"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
10-12-2018, 05:45 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 11:19 PM by North.)
I'm going to stay alone, without songs nor skin,
as in a tunnel, where the very silence goes crazy and kills itself - - - -
The forest is crowded. It comes as a shock to her that the birdsong is swallowed by chatter and laughter-- she had not expected it to be so loud here. But there must be quiet spots to be found, with enough patience. With this thought she steps further into the forest, heedless of what danger might lurk in its depths.
She pushes deeper and deeper until the shadows grow thick and a religious sort of hush settles over the landscape. There is a certain sanctity to the space that old trees inhabit, a knowing calm that can never really be understood- but it can at least be grasped at in the pause between inhale and exhale.
In a clearing riddled with leaves, where the sun breaks its way through in hazy rays of light, the silver bay stands with her eyes closed and she breathes. Time was never hers to catch and to hold, but she can and does extend the precious moments she has, diving deep into the stillness between heartbeats.
On the outside, it looks as though she is at peace.
How long have you been standing here, little translucent one? Are your knees aching? Are you swaying with the weight of waiting? Has your heartbeat stilled along with the rustling of the long-gone leaves? There are no crowds now - no shiver of souls, no loquacious laughs or humming hymns. It is quiet, it is still, it is the blanket of winter being thrown over your skull. (Can you breathe? Do you panic? Is the weight of silence over your aura too much to bear?) Everything has been swallowed now – can you tell? Have you noticed the sweep of shadow over those now-barren trees? You are in the belly of the best – in the heart of the reaching trees, breathing the too-sharp air of the lungs of winter, tasting the metallic tang that the air now holds.
Do you feel him before he comes? Is the peace you created a fallacy of full of fault lines? (Perhaps it was just a look of yours– an attempt to show the world that you are not a wisp of woman, that you are collected and calm; an altogether being who is quite alright in the depth of these woods. Do you feel the ripple of the world rasped open? Do you feel Beqanna and Her gasp of no as he steps back into her terra again? Or are you simply at peace in this moment – obvious to the ominous about to unfold?
No, my little luminous lady- time was never yours to hold. Will you scramble to grasp those satin strings of seconds, North? Will you open your eyes to panic in the past that has been, the moments that have passed while your eyes have ben closed? Will you mull the month that has coalesced into now?
There are too many questions, where there should be none. And yet, there is one more: “What are you waiting for?” He wills (but does not pry open) your eyes to see. He wants you to see. He wants you to simmer in the seconds that have slipped away – it is winter now, no longer a land of low-lying leaves, but a land preparing for flakes to fall. What have you missed? For what were you waiting?
"The moon once pulled blood from me.
Now I pull silver."
North does not feel at home in the forest. She needs room to run and the sun on her back. She needs salt water in her mane and sand in her teeth and the constant presence of something without end. She needs the ocean. Or at least she did before she died.
Here it is claustrophobic and dark and smells of moss and damp earth. She should hate it, but... she doesn't. Her hooves shift and settle into the ground. It is easy to imagine how quickly the forest would grow around her if she remained motionless. A year? Three?
Her eyes are still closed.
(she's remembering sea kelp green and calcium white and the taste of her blood filling the water around her. She's remembering so clearly the exact moment she died. The rest of her life felt like a hazy misremembered dream in comparison. (Dying? Now that's living.) The world turns to pain pain pain and we fade to black and
3- 2- 1-
she's remembering sea kelp green and calcium white and the taste of her bloo-)
A bell tolls. "What are you waiting for?"
The voice echoes as though it's traveled very far to reach her. Awareness rushes back and the first think she feels is that it is cold, cold enough to cut. Next comes the caution of a wild animal-- the body tensing, the senses sharpening.
She blinks once, twice. "Whatever the forest would bring me." She looks him in the eye then, and he reminds her of the creature that killed her. The hair on her spine stands on end, and she is not certain if it is with cold, or fear, or thrill.
"You, I guess." When she suddenly bares her teeth in a grin, she looks less like a lamb and more like a wolf.
01-07-2019, 07:23 PM (This post was last modified: 01-22-2019, 12:15 PM by Eight.)
no matter what they say, I am still the king
Could you ever feel at home anywhere? That word is such a brazen thing: home. A permanent place, unchanging and solid. Home is a bleeding and broken place- a place meant to seep into your bones and wreak havoc on your soul. You seem to say that home is more the ocean; an endless monster with a wet tongue licking at your feet. Home is the sun, riding the curves of your back. Is that what settles you right into comfort? Do you not remember the nights of storms; the waves sucking you under, froth in your nostrils and filling your lungs? Do you not remember the sun stinging your skin, parching your tongue until it swells like as slug?
So you do. Remember, that is. You remember somewhere in that skull, the black soup of blood that was once the sea. You remember something about the end, about the beginning.
And here you are. Ready and waiting - not just for anything - but for him. Perhaps it’s an aching, a reckoning that you want to rewind again and again and again. That siphon of light from your life; a vacuum of death in that place you once revealed as home. How does it feel to be betrayed? It is a distasteful thing; a feeling you won’t soon forget - steeped with slicing hurt, roiling rage, the question of why. But oh is it thrilling. It is sinking into that murk of absinthe, that feeling that you are no longer in control, but it makes you feel so damn alive.
Is He the place you once called home? He is the wave that is gently sucking at your feet, dribbling sand from underneath your hooves, grain by grain. He is the tide that shines gifts up onto your shore, presents from the moon to you, seaglass and shells and scuttling creatures. He is the sun that is gently tickling down your spine, sending a flood of luminescence throughout your bones. He is the wind that is plucking at your mane, bringing to you the salt sweet smell of the shore.
He is the wave that is throttling over your skull, something you cannot break through. He is the current that is pulling you down down down, away from your last breath and look of the land (which feels like a universe away). He is the sun that is slowly filtering into a pinhole, winking goodbye from above. He is the wind that rolls the waves over and over, sealing you in your tomb.
You could be a wolf - A lamb - A wolf in sheep's clothing. But you will never be alive like that again. You could be a delicate lamb, a dastardly wolf, a disguised wolf in sheep's clothing. But you will never quite be prepared for Him coming into your world. He; for whom the bell tolls.
“You were waiting somewhere else.”
He steps closer, His hooves should cause a crunch over the frost, but it is quiet, an envelope of silence, akin to holding your head deep under water.
His nose tips slightly upwards, nostrils flaring once as He inhales deeply. “Somewhere more brackish than here.” Closer, still. “And yet, here you are, ready and waiting for me.”
∞
and now the storm is coming, the storm is coming in
North is somewhat repulsed and somewhat captivated by the stranger before her. She wants to step closer and farther away at the same time and so, naturally, she stays exactly where she is. Motionless as a doe.
He speaks of things he has no business knowing-- where she was, what she was doing (dying, or remembering dying, and what's the difference anyway so let's just call it plain dying-- dying over and over again) and the words are grating to hear for someone who so adores her privacy. She tries, oh how she tries, to fake it till you make it, but she thinks that she can't quite fake calm right now, so she scrambles for something else. Something like steel. She might find it. She finds something. "Tell me something I don't know." She does not smile (is there anything as crude as a smile) but the edge of her eyes seem to crinkle in laughter.
North never much liked magic, never liked feeling like she was standing at the frayed edges of reality, of something. As Beqanna grew wild around her, colorful and strange, she stood very quiet and very still as though if she were patient enough she could eventually go unnoticed. And for a time, she did. But every wild thing has a heart that won't stop beating until it's dead. And hers keeps going (thu-thunk, thu-thunk, oh strange machine) louder and louder like knocking on a door, like pounding on a coffin, until he says "And yet, here you are, ready and waiting for me"-- and a hush falls..
It seems, for a sliver of a second, that not even the earth breathes. The moment is gone so quickly that later she will wonder-- for days, she will wonder-- if it happened at all. She raises her chin, a simple gesture that should be defiant, but the effect is more like a kneel. She thinks she'll probably never win with him, but she sure as hell won't ever stop trying.
"Who are you." She feels taught as a bowstring with his nearness, but her voice does not waver.
n . o . r . t . h what if I want to go devil instead? Bow
down to the madness that makes me
There is the in-between; a frozen universe where you are uncertain which way to step (which way is safest). There is that dangerous caw, warning you to go no further (He is darkness, He is blight). There is that sweet siren call (He is sanctuary, He is raw). Which way points true North when the universe lets you go?
You are naked in his eyes – your fake folly, your rapid scramble to maintain a smooth surface – it is all ribbons to him. You are so easy to untie, to stretch out across those planks, your moods as clear as the summer sky. But my, my, He too can play along. Your cascade of steel (a small shot at redemption, at freeing yourself from this trap that He so delicately lays at your bare feet) – He will see it through, He will pretend as if you are not stepping so willingly into the rest of your life. He will tell you many things that you do not know, my wayward compass.
That stretch of time yawns on – the waves of your future cresting overandover your lithe silver skin. How long has it been? Has He stopped the cosmos for you to ponder? Has the quiet rushed into your ears? Time is a luscious thing, and when it stops, you can feel the prickling your skin, the steady bump of your heart to your ribs, that ebb and flow of consciousness. How long as it been, little North? Has it been long enough for you to decide? (If that is what you could call what He has given you – a decision. As though, you were waiting for one.)
You speak again – the cracks of time filling with your steady voice (a challenge? An assurance? A false security?) The air thrums with what He is about to give you – your future, your conclusion, His name. “Eight.” An endless serpent, a mercurial thing that can escape and mold into anything, an ever reaching infinity. “And you are North – exactly the direction I was looking for.” He comes to you, his dark body a ship cresting that ever foreboding wave. He reaches, eyes downward (so close to you now that He must avert his gaze to still see your shining skin below him), dark maw reaching down to graze your forehead – what will you see what He touches you? What will you see?
