Hushed Willows [festival] the sun's not yellow, it's chicken

for anyone interested in storytime! round 2 will start on the 21st.

well, here went nothing. he didn't intuit any steps behind him at first blush, but perhaps he just wasn't paying attention. in any case, the rush of putting himself out there far clouded any sense of awareness he had, and it took several minutes of traveling through the trees for it to fade. then he was just left with his thoughts, some of them whispers, some screams, some mocking laughter—

yeah, shut up, cortez admonished his inner self-deprecation, rolling his eyes. he stopped in a smaller clearing, near the minnow stream, the sounds of the festival's main gathering faint but still audible even here. but it was a quiet murmur, rather than the cacophony of before. a perfect backdrop for tales.

what would be the best crowd-pleaser? love stories always seemed to catch attention, but that seemed like an easy way to go. tales of children were more difficult to weave together; however, they did have the benefit of evoking nostalgia. he did so love to see the glow of old eyes gone suddenly young again, thinking of their youth.

depending on the audience, he could dive deep into some lustier fare—tasteful, mind you—but that was always a gamble. no, love or children, that was what tonight was really about. even if sex was the means to an end. . .or for some, simply the means, and to hell with the end. love and children. if you went to a fertility festival and then complained upon hearing stories of love and children, that was on you.

The wraith moved to follow after the man who had claimed to offer stories for those who would listen. While he was not the type to always appreciate the work that went into crafting tales, he always thought that there was a way to understand others by how they told their stories. For a man who thrived on learning how to interact with individuals, it was a good opportunity for the titan to grasp something new from an unfamiliar face. So, he did not halt when the offer had been given. The length of his limbs carried him after the master of tales.

“You offered stories,” the warhound spoke to him with a small nod of his head and a ghostly smile that curled the edges of his dark lips. “I was raised on many different kinds of tales. I should like to hear what you have to share.” His smoky voice was not hostile or filled with the pride that ran through his veins. Instead, he seemed welcoming in his voice. The hollow glimmer of his gaze was latched tightly to the features of Cortez. He waited to see if he would be the only one to listen to the stories.

she'd drifted back to the festivities after speaking to her brother, shifting through faces and scents, not quite willing to join completely. she'd heard the storyteller barely over the murmer of voices, but her attention had been caught and she'd made her way to him, where already another waited. recognition glinted immidiately, the drifting scent of salt and shore confirming te identity of the looming figure. she closed the last few meters between them, sitting back on her haunches a short distance to the right of the male, offering him a sideways glance and a curve of her muzzle. "as would I." she shifted slightly as she settled in to wait, gaze lingering on the storyteller alongside the titan's.

the man that came certainly wasn't the audience he expected. brawn like that, guy fit right in at a fertility festival—but perhaps that was the point. the ladies might drive themselves to madness, fawning over him, and him to madness in turn. so cortez's mouth quirked as the other spoke, and the bard gave a nod. not the audience he expected, but certainly an audience he would entertain.

and if this brute sought to escape female attention, then he was out of luck when the young woman appeared. they seemed to know each other, though. on what level, he didn't know. the characters in his mind dissipated quickly, replaced by the pair in front of him. he would tell that story one evening, maybe, but not tonight.

no, he'd walk them into the land of fantasy, a world wholly detached from their own. some sought to educate through their tales, but cortez had never really liked the idea of being preachy. an escape was he provided, what he enjoyed providing. an experience rooted in the present, with no ripples of consequence.

a long while ago, there were two sisters—flora and sienna, the shakti began, eyes slitted half-shut as he entered the storyteller's reverie. out-of-body. sweet girls, both of them, with beautiful eyes and long, shapely limbs. they were every woman's envy and every man's ecstasy. but for flora, there was only jules. and jules might have been even more heavenly than the ladies.

his gaze rested on ford, then, as he let a beat or two of silence go by. in no world could this man be considered beautiful, but he was handsome in his own frighteningly rugged way. the way the alabaster cut across his dark fur, his cold (yet not unfeeling) eyes. . . it took some self-control for cortez to look at the girl, instead, a little breathless as he continued.

no act of any god, nor nature, could have separated flora and jules. they were halves of the same whole, the sun and the moon—truly, for flora burned a dark gold in the sun and jules was a brilliant silver in the moonlight. from the moment they found each other, they were madly in love. they were perfect. cortez swallowed. almost.

he sighed, his chest lifting and falling with great effort, his breath billowing out in a cloud of fog before him. like a drunk man leaning on the brick wall outside the bar, having just taken a drag from his cigarette. he stares at you and a bolt goes through your heart; cortez knew his pale gaze was sharper than the rest of him, and used it to his advantage.

what could have gone wrong? he asked, lifting a brow, looking between the two assembled. this was where it got fun—would they treat his inquiry as rhetorical, and remain silent? would they supply halfhearted answers out of polite compulsion? or—or—or would they take the opening and run, tug the words from his mouth and sail away and craft a world of their own in which they could dwell?

it happened so infrequently, but cortez could die for that third possibility.

There was little expectation from the brute when it came to what he would find in the tales from the stranger. He had been raised on two very different types of story in his childhood. He had heard all things spiritual and beautiful from his mother, and he had been subject to the darker tales from his father. It had been a peculiar means of teaching, but he had done well to absorb what he could and carry it with him. He had learned from the things that they had shared with him – even those that were fanciful and false. Ford expected that he would find something similar with Cortez.

Before the stranger began, the figure of another appeared. The titan was surprised that she was familiar to him. The mismatched colors of his gaze roamed her figure with interest for a long moment before he offered her a police smile. “It is good to see you again,” he murmured to her in a smoky tone, just under his breath so that he did not appear rude to the storyteller.

Then, the bard began to tell them his tale. Ford turned his attention to the other male wholly – his dual-colored gaze was latched tightly to the dusty brown figure. He retained all of the information without trouble and found himself following along with the story. The picture was painted well for them; a story of love. It was fitting for the festival that they were sharing. It left the titan with a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. Love was not something that he could easily relate to, he'd come to realize. The skeletal brute felt as though he had never really experienced it.

Still, as the story went on, he listened. Every so often the dark sea wraith would nod his head, but he was silent through a great majority of the telling. That was until there was a question that was posed to the both of them. Unsure of what he should say in that moment, Ford turned his attention to the grey female at his side. His cold and calculating gaze clung to her features for a long second.

“What of Sienna?” the warhound inquired.

Ford had captured her attention—stoic in presence, yet he still demanded attention in his silent manner. The ivory she-wolf trailed after him, curious of the sea master and the shifting tides of his life. Her own had changed quite a bit since meeting the dark wolf—her loyalty given to the wolves of Diaspora still a decision she held dear to her heart.

Unwilling to draw attention to herself, the exotic sylph crept a respectful distance from the one familiar wolf to her, though her emerald gaze studied the storyteller with open curiosity and bemusement. A gentle nod was given of the slender snout of the woman, her honey and white form lowering to relax upon the ground and take in the tale woven before them.

She held a fondness for stories and those who could weave them—an art she could not match. Yet as her mind attempted to picture the most perfect and beautiful couple in creation, she could not muster them—instead, she felt her heart flutter at the thought of the forgotten sister. The one seemingly left behind.

she has not been told a story in more moons than she can count; it is easy to lose herself in the man's artful words. it is a love story, not the kind she was every particularily interested in as a girl but now drudges up the familiar grief, but with it, something new. not perfection, as the storyteller desribes, but perhaps for another half, as once was Aviana, Aditya, lost now to the past. 

the storyteller paused and his eyes flickered between them; not the smoldering embers of her own but something sharp, colourless and piercing. she is caught for a moment, their sharpness juxtaposed by the softness of the man's words and pelt. but then the heavy gaze of Ford registered as his hung on her features for a long moment. her own answer briefly waylaid as she shifted her muzzle a fraction and matched it for an instant. he spoke and her gaze returned to the storyteller, own words filling the silence left by the warhounds. "nothing perfect is without jealousy." she knew it well, though the exact act of devestation she knew would surely follow had her intruiged enough to keep her attention fixated on Cortez, the third audience member more or less ignored at present.

well, there went that experiment. no one contributed in any fashion other than a question from the burly man, a remark from the woman. another emerged, and he turned his gaze to her with a solemn nod before returning his attention to the trio as a whole. he let a beat, then two and three, of silence go before continuing, his voice hushed as the willows they sat under.

flora was blessed with anything and everything, but sienna, he said, looking at the brute, had one thing her sister did not. and when jules' seed did not take root in his lover's womb, her sister offered her womb instead. not to raise the children as her own—but to raise them as the children of flora and jules, and they none the wiser. they would never know who had suckled them, only who they came to call 'mother.'

cortez looked up at the star-spangled sky half-shielded by the canopy, finding one bright burning ball of silver to focus on in particular. breeding seasons came and went. the arrangement remained the same. and flora tried, and tried, and tried—but each spring, she was barren. and sienna, instead, gave her pups. for sienna was selfless. . .always had been, always would be. she never took a mate for her own, for she knew that was one less niece or nephew for her to love.

and then one day, during the rainy season, flora lay with jules—and finally, the gods made her fertile.

The titan listened carefully as the rest of the story was shared. When the agouti male had completed his retelling of the tale, it had left Ford with a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach. He understood how stories were intended; they followed the actions of a few particular characters. The rest were merely creatures in the background. To him, the idea that Sierra was only used to offer children to her sister seemed to be a disservice to who she was on her own. They knew next to nothing about the sister, other than that she was the only one of the two who was capable of carrying young pups.

Even still, when the story had been concluded, it was revealed that Flora was finally given the blessing of children for herself. It had all but negated anything that Sierra might have done for them. Ford felt as though the sister had been forgotten – used and then discarded when she was no longer needed. He did not share his feelings with the group, knowing that it would not have shone a very good light on his mindset. He had gone there to revel in the stories, after all.

With a small nod of appreciation to the storyteller, the titan breathed a soft sigh. The story still lingered inside of him, though. No matter how long he thought on it, he could not come to a point that he appreciated it for what it was. He wondered how many lines had passed that tale along. He wondered how many young girls had heard the very same words and thought to themselves that they were only good for breeding. The thought lit a fire in the pit of his stomach, and he gritted his fangs to hold it down.