Cerulean Cape levitation
Hushed Willows
Dancing Queen
1,484 Posts
Ooc — xynien
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#14
Pleaseeee let me know if you see any places where it doesn't make sense because I went cross-eyed editing this LMFAO
So she told him everything.

First, The Gilded Sea. She told him about Mother Rain and Father Fire, about her parents and their rules: always be devout, never ask questions, never dare to smile freely lest Father Fire see and strike them all down. They were expected to be pure and solemn and reverent at all times, assigned strict roles by gender and by devotion. Dancers and singers were to exist separately; women were expected to be passive, and men were expected to provide. Marriage and children — in that order, of course — were sacred, paramount, an inevitable end-goal to their lives. At this she hesitated, her eyes darkening with guilt and shame and sorrow.
She went on to explain their rituals, the necessity of flamesingers to keep the fire at bay and raindancers to call down the clouds. She told him about the twins and how they'd been blessed, about Rose and how she'd been cursed, and how Reverie had loved all of them anyway.
She described each of the siblings who had raised her: Atlas and his questing wisdom, Opal and her steadfast strength, Rose and her boundless wonder. Her littermates too: Athens who had always been so quiet and contemplative, Win who never could keep a thought to herself, Tybault who was rarely anything but stern. At Tybault's name she paused, and confessed something she had never admitted to anyone, hardly even to herself: that her training to become a healer had been tainted and twined with Tybault's training as a warrior, that he had hurt innocents at the behest of their father only for her to tend their injuries. But Reverie did not linger on that.
She told Lestan about endless nights, dancing for hours to call the rains, and the breathless exhausted mornings when those first cool droplets fell. The way the heat shimmered above the ground on the hottest days. The hatred she'd always had for the Father they lived in fear of. And the fire; she could never forget the fire. The one that had taken Rose —
She had been meant to run. Even now she could still hear her sister's desperate pleas, but Reverie had been frozen. She could do nothing but watch as the fire consumed everything, and so in her desperation Rose had tried to sing to the flames, to ward them away. Phantom pain simmered in her paws as she recounted the tale, the memory of burns long-healed, but Reverie went on. Everything, she would tell him everything, even as her eyes heated again with tears. Rose had died screaming, writhing, burning alive; she spared Lestan these details, but told him how she had only been able to watch. The flames had touched her too, then, and everything had changed. Her voice fell to a hush as she spoke briefly of the change that had come over her, an unspoken promise in her words that she would tell him more of this.
And when she was found, first by Tybault and then by the rest of her family —
Her parents, furious; her siblings, distraught; herself, lost in a world that was suddenly foreign to her. She told him of how her parents had tried everything to get her to speak, to respond, even just to blink. How they'd screamed at her. Hurt her. That name, over and over and over and over —
She had almost died; unable to eat or drink or sleep of her own accord. She'd wanted to die, but they kept her alive through it all. She spoke of these things with a clinical sort of detachment, moving from the warm tears inspired by thoughts of Rose to something colder and harder. They'd wanted her back, the old her, the one who would care only for their feelings and not at all for her own. They brought healers from far away places, tried herbs and other remedies, horrible things. Once they had almost drowned her. Another time, forced a strange plant into her that left her weeping and seeing flames for hours. Not once did they try to comfort her. Toward the end, her mother had spoken of — giving her away. Reverie shuddered to recall what she'd said; that any man would appreciate a wife as docile as she was then. And so when the fire came again, she ran. Months were lost to her, months she could only assume were spent with Riordan. She came alive in a strange place filled with snow, and was chased from a forest she hadn't understood was claimed.
Then a girl found her in tears and alone, and decided that she would love her. Reverie was still uncertain that she deserved Bjarna's love, but it had changed her life. If not for that meeting, she might have been forgotten in the snow forever. She had met Lestan then, a few days later, and she couldn't help a nervous and slightly tearful smile to remember it. But all too soon she found that it was time to speak of her most guarded secret, her curse, her very nature.
The flower world, what she had once called a garden. She explained what little she remembered in soft tones, uncertainty bleeding into her voice. Before the fire, she had been someone else, just a girl — but then the fire had come, and she was not that girl anymore. A transplant, a sun-spirit sent in a moment of tragedy to fill the space left by it, fated to burn endlessly in a world that did not recognize her. Plagued by small gods and forever chasing a vision of something greater, something that evaded her at every turn.
Yet the memories lingered; the feelings, the hopes, the desires of the girl that was lost to the fire. She was not that girl anymore and yet she was. She remembered more of this world than the one she had come from. The flower world revealed itself to her only in dreams. Sometimes, she saw Lestan in them.
Things are different in the flower world, Reverie finished softly. I - I was… capable there. Powerful, I think. But here - here, I'm just… some girl, except I don't see the world the way everyone else does. But I still remember what it was like to see the world that way. It's all confusing.
It feels like a battle that never ends, She looked away from him then, exhausted with the effort of calling so many horrible memories to mind. For a long time I had forgotten what it was like to feel - hopeful. But then I found you…
And her eyes locked to his again.
When I left The Gilded Sea, I told myself that I would - choose what I wanted, for once. Whatever I wanted, and I wouldn't settle for less. You are what I want, out of everything in the world - in this one and all the others, She would choose him over all of it, everything except perhaps Blossom. I don't quite remember all of it yet, but… I think I loved you long before I ever left the flower world, even. It just took so long to remember anything from - before.
Watching me is like watching a fire take your eyes from you
Messages In This Thread
levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 09:00 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 09:09 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 09:20 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 09:26 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 09:32 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 09:36 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 09:53 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 10:01 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 10:12 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 10:24 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 10:41 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 14, 2023, 10:53 PM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 14, 2023, 11:04 PM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 15, 2023, 12:14 AM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 15, 2023, 10:40 AM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 15, 2023, 11:17 AM
RE: levitation - by Mayfair - May 17, 2023, 11:55 AM
RE: levitation - by Reverie - May 17, 2023, 02:09 PM