It’s impossible to tell which hour it was when the sun grew brave and bold enough to rise through the ash-night sky. There was blackness and then there was pastel light rising above the sea. Rain came with the sun, bloated and fat drops that weighted down all the soot and drowned it in the sea. Whales and rain made ripples in the waves. Gulls swooped low as they returned to the shoreline. The dune-grasses sighed happily in the fresh, clean rain.
Everything was quiet in a sad sort of way, as if the land that was not harmed was thinking only of that island the was.
And yet--
The island had disappeared from view. Even as the soot was still settling from the eruption that had most definitely happened, there was not a trace of any volcano on the horizon. There was no distant shore winking and in out of the waves like a star.
There was no island.
Instead on the horizon was a strange stretch of hardened lava cutting through the sea like a black blade. It rose through the water, as if the sea was nothing but a shallow puddle it decided to conquer. The lava made itself into something like a bridge, a low center path with archways rising up around it like a cage. And in the spaces between the lava, the sea, and the sky everything was both queer and terrifying.
Pearls jutted from the hardened stone like teeth waiting for a meal, or maybe a prayer. Oysters made themselves in arcane shapes and patterns, trapped forever like fossils. Marble rose into small spires on the path like bones peeking out from the stone (bones that the sea was too shallow to hide). Seaweed grew from the cracks even though it clearly didn’t have enough time to seed and root in that hard lava rock.
Each mile of bridge held more mysteries. There was a stretch that looked too thin to bear weight, where the sea peaked through the cracks like a hundred, endless eyes. Another mile had across it bits of scale that shone like trapped stars across the black when the sun shifted out from behind a cloud. The last three miles of it were a tangle of things that made no sense-- feathers opening like flowers, pink sand blowing patterns across the black, metal cogs spinning and counting no mortal time, and then fruit blooming pale orange from stone instead of vine.
What was more terrifying than all the strangeness were the suggestions of great ocean monsters appearing between one wave and the next. Every few moments a tentacle would rise from the white froth, red as blood and cracked with flames that surely couldn’t live in all that salt-water. Scared and broken fins could be seen cutting through the current, each the bright color of amethyst that no whale or shark could claim. Blooms of cooper ink would appear across the churning blue sea from no visible source. The only thing obvious in the sea around the bridge was that death was waiting, and waiting, and hungry.
On and on the strange bridge stretched. It seemed that the mortal world ended on the other side of the lava rock and some other world began. There were no birds flying over the sea and no Pegasus calling out to the horses walking the bridge. The blue sky was empty, empty and thick as glass. For the sea air denied the existence of anything between the sea and the island that was no longer visible.
But finally, although it took hours, the first horse discovered the end of the strange bridge.
And the end was nowhere.
The bridge ended in a wall of ivy, that seemed only to exist the moment the first horse stood before it. It rose endless from the pathway, out towards the horizon and higher in the sky than any mortal eye could fathom. The ivy swallowed up the sun and the moon until it glowed with the muted light of each. The leaves were slick, and shining, and almost a green dark enough to look black. Berries could be found in small clusters. On closer inspection each cluster of berries seemed to be pulsing. Maybe they weren’t berries at all but a million tiny hearts from which the veins of ivy grew.
That first horse tried to turn away, he tried to be sensible and run back to shore where the sun shone and the birds sang like birds should. He wanted the rain and the clouds with warm sand beneath his hooves.
But then the ivy started to learn towards him as if a wind was blowing in, hot and fast, from the other side of the wall.
He forgot all about running back to a place where the world wasn’t so strange and terrifying.
How to Participate!
The ash and smoke from the eruption of the volcano has settled. The sky is clear, although it feels a little too thick to be considered normal. When the black clouds fully dissipate a bridge made of lava is revealed. Strange arches of rock, and things that don't belong, are curling like branches over the pathway. The bridge seems to go on for miles, and miles, and miles. At first it looks like the bridge goes into the horizon before cutting off abruptly into nothing. A terrifying thought when the sea around the bridge is frothing with more than just the waves.
But as horses finally make their way to the end, there is nothing for them to find but a wall of ivy. It stretches deep green from the sea to the sky, and it's dotted with berries that pulse like hearts. If there is an end to all that ivy no one has found it. A wind is blowing though and the ivy is reaching out to the horses close enough. It all makes it easy to wonder....
What exactly is on the other side of that wall. Is it a monster or the end of the world?
A NOTE: There is no way around the ivy. The air is too thick to pass and the ivy seems to go on forever. And should a horse try to swim underneath it, they will find that it extends below sea level.
Each character may reply to this post only one time. Rolls will be done and a staff edit will be posted at the end of each reply with Random Event results. You are more than welcome, and encouraged, to branch off into individual threads to interact with other characters. You may respond to the characters before you or your reply could be set at a different moment in time (this is totally up to you). This event will last for several days IC time.
If you reply to this thread, it gives you +1 post in an SWP.
All replies after June 1st, 2019 will not be considered for a RE roll.
Possible rolls and their rewards are as follows.
1 : 20 signos
2: 40 signos
3: 80 signos
4: 100
5: 140 signos
6: A mollusk shell that when crushed IC will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP, you will have to post a memo at the bottom of your thread when it's being used) Please message @sid or @nestle with questions. If this remains unredeemed, you may use it in Act VI.
To tag this account: @*'Random Events' without the asterisk.
Please be advised, tagging the Random Event account does not guarantee a response!
What no one ever talks about is how dangerous hope can be. Call it forgiveness with teeth.
Ereshkigal circles above Seraphina’s head as she picks her way down the beach, hooded and spectral in the murky light of a foggy dawn; the beach is covered in white ash, and the air still smells almost overwhelmingly of smoke. Still, the vulture is barely visible through the clouds, her shape distorted and flickering in the patchwork of dark and light. Seraphina, too, moves like a dancing wraith, the long expanse of her scarf like a reaper’s cape, fluttering in a trail behind her. She is obscured and ghostly, pale as the snow-ash that litters the shoreline. She feels like a revenant, following in the wake of death; she moves with a quaking dread or a terrible resolve, and she wonders if there is any difference.
Ereshkigal’s laugh rips through the silence of the dawn – violent and crashing, like the waves against the pale crescent-moon of the shoreline.
Exhaustion tugs at her like a weight, and it is not only because of her armor. When the volcano erupted, she was far north of here, in Delumine; but the destruction, like a beacon, pulled her south. (She ran all through the night, sleepless and haunted, red-eyed as a banshee – but she has forgotten what it means to feel anything but fatigue, but the leaden pull of her limbs and a constant sense of weary, weary devastation. She wants to hurt – she wants every terrible thing to set her ablaze, to burn like a blade torn into her gut or a trench of claws drug along her face –, but life has stumbled to a dull, constant ache. There is terror and terror and terror and terror until there is nothing left in the world but terror and the dark shape of Ereshkigal, twisting and flickering, and worst of all things waiting.)
She continues down the beach, towards the volcano...or the lack thereof.
There is a crowd gathered, when she draws close. Seraphina is not surprised – violence (And a volcanic eruption is an act of violence; but whose? Either way, the mountain is gone there, and its absence suggests something worse is at play.) always draw people like flies, eager to bite at a bleeding wound. She listens to their whispers. They blame the gods. (She blames them, too, but maybe not for this.) They weep, or they scream, or they say nothing at all. She says nothing at all. They think that this is the end of the world, but she has seen the end of the world – bleeding out in a patch of dry grass and upturned dirt, one eye facing the sickly white curve of the moon, thin and upturned as a laughing mouth – and this doesn’t feel like it. Ereshkigal dives down from the clouds and lands on her shoulders, the massive expanse of her wings outstretched to their fullest length, barely ghosting across the sides of passers-by; behind the curve of her neck, those great black things might as well be her own. “Where does it lead, Ereshkigal?” She reaches for the demon with her mind. Ereshkigal’s talons curl into the leather of her armor; she can feel them dig into her skin as she settles, her wings slowly closing in at her sides. Ereshkigal leans in towards her ear, and, with the softest of chuckles, drags her tongue along her pointed teeth. “Towards death,” she whispers, her voice low and dark, like a threat, then adds, “Dove. I don’t know, little dove. The air is too much to fly.”
