I SHOULD HAVE LOVED A THUNDERBIRD INSTEAD
AT LEAST WHEN SPRING COMES THEY ROAR BACK AGAIN
Oliver has set up in the city center just as the sun is beginning to set; the light has turned dusky-blue already and it drifts almost like powder through the streets, settling. Dust still catches in molten orbs; small planets drift and float, suspended by the limited rays of a sleepy sun. He has the guitar strung about his neck and, beneath him, a taunt deerskin drum. He is borrowing a girl's turquoise shawl and it is wrapped around his shoulders ornately, with tassels tangling in every colour imaginable. He waits for the lamplighter to come by; he waits for the lamps to be lit, and for Delumine’s nightlife to come alive. It is quiet when he begins to play; it is that sacred moment between gods as they meet in the sky, exchanging power. Caligo is creeping in and in the dimming light his eyes burn, amethyst fire. Oliver strums the guitar almost shyly, transitioning between folksy, almost downtrodden songs. A passerby flips a handful of coins into his open guitar case.
He gets lost happily in the music; it doesn’t matter to Oliver if someone is listening or not, simply that he plays off of Delumine’s contemplative atmosphere. He feeds off the aura of the transition; the scholars are going to their studies and their homes; and the youth of the Court are beginning to stop by the square. Always, always, Delumine feels half-asleep. Always, always, Delumine feels as if it is waiting to wake up. A couple begins to dance in front of him, briefly, and Oliver laughs aloud mid-song. They smile back and then are gone, on to something else.
Oliver loves the transition; he loves that he is a bystander creating a thousand beautiful moments for people he will never talk to. He loves the stares of those who stop to appreciate, briefly, the performance. Oliver doesn’t know how long he plays, from song to song, singing sometimes or simply playing at others. Eventually, however, something distracts him.
Then there is a a girl. A girl who deserves a song. She hangs back in a way Oliver perceives as shy, but understands isn’t. When he sees her his expression becomes mischievous with a roguish half-smile, all teeth. There is a small crowd now and the sky is dark in-between the sun disappearing and the stars rising.
Oliver’s eyes remain on the girl. The girl that opens up before him like a black hole; like an abyss. He loves adventure too much to resist the temptation of being consumed. He stops mid-song, exclaiming, “For the girl in the back…”. He immediately he transitions into something else, something different from all else that he has played; his voice rises above the small crowd to sing, bright as a bluejay:
“All the pretty girls like Samuel,
Oh, he really doesn’t share
Although it’s more than he can handle
Life is anything but fair, life is anything but fair
Oh oh, oh oh ooh
Oh oh, oh oh
Just as soon as they turn older
He’ll come and sweep them off their feet
It’s only making me feel smaller
All the hidden love beneath
So won’t you lay me, won’t you lay me down
Won’t you lay me, won’t you lay me down
Won’t you lay me, own’t you lay me down
You lay me, won’t you lay me down?”
His voice is smooth and dark; it is almost sultry if not for the poignant longing it possesses, a musician’s finest art. Oliver’s voice rises above the small crowd; it catches and croons; young couples have taken up on the cobblestones between himself and the girl, but Oliver’s eyes remain smouldering embers above them, unwavering.
“All alone, alone again
No one lends a helping hand
I have waited, I have waited
Takes it’s toll, my foolish pride
How long before I see the light
I have waited, I have waited
for you to lay me down
Sail on by, sail on by for now
They play naked in the water
You know it’s hard, heaven knows I’ve tried
But it just keeps getting harder.”
Oliver dips his head down, now, and the guitar; the turquoise shall slides from his shoulders that now stand out starkly in the lamplight, emphasised by their absence of colour. With the guitar he crosses the cobblestones, dipping and swirling between the dancers. He crosses the cobblestones and dark street until he stands across the girl, knowing already he is nothing more than an insect drawn into a spider’s web. Yet, Oliver is smiling handsomely, playfully.
“Oh, I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait for you
Yeah I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait for you
Oh I’ll wait, I’ll wait, I’ll wait for you
For you to lay me, won’t you lay me down?”
He sees now, this close, her eyes are the same colour as his own. This only makes him smile wider. Her face is split as if with white lightening against the dark chestnut of the rest of her. Perhaps if Oliver were anyone else, he might have found something broken about it, something lost; he might have recognised the combined pieces of something and thought that is my soul, too.
But Oliver is not someone else. Oliver is only Oliver, with a storm-cloud body ready to thunder and lightening; with a heart ready to feel; with a voice ready to sing. Oliver's soul is only alight with music, and mischief, and the belief in this night being the best one of his life.
@Thana || "Speech" || Songs: All is Well by Austin Basham (inspiration) and All the Pretty Girls by KALEO (for Thana ;D) || Plz don't kill him Thana
GOD TOPPLES FROM THE SKY, HELL'S FIRES FADE, EXIT SERAPHIM AND SATAN'S MEN
All it takes is one line of music for her to start wondering at all the ways in which to pull it loose.
Would it fray like a rope? Would it spill like blood from a mortal wound? Would it run like ink between the mortar of the cobblestone streets?
