In a dream, somewhere foreign and smoky, the air tastes of ash and it melts on your tongue as if a snowflake. You are moving forward, a begrudging pace, stumbling but you are not sure why. You look down, frustrated and curious as to why your balance has been compromised – you see you are walking on a graveyard of bones. A whisper in the distance would fester into quiet weeping, but you cannot find the source of this infinite wailing – she haunts you. You suddenly see a faceless horse, a ghastly equine who personified an absence of light. This creature was shaped like you, but they were a black hole, fabrics of smoke and spitfire dancing around them. You don’t actually wish to get closer, but you cannot stop yourself, you are not in control.
The black creature lingers, no noise except the sound of scissors cutting, cutting, cutting what?
As you get closer, the scissors are cutting hair. Black hair drops like ink, each tendril accompanied by more crying, an insufferable melody of mewling that hangs heavy in the air. But it is not the ghoul that laments.
Who weeps?
Tonight, the question would not be answered; it was just a memory of a nightmare perma-burned into the retinas of a street-dancer trying to earn some coin. She had been accustomed to grazing the few winter grasses that thrived in the sands, drinking the waters that the wilds naturally provided, yet on this winter night, she craved something warm to heat her bones and wine to wet her palette. This dream had been following her ever since her return to Solterra – reunited with her home.
Fever would finish her dance by arching into a refined pose, sylphlike, a serpent poised to strike - a slick of shimmering sweat adhered to her abstract mahogany coat, controlled breathing allowing wisps of hot air to escape her nostrils and dissipate into the frost-ladled night. To her approval, a small audience had gathered, and their hooves would sound a strange applause, a handful of coins tossed her way to encourage more, their eyes hungry for more.
Their eyes would never be as hungry as she.
In a sweeping movement, she would bow gracefully, a spindle of honey spilling onto the floor and whisking away the currency at her feet. She would thank them graciously, insisting should they ever need entertainment to warm them on a cold night, she would never be far from reach.
False promise. She was always out of reach.
And with that, Fever slipped away out of the firelight for another performer to take her spot, the bells on her thigh an alarm that would announce her every movement. A fire-breather had come to perform. Alas, as the mare weaved through the bodies that gathered, a whisper would catch her attention, causing a spotted ear to swivel in the direction of its conjurer.
“Whore.”
An ungodly smirk would touch her black lips, pretending to have not heard the critic, amounting it to jealousy and simply leaving it at that. Perhaps, if not for her pressing need of a drink, she would have taken the time to banter with the jester. Because sure, the viper could certainly kiss you like a whore, but she looked like a fever-dream, and her company was untouchable – wait, no, her affections are generous, her body a church housing many a poor soul who were trying to find seek solace from whatever haunted them.
The dagger of her smile sheathed and she would move along the familiar adobe buildings, these streets she called home. She too, haunted, a slip of a fleeting creature, un-whole, unwell. Stygian and gold eyes carefully concealed under a lavish frame of dark lashes.
Scum hecklers would never be allowed her company – they were never once invited.
Qe sera sera, little graveyard girl, the words a soft melody in the tilting of her head, haunting every dogged stop that she takes through the markets. There are some here, so few, who would remember the little Pegasus with a tilted smile and sparkling eyes as the lover – the sweet dove tricked, the girl wronged, and perhaps some other choice names – of an executioner. El Toro, her memories provide fondly, sadly, softly, almost as soft as the sigh of pale wings against paler sides. Little golden horns lead the way when bodies press too tightly – they are not her sisters, her lovers, her teachers; they are not the feeling of home. And she presses forward through the night, the frost-kissed air is dry like her pillowcases.
Juniper does not mourn him.
Memories – the past, the future, is there a difference when time is a loop and not straight? – flood her system with every nook and cranny she passes. It had been warm then, and it is not warm now. Not when skins shiver for a scrap of heat and affection.
The people gather in the night, those less fortunate, those who do not (or cannot) go home, pleading without ever making a sound for something more. Doleful eyes find them, soft, prayerful eyes find them, and Juniper thinks that they will not find solace and salvation under Caligo’s sky. Not when they, the children of Solis, so scorned the others for years, went to war, gave them a queen and took her away. Caligo holds no love for Solterra, but neither does Juniper love their god. Only Vespera (goddess divine, eternal light and night and dusk and everything in between) runs freely through her day. From morning hymnals to evening prayers. From battlefield songs and wartime talks. She was a Valkyrie, a Hierophant beside the rest ready to go to war for her people when Raum rose and fell. In those times she found him – El Toro – walking among the tombstones time and again.
He is not gone, not truly, not ever.
Now, spring-green eyes turn again, dancing through the crowd as she danced through the sky (was that yesterday, weeks ago? When had her wings last touched the clouds for praise and adoration and thanks? Oh too long, too long, and her soul cries for the heavens and the brush of the Tinea once more.), and land at last on a woman in the final throes of her dance. It was very much like dying, she thinks, with the heartbeats making the woman’s drum, guiding her feet and those ruthless eyes as they sweep through the faces of those hungry for her touch, for her time. Juniper does not know if she wants both, perhaps one, and which one she is unsure of. So she follows her as Fever descends her throne of attention, shadows her as only another dancer might – light and sweet and swift. They are thieves stealing everything but the other’s heart.
At last, when Fever pauses, when she turns, Juniper’s lips tip upward in a faint smile. She looks like she’s waited forever, she looks like she could wait forevermore. An angel. A saint. Something not quite of this world, perhaps half in the next and half in the past. Yet she stands, tall and strong, streamlined and proud. Her wings puff slightly, prettily, and even the sands of Solterra cannot hide the shine and sheen of her coat. Juniper is no beggar-girl, no forgotten-child. ”Hello dancer,” she coos soft into the frozen night, and her words are holy and her eyes are a caress, an invitation. Would Fever dance with her as she danced for them, or would she do so much more?
Soft, quiet chiming of small bells would play along Fever's thigh, happy to mirror her movements with a promise of eternal back-ground music. Thus, Fever could usually not hear if someone approaches her, but she was very aware of how the air smelled, and the sudden perfume of unknown lady would wet her tongue, her muzzle tilted back to the night sky to savor the way it bloomed around her. The mare would halt her forward progression, a glance thrown over her shoulder to confirm that was was being followed.
Fever would welcome the detour from her drink.
"Hello, patron -" she purrs, amusement playing on her face as she pivots to face the seraph. It was not unusual for her to entertain her watchers after a dance, yet usually she only offered them idle prattle; if they were fortunate (or particularly wealthy), she'd indulge them with her banter. Yes, Fever was equipped with an arsenal of charms and stories, midnight-giggles and sticky-sweet flattery that would crawl under your skin and make its bed in your bones.
What did come as a surprise was the stranger herself; Fever made her company with the likes of slippery and dastardly creatures, characters who she could relate to with their pains and her horrors, battle-scarred and bitter - and while her body was a home for the wicked, this peculiar dove looked anything but forsaken.
Fever would entertain the distance between them, allowing the silence to saturate the air, hoping that her hungry eyes were enough to change the woman's mind. The winter air was thin, hollow, all the noises of the small crowd had vanished and nothing seemed to disturb them. The streets were dark, the windows in the buildings sleeping like their masters in their beds, and a sliver of moonlight would cut through the clouds and spot-light the two mares - as if the world was only theirs for the moment, and everyone else was merely a spectator.
"I misspoke - not a patron - I would have remembered someone like you tossing me coins." Bemused that she had chosen to linger, Fever would greedily eat the distance between them with long, powerful strides. The girl was blood in the water, and now a shark had started to circle her.
In her element, Fever would take her time - a sultry, dragging sashay around the pegasus; her eyes were embers in the dark, her gaze a wayward flame that would lick and ebb the flow of the angel's petite body. Though their bodies were at a chivalrous measure apart from one another, there was little respect in the viper's leer. Fever allowed herself to admire the stranger, assumed permission given from her prideful stance. She ate up her long, sinewy legs and the pallid glow she seemed to emanate - like white lightening - she would continue on to curves that were similar to her own in that they were dangerously inviting. It was not the only trait they had in common, for both of the mares tails spilled behind them, long and wild. If ever they were to get too close, the hairs could tangle, and they might forever be ensnared by each other.
Fever would round her backside, a "mmm" humming from her lips, a dark spell of praise as her gaze continued to tip-toe down her spine, over the rise of her flanks, and trace the pink flesh of her delicate underside.
She was pristine, so clean. What was her game? Did she really seek Fever's attention, or was there something sinister hiding underneath this sheep's skin?
"Did my performance not satisfy you?" she asks in feigned melancholy, her question a calculated bear-trap as she finishes her circle of scrutiny. She stands now in front of the dove, much closer than before, yet her body language did not scream violence - it was a answer to spring eyes that drew her in. A touch of envy could be detected in those hot yellow eyes, following the cascading hair that spilled over the other's neck, lush and divine, her face a flower amidst the sea of unbridled hair. Fever once had long hair, but the abrupt sound of ghost scissors kept Fever's attention on the delicate woman.
She was an angel.
Fever was once an angel too.
So was the Devil.
She takes a half-step closer, not close enough to touch her, but close enough so that she could get a better read of her intentions. And certainly close enough so that the angel could feel the heat radiate off her tri-colored skin - close enough so that the static of their bodies could mingle, close enough to where Fever had to look down at her - this gilded angel of storm and heavens. Her voice would be a whisper, an offer of water to parched lips.
