[AW] [FALL] the first rose up from the sea,

[Isra]

Isra and the great beast

"It was like a leopard, with feet like the feet of a bear, and had a mouth like a lion."


It is the darkest part of the night, just before the hour chimes the beginnings of a new day, when Isra finds herself at the entrance of the maze. For hours she had stood on a hill watching the horses of her city walk into the dark yawning mouth of the monster with laughter dancing bright as fireflies on their lips.

For hours her rage had grown, and grown, and grown. It grew seven heads and it roared.

Every drop of her magic, every terrible mile of it it that runs deeper than the sea, is alive in her blood. It's all sharp edges and magma. There are lions running through her bones, and dragons curling their wings across her sides. Each monster, each wicked thing in the world, is moving through her thoughts in black ink so dark it eats every other color. And by the time she looks into the endless maw of the maze she is every monster this universe has ever borne.

Tonight she doesn't have her moon-blessed bow. Her dragon is somewhere else in the city playing with her children on the edges of the markets. Eik too, perhaps, is somewhere else. She is alone in the darkness where the moon has long since turned to nothing more than a distant cold glow behind the fog of the coming more.

She is alone and all she can think is, yes.

It comes out like a roar. Like a whip-lash of magic that makes all the grass around her turn to barbed-wire and quicksand. Yes, her magic roars in it's cage of sea-stained skin. All the wire and sand turns to obsidian grass that's cold and hard and unforgiving. She steps closer to the maze. Shadows gather between the spirals of her horn and in the hollows below her eyes. The shadows devour every blue-green scale on her skin and every part of her eyes that have ever known how to look soft.

Another steps makes her hard, and sharp, and dark enough to be ore.

The first step she takes into the mouth of the maze, to the place where the maze sings of trickery, and where anyone else standing on the hill might not be able to tell her apart from the corn---

The first step she takes into the maze is the last breath the wind makes through the cornstalks.

Because as soon as her hoof hits where the obsidian grass ends every stalk of corn turns into a dragon-high flower. Each stem is a jagged stretch of steel and each leaf is diamond clear and barbed with rust. Each blossom is sun-golden and dotted with black stains. If there was moonlight to see by each spot of black on the gold would look like an beetle feasting on the petal.

But there is no moonlight and so every petal, every single one, looks like an ode to all the blood her flesh (and her magic) remembers.

And still her magic roar and drags the teeth of all its seven heads across the dirt.


@any

[Orestes]

rallidae

perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage--perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that once our loves


- rainer rilke

Breathe.

One, two.

Breathe, and the air is crisp, 

crisp,

but not as crisp as it feels to breathe the sea. His lungs fill with air, but he lusts for salt-water. 

Denocte is dark. 

His soul feels a little like that. Behind a moon. Heavy, heavy. 

Too heavy. 

He sighs, and it is a thing that does not belong to a horse, but to the ocean. Something great has broken inside of him, and it sinks, and sinks, and sinks until it hits, somewhere, at the bottom of his heart. He cannot sleep; Denocte sings to him in a language that he does not know, and it opens a yearning in his chest that cannot be answered. So, he wanders; he searches for the unfindable; he seeks to discover that has been lost, without knowing what it is that escapes him. 

The Harvest Festival, from what he has seen during his visit, has left a lingering discontent in his soul. He misses the sun of his desert city, and wishes to return. He misses the way the water feels when it embraces him, when it pulls him over and promises forever. As beautiful as Caligo’s city may be, it reminds him too much of loss and not-belonging. He hears stories of the maze; Orestes has never seen one, or experienced one, or thought of one. But the idea intrigues him and he wonders if, perhaps, he will discover himself among the corn-stalks. His subconscious takes him there, tiredly. 

When he arrives, however, the stalks are no longer of corn. He steps into a corridor of long, weeping flowers and only when one kisses his shoulder does he discover that they do not weep. They roar. Blood drips a line down his golden shoulder. He wonders if it is all a strange dream, but the blood tells him otherwise. 

