Sunlight glinted off of his golden chains as he walked, and for the briefest of moments, Rufio wondered if they were too heavy in such a harsh climate. Shaking away the thought, he jingled as he walked deeper into the canyon, far away from the blasted desert where the Rift had dumped him. Though the boy had been at Novus for several days now, it wasn’t home. It would never be home. A scowl crossed his face as he pressed onward, eager to get the fuck out of this desert, but finding that it stretched further than he’d care to travel. Resigned, he had simply tried to get as far away from Mors as he could, grumbling with every step, annoyed and completely over it.
Sweat gleamed along his curves, and even the wind seemed to tease and dance away again, not willing to give him respite. This place sucked sweaty balls, truly. How anyone could find beauty in the desert was beyond Rufio, for he wanted nothing more than to get away from it all, tending to now wander at night to avoid the harshness of day. Still, a part of him knew that he needed to get used to it. It was unlikely that the Rift would swoop down and pick him up again. The magic just wasn’t that kind. It was punishing him, perhaps for his years of overindulgence and selfishness in Neverland, but Rufio didn’t give a fuck… he was still pissed.
Grumbling as he pressed closer to the canyon walls in search of some shade and respite, he screamed aloud in frustration, his cry met by little more than the flapping of wings as a couple of vultures frightened away. Figured, nothing around here seemed alive anyway. Perhaps they were here to pick at his body, for surely Rufio couldn’t survive in a place like this for long. Licking his lips to moisten them, he crept onward, tired and hungry, and ever so annoyed.
In the distance, he spots her – blinking and wondering for a moment if she was an illusion. Hello? His question wasn’t so much given in kindness, more to check on his own sanity as he approached her. As he nears Eshek, something eerie washes over him, as if she didn’t belong in the land of the living – even if her coat glowed red and hot like fire, real enough to touch. He doesn’t touch her though, pausing with his breath caught in his throat as her hollow eyes catch his, afraid he might never be warm again.
What are you? His voice hovers between reverent and curious, as he waits beneath the autumn sun to know more about the stranger and her mysterious presence.
mischief managed.
@Eshek | "speaks" | notes: <3 sorry he’s an asshole
Each of the shadows twists grotesquely, mausoleums of black that reach out in tangles suggesting shape and form, in the sunlight. The canyon is a chorus of black and light and red-rock that looks a little bit like hard, dried blood where two shades meet. It stretches out endlessly before her and endlessly behind her, and still she walks, and her eyes shine in the black shadows with spectral half-light.
And each time she blinks the rock near her looks to be squirming.
If there are other bodies around her she takes no notice of their mortal-brine, nor of the direction in which their earthly coils drives them. She takes no notice but that of blood-stone, and squirming rock and the way the sun arches through the shadows around her like a halo. Only the pillars of stones that make altars around her matter, only the things the strongest south wind could not bend.
There is something primitive in this place, she thinks, where the rock curls above her head like a guillotine. Something that suggests that deep in these rocks another world lives, where twilight lives and strange stones bloom from the walls like blood from a wound. She wonders how deep she would have to dig to find it, the thing beneath this world that pulses and drives it onward through the cosmos.
She wonders what it would taste like on her tongue. Would the core of the world burn or cool the reckless wants that pools hollowly in all the light of her?
It's in her wondering that she hears him calling. He sounds like a sinner calling for saving when their eyes are dripping gore instead of tears. She turns to him and answers his hello in a code of darkness and light. She replies by the blinking of her eyes. It seems slow and strange when the chime of his chains rings almost needy and frantic through the hollow canyon. Each of her movements seems grandiose, a suggestion of infinite violence.
Closer he comes and closer she moves toward him. She matches him step for step and where he drips sweat she leaks brightness instead of mortal debris. Stillness only comes to her when he's close enough to touch. She counts the chains on him, each one a mark of worth that she counts like a jailer counts villainous acts. The number pleases her and so she opens her lips to reply and the walls still squirm like worms in the throb of her blinking, bright gaze.
“God.” She says, with light pouring out between her teeth.
There is a chill which cannot leave Rufio, despite the warmth of the harsh desert sun. As he stands beneath the monolithic walls of the canyon, he feels suddenly small and insignificant, staring at the stranger as she stares back at him, in a way that suggested she could see into his very soul. Of course, such things were nonsense… but the boy shivers anyway, willing away the feeling of death which washes over him. He blinks back at her, setting his jaw in a stubborn bite as he refuses to look away (even if every piece of him is telling him to run far from here). Instead, he waits… he has to know.
When she says she is a god (no, when she says she is God), he snorts in derision. IT is only then that his swagger is back, and he offers her something of a sneering smile. Not sure if you’ve heard, but apparently Solis is the one true god around here… While I don’t give a shit about politics and religion, you’ll surely be corrected by the others… they seem quiet a pious bunch. There is an ease to his tone, which suggests that he does not care for the consequences of his words, even if he should be afraid or reverent around Eshek.
What are you doing around here anyway? If you are, in fact, a god… it seems that the mighty must have fallen to bring you to a shithole like this. What’d you do to curse yourself in such a way? Surely, no one would come to Solterra of their own volition. Hell, Rufio wouldn’t be here if he could figure out a way to leave. As the sand itches beneath his chains, he is reminded with every step of how much he longed to be back in Neverland, enjoying the ocean breezes and tropical weather.
Perhaps you know a way out? Personally, I’ve never been much for red clay and sunburns. I need to get back to Neverland. But deep down, Rufio knows there is no going back. It is the child in him that holds a stream of hope, even when the weight of reality lay heavy on his shoulders. There could be only marching forward in this strange new world, whether he wanted to accept it or not.
mischief managed.
@Eshek | "speaks" | notes: thanks for your patience, busy times around here
All that meets each word of his, full of furious sound, is silence. There is only light pouring from her like wine from a cup that has no bottom. There is only light and the walls of stone and red dirt looming over their heads like steeples to a religion that only she knows the secret of. On and on he goes. She does nothing more than listen and stretch her neck side to side like a cobra who hasn't decided if it wants to eat the mouse or go back to sleep.
Eshek moves like a terror in the tall grass even though there is only sand, shadows and death all around her. Does the setting for horrific moments even matter?
He finishes and still she only watches him, head swinging like a gavel between them. There is in her the thought that his blood must surely flow as freely as his words between the cage of flesh in which he lives. There is the thought too that he would taste as bitter as fermented wine. The swinging of her head stops with one final crack of her old, rotten spine.
The silence is louder than his words and she wants to rip off each of his ears so that he might understand.
“I know what is it this world thinks it knows.” Each word is full of brilliance and sublime in the way it forms from the harmony of light, and sound, and everything. Her voice sounds like liquid silver, hot and melted down only to be reformed in something like platinum. She wants to drown him in the sound of her until his chains are no longer gold but her. “It will learn like all the others.” Oh how she wants to drown him, split open her ribs like a mouth and swallow him until the silence sounds like a hallelujah.
Coldness moves with her when she steps closer. Worms move with her too, poking their heads up in the hollows left by her hooves like flowers rising up towards the sun. Everything that is reminiscent of her dead swap full of fat-faced lotus flowers moves with her. She reaches for him with tight lips and almost closed eyes.
She could look like a corpse without all the spectral light pouring radiance from her form.
“I know the way out.” Still she doesn't smile and her teeth ache like knives in her gums. Her stomach growls like a lion. “And I could show you.” Only then does she smile again.
The world jolts back to life in the shine of her white-hot sun.
