"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
06-01-2021, 08:02 PM (This post was last modified: 06-01-2021, 08:07 PM by Morgayne.)
Rolling her black lips back from the fangs that have grown past her chin, Morgayne sifts through the scents of the wintery wood. Pine, snow, and decay. The crispness of the air bites at her nostrils. The forest smells much the same as it does every day, but this foray into the trees is not one she regularly makes. Getting her bearings comes first; the poles of the earth do not guide her, only scent and memory and instinct. Trees grow and twist and change month after month, rendering all but the most well-traveled paths obsolete. Over time old stones drift, markers fall and this is no longer the forest she once knew.
It hasn’t been that long has it? Likely not, but the forest seems to have a twisted concept of time and she has been occupied elsewhere.
Blue eyes skip across the shadows between trunks and tangled underbrush. There is nothing to see. Briefly, the mare tracks the frenetic movement of a chickadee among the evergreen leaves. Beyond this avian distraction, Morgayne finds her surroundings suspiciously still. Turning her ears back and waiting for several heartbeats, she flings them forward again when a tangle of manzanita to her left drops some snow. It is now too late to notice what has been hiding there.
Beqanna is the home of a menagerie of creatures. What breaks cover when Morgayne finally picks out it's hiding spot is so out of place in the snowy mix of conifers and hardwood that the sight of it might have stunned another. Morgayne has been looking for him. His teeth are larger than those of a wolf, his spotted hide stinking and wet. When he slams into her ribcage in an attempt to send her sprawling, she confirms previous assumptions that her quarry is all-over muscle.
Her quarry. The bubblegum girl has been seeking him for weeks, laying herself as bait at long last to draw him into the open. He reeks of rot, death, and hunger. His eyes are white-ringed with madness and bloodlust in equal measure. Perhaps he was once one of those scavenging, laughing things that sometimes skitter through Loess. Magic or another force may have twisted him into this hulking and more vicious stalker. There's a ringing clarity when he slams into her ribcage and knocks the air from her lungs; awakening from her juvenile delusions of invincibility.
He is going to tear her apart.
Morgayne knows better than to lose her feet but slips in the snow. She does go down in the rear, throwing her head high to keep her throat clear of his blunt, overgrown claws. On the ground, he goes for her face rather than her fallen haunches. Morgayne stands. He does not expect her to turn into the attack. Her fangs clash against his massive canines and hurl his blow aside. Recalculating his strategy, he withdraws. Snow sprays around them as they both lunge and dodge in turn. Another turn still, Morgayne's blood splashes across the milled snow and black earth, bright and beautiful in the dappled morning light.
Blood runs down her dark forelegs, tributaries finding their way down to the ground. His muzzle is red. Her fangs are bloodied but only just. He has lost purchase several times but finally grips the small mare above the withers and drops all his weight into dragging her down. Down to the filth, down into a shivering twitching mass of torn flesh and hide. A feeble kick misses and falls away into the mire. He lets go to find a new grip, to cut off the oxygen in her trachea, and let flow the rich red in her jugular.
A splendid agony screams through Morgayne's ruined muscles as she curls in on him. Her jaws part and fangs close on his yielding throat. The monster's hide is thick, but her grip cuts off the air to his lungs and the blood to his atrophied brain. Her stomach roils from pain, from the taste of his stinking pelt and the blood that wells against the pressure of her teeth.
He rattles and twitches beside her, the end a slow race between her exsanguination and his suffocation. When his eyes empty she takes her time in releasing him, cautious, jaw popping and cramped.
Morgayne lays down to luxuriate in her agony, in the torn flesh and the fractured bones. She closes her skyward facing eye and drifts into the dreaming place where she puts herself back together. She begins only with the worst of it, ending fatal bleeding, reknitting bone. In this state of disassociation she floats through pink and blue cotton candy clouds, drifting along with the ebb and flow of pain.
Beside her the creature shivers, but having pulled away she is not roused. Life blinks back into eyes full of broken vessels.
sometimes i wish
we could be strangers
Morgayne
@[Phae] If you don't think you can do anything with this weird post lemme know hahaha, also feel free to take control of Mr. Ugly the fucked up hyena monster. Also idk wtf is wrong with her HTML, but hopefully it shows up and stops getting effed
The winter bite is vicious: snow laps at cloven hooves, wind numbs twitching ears, an empty belly rumbles from the scarcity of food. Beqanna's most beautiful season, pure white and untouched, a last remnant untouched by the magical beings occupying everywhere else. Here, so deep in the forest that snow sticks to the ground in the summer, the reasonable do not linger. Draco despises the summer heat in Pangea and is often wildly unreasonable, so a few days respite in the darkest parts of the Forest suits hims well.
While Morgayne taunts the hyena-monster, Draco watches her with quiet poise. He keeps his distance for days, often hyper-aware of her movements and the constant trailing and hiding of the creature. The speckled woman is entertainment enough while the demon hides away from Desire's tossing rocks and the constant sun, but he does grow bored after the pair's dance seems to amount to nothing. He is humming to himself and thinking Dove is worried about him by now when the raucous and inevitable meeting of the two pierces his wondering. Draco is just intrigued enough to press closer, forked tail shivering with excitement when the scent of fresh blood finds him.
Nestled behind a thick clumping of trees, the demon watches the pair fight. He is delighted by the hyena's viciousness and surprised by the woman's dexterity. Only half of his face is visible, the single glowing eye alive with some joyous observation.
When Morgayne goes down, Draco twitches with the instinct to move but does not. He watches and watches, thinking surely she must be dying; and when the hyena-thing is finished, Draco will wander closer and finally study Morgayne up close after days of unsatisfying distance. Once again, though, the demon is pleasantly surprised to see the twisted canine fall flat to the earth. The bubblegum creature doesn't move and, thinking both surely have perished, Draco carves a serious path in their direction.
"Hm," he muses, leaning back on his haunches. There is an easy rise and fall to the woman's sides telling him she certainly isn't dead. Draco continues to ponder, then, unceremoniously: "I don't think your fangs are big enough to kill that thing." A statement made as he watches the thing's bloodshot eyes flash back to life. Draco sighs. He supposes he won't let Morgayne die, not yet, and begrudgingly focuses his fear on the rabid creature, knowing he could have outran both of them.
The hyena quivers and shakes, rolling to its back and submitting as baseless canines are wont to do. The fear has become Draco's favorite power - he's become terribly good at wielding it.
"Do you want to kill it?" Draco asks, eyes drifting back to the blue and pink woman, bemused.
It always seems like someone is trying to pull Morgayne out of the clouds. Usually it's some do-gooder thinking that she's had an accident or had just tried to end herself. When her eyes snap open and her pupils focus she's prepared to make one of the usual responses that make any well-meaning savior uncomfortable enough to go away.
Instead her brain puts a name to the face, horns and glowing features.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with her lovely teeth and they are of perfectly adequate size.
"Draco." They aren't related, but she knows who he is. One of her brothers' siblings. Not that the degrees of separation or relationships matter to her, to either of them.
Morgayne barely has time to be disgruntled or to notice that the stinking sack of fleas and muscle she is lying akimbo to is rousing before Draco strikes. He uses some ability, she isn't sure what, to make the thing practically writhe in terror. Hissing against a deep but receding ache the fanged girl rises and stares at the creature. How is it not dead? Disappointing.
Do you want to kill it?
"No." She replies, though she had wanted to, had tried to. Now the quivering, slavering monster does not even infuriate her with its weakness. Pity and boredom contort into a sneer upon her dark lips and Morgayne's bicolored eyes return to Draco. "Let it leave if you like, it is not the thing I wanted it to be." Blood stains her pretty pink side around a wound that is mending itself much more slowly now that she has been roused out of the dissociative state in which she best focuses her ability.
