rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
Andras is a creature of little rituals, the sort of religious dedication to a routine-- every thing and every action in their proper places. He is the sort that clings to these rituals with like, sharp claws and teeth like folded steel because it is the single warm and calm thing in his life.
Andras spreads raspberry jam on his toast from left to right. Andras eats the corners first. Andras closes his eyes and tries to breathe and pretends that the backs of his eyelids do not look like monsters and mangled flesh and a friend's face that is not a friend's face but the face of-- something altogether different.
Andras does not stop to think that he is not alone in this. Andras does not stop to think at all, just eats his toast and walks out the door and sinks into the comfortable crackle of his anger as it crawls in wide branches of light from his back to his knees.
Fall has come. The equinox looms closer by the day. Andras goes to the city to see for himself that the gripping fear has died down, that the woods are just woods and not the ribs of some old, rotten skeleton. Andras crackles his way toward the garden, wrapped in thick creeping vine just starting to grow dull for the oncoming winter. It comes as no surprise that he picks up a slab of gray stone, a small hammer, and a chisel. It comes as no surprise that when he carries them off to the corner and sits down to work, there are eyes on his back.
The warden sets the slab in the dirt, turning is so that it sits straight. He takes a deep breath. The comfortable crackle of his magic is quiet, like it, too, is asking him why? But it knows, just as he knows, that Andras is a creature of habit, one that follows an unspoken law, sometimes to his detriment - so, they are also not surprised when the high pitched ting of chisel and stone is comforting, almost safe.
Almost.
Everything is almost safe. Maybe all of it is entirely safe. He wonders when he will get rid of his ghosts, when he will close his eyes and see something other than snakes or kings or monsters. He wonders when his life will be more than toast and walking and reading. He wonders why he is not satisfied with safety, why the thing in him still growls and bellows in his sleep, why he's chipping and chipping and chipping and it does not help him relax.
Andras wonders what it is to relax. He wonders what it is to be calm, to be peaceful, to be anything but an animal, full of gunpowder and lightning, feral in his bones, in his blood, in his rotten little heart. He wonders--
--The slab cracks in half. Andras stares for a moment, sets his jaw, and huffs. He picks up one half and holds it out to the next body that passes. "Here." he says, like he means it, like it matters. Maybe it does.
@anyone, you are welcome to bother or befriend him as you please!
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
There was so much bustle around the Dawn Court, enough to draw out an ounce of curiosity to the quiet mare with a timid smile. She had been here for a few weeks now, always looking over her shoulder, always wondering what would come at every turn of night to day, worried they would find her. Alone, she’d stayed to the shadows, allowing herself bits of sunlight as a selfish reward as she basked in the long summer days among the flowers. Some had come by to greet her, kind and concerned… but for the most part, Solstice had fared her early days in Delumine alone and content to her exploration and introspection.
Word spread quickly of a festival, and her inquisitive nature took hold now, pushing her into the wilds of Delumine with a false flag of bravery, even as she fought to keep butterflies in her stomach at bay. She walked among the crowds, delighting in the fact that no one stopped to look at her twice, each concerned with their own going-abouts and indulgences. Music filled the air, along with sweet and spicy scents of pastries, spirits, and autumnal wreaths. There was so much to take in, and she wanted to know it all, desperate to remember every bit of the excitement and revelry.
She finds her way to Oriens’ table, feasting her eyes on the spectacle of it all. In the center, a grand stallion rises above the others, free and wild as he caresses the heavens. It is a breathtaking presentation, and she walks the length of the display, noting the delicate beading and ornate craftmanship of every piece. There were others here too – some vying to view the art, others tooling with their own baubles and bits, sculpting and hammering as they went. Solstice watches them all, even as she brushes against a stranger, gasping at the touch as she quickly draws her wings tight against her frame, an apology rushing to her lips.
Before she can apologize, he drops the stone against the table, and Solstice flinches at the sound. With carefully banked fear in her stance, her golden eyes flash to his, expecting him to shout at her disruption… but instead, he offers simply, Here.
