IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
From the moment that Locust set hoof on the ivory sand of the beach (a rather lovely one, which she might have enjoyed under different circumstances), she recognized that this was a terrible decision, even for her, and she was hardly known for her stellar decision-making process.
That was before she spent several hours wandering the forest in the center of the island and managed to do nothing more productive than walk in a very large circle. She could navigate the open sea with ease, using currents and winds and stars, but forests? Forests remained a mystery, a real enigma. The only reason why she even discerned that she’d walked in a circle was because she found herself standing, for the second time that afternoon, in front of the ugliest tree she’d ever seen in her life.
It looked like, with very little exaggeration, the souls of the damned had gotten trapped in its trunk. The tree was pale and sickly, the limp, sparse leaves a mottled mash of brown and yellow. Of course, that was ignoring the gaping indentations in the tree’s trunk and curling branches, some of which were lined with bumps that looked, when she squinted, rather like blunt teeth. (Like a parrotfish, she thinks, if a parrotfish could unhinge its jaw.)
When she encountered the tree for the second time, Locust planted her hooves in front of it, glared profusely at the holes-full-of-damned-souls, and muttered a string of particularly creative curses. She’d been charmed to this island by the prospect of adventure, which was always appealing in her line of work, and the fact that she'd discovered that August (and most of the rest of the staff at the Scarab, but she didn’t really care if they pissed off a local god and got themselves eaten by some strange jungle beast) had presumably left to explore the bridge, and, if the boy had anything reminiscent of his father’s nose for trouble at that age…
Well. She wouldn’t think about where that could lead him.
But there was no sign of August, or adventure, or treasure, and, given that she was a pirate on an island, she’d worked her hopes up for a few shiny objects for her trouble...or a kelpie, while she was so close to the sea, if nothing else. (She had her knife, after all, even if she did prefer to have help whenever she found herself in trouble with one.) Instead, there was just an assortment of trees that all looked exactly the same to her, save for the tree of the damned. (Unnervingly similar, she might add - as though they'd never had time to grow differently, so they all looked exactly the same, down to each bob and weave in the texture of the bark.) By the third time she encountered it, Locust had decided that it was somehow cursed, not simply suffering from some sort of…fungal infection.
She stopped in front of the tree again, narrowed her eyes at the toothy divots, and pulled her knife from its holster, waving it threateningly. (Predictably, the tree didn’t seem especially intimidated.) “I’m going to come back with a saw,” she muttered, glaring up at the branches. She was reasonably sure that they had one, back on the boat, but that required crossing the bridge again, and, more importantly, getting out of the goddamned woods.
She turned her back on the tree, preparing to march off into the forest again, when she felt something rake against her spine. She froze. Shuddered. It felt like branches, curved like feline claws, dragging their way down her skin.
She turned, slowly, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits.
The branches were curled at a different angle. She turned, taking a step back, and glowered at it. The next thing she knew, the godforsaken thing was going to be pulling up its roots and chasing her around. It didn’t move while she was staring at it, so, keeping her eyes trained on those gaping mouth-holes on the trunk, she turned, hindquarters to the treeline; she began to back away, still staring at the branches suspiciously, as though she expected the tree to reach out and grab her at any moment. Fucking trees. This was why she spent so much time on the water.
@open || a slightly more humorous locust post. || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
Kassandra remembered reading somewhere, perhaps in a book brought to her by one of the slaves minding her ivory tower back in Furae, the idea of modern researchers believing all forests to be one single organism, woven together at the roots, coming together in one giant heart of life deep, deep beneath the green canopies so thick above her head. The concept of something being so large aboveground and growing equally as massive below the earth made her head spin. It was a simplistic meter of measurement, to be sure— take a distance along the ground and simply flip it up— but something about it made her dizzy when she tried to picture it.
It was a small blessing, she figured, the jungle was filled with beauty; there was still something dreadful about it, like blackness at the edge of her vision, a hot closeness which pressed harder and harder against her sides, but looking at the greenery and the thick trunks wrapped in climbing, flowering vines and the blooms in all colors of the spectrum offered her a distraction, if a momentary one. Even the nasty rot-flowers Oculos had rolled himself in were beautiful to look at, from a very, very, very great distance (one as long as the jungle was tall, perhaps).
(‘Kass,’) her Bonded companion, Oculos, called from a bit further up the path while she herself was busy taking in the minute details of a flourishing plant of multi-colored flowers with zebra-like stripes. Kass snorted the kaleidoscopic pollen off the edge of her nose, now gently stained with red, yellow, green, and purple, and stepped off to find the canine. He was perched, front paws up, on a ridge created where a gnarled root appeared to be bursting free of its earthly confines. His ears were up (one standing at full attention, the other, which never seemed to reach the height of its twin, flopped over at the halfway point) and he was looking down his long nose at something in the dirt.
Kass came round the edge of the root-ridge, where the whitened, twisted end of the thing had been forced to stop by the unyielding power of the ground, to see what was so interesting. “Ah!” she nickered, as there, before them, were a clear set of hoofprints. It was both comforting and concerning. “There are so many others here,” Kass thought aloud, swinging her body around to stand parallel with the track. “Like— like flies to a sweet smell.” She shuddered, and the stars painted on her pelt shivered in place, like a cold snap on a frozen winter’s night.
(‘You alright?’) Oculos questioned, sniffing at her cheek with mild concern. If she was to have one of her terrible visions, fall over and become catatonic (or worse, scream and flail) right here, he didn’t know what they would do. He, too, was unnerved by the forest for reasons he could little describe more than his equine companion.
“I— yes, I think so,” Kass soothed, swishing her tail. “I’ve not felt the dreams for some time now. Maybe they’re gone for good.”
(‘Maybe,’) Oculos agreed, but he was not convinced.
“In any case,” Kass was itching to change the subject, “let’s see where these lead.” She tossed her head, gesturing for him to take point on their quarry’s trail, which he did without question, his long, lithe body trotting along through the path, tongue lolling. Kassandra brought up the rear.
The path went in a slightly moon-shaped arc, indicating the subject was traveling in a circle. After a bit of walking, Kass began to get worried.
(‘If we don’t run into them soon,’) Oculos said, voicing her concerns, (‘we should turn back and head the other way. Else we might be walking around each other all damn day.’)
“Oh, Oculos— look out—,”
So caught up in his complaints, Oculos did not see the horrific, gnarled tree before him, and as he turned his head to see what Kass was staring at, he crashed into its terrible trunk with a solid thunk and an (‘Oof,’).
Kassandra sized the horrendous thing up, and all at once began to tremble and shake. There were mangled skulls staring at her, with hollowed, rotting teeth, and all at once the air was the smell from a breathing tomb. There was a terrible grinding, stone on immovable stone, and she had the vision of time— she did not know how she knew it was time, but it was— grinding to a halt, and the ground beneath her was pushed up by some unseen force and in its throw were the remains of mangled bodies, corpses, legs and heads and dangling, rotting organs, all tossed into the air with the smell of hot, damp earth.
These sights were not seen to anyone else, of course, because Kassandra was trapped in one of her gods-cursed visions, and was standing stock still and eyes-wide. Oculos was nervously calling her name, a whimper-yelp as he snapped at the air around her, trying to draw her back to herself, but from past experience he knew there was little he could do save wait for the vision to play out. At least she was still standing--
Thump. She pitched to her side without warning, mouth frothing, legs flailing, and Oculos had to dodge and weave to avoid being struck by her flashing hooves. He launched himself over the mare and whirled round, catching sight of another horse on the opposite side of the terrible tree; he paid them no mind, and instead continued to whine and lick at Kassandra’s face and mane as the vision passed through her.
“Bones,” she rasped, in an unearthly voice not her own, "bones and time is a crushing gear with gnashing teeth and all we are, are bones in its path, and in its way, and soon we are dust, we are dust, we are dust…”
(‘It’s okay, Kass,’) Oculos whimpered, laying his long, slender head atop her crown as she repeated this last bit, the rasping, terrifying stranger’s voice began to fade to Kass’ own, gentle whisper, and her movements became stiff and staggering, and soon she became still save from the heaving of her sides. (‘It’ll be okay, it’s just a vision, it’ll be over soon.’)
kassandra oculos | 1,049 | @Locust | Hope you don't mind me throwing down here!!
kass is having one of her visions that i still need to set up a quest for, rip so at the moment they're rather useless and just kind of like, uhh, night terrors but EVENTUALLY they'll be prophetic in novus land... hopefully.
I DON'T WANT A GARDEN OF EDEN, I JUST WANT TO BRING YOU TO LIFE
well any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most
August is beginning to get the feeling that he is lost.
Of course, this hardly bothers him at all; it’s an island, after all, and all he needs to do to find his way out is pick a direction and walk in a straight line until he hits the beach again. This, the palomino is confident, is well within his capabilities, and so he continues, unworried, taking in the forest around him with the air of a man visiting a zoo where the bars might vanish at any time.
The most unnerving part is the quiet. Long since has he passed out of earshot of a brook; its unnatural laughing was more eerie than comforting. Likewise there is no sound of waves, no cries of shorebirds, though the tang of salt is still a note in the bouquet of the island. Even the cacophonous birds seem to have fallen silent, and aside from the drone of insects there is only an infrequent, low whooping - the call of a monkey, maybe, or a bird, or a cat, for all he knows. Vik would have a field day here, if he’s poked his head out of his lab long enough to know the island exists.
It’s a little funny, too, that there are so many of them (countless, that stream of horses down the bridge, spilling like pearls onto the beach) and yet it had been so easy to find himself alone, hemmed in by trees three stories tall. If this were a story, the island would be sentient, and know exactly what it was doing, splitting them all off -
A new sound, the whining and yelping of a dog, jerks August’s head up, tilts his ears forward. There was no mistaking the tone of it, of danger and fear, and the palomino’s body is lunging him forward through the brush and brambles before his mind can say no, wait, let’s evaluate the situation. It’s enough to slow him down, at least, and not crash like an elephant onto the scene; he tries to be subtle, or as subtle as a man as gold as a coin can be in a green forest, tripping like a boy over roots.
And then he hears that dreadful voice, and it’s enough to make him wish he weren’t quiet at all.
Bones in its path -
we are dust, we are dust…
It’s like a witch’s voice, like a tree’s voice, and pitched with the whining of the dog it makes all the hairs stand up along his spine. Then he is there, a clearing that is no clearing at all but a mass of gnarled roots and dead ground beneath a monstrous tree. His glance is too quick for detail; there is another figure, and a trunk like a nightmare carved into the bow of a ship, and there is the dog and a mare thrashing in the dirt.
“Steady now,” he says, stopping just of out reach of those big feathered feet, his gaze darting between that of the dog and the shuddering-lidded eyes of the mare. “It’s going to be okay,” he says loudly, soothingly, unaware he’s echoing the words of the Borzoi. There is little more he can do, at the moment, and so he lifts his silver-eyed gaze to search the scene - and freezes when at last his mind makes sense of the silver woman.
For a moment his jaw falls slack and he is nothing but a weanling boy, listening to stories of the sea in a weatherbeaten tavern as the wind howls outside and the tide crawls in. And then he shakes his head and then dips it, a little bow, the closest thing to a grin he can give when there’s a stranger having some sort of episode (we are dust, we are dust) between the two of them.
“Hello, Captain,” he says, and his brows lift in a way that continues to speak, but says only what the fuck?
IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
The sound of a crash from the opposite side of the tree sends Locust running – long strides that aren’t exactly panicked (she’s far too much of an adrenaline junkie for it), but possess a certain urgency as they carry her around to the opposite side of the tree. It takes her a moment to process what the mare is actually saying, beyond that it’s creepy as fuck. Locust has never seen a demon before, though she has heard stories of them – long-limbed creatures with too many mouths and teeth and claws come crawling up from deep-sea trenches to lead sailors astray or curse passing vessels – on her travels. Occultism did not necessitate believing in everything, so she had always assumed that those stories were just yarns, but, listening to the woman’s strange chanting, she considers adjusting her stance on their existence.
She doesn’t know how to describe the voice, beyond that it could not possibly come from the lips of the mare. It is dry and harsh, and it makes her think of the crackle of leaves under-hoof in late autumn, when they were completely dead, or the texture of coral, sharp enough to rake skin if you rubbed it the wrong way. Locust isn’t even sure that it sounds like a voice; she could compare it more easily to a cacophony of not-voice sounds, combined to make words.
Worst of all, however, was what that voice was saying. ”..and all we are, are bones in its path, and in its way, and soon we are dust, we are dust, we are dust…”
It occurs to her, vaguely, that her back is to the gnarled mass of unidentifiable tree; and that there is a whining, frantic dog jumping about the writhing mare’s limbs and licking at her face, perhaps in some effort to soothe her. A normal dog, by the looks of things – not one of the island creatures. She opens her mouth to speak, when, over the muddled, nauseating mixture of whine and unearthly rasp, she hears something that she recognizes.
