Novus
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Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

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August
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#1




the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain


♠︎ ♠︎




It becomes quickly apparent that neither he nor his new companion are familiar with the city’s layout. 

The main marketplace stretches a half-mile down a wide corridor, draped with colored silk canopies and paper lanterns, each dead-end alleyway stuffed with more goods. Their shadows slim and lengthen, the crowds begin to thin, and still there is no sign of their quarry. August tries not to be irritated at the near-miss, but he keeps remembering the way the stallion had turned back to look, the gold of his eye catching in the light - he would recognize August if he’d seen him, he is sure. And if he had it’s possible they are not the only ones doing the hunting, and at a disadvantage. 

If he were home he would have no trouble asking merchants and shoppers alike for help. Here he trusts none of them, and from the slide of their eyes as the pair passes it is mutual. Anyway, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. 

Now they stand at the southeastern edge of the city, near enough the docks and the shoreline to hear the clamoring gulls, near enough the desert to see how the light has turned to rose gold over the dunes. The path before them forks, the left into shadow and the right in sun. August’s patience for this task is frayed; he watches a scrawny cat leap after fat pigeons and turns to Warset with a shake of his head.  Something about the look in her eyes, the set of her mouth, makes him feel like more of a disappointment. He’d rather have her teeth on his hip again. “Care to pick a path?” 





@warset | <3










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Warset
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#2



“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

Warset notices a hundred almost details. The canopies are a blur of different colors, and to her they seem more suggestion of flight than anything else in this copse of sand and worn wood. Each pair of eyes sliding over their forms as they move through the court are nothing more than pale stars on the outskirts of their orbit. Everything here is a suggestion of something else, even the gravity making each step though the dust heavier than the last. It all races by her like a comet too bright, too fast, too full of fire and stone, to dream of holding on to.

So she lets it all sweep her away into the current of this world. And if her ruby and diamond color is tapping against her neck like another heartbeat she pretends not to hear the way it is whispering soon, soon, soon.   The sound of her wings, the market, and their hooves on the sand is not loud enough to drown it out, no wholly.

Ahead, when she lifts her eyes up from the curl of his neck, she can see the sun brushing against the dune and the rose-gold promise of a dead day. Warset trembles against him as her heart races in butterfly wings of hope beneath her chest. She looks towards the sun and towards the shadows with her wings fluttering softly against her sides.

The wildcat in her bones is straining for the shadows, for the dark hallways promising an end to their hunt. But the girl in her, that mortal star, is straining towards the light. They are hunting, she reminds herself, they are hunting a thing of flesh, and bone, and not star-blood. A curse is better for this than a star.

The wildcat lifts up one of her wings in the direction of the dark. Warset's eyes flash, a quicksilver glare that has nothing to do with the screaming gulls and the soft hush of the sea. “To the shadows.” She turns without waiting for him, lifting up her wings to hide the fine trembling of her form as the beast inside starts to wake up.  
 





@August









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August
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#3




the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain


♠︎ ♠︎




What a mystery she is, this girl of few words who offers her help but no information of herself. Her silence allows August to fill in the gaps for her - who she is, where she came from, why she’s bothering to help a stranger track a stranger. But the palomino’s imagination is proving as fickle as the rest of him, lately, always changing the story. She wears that collar of diamond and ruby because she is high-born, or because she is a thief. She is helping him because she is a spy, or entranced by the determination in his eye and the careful pattern of dapples on his golden skin. She will threaten him at the end of this - she has a secret of her own.

Of course he has no idea how close this last guess is. He lets the whole game go, anyway, just watching her decide with the evening light stretching her shadow longer behind her, making her seem to glow like a star. When he feels her tremble he presses more firmly against her, and then withdraws.

“Good choice,” he says, if only to break the quiet. His expression doesn’t change as she steps ahead of him; it is smooth as a windless lake. When he follows, it isn’t Warset he watches but the huddled structures around them, homes with the shutters closed and interiors dark. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them are empty, or have lost members to starvation or stone, victims of the rule of the previous king. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them might feel skeptical of the current rule. August wonders what keeps them in the desert with nothing between their teeth but the grit of sand.

