"Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
- - -
The court walls are beginning to drive him insane. He's walked them time and time again, some nagging thing driving him to map each stone in his mind. As though there is some clue in their construction, some secret message left by the builders, waiting to be found. It is not the first time something like this has happened- he often feels that there is a veil between him and the reality of things. He reaches out but can never push it aside, never see what lies beyond or even know for sure that it is there. It is just a feeling, but he cannot let go of it. He is stubborn as a child in that way.
He planned to spend the day at the coast, to wash his body in the ocean. But instead he pushed rocks around to make an arena. It was grueling work, but satisfying. Eik is smaller than most of his clansmen, and without the gift of wings or magic or companion to help. But he is strong and determined, and worked without complaint. He started before the sunrise, before the brutal heat kicked into full force, and worked until his legs were shaking and the sun was setting, stopping only for a few hours during the peak of the day.
And then, despite his body's protests, he began to walk. He could have waited til the morning, or until his aches faded in a few days, but the ocean had been calling to him all day and he could not deny it any longer. When an idea entered his mind he had to see it to its conclusion. Besides, the moon was full, a good omen. And good for traveling- with it he would not be alone, and it would not be dark.
He follows his feet and his intuition and the vague directions a stranger gave him. He is not afraid of trespassing on foreign lands or encountering some strange beast. Perhaps this is foolhardy. He does not ponder it.
He reaches the beach as the sun begins to rise, the sky blossoming a hundred shades of crimson, orange, and royal purple as the velvet curtain rises. The moon and stars weaken with the strength of the sun, and he finds himself a little sad to see them go. The feeling is dismissed soon after he recognizes it. They will be back the next night, and the following, the celestial dance continuing long after his bones have crumbled to dust.
Though the view is stunning, he closes his eyes and inhales deeply. There is nothing like the scent of the ocean. The sound of the waves crashing is hypnotic and he feels a deep, heavy relaxation creep over him. The exertion of yesterday's labor and last night's travels hit him now, and he is keenly aware of the ache that blooms across his body. He imagines himself sinking into the sand, and then deeper still into the earth, back in time through millennia of rock. And realizes slowly the ache is inside of him as well, deep down in a place of himself he did not know was there.
He opens his eyes, mind elsewhere and feeling as wide as the ocean before him.
- - -
E I K
;;Eik walks all night to get here and half dozes/ponders as the sun rises. Anyone is welcome to join him!
It is funny, in a way – all his youth spent trying to escape the pull of the tide, and yet all he wants at Novus is the comfort of the sea.
Asterion had no particular direction in mind when he began to walk long before dawn, but he is not particularly surprised when his wandering takes him to yet another segment of shore. All lands must end somewhere, after all. Ravos had not, to his knowledge, been an island, but the map of Novus is beginning to unfold itself in his mind, all the edges filling in, and he thinks that it might be.
The shore is a strange thing, before dawn. The gulls are all quiet, the wind is still, and the pull and rush of the water is the only sound. He enjoys the way the sand sucks at his hooves as he walks, and washes his footprints away; the sharp-salt smell is like a balm.
There is so much here he does not understand, and it all makes him feel so very small (small, and humble, and not at all like the hero he’s always dreamed of being) but here is a thing he knows. Suddenly he misses the land he had left, a fierce ache, but a sweet one, too, for he had not known he was capable of it.
It was such a foreign idea to him, belonging. He hadn’t known he had it until it was gone – nor does he realize, now, that that is the way of such things.
The sun is risen, now, the first gulls eager to wake up the rest of the world. The light is too bright on the water; it splinters the world into dreaming, and Asterion lets his mind follow his feet.
No part of him intended to disturb the stallion who stood along the coast. In fact the boy pauses, last step untaken, intending to backtrack and give the man a wide berth – but then he is caught.
The bay is still half-dreaming himself, the silver threaded through his hair alight with the sun, damp sand clinging to his hocks. He is not in a mood to disturb those who don’t want disturbing, but neither is he the type to ever turn away company. And so it’s a compromise he reaches for, there in the new-minted day – a smile, a nod, an invitation only if the stranger wished it.
@Eik sorry he didn’t say anything xD he’s already disturbed like three people just minding their own business and is starting to feel ruuuude
10-23-2017, 10:45 AM
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Rae [PM] Posts: 301 — Threads: 41 Signos: 15
How his thoughts rise and crash and retreat like the ocean. As the waves pull away from the shore, small pebbles and certain grains of sand roll after them. Thoughts, too, have that sort of power. That magnetism.
(Digression: Far away, a hummm of laughter and derision. We use that word for its poetry but, that's not how magnets work)
How often he's imagined he could get lost in a thought. It could grow to be bigger than himself and he could step inside and stay there forever. It is a fear of his. So while he is always reluctant to be torn from his thoughts, there is also a sense of relief. He is saved from himself, at least for now.
