Fantasy 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙞 𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙠𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙩𝙤𝙤 —

[mother of sorrows]

in love, born

!

and of the end, created ♡

an

urban

fantasy

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  location

  
  

  Arcana Central.

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  date & time

  
  

  Right now - or in the past?

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  
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  weather

  
  

  23°C, the weather's perfect

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  
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  writer

  
  

  mother of sorrows

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  writer

  
  

  ravensunset

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

romance in f major

antonin dvorak

the scene

...

Foundations carved in by ancient cannals. Buildings rising up from clear water twirling aged rock in it's hands. Neon signs decorate buildings that have seen empires gone like blooming vines. The technology is about the youngest part of Arcana Central.

Here, magic and tech come together. Here, the line between them exists only in theory.

A girl with no magic, pouring over that same electricity in the moonlight's gentle glow. A girl running through blinding streets and clutching the hand of another. Magic always drifts through the air here like a sweet scent, sizzling in your hair and fingers - but lately, it's been growing restless.

Arcana Central has been stuck in slumber ever since the days of glory and wars fell asleep with it - it's about time somebody wakes it up.

A fantasy roleplay set in a city filled with wonder, talking statues and cats that absolutely will not hesitate to talk crap about your new outfit. Oh, and a possible upturn of the universe as we know it. Small details.

♡coded by uxie♡

 

[ravensunset]

filler

Electrice

filler

“Who wants donuts?”

Jonah was carrying a sweet smelling box as he entered the building, his usual smile fixed on his face as he took a seat next to Tris, propping the box open on the desk in front of him.

“What’d I miss?”

He said in a half whisper as he turned to his colleague.

“The donuts aren’t making anyone forget you’re an hour late. Again.”

“C’mon, Tris, really? I bought your favorite kind.”

He gave her a nudge, and Tris reached for the box, the white glaze on the chosen donut smelling gently of vanilla, and a blotch of pink spilling out the side.

“Raspberry filling? I suppose I can accept a bribe once in a while,”

She grinned, leaning back in her rotating office chair,

“Not much. Mostly just idea pitching for the automated gondola system. I still like the magnetic strips for steering, but-”

Tris’ words faltered out as she caught sight of movement outside a window. The sunlight bouncing off of neighboring skyscrapers meant there was no absence of light shining in, and yet, something was missing. It took a beat, and then another, for Tris to realize what it was.

Someone else had caught on, a

“What happened to the billboards?”

Echoing from an opposite side of the room as Tris jumped up, heading over to the window, searching for the usual, telltale neon glow of the city. Arcana City was never quiet. It was never still, both with the bustling life in it and the lights hanging throughout, changing and shifting through their shapes, their colors and words, some magical in nature, others not. As Tris looked upwards, the familiar glow outlining the neighboring buildings was gone, and only black screens peered back at her.

“Systems are all online,”

Jonah called out, tapping on a large, empty segment of the northmost wall to produce a glowing screen, displaying the status of the light systems in the city, the words next to each claiming they’re operating. He met eyes with Tris, giving her a wink, seeming unconcerned with the situation,

“Looks like I came right on time.”

“They don’t see anything wrong? Refresh them again, they might’ve just not caught on yet- We could reset the systems, but we had to do that just a week ago and it might take longer than-”

“Can’t you feel it?”

Another voice spoke up, a woman sitting cross legged on her chair, eyes closed, her pink hair pulled back into two braids,

“Oh, right Tris, sorry, you can’t. Magic’s going crazy, like someone set of a bomb of it outside.”

“So? Magic doesn’t interfere with our systems.”

Tris’s brow furrowed as Antonia, who was bright and pink haired and born able to sense every source of magic within a mile of her, spoke out.

“I don’t know, you must’ve noticed stuff’s been weird lately.”

Tris had, of course, heard it. But that was a rumor on the wind. Everyone always wanted something to go wrong, even Tris couldn’t deny the excitement pulsing through her at the situation, something to liven up an otherwise boring day, Tris who loved the possibility of every outlandish theory she heard, and as online as she was she heard a lot, but they never happened. Something was always weird in the sprawling city, and yet, nothing ever changed. Nothing came of it, though the conviction of Antonia’s voice always caused her to wonder.

