Solo For Your Consideration

Obfuscate. Obdurate. Oscillate.

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A city floating in the center of a lake, Ravok is a place of dark beauty, romance and culture. Behind it all though is the presence of Rhysol, God of Evil and Betrayal. The city is controlled by The Black Sun, a religious organization devoted to Rhysol. [Lore]

For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on April 13th, 2019, 9:26 pm

25 Spring 519


It’s rare for Caspian to invite company over. Not that he’s against it - not that he’s much of anything to hide, and he’s sufficiently tidy enough about cleaning up - but when he’s out to have a good time, he’s very much out for it, whether that’s at Saticath’s tapestried and fur-swathed bower, Thancerell’s unit adjacent to but blessedly separate from his parents’, or whatever and whichever party Caspian finds himself flitting through. Lately, though, it’s gone beyond errant preference to spend his free time out of doors, because with Taalviel now some permanent fixture at his table, or perched at the foot of his bed just to gaze from a certain vantage point out the window -

It would be nefariously cruel indeed if Caspian were to subject someone he even remotely likes to her glowers.

This is one of those rare moments, though, because against all better judgment and aversion to encountering unpleasantness if manageable, he’s in his own apartment, on his own bed, his limbs akimbo and head in Thancerell’s lap.

They’re passing a bottle of wine between the two of them, something Caspian dug out of Thancerell’s parents’ well-stocked cellar, halfway through its contents as the sun reaches the halfway mark of its setting.

Things haven’t been so seamless between the two of them. They’ve hit a new point - or more accurately, Caspian’s found a vigorous series of nadirs - and he’s letting Thancerell play with his hair at the moment, but it seems rather incidental more than some signifier of willingness to acknowledge any assumed level of affection.

“Little on the sweet side, isn’t it?” Thancerell says, following a sip and a sigh.

Caspian accepts the bottle that’s proferred to him, inclining his head the minimal degree necessary to swig from the bottle himself without causing it to spill. “Better than the last we popped,” he replies despondently, and hands it back.

Thancerell’s fingers have found their way fast through his dark hair. The wall opposite them is blank, and as he gazes after it, it takes on a nullity not so different from the abyssal comforts of shutting his eyes. For the sake of idle experiment he chooses to, settles back into the calm of feeling his mind being cloaked, and there’s something to be said - but wiser than to do out loud - about resting in this space, where he can more readily imagine that the hand possessively twirling through his hair belongs to someone else.

That someone is faceless at first. It isn’t necessarily a man, either, at least at the outset - but the roughness of Thancerell’s digits and the bulk of his lap soon readily rules out the possibility of imagining he’s curled against a feminine form. A man, then - taller than Thancerell, darker and deeper, handsome as all get-out and of a more elegant strain. It’s not that Thancerell isn’t good-looking but there’s an absence of refinery there, a serrated edge to his attitude and mannerisms that’s begun to wear doggedly on Caspian’s own particularly cultivated inclinations.

He might have ended it some weeks ago; the fact remains that he might end it now, and rid himself of this feeling of imprisonment in his own bed. Ridiculous that he’s reduced to feeling tethered by an appendage as flimsy as a hand woven through his hair - but if this is the state of things, surely that’s enough to warrant his taking decisive action.

And yet -

“Almost forgot,” Thancerell says, and he’s shifting around, sending the bed creaking and tugging Caspian out of one of his more arid reveries. “Got you a present.”

Further rummaging around in his pockets and the leather knapsack lazily tossed beside them stuns Caspian entirely back into the materially immediate.

“Please tell me it isn’t another fishing lure,” Caspian replies, taking the wine bottle for himself. A sip - a second one, and deeper, for good measure - and he flops back against his bed, amongst the pillows that feather his fall, tucking one arm behind his head and holding the bottle jauntily aloft.

“This is Ravok. You can’t have too many.”

“A point that might prove valid for, likely, anyone else. Have you ever even seen me fish?” There’s a joke well within reach there, surely, about his prospectively standing with pole in hand - but Thancerell doesn’t rise to the occasion.

It’s in the knapsack, though, slim and wrapped in soft black leather, the whole of it bundled with a length of twine.

Taking very many liberties - all of which perhaps Caspian might blame himself for volitionally doling - Thancerell bounds back to him, very pleased with his having brought Caspian a present to begin with, and here’s that sensation of imprisonment again, under his own roof, atop his own covers, because he can feel Thancerell’s very eager eyes upon him, that his breath is bated, that tussled up in this are several volumes of premeditation and expectation and if Caspian doesn’t smile or shift his expression in the appropriately and generally socially accepted ways, Thancerell will take a turn towards his own volume of disappointment and despondency, and the unpleasantness might stretch on for hours, or even days.

The whole of it is overwhelming, and makes Caspian’s face burn.

There’s no way out of this - but fortunately for Caspian, opening presents is something he’s had a fair amount of practice doing, and its complications restricted only to any accompanying implications.

What he finds is far from an errantly toned, pointlessly flourished fishing lure - it’s an iron dagger, hewn in tight, bright spiral, about five inches in length, handle expertly ridged in aesthetic extension of the blade.

It’s -

“Gorgeous, right?” Thancerell’s grinning.

And he very much deserves to, because gorgeous is very much what it is.

Obfuscate,” Caspian reads aloud, finding the dagger’s name etched in dashed, flying script towards the pommel. “Thance - it’s - I mean, really, it’s -“

“I just thought, you know - that creep you mentioned the other day. Maybe if you’d had something like this on your belt, you could -“

Caspian doesn’t want to dwell on that memory much further. But yes - had he a weapon on his person, a weapon like this, if only just to be secure in the awareness of closely possessing something for his own defense -

“Thank you,” he says, and finds that he means it.


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on April 18th, 2019, 9:59 pm

The very reason Caspian foregoes having anyone over makes herself present at, predictably, precisely the moment she shouldn’t.

It happens in a moment of goading, that pressure being applied from Thancerell in outward vector.

“Come thank me properly” is what Thancerell’s landed on, and the response it might have evoked from some past Caspian, or from some current one from an alternate universe who might have found the prospect charming enough to reciprocate, the words and innuendo carried in their lilt enough to rasp down his spine and sway him into lilting right back -

There’s a touch of that Caspian left in him still. Thancerell’s hands wrap round his ankles and the whole of him goes slipping - the remains of the bottle’s scarlet contents into his system, his new dagger out of his grasp, his tunic from his shoulders and his body down the length of his bed. Not bad, this - having his mood lifted, a present in his peripherals, an article of clothing he supposes he never much liked a little torn, and maybe that’s the lesson to be learned from this, that one can stomach just about anything, even the creeping sensation that between him and another something’s not what it used to be, because all it takes is a little bit of wine and something spun and shiny and wrapped in hide - and if that’s all it takes, couldn’t one then doubt if there was ever a problem to begin with?

Suppose, though, that he did in fact like this article of clothing plenty, and the sound of a ripped seam sent one just as squarely through him? Suppose, further, that he’s already got a dagger and though it may not be as expertly hewn as the silver swivel rolling between the folds of his duvet - it’s a thing for stabbing all the same, so does he really need another? And suppose, all this in tandem and occurring to him beyond it, that the component at odds with his being happy isn’t Thancerell, but - him?

Is it him, though? Is he the fissure between them? If he were less frequently wound up, if even a tad little less frequently drunk, if lately half his days weren’t so spent zipping high up and hurtling down low and the inflictions of the waiting game in between - it affects him, surely, these exertions on his moods, the tendencies of his reactions towards a personality he only ever found amusing for its contrast to its own, all that to say that frankly Thancerell isn’t of the type that he’s historically ever gotten on well with.

Any opportunity for self improvement tenders its premature resignation, however, when his door goes with a bang and Taalviel with a hiss.

Though she as a Kelvic has never had much regard for thinking of a bared body as something to be ashamed of, that’s a state of mind Caspian hasn’t got entirely written into his own genes. Scrabbling for his clothes, Thancerell’s, the indiscriminate scraps of fabric crushed between them, and when one or the both of them have a knee and an elbow apiece rendering that less than possible, the corner of the duvet is made to make do.

More frustrating in this moment, though, is the absence of any real haste on Thancerell’s part to make any of this any easier on him.

And more terrifying than that is Taalviel’s not said a word.

Silently, she shadow-slides past the sorry sight, the semblance of sorriness by her sown solely.

Thancerell’s blustering now, through some apology characterized by chuckles and ruddy grins that might have garnered sympathy and a chuckle and a grin back from anyone capable of it. It takes Caspian the duration of his finally managing to toss his clothes back on to realize that Taaviel’s not doing very much of anything - just perched in the far corner upon the less rickety of his two dining chairs, feet upon the seat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her gaze fixed not upon them, but the opposite wall.


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on April 25th, 2019, 9:38 pm

“I look forward to the day you communicate your itineraries to me prior to suddenly barging in,” Caspian says, that sort of welcome expelling from him naturally, nurturedly, and even as he says it he senses that something’s quite amiss with her. To his recollection, there have only been a handful of instances in which she’s visibly expressed even the remotest form of agitation. One of her greatest irritations is being faced with the fact that she may not know something she previously presumed to have, or that knowledge not revealing itself to her at the pace that she had so markedly calculated that it might. The pressure point makes her an impatient spy, but in turn a ruthless one, her methods of proceeding to overcome the shortcomings of a methodically unrelenting bent. The next step is always known to her, her actions committed with a surety braced by her having parsed out the reasonable courses of action, the viability of the methods to achieve them, a noted ratio of effort over minutes regarded as accepted or, simply, as not. So it worries him here - yes, worries, despite everything that’s gone on between them and will surely keep on going on - that she’s stormed in now, only to land upon an empty chair and fixate upon an empty wall.

Against all cultivated wisdom and common sense, Caspian approaches his sister on nigh soundless patter, standing in the very center of his room, the lengths between her and him, and him and Thancerell at defensive equidistance. It’s only when he defies this radius and draws nearer to her does she finally seem to recognize his presence, and that she’s far from alone. That acknowledgment manifests in a jerk of her head in his general direction, and a sharp retraction to her original position, though her dark eyes glitter and strain back and forth between him and the wall. For a moment, her hands raise and waver, only to wrap round herself and clutch at her own shoulders, wringing at the seams of her linen blouse.

At this demonstration, Caspian becomes more certain that something is quite the matter - though whether he can do anything to rectify it has yet to be determined.

In some not so distant past, it might have been an incredibly viable option to simply turn away, perhaps with some last insult as customarily garnishes their interactions - a last genial stab, for tradition’s sake, and a decisive tending to his own business, that business who’s now tugging on his shoes and bumbling still through interspersions of cordialities that fall flat and pointless given the audience. Take it as some result of their renewed proximity for the past few seasons, then, and the fact that Taalviel has not, in fact, attempted to tip poison into his meals or strangle him in his sleep or so much as threatened to push him down a flight of stairs - but he feels a need to help her now, not as some means of repaying her for a marked absence in violence, but because, unnaturally and uncannily, this presents itself as something he should care about investigating.

“You might have knocked, at least,” he says, testing waters of a chill and depth he’s yet to fathom.

She sucks in a breath at staccato. Doesn’t look at him still, not properly, not dead on. Beyond them, Thancerell’s tugging on and lacing his boots, and in his shuffling about knocks the dagger off the bed with a resounding clatter.

The din knocks something of life back into Taalviel, a shade of it, a shard and shatter, a shrilled croon escaping her suddenly as she swivels sharply towards him.


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on May 2nd, 2019, 4:19 am

Hardly to be classified as premonition, here, if realization occurs within some same moment - but Caspian feels the blood drain from his face, his arms thrown out of their own accord to bar her from diving at Thancerell. It’s far more of a gesture than an action, a suggestion of self-sacrificing heroism rather than displayed proof of having any real control over the proceedings. In terms of height his flimsy frame had finally, at the age of 20, strained resolutely enough to exceed hers, though just barely and only as calculated after excessively hopeful measurement. Through to 25-in-under-a-fortnight-26 he’s only plateaued, and in overall mass, despite any brittleness to be ascribed to being a bird, beside her it becomes ever more obvious that he welts if someone so much as looks at him the wrong way. In this show of - he’s not sure what to call it, because it isn’t necessarily gallantry - his saving grace is that in her blind rage she hadn’t quite factored in the possibility of any opposition. The impediment he presents, however slight and laughable, is enough to skew her, and she rears back in a tremulous, seething hover, eyes flickering rapidly between him and Thancerell, landing so fleetingly that it seems she sees neither.

She’s no love for Thancerell, and she’s made that abundantly clear, long before she’d ever met him and before Caspian had made the fatal error of betraying that his absences and wanderings had some traceable focal point. The failure to keep his own mouth shut is negligible, though, because clearly having nothing better to do, she’d gone quite out of her way to stalk them twice - only the once officially on record because that’s the once he’s outright caught her and the once she’ll admit to - and her diagnosis from the start has been that Thancerell represents, at best, a rotting waste of time and space.

“Bit of overkill, this-“ Caspian says just as Thancerell bursts out laughing behind him. Appalled, Caspian whirls round - and it becomes apparent the ruddy wine’s done a number on his ruddy head for this to be regarded as an appropriate response. Further to the bottle’s potency, in combination with Thancerell’s incredible capacity for incorrectly comprehending the time and place for another one of his petching fits of guffaws -

The misplaced mirth sends Taalviel into a series of paroxysms. A screech rips from her throat, emerging from somewhere twisted in on itself down deep, a sound he’s never witnessed from her even in her greatest throes. The change in her form happens in the midst of an exhale and a blink - and this, perhaps, is what his abandoned blood had feared was coming from the start.

The raven that is his sister barrels into him, still tangled up in Taalviel’s clothes, a dark wing jammed uselessly through one sleeve and a beak razoring through the rest. Now, in this form, she’s smaller than him - but far less manageable. With guttural croaks and caws her wings beat madly against the fabric that keeps them pinioned, whipping against him as he remains at bodily barricade. Indiscriminately, her talons rip through her linens, tearing through to all of his that’s been bared, at the palms of the hands he’s thrown up now in terrorized self-defense. Behind him, Thancerell’s long ceased laughing, letting out a string of curses and swears, and there’s the knock and rattle of wood as he scrambles backwards from the transformed wraith, slamming against Caspian’s dresser.

Capsian doesn’t want to hurt her.

It’s the foremost thought in his mind, occurring to him immediately, distinctly and with a placidity that’s unsettling given the present situation. As a bird the possibility isn’t so remote, because in this form she’s two erratically oscillating fans of feathers and bones rippling from opposing ends of an accordion designated as her rib cage, the circumference of which he could encapsulate in his hands and then crush if he so chose.

Even a grab or a swat with sorry timing might result in the most sickening of snaps - and despite how furious and horrified and categorically baffled he might be right now, he’s no great wish to cause her some unspeakable harm.

Wasn’t it just some few months ago, though, that she’d first turned up out of the blue, and his initial reaction was to draw a knife -

Another great lash of her wings across his vision, and in the blur he narrowly manages to dodge what might have been her talons sawing right through his eyes.

“Taalviel!” he shouts at her, wincing as she sears through his raised forearms, drawing blood. ”Taalviel-!“


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on May 6th, 2019, 9:45 pm

“He’ll leave, alright? Is that what you want? He’s going, he’s petching gone -“ Caspian shouts, but she’s screeching ever the louder and his words are falling meaningless, that failure seeming to stem from an animal alienness, an innate inability to understand him past a certain point that would be futile to try and bridge - one that must lie within her even when she blinks and gasps and smiles and smirks, even when she crosses her legs and smooths out her skirts, combs her own fingers through her tresses and smashes pommels to temples and raises daggers to throats.

Thancerell is at the foremost of his thoughts and also far behind - so, on the whole, not very much of a departure from their usual state of things - but he has, in that very blundering and obtuse way he possesses somehow stuck himself into the middle of the proceedings. The display is more valiant than any of Caspian’s accomplishments so far, which aren’t more impressive than allowing himself to be so grated and slapped. But the interference is only a momentary means of help, Taalviel’s rage proving tireless and indiscriminate, and were they anyone possessing a relationship with only a nibble’s worth more of normalcy, Caspian would not have distilled from this the conclusion that the best way to deal with this is alone.

“Leave,” he snaps at Thancerell, who might have immediately protested, but what escapes him instead is a garbled string of a dozen variations on the word petch and a combination of a couple other verbs that are usually reserved for scrapping schoolboys and geriatric roustabouts. When the order isn’t directly obeyed Caspian repeats himself with a venom that takes Thancerell aback for a moment, as if he isn’t sure which of the two spies poses the greater immediate threat to his physical being.

“Thance. Please.”

The protest Thancerell had queued makes itself known - and instead of packing himself off as Caspian has made it extremely clear is the only acceptable action, the one that might salvage this and if adhered to with some promptness might in some sterile way make him like Thancerell again, and maybe that’s the way he ought to communicate this, through presenting an incentive, the kind that carries a probability of proving appealing, because for some reason speaking loudly and directly is far from enough - Thancerell, with a flourish, tears the rumpled duvet from Caspian’s bed and casts it over the raven still madly careening and slashing with no regard for the contents of the room.

It douses her, as it might have done to a manageable burst of flame - until she proves to be violently to the contrary, the cacophony she begins emitting rattling Caspian even through its being muffled. Self-preservation still shunted to the side, he grapples with her now, the duvet shielding him from the worst of her razorings, wrapping his arms around the bundle, pinioning her still maddeningly beating wings to her sides.

“I’ve got this,” he hisses at Thancerell just as one of the raven’s talons pierces through the wadding. Not having expected her to manage this - not, frankly, having expected any of this emerging to color this particular afternoon - the pain of her catching him across the chest amplifies itself in its suddenness, and he drops the lot of her with a yelp.

“You have not got this,” Thancerell so astutely replies, and in Caspian’s succumbing to his chronic compulsion to positively flay him with a retort - they lose a critical second in which the raven extricates herself from her bindings, duvet and clothes and all.

All of Caspian’s treachery aside, she still seems to identify Thancerell as the sole object of her rancor. As if being netted had taken no toll on her, she dives towards Thancerell again, aiming for his eyes, tearing at his hair and succeeding in ripping a red lock to tatters. Thancerell batters back, sending her spinning towards the other side of the room, and Caspian’s heart shocking and stuttering at the sight.

“Don’t hurt her,” he says, and when Thancerell grabs one of the already rickety dining chairs in alleged self-defense, he wrestles with him instead of allowing himself to be shielded.

“Cas-“ Thancerell begins, incredulously aghast, the chair yanked out of his grasp.

“I said don’t,” he repeats. “She weighs about as much as a parchment roll. She’s just a bird, you blaggard.”

“Yes, that much I can see,” Thancerell replies, and with a curtness and revulsion of tone that Caspian ascribes through anxiety-fueled extrapolation. Caspian worries now, about more than the present, about what might happen after, that after not so far off, relatively speaking - and in that after, Thancerell has to do very little further deduction to suss out the truth about Taalviel and the further truth about the mixed blood he’s been cavorting about with, the sort of truth that most of the Ravokian-born wouldn’t tolerate outside of chains and servants’ quarters and certainly in no genuine proximity to their own.

The violence lies in the binary. At best is scant acknowledgment of the other, at worst extermination, the core of which is the inability to coexist on the same plane. A space either does or doesn’t contain Thancerell, and if the former, Taalviel cannot find the means to function outside of the directive to create, by any means necessary, that latter - and all flourishes and flowery takes aside, the binary here is that one of them in their relationship is a fully human Ravokian, and the other is not. Until this very afternoon he had succeeding in keeping this information to himself, any benefit to be gained from speaking on his past with ease, or allowing himself to gain such a degree of familiarity with another person never outweighing the risk of the world’s worth of consequences that might follow. The fact of the matter at the end of this day, though it may not be in sight, and the end of the next, and likely on forever - is that in terms of Ravokian legalities and their bred sensibilities, without contest half-Vantha Caspian and his Kelvic sister might be drowned in the nearest canal, and no one would bat an eye.


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on June 16th, 2019, 8:34 pm

“Get out of here,” Caspian snaps before Thancerell can go any further, because that further will only burn him not in its betrayal but of its accomplishment in exactly the predictable. He’s sure of it. Just as one learns not to touch their hand to a flame after being scalded once, he doesn’t need to see through to any development of the present situation because all that waits for him on the other side of it is more fodder to keep him up at night.

Taalviel has since recovered from the recent battering, as if the blow had meant nothing, and rears up to take flight against them. She lets out a cacophonous cawing that turns shrill and ghastly, then again to cawing and back and forth anew, one moment a raven and the next far from it, her human form flitting in and out of materialization. Before she can reach Thancerell, Caspian wrangles her from where she holds herself aloft, the struggle made all the worse by her continuing to substitute her delicate carriage back into her personage, all manner of limbs swinging, with fingers to scratch and tear.

When Thancerell tries to advance towards the both of them - when Caspian realizes he’s got a grasp on one of her arms and that if he continues to hold on any longer and she turns into a raven with all its avian brittleness her corresponding wing is liable to snap - he shouts one more time at Thancerell to leave well enough alone, and shoves him roughly away.

With this newest act, the altercation turned physical, it’s as if something clicks - because with this, Thancerell’s finally backing off, with one last glance at him that he hasn’t the space nor the tenacity to properly parse.

The sound of the slamming door is one of finality. Of what, he’s not wholly sure, because Taalviel only seems marginally assuaged by Thancerell’s absence. Still moving too erratically for him to predict, she succeeds in raking across his eyes - while in human form, luckiness abounding for him, but it’s a startling smarting all the same that has him stumbling away.

Now towards the bed again, and Caspian dimly observes that Thancerell’s left his satchel in his haste. Though this isn’t the time to muse over logistics of the most sundry strain he wonders anyway, whether between the two of them he ought to be the one to take the initiative in returning it to its rightful owner. It begs several questions, though, such as hasn’t Thancerell got another one just like it, and even if that’s a misremembering isn’t it simple fact that he’s got the money to buy an exact replica if it occurs to him, and if it’s really so important then wouldn’t Thancerell be the one to drop him a line about sending it back, but at the end of all these consternations upon revelations, is the repossession of a bag really going to be on the forefront?

In his distracted haste, Caspian knocks something off the bed that clanks and rattles. On realizing it’s the other item Thancerell had left - the spiralized dagger - he dives and snatches it up on reflex, and whirls back towards his sister with it raised.

There is no prior experience that he might compare this to, nothing even remotely in her past to inform how the two of them might get through this without suffering another scathing - and as she assumes her human figure once more and her expression turns, suddenly, into one of stock-still astonishment, he’s not sure how he ought to cope with this either, or what might have triggered this sudden change of pace.

“...Caspian?” she croaks out, the first intelligible word she’s managed since this began. She’s peering at him, or at least in his general direction, one of her fingers twisting anxiously into her hair. It’s odd, her growing frown, her leaning towards where he stands - her seeming to look right through him - “Caspian - are you -?”

“What’s wrong?” he asks even as he instinctively leans away.

With his step back, wonder and fright come over her, and she lets out another cry. She runs towards him, though he’s the one holding the knife - and he might use it against her except he doesn’t, the idea far from conception or reality. When she closes the distance he only braces - and when she gets there she only wraps her arms around him, wracked with sobs.

“Oh, Cas -“

“Stars above, Taalviel,” he croaks back, feeling something slowing, finally, finding the last of its steam emitted, ire drained. Though she resists his movements, clutching him wild and tight, he strains towards the crumpled duvet and wraps it around her bare form.

She accepts the offering and clutches him through it, trembling and gasping, muttering feverish and near indecipherable.

“Taalviel -“ he begins with a sigh.

“You disappeared!” she exclaims with a gust. “You held the dagger and then you were gone -“

Perhaps, then, no ordinary knife -

“-oh, Cas,” she gasps tearfully against him. “Please. Please don’t ever leave me.”

Nothing of the kind has ever happened between them. He might toss her aside now, he might at the very least put her on one chair and himself on another or better yet on the other end of the Docks.

But - and without trying, without duplicity - he doesn’t.

“I won’t,” he says, holding her against him, wondering how little it would yet take for her to break, even this way.

“Promise me,” she replies with a startling clarity, a graveness of enunciation. “Because it’s you and I, always, at the end of all things.”

The dagger gleams in his hand, reflecting and refracting, spilling the light that streams in through the windows across the far reaches of his room.

He holds her tighter, and even when he closes his eyes, feels it glimmer.


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For Your Consideration

Postby Caspian on June 17th, 2019, 10:11 pm

A week later, Thancerell finds Caspian in Saticath’s damask-draped, satin-strewn apartment.

“I’m actually quite set, but thank you -“ he’s saying in his brash, booming way, waving off a hostess who’s trailed after him from the lurid establishment just across the way.

Caspian knows that vociferousness anywhere, would be difficult to not know something capable of assuming so much capacity - and though Saticath’s betrayal becomes immediately evident, he’s too listless to do much more than lie on her couch, arms wrapped around an oblong tasseled pillow, and let Thancerell approach him where he wallows.

“You alright, Cas?” Thancerell frowns down at him, vibrant and vital and more valiant than he’ll ever be. “You don’t look so good.”

As if he doesn’t very well know it.

“He’s been high as a starling for the past seven days,” Saticath says, crossing her arms and regarding him with an incessant amount of motherly concern. “Weaning down now, though, aren’t you?”

“Only because you ran out!” he tries to snarl, but coughs through the words instead.

’Ran out’,” he catches her mouthing at Thancerell, the extent of her deception revealed.

“If you’ve come for your bag,” Caspian begins thickly, “know that I sold it for a silver smattering, to a tourist with no taste in the slightest.”

“What bag?” Thancerell replies. Though uninvited - yes, burly and oblivious to obvious social cues to the contrary and boorishly frank - he takes a seat beside Caspian on the couch, placing a hand on his hip with a pressure that’s meant to be comforting. “...oh. That bag.” He laughs, short and harsh. “Cas, I’m not here about a petching bag.”

“The knife, then.” The one right beneath this sofa, well within reach.

“Which is yours.”

Still addled and yet to emerge fully from the slurring of his body and mind, he doesn’t readily find his next retort.

“Why d’you do this, Cas?”

“Do what?”

“That thing where you run when things get hard.”

“Yes, running, I’m the very picture of it.”

“I -“ Thancerell flusters a hand through his hair. “I don’t know how else to say this, except - that I don’t care, you know? About how she might - your sister, that she’s -“

“Don’t you even start on my petching sister-“ Caspian drags himself upright, only for Saticath to slam him with another of her heavily decorated cushions. With pathetic deflation, he shuts up immediately and flops back down onto the couch.

“Shut it,” she says sternly. “I’ve had to listen to you light up and yammer for days, and all I learned was that the daft one might not be so daft after all.”

Ignoring the overarching slight, but not without a heavy sigh at the both of them, Thancerell eases himself off and to his feet.

“Seriously, Cas. I don’t know how else to put it, except - it’s alright. It’s all alright. I can try and figure why you were so afraid to tell me the truth, but - that’s it. That’s all I can do - try.”

“Can you, though?” Moving slowly, head spinning and generally unwilling to incur Saticath’s wrath again as loving as it purports to be, Caspian sits upright, though he’s still threaded his fingers anxiously through tassel strands. “How would you know? One word from you and she’s off in irons. So am I, if someone decides as much. How could you possibly know how that feels?” It’s with no malice that he says this - and even as he does, even as it’s enormous and half-stewed, there’s a tension in him that’s lightening just from its finally being released. “It’s not even personal, my not telling you, my not really bringing you around. I’d do it to anyone.”

“So I’m just anyone?” And Thancerell’s got no malice in him either, but he never really does, it’s the refreshing and wonderful thing about him that keeps Caspian -

Keeps him where, and when, and how steadfast, exactly?

There’s no safe response. He shrugs.

“Better than being it outright, I guess,” Thancerell says with a humbled sincerity that - for just a tick - makes Caspian wonder if he perhaps is just a touch too harsh, more than a few measures heartless, because Thancerell has always been just that, so purely himself, without veil or motive other than wanting to draw a little nearer.

“It makes no difference to me what she is, who you are, what the two of you came from and where you might go. It’s all alright,” Thancerell says. “And I hope she’s alright.”

It’s possible that he wants to believe Thancerell so badly that he -

Just might.

“Yes, she’s -“ He coughs. Wipes the bleariness from his eyes. “I don’t know what’s come over her. She’s solid, you know? Normally. But for the past few weeks, that fit you saw, it’s just gotten worse, and I swear it’s like - sometimes she doesn’t even recognize me. Me.”

Thancerell and Saticath glance at each other uncertainly.

“Something’s been off with the Kelvics in this city for sure. Just the other day a pack of cats went scrapping in the yard,” Saticath offers. “And in human form, too.”

But these are things beyond their ken, problems that might be solved if they can only hold their breaths a little while longer.

The issue in immediacy, though?

“Let me be more than anyone,” Thancerell says before Caspian can find a way to run. “I know it won’t be overnight. I know you won’t believe me right off. But - let me try, at the very least.”

There have been worse propositions - there will be worse but maybe he can have this, just this once, something straightforward and warm and wanting him just as he is.

“I’m sorry,” Caspian says to Saticath, “for putting you through the paces as often as I do.”

“It’s what I’m here for, doll,” she replies with a soft kiss to his forehead, no love lost.

They stay a little while longer, until the sun sets, and Thancerell leads him home.


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Caspian
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For Your Consideration

Postby Marino Oceangem on June 16th, 2020, 1:33 am

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Grades Awarded!

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Caspian

Skills
  • Brawling - 2
  • Endurance - 3 xp
  • Intelligence - 4 xp
  • Investigation - 2 xp
  • Larceny - 1 xp
  • Observation - 5 xp
  • Persuasion - 3 xp
  • Rhetoric - 2 xp
  • Seduction - 2 xp
  • Socialization - 5 xp
  • Weapon: Dagger - 1 xp

Lores
  • Thancerell: Possessive
  • Thancerell: Manipulative
  • Manipulated by Thancerell
  • Seduced by Thancerell
  • Taalviel: Impatient
  • Diffusing Taalviel
  • Running Interference
  • Self-defense against a raven
  • Grappling with a raven
  • Brandishing a dagger
  • Obfuscation dagger makes you hard to spot
  • Thancerell: Coping with drugs
  • Thancerell: Knows the truth about heritage
  • Opening up about Taalviel
  • Mysterious illness afflicting kelvics in Ravok

Awards & Retribution

- Obfuscation Dagger
- Scratches on face, arms, chest (Healed over the next few days)

Notes: This was a fantastic thread to read Caspian and I feel like it helped me grasp your character from the start. If you have any questions about your grade, feel free to pm me.
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