Slowly, ever so slowly, the flood waters recede, the tide creeping its way back into the ocean. Water is left trapped within the streets of Denocte, but it is dramatically lower now.
But the water doesn’t return to its usual position.
The waves pull farther and farther back out to sea, revealing the shore line inch by precious inch. Shells, seaweed, crabs, even stranded fish line the seashore. Off in the distance, the waves continue to recede.
You know it’s dangerous; the last time this happened, the water came crashing back in with hardly a warning, rushing faster than a horse can run to slam against the shore and flood the capitol. But your curiousity gets the better of you, the hidden treasures beckoning you closer. ”I won’t go far,’ you lie to yourself. ’I’ll only stay a minute, pick a seashell or two.’ But the minutes stack up, and you quickly lose yourself in the wonders of the beach.
Will you remember to keep an eye on the horizon, where the water waits? Or has your mind already forgotten the danger?
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08-19-2018, 04:45 PM - This post was last modified: 08-20-2018, 12:26 AM by inkbone
Isra of the deep sea
'I blinked and the world was gone, gone, gone
The sea calls her away again with a siren song.
The dark and taunting song of it calls to something deeper in her soul, deeper than any depth of black seawater. The song sings and sings and she feels deaf with the chorus of it. Isra shivers like a ghost walking across a grave writ with an eulogy of its long forgotten life marking the path it's walked over and over again until the memories feel unending with dread.
She feels like a ghost, a chained miasma that slips through the walls and the crowds upon hooves that feel like something more, something besides her own. To the other healers she bids caution, warning them to stay behind the walls and forget that whispers of treasures and danger ever reached out to them from the cracks in the stones of the keep.
“Do not go to the sea.” Isra begs them, pleads with them even as her chain rings in a walk and bits of rust and kelp fall like soot and rot on the stones beneath her hooves. “Be more clever than I and stray far, far from death.” She could stumble to her knees for all the begging that she puts into the words, her brow could crumble to flesh and dust from the weight of the knowing she has for the sea and that siren song.
It feels like a secret still that she's a queen now, a dream that seems gossamer and spider web thin when she blinks her eyes and notices that they all watch in glimpses that once saw only shadows and starvation on her sides.
Still, she's a queen and the sea still calls, careless of the walls that want to keep her and the mountainside that thunders and roars in the distance. The sea cares little for the thunderbirds and all the devils in the sky and upon the earth. It cares little for life and air and only wants salt and brine and lungs made heavy as stone with water.
Isra knows others will fall for that siren song, for the whispers of sand that shines like gold and crabs that look like rubies begging to be plucked form the weeds. So she follows the song and they way her chain chimes across the silence and the distant thunder and the stones sounds a little like a war-drum and a little like a noose wrapping around her like an eel (tight and cold and slick with sea).
When she reaches the sea she's afraid to see other horses lingering in the sands with their ears pointed out to the horizon like deer pointing to a cougar upon a tree-limb. They nose in the wilted sea ivy and whisper to each others of the strangeness of all that things that lived between the water. They see beauty and Isra understands well that love of beautiful things that live in the dark where mortals are forbidden to go.
There is little of the sea that Isra does not understand and little of it that she does not both fear and love. And when she looks out at a horizon void of sea water and watches for the dark waves to rise again perhaps it's that love and fear that makes her eyes shine bright with hate and happiness as she watches over the fools and hears the siren song in her every cell.
At her hooves a few crabs linger and they seem almost to be reaching up the pull at her chain as if they urge to to go deeper and deeper into the places revealed when the waters pulled back.
Not again, not again not again. She'd already seen the tide pull out once and come roaring back. Had they already forgotten? Fear clenched her gut, winding tight, the signs clear as day of another tsunami. 'Haven't we suffered enough?' she wondered to herself.
"It's not safe!" Her cry was likely on deaf ears. Those that were injured from the first were in the care of healers back in the castle, and she had come out to find others. She had not expected them to fall for the trap once more. Hooves pressed down, digging in to wet sand and kicking up soft clods of it as her wings spread on either side of her head, wide, ruffled, worried.
She skid slightly, kicking up a small spray of water and some bits of shell as she spied one mare, moving toward her and easily waving a hoof to shoo away the crabs. "Go! Go! Shoo!" Her head ducked and she rolled one of the crustaceans over, huffing and lifting her head, eyes worried for the unicorn mare.
"We must get the others away from here. We cannot have more injured." Not with the storms in the distance and the thunder birds riding in on them. They were caught between a rock and a hard place, and needed to find their high ground and shelter, fast.
