Her knife cuts their way into the Creek and through its small window Florentine steps. A warm breeze, so heavily laden with the scent of fresh berries and the chirp of summertime birds, sighs after her through the open window. It pushes her on, coaxing her like a warm hand upon her spine, but the girl is rock and she simply stands, immovable.
Anywhere. Florentine had sighed to her dagger. And yes, she truly meant, anywhere. But it seems, both an irony and an obvious truth that this should be where she most desired to go.
Here is the place where love lingers beneath every leaf and between the petals of every flower. Even the waters of the creek chattered of love with its bubbly laugher. So much love, in all its forms, they touch the parts of her so awfully disconnected.
This girl is losing herself, she feels it, she knows it. A part of her is falling down a rabbit hole she never saw and now, oh now she stands, craving love to fill that terrible hole. Any love will do a child’s voice whispers in her mind as it looks to this land of plenty.
There is a hurt, that slithers like unwelcome serpents through her veins, which has undone her. It has made a forever-grounded girl so terribly unstable. But what is she to do?
Florentine looks and looks and looks. She sees everything with those gold rimmed eyes and yet, she sees nothing at all. Dusk’s curse, to be neither here nor there, has condemned its Queen and she is stuck in a liminal space with no end and no beginning. Her soul trembles, for it should always be free, and yet here it is trapped in this never-ending place: neither here, neither there.
How long does she stand here? It is until the moon descends and the sun rises - until she is so far from Dusk and Night and so terribly unhappy. Then she opens her eyes (that long ago closed) and watches this land of love; feeling nothing at all.
~ Anyone is welcome to post. Flora and I are in need of a cathartic thread, please help <3
Pavetta was not here for love. She searched for pieces of herself, wondering if she could put them together to make someone new that would suit this new land of light better than the valley of shadows she had left behind. She returned for the first time since Somnus and his owl had found her injured and crumpled among the willows. A place of love and secret affairs, she had later learned, much to her amusement. (What exactly was regal Somnus up to in these parts?) Pavetta returned now, healed and refreshed from the sanctuary of the Dawn Court, to discover if the portal itself had manifested—to find part of herself she might have left behind.
Would she return, if such a thing were possible? To the land of darkness and monsters? She had been nothing there, a mere whisp of a shadow, if even that. A servant and then a bride. She recalled the pyre burning, the embers floating in the dark as she had fled into the darkness, a shadow within shadows. No, she would never return. But her father. Could she leave him behind, possibly forever? They did not know each other, of course, but that had never stopped Pavetta from spinning childish fantasies that they would be reunited one day. She did not care to know her mother, a vain sorceress, or so she had been told by the priestesses who had raised her in the mountains. She didn’t know what her future held. For the first time in her life it was up to Pavetta to decide, no one else had a say in her destiny. But now that she had a choice she didn’t know what to do with this freedom, this new life.
Pavetta wandered aimlessly, not knowing where to look for a portal that disappears, but found herself near the crook in the stream where she had collapsed in the willows, where she had first emerged from the flashing green light. The dawn was silver and pearl; the water threaded with sparkling veins of moonlight and the glimmering surface reflected the remaining stars glittering on the horizon that now heralded dawn.
Pavetta hesitated. A golden lady stood as if frozen in the heart of winter instead of the blush of spring. Pavetta hardly dared to breath, the stranger’s beauty was so devastating. The dawn’s pearly rays glimmered on the lady’s skin, setting it ablaze in light and gleaming gold. Flowers were woven through shimmering strands of flaxen hair and dew glittered like starlight on the fae creature’s wings. (For surely, she was one of the Fair Folk that roamed the Wood with their haunting beauty?) The winged creature was elegant and fair, legs like spindles and a face delicate and eyes bright like a summer doe. She seemed deep in thought; so still and silent Pavetta was not sure she could even see her golden flanks draw breath. It was only when Pavetta decided to draw closer did she notice the dagger sheathed in a delicate case around the pegasus woman's neck. So she was dangerous and beautiful? How exciting. Who was she, and what was she?
Pavetta finally spoke, wondering if her voice would shatter the sunrise illusion. “Are you expecting someone?”
isn't it a little late, shouldn't you fly away?
little dove with cigarettes ---
Pavetta wonders of her family. A father that she might never see and a mother she cannot not bring herself to worry for.
They are similar, then, these two girls. Florentine had stumbled upon Novus, stepping through a rift opened by her dagger. But once she was here, the magic of her blade (to open a window into any world) leeched away into this magic-less air. That window was long ago closed, its seam thoroughly healed, by the time the flower girl realized her time-travel magic was gone.
So, maybe it is fitting that Florentine arrives through a portal as Pavetta is searching for her own. In the moments before they meet, Flora stands still as stone. She is a gold statue of finely carved limbs and a delicately sculpted face. Her hair is the part of her most alive and it ripples like a banner in the sigh of the winds drifting through the open portal.
Slowly the window’s seams begin to meet and knit. They close the two worlds off from each other, and even when the warmth of that breeze is gone, Flora still does not stir. Not until the stranger comes, that is.
Florentine turns her golden head; a statue suddenly brought to life and her close and open in a steady blink. It is not just her wings that capture the dewdrops of this day’s dawn, but her lashes too.
Where the Dusk girl is the gold of the day, a herald of the rising sun, Pavetta is the final throes of the moon. She is everything stern and blunt; her hair shorn so unerringly level. Even the lines that march down her limbs are rhythmic in their intervals and curl like snakes about each leg. Pavetta’s horn threatens to pierce the sky and bleed the sun so the moon might shine just a moment more upon the silver of her skin. But Pavetta is not all silver. A rose’s blush colours the ends of her hair and paints her scars a fractious pink.
It might have been any one of these that would hold the Dusk girl’s attention, but it isn’t. Rather, it is Pavetta’s bold eyes that pierce Flora with their unwavering strength. It is those eyes that tell the tales of the scars littering the Dawn girl’s body.
Florentine’s lavender gaze, petal soft, slides down the scar that runs over the stranger’s face. It lands upon the eye that intercepts the mark like a jewel upon a pearl-pink string.
Petals swirl between the girls and reach for the newcomer of pearl and moonlight, snagging themselves within her mane. Yet others drift over her spine and then are lost.
An ear rises through its tangle of golden hair and wild flowers and it captures Pavetta’s question. Her words draw a smile across Flora’s lips. “I do not know,” The flower girl admits so gently. “But you are here, so maybe it is you I am waiting for.”
And again Florentine looks to Pavetta with a gaze that falls over the dark of stripes, trickles over the brightness of scars and succumbs to the soft shading of moonlight.
Finally the Dusk Queen draws her gaze back, and lets bruised purple meet with blushing mauve. Slowly, slowly the caramel girl’s head tilts, “If you believe in fate, that is. Do you?”
@Pavetta ~ Gosh that was so ick, I am sorry. The moral of the story is not to write when your body keeps trying to granny nap. xDD
The willows in the water stirred, shaken awoke from deep slumber by a sweet dawn breeze. The sound was hushed, a whisper. The grasses on the bank of the sparkling water sighed and swayed. Bird song fluttered overhead, sweet and sad.
A fairy queen in mourning, but who or what did she mourn?
“If you are waiting for me, then I’m sorry I’ve kept you so long.” Playful sarcasm lingered in her voice, but Pavetta sensed the matter was more melancholy than the golden woman was letting on. “Especially since I am such poor company.”
Do you believe in fate? A pleading question.
What had fate dealt Pavetta but a life without choices? Until now? “Perhaps from where I am from there is such a thing as fate, but fate is slavery. Fate is a cruel game of the gods, something I’d rather not take part in.” Pavetta met the fairy woman’s gaze evenly. “If there are gods here in Novus then I suppose fate is real and we have little choice about it.”
She smiled wryly, ruefully. “Why do you suppose has fate brought us together, then?” Sunlight and moonlight, gold and silver, shadow and light. They were nothing alike and yet here they both were, dwelling on things past.
isn't it a little late, shouldn't you fly away?
little dove with cigarettes ---
always one decision away from a totally different life
-- ♕ --
There is no rose that could compare to the girl that stands before Florentine now. Nor is there a rose with thorns so fierce.
The fae-girl watches this stranger and thinks how she could write a thousand stories about how she got her scar. Then a thousand more about how she got the colour of her skin – stolen from a setting sky, stolen from a wilting rose and the fresh bloom of blood upon granite.
There is nothing fast in the way Florentine drinks in this blush coloured girl. The Terrastellan’s gaze is a languid caress as she studies the scar – as gentle as a thought and as unobtrusive as a shrug.
When at last she looks away to drink in this land of love, oh how she might have laughed. The stranger draws the gilt girl’s gaze back from the silvering brook (for it darkens as the sun begins to fall). The twilight mare drinks Pavetta in as though she might be the most enchanting elixir, but it is not just the silver-red body that draws Florentine’s attention: it is her talk of fate.
Sarcasm drips like wine from the Delumine girl’s lips but her audience remains unmoved – except for the subtle curl of lips. “I have waited an eternity for someone to show before now. A few more minutes is no bad thing.” Slowly her amethyst eyes trail over the Dawn caretaker. Flora makes no move to make clear whether she had ever been waiting for Pavetta at all.
At her throat, her silver, subtle blade glints knowingly in the fading light.
Florentine is in no rush to speak, so she remains silent as Pavetta’s words roll in like the sea. They wash against the Dusk queen, strong like a wave and rough with sea salt. Oh how Florentine’s skin itches with the implications of such suggestions.
Beneath the long threads of golden hair, her amethyst eyes gleam. They study this silver-red girl as if she might have known her for a thousand years. “Why do you tie fate in with the gods? Do you not think that fate might be beyond even the reach of gods, Pavetta?”
Ah how her eyes glitter with their meaning, sparks flying with the implications of these words. Florentine’s eyes close, as if she might feel the threads of fate binding and linking them and their world together.
The rose-girl’s name slips like silk from the fae-queen’s lips. It was not a strange name to make, it was one her tongue and lips knew well enough. Those amethyst eyes open and snag upon the wry smile curling its way along Pavetta’s lips, sinuous as a cat. “Maybe,” the time traveller concedes with a blink of gold-dust lashes. “Or maybe Time can be bent in such a way that fate may be changed, may be bargained with.” A roll of her shoulders and the fingers of fate slip from her skin. “Fate is the only master I heed, for I cannot escape it.” Slowly Florentine’s gaze lifts to snag upon this stranger’s rosy eyes. “But never be afraid to play with fate, Pavetta. You never know when it might change.”
@Pavetta | | eee let's do this then! Family reunions ftw!