Andras’ voice is matter of fact, and she watches the crafter curiously, unsure of where to begin. She turns a hammer over awkwardly in her grip, before setting it down on the table and choosing instead to pick up some long reeds, grasses, and flowers, beginning to twine them together in a laurel as she’d done in the temple gardens as a girl. “What will you build?” she questions with a delicate smile, watching the stranger from beneath the fringe of her forelock as they stand beneath the autumn sun.
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
It's fitting, kind of: hands full of cracked stone and the tools used to break it, hands full of things crumbling and blowing away like dust. Andras thinks, this mut be what it's like to be the king, to feel haunted and hunted everywhere he goes.
Everything is too heavy. Everything is too dark and too bright all at once. The girl that takes his offering is the same dusty gray as the sky after dawn where she is not the same blue and orange as mountain jays and peaches. She looks frightened, at first-- her eyes are wide, her mouth in a short, tense line, the same sort of stiffness that Andras gets in his wings when he can't quite decide where to put them.
The warden almost apologizes, opens his mouth to do so, even, but she sets his "gift" down far more gently than he thinks he's done anything and it's like someone takes their hand and smoothes over the pleats in her face, rubbing each worry line into butter.
Part of him is jealous. A far larger part than he wants to admit. How does a person smile so softly? How does a person smile at all without looking like a dog baring its teeth? He doesn't make an attempt to return hers--
--but maybe his silence says enough. Maybe it is written in the stiff curve of his neck, the cold gray of his eyes behind the lenses. Andras hopes he does not look as lost as he feels.
What will you build? she asks. Andras takes another moment to think, looking from her to the jagged hunk of rock on the table, at the chisel and hammer still poised to strike, and then back again. She is weaving grass into something-- well, something at all, and that's the problem. Andras' grip on the chisel turns white-knuckled and hot; a spark rolls off the back of his wings, fizzling out over his head.
"What do you mean?" He asks, flatly.
He's silent for a long moment, giving the block one or two experimental chips before setting the hammer and chisel down and turning back to the girl.
"I don't know. I'm building nothing, I think.
What are you doing?" Andras answers, at last, before leveling that stare on her. He has been called bitter, and mean, and rude--and for the most part this is true--but there is none of that in his face now. It may be that the closest he comes to genuine interest is stern silence. It may be that he is intense, and private, and far too serious for a man at a festival. It may be both.
Either way, it is a winding and rock-addled path toward the inevitable: in spite of his best efforts she has endeared herself to him, such as it is.
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
They are as different as two could be – the girl a whimsical morning and the boy a thunderous storm. A wiser creature might have simply walked past the cross stallion, but Solstice had never known better. Instead, she is endeared by the curious stallion, patience masking a quiet chuckle as she watches him attempt to carve his statue just as awkwardly as she. It would seem that neither one was destined to be a sculptor, but she wouldn’t hold it against him. She does not attempt to help him, not sure of how she could even begin to make headway with such rough materials, instead focusing on deftly twisting her reeds until they began to form a circlet.
In their interwoven tangles, she threads bits of purple asters and fountain grass, looking up to find him watching her and meeting his gaze with a blush of shyness. “Here.” She offers his own words back to him, nudging a bundle of fall flora toward him with a spool of wire as she patiently helps him to form the base of a wreath.
“I spent hours in the gardens as a girl,” she offers easily as her touch caresses the materials. “Flowers have always reminded me of freedom.” It sounded silly, but having been captive for so long, Solstice had never truly explored her own desires or interests. Instead, she had relished in what little she saw of nature – blossoms and butterflies trapped between towering stone walls – a tiny slice of paradise in an otherwise bleak confinement.
