In the glacial air of brisk wintertide, it is riddled with fairy tale lies and saccharine promises, of harmonious cardinals and irenic breeze, striking against clammy sinew and sweat beaded— hyacinth fragranced— hide, twisting, churning, baleful and passionate, a incubus upon the brine and a Nightingale to serve each beck and call.
  But on this eve, the Nightingale has endeavored forth, and caught the caw of a crow, deep, caliginous, bellowing, a somber cry, and the Regime, a vigorous and robust screech, a name with which she had no qualms with nor recognized— a name with which she did not intend to find, a name with which she did not wish to know. And perhaps, the elusive daughter of the Revere, the childe of anarchy would have bypassed the opportunities that arose before her, a crossroad of the most intriguing inquiries if it had not been laced with the odor of a lightning-born Queen and hoofprints in the malleable earth below her very own pillars.

Perhaps she would have returned to hearth and home after a tiresome venture if it had not been for the fretful meanderings that wander about a inquisitive mind, if she had not been apprehensive at the paws, if she had not smelt a Jaguar and a comrade, a comrade under her command, a power to which she held with trembling fingers, and she, Nightingale, bedeviled and foredoomed, would not allow even the most pressing of touches to scar her kin's hide (and that is what Leto is to her now, for she is within her coven, her jurisdiction, and if any harm was lain barren to she, the Nightingale would return with a army of ten thousand men and lay to waste this rotunda, this grovel, chase rats and mice from grottos and burn them down with growing pyre).
  There was the whiff of the north in her maw, rolling along her tongue, of milk and babes breath.

She pursues each whisper of the wind with all the starved hunger of a pack of wolves— ice grows and shelters along her heart and when reticent steps bring her to the hind of a group, it is with violet pearls she observes them, upturned neck and high held, tense stance, a stag with a apparel deemed onyx and a little terracotta lass, dual children (to be certain, they were a mere babe, one another, and she queried and doubted whether they would survive without the warmth of a dam's milk); and a lightning-born comrade with a jaguar at her heels.
The Nightingale is late to the arrival— peril and foreboding snarls, a pup having bitten off far more than she should have chewed, mockery and insolence, vulgar language and for all the sleet and ire, flourishing stridence and pitiless chill to the way her snowy lashes brush her cheeks, the way a callous and atrocious grin spreads across her maw she may have been the northern hills themselves. Barbarous, heinous as she focuses upon the beast's tilted maw, a pearl, a sphere to wrap tendrils around his nostrils, malicious and malevolent and not natural; all in a hideous mind of contours and loathsome ideals.
  It is vicious, a monster, and as it reduces and diminishes her mind and bodice into a swaying, buffeted mass, as her knees feel feeble and threaten to knock together, as a all encompassing desensitized, vitality and strength dropping as limbs in the midst of gail forced pressure, she is wholly and entirely damned to enervation, and for one second the world has vanished into nothing but she and the pearl.

And then in a blinding crack she returns, scalding, perspiration glinting and gleaming as diamonds upon her sinew, the world is fruitless and dull compared to the swirling, writhing sphere she had been observing mere moments ago and she has no time to dwell on how fatigued she is, how worn, how she feels she may crumble as collapsing mountains into the earth below, for surely her time to hide has long dwelled into nothing (albeit mere seconds have passed, she feels as if it has been a eon, a century, and she is shocked she still stands alive)— she shivers, as freezing as she has ever been, slick from her own vital liquids and mortally drained from her exertions, there is no time to make sure the elk Prince has been drowned in a lapse of oxygen, for she is stumbling, hazy, a blurring contortion of her eloquent frame and then she is imperceptible, wraithlike, invisible (although this is not to her knowledge, for she has never known of this magic before, even as her flesh trembles, a flickering candlelight of a frame, in and out of existence).

Disembodied, hoarse, guttural, macabre lyrics and eerie song, a combined and ricocheting word as the Nightingale moves around the edge of the coppice— ghoulish, a demand, a single and damnable chorus.
"Run."

It will only be later she wonders why there is a taste of iron in her mouth when she coughs, why her lungs ache so, why there is cruor upon her lips. For if the magic given to her by title and place had meant to aid her— it had met the full exertion she has gone through, and merely caused it to grow worse each passing second.
A witches magic will always come at a cost.


Permission given by Chan to use magic, permission given as a whole to use Chameleon (portrayed here as faulty, she is flickering in and out instead of remaining wholly invisible, because she is exhausted after using her regular magic and moving). No worries, Vail! Your post is fine.

CIRCUTA