[P] Tyger tyger, burning bright

[Raum]

  The Solterran sun beat out a furious, vicious rhythm upon the Crow’s back. The sky, cerulean blue, stretched on and on, higher and higher. There were no clouds to offer respite from the unrelenting summer sun.
 
In the stark heat of the day the denizens of Solterra toiled. Raum’s skin drenched iron grey as he wove his way slowly back toward the Rapax river. Sweat beaded across his skin turning it slick and warm.
 
There were no shadows here to bask in, except for the meager spattering of thin, scanty trees that rose here and there. Their shade was paltry and never had Raum yearned more for the cool of Calligo’s shadows. He was as far from her magic and her influence, as he could ever hope to find himself. Where Rhoswen may have found the sun, so he only lost the thrall of night.
 
Blue eyes scan the dusty landscape of rolling dunes. It glowed gold beneath the sun and with disdain the Denocte boy wondered if there was any place here that was not a lustrous gold colour. 
 
The Denocte Ghost moves with grace, even as his muscles labour and his body grows weary. It was a blessing to have this natural strength from his days as a spy with the Crows… Not that those days were over now, they were just changed. He was here, not for money, but to help his brethren Crows. If there were secrets to be found, he would find them and return them to Denocte.
 
Blue eyes, as piercing as the sky overhead, take in the line of trees that bordered the river, carrying the desert from a parched and barren world, into one of lush grasses upon the banks of the river. Slowly he lowered himself into the waters. They were cool, blissfully so, resisting the heat of the sun as they drifted idly by.
 
In the midst of the river, with the waters licking at his abdomen, he cannot stop his gaze from passing, just once, to the south flowing waters and the mountains that rise beside them. Even here he could see Calligo’s shadows and his skin craves their cool, cool touch. Homesickness was a pang he had never had before, but suddenly it strikes deep, twisting into his abdomen. Regrettably, ignoring the aching pain, Raum lowers his parched lips to the water and he drinks and drinks and drinks.
 
@Rhoswen – holy moly this is the /worst/ ever! I am so, so sorry :( 

 

[Rhoswen]

Sunlight, married to the salt-soaked sweat upon Rhoswen's swallowborne shoulders, cascaded earthward. In the desert, light was the water and the soil and the trees; the angel of life and death - it was everything. And she loved it. For here she could be herself in the most undiluted form. No formalities, or chains, only the great blue tapestry of the sky and gold gold gold beneath her feet. Even today, sent on a task she was dreading, the desert gave her muse and joie de vivre; a skip lilting against her willowy rhythmic canter.  For several days she had spent avoiding the back-breaking work of planting the food garden required to sustain so many mouths; labour of the physical kind had never appealed to a girl like she - a girl with hands as small and soft as a lamb. But what with Max and Avdotya's watchful eyes, she could avoid it no longer and so to the river she had run - a light sling across her dainty back and two buckets either side. The well within day court was small and archaic, no doubt it would take hours to tug up enough water; Rhoswen had thoughts of her own. 

It seemed, however, she wasn't the only one. Eyes of smoke rested upon a figure she knew all too well, her gaze unusually cold for a girl so filled with fire. So far, Rhos had managed to avoid Raum's company - treating it as though he were the plague; but she should have known that at some point their paths would cross. The girl paused from afar, long legs stilling as she watched his silver frame: he wilted, strong shoulders bowed and his ears drooping. Rhoswen knew the sun was draining him, the heat leeching his blood like a parasite; she hardened. It was his own fault, he should never have come. Slowly and quietly she approached, reluctance burning in every muscle in her body. "Go home, Raum. You'll kill yourself out here in this heat." It was not a protective tone she used, but one cauterized by distant contempt. Since their last meeting, Rhoswen had taken time to cool; her temper tamed, her sadness quelled; all those volcanic emotions buried beneath the sand upon which she stood. Now, she was indurate and stiff. "You don't belong here."


@Raum shoddy post rip 

[Raum]

It was a marvel how he managed to turn this girl to ice.
 
He supposed he could spend a lifetime watching the way her fire dimmed and frost began to creep across those storm-fierce eyes. Her dancing, wild flames cool to ash and embers within his presence. And yet, his words are her gasoline. The silver crow knew how to light her like spark upon his gasoline words. He had never been a firesinger, yet, for this Solterran girl, he would learn. Rhoswen would scold him. She would burn him, but he would learn.
 
She moves nimbly, vibrantly, beneath this sun, even when her crimson skin is darkened silver and slick with sweat. The sun smiles, hot and heavy, as it weighs his limbs down with heat. It is effort, it is torture, for the boy of night to be here. Yet to watch this girl flourish, a creature born in the black, in the star-strewn sky of night, is infuriating.
 
Fire steps close to him, the sling swaying across her back. He continues his work, listening as her body hisses with the effort it takes to step close to him. And yet she does; they are magnets; night and day set to dance together, to push and pull forever and always.
 
A smile, as black as pitch, creeps its way across his lips as she stands near to him, stiff and reluctant. She has rebuilt herself, ever the slumbering volcano again. The fire girl simmers, smoky and dangerous, but quiet, for now.
 
“Water?” The Crow offers her simply, when she tells him to go home, when she says he does not belong here. Rhoswen is right, of course she is. Solis is no god of his, this desert with its scolding sands seeks to drain him of everything. He has no shadows here, he is exposed and weakened and the dunes as they laugh their sandy laughs.
 
He places a bucket between them, his ocean blue gaze finally finding her. Electric blue eyes see the ice within her own and the gleam of summer heat across her skin. “You really do thrive here.” He observes roughly, disdain flaring, chasing the heat across his silver skin. Turning to the sling upon her slender back, his voice lowers for her ears alone, “If I returned home, who would you annoy then?” Smoothly he takes the cloth and buckets from her, “Besides, I am not sure who will kill me first, the heat, or you… I am curious to find out.”
 
With that he is gone, returning to the water with her buckets, her sling. Just his words remain to bite along the shell of her ear. 


@Rhoswen dum dum de dum

 

[Rhoswen]

Raum only watches her as she spits and sparks quietly, her voice dipping low beneath an octave she never normally explored. He had stirred something in her, something primal and undesirable; it boiled like gargling poison in the cauldron of her ribcage. Those eyes of ocean and electric seemed to purge the heat from her skin, if only for a moment - a moment that felt like agony for a girl composed and formulated from brimstone and magma. To feel her fire flushed with the water spouting from his briny gaze, flooding all the tropical components of her heart. Her mother had always warned her about men who looked at her hungrily, men who devoured and prowled;  but never had she spoken of those who glanced at Rhoswen so lightly it might have seemed fabricated - with but a single amorphous haze clouding their line of sight. The girl might have shivered, if not for her resolve and the beating blistering sun overhead. 

They stand apart, and yet somehow together; a wildly barren stalemate that locked them into place, as though they were players in a disorientating game of chess. She stares at him from beneath heavy lids and auburn curls, upward and onward, pushing past a veil unseen, chastising him with those blustery stormful eyes. This silvered man would not budge, it seemed, no matter how hard she pushed and pressed.  Though he ebbed and faded under Solis, he did not fall - did not tremble - and Rhos could not help the twinge of admiration blooming in her bones. A sigh, not of defeat but of temporary resignation; currently, there was more important business to attend to. "Of course, I do. This is my nation, hadn't you noticed?" With a swish of her everlong tail, Rhoswen stepped into the gushing river, her ears lacing backward at his light barbs. "I guess you'll have to wait and see." Her replies are precise and curtailed, leaving no room to breathe.

"I can do that myself you know... damn Crows, always interfering." At last: a sideways glance accompanying her retort painted it an easier shade of red; something close to mirth glittering between her teeth. They had been childhood friends, after all. 

@Raum egh

[Raum]

Raum once thought of them as a comet and a planet set upon a collision course. The longer she near him now, however, the faster the Crow is coming to realize that they were planets. Always together, never apart, bound and tethered by a bond that pulls them close, keeping them there but never pulling closer.
 
Watching her slip into the water, he cannot help but marvel when the water does not hiss, does not steam about her skin. Rhoswen is the deadliest kind of fire, worse than the sun that sinks into his skin, threatening to melt it from his bones. This girl works deeper, her fire would burn a soul and his is already blistering.
 
“I had.” He murmurs, something akin to resignation whispering in his words, as he drops her buckets into the water for her. Words play upon his tongue, desperate to be asked, filled with the sharpness of a knife for all his resentment. But, instead of loosing them, his eyes flit to the surroundings. He wishes for no more attention upon him, upon her. Safety here is for him to be perceived as uninteresting in every way. He was more exposed than he ever had been and the girl of fire was a renegade in his plans. One he had hoped to avoid.
 
Fool.
 
Haughtily she pushes past him, the flick of her tail catching across his chest. It is not often he was caught out. It is not often someone else moves faster than he. The sun was making him slow, dulling his senses.
 
Lifting his head swiftly to avoid her dismissive tail, his own ears fall to his skull like tumbling towers.  The crow, silver to her crimson, is aware of her standing close, firestone within the fleeing waters. Rhoswen’s stormy eyes contrast the blue, blue liquid of the river. Every nerve strains to ignore the creature beside him and smooth his skin of dispassionate silver, as sleek and uncontainable as the water that flows by.
 
Her threat demands his attention, pulling it from where he worked to fill his buckets. They flit to her for a moment, but it was a moment too short for a retort for her own final, retort comes like smoke after a blaze.
 
Her sideways glance is enough to miss the water snagging within her bucket, pulling the sling and opposing pail downstream. He lunges closer to her, catching the runaway bucket with a hoof, lingering close, too close. They are light to dark, water to fire. He stays just long enough to murmur, “So you say, Rhoswen. Best to keep your eye on your buckets if you wish to stop a Crow interfering.” Then like moonlight he is gone. The space yawns open between them once again, as if they were never there, so close; little more than fire and ice.
 
 
@Rhoswen  ha! I think he might have just flirted, in his own backhanded kinda way.

[Rhoswen]

A memory dawns - small at first, fragmented and inconsequential; nothing but a tingle on her spine. It grows, rapidly, and Rhoswen cannot stop herself from letting it so, watching inwardly as a white light splinters and bursts until a clouded scene is projected onto the screen of her mind. She hears something, what is it? It was something beautiful - something sinless and blessed, something that erected the hair along her spine as she stood frozen in the water. The sound blossoms, as does the scene unfolding from the cold case of a memory long hidden: it is laughter, their laughter. And they are running, freely - as though they had wings - she watches as they danced and cavorted and poured across Denocte. She couldn't remember their joy so easily now - once it had tasted sweet; now it felt like ash. 

"I had."

The sound of Raum's present voice was a hook, grappling and dragging her from the murky depths of her memories. Rhoswen almost jolts, eyes crowded with an emotion she can't seem to define. Sadness, perhaps? Once again she is thrust into a myriad of sensations, slowly losing the anchor she had built to keep her firmly grounded in the dying smoke of detachment. A second sigh, a delicately composed smile almost entirely aimed at herself. It vanished almost immediately, however, when her own bucket slipped from the cloth and washed but a few feet before her silver-skinned companion brought it's journey to a swift halt. She blushes involuntarily, dipping her head so that a singular coiled lock of hair fell across those stormborne eyes, listening to Raum's soft quip.  Frustrated, she squares her shoulders, "were you always this annoying?"

And then he moves from her, leaving only a chasmic abyss that ruptures and laments. Rhos is startled by the sudden protesting beat of the scarlet organ in her chest - watching the distance stretch between them, watching and feeling nothing but the repetitive throbbing of her heart and lungs and skin. Without him suddenly she found herself turned from inferno to stone. Snorting quietly, the red girl steels herself, arching her neck as she flounced downstream in the tall Crow's wake. "So go on, tell me in one word what you make of Solterra?" Her voice is gravel and hot coal, but something old was reborn; something from a past life: humour. She couldn't help herself. 

@Raum -love-

[Florentine]

He sees the blush as it creeps along her cheeks, he sees the way she dips her head, hiding behind a crimson veil of curled hair.
 
With a retort that snaps like a whip, Rhoswen breaches the chasm his withdrawal had drawn between them. For all that her retort cracks like a whip, it’s sting, its bite, is gone. Now, all her flame-licked words do is pull a smile from his lips. “Were you always this distracted?” The Crow counters, eyes lowering to her bucket pointedly.
 
He wades through the river as liquid as the waters rushing past. They push him back towards her, but their efforts are not needed for he suddenly hears the splash of water as she pursues him.
 
That dismissive snort has him tilting his head to regard her, the sway of her body, the length of lithe, lithe limbs and the fire in her eyes. He renews his efforts filling his own buckets, even when she tails him, even when its all his eyes wish to do to watch her as though she were some undiscovered wonder of the world. 
 
The Sun Girl’s question is sharp, playful. She is the lioness set to play, with her claws well hidden. Denocte’s Ghost feels little more than a mouse in her sights at this moment. But he has been handing this creature since childhood. He knows what her claws feel like.
 
He knows Rose.
 
Despite this, he cannot help the way his eyes trail the line of her neck, the dance of her slender limbs. No one as fiery as she should be so at ease in water. The quicksilver boy stops at last to regard her as she approaches. It’s only when she stops before him, that his eyes narrow, his head lowering to meet her own before his gaze lips pointedly by her. “Forgot your buckets again, Rose?” The Crow murmurs pointedly , his brows lifted, his gaze slyly. “It’s a wonder you made it this far.” He murmurs again, half despairing, half in jest.
 
Her buckets meander their way downstream half submersed, half afloat as they bob away. His gaze returns to her, the electricity to her stormy eyes. Lazily, he lets his eyes trail over her face, close as they are. He does not rush as he takes in  every line of red-silver skin, the glow of her eyes, warm as whisky and as wild as a storm. “Hell.” He says in a voice like a purr, his look suddenly feline, dangerous. She was not the only creature with claws, the grasp of his knife upon his leg is remembrance enough...
 
“Hell, is my one word for Solterra.” There is no ounce of humour as he confirms his answer. But he does not let his gaze leave from her. He feels the torturous heat of the sun, the absence of water, of shadows, of Crows.
 
To have her here too, a creature of fire and temptation, is surely hell.
 
He turns back away from her, continuing to pull his own buckets along, collecting water as he goes. “You may wish to get your buckets, unless you are planning a trip downstream?” He calls back to the girl of fire and smoke.


@Rhoswen <3

[Rhoswen]

"Were you always this distracted?" 

Frankly, yes, probably. Flighty and chaotic of heart Rhoswen had always been; perhaps the legacy to her Denoctian birthright. For the red-clothed girl had never been short of revelry nor lawless anarchy, perhaps evoking the ordinary man to question her compatibility with a nation so militant as Solterra. The magic was forever in the mystery. She merely rolled her eyes, finding it harder to wade through the stream as powerfully as her quicksilver companion, but pushing on regardless. The water licks her sanguine skin, darkening it to a delectable bloodsilver shade, but it is not Rhoswen that steals the scene today. For in the coolness of the river Raum gleamed like polished silver; muscles rippling across broad shoulders - and, quite surprisingly, she finds it difficult to drag her gaze away. She does so momentarily, ashen eyes nonchalantly catching sight of her buckets drifting further downstream as soon as Raum had released them - true to say, the Solterran princess hadn't exactly been designed for labour. 

"Mm, yet here I am,"a soft murmur and shrug of her own combs the damp air between them. They were close now; she could sense the heat of his skin radiating from the tall physique he owned and Rhos could not help but marvel at how a man made of ice seemed to burn with an arctic fire whenever she were near enough to feel it. Their gazes lock momentarily before Raum's eyes change course to travel lethargically across the lines of her razorsharp body and Rhoswen watches him watching her, feeling suddenly quite uncomfortable. You couldn't see it but the inside surface of her skin writhed under the force of his frigid stare. The spell is broken by his monosyllabic voice, and she can breathe once more, breaking their gaze if he would not. 

"Hell is other people." She wasn't the first to say it, and certainly she wouldn't be the last, but here in this moment, it felt like the truth. Rhoswen didn't think he would disagree. 

By this time her buckets, as Raum pointed out, had floated further than she cared for, and if not for Raum's presence Rhoswen might well have discarded them entirely. But she wouldn't allow his condescension a moment longer, and with a determined thrust of her petite limbs the red girl surged past - her fine frame allowing her to cut through the water more effectively. Luckily the pales had snagged on a broken branch floundering in the water's shallows and within no time she had salvaged them, using her telekinesis to nimbly tie them back to her sling; at least they were now full. Satisfied with her catch, Rhoswen burst back up onto the bank, water rupturing and cascading off her delicate body as she did so. 

"We'd better get back before the sun burns you out entirely; I'm sure you've gathered by now that Solis doesn't take kindly to Denoctian Ghosts." 

@Raum 

[Raum]

Mm, yet here I am.
 
Why it was that those words exactly gave him pause, the quicksilver Crow does not know. Yet he cannot resolve the fact that he lingers, his eyes trailing over where the water darkens her skin to blood black – crow black. A shiver slides along his skin and it is not from the cold of the river, nor the contrasting heat of the sun. It is something else, something deeper. Something he fears, but known has lingered within him for so long. It is familiar. It is her.
 
He pushes thoughts of her from his mind, but as readily as water cannot be fully contained, so the thoughts of her will only slip back in. Rhoswen follows him and it is only when her buckets snag upon a branch that she dives downstream to catch them. She is lithe through the water and again Raum finds himself wondering why the waters so readily accept this girl of flame and smoke.
 
Hell is other people.
 
The Crow smirks, lips curling into a sly half-smile at her words. “Hmm, you always were a pleasure.” He says sarcastically, although the smile has yet to fade from his argent lips. “But I do not disagree with you.” He follows her up the bank, water sloughing from his skin, leaving it gleaming dark like granite. The Denocte boy draws level with her slender body, eyes trailing her curves. “I just think the Solterran people are the worst.” His voice is a lions purr, as provocative as a knife across her skin. Like a cat, he toys with her. Raum knows she is no defenseless mouse, but a lioness, with claws and teeth that have more than once known his blood.
 
He draws nearer to her, buckets chinking, his lips finding the slant of her damp shoulder. His touch lingers, indulgent, dangerous before he murmurs against her skin, “Careful Rhoswen, I might think you are concerned for me.”


@Rhoswen <3 <3
 

[Rhoswen]

She wanted to run from him - from that oscillating gaze of ice and everything that lay within it. Eyes carved from glaciers and the arctic concealed secrets and oracles deep within their deep caverns; mysteries she dared not unearth with her devastating torch. She would melt it all away with but a single touch and for a moment Rhoswen imagined what it might be like to watch her flames lick and sweep across his pale bones, consuming him entirely. She shivered, almost hungrily, her slender ears twitching at the sound of his sarcasm. It snapped her from deeper musings, and for once Rhos was grateful. 

Raum drew beside her, his shoulders breaching the hot air higher than her own, but this time the Solterran girl does not meet his gaze, does not allow her own to trace his hips or his throat. Her howling-grey eyes stare ahead - to the horizon, to the castle. Solterran people are the worst, she smirked, "you're entitled to your opinion, Raum, even if it is wrong." 

It was what followed that changed something - everything - and for sleepless nights to come the memory of it would sing to her, a soft and unbearable lullaby. The man found her skin, hot and damp, pressing his lips against her shoulder so carefully; Rhoswen froze, her blood thrumming and screaming, a combination of rage and fervor beating hard against her chest. Who did he think he was - touching her, even only for a moment? The red-haired girl snapped her head toward him, her eyes ablaze, tongue lashing in reply, "I have more concern for a dung beetle." 

But as she stalked off toward home, she could still feel his caress, and from deep within she could feel something growing; a hunger, a desire, a passion - for more. 

@Raum -exit rhos-