Have you seen the flames? If they were not so tied to catastrophe, I would’ve thought them just a little lovely.
In a morbid way.
I think I am becoming too morbid, in the hallowed darkness of the Scarab. But can you blame me?
I do not know what it looks like to you in Solterra, but I wanted to assure you that the eruption looks worse than it really is. You should not worry too much.
There is no need for you to come down. We are alright. I will keep things alright.
- Aghavni
Senna’s lips ghosted over the ink of his daughter’s scrawling calligraphy, each one of her carefully blithe words tightening the clench of his jaw. By the time he reached the end of the parchment, a new line had etched itself into the hollows of his brow.
He shut his eyes and wondered when she had learned to conceal her distress as deftly as her mother.
She told you not to worry. Nestor’s wings brushed softly against the curtains as she sailed in through the open window. She told you not to go. But we both know, the falcon lowered her white head to preen back the feathers of her wings.
you will not listen. He turned a weary eye towards her.
“I know.”
He had not followed the rest of Solterra out to gape at the sky when a thundering — louder than the seraphim’s cannons, louder, he’d thought, than the sundering of the world — had sent the crows taking to the skies in great, black flocks.
(His memories of the chimaeran war drifted in and out like actors on a stage. They visited at unwelcome hours.)
His bones still remembered the makings of chaos. His skin still remembered the heat of flames. He glanced out the window, at the sun not yet hitting the apex of noon.
He folded the letter into quarters.
“If we head for Denocte without delay, we will make it there by nightfall.”
The black clouds. The scarlet sky. The ember horizon that pulses like a glowing heart, where scarlet meets with sea to collide in sparks of orange and white, orange and white.
Ash flecks Caine’s midnight coat like snow. He blinks it from his lashes, snorts it from his nostrils. He watches, impassive, as the crowds stream past, stricken eyes turned out to the sea. The corners of their mouths tug up and down like gull’s wings as they struggle to find the appropriate degree of horror to wear like a death shroud.
The volcanic air smells like Vectaeryn. It had not been called the Smoking Coast for —
He starts. A wailing child brushes past Caine's wings, and he stills when something wet presses against his feathers. "What —"
Then, he realizes. That it is not blood, as his first instinct had thought it to be, but something far more concerning. A girl.
A sniffling child who, for what reason he has yet to fathom, has turned her tearstained face into his wing like it was a tissue.
Gritting his teeth, he retracts his wings mechanically. What does she expect for him to do?
She stares at him menacingly, and answers with a louder wail.
"Alright." Gingerly, Caine extends his muzzle towards her. Alright. There is nothing else he knows how to do, except for what he has always done.His magic taps against the inside of his skull like a branch against a window.
He cranes his neck down towards her, and his thin smile warns for the child to keep still as flames begin to leap from his silver eyes. His magic snakes along her cheek like a lullaby. She keeps as still as a porcelain doll.
He shudders when the dreams begin to flow like cold water into him. A stack of half-formed, hazy paintings. He grabs at the clearest one, and hopes that his hunch is correct.
A flash of warm, golden eyes. A curl of chestnut hair. Deep skin, like chocolate. He cuts the flow of his magic like the twisting of a faucet, and scans the crowd for the mother.
"There. Do you see her?" He nods towards a head of chestnut curls. "She's waiting." Go, his lips curl, but the girl is already off before he has the chance.
He shakes his head, quietly unsettled. He forgets that the air smells like smoke, and that his mouth tastes like ash, for the rest of the night-black afternoon.
@Random Events | "speaks" | notes: even I don't know what happened but it's 3 am and I'm beat
I touch the French window
And leave you behind, one last time
When the earth roars, Sabine knows it is not with rage.
When she casts the spell of her window-wide gaze out across the choking sea and flickers beneath the bruised bulbous clouds overhead, she sees only fear upon the face of mother nature where others see wrath.
What does the sky know of fury?
The hum of chaos does not blind her. She sees the tears as they fall from land into water: weeping and inflamed and nuclear-orange.
