Brother, my sentinel, the tempest is upon us
We are now each other's responsibility
Ard was no stranger to fear. Most of his life spent prior to the stagnant peace of Novus had been moments of terror followed by hours of many more. Fear and pain were constant, but nothing, no amount of cruelty, torture, or terror could hold a candle to the all encompassing horror that he was experiencing.
Erd had not come home. Erd always came home.
Hidden away in their chamber, Ard had waited all night for his brother to return from his errands. He hadn’t slept, waiting desperately for the familiar ’click’ of their chamber door opening and seeing his brother step inside, that goofy, dumb grin on his lips. Except… He hadn’t. The door hadn’t clicked open, his brother hadn’t walked through, and Ard hadn’t seen that stupid, dumb grin in almost ten hours.
Panic set in and replaced his blood with ice. The young warlock wasted no time. He had already wasted enough. Frantically he tore from their room and searched the court but found nothing, not a single trace of his missing twin. Heart thumping wildly in his chest, driven by desperation and rage unlike anything he had ever experienced before, Ard stormed the keep. He was an indomitable army, twelve hands of unbridled rage and resentment, of bitterness and spite, and not even Marisol, Theodosia, and Israfel combined could hope to stop him.
Nothing could stop him, not until he found his brother.
“Halcyon!” The demanding scream tore through his unused throat, the bellow grating and cracking as though tumbled through river stone, echoing back at him in the empty air of the frozen winter morning, “Theodosia! Marisol!” Were they even here? Ard felt like he hadn’t seen them in days, weeks, months, maybe. What had happened to the proud and infallible Halcyon Unit of Terrastella? Would anyone hear his cries?
”Halcyon!”
Mouth parted, Ard could taste blood on his tongue as his lungs heaved in gasping breaths. His throat was not used to screaming, not anymore. It was not used to talking. What a sight he truly made, the mute messenger of the Halcyon, storming through the snow and the silent, peaceful morning to rain hell down upon his enemies, wings and feathers fanned and prepared to take flight at any second, turquoise eyes wide and rolling and shining with hysteria. Nothing would stop him from finding Erd.
She hears his cries for help when she is sparring, and in less than a minute she has dropped her training spear and taken flight in a flurry of pale feathers. At first, she doesn’t realize it’s Ard calling -- she’s barely heard him talk before, much less screaming at the top of his lungs, and it is her first clue that something is wrong. It sends a jolt of unfettered fear down her spine as she circles down to land next to their not-so-mute messenger, sparks beginning to fly from the tips of her wings.
The second clue is that Ard is there, alone, and she has never seen him without his brother. Certainly, she’s seen Erd out without his brother, but never the opposite.
Never.
“Ard -- Ard, where’s Erd?” She can’t help the raw panic scraping at her throat, her eyes darting from the messenger to the empty space at his side where his brother should have been, and she knows the answer even before the question leaves her lips, knows it from the panic in Ard’s eyes and the heaving of his chest.
“Where was the last place you saw him, Ard?”
And she would join Ard in his war-march, if it meant getting Erd back from whatever had taken him -- for she knows that Erd would never leave his brother behind willingly.
Marisol walks careful loops around the edge of the court. Her hooves crunch-crunch-crunch against a thin layer of snow, and frost bristles along the edges of her bicolored feathers. She shivers against the bite of a cold breeze as it washes through the country. Overhead the sky is an amalgamation of pastels, washed in some places bright yellow, in some deep blue, in others pale pink: a sheer white veil of clouds covers the sun as it rises and burns through the mist, casting Terrastella in a prism of gentle, colored lights. Underneath the soft sun Marisol is no more than a pre-darkened canvas for the many ways it preys upon her.
The only noise that breaks the peace is the movement of the wind and the song that Marisol is humming under her breath. Something she had learned as a child, about rabbits and foxes, and chasing in snow - it seems apt now, for the day and the time.
Then the scream breaks.
It is a raw, horrible sound, dark and bloody and feral: it sends chills up Marisol’s spine, the fear spiking so deep it ratchets against her bones. Her throat closes and her pulse kicks up three notches. Oh the sound - it makes her teeth itch, it makes her heart hurt - she pins her ears against her skull, trying to drown or at least muffle it, and with a chalky locked jaw she spins in the fine snow and goes tearing off toward the source of the noise, pounding the hard tattoo of a gallop into the ice.
The world goes quiet again briefly, and that is worse than anything else. Marisol is even eerily relieved to hear voices (broken though they are) as she skids around a corner and finds them:
Theodosia and Erd. No - she stops - Ard.
What is this, Marisol says icily, though it is only a thin cover for the fear that rises in her tone against her will. Her voice pitches uncomfortably high. Slate-gray eyes go flitting from Ard to Theo and back again, and she flattens her wings to her sides and steps forward slightly, squaring her feet and dipping her head to Ard’s level: We will find him, she says, a bitter promise, and nods to Theodosia. Did he tell you what he was doing?
Brother, my sentinel, the tempest is upon us
We are now each other's responsibility
It was Theodosia that arrived first, the lavender of her eyes terrified but alert, clearly startled by the fact that it was him screaming and bellowing and not his brother. Marisol arrived only moments later in a clatter of noise, placing herself at his side and lowering her head so that their eyes could meet. The steadfast shine to her brown eyes did nothing to soothe or calm the panic rising in his heart, causing him to tremble and shake. He shook his head.
“I don’t know!” He wailed, the might of his words emphasized with a stomp of his hoof into the snow, his chest heaving, eyes wild and manic. If he had his magic, that wild, terrible magic that only Erd could properly control, the world would be falling down around their shoulders. The skies would grow cloudy and dark, thunder and lightning raining down from the heavens. The ground beneath their very hooves would break and shift, the earth reshaping into vast chasms and fissures.
It was lucky for Novus that his magic had abandoned him, leaving him with nothing but the wild, terrible feelings tearing him apart in his gut. Erd was not here to save him from that.
Erd was not here.
Madness threatened to steal his sanity, because he couldn’t lose him, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t survive it. He didn’t want to survive it. They had to find him. They had to.
“I-I…” The rasp of his tone was thick, garbled and breaking and he took a moment to spit the collection of blood and saliva to the ground. It stained the snow at his hooves a diluted pink, but he didn’t care. No. Right now everything inside of him was screaming to be reunited with his twin brother. They had to find him. They had to.
Theodosia’s question finally registered through the fog his brain was becoming. “Our room.”
Marisol’s own inquiry, pressing for details. Details meant progress. He stuttered. “N-no.”.
His breath hitched and he began to ramble on upon a croaking whisper. “I-I waited. All night. He left yesterday afternoon to go and get, get… He g-got something. He wouldn’t tell me. He just said it was a ’surprise’.” Every word was agony as it passed his lips, his throat sore as though he had been swallowing daggers. Ard was shaking, trembling. Shock? Stupor? The physical connection between he and Erd so terribly thin that he was falling apart?
“I f-felt him. I felt him. He was scared.” But where? Ard didn’t know where, and that was the worst of it all. What had frightened his brother? What had happened? Was he out there, lost and hurting? Had someone taken him? Dread filled his heart, mixing in dangerous doses with the adrenaline, rage, and terror. Vreis? Was it Vreis? Had he come to Novus? Out of everything, the dangerous rage won out, and there was no one else around to feel it other than the Commander and the Champion of Battle.
Tearing his gaze towards Theodosia and Marisol both, he bit out a croaking, bitter statement, his ears slipping back and his lips drawn up in a dangerous snarl, his spittle stained with pink. Turquoise eyes narrowed in a vehement glare.
”You were supposed to keep us safe! The soldiers, the Halcyon! You promised!” And they had failed.
