#eklipsoi

𓄹₊ ⁰¹ * @eklipsoi entreats with the oracle...

    high upon the cliffside,   chiseled into the island’s very edifice were the caves of istamere. utterly remote,   many a traveler simply heard the utterance of   “   the bone road   “   and knew the journey was nothing short of treacherous.   it is there,   nestled in the peaks of plush moss and obsidian daggers.   in utterly plain sight yet entirely beyond the scope of the human eye where the folk could be found.   they do not call one another witches,   nor abominations,   or even blessed.   they simply are;  both strange and hidden.   only found when they unfurl from the tight-lipped blossom of their sanctuary to be witnessed.   to the locals they are mere legend but it was a single boy who had faith in the stories.   surviving the journey in his cloak of shadows and eyes of ashen sand.   

     surely the ballads would be numerous,   odes to his fortitude.   inquisitive the songstress was she was swift in her welcome and keenly aware of the newcomer’s aversion to touch.   so she flits about in her air-laden manner as if wind were her element and not that of gristle,   bone,   and blood.   a natural border is the unforgiving terrain paired with their bowman placed along the encampment’s perimeters.   still it was written into the lines of his frame,   a body carved out of a state of constant defense.   when they settle for the night she notices a single flickering candle alive and wavering in the lonesome before her eyes shutter closed.   

𓆩 ♔ 𓆪 botanical headcanons . . . accepting

apologize for the yapfest i'm about to unleash here, but you just hit a major artery with this one !! :'))) for pretty much all his verses, i have it that koschei was born in the village of yaichka. it's a pagan farming village situated where a river starts to converge with the sea, but also a borderland where the steppe starts to meet the forest. i have it as a fantasy location in a fabled world, but if i had to throw it somewhere on a real world map, i'd say it's somewhere in the area surrounding the sea of azov. much like how the tale of igor's campaign mentions the city of tmutarakan as being the first place in rus' that khors the sun god travels through at sunrise, my canon then has it that yaichka is the coastal village in the thrice-ninth lands that sees the first light of sunrise, and thus is closest to the isle of buyan.

it had a full view of the isle prior to it's warding, but by koschei's birth, glimpses of it were super rare and even those within yaichka had a hard time believing the isle was more than just a myth. i set his birthplace for a bunch of reasons, but mostly it's meant to align his life journey with the path of the sun. in terms of how koschei relates to his birthplace then, first and foremost there's definitely an element of him using it as a political tool. truthfully, he's born a nobody, no blood claim to buyan's throne at all. to say that fate plays a hand here may or may not be true, but in gathering support to claim buyan's throne, he goes along with inserting himself as the subject of a few prophecies and omens. one being that his being born in yaichka during a blood moon was a sign that dazhbog's reign was coming to an end and that the boy born under that moon ( to a witch priestess of the dawn mother, no less ) was meant to begin a new cycle.

aside from that though, there's also a whoooole other personal layer to this where i think yaichka starts to model a utopia and dreamscape for him too. although yaichka was technically under the rule of the tsardom of zimorod, it was so small and off the map in their eyes that it was often neglected, even though it still had to pay tithe to the closest lord. it frequently made yaichka vulnerable to steppe clans who would come in and raid the village for its resources in the winter. the forest near yaichka was where koschei's father's clan encamped for the winter; they wouldn't raid yaichka, but they also wouldn't involve themselves in their business. that changed after the marriage between koschei's parents formed an alliance which had both factions working together to solve each other's problems.

the plight of a lengthy existence, expressed so accurately it could make even a wizened old crone's heart ache: there never seems to be enough of the good, and there's always too much of the hopeless and the unpleasant. He can only imagine all that which @eklipsoi would have rather remained ignorant to, what kind of aches and heartbreaks have plagued his many years walking the world. Regis holds a respectful silence, long enough for the gravity of the confession to truly sink between them but short enough to make the Darkling know he's been heard.

❛ A common grievance with life, ❜ he says at last, splitting a half - burned log with a single tap of the poker which he hangs back up next to the humble hearth, ❛ especially one such as yours. ❜ He hopes it's clear he means to observe rather than critique; Regis wants no enemies, certainly not one that he's already welcomed into his home. [ Time away from the Little Palace? Strange that the Darkling would spend it here, with that equally strange old herbalist that seldom ventures into the city. ]

❛ I'm no different. ❜ the playing field is level, if only for a moment. ❛ But I prefer thinking about what time remains, what I'll do with it, and what possibilities it will bring. No being is ever solely comprised of misery, and not all of its memories are so lacking in light. ❜

the irony doesn't escape him, but he can't take it back now.