Nocturnal Sunshine (Self Mod Basic Staff, Pre-Veil & GF'd)

[Quenthalus]

...Quenthalus and Wisteria scythed neatly through the crowd, a feather falling from a bird, floating, dancing, bobbing, and gracefully evading every obstacle until the right moment.

Ephemeral as the wind, he exploded onto the center floor, both arms snapped like a lords poise, outstretched, and then with the grace of some arakmatian serpent, set them both to writhing in timid isolations. Wisteria bloomed off to Quen's right, like a flower sprung from her lovers garden, arching over, while Ery'endolen linked fingertip to fingertip, mirroring the torrent of erratic and beautiful upper body movements that came so easy to his friend Quenthalus. The music was teased by a subtle, fallen-back string, some sort of sitar from the Nadir region, accompanied by a solo violin. The air was electric, then the drums suddenly reached up from the earth and caught everyone. Quickenings washed over each dancer, spilling back across the Moonwillow, up to the surface, and ebbing out into the Silverwood Haunt. Somewhere in Tawnleaf the fireflies were glowing brighter and dancing harder.

The beat snagged Quenthalus and he swaggered with a stately cadence in his heel, looking regal, tight like a fist, and more pragmatic than usual. Wisteria laughed, rolled her shoulders, then shifted to this unorthodox three-three stomp before throwing her left arm back, and flipping both legs over her left shoulder just as the next verse of beats hit. Quenthalus blinked and his lover laughed. Ery'endolen snickered, slinking a windmil whirlwind around his friend.

Quenthalus gave a quick reptiles glance to his lover, accelerated, probably something he had drunk earlier, then stretched his emerald wings in a show of phantom force. Both arms went taut just as the next slew of strings gushed out in a flood against the drums. It was a breath of bliss and everyone watched as the misty tendrils rose off the pools surrounding the muscians dias. Bio-lumenescent butterflies painted a collage of colors against the walls and dancers. Wrapped in a cocoon of strange and exotic lights, Quenthalus siezed the moment and blossomed into a wild no-handed cart wheel; dismounting on katta feet and quickly bleeding into the crowd with a backward tribal stomp.

The people of the wood were in a wonderful fit of revelry. Sprites fleeted the surface, a treant could be seen through one of the windows getting down while a chorous of hobbit children straddled its safely swaying arm-like branches, filling the outside of the great seqoiua with a hypnotic and ghostly falsetto.

Some of the lost ones didn't know; couldn't always see the patterns, a deeper meaning, ethereal connections wrapped in a bundle of life happening right now. They'd come and drink the faery spirits, taste the dreaming bodies, and take, but never give, never give of their hearts and their souls. But there were others, a revolutionary spirit worn by the winter winds, where the holes in the forest wall have opened up and a riot of dancing begins to spill across freedoms ground. Quenthalus always admired Llorinal, his open ways, his near demi-godlike sageliness concealed beneath a childs want for fun and playtime. Moonwillow wasn't den of the wanton, a frequent mistake made by the indulgent, who could not reach bliss when their arms grew like branches for the sky, for the moons. Moonwillow was a temple.

The nobles, beautiful and permenant, immortal and forever, but sometimes siezed in an unchanging spring could come here, release, caught in a splendid catharsis, where the winds of new change could cool the fire of fear, and allow them to leave with something they never had before: the attention of their peers, whom they call loyalists, servants and subjects. Nobody had to be afraid here.

Magical lights snapped across the cathedral-like tree, spiraling up to the highest hollow, then gently showering back down in columns of powerful fuschia, violet, and azure. Wisteria and Ery'endolen stood gapping, as did many others, though Quenthalus forced his feet, feeling something hypodermal making its way to his heart and mind. Those lights began to dance, even though they were perfectly still to those whom casted the images. The ground was breathing, as were the walls, and the rippled image of his lover and friend, like portals through a mirror of life. He smiled and gave a haphazard stomp, catching his breath and beginning to sweat a little harder.
"Clover?" Wisteria was a little concerned, touching her lovers bent shoulder.

"I am well, but I may sit for a while and drink some water." He touched Wisteria's back and smiled at Ery'endolen, gesturing for the two of them to go dance. With a shamans interpretation of the nights activities, Quenthalus felt no shame or recklessness when intoxicated by powerful chemicals around his friends. Unlike the rest of the Empire, Syl'rosya boasted an authentic community. They were safe, he was safe, and caring people were all around them. One of those peculiar behavior modes that enabled exacting results in the right environment. Somehow the people just knew these things all along.

Quenthalus rose with a little hunch. The onset often bothered his stomach, and usually water coupled with a glass or two of milk situated everything. Slow, relaxed steps with each breath got him to the severy without any unecessary messes. His rough smile and dizzy eyes told the dreadlocked maiden behind the counter exactly what was going on. She fetched a decanter of water, serving it up in some decorative gourd. When his hands took it hers closed around his and she held tight. He shivered and smiled wider, blushing some, and nodding. "Diola lle," he offered softly, touched with a hiss because his teeth were clenching from the chemicals in his blood stream. He drank the water, rivulets running down his sweaty chin and neck.

"Slowly." She coached with a caregivers tone.
He gasped and nodded, setting a half-filled mug down.
"...ilk pleased," words getting more difficult to pronounce in slurs.
She blinked and he repeated. "Milkt."

It took a moment but recognition hit her and she quickly knifed through two other severs, returning with a punctured coconut shell in her grasp. Quenthalus took it with rapture written in his expression and gorged deep. It wasn't what he had in mind, but it quickly remedied the pangs, and before he was even finished she had a cup of lavender and chamomile tea with rosehip and St. Benedictines Wort waiting for him.

"This will make you feel better all over friend, and here," she leaned forward, a piece of spearmint between her lips, and kissed it to his nose then blew in his face. He felt much better. Mint coarsed through his veins, or so he thought, giving him vibrations of warm winters and shivering joys. Pacing himself, he shifted on the stool, watching the crowd, searching out for his companions, who stayed their stomping grounds right next to the floating dias of wild elves.

It was going to be hard to leave Syl'rosya, but Acumin and invariably one day, the Dolwood awaited him. Serenity had few names, but Moonwillow was surely one of them. Sweeping zephyrs caught the hot winds and sent them twirling against the dias, where elementalists and druids began to coaelesce water and heat into vapor, comingling the winds with delight while still managing to maintain synchronization to the accelerating rhythm. Bodies took flight, while faery's falling from the sky let their fluting voices gasp with echo reverberation. Music painted the walls in a myriad of colors, scattering the majesty against a canvas of tangled and giggling children. The web of elves was gradually taking shape to the tempo of the music, sending waves of gratitude across the Keep, where those wild dancers on the edge, from the severy down to the front doors now knew that something special was amiss. The massive deepearth cog, the last fallen tree remaining of the forgotten forest underground, stretched its mossbed and lichen covered lengths across the Moonwillow, angled from a second tier ledge, where it partially extended across the pool and the dias, down to the base floor where its final resting place now served as a gathering space for dancers to honor it. Strange and phousphorescent mushrooms corraled around the splintered and now petrified stump.

In one explosive movement beneath the lights, darkness, and a spray of metallic rainbow hued blossoms there emerged a gallant and wild figure. Her slender arms knifed through the rising vapors, accentuating her elegant movements with mistfilled sweeps, twists, and unorthodox footwork of the fancy sort. Every fiber of her body seemed fixed to the cause. She whirled with a nobles august ceremony, but seemed to always retreat safely to something familiar in Moonwillow; that enigmatic and fire-fueled tribal step known to be a signature expression of the Daer'on Tribe previously of Natura. Her legs would chatter left to right with abandon, relevating on toe-tips, only to spin haphazard like a drunken ballerina. It was strange, snake-like and hypnotic. Her presence amidst the young ones of Syl'rosya might have seemed a stark contrast by modern Aelyrian times, but to the children of Syl'rosya she was a curiousity and bore an aura of complete seriousness. The young ones of the elvish community, often joyful, and commonly pained only by aching facial muscles (from too much smiling) were still regularly provoked to understand and contemplate worlds and expressions, sociolinguistic and cosmic connectivity, and all while children from most of the other races were discovering that two plus two is three, fire can't be eaten, and faeries are living beings with feelings, not toys to be misused and shaken around.

Once she vaulted to the centre of the fallen deeptree her clever eyes searched the crowd. The music shifted form abruptly, descending into a halo around her silence. Dancers were watching her, and she was looking to them intentfully. It was a curious exchange, seeing this realm of very few personal boundries. Most of the outsiders ran away, not because of something obscene or incomprehensible - these were elves after all-- often it was chalked up to having the self reflected back. Something about seeing yourself in the face, in the eyes, and spirit of others was a conondrum that rippled over the lives of those who believed in right or wrong.

When she felt like she had their full attention (save the jostled web of abandon that the children had now begun to transform into a coil), violet-petal lips pursed and from them Laerithil Daer'on belted one of the most religious experiences to the hammer of wild elven drums. Her raven and fuschia dreadlocks whipped like vines down to the small of her back; one of those dedicated fists clenched a gauze-capped metal staff in her palm, pumping pale knuckles into the sweat soaked air. The kids were stirring into revolutions. The air was electric and Laerithil's vocals were magic-laced with bard spells of courage, well-being and healing. The air was rife with her skill...

