"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
Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive
Still here. Of course.
She’s kept to her own shadows and he to his; in fact, he had more or less complied with her request to divide the island, although he didn’t follow with the borders that she’d once proposed. But he shunned the forest most of his time, and she never walked into the icy plains up north.
A silent agreement like that could never hold. Sure, temporarily, it might work. But as long as they could only agree on one thing - the other cannot rule - this was just a tense cease-fire.
This needed to change.
He hadn’t smelled or seen the magician around since the one time the then-cat had asked for an explanation; no response had followed yet, and still the scaled roan was only waiting. Waiting for the worst to come.
His daughters had moved away, back to Nerine with Breckin, so here he was alone again. Surrounded by those unwilling to have him around, at least so it felt. He simply did not buy the statement that Nerinians would still be welcome here with Set and Phasus as rulers - moreso, since the salt-and-pepper magician had added ‘agreeable’ as a condition for them to be allowed on here.
But it’s not him he needs to talk to. There is a proposition to be made, and honestly, the roan thinks that he should deal with Phasus first, before anyone else.
So he breaches his own makeshift border, and calls out softly for the mare.
you set my soul alight
HTML by Vanilla Custard
@[Phasus] I finally made a starter, I am the worst, but hey, here is an idea I need to share with you ICly
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
12-27-2018, 01:57 AM (This post was last modified: 12-27-2018, 01:58 AM by Phasus.
Edit Reason: grammar alludes me
)
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
At first she had been writhing.
At first the agony of her own gently prodded ego had made it all but impossible to stay away, to keep from provoking them. She, begrudgingly, sent the magician away from her (to keep them from guessing, to blind them from what would come next) and from the safe shroud of the shadows collected the allies she knew would help her cause see fruition.
At night, and with the staccato hum of adrenaline flooding every inch of her fat and muscle, bleeding out into it like oil into the ocean, she would watch the moon hanging in the sky, white and wild as the wasteland; her begrudging home. She would invent in her mind new and wonderful ways to ruin him without ever touching him, because how dare he rob her of her intended victory, because how dare he not fall for her lies and her face and her hips and her talent.
But slowly, those nights became days, became weeks, and then months, and with each passing moment her frantic urency turned bitter hatred became, once again, something else entirely — complacency. Focusing on survival and shielding the wind from her skin she forgot her tactical maneuvers and growing resistance. Of course a leopard cannot change it’s spots, and she would without doubt make a grab to steal any carelessly placed bone that she could manage to fit her teeth around, but her drive to wrangle one had all but been assuaged.
Strangely enough, Set had been crucial in this progression. His arrival meant her survival depended less on the taking of this frozen spit of land, and as luck would have it for the Nerinians, focused her attentions elsewhere. The thought of their tangled magic still sends quivers creeping down the mountains of her vertebrae, and a slow curling smile finds its home across her lips as she walks now across the tundra having grown achingly bored in a thick copse of coniferous trees.
She will go where he goes, she thinks; a pilot fish wavering dutifully beneath the belly of a great white.
That’s when she sees him, and just as he sounds out for her. She takes a moment to let her eyes devour the flesh she finds between the congruent lines of his large body; the thick neck and broad shoulders lead her to the realization that were their political platforms less glaringly different she would not have found him nearly so offensive on first meet. The slow curl of a smile lifts the corners of her mouth, and her eyes seem to lengthen a moment in her own measured delight at what is to follow next. A joke, he will gather, from the playful cadence that weaves through the words:
“Leilan,” she says, remembering fondly the way it had fallen off Set’s tongue during their last true encounter right before the false battle.
Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive
Time - passing time and patience and cooling down: time to contemplate what really matters, time to think of what one loves. Phasus - she loves the safety of the island, and whatever Set can offer her as a magician (that one thing he can’t offer her, even though he has a step-nephew running around healing people as a result of negotiations on Heartfire’s part). The skinny blue roan’s lust for power however, had effectively kept her from that goal, the roan would think.
But he’s no judge - he has his darker secrets. Everyone is like the moon; showing the world only their bright side. Trying to be honest and showing his intentions early on, he still has things that nobody needs to know, per say. Sometimes, the honesty is what makes him clash with others, and sometimes, it’s the keeping of things. One can never know, except in retrospect.
But what’s important, is to make her feel secure. Perhaps not in a position of too much power, but still some? Who knows. She might accept it now, if time turned out not to be in her favour that much, after all. Perhaps Jesper had her realize that sometimes people are not always what they seem at first glance. Not only brash of nature, like Heartfire and him had probably presented themselves.
He’d fixed the crater but he wondered if anyone besides Set knew.
Now, here she was, this glass sheet of a mare - or nearly glass, then. To him, being similar enough, it was easy to see what others might look past. The mask of joy and jokes he hid behind was not unlike the composed and mysterious one she owned, and the physical attraction she seemingly now had found in him, was not much different either. Yet, he knows that game. As old as horses themselves, nature had found autumn a good time for hormonal influences, for reproduction cycles to take place. As such, perhaps she could not help it. As such, perhaps if they hadn’t fought over such a deep-rooted belief of his, or if he hadn’t already decided that the one spotted mare was still enough, or if they’d met earlier on in the fall season before the Plague started... who knows.
Playfully, she approaches, and he slowly bends his neck down just a little to look at her with both eyes; a game, a dance, however one might call it. She drawls his name, asks if he’s missed her, and a slow knowing smile creeps up in one corner of his mouth. ”I know you missed me terribly,” he outs slowly, yet with an almost playful undertone, teasing and at the same time daring her to come closer. ”But you know I already have a wife.” A topic, he thinks that she will probably ignore or waltz over, for the Nerinian queen is not here. His tail moves, brushing past his hock as if perhaps he would have it brush past hers (perhaps he should have long ago, things would have been so different), but he does not make another move towards her.
Let her come, let her see for herself why this one was already taken.
you set my soul alight
HTML by Vanilla Custard
@[Phasus] uhm, this went slightly in a different direction than when I started writing hahaha
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
‘I know you missed me terribly,’ he says, and she laughs, dutifully; a sound that seems to chime and echo out in the stillness of the tundra.
‘But you know I already have a wife.’
He’s calling her out on the swing in her hips, but she quivers with delight in spite of it. It is her good fortune, she thinks, that he appears to be more malleable today, too, and Phasus has never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She moves closer still, curiosity goading her forwards.
And she is still quivering in her delight, but behind the wicked roll of her flesh there are muscles beneath them that are still tightly coiled from all of their previous encounters; muscles that ache in their rigidity, muscles that are ready to come unchained, like springs, should he swing around to greet her with the violence that she has come to expect from the nerinians — muscles that, despite the easy smile on her lips and the playful glimmer to her dark eyes, might betray her. It’s a dangerous game that she plays, to dabble with the minds of men who see the reflections of their own impending empires just beyond the bend of her hips. She is greedy, and she is wicked, but she is not stupid.
One glimpse at the scales along his skin, or the sharpened fangs hiding behind the curtain of his lips tells her that he could have her, or end her, without a second thought.
But playing is what she knows, and she is achingly bored, and so she continues to move towards him as though those screaming muscles don’t exist, as though they aren’t crying out this danger, until they are inches apart and he might feel the head of her body as she stands opposite him, but parallel, with his head nearest her hips. “A wife?” She asks aloud, rhetorically, while she bumps a hip against him in passing and draws out the last word only to find it leaving a sour taste against her tongue.
“Now, why ever would you want one of those?”
In her eyes he is a caged animal; an easy conclusion for Phasus, who has never loved anything beyond herself (and perhaps, Him, in the way that a follower might choose to devote themselves to a god), to reach. Now, still too close to him, she cranes her head across the jut of her right shoulder to look at him from across the length of her back.
“You wanted me, Leilan.” She says, choosing her words carefully for their implied innuendos, a kittenish expression still painted across her delicate face.
Glaciers melting in the dead of night and the superstars sucked into the supermassive
She plays - forced, perhaps, but she plays. Good.
His eyes see more than average, but even if they hadn’t he might have noticed the slight trembling with every step she makes. She knows what’s at stake - ironically, for her it seems to be more than just her position of relative (or forgotten) power on this island; to him it’s only that but for her there is the fear of leaving the safe land, fear of a sickness that to his knowledge had yet to kill anyone (except maybe Arthas but that was more or less the man’s own arrogance).
For what she believes is her own good, she still plays the game.
She lines up parrallel to him, nose to hip and he turns his neck to the right to look at her (let her think he enjoys the sight - which isn’t entirely untrue though she is a bit more skinny than is actually his type). Half-pretends to reach out to her and then doesn’t, grins when she bumps her hip into him. See, that was easy. But it’s not what they’re here for.
A wife? Why ever would you want one of those?
He knows why - but that’s not a reason she could wrap her mind around, he thinks. So, instead he has to give her an answer that’s close to another truth, something that she could relate to. ”She happens to be a queen. Isn’t that what you would have accepted in Set?” Would have, because he hadn’t seen the magician for a while. Would have, because she no longer smells of him. Would have, because for all Leilan knows, the magician doesn’t live on this island any longer. Perhaps he had become tired of the constant challenge he presented. If Leilan hadn’t been in this to protect his family and friends, he might have left, too.
You wanted me, Leilan. What can I do for you? she asks, as if perhaps he might say he wanted her physically. The thought crosses his mind - use her like he’d once used others for a temporary moment of not thinking of someone else, which was hurting; use her and drop her, and perhaps she’d think she had the upper hand, perhaps that was something he could exploit; use her and mark her, to make her never want to go near him again - but no. Not this time.
”I know I made Set an offer for you and him to stay safe on this island even if I happened to rule, but he wouldn’t take it.” The following challenge needed no emphasis. ”But perhaps you want to think it over for yourself, instead. I don’t think he’s around to force you into either decision, this time.” Perhaps the mention of the magician’s name helped her realize that the tobiano male hadn’t been seen for a while; if she had, she would probably correct him.
you set my soul alight
HTML by Vanilla Custard
@[Phasus]
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
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