FROM THE LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF SCALE from the dead: a sense of scale
Winter has come; crushed the leaves from the branches. Septimus could mind, and sometimes he almost does – it is harder to find things to study in the cold, when so much is dead or slumbering. Still. He appreciates the thin, early-morning sheen of frost on the dry grass, the chunks of ice frozen over in the few, slow, rock-shielded eddies in the Rapax, the blank stillness of receding patches of snow, largely undisturbed from a recent fall but already melting. A cardinal inhabits the dark, sleeping skeleton of a tree on the opposite side of the river, red as a splash of blood.
(Every natural phenomenon – even a cold, culling one – has its place. The feathers on his wings ruffle, like a bird’s, and he presses them tight against his sides to block out the cold.)
Tepid daylight streams through the bare branches, dappling the forest floor in early-morning gold. His breath still streams out white; it is not as cold today as it has been, but it is still cold, though it does not much bite. He disturbs each undisturbed patch of snow, leaves deliberate hoofprints in it, plucks a few bright red wintergreen berries – careful to avoid holly, which is altogether more common, though not out in the woods – and pops them into his mouth, pauses here and there to half-sketch some utterly mundane sight and then, feeling uninspired, returns his quill and whichever leather-bound notebook he pulled out to his back with almost too much delicacy for their well-worn forms, leaving the sketches unfinished. It’s a lovely morning, but it isn’t anything exciting, and Septimus-
Well. There is a reason why he spends so much time on the island. Certainly, he can just as easily find himself entranced by a colony of ants or a flock of common sparrows as he can become enamored by the strange, wild magic that inhabits the strangest regions of Novus, but it is rare for any one thing to hold his attention for long. There is a reason why he is a perpetual traveler, always in motion – he hasn’t even set down a proper home in Delumine, though, by now, he has spent years in Novus.
(He should probably, he thinks, do that. Sometimes he wonders if he will ever make it home; sometimes he wonders if he will die here. Never for long, because he knows that he could find his way out if he really wanted to, to a place where the parts of his blood that sing immortal and faewild start to hum again. He is just fascinated by this strange land, fascinated by how it swallowed up those fiercest parts of him, effectively blunted his teeth.)
(But sometimes he misses his siblings. The younger ones, particularly. His mother. He wonders if she has had more children, while he was gone. Probably. She is always enamored with one creature or another. He wonders if he gets it from her.)
He finally emerges from where he has woven near the edge of the trees to stand in a crop of dry roots and snow that borders the bank. One fell; the trunk hangs over the water, a convenient (but precarious, and dripping with ice) passage from one side to the next. It is utterly unnecessary for him, but somehow deliberate. He wonders if someone in Delumine had meant to make a bridge of it.
That is irrelevant, though. He looks down into the water, then out at the rocks, and finally settles on the bank, pulling a notebook – the one with maps; he checks twice to be sure – from his satchel and flipping it open to reveal his developing cartography. He notes down the log with a horizontal slash, then scribbles a careful, messy note in the margins.
No use in being neat in his own notebooks, he supposes.
@Elliana|| me, rapidly shedding my emo skin: science man I owe you my life "Speech!"
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
H
er dreams are filled with a great many things. Memories that are fresh and new, if only because this world is so fresh and new to her. She dreams of fairytales her mother has told her. Of a dragon that destroyed a herd, and a great many knights vanquished trying to slay him. Until there came a girl who befriended him instead of fighting him. She hears stories of girls following wolves into the forest. There is a story about flowers that bloomed magic. Elena tells her how, at the heart of it, dreams are magic. A dream, after all, is what brought her and her godmother together again against the odds of it all. She knows dreams are powerful, her own father has told her as much. He tells her he can walk through dreams just as she walks through the forest and along the river now. She wonders what it is like to be a part of two world, two different world. Elliana will know some day, when she walks through a portal created on her own, and sees spirits dancing among the living and realizes that they have always been there. Some day. Some day.
Not today.
Today they are still hiding, like the fairies in her fairy house.
