The floor was set, then; one less thing to conjure in this three-dimensional space he was trying to establish. Aure paced a half-circle, goose-stepping over the spotted caps and silvery frills. It was a veritable menagerie, grown indiscriminately. Now, he needed to imagine a backdrop for them. Bright eyes peered briefly at the "firefly" bobbing just in his periphery - just long enough for the afterimage of it to be momentarily burned into his retinas. It hung close to him as he focused again.

Dim manifested at first, close quarters that were blacker-than-black, and the young King could almost smell the putrid meat-breath of that beast - Aure tugged his magic in a different direction, towards the confines of Canis. Illusory piles of bones nestled themselves amidst the fungi, rattling silently and drifting into the air to meet and be swallowed by his lantern.

Spurred on by magic - both maintained and briefly-firing - the orb swelled like a star in its last phase of life. It was mere moments away from facing collapse into a hyperdense state (or was that his focus on so much at once? No wonder Damask - oh, Damask - was unimpressed with the single casts that Mercurius had provided. Showmanship over all else.)

Aure ground his beak, and swept both wings out.

The orb exploded, streams of light bleeding out and "carving" the images of twenty-some skeletons, one after another, into the ceiling of Canis, across the floor, amid the fungi. They were crude, made of single stick-lines as opposed to any detail, but the sentiment was there nonetheless; a improvised story of preservation.

Fantastical as the illusory bones and cadaver-drawings were, he couldn't bear to conjure flesh and blood surrounding them, making them dance.

Death was their resting place, real or not - they should be immortalized as such. Each of them was left in their bones; while stones made new forms for themselves, whether or not they were urged to. Aure wondered, briefly, how his own stone had gone for so long without taking root on its own - even in Polaris.

His head shook.

His art faded in time, but that brief moment of calm upon seeing it could've lasted a lifetime - how he wished it could've lasted a lifetime. It was something he could've shown to his daughter, his new niece; Hell, his mother. But, it was his. This first instance would be his. Adapted from a script borrowed from Mercurius, but his. There was no chance of it bringing harm to something else. To someone else.

Aure settled down in the fungus, letting it press against his flanks and throw spores all through his feathers. Ears pricked forwards, and a contented smile washed away the sting of the black along his one wing.

His magic worked idly now, directing itself away from the last glimmers of light and urging the caps to start spawning along his back, his wings, his tail. A reassuring, if damp, blanket. This was what he was familiar with, what he knew: the magic nearly as innate to his stone as that of wind and storms was. Giggle'd raised him to know this well.

The young King relaxed, and let the tension ease out of his shoulders.

I'm going to itch like crazy later, he thought to himself, with mild amusement. It was the sort of humor that came with dreading such an experience. If he was careful and dutiful enough, Aure could quite literally magic it all off, but... he couldn't put any credible amount of faith in himself. It was pure luck, as always, that his will was apparently strong enough to control Canis's weak reservoirs of magic.

The young King settled in deeper. He could delay in getting back up.

His wings pressed to his sides, but he tossed his head just so, dredging up the slightest, gentlest of breezes. He fiddled and fine-tuned the settings, and left it alone once he'd managed to have it ruffle his feathers mildly. It brought the stagnancy of Canis, at first, but the stirred-up air cleared.

Aure inhaled, and let out a long sigh.

... and he smiled. It was a gentle little twist at the corners of his beak, but it was significant. He'd not intended that - his small, genuine smiles - to be his private little thing, like his stolen Olympics act. No, no... that was a victim of circumstances, often out of reach. Aure still smiled and laughed, but not with as much jubilant as he might've as a down-laden child.

The world had made him grow up, was all - and he thought that he might be better for it, lying here in the comfort of his own solitude, prior patrolling sweep of Canis forgotten.

It was strange how one could be so easily distracted by magic.

Aure's ears pricked back into home position as he laid his head down with a contented sweep of his tail. In classic Bone King fashion, he was out in little more than half an hour, lying in some part of Canis - in a bed of his own making, no less.

exit