Denocte reminds him of the sea. It is full of things there are not words for; it is dark and deep and dangerous, a twisting thing with magic at its root, at its core, and he thinks the only reason I am unafraid of the mountains, of the plains, of the cliffs, of the shore, is because all of it existed beneath the ocean before. There is dancing and music and the smell of spices, strange, exotic. In all of his lives he has never lived this, and the crowd breaks around him as though he is nothing but a stone in a current.
Moira told him it is a Harvest Festival; that is why there are tents erected outside of Denocte’s walls, and bonfires rage larger than usual, as though each one is a small sun. She had let him explore and he does this with the feverish curiosity of a child experiencing something for the first time. Vendors offer him spiced cakes and honeyed wine and he takes them for small prices; there is a young girl selling a necklace made of seashells and opal and she loops it twice around his neck, so that the largest of the shells hits at the center of his chest. A violin is reaching into the night, above the crowd, and the sound is a mournful cry—higher, and higher, and higher, and he thinks of a lone whale calling into the deep, waiting for a song to answer.
He explores the markets thoroughly, and sees in the distant the reaching masts of ships. Their sails, tightly wound, are surrender-white against the night sky. He wonders where they go, but the asking breaks his heart, and so he does not ask.
Instead, he drifts, and there are children and beautiful girls with suave eyes and men who laugh robustly, loudly, and he thinks how beautiful. The slickness of the crowd, the close intimacy of the markets, it almost reminds him of his people. But there is no salt in the air, no blood, and the night is too warm. The proximity is not close enough and a part of him misses the intimacy, briefly, fiercely. It used to be he did not know where they ended and he began—there was always someone against his side, his front, reassuring and there and alive.
Someone catches his eye, but unintentionally. It is an insignificant moment of contact, of two strangers glancing at one another in a crowd. Brief. Transient. So ephemeral he thinks he imagines it, almost, almost, if the imprint did not linger within him as if he had stared instead at hot coals—
They are Khashran eyes. Too green. She wears an emerald sash and is gone as though she had never been there.
That is not enough for Orestes. He breaks through the crowd. He might have even cried, “Wait!” but he does not. The Prince is uncertain what holds his tongue. Something awakens in him. Something forgotten, something slumbering, and for a brief moment he remembers what it is like to hunt.
The feeling is gone, but his body still moves, instinctual. He cuts through the crowd with the utilitarian purpose of a falcon, or wolf, or stallion. The sash taunts him, fluttering around corners with the pearlescent cream of her tail. Bright, bright. It catches the firelight as though enchanted, and he pursues with an unabashed curiosity. He takes the corner and arrives at an alleyway, where she stands before a Solterran-style building. He is at a loss, and says, as she prepares to enter—is that a card, catching the light?— "Wait, please!”
Presuming she had, he trots forward into the flickering torches. He does not need them. The excitement of the chase has magic coursing through him, and his tattoos radiate brilliant gold. So does his skin. Light pours through him, as if he were lit from within. He catches himself laughing, a little breathless, with disheveled hair falling into his eyes. “I’m sorry—it’s just… Your eyes. They’re beautiful.”
He knows she is no Khashran.
But he believes in no accidents.
@Aghvani | "speaks" | notes: LOL for the sake of liquid time... this happens after his thread with Moira when she takes him to Night to experience the Festival? But before the audition/meeting thread.
ghavni walks along the plain dirt path that divides town from market, cleanly, like a row of neat stitches. Fallen leaves from the oak trees dotting the path crinkle beneath her hooves but don't crumble; the morning rain shower has fed them with enough moisture to keep them soft. Dead, yet clinging still to the echoes of life.
The air is cold and humid, and puddles litter the ground. She skirts around a particularly large one, and spots a trio of lace-gowned girls giggling into their fans. They look about her age, their cheeks plump with youth and glowing with nurtured vanity. Jewels hang off their sleek ears in twos and threes, held together by links of silver. Polish coats their hooves, and kohl dusts their lashes. One of them, clothed in fashionable scarlet, pauses mid-laugh to glance at her, in the demure, hungry way of new money.
Aghavni is old, old money. Insouciance is forged into her bones like copper into brass, the gold draped along her neck priceless in its facade of blasé simplicity. They say all aristocrats are the same—that money corrupts them all, equally.
For those who have never held it, Father once told her, all gold weighs the same. The newly rich hide their corruption behind charitable smiles and provisioned trusts and orphanages bearing bronze plaques of their names. But us?
We become it, she'd interrupted. If the world believes you corrupt, why pretend anything different?
She remembers being almost flippant in her tone; her philosophy sound, and perhaps even meant, but meant the way children do when they announce aspirations in becoming a playwright, or a mercenary, or a traveling gypsy. But her father had looked at her with a rawness in his gaze that had startled her, the hollowness of his crimson eyes filling with what she now knew to be regret.
In another life, perhaps she would've greeted the girls. Giggled behind her own fan (steel-reinforced even then, she likes to think), hunger in her eyes and comfort in her smile.
She slips past, silent, her steps smothered by damp, clinging moss. It is not that type of life. She knows that the girl's night-smudged eyes will glide past the scarab tattoo on her hip and widen in shock. She knows that her fan will then flutter not to mask delight, but to tremble fear. It's her! she will hiss, to her sisters. And without naming a name, they will dip their heads together and shudder, three lace gowns rippling in sync.