She does not want to move.
Towards death – does she want to die? She thinks so, but not like this, not in the unnatural, pointless way this strange bridge seems to want her to die. She has better things to die for than this, and they call her away from this, towards great expanses of sand and a country and a people who need her to bleed out for them, not for the gods who might have prompted this (What else could? She doesn’t want it to be them, but what else could?), not for the nations it creeps so close to. But this thing – she feels like it could swallow everything. It feels like a test, and she is tired of tests. Everything inside of her begs to go home. (But that desert is no more her home than that bridge, than this ash-coated shore.) “Sweetling,” Ereshkigal croons, her voice dipping to the dusky mimicry of affection. “Sweet thing. Darling. What will you do?” The water is dark and thrashing and terrifying, torn up from the eruption and the presence of – horrible things, creeping on the horizon. And even from the shore, that bridge feels unsafe, like glass, and she has seen enough shattered glass to know how easily it can go crumbling, crumbling down.
At the back of her mind lies Solterra; it is always there, and she does not think that she will ever be free of it. Her love for the sand-swept kingdom does not feel like the love she was told about in stories or hymns or books. It feels like a noose. (The collar is gone, but it is still there.) If she steps onto that bridge, it occurs to her that she might never return, and she knows that she has unfinished business. (That is why ghosts cling to the realm of the living, isn’t it? And he is no ghost – but if he can steal her name from her, if he can steal her title from her, if he can steal everything from her, she can take every bit of him, too.)
She steps onto that dark spill of gloss anyways, her strides surprisingly steady against the slick lava. If Seraphina were to pinpoint the thing about herself that she resented the most, it would be her faith. She does not believe in the glorious way that most people seem to – she believes like a kicked dog believes in its master, with a faith that is violated over and over. (In gods, in people, in the faraway, dizzying concept that perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, if she just tried hard enough, if she just did enough, if she just continued, things would get better. As though any of those things had ever been worth believing in before.) She is scared of the dark, fathomless depth of the sea and the way that it licks at the volcanic bridge. She is scared of the monsters within the sea, with their tendrils and their teeth. She is scared of men with violent blue eyes and what they have yet to do, and she is scared that she will never be enough to put an end to them. Her faith does not save her from any of those things. If the ocean wishes to drown her, it will; if Tempus is waiting at the end of the bridge, and this time he decides to kill her for answering incorrectly, she will die; if Raum burns Solterra, and she cannot do anything to stop him, Solterra will burn, and she will burn too, and she will hope that there is no one to drag her out of the flames that time; if, if, if, if. Faith is not a saving thing. It is not assurance. It is-
If she has to call it anything (she thinks, as she crosses the thinnest point of the bridge, her movements steady in spite of the way that the pull of the waves turns her stomach in knots), she would call it a snakeskin that she can’t seem to shed. It is hopeless and worn and dead, but she drags it along behind her; she still catches her hooves carrying to Veneror, and she still catches her lips shaping the form of a prayer, even though she knows he won’t answer. She thinks that it would be better to believe in nothing at all than to believe in this half-hearted way.
She should be shocked at all these things that she passes, the pearls and the scales and the cogs. But she feels nothing at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing – just the absence that nothing leaves behind, the gaping place where she knows that shock should be. This place is wrong. Perhaps she should find it beautiful, but it leaves her with a dull sense of threat and a panic that stutters in her chest, but never lets bloom.
And then there is the ivy. “Well. Look at that. It leads,” Ereshkigal murmurs into the shell of the silver’s ear, her voice low and growling, like the depths of a raging sea, “to a great wall of ivy – a wall that goes everywhere and has no end. Does that make you think of anything, sweet seraph?” Yes.
It makes her think of drowning. It makes her think of staring what she thinks was god in the eyes and failing to answer his question. She has never been good at riddles; she has never been good at anything, and now she is paying for it. Seraphina back out at that black-glass bridge, and her stomach twists like she is still drowning, and she does not know if she will ever reach the surface, or if there is even a surface to reach for at all. She failed there, too. (She wonders if that ink-monster is there below the waves, with those tentacled creatures and slips of mouths; she wonders if it is coming for her, because anything that she fails to destroy will come back to destroy her in time, just like Raum.) If life is full of tests, that was the first one she was aware of failing. There were others, before that, but she barely remembers them, her memories as fragmented as they are; the first time she had failed, she had failed before god.
And then again, with a skull cracked back against rough stone. And then again, with a teryr that blotted out the midday sun. And then again, with a viper and a sea of flame. And then again, in the face of – her – god. And then again, in fallen snow. And then again, in a field that was now covered by jewel-flowers, soaking up her blood. And then again, with the dead, who watch her. And then again, with those that have walked – away.
The ivy rises up in the distance, endless and insurmountable. She looks at it, and she waits for the world to open wide – and swallow her up, with everything behind them.
*slams this down* 300 posts! also, I'd prefer you bop me if you want to have someone spot Sera, with her faking her death and all. Can't accidentally reveal things ahead of schedule.... <3|| "Change Came To Me Like A Crooked Beast," Clementine von Radics "Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
STAFF EDIT***
@Seraphina has rolled a 3! She has been awarded +80 signos.
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
Antiope has never been a very curious creature. She was not made for curiosity, not made to wonder and question things, only to do as she was told. But this land, it is still so strange to her and around every corner is something she hasn't experienced before. Everything is new in this life she has barely started to live.
So when the volcano stops breathing its black breath into the air and the sky is done raining ash and the sun has just barely peaked over the horizon, Antiope is awake and moving and the world is quiet and the lioness in her bones is restless. Searching.
That is how she finds the bridge, stretching far and strange into the ocean that is the color of her eyes. It disappears far beyond her vision, and when Antiope looks at it the essence inside her that was made from mystics and magic and purple haze, it sings. It says unnatural and she cannot help but make the comparison that everything about her is unnatural, too.
So she takes the first step, and the second, until she is following it mile for mile. And every time the bridge changes, so does she. Lover, mother, warrior, killer. Every part of her rises to the surface like the sea and the beasts inside it reaching for her hooves on that hard, dry lava.
Antiope walks until she thinks the bridge can't possibly go on any further, and then continues to walk when it does. Until at last: she reaches the end. But there is nothing waiting there for her. No salvation, no reward, no mythics and mirages. Only a wall of ivy stretching as far as the bridge had—forever.
That is when she takes her axe, grasping its twisting handle like she might have once gripped it in battle. Like she had once gripped it and destroyed a temple and the beings within. Her blue eyes trace the etchings on its double head and then, "Theófos," its blade begins to glow. Brighter, hotter, until it is nearly blinding. Then, she takes the first swing.
Eik had never been a particularly proud man, until he fell in love and someone told him that love would ruin everything. Oh, how pride reared up in him then! How his blood raged hot with disbelief and indignation. How it hurt to look at her, that woman of fire who signed her messages with the word love only to turn around and tear those four letters apart with her teeth.
"I am glad to see you, Eik."
He expected to only be angry, but when he sees her the first thing he feels is relief. Without thinking he steps closer until he can reach out to press his nose against the delicate skin of her neck. For all that has passed between them, she still smells the same as she did that first morning they met, eyes heavy with sleeplessness and hearts unknowing of the paths before them.
"Moira Tonnerre," he rumbles into her skin. He almost steps closer but there's still a wall between them that he is not ready to knock down (he feels her anger pulsing in his mind, as sure as he can feel her blood coursing beneath her skin) and so after a moment he draws away uncertainly. Over the ocean rain falls, fat and heavy and dark with shoot, and angry waves rise.
He does not need to look at Isra to know she's here, and she's willing to die fighting for her kingdom, and he prays to whatever god may be listening that this is not another new fight, this is not a new war. He closes his eye and prays for Asterion and Moira, Seraphina and Bexley and O, Teiran and Toro and the list goes on, folded up into in a single, humble word-- please--
and when he opens his eyes there is a bridge that stretches out across the water. Horses begin to step onto it, uncertain.
The unknown lies before them, inviting in a wicked way. Home lies behind. "Where are you going?" He asks, chest tight. I will follow, goes unspoken. Because wall or no wall, this is no time to be alone.
however many holes are in you,
E I K there's room for another
she looks into her mirror,
wishing someone could hear her, so loud
She's never been more of a dreamer than she is now, with her heart bleeding somewhere in Denocte and her heart bleeding somewhere in the waters beneath the feet of a wave-frosted man. There are stars vibrating in gold, shining in white, and they glow when they look to Eik and his gentle face, his soft words.
They roll like thunder down her neck where his nose is pressed. It feels like family, like a thing she's never had. The phoenix sighs into the touch, falls into the familiarity of it. This is almost like the first time they'd met as dreamers and sleepless fiends, under the stars and under the sun where all they could do was wait until they would part. How she'd wanted to paint him, a slash of a smile like a comet on his face as the sun kissed it so sweetly, so gently, that she was jealous of his skin for the way the skies wished to hold it. But she could never truly detest Eik, could never truly be jealous when he is light and he is joy and he is life.
Side by side they wait as the ash clears and the volcano disappears, as the dawn breaks and a bridge lays bare. Like whale bones rising to the heavens, a path of obsidian and pearl and shells sprawls out further than she can sea. There's something about the endless opportunity and chance of the future that pulls Moira forward, urges her black slippered feet to press into the pathway before them.
Bodies press nearer, some turn away, some go forward. None are still save Eik. So she pauses, the Tonnerre girl smiles that flame bright smile, she reaches back with a wing once so frightened to move and pulls him near her side so they can walk the same path and breathe the same air. "Toward the future. Will you join me?" For she would not force this upon him should he choose to turn away, but she would lift him into the air and fly her desert companion back to stormy shores should anything happen. Never mind that she never learned to fly, only how to fall.
STAFF EDIT***
@Moira has rolled a 6! She has been awarded a mollusk shell that, when crushed ICly, will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP). Please see above for details!
Yesterday, Ulric would have claimed he was nearing the age where he had seen it all. He’d experienced everything from betrayal to devotion, suffering to redemption, devastation to hope, and most recently, he had gotten to experience something entirely new – love, and the knowledge that he was capable of it. But when the volcano had erupted and threatened to suffocate his people, plaguing them with fear and the realization that they couldn’t escape, Ulric realized that he had seen very little and that he was much, much smaller and more helpless than he had ever felt before.
There was no telling what was to come as he and others bunked down in the citadel late in the night, taking cover as the ash continued to fall reportedly all across Novus. Sleep was near impossible to achieve, and it was only with an hour or two of it that the Warden rose the following morning to inspect what had become of their home. As he stepped out of the citadel, he was bewildered to be met by the uncertain singing of birds, the pleasant fall of rain and a much clearer, brightly colored sky.
A passing soldier alerted him of what had been seen further south; a bridge crafted of lava and other mysterious fabrications, as well as tentacled monsters hiding in the rolling waves of the sea. The latter, Ulric chalked up to the fear-induced panic over the pasty twenty-odd hours, but somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind he couldn’t help but wonder if there might be a bit of truth behind the statement. After all… there had been a volcano on the horizon where there now was nothing.
And so, calling on those that wished to scout out the mysterious bridge formed across the sea, Ulric headed out with haste, determined to see this through.
"Speaking."
-- wow das bad <__< But, feel free to include Ulric in your replies if you wish!
STAFF EDIT***
@Ulric has rolled a 1! He has been awarded +20 signos.
HISTORY HAS ITS EYES ON YOU ➳ allcontact is permitted and encouraged
I know not if fate would have us live as one
Or if by love's blind chance we've been bound
He treads carefully across the sea, the cooled lava more akin to glass beneath his hooves than anything else. There are some sections where he wonders if it might give in beneath his weight, and although he slows his step in those places, he does not falter as he continues down the path leading away from Denocte. The Champion of Felume has always been curious in every life he had been gifted, sometimes more dangerously so than others. Pryna regrets that this is one of them.
