"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I had been lurking the depths of the endless tides since the lands had changed into unrecognizable masses. My waterfall gone. My crystalline pool no more. Like the old world I was washed away into the sea, and it is only now -five years later- that I decide I am lonely. Lonely? It was a weird feeling for me. Creeping up from the darkest of depths I feel it tug me towards the lands. Each flick of my finned tail propels me nearer to the island of land. My reptilian-like eyes can see the clouded mirage of craggy cliffs above as I near the opening of a cove. I press on and around the edges, choosing my break to the surface carefully. Slowly. I could not know the dangers that may wait for me there. I did not fear anything here in my waters. Here I am Queen, Siren and Heathen.
These shorelines are something from a distant memory. Not that this land is a memory, but the emerald cloaked trees stir something from within me. A youthful past in which my sister and I played tag between the silent pillars. My adopted sister who I had accidently harmed by what I was. Running, chasing, hunting. It was the first time I felt the creature take hold and I had spent many years hiding myself away. That is until one day I met someone much like me and I could finally be myself...
My head rises higher above the water's surface to gauge the distance to the shore and to scout for any that may be watching me. Iridescent scales glitter in the faint sunlight like mini prisms. My aqua eyes, slitted for the darkness of the ocean, squint as they adjust to the air. Do I dare leave the safety of my sea on a whim of feelings? My mind juggles the ideas as I draw nearer to the tree line. Ocean water shallow and I can feel the rocky bottom brush along my sleek body. As contact is made, I feel the change. My great finned tail morphs into a matching hind set of appendages. The foreign parts of me I had long forgotten push me up above the waters and onto pebbled land. I stagger, like a newborn foal. Stumbling forward slightly, shifting my weight to my front half to regain my balance. A wispy snort is expelled from my muzzle as I breathe in strange air, strange smells. Tangled black strands fall across my face, covering my unchanging eyes. They, along with my scaled skin, are the only remnants of my altar form.
I was out of my comfort zone, out of my element, and vulnerable here...
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He is no stranger to peculiar things, Jamie.
But, though there is nothing particularly alarming about the siren that lurches onto the Chamber’s shore, the shadow-thing was not built for indifference either. He watches, strange head tilted as the sea-creature shifts her weight, unsteady on her feet. (How seldom he even blinks, Jamie, as he appraises her.)
He is no stranger to sea things.
Together he and Evia had fashioned those three water nymphs. How promptly he had spirited them away, tethering them to three separate pools of water. (And why had he done that? He’s not certain he understands it himself, even now. He has had years to ponder it, to interrogate how cruel it had been to banish them to those ponds. Crueler still, he thinks, that he has never once gone to see them.)
He thinks, perhaps, though, that she is a stranger to land.
Or, at least, far more fond of the water.
He steps into the shadows and they deliver him to her so that he materializes in a blink, standing there in front of her on that secluded stretch of beach. He grins, a flash of ink-black, razor-sharp teeth, his breath rattling as he appraises her.
“Hello,” he rasps, grinning still. A creature pretending, maybe. A creature that never did quite learn how to get it just right. “Welcome to the Chamber.” In the grand scheme of things, he is new to the Chamber himself, eager to take his place at its helm simply because his mother had loved it so fiercely. He has no way of knowing if this sea-creature has been here before, if she has called it home. He could look, certainly, but to dip freely into her memories would be impolite.
“Have you been here before?”
Understand that he goes through the motions, but there is a bone-rattle in his breathing, there is something sinister in those big yellow eyes, there is something wrong.
It is strange here, on this solid ground. My body feels heavy, like dead weight. It is not the weightless fluidity I was used to in the waters. It takes a moment for me to adjust, to breathe.
It is in that moment that one appears. Soundless, weightless. Much like the fogs that cloak the seas from time to time. The sudden dark image startles me and an instinctive reaction shifts my weight to my backside. The swift change, to weakened limbs, tumbles me back into the shallow brackish tide. Hocks buckle and I stagger to save myself from falling, all while trying to process what it was that had caused such a chain of events. Reptilian eyes try to focus as I collect myself once again.
Hello. Welcome to the Chamber.
I shake the tousled black threads from my view as I process the spoken words. "The what? Chamber?" Of all the lands in Beqanna this one I did not recognize by name, but I had never been one to join in on the politics of the kingdoms. I had also been gone for quite some time. My weight shifts along the cobble stones of the beaches and I decide it best to remain wallowing in the shallows in case I must retreat much faster than my legs could function right now. I am cautious of this unknown being, his dark mass and yellow eyes both cause suspicion and curiosity to stir within me.
Have you been here before?
My mind mulls over the question of the stranger and I consider both possible meanings, to me. "Hardly," I reply simply. My eyes judge the situation and character for what it seems. Dark figures do not simply appear from the shadows for good reasons. I know this trick all too well, though only when the creature within me takes hold. Now it whispers caution and unlike most times I listen to it. The hunter knows when it is being hunted.
"And you? Have you been here long?" My voice is more angelic than his by far and I do not dismiss the grin that plagues his face. Had circumstances been different I may have been the one pursuing the creature before me, luring him into the depths of my ocean home. Singing sweet melodies of guaranteed bliss, but that is not me today. Today I seek something else, though I am unsure yet of what -or who- it is...
The sea-thing staggers, loses its balance, and the shadow-thing merely tilts its strange head and watches. The reaper does not spring to her aid or ask if she’s all right, he simply studies and remembers.
(Remembers the years he had spent a cripple, turning his face from the light, grimacing against the ache in his joints. Remembers how he’d pulled the fog around him and slept. For days at a time, he’d slept! He knows exactly all the ways a body can betray you and none of them nudge him toward empathy.)
The grin does not fade so much as the shadow-thing merely closes its mouth when the sea-thing speaks. So she is not familiar with the Chamber, had not meant for it to be the place where she crawled out of the sea.
“Shame,” he muses, the breath still so much like a death rattle. It is a strange thing for her to ask him, he thinks, though the answer is perhaps not as simple as it should be. (How long has it been now? He’s uncertain as time has a habit of bending away from memory. And how does his physical presence compare to the fact that his allegiance to the Chamber spans generations. Were he a romantic, he might have been drawn to the place simply because it had been the setting of his parents’ love story. Alas, he is not a romantic, he has simply always been desperate to prove his worth to his mother and she had scarcely loved anything so much as she’d loved the Chamber.)
There is no sense explaining this to a stranger, though.
“I’ve lost track,” he murmurs then, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. He glances beyond her to the sea.
02-11-2024, 09:46 AM (This post was last modified: 02-11-2024, 02:00 PM by Deiti.)
The sea waters lap gently at my heels as I remain still unmoved from the waters embrace. It is a comfort of sorts. Beads of water roll gently down my blackish scales; tiny prisms of light reflecting the beauty in their dark depth. My ears flick to the stranger as he speaks.
Shame... I've lost track.
I can relate as time has escaped my grasps as well. Time means little when you are an immortal creature. My understanding is shown with a shying of my gaze on the shadowed man. Snips of memories pass over my mind. My uncle, my sister, Kuma, Jesper, Leilan, Ivar... Ischia and my pool with waterfall curtains; the giant palm trees and the curious parrolets that sang sweet melodies with me there. A faint smile tugs at my black lips. A realization of why my heart has pulled the Siren from the sea washes over me...
What were you looking for, if not the Chamber?
My reptilian eyes blink away the memories and look again to the stranger. His question pulls the answer from my tongue without much thought, "home," I breathe gently into the air. I realize now the reason for my return to land, the how is much more complex though. My uncle and Kuma -who had taken me in as a child- have passed to another realm a long time ago. The others may have fallen to such fates as well, I truly did not know. Maybe if I could find Ischia, I could begin my search!
With a slight hesitation my legs draw me up onto the shores. It was strange to move all four of them in tandem and it was not without concentration. They bring me before the stranger, within a better speaking distance. "I am Deiti," my words pause as even those are foreign to me these days, "Is the Chamber your home?... Your kingdom?" I have never been one to engage in diplomatic forums. Ivar is -was- the only one I have ever known to hold a rank within a land, but it was less formal, our interactions. I was but a trinket -a play thing- in my pool within the land. I left the rest of the duties to the others within the harem. Only interacting when called upon, or with those who came to drink from my crystalline pool. So, I do not know what to expect with this interaction, especially with the company I keep now...
Might he have reacted differently to her had he known that she, too, was a pet of Ivar’s? Perhaps. For what a strange connection it would be to think of how he had looked at Evia, how he had shrunk, how he had asked if she’d loved Ivar. (As if a thing like him, heartless as he was, could understand what love meant at all.)
But he feels no overwhelming urge to delve into her mind, to shuffle through the memories. It would certainly be easier to understand where she meant by home if he had, though. Instead, he only nods as if he understands.
“And where is home?” he asks, though he could hazard a guess. The scaled things often came from Ischia. Evia had.
She ventures closer, offers her name, asks about his home.
Home, for him, would almost certainly be Pangea. More specifically, the cave where he had spent his youth, where he had hidden himself away from the things that made him grimace and squirm and cower. The things that had thrown into sharp relief how weak he’d really been. But home, he has come to understand, can have several different meanings.
“My name is Jamie,” he tells her and then exhales, glancing over his shoulder at the land that yawns out behind him. “I am one of its rulers, yes,” he says and then blinks his focus back to her. “But it is not my kingdom.”
He has begun to understand that the kingdom belonged to no one, but countless souls had belonged to it, his mother included. He’d heard tales of a ruler who’d sacrificed his literal heart to the kingdom and sometimes Jamie thought he could feel the pulse of it underfoot.
The answer was never as simple as it should be, was it? Was home a place? Someone? A feeling? I consider the answer and give only what I know to be home, "It is a tropical paradise with long stretching beaches. Forests, thick with vegetation and creatures of all shapes and colors. A deep blue pool at its center with waterfalls as a backdrop." That faint smile from before grows more defined, "Do you know of it? Ischia?"
I had only visited one other land like it, Tephra. They were similar but very different. I had never set foot on its shores, but from the river channel that cut thru it, I had seen the fiery mountain. Being a creature of the water, I avoided flame and lava was no exception. My body shifts slightly, relieving the heavy of my body from one tired limb to the next. How one stands all day I am unsure. He draws my attention back as he answers my previous queries.
My name is Jamie. I am one of its rulers yes. But it is not my kingdom.
The emphasis on my has me tilt my blackish face in thought. It could mean several things, I guess. In my mind things were either yours, or someone else's. So, I assume as much is at play here, especially since he had expressed he is only one of the rulers, another idea that is unfamiliar to me. It does not move me one way or another, because again I have never dealt in kingdom politics. I was much more simplistic, often seeking solitude -or purgatory- if something stirred deep within me. There had been that one time I drug my own friend into the depths of my pool. The instincts had been too much then and overpowered my control...
Ischia.
He had thought it, but to hear her say it sparks an altogether different memory. A memory not of Evia, but of Beyza. How she had spirited the Fates away and he’d heard tell that they’d landed there.
Ischia, where Beyza had taken up the helm as their leader.
Deiti smiles and the shadow-creature smiles, too. But it is neither fondness nor nostalgia that inspire his smile. No, it is something much darker.
“Ischia,” he echoes, barely there at all, “yes, I’ve heard of it.”
He tilts his head and something flickers in those strange yellow eyes as he considers her. Had Deiti known Beyza? Had she watched the white magician make a home for his daughters there? He doesn’t ask, though, no.
“Never had the pleasure of visiting myself.” He glances down at himself, at the red “V” carved into the pitch flesh of his chest. He has always been a thing made of shadow, Jamie, even after he’d emerged the victor of the last Alliance and been made whole in a way he had never been before, he had clung to those shadows.
“I don’t think I’d much fit in in a place like that,” he muses, grinning still. It is something distant, though. He shifts his focus back to her and asks, “what do you think?”
02-11-2024, 04:25 PM (This post was last modified: 02-11-2024, 04:29 PM by Deiti.)
Ischia. Yes, I've heard of it.
For a brief moment there is the elated feeling I'd been longing for. Just hearing the name of my home rushes the feeling through my body. A warmth I have not felt within the vast abyss of the ocean I had occupied for quite some time. It is also in that brief moment that something else within me begs caution. That in my minds wanderings I've forgotten who, or what, company I have found here. I see it now in his eyes, a darkness. It banishes the warmth to a bone quacking chill. One that has my legs buckling and stepping away from the dark man.
Never had the pleasure of visiting myself.
His bringing attention of the mark on his chest stirs more feeling within. Ivar has scars, my sister has scars. It was not usually gentle things that mar the flesh so deeply. My ears twist, half searching for the faint lapping of waves I have left the safety of. Half listening to the shadow creature speak, yet again.
I don't think I'd much fit in in a place like that... What do you think?
The question seems rhetorical but still I offer an answer just the same. Ischia, as I had known it, was not immune from the creatures of the darkness, being one such myself. If it is a sinister darkness in which is implied. With much smoother tone than expected, I speak, "The Ischia I knew welcomed all." It is the creature within that begins to pull the strings. Where my altar equine self would crumble apart, the Siren rose to save face. "Though this kingdom does suit you well I must say," the words flow like wine as sapphire eyes sparkle, putting even the stars to shame. My movements now are smooth and flawless, each step placed perfectly. With the sea still to my back I would have turned tail and tried to run, if I had been in control. But not now. Not this time. The Siren hungers for danger. Excitement. And so, I find myself stepping forward, a seductive grin forming across my fine features, baring the faint glimmer of carnivorous teeth. "You should most definitely come visit sometime. My pool there is quite...refreshing," for drink or swim I do not say.
It is an exceptionally strange thing for her to say, the shadow-thing thinks. There is nothing about this place that suits him and especially not this stretch of beach. He is a thing made for lurking in darkness, the shadow magician had seen fit to craft him as such. But he feels no particular impulse to argue, only study.
There is a shift in her, he can feel it. (And we may never know if it is simply that tangible or if it is because there is magic that rises to meet magic.) He can see it, too, in the curve of her mouth and the way she drifts closer.
He blinks those strange yellow eyes, tilts that strange, featureless head. He is only half-aware of what she’s doing. Or trying to do. And only half-aware because Jamie has never crossed a creature that has tried to seduce him. He is an ugly thing, see. Hideous in the unnatural size of his eyes, the death rattle in his lungs, the rasping quality of his voice. Even the power he possesses is ugly.
“Your pool?” he echoes, thinking then of the nymphs in their own pools. One banished to the pond at the heart of the forest, another two the river, and the third lost someplace out at sea. How thrilling it had been to tether them to those pools! How thrilling to replace their lifeblood with that water. They had not even cried out when he’d left them.
He shakes his head, though, because her pool is quite obviously not the same. She had been allowed to leave it. She is standing here in front of him, breathing.
“I’m afraid that I’ve lost the opportunity to visit,” he tells her, “we both have.” A pause then as he calls the fog to crowd in around them. He glances at it, pulls shapes from it. The world as they had known it then. “Ischia fell some time ago.” He shows her in this strange, dull map. Ischia fading, plunging into the sea.
Deiti
jamie
