[mature] how time twines around your neck; lepis

[Elektrum]

He has spent lifetimes watching it play out.
Rewinding and replaying every moment in a constant loop.

There she is again, nearly lost in torrents of whirling snowflakes that exist only to die by the heat of her skin as they settle on the planes of her body like they belong. He counts them sometimes, as they collect, when he has watched for the thousandth time and can’t think of anything better to recollect about those final unyielding seconds. There are as many of them as there are reasons she should hate him; a conclusion he has reached without a crippling remorse.

Sometimes when he is watching he thinks of ways he could have won her.

Most times, he thinks of the ways he can ruin her still — lets her rejection coat him, thick and black as tar, writhes in it until he suffocates, again and again and again. He drinks it down like poisoned wine, and when he is finished and his tongue is burning and his insides are festering, pours another glass.

Perhaps it is his biggest flaw, the way his pride consumes him; how he fixates on any deemed assault to his own ego.

It is of no surprise then, that he finds her.

That he has been watching, licking his septic wounds from the purple-black shadows of all the worlds he knows without her. Waiting, biding his time as her sides grew round and ripe in the comfort of her newly found haven. He is ready now, his scabs freshly peeled with the knowledge of her latest lover, to rekindle their unequivocal passion as it were.

“You’re not welcome here.”

Oh, and he remembers how much she had meant it as a twisted smirk curls up the ends of his lips, and he appears at the edge of a wild stream.

“Try and stop me.” 
He says it aloud, to the trees perhaps, because there is no one to hear him.
Yet.


@[Lepis] :| Oops.

[Lepis]

There is still a smile on my face as I crest the green hill, remembering the sound of Pteron's laughter as he tumbled over in the grass. The smile remains even when I see the stallion, but it grows still, as immobile as the sudden marble of my muscle.

How is he here? Why?

At my side, the boy disappears, and one stormy grey eye watches the grass fold down in a colt shaped indent. It was his instinct as much as fawn's is to lie still, I have found, and I have never been more grateful for it as I sidestep a conveniently placed boulder and continue forward toward him.

"This still counts as Loess." I tell him, knowing that it really doesn't, not without the formalities, but betting on the fact that he does not know this. Gods do not have time for such petty mortal things like alliances and treaties and oaths of loyalty. Or so I hope.

"Why. Why..." Words fail me for a moment, an uncommon occurrence, and it takes each bit of strength in my still round figure to keep from looking at the hill where I know my young son is hiding. "Why are you here? Go somewhere else. Surely there's a world with no plague."

@[Elektrum]
you can take that to the bank
:|

[Elektrum]

She comes just as he knew she would.

The sight of her cresting the hill beyond the stream is one he finds familiar, as though he’s already been here, done this before (and, perhaps, in another timeline he has — he has found it difficult to keep track lately). The vague curiosity that he harbors regarding this particular circumstance, however, is fleeting. There’s a smile on her face that reminds him of sunlight, but somehow makes him feel darker for having seen it here and the weight of that emotion alone is enough to draw him from whatever introspection he had been lost in.

There’s something else, too.

A child — plastered to her side until it isn’t, until it vanishes. Instantly he can feel the hot prickle of betrayal surge beneath his skin. A god, he will wonder, not seeing the trails in the grass and thinking perhaps it is his own creation that she has kept from him. As she moves towards him, alone now, he is watching the smile die on her lips and is grateful for it. He will be the one to do the wounding here.

“This still counts as Loess,” she says, near enough for him to smell the sweat on her skin that tangles in the air with something more fragrant, honeysuckle maybe. She doesn’t acknowledge the smaller being that she had been with, and he settles back onto his heels and for a moment is quiet. He’ll let her pretend she has come alone.

For now.

“Lepis,” he addresses her, the dark smile growing larger on his lips. His eyes flash in a dangerous way, like he knows how this interaction ends. Maybe he does.

“You must mistake me for someone who kneels to you.” The sentence is telling enough. Before he had been polite enough to leave her past alone, but since the meadow, since their rendezvous in the stars he had grown increasingly less patient. He’d played the reels and seen it all. Here before him she is naked, her truth laid bare.

“And while you do leave me trembling, I can confidently assure you it’s not in fear.”

That much is true, at least, though he can’t decide if the tension wringing through his body is erotic or simply wrathful in nature. Before this encounter there had been moments where he had wondered if he would regret become this, whatever this is. Quicker than he’d known himself, however, he had been placated by the notion that he could erase and abandon what he did not like. The moral dilemma became somewhat ambivalent and convoluted, and he had found himself leaning into the chaos instead of away from it.

He has always found the lines somewhat blurry, anyways.

“Why are you here? Go somewhere else. Surely there’s a world with no plague.”
Of course he knows about the contagion. It had brought his meadow games to a screeching halt, replacing beautiful bodies with xylophone ribs and sharp, jutting hips. Too self-involved to have such catastrophe fall across himself he had abandoned his playing field in search of new entertainment, and Lepis had been a fresh wound for him. Unluckily for her, he’s not one who grows tired of a sport quickly. After all, he’d held Atlantia for years in a beautiful cell of his own creation. Had he let her free when he’d grown bored? He doesn’t remember, and again, the guilt does not cripple him.

There is a moment after she speaks where he thinks to lie and tell her he must stay, that his magic is drained, and force her to accept him into her world for as long as the plague gives him reasonable excuse to. The idea is quelled quickly, however, when he realizes the lie itself would mean admitting a weakness and that alone is something he finds himself unable to compromise on. He is a god, after all, omnipotent and unstoppable.

“Thousands of them, millions to be sure. I could show you.”

There’s a second, dangerous flash of his eyes. He braces himself for the venom to follow in her words. Her answer won’t wound him this time, barbed and prickly as he is in this moment.

The moment he comes to collect what is his.

@[Lepis]

[Lepis]

There is a flush of fear, cold and familiar, at the sound of my name on his lips. I have known, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I would have to face him again. Foolishly, I had thought it would be years from now. I had let myself believe that a god had better things to do than bother with someone like me. He had gotten what he wanted of me and I had done my best to remain unmemorable. Surely he’d had a thousand mares in the time since.

‘you must mustake me for someone who kneels to you’, he says

No one kneels to me, I think. Not here. Not anymore.

Here I am no one; here I live a paused life. My time in the brilliant pampas has thus far been like some sort of dream. Spring is warm and grazing is plentiful; there are no dangers. I know the world spins on outside this little herd land that Noah possesses, but I have thought little of it since my arrival. The arrival of the golden stallion and his harsh words is an abrupt shock, one that I still struggle to process even after he finishes speaking. The danger in his eyes dulls my tongue and amplifies the thunder of my heart.

It would be easiest to become docile.

I am more likely to survive if I give him what he wants.

These are rules that I had nearly forgotten, awareness that comes along with a twinge of phantom pain in my once-broken wing. But there is a stronger ache, one that is far more real, one that reminds me there is a little boy not terribly far away, and that I cannot leave him. It reminds me that I have priorities beyond my own survival.

“Go find one then.” I reply, my reply firm but without venom. I am doubtful (exceedingly so) that this tactic might work, and so I reach for the threads of emotion that bind my magic. It has been some time since I used them. I’d had no need to, not when happiness was the only thing I felt and there was no sadness or fear to cover up.

No fear until now, anyway. I’m not sure how effective I might be against something omnipotent, but I am willing to try.

[Elektrum]

elektrum

how time twines around your neck

There are better things to think about instead of the snow as it died on her skin that day.

Of course there are, but again and again in his mind all he sees are snowflakes (melting, as quickly as her opinion of him had). There are galaxies named for him. There are worlds upon worlds upon worlds that he owns, that he is king of, but here he is ensnared in the faltering opinion of one small, ruined woman. There are better things to think about instead of how the clouds of her breath had rolled out into the empty air alongside her even emptier threats, but he can’t remember them. There are better moments that he could choose to live for, but they all elude him in these ones.

Instead of leaving his eyes flit toward the empty spaces the child had been last; his child, it is likely enough — his. The imagery of taking her between the stars still burns in his mind, not because it was particularly remarkable lain out in comparison, but because of how raw, and dark, and animalistic he had felt. Like the sex was not about her at all. Like it had been about greed, about power — about taking what was owed to him (what he deserved). He didn’t like to leave them with children when he was finished (tiny tokens of his forgotten affections; things they didn’t deserve to keep of him), and so now he is wondering if he ought to take this one back.

If it would hurt her the way he wants her to hurt.
If it would make him feel big again.

“Go find one then,” she says, speaking of worlds with a placidity that he never expects.

She’s playing dead because she’s clever, more so than he will ever give her credit for. And she’s right. He should go find another world, another timeline that exists where he is perhaps not so coldly motivated (Maybe one exists where her eyes won’t look so dead when they meet his). He should, but can’t.

Won’t perhaps.

What is it about her then that drives him to stand so close to the edge of obsession? She isn’t beautiful, or at least not in the ways that he is accustomed to it; hers is not the face to launch a thousand ships, the one that men would burn cities for (if only though he knew). It isn’t because she’s clever, though she is admittedly the smartest creature he has come upon in some time. Perhaps it’s her own ability to not let ruin have her, even if it has every reason to. Perhaps he admires the way she keeps her head above water, even when he (and all that he is)cannot.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with her at all, only timing (and poor, where she is concerned).

“No,” comes the answer off his tongue, as firm as she had been, and when his eyes square up with her own at last she might think the. They don’t betray him, even as a nagging doubt, unavoidable and unshakeable, is rousing now in his mind. It tells him he is making the wrong choices, again and again and again. It worries that everything about these moments are wrong, all wrong, and a feeling quite foreign to Elektrum begins to take root nestled among his innards.

He should know already, but he hasn’t caught on to her little trick. So, agitated with his own internal conversations his ears fall back against his skull, lost in a mound of silver forelock. It will look to her like impatience, but in reality it is something far worse as he digs in his heels and his resolve becomes as strong as his will. For a moment he disappears; every particle of him removed from this plane of earth into the next.

Let her think she has fooled him.
Let her think he doesn’t know.

Let her have a moment to breathe.
Let her think that she has changed his mind.

And when he reassembles behind her, his breath will spill out hot against her right flank and the ends of his lips will curl up in a smile that will save her to not witness.

“You made me a promise. I’ve come to collect.”

@[Lepis]

[Lepis]

I wait, with only the thud of my heart to remind me that an eternity is not passing as I do. I grasp the thread of my magic tighter, weaving a thousand simple strands into a barrier, donning them in a cloak I have not worn since I fled Sylva. In the woods, I had never taken it off: always defensive, always on edge, always waiting. It feels foreign in this paradise of a land, but as I feel it settle around me it is with a still-familiar weight, a reminder of how freeing it is to feel nothing at all.

My emotion is on the outside and my mind is clear, so when Elektrum refuses with a single word I am more than prepared.

I expect an attack from the set of his pinned ears, the darkness in his eyes, and the tension in my wings loosens without conscious thought: ready to flare or flee or fight.

And then he is gone.

“Wha…” The word isn’t fully formed before he is back, moved behind me in an impossible way that might have surprised me more a month ago. (These days I have an invisible son, and turning toward wherever he reappears have become second nature).

He’s visible only with the edge of my wide vision, but the heat of his breath is enough to pinpoint his location.

Enough to give me a target.

The kick isn’t especially powerful – I have little range to draw back – but my hoof is not the only thing I send toward him. The same heady mix of fear and panic that I’ve drawn from within me sails toward him as well, as intangible as his thousand worlds.

With my feet under me again I spin to face him, wings half-flared and my ears lost in the frosted tangle of my blue mane.

“Go Away!” I repeat, the meekness of our first meeting replaced with the calm of pseudo-sociopathy.

ooc: okay this was terrible and i’m sorry D:
@[Elektrum] @[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

My dreams have all come true

Traveling back from Nerine had not been a quick enough venture. Along with his the ache in his wings, Wolfbane could inherently feel a pressure concerning his family and wife. It grew as he paused for a moment in Loess, building into an urgency that sped him on through the territory he and Lepis knew as home, causing him to lather in sweat as the final few hills smoothed out into the Pampas.

He was worried; being too complacent about the wellbeing of horses who depended on his protection had clouded Bane’s usually devoted thoughts. In the balance he’d put the horses who depended on his loyalty, his sometimes aggressive leadership, first. For a moment he’d struggled - let himself slip - now he needed to remember: kingdom before self, but never before family.

With all that had gone sour and somehow sweet at the same time, Lepis and Pteron remained steadfast. Not once had their patriarch doubted the level of trust he and his wife shared. She would protect their son first, above everything, and in the end that’s what concerned her husband most. Of all the horrible possibilities just waiting to happen, the Pirate Lord never believed Lepis would abandon her commitments …

… and he could’ve never imagined what waited for him on the passing breeze. A foreign, heady scent assaulted his nose, brought by the sea to stop Wolfbane dead in his tracks. He’d been navigating steadily onwards, searching the places his mate frequented and having come downwind, now found himself conflicted by the obvious smell of another male mingling with hers.

Just like the colt he’s sired, Bane covers himself with a cloak of true invisibility and then inches softly up the grassy slope. He can’t hear at first; over the sound of his heart pounding and his blood rushing, there’s very little that keeps him focused on what the two above are talking about. They come into focus as he tops the rise, hidden eyes watching in breathless disbelief at the way they stand together. Been there myself is all he thinks, quietly waiting.

The stranger says something, “No” maybe, they both seem suspended for another moment afterwards and then (to his proud surprise) Lepis reacts with force.

It’s enough that he feels inclined towards murder. The dove that comes to roost in his nest is entwined by a serpent, giving Wolfbane enough malice to last him endless lifetimes. He steps forward as she spins around, quivering softly into focus from casting off his camouflage, showing a face clouded and twisted with rage. He says nothing.

Not at first. The striped pegasus only reveals himself and his emotions before calmly speaking his Queen’s name. “Lepis,” he chimes deeply, “Sylva is waiting for us.” As if Elektrum wasn’t there at all, despite how his venomous gaze lingers over the offending creature.

Drifting up beside her, one wing and his blue lips reaching out to touch her, comfort her, Bane takes his place alongside the pale gold mare. “Don’t waste your energy.” He finds himself rumbling, leaving a heavy trail of kisses for her stalker to witness. “I’m here now.”

Like all good nightmares do

@[Lepis] @[Elektrum] Novel for you both lol