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

Private  - we counted galaxies

Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)



Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#1

I am not like any ordinary world

As surely as the sun rises and falls, children grow older and forget to remember their earliest memories. So it is, therefore, that Leonidas has forgotten his grief and his longing for family. His gilded body is carved from the lonesome dark of solitude. Though his skin is the brown of a woodland filled with the company of a thousand trees, the boy knows nothing of companionship. 


The art of becoming an orphaned boy of the wild woods is a lonely one. Yet he grows beautiful with it.  As a butterfly within its cocoon, so the boy has grown and evolved. He grows his butterfly wings and with each passing day forgets more and more of what it was to live within a palace. He is no longer the daughter of a once-queen nor the nephew of a once-king. Now, Leonidas is, simply, wild. Nature turns her new prince too strange for the halls of a palace, too uncouth for polite company.


Nature sculpts her boy. She is both mother and teacher. Her child sleeps beneath the boughs of her trees, upon the bed she makes for him - of leaves and flowers and meadow grasses. Vines weave through the tangle of his mane. Sunlight dapples upon his skin. As a cat before a fire the boy lies where her warm light pools. His golden highlights glow in the sunshine. His gilded antlers are otherworldly, refined gold, adorned with all the forest can lay upon his tines - flowers and vines, ivy and pollen.


Discontent with anything perfect, he is weathered by endless days and nights exposed beneath the sky and the turning seasons. Scars are art upon his body - scrapes and scratches and wounds that never healed right. Leonidas is just a boy who has spent too much time alone. He listens to the whispers of the woodland for its voice is now a friend within his ears. Wary and possessive of the deep wood he has come to call home, the boy watches from the emerald shadows those who pass too close to his nest. 


~~~


This day he drinks from a water pool he knows well. Its temperature is cool and leaves float lazily across its mirrored surface. The woodland whispers, as it always does. This time it tells him someone approaches. Its voice is leaves crunching, its words the sound of feet parting grasses.


The wild-wood boy watches as a figure steps out between the boughs of trees. Her body is pale, angelic. All of him falls still as his sun-bright eyes traverse every inch of her body. It is better, he knows, to study any wanderer that passes close, so he might know whether to fight, to run, to smile, to snarl. 


Slowly, slowly his heart beats within his chest. Droplets of water fall from his wet lips. They touch the lake that shatters into ripples that reach out toward the stranger. A silent welcome, one might think. Leonidas thinks of nothing but how her skin is as pure as the driven snow in the midst of winter. He wonders if she is as cold to touch. Would she also leave at the first touch of sun upon her body? 


The forest boy tips his wings down, anything to stop the golden light of them landing upon her form, drawing her eyes to him.


The boy smiles. It is an ageless thing, feral as magic and as rogue as the forest that surrounds him. Time presses itself across his eternal skin. It breathes itself into his ears, into his soul. His mother (before Nature claimed him) was a time traveller and so it is no wonder that he controls it. 


At the girl’s feet spring buds lie awaiting the warmer air. Their shells are closed, their warmer winds still days away. Yet Time unfolds at Leonidas’ command. It asks the buds to bloom, now. They do. Days of growth and life slip by in mere moments. Before watching eyes the buds grow and bloom and the woodland laughs as the breeze trembles in the leaves.  Newborn flowers tickle at her knees, blue like the sea, blue like the sky that stretches from end to end and always beyond.



@rayoflight - for any of your beautiful chars <3

"Speaking."
credits






Reply




Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Aehra
Guest
#2

the stars and sea sing to me

The sky burns red against your skin
The world we know turns in the wind

-

Like a wild weed in summer, the sea girl’s daring within this new world flourished. Feeding upon boredom, nourished by the inherent wildness of her wandering blood, it lavished the gemstone filly in dreams anew. She woke often entangled in her silvery hair, unspooled from braids that smelled of salt and shoals; drenched in a tepid sweat that sang of pounding hooves upon shorelines, of silken fetlocks dancing through the lapping tide. Of what awaited her beyond a blue, wondrous horizon.

And no matter the potency of the ocean’s song, Aehra was a creature hewn of adventure, and even the too-long grass and the deep throng of forest shadows came to sing to her, a careful lure that tugged upon her opaline heart. Her eyes were youthful and wide: gemstone saucers that drank and drank, filled to the brim with glassy rainwater that reflected the depths of her boundless curiosity.

She was ablaze with life: a rare, winter bloom that learned feverishly to thrive beneath a summer sky.

And so, by a song of sunlight, Aehra succumbed to the insatiable allure of mountain streams and dewy fields. Daring to dance further from her Scholar mother, to let her fleetfooted steps send her careening toward stories untold, she learned to overwhelm the sonnet of soil with a tender symphony of the sea. Her contempt for solid land went unanswered, drowned, ironically, in the tide of her thirst for newness.

For either of the Seaborne’s mothers had been host to a life of adventure; to page upon page of tragedy, a mere line of which was quilled within the scars that marked her dappled skin. But Aehra wore them as a badge—a memory of a war she did not live.

And her opaline skin took kindly to the sunshine that filtered through the trees, kissing the seafoam spread of her speckled skin in shades of yellow as she, days after venturing further inland, now tiptoed through a deep copse of trees scarred with a dozen roads. They intertwined blindly with one another, like fingers of desperate lovers, and left her aimless to the intent of a vast, impenetrable forest.

Her hair caught upon branches; her gaze snagged by the intoxicating newness that surrounded her.

It took some time, but the forest of Delumine earned her smile. And it grew and grew, like the unfurling shadow of a crescent moon, as her heart heeded the trickling lull of water; its gentle lap upon a shallow shore; the richness of its humid scent.

