I'M NOT ONE TO EVER PRAY FOR MERCY or to wish on pennies in the fountain or the shrine, but that day you know I left my money, and I thought of you only - all that copper glowing fine
The sun is the only thing that is moving in the midday sky, but it is not setting. Instead – and her stomach clenches – instead, the sun is writhing, jerking to and fro like a child’s toy caught between two warring infants. The gods, is all Seraphina can think. This is the work of the gods, or something far worse, because she cannot help but think that there must be worse things in lands beyond their own, or perhaps in the depths of the sea, places so dark and primordial that no light can touch them. Of course, didn’t she already know that this was Tempus’s work? Didn’t she know, in some horrifying, heavy way, the moment that she saw the ivy?
And didn’t she know - didn’t she know - that, regardless of what followed, the appearance of a god would always mean some great change in the world they live in?
She wonders what it means. If this is how the world will end – not with some great burst of flames, but with excruciating silence, enveloped with the stillness which comes, as death, to all things.
But – they are still moving. The wildlife is gone, but the people are still moving; she sees them here and there, among the leaves or on the shoreline, as shadows, cast oddly beneath a never-ending stretch of sunlight. Under different circumstances, a day that lasted forever might have seemed an auspicious occasion, to a denizen of Solis’s court. This, however, just makes her think of Caligo’s eternal night, an story she has only heard of in whispered folktales, but one she knows as well as her own-
And with it, a detail that makes her blood run cold. And Tempus could not stop his daughter, for time’s balance could never be restored if a single part of it was frozen-
Her mouth is dry. She steps on a branch, and it does not crack beneath her hooves; when she brushes past elephant’s ears and thick bushes with bright red berries, they do not stir to accommodate her movement. Ereshkigal flies above her, the pinions of her wings barely brushing the curve of her spine, but she does not disturb the air. It is lifeless, dry, deader than the air in the middle of the Mors when there is no wind and the sun is in the very center of the sky. It feels like the air of a crypt.
Her skin crawls. She has not been so solitary as to miss the rumors – of disappearances, of the horribly-mangled dead. Didn’t she know they would die? Didn’t she expect this to happen? (Didn’t she know that the gods were cruel, that their magic was cruel, that this was a test in the same mold as the tests Viceroy would give her as a girl? Why are you surprised, you shouldn’t be surprised, you knew better, you know better - she knows better.) She wonders if she will die here, too.
(A bead of sweat trickles down her brow. She cannot shake the sudden feeling that something is watching her, though all those little creatures in the undergrowth seem to have disappeared. The island itself, perhaps. Does it have eyes? She wonders, sometimes.) “Don’t look back,” Ereshkigal whispers, her voice a low, throaty rasp, and Seraphina doesn’t. She keeps walking. She does not run. She does not run. She knows, when she reaches the shoreline, that the bridge will be there, and she can escape the island – but she knows that she will not be any safer on the bridge. (The thought leaves her with the sensation of tentacles – sticky masses of rubber, sticky, slick with slime. Tentacles, inching around her torso, her throat, dragging her off that little stretch of ink-black, down below the waves…)
Even if she crosses, even if she returns to the seaboard – she knows, knows that if the gods are quarreling, there is nowhere in this world that is safe to return to. The best place to stay is the epicenter, where, if she is clever, if she survives, she might finally be given some sort of answer.
Ereshkigal lands on her shoulders, claws curling into the thick leather of her armor. The sudden weight is almost enough to make her jump; normally, the vulture would laugh at her skittishness, but she is unnervingly silent. (And she told her that she would not look back – how could she be sure that the thing on her back was Ereshkigal at all?) But Seraphina does not look back. Seraphina does not ask is that you, Ereshkigal? Seraphina is silent, silent, silent, like all the rest of the world. If that is not Ereshkigal, she does not want to know.
There are many things in this world, she knows, that do not bite unless you give them the satisfaction which comes from recognizing their teeth.