Rhone had spent his morning up on the cliffs, something he had grown quite accustomed to as of late. It was peaceful up there. It allowed him to think and clear his mind, to feel free and unbridled. But it wasn’t something he could do all day. While he enjoyed the feeling of being utterly free, reality would have to come at some point. And so, the bay had begun to head back home to gather some supplies so he could continue on about his mission to help Dusk Court grow and blossom again.
Just as he was leaving the small apartment he called his home, Rhone had set course for the fields. He supposed that he could probably start there and add some flowers and another sapling. But as he was walking through the streets of the city, something caught his attention. There were raised voices about something.
Not able to really hear what was being said, Rhone stepped a little closer. Up ahead he could see the appearance of two soldiers who he didn’t personally know and Erd. But as he got closer, he didn’t recognize the voice coming from who he thought was Erd. Only when he was a little closer did he realize it was Ard, not Erd, who was raising a fuss.
By the time he came upon the trio, he gathered that Erd was missing and Ard was severely distressed. While he was no member of the Halcyon, he would offer his help in any way he could. He wasn’t sure what he could do to help, but he would certainly try. "Ard, I will help you find him. While I am no soldier, I will do my best." He had been a soldier at one point, but he had retired from that life. He was here to rebuild Dusk. But he supposed that now, Dusk needed him for a different purpose than planting flowers and shrubs. He was needed to help find a friend.
She darts a glance towards Marisol as the commander comes running and feels her heart skip a beat, but she swallows back the bitterness that presses against her tongue. There is no time for her foolish heartsickness, no place for selfish emotions, not with Ard in such a panic before her, the snow at his feet tinged pink from how harshly he had been taxing his throat.
“Erd is missing,” She reports, syllables hard and steel-sharp, and she is quick to begin to put the pieces together in her mind, shaping them into something of a hazy plan as Ard’s wails ring out against the snow-strewn city. Each detail is a new puzzle piece, a gaping hole in the middle of her knowledge ---
And then Ard turns on them, his eyes blazing with fury, and despite the height difference there is a small measure of terror in how his grief has affected him so -- this is not the Ard she knows, and she knows that the only way to fix it will be to find his brother. “Ard, listen to me. We’re going to find him.” And there is an ache in her heart, that she has failed someone else now -- the weight of disappointment heavy in her chest, bile on the back of her throat.
“We’re going to find him, and I promise you, if anyone has touched him, they’ll regret it.” There is a seething venom in her voice now, sparks of lightning rolling off her feathers, and her gaze is narrowed and vicious when she glances over at Rhone joining them. The twins were Halcyon, but they might as well have been civilians -- they didn’t fight, wouldn’t have posed a threat to anyone… not enough to justify kidnapping one of them, at the very least.
“If he went to get something, then he was likely in the marketplace. Someone had to have seen something, or at least knows what direction he was heading afterwards. Rhone -- I need you to head for the markets and start questioning people on what they saw. I’ll be right behind you.”
She snaps out the words with all the authority of the Champion, rising to her rank for possibly the first time since it had been bestowed upon her, and she turns her gaze to Marisol next.
“Have any of the patrols from last night reported anything strange?”
Some part of her wanted to tell him to stop screaming, stop pouting, throwing a tantrum like a little child. It disgusts her, in a way, that he is not afraid to show his anger. The fury roars through him like a wildfire and pours from his eyes in tears of horrible smoke. There is no hiding it, and he is not even trying. How can he be so bold? (In her, anger like that is not a fire, but a brittle freeze. Splices her bones into a hundred little fragments, constricts her heart in an icy fist. Even looking at him and his tiny hoof stamping into the snow makes her a little bit nauseous, a little bit like she has become a mother looking after a baleful child.)
But she knows that Ard is feeling a pain that Marisol is incapable of even imagining, and so she grits her teeth and stifles her disgust and only looks at Ard with a cool, level gaze, as if she is feeling nothing more than a mild concern for how this all might turn out. But there is something like fear in her eyes when she turns them to Theodosia’s, slanted over her cheeks, and tries to say with speaking, Help.
(She is not made for anything but the bare, bright bones of duty, sure as hell not made for the tears and the blood that stream down Ard’s face and the emotion that pulses through the air like lightning. Or is it lightning, spilling from Theodosia’s wings in soft streaks? Marisol does not know whether to shift closer or farther away. She hovers on unsteady feet. Ard’s tears pull at her heartstrings until they threaten to break and flood her chest, and still she cannot find anything to say that would do anything but anger both of them more.)
You promised! he howls.
Bile rises in her throat, some bitter combination of righteousness and anger. It burns against her tongue. Some of the muscles in her shoulders start to vibrate like plucked strings. I promised, she wants to say, nothing more than a home to you, but even Marisol is not so cruel. Not so terribly uncouth. She stifles the retort inside a knot in her jaw.
No, she answers Theodosia flatly. Her eyes remain locked on Ard, two pieces of perfect gray glass burning with a cold, dark worry, almost like a hurricane. She does not ask anything else. She knows very well that if Erd was not taken from his own chambers there is little to no chance of evidence remaining in the city itself. My apologies, Ard, for your brother’s disappearance. The Halcyon will search Dusk’s borders for clues.
Brother, my sentinel, the tempest is upon us
We are now each other's responsibility
It was the most surprising that it was Rhone who soothed him most of all.
The righteous burning anger that pumped furiously through Ard’s veins soothed at the arrival of the rich bay male, as though his mere presence was enough to calm the storm that was the warlock’s fury. It shouldn’t have been. Ard should have been most comfortable with Theodosia and Marisol, but that wasn’t so. He wasn’t. How could he be comfortable amidst the presence of liars and hypocrites?
They had lied. Ard wouldn’t forget it.
Instead it was Rhone; placid, gentle, understanding Rhone. Ard remembered their first meeting, how he hadn’t trusted the bay stallion despite Erd quite enjoying their time together. There was something calming about him. Perhaps it was the nature of his magic, the patience, the soothing atmosphere of earth manipulation that he certainly had to grasp in order to achieve such feats.
There was something in Marisol’s expression that Ard didn’t like. Something cold. Detached. Aloof. It sickened him. Even after all this time, he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t find his voice, ’Do we mean so little to you?’
“Oh,” Ard rasped in displeasure, simply because his voice could no longer handle anything louder due to the shrill strain he had placed upon it, “Now you will check the borders.” He sneered, pierced ears pinned back to be lost amidst wild taupe hair. “Now you’ll do your job as Halcyon commander, now that it’s too late.”
There was so much more he wanted to spit out. Oh, but Ard wanted his words to hurt. He wanted Marisol to feel the very hurt that sped through his veins, that burned and maimed and stabbed his weary, aching heart. If only she hadn’t been too self-centered, too caught up in her desire to galavant across Novus to chase the Night Queen. Did she not understand? Did she not care? There was worry that creased her brow, certainly, but he doubted that she understood. She couldn’t. She would never. Marisol could never understand that Ard could not survive losing his brother… But he found that he didn’t want her to.
She didn’t deserve to understand.
Mournful turquoise eyes danced between the three, the two Halcyon and then Rhone, and it was the latter that his eyes stopped to rest on. “Rhone. Erd liked you… More than I did. I’m sorry.” Apologies never left his lips, but it was so very easy to remember how fond Erd was of Rhone. The gentle spirit that the bay carried had infatuated his brother, and Erd had babbled on time and time again about his latest inventions and what Rhone might think of them. It was that fondness that Ard grasped now, frantic and imploring. He swallowed, tasting the copper of blood from his shredded throat. “Please... Please help me find him.”
Realistically he knew that Theodosia did not deserve such anger. She cared. She understood the frantic desire to bring Erd home, the wrongness of the entire situation… But just like Marisol, Theo had left. Rumors got around. They hadn’t stayed to protect Terrastella’s borders, and in his eyes, stained by fury and terror, they were just as responsible to Erd’s disappearance as whatever truly was to be blamed.