The Night Market looms upon her almost before she knows it. She is distracted, tonight. More than usual. Her eyes smart at anything glittering, avert imperceptibly away from the exposing glow of the spherical, seaglass lanterns. Shadows in lieu of kohl smudge her eyes dark. Make the green of them unholy and strange, like flickering witch light, or the glow of her mother's emerald when sunlight pierced it through.
Sleep has eluded her like a sly lover for more than a week. Teasing and teasing, then pulling away when her grasp shot out to catch it, desperately wanting. Her scarf catches on the corner of a booth, and she yanks it free. The crowds part before her, not readily, but because she slips past when it blinks. There is not a corner of this starlit city she does not know, and on nights like these, she wants to believe it knows her just as much.
She does not notice she is being followed.
Her hooves echo through the streets, click a familiar rhythm up the White Scarab's steps. She fishes in the folds of her scarf for her card, and breathes out when she feels its cool edges, worn soft by use. The obsidian beetle buzzes open its wings in greeting when the card touches its shell, and the door swings open—
"Wait, please!" She startles, a stutter in her heartbeat, a widening of wide green eyes. The card flutters down the steps. "We—"are not yet open. Her mouth shapes the words, but the boy—she is looking at him now, at his ocean eyes and glowing tattoos and rumpled, quicksilver hair, and she has never before been dazed but this, she thinks, must be it—speaks again.
“I’m sorry—it’s just… Your eyes. They’re beautiful.” Shock registers slowly in her brain. She lodges her shoulder into the door before it clicks shut. ...What?
"Oh," she says. Then, "Do you think so?" Her head tilts wonderingly. She cannot help but laugh! She has inherited her mother's laugh; nightingale-sweet, and lovelier in the night. "No one has ever come here just to tell me that." Her laugh fades into a wry grin. How bold he was, saying such things. She had almost stuttered.
Candlelight gilds her hair in filmy gold as she says, blinking languidly: "Come in. I think it's about to rain."
Orestes does not mean to startle her, and an apology blooms upon his tongue—before he can utter it, she speaks. Oh—do you think so?
Yes, he does.
He does not reaffirm it but he laughs when she does, and his laughter is as beautiful as breaking glass, as run through with tragedy and light and something ringing, ringing. It is soft, nearly husky, a sea that goes shush, shush, shush in the light he imagines upon the shore. “You do,” he finds himself reaffirming, against his earlier thoughts. “And people should tell you more often.”
Orestes was not the type of man to deny himself simple pleasures, and one of those simple pleasures includes the compliments of others. To bring joy, genuine and unexpected, in places it would not otherwise belong. It was one of his great purposes—to offer unassuming happiness, brief and transient (some may even say cheap) but he feels his smile widen, widen, and then
he is just a boy
and she is just a girl,
and she invites him inside.
Orestes glances towards the sky, a gesture that is almost childlike in its abruptness. He stares at the looming clouds and can feel the humidity sticking, already, to his skin. He returns his eyes to hers with a wryness to match her smile, and just as boldly says, “If it were raining now, and if I knew your name, I would ask you to dance.”
But it is not yet raining, and he does not yet know her name. So instead Orestes trots toward her, up the Solterran steps and into the Solterran building, where he is met with the luxury he has become accustomed to seeing in his home Court. The difference is this wealth is not old, or dusty, or decaying. It is vibrant, bursting, everything in the colour of royal gemstones. Yes, Orestes thinks. There is no happenstance. He does not step further in and instead waits for her lead, captivated by her presence.
She is an enigma, and it pleases him. Orestes has not many in Novus thus far that present to him an enigma; but she wears the Night like a second skin and enters, as if it owns to her, a building that ought to be miles and miles north, in the city of the sun. There is a sharpness to her, and a softness too, and her eyes draw him in again and again. Jewel-bright, emerald-bright, and he wants to tell her the story of his people, how to them eyes were truly the window to the soul. Do you know, he wants to ask, that among the most beautiful people, green eyes are among the rarest, and they say protector, creator, balance? They say, peace, peace, peace and— the sound of so much laughter underwater, as haunting as the songs of whales.
Orestes does not say this, however. “I’m Orestes. Thank you for getting me out of the rain.” As he says it, he hears the storm break outside—and what comes is a torrent, a downpour, vicious and bitingly cold. He feels the sea closing in, but for now the candlelight keeps it away, and the memories he holds so dear of other skins and forms seem even father away, as if that is a life that belongs to dreams and dreams alone.
“Tell me about yourself? But only if you would like to.” it is a question, a request. He says it politely, gazing wide-eyed and intrigued at the decorations and how everything seems gilded in gold. The firelight catches it, and it burns and burns and burns in a way only gold can. He would know. It dances along his dapples, his glimmering tattoos, in the very same fashion. Orestes eyes are deep, and old, and young, and full of light when he says, “It is beautiful here, too.” And thinks: the candlelight has transformed her into the sun. He thinks of telling her.
But he does not,
no. He does not.
@Aghvani | "speaks" | notes: LOL for the sake of liquid time... this happens after his thread with Moira when she takes him to Night to experience the Festival? But before the audition/meeting thread.