The wild-eyed canid pisses on itself and Morgayne takes a prim step away from it with a dainty sniff that is quite at odds with her appearance and the recent events. Beginning to groom herself she allows Draco to decide about the warped hyena. He may decide to let it go or see if he can goad it to try and kill her again but Morgayne is too absent fear to be concerned. "It was you following me?" she asks, combing through her bloody hide.
"Mm," Draco hums absently, flicking a single ear back as if to catch a noise behind them. He peers blankly down at the cowering thing, wondering if it will run or try to maul them if he frees it.
"What could you have possibly wanted it to be?" the demon growls, baring the sharp edges of his fangs. It's not a hellhound, nor a wolf; and it's not a hyena or a simple dog, no. Too twisted and deranged to be any one of those things. Whatever it was, it was purely Beqanna, and Draco doesn't even try to understand why she would want it coaxed out to attack her.
When the creature pisses itself, Draco scoffs in disgust and releases it from his fear. He takes several steps back and grunts as the once furious thing sprints away while whimpering. The demon lazily casts his gaze over to Morgayne, to the focused way she cleans herself.
"How'd you know I was following you?" he huffs, stepping closer to inspect the way her wound folds itself back together. He sniffs at it, feeling his lips curl back instinctively from the stench of fresh, flowing blood. "Shouldn't you be with the twins?" he adds after a moment of thought, collecting little snippets of them out of her head. It only makes sense that she'd end up with his strangest pair of brothers, he thinks; and it surprises him that they're not together.
“A monster, of course.” Her eyes, rhodonite ringed in sapphire, are raised to watch the released creature crash away through the undergrowth. “Something unstoppable and terrible.” Beqanna had made a thing but clearly the magic had chosen a weak material for corruption.
Small unstoppable Morgayne must process her disappointment, but Draco might as well be her own brother for all of his annoying questions.
”I don’t know.” She tosses her head at him when he sniffs at the wound being unmade in her side, scything her fangs through the air twice before dragging her tongue over the blood drying around a disappearing scar on her shoulder. “Maybe you smell like Pangea. Sulfur and rotting things” Neither of them smell that way despite being from the risen kingdom but she says it anyway, looking up from her ablutions without affect.
“The twins don’t do these things with me.” To be fair, she’s never asked, this is her interest. If Crybaby and Hatchetface were here now they would be mocking her for having been nearly killed by a cowardly mutated canine rat and while that sort of harassment passes for affection in their odd little family she isn’t in the mood for it. Morgayne might ask Draco a similar question but she can’t remember his sister’s name and so she just stares at him for a second too long and then walks past him to paw the bloody snow where she’d lain only a short time before.
“I suppose it wasn’t entirely pointless, I think that was one of my nearer deaths.”
Morgayne proceeds to then inspect herself. Focusing on closing the largest wound, her lip curling on one side as she manages it closed enough. She leaves a wicked scar along her barrel that, without her focus will heal more slowly and eventually disappear. Turning back to Draco, her small pink body bloodied but whole Morgayne twists herself around slowly. “Did I get all of them? The scars are fine but when I’m awake it’s harder to know if I’ve closed everything.”
"Ugh," Draco grunts, as he seems to be doing a lot around Morgayne. His red eyes roll slowly to the sky, wondering if the dark depths of the tightly-knit forest canopy will reveal some terrible premonition about how the smell of sulfur and rot will follow him for all his days. It's easy for him to picture, the world repulsed by him not because of his cruel nature, but because he smells of a fart held in for too long. Though he does not worry for his scent for long, his piercing irritation still settles plainly in Morg's direction.
"Do you want to die?" the demon asks, cocking his head and drawing his eyes back to the closing wound. He thinks he could kill her if she wanted, if death was some unconquered feat she so seeks out. They could even find one with resurrection magic, to bring her back once she's seen the Afterlife. He is admittedly intrigued by the idea, by the thought of someone describing the land of the dead to him. Draco's red gaze leaves the wound and finds Morgayne's face, a sort of hunger marring his sharp, handsome features. Being a creature ruled by both cruelty and impatience, he can hardly hide how he thinks of killing her now.
Every inch of Morg is inspected when she twists in her little circle, and the demon is admittedly impressed by how little she missed; but there is a cut where her hip meets her barrel and Draco commands, "Stop." He reaches forward with his mouth, pressing a little too roughly into the injury and murmuring, "Here." A rogue feeling stirs in his gut and he draws back, eyeing the woman suspiciously.
"Are you only able to heal yourself? Or others, too?" Draco flicks his tail in his typical irritated fashion, wondering what other surprises his neighbor holds.
Does she want to die? What a question. “I don’t die.” It does not matter if she wants to live or not, she just does. Her body even puts itself back together without being asked, though she can focus the ability to spare herself the boredom of a slow recovery. It became a game long ago, seeing how far she could push against the boundary between life and death but she never crosses over. Ever. Morgayne just bounces off, repelled by that good night, and turned away from that last bright and beckoning light. She grows into an ever more gifted healer the more she plays this game. Practice makes perfect.
How can she explain what she actually wants is the thrill of surviving?
”I don’t die.” She repeats, deciding that is answer enough, as there is a hardness in his face that she recognizes, a sharp predatory shift. Has anyone ever wanted to kill her before? Interesting.
Morgayne does her little turn, shadows shifting over her pink back as Draco assists in the inspection. In spite of herself she freezes when he bids her to, and stands still as he presses his dark mouth against the overlooked cut. Pain flares out from the discovered wound and Morgayne draws a deep breath as warmth creeps across her skin in its wake. Twisting away from Draco she mends the gash but does not bother to put some distance between them. It does seem like a good opportunity to leave but Morgayne rarely develops feelings of fear or apprehension and sees no reason she ought to leave.
“Others too, though I find it easiest when I know someone well.” Facing him again, her small dark ears turned forward and gaze bright, scrutinizing. “If I were healing you, for instance, the work would go much faster if I knew the exact shape of you already.”
What an interesting statement, I don’t die. Draco watches Morgayne with those clever, piercing eyes. His head doesn’t tilt like it so often does but dark curiosity is apparent in his gaze. Even immortals die. Who was she to claim death does not come for her? And now he wonders, glittering eyes full of salacious violence, if he could bring death to her body in ways she would never heal from. He was clearly more powerful than he ever dreamed of being, after all. His arrogance doesn’t doubt that he is more powerful than she.
It’s that slithering, sickening curiosity that keeps Draco from lashing out at her immediately. Though he wants to, thirsts to—his tongue even daring to grow slick with watering—he remains still, calm. Ruminating on the words she chooses next and the proximity of her saccharine pink skin. “Hmm,” the demon hums to himself, as he is wont to do when no words will bring forth the full weight of what he is thinking.
Towering nearly a full three hands over her, Draco peers down his nose at Morgayne. The taut tilt of her ears and the insolent brightness of her eyes stirs that killing, sensual instinct in his gut. He hums again, drawing his ears down into his mane and baring his sharp teeth to press against her forehead.
“Then get to know me, Morgayne,” Draco whispers, the ghost of a shark’s smile curling his lips. His words are laced with a violent undercurrent, a warning that he thinks she is playing games more dangerous than she has ever imagined.
“I want to hurt you,” the demon states plainly, taking a step back. “But I won’t, for you are more fascinating alive than dead.” He cocks his head now, insinuating that her healing magic will not withstand his strength.
“Bite me,” Draco urges suddenly, lifting his neck as an offering. “Try to take my throat out with those pretty fangs of yours, then heal me. There’s no better way to get to know someone.” He smiles now, wide and discomforting. A delicious, excited purr rumbles in the back of his throat.
