[P] cipher at the sign

[Maret]

The festival was ending. It might even be over now, as the sun struggled to rise over a cloudy sky and the last of the performers packed up their bags and left the stage. The Night Court was falling into a lull, streets deserted aside from a few remaining stragglers, litter and torn lanterns and crushed letters and forgotten scarves decorating the cobblestone streets.

Everyone else had gone home, or was gone home. But not Maret.

The festival was over - but this was her favorite part. She stood alone in the streets, chin lifted defiantly towards the rising sun as if determined to prevent the morning from ruining her night of fun. A nearby streetlight bathed her shoulders in yellow, and she stood there within its embrace as if it was a spotlight made for her and for her alone.

Of course, she was not supposed to be alone. But she figured she had a decent bit of time left before her father found her again. Denocte was a big city after all. Big to her especially, being the scrawny foal that she still is.

She watches a couple stagger down the street past her, leaning heavily on each other’s shoulders for support. In the instant before they disappear into the fog, they look so much like a pair of ghosts out for a stroll that Maret can hardly bring herself to look away. 

The clouds held back the sun -

The couple fades away but her eyes are still searching the shadows for them, her heart racing inside of her chest. She lifts one hoof, small and black, sets it back down, unable to stand still but unwilling to move.

So that they could walk together,
if only for one more minute -

The words are racing through her mind now, even once she can no longer see the specters.

The eyes glaze once, grey -

“Does anybody have a quill?” she interrupts herself. Her voice is too loud, too bright, but she doesn’t notice. A nearby street vendor looks up from his wares, glances in her direction. He makes a scoffing sound at her, shooing her away, and goes back to his work. This too, she does not notice. Not when the words are still swimming through her mind, obscuring her vision in streaks of ink that is flowing, flowing, flowing -

“Or paper?” Does anyone bother to look up? They are all ghosts now, grey in the gloom, mist and the morning, and the words won’t stop.

“Anybody?”

Not for the first time, she’s afraid that her own words might kill her before she ever gets the chance to write them down. 


"Speaking."

---

@avesta

❋

[Avesta]

avesta
the sun shines low and red across the water,


The promise of snow in the air, and the rose glow of light above the roofs of her city, should have her turning for home. Almost everyone else has gone and the once wild night has been settling into slumber for hours now. Nothing about the dawn, about the silence, should make her feel as wild as it. It feels like her skin is burning, like the silence is made of a hundred of her mother's arrow and each is as wanting as she always it. At her side Foras can feel it too, the tingle at the tips of his fur and the way the earth begs to be explored at the points of his claws.

Each of them feels like they are dragons caught in a cage and all they want is freedom, and air, and fury. Neither of them sees the beauty in the hush, or the couple dissolving into the fog. They can only see the way the silence is begging for something to fill it, the way it's quieter than the sea, the way it is praying for chaos.

They both see the girl in the golden glow.

They see the defiance in the curl of the neck. Avesta turns to go to her with Foras walking in her shadow like another ghost waiting to dissolve into soot and fog. That same fog curls around her hooves and she imagines that it's begging to be remade into something else, something alive, something ready to become anything she wishes it to be. The curl of her own neck is just as defiant. It has to be to carry her horn at just the right angle (like she's debating on running the world through with it).

She hardly pauses at the girl's voice. Avesta is too distracted by the way the merchant tries to quiet her down and rush the other girl off the street. The sight of it sparks that vicious part of her, the part that is all her mother. It starts to smolder. She pauses in a shadow to settle the part of her that's starting to promise wildfire.

And of course she pauses to wake up a scrap of paper and a quill left behind from a poet who had dreamed of fame last night. Her sister could have told her the story behind both, she could has told Avesta what each wanted to be.

Aspara and not here and Avesta wakes them up anyway.

They follow in her wake like faithful hounds following their master into the hunt. And when she finally makes it to the girl and joins her in that golden glow of the coming morning, the paper and the quill dance like defiant hawks above their heads. Each looks like it never wants to be a quill or a paper in the dirt again and Avesta cannot blame them for it.

“Will these do?” Avesta smiles at her and there is something in her gaze as dark as the darkest sea. It looks--

It looks--

Primordial.

@Maret

[Maret]

It doesn’t take long. Even as one couple disappears into the fog, bodies dissipating like a cloud being torn apart by the wind, another appears.

She sees her horn first, a blade piercing the fog until water runs quicksilver down its sharp edge. And then, so pale she could almost be a cloud herself, the rest of the girl appears. And at first Maret thinks she might be a lance, or a sword, or some other weapon with a blade, because the gleam in the darkness of her eyes is something sharp. She turns to face her, but she does not see her, yet - Maret is looking past her, into the sleeping city where other ghosts are drifting, always drifting, and words are dancing around their heads, crowning them with lyrics. A thousand stories, a thousand poems, a thousand lives, and she wants to write them all.

One day, the fog whispers back to her as she stares it down, you will. And she believes it. She believes it the way she believes in the sunlight, the way it wraps around her like a cloak that was made for her and her alone. And in the same way she knows that the sun will bring it back to her come the morning, she knows too that when a cloud pauses to speak, she must also pause to listen. 

