Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
The river, the wildest part of Delmuine with its slippery, jagged rocks and its banks that plunge into almost waterfalls, it not as wild as Thana. Perhaps it's obvious in the way little half-moon crescents of blood bloom like flowers where she steps among the current. Or perhaps it's only the way the coyotes and the deer lining the banks only pause to lift their heads at her, still as stone but for the quickening of their breathes.
Maybe it's only the way the river, chaotic and furious, only seems an extension of the darkness lingering in her gaze like a parasite instead of a look.
On either side of her the forest sits, heavy with blackness and a quietness bred from foreboding. Somewhere there are bones, and blood, and creatures hiding in their dens praying to be saved. And somewhere between all that darkness and bone are poachers whose breaths can be counted in hours instead of days. Her eyes drift to the shore, to Eligos who follows like a distant shadow caught in the current of her war-drum heart that races, and beats, and screams at a pace far too frantic for the steady stride of her legs through the river.
It's racing now, when a form peels back from the darkness lining the place where the forest and the shore meet. And it's bellowing the same low, low, low as a whippoorwill beating against a stone in a hurricane. Thana does not need to look at her reflection distorted in the current, to know that her horn glimmers like a polished sword when she turns it to the form coming towards her.
And she does not need to look down to feel the way the water around her starts to thicken with green algae, like the river has been still for an entire time, around her hooves. She can feel it, the grotesque magic of her making, leaking into the world like blood from a mortal wound. It feels like breathing, like singing, like humming a song only she can hear.
It feels. Oh it feels. Like being god.
Look, her form seems to say, from the tip of her glimmering horn to the stain of her hooves in the water, look. Thana does not try to hide it, that glimmer of holiness, of brutality, of everything that rots a world from the inside out, when she nickers to the horse coming closer.
And even if she wanted to tuck away the violence in her core, it would be as impossible as tearing the sun down from the sky. Only the moon can do it. Only time.
tie up the lines because Ishot the albatross. But I have weathered worse storms than this.
Solis is far from here.
The darkness does not become Solis's favoured son; instead, the colour black rests like a too-large coat upon his shoulders, the cloak of a patriarch and not a boy. There is a hard edge to him in the night that is typically softened by the light of the sun, or the starlight of the too-large desert sky. The luminescent markings of his skin do not radiate their typical heat and light; instead, they resemble the precise colour of a knife’s edge, quicksilver and sharp.
In such a setting, it is not so difficult to imagine Orestes as he had once been: a shape-changer, a flesh-eater, a magic man, Prince of a Thousand Tides.
He wanders far from that life now, too. The discontent of his past roils like a ferocious thing, a starved thing. He is hungering in the woods of Delumine, aimless and uncertain. Orestes does not even understand how he has reached the river and as he stares at its bank, he wishes to take the plunge; he knows the water would take him, eventually, to the sea. If only he could find a way to become the current, to caress the waves…
It is the scattering of deer that alert him to something amiss; the strange, predatory chill that follows. He turns his eyes upriver and sees a striking silhouette. Ariel is somewhere in his mind, somewhere in the distance, and that distance is closing now. Orestes… the Sun Lion warns, but it is already too late. Orestes turns toward the strange silhouette, drawn by a longing he cannot place or name, drawn by a necessity, a want—
When she nickers he knows.
Orestes lips twitch around his teeth.
He feels her rot. Her decay. The closeness to death.
Oh, he has felt it so many times before—
Orestes lips twitch around his teeth; they pull back, drawing into a ghastly shape that remembers not the blunted molars of his new life, but something sharp, something wicked. He presses the blunt of his tongue against them. There is a nicker in the back of his throat, but the Sovereign does not succumb to the urge.
He lets the silence settle. He lets it reign.
He gives the silence it’s due.
Then he answers her with a wailing, screaming keen; the sound of a creature gutted; the sound of something dying. Ariel starts from the underbrush, but the question he would asked is never uttered. The wail continues and then cuts as sharply as it had begun.
