count me in -- open, campfire

[Warringkingdoms]

  [font=trebuchet ms]Life could descend into chaos in the blink of an eye- by now, she was almost used to it.

  It was difficult to keep up with all the shifts in the status quo they underwent on a weekly basis. Some arrived, some abandoned, some were born, some were killed, some came back, some disappeared for good. In the midst of the destruction, it was difficult for Rin not to feel as though she was the eye of a perpetual hurricane, ever raging and insatiable in its assault on those around her, yet never so much as ruffling the fur on her back.

  She had to wonder if this had always been the case, even before she had lost her memories.

  Setting down the last scrap of paper on the pile of wood, Rin sat down and lifted a paw to adjust her scarf. The thought of how much easier this would be were Roy there to start the fire elicited a long, heavy sigh from her. Though the odds were reasonably high of him coming back someday, they could never be counted on. Even knowing that the clan would likely catch and punish the killer, it still stung.

  Taking two stones, selected for their relatively flat surfaces, she struck them together against the kindling three times. The third impact released a spark that traveled along the kindling, swelling swiftly into a bonfire in what felt like the blink of an eye. After checking to ensure the fire pit was clear and the grass around them was sheltered from the flames, she nodded and stepped back, watching the blazes burn high.

  The clan as a whole was like a phoenix- massive, as wild as it was majestic, and perpetually burning to ashes only to rise again from the rubble. The metaphor was not her original creation; though she did not remember who, she knew she had heard it from someone, someone whose wisdom she had evidently considered worth committing to memory. Someone who, perhaps, she associated with a reckless-yet-comforting fire.

  "I got your picture, I'm coming with you," she murmured, turning to open a bag of marshmallows, then taking one out and sticking it to the end of a branch. Holding the marshmallow within the flames, she continued, "Dear Maria, count me in." Maybe Suiteheart was no longer here, but a lot of people were no longer here- that was no reason to stay silent. "There's a story at the bottom of this bottle, and I'm the pen."

  Even if you didn't like All Time Low, you kinda liked All Time Low. Okay, maybe that wasn't always true, but she'd yet to meet someone who genuinely hated them- at least as far as she remembered.

[WINTERWOLF]

[align=center][div style="width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-family: arial; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 1.4;letter-spacing:.1px"]In his experience, the easiest way to keep up with a society is to stop worrying about it. Like Warringkingdoms, he finds himself unbothered by the changes in the lives of others. At the most, it gets him to raise a brow. Takeovers are unimpressive, wars are petty — perhaps he's spent too much of his life accustomed to much worse. He can't use the excuse of lost memories (he has them) or apathy (he has that too). The truth of it is that he's simply spent too damn long under the weight of someone else. In its entirety, his life has always been more complicated than this. Winter was used to gilded floors and colorful fabrics hiding dirty secrets. He was used to monsters under a crown and good people under a layer of dirt. Nothing that happened here could surprise him, and to be honest he finds that almost none of it reaches him anyway. He missed moments of attachment, people of interest. Why they're all grieving, he hasn't the slightest clue. What to do about it, he still doesn't know. All he knows is that tomorrow will still come, and life will move on, piece by piece.

Right now, he's unable to accept the fact that his own life has the same potential. He wanders the territory without any particular goal, drawn to a fire and a quiet voice. It would be easy to simply hover in the background, walk away once he's certain that nothing's wrong. But today — today, he approached on the wrong side of the circle and finds himself looking at the stranger's face with a frown, and then the branch with sugar on the end. "What are you doing?" he asks before he can swallow his tongue.

[MOONMADE]

[size=9pt]Moon was always one for coziness. Between the Movie Night he'd set up and the night he'd spent with some of the Ascendants at Lessa's, he was a sucker for warmth and comfort and anything vaguely wholesome. It wasn't something he'd go around advertising openly, but it was there, and he wouldn't deny it the pleasure of sitting in front of a blazing fire and burning a piece of texturized sugar to bits. "Ever heard of a Marshmallow?" Comes the lions voice, rounding the fire in a lap before finding the place he deemed most comfortable and promptly sprawling himself out on the floor. "Mixture of sugar and pig tissue and shit. Nice, in thought, but once you get to the nitty gritty of them they're pretty fuckin' stumach-turning. Not to turn you off." He glances to the dark lion, and this is when he'd usually offer a flash of a grin, but that was nowhere to be seen, tonight. He didn't seem to hold any remorse for the possibility that he'd ruined marshmallows for everyone. Golden eyes reflected the flames before him as he sucked in breath and released it just as quick, an effort to lull the tension from his muscles and calm the racing of his brain. It was safe to say it was in vain. "Good idea, Rin," mumbles the lion, exhausted eyes drifting shut. "All we're missing now is a bad story teller."

/mobile and im Exhausted

— TAGS

[Feyre]

☽  ☽  ☽

[color=#3f5351]"Did someone say storyteller?"

Feyre seemed to materialize out of the darkness itself, tiny paws carrying her from the shadows she had been playing within and closer to the group and the fire. She regarded the latter of those two things fondly for a moment, the orange flames dancing within purple eyes, heat crackling in the air surrounding her as she halfway contemplated lighting a fire of her own. She dismissed the urge to do so in favor of glancing at Moonmade though, focus once more reattached to his statement, a smile dancing upon her speckled lips. Ah yes, she had purposefully left out the 'bad' part of his request, especially considering the fact that she knew that she was the best storyteller. Yeah, she'd tell them a story that absolutely rocked their world!

[color=#3f5351]"Who wants to hear my story? I have so many! They're amazing!" Feyre exclaimed giddily, realizing just after the words had fell from her mouth that she really didn't know any stories. Hm. That complicated things a bit. I have stories, Feyre darling. Don't fret. Well... At least she had the mysterious mom voice to help her, things wouldn't be that bad, would they?

[BASTILLEPAW]

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BASTILLEPRISONER AURELIUS

BY THE GRACE OF THE FIRE AND THE FLAMES

Sometimes, he felt like Rin in that he seemed to be caught in the midst of a raging storm, but the illusion could never stand for too long; no, there would always come the abrupt reminder that he was the storm. He was the raging winds and strikes of lightning, the earth cracking open under his paws and the raging of flames — how many times in his life had he lost all control and erupted, torn the earth apart with his chaos, dissolved into nothing more than another hurricane on the horizon? In times of peace, he did not stand in the eye of the storm — he became it, always teetering just slightly on the edge, his powers and souls barely in check until the next time something pushed him over the edge and he was raging once more. His eye had lasted so long, this time, even if the face of losing Margy and Suite; it felt ominous, the air thick with the dreadful tension of a storm brewing. It did not help that he could feel that turmoil and exhaustion seeping through the air from everyone around him.

As he wandered absently towards the sound of singing in the distance, he found his thoughts straying idly to Hazel. Although he could name a good number of Ascendants who sang and sang often, it was his first instinct to think of her, paws gentle and voice soft as French lullabies fell from her tongue in tandem to his heartbeat. More and more frequently thoughts of her came with the sudden surge of something, some restlessness, some worry: his pulse would pick up, the thrumming in his veins whispering that he had to find her, had to stop her from leaving, but he could never quite place the unease itching under his skin. At best he could only ignore it, and he pushed the flutter of anxiety away then as he stopped beside the others and regarded the flames idly.

His attention fell on Fey, and he smiled, faintly. She did have stories, didn't she? The vast majority of them resided with him now, and they rose and fell in his consciousness as randomly as the tides of his storms. He wondered, quietly, what stories Fey had gathered in her short life, and drawled, [b]"Hit us with them then, kiddo."

[B]ASTRAL SERAPH — THE ASCENDANTS — [color=#e2e2e2]TAGS — [color=#e2e2e2]MOODBOARD — [color=#e2e2e2]PLAYLIST