“I’m resetting them. We should be back up to glowing in ten.”

Jonah called, back at his desk, and the green lines on screen, one by one, blinked out, reading a loading percentage instead. He was right. Within ten, everything was back to normal, save something new simmering through the air, the billboard lights just barely distorted. The excitement of the day gone, every donut soon claimed.

​

Magic boiled softly under the ground, wires whistled in the air as countless electrons flowed through them, and Arcana City was alight. High above it, the sky was just starting to dim, the sun’s rays below the horizon, a glowing dusk. Every day, a wired clock, Electrice said her goodbyes and left her workplace, a keycard flash letting her up onto its roof.

The first time Tris ever climbed a roof, she was nine. She’d opened up her bedroom window and, after weeks of practice, successfully climbed up through it. There was a moment, perhaps even a span of time too short to be called that, an instant, where Tris was successful. Where she, just barely four feet tall, was on top of the world. The smooth, sharply tilted shingles were hopeless for a child to keep a grip on. For a moment, Tris was weightless, and then she was on the ground.

When her siblings, her cousins described magic, they all said different things. They said it was second nature, or that it was taking in your first breath of air, that it felt like burning, like panic, like itching a scratch, like being alive.

In the instant before she’d lost balance, Tris had been alive. A broken leg meant nothing, was nothing in comparison. If anything, it made her want to try again more. In some ways, Tris spent her whole life chasing that magic. She couldn’t make lights come out of her fingers, make images on nothing on empty air, but she could build a circuit, and close it, and listen to it hum, and was it not her light that flowed out of it? Did she not make it? It wasn’t magic, she was told, just electricity, technology. At a young age, the line between magic and not seemed to have been drawn with no reason behind it but to leave Tris on the outside.

The rush through her body when she looked down from a height, like her veins were overflowing, wasn’t magic. It wasn’t magic flooding her entire being, causing her heart to beat and skin to warm. But what was the difference, really?

The path home was long built into Tris’ muscles. A couple easy jumps, a fence or two climbed, a view of the city in all its glory, the sunset causing the canals to glow golden and the sky purple, mixing in with the similarly colored artificial glow of signs, newly build street lights providing a full cover of their colorful glow across millenia old rock. Tris’ apartment recognized her like an old friend, the security glancing over her face and allowing its doors to slide open for her.

A door swung open into an empty room. The air in it still, and quiet in a way Tris rarely returned home to.

“Melly? Are you home?”

Tris called, to no answer. So her roommate had gone out. She stepped through the living room, not seeing the items scattered out of place, and stepped into her room.

The first thing Tris noticed was the window. Shattered, empty, the glass missing from it lying in shards on the floor, and the second was the quiet. Tris’ room was never quiet. Not between a never fully off computer, remotely connected to the one at work and always scanning, downloading, processing something or other, and the bots, unreliable but should’ve been trying something about the mess. Tris took a step back, her heel catching a shard of glass that slipped right out from under it, sending her on her way down towards the floor. Her hands shot out instinctively to break the fall, the slight turn registering something- someone- in the corner of her vision.

She wasn’t alone.

♡design by neon reverie, coded by uxie♡

 

[mother of sorrows]

venora, the stranger

Summer panted outside of the window, evening stretching its long limbs out to sleep. A branch knocked on the window of the small childhood room, leaves rustling with the lazy wind.

A girl takes a deep breath and burrows her bare feet into the great brown rug. She sets her legs apart.

Closes her eyes and listens to the humming just out of reach.

The world is never quiet, her grandma said, you just gotta give it an ear.

She'd strain for it, when she was younger - press her head to the walls, windows, trees and hold her lungs tight to hear a hum, whisper, song. She'd seek out the cold stream pouring itself out into town, the old carved out tree. She'd tuck her sharp chin on her bruised knee, sitting on her torn sweater and wait for midnight to strike. The crumbling bones of a crurch, the sighing abandoned house her friends dared her to enter, all the forgotten and the kind places she'd seek out with the fever of a teen desperately trying to revive the wonder it once used to know -

with a faint desperation and a foot ready to stomp.