Hello, old friend. Orestes never stopped walking. He is near enough to recognise her to the fissure-fractures of her skin, to the gleaming amethyst above her eyes, to the spiral of her horn.
He should not be here; after all, it is trespassing. He knows it. She knows it. But Orestes merely regards her, ghostlike and ancient, before he steps into the steeped pool of decay at her hooves, the stagnated water, the decay, decay, decay—
Orestes says, “If I could write a poem,” his voice does not sound like his own. “‘I would write about the forest in winter and the way everything is dead and we call it sleep...'” Orestes quotes her, the memory as fresh in his mind as if the conversation had been the day before…
But now it is night, and he stands in her dead river thinking of his dead self, wondering at what the end of this new life holds, and he cannot help but say: “If I were to write a poem tonight, it would be about how the sea is full of the dead.”
The words emerge before he can help them. There is a strange stiffness to his voice, and Orestes continues: “It would be a poem of how some of us do not deserve the sun.”How it has been branded into me, a Mark of Cain.
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
It feels like the light is only feigning dead as he comes closer wearing more than the night she's claimed. There is silence coating him too, thicker than the algae fat water around her hooves and heavy as horn upon her brow. And when she inhales it in the moment right before his call, it only tastes to her like a bitter void waiting. It tastes like the possibility of violence-- like home, oh, it tastes like home.
His call sounds like the sea, like a cry of a stag laying on the shore with his throat cut open and his life flickering faster, fainter, frantic like a dead star. Thana smiles for the sound of it, her look just as savage and just as blunted as his. And she doesn't answer back (not yet, not yet) when the dying sound dies, she only keeps her teeth bared in the silence. Perhaps it's only the look of a wolf waiting for a throat, or of a void waiting for the bellow of a falling thing.
Or perhaps she says nothing because Eligos is there snarling in echo of the siren scream He sounds like thunder in the desert-- all sand and wind and storm song. The shore rocks sing hush, hush, hush as he comes closer to the river choked by magic. Thana doesn't release her hold on it when he starts to talk about poetry. But she thinks it would be easy, to swallow back her magic like bile and let the river wash him far away from her forest.
“Something old.” She greets him but it's not the sound of her voice she can hear. It's only the hunger of her heart echoing in her ears, her bones, her magic. It roars as she closes the distance between them and brushes her nose against the pulse below his throat.
Eligos is still snarling. He has not fallen silent like the forest and the river.
Thana is still almost silent, her hungry heart an echo only she can hear, as she breathes in the desert, sea and sun of his skin. There's blood there too, she can feel it running, running, running like a stag before a rabid wolf. Her own chases after it, the wolf leaping off the cliff savoring the wind and the meal to come. She still thinks his blood would be lovelier out than in. “Do you want me to answer back tonight?” The smile on her lips turns to a dark thing, a bloody thing, a monstrous thing that wants a shadow of blood instead of river moss.
The river starts to run again. It races for the sea. Thana drags her teeth across the outer shell of his ear and whispers hush, hush, hush to him. Once he burned and she wonders if he will again. Thana prays for it as much as any savage, wild thing might pray. Like a howl at the moon, she prays.
“The sea could be full of more than the dead tonight.” She says, and when she pulls away it's to look at the quiet forest holding its breath.
Please. Eligos says like he always does and Thana does not look at him in the same way she always does when he asks. There is only violence between them, only monstrous things, and she cannot look for it it yet. Not yet.
The desert sun might not be not here tonight but monsters are.
And Thana is not sure that the sun something to be missed.
