The Meteor Shower (3) : It wouldn't be a star festival without a meteor shower! Right on time, a beautiful array of shooting stars graces the night sky. This time of year is unnaturally clear and it's incredibly easy to see the stars. Most meteor fragments appear to be little white or yellow lights streaming across the sky, but if you watch closely enough you may find that some of them seem to be a whole rainbow of colors. The scientists have reported that it's just different components burning up as they enter the atmosphere, but there's something undeniably magical about it.
Karakorum had to admit, she wasn't entirely convinced on the front of her "knightly duty" to some random place in space. But Corvina had been on her about it, once he'd heard that she had never been--that was a ******** mistake--and she guessed that bonding with her future brother-in-law was probably a good idea, she guessed.
(No, he and Lanting weren't engaged yet. Karakorum just had eyes. They would be, soon enough.)
It was a lovely night, the rainbow meteors that seemed to turn up during the Star Festival every year streaking through the sky, and she had to admit that it made for a very pretty backdrop, even if they'd undoubtedly be gone when she got to her own homeworld. And she'd found a little fuchsia star charm on her way here, so that was another one for her collection.
"Okay," she said, and she reached out a hand towards Corvina,"we have to be touching for you to come with me, right? So let's...go, or whatever."
xxAmor Remanet
Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2025 11:38 pm
Corvina hadn’t worked closely with that many knights in the time before Chaos had poisoned his world. There had been the Ganymede Knight with whom Alys had been so infatuated. There had, of course, been Zhiheng, with whom Corvina had not really worked at all, much less doing so closely. Unsuccessful attempts at courtship didn’t count as working together on things. Now, there was Shuangxu, and there was Karakorum, and periodically, others.
All up, Corvina didn’t think he was an authority on Knightly matters. But he knew enough to respect most of them and their work. Knights had been called upon by the Code to serve an important purpose, and failure to honor that duty reflected poorly on any Knight who didn’t live up to what was expected of them.
Or, as was the case with Karakorum, undeniably neglected that duty.
Corvina also knew enough about Knighthood to be in An Intense Mood while meeting Karakorum under the rainbow meteor shower tonight. Honestly, part of him wanted Lanting to handle this instead because it felt like Karakorum might accept the criticism better coming from a fellow Knight (it definitely didn’t feel like she’d taken it well from Corvina). But Shuangxu was busy tonight, and it was important to him that Belle get along better with his younger sister, and so here Corvina was, arms crossed over his chest under the rainbow meteor shower and ready to make Karakorum take some responsibility for her Wonder.
“There’s an oath you’re supposed to say, or at least I have heard that there might be?” All the same, Corvina reached down to take one of her hands (gently, carefully, very aware of how much larger he was than Karakorum). “But I don’t know if you need to say it for the first time, or if you can just………think about your Wonder and let it pull us there?”
He huffed. Briefly, he considered adding that even someone like him—someone admittedly ignorant of several things about how being a Knight worked—knew that her negligent attitude toward her Wonder was something unconscionable. But that, Corvina thought, would not have constituted “making a sincere effort to get along better with Karakorum,” so he kept it to himself.
"Uh," Karakorum said, and she let Corvina take her hand, and then pressed her other fist to her chest, focusing. She thought about what a Wonder might be like, thought about finally getting to see Cybele--and if she was honest, she was curious. She did want to know what that place was like.
The first thing she felt on the new world was a soft breeze, and when she opened her eyes, she gasped.
Before them was a great tree. And she could tell there was a building carved into it; a place built to blend in with the forest it resided in.
"Oh, wow," she said, softly. "This is...this is really beautiful."
She let go of Corvina's hand, stepping towards the door that would take her inside, and laying a hand on it.
"Well, let's...go poke around, I guess," she said, looking behind her and beckoning for him to follow.
Okay, maybe she was a little more interested now that she was actually here. This was kind of ******** cool.
Amor Remanet
Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 2:07 am
Huh, well, apparently the oath wasn’t necessary for traveling to a Wonder for the first time. Corvina made a mental note of that, though he didn’t know if it would ever wind up being necessary knowledge for him.
Cybele, too, was something new for him. “Never traveled here before,” Corvina admitted, looking around at the forest where they’d found themselves, then at the tree that had Karakorum the Wonder carved into it. “My people didn’t have a good reputation. Plenty of us respected the hunters of Cybele, respected their skill. But the Corvinate way of life was about warfare, not hunting. It didn’t mix well with other values that the people of Cybele held sacred.”
Things like respect for nature, which probably worked out fine on a planet like this, where it did not seem as though nature was constantly trying to kill you.
“We should look around for Wonder’s Code Piece,” Corvina said as Karakorum moved toward the door. He followed close behind, more curious about what they would find inside the tree than he wanted to let on. “The Code is what empowers Knights. With most Knights, there’s already a place where their Wonders’ Code Pieces go. Kaifeng, Lanting’s Saturn Knight friend? He talks about how many steps there are to get to his. But Cybele Knights and Moon Knights didn’t exist at all a thousand years ago, so the Code Piece at your wonder should be new.……”
"Unfortunate," Kara said. "Maybe there will be someone who's been here before, and I can ask them more about this place?" She shrugged. "Or maybe I'll have to poke around and figure it out."
She stepped through the grand doors, and found herself in a gorgeous great hall. It was all made of wood, carved and decorated, and in the center of the room was a grand hearth carved into the tree's core and reinforced with stone, with a spiral staircase wrapping around it, going up higher. There were tables aroundt he room, and for a moment, she could imagine this place loud and bustling--as it must have once been.
And she found herself drawn to the grand hearth, to the comfortable looking seats around it. Once upon a time, fires must have roared here, cooking food to serve the many tables--to celebrate, perhaps. To welcome.
