This forum uses cookies
This forum makes use of cookies to store your login information if you are registered, and your last visit if you are not. Cookies are small text documents stored on your computer; the cookies set by this forum can only be used on this website and pose no security risk. Cookies on this forum also track the specific topics you have read and when you last read them. Please confirm whether you accept or reject these cookies being set.

A cookie will be stored in your browser regardless of choice to prevent you being asked this question again. You will be able to change your cookie settings at any time using the link in the footer.

Hello There, Guest!

| Register
Home » Search » Roster » Whitepages » Records » FAQ » Guidebook
The voices told me to
Open Floating Key 
Varuna
Currently championing:
#1
Varuna was no stranger to the whispering voices of the rift. As a child, orphaned as he was, they haunted him many a night, eager to prey upon one so frail and alone. As he grew, they quieted. In fact, he had grown to ignore them almost entirely, much like the seafarer becomes deaf to the sigh of the tide. 

Of late, they became much harder to ignore, much louder in their insistence and more enticing in their temptations. They baited him with promises of power and magic, which at first meant nothing to him and he flicked his ears at them in effortless dismissal, like water off a duck's back. But the forces of the rift were incessant. Soon enough the voices became too nagging to forget and Varuna set out to oblige their odd whims, if only out of sheer curiosity - and an odd sense of loyalty to the presence that was always there (unlike those who had left him to be alone in the world).

They lead him to the ocean, a familiar haunt of his childhood. When first he had been dumped into this place between worlds there was a rain that never ended, not for what felt like an eternity. So it was again. Varuna was not so bothered by the weather, being a creature of the storms his mother commanded. He was grateful the dreadful Scorch had ended at last, and with his sanity intact. Mostly, anyway... Afterall, he was chasing phantom voices to odd ends of the earth.

He arrived on the key in the midst of a soft drizzle: an interlude to the violent storms that had raged for the past week or so. They had let up just long enough to allow him to fly. The rain dribbled softly on his wings, which had only just become strong enough to carry him steadily in the air. He alighted in the shallows, ruffling his wings before bending them to his flanks. The water was cold as it sloshed around his ankles. 

As he looked about, he found himself pulled to venture deeper into the sea. For a long while he watched and pondered the dark and angry reaches, frowning at him from a distance. He remembered the giant serpent on the shore of the Rainforest Cliffs, when the matron had called upon them to deliver their hope. She'd even given him some of his own hope to carry, which he had taken to Halyven and disappeared shortly after, but that is irrelevant now. He wondered if the giant serpent lurked about these dark waters just out of sight, and if perhaps the voices had baited him to be monster-fodder. At least the rift had a sense of humor.

With a shake of the head and a bit of reckless abandon, he waded headlong into the deep blue. Thunder rumbled in the sky afar as the water rose first to his knees and then to his chest. 

There he stopped, swaying in the current, hooves grappling the sand. His heart drummed in his ears as he noticed dark shapes stirring about him. They were no more than a foot long, but there was no saying what sort of beastlings lurked in the wild waters of the rift. He was not fearful (Varuna didn't much care if he lived or died; he was not so sure he was really alive in the first place) but excited, intrigued, as he reached down to touch one with his nose...

ooc; Trial, "Float on a Velella"

STILL YOUR HEART, THE DARK IS STILL THE DARK
You may always use magic/force on/against Varuna (excluding powerplay).

Rift Presence
Currently championing:
#2
You lack fear, but this in turn makes you foolhardy and a danger to yourself.

The creature you seek drifts lazily along the rolling ocean’s surface, just a little further out of reach; naridon and pistris stalk silently through the shallows, and the bright-witted velella look to avoid their savage jaws. The dark shapes which have caught your notice instead, are different (though the adults are similarly sized). Your nose dips naively towards the water, inching nearer to a small, beautiful shoal of surface-seeking crazed cuttle, colourful and squid-like to behold. To your fearless, inexperienced eye they should seem harmless, their elegant flight through the waters even mesmerising—surely they present no threat?

Further afield, beneath the slow, gliding velella, larger, more sinister shadows lurk…
image
» Presence of the Rift «


Eira
Currently championing: Reszo
#3

The break in the rain was what Eira had been hoping for—waiting for. Fay was well grown and as far as the orphaned filly could tell, ready to resume the life which she’d been so meanly stolen from. The guilt surrounding that sneeze still sat like lead weight in the blue babe’s belly, and she hoped with some desperation that the pressure would be lost when the tiny Eriucla was at last set free.

Tiny hooves, cracked painfully and brimming with thrush, picked a slow, hobbling path along the southern rim of the island of Floating Key. Their owner was a pitiful sight, emaciation yet visible beneath the threads of a never-shedding, long coat, but she seemed otherwise unaware of her own sorrowful plight; her scrawny, dishevelled figure came upon the familiar silvered timber of a young glow cherry tread at once the hollows of her gaunt face filled with flattering cheer.

”This is it little fairy,” her thoughts whispered affectionately, excitedly, lowering her too-large head towards the horizontal slouch of a small bough. The critter had been living in the warm, furred cup of her ear for many, many months—though on occasion she had ventured down her host’s face or mane, lured out by the temptation of fresh food. On cue, the delicate animal slipped from the safety of her dry nest to pursue the curious aromas of the tree that she neared.

