if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
The whispers spread quickly, but there is no need for whispers when his companion is so heavily tuned into the court. He follows her to the citadel, and his gleaming eyes catches sight of two twin beasts -- and he knows before Raum ever speaks a word, knows that a silver mad-man has taken the throne, because he has watched dictators rise and fall as they grasped for golden crowns. He knows it in the angle of Raum’s body and the way blood coats his fur, because he had once been the boy reaching for a crown he never could have kept -- and his smile is chillingly sane when he moves up beside Teiran’s hip.
He does not bow. Instead, he laughs -- coldly fierce, the laughter of a man who has spotted something extraordinarily funny, with a smile that does not reach his eyes. “The tide will drown your ass in sand, and it will barely have noticed your existence,” he calls out cheerfully, for he has seen this, time and time again -- and never once has the silver man won, never once has the dictator remained. In Solterra, there is already a fable about this very thing, a tale of a man and a spear and how the people would rise up against those they found lacking.
Jahin weaves through the crowd, struggling against the surge of citizens flocking to the courtyard. He can hardly get a good view—he is near the back, trying to catch a glimpse over the swaying crowd.
Someone steps on his tail and he resists the urge to impale them upon his horn. He just needs to stay long enough to know what the hell is going on in the capitol and why people seem to have suddenly lost their minds. He wants to know why soldiers with unfamiliar insignia embroidered on their black uniforms march the streets. He wants to know who has invaded Solterra and why. He wants to know what type of creature lingers in the pale ghost’s shadow; a creature of darkness and nightmares. The creature’s eyes are bound and it lingers by the silver ghost submissively.
I am your new king now…
The words hit him like an axe to the chest. It fells him with one easy blow; he staggers, breathless, and just catches himself.
His first thought, against his determination to remain unfeeling, unemotional…Sera, where are you?
But she is not going to answer. The realization of her death settles like snow—unwelcome and resisted but the coldness seeps into his bones and to the depths of his marrow all the same. He recognizes very few faces—he catches sight of Teiran, he met her once during the blizzards—but then she is swallowed by the wave of citizens, now surging into a frenzied panic. Some cry out in agony and grief, mourning their lost queen. Many leave, but Jahin remains unmoving. Others solemnly stand before Raum, accepting their fate and the new future of Solterra.
these scars long have yearned for your tender caress
to bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own ---
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
He was late to the party, unsurprisingly. “Business” had kept him… preoccupied, for a time.
But this was a meeting he was not going to miss.
He slips the ring into place on his horn, shivering as his body disappears from sight. When he looks down at where his feet ought to be, only empty space greets his searching eyes.
A smile slides into place on his lips, a smile no one else would ever see.
Toulouse is careful to tread quietly; the stone floor could quickly give him away, if someone were to notice the hoofbeats that seemed to have no source. He moves only when others move, staying close beside them but careful to not get too close. It’s slow going, but finally, finally, he arrives in the hall where everyone has gathered, lurking in the shadows near the back, invisible but listening.
“I am your new king now.” A series of gasps and agitated whispers take over the crowd, stunned faces staring up at the silver man. Toulouse makes not a noise, hardly daring to breathe. But he lifts his eyes up to the ghost who claims the crown, and for a wild, reckless second, as Raum’s eyes pass over the spot where Toulouse stood, he has the sudden urge to tear the ring from his horn and reveal himself.
- But he doesn’t.
Seraphina was dead. The golden man hadn’t known her well; for most of his time in Solterra, she had been questionably absent, leaving him to wonder if the Day Court had a true queen at all. But the surprised looks and hurried murmurs of the crowd around him speaks for the rest of the Court.
His smile grows as the tension in the room boils.
Finally, the boring land of sand and sun he’d found himself in was becoming somewhat interesting.
The sun gleams overhead. Apolonia stands tall and screws up a dark eye against it, nevermind that the light still sinks in. What else is there to do when the world has gone to fire like this?
The crowd simmers and stirs. The tension is obvious, but it is impossible to tell how many of them are resisting in grief and how much of them have already given up: when she glances around, O does not recognize the expression on any familiar Solterran face. Even the air hisses and sizzles.
When Elif cries out, she is there, pressing a frown to the girl’s shoulder. But not a sound escapes her.
Instead she watches and watches and watches. The quicksilver of Raum’s skin. The bright black of his eyes under shadow. And that thing next to him, part bird, part snake, all monster, writhing and twisting and seething like it is a prisoner as much as she is, here. Her father’s brother Crow, desecrating her mother’s country: even from the grave he has a way of magicking things up the wrong way, of sinking his hands in where they don’t belong. (At least he is consistent in that.)
It will make Solterra powerful.
Amusement flits through O’s gaze, easy as a ghost. She presses the hurlbat deeper into her hip like a kiss and raises her head over the silent, wide-eyed crowd, and from her spot near the back it is as probable as not that Raum cannot hear her talking, much less make out the words, but still she taunts:"She is already more powerful than you can imagine."
And then, a moment later, mostly to herself, partially a request to God, she adds, "Die."
