There is a whisper in the back of his mind that tells him he should be going home - but Asterion forces it to stay there. Just for now, just for a while longer, just until he can see a little more. It’s a dangerous impulse, but the Dusk King is hardly the only one to follow it; numberless other horses are gathered with him on the beach, in pairs and threes and a few, like him, alone.
He was not always alone. Somewhere, he knows, is his sister, and Isra, and Juniper and Samaira and others, so many others (Moira, too, and at the thought of her his gut clenches with guilt and worry, by now a feeling familiar enough to ignore). But like him, they had each been seized by this place, driven to quiet by wonder drifting off to explore it in their own way.
The island is not what he had expected. Since the eruption, that first tremble that cried wrong, wrong, wrong, Asterion has been braced for war. His magic is still a roiling thing beneath his skin, though his control of it is advanced enough that it no longer shows itself in little rivulets down his shoulders, or along his throat; the only thing to give him away is the sea in his eyes, wild and dark. But even that is softening, a summer-night sky after a storm, as he walks on the gleaming beach and listens to the foreign birds and lets hope tremble in his heart, and it feels as unfamiliar as their wings, as their peridot eyes.
The bay knows better than to follow a bejeweled bird further into the brush of a strange island like a child in a fairy tale - but oh, hasn’t he always wanted to be part of a story?
The sun is just beginning to set as the king moves deeper into the jungle. It is cool and dim beneath the trees, filled with whistling, with rustling, with breathing he has never heard. He pauses to touch his muzzle to a bloom as black as ink; he lifts his head like a startled buck when one of those fire-birds (had they been the ones at the golden pool? he cannot recall; the rest of Novus seems so far away) dips overhead before vanishing with a song that sounds like a laugh. Up ahead there is a gleam through the trees, low and smooth, like water.
And it is still wonder and not fear that pulls Asterion deeper, and deeper yet.
@Ipomoea
06-04-2019, 04:11 PM
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Staff [PM] Posts: 309 — Threads: 165 Signos: 989,640
Brightly colors birds are not the only things waiting in the thick, humid jungle. But they are perhaps the loudest, louder even than the sea against the too bright sand.
Deep in the jungle the doe waits. She's pale brown, lighter even than the sand on the beach that seems so far away. A crown of stone rings her head where antlers made of bone should be. She wears the pale amethysts, and sapphires deeper than the ocean, upon her head like each tine of precious stone was made of air. Each of her steps seems lighter than it should and a closer inspection will show that she leaves no marks on the sandy jungle floor.
Stranger still is the look in her eyes. It's a promise, a warning, a whisper than her antlers make not a crown but a map. The golden light in her eyes is a small sun that's pretending to be a moon. Each leafy frond that it falls across starts to smoke.
She pauses, the doe with her wealthy crown, when Asterion crosses her path. Her delicate nose flares once, almost violently (like a lion instead of a lamb). Those bright, hot eyes blink, blink, blink. She inhales---
and then she's gone, nothing more than a pale ghost who leaves behind only a quivering trail of smoking fronds.
@Asterion will find more than just the birds waiting for him in the jungle. The doe pauses as she crosses his path. Although perhaps he has stumbled upon hers. It was her jungle first, before the bridge and before the volcano. Maybe it belonged to her even before there were horses in this world.
She inhales once, and then she flees.
He has been awarded +100 signos for encountering a Random Event! How you reply is up to you; feel free to NPC the doe. Anyone else who joins is welcome to respond to the doe as well. It is totally up to you how you reply.
Enjoy!
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It is not the island he’s thinking of, when he takes his first step onto the pristine beach. It is a field of jewels, scattered like stars thrown down by the heavens, cast out to live their lives like mortals on the earth. He can still see them in his mind, swimming across his vision until he’s looking out through a rose-hued lens. Their petals are as bright as sunlight, reflecting off cold, carved edges.
He can still feel their touch, the way they had leaned in against his skin as he walked amongst them, the way the wind had made them sing as it passed through their midst. Their song had gone deeper than words, cutting through his heart like a knife and echoing throughout its remains. They had been alive, feeling, knowing; they had sung stories of the heavens and the impermanence of life, even while they had grown upon grasses soaked in the blood of fallen warriors and slain queens.
It had been magic that had cultured them, magic that was as wild and unruly as the gods who wielded it. They had been the first clue that something was not right in Novus.
He supposed it was the same magic that would have created this place.
And even while his own magic reaches out, inspecting the island with its strange flowers and strange birds, the magic of the island is reaching back out to him. It tugs him forward, deeper still into the heart of this strange new world, and he is powerless to stop it (or perhaps he simply didn’t want to.) The trees close in overhead, casting the regent into a depth of shadows so thick they blot out the twilight sky, and not even sound can penetrate the forest. He walks in near-silence on a strangely muted carpet of thick soil, unsure of which direction he’s heading, simply knowing that the magic of the place has convinced him that it’s the right direction, and that’s all it needs to tell him.
He’s not sure how long he walks, or how long he’s alone for, before he finds the doe. She waits amongst the trees, and overhead a single ray of sunlight breaks through the leaves to fall upon her crown.
Her back is turned to him - it is not Ipomoea she waits for.
He comes to a stop, and all at once the pull of the magic dissipates like waves crashing upon the beach. He waits and he watches, wondering if it was the doe he was meant to come for, even if he is not what she came for. Together they stand, she in the sunlight and he in the shadows behind her, as magic thrums in the air around them like a pool that has yet to take form.
She turns her head and looks, at what he cannot see. But she stares and she stares, and he wonders how the intensity of her stare doesn’t burn up the object of her interest in all this time before finally she looks away, moving for the first time since he’s arrived and taking her first step deeper into the forest.
She looks at him only once as she passes, her gaze smoldering and stealing the breath from his very lungs. He’s caught in her eyes, unable to break free for a long second, his chest crying out for air -
- and then she is gone, and the burning fronds she leaves in her wake fills his nose. Only then does he see the bay man, and realizes what she had been waiting for in the forest.
"Asterion," he says with a smile as soft as smoke. It curls at the corner of his lips, taut and nearly hidden. He knows he should be surprised, or at least pretend to be, but he’s not and he can’t. "It seems all of Novus have found their way here. It’s a wonder the island is big enough to hold us all."
He steps forward, so that the sunlight that had crowned the deer strikes his own brow. "It’s good to see you." It’s good to see someone I recognize.
But for her paleness, he never would have seen her. But she is as bright as a ghost in the dim, tawny green beneath the shadows, and as soon as he marks her he stops in his tracks. They regard each other for a moment, but he finds he cannot hold her gaze; it burns too hot, it pierces him to the core. Asterion averts his eyes like a beggar, not a king, but he is too greedy and too wondrous to tear them away entire; they travel the circle her antlers make, strange and lovely treasure, more precious than any crown Terrastella could put on his head. They travel her throat, long and graceful as a swan’s, and the trembling, narrow muscles of her, and the lines of her legs thin as calligraphy.
And then she is gone, a whisper through leaves, disappearing quickly as a comet into the dark. She leaves him with a cry trembling in his throat, unvoiced; what would he say, what name would he call after her?
But his name is called instead. The stallion’s head lifts, ears twisting, not so different than the doe - then his gaze finds Ipomoea and that wildness, that wariness, in it softens to familiarity. Not until he exhales does he realize he’d been holding his breath long enough his body was nearly shivering with the need to breathe.
All at once the air seems richer, more humid, though he can’t tell if there is more magic in it or less. Something feels different, after the doe passed by, but he is at a loss to say what. And so he only inclines his head, and then goes to meet the stallion.
“Ipomoea,” he says, and the name feels as foreign as a bright island flower on his tongue. He knows that Florentine calls her friend Po, but Asterion has always had a difficult time dropping formality before invited. Anyway, the rolling syllables give him a chance to gather himself, when all his mind wants to do is bound after that hind through the trees.
“Maybe that’s part of its magic.” His tone matches the other man’s, soft as leaf-litter on the ground, but at the paint’s offhand statement the king’s mind conjures a fairy-tale vision: an island that grows and grows to fit them, until it has enough. What then? What once it has them all? Steady, he thinks, and watches as Po steps into a column of sunshine. It anoints him, too, and dust motes dance in the gold, and Asterion finds that it is not so difficult to reply, “It’s good to see you too.” He means it, even as he turns his gaze away, to trace the place a deer vanished. His eyes are dark with longing, and intent, but one ear remains fixed on the Deluminian when he speaks again. “I don’t suppose there are allusions to any of this in your library?” Now it is he who smiles like smoke.
Ipomoea. How long had it been since he had last heard his name, his proper name, spoken in full? Since Delumine, his mind answers him, and a knife laced with guilt impales itself into his heart. The syllables seem foreign now, as if he’s outgrown them. They speak of a boy crowned with flowers, a smile on his lips as he dances through a forest; they speak of a boy, saved from death on the highest peak of Veneror and named after the flowers that grow there in the thin, weak air, flowers that opened with the morning and followed the sun across the sky.
He used to be that boy. Now - now he’s not sure who he is. Now he doesn’t even wear the flowers he so loves.
To anyone who asked in Denocte or here on the island, it was simply Po, a title he’s taken up as easily as breathing. Few were none the wiser; he had yet to be recognized as the runaway regent, off to save the world with a bouquet of daisies as his only weapon. It was for the better, he’d told himself - although he couldn’t help but wonder if Somnus had not yet sent out news of his apology and disappearance, or if his court thought anything of his absence. He had always been prone to wanderlust, but did they know that this time, he wasn’t sure when, wasn’t sure if, he would return?
His own uncertainty was turning into a monster inside of him, its venom more potent than the fragrance of the tropical flowers drifting on the breeze around the two stallions.
Maybe that’s part of the magic. One ear tilts in the bay’s direction, mottled and amused. “The gods have outdone themselves.” There’s a hollowness in his tone that he’s not used to - empty words without any hint of sentiment behind them, as if spoken through automation alone. He shakes his head and looks amongst the trees and their shadows, his wandering eyes avoiding only Asterion.
But at the bay’s next words, a smile that is as swift as it is serendipitous takes him by surprise, arcing across the young regent’s mouth. “No,” he admits. “I’ve read fairytales, of islands that float in the clouds and wander the earth, and volcanoes that have turned entire cities to stone. But nothing… quite like this.” There were entire sections of the Delumine library that he had not explored - certainly he could spend a lifetime there and still not even break the surface of its alcoves - yet somehow he already knew that he would find nothing of the sort hidden within its corridors. If there was, someone would know of it - and secrets were never held long in the Dawn Court.
He turns to face the other stallion then, pleased by the like smile he finds dancing like smoke along the planes of his face. Ipomoea follows the bay’s gaze into the forest, along the shadows the doe had disappeared. A single broken twig, hanging haphazardly from a bush, is the only sign of her passing.
“Should we follow her?” He asks, turning back to Asterion. And there’s a hint of mischief, of adventure and daredevil hiding in his eyes.
It is a strange relief, to stand beside somebody he knows so little of. Though he is of course familiar with Ipomoea from festivals and regime summits, by sight and by name, he feels no weight of expectation, no sense of owing or being owed. It’s a kind of freedom he is grateful for - and though he is unaware of the stallion’s relinquishing of his place in Delumine, he wonders is the appaloosa feels the same.
He shifts his gaze toward the man when he speaks of the gods, too accustomed to that feeling of hollowness in his own heart to mistake it in another. There is no judgement in his eyes, only quiet wondering. “Or perhaps it is beyond them,” he says, softly.
In Ravos there had been the gods and their gifts, elemental and powerful, but also the rift of feral magic that not even they had understood. They had tried to keep it secret, that cleft in the earth like a canyon that ran to its core, leaking power like water. He is not convinced it is any different here; no note with the scribbled name Tempus is enough to make him think differently. Too well he remembers the gods squabbling, their pettiness and pride clear. It’s hard to believe they could create something so lovely, so strange as this. Even if it means the island is more dangerous, more unpredictable, he would rather fall to the beauty and peril of mad magic than the whim of the gods.
But Po is spared, for now, of the Dusk king’s doubt. The cherry bay’s smile shifts the mood the way the sun breaking free of a thick churn of clouds changes the quality of the light; at once Asterion remembers that it is spring, that the air smells sweet, that nothing is known and so everything is possible.
He listens with interest to each description, visualizing them each, though he is back to staring at the place the doe vanished. The smile slanting along his own mouth only grows. “Someone will have to add this one, then. Though I suppose we might float to the clouds yet.”Or turn to stone, he does not say; but the thought is there, crouching in the shadows of his mind, with the vague shape of Raum’s monster.
Asterion smothers the image like a dying fire, wills it to dead coals. There are other, better things to think about, like the company of the man beside him, like the hind whose stare still finds him when he blinks.
At Po’s question he meets his gaze, and the expression there is another one he knows, one he’s worn too rarely. “Of course,” he says. “It’s part of the story.” Before the grin can more than crease his cheek he’s stepping forward, once more into the shadow of the trees, and he imagines the ferns pressing the memory of her passing into his cool skin.
And for a moment he pretends they are only two boys, safe as ink between old pages, chasing a fairy-tale.
Ipomoea is not sure when his mind first began whispering doubts into his ear, or why. He knows they were there when he came to Denocte, and when fires tore apart the Viride. He thinks they might have been there before that, too, when he walked alongside Somnus and all the other regimes to meet a god. It was hard to say for sure; they had crept in so quietly at first.
It wasn’t until they had built themselves into an army, and screamed as one for blood.
Only then did he hear them for what they were. There were times when it was quiet, when he was alone with his flowers, that he heard them most clearly. They took him unawares, when he was pruning away dead leaves or packing fresh soil into a vase. And then once they had his full attention they tightened their grip like a vice around his heart.
So at Asterion’s quiet acceptance, at the soft wondering he finds in his eyes, Ipomoea can only smile wanly. Perhaps it is, he says to himself, or perhaps we’re all blasphemers and the gods are plotting our demise. There was only ever one way to know for sure, he supposed; and once you were there, once you found yourself on death’s doorstep there would be no second chance for redemption.
Their only chance was here, and perhaps it was for that very reason that the island existed. It had a way of bringing out something childlike in him: a sense of adventure, or thrill-seeking. All of his emotions felt stronger here, as vibrant as the brightness of the leaves and the water and the sky. The island was a place of extremes, he had found, and there within those extremes he could only feel things fully, or not at all. “Would floating to the clouds be so bad?” he asks Asterion now with a laugh, and lifts his head towards the canopy. “I suspect the world appears far different from up there.” Not for the first time, Ipomoea wishes he had wings that had been built for flying.
But he does not. He has only his legs and his mind, and those alone would be enough to explore this island.
And it was, indeed, time to explore.
“Let us see where her story takes us then,” he says with a smile, and he falls into step beside the king. Be it to something great or something terrible.
The forest path is far more welcoming than it should be, with the tall shadows the trees cast over it. The palm fronds she passed through are still smoking when he reaches them, their edges still limned in glowing embers. It feels like the beginning of an adventure as he passes between them, like the smoke that wafts over him is cleansing him from the inside out.
As they walk the trees seem to shiver, the branches and brambles clearing themselves until a pathway remains in their place, the island’s way of inviting them forward. And yet with each step they take, with each stride that carries them deeper into the forest, the trees lean back in behind them. With a sigh and a rustling of leaves, as more of the forest opens before them - more of it closes itself once more behind them. And all the while there is no further sign of the doe, besides the occasional smoking leaf that flutters down to their hooves.
“It certainly is a strange place,” he muses aloud as they walk, glancing at the bay man from the corner of one eye. His voice is oddly hushed, as if by speaking the words too loudly he might somehow offend the magic of the place. “I can’t help but wonder if there’s a reason for all of this, for this place. It seems too wonderful to have all been made by chance.” Too wonderful, too terrible, too magical.
@asterion hope it's okay where i took this c':
”here am i!“
“Not at all,” he agrees, and lifts his gaze upwards. “I would love to see that view, someday.” But for now, there are only small patches of blue sky, timidly hiding beyond the leaves of the canopy. The forest is bending over them, here, branches meeting like arms overhead, fingers spread and waving.
It is like him, he thinks (and wonders if it is like Po, too) to be hungry for new worlds even as they explore one that’s not yet known. Asterion’s heart is such a needful creature, always wanting more.
Together they pass through the smoke of the doe’s passing, trailing thin as incense, and deeper into the story.
He, too, notices the way the trees make way for them, and the way they close the path once they have passed; like his companion, he does not remark on it. Still, he can’t help but wonder (though he tries to make it idle, a passing piece of flotsam and not an anchor) if the forest is granting them safe passage, or coaxing them deeper for some other purpose. Asterion would think nothing but the former, save for the memory of the soil and stone rising up to hem them in two summers ago.