[Quenthalus]

Spring: Early Immanis

He wandered out from the searing waves of revelry, content in the cool winds that kissed acrossed his chest and arms. The gossamar fields, and eldritch woods seemed to eclipse the well-worn paths that cascaded over the Silverwood. The early morning mist was drifting down the crystalline columns held high on up, where it wound its way through the dappling. Barefeet scrunched the dirt. Sometimes the rocks and grit were a bit much, so he would wrap ribbons around his sole, and inbetween his toes, on up to tie around his calve. On this night he wore something like that, with bits of sumac hanging from his calves and ankles. Some of the kin around the Corranyr estate made a light joke of the noble animal. Another commented that the newphew-exile had finally lost it. Nobody understood that to him the complexities of the Combine and the intricacies of an elms bark were as valuable as one another; they needed one another or the substance between them was all an illusion. He laughed at the easiness of that feeling, but struggled to hold to it. Dramatics of the spirit and heart invariably called him to be close to those around him, even when nothing more than to wander the desert until he found the right place, where a midnight sky above the dunes, blanketed silver-dotted-abyss-drops of dew was perfectly centered, so that he might fall up into the reflecting umbral unfolding.

Stepping away from one rounded curve of the Moonwillow Keep wall, Quenthalus found a familiar knoll where he had once many patterns ago. It was the place where he and Wisteria crept away to talk about life and share dreams with each other; it was a parade of wooing gently wrapped in an offering of their hearts and souls, speaking a keen language of authenticity to one another. Both of them were quite swept away with the possibilities that they dreamt up upon hearing each other's stories, ultimately being able to gauge one another's growth and experience via the poetic form of transmission. He had sat with a host of friends here, from Jhanlariel, to Ery'endolen, Sylia, Llorinal, Destrin, Jael, and at one point Laeriul, the lost heir of E'braeyl. He once got incredibly sick here, and fell into a dimension of halucinations that arrested his mind and spirit, drove him to the edge of his own personal oblivion and rendered him an observant of his own existance. He remembered meeting Laerithil here, and watched her and Llorinal initiate him through the simplicity of conversation, gently peeling away at a shell that was fortified by years of unwavering sentinel. They provoked questions about himself in a time when he felt like his life was ethereal and suffocated. He lacked substance in ways that set him apart from those that found a singular niche. He was in constant pursuit of experience, leaving him breathless, and caught in the grip of turning his dreams and intentions over to the influence of his surroundings. In befriending him, those two read between a line and found a parable that he had been chasing for patterns: be moving and be the moment moving.

Exhaling a ghostly lungful of smoke, Quenthalus turned his sleepy eyes toward the double suns that encroached upon the emerald horizon. He was standing back in time, in the moment, remembering that this was the same place where he had told Wisteria that he intended to leave for Acumin those many patterns ago. Reflecting on the lonely moments, he watched the buds emerge from the naked branches, and touched the ground near a silent Moonwillow, quiet since the invasion, and wondered what was holding him here.

"Quenthalus!" He turned to the shout of a she elf's voice. His ears lent to the north, where a dark haired blur bounded up from the ravine near Yavie'mela Falls. He smiled when he saw that it was Laerithil.
"Vedui` seler!" His dark eyes flashed on her, opening wide to the onyx vortex therein. Smiling he waved her over, surprised to see anybody out here, especially this early.
"Miss the long nights?" She asked, looking at a hollow Moonwillow.
He simply nodded, turning to embrace her, and the two of them seemed to connect like a soul reacquainting its thoughts with its dreams, memories with its expressions.
"You want to learn fire staff then?" She was eager, always ready to extol her knowledge upon enthusiastic and intentional people. When Destrin had told her he was recruiting for a dance troupe in Imperia, surprised as she was to hear his choice of search, she still readily agreed to train him in the use of the staff.
"I feel it is time to expand my horizons of expertise. I have begun to craft a whole new dance, and I feel it may be the most important one I undertake." The seriousness of his voice spoke volumes, and try as she may to not appear puzzled, one couldn't mistake the curiousity piqued in Laerithil. The wilder elf and Moonwillow dancer simply shrugged it off as artistic immersion then quickly snapped a staff out from her shoulder strap and tossed it to Quenthalus. Catching it, she bade him join her in a pose. Her elegant form went perfectly straight, shoulders level, while the right hand folded over the left, working through the rotations of a basic twirl.

"Let it kiss the breeze, toror."