Elliana mostly spends her time alone. She likes it this way though. She kicks out those spidery baby legs and runs, racing nothing but the wind and the river. An activity her mother had often done when she was her age. A dark leg runs forward before one dipped in white accompanies it and she pushes feet backwards. She leaps, so much like a dancer, over tree roots stubborn sticking out from the snow. She cannot feel the plants and animals dying beneath her feet because they are already dead, but if she could, she would weep for winter instead of celebrating it’s existence. She looks like some sort of fae creature, small and dainty, frolicking from one tree unburdened by leaves to the next. She dances in the shadows, unafraid when the light of the sun perches overhead like her guardian.
She finds him in the forest, not unlike how the wolf finds little red riding hood, But Elli bares no fangs and he wears no cloak. She is quiet in her approach, watching his gentle actions. She notices the pointed ensemble on top of his head and finds it strange, though she has seen such a thing in the forest before. Though never on the head of a man. “You are not a deer,” she tells him softly, in a voice like starlight, silver and sweet. A silver bell voice like her mother’s. But where hers chimes a single note, Elliana’s seems to echo and echo and echo. Like ghosts that have not yet left this world. “What are you doing?” She asks him and settles her small body close to him, too close. She is her mother’s daughter in this way. “Can I help?” And somewhere, her empath of a mother says a prayer that her daughter’s heart will not be so cursed by compassion as hers is.
FROM THE LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF SCALE from the dead: a sense of scale
When the girl emerges from the trees, she emerges with a faint rustling of underbrush and a crunching of snow; he turns, slowly, to look at her, and he finds her much smaller and much younger than whatever he imagined might appear from the woods in mid-winter. He can’t quite place her age, though he suspects that she can’t be more than a few months old, and he wonders, abruptly, where her parents are. Surely she shouldn’t be wandering about unsupervised at such a tender age.
She is bronze-brown-coated and white-haired, with brilliant blue eyes and a golden crescent moon on her shoulder. One of her legs is dipped in a coat of white, sharp as the remaining snowdrifts. You are not a deer.
The observation is so stark that he could laugh. He doesn’t, though. He holds it in. It is better to encourage children than to make them feel foolish, better to humor them than to shush them. “No,” Septimus says, rather surprised by her sudden appearance, “I’m not.” It’s such a childish thing to say; it reminds him of his younger sisters (though they were stranger than this child by far), with a bit of a pang. Still, he smiles at her, the sharp tips of his canines just visible below the dark umber curl of his lips. “I don’t even shed these in the winter,” he says, with a soft chuckle, and a bow of his head to point the antlers a bit closer to her; the jewels dangling from their points clink and clink, like his earrings. What are you doing? She moves closer, closer – closer than a child probably should move to a stranger. He notes it without pushing her away. Can I help? She is too young to know caution, or danger. She is too young, and too earnest.
He wonders where her parents are. Surely, they must be close…perhaps she just wandered off. She strikes him as the type for it. “I’m making a detailed map of Delumine.” Septimus flips his notebook around to face her, smiling. He isn’t sure that the cartographic marks and symbols will make much sense to her, but he thinks that she might like the way that he has adorned the edges of the map with flowering vines and roses. “I’m a naturalist, you see – it’s part of my project for this winter.” Which is collecting a register of Delumine’s winter flora and fauna (and where they are located), but that is beside the point. “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think that I have much work left to do.” It’s true – he is nearly done fiddling with this section of the map, now that he has marked down the impromptu bridge.
He looks down at her, bending his head, and he stays smiling, green eyes as bright as spring leaves even against the wintery landscape. “And what are you doing, miss?” He looks past her, as though expecting her parents – or some sort of guardian – to emerge from the skeletal trees behind her at any moment. “I don’t suppose you’re out here alone?”
He hopes not. Winter can be cold, and it can be cruel – and so can people. (It was not, he thinks, so very long when Delumine, soft and scholarly though it may be, was struck by a series of murders, but, of course, he does not tell the girl that.)
Perhaps, he thinks, she is simply lost. He is sure that he can help her find her way, if she is.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
T
here is always such a curiosity, this welling of wonder in the core of her chest. She is a sensitive thing, she aches for places she has never been, and weeps for people she has never met. Elliana was meant to stretch across the earth, dance in the sunlight, and explore every shadow. But she is not in any of those places, Instead she sits by a man who is not a deer, beside a river. She thinks for a quick moment how it might be to be somewhere else. But she is no where else, and so she smiles contently for now, a small thing on her face, teasing blue eyes that disappear for a moment with a swoop of long, innocent lashes.