A cluster of trapped oysters caught his attention at one point, appearing as though they had been methodically placed in an array of symbols just before they had been entombed by the lava flow. No matter which direction he observed them from, however, he nor Pryna could recognize any of them to any degree. They resembled no known runes and it was doubtful they were meant to represent any sort of language, and so Kratos left them undisturbed, yearning for the answers that must be at the end of the bridge that shouldn’t be here.
Instead, man and dragon abruptly find themselves facing a wall, and both looked dumbfounded.
“Was this here before?” Kratos asks as he inclined his head to the right, where Pryna rest atop his horn.
‘No,’ she confirmed, her piercing gaze narrowed as she surveyed the ivy-covered slab. ’It just… appeared.’
There were few options to consider, and turning around to head back was the last one on his list. They couldn’t go around it, not even Pryna, who had concluded the air was too thick and dangerous to take flight in. Jumping into the water and attempting to swim beneath warranted a death wish, he was certain, so what else was there to do? “Maybe there’s a hidden panel,” he pondered aloud, but no, that seemed too easy to open a huge wall that had practically phased into existence before them. “Or… maybe it can only be opened with magic. Or at a certain time.”
STAFF EDIT***
@Kratos has rolled a 6! He has been awarded a mollusk shell that, when crushed ICly, will allow for an extra RE roll (but only for RE threads during the SWP). Please see above for details!
is this a natural feeling or is it just me bleeding?
It seemed much more quiet now, with the ash and smoke settled and cleared from the sky. Lasairian had wondered what it meant, that the volcano was erupting, but there had been nothing he could do but wait it out and see. To hope that the deities would protect the lands and those within it from the eruption and whatever else was happening. They must have had a plan for such things, right? A way to look after the followers and the general life in this place. Natural disasters were rough, but even those were something the deities must be able to damper and keep from being a terrible problem. Lasairian held onto that idea, needing it to be true.
It was with that thought in mind that he had gone from the sight of it, and kept going and living as normal where he could. He kept the faith that all would be okay, or as close to okay as was possible. Lasairian wouldn't let the eruption scare him, though he could not help the basic instinct that had him nervous of the changes wrought by the volcano when all was said and done. Yet he would rest those concerns in the hooves of the deities and hope for the best. That was what he had done, and the outcome of it when he went back to look at the now clear skies and the area where the volcano had been. Because upon arriving, there was no sight of it now.
What had happened here was strange, though, and Lasairian had no idea what to make of what he was seeing. A lava made bridge was extending over the water, stretching on and on. It didn't look right, not in the fact that it existed like this, and not with all the things littered across it. With the way the water around it seemed odd, with strange things swimming within. The sight of it was confusing and not something he would think shaped by nature, which made him wonder what it was shaped by. Or by whom. One or more of the deities, perhaps? That was all Lasairian could think of, for who else had that power here?
As far as he could tell, those in these lands weren't all that strong in magic. Certainly there were some magics, and those that shouldn't be messed with for what those magics could do, but it was nothing like what he had once known others to be able to do. Lasairian wasn't sure if that was a comfort or a concern, but it was out of his hooves and not something he really needed to sort through. Right now he had the sight of this unnatural bridge to contend with, and the fact that he wasn't sure if it felt wrong to him. If being near it made him uncomfortable in some way. He was still trying to sort that out for himself.
Then again, it was a chance to learn something, maybe. That was what had his attention most, and Lasairian would balk from the danger of it. Because it did feel dangerous and unknown. That only mattered so much if Lasairian was careful about how he approached this, how he proceeded forward. The main thing was that he was going to. That he would press forward to look and see. No reason why he couldn't or shouldn't, because he saw others there, checking it out. Looking it over and trying to reach the other side, if they could. Lasairian wanted to learn, so he wouldn't let the strangeness of it all hold him back. Not for long.
tag — anyone who wants to branch off?
template by cas • equine lines by AriesRedLo • border image from hashtag-bg.com
STAFF EDIT***
@lasairian has rolled a 2! He has been awarded +40 signos.