Jezanna looked upon her new sovereign and couldn’t say how she felt about it. She did not know Isra, had never even seen the other woman before that night they had stood in front of Caligo, except perhaps in passing on the court streets. This queen of hers was a stranger, and though they needed a regime more now than ever, the midnight woman was conflicted.
She stood nearly side by side with her on the once more empty beach, abandoned as it was by the water. Idly, Jezanna wondered how big the wave would be that would come this time, not questioning whether it would but when. Still, citizens gathered, drawn by curiosity or the promise of treasures of the sea. Her silver eyes narrowed, her brows drawing together. She may have come to stand beside the other unicorn, but they could not have arrived for more different reasons.
“I used to control the tides. I used to walk the skies...” she said suddenly, the admission slipping past her lips without her blessing. Her voice sounded distant, like she was not quite all there, not quite standing on the shores of Terminus. She’d had yet to tell anyone of her origins and now? Now she felt too tired, too drawn and thinly spread to worry whether her secret was safe with these horses. For a moment her gaze lingered on the familiar face of Araxes before fluttering away.
“Now I am just powerless,” and then she laughed but it was bitterness, not joy. Why, then, had she been brought here to a world that she could not help. What purpose could she possibly have if not to atone for the things she had done and to do better than she once did. And then why, when she had been so ready to stand tall at the side of the party racing out to defend the court against the thunderbirds had she instead found her steps leading her here?
Jezanna had not come for trinkets, not for the mysteries of the ocean laid bare on these wet exposed sands, not to coax and press these reckless few back into the court for their own safety. Had she come, knowing the truth of what she might find in the recession of the water? To brace herself against the tidal wave and to pretend as though there was no fear in her to be found? She could not help but to ask herself why she was here at all. And when she looked out toward the far horizon her heart felt as dark as the midnight of her skin.
This was no simple low tide. The water ran past yards and yards of sand that became yards and yards of rock, more pitted than the moon. Little puddles reflected patches of cloudy sky like slivers of mirror and a thousand things lay dead or dying, exposed for the first time to sunlight.
It was not reassuring.
Acton was not interested in seashells. He could not care less for fish-bones or shiny rocks or shipwrecks or even for treasures. But he would be damned before he missed the end of the world.
And this would be the place to see it. All abnormally, unsettlingly quiet without the rush and run of the waves, a flat and empty line to the horizon. Even the seagulls were too busy feasting to squabble and cry out. It smelled like rot, like decay, like a hundred hundred organisms that had been very recently living but now were very much not. Whatever the opposite of drowning was, that had happened to them.
He walked out onto the beach, his gait careless as a Sunday stroll, but there was something almost mad in the gleam of his kerosene gaze. Almost frenzy, almost range, almost fear – almost invisible. But not quite, not quite any of those things. He did not care for the way his footsteps sounded on such newborn ground, or the way the dried-out seaweed crunched and squelched beneath his hooves. But this was where his queen was, where many other Denoctians were, and where else was there to go, anyway?
Acton watched the storyteller watch her citizens and said nothing; he watched Araxes cry warnings, and he watched Jezanna watch Isra.
“And I used to be able to get a decent drink at a dockside vendor a little ways back,” he said at last, only a few beats after the ethereal mare’s confession. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel much shock at her words; what could be surprising, after all this? “Shame to lose both.” The smile that twisted his lips then was not without mirth.
With a skeptical glance at a salmon-colored starfish that looked to be waving its last, the buckskin stepped abreast of the three of them, and cast his amber gaze out across the horizon. “Hell of a view. Smells like shit though.” It was a comfort, he supposed, to make jokes – but really he was wondering is this it? Is this how it all goes down? Acton was not prepared to die, but he supposed this was better than freezing. Better than burning. Better than being buried beneath rubble and dust.
For a long moment he considered those few, those foolish or mad or careless, who were far out past where the breakers had been, where the seabed dropped off, where there would be no making it back if something were to happen. Then he shivered his skin beneath a bluebottle fly and turned his neck toward Isra. “You want me to bring them in? Frankly I don’t think it matters much.”
you're italic, I'm in bold
it's your friendly neighborhood sarcastic asshole!
08-21-2018, 10:02 PM
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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
He stands upon a sand dune, azure eyes watching the sea upon the horizon. It is a serpent whose scales glisten and roll. It rears back, a cobra whose hood spreads wide, wide and wider still. It will return, that cobra, striking hard, throwing corals to bite with wicked force upon the soft skin of the sea bed. It is a monster rearing there, so small upon the horizon and yet so large, so terrible, so deadly.
Over drying sand, littered with dead fish and crabs whose shells grow hard with salt, Raum’s gaze pulls back. It runs in before the sea, electric blue that drowns all who fall within his stare. Those eyes trail over the new queen, a silent creature that watches the serpent sea. Beside her, Araxes, frantic and desperate, then, Jezanna. All he knew, for he has watched them all in silence, ever the spy to whom the darkness clings like a skin.
Yet there is Acton too. He is a spark of colour upon a bleak beach littered with the entrails of the sea. Silver fish, the ones still alive, flop pitifully, their gills straining, but oh the sea is long, long gone. Salvation is gone and deliverance rears upon the horizon.
Raum has seen enough. The sands whisper as he descends, a wraith that precedes the coming of death. His dagger chimes, a cry against the salty air that would rust them all too soon. “And it was a wonder you did not drown. But maybe this will be the day for us all.”
His gaze shifts to the shadows, to the cloud strewn sky where darkness lurks in the black of the storm’s thick belly. He wonders of his goddess, whether she took his offering, whether this is her vengeance being dealt at last.
Graphite lips pull into a line, bleak as a winter’s morn. His skull tilts to settle a static gaze upon the newly crowned queen. His eyes betray nothing, though they press sharp as a dagger against her skin. She was of the sea, supposedly, but he wanted to know how deep that sea went, how dark the waters were that flowed within her veins.
“What,” Raum asks of her, his voice the quiet sigh of a dagger pulling from its sheath, “will you have us do?”
And he wonders if this is a time for stories and if so, what it took to cut a horn from a unicorn’s head.
Isra of the dread weeds
'In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming” '
They come to the sea.
They all come to the sea.
The gulls and the carrion birds all come to the sea-bed. Even the deer from the plains wonder down past the shore line and pick at the salted weeds and blink their eyes again and again from the strangeness of this new grazing ground. Above hawks circle and spiral in tornadoes of wings, beaks and fury and Isra smiles for the oddity of seeing a hawk dive and rise back up with a lobster between its talons. Everything is backwards now, the dark places of the sea golden where they touch the horizon and the clouds back above the court are dark enough to swallow up any glittering, speck of light.
The world is wrong, wrong, wrong. Even her stories that are dark and full of death and devils know the wrongness of everything spread out before her in a strange feeding ground of things that should not be.
The strangeness is reflected in her eyes (dead crabs on a mirror sea of blue) when she turns to Araxes and lifts her gaze to the swooping patterns of hawks and carrion birds. “Do you not think it's strange that the birds are brave enough to swoop and linger in the sea-weed while they feast on the bellies of crabs?” Her voice is nothing more than a whisper of winter wind off a sea that she can no longer see. The heat of her breath drifts up in tendrils of steam from her lips. It spirals up, up, up like a corkscrew weed that grew up through the long gone tides.
Isra smiles at Jezanna and her mind runs away with imagines of a mare standing before the tidal wave and sending it back out to the horizon with nothing more than a toss of her wild, tangled tail. “I can imagine it.” She's as lost to the dreaming, to the stories hinted in whispers of words as Jezanna is lost to the moroseness of loss.
“Oh,” There's sadness on her voice, a looming darkness that rises in pitches of chain when she walks close enough enough to offer a gentle touch of her muzzle against all the dark skin of Jezanna. “You're not powerless at all. It's just a different sort of power that you might wield now.” Isra thinks of crows and stories and how the whole world is titled and strange and waiting for the touch of a hundred different dreamers to make 'something' from the chaos of ruin.
Isra thinks of crows and then she thinks of Acton when he joins them as brash and bold as the sunlight from which he's plucked all his colors. “Perhaps,” She says and feels strange to hear the soft, gentle hope on her lips that still remember the taste of blood and brine and ash. “you have lost only one.” Surely a vendor on the sea knew the mysterious of the sea, surely he was quick to abandon all his vain trappings for his life. Surely, surely, surely. The words feel like a mantra, a prayer and a wish that she had not dreamed of a goddess and woke only to a court of corpses.
And then, before she can answer Acton there comes a ghost to the sea. Isra can see a million dark places between the pages of a story in the strange darkness in his blue eyes. His eyes are empty enough to be an abyss of space, void and hungry-- a devour-er of worlds and of universes. Like that dark beast of the mountain she imagines there is a dragon, slumbering and curled up in the strange stillness of this gray ghost.
