A party, how wonderful! Really, Relic loves social events, and as a sage, he finds it of the utmost importance to meet the members of his court as well. The kirin hummed as he made his way through the meadow, the twilight heavens above dancing on his scales and horns, even on his hooves as he took steps through dark grass. It was a beautiful night for a party, a crisp early autumn, and he bobbed his head slightly.
So far, there weren't many, but he was happy to nod toward his sovereign with a warm smile, before looking away from her gilded frame, her hair like molten gold water. Instead of poking around others, he settled himself near a fire, lifting a book from a handy little satchel (borrowed), and he carefully opened it to read over it.
The witch doctor was oftentimes reluctant to leave the breathing, buzzing closeness of the swamp. Certainly there was nothing that she, the chosen of Vespera, could hope to learn from the queer folk that clambered about like ants in the stone tower to the west, and they seemed reluctant at best to set foot in the shadowed holiness of Tinea.
Good.
It belonged to the Ilati. The Ilati would keep it.
Now, though, the air was thick with scheming whispers that fluttered like birds from all corners of Novus, and the sun rose before a blood-red sky each morning, heralding war. She had read the portents as plainly as Turhan. However fervently they isolated themselves, the meddling of outsiders would one day reach them. She did not lust after getting involved, but she would sacrifice every outsider to the appeasement of Vespera before she let their petty politics destroy her people.
The outsiders had gathered in the open fields. She hobbled toward them, head low, vertebrae bristling in her coarse mane like the hackles of an otherworldly dog, and her skull-shrouded head swayed side to side, the ensemble clacking against itself in the clear evening air. Between the bloody paint, the rattling of her bones, and the subtle rasping of each breath, she seemed more predator than prey, an old throwback to times when hunters did not bother to skulk in shadows. Back then, their supremacy was utterly assured.
She singled out a stranger that seemed particularly gaudy with his bright scales and broad antlers, perusing a book by firelight. The orange glow cast her strange silhouette in even deeper shadow, painting a demon into the contours of her toothy visage.
"Dis night red moon risin', swewll," the witch doctor growled, a greeting as dark and portentous as the whispers heard 'round the fen.
The Witch Doctor The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
@Relic swewll - secwepemc word for 'fish', so used for Relic's scaly skin.
The book was an interesting read, telling old myths and weaving legends with words so eloquent and well strung together that he was more buried in it than he had first thought. At least, until there was the sound of hooves, and it was then that the ancient lifted his head slowly, his good eye turned toward the stranger with a smile on dark lips. It was soft, small, but there as he watched the other approach, casually tilting an ear as he placed the book down atop a clean rock to keep it from being damaged.
She was a strange looking one, like some of the herds he had seen in his travels with their ancient ways and natural deities, the howls of guttural voices against the sky in the dancing moonlight. It had been interesting in the times he had seen them, but they were all so different in so many ways. In the crackling light of the fire, she looked like a creature that had crawled from the dawn of time with her primal vocals and her looks.
A true beauty indeed, one connected to the lands in more ways than he could ever hope.
All the same, his ears twisted, and he slowly stood himself up to not seem so rude, his horned head facing her, revealing the jagged scar over the right side that was the source of milky white blindness. She used a language he hadn't heard before, at least in terms of a name or nickname, and he only drew in a slow breath, rolling her words around his head.
"Not red just yet... there's no blood to reflect in it." His head leaned back to gaze up at the sky, flicking an ear before he looked back down to her. "Not yet, at least. Certainly, there will be at some point, with what's happening." He had tasted the sour tang of war in the air, the hostility that fizzed and sparked, the soft claps of thunder from a distance before lightning would come barreling down with a torrential storm.
The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
The witch doctor swayed as though to the rhythm a drum she alone could hear, her scowl only transcribed through the pull of her lower lip around her jutting tusks. Who was he to deny her portents, to doubt her connection to Vespera?
The answer to that, perhaps, was obvious. He was no one to the Ilati, as she was no one to him, and if she could not help but surge with a sense of ruffled condescension at his presumptive relaxation she could certainly guess the source of his ignorance. He was an interloper, one of the soft creatures cushioned within castles of wood and stone, who retired to silk sheets and read books and forgot the feeling of night's watchful eye upon him or the taste of mud-gritted grass in his mouth. Of course he could not see the shadows falling, so absorbed was he in his queer hobbies.
With a guttural hiss the dust-spotted mare lurched toward him, rattling with each uneven step as the many bones round her hair and neck clicked against one another. "No blood? One eye see half de worl, miss much." She peered into his eyes - the good and the bad - eyes narrowing in the impenetrable shadows beneath the mask, and licked her lips. The tip of her tongue dragged along the serrated edges of the skull's still-sharp teeth and drew a thin oozing of blood, filling her mouth with copper and the full-bodied awareness of Life in its most sacred, concentrated state.
"Blood dere," the witch doctor said, prodding at the stallion's breast with her snout. "Blood here." She touched her own chest, the eagle skull clacking as though affronted by the intrusion. A flash of reddish saliva coated her teeth; her tongue bled freely, if slowly.
"Mad you make um Vespel. Soon you see." Her words rasped aggressively through an accusatory glare.
Soon they would see indeed. The very bones of the earth groaned for release, stirred like ancient dragon thighs beneath the surface - aching, stiff, ready to burst forth once more.
And he was reading books.
