If Sacha were smarter, he might've prepared himself at least a little before interrupting the summit. As it was, he showed up laughing, clueless, and more than a little drunk.
It wasn't his fault, not really - when he had stopped by the opium tent to tell everyone he was leaving, a little later than most others had left but mostly hot on the heels of the Deluminian regime, Paphos had, of course, sent him off with a toast. Then the toast turned into a round of drinks mixed with some nerve-tinglingly strong whisky, then another one, then another, and by the time Sacha had actually made it out of Delumine his blood might as well have been red wine for how loosely he could almost feel it splashing around in his head.
It didn't matter, at least not to him. Gods be damned if a little day-drinking would stop him from following the party. Intoxicated and laughing he had stumbled off toward Veneror, and with an almost unbelievable amount of luck, here he was, arrived at the summit - still tipsy, with twigs in his hair and new scrapes peeling back the deep-red hair on his chest, but still in one piece by most anyone's standards.
When he entered, the Summit was packed nearly wall to wall with strangers from every Court, and, he suspected, perhaps far beyond: not a single face looked familiar, even when he squared his broad shoulders and began to push through the crowd. Murmurs passed through the air. Tensions rippled like drumbeats through the ground. Obnoxiously indifferent to the importance of the situation, Sacha raised his head to scan the horde more thoroughly and smiled as he realized just how many had come here. The attitude of the meeting was half celebration, half death knell, but if he had anything to do with it, it would be a party regardless.
"Hey," Sacha bellowed in the ear of the stranger closest to him, an unsuspecting outsider he couldn't have been paying less attention to if he tried - "What are we all waiting for? Where'e the drinks?"
SACHA;
open to anyone! | this is his first post so bear with me i know it's ugly |ellipsiem
I couldn't hide from the thunder in a sky full of song
Virun wanted to go home.
She wanted desperately to return to her more comfortable, academic lifestyle. Terrastella hadn’t been unkind to her, but her friends hadn’t returned to her, and she felt horribly, horribly alone. She wanted her books, again, and her spells – and, even more desperately, she wanted her family. For that, she had risked the crowded, rugged trek to Veneror. If she could find the gods, they might be able to send her home.
Even though she couldn’t see her surroundings, the tension in the air was palpable. She lingered awkwardly among the throng of bodies, vaguely aware that she was surrounded by Terrastellans that she was vaguely acquainted with and- “Hey.” Loud as a foghorn – and right by one of her curling ears.
Virun nearly jumped out of her skin.
Even if she hadn’t been blind, the sudden appearance of a strange man beside of her, yelling into her ear, would probably have startled her. However, as she was blind, she stumbled backwards with an unceremonious squeak, her hooves tangling in her genuinely excessive tresses; desperate to maintain her balance, her massive wings snapped out, and, while she was far too frazzled to genuinely process her surroundings, she might well have smacked the approaching stranger with them, considering his apparent disregard for personal space. As she steadied herself, her head whipped around wildly as she attempted to pinpoint the direction of the voice – she’d gotten turned around, however, so she was pretty sure that she was looking in the wrong direction entirely, and quickly gave up. What the hell had been important enough to-
Her mind stumbled backwards, and she attempted to remember what he had just asked her. It must have been important. At such a solemn meeting, so tense and historic, it couldn’t be anything less than dire. But wait. Hadn’t he said… "What are we all waiting for? Where's the drinks?"
No. That was completely and utterly ridiculous. She had been startled, so she must have misheard him; that was the only possible explanation. She blinked, scouring her brain for words that sounded like “drinks.” Minx? Jinx? Lynx? Unlinks? Precin-
The wind chose that precise moment to shift directions, and she might as well have been whacked across the face with the overwhelming stench of alcohol. Virun came to the sudden, horrifying realization that, whoever this strange man was, he was very, very drunk, and very, very confused. Clearly, he didn’t know where he was, or what was going on – otherwise, he couldn’t possibly be acting like this. They stood in the presence of the divine.
