His mind had been rather preoccupied lately, and he had to admit that it had caused him to be out of the loop regarding many court happenings. Poor Ard had been so lost without his brother and it was so startling to know that a sibling pair as bonded as they were, somehow were still managing to work through each day. Rhone had made a promise to Ard, that he would go in search of his lost brother. While he waited to journey to Night Court with Ard, he told himself that he would go search the mysterious island for the lost brother.
The journey to the island had been uneventful and when he arrived, he knew the hour should have been close to nine or ten in the evening. The sun should have set a long time ago and yet, it still hung out at the noon position. It was a stranger phenomenon, but then again, there had been many other strange things regarding the island that had happened as of late.
Steps cautiously took him through the jungle, on a journey to search for the missing Dusk Court citizen. Ears were erect, listening for any sounds that might give him a clue as to where to look. That’s where the strange island just got more strange. Rhone didn’t hear the call of the gulls, the chirping of insects, or even the movement of the fauna that roamed the island. The island was oddly quiet and the only sound he did hear was the crushing of twigs as he stepped over them. "Erd? Are you here?" His voice was soft and oddly quiet, but it caused an echo that seemed to go on for miles. Eyes grew wide as he focused on the sounds of the island. "Erd? Your brother misses you…" The echo was resounding and it made Rhone step back cautiously. He felt the rapid beat of his heart, the racing of his pulse. This place was growing stranger by the moment. Something told him that Erd was not here, that there was something else more alarming that lurked within the shadows.
STAFF EDIT***
@Rhone has rolled a 2! He has been awarded +125 signos.
i'm a pretty flower girl check out my pretty flower curls
The children are playing.
Florentine never considered it before, but already she knows how the twins’ feet sound as they go running over damp, damp sand. The sound of children running, laughing, shouting… it is all sharp and so very real.
Leo calls and it sounds so loud in this world where nothing moves. Florentine steps toward the sea, to where it rears and tumbles forward to meet the sand. Yet it is frozen there, in an eternal diving wave. The wave never crashes and the sun never moves. Her lips graze over immovable water, they taste salt and nothingness.
Slowly she returns to Lysander’s side, her gaze tipping up toward the sun, “It has been hours.” She whispers, though she need not, for their children are playing as if their world is a normal place, as if everything always came to rest like this. As if days stretched on like weeks and the sun never moved.
“Nothing is moving.” She whispers again and it is so like a hum, like a laugh, like wonder. She cannot help but relish such strange moments as these. “There is something about this island.” Florentine murmurs gilded words into her lover’s ear before her teeth nip playfully at its shell.
“I say we let them exhaust themselves and then nap under that tree.” Her wing points to a tree reaching out over the beach, where shade rests, as it has for hours, as it may do for an eternity. “Any frozen day is an opportunity to catch up on sleep, don’t you think?”
Then more softly, as she leads Lysander over toward her chosen tree, “I have asked Asterion to come with me to see Daddy. I want to take the twins to see him too. Maybe we should all go together, one day…” Her side rubs against his, intentional, coincidental, whatever the reason her heart steadies and that small pang of unease unspools. She think she might take on anything, if Lysander is beside her – even eternal days, if this should become one. And if it does, will time mean anything at all, then?
@Lysander
florentine rocking your pretty flower world
STAFF EDIT***
@Florentine has rolled a 2! She has been awarded +125 signos.
The Illuminated
“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
At first she doesn't notice the way the sun is caught in some invisible net between one cloud and the next. Nor does she hear the way the bird-song and cicada song inhaled one moment and died the next. All she notices the the way the sea has stopped roaring around her belly and the fish have stopped nibbling at the edges of her gold.
But if she thinks it strange, if she thinks it magic, there is nothing in the way her eyes turn molten to suggest it.
When she walks towards the shore the water does not cut her like the glass it appears to be. The sand does not pillow up in dunes around her hoof-prints and the trees do not sway to the same beat as her hips. For once Al'Zahra is the loudest thing in the world. Her chains are still peeling out in the silence like bells, and her anklets are still ringing sweetly against bone and skin. And when she laughs there is not a sound on the entire island to drown out the sharp wildness of it.
So she laughs, and she dances, and her body makes enough sound to make the silence feel like nothing more than a promise of a morning fog. Deep into the forest she dances and even the leaves do not sway in the breeze she makes as she runs, and runs, and dances.
Everything is a melody, and right now everything this her. It feels like the beginning of the world did, before gods and mortals and she has never felt more like smoke and magic. Al'Zahra would be content to never see another moon or feel another second tick by in this fragile body she has.