Only then does she look at the moonbright girl and her wolf, at the paper and the quill she offers. 

"They will." It doesn’t sound like her own voice speaking, as the scrap of paper and the quill still dripping with ink reach out for her. But even as the words are leaving her mouth, the quill begins to dance across the page, across the water stains and the tears as if they don’t even exist.

"They will -" the scratch of the point against the paper is reassuring, "-not go quietly into the morning, for at night is when the aritsts lift the veils from their faces and shake the dust from their instruments-"

The quill scratches away at the paper as she speaks, streaking across the page with a speed that rivals her own lips. Until it lays down with a sigh, and the paper dances an inch from her eyes. But she doesn’t read the words back to herself; Maret plucks the paper from the air, folds it once, twice, thrice. 

"I’m Maret," she tells the girl, and one day I’ll be the greatest writer who ever lived, she does not say, although the words are already there, written in the sharp and hungry planes of her face. And for just a moment, she considers what her poem might look like hanging from the end of the night girl’s horn. 


"Speaking."

---

@avesta

❋

[Avesta]

avesta
the sun shines low and red across the water,


When the scratch of the quill on the paper starts to sound like the shush, shush, shush of the sea Avesta closes her eyes. The sound carries her away more than the words. Something about the girl's voice reminds her of the shore, endless. And it could be endless against the crash of her when she opens her eyes to really watch the way the girl  is here and not here all at once. Avesta wonders at it, as much as she wonders how she would feel to be a part of two worlds instead of ones.

Maybe later, she thinks. Everything is later now, tethered by the youth caging her in her sea-storm soul.

At her side Foras is listening too, but he's hearing the words instead of the sound. It's all strange to him anyway and the fog is calling, calling, calling to him like the woods. Maybe later, he thinks at the same time as Avesta, but it's blood he's thinking about. Blood and hunger, things that girls will learn to love after their moment, their first moment, has settled and passed.

“Does anyone ever go quietly?” Avesta knows she wouldn't. She's too much a storm-girl to do anything quietly. If the girl can see it in her gaze, the hunger, the thing too like the sea to be in a look, she does not pause to worry about it. And there is a moment (always moments) when the girl tucks the poem away, that she thinks about taking it back. She didn't put it back to sleep and it's her paper now, hers to shape into anything, even something larger than a poem. But she lets the girl keep her poem--- for now.

The distance between them is an easy thing to take. It's gone with a single step and a touch of nose against cheek. A touch that's half seeking, half wondering. Avesta wonders what's different in their blood to make one of them a poet and the other a god. Fable flies overhead, lowing at the sea and a ship, and she stops wondering. It's all in the sea, and the storm, and the wraith at her heels closer than her shadows. “I'm Avesta.” And she doesn't say, and I will master all of this, but it's in the sharp tip of her horn that's an echo to everything unsaid in Maret's face.

It's all in the blood and the moments. Avesta already knows it, and she wonders if Maret does too.

@Maret

[Maret]

She doesn’t think twice before folding the paper away. Maret doesn’t stop to ask if it wants to be anything more than a dead poem, locked away in her bedside drawer. But it shivers all the while, the sound of dry paper sounding so much like wings that she might have set it free then to fly off into the ocean, if the girl hadn’t been there to watch.

"In Denocte, never," The people, the sea, the dragons - even here, even now with the festival winding down and the sky lightening in the east and all the people falling exhausted, drunken, careless into their beds. Everywhere Maret turned there was life and the living, even the ghosts disappearing into the fog seemed more real to her here than they would have in Delumine. Even the ocean crashing on the black sand shores sounded hungrier, angrier, wilder than the same ocean lapping quietly on the beach back home.

Maret had thought she was loud, when she was in Delumine. But she had not known then how much louder the rest of the world could be.

"But in Delumine it's all anyone ever does. And it’s always quiet." And only for a moment, she wonders if she had been born here, instead, if she might have learned how to be as alive as the paper that flutters sorrowfully against her skin. Or if Avesta might have grown up knowing only longing, never doing, never creating, if she had come from the other end of the world (because to Maret, Delumine and Denocte are as much on opposite ends of the earth as two courts could be.)

But the thought is only fleeting, gone the moment the sea air tousles her hair like an old friend teasing her. 

She wants to whisper Avesta’s name against her skin, just to see if it tastes as primitive as it sounds. She wants to know just how sharp the girl’s horn is, and if all unicorns are so good at taking because everyone knows not to say no to a woman with a blade. She wants to ask a thousand questions so that she can write about her later, and not just as the girl who teaches a pen how to dance. She might have, if her heart wasn’t already choking her with every disturbed stutter, leaping higher and higher in her chest until she can feel it in her throat - and the only words that come to her would only describe what it feels like to suffocate. And she has to wait until her blood starts to settle again before she can trust herself to speak instead of gasp for a.

"Everyone says Denocte is the city of dreams," she doesn't know if she wants to look at her horn or her eyes or her pearls or her wolf; all of it looks like moonlight to her, breaking through the fog like there had never been enough room for a cloud to block the cloud. "Do you ever dream of the quiet too, or is it only ever the stars?"

"Speaking."

---

@avesta

❋