"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
This place is where it all went wrong. Or rather, it is where she went after it all went wrong - when her happy-ever-after became Hell. And oh, how ironic it was that her happy-ever-after was Hell (a demon lady ripping and tearing her up for an eternity, but also loving her, teaching her, breaking and rebuilding her). This place is where she was spat out and discarded. This river is where she looked up by the reflection of the water below and saw the billions of stars that once carpeted her home. Their home. Their place of worship and torture and devotion. Their palace of monsters.
She shouldn’t be here.
But her mind is a broken thing. She goes back to the place it broke hoping to retrace her steps on where it all went wrong, hoping to fix it. Because she can’t go on until she does. It won’t work, of course. Impossibilities cannot become reality on willpower alone. She knows this, she does (doesn’t she?).
She shouldn’t be here, but it’s like a pleasant dream to be here again. The summer air is plump and warm and makes her sleepy, even as she’s pushing through the cattails to the water beyond. The dark makes her obvious with her crimson red glow about her (makes her look like the devil Herself - maybe she is), but she pays it less mind each and every day. Besides, this night is quiet and still. She will be alone, she thinks, and that suits her just the same.
10-10-2018, 12:35 AM (This post was last modified: 10-10-2018, 12:35 AM by woolf.)
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
It never fails to surprise him how truly, deeply boring the common lands can get—especially at night.
He watches without seeing, although there is not much for him to see. His eyes nearly glaze over with it, the emerald of them turning as hard as stone, muscles atrophying beneath the muscles. He stands there, in the darkness, for minutes, and then hours, and it would become days had she not come. But she does and the dust falls from him as his muscles twitch, the motion cracking the veneer that coats him.
His mulberry head, stained darker than the rest of him, angles toward her, eyes focusing.
It is not every day that you see a demon.
His interest piqued, the magician moves from the shadows, letting them fall away from him, curling as tangible things, rippling like disturbed curtains before shaking closed once more. His steps are silent but he doesn’t bother to hide his approach from her, although he could if really wished. Instead, he takes a wider path to cut her off, letting her see his slow, steady approach, each step as sure as the next.
When he arrives, he says nothing at first. Instead he studies her, practically looks through her with a gaze that is cool, aloof, and yet burning bright with star fire. She is more than something. She is entirely different and his mind sharpens with interest, wanting to pull her apart and study all of the threads that make her up, studying each individual strand to understand all of the pieces that fold inside of her.
Was she born this way?
Was she born at all? Or merely molded from the dust and stars?
The questions burn in the back of his throat, a rare excitement building in his chest but he doesn’t give them life just yet, doesn’t voice them into reality. Instead he just waits, wondering how she’ll react.
The water is littered with stars stuck fast to its surface, blinking away the night as it spins on around them. She’s gazing at them (something she should not do, in a place she should not be), her reflection blotting out a Zosma-shaped slice of the heavens. There is an odd feeling that rises in the roiling depths of her stomach, a disquiet that comes from being so close to the stars that are so far away in reality. So far away that there is no hope of ever returning to them. So far away that she will never again feel her own flesh searing off by her proximity to the sun. So far away that she will be grounded here, as a mockery of the Fallen.
A stranger in a strange land that she used to call home.
It is not all so bleak, she knows. She may forever walk this earth feeling like a piece of herself is missing (not missing, even, merely lost in space), but there are pursuits to be had here, too. There are wondrous things, miraculous things, in this place they’ve named Beqanna. There are the power struggles of nations, the rising and toppling of dynasties. There are secrets that spread through the land like her shadows, shaping the lives in unimaginable ways. There are beautiful women – and men – that she finds in those same shadows. But pursuits of the flesh never hold her attention for too long. Most are afraid of her, besides. She only needs an anchor to tether her so she does not continue drifting out of reach. She only needs to get away from this godforsaken water.
Movement like molasses, sure and steady, catches in the corner of her eyes.
He’d been coming on slowly, but the demoness had only cared about the water and the stars it held. Now, she looks up from her guilty post to watch his approach. Zosma watches him watching her with an inscrutable gaze. She’s used to the staring but not the silence that follows. Usually there are questions, usually there is Fear. Occasionally, there is shouting and damning and running away.
She likes when they run best of all.
But this one with his air of indifference makes her feel vulnerable, somehow. The longer the silence lasts, she feels more and more like he is making his own assumptions, cataloguing her in a way he has no right to do. She wants to wait him out but she inevitably finds herself unable to hold her tongue.
“A gentleman might simply ask,” she chides, though it is all bullshit. She wonders if he’ll see right through it. The scaled woman makes no other moves yet. If his intentions are any less than desirable, she’ll be happy to separate his head from his neck with the fangs that poke out of her parted mouth. He’s a handsome thing (for a man), she realizes, as her opal eyes quickly glance over his mulberry coat and feathered feet. In her experience, handsome men could be trusted the very least.
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
He, too, has spent a considerable amount of time with his head tipped back to the stars.
He has watched how they spin and clash, how they spiral apart and away from one another, opening up entire chasms between them all. He has watched how they breed black holes, swallowing entire galaxies in the blink of an eye. He lived there, once. His sister and him took to the stars with family in wake, drawing upon their connection to one another, to this land, to their ever-increasing family. They had shielded them from the worst of the war, taking the ones they were most concerned about and grabbing a few other souls—but then they had over-extended themselves. So certain of their power, they had reached for the sun and felt it snap beneath their fingers, sending them spinning off into nothingness.
He dreams of it still, the quiet, the blank, the crushing gravity.
Such things press into his chest now, a strange weight he swallows around.
When she does speak, he finds he is surprised that she is capable of it. His heavy head tilts to the side and he considers her with his emerald gaze, his eyes piercing from beneath the mulberry of his forelock. He had not thought she could speak—not at first. He had simply assumed she was carved of the earth and the stars and something decidedly different, something darker and earthier and beyond. It drags a curiosity that always simmering just beneath the surface, causes him to quirk a corner of his somber mouth.
“You already know that I am no gentleman,” he says, a line that may be charming in the right mouth but falls flat from him. He has no ability to charm, no ability to coax a smile from companions in this type of setting. He’s never tried. Never wanted to. “My name is Woolf.” His eyes match the name, predatory and dark and hungry for more, although it’s unclear just what he wants from the encounter.
10-23-2018, 01:22 PM (This post was last modified: 10-23-2018, 01:23 PM by Zosma.)
even monsters are made of stardust
This night feels different than the others.
Even if much is the same (her inert ritual of worship and longing under a cloudless sky), there is something wholly unique about tonight. As the cool air of fall whispers through the leaves and twines around the black and scaly pillars of her legs, Zosma feels the change. She is surprised to find, too, that she is agreeable to it. This night will be the fatal blow to her wasted time spent staring at their unhearing heavens. This night she will turn from the water, turn from her indifferent master and do something she should have done a long time ago.
Tonight she will move on.
In part, she believes, because of this mulberry stranger with his own quiet apathy. Perhaps he reminds her of her Lady in this way. The manifestation of her demoness finally brought down to her, to her lowly level here on earth. It makes her want to punish him for it, to carve out all of her anger and frustration in lines of violence on his skin. Lines of words and pleas and prayers she’s said over and over in her mind. Can you hear me now, Kangaroo? But of course, she’s not listening. She’s never listening, and a bloody sacrifice in her name will make no difference.
You already know that I am no gentleman. “Do I?” She asks, instead of ripping him apart, watching the way his head tilts to take her in further. Like he is still magnifying her, bringing her into better focus. There is revelation brightening in his eyes that she means to capitalize on. See if he underestimates her again. “I don’t know a single thing about you.”
Finally, finally, she pulls herself away from the river because what she says is true.
Zosma places deliberate steps over the firmer mud of the banks, bringing herself nearer to the stallion. As she draws close, his features come alive in the same way that hers’ must for him. Her own red glow washes over him and makes the hollows behind his shoulder and below his hip darker with shadows. “I don’t know if I want to,” she says, even as she’s tracing the lines of his body and then his face with her wide opal eyes. My name is Woolf.“Do I?” She echoes again, her voice dark and deep like tar.
There’s potential energy humming in the air between them, like together they are tilting precariously on a precipice, ready to fall one way or the other. She’s never met anyone like him here in this plane of existence. Even in their few instants of time together, she senses his Otherness. It reminds her of the stars she’s just banished from her heart, her future. But how can she resist a brush with them right in front of her in the flesh?
Flicking her forked tail against her haunch in a cat-like gesture, the demon looks away into the night-gloom. She wants to know everything, truthfully, and she’s sure it is written all over her face. When she turns back to Woolf, she tries to look as aloof as he had at first. “Is that what you want, my name?” Shadows snake up her legs then, thin tendrils at first that widen as they encircle her. There is power in knowing a name, she’s learned, but surely that’s not all he means to collect tonight.
bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
He’s not sure if he’s ever met anyone like her before either, although he doesn’t dwell on such thoughts too much. She is fashioned like a demon but otherwise has little about her that speaks to demonic qualities. She appears thoughtful, measured, reserved, and he finds that he can appreciate such things, watching her with a cool gaze, studying her and taking her apart with an unabashed stare. He’s never felt the need to apologize for his curiosity, for the constant thirst of knowledge that scratches at the back of his throat, and he’s not going to start now. Instead, he hungrily watches her, soaking up every detail.
“Very few know anything about me,” he says simply. He hasn’t ever opened himself up for it. The only soul on this earth who could claim to know what lay beneath his surface was his twin, brilliant and sharp and cruel in her own right. She dug hungry, greedy fingers into him and lay claim to everything that lie below the surface. Not that he attempted to keep them from her. After all, she was as much his as he was hers and trying to shield something from her felt as unnatural as segmenting his own mind.
But she is not here now and he leaves her in the back of his mind, instead focusing on the demon woman before him. “You would probably be wise to stay among the masses.” He wasn’t particularly cruel, and he didn’t necessarily hunger for destruction, but he also couldn’t be bothered to shield others, protect them.
His gaze flickers to her tail, forked and alien, before they drift to the shadows that curl up her legs. He tilts his head in thought, taking the metaphorical blade to his flesh and splitting open his shoulder. The blood flows more freely as he calls upon his own magic, letting the darkness sizzle as it crawls up him in kind, mirroring her own tendrils. He contemplates it for a moment, and then ignores it, letting the ropes of the darkness wind around his limbs. He brings his gaze back up to her face, searching it for a moment.
“To start.” A wolfish, predatory tilt of lip. “I want a great deal more.”