When she passes the treeline and steps out onto the beach, the weight disappears. A moment later, Ereshkigal lands at her side, and she does not ask if it was her in the woods. Instead, she steps forward, towards the water, towards the water - her hooves should disturb the sand, and trail it when they lift up, but none of the grains stir with her passage. In the sky, the sun is great, and it is terrible, and somehow she is sure that it is closer than she has ever seen it before, and she has stood at the side of its god. It is terrible, and it is burning, and she is terrible, and she is burning, so she looks up at it and she thinks she sees some terrible mirror of the gaping space growing in the darkness between her ribs. Jerked. Tattered. The water is frozen in motion; it is still, but in a strange way, the waves like some foaming painting, a moment preserved. She wonders if she could even pass through it if she touched it, or if the surface had become hard and solid, like metal or clay. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know, so she looks to the sun, but it does not look back. There is no golden figure who breaches the edge of the horizon; there is not even Tempus, who is likely more qualified to fix troubles with time anyways. There is no one. She looks up and down the shore, expecting some other figures, but no one is there.
If this is the end of the world, she and Ereshkigal are watching it alone. “Solis,” she whispers, her voice a barely-audible tremor – a flighty thing, like the beat of a bird’s wings. “What is this?”Where are you, she begs. Where are you?
But, as usual, his answer never comes.
something solitary & vaguely creepy. I'm enjoying all these twists and turns! "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
STAFF EDIT***
@Seraphina has rolled a 3! She has been awarded +150 signos.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
IT SPROUTED A FEW HOURS LATER INTO SOMETHING THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES, WHICH I HAD NEARLY FORGOTTEN. IT BEGAN TO SING --
This, Septimus thinks, is the sort of unfortunate situation which inevitably ensues when mortals meddle in affairs that are beyond their realm of skill or knowledge.
There is a dead girl lying on the ground in front of him. Serpentine, floral vines are stretching out her open mouth, which has been pulled back so far that her jaw is broken; the plant seems to have taken growth somewhere in her throat. There is a dead girl lying on the ground in front of him, her body shaded by branches and leaves, and the only reason her body doesn’t stink is that the world has frozen up around them. The sun has remained in the sky for more than a day, and not in the way that the sun sometimes remains in the sky near-endlessly in some distant, far northern regions. No. This sun jerks and twists like a lightning bug caught in a clear glass jar, captive to some fascinated child.
So. There is Septimus, there is a dead girl, and there is a sun that does not behave like a sun. If he were less accustomed to such strange, deadly things (or even if he had fully acknowledged his own mortality), Septimus might have been – rightfully – terrified. He is not. He is still curious, and a bit sympathetic for the dead creature in front of his hooves. Mortals always died, of course. He’s seen them die countless times. But this one is young, very young, and it is a terrible thing, he thinks, for any creature to have its lifespan snuffed out when it is so far from its prime, when it has so much life left to live. He doesn’t dare touch her, because he does not want to draw out the vine, but he dips his head and whispers a sort of prayer in the language of the Wilds, and he wonders if this island can understand it.
(He does not pray to any god, of course. He still does not believe in them.)
With that, he strides forward, his strides so careful, so practiced that they barely so much as brush the seemingly-endless vegetation which populates the forest floor. Even if his limbs brushed against it, he knows, within a second, that it would have returned to itself, as though he had never touched it. Perhaps that was the world as it should be. Who ever gave them the right to touch it? (He always comes back to the Wilds, in the back of their mind. Even if they wanted to touch it, to change it or meld it to their will – the Wilds were a creature of their own, and they did not tolerate disturbance.)
Perhaps, he thinks, this is an act of reclamation.
(And he, the unthinking traveler – so content, like a snake crept back into its own skin, that he does not realize that comfort is sometimes a trap.)
@ || RIP this NPC, who died for the sake of me having set-up in this post, I guess. "Speech!"
STAFF EDIT***
@Septimus has rolled a 3! He has been awarded +150 signos.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
The changes on the island were not as noticeable at first. Here and there, Morrighan would catch something in the corner of her eye but dismissed it as her imagination. Now she could no longer ignore it, especially after what happened with the young boy and woman back in the forest.
