An arrow whizzes into the ground several feet away from Caine. It does not seem as though it was meant to hit him, and, if he looks around for the archer who shot it, he won’t even find a trace, as though this unknown assailant was some sort of ghost. The fletching is immediately obvious; the feathers of a hawk, tipped with bright, bloody red. (Paint, or something more sinister?) A closer examination of the arrow will reveal a piece of paper tied firmly to its shaft. However, it seems to be blank…
The surface of the paper glistens with something…sticky. From some sort of plant? Perhaps if he were to wave the letter above a flame, Caine would find a message…meticulously neat and practiced in design, but brief.
RAVEN,
I’ve observed your actions since our new Sovereign took power, and I find that I’m rather impressed by you. I believe that we share a common interest. If you are interested in learning more, meet me at the southern tip of the Vitae Oasis at midnight tonight; you’ll know where to look when you arrive. I’ll be waiting.
Burn this message.
-A Friend
Should Caine decide to meet this mysterious “friend” at the Oasis, when he reaches the southern tip, he will find it apparently empty. If he examines the location a bit more closely, however, he will notice that there is an unmistakable brokenness to the palm leaves lining the shore, and this deliberate brokenness carves a path towards the waterfall several meters away. As if to encourage him, one of the palm leaves has a feather caught in its broken stem, and, although the casual observer might imagine it fell there naturally, it is tipped with the same violent red as the feathers from the arrow. As he approaches the waterfall, perhaps he notices a faint, clicking sound, barely audible over the rush of water – as though someone is stepping out of the shadows cast by the rocky crags…
they made you into a weapon and told you to find peace.
I
n an alley on the edge of a sleeping city, a shadow breaks free from the depths of the dark.
With practiced ease does Caine take turn after twisting turn through the labyrinth of sandstone alleys, his pace never faltering, his gaze never wandering. A dagger, as sharp as it is beautiful, sits cool along the curves of his knotted spine. He itches to feel the heft of it in his grasp.
Caine cannot remember the last time he has slept. Shadows line his eyes like kohl, and a dull throbbing has taken root just behind his temple — yet, he is not tired. Far from it. In the hazy light of blue dawn, Caine's silver eyes, normally pallid, gleam fever-bright.
Tonight, he is on the hunt for secrets.
The ones he has already amassed buzz like flies in his skull. Whispers of the silver Crow who'd murdered a brother. (Acton. The magician's name triggers a rush of... rage? Regret? If Caine could grieve, he would've for him.) Murmurs of the silver Queen who'd fought for a kingdom. (They say that she is dead. No body, but — no one could have survived that. There had been too much blood. And yet...)
The days and nights following Raum's bloody ascension have been nothing short of chaos. Fear runs rampant through the streets, breeding faster than maggots in a corpse. The people are restless. Angry. Thirsty for the blood of a newly crowned boy-king.
It is a caustic mix, and soon, something will give. Something has to give. Caine's mouth twists into a scowl. Madness. It is all madness.
Somewhere, a raven caws, its echo an omen of things to come.
Caine stops to lean heavily against a rough, crumbling wall. His breath comes short and sharp, his eyes glassing over as pain pulses through his skull to the beat of his racing heart. The silver scars on his forehead throb a livid, glowing orange, and they threaten to burn the last strands of his composure to smoke. The lack of sleep is starting to cost him.
Damn Agenor to hell. Gritting his teeth, he reaches into the folds of his wings and pulls out the dagger. The magnificently carved hilt gleams dully in the moonlight for just a moment, before he slices it neatly across smooth flesh. Blood rushes to the surface of the cut.
He exhales when the familiar pain comes, slow and steady.
Hurt for hurt. Blood for blood. The sorcerer's last cruel joke, to make it so that only the addition of pain could stem the agony of Caine's curse.
A streak of silver. He does not see the arrow until it strikes the sand at his feet. "What —" Seized by momentary shock, Caine drops to the ground, back pressed to the wall. His eyes shine with a predatory light. The shadows shift — or do they? He swallows his panic, slows his breath. Looks carefully at the arrow buried shaft-deep in the sand. It had missed him by strides — he has never known an archer with worse aim. Clearly, it had been shot for a different purpose.
When he sees the note affixed to its blood red fletching, he almost smiles. "Now that," he says, "was exciting."
---
The midnight moon hangs crescent and crooked, a grinning mouth in the starless sky. The roar of the waterfall drowns out all other sound. The location is well chosen, Caine thinks, marveling at the pool of sparkling water sheltered by the crags of a limestone canyon. To think, that such a place existed in the middle of a desert.
Something — someone — approaches. If he strains his ears, he can just make out the click of hooves on stone. The shadows shift, and this time he knows he is not mistaken.
"A Raven has come to call," says Caine carefully, with bated breath.
And just who, exactly, has summoned him?
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: let's get this show on the road
Even at night, the Mors are hot.
It is a different heat than the one that haunts the landscape during the day. The heat of the night is not suffocating, and it does not taste like sweat and grit dripping down along your lips, catching in clumps your eyelashes. It does not strangle. It floats, enveloping the wayward traveler like a warm blanket or a crackling fireplace. Seraphina has always liked desert nights. Out in the middle of the Mors, you can see the sky unobstructed for miles; it is a particular sort of irony that the Kingdom of Day is perhaps the best place for stargazing in Novus. When she was queen, and her soul was troubled (and it was often troubled), she would abandon the high city walls for the desert, lose herself among the rolling dunes and the rhythm of her hooves in the sands. She can remember them stained red, during the war with Denocte, but, even as the tumult of political overthrow engulfed the capitol and its citizens, the desert was mercifully quiet, mercifully stable.
It has not changed, in the precious little time she was away, but Seraphina has.
She lingers in the shadows of the rocky crags that build up the waterfall, as dark and still as one of the stones; the sunny gold of her scarf is stained pale and sandy in the moonlight, and the silver-and-brown of her scabbard and armor are obscured altogether by the darkness that engulfs her from the overhang above. A fine mist of cold water dribbles down her coat in small streaks, a welcome relief from the sweat and sand that built up on her coat throughout the day. She watches the horizon. She waits.
And there is her quarry.
She watches patiently as he follows her trail, noting, with a hint of relief, that he seems to have come alone; the distance was necessary, on the off chance that she’d set herself up for an ambush. He is a handsome creature, or a beautiful one – black as ink and limber, with sleek waves of dark hair that appeared painstakingly organized even from a distance. Two pairs of dark wings adorn his back, and she marvels, momentarily, at the sight of them; she doesn’t think that she’s ever encountered a horse with four wings. He approaches the waterfall, and she stands, hooves clattering against the wet stones. “A raven has come to call.”
She pulls her hood forward, obscuring her features, and steps into view.
She draws down the waterfall with practiced ease, her movements as slinking as a prowling tiger. “And what a raven you are,” she remarks, her voice lilted with the foggiest hint of amusement; a strange bird, certainly. Her hooves hit the sand with a soft thud, and, though she lingers at the foot of the waterfall for a moment, she is quick to bridge the distance between them. Perhaps some sort of hesitance would be wise, under the circumstances, but Seraphina tires of hesitating – her strides are long and unhindered, in possession of the cool confidence that comes with an absence of fear.
If it becomes necessary, she can always drive an arrow into his skull.