AND A GOOD SOUTH WIND SPRUNG UP BEHIND; THE ALBATROSS DID FOLLOW, AND EVERY DAY FOR FOOD OR PLAY, CAME TO THE MARINER'S HOLLO! IN MIST OR CLOUD, ON MAST OR SHROUD, IT PERCHED FOR VESPERS NINE; WHILST ALL THE NIGHT, THROUGH FOG-SMOKE WHITE, GLIMMERED THE WHITE MOONSHINE
Perhaps their meeting is inexorable. Perhaps Fate is woven in it, unavoidable, half-forgotten. Perhaps it is the remnants of all his snuffed-out, forgotten magic. That sounds right. All of Orestes’s forgotten shapes, his thousand-souled blood from another life that sends him step-by-step closer to her macabre smile. Perhaps his other-life magic seeks a place to come and die. And why not her hooves? Why not at her feet in a reeking river, glutted as if with death itself?
There is a snarling, dark creature that Orestes does not recognise but Ariel does. Stay away. The thing is of myth, rumoured up from old shepherds in the desert. The thing should not be real but somehow is, and Ariel is at the opposite bank burning as brightly as the sun. He appears abruptly from the undergrowth and casts burning-hot, too-bright light across the river. It dances across the algae bloom and transforms the dark meeting into one of stark, unforgiving light.
And that bright gold wafts over Orestes. There is a tingling in his heart, his chest, a want to let his own magic shine. Yet his own, living magic does not rise to meet it; it stays dormant in his blood, forgotten, and the luminous gold glints and catches in the stark silver of his old scars, nearly dancing. Ariel is growling, sound like thunder deep in his chest, a sound that reverberates in Orestes’s soul and begs wake up wake up wake up.
Trance like, he does not. Trance like, something old, he shakes his head. He is not the man she met before; the monsters he spoke of roil within him, a thousand incomprehensible shapes dancing beneath the dark blue of his eyes. Do you want me to answer back tonight?
It is so quiet, but her voice.
Then the river is running toward the sea—always, always, always towards the sea—and her teeth are against his ear. He braces himself against the current.
Don’t let it take you, Ariel whispers through their bond.
Please take me, Orestes thinks.
He is only a man.
He will never be “only” a man.
“What would you fill it with?” Orestes asks, and follows her eyes to look at the forest.
Solis is nowhere. But neither is any other god; and for a moment in the tangible silence Orestes wonders if it is only them, only them, and how close to monsters they really are.
@Thana
'GOD SAVE THEE, ANCIENT MARINER! FROM THE FIENDS THAT PLAGUE THEE THUS--! WHY LOOK'ST THOU SO?' WITH MY CROSS-BOW, I SHOT THE ALBATROSS
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
This is the thing her magic, her form, her furious rage is made for. Perhaps the cursed and poisoned magic poured infected sea-water into her blood. Perhaps there is nothing more than barnacles floating aimlessly around in her veins seeking for a surface that is not rotten to roost on. Thana feels like she's made of more than cells when she presses against him, like she's made of a million cracks besides the two white ones cleaving a storm through her bloody flesh.
She wonders if like the magic she can corrupt, remake, and devour the world to feel like something more than alone.
The rush of the lion's too-warm too-bright light shakes something loose in Thana, or maybe it only gnaws at a noose tied around her magic. She doesn't pause to think about the instinct (or maybe it's want only disguised as this violent need) that makes her bring her teeth to his cheek. Nor does she wonder at the lash of that loose thing in her that tells her over and over again, consume, consume, consume. Thana only listens like a wild thing listens to the silver moon, or a wolf listens to the call of a distant pack. Eligos is listening too and perhaps it's only his call that she's hearing.
“Your blood perhaps, if it suits you. But not your body.” She says the words with teeth, drags them along his scars glimmering slick and silver like scales. The loose thing is still roaring in her, driving her, splitting apart the bits of her that felt lost, then found, then loved. Nothing in her feels whole, not with the sun flaring against her sides making her froth like a monster that's been running for hours, not with the flesh beneath her lips promising something sweet like surrender. Hadn't she heard it in his call, in the way that even now there is the sea under his dust and sunshine?
And if the magic, the rage, the rot wasn't rattling in her bones (a siren song of her own, so unlike his and so similar) she would have asked him if the sea would welcome his blood.
