[private] you got me with my worst intentions; ryatah

[Carnage]

lord, I fashion dark gods too;

Though time does not pass for him in the same way, it does eventually dawn on him that it has been some time – even by his warped standards – since he has last seen her, or even checked in on her. She is a background hum, often, one of several things put into motion by his magic and still going.
(This is how he thinks of her – as his possession, his prize. His, his, his.)
No one thing in particular drew him back to Beqanna, He’d returned to the land, bored, and blood still remains on his lips from his efforts to alleviate that boredom. It had worked, for a moment, but then the joy of it had faded and he was again left idle, and so his thoughts turned to her, to the pale woman he so prizes.
(We’d say love, but love has never been a word to fit well on the dark god. He consumes, instead.)

He moves to the meadow, such familiar ground, and he reaches out for her. He feels her presence, tugs on it like a string, reaches further, beckoning. He finds, oddly, that what he can read of her is muddled, less refined, but he does not dwell on this. He dwells instead on the feel of her, of tracing the familiar lines, hearing her heart speed up as he chooses what to mete out.
She does come – of course she does, how could she not? – but she is changed, and it was not him who changed her.
He does not like this alteration, for he considers himself the sculptor of all things regarding this particular angel. Never mind that he has been gone for years, that she has always been powerful, in her own way – this is something else. His jaw tightens, and he feels the dried blood on his chin crack as the flesh stretches.
“Ryatah,” he says, and he does not touch her, although he wants to, “you’ve changed.”

c a r n a g e

@Ryatah

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

Her mind wanders to him more often than his wanders to her, but not even she is masochistic enough to count the days that he is gone.

She does not deny herself the pleasure of missing him, though, because there is a perfect kind of ache that only comes from pining for someone that you don’t know when — or if — they’ll ever come back. Romanticizing their own twisted kind of intimacy is a pattern that is easy to fall back into, especially when there is no one else around suitable enough to use as a placeholder. She has been so good about that lately — letting herself remain untouched and sitting with her boredom, retracing old memories and letting her longing build.

But then magic found her, and suddenly missing him morphed into almost dreading him.

She cannot fully articulate why she thinks he will be irritated by the discovery; she only knows that somehow having magic feels like a betrayal, like she is knowingly toying with the power dynamic they have perfected over the years. She tells herself that he must know she would never think she could use her magic against him, but she remembers too how quickly he had bled her out on the mountain just for the simple fact that she had climbed it.

When she feels that long-awaited pull from him, it is fear that leaps into her throat first, and she cannot even recall the last time that had happened.

Outwardly, she is the same as he had last left her: golden halo and angel-wings that spill stardust, radiating that same honeyed glow and looking at him with those same nearly-black eyes that stare at him with both reverence and trepidation. But the magic hums like a current of electricity in her veins, and she knows that he senses it.

She sees the blood that stains his familiar lips, and it is a strange thing, the way jealousy still manages to flare up through the fear. It pulls her focus from his wine-red eyes for only a moment before she shoves the emotion to a far corner of her mind, along with all the other cobwebbed things she doesn’t like to think about.

“Carnage,” she says his name almost like an apology, all too aware of the space between them. This is usually where she would say she had missed him, and likely would have touched him just because she knew he would let her. But she sees the tension in his jaw and instead stays still, her pulse steadily rising like a slow flood. “It wasn’t on purpose,” she says softly, imploringly, yet she finds that she is more afraid that he will not even think her worth punishing and will instead just disappear.

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

@Carnage