[AW] we search alone

[Teiran]

In the winter, the markets are quite busy late morning. The sun has been up long enough to warm the air and the sand, but it has not gotten quite as hot as it will be, in the late afternoon. Teiran walks through pushing, wandering, talking bodies as stiffly as she can. Trying to look sharp, and hard, and not in the way of cracked glass or broken stone.

She’s busy trying to emulate something that that used to be normal, busy trying to remember what it was like to just be a soldier. Things had been easier, before Raum—there had been her duty, and that had been all, none of these things fighting for space inside her like desert winds, crushing her, threatening to erupt from her skin.

Teiran is too busy trying to remake her life into what it used to be, to notice the merchant leering at her with dark, shadowed eyes. He sidles up to her like a dog, dirty with years on the streets. He sidles up to her like a serpent, and slips the dagger out of the sheath on her left side before she has a chance to stop him. Her sapphire eyes narrow, hard as the gem in the mouth of the snake which makes up the pommel of her weapon.

“A mighty fine weapon you’ve got, darling,” he says, words grating against her skin like coarse grains of sand, burying themselves deep into her flesh. “You be willing to part with it? I’ll give you a good deal,” she might laugh, if it were in her to know how. Teiran steps closer to him, grasping the dagger, “I wouldn’t sell this to you, even if you weren’t a thieving rat. Drop it.”

Any humor the merchant might have had bleeds from him like beer from the kegs in taverns on cold, lonely nights. “Is that so?” he asks, stepping closing, bumping his chest up against hers. Her skin crawls. A crowd is beginning to draw. “How about this pretty little piece ‘round your neck, then?” the merchant drawls, almost wickedly. He is a good foot taller than her, if not more.

She can tell by the look in his eyes that he knows what he’s doing before he does it, but he still stupid for trying. “Will you sell this to me?” he clasps down around the silver collar, at the same time everything in her body goes cold, cold, cold. In a matter of seconds, there is a second dagger at his neck, wavy blade biting against the flesh there.

“If you do not let go of me and my dagger, I will kill you,” there is no warmth to her voice, no humanity, there is nothing in her but the weapon that had been created nearly seven years ago. There are many eyes watching them now, but she doesn’t see them, doesn’t hear the shock and concern in their voices. The merchant tries to laugh, but her dagger is pressed too tightly to his throat. She sees the moment his stupidity finally gives way to reason, or fear. Teiran doesn’t care which.

He releases her, and her other weapon, and takes a few steps away. “And if I ever see you treat anyone like this again, there won’t be a warning next time,” she sheaths the first dagger, then glances at the second, “Oh and this one? It won’t miss.” Then she walks away.

Sound and sensation return to her slowly. The burning cold and the strange, echoing emptiness fade. The crowd parts; she knows what they think of her, it is the same things they have always thought of her. Pity, fear. Some call her a monster. She has never cared, but now there are so many cracks in her that she isn’t sure what she feels. Their mutterings and whispers follow her down the street.

"Speaking."

⚔ | Open!

[Jask]

“And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
felt myself a pure part of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose on the wind.”

The Circle would tell him, them, that the silence is a gift. There is no greater treasure than to hear only hymns in your bones, nothing more valuable in this life or any other than to let go of that which shackles you--and to bind yourself with holier rope.

It is still binding. It is still taking away.
It does not matter, anymore. It has gone the way of most other things: if he feels or has felt anger at all it is no more than a blurred reflection of it, like squinting in the dark. If he is anything at all it is gray shapes caught by the moonlight, obfuscated by all brighter, more beautiful things.

The silence is palpable when he closes his eyes. Jask feels it against his cheeks when he bends his neck to pray. He feels it in streets full of people and he feels it as they circle like vultures, with hungry faces and the gnashing teeth of curiosity.

There is a fight in the square, knives and threats and the glint of hot steel in the still-warm winter sun. Jask shoulders into the crowd, the red of his robes cleaving its way toward the center, red like blood against the pale brown stone of the city, like a fan-tailed fish floating through the reeds.

He looks at her. Straight into the heart of her. He does not see anything that he does not see in himself. And when he follows her away from the crowd he is not sure why.

"It is a pretty dagger." he says, smiling in a way that does nothing but fold the corners of his mouth. It does not touch the rest of his lips. It does not tense his face. It does not reach his eyes. It is not even a smile at all, really.

@teiran yikes this is bad sorry

[Teiran]

She doesn’t realize he’s there, at first. It takes her a moment, to hear the sound of steps behind her, to hear the soft sound of fabric whispering against sand and quivering in the wind. There is still nothingness at the edges of her when she turns to meet his words.

His robes are red and gold, bright against the sandstone and sand-filled city. His skin is dusky and blue, like late morning skies filled with clouds. But his eyes… his eyes are red like blood. Except for the one poised upon his forehead, beneath a long and pointed horn.

None of these things matter to her. Her sage green eyes zero in on one thing: a collar, though leather and black, strung high upon his neck, right around his throat. And his smile, which looks how Teiran images it would look if she tried to smile. Like it is wrong, incomplete. It looks nothing like the smiles other equines wear.

“It’s not for sale,” she responds, rather flatly, as if asserting the previous point she has just finished making. Then, still uncertain of and trying to gauge his intentions, she says, “They were made for me, a matching pair.” Almost, at least.

If one of them weren’t enchanted. If one of them weren’t able to be directed to a bullseye by her very thought. The soldier tries not to think about who had them made, tries not to imagine eyes that are gold and then black. Eyes both gilt and sapphire. Eyes blue and cold, cold, cold.

All the eyes in her life that have made her, stripped her, and left her.

"Speaking."

⚔ | @Jask hush I love him <3

[Jask]

“And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
felt myself a pure part of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose on the wind.”

Jask is still folding his mouth, as if he is a tablecloth neatly tucked in on itself, and the void is pouring out of him in wave after wave of emptiness as cold as the black space between stars. 

They are humming the same song, one that is long and almost sad and frankly boring, hours and hours of droning punctuated by holy silence. When Jask listens he does not hear her music, only the hymn of his quietness, only the wind grinding away each sandstone wall. Jask wonders if she knows her city will be gone in a century, blown back into the dunes that built it. He wonders this like he wonders most things, as if through a fog, some half-remembered question that he never quite thought to ask.

He is mostly half-remembered questions, now. That and the silence. The stillness. As she speaks the wind picks up the edges of his robes and curls them around his ankles. It feels like the hands of god.

It's not for sale, the girl insists with a voice full of dog's teeth, gnashing, and gnashing and gnashing. Jask is still smiling like a stepford wife, all lips and no teeth. Together they are a strange tableau, a frown that is almost a threat and a smile that is not quite a smile. The red of his eyes is bright and still. 

He does not care that she is lost in thought, does not care that she is as sharp as her blades, could not care if he tried--and he doesn't. "I know," he says, "you said so." While the statement itself is not exactly kind, the voice that carries it is an almost practiced softness, as if being read from a book.

The smile drops off of Jask's face, an act that looks vaguely mechanical and not at all fluid. "Where do they come from?"

@teiran

[Teiran]

Teiran gets the feeling that something about him should be unsettling her and she wonders, is this why all the equines on the street look at her strangely? Why they don’t smile and say hello as they pass. Why their eyes are filled with the few things the soldier has truly come to recognize. Suspicion, unease.

Something about him is not quite right, but there are many things about Teiran that are not quite right either. Every day less and less of her feels right. Every day, less and less of her feels like something she is supposed to be. More of it cracks open, more of it dissipates on the wind like sand.

“Someone who is gone,” Teiran says, with eyes like emptiness and a voice like flat metal. Eyes, it’s his eyes that refuse to leave her. His eyes that she sees, everywhere she goes. She can’t say whether Viceroy had specifically had them made for her—she was not his pet project, not in the same was as Seraphina—but she had gotten them from her time in his army. She had learned to throw them, learned the double’s magic.

They had made her into a predator, a snake, and then given her something that could bite. They matched her eyes. Whoever or wherever they had come from, they had clearly been for her and her alone. “Where do you come from?” Teiran asks, because there is nothing else she wants to say. Because, as similar as they are cut, she does not recognize him or his collar.

"Speaking."

⚔ | @Jask

[Jask]

you have heard the stories about how the dead have already cried, like crushed grass and wilted flowers and memories carved into stone, then forgotten.

Teiran is correct, but only partly.
Everything about Jask is meant to be unsettling--and this is perhaps the aim of the Circle, the more he thinks about it. At a young age, Jask understood that he is to fear himself so that the world might fear him in turn. He is not a man, or an object, he is a symbol. All of them are symbols.

The question has always been: a symbol of what?
What might be. What has already come to pass. The voice in the dark that says you must hate what you cannot control, you must fear what you cannot understand. When he thinks of himself all he knows is fear. When he thinks of the world all he knows is hatred. Hatred and scorn and disgust, blurred by the eye on the shelf of his brow, the one that might have seen beautiful things if it had been allowed to see at all.

Beautiful, terrible things.
This eye, the each red one, do not move from her face. Jask is still like a spider, still like a thing in waiting, still, and still, and still, until he draws his breath to speak.

"I am sorry for your loss." he says, because Jask thinks this is what is expected of him - to bow his head and close his eyes and say a silent prayer for a monster with a name like hot iron, the shape of her bad dreams. And when he opens his eyes again, and they center back on her face, as if they had never left, there is no glint of recognition in his eyes. Her pain is nothing more to him than a prompt to respond.

Teiran continues: where do you come from? and Jask answers plainly, if with a hint of pride: "Far away from here, across the sea, at the very least. I come from a land plagued by magic, unbelievable as it may seem." He pauses for a moment, face set in grim, rough lines. "Count your blessings that yours is not."

Jask does not smile again. The face of her collar glints like a sword in the desert sun. Jask's feels warm against him, the black leather baked and nestled beneath the curve of his jaw -- and so they stand, warrior to warrior, slave to slave, except one does not know what they are.

jask

@teiran