IT'S A TERRIFYING THOUGHT, A RED RIDING HOOD
WHO KNEW EXACTLY WHAT SHE WAS DOING WHEN
SHE INVITED THE WILD IN
The black island, her homeland, seems a distant memory. Summer had never been a real season there; instead it brought torrential downpours and mornings that held the cold into evenings, everything fog, everything fetidly humid. It had always been the season of rot; bodies clogged and stinking on the shoreline, carcasses strung apart by gulls. No, summer had never been a friendly season, a season of growth and blooming—
Nothing like Novus. Nothing like the cool atmosphere of the mountains at night, where the air was so fresh the sea seemed a distant memory. Boudika carries with her the scent of the ocean; salt; kelp clinging to the leonine threads of her tail; fresh fish; baked sand. The further she travels the more it begins to fade, until her nostrils fill only with the thick aroma of the woodlands, the pine, cedar, juniper, crushed foliage underfoot. The earth turns up at her heels, a ripe and bursting odour of wet soil, fresh from a recent rain.
The trek is a long one, and all uphill. Her ascent is taken without fatigue; her lungs fill eagerly and her body, completely utilitarian, delights in the burn of muscles. Her reasons for venture so far from the sea are complicated at best, and guilt-driven at worst. Denocte is a city that took her in; sheltered her, when Boudika felt as if the world had turned against her. She had sought to repay the city by taking up the mantle of Champion of Community but, since the magic island and her Changing, Boudika has scarcely visited the city streets. It is in part due to fear—the ravenous hunger in her stomach, the nearly amorous lusting for flesh—and in part out of guilt. She had been go so long it seemed wrong to return, and, anyway…
What if they feared her? She knows her the persecution of her now-kin intimately. She knows the persecution of her breed with a firsthand knowledge, as she had once been responsible for wholesale slaughter. Her tongue slicks over her too-sharp teeth, and Boudika diverts her thoughts by cresting that final hill and—
Eventide Arch opens before her, lit beautifully by Caligo. The sky above is clear and fully visible, with a dusting of stars. Boudika cranes her neck back and admires the view; it is as if some great god sprinkled a handful silver dust across the black-velvet sky, and left it there.
There is the Arch itself. Newly constructed, the power is both ominous and welcoming. Paned glass windows catch even in the night-light; Boudika walks until she rests at the center of the open arch, staring away from Denocte and down the path that leads to the rest of Novus.
She stares quietly, almost thoughtlessly. But in her stare is knowledge that northward lay Solterra; even from here she can catch Verenor peak, and knows that to the east lay the Court itself, and within the Court—
A palomino who was once sea-speckled grey. Now, he glows luminous and golden, marked by innumerable tattoos.
Only Boudika knows better.
Boudika knows.
The Day Court Sovereign, named Orestes, bears exactly one hundred scars from her people and with his new magic, stripped of the Old Magic of Oresziah, they glow with the vigour of Solis’s blessing.
Boudika is not surprised by this; Boudika is not surprised to discover he is serving another people’s, far from their homeland. No, she is not surprised at all.
She is only surprised he is alive, and they are separated by a distance greater than the land between them, greater than what is fathomable.
Boudika finds that the openness of the arch does not matter. She cannot force herself to step forward and the sea, at her back, beckons her to return.
@Antiope || "Speech"
