[AW] oh, you saint

[Tuolouse]

TOULOUSE



Denocte glistens like a jewel in the valley below him, the flames of its bonfires reduced to a scattering of lights on the horizon. If he’s still enough, and patient enough, and imaginative enough, he can almost hear the pounding of a drum when the wind shifts. It beats in time with his heart, thud, thud, thudding inside of his chest, echoing through the halls of his veins. It’s a wild music, one that ignites a fire somewhere deep inside of him, a fire that burns and rages, that sings and loves, that makes him want to dance. 

He loves it, and he hates it. 

He knew his brother would only love it; he had always been the reckless twin, the one that threw inhibitions to the wind and always hit the ground running. He was the wolf, with an insatiable hunger. 

But Toulouse was the snake in the grass, waiting for his moment to strike, happily biding his time. They played the same game, but only one of them understood the importance of patience. 

Below the lights are still calling his name, with a voice that makes him simultaneously want to lean in closer and claw his ears out. He grits his teeth, green eyes turning back to the mountain path. He stood nearly on the border of Denocte, a stranger from another land. Could they feel him watching? Did they know a snake was on his way to their Court? Did they care?

He supposed they had snakes of their own to worry about, both reptilian and equine. The southern court was a melting pot, home to those from all walks of life. Toulouse had fit right in here the last time he had visited, had pressed a black card into his brother's hand and whispered a tale of the white building in the markets. He was determined to live up to his twin's reputation tonight, and for as long as his stay in Denocte lasted. 

A smile slipped into place across his features, his wolfish teeth glinting in the moonlight. With a dip of his horned head and the echo of the drums reverberating through his soul, he stepped back onto the path that would lead him to Denocte. Overhead the stars are smiling, the moon is singing in rhythm with the pounding drums and the crashing waves, and he weaves a dance into his steps. Tonight, like every other night he would play the part of his smiling twin. 






the motherland don’t love you
but you love everything




@erasmus  
suuuper late starter for you, feel free to intercept him on the trail however you’d like c’:

lunarblues | sid

[Erasmus]

Something looms in the air about erasmus with a stagnance that is chokingly familiar – one whose nameless, faceless glare is left to variable science – that whose sphynx nature derives from something shallower than disappointment, yet so heavy. It isn't depression that clots his mind with thunderous derision, a clattering of agonizing soulfulness and demure; and it isn't quite anger, though he feels the way that heat rises and falls against the lining of his flesh as if it, too, breathed within him. Though the chill of the mountain peaks still strain their frigid fingertips about his flesh in twining breeze, and the warmth that rises to meet it finds it with an apprehensive bristling, Solterra and its golden sight reclaims every other thought. It isn't for admiration. In his mind's eye, spheric temples and sultanic spires reach longingly for the sun that gleams wildly upon their rinds – blindingly brilliant, a wealthy display of richness in stalwart hue that is, more than plainly, characteristic of the day court. He replays his memory with a loosening fervor, as if its constant re-occurrence was at a violent attempt to smother it into meaning.

As it was, each memory is the same, just as listless as the one before it. The wall cascaded in diamonds, crumbled to fealty beneath the touch of the denoctian dreamer, the languor that shifts from the severity of the desert into the terse intensity that lingered inside the walls. The military parade, the jeers, the scowls, and finally, the whispering streets that lay beyond. Those streets engulfed in shadow. What was lost there? As the heat cascaded off and struck the cobblestone, the slate walls and sand that rose up about him like menacing jaws – or a cage, whose bars he rattles even still. He remembers the hush that rests beyond the fever. With some small resolution upon leaving, he considered never returning. It wasn't the heat, the pandemonium, the teryrs, the guards who lurked every street corner. It wasn't a distaste for chaos, as of which he too often cuts his teeth on, or the overwhelming sense that its ancient, regal streets were not fitted to his hooves.

His gut curdled the more his mind roved that empty sidestreet and recalled, with some exhaustion, the pale man who joined him at his leisure.