She could still remember looking up and seeing the trees change before them. It was like time had gone into hyperspeed and the seasons changed in front of them. Only it wasn't just one season, it was all of them… at once. The trees shook and shed their leaves which shriveled up into brown crisps beneath their hooves. The now empty branches loomed over them only to slowly blossom again with new buds that sprouted flowers. Within seconds they shed the petals and turned to fresh greenery again. The mare had been left wondering if she had been dreaming or maybe one of the mysterious fruits she had eaten was starting to affect her. From what she could tell, this was simply how the island was acting now.
As if the walls and walls of ivy and the berries with hearts weren't creepy enough, now all this. It also seemed since the strange episode in the woods, the sun no longer set. It still appeared to move across the sky, but night no longer existed here. It didn't sit well with the mare and she was starting to feel that her time on this island was coming to a close. Besides, the relic hunt was seeming to be a bust anyway.
Then again, she didn't want to be seen as a coward who ran at the first sign of danger. Morrighan grumbled and headed off in the direction of the pool for a drink. As she walked on, she realized the ocean waves nearby no longer roared in her ears. It seemed time had completely stopped here and she only hoped she had not become a prisoner. Although if that was the case, she'd gladly set the place on fire.
STAFF EDIT***
@morrighan has rolled a 2! She has been awarded +125 signos.
IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
Oh, seven hells-
When she’d returned to Novus, she hadn’t been prepared for the world to break. When she’d returned to Novus, all she’d wanted to do was check up on Locust and sell the goods she’d collected on her most recent voyage. When she’d gone to the island, she hadn’t been prepared for the world to break; all she’d wanted was a little bit of adventure, possibly some profit.
She wasn’t sure that there was any amount of profit that would be worth what was unfolding before her eyes.
The sun had been up for more than a day already. Even when she’d sailed to the northern-most reaches of the ocean, where months stretched on that were almost entirely day, there were rare periods of darkness, and the sun still moved across the sky; she could see it well, from the deck of the ship. Here…here, the sun did not move. Here, the world was listless. The waves rose up along the shore, but they did not move – when she pressed the bottom of her hoof to the surf, just to test it, it was hard and unmalleable, like ice.
Locust stood in front of the unmoving waves, her lips curled into a dark grimace. (She hopes that it won’t hurt the hull of the Strider like ice would, back in Denocte, assuming that the condition of the water extends to the opposite shore – in the absence of a better explanation for this, her mind defaults to the practical.) She thought of demons, of deep-sea horrors, of gods – she thought of the stories she’d heard of strange phenomena on the waves (which often seemed relegated to triangles), of the strange things she’d seen on the sea. Ghost ships. Many-eyed, tentacled beasts. Voices with no owners. Places where the ocean would end with a great, great waterfall, which went further down than anything she could see from the edge – possibly forever.
This was different. That was strange, but it was strange in a passive way. If it was predatory, it was predatory in a way that was impersonal. When you passed through the horrors of the sea, you had the feeling of insignificance; those horrors would exist regardless of you, and you were not even so much as a speck of dust in their face. This horror was different. It was personal, and it was malevolent. She’d heard tales of the dead, of ancient caves of flesh-devouring acid and land that swallowed up to eat the living.
She watches the sun, still and lurid in the midday – what time was it? – sky. This was not mindless. These were not the actions of something mindless. No, this was horrible because it was intentional, because there was some mechanism at play that none of them were aware of. She thought of crossing the bridge back to shore, of trying to board the Strider and escape to distant shores (if she could find August), but -
She doubted that this thing - this force - was escapable. (Once a shark was on your trail, did you run? No. No, you had to outwit it, to strike it where it would bleed, to go for the gills or for the eyes…) Even if it were, Locust has never been one to run. No, she had never been one to run; she had been one to devour what would devour her.
She’d far rather go down fighting – with blood in her teeth.
|| aaaand done for this round || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
STAFF EDIT***
@locust has rolled a 6! She has found a strange, iridescent feather that may come in handy later... This item will grant your character an extra roll in a future RE! Please message @sid or @nestle with questions.
Baphomet slid along the brush, her almost feline movements barely rustling the branches and making nearly no noise. Stepping into a clearing, she shook her head, sending waves of silken tresses everywhere before standing and taking stock of the world around her. She stood like a royal statue, her head raised and white cross gleaming under the bright sunlight. The rest of her white markings were hidden in the underbrush, leaving just her sooty bay and chestnut coat to gleam with good health and care.
