[AW] and the leaf is singing still

[Septimus]

THE WET GLASS, AND THAT CLOUD
which is slowly taking the shape / of an astonishing idea

The reflection to Septimus’s left is bloody.

The Septimus-in-the-mirror’s mouth is dribbling blood; there is some concoction of feathers and skin caught between his canine teeth. Distasteful manners, really – he might be an omnivore, and he might be fey-blooded, but that does not mean entirely disregarding matters of personal appearance. It isn’t as though the reflection can hear him, but he gives it half a roll of his eyes and says, “I believe you have something in your teeth.”

The mechanics of these strange stones are interesting, at least – if somewhat insulting.

Some kind of illusion (malevolent or apathetic; it is hard to tell), he assumes. He’s seen the type; in the Wilds, it is rarely so obvious, but, like will-o’-wisps, they make you doubt your own eyes, and, more importantly, yourself. Septimus is not sure that there is any kind of intent behind these strange reflections, but he’d like to find out, and, if there is an answer, it might well be further in the labyrinthian expanse of spikes and spires.

He drifts between mirrors, largely disregarding the images found within; some of them are familiar, some of them are exact, and some are a twisted, ugly distortion. He wonders if there is something different to the material composition of the different shards, or if there is some difference in their - theoretical – enchantment. If so, what could it be? It could surely explain the discrepancy in image – but, of course, magic often defies explanation.

(It is part of why it is such a fascinating subject. Although Septimus has lingered in Novus for quite some time, now – and not necessarily by choice -, he hasn’t even come close to grasping the rules of magic in this place, if there are any at all.)

Septimus leans in close to one crystal, squinting at the material, lips quirked. It is difficult to make out exactly what it is composed of, particularly with his reflections obscuring his view, but, even if he could see it more clearly, he isn’t sure that he would know what it is. It doesn’t look – or move – like any material he has ever seen before, in all his (many) years of travelling, and he finds himself wondering what it would look like under a microscope. Surely, it would be fascinating.

He does not have a microscope, at the moment, but he can find one later… if he can find a way to take a sample of the stone. He could try to use his antlers, he supposes, but the stone is probably much harder than they are; he isn’t even sure if a blade would be able to chip a bit of it off. Perhaps he could find a shard that is already broken, but he hasn’t seen any, and he feels like he has been walking for quite some time – even when he finds the crystal broken, he rarely sees the pieces shattered on the ground. Even if he can find one, that doesn’t mean that he will be able to take it back to the mainland with him. In the interest of progress (and his own curiosity), however, he is obligated to try.

The Septimus across from him has antlers twined with emerald-green vines; he thinks that he recognizes them from his childhood, but it has been many, many years since then.

How nostalgic. He doesn’t allow his gaze to linger. He needs to find a shard; if he does, he might even be able to use it to break off bits of the other crystals, to see if they differ in material like they do in reflective quality.

---

open! || he's, uhh, literally just vibing. 

"Speech!" 

@

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

She comes to find her children.


As she crosses the channel of open water between the mainland and the strange island, Florentine feels the way the winds change beneath her wings. It goes from a normal salted breeze, chopping and changing like the waves, to something entirely other. The air is filled with old magic. Its essence across her tongue is as metallic as the tang of rust upon ancient metal. Upon her feathers it feels warm, silken, wrong. Already Florentine knows how this island’s magic fights her own. It might be the only place she has encountered, across Time and Space, that can better and break her own.


She lands upon the comma of land. This time its face is barren and angular, full of glass and stone. The glass stones each mirror her. She is surrounded by a thousand Florentines. Some she recognises and some are worlds and existences she has yet to explore. She would linger, examine every stone and remember its reflection and its world that she might travel there one day. She looks for one with her children, hoping that it might reveal to her what her twins may look like now. There are none that she can see. 


Oh. 


Does this mean that they are doomed to never be reunited? Is there no existence in which she can ever be a true mother? She birthed her children upon the island when time stood still and it was from the island she tried to take them away, back to the Riftlands. But the island revolted. Maybe her children were never meant to be hers, their magic connecting and holding them to the island. Together their magics could stop time, after all.


Slowly Florentine peels herself away from her reflections. Her amethyst eyes search for a flash of gold, bright as sunlight. She sees nothing but a man stood as dark as Lysander, his antlers reaching tall and proud, up to pierce the sky. The fae-girl moves toward him, her petals guiding her close. They skip across the glassy ground and swirl about his feet. The man is a flame and he turns Florentine into a moth he draws in with the bright familiarity of his looks. Her love for Lysander does not wane with time nor distance. She thinks it might never subside. She would wait for him in any world.


Though she knows the fae stallion is not her love, though she sees the blaze of white trickling down from his brow and over his nose, though she does not feel how the earth bends for him, reaches for the fae stallion (as it does for Lysander - once a god of the earth) she still steps closer in fanciful hope. 


The fae man is gazing at a reflection, vines twine through his antlers, he seems wilder, more godly. Her stomach twists and dips. The sensation pushes a breath past her lips, a sigh, full of magic and Time. Florentine’s magic reaches for the glass, keen to cut and carve and reach into this world that makes gods of men - would Lysander be there with his divinity returned?


“Stay.” Florentine breathes and begs as the fae stallion moves to turn from his reflection. “You remind me of someone I have lost. My love. He had vines in his antlers like you do here.” her lips touch the glass. It is warm, like a film, as if flimsy enough to pierce and tear and fall through - to him, that stranger, ever more fae, world. She lifts a blackened glass, fragment of bone. It once belonged to monster, who was once a horse, twisted by a virus into a monster. She plucked the bone from its desiccated body and fired it within a dragon’s flame until it turned to unyielding, unbreakable glass. Its point is wicked sharp and more terrifying than her silver, beautiful dagger had once been. 


Florentine presses the point of her new bone dagger to the warm glass of the stallion’s reflection. The ring of bone glass upon glass stone, the sound of clashing time magics is a scream of grating metal. Slowly the gilded-girl removes her dagger and the sound muffles, abating. “Huh, the island still doesn’t like me then.”


@Septimus

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Septimus]

THE WET GLASS, AND THAT CLOUD
which is slowly taking the shape / of an astonishing idea

Everywhere he looks, he stares back. On occasion, he isn’t alone in the mirror – he recognizes some of the faces, but others are people he has never seen before, and he never forgets a face. Some scenes are familiar. A woman with a scythe-hook of a tail surrounded by dead fireflies. A pale girl, attempting to thieve his earring. The island remembers what it has seen before, he supposes, in particular – of all his many, many years, it keeps picking images of him, here.

He doesn’t see the girl until she speaks, too caught up in his own observations to notice the sound of her approach. (An amateur mistake, really.)

Stay, comes her soft, pleading voice. You remind me of someone I have lost. My love. He had vines in his antlers like you do here. He does stop, and he does stay, but that is mostly to get a better look at her.

She looks bird-boned, fragile – a pastel and delicate creature, dripping violet flowers in her wake. He wonders if they grow in her hair (it somehow does not seem implausible, from her bearing), or if she simply tied them in. There are thousands of copies of her, reflected in every which direction; he is too perplexed by her to pay too much attention to them. It is as strange as the island itself to see any other soul in this strange, wild place, and he cannot help but assume it is the island’s will – with its wild, tangled magick – to bring her here.

At any rate – he is grateful for the company, although the nature of her request…

It is, admittedly, one of the more bizarre requests that Septimus has gotten. (He does not recall having ever being compared to someone’s lost lover, but, then, he has lived for a very, very long time.) He arches his brow at the golden girl, but he does freeze in place (although he feels rather strange about honoring her request), save for the persistent push and pull of the wind in his mane. “A lost lover?” He isn’t sure if it’s something she needs to talk about – but her breathless and half-begging tone bears questioning.

There is a dagger hanging around the curve of her neck. She faces his reflection, the one with the vine-strewn antlers, and she plucks it from its holster and raises it to the stone. Septimus watches her wide-eyed, wondering if she can be coerced to get him a sample for his service.

When she tries to cut the stone, however, a horrible sound rings out – the clash between two materials, two magicks. It screams, and he nearly winces, but he cannot bring himself to tear his eyes from the sight of her cutting. She draws the dagger back, finally, and the sound dissipates. Huh, she says, the island still doesn’t like me, then. He wonders how much time she has spent on the island. (He wonders if it can really be said to like anyone at all; wild magic, like this kind, rarely bears fondness for anyone. He thinks it might like his siblings, if they were here, or his mother, or even him, if he were properly himself – it reminds him of the wilds. But he is not himself, and they are not here, and this is not the wilds.)

His gaze lingers on her thoughtfully.

“It’s a pity,” Septimus says, still unmoving. “If you could have broken it with that dagger of yours, I would have asked for a sample.” It seems that his scientific inquiries would have to wait; perhaps he could come back later, before the season is out, with something sharper to cut the stone’s glass-like surface. His eyes drift down to the dagger, which seems to him polished bone – but what kind? The sharpness it seems to exude is entirely unlike its make. “What is your dagger made of? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before.” And, considering how long Septimus has been alive, that is rather rare.

---

@Florentine || <3 <3 <3 

"Speech!" 

@

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

What is your dagger made of?


Of all the questions he could have asked her…


His words throw Florentine back into the Rift, back to where Lysander and her father are. Then it takes her even further back, to Novus, to this very island when her children were still young and she dared to try and unite her family, her children with their grandfather.


But that was never meant to be. Now they are scattered again. Asterion, somewhere here, her children too. She has come to this island once more and found no one - not her brother nor her babies. Only this fae man who waters her with eyes as green as her lover’s. 