Eira shook her head with enough force to purge her foster-child from her hair.

“Sorry,” she hummed as Fay scrambled fretfully along the cold, wet wooden surface of the branch and into the small crevice by the union; already the smiling filly felt relieved. Perhaps she might have lingered longer—to truly be certain that the creature would be okay—but the rather violent crash of a wave against the shoreline behind, caused her to turn suddenly. The wind along this coast was fiercer than she remembered it being on the mainland.

As her soft gaze traversed the grim, grey horizon, she became aware of the presence of another horse, a pegasus it seemed—just like her. Distracted from duty, Eria turned around fully and began the short trek which would land her on the water-logged sand of the beach; the colt stood breast-deep in the surf, and worry triggered boiling heat beneath her blue, sickly facade. It had barely been two weeks since this very ocean had tried to claim her.

“What are you doing?” she probed concernedly in thought, pausing her crooked knees just short of the visible waterline. “It’s dangerous out there, you know…”

image

@Varuna - she doesn't have a horn yet, ignore the picture lol
Varuna
Currently championing:
#4

Bright colors dart to and fro below the melancholy-gray waves, stirred into a foam by the wind. It whips his hair all into his face and carries with it so many smells it is hard to make out any one in particular. Even if it were otherwise, Varuna likely wouldn't care. He is mesmerized by the glowing, alien bodies that seem lured toward the dark shape of him (whether out of curiosity or some more nefarious reason remains to be seen). Varuna, ever the scientist, is set on finding out.

He extends a forelimb, lifting a hoof to wave it at the animals. They dart away quickly but come right back. Some even skim past him, cold and slippery on his skin.

A voice, distant and wraithlike—barely a mutter rising up from the deep—insists he investigate farther. He lowers his ghost-of-a-muzzle so what whiskers he has bristle the surface of the small but frantic waves. The water itself seems to react, lapping excitedly at his flanks as he draws in a breath of salty air and plunges—first his muzzle and then past his eyes—below the surface. His ears bob just barely above the waves.

He peels his eyes to get a look at them. At first, there is a sting, but soon enough they adjust. White bubbles burst up from the gaping hole where his nose used to be and the squid dart away, bright smudges of color in his vision.

Then, there comes another voice from somewhere inside of him—not his own voice, but the voice of a filly, and Varuna briskly emerges. It is too loud and too tangible to belong to the phantoms of the rift (the voices he is used to). He draws his head up tall, water dripping from his chin, his eyelashes, his mane, as he blinks the brine from his vision and searches all about him for where it came. 

There: a pale blue shape up on the beach. 

Varuna snorts, peering down the bridge of his nose as he inspects her. He squints his eyes, wondering for a moment if it was in fact her or if he is imagining things. Then her voice comes again and Varuna quirks a brow, ears retreating into the heap of mane on his neck. It's dangerous out there, you know. Of course he knows that. He levels a critical stare in her direction, unhappy with the invasion... his skin crawls with the feeling of another in his mind... can she hear him as well?

Get out! he growls internally, thrashing his nose in emphasis, his features bent into unfriendly angles. He flares his too-large wings at her, black feathers sweeping the seawater—a display of weaponry; a warning.

/ ooc ; it's not the greatest but yay! glad to thread these two again

@Eira


STILL YOUR HEART, THE DARK IS STILL THE DARK
You may always use magic/force on/against Varuna (excluding powerplay).

Eira
Currently championing: Reszo
#5

The horizon warned of weather, a change no doubt for the worse, and Eira’s wary eyes danced between the stranger in the sea, and the veil of gloom lurking a way off behind him; now, she knew, on top of every other danger the Rift could invent, was not the safest of times to swim. Her concern, mind you, was met with startling resistance, a blatant show of hostility even, that instantly set the scrawny orphan’s frayed nerved into overdrive. Her coat, thick and blue, quivered and flinched to the blaring tune of wild uncertainty as it began quickly to pulse against unsteady ears; so too did her tail clamp down, its narrow length sliding between back legs in a subliminal display of her own—submissiveness.

The waif’s tender hooves slithered backwards in the wet sand, indulging his unspoken authority with a generous amount of returned space. The wings that he flashed aggressively were enormous, easily amplifying his intimidating posture, and in response the barbered, beaten feathers of her own flattened further, cuddling tightly against the knuckled surface of fleshless ribs below. Eira had no desire to challenge the unfriendly colt’s status in this world, and wondered, as she stood unfortunately paralysed on the spot, whether it might be a pleasanter experience for them both if she vanished simply, without further interaction.

Still, the colourful creature’s by his feet were deadly.

Unable to withhold the boiling worry (and the nag of her very loud conscience), Eira tried to move him from danger again. “Please! Those cuttles, they’re really dangerous…” her thoughts begged. Her shoulders were driving forward, though her legs refused to follow; every inch of her willed the colt in the sea to come forward onto the sand. Further afield, behind him, a small murky shape within the tunnel of another descending wave caught her eye. The filly had seen Velella before, understood them as harmless, and paid the swimming creature not another second’s thought.

image

@Varuna - she doesn't have a horn yet.

I'm really sorry :[ Let's get this finished for his trial.