She was reasonably sure that she could get drunk off the alcohol radiating off of him, but, at the very least, it allowed her to turn to look at him. (Was there a bar on Veneror that she didn’t know about? Good gods.) “What are you talking about?” In spite of her best attempts to sound like she was anything less than utterly dumbfounded and mortified, she was reasonably sure that she sounded much like a prisoner being led to a guillotine. “What drinks? This is a meeting with the gods, and the regimes are trapped.” It didn’t occur to Virun, who was terribly sheltered on a good day, that this explanation might do little to clarify the gravity of their present situation to a man so inebriated; then again, she wasn’t the best at explanations for people who were completely sober, either.
The atmosphere of the summit is incredibly tense, and Sacha chooses to disregard it completely.
Why stress himself out when he’s got nothing left to lose? Dawn is empty save for Paphos, boring and stuffy and erudite as ever, nothing but books and dust to bore him to death. It seems that everyone in Novus has migrated to Veneror to stick their noses where they don’t belong, and Sacha is happy to follow the status quo.
He glances down at the stranger beside him and notices her , truly, for the first time - coated in dark purple and a motley of fine feathers, eyes a globe of lilac sans pupil, the smell that floats off of her one gentle and delicately feminine, in stark contrast to the alcoholic stench that sticks to Sacha’s skin like a burr. She looks anxious, like the whole world is something to be scared of, like this is a car wreck in motion and not something to be celebrated.
Confidence only slightly dimmed, his azure gaze narrows in consideration. Perhaps this was a wrong turn to take. Perhaps this situation is more serious than he thought, if the girl he’s staring at now is trembling like a leaf in a gale even as the crowd around has simmered to quietness and calm. Then again, Sacha’s first impressions are wrong more often than not. He can only hope that the celebration picks up speed: right now it looks like more of a funeral procession than anything, and not one anyone wants to be attending.
Distracted as he is by the scene around them, he at least does notice her wing scraping against his side as she falters and attempts to regain balance; with a loud sound of surprise, he snaps his own wing out to curve against her back and hopefully push her back to standing, taunting her with a good-natured, Careful, there, sorry if I swept you off your feet. Still only half cognizant of her blindness, he throws her a wink and folds his wing back in as she begins to speak again.
Trapped! Sacha repeats in surprise. Again, head and gaze swerving over the top of the crowd, he remains blissfully unaware of the logistics of this situation - the sheer volume of his deep voice, how his breath stirs the fine hairs on her ear with its closeness. Iiiin-ter-est-ing, he mumbles mysteriously. Chance of death if they’re all trapped, huh? Only more reason to drink - Sacha bares his teeth in a salacious grin. Too bad it’s a dry spell then. What’s your name, anyway?
I couldn't hide from the thunder in a sky full of song
Apparently his drunkenness has not quite diminished his reflexes. As she stumbles backwards, awkward and entangled by the lengths of her own body, she feels what she can only assume is his own wing snap out against her spine. Although she’s admittedly grateful for the intervention, she’s considerably less grateful when he opens his mouth; there’s something somewhat smug to his good-natured reply, and it takes her by surprise – not that she’s completely sure that she understands the point he’s trying to get across anyways. Swept her off her feet? As far as she could tell, they’d never left the ground. “Excuse me?” She starts, then shakes her head swiftly, as though she’s attempting to rid herself of her vast assortment of – probably foolish – questions. She’s definitely overthinking this. Before he can reply, she follows up with a quick, nervous, “…Nevermind. Thank you.” This much is genuine, even though he is the one that startled her in the first place.
It seems to take him a moment to completely process the situation, and he brings up something that the crowd at large has been too frightened to admit, and he does it right next to her ear, his breath tickling her skin; their trapped leaders could very well perish in the collapsed meeting-place. She shivers, and she isn’t sure if it’s the proximity of his lips or the implications of his comment. There’s something flippant to the way he says it, and it makes her wonder what his prior experience with death is – the way she sees it, only someone who’d faced it many times or hadn’t faced it at all could so comfortably drag out the word interesting, could so easily bring up the topic.
Then again, maybe he’s just really, really drunk. “There is…indeed a chance of death – probably even a sizable one,” She admits, “b-but isn’t the concept of divinity more interesting than that?” Virun doesn’t know any of the Regime members, save Asterion and Cyrene, and, while she thinks that they’re both good people that have helped her immensely, she’s too focused on finding her way home to spend too much time concerning herself with whether or not they live or die. Perhaps that’s a selfish thought to have; she really thinks that she should be more worried. However, Novus still isn’t quite real to her. The people are just shadows, passerby on her way back home to Roskildar.
