Novus
an equine & cervidae rpg
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Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

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Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#1


leonidas

holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.



The red sand stretched, reaching like a red blood river from edge to edge of this obscured cove. It was as if the island hid it from sight, as if this place where the terminus see pressed in had opened the island up, right down to its beating heart.

Red, red, red. 

That was all that filled the forest-boy’s gilded eyes as he drank in the arching beach. It throbbed and it rippled, blood pouring out along the river beach, out into the reaching tide of the azure sea.

Terminus was the deepest blue, nearly black where the land fell away below, deep, deep into the core of Novus. Yet as the swell pushed up along the beach, the water turned an eerie green as it ran over the crimson beach, then it shattered, white as bone - white like a curved rib - as the waves crashed upon the crimson beach.

Leonidas steps down, down upon the crimson sand that is, in fact, not sand at all. A shore of crimson flowers and weeds are what lies where golden sand should be.Yet the boy wades out, following the only channels of white surf that runs in rivulets through the red. Bones and blood Leonidas might have thought - if he were a boy older, if his eyes had seen blood and gore and tragedy.

Yet he knows nothing of the chaos of this world. He knows nothing of magic that writhes wicked and dangerous beneath the crimson. His golden antlers, sharp and fine and bright like torchlight, gleam as he lowers a tine to the crimson beach. The flowers yield to its midas touch, they part as if he is a god, they yield to reveal surf - white as bone. Then the surf is gone and the flowers swell like a wave has rolled in below them. They ripple, pushing up the beach toward the rocks. There is no white surf that Leonidas sees now. There is nothing but black scales, slick with saltwater and raw with golden sand. The black surges like a serpent slithering its way deeper. Below the crimson beach.

Suddenly more ripples appear, behind him, beside him, before him. The small boy shies back, his skin the colour of hearth grows dark as a spring shower. Sweat slicks along his coat and oh, even to a newborn boy this tastes of death. As if in answer a tentacle looms up in a hook. Its shadow casts the wild boy in dark and at once the fairy boy (with mud upon his body and vines and leaves within his hair) knows that this is the time to run.

The tentacle reaches for him as another rises from the crimson beach. Up and up it comes, a monster from the deep. He leaps, with spindly limbs and a heart surging wicked and wild at his breast. Leonidas, Midas’ woodland boy, clears the tentacles and feels their brush as his fetlocks as if they breathed upon him. He is running and leaping with his golden eyes blown wide, wide. He runs brighter than the sun and darker than the unsettling deep of a fairy wood. He laughs like a reckless thing. It is the sound of the wind in the boughs, the breeze through woodwind instruments. He spies a girl, who dares to step upon the crimson beach that dares to hunt him so. Oh, he hears the rustling flowers, the hiss of golden sands shifting as a leviathan surges after him. “Run!” The boy shouts, he laughs, he bares his teeth as feral boy’s do. He looks for stones and rocks and plucks them as he runs. He looses them behind him and they strike into the water, bullet’s loosed from a gunslinger’s weapon. Still the boy is laughing as he reaches the girl - a girl, a girl, always a girl! He thinks nothing of the boys he might play with, not when girls are all and enough and always so pretty.

Leo shouts, fearless as a lion, startled as a fearful boy. Yet he laughs as red petals splash and cling to his mahogany skin like needle-pricks of blood. “Run.” The boy urges the girl, “It is dinner time and we are both too sweet to eat.” His smile is playful and wicked as he swerves a rising black tentacle. It rears into the sky and were he older, were his wings not still unfledged, he might have risen to meet it. Yet he is just a boy and so he ducks and swerves and laughs, and laughs and laughs.

@Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: thank you for threading with him! Please bear with me whilst i work out how to write him and who he is!










Played by Offline RB [PM] Posts: 89 — Threads: 13
Signos: 185
Inactive Character
#2



stay low go fast
kill first die last


What an island this is that turns the sand red, that bleeds black water! O is thrilled, far more excited than perturbed. She races down the shore on long, nimble legs and sends up clouds of deep merlot sand that coats her with a fine dust of red like blood. (Nothing she has not felt before).

The wind rushes past her as she bends her head into it and goes running like a wild animal. The breeze is not of consequence, nor the bitter, whipping saltwater that stings her frail skin or the loud, insistent crash of her heart against her chest and the cage of her teeth. No, there is nothing to be feared—this is living, really living, on this magic island young and totally free. So when she sees him, that lithe shadow against the sea, she does not scream. She does not falter.

He is coming toward her, and behind him follows a writhing mass of pointed darkness. A monster like she has never seen. She turns her head back toward it, and in the dim starlight a hulking, twirling clump of tentacles rises up into the air and slams down again, spraying sand and saltwater high above their heads in a fine arc. O laughs, her breath catches in her chest. “Obviously,” she shouts back.

Then with the practiced hand of someone much older than herself she throws the axe.

Tuchulcha goes spinning and spinning and spinning toward the monster. This may well be the first time she has tasted real, evil blood. O watches with her heart on pause—

The god-sharpened edge of the blade slices through the thickest tentacle easy as butter. Black ooze spurts out of it, thicker and more acidic than blood. The smell of sulfur fills the air. And then the moment is past and she’s breathing again and Tuchulcha comes back to rest at her side, and she slows to let the stranger catch up at her side.




@| "speech" | notes:
rallidae | art









Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#3

I am not like any ordinary world

Obviously!


Her laughter joins his as the children join together and run fleet footed across the crimson sand. Water and sand drip from his skin like merlot wine, it drops as rubies upon the ground.


Her weapon looses and leonidas hears it sing through the air. His head turns with his running. He watches the weapon spin and curve in an arc. It reaches for one of the beast’s tentacles and cuts with a whisper. A crowing shout rips from the boys lips as delight slips white hot through his veins.


Fine boned and slender the children leap between rock and sand as the beast bleeds but does not slow. Its other arms reach, thrashing and furious for the children. Oh how Leonidas laughs, oh how he looks back with a wicked grin before he turns his sunbright gaze upon the girl who runs like a god beside him.


Blood is upon her axe, it is stark compared to the pale of her skin. She is more tan than his sister, but older, wilder, more real and earthbound. He picks up stones and turns to fling them at the monster. One upon its severed stump and more and more upon its face that rises like a mountain from the crimson sea of sand.


Slowly the monster falls away, it retreats into the sand leaving a bloody trail of carnage in its wake. Slowly Leonidas slows, looking behind him to the empty sand and then to the girl beside him. “Where did you learn to throw like that?” Awe is a spark within his voice as his gaze lingers covetously upon her weapon. It drips blood as black as night upon the ground and a shiver rocks through Leonidas young torso.


He laughs relief into the air, sharp and bright. He looks across the sand and then back to the feral girl and her wicked axe. “What are you?” He asks as he turns about her studying the slim lines of her, the way muscle builds beneath the silk of her skin. “And where did you get that?”


There are times like these when Leonidas wishes he were a better pickpocket.

@Apolonia

"Speaking."
credits










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