“You,” She says because she doesn't know who he is other than a wisp of fog that moves like a shadow and her voice is stranger than the sea-bed with the soft hiss of that star-fire in her heart. “may do whatever you like. I will go bring them back to shore.” And then she pulls away from the others. Her ocean eyes beg the other mares to be better at survival than a slave who tried to down might be, but she doesn't offer a word to stop them if coming is what they truly want to do.
Isra moves though the weeds that are crusting with frost and the clams crack like glass beneath her hooves when they are too many to avoid. Lobsters and crabs and fish bury themselves in her hoof-prints, hoping that the mud and silt might offer any respite from the harsh, winter are they cannot breathe. And when she can she flips over ocean beasts stuck on their back and digs small holes to push the mussels back into dark dirt.
Where the others sea only death and fish flopping belly up she can see creatures that begged the sea to sweep away, they dreamed perhaps to swallow the air and dance upon clouds. But she's learning that dreaming is a foolish pastime and her hooves kick into a canter as the ocean-floor starts to dip down past the horizon.
Suddenly there were more bodies on this sea abandoned shore than there should have been. Acton, first, followed by a faintly familiar face from a time that felt much longer ago than it was. And there is derision in her silver eyes and more bitterness in her heart than Jezanna knows what to do with. When Isra touches her a shiver passes over her skin.
"The power to do what? To stand here and die at the hands of a wave that reaches for the sky?" and she thinks she should fear death, should fear the clock slowly ticking down on her life. Right now though there is only a bone weariness that spans space and time; worlds and centuries. "You may need more than just a decent drink after all this, Acton," Jezanna says to the fire and smoke man, eyes flitting momentarily over the ghostly one behind him. She's not sure if she trusts the way he draws his dagger.
Then Isra goes to the beach and beyond, where the sand is packed and wet and the too curious for their own good poke their noses and dig with their hooves. Jezanna thinks they could all die here on this shore, bodies washed onto the cobbled streets of the court or maybe out to sea, lost forever. And to think, of all the dangers they have been faced with, it is be their own stupidity that could be their doom.
The midnight woman laughed, then, because there is nothing funny about the lost and injured—those who are and will be—and yet they have gone into war with birds that make lightning and left the safety of their homes, bating their breath and seeing how long they can get away with it. Jezanna looked at Acton, and Araxes and even Raum and says, "If we survive this I will find a place to buy you all a drink, and it's going to taste damn good to be alive."
He should have known that Raum was nearby – that nothing followed so closely to the heels of destruction as the grim silver Ghost of Denocte.
His brother-Crow had changed of late, but oh, Acton was too foolish, too preoccupied, to note the depth of the differences. The buckskin was unaware of Raum’s conversation with their patron goddess, unaware yet of the darkest of the plans that pieced themselves together in the man’s nimble, shadowed mind.
So he grinned at the sound of that dagger he knew so well (had wielded himself, against better sense) and turned toward his brother, nipping at his throat in wordless response. He thought nothing of the way that Raum considered Isra – when did the man’s blue eyes not look like a depthless lake limned in ice? If the Ghost’s question of their new queen is a test Acton is no judge of the answer; he only glances at the other stallion and then follows the unicorn out further onto the seabed.
He only paused once, to look back over his shoulder at Jezanna with a grin that felt too broad beneath the bright sunlight on the baking sand. “If we survive this I’ll open every vintage cask myself and we’ll drink until we can’t tell if we’re still living, anyway.” The flick of his tail was irreverent as a wink when he turned once more away.
Acton moved with little of the care that Isra did, and his focus was not on helping the small things. The mussels could watch over themselves, the starfish had little chance with the water vanished so long. Not even the fresh dead caught his eye, once he got used to the smell – but once he stepped through tangled, dried seaweed wound around the unmistakable ribcage of a horse, and that did give him pause.
The skeleton was far too bleached, too picked-clean, to have been from recent disasters. And for the first time in too long, Acton considered the other secrets the bay held – bodies he’d helped put there.
Unease settled over him then, heavy enough to force a swallow, and as he stepped past with the seaweed crackling under his hooves he almost shied when a gull shrieked overhead. He couldn’t say if it was fear of discovery or a fresh kind of guilt – but he was glad to finally reach the first Denoctian, scuffing at the seabed like a hen with a bag slung across his withers.