Flora looks away from him and down to her strange dagger, “It is bone.” She breathes lightly. “Bone from a plagued horse turned into a monster by sickness, and then torched by a dragon in its fire…” Over and over she turns the dagger, watching how light gleams across its wicked length. It is otherworldly in her grasp. “I used to have a prettier one, a dagger made of silver and flowers.” And its scabbard, woven silver like vines… Lysander gave it to her. Now it is shattered, lying in pieces, never to be remade. She has no idea her children carry two pieces, her self the hilt, but its tip is lost, fallen into some interim world.


“This dagger is the only thing that can cut between worlds now. My first was broken by magic.” But oh, her newest dagger is a thing more monstrous than the first, made by a fetic magic and run through by endless Time. She sighs lightly and looks up to the elven man who reminds her so much of Lysander. Her heart aches, she wishes to press her body into his and pretend for just a moment he was not him but Lysander. Even florentine knows the cruelty of making Septimus anything other than who he is, even for a moment of her own comfort. So she doesn’t. Instead she says, “You havent seen two children around have you? Twins? Both have gold antlers, a girl, white and a brown boy? They were born on the island, i hoped they might be here, somewhere.”


@Septimus

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world

[Septimus]

THE WET GLASS, AND THAT CLOUD
which is slowly taking the shape / of an astonishing idea

The golden woman looks away from him and down towards her dagger, and Septimus thinks that there is something deeply complicated in her expression as she does. She turns the dagger over and over and over again, and he watches the light glint off the sharp edges of it, his eyes widening by a fraction when she tells him that it is made of bone, but only because he would not have expected it from the dagger’s sharpness.

When she explains where the bone came from, however – that is when a look of something like understanding settles in his stare.

“Bone…” He trails off, his expression turning thoughtful and his head tilting a few degrees to the left, bright green jewels clinking against the ebony dark of his antlers. Her story is hardly implausible to Septimus; he has been to lands that are just as strange and chaotic in nature as the one that the flower girl speaks of, and he has heard stranger tales than this. Still, in a land that possesses the relative normalcy of Novus, he is admittedly surprised to find a traveler who speaks of such things so easily. Perhaps it is because he has met her on this island. He gives a decided nod, and adds, “I’m sorry that you lost the first one…though it seems that there is quite a story behind the second.” He’d like to hear the details of it sometime, but, when she continues to speak, and with a decided urgency, he decides that such inquiries can wait for a better time.

(And, he notes, she doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.)

She asks him, then, if he has seen a pair of children; both antlered, one dark and one pale. His lips twist momentarily, and he tries to consider whether or not he has seen a pair of children matching her description during all his time on this island, but he is forced to concede, sympathetically, that he most assuredly hasn’t. “I’m afraid that I haven’t seen them – but perhaps I can help you look for them?” Septimus offers gently, a smile that he hopes is reassuring settling across his face. “Are they your children, miss?” He knows how quickly and how easily they can get away from any adult who is supposed to be keeping an eye on them; he certainly has enough siblings for that, though he concedes that the dangers that mortal children find themselves end tend to be…different from the ones that plague young wildlings.

---

@Florentine || <3 <3 <3 

"Speech!" 

@

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

Florentine smiles, small and sad, when the man comments upon her new dagger at the expense of her old one. She looks to her new dagger (she has never stopped, really) and lets her eyes run across his gleaming black, charred surface. It is hard liek obsidian spewed out and cooled from the belly of a volcano. “I miss my first one,” The flower-woman whispers at last. “That one I got from the lair of a siren. She had many trinkets there, you could take one, if you managed to answer her riddle. If you got it wrong, she would chase you out of the broken abdomen of the sunken ship. She chased us-” (Us. Florentine thinks of Pan and wonders where he is, how he is still suspended in his youth. He had been her closest friend as a child. They acquired her dagger together. So much has changed since then..) “She chased us but I managed to escape and keep it.”


Ah, a mischievous, victorious smile creeps, devilish across Florentine’s lips. “I prefer my old one. This one is made for more terrible things. I can feel it.” Her first dagger thirsted only to cut worlds, it blanched when faced with blood and skin. It hurt as much as she. But this one, oh, this one, its thirst is insatiable. It distinguishes not between the skin between worlds or the skin of the living. Yet it whispered to her. It demanded to be made, like it demands to stay with her now too. It has business, Florentine knows not what. Yet she will keep it as the only way to travel between her family. She will bear its dark and sinister magic.


Are they your children?


“Yes,” She says heartbroken and yet resolved. “I lost them so long ago. We got separated - only a moment for me, but I am terrified how long it was for them. Magic moves differently in different worlds.” A sigh slips past her lips and the island laughs in her bones, it breathes acrid upon her hopes. “I have been trying to get back to them for so long.”


@Septimus

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world