"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
for every tyrant, a tear for the vulnerable in every lost soul, the bones of a miracle
She is changed. Her once plain liver chestnut hide (though it had been lustrous) is highlighted by gilded sabino. Though she is thin, and her topaz eyes are sad and sharp, she draws attention like a vein of gold in cold dark stone. Inspiring greedy desire without doing anything at all.
That’s why she comes out of her fortress during these dark hours. To capture something.
Her children are all tucked into their soft beds, sweet angel faces a kind of peaceful that almost kept her there--lingering over them, doting and heartsick.
It’s the anger that broke the spell, her little darlings with only a sad sick mother to keep them. Her vast and splendid Hyaline with only a few fools lingering within it’s plague ridden borders. She recalls Kagerus’ fury when she’d come, desolate, to throw her lover’s name into the dirt at the Queen’s feet only to realize that she’d only made herself look weak and stupid, and perhaps put the final nail in her poor Litotes’ crucified palms.
Kensa is not truly weak or stupid, but she is at a loss. She cannot take Lie back, lacks the skill to fight for him, and will not risk leaving her children or putting them in harm’s way. She will need to go to Loess and ask to have him back, ask and offer… She has nothing. No, not true. She has one thing, but does not know what price a mad serpent will exact.
The Primarch doesn’t reason that she needs time to think, does not try to rationalize this. She is, in this hour (a summer night gone crisp) only a woman, an animal, and the forest always draws her when she feels these compulsions. The heady fragrance of earth and rot is welcome as she draws a deep breath of forest air, stops amongst a tangle of hardwoods that have left a many years deep bed of leaves for her to wade through, ferns pushing up around the bases of the trees. She calls out, silvery voice slipping through the trees to reach whoever might wait for her here. It’s not a wanton call, but her voice is like water. Let the thirsty come and drink.
There are monsters here, but she hasn't found one yet. She is perhaps too vivacious for their appetites, but tonight she would follow devils down their rangy paths if they would satisfy her.
kensa
for every dreamer, a dream. we're unstoppable with something to believe in.
It was the sweet scent of a woman near that stirred him, his eyes flashing open as if he hadn't been asleep at all and his body remaining completely still. He listened closely. Her fragrance held something rare in it, a taste without a name that so very few had ever possessed. The beast in him leapt into the forefront of his
mind so effortlessly, consuming his body as it always had. And his mouth watered.
Born and raised in the Amazons by his mother the Queen, he was a threat on a good day.
He'd been one of the very select few males allowed to remain there, a place of only the toughest women warriors, after earning it. He once had a tattoo that proved it before the fairies had them removed from every last hide. The proof had been more in his ability than something burned into his skin anyway. His intense training showed in the way he rose to his feet with complete silence, liquid gold eyes lighting across their likeness buried in her flesh, the way it licked around her cream markings and met the rich color of the rest of her.
It was the beast though that would meet her tonight, the creature of myth locked away in his mind where it melded with the man and became something more. He stepped forward as she called out, slipping languidly from the silky sheet of deep night shadows like a forsaken King. His eyes sat like sharpened jewels in his dark face, and the blood red of his bay skin peeked out from a strong jaw as the Siren in her sea of forest debris came to a stop.
He remained silent, his feral gaze solidly on her with the stillness of a predator. There had only been one other woman fool enough to push him when he was this way; greedy. Hungry. And dangerous. He'd taught her a lesson in what it was to tempt a beast.
This one should definitely change her course, slowly back away.
But he dearly hoped she wouldn't. He could nearly taste her already and she'd be worth it.
I've been on a long road with the devil right beside me
ainlif
rising with the morning sun; it’s a hunger that drives me
for every tyrant, a tear for the vulnerable in every lost soul, the bones of a miracle
Creatures stir, burrow, hiss through the red brown leaf litter. Black bats, small and blind, swoop across the star-filled breaks in the trees. These small things live their small inconsequential lives without agendas or ideas beyond survival. For them, little mice and many-legged insects, each day is hour upon hour of striving. They eat, and drink and fight for their few inches of the world and rarely lay down to die old and finished living. There is no love or justice in a life like that, not really. When they eat it is not for the pleasure of taste, when they gather it is not for the joy of company, when they fuck it is only to make little future hours of struggle and strife.
The woman casts her eyes about, to catch on these little blurs of life in the darkness, her ears swiveling in a slow and deeply attentive way. She knows the futility that defines those small lives and still she marvels at them, has taken time to notice them so that their presences have become as familiar as old friends.
There is one who is not familiar, and as he slides out of the darkness Kensa turns her face to toward the sensation of being watched. The wane light leaves shadows in the angles of his arabesque features, drawing her attention to the masculine ridges and planes, muscle and bone. She stares, intent. Less a deer caught than a serpent charmed. This is what the forest has given her in exchange for a dark wish.
Leaves rustle like crinolines around her pale legs as she once again drifts through them, this time toward the man. She has not the faintest idea of who he might be. One of these that lingers in the forest waiting for things to wander into their web, most likely, but the Primarch does not often linger on what she doesn’t know. It’s always more interesting to go looking for answers instead. The richness of his scent is on the air between them but she reaches out to pull it from his skin instead, lips hovering a hair’s breadth from the rugged edge of his jaw. Maybe he meant to intimidate her from this place, but she is brazen, especially tonight.
kensa
for every dreamer, a dream. we're unstoppable with something to believe in.