As she draws closer to the raven, she notes the unmistakable marks of distress drawn into his skin. The shadows cling to his silver eyes unnaturally, and she thinks that she sees the certain delirium that she associates with an excess of thought in their glossy depths. (She wonders how long it has been since he has slept. She wonders why he is so troubled by this turn of events – what is his stake in all of this? She doesn’t know. She wonders, too, at that dark marking on his forehead. A natural pattern? A tattoo? A brand? She doesn’t recognize the symbols.) Her lips curl up in the wry echo of a smile, because that look is so familiar that it is almost painful.
She brushes by him, and she thinks that she smells blood. Her gaze turns towards the horizon. “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” There is a certain, conversational warmth to her tone, a strangely soothing and gentle fondness. “When I was still a guard, and most of my job seemed to consist of escorting wayward travelers across Solterra, I always tried to bring them here at night. They often found the deserts barren and lifeless, but I’ve always thought them the most breathtaking place in Novus. There are so many easily lovely places, but the desert requires you to search for its beauty.” She lets her eyes linger on the glittering, star-filled pool for a moment longer, and then she turns to observe her contact again. Perhaps, even under the shadows of her hood, when he is standing so close to her, he can make out the vague outline of what lies beneath it: those odd eyes, gold as fire and pale as ice, and the outline of the gnarled scars carved into the right half of her face. “Forgive me. I’m getting ahead of myself.” Something in her voice darkens; those silky, lilting tones take on a venomous blush of rage. “Thank you for coming. I won’t leave you in suspense – my name is Fia, and I intend to kill our king.”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
02-23-2019, 04:45 PM - This post was last modified: 02-23-2019, 04:49 PM by Seraphina
they made you into a weapon and told you to find peace.
A
figure appears at the top of the falls, between one heartbeat and the next.
Caine’s eyes strain to pierce through the dark. He is able to make out the faintest trace of substance before a cloud moves to blot out the moon, plunging the land into blackness.
He shifts uneasily in the dark. Not for the first time that night, Caine wonders if he’d made the right choice to come. Alone, without a soul knowing his whereabouts... as it has always been, and shall always be. A wry gleam dances through Caine’s silver gaze when he finishes the thought. If either of us should be afraid… His dagger presses coolly against his midnight pelt.
Well, at the very least, he will not leave empty-handed.
He snaps at once to attention when a voice, low and foreign, drifts from beyond the veil of shadows. “And what a raven you are.”
Surprise flits across Caine’s eyes when the utter reaches him over the roar of the rushing water. Female. That was unmistakably female. He does not have time to dwell on the revelation, before —
He sees her. There, at the foot of the waterfall. For a moment, they simply watch each other, neither moving a muscle. His gaze sweeps over her form, or what little he can see of it — a scarf of pale yellow cloaks her features in shadow.
We are each entitled to our secrets, he muses, though he is not deterred — with an artist’s eye does Caine pick out the details she is unable to hide behind cloth.
She is slender, but tall — an amalgamation of sharp angles and smooth, elegant lines. He notices the predatory grace of her gait when she moves again, nearer and nearer. The precise, severe way she holds herself. When she draws close enough to touch, he regards the armor she wears like skin, studies the scabbard slung low across her back.
The pieces of a puzzle dangle tantalizingly in front of him, waiting to be put together. She moves like a soldier. Composed and commanding. Though Caine sees only darkness beneath the girl’s hood (girl, because she does not feel much older than he — though he can’t say what exactly it is about her that makes him think so), he feels the weight of her gaze on him, as scrutinizing as his own. He wonders, with sudden curiosity, what she sees when she looks at him.
“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” When she speaks, her voice dips in a silken Solterran accent.
She turns away, brushing past him, and her boldness at turning her back on a stranger — paired with her odd question — elicits a faint smile from Caine.
“I’ve never stopped to admire it.” He looks towards where she gestures. "But, I suppose it is.”
“When I was still a guard, and most of my job seemed to consist of escorting wayward travelers across Solterra, I always tried to bring them here at night. They often found the deserts barren and lifeless, but I’ve always thought them the most breathtaking place in Novus. There are so many easily lovely places, but the desert requires you to search for its beauty.”
Her accent is low and musical in his ear. For her to hold such fondness for a kingdom of heat and ash and violence — just who, exactly, are you? Caine wonders, as he listens. His eyes gleam in the night, corvus-keen. Considering her words.
Never has he thought of the Sun Court as beautiful. Perhaps, though, he has just never bothered to look.
When she turns back towards him, on a whim, Caine leans forward just slightly. He is taller by a hand, so he lowers himself just slightly. He is keenly aware of the blade strapped to her back, of the nonchalance she wields like an even deadlier weapon. But she has not been cautious around him, and neither will he.
When Caine locks his gaze on her, eyes narrowed in feline amusement, he thinks he sees a flash of blue and gold staring back at him through the dark.
“Forgive me. I’m getting ahead of myself.”
A dark brow raises when he hears the beginnings of rage leak into her voice, though his expression remains inscrutable. He waits.
“Thank you for coming. I won’t leave you in suspense – my name is Fia, and I intend to kill our king.”
He had considered the possibility of regicide, when he’d puzzled over the letter sender’s intentions earlier that day. And if this Fia had been so keen as to be able to track his movements like she’d claimed (an impossible task, he’d once thought — he was reconsidering many things, this strange night), she would’ve known that he’d been collecting as much information on the ex-Crow as he could glean. Tough work — hence the sleepless nights — but he’d found out enough to know, with grim certainty, that Raum’s intentions were as black as the magic pulsing through his own veins. Perhaps even more.
A bloodthirsty king was volatile. He would drag his court and his people to the ground with him. Solterra would burn, again and again and again. Why do I get the feeling, Caine thinks darkly, that that is exactly what Raum wants?
"Fia.” A smile ghosts across his lips. "My name is Caine.” He does not draw back, though he should have. This close to her, his flickering magic aches to know the memory of her dreams. It struggles inside him, and Caine, tired of fighting, lets it win.
"Bold intentions," he says, after a moment of silence. Questions fly through his mind, but he asks her only one. "Tell me, then — why do you think he deserves it?” A tendril of magic snakes out from him. It sinks its teeth into her anger. What has he done to you?
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: our poor suffering children unite in their suffering :')
and then it's just too much the streets, they still run with blood
He mirrors her casual posture, leans closer – she thinks that she sees the hint of something like amusement in his silver stare, and she matches it with a certain, bitter amusement of her own. She is used to being tragic, or imposing, or some mixture thereof. Attempting to be approachable, even likable - because Solis knows that the leader of a rebellion needs something reminiscent of charisma - is…new. “Fia.” A ghostly, but genuine, smile. At the moment, she has a certain, desperate appreciation for the simple gesture; at the moment, she can appreciate any semblance of kindness. “My name is Caine.”
She remains nothing if not polite, and dips her head in something that almost resembles an informal bow; peeking out from beneath the golden fabric of her hood, her lips hint at a smile of her own. “A pleasure to meet you, Caine.” She hopes that it will remain one.
He is quiet, for a moment, after she admits to her ambitions. Her mind, drawn tense as the string of a bow, clamps around the arrow at her side, obscured beneath rolls of fabric. “Bold intentions.”
She loosens her grip around the arrow.
