HE IS ALIGHT.

      Sunlight streams with a whimsical affection, cloaking him in its comforting warmth. It is neither sword nor shield, for such have no belonging in this trio of hearts. 

      One sister glitters, bathed in beaming rays and coddled by pious beauty. The other gleams, a reflective darkness pooling from her bladed being, blasphemous where the former is holy. Both pillars of his heart. A sun and a moon, flanking the brightest star. They are his to protect, to know, to understand, as he is theirs. Is it not a magic of its own, to a man who bows to such otherworldly delights, that the same crimson blood sears within their veins? They, the three turrets of the Paol kingdom, bound in a web that has somehow borne manacles.

      And it seems he can no longer bear to swallow the key.

      The fury, guttural and disbelieving and betrayed, from his father’s soul swarmed before him in ceaseless pour. Even now, an hour later, does he feel the brunt of it splayed out across his flesh, stinging like infected wounds and scarring like a promise. But Victor does not cease⏤⏤⏤he cannot cease. Perhaps it’s arrogant; it’s certainly selfish. His father suggested ungrateful, among a sleuth of other digging emotions. But it is, beyond anything else, survival. Even the manner of his chamber, kingly in its very essence and sweepingly remindful of his life, paralyzes him in a way. The soft patter of his heart is now beating in song, the monotone drone it was this morning exorcized. His life will no longer be strung along by magical nights among the stars and sea and the devilish delights his father has thrust upon him, but a symphony in which he is the conductor of his own orchestra. In which he serves a crown, but not his own.

      None of that, however, makes it any less calamitous having his sisters brought before him, before the seeds of his father’s fury plant themselves against him. He, no longer a king, begged before his counsel for this moment, to coddle in this sunlit place and hide away for however many minutes he is allowed. To let the fruition of his betrayal be revealed by his own tongue. Yet, he falters. He gazes, deeply and with mourning curling around his chest, at their awaiting faces, hints of himself in each of them and they in him. The grief topples.

      On the stage of twilight, magic dawns. 

      Stars coat the obsidian oceans above and magic dances in its dazzling spirit, mindless reverence doting upon any soul who dares to look. It is dizzying, to look upon it (this enchanting sorcery of dark and light) and breathe in its allure. Even now, just as it was then⏤⏤⏤when such otherworldly treasures were beyond his grasp, forbidden to a prince who wanted for so little, for nothing but⏤⏤⏤does he quiver in its wake, nerves alight and heart greedy. As always, the night feels pregnant with possibility. Tonight perhaps especially so. 

      His eyes flitter from the heavens to their mistress, their effervescent and lusty empress, a vision of starlight and ferocious majesty. Vertiginous delight overcomes him, as it oft chances in the manifestation in her presence, and he eyes his friend with felicity in his soul, obvious in every flush of his beaming spirit. Where Selene’s emotions bubble between them, intimate and vulnerable to the channel of his mind, Victor displays his own through hearty gestures and exposed expressions with little reserve, nearly as keen in the space of night, clear as unveiling daylight. After all, there is nothing to hide⏤⏤⏤the swaying sea and amatory comets their only witness. 

      Tranquility framed in magic.

TIMESTAMP : mid aries , 998 a.l. / dusk LOCATION : bone fortress / pine gardens STATUS : closed to @victorpaol

Her exile is self inflicted, a wound in which she never seems to lick clean. Painful is the reminder that she, a ravaged sovereign, burns inside at her own hand. Flesh, charred from insides out, a slow decay that had been going on for centuries. She glides swiftly, a slice through the still air, towards courtyard. A solace amongst the heavily snow capped trees, able to breathe in the scent of pine and feel content in her boiling blood. In her rage, in her anger. Moon illuminates as the cloud free sky shines, stars of far off beauty flicker throughout the black backdrop and Nehelenia cannot help but feel a feral madness beat within her heart. To the sun, to the moon, to the stars. Her anger is not a misdirect, nor is it unwarranted. Yet, curious be the soul that had managed to break that barrier, to deteriorate further the rotting wall in which she’d hidden herself away within.

Beneath footfalls, snow crunches and a surge of glacial winds weaves through her thickly weaved cape. Wolves fur wrapped around her neck, her lithe digits curl around collar as she readjusts. “If I had wanted your company, I would’ve sought it out.” Monotonous in her displeasure, she needn’t avert her gaze from it’s still remaining place upon the trees to know he’s present. An ever looming presence within her castle. He, as gleaming as the sun itself, could hardly go unnoticed against the harsh juxtaposition that came with Kova. Perhaps centuries ago, when the world around her still thrived, when florals bloomed and the mountains moved. Now, however, he was an incessantly lively thing within her cemetery, her country serving as nothing more than a mausoleum. 

“What news do you bring to me tonight that cannot wait until tomorrow? Pressing matters of something that concerns you more than it does me –– ?“ The sound of silence is hollow, her gaze is dark and brows furrowed as she darts attention towards Victor. Her morbid curiosity had, more oft than not, taken ahold of her in his company. Where jealousy began to outweigh the feeling of disdain, and the slight itch of reveal had eaten away at her unease. For, it was not comfort or peace that she’d felt with him by her side, but a calm before the inevitable storm. “I thought I’d made it clear to you that I was to be left alone this evening, like the rest. Had I not made myself heard, had my words not managed to find their way through to you in time?” She speaks and her tongue is likened to that of a viper, spitting sharpened syllables between them if only to poison, if only to harm the immune. 

      As a child, thorny legends and nightmarish fables sculpted his knowledge of the formidable, frosty wasteland that was Kova, a daunting dust bowl regimented by a mad queen, cursing tragedy unto the once prosperous kingdom. He was taught, with precise disdain, to overcome her bladed darkness with the scathing gold of his own dynasty, whispers and prickled suggestions of a conqueror king tickling his ears. His reign, cemented through the dozens of monarchs before him, should have been the one to stake a blade through her withering sanity. Destiny, a fanciful myth made for the weak (so his father droned with callous jest lodged in his throat), assured their fates be intertwined. Even in his mockery, Ignatius could have never imagined the way such a collision came to be. Neither, Victor admits with a certain self-deprecated loaded wit, had he.

      The winters of Kova are harsh in their might, and cruel in everything else. It is only the justice of nature that their Queen should exemplify these same vitalities, cloaked in the obsidian darkness of nightfall as if it were a mere accessory to her being, rather than it holding her captor as it does every other creature daring to venture into its heart. Nothing, however, can conceal her from him, much as she tries. The coordinates of her soul are embedded into his own, and no compass can compare. After all, he, a bleeding star, needs no guide in the dark. It is a pull⏤⏤⏤inevitable and tugging; who is he to disobey?

      Though she does not give him the pleasure of eyes feasting upon each other, a smile nevertheless dons his lips at her words, obvious in their ire at being forced into a conversation, and it is a sliver of light being punctured into the dark. “I’m afraid the subject doesn’t share the patience of a saint.” He is careful with his steps, coming up a mere foot from her own stance, defensive as it is with no true enemy in sight (a consequence of her existence, one might fathom), and he makes no dismissal of his boldness. “Forgive me.” It is not a plea, nor a command, though either may be argued. Perhaps it’s simply the gall of a king (dethroned, separated, disgraced) still a force in his veins. Or, in truth, maybe it’s the arrogance of man⏤⏤⏤the virtue of a servant under his queen. In any telling, the words ring true. 

      Her words are coated in venom, and while a snakebite she does possess, it is oft harmless when surges of things unspoken betray a more veracious truth. He listens with a keen ear, but understands with a cognizant heart, and the linguistics of her tongue, rancorous and razing, simply rebound. Her grief is dormant, but a well so deep even he teeters on the edge. And now, he must be defiant to the fall, and so must she.

DATE: Early Aries, 998 A.I  LOCATION: Bone Fortress  AVAILABILITY: closed for @victorpaol​

Camille always felt a certain chill when she entered the land of Kova. The kingdom was so different from the sun palace she knows to be home, but if she wanted to visit her brother this is the way to do it. With Daphne’s coronation not going as well as they had planned, Camille wanted to take the time to not only catch up with her eldest sibling, but find out if he knows a bit about what was occurring with the lunar court.

Her eyes flicked around the room as she entered the palace of the bone queen. The palace had always felt so empty, so cold, and it made her wander what her brother saw in the place. Paol was a land of eternal summer, always bright and warm, and this just felt like the stark contrast to their childhood home. She also knew the stories behind the land’s queen, which made Camille a  bit on edge in the foreign land. 

Her eyes lit up when she spotted a figure wandering towards her. She never saw that many people roaming around the palace, so she knew right away that it was her dear brother heading towards her. She smiled as she watched him. The magic she had used earlier made her hair shine and her face have a certain glow to it, but it was the actual joy in her eyes that made her a sight to behold. 

“Victor, my star. It’s so nice to see you again.”

      He was born in the land of gleaming sunshine, vivid and beautiful in its radiating heat, and forged in the arena bounded by sea, primal and commanding. His edges flare, an eternal image of burning bright to the touch, but they do not catch, do not char. His fire cannot be so easily dimmed, for when it is threatened, it comes back burning fiercer than before⏤⏤⏤a trick candle, a feat of magic.

      In the kingdom plagued by winter and affectionate only to those cast in tragedy-stained steel, it should not have been as easy as it was, to shed his skin, his duty; one role for another, one kingdom for another, when such could only co-exist in separate planes of seasons, traditions, people, worlds. A collision was disastrous, a cataclysmic wrong that upturned ancient notions and identities both.

      Victor was of the opinion that should a foundation be so easily threatened, a reckoning was only fate coming to deliver.

      Yet, if one soul was to be spared, hidden away in tender dreams and swaddled in shelter from the comets of chaos, it was to be the heart of lovely Earth, the muse of poets and admiration of artists, the bewitching spirit of a mortal angel. Sweet Camille, beautiful Camille, effervescent Camille; how they adore such a gilded girl. The Summer Princess of a paradisal kingdom. Even the thought of her, a memory of saccharine smiles and lustrous eyes, is enough to sink a shard of grief into his spirit, latching onto his newfound freedom with the typical tenacity of regret, one he longs to forget, yet cannot, as its nature dictums.

      But to see the vision of his sister, in all her enchanting visage, outside of the sun kissed halls of the Summer Palace⏤⏤⏤the home he forsake for this merciless tundra of frost and night⏤⏤⏤is a sight his eyes must adjust to, even as his heart swells in the cavern of his ribcage.