For now, he continues his stubborn belief that this place is born of magic beyond that of Novus’s gods. That it is ambivalent, and not openly hostile - as curious about the horses who have come as they are in turn.
They walk in silence, for a time, but nothing about it feels oppressive. Their hush is soft awe, not fear. Occasionally the bay thinks he sees a flicker of tawny fur, or the glint of stray sunlight off gemstone antlers; but when he looks harder, there are only waving leaves.
When Po speaks the king is almost startled by the break in the easy quiet; he meets the other man’s glance with a slight and sheepish smile. “I feel the same,” he says, his voice as soft. “Though I’ve learned better than to guess what it might be. Perhaps she can tell us,” he says, and tilts his nose ahead to where the path vanishes in the undergrowth, “if only she allows us to find her.” But Asterion already has the feeling that they won’t - though what surprises him is how little he minds.
@Ipomoea crap post D: but I feel so blessed to be writing with po!
His smile is crooked and boyish, a smile that seems to know more than it lets on. “Me too,” he says, and leaves it at that.
But in his mind he can see it, the way the earth might see from the clouds, the way a bird might see the rest of them far below on the ground. He wonders how far the sky goes, and what he might see waiting on the horizon. And in the lack of knowing, his mind builds all sorts of fantasies to amuse himself with.
He thinks he might ask Florentine later about the worlds she’s seen, and how far away they were. But for now he walks and he daydreams and he follows the doe like a hound follows a scent. The dappled light of the forest makes it hard to see her trail, but the smoking palm fronds and the occasional cloven hoof print lead them on all the same. Deeper into the forest, deeper into the mystery - and Ipomoea does not stop to consider that they’re walking into the unknown (foolish as it may be.)
He steals a glance at the king, his eyes dark beneath the forest’s veil. “But do you think she would tell us if we asked?” He hoped she would - where would be the fun otherwise? - and yet there’s a part of him that suspects this was one mystery designed to be only that. A mystery, a tale without an ending, a riddle for them to make up their own solution for. Was a bad answer better or worse than no answer at all?
But before he gets a chance to say more, something shifts in the air around them, something sharp now carried on its undertone. He can feel the wind lifting his mane from his neck, and a shiver raises the hair along his spine. Light is streaming through the trees ahead of them and, quite unconsciously, Ipomoea quickens his step. The forest gives way to a meadow, small and flanked by trees. And he thinks, as he steps into the light, that the shining gem he sees laying upon the grass is one of the gemstones from the doe’s antlers, and a part of him thinks he sees the shadow of her hiding behind the trees at the far end.
”I think she’s close,” he whispers when he comes to a stop. The trees shiver around them, and his eyes search quickly for movement beneath their outstretched arms.
@asterion I want to be respectful of asterion’s leaving, so figured we can wrap this up here or soon c:
”here am i!“
It is almost enough, here in the sun-dappled undergrowth with magic real as fog around him, to forget everything and simple be. His companion is a part of it - something about walking with Po makes him think of Eik. The bay hadn’t known much of the man, save for his friendship with Florentine, but they lapse into silence as comfortably as if they’ve been fellows for years.
Not for the first time, he wonders what Novus might be without its courts and superstitions (of course, he thinks, it would not then be Novus at all). Is it such a treasonous thing, to wish that nothing divided them?
The king looks over at the paint’s voice, and his eyes are equally dark. For a moment he only considers, stepping carefully over a jut of fallen branches. Caught on the rough bark are a few strands of tawny hair, smaller together than the down of a dandelion. But the doe seemed far too graceful to leave such a sign unintentionally.
“If she could,” he says at last.
By then Po’s pace is already quickening, and Asterion follows. He is content to stay a few steps behind, though the same breeze is lifting his forelock and tugging his hair (it feels good, after the thin humidity of the forest) and the air itself has shifted. Sharp-metallic, almost like blood - or like magic.
Wariness and boyish excitement war within him; if this were the Rift, he thinks, anything could be waiting for them, having laid its trap. But it isn’t - it isn’t - he still can’t accept that the island’s magic might be bad, and dark, and hurtful. Not when he wants nothing from it, only to know.
There, winking like a green eye, is an emerald in the grass. Though it is high summer, the clear color of it makes the plants around it look autumn-dull. Asterion’s ear flicks toward his companion at the sound of that whisper, and he lifts his head, slow, already searching. The trees are moving, whispering too, and there, there, there -