Instead she only traces the hollow of cheek where it meets his neck. He feels like fire underneath her touch, furious heat that makes all her winter death feel like pins and needles beneath her skin. She traces the underside of his neck and her heart flutters at the feel of his buried pulse against her lips. It flutters like a poison leaf at the touch of a butterfly's wing, like hunger. “Not this.” Thana says the last as she nips the of his chest, that thin layer of flesh protecting his heart (thin enough that her horn begs for the feel of it). For a moment she remains there, waiting, teeth aching beneath her flesh. For him to answer the question she never thought to ask.
And if she knew he was looking for monsters in their skin, she would have cut herself open with the tip of her own blade and whispered look to him like a poem writ by eternity.
AND A GOOD SOUTH WIND SPRUNG UP BEHIND; THE ALBATROSS DID FOLLOW, AND EVERY DAY FOR FOOD OR PLAY, CAME TO THE MARINER'S HOLLO! IN MIST OR CLOUD, ON MAST OR SHROUD, IT PERCHED FOR VESPERS NINE; WHILST ALL THE NIGHT, THROUGH FOG-SMOKE WHITE, GLIMMERED THE WHITE MOONSHINE
Your blood perhaps, if it suits you. But not your body.
There is a stark contrast of light and dark, life and decay. Ariel burns, and burns, and burns and Thana’s teeth at Orestes's cheek are a memory and a searing pressure. He has been here before and it feels, strangely, as if he will be here again. Perhaps he will be here endlessly, suspended in a moment that feels as hollow as everything he was meant to become.
He could never could have imagined himself in a river with no salt, with only dreams of the sea, yet there is none of it left in him. Only sand, and the running of an hourglass.
Not this. And her teeth claim the flesh just above his heart. He closes his eyes and the thing that floods him is not relief, but remorse.
Ariel’s light wanes. The Sun Lion dims the violent glow and watches cautiously, apprehensively, the two horses. An older part of him, archaic and beyond the language of mortals, understands what Thana is by knowing the nightmare of her bonded. There is a delicate tension, however, that Ariel does not wish to disturb—and so he watches in the renewed concern, a glint of polished gold in the darkness.
Orestes pulls away from Thana at the same moment Ariel quits burning, stepping forward and up into the current. It buffets his legs; it rushes against his chest and washes from him the imprint of her teeth at his chest, the memory of their feel. Yet the memory of it lingers in the way an echo might, fading even as its heard, dissipating even as its felt.
“Why do you stay among us?” he asks at last. He does not look at her. He stares up the river and wonders where the source of it might be; he wonders if he followed it far enough, if any memory of the sea would fade and he would be left with clear mountain springs. Orestes asks it as if she has a choice; Orestes asks it as if there is somewhere else she might go.
And that night, far from the sun, far from his Court, he thinks if there were a chance he might go as well, if she were to extend a metaphorical hand, if she were to say because I have been waiting for you to be ready to leave and for a moment, brief, aching with a tremendous burden... he would. Orestes would slough the world from his shoulders as Atlas never had and say enough, enough, enough. Orestes is in his inaction provokes Ariel into action; the Sun Lion wades into the river and crosses it. His eyes, like small suns, are on Eligos. They burn and burn; and if the other feline is darkness incarnate, violence incarnate, suffering incarnate, Ariel is his opposite. Ariel is the guardian, the keeper, of the dunes; he is daylight and dreaming and nobility, the blood of warrior's, the golden center of what Solterra is meant to be. He draws his teeth back, dripping water; he feels the press of something tremendous, something unstable, and Orestes
is turning to look over his shoulder at the unicorn that reminds him of all the deaths he's died. He knows she is Dawn's Champion of Battle; when the word reached him there was nothing he could do but be surprised. She does not belong in this Court with it's greenery and kindness. There is something possessive in him, something that wants to say you belong with me in the desert, in a place that does not wilt at your touch. He doesn't say it, however, because he doesn't even understand why he wants to.
Instead in a voice as raw as bleeding flesh Orestes asks, "What do you do with the emptiness of knowing you will never belong?" Because he, too, no longer belongs. He, too, is rent open from everything he was meant to be and will never become. Another world away, everything he ever loved is broken, Bound, and Lost even to him, even to his memory, to his heart;
all that remains is an abyss.
A place, a scar, where there was once something
and now
nothing.
@Thana
'GOD SAVE THEE, ANCIENT MARINER! FROM THE FIENDS THAT PLAGUE THEE THUS--! WHY LOOK'ST THOU SO?' WITH MY CROSS-BOW, I SHOT THE ALBATROSS
Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;
Thana knows she should feel something when he steps deeper into the river to wash the echo of her teeth from his skin. There should be something there, turning over behind her eyes like wings over the wind, to see the water dip into the hollow of his chest and race against his legs like they are roots instead of an echo of desert sand pretending to be real. Part of her thinks it should be regret: a hollow ache or perhaps an echo of a hurt almost forgotten enough to lose its sharpness. Another part of her things it should be rage: a bellowing hurt that he would let the water wipe him clean instead of the tip of her horn.
She does not follow him into the current. Only her eyes follow him, tracing the pale echoes of sunlight scarring his cheeks where the water does not reach.
Eligos watches the lion with that same look: almost regret, almost rage, almost hunger. If they are two sides of a coin he is the heaviest, weighted down with all the parts of the desert everyone tries not to see. He is the monsters beneath the dunes, the bloated tunnels full of bones that have been filled in by sand. He is every echo of the murdering king that starved an entire culture. For each tooth that the lion bares, a beast is formed by the sand.
And each says, in the way of rage shaped into form, where were you god-creature when the world was burning? Because Eligos knows he was made, was formed, the only one of his kind, by the stone-hard weight of each moment in which no one came to save the suffering and end the violence.
His snarl still echoes above the river. What need does a monster have for almost-tender moments between a king and an immortal?
When he asks her why, Thana only blinks at him slow as a monster waking up into the first light of day. Behind her teeth, salted as seed on her tongue, is the name Ipomoea begging to taste the air. And for a moment Thana is about to tell him, this king with his skin begging to be shed. For a moment she wants to let him carry the weight of it, how each bit of her soul is heavier by the day as it reforms (how it makes her angry, and settled, and like a comet each night).
For a moment she wishes for the desert canyon and the screaming hawk.
For a moment she wishes for the feel of her horn across his neck, for the whisper of magic leeching out from his blood.
The name on her tongue dies beneath the weight of her teeth, guarded and tucked away like a secret buried with all the bone tunnels in the sand. Like a forgotten treasure only the gods know. Thana pulls away, back to the shore with Eligos who is still begging the lion to come closer.
She lays her nose against a golden horn, breathes in the violence. And still she does not stop watching the king washing away her touch. In the fur of her bonded she smiles, a sharp-tooth grin as hungry as the looks of the lion and the monster. She pulls away with the smell of the desert thick enough to taste, even here in the forest Eligos cannot wash the desert from his fur.
Thana aches with the need to step closer to something old, to carve out the bits of him that are begging for freedom. “I cut out the emptiness.” She says he words to bury the ache as she turns away. But before she dissolves back into her forest, she looks over her shoulder just once at him.
The look she gives him is a weighted thing, like stones begging to be tied to legs and returned to the sea. It's hot too, molten, when she whispers just barely loud enough to rise over the racing of the river. “And when you're ready I can cut it out of you too.” Thana leaves, the trail of rot painting infinity patterns on the shore the only sign she was there at all.
With a final snarl Eligos follows, leaving their forest to the remnants of the desert. For now.
THE SEA DISSOLVES SO MUCH AND THE MOON MAKES AWAY WITH SO MUCH MORE THAN WE KNOW--ONCE THE MOON COMES DOWN AND THE SEA GETS HOLD OF US CITIES DISSOLVE LIKE ROCK-SALT AND THE SUGAR MELTS OUT OF LIFE
Orestes will always go back into the water; always, always. Even now the touch of it against soothes away his hurts, placates his mind. If he were to die here, if her horn were to pierce his flesh or her rot were to reach his heart, Orestes would float back to the sea; and although the thought fills him at once with a kind of poignant regret it also meets him with relief, with assurance.
