Kratos had stood before the great passageway soon after the humming had begun, a beckoning for all to gather and see for themselves what it had to give. The man of stars and moon watched, enraptured, as the ivy began to die off and fall away, each tiny piece giving way to more and more.
There is no fear, not a shred of hesitation once the door opened itself and revealed to the gathered crowd a glimpse of the secrets it contained. A world unlike any other, a wormhole out in the middle of the ocean that, for all that they knew, had always been there, only now to be presented to them. It was a mystery to be solved, and by Felume’s hand, Kratos was determined to unravel it.
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
Well?
His question hangs, bright as a spark and it creeps like fire up her spine. She grows rigid at its touch, rigid at his presence. He steps close, gold as the sun, as a pharaoh rising before his legions. She looks to him, like a god, elegant as Bastet, her eyes sharp as claws.
Feline and aloof, cold as the Arctic, she steps away. She is the moon refusing to gaze upon the warmth of the sun. If her spine was rigid once, it is no longer. Grace oozes from her every pore. It unfastens her spine and she slips from him balletic and divine. The bells and gems atop her crown of antlers chatter and laugh at him. Pine leaves reach down, some silver, some green. Oh this is a nirvana, such perfect beauty nestled within a sea of monsters. But look a little closer and anomalies have spread like plague. Flowers gleam as metal, birds like fire and smoke within the sky, the leaves of pine trees are green and vibrant.. but for their twin ghosts that stand as if moonlit, silver and black.
How easy it would be to cling to August, to take comfort in his warmth, in the white scarab that clings to his skin. Yet she does not, still she walks from him, no, she stalks from him. Her hips roll like a cat, her chin tips up as if she knows the world adores her, as if this island is here for her alone.
She stands beneath the cold of a moonlight tree and turns at last to her compatriot. Minya holds him in acid pink and unyielding grey. She is stone, as unmovable as the earth beneath her feet. “Do you think this tree is dead?” She asks of him, her gaze holding his before she turns to the tree once more. It stands as if in rest, as if sleep was slipping like a tranquilizer through its bark.
Her heart is thunder in her chest. It is rumbling loud and splitting. Oh she feels it eking out to every corner of her being. Her lips dare to open but oh she bites her tongue down, down and does not say to August, “So you do not weep at night like I do? Or lie awake just to hear your heart racing for all the ways it could not save a life? We have treacherous hearts, August. You and I.”
@Random Events @August | "speaks" | notes: skidding in here at the last moment!
Dragged by the wind, taken by the stars
Carried with the madness and scars
He stands curiously before the door, eyes of gold and black narrowed in scrutiny as, piece by piece, the ivy slowly withers and dies under the power of an unknown force. Around him, all emotions are displayed – fear, excitement, wariness, trepidation, and everything between. Truth be told, Atreus himself isn’t sure what to feel as he awaits the grand reveal of what lies beyond the door, half expecting a gargantuan monster to come charging out at the unsuspecting crowd and the other expecting nothing at all. Honestly, he didn’t even know what he wanted to see when the moment of knowing came.
Shifting closer to Fiona, whose side he had been circumspect to leave since the volcano had erupted, the roan brushed a wing tenderly against her side, a gentle reminder that they were in this together and to breathe. No matter what happened, he would not leave her, not even for the world itself.
The heartbeats beat like tribal drums. Her feet move as if they still hold sway over her. all of Novus still reels with the wall of ivy and the hearts whose rhythm reaches deep into the bones of Terrastella.
It is still rattling her, rattling like the bones of birds that fly with halos milky white beneath the sunlight. She watches them go and wonders what magic lingers in the bones of birds like they. Do they hold with wild island magic? Do they sing and throb as bright hearts might?
Still she sees the bones and blood. Still that portent hangs heavy and low upon her shoulders. Still the bones and blood are laughing. Still she sees the way his eyes glitter. He long ago left their gods of Novus and still she clings like a child. Her heart thunders in her chest, but oh her teeth grit tight.
Her gold leaves jangle and her bones chink ominously in the night. She slinks black as pitch through the island. She waited until now, until few could see the tears of a girl shedding a god from her soul. She wears not paint this night, though the fires of Phoenixes search her skin for them like torches. Tonight she is not shedstar nor Ilati. No, this night Leto is, quite simply, nothing.
He isn’t sure which beat louder – the thrum of magic stirring and growing around them or his own heart pounding relentlessly against his chest. The young Prince struggles to keep a brave face as he edges nearer the door he and countless others had investigated throughout the course of time since it had first appeared, standing close to his parents as he looks on with muted fear. Instinct tells him to stand flush against them, his pillars of safety since infancy, but he is older now than he had once been, slowly but surely closing in on two years of age. It’s time for him to grow up.
So he stands with room to spare between his parents and the rest, Milo standing between his front legs as the bonded pair watched with baited breath until finally, finally it began to wedge open, revealing to them all a world far beyond their wildest dreams.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
He pours off the bridge, quicksilver running. He had heard of the hearts that bled and the sounds they made as their words came to a heaving end. Raum has seen hearts that slowed to stop, he had seen how life slipped away behind liquid eyes that slowly grew white and pale, utterly empty.
But these hearts were gone, their ivy leaves too. Behind them yawned an idyll. It was a place of peace and beauty. Raum moves through it, a cursed and bloody monster in a place of beauty and tranquility.
Yet he knows better and above him flies a phoenix, its tail a contrail in the sky. The luminous eyes of birds watch him as he pass and the rustle of their wings hiss murderer, murderer. yet he does not blink and he does not slow. He does not think of the Solterran’s he saw with bones jutting and flesh pulled tight. To eat in Solterra is easy, you bend the knee.
Casually, he lowers his lips to the green grasses at his feet and oh, they taste sweet and magic upon his tongue.
STAFF EDIT***
@Raum has rolled a 2! He has been awarded +80 signos.
For one so young with a life unfulfilled, Lieve has already experienced so much – pain, loss, love, and even death. She shouldn’t be here, she knows, and she fears how her father might react to her grand adventure more than she fears what could possibly be hiding beyond the door. She hadn’t come here with the intent to upset him or cause panic (even though it would), but rather to satiate the intense curiosity which gripped her heart so fervently.
The ethereal pounding in her ears has made her deaf to anything else, and when silence finally does come, the sensation is nearly agonizing. Eyes that glow like the sun grow wide once the ivy had completely fallen away and the door, ever so slowly, began to crack open and reveal to the crowd what lie beyond it. There’s a wave of barely hushed whispers, some drawing back with fear while others shouldered roughly past her, jostling her lithe body this way and that but by some small miracle, she managed to stay upright. With a bit of luck she made it to the edge, the proximity of the water making her uneasy, but she knows now that she must either wait for a familiar face or journey back before she can progress. She will not go alone.
burning cities and napalm skies fifteen flares inside those ocean eyes
Oh, this place could be paradise – but Seraphina would not see it.
All she sees is red, wherever she looks. Maybe it is a trap. If it is, she does not care. She does not care, as long as the men that she would see dead shudder and fall limp in their graves; if it were up to her, she would burn them, and, god willing, be sure that they would never see a scrap of goodness or mercy for the rest of all eternity. This could be paradise, but she has caught little glimpses – flashes of a silver hide so similar to her own but so wrong, wrong, wrong, of a black darker than ink and night, of all manners of twisted and monstrous creatures. She looks at the island.
Ereshkigal laughs, inside of her head. Every moment, the raucous, violent sound – like waves crashing against the shore, like unoiled hinges, like the screech of metal along stone, like all of those things at once, something unnerving and low and roiling and sometimes unbearably high and shrill – grows louder and louder, and she can’t drag it out of her head, although she presses her eyes shut and tries to breathe through her ill-contained and red rage. Shut up, you damned bird, her own mind snaps, jaws clamping insistently at the near-overwhelming presence of the demon; but she is like a chained and cornered beast, growling at something just out of her reach.
Ereshkigal wants her to kill them. She doesn’t have to say it for Seraphina to know it; she does not know where her fury ends and the demon’s fury begins. Ereshkigal’s anger feels black and impersonal, the stewing vengeance of a watchful fury, and, in more ways than she wishes that she did, Seraphina is grateful for the pull of her logical, surgical outrage against her own – which is blind and unreasonable and often threatens to swallow her whole. Ereshkigal does not care about what they have done, not really; she does not care for mortal life and mortal death. She only cares that blood is met with blood, that tooth is met with tooth.
(Seraphina wants something, too. She knows that it is worse.) “Which little bird will you pluck first?” Ereshkigal’s voice echoes in her mind, nauseatingly distorted; the tone vacillates wildly, ear-piercingly high and then so low that she can barely hear it. “Bird-bones break so easily. Can I devour them, when you’re through? I don’t mind if they’re a little bit burnt.” She giggles, then, almost girlish in her glee. “Whoever I can catch,” Seraphina growls, her eyes flickering open; they gleam like twin lanterns in the bright noon-light, dull and unfocused. She takes in the oddity of the woodland – and the shore – without much of a reaction.
(Tempus. This feels like Tempus. And you should not kill in holy spaces, should you?)
(But she does not care, not anymore – no god or man will keep her from her quarry.)
Everything inside of Seraphina screams that this is dangerous; that beautiful things are so rarely beautiful when they are examined with a more critical eye. (She wishes that she’d given that damned traitor a good few scars, now – made them deep and unforgettable, like a promise, so that whenever he looked at them he would know that she was coming for him, and, when she caught him, she would do far, far worse.) She knows that she cannot trust the gods and their magic; Tempus has thrown her to the wolves more than once, and she knows that he would do it again, if she were to stumble. (But everything in the world is a wolf, come to swallow her whole the moment that she begins to bleed. There are sharp edges everywhere, and teeth; and the moment that she thinks that she is safe, it snaps at her again. She cannot breathe.) This is a trap. She does not trust it. She cannot trust it. Tempus will collapse the exit again, and they’ll all fall into the sea, or something will come crawling out, or, or, or -
(But she is already a dead thing. What does it matter if she falls into the sea, so long as he and all of his ilk fall into the depths with her? She would let that dark monster eat her alive, if he were swallowed too. There is no going back, for her, and there is no way forward. Only blood. Only bone. Only flame.)
She runs, like a knife, into the woods.
STAFF EDIT***
@Seraphina has rolled a 3! She has been awarded +100 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
The little dark body trailing plumes of silver hair could be no one else. But what was she doing here by herself?
Aghavni didn’t allow herself time to think on it. Tucking her limbs in and swallowing a scowl, she jostled her way through the crowd of wary onlookers, not sparing the breath to utter apologies.
Though it was only around mid-noon, the Scarab’s doors would stay tightly sealed for yet another night. The little sign posted like a sentinel out front stayed unchanged save for the line drawn through “imminent,” because disaster had truly arrived, and it thoroughly lacked the hospitality to leave anytime soon. As disasters were known to do.
“Selfish little bastards,” Aghavni swore, because the idea of belittling a volcano exploding and a wall of ivy growing and pearls raining seemed like something no one else had done before.
In any case, it placated her fraying nerves like nothing else could.
A boy with a basket of fish at his side chose the precise moment she was passing him to step into her path. Gasping, she narrowly avoided the fate of crashing face-first into fish by ducking beneath the basket. It was times like these when Aghavni was just a bit glad for her height.
Any other time she would have slipped something poisonous into the boy’s ear, but she lacked the time for it, so he got off with little more than a smile that promised daggers. She caught a glimpse of his puzzled face, shot through with a hint of recognition, before she hurried back after Lieve.
Slipperier than a fish, that girl, Aghavni thought, with a touch of pride, when she reached the side of Vikander’s resurrected daughter. She had paused at the edge of the sea, uncertainty painted across her prim features. Her youth made her bold, but not at the expense of caution.
“Your father will not be happy you’re here.” She lowered her head to touch muzzles with Lieve, before curling her lips into a conspiratorial smile. “Want to come with? I doubt he’ll protest later if he knows you’re with me.”
With a sly glance over her shoulder, her brow lifted when she saw a white falcon circling the skies, halfway to the island already. “And the nobleman Hajakha, an important patron of ours. Your father knows him. He'll be very intrigued by you.”
She straightened herself back up, eyes shadowed, her smile little more than a memory. Little Lieve was too young to bear the treacherous secret of the Hajakha's on her slim shoulders, and if Aghavni had any say in the matter, she never would. But the decision was not hers to make.
It was —
“Lord Hajakha.” She sank into a halfhearted curtsy when her father strode out of the crowd.
@Lieve'tel - little did Lieve know who she would meet today...
He managed to clip a sample of the ivy, before it fell apart – and leaked pearls – but the sample fell apart too, and he found himself with nothing more than a pearl in a vial, and he wondered if it would last, either, or if it would keep changing, like its brethren seemed to suggest. Septimus wasn’t sure if he liked that as much as he liked the initial promise of adventure; the transition of a living thing into something dead reminded him of why he never remained in any one mortal realm for too long, more than a few years off his lifespan.
But he had more pressing things to concern him than ugly, ugly mortality. The island that rose in the distance was beautiful, and, like most beautiful things in nature, Septimus assumed that meant that it was dangerous; however, danger hadn’t stopped him from stepping out onto the bridge, or making any number of ill-advised decisions, such as falling into Novus, and considering how old he technically was, Septimus had made innumerable. If the island contained things – and, more importantly to a naturalist like Septimus, creatures - that were as unusual and unnatural as the pearl-bearing ivy, he had to see more of it.
He still couldn’t fly, and that made some anxiety coil up in his stomach, even as he made great, bounding strides towards the island, seemingly-unhindered by the vague press of fear at the distant edges of his mind. Some animals could practically smell fear, he reckoned, or sense it, through posture or any number of other little cues that one was apt to give off when they were on edge; even if some part of him was scared, particularly given that this wasn’t apparently a normal occurrence in this land (if the reactions of his fellows were anything to go by), he couldn’t allow it to show on his features, or he chanced getting in over his head.
(Or antlers, really.)
He did not stop running until he reached the shore, his dark hooves kicking up great clouds of ivory sand; the beach was pristine, even as bodies swarmed it, and he couldn’t help but marvel a bit at the untouched nature spilled out before his eyes. It was like the forest, but newborn.
He tilted his head towards the seemingly-massive expanse of trees further inland, his green eyes glittering with fervent curiosity. Untouched, unexplored…think of all the new things to discover! That he could discover. In spite of some essence of his better judgement, which has rarely altogether won with Septimus in his life, he presses forward, into the shade, and he tells himself that, so long as he follows his mother’s rules for navigating the wildlands, he will be fine in whatever strange place this is.
@ || he and sera sure have different views on this development, huh. "Speech!"
STAFF EDIT***
@Septimus has rolled a 5! He has been awarded +180 signos.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