It is cooler in the dark. August keeps close to the pegasus as they leave half-moons in the dust, and when he catches her eye it gleams like a cat’s. “Where do you come from, Warset?” he asks, just to keep the silence at bay.






@warset | <3










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Warset
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#4



“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

If there are signs in the darkness between the stone walls leading her steps, Warset does not know what they are. There is only the instinct to lift her head into the wind and flare her wings wide as a sun as they leave their half-moons in the sand. Here the air smells stale as dust and almost metallic with the tang of old blood. It smells like slumbering violence.

Warset remembers the great cosmic snake. She remembers the sweet bitterness of his breath as he woke his children upon the blood soaked war-lands. The press of his body against her settles the humming song rising in her throat like bile as the memories dig and etch themselves behind her eyes.

The darkness grows thicker as they walk, layers of layers piled onto each other until the walls turn inky and ominous. Behind them rose-gold starts to turn to shades of twilight. Warset trembles against the coming weight of night as much as her bones rattle and rejoice. Soon, too soon, it will not a star with which August hunts. She drapes a wing across his spine, trying to use the heat rising from his form as a noose.

She tries to hold on.

When he breaks up the silence, Warset lowers her nose from the air and her wing from his spine. She steps close enough that her half-moons start to swallow his. The north star whispers down to them as it rises from the twilight. She presses her nose to the bottom of his cheek and pushes his head up, up, up towards the rising stars and moon. And if the gesture seems like a kiss it is only one borne of desperation. “I am from there.” Beneath her skin her scarred up heart trembles and starts to crack around the edges. Her eyelashes whisper against his cheek as she blinks and pulls away. The distance feels like the first cut of her curse as her bones start to crack.

Her ruby pulses blood-red.

Beyond their shadows, in the alley a door slams, and the stallion who pauses in the faint starlight makes something leap in her predator heart. Her bones sound like stones falling in the brief silence. Her feathers tremble as if in a storm as the stallion turns his head to look at them like a wolf. Warset steps closer at the same time the gold-eyed stallion does. And when she lunges towards him it is a fallen star that spreads her wings and jumps into the air--

But it is a leopard black-as-pitch that lands and snarls at the stallion who is starting to flee.  
 





@August









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August
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#5




the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain


♠︎ ♠︎




For August touch has always been a kind of tool - something only rarely used without calculation or motive. Even among his friends (and those friends were as good as family) they were all guarded in some way, spending gestures like nose-to-cheek like currency. Even when he’d broken from the Scarab, when he sought the press or teeth of another for pleasure and not payment, he knew the impulse was a selfish one.

So it is strange, to be touched by Warset so carelessly. He wonders what she wants, and why she’d agreed so quickly to help him. He welcomes the warmth when her wing spreads over his back, like a mother; he tells himself he won’t miss it when it’s gone. August knew, intellectually, that the desert got cold at night (how quickly Solis turns his face away), but he is still surprised by the chill. The walls, the sand, they all try to hold the heat in as long as they can, but the sun is gone now.

When she stops he does too; his heart skips quicker at the touch of her nose. August wants to look at her but lets her guide head up, where the sky is a deepening lake, and the stars are emerging. It takes him a moment, staring at that distant point of light, to understand what she’s saying. Then he does look at her, surprised, but all her strangeness starts to make sense because -

“You’re one of the shed-stars,” he says, his voice soft and round with wonder, and if he is wrong there is no time for her to correct him.

The sharp slap of the door draws both their attention, and when the stallion steps out August stiffens like an eager hound. He recognizes that silhouette, or at least wants too badly enough that it doesn’t matter. There is something familiar about the rage that flickers between them when the tiger’s-eyes meet his own, just for a moment. He swears he sees the man sneer -

Things happen very quickly, then. There is a flurry of movement that makes August shiver and shy like a racehorse at the gate, but what he sees, smudged by shadow, makes no sense to his adrenaline-surging mind. Warset is gone; there is a jungle-cat in her place, a deeper black than the rest of the night, and their quarry is running, a sudden drumbeat that echoes in his bloodstream.