To Thana the silence feels like a weight pressing down. It feels like home, like dead-space, like nothing. Even the air when she swallow it down tastes like nothing and for a moment, one wild moment, her body tells itself that she is dead. And Thana does not pause to wonder why she is dead, only that it feels like weight, and like home.
So she walks through flowers that are thin enough that she can see the bark behind them, and she thinks of nothing. There is no hunger in the silence and the world around her does not run fleet-footed towards decay each time her sharp shadows falls across it. When she reaches a meadow thick with wheat the stalks make themselves into no waves when she runs across the barren plane. There is only that weight ever pressing down, and down, onto the wicked point of her horn.
I cannot be a hunter, she thinks, when there is nothing to hunt. But she doesn't know what else to be so there is no thought to follow that one.
Her blade leaves no tracks in the soft wheat-sand, no hint that something walked this way and dragged death along with it. Perhaps death was always meant to be a peaceful nothingness, because even the caught sun does not feel hot against her bloody skin. There are no birds to bare their teeth at her like they know something similar to them is walking beneath their nests, and their wings, and their canopies.
Thana walks on, dead. Though the forests, and the sand she walks on dead and alone. But when a lily catches her eye, with small sweet berries blooming from the bottom on the flower, she pauses. The petals smell like spun-sugar when she brushes her nose against them. They do not move, and she thinks that maybe this is dead too.
And it's not until she plucks a berry between her teeth and taste the sweetness, that she starts to think that this is something more than death. Something terrible. Because only terrible things feel like home.
STAFF EDIT***
@thana has rolled a 3!She has found a strange, iridescent feather that may come in handy later... This item will grant your character an advantage in a future RE! Please message @sid or @nestle with questions.
She had ignored the tales of the island on the southern coast, let slip the whispers that drifted through her ears and dismissed them as nothing - but she can no longer. At her back is the chaos that is Raum and Solterra, rife with death and threatening to crumble. She left it there to fester along with her growing hunger for the blood of the crown; there was a yearning inside her now, a seeping desire to once again betray her falsely accepted duty to the king’s rotting throne. Politics, after all, never really suited a Davke.
For now, however, Avdotya let stew her lust for violence. It was the island now that lay in her sights, frozen still like a statue and yet so fully surrounded by movement and life. She watched it from afar, standing quietly upon the shore with her molten eyes trained steadily upon the sky and the sun’s peculiar placement... it did not move, did not follow its typical path as guided by Solis. There was something incorrect here, something so against the nature of the world that it unsettled her enough to have drawn her closer.
Her hooves carried her slowly, over the bridge that crossed over motionless sea and onto a land that she half-expected to snap at her heels. This is not right, the viper thought to herself. The sand did not cushion her steps, the beach grass did not sway and the seabirds did not glide over ocean breeze. It was wrong. Whatever magic it was that lived here, whatever spell that held every particle in place, it simply didn’t feel okay. For a moment, Avdotya questioned her decision to leave her desert home behind... but there was no sense in leaving after coming so far.
And so the woman merely observed. She remained close to the bridge, at least for now, and watched as others ventured deeper into the trees towards the island’s core where Solis’ sun was so keenly fixed. Perhaps the ground would swallow them whole, if the stories were true.
Anandi does not care about the disappearances or the deaths. But she cares about eating, and one day all the food is gone. Small cats, big cats, bushy-necked squirrels, green-eyed mice, a thousand types of birds, razor-toothed geese– they’re all gone. Even the reef fish that surrounded the island, vanished just like that. Eden, gone to rot in the blink of an eye.
And don’t get her started on the sun. That gaudy, pompous eyesore, showboating around like it was a fucking parade.
Hunger forces her to leave the cool cover of the ocean. The sun merrily wicks the water from her skin (pervert) and within a matter of minutes all that’s left of the sea is Anouk (pressed carefully to the shaded curve of her stomach) and grainy flecks of salt in Anandi’s skin.
“I don’t like this Anandi,” Anouk flutters against the kelpie’s stomach in concern. “No shit,” Anandi retorts with a snort. She is too displeased to put her face together, and a hangry scowl paints a mean streak across her otherwise pleasant features. “I’m sorry, Anouk. I’m just hungry. Let’s see if we can find something to eat, yeah?” She presses forward into the jungle, even though it is silent as a crypt.
When Ipomoea asked Mateo to be his eyes and ears, the young pegasus had taken the task very seriously. Perhaps exceedingly so. Although he had left once to investigate the strange bridge everyone was talking about, he quickly returned to Delumine and remained there ever since. It seemed to him a very noble sacrifice, to set aside his curiosity and scholarly interest in order to keep watch over Dawn Court and its proceedings.
But– nothing was happening in Delumine. And nothing continued to happen.
So when the sun stopped moving, Mateo made the decision to lay aside his sworn duty and investigate the island. It was by no means an easy decision to make– he fretted about it for many hours, waiting anxiously for the sun to keep turning so that he may turn his attention back to the very slow proceedings of the Northwestern court.
But no, the sun did not budge. Something was terribly wrong, and Mateo could no longer sit idly by. So he began the flight south. With every flap of his wings, a strange thing began to happen. The closer he got to the mystery, the more his guilt faded. And in its place, excitement shyly bloomed.
STAFF EDIT***
@mateo has rolled a 4! He has been awarded +200 signos.
He could not explain exactly what he was experiencing or why, but it was like what he imagined poison to feel like as it crept along your veins. It was a very heavy darkness, a leaden-limbed rot, but it was not in him. It was in the island.
“You feel that?” He asks Isra. The answer is in her eyes as she looks at him, all glorious and wicked and– and righteous glee. The weapon in her sharpens to a fine point and longs for something to sink into. (He knows. He feels it too, although with far more trepidation.)
Then they begin to hear stories. Deaths, disappearances. The earth opening up and swallowing horses whole. And then the sun stops. The sun stops and he knows they’re playing a whole new game now, and the stakes are much higher.
Two stars higher.
“Love,” he says as softly as he can, thinking this might be a thing she does not want to hear: “I think you should go.” He nuzzles her belly, feels the twin stars that smile in their warm briny sleep.
It hurts to say you instead of we– how long ago was it that he said he was going home with her? Days? Hours? Somehow he lost track, in the haze of love and magic and wonder. But he knows he can’t leave yet. There are people here that might need him– Asterion and Moira and Seraphina. Solterrans (rebels and traitors alike). Denoctians too now.
(and, selfishly, he wants to see what mysteries the island has left to offer)
“I’ll be home–” he does not even think of how that word, and how easily it slips out, sounds a little like traitor. He’s too busy thinking of the next word, which he wants to be soon, but he won’t make a promise he can’t keep– not again. So the word dies in his throat before it ever lives. Instead he just nods.
He knows she'll understand. It still feels like another heaviness, another betrayal, one of what is becoming many.
"I'll be home."
@Isra ugh PLEASE excuse this I just need a few more signos for baby
STAFF EDIT***
@Eik has rolled a 5! He has been awarded +300 signos.
She moves like a stranger on the earth. How many horses had she passed, staring into the sky, inspecting all the million things that should be moving. This was a world made for motion, not stillness.
No longer do the trees groan. No longer does the sun drift in her arc across the sky. There is nothing normal this endless day. All is more silent than it should ever be. All the world is held photograph still.
Animals are statues, the sea a sculpture made more of rock than anything she has ever known. Oh, what parody is this?
Her bells chime in her hair and that sound reverberates, it echoes and echoes for there is no sound to match it. She steps through frozen grasses, beneath birds immortalized as they reach out for flight.
Time has no meaning here, or, maybe, it has too much meaning.
Leto thinks of a bowl and blood and a king who had already denounced the gods. They were alone, they were alone – yet this, this felt the closest to god-like than Novus has ever been before. This is the wicked games the gods played and with every step she takes, with every new, frozen discovery she makes, her lips grow tighter, her teeth pressed more firmly together.
If this is a god’s work, then they are no god of hers.
| "speaks" | notes: table 2/2!! this was super fun to make
STAFF EDIT***
@Leto has rolled a 3!She has found a strange, iridescent feather that may come in handy later... This item will grant your character an advantage in a future RE! Please message @sid or @nestle with questions.
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
She wonders what it would be to be frozen.
She wonders how many hours it has been since the day simply… stopped.
Minya wonders whether the day might ever end. Her limbs ache, her bones ache, her eyelids are heavy with exhaustion. Yet the sun burns brightly, it does not waver and night does not come.
The Denocte girl roams, as if she might find some hint of what time it truly is. Is it midnight yet? Her body aches for sleep, but that sky is brighter than bright. Daytime is cruel when the body craves only darkness.
There is a tree, its bough great as it leans over the grasses at its feet. Nothing stirs and the shadow is generous. Exhausted, her body confused, Minya lies down at its roots. Her silver eyes gaze wantonly at the sun – they are eyes made only for the moon. Will it ever rise again?
Weary, with sunlight dappling through the shade, Minya falls into a restless sleep.
STAFF EDIT***
@Minya has rolled a 3!She has found a strange, iridescent feather that may come in handy later... This item will grant your character an advantage in a future RE! Please message @sid or @nestle with questions.