In the garden, she had felt the warmth of the sun on her back and the caressing breeze which twined in her wings. She’d tasted the burst of sweetness from forbidden fruits, breathed the scent of summer rain on wet pavement, and whispered long into lazy afternoons with the geckos who climbed the temple walls and escaped to what lie beyond. Perhaps then, the tangle of plants on the table should instill resentment at her bittersweet memories… but it doesn’t. Instead, the array offered choice – something Solstice knew very little about. It offered hope for new beginnings.
On impulse, she reaches toward the winged stallion, deftly plaiting a single golden Chrysanthemum into his mane. “There,” Solstice smiles softly as she admires its sunny hues in the sea of his dark curls. “It suits you.”
As she finishes forming her wreath, Solstice carries it carefully to the rearing statue, placing it at his feet. “Who is he?” she murmurs to her companion. “He seems… conflicted.” As she stares at the lines in the marble face, a poem comes to mind – one which speaks of a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid. “…we must catch the winds of destiny, wherever they drive the boat…” She muses quietly, reflecting on the poem’s meaning for only a moment before she peeks once more to Andras.
He probably thought her mad as a loon.
“I’m sorry…” she flustered. “I didn’t even ask your name. Please, what should I call you?”
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
Perhaps, this is the thing about Andras, the problem with him, that one, ringing truth that paints all things he does in the light of some great betrayal, and not as if it is some helpless tragedy: Andras has always been free.
Free to hate, free to fight, free to bleed and to rant and to huff and to crackle--and even now, under the weight of his title, under the weight of his king and their kingdom, still he is as free as he has ever been. He was free when we was born. He was free, wrestling with his brothers in the woods. And he is free now, as he takes the long reeds and fresh-cut peonies from her and holds them in a grip that feels too soft to be his own.
Andras grits his teeth. He looks down, past the handful of materials at the sturdy wood table and the lawn grass beneath it. Andras grits his teeth and wonders if freedom is freedom-- because he does not know, like her, what it is like to have anything but.
"Why does it do that?" he asks, even as she reaches out to touch him, winding the stem of a puff of thin yellow petals in a million rings. It is strange, that someone would touch him--and not the way Pilate would, like poison sinking into the pores of his skin and turning him hot then cold then hot again-- but like his mother might have, if he had not been then as he is now. She reaches out to touch him and it like she is holding him, cupped in her hands, and that he is a fragile and beautiful thing.
The strangest part of all is that he lets her, only turns his head as she starts to braid the flower into the black river of his mane. He can see it in the mirror of his glasses, the yellow of it bobbing against the white and the green and the gray of the rest of Delumine. He lets her, begrudging as it is, and the weight of the thing against his cheek feels foreign and uncomfortable and it makes him itch.
But he does not move to undo it.
"I sincerely doubt that." Andras argues, but it is what it is. He follows her shape from her spot at the table to the tall statue before them. She looks up at its face, carved stone that feels more familiar than it should, so finely chipped that each vein is rendered into the skin. It looks... alive. It looks.... conflicted, as she says. Who is he, she says, and the Warden only shrugs,
a quiet roll of his wings before the settle over his back as if they had never moved at all.
I'm sorry, she says, then, and Andras grits his teeth again. "Don't be. I am Andras, Delumine's Warden."
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
She finds his presence strangely soothing, his awkwardness endearing as he fumbles with the crafts. Muscles ripple across his broad shoulders, and she knows instinctively that he is a fighter – that should he touch her, his touch would be rough. But he is unlike the raiders who had stolen her away. Rather than sneer at her and force her against her will, he simply waits beside her as a calming sort of presence. His face is hard with concentration as he twists the reeds more carefully than she expected, and she offers him a quiet smile in response.
As they lay their wreaths in tribute to the strange stone stallion, he offers his name. “Solstice”, she replies. “I suppose Delumine is the place where I live now too, though I didn’t know it had a name. I was told to come and see the gardens… Ipomoea mentioned they were the jewel of Delumine.” Though she does not know him as the king, she speaks the regent’s name as if he were a friend, nodding in agreement with his suggestion. “He wasn’t wrong – the fall colors are lovely. The place where I came from didn’t have seasons like this – it was always hot and dusty.” Nevermind that she hadn’t come from the desert originally. Though she held little more love for the temple which had been her prison, it was no more her home than the desert warlord’s tent where she’d spent her days shackled.
“What’s a warden?” The small talk was kept casual as she busied herself again, folding flowers into the linen tablecloth and arranging the tributes in an orderly way. After all, the priestesses had always taught her to keep a tidy altar. She couldn’t know what traditions were required and what religions were held here, but it was clear the sunrise-hued Pegasus was trying desperately to fit in, unable to let her guard down completely as she did what she could to contribute to Delumine. Perhaps then, they would let her stay. Perhaps then, she could truly call this place home.
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
He looks at his wreath before setting it in place: dried grass, but expertly wovenn by any means but still holding together-- something he made with his own hands, something he touched carefully and with intention, something now more beautiful because he had come in contact with it. Andras places it next to hers with a reverent quiet, like he is capable of anything of the sort, and turns to look at her again.
The king asked her to come see the garden. A part of Andras says, of course, loudly enough that he hears it through the roar of his magic in his ear. The rest of him watches her face as it moves, searching for something that makes sense of her quiet, her gentleness. It surprises him that he can't understand. It surprises him more that he wants to.
"Ipomoea would know." Andras says, almost smiling, the light like a film on the lens of his glasses. He does not see it, himself, but he imagines the king spends most of his time in his garden, trimming hedges and carefully touching the early-autumn rose petals still clinging to their stems, as if just by holding on to them, to him, a little longer, they can stave off the dead cold of winter.
If only they could. If only any of them could. "I used to like winter best. Not as much anymore, but it's still nice, I suppose." He does not say why-- does not mention the blood in the snow or the ragged, wet breathes of their emissary as the group bore down on her cabin. He does not say anything, but his mouth is a tight, flat line, and the crackle of his magic has picked up again, and the red-hot hole in the pit of his stomach is roaring its way back to life.
It's a comfortable anger. A familiar one. He does not like winter so much, anymore, at all.
"Well," he begins, but does not quite know how to finish-- to say anything about himself, to acknowledge anything about his perceived importance always feels like nails on a chalkboard, like dredging something up from his pits that would rather stay drowned. He doesn't like to see it gasping when it comes out of the water. He makes a point at not looking at most of his pieces, if he can help it. Usually it's easy.
Usually there are not girls with rings of grass and white-pink dahlias, arranging the already-gathered offerings at the statue's feet so that each can be seen from a distance. He feels a strange, unfamiliar knot in his throat as he watches her. Something close to comfort, but not quite. He only knows it is warm, and soft as it spreads to his chest.
Andras blinks, and looks to the side, and begins picking up their pieces of cut grass and green, topless stems, plus a lengthy strip of ribbon that he rolls carefully back into place as he speaks. "A warden keeps the law, and watches for trouble." In his sleep. Every moment of his life. Even when it's not there. "Which is why I'm here, and not in the library, as usual."
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
Something flashes quickly in her eyes – a bit of worry to mar her hopeless optimism, as she searches his gaze with a thing akin to pleading. “Is there much here?” she asks, “Trouble, that is…” There is a worry in her words that speaks to her greatest fears – that the demons of her past would find her in this place of peace and serenity. Still too, there were those like Andras would stand in their way, or so it seemed… beside the warden, she wished to feel safe from harm, yet a nagging sensation still plays in her mind, that things could be too-good-to-be-true. Solstice wondered if she would ever truly feel safe, anywhere.
“It seems like a peaceful place, Delumine…” Her words are quiet and speculative, even as she shivers in the autumn breeze, staving away the cold that came with fear. And as she closes her eyes, the girl counts to herself. One. Two. Three. with each number, a steadying breath brings back her joy, so when she opens her eyes once more, they are a bit brighter – hopeful once more. “Thank you, for keeping us safe.” she murmurs, stepping away from the table and gesturing for him to follow as they walk along the edges of the garden, away from the din of the festival.