Orestes closes his eyes in the darkness and breathes the scents, listens to the sounds, and feels the air as heavy, heavy. It is iron and gold, like the weight of all the things that had once pushed him beneath the sea he loved. Yes. Those rusted flowers belong to gold nets, gold dust, all the things that can Bind a Soul. The memories are twisted things; fish in nets; blood spraying from a whale’s breath, brilliant crimson, caught in the sun like so many shattered rubies; falling from a black cliff-side, tangled in white and gold and black and grey until he did not know what shape he was, but in none of them could he fly. 

Orestes opens his eyes and steps deeper, and deeper, into the maze. There is something aching here, something that aches like he aches; the steel stalks brush his flesh and he marvels at how they only sting, they do not burn. His mind is white with fear; white with the memory of what burnt flesh smells like as a sun is seared into his forehead with glistening gold paint—

He finds her. 

He finds her and knows in a way he has always known hungry things intimately. Yes. Rage, to him, is a center. It is the thing that calls him back and says, you are the counter to every storm. Hunger and anger and discontent. He wants to say, if I could, I would transform into my ugliest shape tonight. He wants to whisper to her not-flowers, to her wicked things, I would be a kraken that would crush a ship, or a horse with shark teeth and skin like brine and kelp, or the great pod of orcas that stalks the whale calf indefinitely. I would be a Soul without a shape; I would be salt and rock and sea and this aching, empty longing for what cannot be. 

He is not yet radiating light. His fear has kept it at bay; yes, his fear; yes, the ragged beatbeatbeatbeatbeat of a frantic heart that says, change, that says run, that says stay. 

He stays. 

Orestes whispers her dark shape, to the shadow of a horse and not a horse, “Caligo,” he names her goddess, he names her darkness.  “Perhaps we could share some light.” 

As Orestes says it, he thinks of every beautiful thing he has ever known. Solis is not here. Solis is far away. But there is a desperation to his actions, a necessity to his thoughts. Perhaps they are both drowning; perhaps light has never been so needed. 

He thinks of the surface of the water as it rains softly, gently, and how time stops as he watches the droplets at eye-level, nearly becoming them. He thinks of Solterra’s sun, and the heat of the desert, and the lion that Chose him. He thinks of Boudika, when he set her Free. He thinks of the sound of singing, singing, singing in the sea, and then he thinks of rising, rising, rising, and saying enough to all the things that have ever promised harm. He thinks of Solterra's pride, and his once-people, his lost people, and how they had been everything. 

Faintly, so so faintly, he begins to radiate light. It is muffled, star-like, as if they are both in a dream. It is as far as Solis can reach tonight, but Orestes knows. 

Yes. 

Orestes knows.

He breathes again, 

and this time

it is enough. 

@Isra | speaks | notes: I COULDN'T HELP IT *sob*

[Isra]

Isra the sea god

“It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us."


If he had been any color at all, any color but golden, she would not have hated him. Or maybe if it had been any night but this one with the blackness thick enough to drown. Maybe later she'll tell herself  it was all the edges of her laid bare that made her so monstrous.

Maybe.

But he's there when she turns to see what foolish thing followed her into this first garden of weapons. He's there-- golden enough that she can see the way dapples blossom across his sides like small hearts. And she can't see it, but she can taste it in the air, his blood clawing its way through his skin. She hopes her flowers took it from him, reached out their petals like roots and whispered to him come closer.   The taste of it, faint but there, gnaws like a hundred ants at all her sharp places.

Her magic rises to meet them (all those ants). It gnashes its teeth and foams white (frothy white) at the mouth. Isra's own teeth flash like a bear that's been backed against a cliff by a pack of starving wolves. Everything in her is telling her that she has to survive, that she has to be a god, that she needs to be anything at all but dead in the grass with blood around her throat like a string of pearls. The stems around them turn into pure, soft gold-- soft enough that the petals hungry and dotted black start to drop towards them.

Isra does not need to look up to know that each flower, each golden flower, looks like a lotus face watching them in the place of scripture.

She does not correct him when he calls her Caligo, although that names makes her think of a goddess that let her religion be washed away by the sea. Isra feels enough like the goddess, like a devil that cursed the world to die in the darkness once, she doesn't want her own name tonight.

Her own name is for love, for Eik, for her children and her dragon.

Tonight she is for the black sea.