A hint of a smirk curls across her lips. “Perhaps so, though, in hindsight, I don’t think they’re my boldest.”Those would be her childish desire to make Solterra into the Day Court of fable; killing a mortal man meant little, by comparison; even regicide was a somewhat minor ambition, by Solterran standards. How many of those who’d worn the crown had gained it by blood? Well, he’d certainly taken it with hers - and violence, she’d learned, must be met with violence in turn. “Tell me, then – why do you think he deserves it?”
She is quiet for a moment. Considering.
In her nightmares, she is haunted. She is caught in the flames of a burning court, or she is bleeding out on the Steppe, or perhaps she is in both places at once. Raum vacillates between himself – quicksilver smooth, eyes of the purest blue – and the bulbous figure of Zolin, draped in gold. She can hear him laughing, but she is not sure where one of them ends and the other begins. She does know that she smells the unmistakable stench of the burning dead, of the rotting dead, of blood, and, everywhere that she looks, she is surrounded by glassy eyes and broken corpses-
Finally, she speaks, with a voice that is quiet and dull and caught somewhere far away, in a very different time. “You know, I remember Zolin.”
She looks at him, and then she looks away. She doesn’t know those silver eyes, but this is not a story that she can tell while staring into them. “I do not know if you do – I do not know how long that you’ve spent in these lands, only that you are not a native Solterran. I am sure that my accent has given me away by now; I have spent my entire life among these sands.” Her words roll off her tongue easily enough, at first – this admission is no secret. She knows the way that her voice lulls and rises like the dunes, and she would never so much as attempt to obscure it. For all of her nation’s violence and cruelty, she holds nothing but pride for her lineage. “I won’t bother to tell you the full story of how Zolin came to be ruler of Solterra – a summary is enough. For a hundred years, we were ruled by a class of nobility that claimed descent from our first queen. The first ones…they were good. Powerful. Wise and warlike, and loyal to their kingdoms. That was not to last.” Her tone should hold a storyteller’s cadence, but there is something in it that is strangely clipped, as though she has to force the words out of her throat. “Solterra’s rulers grew increasingly despotic and tyrannical. Their final incarnation was the boy-king, and I was born in the final years of his rule.” A long, slow sigh escapes her lips. “The word monstrous does not do Zolin justice. He threw lavish parties and grew fat on wine and sweets while his people starved in the streets. He and his nobility took slaves-“ Her voice shudders with white, white rage – it burns in her throat. “-wherever they could find them: for labor, for fighting, for…pleasure.” Disgust pulses in her stomach like a flickering ember, and, though she lingers on the raw brutality of the statement for a moment, she is quick enough to continue. “His people scoured the streets for any sign of rebellion, and they crushed it systematically. Sometimes, they would slaughter people who’d committed no crime, just to make sure that we would remain compliant and fearful.” There was no room for organized rebellion – it was too late, too far gone. “And, because Zolin was so hungry for power and destruction, he set his sights on Denocte. We have a reputation for the strongest warriors in Novus, but he was unwilling to expend the supplies that a war requires. We died by the masses, and…” She trails off, her own heart jumping to her throat and clenching with a truth that she does not want to tell, a truth that she has never willingly told – anyone. “…when he began to run out of soldiers, he took the advice of Viceroy, his Warden, and he began to send our children to war. Between the starvation, the slaughter, and the child soldiers, we lost…” She sounds dreamlike, distant, drifting through water. “…we lost a generation to Zolin.”
She lets her words hang in the space between them, thick as spilt blood.
Finally, she speaks again. “I was one of his child soldiers, though I am…something of a strange case. I do not want to speak of what I saw in my time under his command-“ And she doesn’t. Every bit of her begs to stop, while she can, but she needs the vicious bite of her history. “-or what they did to me, but I will. If we do not tell our stories, if we forget what we can become, it will happen again.” She wants to forget. She wants it to all be forgotten, swept away like a layer of sand in the desert wind, but she knows that forgetting – that silence - is the greater crime. She is quiet, for a moment, trying to summon forth the right words; this is a story that she has never told in its entirety, and, for all the dead that it has collected, she wants to tell it right. “Viceroy was a powerful mage, and his magic allowed him to manipulate minds. He could…rearrange your memories, or destroy them altogether, and, if he sensed that something inside of you that he disliked, he would rip it out of you, or torture you until you…bent to his will. He used poisons, drugs, pain - whatever he needed to, if it would make you obedient. And we were children. Orphans, usually, but some of us were simply stolen from our parents. The distinction mattered little; he would make you forget them, if you knew them. He would put a collar around your throat, and it would itch and sear, but if you so much as tried to adjust it, he would make sure that you felt your disobedience for days. He renamed us. Remade us. He took everything that we were, and he left us…left us empty.”Empty, empty, empty - a hollow little shell. She remembers her earliest days of queen, and they way that those subjects that knew would look at her. Like a doll, or a puppet, an automaton. Not a queen. Pitiable, fearful, or something in-between. “I daresay that we were better killers than most children should ever have to be, but we were still children, pitted against Denoctian knights and battlemages; I watched them die in droves alongside me. Sometimes the healers would pull us back from the brink…sometimes we would bleed out on the sands, and maybe that was a mercy.” She doesn’t know. She still doesn’t know – was it better to have lived or bled out on that battlefield? She is finally starting to feel like something solid again, but she knows the others, she sees the others, and she wonders. “Viceroy had a certain…fondness for me.” The bitterness in her voice makes it evident that this fondess was no blessing. “I was his favorite example. He brought me before Zolin, once. I have never forgotten the sight of him, sprawled out on his throne…” Under her hood, her eyes narrow to slits, and her charcoal lips twist into a snarl. “…dripping golden silk and jewels.” “…I was near my third year when Zolin was assassinated. I was in the capitol, with Viceroy – the response was volcanic. The palace was set ablaze, and people fought in the streets, stormed the noble houses, and slaughtered most of the old families, robbed their gilded vaults…” She trails off. The images flash, behind her eyes; the dead in the streets, staring blankly at the sky, and fire, fire, fire. “Viceroy was killed, but I escaped the madness. We scattered, or went into hiding, and, in a few months, Maxence rose as our new sovereign…with the Davke queen as his Regent and Seraphina as his Emissary. She was…like me. I caught sight of her, a time or two, when I was still a soldier.” An addendum, but not an unnatural one. It was fortunate that she was nothing special; it meant that there was little reason to obscure her history. There were many with the same claim to it as she. “And then a Teryr slaughtered Maxence, and she was our queen. We wondered, at the time, why Avdotya had spurned the throne…when our kingdom lay in ashes several months later, when it had barely even begun to rebuild, we wondered no longer. Seraphina was little more than a girl, barely into her third year, and colder than ice; she had no place in the realm of politics. But she believed in the Solterra of old, the Solterra of…noble warriors, a Solterra where each child grew up proud of their bloodline, a Solterra that was…violent, certainly, but not brutal. Certainly not barbaric. She tried. She tried, and, for her efforts, we began to creep towards something resembling stability…but trying to rebuild the Day Court of old was a slow, painful process, with more setbacks than successes.” A simple admission, tinted with an icy bitterness. The silver queen had been foolish, naïve, and now she was paying the price – she had always been paying the price, for her crimes or the crimes of someone else entirely, and she had begun to wonder if there was any difference. “And now she is dead, and a man who would love to see us reduced to nothing more than ashes all over again has risen to take her place. If you want to know the truth, I know Raum. I remember when he was a spy within Solterra; he nearly killed a friend of mine, back then…” She thinks of Bexley Briar, trapped in a prison of fallen rocks, the thick rivers of blood trailing down her beautiful face. “…and he has killed a…friend now.” Can she call Acton that? She is certain that, if his ghost is listening, he’s probably laughing at the admission. For the way that she clashed with the Crow, she’d held a certain respect for him, and perhaps she’d given him more of her mind than she was apt to offer freely. She didn’t know. All she knew was that his death felt like the echo of a knife to the ribs.
