lower, lower her lips slip and as the flower croons and leans in, Leto’s lips part, a hiss escaping through her teeth. She snaps toward the flower and immediately it snaps away.
Her ears fall to her skull and she turns to run, to escape the flowers that sway and cackle in resounding, peeling bells. They whip at her galloping legs, their petals strike her legs like whips and the Ilati girl runs on as a star descends from the sky, alighting upon a flower and melting through its precious stone petal.
Leto jumps out of the meadow, her veins glowing with the fire of her white blood and she streaks from the Steppe, a torch amidst the night. She would not return to sleep so easy.
The flowers merely laugh and dance and wait.
@Random Events
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: loooooong
***STAFF EDIT
@Leto has rolled a 1! She has been awarded the common Agora item Breeding: Healthy Pregnancy for interacting with the flowers.