Tonight she is the sea.

And oh! Oh she's deadly when she moves towards him with those gnashing teeth of magic below the tight curl of her neck. He starts to glow and she only smiles enough that the soft silver light will do nothing more than make her teeth glare in a cut of bone through her black lips. “And if I said no?” She steps closer-- like a lion, like she has seven heads and all of them are rising up from the sea all at once. “What if I preferred the darkness?”

If he has a sea whispering to hers, her own is whispering back, I could devour you.


@orestes

[Orestes]

rallidae

perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage--perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that once our loves


- rainer rilke

The thing about the sea—it cannot devour itself. It can only rush and rage and beat itself against a shore it cannot overcome. There are days when it floods and lashes the land with hurricanes, or places where two great currents meet, but it is endless, eternal, warm water and cold water and deep water and shallow water, all of it moving and pulsing alone great thing. Orestes does not know her thoughts, but he looks at her with the expectant expression of a child convinced of certain beliefs. One of them is the confidence that always, always, there is this thing within him as well and if he let it—because Orestes sees it as a choice—it would consume him.

And so he does not let it.

He does not dwell too long or too hard on how there are some nights he wishes he could destroy more and create less. Nights where he wishes his nature was not to sacrifice; and then he remembers why those burdens are his and he cannot, will not, let them go. 

And if I sad no? she asks. 

But Orestes already knows. She did not have to say it. No, it is there in her gnashing teeth and drooping, gold-heavy flowers. It is there in the way her magic is electric, pulsing, living—and as she nears the world is only a suggestion around them, raven-black and wicked, rather than the concrete reality of what it would be. Beneath all of this Orestes believes there are still corn stalks swaying softly in Denocte’s night; there is still a pathway that must lead out of the twisting, devilish maze. 

“I would say, alright.” Orestes voice has none of the violence of hers. He is still the sea that goes shush, shush, shush and always will be. The fear he felt, white-hot and blinding, was not for her; and as the flowers droop not with steel but with gold he finds himself, again, where he ought to be. Does she know she has made the prison of his past? Does she know that once he would have writhed at her feet and screamed, his skin twisting into a thousand different shapes he could not become, all because she invented a prison of gold? 

Not tonight, however. 

No. 

Not tonight. 

His illumination, brief, is just enough for him to see her face and glittering scales. It is just enough to see the face of a unicorn that does not feel like a unicorn and then, at her wish, the light stops. They are again in the dark; it is a thing absolute; a thing as alive as her magic; and what he has learned from Solterra, from Solis, is the wrongness of it. 

But deep within Orestes, in a place almost forgotten, there is a quiet breaking of the sea against jagged cliffsides in a storm. He knows the turbulent nature of the deep, the dark. He knows the way the sea is indiscriminately cruel, a bit like life, and how that makes her beautiful. This unicorn with her dark, transformative magic makes him remember that. It is the gnash of her teeth not made for killing. He stands quiet for a long moment and he admires her flowers, and her darkness, and her rage. That is when he knows she is the Queen of Denocte, but he does not want to take those things from her; he does not want to challenge her darkness with a name, or her rage with an obligation. He does not name her “Queen” or “Isra” (as he’s been told). He lets the thing within her grow, and grow, and grow, and he admires her. 

Yes.

Orestes admires. 

Then, “You do not have to join me.” Orestes says it almost flippantly. His words come out breathless, however, because he has never been good at flippancy. Everything from Orestes sounds more like a prayer, or a promise. “But I am going to find my way out of this maze.” he steps around her, and his head is high but not arrogant, because he will always also be a prince.

He thinks a little too late at his own recklessness, the way this maze could become anything she wishes of it. It could kill him. But there is an old, familiar thrill to the idea; one he cannot help but acknowledge as quite enticing. There are many things he wants to tell her, and none of them will save her from her pain. He only walks a little ways off before glancing over his shoulder expectantly, boyishly. “Perhaps if you found your way out, you will find something else as well. Or you can stay here and be whatever darkness you wish. You can turn it to stalks of razors and let me cut my way through, or so many twisting, sharp plants.” Then he smiles, and it is a wicked thing, because yes

yes

yes

Orestes knows what it means to take a life and have his own taken. Has he not died? Does he not know how twisted a Soul can become when what they know is suffering, and tragedy, and heartbreak? He thinks of his people enslaved across the sea; he thinks of what it felt like the first time he realised he was Bound to one shape and one shape forever; he thinks of the moment he knew he failed, and he would not save them. He thinks of how he was captured trying to become every shape he knew how to become, and none of them were enough, he was not enough, and they pulled him from the sea in a writhing net and he was met with eyes as red as blood and hate, hate, hate. 