She turns back to him, finally, and stares directly into those gleaming quicksilver eyes. She is burning, burning, burning - her magic crawls beneath her skin, and Alshamtueur hums for blood and blaze at her side. She keeps them still, but she knows that they will not rest until they have had their fill of vengeance.
She stares at him, and, with little more than a brush of her magic, she pulls down her hood just enough to reveal her features. A tangle of scars, filled with gleaming, metallic gold, wind across the right side of her face, barely missing her golden eye; their age is indeterminate, newness tempered by Isra's magic, age tempered by the reddish sheen of the skin around them, as though they remain irritated. There is something grotesque about them, an afterthought of the violence that must have created them, but, at the same time, there is something hauntingly beautiful about the way that they are stitched together. Her white hair, torn from her braids, hangs loose around her face, dripping moonlight. She watches him with an intensity that borders on predatory, tempered with a certain bitterness, and, as she speaks, she never allows her eyes to leave his own. “I will not stand idly by and allow him to destroy us. I have bowed to a tyrannical madman before – I will never do it again.”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
02-24-2019, 02:41 PM - This post was last modified: 03-01-2019, 01:50 PM by Seraphina
they made you into a weapon and told you to find peace.
"A
pleasure to meet you, Caine.”
He returns her courteous tip of the head with a bow of his own, less sweeping than he’d normally make it. He suspects the effect would be lost on the cloaked and armored Fia — seldom do maidens who send messages by steel arrow and arrange rendezvous’ by moonlight appear to be much charmed by such flatteries.
Not that Caine has ever met one, before tonight.
Her hood slips back just a little, and he is pleased to spot a trace of a smile on her lips.
“Perhaps so, though, in hindsight, I don’t think they’re my boldest.” He snorts lightly at that, his muted smile stretching into a brilliant flash of teeth. "Consider me impressed, then. If more had your resolve, Fia, this world might have itself competent leaders.”
Light as Caine carries his tone, his smile does not quite reach his eyes. Though Fia’s words burn with the intensity of truth (lies are always so flat, after all; rarely believed in by their own liar) he cannot yet tell if she is foolish or fanatical — or something to be feared.
Silence stretches thin and taut between them when his question falls from his lips like omen. It had meant to be a test — those are the only questions Caine knows how to ask — but perhaps it had been too sharp when it ought to have been soft. Like honey to sweeten a bitter poison.
Exhaustion fogs his mind, dulls his tongue. The old, familiar… dread, of saying something wrong, of being wrong, tiptoes into his chest. Why now, he thinks bitterly, when it has not visited for so long? Perhaps he should —
Gaping eyes of electric blue explode into being in front of him. He blinks. Once, twice. Until —
Caine’s breath halts in this throat when he realizes it had come from her.
The nightmares she relives in her mind — he can see them. His magic gorges itself on the pain, the fear — too muddled for him to comprehend, but enough to send him jerking back as if he has been burned. He feigns a casual flap of his wings to mask the movement, but Fia has already turned away.
Saints.* Of all the times, of all the people.
The binds around Caine’s awakening magic are tattered by sleeplessness, and by Fia — she had been too close, and he’d known it. He had been arrogant to think he could’ve controlled it.
“You know, I remember Zolin.” When her voice finally breaks through the silence, low and solemn, Caine clings to it. He forces the illusion back down inside him. It begs to be freed, a screeching, clawing hawk. Not yet, Caine whispers. Not yet.
“I won’t bother to tell you the full story of how Zolin came to be ruler of Solterra – a summary is enough.” He had liked her voice when he’d first heard it. Low, rich, tapering — the Solterran accent had always been musical to Caine, in a different way than his own was. But as Fia weaves together the story of her kingdom’s bloody past, her tone rising and falling like the tides, the boy who’d once loved stories more than he’d loved anything else forgets his exhaustion and his wild, untamable magic.
He forgets, and he listens.
The tale of cruel kings and crueler fates is one Caine has heard a thousand thousand times, and will hear for a hundred thousand more. Never had he felt particularly moved — men were born to die. Empires were built to fall. Death was the only fate guaranteed to all. He had never understood why so few ever came to terms with those truths — why fight for a future destined to end before it even began?
The silver-eyed boy simply did what he was told. Never more, never less.
“I was one of his child soldiers, though I am…something of a strange case.” His ears flick forwards at her admission. The child soldiers of Solterra. Wasn’t the queen one of them? He wonders, vaguely, where she is. They say that Seraphina is dead, but Caine has seen lesser kings stroll into their throne rooms, none the worse for wear, months after his own people believed him “gone to seek peace among the Gods.”
They are harder to kill than most like to believe.
But Caine does not interrupt Fia, not once, for fear of breaking the fragile spell of her tale. It is only when she begins to tell of Viceroy, that the spell begins to shatter. Suddenly, it is no longer a tale. “He renamed us. Remade us. He took everything that we were, and he left us…left us empty.”
Suddenly, it is all very much real.
Never has Caine been given words for what Agenor had done to him. (“Ask her to tell you where her mother is,” the sorcerer hissed. The dead-eyed boy’s hand trembled. His blade shook in his grasp, slipped against her throat. The child, scarcely younger than he, whimpered.) Never had he realized… just how much Agenor had taken from him. (She lay there, dead at his feet, her neck bent at an odd angle. A broken doll, he thought, and he almost wanted to laugh, because she had been alive and now she was dead and he hadn’t done it, hadn’t even seen Agenor’s hands slip past him and snap her neck in two. “You killed her. The next time you fail me again, boy, another will die at your feet. You are not made to feel. You are not made to feel.")
Caine’s magic roars with the shock of his fury. His eyes gleam fever-bright with the overwhelming force of feeling. He does not want to feel. He does not want to hear her memories, to see her dreams — but above all, he does not want her to stop.
Fia's voice, when it ebbs, takes a part of him with it. She turns to him, chest heaving, and Caine thinks he sees the echo of flames along her spine. In the darkness of her hood. The effort of holding back his illusion has cost him, badly. The pain in his skull has returned for a reckoning, and with a clenched jaw does he mourn the searing kiss of his dagger on his flesh.
He is glad that the waning moon is weak and thin. He is glad for the darkness, so she cannot see.
He cannot keep himself contained for much longer.
“I will not stand idly by and allow him to destroy us. I have bowed to a tyrannical madman before – I will never do it again.”
She pulls her hood down, the final note to a crashing crescendo. He had not expected for her to remove it, and surprise shines clear as day in his glassy gaze. For a moment, all Caine sees is the white of her starlight hair and the fire of her jewel-bright eyes. Beautiful, he marvels. Never in all his years has he encountered eyes like hers.
Then, he sees it. The knitted flesh. The missing fur. The golden scar that runs jagged down one side of her face, like a knife through a paint-thick canvas. He marvels at her scar's strange beauty, and finally, he thinks he understands.
What has he done to you? he had wondered.
"I —" Never in all his years has Caine been at a loss for words. Saints. It's better for me to show you. His magic screams for release. He lets out a shuddering breath when he finally lets it.
Electric blue eyes — Raum’s eyes — blink into existence in front of them. There is no time for shock before it is followed by a wicked golden pair — Zolin’s. And finally, eyes of the purest black, shiny as beetles, gape open. Unblinking. Viceroy’s.
The eyes hover like an unholy trinity in front of them. Three huge, monstrous pairs, more alive than they’d ever been in life. They are abominable, beautiful, haunting. Mocking. But they wobble, flickering in and out of existence like some demented summoning, until Caine steps so close to Fia he is just shy of touching her.
"Forgive me — I cannot… I cannot yet establish a proper connection without physical contact,” he manages to say between breaths, his gaze never straying from his creations.
Slowly, Caine extends a midnight wing over Fia's shoulders like a cloak. It is the least invasive touch he can manage, without losing sight of the eyes. The moment his feathers brush against her silver pelt, the effect is immediate — they solidify until they are no more illusion than the sand at their feet.
He glances over to make sure she is watching.
Then, with a tilt of his head, Caine sets them all on fire.
The eyes catch like kindling, because this is his illusion, and no rules bind the Illusionist save for the limits of his imagination. Tonight, Caine’s creativity is at its peak. He watches in grim satisfaction when identical looks of terror flicker in each burning pair.
He enchants the flames to be as hot as real fire; so hot, beads of sweat begin to trickle down his raven-black pelt. The hollows of his face deepen, and his skin radiates heat like a furnace. But the three pairs of eyes burn on and on, grotesque in their destruction. He licks the sand from his cracked lips before speaking.
"I draw my illusions from dreams. Your dreams. And though I can manipulate them to some degree, the core of it, the substance of it, I drew from you. I hope,” Caine’s grin, in the light of the flames, is ravishing. "It is to your satisfaction, Fia.”
Black smoke billows from the now-fully melted, charred orbs. When the smoke clears, however, one final pair remains. Hers.
He maintains the illusion for a few more moments, and exhales when he finally lets it fade into the backdrop of night.
"I never had any intentions of bowing to Raum. Mad kings cannot rule for long. Seraphina was a good and fair queen — her death is a shame for all of Solterra.” His gaze lingers on Fia, on the white of her hair, the silver of her fur. The Silver Queen. That is what they'd called Seraphina. He cannot shake the feeling that he has seen Fia before, somewhere, but he does not dwell on it long. Whether Fia is her true identity or not matters little.
"It has also been a long time since I have had a proper target. I suppose, after tracking me so well, you know of my occupation?” He turns his smirk onto her, and his eyes gleam with dark amusement.
Deliberately slowly (so he does not invoke an arrow to the skull), Caine draws out his silver dagger from the folds of his wings. He raises it towards her, blade down, in salute.
"From tonight onwards, I swear to wield this blade for you, dear Fia.” He looks thoughtfully at the metal, at one inscription in particular. The emblem of House Selwyn. "That is, if you’ll have me.”
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: caine is all over the place and feeling all of the things
*Unlike other Taeryns, Caine has never invoked the names of the gilded gods. Instead, he’d gleaned the term of Saints — men more holy than their gods — from the pages of an ancient tome when he’d been little more than a child. A slight he utters when he’s feeling particularly spiteful.
She is amused by the bow.
After she’d lost her crown, Seraphina had expected to be done with courtly pleasantries for a time, shedding the luxury (that had never felt especially luxurious) of politics and nobility for sand and grit. It is strange, she thinks, to see the gesture on a man that she knows is a quite deadly assassin (if rumors are to be believed), but, unlike the others she has met, she finds his company pleasant.
Her comment brings a flash of an amused grin to his lips. "Consider me impressed, then. If more had your resolve, Fia, this world might have itself competent leaders.” She merely holds her smile, stifling the urge to make some sharp remark about how it would likely only breed more foolish young queens without the faintest notion of what they were entangled in. She is sure that she is already suspicious, her guise as flimsy and transparent as water; she is not particularly accustomed to lying about herself. The statement in and of itself is almost enough to make her wonder if he knows, but she reminds herself that she is positioning herself as a different kind of leader, some hooded figure of rebellion working outside of the machinations of the law. The irony of the situation is not lost on her.
She does not notice the pained reaction of her contact when she turns away. Her eyes are cast on further things, on the stretch of stars that fade off into the midnight-blue sky and the gentle, lapping rise and fall of the dunes, like strange, golden ocean waves against the darkness. She hears him move and tenses her grip around the hilt of her sword, but, when she risks a glance out of the corner of her eye, she sees nothing more than a stranger, perhaps enraptured by her tale, perhaps troubled; in the darkness of the night, he is almost entirely unreadable, save for a faint furrow in his brow.
She continues. “I-“
It is only when she hears his voice, brimming with some emotion that she can’t quite place, that she realizes that something is wrong.
Her lips twist with concern, and she takes a step closer to him, and then another. Beneath her hood, her brow knits, struggling for some sort of comprehension that lingers just out of her grasp. “Caine.” Her voice is low, trying for soothing, as she stares at those feverish quicksilver eyes. She couldn’t say that he had seemed fine when he arrived, but this was something else entirely; this is no mere sleeplessness, no mere burning desire for knowledge. The raven looks as tense as a bow strung too tight, and she is almost hesitant to continue speaking, at risk of further agitating him. “Are you al-“
She is halfway through her sentence when the eyes appear.
She shies back on instinct, her mind grasping for Alshamtueur, and drags in a painful breath. Her magic swirls inside of her chest, a tempest ill-contained by her ribcage; her hair rises, buffeted by some invisible, absent wind, and trails after her jerking movements as though she moves through water as she backs towards her companion. Raum’s burning blue eyes send a shot of pain through the scar on her face, and Zolin’s golden stare makes her stomach twist with nausea, but it is Viceroy’s black-eyed gaze – a blackness so dark and empty that it swallowed up all the light around it, the color of his eyes when he drew upon his terrible, terrible magic – that captures her attention. For a second, she waits for the inevitable lash of pain, the sensation of her skull being ripped open, the immense, crushing weight of loss as he tears her open and hollows her out of everything that she is all over again-
But it does not hurt. Her neck does not burn.
She is no longer his.
With that revelation comes the realization that those eyes – those massive, flickering eyes – are some sort of tortured, phantomlike illusion. They are woefully unstable, likely the product of some magic user who’d yet to gain much control over his craft, and, as her momentary panic floods free of her, she realizes that Caine has breached most of the remaining distance between them. She almost snatches for her arrow, but the strain in his voice keeps her still. "Forgive me — I cannot… I cannot yet establish a proper connection without physical contact.” As difficult as it is to drag her stare from those eyes, she manages a worried glance at him, noting the uneven heave of his breaths and the way that his gaze remains stuck on those eyes, as though he wants to – has to - keep them there, and they’ll fade away if he did not. Perhaps they would; he clearly doesn’t have much control over his magic yet. His wing brushes her shoulders, settling over her like a cloak. In the past, she might have shied away from the gesture. Now…
Seraphina is rarely grateful for touch.
However, as those flickering eyes solidify, impossibly real even though they are attached to nothing at all, she is grateful for the press of his feathers against her shoulders; perhaps she even steps in a bit closer, just brushing against his shoulder, because she is so desperately seeking some anchor to reality. (It is then that she catches the faint whiff of blood, though it is not until after the illusion has faded that she realizes that it is coming from her companion, rather than some phantom-sensation that haunts her as clearly as the eyes.)
She does not notice his sidelong glance; her stare is trained on those eyes, her mind running circles around itself as it struggles for some reason why he has summoned them.
And then they are burning.
The fire is so real that Alshamtueur throbs at her side, begging to ignite. She ignores the call of the blade and simply watches, wide-eyed, as the illusion burns - and she is not sure if she is relieved or horrified that she feels some spark of vengeful joy at seeing them twist and writhe as they are consumed by flames. She has been struggling with her newborn freedom, stumbling and twining like a climbing vine stripped of support without all of the things she left behind on the peak, but, standing there, shadowed by the wing of someone who was practically a stranger, consumed by the heat of the fire in front of them, she feels as though some weight has been jerked off of her shoulders.
This is the first time that she has thought that her horrors might not be such a horrible thing to have – that her past might be something to wield like a knife, a spur to will her into motion. "I draw my illusions from dreams. Your dreams. And though I can manipulate them to some degree, the core of it, the substance of it, I drew from you. I hope it is to your satisfaction, Fia.” His grin, illuminated by that burning red, is wolfish and haunting, as charming as it is a distant threat – though not one directed at her. She is not a trusting creature, by nature, but, somehow, in the wake of all of these flames and the painful realization – that still knots her stomach - that she cannot walk this path alone, she trusts him on instinct.
Those eyes burn away, but she is left behind with one more set; they hang in the air in front of them like a mirror. She stares into them, and she sees herself reflected back. You are still here. You will remain.
The illusion vanishes with a heavy exhalation from her companion, and, as she turns her head to look at him, those white trails of hair falling back against her neck, she wears a rare, sincere smile – there is something in the soft curl of her lips that is warm. “It is…far more than to my satisfaction. Thank you, Caine.” It is a gesture of kindness to which she is unaccustomed, made even more powerful by the fact that it was unexpected. She lets her gaze drift back to those quicksilver eyes of his, and she wonders what she was expecting when she sought him out; similar goals, perhaps, but not empathy. "I never had any intentions of bowing to Raum. Mad kings cannot rule for long. Seraphina was a good and fair queen — her death is a shame for all of Solterra.” She could have argued that point, or offered some opinion of her own, but she lets it go with little more than a passive nod, noting the way his stare drifts the silver length of her; she knows that she has already been dancing a fine line, and she doesn’t want to risk entirely revealing herself by seeming too personally invested in the topic of Seraphina. He continues, a smirk curling across his dark features. "It has also been a long time since I have had a proper target. I suppose, after tracking me so well, you know of my occupation?” Seraphina had almost let herself forget that he is an assassin. It is with an almost bitter humor that she notes that it would have been her job to hunt him down, as a guard; as a queen, she’d enlisted the aid of some spies and assassins of her own, though she’d tried to refrain from using them, save in extreme cases. (It didn’t look especially good for her lawful and just record, but Solterra was a den of snakes, even on a good day.) She nods her acknowledgement again.
He draws his knife, but she does not flinch away; the gesture is slow and calculated, and, even if it weren’t, she doesn’t feel threatened by his presence. He raises it towards her and offers a salute, a distorted reflection of a knight vowing his honor to a queen. "From tonight onwards, I swear to wield this blade for you, dear Fia.” A hint of that smile is still flickering across her charcoal lips, but he is looking down at the blade. "That is, if you’ll have me.”
Her response comes immediately. “I’d be honored,” she says, and she means it. Her mind grasps for Alshamtueur, pulling it slowly and deliberately from its hilt with a soft screech; she suspends it in the air between them and all but mimics his gesture with the blade. “I want you to know that this arrangement is...reciprocal. So long as you are at my side, I swear by my sword – and, I assure you, she is quite a special one –“ Alshamtueur’s sizzling hum seems to increase in volume, as though she agrees. “-I will do whatever I can to protect you.”
She knows what a dangerous game she is playing, and she knows what any who aid her have to lose.
She quirks a brow at him, then, and adds, “Starting now. Come here for a moment – a bloody wound, no matter how small, is an excellent way to attract a hungry Sandwyrm when you’re traveling the Mors.” With that, she brushes past him, tossing a deliberate stare at his shoulder, and strides to the bank of the Oasis, her contemplative stare brushing across the rows of palm trees and shrubs. She wishes that she had bandages with her, but she supposes that cleaning the wound will do, for now; they have supplies in the canyon.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
02-27-2019, 06:30 PM - This post was last modified: 02-27-2019, 09:38 PM by Seraphina
they made you into a weapon and told you to find peace.
H
e had expected for a reaction from Fia when he’d summoned the eyes into being. Prepared himself for it.
In Vectaeryn, Caine had once set one man’s most horrific nightmare upon him as a desperate final resort. The dream he had conjured for him — there had been four figures sitting by a lake as smooth as glass, Caine remembers, the man’s family; a little girl’s laugh had echoed like bells through the sunlit glade — had not been enough to subdue him. The man’s eyes had been ravaged by rage, and… sorrow. The knife had come from nowhere, and before Caine could react, the man had buried it hilt-deep in his leg.
He had panicked, then. His magic had slipped. Sank its ravenous teeth into the sea of despair emanating from another dream — it had needed no further invitation.
(The little girl’s rotting corpse stumbles towards them. Gaping mouth open in silent agony. Bloodshot eyes dripping blood-red tears. The man stops struggling. His face falls slack with horror, the knife clattering to the floor. The corpse of his daughter is the last thing he sees before Caine’s blade flashes, shaking, across his throat.)
He had expected a reaction. Yet when it comes, when Fia jerks backwards from the eyes in shock and fear, Caine’s revulsion at himself swells just a little bit more.
But he cannot stop his illusions once they are cast. He can only see them to their end.
The eyes burn and burn. His skin crawls, slick with sweat.
And then she steps closer, just enough to brush his wounded shoulder. Why? His startled gaze does not break from the flickering flames, but his breath shudders as he fights the urge to retract his wing, swallows the shock of her drawing ever nearer.
Why isn’t she afraid of me?
The flames ripple when his attention slips. Focus, he hisses to himself, pushing the thought from his mind. Focus.
When the illusion leaves him, Caine’s breath comes easier. The feverish light departs his eyes. The exertion lifts from his shoulders, and at once, he seems to solidify. Exhaustion still plagues him, but the boy is more flesh than shadow for the first time this night.
“It is…far more than to my satisfaction. Thank you, Caine.” He nods, strangely comforted, and returns her two-toned stare with brooding eyes. He wonders what she is looking for.
His dagger bends the moonlight into a ghoulish halo above his head when he offers Fia his salute. When he ponders over the oddity of a foreign-born assassin swearing his fealty to a golden-scarred girl, his smile deepens.
Out of everything, this is by far the least odd thing to have happened tonight, he muses.
“I’d be honored,” comes her reply, and he begins to rise when he notices the sheath at her side shiver. He halts, puzzled.
And then she draws out a sword.
“I want you to know that this arrangement is…reciprocal. So long as you are at my side, I swear by my sword – and, I assure you, she is quite a special one –“
His gaze lingers over the intricate carvings of the sword’s handle, and when he strains his ears, he thinks he hears it humming softly in the air. The blade is lovingly polished, the forging masterful.
He has never been more pleased to be bested by another in the finery of their weapon.
“-I will do whatever I can to protect you.”
Her words ring in the space between them, heavy with sincerity. Glistening with promise. They are a novelty to him.
"How odd. No one has ever said that to me.” Caine punctuates his admission with a chuckle, to make it so that she will not be able to hear the bitter vulnerability in his voice.
"By our blades, then.” He does not have the right to hope. But a flicker of it ignites in his chest still, and Caine hopes that he will never have to betray his oath.
They slide their blades back into their sheathes in unison. And it is done, he thinks, with a pang of dissatisfaction. He frowns when he realizes he does not wish to leave, to melt away into the night, like he has always been apt to do.
To his surprise, Fia's voice comes again. “Starting now. Come here for a moment – a bloody wound, no matter how small, is an excellent way to attract a hungry Sandwyrm when you’re traveling the Mors.”
Blood? Suddenly, he remembers. He glances down at the wound upon his shoulder, almost painless now, and considers telling her that it is no more than a scratch. And a self-inflicted one, at that.
Perhaps he won’t tell her that specific detail.
But she leaves him no room for protest, and there is little he can do but trail her, intrigued, as she heads for the oasis.
He hangs behind and peers at the oasis’ lapis blue waters as she begins to survey the various shrubbery. He doesn't know what she's looking for, but what he does know — sand and sweat cake in rivulets down his pelt, and he detests nothing more.
"Wait,” Caine calls out to her, before he turns and wades into the water’s cool, refreshing depths without a second's hesitation. "I suppose my wound should be cleaned, yes?” He does not look back towards her, though his tone carries a breezy nonchalance to it.
The water is blissfully cool against his heated skin. He sinks into it until he is chest-deep, and watches as the sand billows from his pelt in waves. The ends of his hair float along the water’s surface, like a spill of black ink.
He lingers in the pool's depths for a few moments more, sighing as the knots in his muscles loosen, before wading back towards the shore and Fia. He draws to a stop next to her, and siphons away some of the water dripping off of him with a flourish of telekinesis.
"So,” he says, glancing at his wound — and her — with keen interest. His dip in the oasis has washed off the sand that had clumped along the cut, and a few drops of fresh blood drip from it to the sands below. "How do you Solterrans heal wounds in the desert?”
He is more than a little amused, and he doesn’t bother to hide it. No one has ever tended to his wounds before. Caine had always done it all himself, with gauze and ointments and alcohol-dipped needles. There are none of those here, among the golden sands and swaying palms.
He looks at her expectantly, his gaze tracing, none too discreetly, the lines of her golden scar. His curiosity, he has realized, is a heedless creature.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: briefly considered having caine ask sera to join him for a dip
forget the horror here it's future rust & it's future dust
“How odd. No one has ever said that to me.”
There is something off in his tone, punctuated as it is by a ghost of a laugh, and she furrows her brow at him for a fraction of his second, considering. She doesn’t push; it seems wrong to press someone who is practically a stranger. (When she thinks of it, however, she wonders if she has ever heard those words spoken to her, either.) “I believe that it is my first time ever saying them, so I suppose it’s a first for the both of us.” As Solterra’s Queen, it had been more of an implication than anything. She’d hoped that her subjects would always assume that their leader would protect them, to the best of her abilities. (Failure stings again because she hadn’t, and it is a throbbing pain in the back of her chest like an unstitched wound; she brushes it aside.)
Well. Seraphina was also…much less… outgoing than Fia. Open than Fia.
And, for the moment, she is Fia. “By our blades, then.” “By our blades,” she repeats, with a sincere nod, and then those blades are put away, an arc of silver in the moonlight. She is quick to turn on her heel and examine the shrubbery, and he is quick enough to follow; she keeps her eyes trained on the plant life, looking for a certain something in particular, and his gaze, barely noticed by her, lingers on the cerulean pool stretched out in front of them. She is by the shoreline, eyes narrowed in concentration as she attempts to pick the plant life apart in the perpetual darkness of the night, when he steps past her. “Wait. I suppose my wound should be cleaned, yes?” It certainly should be cleaned, but, giving her companion a rudimentary glance, she has a feeling that it is the appeal of cool water that attracts him more than the dangers of an unclean scrape. “Yes,” she says, with a raise of her eyebrows. “Yes, it does.” She watches him for a moment, as he dips into the water, great lengths of black hair pooling on the surface around him; Seraphina hadn’t registered quite how much of it he had, but now that it is loosened, neat braids coming unbound as they soaked, it occurs to her that his hair is almost copious in length. (She wonders, momentarily, why he keeps it so long – she remembers her shorn hair, when she still served under Viceroy, and supposes that assassins (and spies) have less use for direct combat.) She shakes those thoughts off, however, and set to examining the plant life growing along the shoreline.
They are in the Oasis, which is quite lucky; most of the plant life in Solterra grew on its verdant shoreline. She is on the lookout for bright yellow flowers. Aspilia doesn’t grow anywhere else in Solterra, but it staunches bleeding more efficiently than any other plant in the arid region. His wound isn’t especially deep or severe, but it is clean, - perhaps from a sharp blade, from her rudimentary observations – and clean wounds don’t scab easily. The damned thing would probably be bleeding for ages. (She wonders, momentarily, how he’d gotten it, but she decides against asking.)
A flash of yellow near her hooves catches her attention. The faintest hint of a grin tugs at her lips, and, without so much as bending, she breaks off a part of the plant with her mind – flowers, stem, and leaves. She can work with that. His wound isn’t really bad enough to warrant such elaborate treatment, but, now that she’d breached the subject, she thinks that it is a matter of pride.
She steps back, victorious, to notice that her feathered companion has left the oasis to wander back onto the shoreline, dripping wet in spite of the flourish of what she could only assume is his telekinesis wiping some of the water off his coat and hair. (The part of her that meticulously organizes her own thick white hair into neat braids every morning – shortening her carpus-length locks to the simplistic style she usually wears – is mildly offended by the way his own braids have fallen in the water, by the way his hair is crimping. Perhaps it is just because so much obvious effort had been put into its neatness when he arrived.) “So, how do you Solterrans heal wounds in the desert?” She can hear the amusement in his voice, though her only response to it is a faint quirk of her eyebrow; instead, she notes the way that his gaze flits momentarily – but purposefully – over the metallic scar wrapped across her face. “Not with gold, if that’s what you’re asking,” she responds, with something that is almost akin to amusement, albeit of a cynical sort. “That is the result of one of many near-death experiences. When I was a soldier, healing mages tended to my wounds, so I do not have many scars, but, in this particular case, the woman who found me is a mage of…a different sort. I almost bled out, and I suppose she has a flair for the artistic; she decided to seal up my wounds like this. Denoctians always seem to have quite inventive spirits.” Many of her court dislike the Night Kingdom, but there isn’t even a hint of reproach in her tone; if anything, it holds a subtle admiration. “Now, Solterrans heal wounds in the desert by using whatever they can find. Which is not much, most of the time.”