“I haven’t always been safe,” she admits to Andras, surprised to share her story with another so freely. It must be something in his eyes, the way they peered through his spectacles, shrewdly and kindly behind the gruff exterior. Solstice felt compelled to share her truth with him, even though a small part of her warned not to burden strangers with her baggage. “From the time of my birth, I was held a prisoner… first by the temple, then by a nomadic war tribe.” She doesn’t get into the details – the details weren’t important.
“They will be looking for me here… honestly, I wonder at times if I will ever be safe… if I can ever stop looking over my shoulder in fear.” He mentions the library, and she smiles softly, in an easy and whimsical way. “But here, among the flowers and the books in the great library, I’m finding my way… I’m finding that freedom suits me well.”
She stops beneath the trees, dappled sunlight at her back, stretching her wings ever slightly to allow the fall air to chase away her worries. “Still, there are nights my demons seem close… and in dreams, I sometimes run in circles, never truly free.” She chews her lip thoughtfully, looking at the muscled stallion with a sudden spark of inspiration. “Perhaps you can show me how to stand up for myself more? How to fight back, if someone were to wish me harm? Maybe then, I could break free from the fear…”
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
Thank you, for keeping us safe.
She looks so worried, creased around the eyes and the mouth, cheeks drawn in hard lines. He doesn't know how to tell her that every light casts a shadow--which she must know already, right?--and that Delumine is drawn primarily by the shade of its tall trees and the lightless black of its nights. He wants to say, thank you. He wants to say, yes, of course, anything for my country and its people.
But he has not felt safe since the meadow and its shack, dripping with saltwater and lit only by the blue light of his rage. He clenches, then unclenches his teeth. For perhaps the first time in his still-short, volatile life, the expression passes over and out of the lines of his face like it was never there to begin with. Andras only nods, sternly, meeting Solstice's eyes.
"No, ma'am. It's safe."
Her story works its way first through his skull, making it ache with the force of his jaw wrenched together. He's trying to imagine this girl, all the soft, vibrant colors of the morning sky, like a summer bird perched in one of their old, looming trees, held prisoner, made to feel small and afraid and trapped.
Andras follows her as she walks, only stretching his wings out when she does, crackling uncomfortably. He has never known her kind of fear, or sadness. He has never known what it's like to be held against his will-- or, on the flip side of the coin, her brief moments of rest in an otherwise unforgiving world.
He has never let anyone, or anything, close enough to have the chance.
Maybe you could teach me? she asks, and Andras looks at her, not for the first time, and he's sure not the last, with sudden, slack-jawed surprise.
There's something in her eyes, when he sees her. It makes him feel light, and giddy, and ready to burst. It's a familiar feeling. "I can do that. I would love to do that." He smiles, again, bright and warm and comfortable. "But for now, I need to check on the rest of the festival. It's been--and I mean this--nice to meet you."
The warden ducks his head, an overly polite bow, and turns to leave.
As he does so, he raises one wing to wave goodbye. "Freedom does suit you."
@solstice
<3 closer for you! i love her desperately
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
She feels safe beside him, an easiness washing over her which suggested she could trust and learn to embrace the world around her with a bit less caution than before. Though the fear would always be there, her time in Delumine had let it subside bit by bit, sunshine brighter than shadows these days, comfort worn far more than worry. Her smile comes easily as he agrees to teach her self-defense, resolved to the idea and the potential to grow stronger. For though Solstice had never seen herself as particular strong, she had always been strong willed and of strong resolve. She had always had passion and free will, though perhaps masked by worry and the unfounded need to please those around her, often at the expense of her own desires.
“It’s nice to meet you too… I hope to see you soon then.” And she watches him go, smiling softly at his retreating form with slight butterflies in her stomach, unsure of where they’d come from. When she lay awake at night, staring at the stars, she would probably overanalyze the feeling, but for now the girl simply turns back to the festival, allowing herself to get lost in the merriment and let the rest of her worries fall away.