05-20-2019, 06:10 PM
Played by
kealie [PM] Posts: 74 — Threads: 16 Signos: 0
the most dangerous woman of all is the one who refuses to rely on your sword because she carries her own
The clouds part as if something had distinctly told them to do so. What the fresh expanse between the dappled vapors revealed was unnerving, though not unexpected. The savage volcano had developed a well-made obsidian bridge for the equine to tread. She was bothered, but her bravery was palpable and she strode forth. The atmosphere was viscid, a dense syrup that was uncomfortable to breathe, but she trekked onwards and nothing but a blessed tragedy could've changed that. Maerys's hooves banged evenly on the still-warm rock as she pressed forward, her hammers catching murmurs of ivy and vine. As her steady gait led her further down the track, she knew all she was destined to reach was the horizon where the wall remained for those brave enough to approach.
In the mare, on either side of her mule quarters, beasts dirtied the seas. Their physique was hardly discernable in the murky adumbrations of the waves swelling, though in her core she knew the sluggish movements they projected belied the pace they were truly capable of. Though she only saw glimpses of this and that, she wondered if slime dripped and oozed from their bodies, if their jaws were strapped with rows of fangs, or if their force was beyond understanding. The flame their tentacles flashed was violent and hungry, waiting for one of the equines to simply blunder and fall into the liquid where their bodies would be devoured in some brutal way.
The bridge itself was unusual at times, too shallow and irregular. There were quills, sand, fissures, kelp, margarites, and oysters within the obsidian. It tasted unfamiliar, but Maerys trudged on and on, her hooves carrying her the miles necessary to reach this ivy wall. The volcano in the distance had vanished soundlessly, unlike how it had entered. There was little sign that any volcanic action had taken place, but they had all seen it and would surely never forget.
As she reached the wall of ivy, a faint film of perspiration beading her golden fleece, she queried if in hundreds of years, when the rest of the world had broken from age and everyone she knew in her short life was lifeless (including herself), if the bridge would still remain- a fossilized bone of Novus's history.
MAERYS
of dawn court
STAFF EDIT***
@Maerys has rolled a 4! She has been awarded +100 signos.
“What makes you think it isn’t?” he says, and the bright, bold edge to his voice - the gleam of light off a drawn blade - is absent, his words a murmur soft as the edge of that billowing cloud of ash.
But his eyes are no longer on whatever curls toward them, there at the horizon. August is watching Minya, regarding each bright and jutting curve of bone the way he has a hundred times before. In the dullness of the day her skin still gleams like satin. They are a pretty picture together, and strange - the way it has always been with those who wear the beetle - and he is glad not to be alone.
“First the gods return,” he continues, musing half to himself as his silver-moon eyes flick back to the sea, “and then the disasters begin. Now the courts are once more in upheaval, and the gods are conveniently absent. There was the blood-moon, and now…” When he grins it feels only like a baring of teeth, and the expression doesn’t last.
It is hard to say where the hours go, when the sky is all the same color with the sun blotted out like nothing so much as a sooty lantern. All is darkness and uncanny silence, with the tide calm and the sea-birds fled, and though August longs to know what his companion is thinking he does not ask.
When the sky clears again, it feels like dawn.
It isn’t - it’s somewhere in hazy, bleak-winter afternoon - but August tips his head toward the sun like a young plant, hungry for the light. But as the darkness recedes it’s clear that whatever is happening isn’t finished. And the golden boy finds himself glad.
All the horses still scattered on the beach press up toward the shore, and when August follows - with a sharp look at Minya - his heart is an urgent thing in his chest. He feels the way he does before a spar, or a betting hand with everything on the table - that is to say, eager and cunning and ready to win. There is no hesitation in him when he places a hoof upon that strange black rock; the smell of the sea is all around him, and he thinks of his father’s ship and his father’s stories, all the wonders out at sea.
When he steps fully out onto that strange bridge, with an archway curling over and all the waves licking white-tongued against the black rock, he buries the part of himself that says the Scarab, the Scarab. The pain (the guilt) of it does not leave him, nor does he expect it to as he pauses to see if Minya will join him - but August has long lived with wounds, and they all become scars eventually.
Whatever waits for them beyond the horizon line, he will go to meet it. To see what lies beyond the bay -
it’s all he’s truly wanted. Of all the secrets he has kept, it is the only one buried so deeply even he forgets it’s there.
![[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png)