“I kind of wish you were one though,” she says, confesses, observes in that way children are so known for. It is so perfectly innocent and maybe had it been said by any other it could have been taken differently. But Elliana is just different, just strange enough. She was a shadow. A flower hidden by the trees. “Do you?” She asks him. Deer weren't common in Terrastella, aside from the Mirestag, but she was hardly allowed to go looking for such creatures. “I’ve never seen one, only in my storybooks,” she says. The princess who sang to the wild animals, the faes that cared for the forest. Pictures, and she has painted her own. Maybe this antlered man knew where to find them.
She admires the jewels that come close to her. “Those are pretty,” she remarks. Though her small family did not hurt for money, they hardly lived lavishly, Elena preferring her daughter to grow up modest and humble, just as she had. Their rubies were red roses, their emeralds new sprouts, and their aquamarines forget-me-nots. If flowers were jewels, then perhaps they would be the richest in the land.
Her small body is dwarfed even more next to the stallion, but she doesn't notice. Elliana spends far too much of her attention on insignificant things and is blind to what her mother cautions her of. She would see not a wolf’s teeth, but his amber eyes. She would watch not a dragon’s fire, but the glisten of her scales. She would notice not the kelpie’s hunger for her flesh, but the smell of sea salt on their skin.
She laughs like snowflakes in the sun. The plants are beautiful and Elli smiles. “You need more paintings.” A pause and a smile that is so delicately beautiful when it crinkles in the corners of those too blue eyes. “I could paint some.” Clearly, her understanding of maps is limited. She sees pages and thinks of stories, she thinks of stories and she thinks of pictures. “Well, you suppose wrong,” she says to him, looking up at him with satellite dish eyes. She is a bold little thing, but she thinks she has nothing to fear, but the shadows that whisper to her at night. She thinks if she has a nightmare, her father will vanquish them like the dream knight he is, that she knows him to be.
Elliana is ignorant of the fact that it is her real father that placed those shadows, however accidental it may be, there in the first place.
“Want to go on a walk together?” She asks him, tilting that little head. “You can finish your map and I can look for tulips in the snow.”
FROM THE LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF SCALE from the dead: a sense of scale
The girl tells him, with a sort of bluntness that might have been insulting were she fully-grown (but is made charming by the fact that she is a child), that she might have rather liked him to be a deer instead; she asks, then if he wishes that he were a deer, with an inflection that suggests it is a perfectly normal question. He swallows down a laugh. “Do I wish I were a deer?” A smile twitches at the corners of his lips. “I rather like being what I am – we wouldn’t be talking if I were a deer, after all.” She goes on to tell him that she has never seen a deer before, only pictures of ones in her storybooks. (He finds the prospect of it almost depressing, but at least it means that the girl has books to read, and stories.) “You’ve never seen one?” Or, more likely, a few at a time, considering that the white-tails that he often spotted among the trees and the underbrush of the forest were herd animals. “They’re common here, even this time of year.” Not to mention easier to see, given the stark white of snow and loss of much of their protective cover.
When he twists his head, gemstones clinking, her eyes catch on the stones dangling from his antlers, and she remarks that they are pretty. “Would you like one?” He pulls one of the green gemstones off the hook of his antlers with practiced ease, and he offers it to her with a faint smile. “I have more than enough.” He certainly does (and is constantly forced to buy more, with how easily he loses them while working), and the only ones that really matter are the earrings.
The girl looks at his map, and she tells him promptly that it needs more paintings. “You might be right.” There are all kinds of maps that are prettier, after all – ones with ornate vines and metal leaves painted around their borders, with monsters poking their heads out of the waves and unscaled depictions of landmarks. His are hardly so creative; he is plenty good at more detailed drawings, after thousands of years of sketching on-the-go, but he’s never bothered to detail his maps. When she offers to paint for him, a grin twitches at the corners of his lips, and he says, “When I’m done with it, I think I’d rather like that. Perhaps you could paint a nice border?” He doesn’t know if she is any good at it, but he doesn’t think that matters; at any rate, it would certainly make his sketchy maps look a bit more formal.
She informs him, with the sort of self-assuredness that could only come from youthful naivete, that he supposes wrong; so she is out here alone. (What are her parents thinking?) She tilts her dainty head at him, blue-eyed gaze inquisitive, and asks him if he would like to go for a walk with her, proposing that he finish his maps while she looks for tulips in the snow. He thinks that it is likely still a bit early for tulips, but she might get lucky – and, even if she doesn’t, he has a feeling that he can find something else to interest her.
(It would, after all, be no good to leave her out in the woods alone in the midst of winter.) “Alright,” Septimus says, though he is not so sure that he should be encouraging the easy way that she proposes a walk with a stranger. “Perhaps we’ll see a deer, while we walk.” He’d seen their cloven hoof-prints in the snow, earlier this morning, and he still remembers where they were; if he guides her that way, they might just happen to see them.
With that in mind, Septimus starts off towards the place where he saw the tracks, tucking his notebooks back into his satchel (he can pull them back out if he needs to mark anything); he keeps his strides slow and short, so that she can easily keep pace with him.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
I
t's nothing to kill a child, a simple thing, and one needn't be a god to do it. It does not require magic, nor any great force. The children, the children who come from the night, from the shadows, they told her how they died. One forgotten, two wandered too far, three fell, four from war, five murdered, six, seven, eight. It is nothing to kill a child. Elliana knows this best. And still she smiles to stranger who could take her out of existence in a moment, and she explores, and she looks at the world through rose colored glasses, while those shadows loom behind her, aching to be heard with words of a caution to a blue eyed little girl, with a heart too big.
A tentative smile grew on her face, and those blue eyes shined a little brighter. Her head tilts like a little bird as he speaks, encouraging him for an answer. “I suppose not.” Is all she offers him, though it is not so easily accepted inwardly. She thinks if he were a deer they would be just the same, and they would be friends and have adventures together. Just like in her books. But as it is, he is no deer—though Elli knows they will be friends despite this setback.
“Only in my books,” she murmurs softly with a roll of her slight shoulders. “I saw some have antlers like you, and some do not,” she points out, comfortably settling beside him as if she has known him for ages. “Why?” She questions him, expecting him to have the answers. (He looked so very much like a man who has answers).
Blue eyes watch the gems as they sparkle in the sunlight that manages to break through in the forest. She hesitates for only a moment, her mother reminding her not to take things from others, especially strangers. But the instincts her mother tries so hard to instill in her are gone in one blink of forget me not eyes. She tucks it away inside blonde locks and whenever she shifts that delicate head, it pops clear for just a moment.
His map is filled with intricate lines, and Elli is amazed by the way they weave and draw, but she is a girl of colors and art and so she cannot help but find there to be something missing. “Oh please, can I?” She asks him, looking down once more at the map and envisioning a scattering of colors around the outside. “What’s your favorite color?” And this is perhaps the most important question that will be asked all day.
“You keep a look out for the deer, okay?” She asks of him, a simple responsibility, but in her eyes it may be viewed as one of the largest she could ask for. She moves, as light as a butterfly across the forest floor, keeping pace with his slowed steps. “I’m Elliana,” she says. “How do we know where to look for deer?”
FROM THE LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF SCALE from the dead: a sense of scale
If anything, it is the soft and sunny hesitance of her smile that assures him the girl is very much a mortal child. Fae children, or otherlings, or whatever you like to call him (he’s heard his siblings called every which thing, in his travel) are never hesitant about anything at all. They spring through life with all the wild-eyed thoughtlessness of wolves and bears, carnivore teeth and claws bared. I suppose not, she says, and he can’t help but smile back, amused, as it were, by her supposing.
(He wonders what sort of parents she must have, to have developed such a manner of speech.)
The girl settles alongside him, and she looks up with him with large, expectant blue eyes and asks why some deer have antlers and some don’t. “Well,” Septimus says, considering her (he knows the importance of answering questions for children, and treating them very seriously), “Male deer – bucks – grow antlers, but they shed them during certain parts of the year. Female deer – does – almost never grow them at all.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, however, he thinks to issue a correction. “Of course, that can be different in different places. Magic can do all sorts of things to deer, and to almost anything else.” He pauses for a moment, a grin settling across his lips, and adds, “It was very clever of you to notice. Perhaps you have the making of a biologist yourself.”
All science, after all, begins with an observation.
