"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
11-17-2019, 02:22 AM (This post was last modified: 11-17-2019, 02:23 AM by Dacian.)
I hope he takes your filthy heart and then he throws you away someday
The afterlife had trembled when the gates broke.
He had felt it in the far corner of darkness that he had chosen to reside in for the last hundred or so years, a subtle tremor that rippled across his abysmal expanse of nothing that he created for himself. The afterlife was a vibrant and colorful world for some, but Dacian had chosen darkness. This was the closest to peace he has ever felt. All that fury and rage that he fought to harness when he was alive, it suddenly disappeared once he was dead. That impossible unrest, that toxic poison that had lived for long in his veins was suddenly sucked dry.
He felt it, the moment it had the chance to creep back in – like tapping on a door, and only needing it to open just a crack.
But it was a mistake to step back through. Things that were dead were meant to stay dead, this he knows. His curiosity gets the best of him this time, though.
When he crosses back over, it is a shock to his system. He sucks in a sharp breath and the air nearly assaults his lungs, and his heart kick-starts into a beat so hard and fast he thinks it might bruise itself against his ribs. He blinks his rich brown eyes, and for a fleeting moment he knows what it feels like to be alive and tranquil all at once.
He is surprised at how quickly the anger returns.
Memories come flooding back to him, all of them bad, all of them the things nightmares were made of – but most often he was the nightmare. A feeling of betrayal is the first poison to creep back in, followed by a twisted need for revenge, with a flicker of remorse that is chased by anger again. It was a vicious cycle, one that he had never managed to escape.
For now, he keeps that darkness captive inside of his chest. He stands shrouded in the shadows of the forest that flank the meadow and he watches them, taking in their vibrant new colors and powers that run rampant. She would be easy to spot now, he thinks. A winged bay mare would be an oddity now, but something tells him that the source of all his heartache and rage no longer lives here.
And he is torn between a sigh of relief and an ever-growing flame of anger at that thought.
but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
Aurorae is too young to fully comprehend what it means to be dead.
She knows it is out there—somewhere—but she hasn’t given it much thought. She has been too interested in the world around her, the world that she explores alone, to think about what lives beyond it. She has been too curious about the stars and the skies, her mother’s strange gift to her, to think that perhaps there is more than the night. Even the day feels like a strange, foreign thing. From a young age, she had adopted a nocturnal existence, one that left her mostly alone save for the creatures of the night.
And such things were no good influence for her young mind.
She grew up lonely and yet unafraid. She grew up with a morbid curiosity about that which lives in the shadows, a strange kinship with those who find themselves most alive when the sun had finally died.
So it is strange that she is here now, in this moment of twilight. It is not yet fully night, and yet she finds that she wanders the meadow anyway. She is nearly two now and strangely mature for her age—her body somehow knowing that her mind had long ago escaped the trappings of youth. There are more creatures here than she is used to but she doesn’t resent them as much as she would have expected.
They crowd her, but she is not so arrogant as to think the meadow is hers and hers alone.
Sniffing a delicate nose, her bright eyes turn toward the shadows where she sees him.
That same darkness that has always drawn her in strikes her chest and she angles a delicate head to consider him, the endless darkness of her mane and forelock framing her midnight face. For a moment, she is still and then she begins to make her way toward him, as natural in her curiosity as the stars are in the sky. When she is close enough to see him better, but not close enough to completely unravel the mysteries of him, she pauses—staying for a moment just to watch him, study him.
“Do you always find yourself in the shadows?”
Her voice is throaty and breathy and there is no smile to soften her features.
I hope he takes your filthy heart and then he throws you away someday
Her voice is quiet, and yet it feels like it may as well have been a scream.
It shatters the silent bubble he had managed to encapsulate himself in, and it immediately causes his skin to prickle in the way that it does just before he snaps. However, being dead for so long seemed to have strengthened his patience, or perhaps built his tolerance, but it was a tenuous hold that he had on it, at best. Still, with a grit of his teeth he manages to swallow the biting remark that was trying to build on his tongue, and he turns to face her.
