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Aelin
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#1

Our love bore the wildest sea



The forest floor was marked with weathered trails, and yet Aelin was touched by the comical notion that too many wandering footsteps wound in circles here—as if the woodland were another world, preying joyously upon the lost, unwitting traveler.
 
She was but a babe in this new land, but she was an experienced sleuth of lands unknown.
 
Aelin would always be a girl teetering on soles too weathered for her current naivety, plundering the bounties of new adventure with hungry eyes. Truth be told, she wondered at night if curiosity ought to have been bludgeoned from her being by now. How many times could a bird be burned before it learned not to fly too close?
 
Too many times, it would seem, as Aelin succumbed to the insatiable appetite of her wandering heart. Beyond each horizon came the small hope of finding Jahra or Aehra, and the infinitesimal dreaming that she might otherwise unearth some stolen secret. An endless song played through her head as she took her careful steps, picking her way through Delumine to the symphony of scholarly hunger.
 
Scholar. That was her title, now, within the walls of a Court beholden to Dawn.
 
Fitting, she often thought with a smile. That the sun might finally rise for us.
 
It nursed her little hopes into fragrant blossoms, and the silver woman was able to map the world with burgeoning boldness. She didn’t dare suffocate Lumaris, despite their honeymooning freedom in this peaceful place, and knew better than to bind her wings too tightly to her body.
 
Months had passed, and the Fair had yet to muster the courage to fly. Once, she would’ve leapt from a cliff with the founded certainty that the wind would catch upon her outstretched wings. Now, though—now she slumbered upon the fearful woe that one gust would send her careening, and that only the abysmal nothingness would catch her inevitable fall.
 
After everything, some fears had yet to die.
 
Only natural, she assured herself. Time. As with all wounds.
Perhaps scholar was to be her new badge, but her heart would always carry the lessons of a healer.
 
Too often, Aelin’s reflection reminded her of the sash of titles she wore. It felt like a bandolier, laden with biting bullets and strapped too tightly to her person. Some were suffocating, and each of them muddled her identity into something incorrigible.
 
Warden of the Eventide—the Fair—the Princess of Nowhere.
Would being Aelin be so bad?
 
A gentle smile played upon her dreaming countenance as she perused the woodland, her heart lost in memories of her precious island. Ard Maleficar had been its name, host to the Eventide, and the heart of Nordlys. Mystery had sprung from the center of it in the form of a mountain, capped at its peak with the frothing heat of a volcano. Its jungles had fostered the deadliest of wildlife, and yet its people had nurtured the wildness of its woods with respect. Her family of scholars and healers; her kinsmen of dreamers and wanderers.
 
As the ill fortune of her cowardice would have it, she had not been there to see its fall, to watch her people sucked into the swell of the Dark Sea.
 
Aelin, Protector of the Isles—her steps stuttered under the crushing weight of that mocking reminder, the breath left her in a rush, and she willed her heart to be at peace.
 
Best not to lose herself to those memories; to those failures. Better to look ahead, to smile for the remainder of the day, and to turn her unspoken woes into soft songs for Lumaris’ ears come dusk. He would understand, as he always did. And she would pay her respects, her apologies, to the fallen.
 
As she always did.
 
The Fair’s breath drew deep as her steps paused, caught in a rare beam of fractured sunlight. She tipped her chin back to let the rays catch upon her face, to let the warmth of the midday sky soothe the chill that’d overtaken her.
 
For a heartbeat, she locked eyes with the curious, twitching head of a bird. It sprung from its branch quickly, its wings a frantic staccato against the wind. She smiled, almost longingly, as her blue feathers twitched.
 
“Soon,” she promised them. “Soon, we will.”

Soon, she would find the courage.



Speech, @Drune

Art by Rhiaan, Table by Rayoflight










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Drune
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#2


blessed be the one
whose lips spill the truth of gods

He walks.

Walks the paths that even one with such an untrained eye as he can tell has been trodden by many others before him.  Smooth marble and polished stone is what Drune knows best (but he also knows cracked stone, dirty floor, and blazing flames that dance across the cold walls of an underground crypt).  

He knows more too, of course, but he has never experienced any of it.

The hands of Gods have shown him lush crops, ones that grow beyond expectations and flourish despite the parched land.  They have shown him the raging sea, her tumultuous waves that crash against the bow of a wooden ship and decimate it into little pieces.  

He has seen raging fire consume loved one and sacred land, the earth tremble and shake the very foundations of a precious home to pieces —

—destruction, consuming, but it cannot stop the hope.


A sneer tugs at one side of his lip, giving him an even more unflattering appearance.  As the sneer appears the tresses of his molten tail crack like a whip, stinging his hocks as he glances over his shoulder with the only eye he possesses.  There is no reason to do this; no fear or concern for something heinous appearing gathering inside of his mind.  Something does tell him to search, though.

Search and look for what he has gleaned; find it and reveal what you have seen oh blessed Oracle of Sohorn.

His ears flatten.

Nothing was there (this the Oracle knew), nothing but the forest and whatever called her home.

A huff, irritated and glad to be rid of the brief vision bestowed upon him, left his nostrils as he flexed his neck.  Ribbon grew taut against the muscle that thrived there as he did so.  It is as much a grounding action as it is a gesture of unspoken displeasure.

Such small, inconvenient things and they have plagued the runaway for years.  It had only been but a year or so after his birth that the first one came.  He had been so overcome with the need to speak about what he had seen that he had been too blind to see what it would lead to.

What does it mean?

He found out soon enough.

The hidden call to search does not go unanswered, for while he doesn't dare to accept what he has been given there is nothing here for the Oracle.  What he knows is gone.  There are no statues that stand tall and proud, no quiet garden oasis that hides him from the predatory, pleading gaze of the denizens that spend hours hoping he will finally write on that blank parchment for them.

Hope.

The sky is blue, blue and bright — cerulean.  The sun permeates the cerulean blind that crosses the path of its rays — swift, free, is this joy?

Joy; blooming, thriving, growing.  There is rebirth after decay.  There is hope.


Soon.


Jaw clenching, his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth.  The words feel like old familiar friends, just out of reach but ready to greet him with open arms and celebratory cheers.

The metal of his hoof digs into the gentle earth below.  The pressure he applies is unforgiving, printing into the soil a singular circle that rests deeper into the ground than any of the other prints he might leave behind.  Just like that, he rejects those words that wish to try their luck at getting through the damaged ruins that his body has become.  At times he wishes it was different, that he could speak his mind and be just a little different.

The Gods showed him long ago, though, what was to become of him.

Soon, the hands upon his brow whisper.  Drune searches.


Aimless his search might have been, but he still comes to find what he knows he needed to (he didn't know, though, not really but with each piece he connects, the picture becomes a little more clear until he knows it cannot be a mere coincidence).

As he spies her, ivory and cerulean, the picture becomes a little more clear.  Almost immediately Drune is sounding out his appearance: another quick lash of his tail that slices through the air like an unforgiving cane.  Threatening it might sound but Drune knows otherwise.

His ears no longer lay flat and he continues to do more to portray what he verbally no longer can.  All the while his eye flickers to the crystalline wings that remain at ease on either side of the silvery woman.

Long ago Drune learned that much is inevitable; not much can be fought unless one went above and beyond to avoid it, but even then that guaranteed nothing. However, when it came to endings Drune knew that how one got to the ending could change.  This is where he liked to test the Gods; he liked to push the boundaries and see if he could make some things occur sooner than expected.

Soon.  His head cocks to the side, almost humorously so in order to compensate for what he can't ask.

Why here?  Why below?  Why not up above?

Maybe they will understand. Maybe not. So is part of the curse of not being able to speak.




@Aelin
Ray has permission to powerplay Drune
for the remainder of this thread












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Aelin
Guest
#3

and we would
meet by the moon


Her appetite for flight shivered to life with all the ravenous searching of a waking beast. It flexed white talons into the shoals of soft beaches, it razed the cobalt spindles of her feathers with a wanting, burning touch. But Aelin, who had learned so painfully what it meant to fall, did not dare heed its whispers—

Now, her wings twitched, ached. Like a limb severed from its body, her phantom desires roared with the ghosts of ancient winds, sweeping her heavenward to dance with the clouds. She couldn’t, she couldn’t.

Soon, the lily woman repeated, soothing the wildness of her with promises. But as with so many things, it was not in the primal nature of a beast to understand the words of a girl.

In so many ways, she was still the weed-covered creature that had scoured Nordlys for home and hearth, seeking purpose between each stone she deliberately upturned. And she still remembered, as surely as if the memory had been burnt beyond her eyes, what it had felt like to approach the stone walls of Morthalion and seek her future beyond the King’s gates.

This time, it was memory that forced her to shiver; and she realized she’d been gazing through the window of dappled sunlight for so very long that her eyes had begun to burn. Like dreams, like wishes, scorching purls of tears unfurled from her piebald gaze. She blinked rapidly, letting her silver lashes catch upon the filigrees of starlight that pooled down her cheek, thick with emotion she hadn’t known she felt.

The cracking of a branch, the deliberate slash of a tail through summer air, forced her hoary countenance to tip toward the forest floor. The vines of a long-burned jungle receded, releasing the island mare from the crushing vice of memory as she returned to the waking world—to behold the ribbon clad stranger who wore his scars beneath dressings of silk.

Aelin would always be a healer. She would always see the pain before the beauty; and so, too, would she see the hope among the blood.

The stranger was mute in a manner that spoke volumes, the drawn-out motions of his head, the pointed flicker of his eyes across her incandescent wings. Aelin shuddered in silence, the glimmer of her tears replaced with a flash of unspoken queries.

Gods, how long had it been since she had spoken a word to a stranger?

And yet he was quiet. A sentinel emerged from the woodland, a head higher than she, to look upon some weeping wraith of a winged, flightless bird. Phantom as she might have been, even the traces of death her divinity still shouldered could not elude the beginnings of a smile.

Aelin was soft before she was anything else; she was kind. Her eyes did not linger upon his scars, and her woes were forgotten with the ease of a breath as she angled her body toward him. The Dawn woman’s head bowed first, his wordless enquiry answered with a greeting, before she sought out her voice.

“Hello,” like the brush of her feathers, Aelin’s voice was whisper soft. The intimacy of her singular vocabulary still spoke of legions, and yet she knew, even as a Queen, she had never possessed the range of command.

A healer—she was a healer with a hunger to learn. To help.

Her smile remained, sometimes too-perfect; sometimes too-sweet. She was still learning to trust again.

But so, too, was she perceptive. Once, her magic had taught her the nature of empathy. Gone, it might have been, but the Fair had never forgotten to know the intricacies, the delicacies, of small changes.

A wing twitched by way of answer, and she glanced to the translucent light they cast over her skin.

“Forgive me. I was speaking to myself; to my wings,” her eyes were bright as she smiled, her feathers ruffling. “They have a language all their own—and would rather I let them take us somewhere far from here.”

Aelin paused, her soft heart registering one blue eye—and the absence of another. “I am Aelin."


Speech, @Drune
the table changing game











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