Focusing back on the two Halcyon, he swallowed once more, his chest heaving. ’By Her hand’, Marisol said, as though Vespera's influence really fucking mattered here. Ard scoffed, although it came out like a painful, warbled gasp. Fuck Vespera, fuck the Halcyon. “Search the borders if you want to, but I’m leaving. I don’t think he’s here. I can’t feel him nearby.”
And that, too, was something that they did not deserve to understand.
Rhone’s heart went out to Ard, knowing how much the brothers were bonded with one another. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what the other stallion was feeling in this moment, but he could tell just based on his expressions and body language that he was hurting. That hurt spoke to the softness in Rhone, the softness that came from his own mother. He hated feeling such emotion as this, but he cannot help the way he feels so freely. Such emotion is dangerous for a soldier, so it is a good thing he is no soldier.
His offer to help is heard, by everyone it seemed. He was no soldier, no battle ready body. He was a simple man, a relatively peaceful man. But he knew when it was time to step up to the plate and be the friend he was, the friend he knew Erd and Ard needed to him to be. He did not expect some fancy mission, so he was thrilled when their own battle champion asked for his help in the markets. He nods his head to her, letting her know he had heard her request. "I will start my search immediately." Even though he had assured Asterion that he would rebuild Terrastella with his magic, he felt as though this was more important. There was a part of him that knew Asterion would understand.
He listens to the conversation between the soldiers, feeling out of place. And yet, he still feels as though this is where he is meant to be, by Ard’s side in his time of need. There is a pressing need to stay, even though he has been order to travel to Denocte to search the markets. And when Ard’s eyes rested on his own, Rhone offered the male a soft smile, a soothing ounce of affection.
There was a softness to Ard’s eyes tonight, something that was not present there before. But before he could think much more on the matter, he is graced with an explanation to unasked questions. He stepped towards Ard, wanting to reach out and give him a stroke of affection to show that he held nothing against him, but he paused, unsure if the touch would be wanted. "There is no apology needed, you were justified. I was new. It is good to be weary of strangers." When they had met along the seaside, Rhone had been new, never really made himself known here. It was right for Ard to be suspicious.
But then the mood changed, no longer was the look in Ard’s eyes apologetic, it was desperation. At his request to help, Rhone offered a nod and a smile. "I promise you, Ard. I will not stop looking until he is found." He would not give up. He would search every inch of Novus if he had to. He would not let Ard down.
At Ard’s insistence that he would leave, Rhone took another step closer to him. "Ard, come with me to the markets. You and I can search together while they search here at home." His words were soft, soothing, and held a promise of hope. He would help his friend (even if Ard didn’t have the same feelings about their relationship with one another) to the best of his abilities. He would not let Ard down, he couldn’t.
She turns to Rhone with lightning searing through her veins, crackling off her wings until it seemed as though she had become a storm herself, feeding off the fury and the fear that holds her throat in a vice. “Thank you, Rhone,” She bites out as she wrestles with the magic, because the last thing they need right now is a storm that will wash away any leads they may be able to find -- the last thing she needs to do is make things worse, again, by failing to control herself.
She has done enough of that, lately.
She will not comment on the Commander’s performance -- she is a Cadet, after all, and it is not her place, but even she had chafed when the rumors had surfaced of the Commander’s impromptu journey to Solterra, of her gallivanting with the dreamweaver queen. There had been something darker beneath the frustration, something too close to jealousy for her to be comfortable, but still she said nothing even as others had questioned the motives behind the trip.
“Vespera will not bring him back,” Her lips flatten into a thin line at the mention of the goddess, her eyes darkening and the crackles of lightning growing more numerous until standing beside her became a danger of being shocked. “Gods do not meddle in the affairs of mortals unless it serves their own ends.” She had thought Vespera could be trusted, could perhaps be a better deity than her father -- but she had been wrong, and it still stung.
“Keep him safe for me, please.” She bows her head to Rhone briefly before she is in motion once more, throwing herself out past them and into the sky that has begun to gather storm clouds around them.
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