[P] i'll be the beauty queen in tears.

[Maybird]

I think the berries have made me sick.

I’d picked them myself, earlier today, because Rook had been out doing Rook things and the bush I had found had looked promising. The berries had been red, like raspberries, and hung down in fat heavy strands. I’d even waited until a cardinal flew down from the canopy and pecked at one, before it'd twisted it off the vine and choked it down its throat.

Of course, I hadn’t waited to see if the cardinal would drop dead to the snow. 

I have never felt hunger before as Ma’s only daughter and Elder’s only granddaughter and feeling it now, a wide-open mouth at the bottom of my stomach, has made me irrational. 

I should have waited for the bird to die. Or, I guess, to live. I should have trapped it and waited.

But the cardinal is gone, either dead in a snowdrift somewhere else or perfectly alive and perfectly hopping—perhaps only I am affected by the red berries because the Goddess is angry I hadn’t offered some to her first.

If I had a mirror, I could check if my face is faintly green, or if my pupils are blown out black and gaping, like the mouth in my stomach that begs to be fed. I shouldn’t have listened. I fed it, and look where that got me.

I know that I’m close to the capital. We’d passed it last night, skirting around its bubble of light and city sounds and sewer smells. I’d told Rook that I would visit after an evening of rest; he’d said that I was bluffing, that I had lost my nerve when I had smelled it, and especially after I had seen the rat as large as a cat crawl out from under a pile of rubbish.

Angrily, I'd informed him that I hadn’t thought cities would smell so terrible, or host rubbish-digging vermin. He’d laughed, and for once it hadn’t sounded like a keening wail. (It meant, I'd realised later, that he’d been genuinely laughing. Instead of using it for something, like a squalling infant when it wails for its mother’s attention.)

For a while I sit in the snow and weigh the chances of me dying if I don’t go into the city and find medicine. As familiar as I am with death—as dubious as I am, sometimes, if I am truly alive, when I had been born dead—I am still faintly afraid of dying, or know that I should be afraid of it, and anyway Elder isn’t around to catch my soul and keep it for me if I ever lose it.

It is this realisation that at last sends me stumbling out towards the outskirts of Terrastella. Beneath my mask the stench is only faintly bearable; if I don’t die from the berries, I think grimly, then I will die from inhaling the city.

When I make it past the gates—guarded, enormous, and made entirely of something harder than rock—I duck into a shadowy space and take out the small leather pouch I keep tucked in the eye of my mask. I hold my stomach, dump out the gold coins and necklace of sparkling sapphires Elder had slipped to me, and try to recall what she'd told me.

“Exchange it in Terrastella. The necklace will fetch a fair price, and keep the gold for when things are truly desperate.” I know how much I should get for the sapphire necklace, since Elder had made me memorise the conversions of various currencies, so that I would not be swindled. I remember saying to her darkly that anyone who dared swindle me would regret it.

I remember her chuckling, and shaking her head.

The sapphires rattle together like a can of loose teeth when a wave of convulsions rocks through me. Shuddering, I spit into the grey churned sleet and am relieved that there is no blood.

But I cannot buy medicine before I exchange the necklace. For that, I need a buyer. Glaring up at the sky, I send a prayer to the Goddess that the berries will not kill me before sunset, before stepping back out into the jostling streets.

@Luvena | speaks | 'dead' is written here like 20 times please bear with me

[Luvena]

The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!

At times I wonder what life would have been like had I not been born so feeble. Had I been born to match my parent’s strength, my father's strong shoulders, and my mother's lithe agility. Had it been the case, I would not have had to marry Obyana, would not have handed my people over to his smoldering rule. One that lasted for only a moment, before he cast it all into ruin. And for what? His own pleasure? He never did tell us. 

Perhaps it was because we had spent so long disparaging his kind. It was all we knew, all we’d been taught. My so many times great-grandfather had ingrained it into Herstials very essence, weaving our distaste into the willows themselves. Every child born under Herstials skies was told cautionary tales about magic. I sometimes hear my grandmother’s voice still, telling me all about the ways magic could sew chaos into the earth.

But had I been born strong… We could have lived in peace. I could have danced among the people, the candlelight flickering off my would-have-been rosy pelt. I could have sent my parents off properly at their funeral, raised children who would take on the role of heirs. Become a grandmother, who whispered the same tales. 

These days I can’t even bear to be in the presence of candlelight. I sleep when the sun sets. I know I should cast the fear out of my heart. Winters without fire are pleasant for no one. But every time I catch a glimpse of that orange flicker… I see Herstial up in flames, and my eyes roll and my heart pounds, and I cannot escape that terror. 

I think maybe… I won’t stay in dusk court. I thought here I would find happiness… fulfillment... but everything about this place is like a remnant of a past life. And it is one I want so desperately to go back to and at the same time one I cannot bear to see any longer. It is so much like home it’s almost unbearable. The temple is far from that. New and exciting and different, and perhaps there I could cut the ties of longing that have kept me tethered for so long. 

Finally, I am stricken from my thoughts as my hooves meet the cobblestone of the city. It’s been over a year I’ve lived within these walls, and yet still it seems so foreign. I didn’t know us creatures were capable of making such structures. Towering buildings of stone and mortar. I wonder who built them, who came first to Novus, and decided to lay down stones in each court. Was there some great architect whose name has been lost to time? Or were the courts already established, and fighting to have the greatest city. I suppose it would be written down somewhere, but I cannot be bothered to check. 

I can see a girl ahead. She seems to think she is hidden, but in the city, it is far easier to hide among crowds, than it is to stand in the shadows. The latter only makes you seem like a creep. She seems… out of it. She holds a beautiful necklace, that I can only imagine is even more impressive when the sunlight hits it. I can imagine the refractions it would cast upon the stone walls. 

“Are you alright?” I ask, the words slipping from my mouth before I think to stop them. Most people here wish you to leave them be. Before I even finish the sentence I watch the girl spit onto the cobblestones. 

@Maybird

@Luvena

[Maybird]

The city is unkind to its strangers. This is the first lesson imparted to me by an entity wholly separate from Ma.

Twice I am shoved aside by rushing merchants and their glum sons, sent stumbling into their booths that line the riverine street like chunks of quartz. Twice my fall sends crashing to the cobblestones a rain of sparkling wares; and twice I am spat at by a flock of silk-lathered merchant wives, descending upon me like sparrowhawks.

I jerk backwards when a woman with a face made all of angles sweeps down from her perch and snaps her teeth at my neck. The consonants she makes are so jumbled by her tongue, so different to Elder and Ma and I's lyrical words, that I am swept across the street again before I realize she'd called me a thief.

"I am not a thief!" I scream, and scream again, this time in wordless fury, when my voice is drowned to death by the gleeful laughter of the city.

Fleeing into the shadows of another alley, I grope inside the eye of my mask and clutch at the cool stones of the sapphire necklace. The high noon sun shines bright and misleading, summer-yellow instead of winter-bleak, and I recoil farther into the dwindling shade.

I will die here, and my body will be collected days later and left to rot in an unmarked grave.

I am becoming ever more certain of my future when I am broken from my reverie by a soft voice, drifting above me. "Are you alright?" she asks, but made faceless by a halo of blazing sun, she is just another merchant's wife, just another laughing boy.

I turn towards her, hissing. "Does this alley belong to you? Are you here to sweep me out of it, back into the street?"

My grip tightens on my sapphires; they are the only solace, the only physical reminder I have that I am apart of something other, something better, than this city and its rat-filled sewers. Pain spikes my stomach; bile fills up my throat.

Only an hour in the city and I am already smelling of it; of spoiling, of tar, of vermin. I will die here, and there will be no one to mourn me but the moon.

@Luvena | speaks

[Luvena]

The stars are alive, child! Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purpose abroad!

The court is a scary place when you've never set foot in a city. I came from a kingdom, born and raised, but ours was not like this. It was quiet,  more an overcrowded village than a largely populated affair. My first time in the court I was so overwhelmed I simply stood by the wall watching the ocean, letting the crash of waves drown out the crowds around me.  The markets especially were fierce, everyone speaking over each other, bidding and bartering in harsh tones.  The more merciless of the merchants scamming people out of their possessions, taking a bundle of pigmy dragon scales and in return giving them a fake ruby that shouldn't have fooled anyone. 

This one didn't seem to be handling the bustle well. My eyes wander to the precious gems she clutches. these ones real, catching the light with beautiful blue hues, shining them upon the stone walls.  "You won't get far bartering that in the market with this attitude" I chide to her.  "Do you see those stalls?" I gesture to a few ramshackle stands, with lines behind them. "I've watched those men scam 3 others out of their possessions, they won't waste a moment stealing yours if they see you sulking about in an alley"  I didn't dare mention that she was a child, and they wouldn't even give a second thought about taking her necklace without giving anything in return, she seemed angry enough as it was

"Come out now before they notice," I turned to step back into the crowded street, "What is it you're looking for child?"

@Maybird (This is crap im sorry)

@Luvena