At his offering, she takes the gemstone, tucking it away between her soft, silver-blonde locks of hair. Her eyes dart over the map thoughtfully, and she responds with something like delight to his proposition, asking for reaffirmation and then – the quintessential question of a child, he thinks – what his favorite color is. “Of course,” he says, resisting the urge to let out a laugh at her enthusiasm, lest she think it mocking. Septimus can appreciate art, and it doesn’t much matter if hers is good or bad – she seems so happy that he’s sure she’ll do a wonderful job with the border of his maps, if he only gives her the chance. “I think that it’s probably green, like early spring. Have you seen a spring yet?” His head tilts, and his eyes dart the length of her frame. She looks too young for it, too small.
(He thinks that she will find her first spring delightful. How often does he wish that he could experience something again, for the very first time? But Septimus is old, far older than he looks, and very few things are new to him any longer. He is trying to teach himself to be content with that.)
He is a bit amused at how easily – and immediately – she begins to give orders. “I will,” he agrees – he intended to regardless. She introduces herself as Elliana, and he responds in kind, “I’m Septimus. It’s nice to meet you, Elliana.” She asks him how they know where to look for deer, which he finds to be a fine question. “Well, we can look for their tracks. Deer leave hoof-prints in the soil, but their hooves aren’t shaped like most horse’s.” He has met a few with cloven hooves, though, mostly unicorns – so he doesn’t want to say that all of them have different types of hooves. Septimus pulls one of his notebooks from his satchel with an easy flourish, and, flipping open the pages to find a drawing of the track of one, deer-cloven hoof, he suspends it in the air in front of her. “If you see anything in the dirt that looks like this, it might lead to a deer – they have cloven hooves. They also paw at the ground, sometimes, so you might see scratches in the dirt, and sometimes they make a sound a bit like…” He trails off, thoughtfully, and finally decides to attempt a mimicry. “…this.” He gives a soft, deerish huff, finding it rather fortunate that he’s had ample time to practice making calls.
(Hopefully they’ll find a few deer – he doesn’t want to disappoint her.)
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
H
e smiles and she wants to ask him something. Are we all born from stars? She wants to ask him because he looks like he would know the answer. But she lets it glide by on the passing breeze, remembering that it is a silly question and that of course they are born from stars. Her papa told her as much.
And he would never lie to her she thinks.
She thinks but does not know for certain.
He explains things to Elli and she finds herself watching the way his mouth moves, how his lips form each word, and the way his eyes tilt down to her own, she thinks she will paint him, probably, but she may just paint him as a deer instead. So much she is concentrating, remembering every angle of his antlers, every point, she misses much of what he says, clasping only onto that there are boy deer and girl deer. (Male and female mean so little to one lost in her innocence.) She skips forward, closer to him, head nodding back and forth, side to side. “Boys and girls, boys and girls,” she says in a haunting sing song voice. It would not be so chill inspiring perhaps if it were not so high pitched, like the wind, and maybe if it were not sang in such perfect tune, her melody impeccable. She thinks of boys and undoubtedly that leads to thinking of Aeneas and she wonders if he has tried looking for her, and she smiles because he has yet to find her.
“I don’t want to be a biologist,” she says direct. “I’m going to be a paint, you can be a biologist if you want,” she pushes the reassurance into his heart, although she knows her approval means relatively little to adults, she offers it anyway.
She takes the gemstone and leans towards his ear. “I will put it under my pillow,” she whispers like a secret. “I wont show anyone—except Nicnack,” she says. Of course, except Nic. Her mother’s ward was perhaps the exception to everything, as much a part of her home as her mother’s flowers or the smell of the sea. “I have not,” she admits. Spring is a concept that she does not quite understand, she has seen it in books, learned about it in school, but she cannot see beyond the snow.
“Blessed Night, Septimus,” she offers him, a greeting her father taught her to use in Denocte. A phrase she took home with her. A girl of Dusk and Night, who has found companionship in the dawn. She has her mother’s build in so many ways and is lovely in her movement, fluid and soft like the calm banks of a river, so she walks almost carefree until he speaks, and her response is a girlish giggle before she grows quiet. “Wait, I hear something.” She says and turns blue eyes to face the forest.
AND RARELY, IF THE WOOD ACCEPTS THE BLADE WITHOUT CONDITIONSthe two pieces keep their balance in spite of the blow❃please tag Septimus! contact is encouraged, short of violence