It had taken her half a year before she heard it for the first time. Sitting there in the ever-dark, eyes closed tight and feeling more than a little stupid the less anything happened; her ears caught nothing but the distant song of frogs, the laughter of the wind. Trees breathed above her and roots dug into the soft parts of her skin. Like a little kid again, she thought; a burst of embarrassment made her remember what she must look like, if somebody walked in on her now.

The noises around her curled.

And really, what is she even supposed to be looking for? Her grandma never mentioned what magic sounds like.

A rumbling of thunder somewhere on the horizon. The smell of in-coming rain drifted lightly, rustling her short-chopped hair.

And once she hears it, how is she going to know it's the right thing?

For a moment, there was nothing.

And then there was something.

Her eyes snapped open, ears burning with the strings that pull the universe taut.

Like in a daze she stumbled up on her legs. Brittle, like a young tree in the storm, two arms stretching out as if to plunge out of an icy, gray sea and -

---
​

she tore through time space, sneakers skidding short of a red-clad roof. The soles screamed as she re-gained her balance just at the last second, stopping herself from crashing into the bustling streets below. Venora grabbed for much-needed breath as her burning hands dug on any surface strong enough to hold her, lungs starving for it. Sweat dripped down the woman's forehead, soaked with blood and stinging the open scar splitting her temple.

It hurt. Everything hurt, but she has to keep moving.

''There! She went there!''

''Fuck me.'' Venora cursed, giving a tentative glance to the city below. Cars glided across the constantly-changing pavement, voices laughing without a glimpse of what's going on just above their heads. The sun let out one last sign on the horizon, but not without making Arcana City glow like dry gold. It was still hot, unbearably hot and night is still far away, but Venora still has hours to run.

Speaking of running.

''Get her!''

Two black-clad figures below. Pointing right at her, running for the nearest staircase.

''Shit. Shit!''

A million escape routes, turning in her adrenaline-pounding head like a washing machine that just couldn't get off the spin cycle. Roofs stretched into infinity, balconies waited below, a thousand hiding places for a woman covered in her own blood. Somewhere in this city below, Robin must be running on as little breath as she is; Venora could only pray to whatever deity cared enough for people like her that she made it, hiding somewhere safe and far away from -

''I see her!''

Gritting her teeth, Venora's legs tensed in preparation. Her knees pounded, pounded with stinging fire and her magic is almost out. No other option but to jump.

All muscles screamed for relief as they strained, pushing her to the nearest balcony - her taped hands held on to the edge, all air pushed out from the impact. She could hear them now; footsteps in the distance, climbing up flat roofs and staircases growing flowers. Venora pushed herself up, sprinting out glass doors - vases, curtains, paintings crashed behind her, running through the small apartment as fast as her injured leg would allow. Exit, her mind screamed, exit. A window right on the other side.

And in her way, a terrified looking grandma holding a watering can. The water dripped away from the targeted pot, dripping on the carpet as if shocked too.

Venora stood there, half-over the kitchen table, streaking blood all over the polished wood. They stared at each other, for a moment and both decided privately that they live very different lives from each other.

"Uh. Sorry." A bit sheepishly, a bit panicked, Venora pushed past the still gaping woman, putting a stray curtain down with all the awkwardness of somebody who knows they've done wrong but had no time to reflect on it. "Nice flowers by the way."

And with that she stepped up on the windowsill, jumping into the evening.

Roof after balcony after alley after roof after staircase dug into the last remaining rays of energy, night creeping in from the corner and sending her leg quavering. No longer she could drag in the slightest breath, her hands resting on her knees - but still the footsteps followed, chased, mocked. Using her powers was out of the question. Blood leaked out her wound with steadily fear-inducing speed. Her head swam.

Hide. She had to hide. Behind her, another yell of 'she has to be here somewhere!'

Like a cornered animal's her eyes ran, flickered - for an exit, for a way to gnaw off her own leg like a rat. Death or sanctuary, one of those; and Venora wasn't one to lay and wait for the sword to chop off her head. Not if she could help it.

And as long as she was breathing, there was still a way.

In a window. Locked, but not for long.

Glass tore through the fragility of her skin, digging it's teeth in. It splattered across the floor like glitter, lost in the depths of a carpet; furniture turned under the impact, giving her bruises that she knows will last for days. Silence. Her heart beat in her ears as she leaned on her shaky knees, listening for anything - a voice, shout. Anything to tell her she's been found out, that she's going to have to run when she knows she won't be able to.

For a moment, silence. And then a yowl.

"INTRUDER! INTRUDER!"

You know. For her credit, Venora has seen a lot of things. Murder, explosions. The life leaving it's chamber in an eyes. But she's yet been attacked by a talking cat.

A ball of fluff, flying straight at her face like a bullet of the only slightly less deadly kind - Venora's reflexes were only fast enough to catch the beast before it got a scratch at her face, hissing and spitting.

"AAAAAA! INTRUDER!"

"What the fu -"

In the confusion and even behind the literal hissy fit, a sound that made her heart stop. The unmistakable noise of house keys unlocking a door.

The cat turned in her arms like laundry that's gained a sudden grudge, struggling to attack even as Venora covered it's (his? Hers?) maw. She pressed up against the wall, heart fluttering like a trapped bird.

A sudden chomp at her finger sent Venora's hand snapping back, letting out a gasp of pain.

"TRIS! TRIS, I'M BEING KIDNAPPED! AAAAA -"

And into the room came a woman.

Confusion painted on a delicate face. Closely chopped hair.

Tripping on a shining piece and falling.

Venora grabbed hold of her wrist, just as outside the window a voice screamed;

"The window!"

coded by kaninchen

 

[ravensunset]

filler

Electrice

filler

Everything happened all at once. The ground came towards her. A scream rang out through the air, a familiar voice, but before the words had settled into her brain, a sharp pressure pulled up on her left arm.

Was Raffie hurt? How could this have happened? She had an alarm system, a pretty good one too, hooked right up to the city’s grid and power source, an unauthorized perk of the job. Things were going wrong, breaking, the city itself, if only Tris could see,

Her mind raced, adrenaline pumping through her body with strength she’d only ever prior felt when in the air, completing jumps stories and stories above the ground.

Someone must have broken in— to her apartment, she didn’t have anything valuable, but she’d spent years working on her room’s electronic setup, her robots better not be broken— and they were now disposing of witnesses and Tris didn’t even know how to throw a punch, not really, although there was glass on the floor if she could get her hand on it, and,

Tris twisted upwards. The reason she had not fallen hard onto the ground stared down at her. Her eyes are huge. Tris couldn’t pick what to focus on, the shape of those eyebrows, the deep brown hair, the blood. Blood on her face, a gash streaking her forehead, the purpling of skin as bruises form on her arms, there was blood on her wrist, Tris’ face reflected in moon sized eyes.

“Holy shit.”

Did she say that out loud? She hadn’t felt her lips move.

The arrow of time flew back into motion. Tris’ body followed through with its twisting motion, years and years of muscles trained for balance and flexibility kicking into place. Her right palm connected hard with the floor, and a sharp pain rang through it as her fist closed around a sharp fragment. The force propelled her body’s spin and then she was upright again, only still connected to the other woman through where their hands met, where Tris’ wrist was burning hot in her grasp.

Blood leaked onto her floor, even a single drop multiplied in clear crystal shards.

Was she about to get murdered? The woman, taller than her, smelling of iron and sweat and pure intimidation, certainly looked more than capable. Tris tried to yank her left wrist out of the woman’s grasp, to no avail, and so lifted her right hand, the sharp edge of glass splitting open the skin of both her fingers and palm, angling its end point forward. She could feel her blood pumping, coming first through her heart and spilling out around the glass with each beat, adrenaline mixing in it just barely not enough to conceal the pain.

“Let- um, let go of Raffie,”

Tris had never been good at confrontation. Not even casual ones, like, hey, Melly, did you finish the milk and not replace it again, so someone invaded my home and grabbed me before I could do or reach anything was fully out of the question. Still, she wished she could have covered the pain, the fear sliding through her voice, the volume falling far short of what she’d tried to ask of it.

“The window!” The voice came from behind Tris, outside. It was a bad idea to let her sight off of the invader, she knew that, but still she turned. Shadows outside her window took from, from amorphous black to humans, feet thudding down on her balcony, approaching its now empty, broken frame.

Tris’ eyes snapped back to the figure holding her, a question ringing clear through them.

♡design by neon reverie, coded by uxie♡