a fallen star

for @"Aeri"

---

Perhaps too true to its nature, the mountains cut along the bottom of a stormy sky, it’s jagged spires like talons pierced through the bottom most layer in silence. But it was not a true silence, for low rumbling peals of thunder echoed across the sky, at times the very percussion of such booming with such force that the very earth seemed to shake at the demands of the heavens above. Lightning itself crawled along the underbelly of the tempest, illuminating the violent twirl of the clouds that churned all too like a skybound maelstrom.

It was a deluge for the world below—stones slick with heavy rain, valleys suddenly inundated with rainwater that made minor streams swell to raging torrents that continued to carve their way across and along lowlands and ancient waterways; there was an energy fierce in the air that sent the nocturnal creatures to safely tuck themselves away within the vale below. The late summer storm was a fierce one, but perhaps not quite the worst that the world had seen over the season. Even with the rain, the air did not cool quickly, and the humidity clung swiftly to all that the rain could not reach.

Higher upon the mountain still, the wind picked up with the height of the storm. Such a gust could be heard like a roar as it moved effortlessly through the forest, plucking leaves and pulling them along to distant places. Distantly over the rain and thunder, the sound of breaking branches came and went—such storms made the trees shed their dead with ease—before all seemed to pass. Like a wave, a natural ebb and flow as a quick arising summer storm lost the heat of the day from the sun, though it continued its thunderous chorus as it moved on past the mountain itself and on towards the open plain to exhaust and depart.

Yet it was on the tail end of this that the light show of the sky began, as even a quieting storm fought to relent. Perhaps an hour had passed, no more than two since its arrival, and now as life returned to its active state the clouds were illuminated from within. Another great peal of thunder, another earthshaking percussion as it rumbled; another flash with an outside arc to light up a sky turning more starry than cloud-covered.

Mother Nature heaved one more great sigh.

And in a great bolt that came down against stone to blacken the earth, he arrived.

---

+2 Discovery Points

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]miracles didn't often happen before her very eyes; and when she soon returned to her vale, she might have thought the raingather were pearls, evening mist, or her tears. but even though she had been left absent of those few she'd thought her followers, there was no room left within her to sorrow; no part within her freed up for the self-seduction of her miserable doubts. not as she later found herself preening the brow of little ifalna, the pair of them held close beneath a crowding, furling thicket as summer's tempest was ushered through their realm on its terrible and searing war-foul breath.

it's in the after-hour  ( and then some )  when the winds have half-gentled to celestial symphonies that she finds the felled one; all cloudspun and lain on an untomb of blackened, split stone. the nightingale should have kept well away from the inwrought, old fable sense of doom ... but, as ever, aėrith had no wish to turn from the strange suddenness of such things, for it was not so to her.

and it wouldn't have been any stranger in the last life, either.

so she waits from a while away, and wonders if he hand been sent by some way of god as she; her face cast inscrutable and eyes glittering absent, phantom-pale; frond of a tail arced watchful over narrow hips.[/narrow]
the staff team luvs u

He could feel the electricity in the air even after it passed, felt its pulse curling in every fiber of his being even in a sprawled, prone state. His chest heaved with effort, drawing in breath painfully; the blackened stone beneath him was still not quite as dark as his dipped limbs were. It was all disorienting, but many things as of late had been, and they would continue to be for some time.

His head ached, vision swimming away in its own tidal force as he struggled to make sense of what had just transpired. How long had been out? How long had he fallen? An eternity, perhaps, for it surely felt that way before the mortal realm had come up to smack him clean and clear and sunder him into darkness. He was so very used to the light, to the sight of cleanliness; all of it now, gone.

With some effort and the passage of time, he managed to draw his legs in to right himself somewhat, to put an elbow beneath him to prop himself up proper and gaze upon that earthly realm he had been consigned to. At first, it was nothing more than a blurry mess of forestry distant and hewn stone structures; the fog coiled up to linger in the branches and boughs, driven from the damp earth and in it all, he did not see her.

Wearily, he let his head droop with a sigh.

There was far too much to process—where to begin?

---

+1 Discovery Points

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]aėrith cants her head to hear now what her trees might whisper, and the word of beasts carried on exhausted winds. on the ungiving and unwelcoming split stone, she breaths the thin and strange, charred air  –  but perhaps it was not so strange. not really; and not when her throat held the char of it in the back of her throat like some half-wanted thing; not when a deep shiver threads down her spine, rippling the moonshed fur there and shuddering throughout her skin in an old-known way. stormcloak nevermore, but ...

it was not so strange at all.

she did not know if this happened had been the same godspear that had, once upon a time, almost felled her. but the nightingale steps over the skyburnt threshold, and into the first of many unknowns. steps over rotted logs and past spores of toadstools, pushing her way through now-flattened foxtail grasses; comes to appear before him with her arch of dark brows above inscrutable, watchful eyes.

  "you were thrown from your own godsplain, i take it? i would think how curious such a thing is ... but it is not so unusual for cloudrest, in the end."

a lengthy guess, sure; but one that supposed the doing of some scorned, pitiless god, as they often were.[/narrow]

---

+2 Discovery Points

the staff team luvs u

From the corner of his vision, a wisp, a ghost pale as the angels themselves but not as faceless. A voice, reaching for him in the darkness like a gold braid glistening beneath faint moon-glow from between foxtail and sedge cover; it enraptured his attention and pulled his gaze to her with the sharpness of a spear. His eyes narrowed at her, but not with ill-content lacing them; he strained to draw her into focus and loathed the adjustment that would not come so quickly.

How long had it been since he had experienced night? He, a creature that in spite of being dipped in soul-black ink of the purest depth, had existed so long in eternal bright that he had forgotten such day and night cycles existed. Yet now the darkness of his limbs seemed a forsaken thing, something that could not be washed from his skin, washed from his pelt… from this form, whatever it was that he happened to be.

“I—,” his voice cracked, throat feeling too dry. He cleared it, trying once more. “Where is this place?” What was it? He could peg it all day for being a mortal realm but the names were long lost to him as they would be anyone from an astral, heavenly realm—or even one from the deepest pits of hell that managed to crawl their way out.

Perhaps it mattered not. Piety mattered little among the lives of mortals now, creatures even less.
the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]

edit for recruiter specialty points / tag

---

"on some world, surely,"  said she, moving nearer to the inksetter with her tail sweeping loftily at pale hocks,  "although, i cannot say which one."  and truly, she had no desire to learn the name of wherever they stood, as much as she had not verily cared on the last. did not wish to know the place that her aviomiehen — husband's terrible gods had decided to set her so far from him and all theirs from. not at all, she thought, now with her snout creasing bitterly, broke-heart  —  "i can say that these lands are those with a claim of my own, of frostchant ... little as it may be."  a pause, to look him over for any obvious hurts that he may  ( or may not )  bleed from in the moment.

there would be time to wonder at all of this later.

for now, she stoops her sinewy figure down abreast of him, offering the sharpness of one shoulder so that, if he so wished, he would take her offer and lean against her so they could rise together. nevermind that so many thought her a wispful thing; her gaze was hard and searching upon his ash brow, mind clockwork at any possibility of ailment.

"have you a name? one that you remember?"[/narrow]

---

+2 Formation Points

the staff team luvs u

Frostchant—a strange name in that moment where the humid air is almost too warm, no, is too warm. Even up on the mountain heights, he felt the heat of the world bearing down though he could not tell whether or not it came from the aftermath of his descent and the skyfire bolt that sent him there. Even so, she drew nearer to him, close enough now to touch.

It made him uncomfortable but of no fault of her own.

These were her lands, her home, and he a stranger midst them.

“My name is Inarius,” he managed out, clearing his throat. Adjusting himself, drawing himself up properly as best as he can manage without aid though he did not rise. “Forgive my transgressions for… being here. It was not my choice where I ended up.”

