The waters recede from the Denoctian shores, revealing all wonders of the sea: glittering seashells, brighter and more vibrant than any seen before; stray crabs with intricate designs wrought upon their shells, scuttling sideways across the still-damp sands; wonderful beds of coral and seaweed, of every color known to man, shifting in the wind as they might have once shifted in the ocean current. The stray fish can be seen flopping on the land, struggling to get back to the ocean - but the ones that are left behind do not seem to be dying. In fact, they seem to take just as well to land as they do to water.
For nearly a day it’s peaceful, the newly-revealed ocean bed seeming to call out and invite the equines of the Night Court closer, to inspect the wonders it has to boast.
Until, of course, the waters come crashing back.
It happens in the blink of an eye, waves taller than the walls of the castle roaring in to reclaim the beach. It sweeps in with a fury, taking back its land with all the rage and power of a god. It falls like the crack of a whip, flooding the beach and extending its reach farther and farther up the shores, until the sands fade away and are replaced with cobblestone. The water does not stop, but surges on without mercy.
As the waves crash upon the shore, sweeping through the streets of the city, the storm clouds begin to gather. Thunder and lightning rumble in the skies, but no rain falls - not yet. Dry lightning strikes at the land, while the sea water continues to invade the capitol.
And all the while, the waters continue to rise.
A tsunami has crashed upon the shores of the Night Court! For the entirety of a day the waters recede farther and farther out to sea, leaving behind a wet seabed with all the wonders of the ocean, awaiting to be explored. But the land is not to be trusted: come the next morning, the waters rush back in with a vengeance with waves taller than the castle.
The waters will flood the capitol, but within the city walls with come to be no higher than a foot in most areas; then does it finally stop, the waters ebbing at the feet of the residents, invading houses and soaking the markets. The beach is decimated, structures crushed beneath the weight of the water.
As the waves crash upon the shore, the storm clouds gather. They do not weep, but thunder and lightning crash in the skies, striking at the plains and prairies of Denocte.
Will you be caught in the fury of the tsunami? Or perhaps you’re left to encounter the winds and lightning of the incoming storm, that sparks the ground and leaves glass and smoke in its wake?
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Raymond was never foolish enough to trust the sea.
He rarely trusted anything or anyone, so perhaps that was an unnecessary statement, but sometimes it was good to be reminded that only people are treacherous and not only animals want you dead. The universe entertains creative endeavors only for the opportunity to destroy them, and the sea along Denocte's remote borders lapped and danced its silent threats for all the kingdom to see - should they choose to look.
Raymond had looked, had marked the sea's erratic behavior, and the part of him that ate grass and still wanted to jump at the movement of the slightest shadow shuddered its primal affright.
This was the deep breath before a storm. Clouds gathered like carrion crows in the sky, painting it into a sheet of purple bruises, and even Ruth had woken from a deep slumber in the Armas as though roused by an unseen hand. Little tremors - the passage of tiny equine feet, the occasional cry of rutting elk through the range - never bothered her, but rumbles that made even a Tarrasque's footsteps feel soft unsettled her as deeply as they unsettled him.
Mother nature loosed her breath on the following morning.
Raymond was not in the city proper when the tsunami hit, preferring as was his wont the open spaces afforded him by being nearly anywhere else. But he saw the wall of water roll in and break upon the castle walls, brown and churning in its insistence, and no sooner did disaster strike than he ran toward rather than away from the danger.
Where had Calliope been amidst all this?
The streets of the Night Court were full of rushing water and dangerous flotsam. He waded through it, head on a swivel, careful not to lose his footing lest he be swept away and dashed across some unforgiving wall. Amidst the chaos, his devil-red skin stood out like a rallying point.
Raymond. Ruth's inner voice was agitated, a cornered-lion sound vibrating with the urge to pounce.
Be ready.
Overhead, the sky came alive with tongues of forked lightning and whipping winds. The storm was coming hard on the tsunami's heels.
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
– Calliope – 'every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.'
*
Calliope watched the sea sweep back out to the deep. She watched the whale bones rise up like a splash of dread white against the sands in the distance. The seaweeds swayed in the ocean breeze, gaping for water as plants gape in the drought seasons. All the secrets of the shoreline are laid bare before her, crabs with old scripture on their shells and shells brighter than the sun.
But she is a unicorn who has been a wildcat and the ground feels like a trembling, dying thing beneath her hooves. Her blood sings with the wrongness of the sands before her, for the way the sea sweeps back like the night before the dawn. This is not the sea tide that rose and fell before her and Raymond, a backdrop to the fires in their hearts.
This is a killing sea and she laments that there is no great beast driving back the waves that she might venture down the cliffs for and drag her horn down the rocks until it sparks and smolders like a war-blaze.
For a day she walked the path back to Denocte warning the travelers to head to the high-ground. She walked and felt how the earth seemed to breathe beneath her, great sighs of sadness that whispered to her bones to run, run, run for the hills, the mountains, for any place high enough above the sea that it might look like heaven to the things laid bare upon the sands.
The Riftlands trained them well and she remembers what it feels like to watch the landscape shift before her like a dream-- sea to stone, mountains to shells large enough to be a continent, caves to towers that burrowed down into the sky. This slight trembling feels like a soft thing to her, a disaster with no rabid magic that wants to kill, kill, kill.
For a day it was quiet, but for that sorrow sigh, and as the night came and went the stone walls of the Court rose up like bones from the earth in the distance. Just as she moves towards those walls, loathe to feel the wilderness swallowed up by stone, the sighs turn to screams. It feels as if the dirt might crack open between her feet and swallow the entire world in no more time than it might take her to blink.
And overheard the skies turn dark, darker than her skin and the sun glows behind that darkness a crimson red color that is darker than blood.
Calliope's skin sings for the charge in the air that comes with the crying of the earth and the distant roar of the seas as they sweep back in with biblical violence to devour what they briefly offered like an apology. The horror calms her even as her blood sparks as if that overhead lighting rages not in the sky but through the rivers of her veins. The fury of the sea as it comes for her is nothing more than a spark to the wildfire of the fury that roars like a lion between her bones.
Let the sea come, let the lightning crack and raze against the prairies and turn the world to nightmare. This will not be the end of Calliope who knows what it feels like to have electricity run through her like whitewater, who walked on a frozen sea and challenged a monster beneath the waves.
She screams for the storm, for the death coming for them from the crumbling cliffs that rises and rises unstoppable even by the power of her mighty will. Calliope's clarion call for the stragglers to come to the court and the higher grounds sounds like a roar as it echoes against the sea rising across the lower prairies. It echoes almost endlessly behind her as she runs for the walls, slow enough to let her darkness flash like a banner in the bright bursts of lightning white.
A boulder looms up before her, a pillar of salvation above the waters starting to lap at her knees and the brine that stings as it sinks into her pores. It's to the top of that boulder that she leaps and her hooves sound like screams as they scramble where the bottom of the stone has become wet.
And when she's atop that boulder, a hoof raised like a starving lion who has seen the last antelope left in the wild, she calls out for the stragglers and waits to hear an answering call to know who she must come for.
Above the lightning rages and the dry air feels like kindling against the fury that promises to come. Calliope blazes like faith in the brightness that flickers like dying stars and she's almost darker than the places where the sea roars under black storm clouds.
Her eyes look like a storm of their own when she glares in the darkness and watches for a glimpse of red and one of white, bright enough to be bone. There is no sea, no thunder storm, no disaster that can hold her back if either Raymond or Shrike are out there in place where the ocean is high enough, fast enough or angry enough to drown.
The sea had drawn back, and it had been.. strange. Many of those in the Court wandered out to pick at shells and things that were otherwise hidden, all while her feathers had prickled and her fur stood on end from unease. Something had been off, and the Champion had called out for them to take care. It had taken a moment or two, before it was something he had remembered.
She had rushed out on to the sands with cries of alarm almost immediately, and called for them to run, to take shelter. Tsunami tsunami tsunami! Written in the books of the past, only one or two had ever happened, but they had been devastating. She had brought many back with her, urging them to seek higher ground within the capitol, or to run further out from the lands if they could and seek shelter elsewhere. It was dangerous.
It had come when she had returned to the capitol herself, and then the waves had slammed the mighty structure. She staggered, knocked off balance from the rumbling waters that even rose up and over the wall to hit her. It was not enough to flood, to reach that much higher, but it had been enough.
The sea had left its mark on Denocte and its court.
Her hooves sloshed through water, her tail dragging behind her, weighed down as she took in to account all the damage. What was whole that she could find, she lifted up out of the way with what little telekinesis she had, nudging it from herself gently and putting it where the waters couldn't reach it.
In the distance, there was a rumble of a storm, and her head leaned, eyes going wide as a flicker of fear cracked through her spine and over her nerves. The storms of home, it felt like, had come to Novus. The waters, the angry sky. Her heart stuttered in her chest, but she shook her head and wallowed out in to the waters to seek out survivors.
Some were on higher grounds, and she asked if they needed anything, working her way through. Araxes was dedicated to the people she had been with for so long, and her tender heart left her open and vulnerable, but it came in handy, perhaps, for the people she had come to love.
There were others, she saw, one bloody bay man wading the waters. She had met Raymond before, and her head nodded, before she moved on her way, seeking to help anyone that needed it.
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07-22-2018, 03:20 PM
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Calliope was not amongst the horses trapped within the walls when the tsunami hit. He almost wanted to breathe a sigh of relief for the fact but, knowing her, the unicorn was in far more dire straits than these and loving every moment of it.
He steeled himself. There was no way to protect her here, now, when he could not even begin to guess her whereabouts, and she of all horses knew how to take care of herself. There were other things that needed doing now.
Ducking into an alley, he beckoned a cluster of huddled denoctians from their shelter with a tone that brooked no argument. "Take shelter in the keep," he urged them, knowing that a structure that had stood as long as that would at the least have a good roof overhead and be mostly beyond the reach of weather. He only hoped that it was beyond the tsunami, too, but wet ankles were preferable to wet everythings.
Systematically he searched the court proper, delegating teams where necessary to ensure even those injured could make it safely to shelter. He recognized only some of the faces hustling by, their brows drawn with worry and bewilderment. Nodding back to the familiar spotted shape of Araxes and ignoring the flotsam drawing blood as it eddied about his unprotected legs, he waded near enough to hail her. "Send them to the keep if they can't make it to higher ground," the red stallion urged.
There was no time to weigh alternatives.
Raymond. He looked north, as though the tarrasque speaking so plainly to his thoughts was only just at his side. Birds. The word carried with it a waiting excitement with which he had once been familiar, far larger now that Ruth herself was not as she once was. It was the excitement of the hunt, the excitement that had swatted Florentine like a moth out of the air. It was predator seeking prey, but the prey she drew for his benefit was no prey he had seen before.
Not birds, but Thunderbirds. And they were flying south on the violent stormfront.
Turning again to address Araxes and the others nearby, he said, "we must shelter as many of the injured and infirm as we can." A burst of color erupted through the link as the hellbeast readied herself to pounce. "We're under attack."
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
Why did fate always have to ruin a good thing? It had been so lovely, such a wonderful proposition. Slip along the ocean bed and collect the many trickets, and treasures. Not that he had been blind to the eerie foreboding unnaturalness or the suspense which hung over the dying fish and coral. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t natural. And it whispered in his ear to leave, to go. But then there was a shiny pearl. And farther down, a glimmering sun disk shell. And who could say no to that?
He should have said no to that. He knew that when he heard the roar. When he felt the trembles. When he was racing back up the dunes as fast as his legs could carry him he knew. They were absolutely screwed. He especially- all for a few pearls and shells. Idiot.
The first wave tangled his legs over the last of the dunes and down the gold fell. A roar, beastly and savage sounds in the water as he rises up above the surf, finding his footing again as the wave recedes for another go. It wasn’t going to give in much, so there was little time to waste. Legs, kick and pull as he climbs the last dune and up towards the steps to the market. Screams, shouts and prays echo the terrors now filling the sky as the water, waves broken up by the outer dunes, now floods through.
He should have learned his lesson. The gold should have continued to race the water up to the keep (a race he was somewhat winning). But, there was a lovely cuff. Abandoned. Bobbing in the water. Forgotten and kicked about as horses raced from the ankle deep, rising water. You shouldn’t blame him when he stopped. Shouldn’t blame him when he reached for it. Children will always reach for candy, and the gold will always reach for shiny objects.
The gold found out, a minute and half later, the object wasn’t as free as he thought, when, in pushing through the deeper water, a roar louder than the rest, was heard above the chaos. The wave was massive, but he didn’t have time to marvel. Over the outer banks it crashed, and crushed beneath it the lower stalls. Splinters of wood, metal, and even the lovely objects of jewelry became knives and razors.
By the time the gold had made his way to the upper courtyards, he’d numbed to the several stinging cuts on his lower legs. Salt was supposed to heal right? Perhaps that’s what it meant: it gave you all the pain up front. He was now walking, limbs exhausted, when he came upon a red brute who he’d met before, and a speckled bird. Catching only the last of what the commander in chief like voice said the gold was brought to a halt several paces from them. Exhaustion was beginning to muffle his tongue, but it still rose in his brain. No shit Sherlock.
Yet if this was an attack…where do you fight? Still by them he turns to look back out through an opening. Water. Flotsam. Bodies. And no cause could be seen but Mother Nature or a God, vicious and cruel as they welded the weapons of water and sky. How do you fight against that?
(Still he did not run. As little invested in this castle and keep as he was, the gold remained beside the other two, listening, waiting. Call him out for it though, and you might scare him off, but perhaps there was a little fight budding in him for this land.)
The sea calls to her from far beyond the stone walls and the crush of bodies that ebb and sway like eddies when she walks among them. It's a bell-toll of vibration and it shivers up her legs and plucks that horn upon her head like a harpsichord string. On and on the sea calls her, awakens all that slumbering salt in her veins and thickens her blood until her heart beats in hours and years instead of moments.
Everything is diamond sharp as the sea calls to her and she feels as if she moves in slow motion through the market streets and then through the keep pathways. The day passes by as a year does and the wings of birds carrying letters look like ten different nights setting across her body when they fly overhead.
When the night finally does set and she listens to the streets sing the of the wonders laid bared by the waves and she looks up at the sky and sees not stars but a mausoleum of tombs made of bright light. And still the sea calls and crawls it's message with icy, inky fear up, up, up her legs and into her fragile heart that beats like a hummingbird when the messages turns to words that shatter like falling stars when she looks away from the night sky.
The sea calls and it says, death and drowning, death and drowning. It calls like a crow, a reaper far above the mortal realm and it feels like a mark against her broken soul that she knows the song of the ending so very well. It sings a chorus in her bones and she lets that instinct that carried her swifter than the wind down the burning mountainside take over.
“Away, away, away.” Isra chants her eulogy through the night in the streets and they must think she's gone mad again, crashing against the slick, sweating sides of others as she urges them all to run, to flee, to do anything but think they are safe behind walls and wealth and silly things.
“Get as far away from the sea as you can, climb as high as your legs will carry you.” Isra nudges a child from the streets and nips at his hindquarters when he pauses to look at the wild, mad unicorn with a fear that froths like white-water in her eyes. But she's not fast enough and the sea calls her in a fervor through the stones below her hooves.. She's not fast enough and her salted blood feels as cold as the moon as the world feels like it takes one big gulp of air in the dawn-light.
Silence grows and it spreads around her like a disease and then bird-scream breaks the stillness and the world erupts into chaos...
The waters crash against the stones walls and Isra calls herself a fool for thinking stone could keep the sea from her, protect her from those violent waves that still call, death and drowning, death and drowning. Her legs are wild as they clatter against the now slick stones and the water drags her knees towards the ground.
It's not long before she's under, sweep away by the rapids rushing through the streets and her horn bobs above the waterline like a scepter of a dead thing. But Isra knows how to swim better than most and she screams in bubbles and determined lungs as this sea that tries to reclaim the story-teller who took from the waves a second chance.
But soon there are stairs before her and her eyes sting from relief and salt as she climbs even as she screams through the black salt-water. Death and drowning, death and drowning. The sea still calls as she rises from it dripping blood and water and dirt. Every sting is a war and she looks up long enough to see other rise like sirens around her and she smiles a weak, soldier's smile to them.
And though the sea calls and calls and calls, Isra looks out at the injured before her and summons up ink and ichor to fill the fear that still rattles deep in her marrow. “Come away.” She turns, passing a gaze over the distant red and gold and white that she's seen before. They stand like sentries in the courtyard, gargoyles made of flesh and bone that seem as immobile as stone with the waters lapping like snakes at their fetlocks.
Isra is no gargoyle, no great unicorn to listen to the coming beasts and the calls for death that they make through the sky with their wings. She is a storyteller who knows how to heal and how to soothe all the places deeper than blood that break and shatter and lead the healthy towards death and drowning, death and drowning.
“Come away.” She coos to the newly risen horses, welcoming them to dry stone beyond the seeds of lightning sparking through the dry skies. “Come away and I will tell you all a story while the world dries around us.” And though she smiles and touches her nose to their bloodied shoulders and dirty faces she looks out at those sentries and feels a pinging in her soul that this is no chaos to be so easily weathered.
But for now she knows how to undo the damage the sea does to mortal bodies and she turns away to heal the bloody and soothe the fearful.
It was no surprise the two of them had come together under the circumstances, both with the people they loved in heart, the court held above all else. It was a time of need, and the two of them were spearheading most of it at the time being. Any other time and she would have wondered how well he would do as a Sovereign, just as well as she was herself. Two wholly different souls, vying to protect their home.
"Attack?" The speckled woman felt her heart flutter before her wings spread out, the lightning in the air making feathers stand on end as she looked up. "..the Thunderbirds?" They were a creature that hardly came out to the Court itself, but this was a massive storm rolling in, and her ears fell back as her head nodded immediately. "The castle will shelter anyone from the birds here in the Court, the thick walls will do well to hold the attack at bay and protect innocents. We must find shelter for the others as you said, the high ground is not safe if it is open." The last thing they needed were others to be attacked, and she stepped forward, her hooves sloshing through the waters that had come.
But it was unlikely there would be any way to hold the attacks off for long. They wouldn't exactly swoop in on them, but they were unpredictable creatures at best. "Can you find others and help them find shelter? High ground and protection to keep them from getting in the way of the storm or anything else that comes this way." She hadn't heard of the birds coming this far to the capital, and it worried her more than anything.
It was a disaster, but they had to work with one another to survive. The Court was in shambles but she would be damned before letting any of her people get hurt worse than it was already. "If you find others strong enough to help, they can too. We just.. we need to get this done. We cannot let our people get hurt or fall." She refused, and she would fight if she had to.
When the sea sweeps away from the shore Wormlust goes with it and dives divinely into the dark deep that's black enough to be not ocean-water but the blackness between universes where it's still and cold enough that nothing lives. She's another thick shadow moving through the bottom of the sea, a shadow of a shark with dark droplets of blood floating like clouds above her head and octopus tentacles hanging from between her smile like a broken silk on the loom of fate. The sea is deeper where she is now and she waits, waits, waits for the rush of immortality to burn like molten metal through her bones again.
It never happens.
And when the sea rises like a mountain and crashes back to land Wormlust goes with it again. She is the white-water and flotsam on the curling, tsunami and her wings hang over the crest of that dread wave and carry her on and on with the waters as they crash over the cliffs. For a moment the sea feels higher than the mountains and she feels higher than that as she rushes to land on the waters.
