IC: Midsummer Rising

[white_flowers]

Midsummer.

Longest day, brightest day, day of celebration for those of the Light and also of the Wild.

It will be a day of great power-- and had once marked the ending of the rising Dark in the world she had once called her own.

But here at the end of all the worlds, she intends to change things. The longest and brightest day it may be, but there is another side to it as well; for at the moment that the sun passes zenith, the time of Light also passes.

So begins the long slow fall into the Dark.

This time, the White Rider means to turn her carefully-gathered power to advantage at that precise moment, bringing the cycle to an entirely different ending -- for everyone.

She is smiling cruelly when she steps out of the forest and starts toward the bar, half-lost in her thoughts and her plans.

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[white_flowers]

"Why, and cast her aside?" she says lightly. "Surely it is that you do not mean that -- and even if you did not, still and it is not a good idea with her so upset."

She lifts the cage higher, holding it between them where he can easily see the angry bird within as she chides gently,

"Have a care, dear, such an injury you will do yourself if you struggle so."

Over the silver wire, her bright clear gaze meets Raven's.

[nitro-is-ace.livejournal.com]

Have a care have a care have a care have a care... She warbles, staring hard at Raven.

Go.

Run.

Fly.

You don't trade a king for a pawn. That's not how the game is played.

[creator_raven]

"It is a thing you believe matters?"

Raven's smile is a small thing, and full of pity.

"There is little care to freedom, and still less to cages."

He takes another step, close enough for Blodwen to see the whites of his eyes, stark against the rest of him.

"But perhaps this, too, is a thing you were not made to understand."

[white_flowers]

"No, pretty bird," Blodwen says, and the light musical voice is very soft indeed-- and very certain.

"I understand very well indeed, and it is you who does not see it."

He is very close now; only a few feet away at the most. Her hands tighten on the wire as the White Rider tells Raven,

"Freedom you cannot have, without power."

And in the next instant, she slings the silver cage and its occupant aside as she calls down the storm.

[creator_raven]

Raven's laugh--Raven's power--rises to meet it, bright and wild and true.
they hear the wind they hear beyond the wind the other sea
"Power itself is a cage, Blodwen Rowlands--a trick, a trap, a joke. I know it very well."

No thread tangles at his fingertips, no charms hang from his sleeve. All that he uses is that laughter, spinning through the thunder and the lightning and the shriek of the wind.
like a closed shell near them, they don't hear
"Freedom is in the choosing, in the changing. And you have said, I think, that it is a thing you cannot do."
anything else, they don't look among the shadows of the cypresses;
Something is building, stirring, springing to life around him--nothing like light, nothing like flame, but something else altogether.
for a lost face, a coin; they don't search,
"But I can."
watching a raven on a dry branch, for what it remembers.
And now he moves, darting forward, heat haze spilling from his hands, from his eyes, from his skin, rushing to meet her through the rising storm.

[nitro-is-ace.livejournal.com]

When her world goes tilting and spinning out of control, she squawks once in startled panic. Then, for a precious few minutes, she finally learns how to fly.








And then the ground comes rushing up in a bright green blur.

[white_flowers]

Heat races over her in a wave and is met by a rush of cold that pours upward in response. Icy chill radiates from her as its heart, bitter and overwhelming as the shrieking darkness of the blizzard closes now around them both.

He is too close to her to evade, and she does not even try. As Raven closes the distance between them, she throws both hands out before her and slams them flat against his chest, sending the power of the Dark rising over him with reflexive force.

[creator_raven]

Raven could fight, fire and heat and power flung up against the dark in a wave, a wall, a counterthrust.
It remains motionless just a little above my hours
Raven could flee, grabbing Ace's cage as he goes, safe and away and gone, for now or for good.
like the soul of an eyeless statue.
Instead he raises his hands to Blodwen's wrists, grip firm but gentle, and he lets the Dark in, heat haze twining around it like vines, like ivy.
There is a throng gathered in that bird
His laughter stutters, body choking in one breath.
thousands of people forgotten, wrinkles obliterated
Two.
broken embraces and laughter that has not ended,
Then silence.
works arrested, silent stations.
And a rising tide of power floods out of him, from his hands, from his chest where she touches him, and pours back into her, back over her, Raven's laughter ringing high and clear above it all.
a heavy sleep of golden spangles.

[nitro-is-ace.livejournal.com]

At most any other time, Ace would be cheering her brother on wildly, no matter what form she's stuck in.

However, she has come to a new and stunning appreciation of how hard the ground really is. Thus, just beyond the focused combatants, a small silvery cage glitters in the failing light. Inside that cage, a miserable pile of tan and iridescent blue feathers is slowly becoming drenched at the bottom.

[white_flowers]

She is smiling, coldly and cruelly, as he grasps her wrists, and as his laughter stops the wind keens through the silence in a mocking triumphant shriek, echoing her own.

And then, her breath stops in her throat, and it is her voice now that dies beneath the wind.

Power twists through the White Rider, spreading over and within her like an uncoiling thread-- familiar power, which she has become accustomed to when she has used that piece of it which she holds to shift into an owl's shape.

But not like this, oh no.

Ice-blue eyes are shocked and wide with sudden fear as her gaze meets Raven's once more, and then Blodwen throws herself backward and away from him, struggling now to tear herself free of both that gentle grip and that twining power.

And in answer to her desperate call, the Dark rises up inside her, falling upon the intrusion with choking, blanketing force.

[creator_raven]

Raven lets her go easily enough, hands falling away from her wrists as she flings herself backward.
It remains motionless. It gazes at my hours. What does it remember?
His power, though, is much more difficult to unwind, tangled as it is through the Dark, through her. Tangled up and searching, looking for the joints, for the seams.
There are many wounds inside those invisible people, inside it,
Hunting down the cracks.
humble desires cleaved upon the ground,
Even as the Dark blankets him, a smothering weight of fury and power, he tilts his head back, laughing and spinning aside, riding the assault.
children slaughtered and women exhausted at dawn
And still his power weaves through hers ever more tightly, following the pathways she has made--pathways born of blood and long familiarity.
Who knows if it lies heavy anywhere at all?

[white_flowers]

It's everywhere around her, inside her--

(creeping coiling spreading growing)

--and she can't breathe, can't see, but she can feel it working--

(warm burning melting changing)

--and Blodwen screams.

She screams in horror, screams in terror, shrieking in wordless panic over and over again as she blindly rips the glass globe from the ribbon at her throat and throws it toward him, as far away from her as she can manage.

[creator_raven]

Raven reaches out one hand to catch it, the sound of glass meeting clay hidden beneath the desperate sound of Blodwen's screams.
Your hands had the weight of hands in the water
He weighs it in his hand for a moment, black eyes wide and dark.
in the sea caves, a light carefree weight
"No. I rather think this is yours, yet."
with that movement we make sometimes when we dismiss a black thought
With a casual flick of his wrist he tosses it back at her, low.
wedged between man and the memory of man,
The harsh, brittle sound of glass breaking stands out in the silence where Raven's laughter had been.
between the wound and the hand which was wounded by a black lance.

[white_flowers]

Glittering shards scatter over the ground at her feet, gleaming with the harsh cold beauty of ice in the late afternoon sunlight.

She has no appreciation for the sight, however. Instead, Blodwen's gaze is fixed on the smoke-- long stained pink with Raven's blood-- that now boils upward in a wild, uncontrolled rush from the shattered ruin of the glass globe that had been its prison.

She staggers backward a step, then turns to flee-- and the smoke coils itself around her.

[creator_raven]

Amidst the memory, a gulf - a startled breast
Tighter and tighter it winds, the pink stain bleeding away, flowing into the power that Raven has already twined with Blodwen's own.
amidst the shadows struggling to become man and woman again
Unerringly it dives deeper, dragging the heat haze with it, sword-sharp and bright as the sun, as the stars. It cuts through the Dark, tangling itself in the loose edges and pulling them along, ripping them away from what lies hidden beneath.
amidst sleep and death a stagnant life.
There is a shriek--from Blodwen? from Raven? from both?--high and ringing and wild, and the sense of something snapping, pulling back in on itself. The heat haze swarms over Raven, blanketing his skin, and he staggers back a step, dropping down to one knee.
Your hands moved always towards the sea's drowsiness
caressing the dream that ascended the golden spider
Silence reigns, at least for the moment, and Raven lifts his head to watch the woman, black eyes wide and bright and old.
bearing into the sun the host of constellations
the closed eyelids the closed wings . . .

[white_flowers]

once upon a time...
Long ago, so long ago as to have been almost lost to the ages and the mists of memory, a young woman had walked out of her home at night across snow-crisp fields. She had never minded the cold, or been afraid of the dark, and she climbed a high hilltop and there looked up at the cloudless sky and the ice-cold chips of light that were the distant stars.
watch, I can flash across the sky
There she made of the stars not a plea, but a demand. She demanded power, that long-ago woman-- she cried for power, that she might control all who would use her, bend all who would deny her, that she might shape the world itself to her bidding and nevermore be helpless before others' will. And it was power that came to her calling, but not the power of the stars nor of any light-- instead, it was the cold deadly strength of the spaces between, the empty void of the universe that answered her, that devoured her and filled her with the Dark.
A lightning bolt from up on high
And the woman known to those in the bar as Blodwen Rowlands, or sometimes as Anghared of Northgalis, that woman -- the White Rider of the Dark -- had smiled a cold cruel smile and leaped up into the wind of the howling storm that came to her calling, and had left that place, never to return.
And I can crash into myself
Or so she had then thought. Now, however -- now she stands, staring at Raven with wide eyes of a soft delicate blue, swaying on her feet as a dark cloud of purely malign force roils violently overhead, cheated of host and home.
Now a flower blooms in reverse
And as the Dark draws upwards away from her, bound apart by Raven's working, Blodwen-- or is it Anghared, or someone else entirely?-- lifts her shaking hands, looking down at them--at her fragile, powerless, mortal hands.
And a song takes back a verse
"No," she whispers. "No, you can't." But then there is nothing else for her to say, as she collapses softly to the ground.
A photograph fades to white
And as she does, the unleashed power of the Dark coils one last time above the fallen woman-- and then it strikes.