“Look,” he said, and the pinto glanced up at him. Acton indicated the distant shoreline with a jerk of his head. “Get back to the city. It isn’t safe here.”
“Why should I? I’m far from the only one out here. If the wave comes again, well, it’s what Tempus wants. Anyway, there’s riches out here.”
Acton grunted in response, ears twisting back, but he looked where the stallion indicated and damned if there weren’t a few worn-smooth coins, dim moons in the cracked seabed. He considered the man a moment longer, then shook his head. “Worthless junk,” he said (maybe a lie; he had no idea when the coins were from), “but I’ll pay you to get back to shore, and take as many as you can with you.” With a flourish he produced a sackful of money (all of it conjured, all of it sure to vanish within the hour) and the gleam of the stallion’s gaze in response was brighter than the gold.
“Done,” the stranger said, and took the money with a crooked sort of grin, one Acton couldn’t help but appreciate.
“A wise man,” he said like a clap on the shoulder, then let his expression slip into something conspiratorial. “But what were you looking for, anyway? Surely it’s not worth dying for a few ancient coppers.”
The pinto’s gaze turned reluctant, but he hefted the sack of money and finally said, “They say there was a ship wreck here, not far from the rocks where the sandbar drops off, decades ago. A smuggler’s load – gemstones and gold from the seasonal courts. Maybe it’s a myth, but –” with a showman’s flourish the man flipped one of the old coins before slipping it in with the false one’s Acton had given him. “It’s a time of miracles, innit?”
At that the buckskin had to laugh. “Miracles, sure,” he said to the stranger’s retreating back, but when he glanced back at the bare ocean floor there was something new in his gaze.
Suddenly the day was even more interesting.
you're italic, I'm in bold
@Raum @Isra @Jezanna @Araxes so this is admittedly random as hell but uh...anyone wanna go on a treasure hunt? (though obv all we need is a pegasus to fly over and go 'no you dummy there's nothing here')
Isra of the spiral horn
'I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. '
Had she paused long enough to answer Jezanna perhaps she would have said, You are female we need no other power but that. And perhaps she would have started to believe it a little more. They are wild and they are free and there is no sea or death that could take from them those things. Even in the darkness there are no more chains that she could stand to wear. But the water-less sea calls to her and the fools beyond the ocean weeds and she only gives the mare a sad smile that says perhaps she knows too well how helpless feels (and she knows she refuses to feel it again).
So she continues on acting like the queen she should feel like when she demands that her people return to shore. Her horn quiets their protest and she wonders perhaps how they can see any violence in that spiral of bone. Isra doesn't know to be angry at them, how to rage that they taunt fate. But she's learning many things in this new skin of her and soon she understands their caution when her eyes flash like storm seas.
The first bloom of rage unfurls in her chest like a new rose on a tower of thorns. It's red, blood red.
It opens in her soul when she spots the horse bones, picked bare like a treasure chest bleached to pristine white by the sun that never should have reached them. Her rage rushes once it's been unfolded and it flows in a secret waterfall through her veins, bits of ice and fire and steam that pour from her eyes like sorrow but burn like fury. The rhythm of her hooves falters as she pauses at the bones and her lungs feel too large to be held inside mere bone and flesh.
And when the pressure boils up it sounds like a scream when she parts her salted lips to sob. She sounds like a unicorn and her horn looks like a weapon when she tossed it to the sky in that rage even gods could not mistake. The rage is still there when she watches Acton stumble past the bones and spook and she thinks that he must understand that these bones look nothing like she once dreamed her bones becoming.
That she misunderstands his faltering is a blessing for perhaps she would have finally thought of her horn and chain as weapons and nothing else.
The interaction between Acton and the pinto is tinted by her rage and she fumes silently at the greed of the stallion. Only her uncertainty if the urge to chase him back to shore with the tip of her horn belongs to her or if it belongs to her bones and flesh, stills her voice and hooves. Instead she only watches, silent and glaring (even though the expression feels strange on her brow) as the two part ways and the pinto retreats back to the shore.
Her horn tingles and she wants, for a moment, to follow him.
Isra saw the way Acton looked down towards the coins at her feet. She noticed them at well but she sees only death, treasures given away to the sea only by the calling of the reaper. The sea takes nothing easily, nothing gently (besides her, her memories remind her but she shakes them away with a toss of her mane). “Death is no miracle, Acton.” Isra watches him not like a mare but like a unicorn and if a little of all her rage leaks out in the words she's cannot bring herself to care, not here, not surrounded by so much death.
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