Two Eyes Cenote [ap] A wallflower, mind the thorns

Some late AP/WP threads from me. Loosely backdated. Reigning in my muse here. AW but looking for @Eset in particular. Feel free to prod me if I'm posting in the wrong place.

Beautiful ceremonies, lavish feasts, strong drink, boisterous guests, and attentive staff. It was an event of a lifetime, and he managed to not have missed it. What a lucky man he was, to stay in luxury as a guest.


He hated it.


He didn't hate the ever-so-kind hosts. The newly crowned Pharaoh with newlywed husband. They seemed overjoyed with themselves and their ceremony. It was not lost on him that the halls were open to outsiders for the obviously monumental occasion.

He didn't hate the members of Akashingo. It was blood and sweat that kept the hold thing together. From where he sat he watched fellahin dance through the crowd with serving trays. Guards, mazoi if he recalled correctly, were present with watchful eyes.

He didn't even hate the others guests. Each face he saw held some amount of awe. Even if that mostly was at the prepared food. And even after, there was still a good time to be had. Dancing, singing. There was joy and excitement.


He didn't feel the joy or excitement. That's what he hated.


Briar sat against a wall, spine pressed into a recessed portion of stone. A half-drunk serving of the cactus drink between his paws. It made him feel rotten, or at least more rotten than he already was.

So, he leaned back and observed. The place where the blue and yellow of his eyes met tinted green with envy.

Guests are never difficult to persuade, or in the very least, neutralize. Everyone wants to believe they’re the recipient of some great intrigue, and alcohol makes the rest easy. It is true for socialites as well for the wallflowers.

One such looming figure had stolen the fellahin’s attention. Tall, and scowling, and seemingly determined to have a miserable time.

“I'd not wish to be on the receiving end of that look,” Eset teases as she strolls forward. Her golden eyes lift to peer up at him before flicking down to his drink.

“Not to your taste, my Lord?”

His brooding had been interrupted.

His eyes focused on the small figure of the fellahin as she glided over. A slight knit to his brown as she commented on his expression. With a furtive glance, he observed the general berth given to his corner by other partygoers and staff. He returned his gaze to her to find the gold of her own eyes.

Lord? I'm afraid you've mistaken me for someone else. Briar took a deep breath. Releasing the tension of his brow and unclenching his jaw. His paw lifted, fiddling idly with the edge of the drink. But, to answer your question, no.

It was undeniably sweet. The drink, that was. Yet it reminded him of a juvenile mistake. Tasting the remnants of fruit that had long dropped to the ground. Left in the sun to ferment. He ended up quite sick then.

It must have make him sick now. Surely that was it.

Just doesn't sit right with me, unfortunately.

Eset watches his stiff mannerisms but also the way the coolness of his eyes soften- if only for the briefest of moments.

“Perhaps the palace has something more to your taste: berrywine? Pomegranate? Rosewater?” They are effusive offerings. She anticipates his refusal.

“Perhaps not a drink at all,” her gaze pass from his and into the crowds of attractive faces.

He is offered a different pick of poison in the form of alternate wines. Briar's idle fussing with his current drink ceased and his paw returned to the floor. He was not satisfied, nourished, or hydrated by it. Only left with a faint fog within his mind. A sigh heaved from his chest.

No, I think I've finished for now, thank you. I'll search for water later if that changes.

As her gaze travels away, his remains on her. A guardedness to his eyes as an inkling of suspicion latched onto her following statement. It was vague, open-ended, barely a suggestion. But an insinuation was there. Or so he suspected. He'd rather such things be stated plainly

He voice kept a level tone, Might I ask what you mean by that?

“Dancing, star gazing, senet, a tour of the palace. Muat-riya offers amusements other than drink,” an energy in the words springs but her tail cloaks about her paws as she joins the seated side of the man with the heavy brow.

“Though, so fine a wall it is upon which you lean,” the fellahin enlists the playfulness of her dark-lipped smile and glances back into the compelling contradiction of the stranger’s two-toned eyes.

"I would regret for you to part from it."

He listens. Her answer is enough for him smother the suspicion that picked at his mind, for the moment at least.

She joins him, sitting delicately at his side. His head turns to follow her. A twitch ripples along his flank which he attempts to hide by adjusting how he is seated. Posture straightening and collecting his legs closer to his body.

She teases and a low grumble sounds in his throat. Not that she was wrong, glib or not. It was a nice wall. The cool stone remained in place when he spiraled into his own head. Lingering on how awful he felt did feel better with the wall to lean on. He would have melted into it had he the option.

His gaze traveled to the party's crowd. A lingering resentment smoldered like a dying ember in his chest. There was no one to direct it to, other than himself.

He glanced back to the fellahin. He pitied her, if only for the misfortune it was to be in his company. He was quite the wet blanket of a man.

I'll have to think on that a moment. He would give it a try, but a different thought came to mind than her offer. Perhaps you could answer my question in the meantime. Is this to be Akashingo's new home as opposed to the red sand palace? It was a question he had upon arrival. Not that he ever stepped foot within the mesa itself.

He is tough and silent and she regrets that her nearness presumably ripples his hide. She paces a respectful step away, easing her humor and turning her eyes out into the crowd before them.

“Akashingo will still be the primary residence of Pharaoh and her consort,” she explains, “Muat-riya is intended as a summer palace. A number of us will remain here to keep it when leadership returns to the North.”

“What do you make of the palace?” She asks, gaze meeting his own once more.

He barked out an incredulous laugh. Summer palace?

He collected himself with a slight shake of his head. Had she said winter, the season that they were soon diving into, perhaps the notion would not have been so ridiculous to him. Then again, he thought of encountering the imp woman in the golden sea several months prior. Some people were somehow built for the desert. He could not share that sentiment.

To each their own, I suppose

She was now looking to him again. An earnest inquiry presented to him. He took a deep breath. This one?

His eyes flicked to the party hall. It continued while they were tucked away in the corner. Laughter echoing while stone platters were carried to and fro. He struggled to locate a dour face (he seemed to be unique in that regard). The ceremony itself had been conducted in an open air chamber. Even the brief moment he was introduced to a room delegated as his chambers, there had been furs set on the bed. He hadn't known it a practice before coming to the Teekons.

I've never been in a settlement quite like it before.

His face distorts with a laugh, awakening a great offense in the coywolf who always armed herself in careful neutrality.

Perhaps he means to disparage this place that rises from the desert, a land that’s brown and flat and does not call for attention like a lush woodland nor a range of mountains capped in snow; whose terrains required patience to navigate and whose secrets had to be persuaded from the sands like something fine and sacred.

Perhaps he is here as a witness without knowing the full virtues of the woman he celebrates; a Pharaoh who would end enthrallment, who makes it her purpose to safeguard her people and sever the trammels of history; who asked what she could give where others with her power had sought only to take.

Perhaps he did not understand the significance of his feet as they placed upon the ground of Muat-riya, where on this day a Goddess had ascended.

Perhaps he views this commemoration as a shallow affair.

“Neither have I,” in that much they are agreed, and the fellahin was intent that there would be no other place like it.

“I gather you have traveled quite far to frown at our dancers.”

Briar's perception is a little skewed, lmk if his assumptions are too far-fetched

Briar was not a man skilled at conversation, idle or otherwise. And now when he wasn't watching his step, the conversation shifted much like how the curb of a sidewalk meets the road. The change in her tone was perhaps more subtle, but he lurched over the edge just the same.

That was what she gathered?

Indignation began to boil in his core, bubbling to the surface. His nostrils flared as he vented the heat.

What did she even know about him?

He barbed his tongue as he retorted, Actually, that was the one thing I was just waiting to do all night. Immediately after his eyes found the floor and he swiftly turned away from her. Skin prickling wherever her gaze landed upon him.

He was determined not to look into the crowd again. The bodies losing focus as he searched the distant walls for an exit. Surely he'd be asked to leave, anyway.

As the heat melted away, he was left hollow. Rot gnawing away at the pit of his stomach.

The briefest of glances was thrown her way as he murmured,Sorry.