Fantasy =-[~_-¯𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚜.¯-_~]-

[ravensunset]

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rethreading.

a roleplay by raven & svetnica.
midday. the sun hangs dully in the sky, puddles slowly evaporating from worn cobblestones. the air starts to buzz.

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© weldherwings.

 

[ravensunset]

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Wylla.

location

mother of sorrows

Every year, the birds return home.

At least, that’s how Wylla thought of it. Some part of her knew this was no more their home than the far-away warm place they spent their winters. And yet, every springtime, when the brown creatures found their spots on building’s roofs and strutted confidently down the streets in what felt like deliberate attempts to worsen the crowds, when they made music to accompany busy nights, she would throw them crumbs of her lunch and say, welcome back home.

Wylla did not find her way back on so clear a schedule. To most, at least. The train would pass by, stopping for barely a half-hour, and move on. She wondered, often, if the nights she’d spent at other cities, or even on the train itself, yet rivaled the ones she’d spent before ever leaving home.

The train pulled up to its station the way it always did, in screeches of metal and a puff of exhaled smoke that dissipated away before it could be caught. Wylla stepped out the way she always did, wobbly from acceleration at first and then confident, as if nothing had occurred at all.

“Wylla.” Oren, Wylla’s train conductor and boss, was a large man with a deep voice. Wylla loved his presence on the train, his interactions with their customers; he radiated intimidation in a way she could only aspire to.

“Yeah, I know. Leaving soon, I’ll be ready.”

“No, not that. There’s something you should hear, and if you decide you need to stay for a while, that’d be alright, we’d pick you up next time.”

“What?”

Wylla’s head snapped forward to face him, tone suddenly high,

“I’d never want— are you firing me?”

Oren laughed, but the sound only added to the panic on Wylla’s face. “Something’s been happening here. The lights have been going out.”

Wylla stared at him for a moment, then another, and then took off running.

Some things had changed. Wylla had to swerve around signs, and skidded to a stop in front of where an alleyway had once been, and now was a solid brick wall. Most things, however, hadn’t. It was easy to get to the heart of the town, to where the buzz in the air was almost thick enough to taste. That was something that hadn’t changed either. The something the city was built around, whose roots reached out through every corner, that Wylla once thought would talk to her, if she asked enough.

The facility hadn’t changed at all. There was no surprise there. It was dangerous to mess with even for the most trained, the walls bleeding if cut into, the old works running through them least diluted. That meant Wylla knew her way around, knew the holes in the fence and the door that never closed correctly.

Wylla didn’t know what to look for. The first time she’d ever broken in, she was just barely old enough to go to school— just barely old enough to sneak away from class. The facility in their town was small, nothing like the one the capital city was based around, and left locked but largely unguarded. She hadn’t known what she was looking for then, either.

Wylla turned a corner, then another, then skidded to a stop. She wasn’t alone. The dark haired woman whose presence broke the emptiness didn’t seem to notice her.

Wylla cleared her throat, intentionally loudly.

“What are you doing here?”

Wylla asked, crossing her arms, her body stiffening to signal the presence was unwelcome, the worlds tumbling out before she could stop them. She knew, in some way, the place wasn’t really hers, no matter how it called to her, but in another, she was faced with an intruder in one of her never-permanent homes.

♡coded by uxie♡

 

[mother of sorrows]

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Aisha.

location

mother of sorrows

If she raises her hands now, Aisha imagines she can feel the waves.

Like pulling strings loose out a cotton ball, or radio waves tingling through her hair in an electromagnetic breeze. Ancient enough to not have a perceivable form, and old enough that it fought in great, vast battles with atomical energy while Aisha laid in a womb, sleeping in the shell of brittle self. Even when unborn, it had slithered past skin, bubbling veins, perimetrium, into the darkness of odd fluid; even unborn, something that understood the mystery of life felt the old works, and they cast into her its presence. As it exists in everything, it exists now in Aisha and she welcomes it like a friend that she has only written to by letter.

A friend that, for the first in twenty-seven years, does not take her hands in greeting.

The University has told her there would be complications. That in this unimportant, nameless little town and in countless other unimportant towns, there have been interferences in power. The Apparatus in the wollen pocket of her jacket is silent, thoughtless and Aisha's face crumbles into a frown. She goes over this problem methodically, as she was taught; what the problem here might be, Aisha does not know yet, but her fingers curl around a crumbly piece of chalk and dig into the hairline-cracked cement. A white, powdery line stretches on and turns round to hide into itself, like a worm. She taps short-cut fingernail to the ground, calculating the symbols like a professor pondering over a problem. Math and magic are not so different - like other concepts, magic needs a language to inhabit.

Aisha speaks one of power. Not of pure logic, but of time.

Plain, with ruffled black hair cut to her shoulders like a stray dogs' and a dustbunny colored turtleneck, she kneels on the ground of the warehouse. Alone, because no one else wanted to go with Aisha, and a single ticket would have been cheaper anyhow. She resembles nothing of an Academy scholar.

Not for the first time she wonders that, if she wore sleek black heels, maybe better pants and brushed her hair into a bun, if people would recognize her as someone of authority. Situations such as this could have been avoided, then; a pale woman, with wisps of red hair and uncertain hands that tell Aisha she has no more right to be here than her. A maintance worker that hasn't been told about the closed day, perhaps? Aisha puts both her chalk-covered hands on her thighs, and watches the other woman with blank lips and cold eyes. An irritation that turns into seconds, seconds that turn into minutes, minutes that she could be using to write.

Aisha uncurls from her sitting position and settles into her full height, hands settling behind her back. Her voice is unpleasant, frigid. ''Did someone tell you to come in here?'' She looks over this stranger. Her clothes are not fit for maintaining the gear here. A local, then, lead by curiosity.

The thought is does not make her happy. Her upper lip twitches in disregard.

♡coded by uxie♡