Wormlust feels high enough to be something more than divine, something more than the very first living creature ever to be. She feels as if the land rushing below her waves is nothing more than the below and she laughs and laughs and laughs to see the mortals sucked deep into the foaming dark waters. Her only regret is that she's too far above the swallowed grasses to feed, to fill her belly with the dead so that the sea-worms might not feast and bloat and look to be the great devouring predators of the deep.
She's too alive with the speed of her forward flowing to notice the rocks and twigs that leave razor blade lines of blood across her skin.
Soon the land no longer passes quickly below her and the waters spread to thin to carry her further. It's her wings that carry her deeper into the Night-lands, and they look like storm clouds when they spread wide and she looks like a bolt of lightning when the storm flashes in the distance and reflects upon her skin.
Wormlust is incandescent in the storm-glow and her reflection looks like a strange thing in the waters that ripple black enough to be melted glass that might cool and capture all those trapped to the land like ants inside amber.
Ahead a black unicorn poses on a rock and Wormlust imagines tearing that horn from upon her head and tossing it out like an offering to those black waters (her waters). She spirals above the unicorn and looks to be a great monstrosity of feathers and bone-white and glow when the storm rages on around them.
A bolt strike near by the two of them and Wormlust drifts off again, her wings are too lovely to burn and smolder and coat the sea in a fine dull sheen of ash.
And in the corner of her gaze when she turns there are great beasts that fly towards the court. They are mighty, wider in the wing than she. Oh, she thinks, they look to be god-made, monsters from the imagination of children and she bares her teeth and her lips bleed where the edges of her sneer meet flesh.
They look to be worthy of a hunt and perhaps strange enough to carry bits of her immortality in their blood. So she flies higher than them and drifts almost above the storm clouds, a dread eagle as bald as bone that closes in erratically in her madness of need, need, need. Even the chill in the air and the way her weak lungs scream for air, for a lower altitude in their new mortality cannot stop her.
She's felt death in her bones since she surfaced on this wicked sea and she would dash herself to pieces in the storm-clouds just to feel the thrum of religion coursing like a meteor through her veins.
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying,
'Come and see.' and I saw.
***
The ranger offered Araxes enough attention to follow the thread of her words, taking the points of data they offered and stitching them into the chaotic tapestry that his trek through the flooded city streets had cobbled together. Thunder clapped overhead as some semblance of process took shape in the trickle of horses taking shelter in the castle, called to shelter by the scaled unicorn Isra.
If Calliope had been in the city, she would have made her presence known by now.
We cannot let our people get hurt or fall, Araxes concluded.
Raymond fixed her with a stony glance, battle haze creeping over his expression like hoarfrost. "If they made it this far," he replied, invoking the dragon and forced imprisonment with a derisive verbal handwave, "then they won't fall now." No one who walks through fire comes out the same creature they were before. Fire forges anew, makes phoenixes of those that dare to emerge on the other side.
The flashes of a distressingly distant battle went off like fireworks in the back corners of his mind. A flash of pain, deadened by unreality, sent dull ripples through his consciousness. He stamped his impatience.
"Keep order here. There's scant shelter between here and the Armas, and if those things are after a meal I'd rather they try red meat on for size." He clicked his tongue and flashed a knowing half-grin before charging off toward Night Court's outer walls. What he saw when he reached them was truly a sight to behold - and that's saying a lot, given the general fuckery that the riftlands got up to.
Lightning arced like spider lace across the livid blue-black sky, illuminating the dark silhouettes of thunderbirds as they approached the court on the wing. Vitreus lake seemed to be not a mirror but a pit, out of whose belly forks of lightning spun with grasping fingers toward their sisters in the sky. Some of the birds had joined in battle with what must have been pegasi, but what madness would draw them aloft in this storm the red stallion could not say. What he could say was that they needed help here, in defense of the city.
Ruth. Come.
A ground-shattering roar rose from the distant north, scarcely more than another peal of thunder in the deepening storm. The link between them was red, red, red, and the cat he knew slipped beneath the Tarrasque's bloodwrath as though victim to a swift, sure current. Raymond's tail blade curved up over his back as he stood, a lone streak of crimson in the open space between the thunderbirds and the court.
***
Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.