Eik opens his eyes at the sound of footsteps slowly approaching, one eye lazily resting on the stranger who stops and offers a silent invitation. He accepts with a nod, moving to fall in step with the twilight-kissed bay. The man seems amicable enough, and certainly, thankfully, doesn't seem to talk too much. But truth be told, Eik would have accepted the company of anyone. Perhaps it is age, perhaps it is loss, perhaps it is all of it, his whole life. Maybe there are no real choices any more, just illusion. Just consequences of the chances and actions of his youth.
(That, there, is a thought he saves for another time, when he can pick at it like a scab)
His muscles had stiffened as he dozed and he imagines he looks much older than he is, as he half-hobbles like an arthritic to Asterion's side. He shakes the sleep from his head and stretches like a cat- forelegs forward, belly half-lowered to the ground. All of this still in silence save for the shuck of his hooves in the sand. And maybe, as he stretches, the quietest of groans rising from his chest.
A bit of dexterity returned to his limbs, he beckons forward with a tilt of his head, and begins to walk. "Where is it we go?" He asks, eventually, sounding as though the answer is not very important to him. He does not get the sense that the other man is in any hurry, but that doesn't mean there is no destination... and if there is no destination, well, the scarred grey has no problem with that. For don't you know? We are always going somewhere, even when we're not.
- - -
@Asterion lol no complaints here! we like silence :)
Asterion waits to let the stranger join him, letting the slow-rising sun warm his coat against the autumn breeze made cooler yet by its trip over the water. His ears are forward, head cocked just slightly (little enough he doesn’t realize he’s doing it), wondering at the stiffness in the stallion’s muscles. When they do begin to walk, he is careful to match the gray man’s pace.
Age is almost as foreign a thing to him as courts and castles and keeps. He has led a strange, charmed life so far, among young and wild things.
He does not break their long silence. He lets the gulls call fiercely to each other, and watches the sandpipers bob between the shore and the sea-grass that grows course at the edge of the sand, and searches himself for any trace of the tide-pull, the water magic that had once been within him.
There is nothing, and though he feels emptier for it, he does not yet feel sorry.
At the sound of the stranger’s voice he almost startles, nose jerking away from the coastline. He’d been lulled by the day, the sun on the water, the sounds of their feet in the sand. Really he ought to be more vigilant; it might cost him, someday.
“Ah,” he says, and a smile crosses his dark lips, fleeting as sea-foam on sand. “I am the wrong horse to ask.” He glances at his new companion, searching for irritation but not expecting to find any. The stallion had come at his invitation, after all.
The boy is a pilgrim on his way to any number of wonders, each unnamed and unknown until he finds them. If he’d known where he was going when he left Ravos, he certainly wouldn’t be in Novus. As for what lay further up the beach…well, he was still as new here as the dawn was to the day.
You are born of drying concrete and car exhaust, the slow crawl of steel beasts over cracked and filthy roads. Is that why you strive for nobility, why you grasp for something beautiful in the dark, something different? All you want is everything you don't have. It is no small matter, the things you lack. It slowly drives you insane, a woodpecker in your skull-- brainpecker? We digress. And for every hole that is drilled, another fantasy rises up, another dark and whimsical thought. And your panic rises and falls and rises again, each time higher, more frightening. And--
And peace of mind is a fickle butterfly.
Fickle, he likes that word. He often feels fickle, mood changing on a whim, never for the better. He wonders when it started, this up and down. Was it always in him or has it risen like a slow tide, from birth to now? Or is it the shockwaves of the fire that took his life four years ago? Regardless, the ocean seems to balance him out, only leaving behind fatigue. Dull, flat, grey fatigue.
The salt air makes him feel like a different man, though he is too tired to be that man. But he doesn't think of the way he is feeling, not in words at least. Instead he's thinking of the ocean and the sand and the way time passes. It feels good to share silence and space and he thinks this will be one of those moments he will revisit later, in his memories. (He once valued living in the moment- now it seems memories and daydreams are better places to live)
And when the silence crests, and breaks, and falls, that is good too. Everything is right here.
"I think..." He trails off, going over the map of Novus he's shaped in his mind, then shakes his head, not very fond of sharing conjectures. "We will have to find out." He offers a small smile, as though sharing something secret. "Where are you from?"
His gaze slips to the gray stallion’s and he smiles before nodding and turning his eyes once more ahead. It’s the answer he would have given, and it makes him like the stranger. Asterion wonders if there is a difference between aimless wandering and adventure; he wonders if there’s anything particular to find but sand and seashells and strange shapes the water has carved into the rock.
Nothing here has given him the impression that there may be monsters or wild magic. Not like Ravos, where following your feet might lead you to a god on a bad day, or a maze so thick with magic you could taste it, bitter and metallic. For a moment he forgets he is not alone; his sigh is a slow thing.
Maybe it’s an attempt to make up for it, the eagerness in his reply.
“I’m from a sea not so different than this one, though it never got this cold.” When he closes his eyes, they almost sound the same; were the sun a little warmer, he might have been there, with his mother and his sister. “And then a place called Novus, where the gods often visited but the magic was…growing wild.” It takes him a beat or two to realize that this is probably not what the stranger meant.
From meant Novus, now; this was, after all, his home.
Asterion shakes his head, mane and forelock tangled and thick from sea-spray. “I’m from the Dusk Court,” he says, glancing again at the gray, hoping the words sounded more sure, more proud than they felt. “And you?”
He's already forgotten that they never traded names; he's never been too worried about such things.
The dull, flat tiredness settles over him. It quiets. As it does, it transforms to something different. Suddenly, the distance narrows between the way things are and the way they seem to be. Maybe it is the company, or the particular way the light shines on the water, or the sea itself, the needle that stitches reality together with the rise and fall of the waves.
This clarity is rare these days, and he ponders further the cause of it. The more he searches for an explanation the father away it seems, so he tries instead to settle into the moment and savor it while it lasts. Times like these he'd like to be alone, to use this clarity to ponder the hows and whys, but he knows if he forced the situation it would crumble away and he would be left again with the maddening feeling of... of
(galleries full of slightly crooked portraits, and everyone absorbed by the brushwork and motion and colors, and nobody seems to notice the frames aren't plush, or do they notice but don't care, or is their gravity simply different than yours, is it you that's crooked or)
the things we don't have words for. Anyway, we never find clarity when we are alone. But we enjoy it now. The sea, the sky, all of it so sharp and clear now, as though a veil has been turned to glass. It lifts his spirits a bit. And he is unexpectedly very fond of this stranger, with whom he's shared only a few words. They are very different, certainly, but there is a sense of a kindred spirit. You don't need words for some things.
He is interested as the man speaks of where he is from. Eik is one of those many men of the road, tickled by wanderlust no matter where he does. Novus is the warmest place he's ever been, and it has taken him a long time to get here. He can only image how long it would take to end up somewhere warmer, and what that would feel like.
"You call this cold?" He is clearly amused, and suddenly stops in his tracks. "Where I'm from, summer is a single, very long day, and winter... horrific. I don't have words for it." He grins, an unexpected response to memories of such a harsh, unforgiving homeland. It was a place that suited his melancholy. He misses it. He turns to the ocean and after a moment of hesitation charges in, right up to his chest. The water is admittedly colder than he expected (he's a land baby, and still cannot wrap his mind around the water feeling colder than the air around it) and it almost knocks the breath out of him. But it is nice to feel things, once in a while, and he finds himself laughing.
"I am from Solterra," He calls over his shoulder to his companion. "It is so fucking hot there." It is not like him to complain, but he does not feel like himself right now.
- - - There is no better way to know us
E I K than as two wolves, come separately to a wood
That grin catches him by surprise; it’s open and it’s kind and he is helpless but to match it with one of his own, still a little shy. He wants to ask more – a single day of summer? – but before he finds the words the stallion has turned away and the wind would snatch them from his lips, anyway.
After a breath or two of uncertainty, he follows the stranger (if strangers is still the right word for them – perhaps it isn’t, perhaps it’s companions) into the sea.
It is the first time he’s been in the water since Novus. He gasps at the cold even as he waits for the familiar magic to seep into him like the tide, the saltwater tingle in his veins. There is nothing, nothing, nothing and all at once the loss crashes into him like a wave.
What was this place, that it stole his magic? And what had his magic meant to him, anyway, that it had been as much a part of him as all the blood in his body and yet it took him so long to know, to really know, that it was irrevocably vanished?
He shivers as the stallion laughs, stopping with the water lapping his knees, and is grateful the grey’s eyes are turned away. A gull calls, shrill, just above his head and he crow-hops in the waves and silvers himself with spray.
Maybe it’s alright – it always has been before. Maybe the losing doesn’t matter so much as the finding, and there’s been plenty of that.
When the grey calls back to him Asterion falls still, dark-tipped ears shifting forward. Solterra – the desert, he remembers Florentine saying.
His only memories of a desert summon a god-fire, raging and starving, his golden twin running for its hungry mouth –
Fear and heat and shame, all of it searing him as he tried to dredge up all the water in him to save her, at least long enough for someone who could better help –
Asterion’s wide, dark eyes are far away for a moment, and when he comes back to himself the water is once again startlingly cold. He hunches against it like an old man. “Why do you stay?” he asks, knowing the question might be fearsomely rude. It is quiet enough that it very well may be lost among the waves, the gulls, the wind.