"Wow," she said, softly. She ran her fingers over the wood around the hearth, taller than she was, and they found a knot that felt--odd.
Out of place.
She pushed against it.
It clicked, and there was a grinding shift, and the back wall of the hearth came open, revealing a hollow space behind. It was small, but she could see what looked like a workspace--hidden and private, maybe to store something special.
And waiting there was a glowing orb.
"Is that...the Code?" She asked Corvina, softly. But she didn't pause; she stepped forward, and reached towards it, because it glowed and it seemed there was something inside--and her hand closed around something solid.
When she withdrew it, a ring rested in her palm.
"Oh, s**t," she said, startled. "That's--my signet ring?"
Amor Remanet
Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2025 3:13 am
As he followed Karakorum into the great hall of this……ancient hunting lodge(? maybe? something like that?), Corvina made a pensive sound.
“There’s always Princess Cybele herself,” he pointed out as he looked around at the spiral staircase and the tables, his voice absent much of the judgment that he usually had while saying basically anything to People Other Than Lanting. As much as he had judged Karakorum for neglecting her Wonder, she was a good sister to Lanting, and clearly, she needed some kind of encouragement to take herself more seriously as a Knight. “Haven’t met her myself, but she’s a royal senshi. One does not simply become a royal senshi without making an impression on people. Someone we know probably knows and can contact her, if you ever wish to speak to her?
“Other than the Princess herself, there are likely other Cybele Knights around the city. Some of them may have been Knights longer than you have, might have spent more time up at their own Wonders.”
He wasn’t going to judge her for this (not anymore, at least). He was going to follow her through her Wonder’s interior and be helpful. Not judgmental, but helpful, even if it was very difficult not to judge her frivolous attitude.
“Aside from them,” Corvina went on, inspecting some of the finer details carved into the spiral staircase while Karakorum inspected the hearth, “I’d imagine some of the other long-surviving senshi in town might have visited this place in the past? I know gossip spread like wildfire about the Sailor Cybele of a thousand years ago and how many marriages she had—concurrent ones, I mean. Polyamory, I think is your term? Rather than the ‘woman marries wealthy men, one after another, and kills them to collect their money’ thing? Some of us long survivors might have been married to her back then, so they might have better memories. Or some of them did more work as diplomats than I did, like, um.”
Corvina pursed his lips, not at Karakorum but rather at the first idea that came to mind. “One of my old friends, Pyrrhus of Nihility? He had another, different friend, Thalassa of Exhaustion. Both of them—and Pyrrhus’s cousin, Troilus of Enthusiasm—all survived and now live with Kaifeng and Helene. Thalassa used to make diplomatic visits, both earnestly and to scout out places where the three of them and Pyrrhus’s late husband would run heists.”
Rolling his eyes at the carvings before him (which didn’t deserve it), Corvina shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust Thalassa of Exhaustion to tell you anything true about Cybele. His people had honor. His people were strong and committed to their values—more hunters than warriors, though of a harsher sort than the people of Cybele. But as far as I ever saw, Heibing of House Morningstar knew no lies he considered himself above telling, often for no reason beyond his own amusement, and knew no intoxicants that he wouldn’t indulge in until he rendered himself completely insensate. Kaifeng’s predecessor often drank to excess, to his own detriment as well as Helene’s. Yet, Thalassa made Xingyi Kurogane look restrained. He had no honor, and if I were you? I would neither seek him out nor trust anything he thought to tell me about what Cybele was like back then.”
But hearing a soft sound of wonder from Karakorum, Corvina turned back in her direction.
Awed into silence, he stared at the space she had managed to unlock—and the glowing orb within it.
“It’s a piece of the Code,” Corvina corrected her, his tone gentler than anyone but Lanting and Huo-Huo ever got to hear. “The Code is an ancient entity, more powerful—I think—than we can truly fathom, even fragmented as it is. The pieces like this one, they are why Knights exist and why Wonders have the power that they do. As a senshi, I protect my homeworld. But as a Knight, you protect this Code Piece. Keep it from falling into the wrong hands, or from being tainted by Chaos. In turn, it gives you your magic and empowers you to fight.”
Another pensive sound escaped him as Corvina blinked down at the ring Karakorum had pulled from her Wonder’s Code Piece. “It also empowers your signet ring, yes.…… We may also want to put you in touch with a Mauvian when we return to Earth. Kaifeng has indicated that the Mauvians of the twenty-first century have created several beneficial modifications that allow the signet rings more power than comes to them naturally.”
Karakorum nodded. "Princess Cybele" seemed like a sort of pseudo-mythical figure; she had to exist, obviously, at least based on what Karakorum understood about Knights, but she'd yet to meet her. Maybe in the future, next time there was a big group all gathered, she'd find her Princess and introduce herself.
"Yeah, I can look out for that," she agreed. She'd met Hierapolis and Celadon; they couldn't be the only ones, either. Surely Cybele wanted more Knights than that. Especially since it had scooped her, someone so thoroughly unremarkable.
And she had a name! Even if that name was a massive bullshitter, maybe she could get something out of him.
"I'll shake Thalassa down," she said, perkily, for someone making a threat. "I bet I can get him to tell me things. And even if they're outrageous lies, I can always cross-check with other people." A lying party boy drunk did sort of sound like her idea of a good time, if nothing else.
And, if Corvina's sudden gentle reverence surprised her, Karakorum didn't say so. It felt...right, in the face of what they'd found.
"Yeah, we can...find a Mauvian," she agreed, a little dazedly. "Let's poke around just a little more and then head home, huh?"
She stepped out of the secret space, and the door closed behind her.
