She watches him with quiet consideration as he paces, treading careful, laborious pilgrimage into the depths. She frowns, for she knows that travel all too well. Knows, also, what it is like to be a memory-treader. How it leaves you skinned and naked and raw. Painful. Fulsome. Empty. Everything, somehow at once, all made dull and funereal by time. Or by the unknown. Or simply by the fact that there are no answers, not really, where you had thought one day you’d find them. Where you were sure you might be able to scry some meaning from the entrails of everything that had come before, you realize the feeble limits of your own grace. Your own ability to understand the meddling of gods and anti-gods.
She sighs and nods. She knows what had brought the war to Nordlys. It had been petty differences. Culture ties, geographic borders. Gods. The way gods can be split and used as masks to hide warcries. Used as a way to differentiate oneself from another – to draw lines in the sand that cannot be breached by one side or the other, and so they serve as the margins of strife and death and martyrdom. How so easily it all becomes convoluted and garbled, twisted and turned into beasts of no reason.
“Hubris,” she mutters, “the steady weakness of a society. I think my people thought we could fight something we could not, too. Tried.” She shakes her head, remembers the night she fled the Morthalion harbour on a trade-galleon due anywhere but there. How horses had crushed one another to board, tripped over their pearls and samite cloaks, and the poor. How the streets had run red, how the fires had burned and became almost beautiful as she watched, through teary eyes, the final goodbye of her homeland. She had gotten out early.
She had held no pretence that she was strong enough to face that eldrich army.
Stella takes a deep, hitching breath and smiles, nods at the map once more before asking it to roll itself up again, guiding it back into its holder. “Of course,” she feels the cold, burnished curve of metal against her ribs, the engraved telescope she had bought as a very young woman from a very old man with a very heavy accent. His stall had been crowded with meticulously arranged curios and instruments of science and alchemy. Beakers of glass and metal; scales and weights; a shiny, copper alembic and a gilded, spherical astrolabe, it’s framework of rings resting on the heads of three small, rearing horses.
A copper telescope, the polished curves of each section engraved with intricate filigree and images of stars and moons, and the words: RESPICE SEMPER AD CAELUM. Look always to the sky.
“Intiuion and feeling is still a part of it. Always will be.”
Alone. She looks down at her argent hooves for a moment. What a weighty question. Where is Kyrr? Where is the belladonna man? The others, who had crowded the deck of the ships she had fled on? “Utterly,” for there is no reason so answer Azrael dishonestly. It has been that way for a long time. Her mother had died before they could meet more than skin to dying skin. Her father had drank himself to death on sorrow years after the war. She still carries the forgotten fire, an ember from her mother. The keen scent of badger’s blood and bush knowledge from her father. Kyrr’s passed-on insights into what to eat when your stomach hurts (peppermint and fennel).
“I suppose I am trying to get used to it, this time around. I’ve always found comfort in knowing there was a place for me to go, to come back to, when I was ready. I am no longer convinced that exists anymore, that it’s wise to lend trust to a certainty that is not.” So when she came to Novus, she had not ingratiated herself into a court, as she might have before. But had sworn herself to nothing, as nothing has shown her most reliable.
She smiles, tilts her head, “it does not mean I do not wonder on where my loves ones have ended up. As I am sure you do too...”
She sighs and nods. She knows what had brought the war to Nordlys. It had been petty differences. Culture ties, geographic borders. Gods. The way gods can be split and used as masks to hide warcries. Used as a way to differentiate oneself from another – to draw lines in the sand that cannot be breached by one side or the other, and so they serve as the margins of strife and death and martyrdom. How so easily it all becomes convoluted and garbled, twisted and turned into beasts of no reason.
“Hubris,” she mutters, “the steady weakness of a society. I think my people thought we could fight something we could not, too. Tried.” She shakes her head, remembers the night she fled the Morthalion harbour on a trade-galleon due anywhere but there. How horses had crushed one another to board, tripped over their pearls and samite cloaks, and the poor. How the streets had run red, how the fires had burned and became almost beautiful as she watched, through teary eyes, the final goodbye of her homeland. She had gotten out early.
She had held no pretence that she was strong enough to face that eldrich army.
Stella takes a deep, hitching breath and smiles, nods at the map once more before asking it to roll itself up again, guiding it back into its holder. “Of course,” she feels the cold, burnished curve of metal against her ribs, the engraved telescope she had bought as a very young woman from a very old man with a very heavy accent. His stall had been crowded with meticulously arranged curios and instruments of science and alchemy. Beakers of glass and metal; scales and weights; a shiny, copper alembic and a gilded, spherical astrolabe, it’s framework of rings resting on the heads of three small, rearing horses.
A copper telescope, the polished curves of each section engraved with intricate filigree and images of stars and moons, and the words: RESPICE SEMPER AD CAELUM. Look always to the sky.
“Intiuion and feeling is still a part of it. Always will be.”
Alone. She looks down at her argent hooves for a moment. What a weighty question. Where is Kyrr? Where is the belladonna man? The others, who had crowded the deck of the ships she had fled on? “Utterly,” for there is no reason so answer Azrael dishonestly. It has been that way for a long time. Her mother had died before they could meet more than skin to dying skin. Her father had drank himself to death on sorrow years after the war. She still carries the forgotten fire, an ember from her mother. The keen scent of badger’s blood and bush knowledge from her father. Kyrr’s passed-on insights into what to eat when your stomach hurts (peppermint and fennel).
“I suppose I am trying to get used to it, this time around. I’ve always found comfort in knowing there was a place for me to go, to come back to, when I was ready. I am no longer convinced that exists anymore, that it’s wise to lend trust to a certainty that is not.” So when she came to Novus, she had not ingratiated herself into a court, as she might have before. But had sworn herself to nothing, as nothing has shown her most reliable.
She smiles, tilts her head, “it does not mean I do not wonder on where my loves ones have ended up. As I am sure you do too...”
@Azrael
☽
