Pyrithaea,Vance, Skylar, Nathel, Key, Serena and Phil - @keymintt (Artfight|Tumblr|DeviantArt|nstagram)
Started off art fight with a bang this year, with 7 characters all interacting! Key’s OCs are all incredibly good, plus they made me?? the most gorgeous attack ever?? so I had to do something good in return
why the HELL did i not think to give rithaea earrings earlier. she's gotta have a huge collection of those things in all sorts of colors my mind has been blasted open
mostly some character exploration with a touch of what little plot i have
Stargazer ~1.6k words
“Isn’t it weird to watch the world change before your eyes?”
Pyrithaea lay sprawled over the whole of Serena’s couch, arm and legs and wings askew (though mindful of the plants)—her stare fixed out of the window. The night sky was a familiar quilt: each constellation a patch, each star a stitch she’d run her fingers over many times. She couldn’t wrap herself up in it, but looking at the sky brought her comfort nonetheless. A comfort she especially needed as the past few weeks played in her head relentlessly.
Vance, who sat in a fold-out chair nearby (the one human-sized chair Serena kept around, she had little use for them as a dragon living alone), glanced up from his phone to see Serena come around the counter with a bag of potato chips.
“I don’t think the world is changing. I think our world is changing.”
“Changing” was beyond an understatement when an undead dragon with more eyes and teeth than normal had taken residence in your apartment. Or when the magic you’ve used your whole life has an underside unknown and dangerous enough to raise the dead. Serena was difficult for anyone to read, but it didn’t take a scholar to know reality had been turned on its head for her and everyone else.
Vance put his phone down and cocked his head, “What do you mean?”
“I guess that’s true. If you look at everyone else, nothing’s changed for them. They’re all going about their lives as usual, working, raising families, and that kind of stuff, while we have to deal with...whatever we’ve gotten ourselves into.” Pyrithaea’s head bobbed up and down as she spoke with her head on the arm of the couch, “Besides, we can’t really tell people what we’ve seen. They’ll think we’re batshit, talking about stuff like blood magic as if it’s not an urban legend. We know it isn’t a legend of course with what we’ve seen but...” her words trailed off.
“But where do we go next?” Vance asked, in-tune enough with his best friend to know what she was thinking. Most of the time anyways.
Serena ripped the bag open with a quick motion of a claw and put it on the coffee table before taking a seat on the floor. “Or what do we do.”
The trio became quiet save for the gentle, rhythmic thump of Pyrithaea’s tail on the couch and the rustling of the plastic bag as Vance grabbed a handful of potato chips. He turned on the TV to some rerun of a sitcom played too many times already.
Pyrithaea’s attention returned to the stars and her eyes traced over the nonexistent threads holding the constellations together. Her painted claws delicately plucked away at these strings, stories resonating in her mind instead of notes. There were the almost-octagonal stars of Ramast, the spider who wove a tapestry so beautiful the king would give half his fortune to display it upon his wall, but she used it as her humble family’s tablecloth instead. Or the winding shape of Ophir the river serpent, once thought to be the force that drove the rivers out to sea. The two stars at the end of the snake pointed to Ivonep, the warrior gifted with a spear unbreakable only in her hands, slain by it and the jealous mother who seized it from her. Stories all told in her youth as she drifted off to sleep, a worn and warm blanket always with her.
She knew the stars were actually orbs of plasma so far away and untouchable the night sky glowed with light born before life on this planet. But people didn’t always know that. To them, the heavens were there to guide their way and tell their stories. And they still were—at least to her—even after learning all about subjects like stellar magnitudes or spectral types, the sky still held her attention like nothing else. Eternal and shifting ever so slowly, so patiently. An axis around which her erratic mind and hasty body spun.
Or maybe it was all a black hole, drawing her into its event horizon and stripping her of everything but facts and numbers. That’s what hyperfocus felt like sometimes, drawing her in and holding her there blissfully until something snapped her out of it, reminding her she forgot to eat or sleep. She smiled to herself at the analogy. Most days she orbited at a comfortable distance.