"Or perhaps you've come to me in search of something else to satisfy you?"
Gold catches green in a game of cat and mouse, a wicked challenge and delicious smile in those distant eyes that Juniper can’t quite make out. Only the flash in her direction – she knows that Fever knows she is there. It excites her, and she meant to keep no secrets despite the night that closes in around them. Somewhere down the end of the street, someone lights up a cigarette and lets the match tumble to the ground with the ashes on the end after a long inhale. Her nose wrinkles ever so slightly in that direction before smoothing out when words snake through the air as Fever snaked through the crowds. Her voice is sandstorms and satin sheets – sultry and seductive. She was meant to be nothing more than some dream someone had in the middle of their nightmare.
Juniper knows this is not a nightmare. She knows that she is perfectly awake and charmed by the shock that registers as only a moment upon sanguine features that are quickly schooled. Well-trained. Schooled in the art of entertainment. The hierophant is instantly captivated, dove-grey mouth tilting up further for only eyeless windows left to look at. Those dark holes are nothing like the flame that burns within the woman before her, and that heat that licks over her skin is electric if nothing else. If that were all she needed for the night it would be enough. Chin tilts toward her chest, her neck arches prettily, and she is a bird put on display, knowing how she looks and what affect she has on another at almost any given moment.
This is a goddess-girl in love for a night, half-mortal, half holy, entirely predator and prey.
“It is an honor to be so memorable,” she says softer than the kiss of a snowflake over each eyelid as they close. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but even Juniper knows hers is as lovely a weapon as any other that she has. Even the sharpest smile or coldest shoulder could topple nations. Perhaps Vespera knew that when she blessed her daughter so generously and sent her into the heart of a nation as ready for war as they were anything else. Now though, now that the tyrant has gone, it has been so quiet. Too quiet. Even the Halcyon, without Marisol, has fallen into a slumped form of what it once was. Their trainings are sloppy, and one by one the priestesses she’d come to call sisters went back to their temples, waiting for a time they would be called upon once more. With a sickened stomach she’d left Terrastella, letting her heart beat more heavily for their lack of fire and passion and commitment than it ever did for her dark bull demanding he leave for her safety.
She needs to warrior no keep her safe.
She is a warrior and would save herself.
The flash of teeth, the first sign of a bite, as Fever begins her self-guided tour over the many attractions lain out for worship and praise that lie heavily on Juniper’s silken skin. It is not untoward, nor unwanted, and she flicks her hair over the other shoulder so casually it is hard to think the move could ever be calculated. They clash so beautifully; if Juniper cannot have war in the skies then she would have war with the heart. Where she could wear blood and smile as it dripped, Fever would hide it upon her own skin and call her wounds nothing more than freckles left over from her past.
Seduction is an art form, an understanding between two bodies, and both dancers know it well. When one moves perilously close, the other sways in and out. Dipping nearer, so close to brushing, to touching, before swaying away again so only a breeze and sudden chill is left betwixt the two.
At last, eye to eye, Fever looks down to Juniper, and the goddess-girl glances down her nose, beneath a dark storm of lashes, into the flames of salvation and hell. “Do I seem so dissatisfied, little dancer? You pleased me greatly,” words escape on a breath, a sigh, as the mare reaches forward and runs her lips along the side of Fever’s neck, pressing gently to the base and across the top of her chest. “You’ve mastered your art well, I would think your instructor quite talented and would fear you’d surpassed them by far.” Flattery and honesty mix together so easily, they slip from her tongue as sand between fingers and she can feel her heart beat with each chime of the bells along Fever’s thigh.
Now, she pauses her perusal, a careless caress into the other’s skin, remembering the press of her sister’s in the swamp, the curling of their bodies so freely along her own. A den of vipers. Each of them were poisonous and beautiful and loved her just as much as she loved them. Fever is not so unlike them save for the smell of sand and Solterra pressed into her skin, her soul. It was pressed into Toro’s too, and even he loved a wretch like she. “Even lambs come home to feed when they’ve strayed too far from the flock, and I am no lamb.”
She is positively wicked for a moment, in the flashing of some passing light as a door opens and closes she could be a thing of nightmares – her face cast in harsh shadows both hollow and full, weeping and furious, but she is not furious nor afraid. Juniper is unsure, tonight, what exactly she is. Lonely perhaps? But even that should have driven her home to a world of wonder and warmth, not into the home of her once-love gone astray. “Tell me, do you pray?” Because she could – oh Juniper could – pray to Vespera for understanding and forgiveness when she presses her body into the gentle folds of the other’s. Solterra holds no particular cares for Terrastella, but Juniper always seems to find a bed beneath his burning skies.
Memorable was an understatement, for the viper had already begun to paint a picture of Juniper’s likeness. Surely, the dove knew how much of a doll she was – green eyes smudged like mascara, framed with fluttering lashes, a softness to her expression that reminded Fever of silk against her skin. She was doused in a veil of virility, her perfume an air of mystery. The way she would shamelessly accept Fever’s advancement, and then continue to dance with her would make Fever a bit weak in the knees. The mottled skin Juniper would touch would quiver with anticipation.
At the mention of an instructor, a curious crook formed in her brow, dangerous amusement teasing her facial features. Sure, if there were teachers to credit, Fever would feel inclined to thank them for instilling upon her the weapons of entrapment.
But everything Fever had learned was through her own destiny, her own choices.
Whatever masters there might have been? Well –
They were dead.
“Pleased greatly?” She grins, her posture elongating as she revels in the flattery – a cat arching its back and begging to be pet. A sultry giggle laces her words like a ribbon of chocolate. “I am pleased at your review, though I think it’s premature. You have yet to see all my tricks.”
Fever listens with her full attention, considers her words and then tilts her head, musing quietly. “No, perhaps not a lamb.” She would agree with the pale woman, bending down to tuck a whisper into the bed of her ear.
“I don’t know any lamb who is eager for slaughter. Are you lost?”
As Juniper spoke of religion, Fever was careful to keep her expression unmarred by dissatisfaction. She was not one to pray, and if not somehow seen as tributary, she would have burned down Solaris’s temples the moment she had returned home to Day Court. Instead, she focused on the saccharine purr of Juniper’s voice, curious to know where a creature like her had crawled out of – it was blaringly obvious she was not a child of the Sun. There was no grit in her voice, as if she didn’t know what it was like to go without water in these deserts. She smelled like wet earth; sweet, refreshing, an answered prayer for rain.
“You will not find me bending my knees for religion. I’ve been bent at the knee too many times to ever willingly put myself in that position.”
There was a bitterness in her heart for Solaris – how many times had her mother, Temper, spent her nights in a desolate corner, weeping for enlightenment, begging for deliverance, desperately trying to convince their patron God to take pity on her and her daughter and guide them out of this evil?
Yet, she held just a sliver of solace for Solaris; a sort of morbid understanding that if the Gods could still be praised despite the heinous lives they lived -
Then so could Fever.
The Gods blatant disregard of mortal life and its complicated web of cause and effect would inspire the spotted minx. If they did not have to listen to the rules, why should she? At any time, Solaris could have extended His hand and carried her and Temper away from the misery and shame of a servant’s life. And yet, He didn’t.
If Solaris were an actual higher being, bedding in the clouds, joyous and gluttonous as he moves his pawns, playing his games with his people, then so be it. He would be held responsible for the gifts he had bestowed Fever: passion and wrath.
And Fever would not feel any guilt for using those gifts.
If He wanted Fever to be a mess, then by God, she would make a fucking mess.
Her touch was hot, yet somehow gentle as she delicately plays with a strand of Juniper’s lush hair. Imagine a cattleman speaking sweetly to his calf as he hides the branding iron. “But you –“ she croons in gentle admiration and complete dismissal of the warring emotions inside of her, “You look like you’re devout, you seem eager to worship.”
Fever was certainly a figure worthy of worship.
“I have no salvation for you.” Her words were dead in the air – honest, for once, as she pulled herself away from Juniper. The heat of their skins lingers. Fever stares for some time, her gaze hungry yet patient, a feline calculating when it would be appropriate to pounce – if appropriate at all. Though her body snaked and curved away from smaller one, allowing her the chance to disappear into the night if she chose to, Fever’s eyes would naturally be a beckon, a beguiling invitation.
Typically, Fever knows no hesitation – every action and behavior were premeditated risks, well thought of and almost always benefitting herself. And even though she might seem meek, Fever knew that Juniper was not a victim, she was too brash and bold, and while Fever was fire, Juniper was smoke – seemingly less dangerous, but just as able to suffocate you. Perhaps her feigned frailty made her even more of a predator than Fever.
A wolf in lambskin.
Nevertheless, Fever could not resist the temptation of sharing an evening with her. Despite their religious stances, the viper was certain they could find many things in common: certainly, they were similar in the way they could love? Certainly, two savage women could share their knowledge of their crafts, they could compare the scars on their skins, they could just for a night pretend they were madly in love with each other. Fever was willing to share her passions with an unspoken understanding that come morning, like all beautiful things, their violently brief affair would die.
“I cannot promise you deliverance. But I can offer you a drink?”
Perhaps Juniper was the real deliverer, and Fever the forsaken.
OOC: @Juniper sorry for taking forever and sorry its a goddamn book lol
![[Image: 45505141_kShAGp5UVRG2Lvt.png]](https://f2.toyhou.se/file/f2-toyhou-se/images/45505141_kShAGp5UVRG2Lvt.png)