He is at first mildly surprised at how striking she is. He had been born in a time when such colors did not exist, save for a rare few. The teal of her eyes were bright when set against the black of her face, and he couldn’t help but to notice the way the aurora-like colors crawled up her legs. She was beautiful, there was no denying it. But instead of being quieted in the presence of something so delicate and lovely, it made the anger knot tighter in his chest.
She was a pretty little thing, but she wasn’t his.
“Does being dead for over a hundred years count? If so, yeah, I guess you could say that. The afterlife is pretty bleak sometimes.” His voice is rougher than even he had expected; harsh and grating on his throat, and he does not try to clear the gravel away from it. Instead he takes a step towards her, his lips forming a small but careless grin. “I’m Dacian.”
but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
She should be more afraid of the shadows than she is.
She should have, at least, a cursory respect for it—should tremble at the things that crawl within it. Her mother, after all, is Queen of the shadows and commands the darkness and she knows what lives within the woman’s heart is anything but kind. But despite this knowing, and despite the acute awareness of her own inexperience, she does not turn her cheek toward it—does not run when he stalks forward.
Instead, Aurorae just lifts her pretty head and watches him with a calm gaze, her feet firmly planted on the ground. He moves, his voice grating and rough, and she doesn’t smile still, but there is something like the promise of it playing around her too serious mouth. “I imagine it is not sometimes,” she muses, wondering what it must be like to be dead—to feel the eternal coldness of it settle into your chest.
“I feel like the afterlife must be bleak always.”
There’s no pity there or sorrow for what he has felt. She feels the stirring of curiosity and the otherworldly pull of gravity toward things she should avoid, a hook in her belly—a hunger she doesn’t understand. The grating fury buried in his voice should drive her away and she instead finds herself pulling closer as she feels the weight of the stars begin to dot the sky above them. She could pull them down, she thinks. Could bring the cold fire of their life between them, but she prefers the darkness.
“Dacian,” she murmurs his name, meeting his gaze. “I am Aurorae.”
I hope he takes your filthy heart and then he throws you away someday
Her face is almost impassive, and he cannot help but to wonder what might be churning beneath it. She must be hiding something beneath that cool exterior, he thinks, because he knows he certainly is. A face carved of granite hides a tumultuous sea of anger; anger that he no longer remembers the root of. He had not been born as this ruthless, almost heartless creature, but he had let it become him. He had let the poison sink into his veins until he knew nothing else, until it twisted into an irreversible knot at the base of his chest.
It had not faded in death, it seemed; still a white-hot burning that settled in between his ribs, begging for a reason to ignite.
“It’s not,” he says curtly, “not for everyone.” The pause that he lets settle between them is so heavy it feels as though it intends to be a stretch of silence, before he elaborates, “But mine was, so, I guess in a sense you’re right.” His dark gaze shifts from her face, staring out to where twilight stretches across the meadowlands. Most would find it beautiful, and he is sure if he wasn’t so busy being irritated at the world, he would too.
“Being alive and being dead really aren’t all that different,” he mutters mostly to himself – although it’s far from true. His life had been far from perfect, and it had been easy to forget how warm it was to have blood in his veins, and breath in his lungs. But the quiet fury was a welcome change from the dull apathy, but of course he didn’t want to admit it. His eyes then turn back to hers to ask in the low grit of his voice, “What reason do you have to be alive, Aurorae?”
but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
There is a darkness to him that hides underneath every fold of his voice, that shows prominently in the spaces between the breath. It is not the promise of a hidden kindness that draws her forward but rather the idea that his darkness could be endless, could be depthless. Could his cruelty cut like a knife? Did he turn it against himself only or could he lash out? What would it be like to have his teeth sink into her throat?
Not that she would let him, she thinks, and she hugs the idea of the starlight closer to her.
But it would be so interesting to watch him lunge for her.
She angles her pretty head, infinitely curious about the stallion in front of her and takes a step closer, not noticing that the gravity of her thoughts pull the stars in closer—bringing their light down into the atmosphere so that the area around them glows silver. “Is it really so similar for you?” she breathes, her voice too mature for her age, her almond eyes wide and innocent and knowing all at once. “Was your life so similar to your death or is this new version of it the most akin?” She doesn’t think twice about asking all of her questions, about pressing them into his skin as she and the light step in closer to his vicinity.