Erasmus was no longer certain on what he had anticipated when he first climbed the spine of the Arma Mountains. He divined, watching the way the bone-white paths cut and split, divided into dredged hollows and subtle deer-passages that vanished into the underbrush, that some sport of nobility was to be honored in his original intentions – but it was laughable now, thinking back on how his mind leeched to think of such a dictator, such a madman, bloodthirsty and skin crawling with untold antiquities of horror. He thought to how he had marvelled and feared awfully the mind-drawn caricature of a face-changing terror, and all the ways in which its great valor of unholy flesh could twist in distorted frenzy, too many likenesses all at once for the sane man to compensate all his nightmares. There was a pining, in the anxiety. There was a nourishment of cruelty in that fear that bore itself with pretense – for with each trembling vision of the impressed imagination, there crept the envy. The envy that Erasmus himself could not shift, could not perplex his musculature with undesignated purpose, bones clinking into place and innards meshed in ways that should not be – an unraveling of auroric flesh and a terrific conspiring of welded dreads. 

The opportunities could be of magnanimous potential. To harness that will, that nature of fright that makes of itself what dared to be or not be, wholly unhinged to feast on every facet of omnipotent doom. This was the true strain of curiosity that drove him, beneath the denial. To see it for himself, a man made of myth. The skinwalker. The denoctian devil. The murderer, the tyrant, the villain king. 

What he met was a face shallow with madness and loss, not a loss of morals or an expression swelled with trepidation for his crimes but – a loss of everything, all remarkable expression entirely void and narrowed to sharpness only in its immortalized contours. Therein lay the method of his disappointment – one that is selfish and deluded, disenchanted, one that guiltlessly falls upon itself with an exasperating cry for reprieve. It goes unanswered. He left Solterra swiftly and harshly, and the ruggedness of his furor was marked in each step that fell heavier in place over the mountain gravel, a gait that no longer swept with the grace of arrogance but the startling, wolfish hunch of a manic bemusement. A shadow of a sneer dangled on the edges of his teeth, not a grin but a darkened scowl, one that entertained itself with a twisted humor. He had come to Solterra to seek the council of a villain king. But he had left only having met a depraved, crumbling mad man instead.

In the lapsing moonlight his silhouette came with the rippling devilry of conjured shadows – a mass entanglement in the shade of the pines which, in its lurching, phantasmic composure, appeared too predatory to be equine. His gait is languid, heavy, peculiarly feline – the pacing, sailing stride of a thoughtful amble. His crown met the level roll of his shoulders, each peaked with a sharpness that resonated from his likeness, that every shadow that pronounced him was marked in curious angles, rigid and alien to the way in which he moved. The contours of his expression found it sharper still, for the way in which his crescent pupils flashed in the nightly dark was glaringly acute, calculative, and the weight of their penetrative measure was all too unsettling. This, in its nature, is what bore itself deeply into the spine of a man who stood in the light of distant Denocte, his soft edges bathed in the glow as he turned back to observe the high slope from whence he came.

Erasmus himself rose up from a northwestern quarter that met the stranger's path, having cut a sideways passage from the main road that wound and wound about the peaks. When a breeze suffered past them, he thought that he had caught the faint scent of Solterran streets, the finer roadways that smelled of incense and richness and languor. But he didn't care to be accusatory or suspicious. He couldn't blame anyone for leaving that hellish desert, and he knew many had fled through the broken wall from which spilled those multitudes of glimmering, fresh diamonds. 

His only curiosity was borne in admiring the way a smirk wrapped itself so securely upon the patron's lips – so smoothly, so seamlessly, that it seemed only natural to be there. That no other expression surely found itself as comfortable on that face, that a scowl or a hint of sadness or remorse would look too awkwardly imposed on his faun-ish looks. Indeed, one devil recognized another too easily outside of hell. Erasmus was an abysmal contrast to this summer-sprite of mischief, he too dark, too sharp, too rough and grim. This stranger was a different kind of welcoming handsome – one whose beauty was marked in sprightly and cunning grace, cherubim candor that yielded to a magnetizing air of mischief and pride. Hades to Hermes --- "fine night for travel." from behind the golden stranger rises his voice like smoke, unfurling and intangible, musing on teething the edge of a dream. the whispers of a shadow. "–the moon is right, is it not?" 

His eyes, bright golden crescents that starkly rival the surrounding darkness in their glint, drift from his companion to the heavens, wherein each star seems to tremble in waiting. In his mind still teem the displaced frustrations of disappointment, but here at last the fervency is quelled to complacency in the delight of entertaining such a peculiar, graceful stranger. 

@Tuolouse ; i am so sorry for your wait.