"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
06-03-2018, 01:26 PM (This post was last modified: 06-03-2018, 01:27 PM by violence.)
violence
It's not that she holds a grudge, but --
Well. She doesn’t take well to being defied. Especially by those stupid things, those creatures. She was the first. She may not be a monster (not in form, anyway), but she was first.
She has made sure they all know it, each of her sisters. Cowed them. They are toys, each unique, each powerful. But none so powerful as she.
But when she had taken Nexu’s mind, just to show her – show her the fun of it, the possibilities of her alien form – Nexu had fought, had spat her back out. She hadn’t cowed, her mind had not been so open and simple as the other monsters. Something lurked there besides instinct, and oh, Violence hates it.
So she’s watched her, followed her. Not all of the time. But enough to see the ridiculous courtship, the man she fell sweet on.
Fucking weak, was what it was.
Violence finds the man easy enough, follows him to his wooded him. She doesn’t know him, but she has watched. There is a similarity to their wants, she thinks. The difference is, she is stronger.
(She is an arrogant thing, empowered by her traits, by the fact she is so rarely beaten.)
Before walking to greet him, she summons her bone creature. It is her project, this thing, a menagerie of bones from several different animals. She holds them together by magic, makes it move and interact. Some love it, some fear it. Either way, it makes quite an impression. She leaves it at the edge of the woods, just out of sight, as she makes herself known to the stallion.
Violence is not particularly beautiful, no more so than the average mare. She doesn’t care – attracting others has never been her fancy – but she moves with a confidence that does catch the eye. She doesn’t try to be seductive as she nears him – she would fail at this, she knows – but she makes herself striking. Something to notice.
“Hello,” she says, and her voice is sweet, as if they were old friends, “you don’t know me, but I feel as if I know you. And I think you’re the kind of man who likes power.”
She drops her voice then, as if conspiring.
“I’m the daughter of a magician,” she says, “and I have many powers of my own…”
As if on cue, her bone creature charges out, moving unnaturally fast. It charges towards them, skids to a stop. The bones briefly separate at the jarring motion, and then knit back together.
“I made this,” she purrs, “and can do so much else.”
She presses at his mind, lightly. Enough to be felt. She doesn’t push any harder.
“I can enter others’ bodies,” she says, “and from there, we could combine our powers…”
A lie – her necromancy is all but worthless when she’s in the throes of someone else’s mind. But he doesn’t need to know this.
“I could make you so strong,” she promises, “so powerful.”
She continues to press at his mind. Makes her presence known.
“What do you say? Let me in?”
She seeks him out, like a moth to a flickering flame.
His dark eyes flicker to her with an expressionless gaze (though not to be mistaken with a bored look, or lack of amusement), a sharp snort leaving the lavender-pearl of his nostrils at the sight of the unfamiliar woman. He’s immediately interested, though it is not because she is female that he is curious. There is something about her - the confidence she exudes, perhaps, or the solidity in her voice - that makes him step forward to meet her, shadow spilling over each curve of his muscled body. She speaks to him as if she knows him, and he does not stop her. Maugrim watches her carefully, wondering where exactly this conversation was leading.
Maugrim’s head turns slowly to the movement in the undergrowth, a whuff of breath leaving his mouth as the skeleton trapezes across the darkness that breeds beneath the forest’s canopy. He is genuinely surprised, stretching his neck out towards the creature. His head tilts with a calculating click as his gaze shifts to the obsidian woman, curving his neck in pensivity. He can feel her tickling at his mind, which is met with a sharp toss of his head and a loud snort, lips rippling unpleasantly.
But his eyes then rove back to the demon made of bones and the pale of his tongue dampens his lips. He is already quite powerful - with his water welding and ability to melt into it - but the stallion continues to crave it; strength, control, ferocity. There is a rumble of contemplation that vibrates in his chest as his dark eyes slowly turn back to the magic woman.
She knows that many – including herself – grow drunk at the idea of power.
She has fallen prey to the temptation as well – has done foolish things in its name, in her hopes of extending it.
(Like this, even. She is a stranger in a strange kingdom, here with her powers and her lies, confronting one of its residents. Asking for trouble – one of the few things she asks for.)
She lets the creature meet his touch, its dry tapered bone against the velvet softness of his muzzle, life and death comingling, and her, the overseer. She can’t help but grin., tugging at these strings. She imagines herself the conductor of some grand, macabre orchestra, moving things to her whim. The bone creature mimics her glee, tossing its head and chattering its teeth, a symptom of her joviality.
He makes his promise, his acquiescence - you have yourself a deal - and her grin deepens, etched into her.