---

+1 Formation Points

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]

edit for recruiter specialty points / tag

---

"there is nothing to forgive, ser,"  the nightingale mused levelly,  "when this choice has never been our own."  and, seeing that he had the capacity  ( she hoped )  to make do on his own, the duskwild leant away and gathered her self to rise before him once more; all paws so terribly grounded, as ever. the look of her as she gazed upon him was not the pitiless sort; not imposing, but imploring.  "whoever  –  or whatever  –  it was that sent you here did so with the intention of carving some predestined thing of its own design,"  dared she, to speak so fiercely against the forces that ever sought to contain them both but would nevermore,  "but i say this: if purpose is what you seek, then i am only a vessel through which you might find it. if you do not stand for anything, then i will show every right and reason that you should have something to stand for. all who wander will want to be found, 'ere; each of us who have forever been lost."

the starcatcher steps away, then; watching with frore-fever eyes to see if he would rise now or only fall further, and turn to dusk in the dark.

if he would surrender the way she nearly had, once upon stygian shores.

"yes  —  this terrible rebirth eats at our living bones, inarius. to be made again of flesh is humiliation. but you do not have to go on alone."[/narrow]

---

+1 Formation Points

the staff team luvs u

He fought it at first, though unable inevitably was he to ward off the narrowing of his garnet gaze on her as she spoke. Like a judge of old times; something about the way she spoke and the weight those words carried held something to them. Not quite fire and brimstone, no, it was nothing so Old Testament meant to shake and rattle him down to his core.

He closed his eyes in thought as she continued to speak.

In a way he did not care too much for the purgatory scene she seemed to paint, veiled behind pretty prose. Then again, there were many things that Inarius felt in that moment that diluted and derailed his train of thought over and over. He scarcely knew what to make of the predicament he was in, and felt the grasp of worrisome fear grip his mind like an icy hand endlessly reaching, and taking, though he had little to offer.

“Then I suppose I will make do with what I have,” he said, eyes opening once more to the world. His body burned with electricity; an elbow rolling against stone from where he yet did not rise. “You speak as though we all fall from one godsplain to another, and I’d have half a mind to presume you’d fallen before me.”

But that was blasphemy—he had been cast down, the first in a long time.

He hadn’t fallen so much as he had been thrown.
the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]

edit for recruiter specialty points / tag

---

the sotaherra watched him shift about on the charred earth where he had been struck down, ears flicking forward in a rare moment of their own.

she supposed that if inarius did not take well to what was being built in her hollow, then he would take his leave, out of no fault of his own. like any who sought to lead, there was a vision in her head: of her northern and southern ridges guarded by the dutiful and the vigilant; of order, where those who wished to be a part of this clan earned the trust of its people to finally know their place within it; and where, especially, each would enrich the lives of another. but it all meant nothing if she didn't have those of like mind at her shoulder; nothing at all, if she didn't have those willing to watch her back as devotedly as she would theirs.

his next words prompt her eyes to lid and one dark arch to lift in unbiased consideration.  "had i not, then i would not be standing before you now,"  settling back onto her haunches, tail feathering with neat absence about her paws.  "i was torn. parted from what i knew. summoned, and then ..."  the old had been buried at sea, and she had emerged kickng and screaming as if rebirthing. come again, when she only wanted to return to her bones and her stonebed and ... her mouth thins, the gleam in gray eyes guttering.

"no matter. from hereon, we will choose our own paths. our gods should feel honored that they are even able to watch. ...when you are able, i will lead you to the water. you should drink  —  and bathe that heat from your skin."  let him cleanse that singed fur, and the stench of wherever his after had been; and when ( if ) he decided to rest, she would hunt for him.

and though aėrith did not often turn from such discussion, she tired of this higher-than talk; there was much to be done.[/narrow]

---

+1 Formation Points

the staff team luvs u