When he turns the question around on her, she smiles—quiet and small.
“I have so many,” she thinks, although they are utterly selfish. “I would uncover and hoard every secret in the world if I had enough time.” The dark ones, she thinks. The ones hidden the most.
“Do you have secrets that you would share with me?”
I hope he takes your filthy heart and then he throws you away someday
There is something about her that feels familiar, and he wishes that he could place it.
Something in her face that feels like he has seen it before, even though he knows it’s impossible. He has never seen anything quite like her, because it didn’t exist when he was alive. He’s never seen skin colored like night lights, and he doesn’t even think he’s seen eyes such a bright shade of teal.
And still her eyes feel like someone else staring back at him, and this feeling is so unsettling that it threatens to stoke that ember of anger that currently lays quiet in his chest. He is afraid of what will happen if he manages to piece it all together – afraid that he will want to kill her or keep her or both.
Afraid that he will have rid himself of one obsession only to find himself ensnared by another.
“Life and death are both miserable, one of them just lasts a lot longer,” he says flatly, though it is punctuated with an unamused laugh. “Or at least, it was supposed to.”
She moves closer, and he notices how she seems to pull the starlight with her, like it is attached to her by invisible threads. For a moment the apathy in his eyes is interrupted by curiosity, unable to recall if he had ever witnessed magic when he was alive before. It had existed, but it was a rarity. He watches her with a newfound fascination, this girl colored like the northern lights and seemingly the ability to bend the stars to her whim, and again he wonders who she is. He is careful to shadow it, though, his face still smooth and unreadable, and the only glimmer of light comes at the crooked grin that accompanies his answer to her question. “If I shared them they’d no longer be secrets then.”
but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
The longer they talk, the more than she is drawn in by the way that she cannot read him. The way that she cannot peel back the layers of his stone exterior is a challenge that is too delicious to resist and everything within her inherited from her parents—her tenacity, her stubbornness, her arrogance—rises to the bait. None of that shows on her face though. Instead she remains passive, studious, coy, her eyes angling upward and latching onto his own gaze before tracing the hard angles of his face, his jaw.
“They don’t have to be miserable,” she says with a simper, more innocent than anything as the night sky lightened tip of her tail flicks at her bright legs. “My father says that death isn’t so bad either, although it gets easier each time.” She considers that for a second, lips pressing together, her delicate face pensive as she wonders at how many times Atrox must have died. “Have you tried it more than once?”
Perhaps that was the problem, she considers.
Maybe he just needed to give it another try.
Still curious but willing to move to the next subject, she rolls a shoulder and takes another step forward, as though testing his boundaries—wondering at what point the wall would become impenetrable. Would he lash out? Back away? Remain still and let the starlight of her wash over him like a stone?
“They can be our secrets though,” she breathes quietly, her voice dropping now that they are closer. “I find that the only thing better is a secret is one that you share with one other soul.”
I hope he takes your filthy heart and then he throws you away someday
It was a strange way of the universe, it seemed, that dark and light were always drawn to each other. He has always been so easily taken by the ones that are all he never was; or maybe because they are what he could have been if he had not allowed the bitterness of life to eat him alive. He likes the ones that are softer, the ones where their voices sound the way the stars look, with maybe a sharpness hidden beneath it all. It’s not because he found them easier; Dacian was never after easy. There was just something utterly fascinating when you held something that was everything you could never be.
“I’m not really interested in your father’s opinion,” he responds dryly, not even bother to ask or even wonder just who her father might be. The only thing that knowledge would change is it would further fuel this blossoming fascination with her – to learn that she had a familial link to Devonae. “I died once, a hundred years ago maybe, and now I’m back. Maybe death doesn’t seem so bad to those it continuously spits back out.”
She steps closer, and his gaze sharpens onto her. She is young, but she does not appear to be naive, and he wonders if she knows what she’s doing. If she knows she is stepping close to the monster’s waiting jaws, if she knows that once he swallows her up he will never release her. Boldly, he moves forward too, and this time, he touches her. His lips graze across her dark cheek, traveling up, until he is near her ear and he whispers in the low gravel of his voice, “You don’t want to know my secrets, Aurorae.”