“So alike,” she murmurs softly – fondly – and she presses deeper into his mind, breaches her, stumbles into a dark and power-hungry place, one that almost feels familiar. He has his own powers, she realizes, for as she slips into him she begins to feel the water around them, in the ground and the air, calling to her the way the bones call to her when she is in her regular form.
“Ah,” she murmurs, but the words come from his lips, the depth of his tone surprising her. The bone creature crumbles, her power distracted as she sinks tendrils into his mind, establishing her hold – tenuous (it is always so tenuous) – but there. I see there’s a woman, she purrs, let’s go show her what we can do now.
Without waiting for an answer, she moves on, piloting his unfamiliar body with her own overwrought confidence. She can’t help it – as she walks, she pulls water from the atmosphere, fashions a brief mist that leaves the coat damp. It’s not much, but she enjoys the new power, the new sensations.
“Nexu!” she calls in his voice, so rough and unlike hers, “Nexu, come see what I’ve become.”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
@[Nexu] @[Maugrim] once again holler if anything overstepping or needs changing !! im wine drunk happy sunday
It’s his voice but the expression behind it is not him. He doesn’t dare speak her name paired with that slippery language she still struggles to understand, for the very simple reason that she can’t understand it. Their communication is a twisted conversation of body language (sweet touches, rubbing embraces, snarling teeth) and wordless noise (sighing, twittering, nickering) and never the low voice she hears now.
Oh no.
She can remember the pressure of Sister’s fingers against her mind, cradling her first gently and then tossing her into the jail cell in the corner. It’s a flashback and not a good one, pricking at the back of her memories like a sharp dagger. A snarl rips from her throat already. Sister is predictable — just as Nexu is predictable in arriving — and determined — just as Nexu is determined in arriving — and the xenomorph will do her damn best to release Partner from her angry hold.
She slides from the shadows, inky and lined with lithe muscle. She’d been sleeping nestled in their lake-side cavern, enjoying the quiet of the afternoon and the sound of the waves lapping the shoreline, but all the drowsiness has fled her body. When her eyes land on Partner, there’s a different light in his dark eyes.
Sister.
A rumble clicks in the low of her throat, threatening and bold. She knows of Partner’s magic (the ways he can twist water with his bare fingers) but that doesn’t stop her from flicking her knife-tail behind her heels.
06-22-2018, 06:27 PM (This post was last modified: 06-22-2018, 06:28 PM by Maugrim.)
it was a blood-soaked feast that never ceased
At first, he feels her in his subconscious. She would be met with resistance - the innards of his existence now unfolded and laid out for another to see did not strike the man as an easy thing to allow. Even as he agrees to her terms, meek and calm to allow her full control, naturally he reacts to expel her - as any mortal would do. She reaches out for the furthest parts of his mind (what would she find there?), and though he resists and the pulling of her fingers are unnatural and obtrusive, she would be much too powerful for him to be able to overcome. Perhaps outside of his mind he would have made a cunning foe, but as she wraps herself into his brainstem and spinal cord he is sure she knows she has the upper hand. The bone creation falls to the floor of the forest, lifeless and without a mind to control each of its movements.
She calls the water to him despite his thoughts not directing them. His body is not his own; he is merely a spectator, and where he would have snorted angrily and pawed heavily at the damp undergrowth at the idea of someone else controlling the water, his body remains still. The water recognizes its master and without a mind of its own, it succumbs to whoever wields its leash. The dampness of the mist that surrounds him is somehow comforting however, despite feeling locked in a cage. He wonders when she exits (if she exits) if he will feel freer than he had ever been and what poor victim will be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But there is no time to think about that now. No time to think at all, actually, because someone else’s thoughts are there and it startles the stallion. A woman, the stranger’s voice purrs, and though he has no control over her idea to find Nexu, he does not find himself with fright riddling his consciousness as she begins to move in his body. Nexu would not fall for such a thinly veiled trick; the armored woman (his armored woman) would easily tear him apart before the stranger could use his powers to hurt her.
It is evident that this powerful stranger merely had entered him for a silly, girlish game (there is no promise of power, nothing of the sort) and somehow, does not stir. His consciousness festers, rabid and violent against her control, but there is no panic in his attempts.
Maugrim hears the familiar click of her voice, though it is not in the same tone that normally comes when she greets him. She is menacing in the shadows of the forest, eyes glinting with rage. If he could have smiled, he would have. The two somehow know each other and Nexu is able to recognize the stranger easily that now keeps him prisoner in his own mind. He wonders idly who will die first at this stranger’s hand - himself or Nexu?
m a u g r i m.
@[violence] @[Nexu]
i am okay with anything physically happening to maugrim if it comes to it, besides death! <3
“What?” the words curl in her mouth, staring at her sister through his eyes, “aren’t you happy to see me?”