"This realm is unusual... It should not be the bright of day, but yet the sun is high and making the world glow with its golden heat..." Baph mused, her velvet voice ringing around her. Moving on, her golden bangles rang like bells on each hoof and her crimson scarf played along the vegetation around her. There were other horses on the island around her, and Baph carefully skirted them to explore on her own for a bit. She liked to learn the world before interacting with others... It gave her ways to explore and learn that were not colored by opinions. It also let her figure out paths to get where she wanted to go and know how to leave. Not that she would deny talking to anyone, just that she was not actively seeking it.
"Speaking."
If anyone wants to spin off with Baph, just feel free to tag her and I will throw her in <3
The strange happenings were what brought Corrdelia back to the island.
She was hearing many stories- trees going through all four seasons within minutes, a filly being swallowed whole by the ground, skeletal remains being found in a strange cavern, the sun no longer reaching the horizon. It was all very concerning, especially since not too long ago she was telling Asterion to keep an open mind. Normally she was not one to doubt herself. She had strong intuition, but she knew not to ignore it either.
Hāsta flew by her side as they soared over the endless lava bridge. The crow, as usual, was not a fan of coming here again, but she still insisted on accompanying Corr. A high pitched chorus of the strange birds could be heard in the distance when they arrived. It reminded her that this was no ordinary place and they would need to be on high alert. When they landed, her hooves sunk into the white sand and her companion took her perch on Corr's shoulder.
"I hate this. Why isn't the sun setting?"
"I don't know, but it might have something to do with that god Tempus everyone is talking about."
Everything that was happening so far was pointing to him, so it had to be something related to the mysterious god. After all, he was the god of time, so why wouldn't he be able to manipulate the seasons and the sun itself?
The big question though was why?
STAFF EDIT***
@corrdelia has rolled a 1! She has been awarded +1 EXP point.
She begins to have nightmares of the desert, those long, unending days of torment and heat, of splitting lips and seared flesh and eyes blinded with whiteness so harsh and painful it seemed permanent. She remembers the painful touch of Oculos’ dark fur when he would brush against her, the overblack spots of his brindled, star-painted coat heated to almost boiling. He would dig them holes in the sand, down to the cool grit below, until his footpads bled; and then he would flop in his grave-sized hole and the sides of his body would heave with exertion and exhaustion.
It is not quite so bad under the trees; there are spots of shade and occasionally a breeze ruffles through the foliage, making a sound like flayed skin being sloughed from living flesh. Kassandra fights the dreams, fights them as they try and weasel their way into her brain; she squeezes her eyes tight shut and focuses on the here, and the now. Oculos sits worriedly beside her, watching the sun that behaves erratically, like ethereal beings in the sky are playing a ball game with the celestial orb that so strongly dictates their lives.
She does not know, exactly, when it happens, but eventually a restless energy, like a ghost in her own bones, filters its way through her flesh into her legs. She rises with labored breathing, form and hooves scuffling the detritus and litter beneath her mass, and slowly plods outwards from beneath the shadows into the sun, the sun, the sun that will not set.
Kassandra moves from the jungle to the beach, somehow, in her sleep-deprived, night-terror haunted stupor stumbling less than she does at full consciousness. She sinks to her ankles in the soft sand, lifting her head up to the gods-forsaken sky. She remembers a dream she had, once, of a world where Life and Death fought; Life won, and all things lived, and grew, until the world was swallowed, but there was no escape. She wondered if this was it, wondered if the dichotomy of sun and moon, day and night, light and dark, Life and Death, was finally thrown off it’s scales, the delicate balance, usually so unseen, unappreciated, knocked away forever with the same errant nonchalance as a child kicks a ball.
The sun beams down on her face, warming the dark spots on her pelt to an uncomfortable level. Her whole world was silence, the stillness of the ocean, the deadness of the air. Oculos paced and whined at her side, nipping her gently, imploring her to come back to the relative safety of the shadows. He was ignored.