“You doing okay ‘Rithaea?”
Vance’s voice pulled her back to the ground. Her neck was a little stiff as she turned to face him. “Yeah I’m all good. Just...”
“Wondering?”
“Wondering.”
At some point Phil ambled into the room and sat between Serena and Vance. Now more aware of her surroundings and the fact Serena’s single-bedroom apartment was not designed to host three dragons and a human, Pyrithaea scooted to one end of the couch. Her small frame didn’t take up much space, but she still folded in a wing politely to allow someone else to sit. Serena took her up on the offer.
After a few minutes of mediocre jokes and stale laughter, Pyrithaea was already bored of the TV. “Do you think we’re going to change the world?”
Serena spoke first, “I hope not. If we do, I don’t want my name on it.” No elaboration, as usual.
“Only if a lot of people find out. But I have no clue how people aren’t going to find out about something like this,” Vance said whilst nodding towards Phil. “No offense.”
Phil shrugged, “None taken.” The anxiety that Phil would be discovered nagged at everyone. As much as they had discussed the scenario, it all dissolved to questions: what would they do if he was found? What could they do?
“You’d be surprised how quickly the world forgets about things.” Serena offered flatly.
Pyrithaea kept up with most news, and even then so much happened in the world it was as if nothing could change. The matters of today drowning out yesterday’s in a cacophony of current events. Wasn’t this planet just a mirror of the larger cosmos? It still turned as the lives of billions shifted and changed daily: the bigger picture impossible through a single pair of eyes, like a single telescope trying to see the whole night sky. Her mind was wandering again.
“It has already forgot about blood magic,” offered Vance, “Not entirely, but enough to think it’s a fairy tale.”
“I think things are only gonna change when a lot of people know about this,” Pyrithaea shifted in her seat and tapped her tail lightly. “And I mean a LOT of people. We still don’t know who knows about blood magic. Or even if it’s truly blood magic—since Me, Key, and Skylar made that connection based off some stories we know. Or who made Phil for that matter! There’s people who know a lot more than we do about all of this, but we don’t know how many people. There’s so much about all this we don’t know.” Her tail thumping grew more agitated.
Despite the rising intensity in Pyrithaea's, Serena's voice was level, “It’s dangerous knowledge.”
“Are you telling me you don’t want to know what we’re dealing with? Or what the hell we’ve gotten ourselves into?” The discovery of Phil meant a few stars of knowledge had begun to twinkle where a void used to be, of course Pyrithaea was curious.
“I do want to know.” Serena admitted, “I just don’t want to rush into something that might get me killed. We don’t know what we’re getting into.”
Vance chimed in, “If it can create a zombie, I’m sure there’s other horrible things this magic can do.”
Pyrithaea eased her shoulders and took a breath before she spoke, calmer this time, “You guys are right… It’s just. I want to know what’s out there. I can’t stand things not making sense right now.” The uncertainty, the new rift in their reality only they saw. The knowledge had to be there behind some veil, it was only a matter of how to lift it.
“We will ‘Rithaea.” Vance stated, simple and confident. A moment passed before he unwound his legs from the arm of the chair and grabbed the bag of chips, “Want some?”
She grabbed a handful wordlessly, grateful for his consideration. The crunch of cheddar-flavored potatoes drowned out the TV and her whirling mind enough to find some ease. They would get answers; as confusing as everything was at the moment, she had to find somewhere to place her hope.
Several minutes dawdled on before Serena spoke, “This show fucking sucks.” No one disagreed.
“It’s like they recycled every joke and made it worse in the process.” Pyrithaea muttered, eyes beginning to glaze over.
Their world was morphing into something unrecognizable, but for now she sat on her coworker’s couch, crunching potato chips and watching a bland sitcom—if only to point out how bad the jokes were. The four of them all shouldered the weight of what they had found, but moments like these made gravity’s pull on them a little lighter.
fact: pyrithaea likes having her nails (claws) painted. she can do them herself, but vance likes to painted them for her so they’ll occasionally sit around and chat while he paints
