[P] castles in the air

[Lothaire]

CHILD OF THE COSMOS AND RULER OF THE SKIES

 
The world below slowly burned, the corners and edges of Denocte curling inward - blackened by the redfire sunset and the promise of nightfall. He watched as a timeless ritualistic dance between day and night unfolded before his bleak gaze; there was no triumph for Solis here; only the absolute dominion of Calligo and her chaotic descent. The emissary, having visited Solterra once at the end of a long airless summer, recalled the heavy feeling of time weighing in his bones with every step taken across that old whispering sand. There was something infinite about the desert, something transcendental that had settled into the pithy hollow of his chest; weighing him down, and even still he could feel the dregs of whatever singed entity had made a home inbetween his ribs. People breathed rumour of the magic hidden within Caligo's palace, but they did not often speak of the Solterran illusion - but Lothaire knew - oh he knew the way the asphyxiating heat had conjured illustrations only a devil and an angel could have cast. Images he would never forget.

A cold wind buffeted his sinewy frame, faint patterned skin glinting in a wash of red as the light died slowly. Deciding to rest but a few more moments upon this isolated precipice before embarking on the final descent into the land of Night and revelry, Lothaire inhaled deeply. Already the flickering of newborn candlelight had begun to decorate the lowlit prairie, stirring only an angular tilt of his head in recognition. Nothing had changed in his absence; the revellers would dance on still, the thieves would steal and the wolves in the shadows would watch with the same perpetual hunger.

Then, from the blooming darkness, came a sound: it warbled on the thinly-stretched air, twisting and dancing toward his formless ears. At first he remained statuesque save for the slow bloody beat of his pulse throbbing beneath the membranes of his skin, closing his starless eyes to listen purely to the sound spiralling toward him. Memories and nightmares flashed violently in the secret, sealed tombs within his head - tombs barricaded shut to shield himself from horrors of his own design; but even from the outside of those chambers he could see the flares of white light spangling and radiating through the cracks around the doors. Dread seeped slowly into his nervous system, his blood thickening into crystallised poison; this strange song contaminating his body with a cancer he had long thought dead. A single image now: his second winter, snow gripping the window frame, Mother. Her kaleidoscope gaze dull and choleric; but from her lips had come the most beautiful sound he had ever heard - only the second time he would ever hear her sing.

Lothaire is drawn from the past by a foreboding hand. The singing had stopped without him even realising so deep had he sunk into his mind. Silence now; darkness. And something else, someone else. His vacant black eyes bore into the dim light, consuming the sight of a girl who had appeared like magic from the mountain, almost as though Caligo herself had placed her there. The man does not flinch, or start, at the discovery of this fairy - for that is the label to which he instantly assigns this pearl-skinned woman, with braids and roses in her ethereal hair and eyes as wide as the sky. Would her porcelain body shatter if he elected to beat the air with his colossal, taloned wings? He stared, only the sound of their rhythmic breathing layering the heavens beneath which they stood. The fairy looked perturbed, by what? - he could only imagine. Her scent flowered and flourished, lilting toward him as he filed it into a corner of his library - Delumine. She was a child of Dawn. Of course she was.

A long drawl melted into the cold air, as toneless and as vast as his gaze and being.

"You have travelled far, with only a song and a rose."

And so it began.

@messalina ahhhhh c: