[P] every awful second

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

It is near-dawn when Mari leaves the festival. Overhead the sky is awash with gauzy pinks and purples, stained with beginning color and only the earliest warmth of the rising sun, and against the low-slung outline of the Dawn Court, Mari is simply a dark feline figure stalking through the streets. The blunt cut of her hair is off-putting against the softness of everything else - the way she walks, predatory and mechanical, makes her stand out like a sore thumb. Delumine is not made for a girl like her, she knows. Is not made for someone so much a soldier. 

Still she slinks past stained-glass windows and ribbons floating in the wind, past cobblestone buildings and gilded wooden doors. The world is utterly quiet around her. Most of Delumine is fast asleep or fighting a hangover - either way, they’re deadly silent. Mari can hear her own breath, her own blood, her own steps on the pavement. It is utterly fascinating. Terrastella is hardly ever this dead, at least at the times that Marisol patrols; even in the early morning she’s likely to come across Florentine or Asterion deep in thought and wandering the streets, never mind their caretakers, stumbling out of hospitals and herbalist shops only as the sun comes up. The deepest, strangest parts of her are comforted by this sudden aloneness, and she has to force herself not to read too far into it.

A bird coos overhead, soft and musical. Mari’s ear flicks. Her gaze snaps upward for a half-second, just catching the last beats of its wings as it disippates, and something warm and off-putting - something near to appreciation - hits her in a moment, then disappears the next. She quashes it.

Marisol turns the next corner absent-mindedly, then stops in her tracks, wings flaring in surprise: at the other end of the street, a silhouette looms, black against the watery sun, moving at a militaristic click. The Commander’s gray eyes narrow. With only a moment of pause, she pushes her wings to slick back against her ribs and starts to move forward, head tilted upward, strides contracted and composure steely. 

Greetings.

@tieran

[Teiran]

Teiran had come to the festival held by the Delumine natives to, she unabashadly would admit, search for any potential dangers for her people. She had not come to play and have fun and make friends, even if she knew how to do such things. Which she did not. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how one looked at it, the Solterran soldier and not found any such threats hiding among the flower crown wearing crowd. Even that man, Raymond, had turned out to be annoyingly cheerful and accomodating. 

She left quickly, after that. As a first trip outside her sand bound home it hadn't been entirely awful she supposed, although she certainly had not had the time she thought she would. Regardless of what Tieran had and had not found she was more than ready to return home. Her court called out for her, tugging her back in the direction of it. So, she walked through the empty streets at a pace that suggested she knew were she was going and did not want to be disturbed.

At least, that's what she thought it said until the sound of approaching steps reached her ears and a voice filtered through the silence. Her eyes settled on an unfamiliar face, although everyone she had come across at the festival had been unfamiliar to the rose hued woman. Dark like a summer night, but for the brown at her eyes and mouth and a splash of white on one rear leg. And those eyes, grey and akin to the steel of the dagger Teiran liked to wield. This pegasus was certainly not of Solterra, for she carried not the smell of sun and sand with her.

"Hello," she responded with little to no fanfare, and though she was not hostile there was no warmth to her voice nor her eyes. "I suppose you are leaving, unless you are of the Dawn Court. Was there something you needed?" There was a sort of familiarity she recognized in the way the other woman carried herself, the stiffness of her shoulders and the sharpness of her gaze. Another soldier, perhaps. What the other wanted from her she could not even begin to guess, however.

 

@Marisol She's such a social butterfly

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

Marisol aches to go home, to stumble back into the embrace of Terrastella. She thinks about it like light at the end of the tunnel; a halo of want, strange only because want is strange to her, a girl so cold and soldierly she does not even know her own thoughts half the time. In the distance she can see the very edge of Dusk territory, shrouded in mist and miles away, and it pulls at every muscle of her heart. Briefly she thinks of the twins and if they’re doing okay alone, then of Theodosia and how her training might be going - then she’s startled back to wakefulness by the response of the silhouette at the end of the street.

The girl is short, taut, militaristic. A silver collar refracts light from its circlet around her throat. Marisol thinks the two of might be similar, never mind the soft brown of the stranger’s skin and her too-bright blue eyes and how they stand in stark contrast to Marisol’s dark-and-grey - more importantly, they’re matched in the tight wind of muscles, the critical way they look each other up and down, the smooth coolness of her voice when she speaks, like steel hardening into its final blade form. It is militarism. That she knows well. Mari dips her head in a subtle greeting and watches the girl with molten-silver eyes.

Was there something she needed? Not really, Marisol realizes, but still she stands firm in the center of the street. Perhaps this is the danger she had missed in the crush of bodies that filled the festival - perhaps there’s something to be discovered here, the information she’s been waiting to unpack and take back to Terrastella. The girl is Solterran, that much is obvious, and Mari’s constant prowling at the borders has made her privy to whispered rumors of the Day Court’s violence, the fire that swallowed their capitol, the anger that lives inside every one of them.

Seems dangerous enough.