Locust looks up from the scene unfolding before her, and, on the other side of the mare, she rests her eyes on a familiar gleam of pale gold. August - and he doesn’t seem to have noticed her yet, as absorbed by the mare as she had been before she’d heard his voice. Perhaps that tree wasn’t as cursed as she’d thought after all.
(Gods. He really is starting to look like his father, isn’t he? She still remembers him newborn – hell, when she found out that Goldie was going to have a kid in the first place. She’d never known, exactly, how to take the news, or the idea of anything tying him to shore; for once in her life, Locust could say with complete confidence that she didn’t know what Golden would do, and there was a part of her that half-expected him to stay ashore with his wife and son, and she knew that she couldn’t have blamed him for it, though she thinks that she probably would have found a way to do it anyways. But she liked the kid, and she wished he’d stayed with him. If he did, he might have been alive, and she would have been much happier to lose him to that than to the sea.)
(Anyways, she likes the kid. Loves him, even, in the same sort of way she’d loved Maribelle – which was most of the reason why she’d never offered him a place on her vessel, even after his mother died and he was taken to the Scarab, even though she would have much rather taken him with her, if he would have come.)
(But the sea was dangerous, and it had taken her far too long to know it.)
August looks up, and he sees her, pale eyes taking her in; his jaw dangles open for a moment, and she stifles a snicker, primarily because there is still a possessed woman between them. He dips his head, and offers a, hello, captain, and his brows knit in a way that suggests that he doesn’t know any more than she does about what’s going on in front of them. “Hey, kid,” she says, with a brusque kind of affection – it tugs at the corner of her lips, something like a smile. (And her sidelong glance at the convulsing mare suggests that she has no more of a clue of what’s going on with that than August.) “Seems like I got back just in time for trouble.” Whether she means the island or whatever the hell was going on between them is an ambiguity that Locust doesn’t bother to remark on; she just takes a cautious step forward, as though the drafty mare in front of them is a snake about to bite, and, in a low voice, inquires, “Lass? Can ya hear me?” She doesn’t think that she can, so she doesn’t bother saying anything else – her convulsions seem to be coming less rapidly, that strange voice and chanting fading. Might as well see if they can wait it out.
Whatever this is, Locust is convinced that it’s probably that goddamned tree’s fault – and, with that in mind, she raises her gaze momentarily to August. “Keep an eye on that tree, will ya? It seems to…move.” She still doesn’t want to think through the implications of that (much like she doesn’t want to think through the implications of whatever possessed the poor woman in front of them), and, with her back to the branches…
Oculos had no time to dwell on the awkward nature of his companion’s fit. He could not think of oh, how embarrassing, oh, how freaky, oh, get a load of this fool; they were trains of thought he did not have the luxury to board. His entire mind has to be focused on Kassandra, though his paws are tied and there is little more he can do but wait. She could come out of the fit in a number of different ways: she could wake up and bolt, and he would half to follow as close to her as possible as she careened madly through the wild, untraversed jungle; she could fall into a deep slumber, as close to death as she possibly could tread without truly dying, and he would have to sit at her side and defend her; she could come to, disoriented and confused, with little to no memory of her visions or where she had the misfortune of falling victim to them, and he would have to do the gentle but firm job of explaining their situation back to her.
As the otherworldly voice grates from the mouth of his best friend, Oculos imagines claws dragging down the inside of her throat, serrating the flesh and leaving her raw and exhausted. His heart hurts for her, and it makes him long for the repetitive, slow slog of them trekking through the jungle on the heels of some unknown quarry. Remember, he thinks, how they were, five minutes ago? Bored and hot and lost and confused? Yeah, that was significantly nicer than now.
Above all, he wishes they were alone, as another form comes into view. They look like a dappled golden shadow come to life, and at first Oculos fears he, too, is having a vision; then he sees the question in the eyes, the perturbed unease bordering on fear, and he relaxes a bit, because any rational, flesh-and-blood creature stumbling upon such a sight would wear that selfsame expression.
