Novus
an equine & cervidae rpg
Hello, Guest!
or Register




Thank you, everyone, for a wonderful 5 years!
Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

All Welcome  - (fire) and silver bones wait in all animals,

Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)



Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Danaë
Guest
#1

 
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.


Danaë does not know much about fire-- why it is a hollow hunger without end, why the smoke spirals up instead of into the ground that is starving of want of carbon. Mortals are lingering around the flame, diving through the circles of them like frail hawks between clouds. Their thrilling avaravice for danger, and cleansing, and whatever else it is they are seeking, echoes in her ears like the wailing of the trees in the hurricane winds. 

And so she watches them, each bloody eye as intent as the eyes of a predator pack of rabid beasts, dissolve into the base chaos of mortals. Each time one singes the tip of their nose in the flames she images growing a morning glory from the black wound on their lips. Every time a horse bellows in victory she imagines etching out the sorrows of the dead-wood into the canvas of their brittle, mortal cheeks. Every time a horse tosses copper, and metal, and whatever else they call magic, into the flame she imagines tossing them into the fire to burn. 

She wonders who would leap with her then, when it’s not sorrowful wood burning but ignorant moral skin. 

Without her sister she is too cautious to stray to close with her heart wandering between the laments of dead-wood and the wrath of a unicorn made. In the darkness, just beyond the kiss of fire-light, she paces with her head slung low like a dragon and her tail lashing tracks into the damp, dawn earth like a lion before a hyena pack. Beneath her hooves buried voles, and rabbits, and mice devoured by owls, tremble as roots bloom between the sockets of their long gone eyes. Her soul flickers between unicorn wrath, and dead-prey lament, and something darker and needier than both. 

On the edge she waivers and with each blink she becomes something else. In the fire poppies, and jasmine, and nightshade bloom and burn in the knots of the dry wood. Her eyes gather the red-light, and blue-light, and amethyst-light, until her gaze is glowing with a hundred different shades of blood. 

With that bloody kaleidoscope gaze, she finally steps closer to the fire. She plummets off the cliff-edge of kindness into the black yawning jaw of the earth in which dead things tremble with those vine stitching their broken, dirt-fat, jaws back together. Danaë walks closer, and closer, on her graveyard of things trying so desperately to feel the heat of that fire. 

And when she stops, with her horn tossed violently into the smoke, her eyes blaze in the ways of unicorns and lions. Every inch of her body screams in the immortal challenge of a monster, and a mother, and a wolf with dead cubs in her womb, that for each inch of sorrow the wood had to suffer that a drop of mortal blood will be spilled in payment. 





@any!
« r »










Played by Offline Elidhu [PM] Posts: 55 — Threads: 14
Signos: 40
Dawn Court Soldier
Female [She/Her]  |  10 [Year 500 Winter]  |  17 hh  |  Hth: 10 — Atk: 10 — Exp: 16  |    Active Magic: N/A  |    Bonded: N/A
#2

 
↞ Meira ↠
   
There is something peculiar about the Unicorn standing at the edge of the fire. She is not mesmerized by the equines, nor those who call themselves mages. Meira does not believe these equines to be mages, for they do little more than throw bits of metal into the fire that stain the smoke. She watches the Unicorn from a distance, she too is not invited into the throng of bodies that try so hard to mimic the sea. It is a false sea, one that the Roanne rejects. Her thoughts continue to drift back toward the peculiar femme, with war in her eyes. A lion rests beneath the surface of her pale hide. She does not believe that this is a mistake, it is too obvious. No predatory is ever truly able to hide themselves, or so she thinks. The woman is smaller than her, but not by much. Ivory limbs stalk across the ground, a ground that seems to be alive with magic beneath her feet.  Meira draws her gaze from the Unicorn's feet back to her face.

It is not familiar to her. Why should it be? Meira has made no friends that bind her to this court. She is a soldier in more ways than one. A blast of coloured smoke rises from three columns suddenly. The peculiar woman begins to stalk closer and closer to the flames. She is in a world all her own, or so the earthen Unicorn deems. She is a sea made of earth, in more ways than one. Still, the woman draws closer to the flames. Closer and closer the horrible thing stalks, and the pit in her stomach grows. It swells like a horrible wave and threatens to crash down around her. Before she can think, she is moving. Moving toward the horrible war-eyed woman. The blood tint of her eyes dances in the firelight, it makes Meira's skin crawl. She is not fond of real magic, and yet she is compelled to intervene.  "What are you doing?" She asks quietly, because she does not want that hate to fall upon her. 

Her striped frame has stepped in front of the other Unicorn. She has placed herself between the other woman and the fire. 





I hope this is okay! @Danaë 
 










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Danaë
Guest
#3

 
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.

Ants are being boiled in the fire, their exoskeletons cracked open and popping like bits of amber tossed into the flames. With them moths are burning and worms are digging deeper in the dirt desperate to feel any relent from the embers sinking into their homes. Skulls are charring in the heat from where they rest below the spring grass wavering in the night breeze. The entire meadow, the entire meadow, is fat with sorrow at the desecration religion has sliced open its throat with.

And for the first time Danae discovers what it is to look upon the beliefs of mortals and crave the unmaking of them all: tibia to tooth, femur to ventricle, rib to liver. Her mouth dampens as the thought and her belly rumbles like a bear in the dead of winter.

She is still listening to the popping ants, and the screaming moths, when the other unicorn approaches. On her skin, when Danaë licks her flavor and detangles it from the char of soot, she can taste brine and strangeness. Her soul, her made and terrible soul, bellows to her that this is not a unicorn, not in the way that anything is a unicorn.

Her teeth and tongue ache for the feel of femur, for the feel of anything to blot out the screams of the wood and the forest scavengers as they all die. A dead fox beneath her hooves clacks his broken teeth as roots weave his broken jaw bones back together. She swings her horn towards the approaching unicorn and a pillar of smoke, one clinging to the wanting hollows of her horns, follows.

She does not stop the arc of her horn until it is pointing at the hollow above the mortal’s left eye (the one begging to unfold, and unfurl, and root daisies in it). “The forest could have been something more than embers.” Her voice is little more and little less than a frothing snarl held together with those same woven together fox jaws.

The grass whispers under her hooves as she steps closer. A fox paw scrabbles at the dirt beneath her hooves but is too weak to be free of it. Beside the fire a stack of wood starts to bloom with a garden (wisteria, and lilacs, and mint). And the look in her eyes as they flicker to the new-born garden and back to the mare promises that it’s not rain that will water her foliage.






@Meira
« r »










Played by Offline Elidhu [PM] Posts: 55 — Threads: 14
Signos: 40
Dawn Court Soldier
Female [She/Her]  |  10 [Year 500 Winter]  |  17 hh  |  Hth: 10 — Atk: 10 — Exp: 16  |    Active Magic: N/A  |    Bonded: N/A
#4

 
↞ Meira ↠
   
As soon as the other unicorn takes notice of her, she can see the hate brewing beneath her red gaze. Smoke trails her horn, as though it has been sliced by the makeshift dagger. This woman is a threat, the language she speaks is danger. It is blood, and violence, and rot. There is a snarl in her aura, Meira can feel it. She takes notices of the small garden lurching forward from the wood. It is so beautiful, and it abides by the bidding of this violent magician. When she speaks, it too sounds like war. Meira feels a part of her stirring. A part that she has buried as best she can. When she speaks, it is the language of death. She mourns what the forest could have been. It could have been proud instead of pillars of coloured smoke. The predator inside Meira stirs in response to this threat. Discomfort at the feeling, the ache for her to taste the blood this woman promises to water her garden with begins to swell. The feeling begs for Meira to question how dare she threaten the sea.

"Do you mourn them? Do you weep for what they could have been when you see them reduced to pillars of ash and smoke? Does it make your boil to see others celebrate the desecration of something that was once so beautiful?" Meira knows she is asking for a fight, but the dull roar of her predator is growing. It is no longer a soft buzzing, but a low rumble like the thunder of an approaching storm. None in Delumine so far had made her feel so violent. She cannot stop the surge of adrenaline any more than she can cease the rising war inside her. "What will you do? Do you intend to tear into me in the same way you sliced through the smoke? Try it. I dare you." Her rage begs the woman out loud to make the move she is silently promising to make. Meira steps closer, her own crown tipped downward. Each dagger pointing toward the curve in her neck that housed one of the most important veins. It supplied the very thing that kept the magician alive. This woman was the exact reason Meira did not like mages. Meira knew that she technically shouldn't be starting anything, but she could not allow someone to raise their hackles at her without consequence. She would deal with the consequences of tarnishing her own reputation if it came to that.



 Meira is definitely threatened, and so this is how she deals with that I guess 
@Danaë
 










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Danaë
Guest
#5

 
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.

Life is nothing without rage, or violence, or love deeper and blacker than the ocean. It is nothing without ore turning to diamond in the belly of the earth and deadwood blooming flowers instead of ember. Life is nothing, nothing, at all to all the dark things swirling in eddies of rot and decay in her blood. But still, as this mockery of a unicorn steps closer, she cannot help but treasure all the fragility the mortals lays at her feet like a gift.

Danaë treasures it, but she will not save it. Not tonight.

“Why weep for what you can save?” Each step carries her closer, like the quiet wrath of a storm too far from the horizon to feel, to the point of the other unicorn’s horn. In her eyes, in each tight curl of her form as she coils like every wolf, and bear, and stag at the border of their territory, there is only life following closely on the heels of death. And when she exhales directly into the mortal’s lung it is the touch of a wolf’s nose to the pulse of a rabbit’s neck.

She does not laugh, or mock, or banter with the mouse come to the wendigo’s den. With the fire at her back, and the last tendrils of smoke in her horn dissapaiting to make room for the sinew of a kill, she is nothing but all the things in the wake of the night gazing out from the darkness at all the things that do not understand them.

A lion still feels the vole when they swallow them whole, each small movement an attack as useless as it is frantic.

Their horns sing when Danaë tosses her head to meet the warning tip of the mortal’s horn. She should not have paused to warn her like a child with a flame in the middle of the purring darkness. The blade of her tail curls upward to rest just below the steady pulse that sounds, to her, like the sea. “Shall I grow yarrow or cornflowers in you so that you too might be something more than pillars of ash and smoke?” And this time, when she smiles, it is with every ounce of violence, and ire, and rage of the ant exploding in a race towards death.







@Meira
« r »










Played by Offline Elidhu [PM] Posts: 55 — Threads: 14
Signos: 40
Dawn Court Soldier
Female [She/Her]  |  10 [Year 500 Winter]  |  17 hh  |  Hth: 10 — Atk: 10 — Exp: 16  |    Active Magic: N/A  |    Bonded: N/A
#6

 
↞ Meira ↠
   
Hunger. Wrath. Violence. Each glance she steals at the mare before her, who stalks her like a true predator, this is all she sees. The sea inside her churns into a terrible, violent storm. Meira stands her ground, she is not afraid of this unicorn. It is not the first time she has found herself in the path of a violent mage. One might say that Meira has spent much of her life in the path of one. Each step the woman grows closer gives her all the more reason to defend her self. She asks why, why should she mourn what can be saved? Meira laughs, it is a cold, hollow sound. It is not mirth in the bubbles of her laughter, but hate. "Only a child thinks such things of those already fallen and burned to ash." Her words are as cold as the depths of the sea. Meira does not flinch when the woman's horn grinds against her own. It is a foolish move, or so she deems. The pale creature speaks again, asking what kind of flowers she should grow in Meira as she burns like the wood in the fires. The storm inside her rises as she stares the woman down.

She is so close, so close. "Has no one told you? Flowers don't grow in the sea." The monster he keeps inside is unleashed as she speaks these words. Meira moves quickly, so quickly. Her teeth aim to pull at the Unicorn's horn. The desire to feel the boney structure between her teeth. Forward, forward she lurches. Toward the mage who has threatened her. She is not a victim, and will not allow herself to become one. Meira does not think for a moment that this could be one of the citizens she has promised to protect. It is hard to submit your life to those who would threaten yours. A better equine might have turned down the challenge, and turned away for the sake of their court. Their reputation. Meira is someone with nothing to lose because she has already lost everything. Everything but the sea, and the storms of her fury.

"Do you think that if you burn down, you'll be fine?" She snarls to the unicorn as she attempts to edge her closer to the fire. Meira knows this is a brutal threat, and if she is able to follow through on it, she likely will have no place in Dawn. Meira does not back down, even as she feels the quiver of her lungs. Mages are dangerous, especially this one.



I love your girl so so much <3
@Danaë
 










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Danaë
Guest
#7

 
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.

“Is it childish when I do not think it but know?” Each word is a snarl, a frothing rage only pretending to be tame as langage. Beneath her hooves mushrooms start to bloom where the fires had burned the night before and destroyed all the grass there. The smell of them is a festering thing, a rotting thing, a fermented flavor of the earth left behind in the wreckage of mortals. From the fire the smell of charred jasmine starts to rise in blooms of spiced smoke.

Danaë feels like she’s choking on it all as the mortal tries to hold her horn between her teeth and drag her into the flames.

And let it be remembered that her eyes wept with sorrow in that last moment, that last almost-mortal beat of her heart, before the wrath settled like a stone in her chest. A single tear, a lone regret, gathers bloody against her cheek before she leans into the feel of the other unicorn’s teeth. A single tear.

The world trembles at the bottom of the fire, where saplings start to rise out of the charred oaks and birches. Each is wet enough, new enough, green enough, that they do not burn completely before the leaves start to rise outside the flames. The tear in her eye is replaced by blood, and malice, and every raging sorrow of the dead forest, and the dead predators beneath them.

Her tailblade presses against the mortal’s throat, sharp and eager for all the sinew and blood beneath the skin. “If you were the sea once you are no longer, mortal.” The curls of her horn dig into the attack as vines grow from the cleaved out land to steady her. “It is not the tide I hear thrumming in your chest and it will not be brine that I spill when you are cleaved in two.” Danaë pushes her tailbade so closely that it might sink in and dig deep.

All she had wanted was to save the dead-trees in the fires and the charred grasses around the stones of them. All she had wanted was life instead of death-- and this, this will have to do.

“I will not be the one to burn with the trees and the flowers, tonight.” She snarls and every vine at her hooves bloom with holly-berries that stain the ground like blood when she steps on them to push the mortal back.

Mother and Isolt would have unmade this mare already. And still Danae tries, just a little, to save her before the death blow of the wicked tailblade poised at the mortal’s tender throat. .









@Meira
« r »










Played by Offline Elidhu [PM] Posts: 55 — Threads: 14
Signos: 40
Dawn Court Soldier
Female [She/Her]  |  10 [Year 500 Winter]  |  17 hh  |  Hth: 10 — Atk: 10 — Exp: 16  |    Active Magic: N/A  |    Bonded: N/A
#8

 
↞ Meira ↠
   
Her words mean nothing, nothing until she sees. A glimpse of him as they near the fire. A single tear. It drips down the unicorn's cheek until it turns to blood. Flora begins to erupt from the fire, no doubt at the command of this violent mage. Guilt, guilt gnaws at her. It chokes her. She has become him at this moment. Hate for this unicorn has turned into hate for herself. Her tongue feels heavy with the weight of regret. She understands too late, too late to take back all she has already done. Hypocrite the sea snarls at her. The disappointment of the sea she can feel in her bones. The flora begins to creep towards her, pushing her, pushing her away. These are the tides of the unicorn who weeps for the trees the same way she weeps for the sea. Empty, she is empty. Meira can feel her anger beginning to dissipate, even as the mare's tailblade presses into her skin. She hears the words telling her that she is mortal. It reminds her of the sisters in the history of the Roannes. They too were mortal. Away from the woman, she is pushed by the red berries that stain the sands beneath their feet red.

Meira's teeth pull away and she stares, stares at the woman. The hollow, emptiness fills the space around her heart. It aches; aches like the dying trees in the fire. The mage speaks the truth, and it stains and taints her view on what she has done. "There have been plenty of seas made of blood. But it will not love you, it will rot." She promises, her voice is so soft. Her voice carries guilt, so much guilt. Meira does not pull away from the blade pressed against the vulnerable flesh of her throat. It almost seems a silent invitation to the woman. The Roanne cannot rightfully protect Delumine when she is the one causing the problems. The snarl from the woman is her own fault, she shrinks. Shrinks like the dying flames that crackle and sputter around the flora that abides this mare's bidding. "I have burned far longer than you have breathed." She answers the woman. Softly, softly so as not to spill the truth to the woman who threatens her life. "It's funny, how often I have come to face death. Not even it scares me anymore. It is even funnier to me that you never thought I could have shared your thoughts on the trees. You are not the only one who loves them, but you are perhaps the only one I know who can speak their language."  

Meira steps back then, away. Away from the blade pointed at her nape. "Your life is worth more than consequences you'll face if you kill me. My apology for my actions will fall on deaf ears. I never meant to turn into the very thing I hated. We could extinguish more than lives if we worked together instead of against one another." The foreign words feel so wrong as they come from her mouth. She is sorry, so sorry but she knows it will not matter. It is the same as him, she cannot take it back.




Nestle, writing with you always gives me so much muse <3
@Danaë
 










Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Danaë
Guest
#9

 
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.

Sometimes, to her, the entire world feels like a garden in a low-fog and a sickle moon. She can taste the brine in the air and the fermented sweetness of flowers gone to rot. Each step she walks is across a gravel-path made not with stones, or shells, or dirt packed down, but bones. And she can hear the crunch of skulls, and knee-caps, and teeth, beneath her hooves as she walks closer and closer towards the gate beyond which a million more gardens wait.