She edges closer. He’s more resistant, now, and she claws back, gripping into his mind like a cliff’s edge. She doesn’t have forever here; cannot linger the way she would like.
(Dead things are ever so much easier to manipulate, she laments for the hundredth or thousandth time.)
She hears the warning click, sees the knifelike tail switch at her sister’s alien hocks. This doesn’t bother her. Her own body is further back, and she has no qualms about spilling this vessel’s blood. Would rather like it, in fact. Pain feels different when you’re inhabiting someone else’s body, a layer removed. Easier to quell the instincts down and just focus.
“You’re weak,” she says, “a fool.”
Her words, his mouth. She doesn’t know how much her sister understands, what her grasp of the language is. But the tone is clear enough.
She can’t access all his memories, doesn’t bother wasting time rifling through them. Digging deep into his memories – his emotions - would weaken her already faltering grip. So she mimics, instead – relaxes and lets muscle memory take over, for just a moment, tries to imitate him at his sweetest, a low purr, saccharine and stupid.
She doesn’t wait to see if it changes things or not, she flattens his ears to his skull and moves, charging, his weak body against her alien one. It’s a pointless attack, suicidal, charging her dead-on with teeth snapping at her face, her neck, a kamikaze rush.
Inside his mind, she’s laughing.
She is a complex creature. She is crafted of intellect and savagery with scattered moments of complicated thought and wild instinctual abandon.
Her thoughts can turn on a dime.
They do so now, in the moments between Sister’s threats and Sister’s attack (both in Partner’s body, a fact that makes her stomach snarl in disgust). For a few generous seconds, she is thinking through the best tactic to force Sister out of that emerald and pearl body. Perhaps she will run for Sister’s body (slack-jawed and hazy-eyed somewhere in the woods) or perhaps she will turn away from him until Sister gets bored and leaves naturally.
“Hmm, you are my Partner.”
She hears it in that rosy-sweet tune in the back of Partner’s throat. Her heart skips a beat in spite of her calculating thoughts, although she is still startlingly aware of the situation. The attack snaps her into action — into another side of her Partner has never seen before — and a harsh, careening whistle flies from her throat like the first bullet in a war.
Hellbent, dangerous, blood-seeking.
Fight. Blood. Win.
It no longer matters who she is attacking, only that she is. Her daggered teeth are obvious now, inky outer-mouth ripping open to expose the danger that lies beneath. She moves into her attacker, the height of her species pushing her armored chest toward His neck, and snaps her teeth down toward the tender tissue of His left ear. She aims to shred it, potentially as a warning to drive Him off.
Although her instincts and ferality have taken control, her humanity rides in the backseat and shouts aloud to: Save him.
Another snarl rolls out of her salivating mouth and her dark eyes have narrowed with anger and bloodthirst. Her knife-tail, thrashing at her heels only moments before, swings around the side of her body to aim for His legs. At the same time, her head is moving toward His left shoulder, intending to push a deep wound into the supple, strong muscle with her teeth.
She is no longer Nexu. She is a savage wild animal, true to her roots, hellbent on destroying this Attacker.
credit to fangs of bearbones.
@[violence] / @[Maugrim] / hope this is okay!! let me know if i should change anything <3
Her sister takes the bait.
It’s all she can do, of course. Violence knows the species – she’d shared Charnel’s mind enough times that she can practically imagine what’s churning in Nexu’s head (she’d be wrong, but she will never know this). She knows how they react, the savagery that lurks in their blood, the base instinct.
Besides – she may not look like them, all trills and armor and poison, but she shares the same blood. A half-breed.
Savagery runs thick in her blood, too.
She feels pain, once removed – the body that is not her body. A rending of skin, the warmth of blood blooming like madness in the spring across his hertheir skin. She tries to bury herself deeper in him, longs to feel every ounce of pain, to zero in on exactly what damage is wrought.
“I’m your partner,” she mimics, voice thick with blood, with want. She keeps urging the body towards the weaponry of her sister, the sharp teeth, the knife-tail. Keeps urging for blood.
She’s losing him, though. She can feel her grip slipping. The pain dulling, disappearing. She wishes he were dead – how she could control his body then!
She tries, a last ditch attempt, to do just that, to impale him on the sharp points of her sister, but she misses, or he redirects them.
“Your partner,” she manages, the words slurring now, hard-fought, “hates you.”
And then she lets go, and as she falls back into her own form, she gives one final shove, hurling his body to her (hoping for more damage, that her sister won’t realize it in him, won’t be able to stop herself), trying to scream, and then she is gone from him, back in her own body, a pile of bones at her feet.
