Riptide Isles
Player is absent until
She turns her eyes back onto the horizon, searching for secrets in the shattered sky. She looks at her sister as the older draws near, one large ear sweeping toward the starlit filly, another trained on the surging sea. The broken world is beautiful, cruel and clear, a contorted landscape that Savera does not yet know to recognize as wrong. Her face is flushed; she looks back at it, the wind pulling aggressively at the pale gold of her forelock, licking sharp lashes on her midnight cheeks. Devi, less amused, curls deeper into the space between the filly's downy wings, mewling her displeasure with this weather, the wind. Dark clouds roll and boil above, a reflection of the furious sea- but Savera is too distracted, too drawn in by the beauty, to recognize the danger that lurks below.
Vesper says something about the stars and moon, their notable absence from the sky above. The filly frowns, her crowned brow crinkling in quiet confusion. Is it odd? She believes her sister, of course, trusts Vesper implicitly, and yet she cannot find within herself the concern her sibling clearly feels. She lived so briefly with the moon. No, it is her family the little morning star misses, the absence of them she finds so strange. Her father is the moon, her mother the sun. She does not miss the sky.
She tries to tell this to Vesper, to convey the depths and extent of her emotion, but words still largely elude the child. They are ungainly things in an unused mouth, ugly and uncertain, sandpaper on her tongue. Still, she tries, voice deep with disuse. "Familiar stars," the girl hums softly, parroting with pronounced inflection, her gold nose pressing gently into Vesper's neck, running like velvet on the silver neck. She smiles her half-smile, silver eyes glittering with innocent wonder, adoration and adulation upon the auerate lips. Her sisters all the stars Savera needs - and of late her life has been a sky of stars, but they are familiar stars, at least.
She turns to Neaera- and it is not Neaera at all, but another, wingless, slight, another child cast out upon this world. Savera's ears dip and rise, uncertainty rising vice-like in her chest. She peers out, grey-gazed, through the mire and toward the interloper - is this new world populated entirely by fillies? - distracted from the fragmented world by this flickering figure, this newcomer into their night. Inter-esting, the creamy girl says, and Savera rolls the word around inside her head, tastes it on her tongue and the roof of her mouth. It is a graceless word, intriguing, metallic, a barby thing with sharp edges and a cool interior. She parrots it lovingly, "Inter-esting," a look of delight creeping into her sterling eyes. She nods agreement - Yes, inter-esting, bottle brush tail flicking with pleasure. She looks back over the precipice, ready to invite this new stranger closer, to induce her into peering alongside her and into the unknown-
-but the unknown is peering back, and Savera freezes, enchanted, her pale eyes affixed to the dark ones that glare back below. Light glitters on the surface of the water, lights that are cut by a jagged fin, a slicing arc of vicious black that threatens and looms like a shadow on the moon. The storm is growing stronger, wind hissing warnings to the errant child; lightning illuminates the great behemoth in the depths below. Foolishly, brazenly, the filly steps closer, her cloven hooves gripping the edge of the world, unafraid, unable to comprehend the danger that dances at the edge of everything here. "Inter-esting," she whispers again, softly, awe in her voice. On her back Devi hoots a shrill warning, suddenly afraid, her instincts so much better than the starlit child despite her faulty sight. Her mind barges into the little filly's, reining her back with such vehement force that the girl trips back, stumbling away from that seductive precipice.
And not, it seems, a moment too soon, for where the girl stood mere heartbeats before now leers a jaw with too many teeth, wretched and thrashing and backlit by lightning, easily large enough to swallow the tribrid girl, she and her sister and the stranger too, three girls inhaled in a mouthful by the beast. Savera gasps, a high-pitched squeal threading involuntarily from her lips. For a moment all she can see is the gaping mouth, the gnashing teeth, the blue light and the vicious eyes. Its breath is hot on her face, the spray and spittle of it like acid on her onyx hide. She scrambles against the splitting stone, useless, downy wings splaying as she attempts to regain herself, to center herself back in the real world, to escape death as it rises from the sea. But the wings are useless, and Devi's hooting has devolved to a screech, and Savera pauses in her retreat, now largely out of range of the horrible jaws but still entranced, intoxicated, too fascinated by this turn of events to abandon it entirely.
@Rift Presence, @Vesper (I can't seem to tag RP :/)