The world feels like an endless garden now, when the rage spirals back into her like a buckshot and the mare pulls back. Danaë feels like a seed caught on the wind instead of on a leaf upon the forest floor. All she had wanted to do is sink deep into the loam of the mare and plant down miles and miles of roots. For a moment she hangs there, between seed and wrath, and swings like a corpse on a noose by the sea.

She blinks and it is to the image of the mare unmade superimposed in the darkness. Another blink, another shape by which she might recreate the unicorn-who-lost-her-sea.

And when she opens her eyes there is still an ember of wrath in her bloody gaze. Every ounce of her fury at the celebration has been whittled like a spear onto this point by which the other unicorn speaks. Danaë watches only the darkness between her teeth instead of the smoke of the words when the wind pushes the fire towards them. It takes her longer than it should to form sound into a language that sounds different than wrath and ruin.

Her laughter surprises her for it is a sound her father has made (one that always made her mother look too long-- as if she could see the marrow of it if she looked hard enough). That bloody tear catches in her lips like a seed finally caught in the dirt.  “You do not know enough of death if you are not afraid of it.” Danaë’s look turns to teeth, a dim echo of that wrath still clawing at her insides, before she too steps back.

It feels like tearing her own skin away from her sinew.

Everything in her is too raw, too hungry, too whittled down into the shape of her mother, to care for the story promised in the mortal’s words. The look in her eye, that ember in the blood, gives away the regality in her bones and her genes. She had not thought pride a trait of hers but she does not mind it so much when faced with too-brave mares in her parent’s city. It is a better feeling than the one left in the wake of the image of the mare unmade.

“If you touch me again, there is not a corner of this world in which you will be allowed to live.” The blade of her tail makes an echoing sound, like a church’s throat, when she lets it fall to the ground. Or maybe it is the echoing sound of a distant drum-of-war echoing in spirals across the horizon.

And she does not wait for the echoing sound of it to fade before she turns back towards the fire her plants are choking out.










@Meira
« r »










Played by Offline Elidhu [PM] Posts: 55 — Threads: 14
Signos: 40
Dawn Court Soldier
Female [She/Her]  |  10 [Year 500 Winter]  |  17 hh  |  Hth: 10 — Atk: 10 — Exp: 16  |    Active Magic: N/A  |    Bonded: N/A
#10

 
↞ Meira ↠
   
The world and everything in it is a broken thing. Meira is no exception to this idea, she too is a broken thing. Cast aside, forgotten about until it suited others to acknowledge her existence. This unicorn does so much more, for she is so aware of her existence that she bares the teeth of hatred, violence, and death. It sits in her breast, it breathes for her. Meira watches. She watches the way her mouth hangs agape and a terrible sound comes out. Laughter. It is laughter that is followed by challenging words. The unicorn speaks of death as if she is the only one who knows what it is like, and that all are meant to fear it. She does not understand. " Or perhaps I know so much of death, that I know it is the only promise that life keeps. There are more ways to die than a cessation of existence."  Meira explains because perhaps this woman knows only of one kind of death. So many only think of one type and not the death of the self. The death of love. She watches the mare turn away from her.

Turn back to the fires with the crackling and writhing of the saplings that sprung beneath her command. Eager to please her, only to burn. At this moment, she is like him. For a time Meira considers her backing away a detriment, the thought is fleeting. Meira knows she has no right to attack anyone simply because they remind her of him. Remind her of the way his smoke infects her lungs, the way he drained her sea. There is another threat that comes, this too is a promise. It promises of the one kind of death that all beings know. That even more fear. Meira stares at her, pale frame illuminated by the firelight. Smoke swirls around her like an angry ghost. She pauses, thinking she might see him in the fire. The earth-bound sea convinces herself this is not true. Nothing is true. So she stares, and a small laugh escapes her lips. It is her turn to feel the surprise to claim her face because not many would laugh at such a promise. "You speak as if I was ever allowed to live in any corner of this world. I have died far more than I have ever lived, and die a thousand times each night. Make use of that blood then, and extinguish the flames that bring such ire to you. It will not last long." 

She too has promises that she can keep. Meira agrees silently to the woman's words. If it is up to her, she will never again see this pale ghost who will surely haunt her each night, just the same as he does. A ghost, a ghost to gnaw on her bones. Meira turns and bows into the darkness of the night. Toward the trees she carries herself far, far away from this hungry ghost.




To close it out <3
@Danaë
 










Forum Jump: