looking for heaven found the devil in me; witching

[Rodrik]

It is so very hungry. Hollowed eyes that belong to the demon searched across the meadow. It waits patiently—carefully watching each animal it can see. It searches across the multitude of bodies for the very best one—the innocent soul of them all. It feels her presence before she is even close enough. The very life of her beats like a heart, pounding with a greater force. The monstrous hunger roars out like a lion, demanding to be fed—to fill this never-ending hunger. The devil turns to the silver-bay mare, ready to devour the very existence from her earthly body. It is a predator. And she is the prey. She was answer to fill this void within its dying body. The prayer the devil has been begging for all these past years. ”Rodrik,” she mouths. It recognizes her quickly. The creature of the night could not forget about her. It could not forget about the three, its three – not Set’s three. One, two, and three. Witching, Gravely, and Reap. it had named them, called them its very own. Its flesh and soul was its own flesh and soul. “Witching,” it whispers hoarsely. The land shakes slowly at first. It then trembles like a touch of a lover during the most intimate time shared with another. The touch is gentle at first, passionate, but then there is fury—so very strong. It shakes harder, sending the devil tumbling forward, losing its balance as it tries to find its footing in all the mass. The earth cries out in fury more, the land shatters beneath the heathen. And it is falling. Falling into the darkness. --- Hunger is the first thing it craves when it opens its eyes. It is always the first thing—a need to fill the void, to survive on this earth. However, hollowed and lifeless eyes search through this land, it knows it is not where it once was. The Meadow was gone, or it was taken from the Meadow. It ponders the events, the change. There had been an earthquake. It had fallen into the darkness. Was the devil placed into another life so suddenly? It remembers all those years before—simply ripped from everything it had once known. Oh, the creature’s soul is so very hold. Yet, it couldn’t be that. It smells the familiar scents, the scent of Beqanna that are from her kingdoms and hers. It smells them, their sweet aroma. And it feels the hunger, reminding it. Survive—it must eat. The creature of the night moves forward, breathing in the air. The air is thin here; it can feel the earthly necessity for oxygen begin to kick in. The lungs of the heathen beg for more oxygen. Hunger—it pushes the demon forward—forgetting all necessity to have more air to live. It craves the essence of life itself beyond the earthly needs. Yet, it reminders it is no longer in the meadow. The devil must find out where it has been taken. It must know. It must eat. It has to survive. --- It is the hunger that drives the red devil towards the edge of the Mountain. At the very edge, sunken hollowed eyes can see everything. It sees everything that is called Beqanna—is it even called Beqanna? Everything the creature has known about this land is entirely gone. Its home is gone. Its family is gone. Its memories are gone. Everything that had kept the creature in touch with its own humanity was gone. It was torn away, taken to some other dimension that was home but not home. What sort of trick was this? It ponders. It was likely the work of the darkness; finally the darkness was taking the devil into its own hands. After all, there had been so many times the beast had turned away from its maker, its master. The red demon moves forward, taking careful steps down the side of the mountain. The air is becoming thicker. It can feel the necessity to breath again becoming easier, but still the hunger within the beast screams. It screams to be fed, to be freed from its cage. Suddenly, the hunger stops. The overwhelming feeling of peace hits. It can feel the darkness wrapped around it beginning to uncoil. Cartilage, ligaments and tendons quickly pull back together. The body of the beast quickly mends torn muscle and broken bones into one again. It screams out in pain. A raging scream echoes below the mountain. Everything that had once made the devil who it was had been stripped away. The magical barrier snatched all the magic, yanking it back into the mountain. And then an unimaginable rush of pain came to the creature’s forehead – suddenly there is a horn. It can feel an inevitable headache coming on now. The sudden physical and magical change had been demanding and tiring. The devil sighs. It can feel its body weakening, begging to lie down and find some sort of rest where it is. Where is it though? The obvious feel of rocks beneath its hooves is evident. Its once hollowed eyes, now full of bright nutmeg color and life, search from where it sounds. The meadow lies just beyond where the red devil stands in the outskirts. And then it remembers her – Witching.

Rodrik

angels banished from heaven have no choice but to become devils

character info: here | character reference: here | image © uribaani
@[Berber]

[Witching]

She is a bird, tangled up in netting. She had never learned to be cautious. She had never learned to be prey – fleshy and bloody though she is, underneath… like mother… like father – so she never learnt to be safe. She learned the touch of Two and Three, noses and knees; the quiet intonations of their tongues against the walls of their mouths. The things that make her and Two mirrors and the ways her and Three were so similar despite him being the different one.

She learned Gravely and Reap down to the fine lines on their muzzle’s velvet. She learned the prints their frogs made in the mud, and so when they were detached from orbit, she hounded them ceaseless, pulled along by all the things she knows.

(Something flutters in her chest, like wings. Primordial and beseeching. There is something not right about the exposure of his guts and musculature – his bones praying in greenish rot that has a sickening glisten to it – she knows that, faintly. Vaguely. Her nostrils quiver and tighten, and her blood pressures the twitching nerves of her own healthy muscles with the impetus to run.)

But she never learned flight.

He says her name and her ears flick forward, and she can see smoke belching towards the sky and fire. Monsters and demons and magic, all over again. She smiles, though it is as false a smile as it gets. (She never learned to show these things easily – Two and Three just know, and so her face can only create contrived imitations of things others might understand.)

“Yes.”

She moves to be closer to him (her gut knotting in a million, unnerved quakes) to inspect the strange, tugging sinews and the flat, white cartilage.‘Do you know where mother is?’ she means to ask, before the earth jerks and she is tossed off balance.

Two. Three.

-----

She screams.

In anguish.

In rage.

Screams until blood spatters her lips and her throat feels horribly raw.

“GRAVELY!”

She continues down dark passages, away – far, far away – from Her.

“REAP!”

She crosses thresholds and births again through the tight, pulsing of a canal. Without Him.

“Gravely! Reap!” She is high above, in thin and insidious air. She gyrates and shivers, her lips dry and cracking. She feels the need for them squeeze her heart too tight and she falls to her knees, again and again (in bow to something awesome and demanding), scraping them bare and open. 

She does not feel her limitlessness leech from her body – replaced by a queer impersonation of it – only their absence, more sure than it had been the first time they were separated.

-----

Fury chases her down that mountain. 

And panic. 

Loss cramps her muscles as she twists and turns, sliding down on loose stone and dirt that threaten her purchase on the descent. Down, down. Like an avalanche of meat and wild, blind thoughts, she follows the many others who have tumbled from that peak to crack like birds’ eggs on its foot.

She screams. It ravages her larynx and comes out weak and miserable.

She gets no peace. Darkness does not peel off her like it does him, relieving him of a his prison (a cell, perhaps, that he has come to love?) of undead vestments. She is weighted and confused. By and large, she is unchanged, having simply been exchanged one eternity for another.

But the rest?

The thing she loves and needs so deeply?

Gone.

They are gone. Tossed haphazardly off into deepest, darkest space. Split apart by the violent course of spacestuff – a meteor come to fracture their little galaxy. One. When she passes the righteous and unkind gate of that mountain, where the air is easier but so unimaginably changed, she stops. Dead, blinking around her, breathing heavy as her lungs satisfy themselves with the readiness of this atmosphere. Two. Three. She blinks, light-headed and filly-footed, she stumbles forwards, into alien territory.

Stumbles and blinks until she finds the naked, unbroken chestnut. The muscles, now live wires and unexposed. Her dark eyes narrow and she remembers war and a monster hurtling itself towards her…. ‘Your father, the one who calls himself Rodrik, is not to be trusted.’ She moves towards him, her legs criss-crossing and unsteady, her knees battered and smeared, dark crimson and dirt. “Rodrik?” Witching considers his cleanliness and vitality, the brightness in his eyes. “Where did you get all that skin…?”

@[Rodrik] -- sorry this took so damn long, honestly, I have a weird feeling that it kind of intimidated me <3

[Rodrik]

It – No, he. He is no longer bounded by shackles, the shackles that were fastened in the image of darkness and thousands of souls (souls that have been in the pits of hell itself for thousands of years, suffering and calling out for help). The very heart of his, once free and loving, beats slowly and steady. It feels strange and freeing to feel empty and alone – no longer the constant hunger and the cries of voices he had learned to silence so many years ago. If there was anything that felt like heaven or some sort of paradise, this would be it. This was his heaven. This was his redemption. His heart beats now to a new beat. It beats with a purpose, a deeper meaning than before. If anything is to come with this new freedom, there must be a change. Freedom always had a price to pay as it was never free—nothing was never free. The red stallion’s bright eyes search across the land. It is frantic glances here and there that he looks across from the outskirts of the meadow. Fear crawls up into the cracks of his mind, clouding his newfound feeling of peace at last. He knows this freedom will not last long. In time, but not right now, the darkness will find him again. It will consume him, chain him again. It will drag him all the way back to hell. This war was never ending. He has been fighting it for thousands of years, unknowingly he (Rodrik) is just a vessel for a soul that is old and bargained with the wrong god, the very image of darkness. This soul, nameless and forgotten from another world now, belongs to the destroyer of all things that are good. It has been and always will be a servant to the maker. But, for now, it does not cross the mind of the vessel—Rodrik. Rodrik is simply that one to carry the soul forward, to find some sort of peace within this life, and all things that the soul at one time had endeared. It had been warrior, king, and great, just as Rodrik had, still is, and will always be. Rodrik catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eyes and sees her. One. She struggles with her footing, so uneven and foal like. It reminds him of her – their – birth, the very memory is clear and crisp. She calls him, not monster, demon, murderer. Not even father. She calls him his name that he had been given at birth, the very thing his mother first called him. He considers her question, lightly though. Rodrik did not plan on dwelling on what he once was—the very thing he hated most that had consumed him. It was a darkness he should not have given in long ago, killing the stallion on the beach that night (whom he does not even know had been his half uncle through his father, Rhaego). But it is here he now is, and here he plans to stay in this way and form. “The darkness is gone,” he says softly. The words feel strange and foreign when he says them, but that is the truth (for now at least). “This is who I am,” Rodrik watches her carefully, “I am now fully flesh and blood, just the same as your flesh and blood is. This is who I always was.” Always was an understatement though. Rodrik was beyond mother than just flesh and blood. He had deeper secrets buried beyond the physical nature. There were far greater things he hide then he was ever willing to tell anyone.

Rodrik

angels banished from heaven have no choice but to become devils

character info: here | character reference: here | image © uribaani

[Set]

" There's a black bird perched outside my window, I hear him calling. I hear him sing. He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers. He sees all my sins. He reads my soul. "

Oh. It is too rich. Too perfect. It is sickly metallic on his tongue, this wondrous kismet.

He is the prodigal just in time for the world to shift. With a shudder, a low moan, she had twisted them all into struggling chaos; broke off pieces of what they had thought they had known and then jumbled them together and rearranged them until they knew themselves but could not recognize one another. Or was it the other way around? The magic had leached from him not long after he'd set foot on home soil and though the principle of its absence - he had fought and fought hard for the powers he'd once wielded - irks like salt in an unfamiliar wound, his magicks would be his again. There is an ease to his arrogance, a self-confidence one cannot help but notice, perhaps grudgingly admire, here in the arch of his neck, the direct gaze.

It's this same yellow-gold gaze that's hung on the red stallion's frame, made whole and hearty again by the shift in magical tides. Rodrik. By all regards, a nemesis, the sentiment ground home by the creature's treatment of Set's bloodlines. For a moment, his vision narrows, the edges darkening and drawing together. His tail wrings, lashing smartly at his hindquarters, once, twice, again before falling still. A flicker of movement draws his focus wider. Witching. The silver bay steals closer to her father, knock-kneed and wide-eyed - much like the first time he'd set eyes on his great-grandchild. As he slips forward, strides long and sure over unfamiliar terrain, he wonders if she remembers him, his name the first sound to touch her lips.

"Likely he made another deal with the devil," he inserts, drawing near his blood at Rodrik's reply, eyes held steady to Rodrik's. It is, no doubt, the work of their homeland's recent ... changes, but the piebald takes simple pleasure in digging at his enemy. Petty, perhaps, but pleasurable nonetheless. In a brief glance, he gathers in Witching's appearance, disheveled and lost as she is. He offers her the crook of a smile, warm in spite of the steel behind his eyes, looking back to Rodrik but still addressing her. "Rodrik enjoys making deals." His grin widens, taking on a sinister light just for him, the knowledge that once the devil-stallion had made a bargain involving Talos and Reap's life held in the gaze that clashes with Rodrik's. "Don't you?" Despite not knowing the complete truth - there had not been time to glean all the information - his stare does not falter, the accusation in his voice unmistakable.

Moments pass. He snorts, suddenly. "It is perhaps who he always was ... but it won't be all he will ever be," he spits. His confidence in the eventual return of his magic meant that Rodrik would one day be cursed again. His eyes narrow, remembering Nocturnal's stench, her body turned to carrion so unnaturally soon following the birth of her triplets.

SET

alliance champion, once king, magician

[Witching]

She eyes the bright, red skin, taut (like perfection – like hers, indeed, except by all rights, she would never look as he had; her own flesh is timeless and her own clock without hands, though she does not know this yet) over bones, now hiding their modesty. It seems to her his reasoning rings fair (though his darkness she does not know – or does not know to recognize it), she cannot recall if he had been tatters and rags the day he had named the three of them in succession, and touched them each with some pride, so she accepts that his rot had been a passing phase. She does not know his heaven, either. That this wreckage could be a firmament for him is lost on her, because she feels no different, only that she is indelibly separated and the hurt burns deep. She is too single-minded to read into the brightness in his eyes, to find that in that nutmeg and glint, there is freedom.

He had loosed himself, from his shackles and his ancient, long-braved darkness.

She has only lost. And because his eyes are not Two or Three’s, she does not understand them enough to celebrate with him.

“Oh,” she tucks her misgivings in the back of her mind (after all, neither Two or Three are red… at least, not on the outside), and considers that he (no longer so nauseating) could be just who she needs. “We have to find Two and Three,” she says, not softly but firmly (perhaps a forwardness that comes from being One) and moves towards him, indifferent to the pain in her torn-up knees, to herd him back to the Meadow, where last she had been with them (and so foolishly wandered away to chase that stench). 

Until he comes and she is stilled again by memories that bite and bark.

He had come to them like fury. He smelled like war – what would have been gunpowder on his skin anywhere else, was smoke and ash and magic bent for violence here – she had blinked up at him, as cremains fell from his shoulders and back in a bellow that settled in the blood and dirt and lifelessness that welcomed them to earth. And since mother had perished once again, just as soon as Three slipped from between her legs – never meant to last, just to labour for their gestation and birth – it was they she imprinted on in her stead. Two. Three.

‘Set.’ 

And to this day it tastes like treachery on her tongue. The first thing to worm into her soft, young brain. Mistrust. She had been so welcoming to it, as he no doubt had planned (and hoped) for. Witching has picked it up from him in fat fists and considered it, turning it over and over in her babe’s mind until she thought she had a grasp of it. Thought it could not possibly be a lie, because who would lie to babes, still damp? 

“Set,” she mumbles, tilting her head at him, blinking.

(Before it had been ablaze and a roar it had been such quiet, warmed-up peace. It had been the strange, hobbled rocking of reanimated flesh, a place made just for them, One, Two and Three. A galaxy unto its own, with three planets in orbit around a blue and oxygenless heart.

And then came Set. 

And Rodrik.

Welcome.)

“Darkness?” she questions, and devil and it becomes one. One big thing that she does not know, but suddenly feels as if she grasps. An image of sinew torn and split down the spine, dancing around two heaps of skinless meat, with formless darkness in waltz. She turns back to her father – his living eyes and the blood-quenched muscles beneath his skin; much like her – “what does Set mean, Rodrik?” There returns that air of wariness – an insidious and rotten thing her great-grandfather had planted deep in fertile soil those many years ago – and she once again considers the bolts of beautiful, glossy pelt, with narrowed, dark eyes.