August’s instincts tell him to flee, too, from that snarling predator, and have not quite accepted that the girl has become the beast; still, when his mind grasps for other explanations it comes up empty. And there is no time. So he just gnashes his teeth together and cries ”catch him”, then gathers his hindquarters and launches after the other stallion. As he plunges into the darkness, he only hopes not to feel claws sink into his own flesh.






@warset | <3










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Warset
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#6


“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,
and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,”


In another form Warset might have rejoiced at being understood, or perhaps she would have pressed her lips to his and whispered instead of kissed. Is that what I am?, she might have asked. Or maybe she would have only snapped out her wings like a bird of prey and painted the words, I am not shed. I am torn out like scars instead of this mortal, fragile language.

But now, with the thing in her bones snarling mine, and kill, kill, kill there is no space for language in the small spaces between hunger, and want, and running.

Already she has forgotten the golden boy with her silver eyes that made her wish for comets and stardust. There is only the sand pillowing her paws as she runs. And there is only the darkness brushing cool as saltwater against her hide. Her tail lifts behind her, almost playful in the chase now that her thoughts are full of only violence and confidence. Almost she is lost to the pure joy of streaking through the alley,  in the knowing that she's the only one of her kind that has hunted through these hollow, limestone walls. Almost--

She does not stop to think about the wrongness of the want or the way that somewhere in the soul she's praying for music, and sisterhood, and the sweetness of moon-water on her tongue. She does not stop to think about anything at all when she lunges for the stallion's nose as he tries to leap around a broken cart. All her veins are singing as she soars through the darkness like the tiger-eyed stallion is nothing more than another mountain rising out from the dream-water begging for her to land.

There is not thought for the after or the longing, or the way her soul is lamenting the loss of his skin against her lips.

But there is a moment, with her claw bared and her lips peeled back in a feral roar, that she wonders if she's still shed like a old, rotten flower in a garden. The wondering goes on, even as her weight catches the stallion in mid-flight and sends him tumbling to the ground.

And so, unlike a real beast, she turns her head to August and waits before laying her teeth against fallen stallion's jugular.



art credit

@August









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August
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#7




the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain


♠︎ ♠︎




August is in over his head. He knows it, even if there’s no time to think about it; for all the delicate situations he’s seen as part of the Scarab family, he has no experience to compare to racing pell-mell down a dark foreign street after a dangerous man and a girl who’d just turned into a panther. (Later, he’d think of how all his ‘adventures’ in Solterra felt like the stuff of dreams, terrifying and exhilarating and strange, only the consequences never faded when he woke).

But for now there is only trying to keep up, trying not to stumble when there’s a dip beneath his feet, trying to be aware of any other heads poking out of doors to identify the thunder of hooves, the roar of a wildcat. The sandstone walls feel close, claustrophobic; but for the strip of starlight overhead he could be back on the island, back in the not-cave, back with blood-substance raining down and the relic waiting like a heart at the center of it all. This has the same tilted, unreal feel to it.

His thoughts skip the tricky question of what he just saw Warset become in favor of the hunt. It’s a relief to feel anger start to burn him up at the edges like a piece of paper touched to a candle; he welcomes it, thinks of the man with his blade lifted toward Aghavni, his scarf around her neck. In this way he battles the chaos, and so by the time the creature that was Warset sends the stallion tumbling with a terrible sound and a worse cry, by the time August clatters to a stop a few feet away, he is settling into a killing-calm.

Still, his heart is a drum it feels like he’s shouting over, even though his actual voice is low and urgent when he drops his head to be level with the tiger-eyes of the other man. “Who are you with? Why did you threaten Aghavni?" There is no vocal answer, only a baring of teeth, a glare of white-rimmed eyes, before the stallion thrashes like a fish. He is making a terrible racket; it won’t be long before they have company, and while August has no doubt that panther-Warset can take care of herself he is not so sure.

“Fuck you,” the chestnut snarls, “and fuck house Hajakha-” he kicks out again, and the palomino leaps back, his gaze flicking to the panther’s, pale flashing eyes like stars above the collar she wears. From behind them there is shouting, and the sound of doors opening, and the dim glow of torches. They have very little time.

August jerks his head in a nod. He doesn’t know what he’s asking - both kill him and let him go - and his conscience says how awful, how awful to make her decide.






@warset | <3










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Warset
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#8


“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS
WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”


There is that feeling again, the one of being caught in a tornado between a girl, a star, and hunger. It stretches over her soul like a bruise as blue-black and glittering as the twilight. It aches and trembles like a mouse in a dark cage where there should only been silver moonlight.

It hurts. Oh it hurts.

And she wonders if it is the nature of not-stars to look at the constellations and beg for pathways when they are not strong enough to lead. She wonders if he's wishing on whatever it is she used to be for strength, and courage, and violence when he skitters away from it like a shadow from a fire. The girl sobbing in the marrow of her wildcat bones wastes away to nothing, nothing, nothing at the injustice of this awful, mortal, coil. The star hurts and sobs and falls from the blackness into the blood-red of rage, and wrath, and predatory need.

They fall, and fade, and wither, and sob. They dissolve until only the feline is left, only the beast of tooth and claw. Only the thing that looks at silver eyes, and tiger eyes, and hungers for the meat around their rib cages.

There is no curse now. Only need.

A starving leopard does not care for sorrow, and caution, and boys who do know how to decide. She does not care for things like justice, retribution, and revenge. She does not care for sorrow, and hate, and unmaking. All her thoughts are hot with hunger and oil-thick with blood. The teeth in her mouth ache like hollow things begging for water, and salvation. There is spit in her mouth that snarls in anticipation instead of lament. And she does not hear the horses looking out their windows and whispering between each other if it's better to turn away or become a hero.

She only hears the trash of hoof and sand and flesh as the stallion on the ground kicks at the silver-eyed one. Beneath the sound of his rage his heart is humming a melody of fear and prayer. The echo of it sparks like a comet in her wildcat soul. It calls her home.

A starving leopard does not care for anything but that humming heart.

She does not look at the golden boy who could not decide as she grabs the tiger-eyed stallion by his throat and drags him into the darkness between the building. And the girl inside her shatters even as the star goes cold, and dark, and all her fire goes out.

The leopard purrs.

@August



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August
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#9




the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain


♠︎ ♠︎




If he never realizes how badly he failed her on this night, he will be lucky.

As it stands, the guilt will begin to gnaw at him the moment his adrenaline wears off and he’s far from here, his heartbeat quieted, and alone. The shame will come later, the next morning, settling low in his belly like a rough lump of coal. Both will grow the more he thinks about them, and Warset, and the things that happened at the fringes of the desert that night.

But for now there is neither. There is the pound of his heart, a god’s gallop against his ribcage, and the wheezing sound of air moving through the stallion’s punctured throat, and a snarl from the leopard-that-was-Warset that sounds almost liquid. There is the sight of her, dragging the chestnut by the throat further into the shadows, his hooves still kicking up sand and dust. All of his senses seem clearer, as though they’d been fogged before and are suddenly clean for the first time.

And what does he do with these marvelous senses, all his blood prickling his veins?

He runs.

Because as she purrs and bends low over the other man’s neck, there are cries rising up from behind them. First they’re questions, and then shouts, and August is too recognizable, and has not made himself a friend of the king. So he flees, out of the alley and into the wind, his ears turned behind him to listen (as though he could hear anything over the sound of his own surging hooves, his own thundering heart).

When he slows down enough to feel anything other than alive, it is sick satisfaction at the thought of that bastard who’d threatened Aghavni caught between the jaws of a predator. It’s possible that the crowd had separated them, that he had survived, but August does not say a prayer for him. In a way it turned out lucky - now any investigations would be for a panther, not two horses. And everyone knew such predators were not unheard of in Novus. Even though he left without information, he isn’t sorry for what happened.

Not until he thinks of Warset, and wonders when she will become a girl again (one of the Shed Stars), and whether there will be someone’s blood in her belly when she does, does his own stomach begin to turn queasy. The change hadn’t hampered her at all; the big cat had not seemed distraught. And he was not worried about her ability to escape.

But it is a long night, after that.  






@warset | <3










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