She wonders, if she were to dip her hand into the ocean, would her skin now fall from her bones? Sabine did not think, even if it did, it could hurt more than when her heart had been ripped out from between her ribs. She still carries the scar; can you see it?
The world has committed treason against itself; nature is bleeding death through an orifice across the water and the girl can only watch as the mighty traipse like ghosts into chambers filled with gas and ash and terror.
She does not follow them. She does not try to save them.
For she knows fear and her home has always been on fire.
As if the fires within Denocte weren't enough, now the world appeared to be on fire.
The smoke engulfed the horizon and suddenly everything became dark. It was when her lungs began to suffer from all the shit in the air that she finally decided to go out and see what the hell was happening. She didn't get a good vantage point until she got along the shore and that's when her eyes went wide.
It was like nothing she had ever seen before. The Great War had been one thing with the cries and screams and bloodshed, but this… this was much worse. It was as if the world was tearing itself apart and going up into smoke. The cracking and crunching could be heard in the distance and, for once, Morrighan felt scared. This was something entirely out of her control and there was no telling what was even happening. Judging from the voices and the cries from others around her, no one knew what was going on. Was this how the world ended?
A crowd was beginning to form along the shore as more and more gathered to watch the scene unfold. For Morrighan, she had seen enough and plus she was getting tired of breathing this air. Now it was time to find those that she knew and maybe get answers. It wasn't just Raum they had to worry about, it was this too. The grullo mare, now pissed, pushed her way through the crowd and ran. Somehow, her homeland seemed less chaotic than this one.
***STAFF EDIT
@morrighan has rolled a 2! She has been awarded +20 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.
This is not the first time that Locust has seen a volcano erupt.
No, it’s not the first time that Locust has seen a volcano erupt, and, in fact, she has stood even closer to eruptions in the past – perched at the front of a ship, watching the steady formation of an island through the glossy lens of a telescope. Now, that telescope is certainly broken, buried somewhere hundreds and hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the sea with the rest of the Sea Star. Still, the memory of stumbling upon an active eruption and watching the lava for some time is a fond one, unhindered by the events that came – several years – afterward. She had been much younger then.
She picks her way down to the shoreline, smoke-thick air tangling in her white hair. (It was tangled anyways.) The sky is ablaze with fiery reds, interspaced by thick, black clouds of smoke, which trail and split the horizon in spaces of flame and void. Occasionally, the clouds are split by a fork of lightning, pale blue or violet – but never, she notices, white. Cinders and ash float down like black-and-red flakes of snow; she blinks strays off her lashes, because gods know she doesn’t want that in her eyes. (It would hurt.)
Around her, Denocte’s inhabitants seem to be possessed by an overwhelming sense of horror and dread. She supposes she can understand it; by all accounts, the sky is on fire, the gods are about to descend from the heavens, and the world is coming to an end. Ridiculous rumors, of course. (But amusing ones.) She passed the island when she came to dock in Denocte, and there seemed to be nothing unusual about it. The eruption might have been worrying, had it occurred closer to shore, but, as things stood, in spite of the dark tendrils of smoke which were descending like skeleton fingers over the coast of the Terminus, she doubted that the eruption was close enough to the court to cause any real problems. At worst, the smoke would be a bit damaging to the observers’ lungs. (But she doubted there was enough, from this distance, to do much.)
For her part, Locust decides to treat the whole thing as a spectacle. The doomsayers, the lava, the crackle of lightning – it all seems rather grandiose to her, in a way that makes her grateful that they aren’t slated to leave Denocte for a few weeks. (Months, possibly.) Primarily, of course, because the eruption would stir the water to chaos for some stretch of time, but also because people were often at their most interesting when they thought that the world was going to end. Always apt to do things they’d never so much as consider under different circumstances.
With a flick of one, dark ear, Locust settles on the shoreline, allowing her legs to bend beneath her weight as she lays down in the sand. Even when night comes, barely discernible save through a vague impression of the already-dark sky growing a few shades darker, she remains on the shoreline – content to watch the sea roll, dark and hungry, and hear whispers of the future.
|| catch me doing this just because I can't turn down free EXP, even for characters I don't plan to keep. || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
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