So much hate.

And when he thinks of those things, there is no light in him to radiate for her. There is nothing in him but the hollow cavern at the bottom of the sea full of frightful things. 

He says, “Perhaps, if the mood takes you, you can even transform me into a monster to defeat, to fight, to gnash your teeth at.” Even more quietly, more thoughtfully, he adds: “I do not want to be a monster, but that is what I will be if that is what you need.” It is what he has offered to all the aching souls he has ever known because, even know, he is their Keeper; and this one, 

this one,

Orestes believes belongs to the sea. 

@Isra | speaks | notes: I COULDN'T HELP IT *sob*

[Isra]

Isra the last in the garden

“the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm:"


Isra knows--

That she has the power to change the world, to free it or to destroy it. She could level mountains into yellow-flower meadows. A wasteland could become Utopia or Eden could become the end of the world where things go to die. Solterra could become more than endless sand where the sea touches it gently and waters nothing. And when she looks at him, with his golden-glow and his bone pale hair, when she looks out past the monster blazing in her eyes, all she can see is sand, sun, and something like hope.

Maybe it's the breathlessness of his voice that reminds her of the wind. Or maybe it's the way that he turns away like she's something too heavy for bones and skin and eyes to told. Maybe it's only the way Eik is a constant pressure in her head and like breathing she does not need to think of it to know there is air in her lungs. Maybe it's each one of those things that settles the beast in her to something tame enough to put together all the pieces of him and give it a name.

Orestes.

The new king of Solterra, the court she killed for. She wonders if his desert has told him of the battle, of how she gnashed her teeth then and tasted blood and dirt. And she wonders if they told him to beware the queen with magic enough, power enough, love enough to take his castle from him.

She does not follow him when he moves away from her (and she thinks it's the only smart thing he's done so far). She does not do any of the things she knows she should do, because she is angry.

Isra is angry.

She's angry that her city made another maze. She's angry that she's supposed to remember only gently how Acton died trying to save her and how even now when she licks her lips like a wolf she can still taste the iron sting of his blood. She's angry that she's supposed to smile like a mother should and lead her city like forgiveness is the only thing racing in her blood. She's angry that she's supposed to be soft and that she cannot love her stories the way she used too. She's angry that there are still evil men and gods in this world and she's supposed to turn away and worry only about her city. She's angry that everyone is moving on around her like her city didn't burn, and her people didn't die, and that the gods didn't let her city flood and thunder-birds come.

She's so, so angry. And right now she knows there are only the two of them in the maze. She knows she could kill him and there would be no one to see.

“You won't get out that way.” Isra says in the space between his breathless words and his taunting of the beast (and she wonders why he cares so little for his life when his desert city is in ruins and needs him). Around her the golden flowers sigh as their metal hardens until their faces are pointed back at the moonlight instead of his soft-light.

Her hooves still make no move to join him. This maze is hers now and she's not ready to leave. Her magic is still an itch she needs to scratch and her rage, her anger, all the sharp pieces still need somewhere to go. Because, she tells herself, it's better than tasting blood.

The wind, the howling moonlit wind, whispers through her spiral horn when she tosses it to the dark place between two golden, barbed stalks. When she does the stalks turn to rubies red as blood and diamonds brighter than he could ever think to shine. They fall to the ground and it sounds like rain.The path goes on until the darkness swallows it, but it looks straight. “If you go that way it'll lead you back to the city.” She doesn't say and away from me but it's there in the way she looks at all his golden skin like the sight of it is leaving a bitter taste in her mouth.

Isra moves to turn away and let the darkness of her garden wrap once more around her. But before she does she turns to look at him once more-- a dragon roars in the distance even though he doesn't need to.