I suppose not - seems it’s just in my nature to look for trouble where there is none. A faint smile washes over her lips, then disappears, as if brushed away by the breeze that surrounds them. You’re Solterran, she says then. It might have been a question but for the way her voice lilts down at the end, as if she already knows the answer and her words are just a casualty of politeness, and they very well might be.

@Tieran

[Teiran]

Teiran listened to the other woman speak and if she had the social faculties she may have laughed over their similarities. She too had come looking for potential trouble and found none, and she had been both disappointed and satisfied. Not that she wanted to find any threats to her people or her home, but she also might have enjoyed doing a bit of surveillance. Instead, she had been forced to mingle and socializing was low on the Solterran's to-do list.

And here she was, having to do it again. Cruel irony.

"You might try looking at your own people," and she did not say it to be cruel or sharp. No, Teiran knew all too well how the ones you shared your home with could devastate everything. The Davke had risen from the desert sands she knew so well and burned her home and killed the citizen of her Court. "I met one whom wields a blade from his tail, which seems a little convenient," her voice was dry, monotone. Perhaps Raymond had caught her off guard with his amiability but she did not really trust him. She did not fully trust anyone.

The winged woman's observation was not a surprise. Teiran carried the smell of sun bleached sand in her skin, wore the hardened expression of a Solterran native. She was carved from the Elatus Canyon, born of the Vitae Oasis. At the same time, though she did not know which Court her companion belonged to, for Teiran had never traveled to any but Delumine, she recognized the same smells clinging to this one as she had the red man. She guessed Dusk, for she heard regularly that Denocte liked their oils and fragrances, and this warrior carried none of that on her hide.

"You didn't find what you were looking for then, I take it, if you are still searching," Teiran assumed, because she felt the same way. If you eliminated the location of danger, there were less places for it to be lurking. If her Court did not need her, the rose hued woman might have spent more time looking. But there was work to be done, and if something were to happen while she was gone then who, she wondered, would put themselves on the line like she to protect it?

Not that she didn't think there were others capable of fighting for Solterra and its people, but Teiran knew she was more than equipped to do it and would, without hesitation, shed blood if it meant keeping them safe. It was what she had been trained to do, afterall. It was, really, one of the only things she knew.

 

@Marisol

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

One who wields a blade from his tail..

At that, something like amusement flares in Marisol’s dark eyes, or recognition, at the very least - Raymond, she says, acknowledging that vague description with the name and a light dip of her head. Who else would it be? Blade from his tail isn’t the most inauspicious detail to add, but it’s quite the defining figure, even on a man as strange (maybe even suspicious) as Raymond. Trust me - if I could find a way to remove the blade, I would.

What other way is there for Marisol to admit, even slightly, she’s as distrustful of most of her court as Tieran is? Outside of the Halcyon ranks, truly loyal citizens are hard to find, and friends even harder. No doubt she’s more inclined to trust her fellow Terrastellans more than she would the average Day Court asshole, but still the soldier in her won’t let her guard down, looks for the bad in everything, the omnipresent danger, the threat lurking dark and sharp-toothed around every corner.

She thinks Teiran might be built the same way.

I did not, Mari agrees. Her dark lashes flutter slightly against the watery-pink dawn light. I should be relieved, but - I just feel  like I haven’t found it yet. Her voice dips low at the end of that sentence, putting emphasis on the possibility that still looms around them - yet. They still are standing on some kind of precipice. No danger, yet. No horrors, yet. But it could very well still happen.

Perhaps it has. Only quietly. In the way Mari's heart stirs in her chest, or her nerves pick up a bright pace under her skin.

@Tieran

[Teiran]

"You would not be the only one," Teiran said. Truthfully in some way she almost envied Raymond. It was a feeling she'd had when they had spoken at the festival and again now, mentioning it to the Terrastellan. Perhaps she wanted to be able to wield a weapon that was so readily at hand, but she would not want the same to be said of anyone else. Anyone else would be a threat. Raymond was a threat, she thought, felt. Perhaps she did not know in what way, but she believed it true.

"Just because it eludes you doesn't mean it isn't out there," the Solterran soldier speaks, agrees. She had stared down the barrels of enough guns to know there is no such thing as true peace. Comfort and safety are illusions, but damn good ones. Teiran refused to let her guard down just because nobody started trouble at a flower festival in Delumine of all places. Her sage green gaze flickered over the winged woman at her side and Teiran felt a sort of camaraderie with her—like the kind she felt with Seraphina—but incomplete. There was no silver collar, no army of child soldiers they shared. And yet, somehow, they were of a similar vein.

She wondered, then, if she should warn this woman of the Davke, and then if she also should have warned the Deluminians. Teiran could not say if they knew at all of the attack. What Seraphina had decided to tell the other courts, if anything at all, was not really her business. It didn't seem like the Davke to leave the sand and sun soaked home they had killed for, but Teiran did not trust them or their unpredictability. "I find it's easier to suspect everyone, rather than no one," she said at last.

@Marisol