Is it sweeter in or out?
The wondering is what brings her to the gathering in the center of the court. It's what makes her linger by a small garden and what makes her stay long enough that someone's treasure turns to dust and decay at the edges of her shadow. Wonder lives in the blaze of her violet eyes, a roar of hunger silent in the throat but deafening in the form of her. Each drop of her wondering, each itch scraping dark marks across her spine, each rotten seed blowing in the wind around her like a dead wish---
Each drop turns her into something else, something profane instead of holy, something born to worry at the knots of the universe until it crashes down in comet dust around their heads (until it chokes them all to death, all that dust, all that almost life). Thana is that other thing when the boy at the center of the gathering, with poetry on his life and something in his heart wanting for death, turns his gaze to her.
Thana looks back. Every drop of her magic rises to meet his searching, hungry gaze and everything in her says This. She steps closer. This is what real hunger looks like.
Eligos presses his nose to her hip. She can feel the scrape of his teeth, one small thing to ground her to more violence instead of the stone and dead earth at her hooves.
The song continues on, rising notes that bring her magic to the surface of her skin. Frost cracks along the hollow spiral of her horn. Ice glimmers in the facets of the stone hanging upon her brow. Never has there been a moment like this, with the crowd watching her as cautiously as lambs watching a lion that has appeared in the center of their flock. He is close enough now for her to hear the emotion in his song, when she digs under the hunger roaring in her bones. She can see too the shine of his eyes, the way their color is an innocent, youthful echo of hers.
Something whispers inside her bones, a ghost memory of the time before flesh and bone. You've never been young. You were never innocent. All she can do it give in to the whispers, lay herself bare before the aching and the sin the same way the boy is laying bare the pulse at his throat.
Thana still wants to hear what music sounds like when it is out.
She closes the small distance he was not brave enough to take (part of her wonders if it's a lamb's instinct, an echo of the way the crowd skims just along the outside of her shadow and never in it). There is barely a trace of the forest on him, of the wild, of the world laying just beyond the cusp of this tame, quiet version of Delumine. It settles her a little, just enough that she only lays her horn against the curl of his lips where a dark echo of his song is still alive.
“Have you been waiting long?” Her voice is a pale reflection of his sultry poetry. It's a rasp of rust in the winter, frost on a sapling, the tap, tap, tap of death begging for a way in. But perhaps there is music in the way she touches her nose to his and inhales all his echoing song like she's been suffocating for an eon.
I SHOULD HAVE LOVED A THUNDERBIRD INSTEAD
AT LEAST WHEN SPRING COMES THEY ROAR BACK AGAIN
He has always been the type of boy a little too in love with fire. Not for the sake of arson, no, but because he believes too vivaciously in the beauty of burning. Oliver has always loved the honed edge of the blade, the way it can whistle. He’s never wielded it, but he’s played with knifes, with the edge of the precipice because what if, what if, what if—
and
it is something to make him feel exquisitely alive. That is with this mahogany woman, coloured like a deep, rich wine. Coloured like pomegranates. And his heart is still singing even after his song has stilled, even after she has laid the edge of her horn against the edge of his mouth and asks, have you been waiting long?
He pauses just long enough to let her breathe whatever she wants to in; he pauses just long enough to hear the empty something in her voice, like a winter plain in subzero weather. The absence of sound, of movement, the absence of anything but aching.
But Oliver doesn’t know about that. Oliver only knows how to curl his mouth into another smile and speak with a voice like embers left to burn, burn, burn. “Only my whole life.” He adds the next part as a darling, roguish afterthought, knowing he shouldn’t: “Sweetheart.”
Perhaps it's because he sees her bladed tail and his reflection in it. Perhaps it is the way the wind catches and almost whistles down her spiral horn. He strums the guitar with a lover’s light touch; he strums it again.
“Do you want another song?”
His blood hasn’t stopped trilling, with a bird’s high bright call. He feels it rush in his ears, behind the pulse of his neck, in the corner of his head. He feels frightfully alive.
@Thana || "Speech" || Songs: All is Well by Austin Basham (inspiration) and All the Pretty Girls by KALEO (for Thana ;D) || Plz don't kill him Thana
GOD TOPPLES FROM THE SKY, HELL'S FIRES FADE, EXIT SERAPHIM AND SATAN'S MEN
This is what happens when a child finds a lion who has long lived with the entropy of hunger.
There is the thrill of danger, the headiness of feeling skin and tooth and fur. And perhaps the lion's eyes glimmer softly like it's only waking up from a long slumber. Perhaps there is innocence too in a beast driven by instinct instead of cruelness.
But the hungry lion will still open its mouth and swallow the child. It will not taste the sweet singing screams, and lament at the fragile crack, crack, crack of bone. The lion will only feel the purr of abated hunger, it will only feel the blood. And then the lion, that sleepy lion, will crawl back into its cave and start to dream.
Thana is looking at the singing boy like a lion.