For all her life Kassandra had felt some connection with the stars, however distant, however… muddled and confusing the true spectrum of their relationship. It was a damning, heavy darkness on her mind to realize now, with the sudden realization of perhaps never seeing them again, that she missed them.
kass doesn't do too hot on no sleep lmao
THE NIGHT SO BLACK THAT THE DARKNESS HUMMED
STAFF EDIT***
@kassandra has rolled a 2! She has been awarded +125 signos.
It was dawn when he came across the carcass, and the sound of the buzzing had overwhelmed the hum. A curious despair fell over him at the realization that the hum had diminished slowly, gradually, a small fear curdling at his core for what would follow the encroaching silence – though what he found did not deepen or disgruntle that fear by any means. A simple mishap, so seeming, the way the leg was split and twisted in a way that it should not have been. The bone was sharp white, a gleaming white, a licked clean white; it struck out from the knitted fibers of flesh like an arrowhead, jutted eerily from the disfigured anatomy far too unnaturally to be of any coincidence. For a moment he assumed that the helpless thing had collapsed, after misfortune had so seen it through, having a broken ligament that warranted full game to those who loomed as predators. The ribs were bent and some broken, tissue receded back against the ivory, earthy brown a filthy, tattered leather that complemented the pink fingers of skeletal bars – slashed across, so that the innards (or what was left of them) had been provided as a feast for the flies, for the worms, for the teeth and the eyes and tongues of those who cared for decay.
But he didn't care to pay particular attention to the sheen of the ribs that curved like a cold embrace, like a coffin lid. The pallor of the leg bone – where it jut out just above the hock, sharp and thick – was what kept his attention. It was the sheer white of it that drew him, that kept him perplexed, that possessed him with a hunger to know, to understand. It was not coincidence, the longer he observed it, so he resolved in musing the coldness of its appearance and the immaculacy of the way in which it shone, mercilessly, so much so that it almost glowed in the peering light of dawn. The skin around it had peeled back – artfully, not with rot but as though it was intentional, like rolled up clay – to reveal the bone. The flies, too greedy, too bloated, too careless, sought his live flesh with a grieving hunger that could not be sated on the dead. Their gluttonous mouths turned to his warmth, suckling on the perspiration that beaded, biting when it was not enough. Each he flicked or nipped from his flesh when their famished mouths were too exploratory – but the buzzing droned on, and where one was felled another two reclaimed its place.
Though the nuisance of the flies seemed to grow by the ticking second, his observations uncoiled with each wonder in discovery. The blood was cold, the muscles laxed, and most its insides removed like sacrificial rite. It was clean, cleaner than a massacre should be, if a massacre was what it was. A poor funeral deserving of a better eulogy, if even by an enemy's means – there was no pool of deep red, no spindling fibers of sinew that came unraveled from the body like an unfinished kill. The heart, the stomach, the lungs, and the liver had been removed – and he wondered if it had been by choice of appetite. What was left was something that only the insects could indulge themselves on, and even that was sparing. The body was celestial, if only in death, and the events that took place afterward defined that too well: buds had formed where he initially thought had writhed the pulsing bodies of maggots, black and bulbous. Now pulsed instead small, beady sarcophagi like swollen ticks, rounder and rounder until they formed a seam like a frowning mouth. His brow furrowed, and he took a step back as that mouth unfurled – spread wide to reveal within itself a display of blooms that quite resembled african violets – but instead grand shades of vermillion and some glowing hue between orange and yellow that he hadn't seen in nature before except in glimpses of the sun on the edge of the dusky horizon. Their opening petals edged with needles like teeth – pins, golden and hair-thin, stretched themselves like a tired lion's maw beneath the shadow of the flowers.
And then - snap.
Three of the many that bloomed had cracked their jaws around the curious kneading of flies and bees and beetles, suspended in fluttering wings until they succumbed to nothing. Four others followed suit in consecutive order, while the rest sprouted between rib and intestine and dirt and maggotry, until the corpse slowly brimmed with the sun-drop flowers that all but replaced the organs that had been removed. The buzzing of the flies increased – too much despite their imminent deaths, they were swooned to the flowery corpse, quickly forgetting the warmth of the stallion and his salt-licked flesh, until their drone was almost unbearable and the flowers seemed to grow in hundreds, nurtured by the writhing bodies.
Erasmus took a step back to allow the final flies that clung to his shadow to discover their new fate, and returned his fixations to that gleaming white bone. It pointed like a finger, sharp and direct, an arrowhead on the face of a map. And beyond it lined a trail of similar flowers, not made of sunlight but deep, deep red – and about them a faint pungence of death. Obeying some sense of deliverance, he discarded the carcass behind him and took to the path that unraveled ahead, unaware of the shifting lights that warred overhead, cast out by the looming foliage. Each bud bloomed with the urgency and haste that looked too much like drops of blood hitting the ground, but instead pulled from the earth in the movement. Too enthused with their nature, he hadn't immediately noticed the change that had unfolded over the island until he realized the hum – the thing of epiphany that became something terrible, pestering – had ceased entirely. No longer did it pulse in his ears, an enigmatic sound that droned like white noise.
He looked back to where the carcass lay. The buzzing had stopped. The clasping jaws of the flowers were suspended – either shut or open, but none given to any motion even so much as bouncing in the breeze. The breeze by note had gone out, all that remained was a stagnant air that grew with humidity, swelling and sweating and choking out his sensibilities. The birds, where once they had flung from branch to branch, watchful and aggressively conspiring, had all turned to silence and gone. Even beyond the forest he could no longer hear the roaring of the waves.
And in the emptiness looming and lonely, the silence sounded something like fear.
Metaphor’s death has hit her hard. Her heart feels as though it is beating, but it has been shredded and mangle beyond recognition. She feels as though she is simply drifting through life, letting her depression consume the best parts of her. While she is still conscious and well within her mind, her desire to do anything but pray has all but left her.
And yet, there is something still strange about the island that appeared not so long ago. It calls to her and almost sounds as if it calls out her name specifically. She follows the calling, hoping that she might discover something at the other end that will help to mend her heart and soul. Perhaps she will get a glimpse of her lover, a moment to tell him just how well his child is doing growing within her womb. Perhaps it is the gods calling her home, taking her away from this life she has begun to hate.
Regardless of the reason, Katniss finds herself following the voices, her path leading straight towards the island. She stays there on the beach, listening to the waves crash along the sand. She also prays. She prays for hope, for wisdom, for strength. But then, suddenly the world seems to stop. The waves no longer crash against the sand, the wind no longer howls. Animals have grown scarce and the sun appears as though it has no intention of setting. Eyes look around her, looking for anything that might make some sort of sense.
It is in this moment that Katniss feels the weight of being absolutely alone. She sinks into the sand, her body laying out flat as she surrenders herself to the magic, danger, and wonder of this island.
STAFF EDIT***
@Katniss has rolled a 4! She has been awarded +200 signos.
Delumine was hardly enough to keep her mind occupied these days. It was her own thoughts that had become her worst enemy. For hours on end, Sloane would remain in the library, reading or thinking about all the lost secrets of Delumine. She wondered what those that came before her were like. She wondered if all the past kings and queens had understood the secrets that this library held. In her hours of discovery, she had uncovered many secrets, locking them away for a rainy day. But there was still one secret that she needed to unlock, that she needed to understand. That secret was the island that had arisen out of the ash of a volcano.
That island, though no one truly understood it, held so many secrets that Sloane was absolutely determined to uncover. And so, on this particularly sunny and hot day, the mare had traveled from her own little private island that she had grown to love, back towards the island that held so many unanswered questions.
Her journey had begun at dawn and she had traveled throughout most of the afternoon. By the time she had arrived on the mysterious island, the time should have been well close to dusk. The sun should have begun it’s descent already, the moon creeping out from behind the clouds. But what Sloane found was that the sun was still set at mid-day.
Eyes looked up at the sun, eyelids squinting at just the sheer amount of sunlight that flooded her senses. And as she looked away, she realized just how oddly quiet this island was. There were no birds in the air, no sand crabs scurrying through the sand. Even the waves had seemed to halt. Curious. Very curious.
STAFF EDIT***
@Sloane has rolled a 1! She has been awarded +1 EXP point.
