Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » The Drunken Bee (Open to all fantasy OCs.)

(Yes. No one here cares about length or judges. Rp is a group effort fam. Not a contest.)

Xib had his big face down near the wreckage, sniffing a finger like it was going to confess. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth, stupid and proud. Then the air got cold in a weird way. The pale blue float-lady started forming up from nothing like swamp mist learning how to be a person. Xib froze. Blink. Blink. Tongue still out. “BLAAH. No biggie.” Xib said fast, like this was normal tavern service. He snapped his tongue back in and nodded so hard his whole shell did a little wobble. “Xib no dumdum. This one knew you was in there.” Another nod. Even faster. He stared at her glowing eyes, then down at the shattered box, then back at her, like his brain was running in circles and tripping. “Xib just… got lucky.”

Xib pointed at the broken bits with his log, very careful, like poking a sleeping frog. “But why ghost be in warm-box prison, eh? What you doing in there. You live in box? You pay rent?” He squinted. “What ghost do for fun-fun when not trapped. You haunt mugs? You sing in Led-ie melody? You make spoon float and scare flatbacks?” He sniffed again, confused on purpose. “And why you go bleeeeh and croak noise. Like ‘brrr’ and ‘eeee.’ Is that ghost language? Or you just mad. Because box make you cranky-hungry like red light?”

From a simple question, the entire atmosphere of the conversation changed. The mystery of the beautiful brooding began to unravel itself as she professed the truth of the Lord of Light’s Identity. Lut didn’t really put that much stock into gods or religion, he simply just coasted by the flow of social norms and expectations. Yet to hear Zubiada’s words feel so strong and full of admiration, it was at least worth listening to her impromptu sermon.

The concepts of her religion sounded simple enough. The Lord Of Light was a creator and a redeemer using fire as a profound metaphor. Her words were filled with passion and love for their deity that most simply did not have. It made the fox question whether or not she was either crazy or there was something more to her deity.

Yet her gentle smile and words caught Lut off guard. It was as if her whole demeanor changed. She seemed hopeful and tender with a smile almost afraid to shine through. He couldn’t help but smile back at her.

“Perhaps.” he said with a swish in his tail. His eyes observed her muscular form with a nod. “We can find some trouble in one at one of the runefalls and find out for certain.” He suggested, glancing away awkwardly.

Lut couldn’t help but blush at the insinuation. Was she really that keen? Spending a night with her tickled Lut’s ears. His eyes watched as Zubaida placed her hand on the table and voiced her warning.

“Isn't that what makes fire beautiful?” he added. “Something so dangerous, yet it’s tamed in everyday life. It’s nice to watch the flames dance sometimes.” he added.

The nohkoi looked at her hand as Zubadia uttered her apology. Lut reached out to touch her hand and gave it a gentle pat.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s what long ears are good for. I don’t mind.” He said, wiggling his ears.

Zelena held at the cusp of motion for several respiratory cycles. Not statuesque. Instrumental. A system hovering in metastability while it evaluated whether the new input would persist or precipitate another excursion into divergence.

Salman’s offered claw occupied her near field as an apodictic constant. A vector without concealed torque. Her pupils split. Fused. Split again. The oscillation was not a panic semaphore now. It was optics. It was physiology. She polled her own telemetry with ruthless granularity. Pulse had reduced. It remained elevated. Respiration began to smooth, though it still ran shallow. The musculature at her shoulders relinquished a fraction of its clamp. Her jaw unclenched by increments. The chant in her skull continued, but its amplitude attenuated. The internal noise floor dropped enough that cognition ceased arriving as a single white roar and began re-separating into discrete bands. That alone felt like mercy.

Slouth’s ember-eye remained unwavering on her shoulder. A reference lamp. A calibration signal in a room built out of flicker and social aliasing.

Zelena reached for Salman’s claw.

The contact did not register as romance. It registered as structure. A handrail on a moving deck. A datum point in a coordinate frame that had been precessing like a damaged gyroscope. Her fingers, cool and faintly damp, wrapped around the hard plane of his shell with cautious pressure. As if the act of needing him was a mechanical failure that might incur punishment. She exhaled. Then permitted a small transfer of load. It was visible in posture. It was enormous in meaning.

“T’ank yuh.” Her voice came out smaller than intended. Still clipped. Still warm with that dense accent. It no longer frayed at the edges. “Yuh words act like damping.” She swallowed. Reflexively corrected herself with grim rigor. “Not spell. Not comfort. Damping. Reduce oscillation amplitude. Mi mind still vibrate. But it not shatterin’.”