She lets him see the dreaming of her gaze and the glory of her horn when the light snags on it like liquid silk. She inhales the sweetness of his sultry voice and basks in the sunny glare in his eyes. And when she stretches, and her neck cracks like a gunshot, Thana wakes up.
The crowd pulls back, some of them see it. Some of they listened well to their parents when they were tucked in a night and warned about the darkness. Her eyes do not flicker towards them, not with the echo of music rolling between her bones like a wave. Over and over again it froths and turns to riptide. Behind her almost-smile her teeth ache to lay themselves at his pulse and pull out the music, and blood, and innocence. They ache to know the wonder of of poetry and brashness (and they ache to tear it from his heart).
“I am not yours to name.” Her warning is whispered, nothing more than another sigh of a blade in a spring wind. It's almost sweetened with the last traces of dreaming slumber. Almost.
She quivers; she tries to bury the ache of her teeth and the crash of her violence. In the back of her mind she tells herself that Ipomoea loves song, that he surely does not love it in the way she loves the iron, and acid, and blackness. He does not hunger for it. But when she says, “sing.”, the want is still in her voice no matter how deep she tries to buries it.
I SHOULD HAVE LOVED A THUNDERBIRD INSTEAD
AT LEAST WHEN SPRING COMES THEY ROAR BACK AGAIN
One must not forget the wickedness of children. Fear is learned, after all.
That is why when Oliver looks at her he does not see a blade, or a lion, or a weapon. He sees a woman that reminds him of a falcon, or a flame, or something else beautiful but only slightly dangerous. He sees a flame that might burst out of control, or a falcon that might fly away, but not a beast capable of consuming him.
Or maybe, he thinks, as she draws near, she reminds him as a cobra dancing to a flute.
The difference is she is whispering to him, I am not yours to name and her blade of a tail sighs with her voice. Oliver says with that easygoing smile, “My bad. Can I catch your name, then?”
When she demands, sing, it is in a way Oliver has never been told to sing. The boy’s smile is as bright and wide as her blade, although better sense tells him, slow, slow, back away in the same way his nannie used to warn him against stray dogs and feral beasts.
The guitar begins before him, a strum-strum-strum that parts the violent light of the evening like a cry. Oliver begins to sing:
“ We’re all just debt collectors
in an absence of grace
Showing up to your birthday party
just to show off our face
Get your mind off it, boy
There’s room to grow.”
The crowd, by now, has departed. It is them, alone, and his voice the only thing between them. Oliver sings as he would sing for anyone; not as if he were terrified, not as if his blood rose higher than his voice.
“Like ooh la la la, ooh la, I know why you like death
‘Cause when you get in trouble, pulled under rubble
You want something else
Learn how to operate us
Feel like you’re just passing through
But Everyone I know loves you
Get your life right
There’s so much more—"
Oliver cuts off abruptly. “Hey now, aren’t you the Regent?” He should probably know something like that, being native to Delumine and all, but sometimes these things escape Oliver. He adds, more conversationally—and nearly politely: “If I had known, I’d have brought my violin instead. It’s fancier.” In another tone of voice, it might have come across as sarcastic; in Oliver’s, it is genuine, and earnest, and vaguely disappointed in himself.
@Thana || "Speech" || Songs: Death by Mt. Joy
GOD TOPPLES FROM THE SKY, HELL'S FIRES FADE, EXIT SERAPHIM AND SATAN'S MEN
Thana remembers how it felt to dance, and sway, and swallow the shine of winter spectral lights. She remembers how to move her sinew in whispers of melody that chant almost sweetly of war, and chaos, and blood running across the loam in wide tracks of ruby.
She remembers. But she does not dance for him.
Her steps are for war-fields, and ice sharp enough to cut, and for moon-gold on silver nights. When she sways for him, for the melody of his song, there is a battle in the way her sinew slips over bone and the way her horn catches the light and turns it to billowing pools of star-shine. And perhaps there is a new song, an immortal song, in the way she howls a story without making a single sound. Perhaps it is only a tease of something deeper, something thick enough to drown him. Like a siren of death her magic, her brutality in the gardens, her blade tapping a heartbeat, tries to draw him closer, and closer, and closer.
The mortals around her head for slumber and their down-fat pillows and silks. Thana does not watch them go and she does not notice when the night billows heavy around her and the boy who was foolish enough to sing when she demanded it of him like a god. And when she offers her name, “Thana,” it is only so that he might have a name to sing when he lays down to pray.
And when the music stops suddenly she freezes like a god of war before a den of lions. Her horn sighs when she swings it to him and her eyes turn twilight dark as she watches the boldness shift across his face like a spring cloud. The pulse below his throat turns to numbers in her thoughts and the curl of his neck turns to gravestone. She paints him in death and glory even as she closes the distance between them in which the music (and her war-sway) has died.
Beneath her almost-smile her teeth grind together. Moonlight stretches out her shadow into another sentient dark-thing looking at the youthful perfection of his form. And she does not deny or confirm his question as she presses her lips to his shoulder.
Nor does she smile when she presses her teeth into his skin like a warning. “You should run.” The flat of her blade taps, taps, taps against the stone like a continuation of his dead song.