He asks her what her name is, and she responds without thinking. “Virun. My name is Virun.” Her northern accent slides comfortably across the syllables, caressing each sound. Veer-rune. Veeer-oon. She ventures, then, to ask, “And you are…?” though she isn’t sure that she really wants to know.
Sacha’s reply to her probing about divinity is immediate - careless, even, in the brashly confident way he throws out an answer without even looking at her. Rather than meet those lilac eyes, his gaze remains impermanent and unconcerned, flickering curiously over the crowd that surrounds them, disregarding the seriousness in her tone and discarding the question as quickly as it was asked. (She’s lucky not to witness his subpar social skills.) Divinity has nothing to do with me, he continues. A smoky silver curl falls over his eye as he finally turns to face her. Death does.
It is a simple fact, relayed with the kind of childish straightforwardness that’s typical for Sacha. Perhaps it stems from his overconfidence, perhaps from his stunted phase of maturity - he doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else, and does it matter, really, anyway? It’s still true. All his life he’s faced death, and absence, but never divinity. Mortality but not the gods. Omnipresent as they seem in Deluminian culture, they’ve been silent all Sacha’s life; even if they are as watchful as people believe (a big if in itself), they are passive, and Sacha has never cared much for passivity.
As he looks toward her, scrutinizing, something like surprise flickers over his face. The wind blows both their hair into wild airborne swirls, but it’s not enough to cover Virun’s glassy eyes, with finally make their impression - You’re blind, he points out with mild bewilderment, as if he weren’t expecting it of her, as if he thought it’d be even more obvious. (It’s been said that his obliviousness is so intense it’s almost artful.) Virun, nice. Well, at least if we die we’ll have company. I’m Sacha -
His introduction ends suddenly, clipped with surprising speed; he has to bite his tongue to keep from continuing with Baumann, a habit forced by years of justifying his own bloodline. Virun, foreign as she sounds, won’t know of it unless he brings it up, and he won’t, if he can help it - there are much more interesting things to be talked about here.
I couldn't hide from the thunder in a sky full of song
His reply comes jarringly immediate and nonchalant. “D-death?” She stammers out, dark lashes fluttering anxiously as her lilac eyes seemed to expand in proportion to her shock. Was he some sort of mercenary, or assassin? “What do you-“ She starts to ask, then cuts herself short abruptly, thinking better of it. If he was in that line of work, it was probably better not to know about it; she’d heard unpleasant things about getting involved with people like that.
If she had been able to see, she might have noticed his scrutinizing stare. Seeing as she could not, his realization comes stark and sudden, and she squints at him. “Yes, well, of course I’m blind,” She says, rather tactless in her own surprise, and amends her suspicion that he might be some sort of knife-for-hire. No assassin worth their salt (coins?) would miss her blindness. (She does not consider that it might seem so blaringly obvious to her only because she is so glaringly self-conscious of it; Virun does, after all, dedicate plenty of her time to cultivating the appearance of normalcy.) This is enough to embolden her to finish asking her previous question. “What do you mean about death?” Her ears tilt forward. Some sort of warrior, maybe. Or guard. (But what kind of guard or warrior would show up drunk to dine with divinity?)
He remarks, rather cynically, that, if they die, at least they’ll have company. Her mind drifts again to the trapped regimes, but not for long, because she doesn’t want to remember the sound of Asterion and Cyrene’s voices. Better to push that all away. “I’m too busy to die here,” She mutters in protest, then, in the interest of politeness, adds, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” even though she still isn’t sure that it is. Sacha. He was certainly…different than the people she’d met in Novus so far – where Cyrene and Asterion and Ein had been kind and serious and polite, this fellow was…not unkind, but…irreverent, perhaps. He came to a sacred place and treated it like something that wasn’t sacred at all. Virun wasn’t very familiar with gods, in the land that she came from; by any normal standards, she supposed that she had brushed shoulders with them more than once. Her friends could warp reality to suit their desires, and that was what a god was, right? “If you aren’t here for the gods…how did you end up here?” Looking for drinks, even.