Her gaze threaded past his shell again. Across the honeycomb. Through the amber attenuation zone where hearthlight became less aggressive and faces softened into partial data. She found Watari.

He was not merely present. He was coherent. Coherence as a property. A rare, high-value mass in a room dominated by jittery microeconomies of ale and appetite. Winter residue still clung in the seams of his fur armor. Snow nested in folds like retained phase debris. It sat in his beard and along the planes of his hair as granular scintillation. Steam rose from his tea in thin laminae and vanished into the stratified smoke canopy. The room broke around him and did not remap him. That steadiness was not theatrical. It was load-bearing. It had inertia.

Zelena’s chest did a strange thing. Not the spike of imminent threat. Something gravitational. A shoreline remembering its ocean. The recognition returned like a conserved quantity released from an artificial constraint.

“Salman.” She did not release his claw. Her grip increased by an involuntary increment. “Yuh see him.” A minimal chin tilt toward Watari’s cell. “Watari.”

Her gaze lingered longer than any audit required. She tracked him the way a mathematician tracks a term that keeps resurfacing across unrelated proofs. His posture read thermodynamically parsimonious. Minimal wasted motion. No territorial flaring. His eyes sampled the room with a surveyor’s cadence. Periodic. Dispassionate. Not predatory. Not anxious. Just measurement. The microexpressions were sparse. Not blank. Sparse. Blank is often concealment. Sparse can be restraint. Restraint can be kindness. Kindness can be safety.

“He have di hallmarks.” Her pupils split. Fused. Split again. “Positive progenitor. Yes.” She swallowed. Then corrected herself, not away from the implication, but into it. “An’ mi also mean mate-candidate.”

The admission landed without flourish. Dense. Unavoidable. Ripples expanding without permission.

She looked at Salman as if she needed a second instrument to verify that she had, in fact, spoken it aloud.

“Mi used to file him under non-romantic constants.” A faint, embarrassed twitch of a smile. Gone as quickly as it arrived. “So mi could keep mi dignity. Keep mi cognition formal.” She inhaled. Measured. Exhaled. “But di truth is. When mi see him. Mi internal threat posterior collapses. Mi breathing stop snappin’ like a flag in wind. Mi fear cease its whitewater and become current again.” Her eyes flicked back to Watari. “An’ mi mind start doin’ pair-bond calculus even when mi try suppress di computation.”

She angled her body slightly. Enough to keep him in peripheral view without staring. Staring felt like initiating an experiment without consent. It felt like contaminating the dataset with yearning.

“Mi run it like model.” Zelena said. “Fit parameters. Test robustness.” She tapped the table once with a fingertip. Enumerating variables as if enumeration could cauterize vulnerability. “Temperament stability. Prosocial yield. Dominance style. He don’t destabilize others to feel tall. He don’t harvest insecurity like currency. He don’t require spectacle to legitimate strength.” Her voice thickened. “Before mi have yuh. Before mi have any o’ mi children. He was di only land-born variable who treated me as human. Not specimen. Not caricature.”

She paused. Her pupils split. Fused. Split again. The oscillation looked merciless in the dimness. Like a metronome refusing sentimentality.

“Mi told meself it was gratitude.” She continued. “Only orientation. Only respect.” She breathed out, slower. “Expedient fiction. Defensive reparameterization.” Another breath. “Because if mi label it desire. Den mi risk rejection.” She swallowed. “Rejection not just emotion. Rejection becomes evidence. Evidence poisons priors. Priors contaminate every future inference. Den mi become a self-fulfilling error.”

Her gaze dropped to her own hands. To the glossy white-and-blue fabric. Immaculate. Diagrammed. Tight. It was not dirt that worried her. It was existence.

“Salman.” Her voice lowered. “What if mi too unkempt.” She grimaced at the word. The outfit was pristine. The question was not hygiene. It was ontological. “Not unkempt like mud. Unkempt like mi whole morphology look wrong in his eyes.”

Her attention surged across her own features with clinical cruelty. A brutal internal peer review. Green skin that cooled the light as it returned it. Horns rising in paired crescents. Keratin ridged and striated. Eyes that refused singularity. Pupils splitting into twin apertures. Fusing again. Split. Fuse. Split. A conch-creature perched on her shoulder like an omen that would not be dislodged. She knew, intellectually, that difference is not defect. Her nervous system did not accept the theorem.

“Mi know how di room categorize.” She said, voice sharpening into analysis as if analysis could cauterize shame. “Chromatic deviation. Nonhuman optics. Horn morphology. Parasymbiotic shoulder organism.” She swallowed. “Di split-and-fuse pupils make people think mi lyin’. Or think mi hungry. Or think mi cursed.” A brittle breath. “An’ mi proportions. High curvature. Tall silhouette. It reads intrusive. It reads like claim. Even when mi try be rounding error.”

Her grip on Salman’s claw tightened. Then eased. Then tightened again. Not weakness. Computational overload. Autoregressive worry feeding itself. An ill-conditioned solver seeking the worst local minimum because it fears surprise more than pain.

“What if he see me close.” Zelena whispered. “An’ his face change.” Her throat tightened. “Mi can model aether constants. Mi can predict leyline drift under load. Mi can solve binding ratios while everybody else drink an’ laugh.” Her pupils split and fused. “But dis is where mi self-worth become variable. An’ mi don’t trust di instrument.”

She leaned closer to Salman’s shell. Not touching. Almost. The nearness made her safer. It also made her feel smaller. She hated the need. She needed it anyway.

“Mi worry.” Her voice barely rose above the tavern’s noise floor. “Dat if he look at me as mate-candidate. He see monster.” She swallowed hard. “He see anomaly that should not be touched. Should not be loved.”

She forced herself into the only posture that ever let her survive. She turned the feeling into a ledger.

“Evidence for mutuality.” She began. “Kindness history. Prior humanization. Stable conduct.” A pause. “Evidence against.” Her gaze dropped. “He never initiated. Never signaled.” Another pause. “Possible explanations.” She listed them like adverse effects on a label. “Disinterest. Or restraint. Or an existing bond. Or he class me as out-of-domain.”

She hated the phrase out-of-domain. It made her sound bloodless. She was not bloodless.

“Salman.” She looked back to her son. “If he say no. If he look at me and update negative.” Her voice tightened. “Mi mind will write it into di priors. It will propagate. It will generalize. It will contaminate future interactions like pathogen.” She swallowed. “Mi will become drought again.”

She glanced toward Watari once more. He still sat like a stone in moving water. He still looked like the only object in the room with enough mass to resist the shallows. That was exactly why the risk felt existential.

Her fingers locked around Salman’s claw as if gripping certainty itself.

“So tell me.” Zelena said, not demanding, but pleading through rigor. “Could a man like dat see past di optics. Di horns. Di skin. Di monstrous silhouette.” Her pupils split. Fused. Split again. Slower now. Deliberate. “Or am mi just projectin’ lodestar qualities onto a star dat never had my name in its sky.”

She drew one more measured breath. Then forced herself to articulate the final statement. The one no equation could protect.

“Mi want to try anyway.” The sentence arrived like a theorem accepted on faith. “But mi need yuh near.” Her voice softened. “Close enough that if mi collapse. Mi still stand.”

For a fleeting instant, the veil slipped.

Zubaida realized it the moment his hand brushed hers. Not because the touch was bold. Because it was gentle. A brief warmth. A mortal reflex to answer gentleness with gentleness. Her expression, once composed as scripture intaglio in marble, softened. The faintest smile ghosted her lips like the remembrance of sunlight on an overcast dawn. It was perilous. The sort of softness her Lord cautioned against. The Lord of Light had a way of burning away deceit and artifice alike. He exposed not only sin, but sincerity. He illuminated what one wished to keep hidden. Even from oneself.

So it was that the Shaitan found herself suddenly, intolerably honest. The Drunken Bee did not notice. Or it pretended not to. Its patrons kept their rituals of heat and distraction. A mug struck wood. Dice clicked and stopped. The hearth at the center of the honeycomb spoke in patient pops. Smoke lay in disciplined layers above the crowd. Peat. Char. Tallow. Brine tracked in on boots. Wet fur steaming off shoulders. Along the resin bracing, condensation gathered. It slid in thin threads. It vanished as it neared the fire’s jurisdiction. Undead servers moved between stools with trays held level by habit and binding. Their seams were neat. Their preservative scent cut cleanly through the smoke, medicinal and cold.

The front was reassembled almost at once. Zubaida's smile withered into something elegant but distant. Her gaze lowered back into its disciplined repose. The golden irises no longer shimmered with warmth but with that inscrutable brilliance that reflected judgment and restraint. She inhaled. With that breath, reclaimed her equanimity.

When the fox spoke of the runefalls, her brow arched ever so slightly. The suggestion was unexpected. Charming in its audacity. Foolish in its peril. Those places were where the world's carcass had split open. Where relics of other realities festered beneath our own. Zubaida had seen them from afar. Pillars of ruin bleeding foreign light. Whispering tongues that did not belong to this world. Hunters called them hazards. Scholars called them thresholds. In Winterwake, the storm made everything honest. It made courage look like stubbornness and curiosity look like hunger. To her, they were merely another theater for the hunt.

"I am no philosopher of the ruinfall," she murmured, her voice rich as dusk. "No scholar prying into the carcass of forgotten worlds. I am a simple woman. If it bleeds, it can perish. And if it perishes, that is sermon enough."

Her hand rose to comb back a stray lock of silver hair, briefly revealing the mark upon her forehead. A pale bloom of piebald skin, shaped like the thumbprint of divinity itself. The motion was unstudied. Almost intimate. For the briefest breath, her face appeared nearly helpless before the hair slid back into place, restoring her symmetry and her mystique alike. Firelight took the edge of her cheek. It gilded the curve of her mouth. It caught the turquoise at her throat and made it look like frozen sea glass. Across the room, the antlike bartender clicked mandibles at a joke and turned away. Life continued. It only felt thinner near her table, as if the air had learned caution.

Then came a laugh. It was quiet and throaty, almost unwilling. "Typically, men ask me to go somewhere far more quotidian." The faintest hint of mirth curved her lips again, though she tempered it quickly. "I should have expected the grandson of the Blood Fox would not be so dull."

Her hand drifted once more to her cup, the scarlet liquid within reflecting the golden fire of her eyes. She turned it slowly. Watching the play of light along the rim as though reading omens in its movement. Around them, the Drunken Bee offered its humble sacraments. Black bread. Smoked fish. Mussels when the mire surrendered them. Spirits that warmed like reprimands. Bogwater brewed dark and bitter. All of it tasted of endurance. All of it existed because Winterwake allowed it.

"If it is your will to draw your blade beside mine, whether to sate curiosity or to test your mettle, I shall not dissuade you. Few seek to witness what an Obsidian Witch of the Lord's order may unleash. Fewer still live to describe it."

She raised her gaze to meet his. Lut's mismatched eyes caught the glow of the ambient light, his tail swishing in nervous rhythm. A subtle smile ghosted her lips once more, not mockery but recognition. He looked like someone who had learned charm as armor. Someone who had not yet decided whether to keep wearing it.

"You say there is beauty in flame," she said softly. "In how it dances. You are not wrong." Her words slowed, like a psalm. "The dance of fire is the world's oldest prayer; a union of cause and effect. It is not the destruction that moves me, but the harmony within it. The flame burns because something else surrenders. Creation, consumption, rebirth. They're each a note in His eternal canticle."

She tilted her head, studying him the way one might study a reflection upon water. The hearth’s light made one eye seem warmer, the other colder. A contradiction made visible. The Bee’s noise continued. It did not intrude. It framed them, the way a chapel’s murmurs frame a confession.

"Humor me. When you watch the flame's dance; do you see yourself in its light, or in the shadow it casts?"

The faintest lilt of teasing touched her final words, awkward yet earnest, her crack at flirtation gauche in its pleasantry. The sort of jest one might expect from a warrior-cleric who had forgotten how to speak as a woman.

Her hand brushed the table again, fingers tracing the edge of the cup in slow, absent circles. "Perhaps," she added, barely audible, "one of us is the Light…and the other, the shadow that gives it meaning."

Then, with that same deliberate composure that veiled every other trace of humanity she carried, she leaned back in her chair, her golden gaze never leaving his face.

Ixqueya remained seated upon the circular stone bench that cupped the hearth, as if she had taken vows to its heat. Firelight performed its patient homily across her knuckles. It gilded the meltwater beading on her cloak, each droplet a brief reliquary that shimmered, fell, and perished. The room around her was a low cathedral of appetite and fatigue. Smoke hung in a sepulchral pall beneath the rafters, sweet with spice and old breath, and the patrons’ murmurs braided together into an antiphonal psalter of wanting.

Then the air committed apostasy. The cold did not seep. It pronounced itself. A gelid proclamation. A cryophoric benediction that made the lanternlight look briefly anemic, as if warmth had remembered the grave and faltered. The hearth continued to burn, but its jurisdiction felt contested. Breath tightened. Sound thinned. The tavern’s life did not stop, yet it hesitated, as though the world had been asked to witness a sacrament it had not consented to.

Above the wreckage, the apparition cohered. Not flesh. Not void. A liminal catechism given outline. Pale blue translucence. Hair drifting as if the room had become water. Eyes incandescent with that unnerving sincerity that belongs to the newly unburied. It was less a haunting than a manifestation. A thanatophany. Death turning its face toward the living and blinking.

Ixqueya did not rise. She did not approach.

She did not offer speech, not even the smallest syllable of inquiry. Yet her composure took a hairline fracture that only a trained observer would notice. Her brow arched, slow and involuntary, an imperial gesture that confessed flabbergastment before it could be disciplined back into neutrality. Flummoxed. Not frightened. Not threatened. Simply displaced from certainty. As if her mind had reached for a familiar rubric and found only blank vellum.

Her gaze moved once, precise and unblinking. From the spectral woman to the glittering shards at her feet. From the shards to Xib’s hulking presence and his wild, earnest orbit around the impossible. The scene refused taxonomy. It was not a trick. Not a rite she recognized. Not a weapon she could name. It was transubstantiation without clergy. An anastasis without altar. A rebirth exhaled into a tavern that had only asked for warmth.

So Ixqueya stayed where she was, within the hearth’s red jurisdiction, silent as a cenotaph. Watching. Measuring. Waiting for the moment to declare whether it was miracle or malediction. And until it did, she allowed the cold to touch her, and did not flinch, as if even surprise must kneel before the discipline of winter.

The air is cold and breathing dissipates in the air by fume and mist. hoarfrost all over, soft but cutting when touched.
Very soft steps can be heard in the snow, but not with that thundering cracking of boots crushing the perfectly formed ice crystals. No the steps are delicate, piercing the cold surface like needles. It aren't feet, it are splitted hooves, hard enduring hooves that found their way into these cold lands of Winterwake. Those hooves belong to a deer, nothing spectacular as wild deer can be found on many places. But here it's not a 'normal' deer, here it's Lizbeth that lost herself in these lands.
Lizbeth Redwood anthropomorphic whitetail doe, a feral deer shaped into a humanoid form. She doesn't even know herself how she stranded int this wide coldness. It's not the freezing that bothers her, she has a fur, made for such temperatures, hair standing and blowing her form into a fluffy plushie-like appearance. She doesn't wear a lot, as her natural coat protects her from extreme cold, only those typical linen outfit, and her long hooded linen cloak, protecting her from the wind. That icy wind, sharp like knives, would be cutting through her pelt and leave invisible scratches that hurt.
She eventually arrives at that place, that anchor in the cold, inviting to be entered. Never saw she such structure as if giant bees had built a refuge against cold. The amber light emanating is by itself already warming, if she doesn't enter, she might be doomed. Yet she hesitates, the persons inside seemingly not of 'usual' shape, non humans and other species of all kind can be glanced at through the hexagonal windows. Still all seems peace, tranquil hubbub reaching in disrupted flares the deer's ear. She stands out for a few moments, hesitating, does fear overtake the will to survive, does she just freeze only few steps from undeniable warmth? The doe trembles, heavily, the moment she grabs the doorhandles, cold steel rigidifies her fingers, don't let them linger too long.
The door of the Drunken Bee reopens one more time, the warmth trying to flee outside runs over that doe like a steam train, and fills her heart immediately with courage, enough courage to enter the tavern.
One step inside, the door closes again, the deer stands, looking, searching, panicking. Her eyes wander over everything, all the guests and patrons, but she keeps petrified at the entrance. Even if that warmth invades her body, she's unable to move. All is strange, unknown, and unknown to a deer means 'flee'. Flee into death? No, fear doesn't take the lead, no, she has to step over her own shadow and enter, be a patron.
Lizbeth feels like being watched by everyone, as if all eyes are riveted onto her frame, that so tender frame in this hostile world. "What is that thing doing here?" echoes form the walls. Trembling the deer decides to walk through the hall, directly to the hearth, to the fire. That furious fire now just an invitation to stay beside. She doesn't look at anyone, her eyes felling immediately every gaze, "I don't see you, you don't see me" is the game. At last she takes place at the hearth, not far from this giant woman without speech, little did the deer know who she was.
Of goes the hooded cloak, neatly placed beside her, she only looks to see what is the usual behavior, not wanting to bother even the smallest creature inside the Tavern, as The Drunken Bee is a hosting place where everyone seems welcomed.

"They... Have gone for a long time."
Taking a sigh, Xueqing replied with sorrow.

"Great that your children built it, you have something to be proud of. If they are still alive to this day, they would also be proud of me. I hate those who killed them."

...

Xueqing didn't notice the doe at first.