boudika
rebellion sits well on you; like a red coat
rebellion sits well on you; like a red coat
Boudika was a devil. The darkness ate the copper of her head, the white of her limbs, and turned her nearly black—until firelight glinted against the metallic coat of her neck, or haunch, and suddenly she was all red-and-black, devilish, haunting. Her crimson eyes were deep, brooding, and she wandered Denocte like a creature possessed. She could not sleep… She could not sleep, for the dreams that kept her awake, dreams of drowning and dreams of swimming.
I could Make you, he had said. And I will help you look, he had said. It was the first time she had not felt lonely.
The streets should have taken on a shadow of familiarity—they ought to have brought her comfort, or at least a sense of security, rather than the creeping sense she was in someone else’s skin as she walked them. But, there it was. It felt as though when she washed upon the sands of Solterra, she had cast off an old skin and on weak, trembling, foal-like legs she sought something to compensate for what she had loss…
Instead, Boudika was continuously met by strangeness. One of the customs she could not grow accustomed to was the Denocte’s penchant for darkness—her people trusted the daylight, in that a Khashran could not turn ink-slick black and disappear… her people trusted the daylight, in that everything was laid bear, all honesties and dishonesties.
But Caligo was different, and Boudika was uncertain what to make of that, as she navigated her way through Denocte, feeling lost but not lost all at once.
Boudika did not know what to make of Denocte’s goddess. She did not know what to make of a goddess who had been overcome by anger and discontent at her mistreatment. Of an outcast, who caused of a rift that broke their worshipers into four kingdoms, whose overwhelming response to surmounting injustices she suffered had been to plunge a world into a darkness that lasted a hundred years. Caligo. A goddess who, after that decade of shadow, consented to end it only to preserve her brother’s lives and to be left alone, forevermore. But somehow, for some reason, Boudika felt like she ought to pray—for forgiveness, for acceptance, for an end to her raging, torturous thoughts.
These were heavy concepts, heavy deeds, and they were the thoughts that occupied Boudika as she wandered aimlessly, searching… searching, for what? She had meant to go to the markets, to procure provisions for the next week… but somehow, the sea had driven her away, and she found herself without direction, being buffeted through the current of equines like flotsam, the words of the strange water horse resurfacing again and again to the forefront of her mind. I could Make you. A promise. A curse.
He could Make her. What did that mean? But she knew. Boudika knew the answer; it was at once a massive temptation and a leaden burden, the knowledge, that she could perhaps become the very thing she had hunted, the very thing she had spent a lifetime fearing. And all for what?
A shoulder brushed her shoulder. A child skittered about her legs, chasing after a pygmy dragon in jest, marked by a high trill of laughter. Firelight danced and glittered upon the stones and varying skins of Denocte’s residents. Denocte was marked by a perpetual air of festivity, the scent of bonfires subdued by ocean breezes, the liveliness of the night, the chaotic vivaciousness—all of it, all of it, filled Boudika with a strange hollowness, as though one could drum her ribs, and her loneliness would echo out.
Perhaps she did know what to make of Denocte’s goddess. Perhaps she felt it, deep within her, in the stirrings of her own sentiments for a life she had forsaken, a life she had turned away from, a life from which she had been banished, a skin she had shed.
Perhaps she knew the rage that could launch a nation into darkness, for a century. Did that very thing not hold her now? Did it not cause her self-imprisonment to her room after each performance, as though she were a beautiful object only to be admired, and then put away, before they realised what horrors her dances mimicked?
Boudika would not have noticed Ipomoea, she would not have paused in regarding him, if not for one very simple fact. He had stopped to breathe in his memories directly in front of the alleyway that allowed Boudika to enter the performance hall through the back door. She cleared her throat, not wanting to disrupt him, but finding it necessary. ”Um… excuse me. You’re blocking my way.” And then, because she felt rude, and thought she might know him—perhaps from the guild, perhaps from the Court—”Have we met?”
The loneliness gnawed.
The promise returned. I could Make you.
Oh, how she wished to be made.
@Ipomoea ... oh man I apologise for how long this got and that it's so rambly D: i started it and then came back to it and then was like "eh let me destress before bed" and BAM all the words :c (also i hope its okay I assumed it he had stopped walking to breathe it all in for a moment? if not i will gladly change!)