The Witch Doctor there are no grotesques in nature
Raising his head, Relic was more interested in the way she moved toward him than threatened. He'd lived for millennia, and this was simply a time where his immortality had finally shed off of him like a winter coat in the spring. "No blood shed just yet. The moon reflects what it sees, not what is inside us." The words are a low rumble, a simple admission as he stood, allowed himself to be poked with her muzzle at his chest. He disregarded the statement on his sight, not really ruffled by it. After all, there was much he had seen, much he had missed. This was one of the things he'd missed; creatures like her, made of earth and bone and connected in ways most primal, where no others could be.
Vespel. Vespara? The deity? His ears flicked as he watched her glares, her pinkened teeth from blood that slid from her tongue. "If I make her mad, I will face her wrath. I do not fear deities when I have been one of them myself." Perhaps not all powerful, but immortal. It was nothing against those that wielded magic as easy as breathing, but he could weigh his experience of the world with them. Should he be struck down.. then perhaps it was his time. "If I'm struck down, then my time has finally come. I've seen plenty of the world over millennia. I've missed much, and seen much."
He was flawed as any, he knew that. His long life did not grant him the ability to be some perfect creature and he would be the first to admit it. "Tell me, how do I anger the goddess?" It was curious more than accusatory; after all, gods and deities were all fickle things. "How was she, before the court...?" His books only offered him so much information, when here in front of him was a woman that came from the past itself, it seemed. She likely carried years of stories in her head too.
The first records of our young world
were those of tears and blood
***
The witch doctor drew in a hissing breath through her displeased grimace as the kirin spoke, her scowl invisible beneath the mask to all but Vespera herself. He thought to pick her brain? After that display? Her shaggy fur bristled along her back, her tail switched irritably against her rump.
"You idiot god den," she fired back derisively in a tone that said far more clearly than her limiteded vocabularly would allow that she did not believe for a second he had been anything more than a cushion-sitting, tea-drinking Court freeloader growing fat on the bounty of others, in this life or any other. "Swewll ack ver' big an' 'portant. Swewll read big book an' whole brain fall out." She laughed, an ugly jackal sound.
Pacing a rough and aggressive circle around him without consideration for such trifles as personal space, the painted mare continued. "Vespela talk wit Witch Doctor, she talk wit Ilati. Vespela give um sand-girl an strong medicine. Swewll have big book an questions, an when da gods come to punis de courts, doing noting no save swewll from dere wrat."
The witch doctor may well be the most accomplished healer among the Ilati, but she was every bit as sharp as the skull she wore and every bit as wild as the swamp she called home. She had no patience for the games of cityfolk.
***
The Witch Doctor
Its last records will be those of tears and blood also
A low laugh bubbled in his throat, and Relic chose to merely smile slightly. A god to some, perhaps, he was, and maybe he was an idiot at times. Was he not prone to what mortals would do? Stumble and fall? While he had been immortal, that hadn't meant that he was someone immaculate. No one -- even deities -- was spotless with their record. "If I was, than I was. I am not some all powerful thing." Not anymore, rather.
His head tipped as he attempted to translate her words, though he was fairly certain Swewll was some sort of name for him, and something told him it was nothing nice. Not that he expected it to be. "I read a book and learn about a land I've just come to. Though if my brain falls out I'd be surprised." He was clearly unruffled by her words and her tone, a man that had been rounded by millennia.
Still, he was curious. His ears pricked as his head followed her motions, his good eye keeping focused on her, the other merely a blank and milky thing buried in scar tissue. "So what do I do? Go back to the old times, perhaps, a sacrifice? Or maybe she wants more than something as simple as that." Now he was really sparked with curiosity, standing on gleaming hooves as he watched the painted mare.
Primal, aggressive, every bit of what everyone had used to be at one point, before growing accustomed to living in structures and learning to read and write. She was smart, he knew that much. Her vocabulary meant little when it came to intelligence, there was a gleam he could see in the depths of the dark holes on her mask.
The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
"You no learn about place from book. You learn from place," she sneered, bone-ridged neck arched with savage imperiousness. She saw not the unruffled patience of an ancient one but the vacant stare of a buffoon who had no idea of even how much he knew nothing about. If he had lived that long, a claim that could hardly be believed in a place where immortality was a rare gift from the gods to their most loyal and deserving followers, then he had lived it in darkness and ignorance.
And, while the witch doctor might have been more than willing to share her expansive knowledge of medicine and herbs with the Ilati, she had approximately zero patience for a basic history lesson with an emotionless fuddy-duddy reading books by firelight. Her bobtail switched metronomically against her rump in her agitation, then abruptly slowed as the corners of her mouth turned up in a half smile empty of compassion.
"Too late for swewll. When judgment come, you see."
They would all see. They would face the gods' wrath and they would turn their eyes to the sky in pious desire for mercy. Perhaps then Relic would see fit to show a shred of mortal emotion about things, lift his eyes, and look at the world through his own eyes rather than the eyes of a possibly-dead author.
With one last jerk of her skull-masked head, the spotted mare stalked out of the firelight in much the same way she entered it, swaying with each step like a battle-scarred lioness.
The Witch Doctor there are no grotesques in nature
Relic was left more baffled than he had been in the very beginning of their meeting. She walked as a predator away from the fire and him, back in to the shadows that she had first appeared from in the depths of the land, and he flicked his ears a little, curious.
It was rare to find anyone that was so dedicated to their beliefs and those of the olden days, of the old ways. It plucked at him in ways he hadn't felt in a long time, made him long for a simpler age. Once upon a time, in the days of prayers and blood. Perhaps it was safer now, but many did not know the dangers that were still lurking.
The kirin drew in a breath before letting it out again, his nose shutting the book the next moment, the cover glimmering in the sparks of the fire. He only was left to his own thoughts, and it was something he was content with, at least, until he picked up the book, and took his own leave of the party.