Ariel would have liked to ask, why are you thinking so much of death? but the answer to that question is present in the form of a mahogany mare and her companion borne of suffering and suffering alone. Ariel’s chest resounds with the beating of his heart and again, brilliant and furious, he begins to shine like the sun. A part of him wishes to challenge this creature of lore and darkness, what do you expect of the desert, if not a suffering like no other?—
and Orestes only spares a glance, nearly disapproving, at the Sun Lion that rages enough for all of them against the darkness of the light. He feels deeply envious of his bonded, for a moment, and the vivaciousness with which he shines, the righteousness with which he lives—if only it were all so simple, so black and white.
She does not answer his question at first, and the pain of waiting is far worse than the pain of any blood she has ever drawn. His eyes follow her, imploring, and her movement to the shore opens up a loneliness in him so deep Orestes does not know if he will recover—
then, at last,
I cut out the emptiness.
He cannot know the name on the tip of her tongue. Orestes cannot know the thing that staves off the abyss; he can only watch as she begins to turn away, into the forest.
Ariel’s snarl continues to rip the air like tearing cloth; it intensifies when the woman glances back, just a single time.
“And when you’re ready I can cut it out of you too.”
Orestes is left in the silence of her resounding words, and Ariel’s fading fury. After several endless seconds, the only sound are the forest, and the river that berates him. Orestes wants to follow her; he wants to demand more; he wants to know exactly what she means, even with already knowing it.
And when you’re ready I can cut it out of you too.
He hears it again, and again, and again and the more it repeats the more he hears the phrase,
I can’t die so far from the sea.
Orestes no longer knows who said it to him, or why it matters; perhaps it was even his own voice. He stands there for a small eternity; he stands there until the press of water is almost too much, is almost enough to drag him away. And then, fatigued, he presses from the river and onto the bank where his companion waits. He leans into Ariel’s side; and after a pause, the lion begins to lead him from the forest, along the winding river, back toward their desert home.
The encounter has left him feeling no more resolve, or certainty; only a gaping absence, a reminder of what it feels like to be lost. He finds an irony, as he reflects, that this encounter had him bearing questions for her. The last time it had been the other way, the last time she had asked him and as the horizon breaks, as the darkness seeps from the sky and his beloved Solis returns, so to does the poem he finished for her—
It is a great stag running and running in a beautiful forces, with dusk fading upon the horizon. Everything is blue, soft, cold. Everything is still except the deer that is running so fast, so elegant. There is a wolf at its heels but you hardly see it against the foliage; it is a blur, not a shape, as the stag bounds endless and graceful. The wolf fades back, away from the deer’s heels, and as you watch the sun edges the end of the world and the stag leaps toward safety—but as he leaps the forest comes alive, and a wolf that was in the shadow leaps to meet the stag just as he believes himself free from the jaws of death, just as the light of the fading day fills his eyes, just as he reaches the brilliant pinnacle of survival, of tomorrow, of life. It feels like the moment the stag leaps and sees from the corner of his eye his own death; he thinks, I made it, but even as he feels the truth of that thought he knows the truth of his fate.
Orestes no longer knows if he is the stag, or the wolf, or the moment in between.
@Thana || I LOVE HER SO MUCH ALWAYS and your characters always give mine development so thanks for a lovely thread <3
IRON WASHES AWAY LIKE AN OLD BLOOD-STAIN, GOLD GOES OUT INTO A GREEN SHADOW, MONEY MAKES EVEN NO SEDIMENT AND ONLY THE HEART GLITTERS IN SALTY TRIUMPH OVER ALL IT HAS KNOWN, THAT HAS GONE NOW INTO SALTY NOTHING