The simple act of a returned smile, a moment of camaraderie- it is the smallest of things these days that lift his heart, but he is all the more thankful for them. Eik is so grateful that this stranger- somewhat shy and quiet, not at all unlike himself- has joined him today. He is a breath of fresh air from the tempestuous company Eik has made in Solterra.
Eik and the absurd are linked in some intricate dance, one he does not know the steps to but all he needs to do is sway, sway to the faraway sound of the orchestra that turns the world round. The waves wash against his legs and underbelly, and the cold begins to feel cold. He retreats from the sea until he is level with his companion, the water now just to their knees.
It is probably a lucky thing the grey was focused on the ocean, and hadn't seen the thoughts, the emotions, on the quiet bay's face. He would have been troubled by them, his lightness would have come crashing down in a flurry, and the conversation would turn heavy and somber quite quickly. Which is not a bad thing in and of itself- Eik has had enough losing for one lifetime- and there is still so much that lies ahead. It feels good indeed to be on the finding side, at least for now.
When Asterion is gone in his thoughts, Eik leaves as well, and perhaps the two soul travelers anchor each other with their bodies. The scarred man returns at the sound of his companion's soft question. No doubt some would find it rude, but not Eik-- he's never quite grasped social nuances. He does, however, think carefully before answering. There are so many ways he could respond, and all would be right, even the answers that conflict with themselves.
Finally, it is the dreamer and the seer within him, the man of a thousand eyes which speaks. "I just have a feeling... there's something there, waiting for me to find it." Yet here he is, miles away from Solterra. Even children get tired of digging in the sand. The edges of his eyes crinkle in amusement as he turns to his companion. He knows his feelings are nonsensical, but isn't that what feelings are supposed to be? The other side of logic? "Have you ever had a feeling like that?"
When the quiet returns, he looks to the horizon, which begins to distinguish itself as the glow of sunrise fades into a calm blue day. "Do you think, if you kept swimming, you would reach the shores of your homeland?" He's seen women fall from portals in the sky, so in a sense he is asking if Asterion is from this world-- if the bay even knows.
- - - There is no better way to know us
E I K than as two wolves, come separately to a wood
@Asterion Happy early thanksgiving! Hope you have a great time with the family <3
It is a strange thing, Asterion’s momentary heaviness, because he has never felt it before. Always his thoughts have followed along with his feet, drifting lightly ever onward – or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way Novus is the first place he has ever felt grounded, and if he were more insightful (which is to say, more like his father) he might have considered why that is, and what it meant.
Instead there is only his question, its true source as inscrutable to him as tomorrows weather, and his companion’s answer.
The bay finds himself nodding along with the stallion, his small star bobbing like a bright distant ship on the sea. Feelings are what he’s been following his whole life, though his experiences at Novus are beginning to give him the nagging suspicion that one of those feelings is his own selfishness. His large dark eyes are all serious as they reflect the ocean, which in turn reflects the sunrise.
“I have,” he answers, but it’s careful as he tries to parse out the particulars of it. In seeming contradiction to his nodding, he gives his head a shake, his dark hair thick and curly with salt and damp. “I mean, I’ve always felt like there’s something ahead of me, waiting – that I’ll know it when I find it. But it doesn’t seem to stay in one place. It’s always…tugging.” He doesn’t say that it might be easier, if it were centered somewhere; neither does he let his thoughts continue, because then he might think that the feeling is from himself, and not some adventure waiting for him. A Meant For, a Rightness – that is what he pursues.
He is far more fearful of anchors than he is of any wind.
The next question is an easier one, and the corners of his dark lips turn up. This time, when he shakes his head, it’s with a lightness that suggests laughter, and the dreamer’s gleam is back in his eye. “No current I know could bring me back,” he says, and if there is a shadow of sorrow it is only for his mother. “It was magic that brought me here.” He says magic with a boyish reverence, and does nothing to disguise his curiosity when his gaze darts again to the grey’s. Now, in the light going from rose to gold to whatever hue meant daylight, he could see a scattering of scars across his companion. It is a map that only sharpens his curiosity; there is little that Asterion loves better than heroes and knights, and he has no scars of his own.
“What of you?” he asks, and all the haze of bad memories is swept under by the next murmuring wave. “Is it that feeling that brought you? Or…” he falters, not wanting to ask if it was an accident, coming here (that seemed to suggest poor direction, or lack of awareness). “When I came here, I knew I was leaving Ravos, but I didn’t know this is where I would arrive. Did you know where you were headed, when you left?”
@Eik <3 thank you! it's always good to see them. I hope you had a good one, too! excuse the novel - alarmingly this is me trying to cut the post short xD
