After a time, the rains finally begin to slow. The sky still weeps from time to time, but the showers are scattered and infrequent, their fall light and easy. The clouds even begin to part, flashes of blue woven throughout the gloom, a ray of sunshine piercing the murk.
But it only serves to shine light upon the destruction left in the storm’s wake.
The flood waters are still high and raging, the streams flowing far past their banks and drowning the surrounding meadows. The swamp has become one big, stagnant freshwater ocean, downed trees hiding in the muck and waiting to knock horses off their hooves. But the greatest change lies in the Sussoro Fields, where the earth has seemed to collapse in upon itself, leaving holes several tens of meters deep.
Sinkholes have ravaged the ground, hidden tunnels broken and fallen. The ground is unsteady and prone to mudslides, every step treacherous and uncertain. The cries of horses and other animals can be heard, half-buried beneath the mounds of dirt and mud. But rescue itself is also uncertain, when every step might prompt another section of ground to fall suddenly fall away.
With the storm passing and the sinkholes beginning, you can’t help but wonder: is the true disaster finally over, or has it only just begun?
The capitol has been set up as a storm shelter, tents erected outside of its walls to provide shelter from the rain, and its great hall opened to the public. The area is dry and fires provide warmth: tables also have been set up to provide food and refreshments from the capitol’s own kitchens. Horses and animals alike have sought shelter here: a family of squirrels chatter noisily nearby, birds wait to collect any fallen food from the tables, and you see a fox darting after a small hare in a corner.
Still, it is warm and dry, and the drinks are flowing. You place yourself at one of the tables, listening to the stories and jokes around you, waiting for a turn to join in. Perhaps you’ll even find a familiar face here, or meet a new friend?
This thread will remain open for a minimum of 3 weeks. Anyone who posts in this thread 4+ times before the deadline will be able to claim this thread as completed, and will receive an additional 250 signos.
This thread will be driven by YOU, so contact with other characters and NPCs will keep it moving smoothly! Please allow a minimum of 2 posts in between your own before replying again.
The RE account may pop in from time to time with short prompts to keep things moving, but otherwise this thread is what you make of it!
To tag this account: @*'Random Events' without the asterisk.
Please be advised, tagging the Random Event account does not guarantee a response!
08-19-2018, 04:42 PM - This post was last modified: 08-20-2018, 12:23 AM by inkbone
He supposed he was one of the lucky ones that had only been reduced to a dripping mess, instead of swept away.
Relic had been caught in the winds and rains, and had come in to the safety of the capital looking like a wet rat for it, his mane plastered to his neck, his tail dragging in thick cords that wrapped around one another. Even so, he had eventually settled among others, watching carefully as he took a position and slowly began to dry.
Over time, he went from sopping wet to merely damp, his mane and tail no longer giving the appearance of some poor drowned animal. They were both fluffed, and his tail even curled his back legs as he watched smaller animals dart, and kept an ear out on conversations that were spoken between friends and acquaintances.
While all was.. pleasant, here, he doubted it was elsewhere in the lands. The capital seemed to be the best place to take shelter, and he wondered perhaps if he should wander out eventually. For the time being, however, he was content to help where he could, passing on teas and drinks, and remaining unusually silent.
This was no ordinary storm, he knew that much. Novus was... changing.
When he finally enters the court, Raam looks like some strange swamp creature. The mud mixes with the black and brown paint of his coat until it is not clear where horseflesh ends and wet earth begins. His thick mane and tail hang heavy, matted and tangled with mud and debris. He favors his left foreleg but cannot remember exactly how he hurt himself... For some time he had released himself to instinct, and in that state of mind memories have the uncertain quality of looking through an oil slick. Whatever happened, the pain had not come until later, after the fear had worn off. Later, when the haze of shock took hold.
In his many, many lifetimes, Raam had never experienced a storm like this.
This is not the appearance he had wanted to make. He had spent many months preparing for his official entrance to the court, learning about this world, planning the exact words he would say to appeal to the kings and gods of this land. Now he limps past the open gates, wide-eyed and bedraggled.
"Water," he calls weakly to a jeweled man who seems to be helping the many strangers huddled here. A bit of perspective suddenly strikes his loopy mind-- it rains for days on end and he asks for water?? He laughs then, the deep belly laugh of the exhausted and the insane (feeling a heavy mix of both) and considers a punchline, but in his deep thirst the words fall short.
"Please." He has never sounded so much like a dying man and at the sound of his own voice he starts to laugh hysterically once again.
Not just in the shifting landscape, caverns and sinkholes new-made, the ruin of what had been sweeping fields and sleepy forests. And not just because most citizens who remained looked little like themselves, and instead much like Asterion – black and brown and lean and weary, so weary.
But there is something else missing – a hope that has been replaced with fear, a happiness swallowed by uncertainty. Once, on his way back into the keep, he passed a young mare preaching Vespera’s unhappiness, and the coming of the end of days. Repent, she cried, and the wind tossed her hair, and only because Asterion had met the goddess himself did he order her to be quiet. More fear, more panic, was not what they needed.