Kassandra’s eyes open weakly just as the second stranger— this one silver, Oculos notes, with a petulant grumble in his throat, why can’t these people be normal colors, as though his companion isn’t night blue and speckled with stars— comes over and greets the first. Her eyelids are heavy and her throat is dry as bone. She feels a familiar weight on her head and upper neck, warm breath on the side of her muzzle.
Her companion’s neck and head are tight to her flesh and she can feel the tension in his jaw, his discomfort at being under such scrutiny; and so her first sensation is shame. Her second, as her breathing levels and she mentally takes stock of all her facilities— body, limbs, senses, no pain— is a voice, saying something about a tree…
…a tree.
“The tree!” Kassandra lifts her head up in such a hurry that Oculos is nearly thrown from the velocity. He makes a somewhat comical yelp-gasp-whine and sinks down by her haunches, crouched on his claws and ready to bolt if necessary. After her outburst, Kassandra blinks, confused, eyes adjusting to the relative darkness of the jungle shade; she swivels her head to the two strangers, then makes a noise halfway between a sigh and a grumble, and rubs her right eye sleepily on the inside of her foreleg.
“‘m sorry,” she says, fighting off a yawn. “I hope I didn’t frighten anyone. Too much, anyhow.” She reaches out her muzzle and lips gently at the fur of her companion. “I’m sorry, Ocky,” she says, quieter, with more feeling.
(‘You don’t have to be sorry,) Oculos says, his growl affectionate, as he curves his long spine downward and comes to a sit, relaxing slightly, (‘I’m just glad you didn’t fall on me.’)
She gives him a small smile and then winces, shifting her heavy, bruised bulk in the dirt. “I’m sorry, again,” she says to those gathered, looking from gold to silver, from silver to gold, “that happens, at times, and I’m afraid I have no control over it. I know I must seem deranged.”
She shakes her head and neck as she prepares to stand, and then pauses: “Pardon my question, as I probably am just confused: but did you say… the tree moves?” she asked Locust, her eyes landing on the trunk in question. It’s visage made a horrible feeling crawl through her gut.
kassandra oculos | 743 | @LOCUST @AUGUST | wakey waking eggs and baking. sorry for the wait! this is a whole night crew meet up isnt it
I DON'T WANT A GARDEN OF EDEN, I JUST WANT TO BRING YOU TO LIFE
well any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most
August is not the kind of man who raises a brow at the idea of coincidence.
He might not be so quick to call it fate - but he has had many brushes with chance in his life, and most of them (barring a few notable exceptions, namely the deaths of his parents) have worked out in his favor. So, to find his father’s former captain and closest friend here, on a rampantly magical island, at the base of a nightmare tree, with a girl moaning prophecies in the dirt -
Well, fine, it pushed the edges of his belief and raised both his brows. But it did not strike him as impossible.
Hey, kid, the silver woman says, and he does not bristle at the word the way he might have if it came from someone else. There is (though it feels shameful to note it) even a part of him a little grateful, a part of him that thinks yes, I’m little more than a boy, let her be in charge. But August has not had the luxury of passing on responsibilities for some time now.
“I was wondering if you were the one that brought it,” he returns, and his mouth is still shaping a grin, though it vanishes as soon as both their attention returns to the girl. August leans back on his heels as Locust addresses the stranger, leaving her room to breathe, giving himself room to try and assess the situation. He curses himself as a fool for not bringing more supplies with him; he should have known better than to set off into the unknown with not even his sword or rudimentary first aid supplies. They are not children in a story.
Locust’s warning only reminds him of that, and he lifts his attention to the tree, which is indeed looking particularly ghoulish. “Happily.” After the birds and the butterflies and the pearl-dropping ivy, there’s no doubt in his mind that the tree is capable of something. With any luck they won’t find out what.
The threat has a not-dissimilar effect on the stranger; at her exclamation and the flurry of movement August steps back again, gaze curious but sharp on the dog and his companion, relieved for any change in the direction of normalcy.
When she continues (in a blessedly normal voice, nothing more of that terrible rasp) he can only laugh with a shake of his head. “No need to apologize. We’re a hard pair to scare. Are you, ah, feeling alright now?” He still can’t shake the vague sense of familiarity, as if they’d passed on another in the markets - but he would remember anyone accompanied by such a dog.
When he looks back to Locust, there are no fewer questions in his gaze than moments ago. “Maybe we shouldn’t stick around to find out.”