When she says, “the father of my children will always love the desert.”, it sounds like a warning with a mouthful of teeth. Like she'll come calling if he betrays the desert Eik loves in any way.

And she wonders, again, if his people warned him of the queen that came to kill their last king.


@orestes

[Orestes]

rallidae

perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage--perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that once our loves


- rainer rilke

A quiet part of him wants to say

it is all just sand. 

The pain. The sorrow. The rage. 

Especially that one. 

The rage. 

He wants to take her palpable anger and turn it into the sun. He wants to say, rage, rage as dying things do, but do not die. He wants to say that if she is like the sea one day she will understand the pain never ends; there is just life and death and the eternal span between that is still, somehow, finite. He has seen a people eradicated. He has fought genocide. He has lost, and he opens his mouth to speak, to say, it isn’t fair, but he does not. He does not, because when he closes his eyes he remembers horses of stone, and the fear that has browbeat his people, and the way the desert is tired. He wants to say it isn’t fair. He has heard many stories of Isra, some rumours, some perhaps true. A Queen who was a slave, perhaps. A transformer who changes reality to illusion; or illusion into reality. A victim of Raum; a saviour of a city. He wants to ask her, where do you hurt? 

But the answer is one he is not ready to hear. 

And he cannot rob her of her rage.

To ask is childish. Assumptive. Perhaps even cruel. 

A part of him opens up like a flower; a part of him is wounded and dying; a part of him is a bird that cannot fly in a cage, singing, singing, at the sky. He looks at her and there is something timeless in it, something aching, a hollowness that offers this is what is left when the rage is gone. He wants to tell her. He wants to tell her that nights in darkness do not help. He wants to tell her solitude is the worst medicine. He wants to say that nothing drowns out the hurt, the past, that it is forever a poignant shard lodged in the livings’ lungs. His eyes are bright, but they do not glow—they are the colour of the sea beneath the stars, and Orestes thinks: 

He was once the sea, and even being that could not rob him of his rage. Even that could not save Orestes from his cursed mortality; it could not breathe the magic back into him or the life back into his people. He was once the sea, and that did not save him. It simply taught him the finite. It simply reminds him, again and again, the smallness of his suffering. I will take everything from you, his mother might have whispered, had she the courtesy. But Orestes did not even get that, her failed Prince, her sinful son. 

You won’t get out that way, she tells him. Her flowers become revitalised, but she does not move to follow him. Instead, she opens a path back toward the city that falls with the musical patter of rain and breaking glass. It is red as blood and bright as hope. He looks at it, and then back to her, even as she turns from him.

“If…” it is a quiet acknowledgement, a boyish, nearly flirtatious possibility. If. But he steps toward her pathway and the bonfires of her distant city, hesitantly, haltingly.

Orestes wants her, desperately, to come with him. He hears the dragon roar and thinks of all the nights the sea whispered dark and terrible things to him as Boudika slept. He closes his eyes for a moment, and there is only darkness, and he remembers what it felt like to drown. He says, “And I, Isra of the Night, will always love the sea.” He sighs; it is a heavy thing leaving him. There is no threat. It is an admission; a truth; pained and real and earnest.

Orestes steps forward, and forward again; the rubies and diamonds shift beneath his hooves, and the sound is still that of breaking glass. “It would lead you back as well.” 

He is not worried about death beneath Caligo’s dark stars. He is not worried about it in strange magic of Isra’s twisting maze. He does not fear for his court tonight; not beneath a blanket of so much pain and wrath. In his mind he remembers the sun and the brightest gold of the Mors’ sand; the red of the canyons; the blue, blue of the sea. He continues down the path she has opened for him and decides some days it is better for the monster to burn.

Perhaps, on a day when it has burnt out, he will tell her that Solterra does not see her as a monster. That the desert might have breathed out as a sleeping dragon would, and dreamt, thank you, thank you, thank you. Perhaps one day he would tell her that he does not fear death, because he has already died. 

But Orestes stops. He stops, and he looks behind him. He looks to see if she is still there. "You should be angry, Isra of Denocte. It isn't fair. It isn't right. None of it is, and you should be angry. It never will be. Raum. He was a monster I am glad I didn't meet and I am sorry I did not stop." 

And in his heart he remembers falling from a black cliff when just before hope had been a dove in his heart, white and innocent. And in his mind he thinks of how painful the crash was, how betrayed he had felt, how the name of Vercingtorix followed him all the way into the sea and beyond. In his heart he remembers the moment he failed and how always, always, it would rot inside him like a cancer. How it would bring to mind a searing hatred, even as the magic faded, even as his colours changed, even as he fought for a new people. A part of him would always be angry. 

Orestes turns away. He keeps walking.

@Isra | speaks | notes: I COULDN'T HELP IT *sob*

[Isra]

Isra and the bloody earth

“Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying"


I do not enjoy this new desert-prince. I know I should be welcoming, or kind, or anything but a monster gnashing my teeth at him and wondering what's beneath all his gold. There is a sea in his eyes, I can see it looking at him. But it seems too bright, too shallow, like it's golden water at the desert shore instead of the deep black sea that is mine. Maybe there would be a current between us, a tide twisting together the shallow and the black, if he came to me at any other time.

Tonight in the center-of-the-maze, in my-garden-of-golden-death, in my Eden, I am breaking. I am breaking. And I know I am going to reshape all the pieces of myself. But first they are going to break into sharp arrows and shot straight into the black space between the stars.

Of course I'm going to reshape myself. I've always been a survivor.

I even tried dying once. I tried to open up my teeth and pull the salt-water in. My legs tangled in sea-weed and my belly brushed against the sand like a garden. I tried so hard to die.

Here I am. Raum is dead by way of a cowards death, and here I am. War has come and gone. It showed me this hollow hole inside myself, a hole big enough to fit the hole world in it and still not be full. It showed me that I don't need to like men with the sea in their gazes and looks that promise they know something about holes bigger than the world.

He doesn't. How could he?

“There could be a hundred paths to lead me back if I wanted to go.” The terrible part of me wants to laugh at him. Like a man with the sea in his eyes could be the one to lead me home. I need scars and gray skin. I need Eik. And I still need to shatter and explode like a dying star dreaming of being a universe in the decay of death. But I only smile a bitter look when he looks at me with a dove in his gaze. I can almost see it beating down-white wings against the concave curl of his lungs, like he's only glass covering this shell of hope that he can change anything in the world.

I can though. I know I can. I can change it all.

In the end I say nothing as he walks away. I only tilt a ear to listen to the way my pathway cracks like glass underneath his weight. Maybe I should turn it to grass, or sand, or anything less sharp.

Maybe I should....

I don't.

Fable's wind brush the hair back from the eyes when he swoops low over the maze. He's always so quick to find me when the beast I'm learning to be starts to crawl out of my mortal skin. The air tastes like salt when I inhale. Dragon wings beat against the curl of my lungs, and my spine, and everything trying to hold the dangerous parts of me inside where it can't bring the world to its knees.

I walk deeper into the maze. I can hear Orestes hooves on the stones even now. Glass and diamonds. Sharp and lovely—like me. My garden shines in the same way around me, all tips pointed to the sky as if the metals flowers know that somewhere the gods are watching. I hope they are. I hope they all are.

The center is just like I remember it. Here the flowers are golden and sprinkled with black like ash pretending to the snow. Acton My heart shatters on the name and my lips ache like I've said his name instead of thought it. Even now when I close my eyes I can feel the cool kiss of blood on my cheeks and on the ring of scars around my throat. I wish trying to save me had been one of his illusions, I wish he had let me die.

It wasn't so bad when I tried to pull the sea in.

I think I'm crying when the first pieces of me start to shoot into the sky. I might be screaming too, or maybe it's only Fable I hear keening into the night, or a wolf. More pieces of me fly off towards the moon. Around me I can feel the earth shivering like it's begging me on bent, bloody knees to change it.

And I let it. Beg, I say, beg.

My garden curls in towards me and the gold presses against my spine like a hundred small, hungry kisses. I should be bleeding, I should be dead with all this metal folding around me like a rib-cage around  its heart. But I'm not and I tuck that away with another screaming howl.

Because this is how I will survive.


@orestes