In such chaos the great hall is almost a cathedral. Warmth and light wash over him as he steps within, as does the sound of talking, and – though he can scarcely believe it – laughter. There are not many faces he recognizes, but he is grateful for all of them nonetheless. Even the squirrels and foxes and ground-nesting birds he turns his dark gaze to, and smiles (albeit grimly) at the sight of a family of otters, setting about some fish.
He passes among them, offering a smile or a word of reassurance or gratitude as he goes, and makes his way for the kirin. Amidst all of these Relic still glimmers like a jewel and though Asterion has never properly met the man, Florentine calls him a friend, and for now that is good enough.
The bay arrives just as Relic is pouring a pitcher of water for a stranger who, muddy and injured as he is, doesn’t look unlike the king himself. A faint smile creases his lips at the request, when most of the wine and all of the ale of the capital has been opened for all.
“I’ve never cared for the desert,” he says idly, “but after this I’m not so sure it wouldn’t suit me, after all.” His smile takes as much effort as using the last dregs of his power had the day before; still, he does not let it fade, only softens it into something without humor. “Thank you for your help, Relic,” he says, his gaze meeting the kirin’s before slipping to the stranger. “And welcome to our halls, sir. Is there anything else you need in this moment? Has anyone looked at your leg?”
It's Calliope from the Riftlands that returns to the dusk court, cased in fresh blood, scars and the faint whispers of lightning that make the story of war looks stark upon her black skin. All her steps are as wild as they are slow and she drives herself on and on through the muck and mud even though her muscles and her magic scream for sleep.
She walks though the ruined court and the mad-horses that scream of the end of times. And where they see Calliope their yells turn to whispers and their fevered eyes dim when she looks to them as her horn sighs out a warning. She silences them like the rain in a divulge of promise, blood, and death.
The end seems so less terrifying than the lingering violence that hangs on her every movement. The dusk court knows it well, knows what sort of unicorn their old warrior is.
On she goes and the survivors point her onward with looks and none are brave enough to break the battlefield silence around her. She's alone when she opens the door to the hall. The birds flutter away from the metallic tang around her and the otters pause with the fish almost to their mouths. For a moment she just stands there, covered in blood as she listens to laughter and watches them drink.
And for a moment her weary lightning sparks a bit brighter and something dark and reckless claws at the sides of her rib-cage.
Perhaps it's still in her eyes, that whisper of fury and rage, when she turns to Asterion first. “You're alive.” In another land, another world, another time the words might have sounded like a prayer but now they only sound as tired and battle-worn as Calliope.
To everyone she says, “what happened here.” and it's not a question at all.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
It’s the hush that makes him turn first, the silence that had swallowed up the room when only a moment ago there had been the background-noises of talk, of laughter, of clinking glasses and footsteps on stone.
But when Calliope approaches, there is only the snap and hiss of the fires, and the battered king turns to see his unicorn, yellow light flickering over blood that looks black in the dim. Almost it could be mistaken for mud – save for the sharp copper, a tang he can almost taste.
You’re alive, she says, and he wonders at the glint of lightning in her eyes. Is she surprised, is she sorry? She had left without a goodbye, and he searches his heart now for feeling but finds only more weariness, an empty well.
“For now,” the bay says with a grim smile, and he does not reach out to touch her the way he had before. So many things have changed he can’t track the pieces anymore.
Once they’re through this, he promises himself, he will gather them up again.
Her statement then is not only for him, but he continues to watch her (is unable to do anything else,) the way her electric gaze touches the others in turn. Asterion speaks before either of the others can offer an answer, guilty for the way he wants those eyes to turn to him again.
“A rain that can’t be anything but god-sent.” There is a bite to his tone; he remembers well Calliope’s lessons on gods. Her distrust does not seem wrong to him, now. The details he does not go into – surely she had seen them for herself on her way to the capital.
“Why did you come, Calliope? It looks like your court is no more free of disaster than ours.”
He thinks that theirs must be worse – for no rain would cause such blood and scars.
“I had to know.” Calliope growls just to break up that endless fury boiling inside her. Through sheer will does she force herself to speak in vowels and words instead of bolts of hungry, savage lightning. Her skin quivers with the force of it and bits of blood fall like salt and dust unlike the rain that drips from their soaked bodies.
She's a war among revelers and she feels sacrilegious when they speak of Vespera in a dark corner. Calliope craves to answer them with talk of blood and bone and hate. Under the ceiling that has not caved she remembers them screaming 'repent' on the roads and she can hear whispers of it in the broken silence that comes after her and after their king.
Calliope wants to turn to them and say I have come and brush her horn across their brows and ask them who will repent for all the death and war and flooding? Who? Her bones quake for justice for vengeance, for Tempus and all his children.
Her horn wants to drink, drink, drink and not of rain.