Aehra’s steps quickened, blind to the leafy arms that stroked her skin and the bushes she shouldered gracelessly through, until her opaline hooves dipped beneath the rippling surface of a wondrous woodland oasis. It drank her in steadily, as though the water was the one that was parched, and the sea’s uncharted daughter smiled at her dazzling reflection. The wildness of her hair, the contentment of her eyes.

Until another ripple kissed her pasterns, drawing her gaze to the newborn shadows—spread upon the water, upon her, by the stretch of a mighty wing. Aehra thought of mahogany; of treebark dipped in resplendent, golden ichor. She thought of gods and of demons; of darkness and of light; and she stumbled back and out of her shallow haven.

Her lips parted to the taste of magic. She knew its flavor well, for she had been born to it—molded by it.

And so entranced was she by the sight of him, this stranger who stood smiling among the trees—as though he were one of them, as though the forest nymphs had claimed him as their gilt son—she did not notice the blooms he nurtured until their colorful petals kissed her knees.

Blue—blue.

Aehra laughed. A soft, tinkling, delighted sound. As bemused as she was naïve, as taken as she was startled. Were she a day younger, an hour more foolish, she might have believed she’d overlooked the flowers when first she’d stepped into the pond.

But Aehra knew better.

"Fecerunt haec tibi..." The boy would not understand, of that she was sure, as she breathed her awed words into the space between them. It took effort, courage, to tear her eyes away from the newborn flowers to meet his halcyon gaze.

To look upon the golden tines that crowned his brow, like a Hart among his Kingdom.

"Hello," her little heart sang as she spoke timorously, and Aehra was too wickedly curious to quell its pitter-patter.

He had shown her his gifts unabashedly, placed them upon a pedestal at her feet. Coupled with the naivety of her courage, only the breathlessness of her voice made her queries soft spoken.

"Can you make anything grow...?"



Speech, @Leonidas <3
Hover for translations






Reply




Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#3

I am not like any ordinary world


The boy’s eyes are burnished gold. They gleamed as they watched the girl step out from within the cathedral of sable trees. She walked, enchanted, her body suspended in wonder. The woodland has made her a shrine. Across every inch of her is its signature. Leaves and blossoms are snagged within her salt-silver hair that curls, he notes, sea-foam waves. 


There is a ringing in his ears, a laughter of the water pool that bubbles at his feet. Its song is liquid and free. It sings of nymphs rising from the sea with the ocean’s blues in their deep, deep eyes. It sings its song deep into a time-boy’s crimson blood, it serenades the pieces of him where the earth has lain her roots.


This girl, stood across the copse from him, with her hair wild as ocean waves, her wide, wide eyes bright and her skin the colour of frost does not belong here. But Leonidas does not fit any more than Aehra. The boy is a piece of the sun, the dust of his autumnal antlers shedding as solar rain. He stands, as resplendent as the sky. The sun lauds him as loudly as the sea sings from the girl’s body.


She thinks him a hart and he is as he stands proud and wild within the centre of his kingdom. Autumn has already come to the ivy that strings itself between the tines of his antlers. They glow in burnt oranges and coppers, browns and sunset golds. Leonidas claims for himself a kingdom of sky and thriving earth.


He smiles like an imp when she speaks. His nape arches as his young ears, twist toward her, tulip fine, to catch the strange words tumbling from her tongue. His skull tilts and the dark of his throat is exposed. It is no colour her sea would know. The brown is the darkness of the earth, soil that is deep and rich and fertile. Already next year’s spring is settling itself into his immortal flesh. The boy stands, a herald; the son of an earth god. The son of Time.


Then she speaks a word he knows. Her voice is breathless, lost to a heart that flutters with its pitter-patter run. Leonidas blinks slowly and it is something like an eclipse, a darkness into which his woodland falls, until he opens his eyes again and turns them upon her. His gaze gilds her it wanders over her every inch and joins the surf of her mane.


His flowers still remember the way she watched them with wonder. They tap upon her knees before they lean towards the boy, as if he were a sun, as if his magic is the only thing that keeps them alive when all around them is falling into autumn.


She is bold in the way the sea will never let itself be stopped, she wanders as waters loosed and his forest welcomes her. 


He is bold in the way the sun will never cease to rise, in the way it is unrelenting light.


Can you make anything grow? Still her small voice is breathless, wonder weaves through it as light dances across the sea.


How long has he been lost within his wild-wood, growing more feral, growing more intertwined with the forest and her lovely roots? It is long enough that words are almost lost to his tongue. 


The arm of a tree grows at Leonidas’ command. It reaches down and reaches out with new-born fingers. Each fine branch is laden with flourishing flowers that brush across her salt-hawn cheek like a finger. The boy then shrugs and looks away as if this influence of time, the gentleness of such a gesture is of little consequence. And maybe this is so, for it is his magic that has her blooming when she should be dying and dying when she should be thriving. The woodland beckons to her feral boy but he does not heed the way her leaves sigh for him.


He steps toward her along the water banks. The mirrored water watches him, paints him clear and regal, sun struck and haloed. He walks like a like an elvin prince across his kingdom and stops just before the strange-sea girl. The air is full of the scent of the sea, Leonidas knows without touching her that her silver-blue skin would be salty and sweet.


“What are you?” The boy murmurs, the ivory of Aehra’s skin so much like his sister’s. But she is bruised blue where his sister had been gilded gold. “The water wants you,” Slowly he tips his sunglow gaze down to where the water laps and tugs at her ankles, beckoning her out, deeper, deeper. “Don’t go,” he whispers against the babbling of the lake.


@rayoflight - She is wonderful!

"Speaking."
credits






Reply




Forum Jump: