[P] the storm-taste of our skin,

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


An end-of-summer storm is rolling in and the docks are spiraling into a frenzy. For each roar of distant thunder there is an echo of hammer against wood and hooves racing against stone. Lighting spiderwebs over the scene, making bits of it starker than the rest. She can see a boy racing to lower a sail, his eyes white-rimmed and wild in the flash of brightness. There is a captain bellowing orders and his teeth flash bright as razor-blades in the lightning. 

And then there is the way her golden chains turn silver in the corner of her vision-- silver as new-forged iron. 

It's almost easy to miss the pull of them and the ache of them as the wind presses them hard-as-nail into her sides. The wind is holding on to most of her attention, the howl of it, the way it's racing to crown her head with fury nature born instead of god-born. 

This is how it felt to be made free-- standing over the sea with nothing but a bit of wood holding back the black bottom from filling up her lungs. She wonders if it would feel the same to plummet into the belly of the storm, to let it reshape her into dust and memories like a well-worn leaf. One hoof lifts to hang over the edge and her anklet recreates the wind into a whispering howl of gold, bone and sea-salted skin. 

She thinks about leaping. 

But behind her a captain blow a horn like a call-to-war. Instead of leaping she turns to watch the crowd scurry to follow his orders like lambs before their Shepard. Something half-slumbering in her veins snarls at the sight even as something else purrs, and starts to hum. 

Al'Zhara listens to the humming part as she turns from the storm and the sea just starting to lap at the edges of the dock like it's shore instead of anchor. And inside the seaside establishment a drum starts to beat, low and steady as a heart, urging the crowd to set anchor by their vices instead of bones. 

art credit


@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

She had stood before him like a tree bowing to a storm when he had said what he had. She had felt her bones bending and breaking and caving through her skin, had felt her veins unravel like yarn and fall away into the dirt. Her heart that had already beat itself ragged so long ago between Aerwir’s touches and Underworld’s, but the tattered remains were little more than a flayed pulp before him, thudding within her imploded chest. How words could hurt so much. How could he cleave the flesh from her bones with something as simple as a smile slashed across his mouth. It had been impossible to breathe she had realized abruptly, to force her lungs to expand beneath the press of furious, frightened muscle.

Her soul still thrashes in wild death throes.
Something had to give.

So it had.

Like a switch, Tenebrae had dimmed her. Her lungs had expanded without the clutch of muscle to stop it, her pulse slowed to a steady thump-thump. She felt, in an instant, calm. But even this was a lie – how could it not be, how, when everything else was, too. Her blue eyes dulled from a wicked winter to melted ice. She hadn't quite stopped listening to his words, they still registered, somewhere deep, somewhere that was still bleeding today, but she has tried to numb the pain. She tried to forget how to care.

It was better this way. A voice whispers in her mind.

But in an instant, away from him, she is toeing the line of lucidity again and she doesn't bother to the flinch that tightens beneath her skin. “Don’t come back to Terrastella, Tenebrae.” She had told him, a quiet poison.

She can remember how his hunger—their hunger, had been mirrored in the way they looked at each other. Their desires starved and suppressed, building tension between them. She is usually so kind and mild, a happy girl despite the ghosts of her past, but a feeling brewing inside of her with such intensity that it is close to spilling over, and she isn’t sure how to handle it.

The sound of her pulse is unbearable. Maybe this is why she had gone out to the sea, even when the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed warning lights. There is the steady thrum of emotions that pass by her as she makes her way beside the sea. The weather is still warm, but the rain that proceeds to fall is like drops of ice as it chills her golden skin. Elena has never liked rain, has never liked clouds. She was child of summer through and through.

She decides to save the beach for another day, and slips inside a building close by. There is the chatter and vibrancy of emotions as the storm rains down outside. Elena takes her spot in a corner, blinking blue eyes at those that surround her. She longs to lose herself in a conversation of the large group that sits there, but their emotions toss themselves at her like a punching bag and cannot silence them. It is then she sees a woman, with chains adorning her, and there is something that reminds her of another woman with wildness in her bones. Elena approaches her with an openness that she has a hard time restraining. She itches to know the lives of strangers. “You seem,” she hesitates, standing at edge of her words like the woman before her had stood at the edge of the sea. “Weighted,” she offers, unsure if the word was right, if the emotion was right. “Want to talk about it?”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

Elena is Novus’s new resident therapist! Your first session is free!

@"Al'Zahra"

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


It feels strange to let the music ebb and flow around her instead of between her bones and skin. Here it seems less like a pulse and more like a shadow below a full moon, stretched and longing for a million holes to be chewed out of it. She lets it wash black and heavy over her, through her, around her and out again. And perhaps her heart is only singing a mockery of this song as it roars and trembles in her chest to the same brass deep howl of the thunder outside.

Lighting flashes outside and the crowd flashes stark and almost otherworldly. Tonight perhaps they all are, just bits of mortals tangled together in some chaotic design of life.

Zahra watches them all and drowns down the sight of it drop by drop as she sips at her liquor. It is the first time that this has felt so far from her own world that she longs for the memories drifting just out of sight in the remnants of her immortal soul.

She notices the girl the moment she walks into the building. There is gold, rain-water and something so soft it makes Al'Zahra's teeth ache to see it, dripping from her. Innocence, she thinks. It has been eons since she's seen it (and eons since she twisted and mangled it into something bloated with avarice and gluttony). Her smile has too many teeth in it as she watches the girl walk to her corner. Wolfish, perhaps, or monstrous (or maybe just hungry).

“And you seem light as air.” Desert, and sun, and gold cling to the notes of her voice. It promises a song, and a glorious fall down, down, down from wherever it is the golden girl is flying. And in her gaze there is the weight of eons, and embers, and magic as she traces each hollow between the girl's rib-cage. “Better sit before you float away.” Some of the teeth fade in her smile as it turns to fox-cunning gentleness.

A glass scrapes like a blade across the table as she pushes it to the golden girl. And the echo of it seems to say, in a language older than them both, let us not go gently into the belly of the beast.

And her next sip, with tooth and claw and wrath, goes down smooth as blood.

art credit


@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

She can remember the first time she had considered leaving home. The first time the thought of ‘What if I never went back?’ crossed her mind. She had gone of by herself in Windskeep, against her parents rules and requests. Windskeep, in peaceful times, was the epitome of safety for a child, but this was not times of peace, but of war. Dangers lurked in shadows. But Elena was angry, having been reprimanded by her parents and so she searched beyond those shadows and it was beyond these shadows that she found a cave, adorned with crystals, bright and beautiful. What illuminated the cave was unknown to the little blonde girl. Magic, always magic. And she thinks, within the confines of her cave, what if she didn't go back? Would the world continue on without her? Would they miss her? Would they regret ever being angry with her, scolding her? Elena thinks they would. They would be sorry.

In the end though, it was Elena who was sorry, alone and scared when the sun was inching closer to that horizon. She ran from her cave, with tears streaming from her eyes until she found her mother and into her pale form, the golden filly buried herself. Beylani had been looking for her, she had missed her, she had worried for her. Elena was sorry, Beylani was sorry. Elena thought then that night, as she laid nestled between her parents, her grandmother close. “What if she had never come back?”

It is her daring she is drawn to, the chains on her face and the secrets she thinks she can see swimming in the backs of those eyes of hers. She has seen eyes like these before, eyes with ancient storms trapped in their bellies. For a moment her attention is held captive by the chains she wears and she traces each delicate link with blue eyes.

A laugh, silvery and playful, steals her breath for a moment. “If I could float, I can tell you I would not have been caught in the rain,” she says, searching the woman’s face with eyes like sky blue.  She wonders, does this woman like the quiet of a drizzle or does her breath hold for the noise of storms? Whatever those silly thoughts are though, Elena buries them away as she takes the drink that is handed to her.

A single sip and her face contorts with the strength of it, it feels feral sliding down her throat and swims like a shark in her stomach. “That’s uh, stronger than what i am used to,” she admits to the woman, sliding blue eyes over to her with a hint of embarrassment. “What brings you out on a rainy day?” She asks her, even as her voice is light, Elena finds herself choosing her words carefully around her. There was something about her that made the back of Elena’s neck tingle with something like adventure and mystery, it tastes like wild promise on her lips. Her empathy wraps around the girl’s emotions like a lover, and greedily sweeps it away into Elena’s gut. She cant quite place what emotion sits on her face, but everything in Elena wants to run, to throw everything into the wind and see if anyone would catch her if she threw herself over. It feels unfamiliar, it feels invigorating, and she isn't ready to relinquish it just yet. She takes another sip, a silent confirmation she would stay with the woman.

“Seeing you happy would be enough for me.” She had once told a man. Even as she hurt him again and again, with every wanton gaze she threw to the boy with antlers, and every unchaste touch she let upon her. Her unloyal heart was as much a villain as it would be if she slipped poison into his drink. Seeing him happy would be enough for her, and once it would have been. But looking to the strange girl before her, she thinks for the first time, selfishly, maybe there was more to all of this than just the happiness of others. She tries to bury the thought inside her chest, but it stands there, clear as day, blazing behind her eyes.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@"Al'Zahra"

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


Rend and ruin someone had called her once, when her eyes leaked soot instead of tears and her life ran is river of magma instead of blood. She can see it now, as the girl joins her like a lamb to the wolf-den, in a bit of language the golden mare does now know she's speaking. Al'Zahra reads it like a song: a note of  fragility in the way she chokes and sputters at the virgin taste of liquor, a ballad of almost-mortality in her laugh when it rises cloud-thin above them.

She wonders if the mare knows all the ways in which she speaks.

Al'Zahra misses the mystery in the places with only storm-clouds and no song.

When she smiles, and laughs as low as an ember, she begins to teach the golden mare the secrets of the shadows, of the song without words, of the pull of soot and smoke down their throat in the wake of the liquor. “Would you have drifted into the storm or away from it, little dove?” The question comes belatedly. She had been too caught in the soundless song to string together the pattern of words instead of bone notes and curling shivers of flesh.

With another swallow, one that looks far more graceful in her form, she leans forward until her chains whisper against the half-rotten wood. “The question should not be what brought me out on a rainy day.” The look on her face turns both feral, and wanting, and something more immortal than the gods in a lost stallion's religion. It is both the look of a siren, and a lion, and a girl who burns brighter than a solar flare.

It is a look that destroys both worlds and hearts.

One of those is already burning parts of this world to ash.

“You should ask instead what brought me in.” That look does not fade in the echo of  her desert-in-the-twilight voice. It only flashes a warning when a stallion passes too close to their table before stumbling onward to easier marks than a dancer with a wildfire in her eyes. Or maybe he only caught that air of 'other' on her skin like a stag catching wolves on a downwind.

Al'Zahra takes another sip, encouraging the girl with a look that says, try harder little dove, you will need to be more clever than that to keep up. Beyond their nook of things unsaid, the musicians sip their drinks until more and more wildness leaks into the sound of their poetry.

And it is still not enough for her, not nearly enough.

art credit


@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

When she had been little, back in Windskeep, even in Paraiso, in Murmuring Rivers, she had seen the world in many colors. The rich flowers, the warm sun, the soft grass, and giant trees. Everything was bright and it erupted around her, flourished. Elena never knew the colors would one day leave her, descend into the darkness of monsters and madness.

She doesn't remember the exact moment the colors began to fade, maybe it was bit by bit. Her parents died and the sun was not as bright a yellow. Frostbane tried to take her away and the lavender beside the river was not as vibrant. She was stolen from Culloden and Woodlands and the bluebird seemed a little more dull.

Take, take, take.

And then in one final rush, all the color left her. That day, those weeks, they are a blur now. She could only tell the passage of time by the weather growing colder. She left in summer and it became autumn. She only remembers something dark enveloping her. Something closing in around her, filling her with the deepest dread. Her body ached from fighting, but what she fought she didn't know. (Herself?) She couldn't see. She lost hold of her consciousness eventually, drifting into the vast, menacing darkness. It felt like she was trapped in another world, where she could not breathe or escape. The last thing she remembers before slipping away was pain.

And then her mother found her.
And her life was brought back into the light.

She opened her eyes and she could feel that they were blue.

“Maybe up above the clouds, back to the beginning of summer,” she says almost sadly. When the festivals had lit up the sky and night never came to them. The stars would peek out to say hello, but the darkness never came. Light and light and light.

There was something dangerously tempting about Al’Zahra and was may be offered in the words unspoken. A wisp of a smile pulls at her face. She wonders how many hearts she has taken, or how many had been offered to her and how many she has left, how many she has broken. Elena can see it in her face, her eyes, the tilt of her chin. One does not live as this stranger without a trail behind her. Elena is too terrified to look behind her dark shoulder, to see what really lay behind her.

Longing kisses her skin. Elena knows the emotion well, but it blooms differently in her chest, enough to tell the golden girl it was an emotion that did not belong to her, an emotion she had no right to, but one she steals and wears as her own all the same. And the same feral look that steals the stranger’s face, rests on Elena’s as well. Elena has never been a face stealer as much as she is right now. Those blue eyes grow strong and wild as a glacier.“The question should not be what brought me out on a rainy day.” And the Terrastellan watches her like a cross between how one might admire a firefly in a field and how one looks over their shoulders at the coyote stalking behind them.

Elena has aways been terrible at following directions. Not so much an act of rebellion, but more she cannot confine herself to those straight lines from points A and points B. She drags herself to those cliffs and walks a jagged trail so oblivious to her own peril. “What’s out there?” She asks instead, turning blue eyes to the window. She takes another sip (winces) before looking back to the woman because she realizes that the storm no longer rages outside these walls, but beside her. “Teach me.” Her voice has only sounded as urgent a few times in her still young life. “Teach me to leap without looking,” she says, because Elena, for all her cliff dancing, has only fallen once and she landed in the arms of a man. Maybe, she can teach her to catch herself.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@"Al'Zahra"

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


“You are no better than the rest of them then.” The fire in her gaze, caught between the cracks of her smile that shifts to snarl and back to smile, turns devouring instead of smoldering. “Always looking to go back instead of forward. The past is no place for doves.” The wild serenade of the band makes her voice, her words, her cruelty seems both holy and profane.

The look, oh the look, that shifts across her golden eyes like a thundercloud promises that she knows all the ways in which to be holy.

And all the ways in which to be made holy.

Al'Zahra swallows her drink like a leopard swallows a sparrow, or a vole, or a newborn rabbit crying out for water. It does not burn, nor does it wrinkle the perfect lines of her face into anything but that black look, bright eyes, and gold framing the two. When she unfolds from the table it is as a root does, muscle by muscle. And when she turns to move away, it as a flower does, unfurled and dew-damp petals turning hungrily towards the sun.

One of them is the sun. One is a the storm. Between them there are only clouds to drink. She smiles when the music stutters like a jack-rabbit heart as the singer recognizes the curl of her neck, the guitarist the angles of her hipbones. Neither of them is spared a glance as she waits for the girl to stand or to stay. Her face stays full of those dark looks and those darker promises.

“There are monsters in the storm.” The door blows open in the wind. Rain pours in and catches on her lashes like tears as she walks towards the violent sea and the devouring storms. Just before she dissolves into the thunder and the cutting the rain she looks back over her shoulder and says, “You'll have to leap on your own. But if you do I can teach how to own them all.”

And then the storm swallows her whole as she walks out of the tavern.

Or is is Al'Zahra that swallows the storm?

art credit


@Elena

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

This woman, is everything Elena is not. She is elegantly wild, like wolves howling under a moon, while Elena is the deer running madly through deep snow, so unclear of where she goes next, just knows something chases her. She is a sail, standing at the front of the ship, the sea breeze in her hair, the palomino stands to the back, stealing peeks at the shore she left behind. This woman, is everything Elena is not.

Maybe she should bow her head in shame with woman’s accusation, but instead she utters a barely audible sigh in amazement and realization. She’s right—this stranger of chains and challenges.

An emotion bleeds from her face. It falls down her golden face and it looks something like the wild rain that pours outside. She savors the different notes of their conversation, lets the taste of the drink roll over her tongue as it bites like thunder, it burns her throat like lightning. This is her communion and this stranger has led her to the alter. She mirrors her body, moving from the table, she takes a final drink and everything begins to grow fuzzy. The rain feels like shards of glass against her skin and blue eyes are not bold enough to look down to see how it has cut her and how she bleeds. Doesn't want to remember that she even can.

Elena once knew without thinking, how to dance with reckless abandon. It was the way she raced with Lilli across the ancient emerald carpet of Paraiso. The scent of summer filled her lungs, intensifying the heat of life that raced through their veins like young fire. They race because they can, they run just because, before a time when they will long for longer legs, for broader bodies, sharper minds, stronger hearts.

She can almost hear the echo of laughter as she blinks in Zahra’s direction. Her skin itches with the memory. She bites her bottom lip. It tastes like a thundering waterfall she hasn't seen in so long.

‘If you want to remember, you should come to Denocte’s lake one night and watch the stars from there.’ His voice echoes in her head as she watches when the strange woman first steps out back into the rain.

And she decides, maybe today, may tonight, and clear on till morning—she doesn't want to remember anything.

Elena pockets photographs of memories she once held and steps into the storm, pretending she has never seen one before. She is at Zahra’s side, looks into her eyes, eyes that look like amber gold, like a father that she pretends she never had, that she pretends never died, only for tonight, only during this storm. “I’m coming with you,” she says, and the words taste something like the fate of a girl Elena wont recognize come tomorrow. “Teach me.”

And into the storm—they leap.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@"Al'Zahra"