“Always god-sent.” And now the lightning feels more fury than Calliope when it echoes in her voice for all of them to hear. The magic remembers her almost death, the way she felt so weak and it almost snuffed out like fire before the storm. The magic in her bones feels like the Riftlands and Ravos, wild and hungry and broken.
“Do you remember now Asterion? Do you remember when I queen?” And now! Oh now! Now she speaks with sparks of white-light crackling between her teeth and pouring like angel-fire from her eyes.
Her old magic remembers just as her dead lion bones do.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Asterion understands now -- that she does not fit in this room, in this castle, in this court.
She is a like a lion in a library, a wolf in a rose garden. She is too big for the walls, for the soft firelight and laughter that arcs and echoes over them both. Calliope is a creature from a story far older than this one and oh -
for the first time he is afraid for her.
It is almost enough to send him trembling like something newborn, and his gaze rakes anew across the blood dark on her coat that glistens like rain. The bite of her words, fierce as a strike from her horn, steadies him.
“I remember,” he says, and it is almost a whisper even though it seems to fall hot as a coal from his ash-dark lips.
His eyes when they find hers again are burning, too, with such an intensity that nothing so sea-dark and secret should have. Now he does move closer, so that it is only the two of them, the rest of the world forgotten (oh, but not really, not when they all weigh on his heart heavy as a castle on sinking soil).
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, and maybe he, too, is ready to repent, for it is nothing but a confession. “I have never known what to do, Calliope.”
He says nothing more - for surely she knows it already. That her sureness, her cold fire, had been the reason he needed her and followed her. That it had been the reason he had loved her, too, the way any boy who dreamed of being a knight could not help but love a queen.
How far away it all seems now, when a boy saw a unicorn practicing for war, and she told him how the world could be.
Calliope becomes the lion, the wolf and everything about her suggests a predator caged. Her body snakes back and forth. Her horn sighs through the silence that grows like disease around each echo of her hooves as she steps from one to the other and back again. She is a storm and her body is only the eye of all that violence and rage and fury.
“Take.” She growls in time with her steps. “It.” Her horn feels like flint upon her brow and for a moment when she looks at the stone walls she wants to light the entire castle ablaze with a mere breath of her anger. “Back.” All it would take is a spark, she thinks, a simple spark to light all their temples and vanity and burn then down to cinder and dust.
She could be a flame. Her hooves spark with white-lighting as she drags them across the stone floor and the carpet closest to them singes and burns. “Take all your faith back. Swallow it.” Calliope breathes out a storm in rolls of thunderous roars and sparks. The otters tremble and hide themselves beneath the table and the devout lower their eyes before the inquisition boiling in her gaze.
“We could drown them in disbelief.” And those words fall like a guillotine and all her movement but that hiss and spark at her hooves stops. Her eyes could be a blade for the sharpness of them when she watches only Asterion, only a king.
Calliope is a still as the storm-eye then, loveliness surrounded by a brutal storm-wall that threatens to chew up the entire world.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
He had thought she was a wild, dangerous thing before, when she stalked in with blood on her pelt and lightning in her eyes. He sees now that he was wrong; somehow she has become more fearsome yet, her gaze so full of fire he forgets her eyes are blue. Asterion watches her horn sway like a mongoose watches the hood of a cobra even as he is mindful of all those gathered in the hall.
But her fury seems only for him.
Each word she speaks with the promise of blood and as bits of rug spark and burn with her lightning (flickers of flame he puts out with a thought, a gesture of his own magic) her voice rings in his heart like the toll of a war-bell. On and on, each short syllable until all his organs are rolling with it, shuddering like bedrock before a coming storm. Her breath is hot hot hot on his face and the tip of her horn is so close to the small star that marks his forehead -
She falls still, and Asterion does swallow in the deafening silence that follows, as if obeying her command. Before the fury of her he does not avert his gaze and he does not drop his head; even as she stands before him, immense in his heart and his vision with her words ringing in his heart, he thinks of each creature around them (staring, fearful, curious) and each outside the walls (shivering, hungry, fretful).
“First we must survive them,” he says.
If she is as still as a storm-eye then perhaps he is a gathering wave, somewhere well out beyond the shoreline where things gain strength in the dark.
Or maybe he’s just the boy he’s always been, only he’s found himself caught up in one of the stories he’d always wished for when he was just a colt along a shore, racing gulls and foam and clouds.
Before he can decide which the doors are burst open again, and all the strange storm-air seems to go out of the room and the voice of one of the Halcyon rings out.
“We need the king! Something has happened - we must see the king.” The pegasus and his companion are searching the faces, not yet frantic, still restrained.
Asterion turns toward them even as his gaze lingers on Calliope from the blood on her high cheekbone to the scar across her eye. So many words press like floodwaters against the dam of his teeth but he leaves them each unsaid; at last he tears his gaze away and goes to the horses at the door, to see what new thing is his to decide.
“I am here,” he tells them, and together they leave the uneasy peace of the hall.