She returns to his side with her plant, pausing by the surface of the Oasis. As she begins to speak, the golden expanse of her scarf unwinds from about her shoulders and sides, coming to lay flat on the ground; she hardly seems to notice. “This is Aspilia. You can take it orally, for some conditions…” She gestures at the plant, placing it on the scarf. “…but we use it most frequently to stop bleeding. It works particularly well when ground and combined with water.” Her sword is drawn, again, from her sheath, and it sets to work crushing the delicate plant against the fabric of the scarf. She seems quite focused on the plant – so focused, in fact, that she entirely misses her magic threading itself through her companion’s dark hair, tidying his unkempt braids and straightening the faint waves that the water had created in his otherwise silky-straight locks. While a bizarre sensation, it probably isn’t unpleasant, if one can disregard the strangeness of the situation; a bit like having a comb taken through it, or someone’s fingers. For her part, Seraphina is entirely unaware of the gesture, her gaze trained on her sword. “It only grows in the Oasis, however. It won’t do you much good elsewhere; it’s always smart to carry supplies when you travel.” With the plant crushed to a fine powder, she dips her blade into the water to wash off the dust, and then, rather carefully, dips in the scarf, sides pulled up into something of a makeshift bag in the fabric so that the powder doesn’t disperse. She turns back to Caine, eyes his shoulder, and takes a step or two towards him.
She dabs the paste onto the scratch with the scarf, then dips it back in the water; when she pulls it out, she wrings it, and then, with the slightest hint of a flourish, wraps the great expanse of golden fabric across her companion’s shoulders, tying it neatly – and tightly, in spite of its size – in place so that it covers the wound. “We also always keep something around to act as a bandage, if needed, and scarves do more than keep away the heat. I’m sure that you’ve noticed how easy it is to find yourself covered in grit in Solterra; if you don’t want an open cut to end up infected, it’s best to keep it covered.” There is the faintest hint of amusement in her mismatched stare; this is altogether too elaborate for such a minor wound, though she has seen rather nasty infections grow out of untreated wounds in the desert landscape. “We can bandage it properly later; for the moment, that will do.”
(Later. Although her feathered companion perhaps hasn’t realized it, she has every intention of showing him where the makeshift rebellion is stationed; it only seems reasonable, under the circumstances, that he should know where he could find her. She can’t always hunt him down in the back alleys of the capitol with an arrow, now can she?)
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
we slipped into midnight like the death of the sun
H
is hair, damp and fallen from their braids, sticks to his neck like seaweed. Frowning, Caine flicks a few curling strands away from his eyes, resisting the urge to straighten them. It’s hopeless, anyway — his hair always curled when wet. Not enough to form ringlets, but enough for him to find entirely unappealing; he isn’t a vain creature, not really, but he’d always felt considerable pride in how meticulously he kept his hair.
And when he didn’t — Caine’s brow twitches. He fights the urge to fix it. If there is one thing the boy has learned over the years, it is that there is a time for everything.
Right now, that thing is Fia.
Droplets of water carve silver paths down Caine’s pelt as he stands patiently behind the hooded girl, waiting for her to finish… whatever it is she is doing. Her back is to him, but he thinks he sees something small and yellow spread out on the sand in front of her, the dull end of her blade mashing it to powder.
He listens as she tells him about her gold-filled scars (he had made his interest blatantly obvious in hopes of hearing exactly this). When she mentions the Denoctian mage, his ears prick forwards.
“I almost bled out, and I suppose she has a flair for the artistic; she decided to seal up my wounds like this. Denoctians always seem to have quite inventive spirits.”
His thoughts trickle back to the living magic of Queen Isra’s labyrinth, on a night stranger than dreams. Above all be brave, and remember how to dream. His lips curl into a half smile.
“Inventive,” he muses softly, before meeting Fia’s odd, bicolored gaze. He tilts his head, admiring her scars thoughtfully. “Yes. She has made them very beautiful.”
There is no inflection of flattery or mockery in his voice. Only conviction, like he is stating a fact. He doesn’t know why he says it, after, and worst of all, he can’t figure out which expression best suits his statement (a teasing smirk? a sincere nod?). The not-knowing gnaws at him. He settles for a distant smile.
“This is Aspilia.” At last, Fia steps aside to show him her handiwork. Caine looks down at the dandelion-yellow flowers she nods at. She lists the plant’s various medicinal properties without hesitation, like she has known it for years. He supposes she has, but she could not be much older than him, if at all. Solterrans. Are they all like this?
Before he can ask, she turns back to her work, engrossed. No matter. He tucks the question away for later, and makes to step to the side of her so he can observe more closely —
Until a tickle begins at the nape of his neck.
His brow lifts. Had he imagined it?
No — no, he feels it. Feels the ends of his hair lift off his neck and twine back and forth, over and under, on their own accord. For a bewildered moment Caine thinks that he is dreaming, that his exhaustion has claimed him at last — until he remembers that he cannot dream. (In a moment of utter disorientation, he wonders if he is finally being haunted. He has always entertained the thought, but now that it is — possibly — happening, he feels quite sick to the stomach.)
There exists an explanation. There is always an explanation. He remains perfectly still, mouth drawn. Silver eyes search and search, until they narrow on the floating sword grinding the aspilia to bits. On the neat row of braids crowning Fia’s silver neck.
It’s… her. A breath of relief and bafflement escapes his lips. For a moment he is lost for words, silent as his hair is combed and woven by an invisible hand. She is not aware, is she? Astonished, Caine chokes back a genuine laugh.
“It only grows in the Oasis, however. It won’t do you much good elsewhere; it’s always smart to carry supplies when you travel,” she continues. Completely, utterly unaware.
“I thank you, Fia, for your knowledge and your care.” And your braids. The words push and push at Caine’s lips, yet reluctantly he swallows them down. There is a time for everything. His eyes shine bright with the effort of patience.
Will she notice? He plays a game with himself, then, counting the steps it takes for her to reach him. The breaths she breathes when she dabs the paste onto his shoulder. The stripes on her neck when she loops her scarf once and once again over his withers. Has she noticed?
“If you don’t want an open cut to end up infected, it’s best to keep it covered.” Not yet.
“We can bandage it properly later; for the moment, that will do.” His patience breathes its last, dying breath.
“Consider me thoroughly humbled — I have never received such meticulous care before.” He lowers his head, feigning a sweeping bow. The braids slide down and up again on his neck, and he tosses his head with a cheshire grin.
He hopes he has made it obvious.
Before he can see if he has or not (the temptation would be too great then, and he does not trust himself to behave), Caine sweeps past her languidly, stretching his wings to the sky. He yawns, eyes slitting like a cat’s.
He looks back when he is a few strides ahead of her, struck by a sudden question. “There is something I am curious about,” he remarks, glancing down at the scarf that binds his wound, and then back at her.
He had spotted it, when she had slipped her scarf off of her head. The ring of chaffed skin, where a silver band should gleam but doesn’t.
When she catches up, he shortens his stride to match hers. “Why do you not wear your collar?”
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: he has asked the Question
