"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
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
It would not be hard to find them, the first three daughters.
Beyza.
It would be as simple as sending an army of shadows out into the world in search of them.
And yet.
He does not.
Perhaps it is because he has no interest in finding them.
Or perhaps it is because he is merely biding his time, waiting.
The white magician does take up more space in his thoughts than he would care to admit, though. When he calls upon the dogs to do his bidding, when he watches them sink their teeth into the throats, when he watches the life bleed out of his prey, he thinks of her and how she, too, had been so willing to kill for him.
What had changed?
This is the thought that haunts him.
What had changed?
They were meant to be all-powerful, the five of them. The black magician, the white magician, the daughters of creation. But the reaper prowls alone now. He rarely strays far from Pangea, lurking in the same cave in which he had spent his crippled youth. (He will never forget where he came from, Jamie, because it is the rage that fuels him. It is the disgust that spurs him into action.)
But he has ventured out to check on the nymph daughters today. Never getting close enough that they might notice him, no. Just peering at them from a distance. Loathing them and all that they represent. The staggering beauty of them as they languish in their pools, tethered there by his magic.
He is on his way from the forest daughter’s secluded pony now, making his way through the forest, flanked by two elk crafted from shadow. The breath is a rattling wheeze, as it has always been, and the eyes are the same freakish yellow.
So many have died at his hand since the last time Jamie was spotted in the forest, feeding the dark heart, and he wears that same shark-tooth smile. Ink-black mouth dripping something terrible as he moves, silent.
I am not sure what wakes me, but even before my surroundings register, instinct drives me to my feet. I scramble over still slumbering limbs and curse my sluggishness when I nearly trip onto my face. I do manage to catch myself but not without knocking the snow from the heavy-laden boughs on my exit, covering myself in the stuff. Adrenaline tickles and stretches my skin as I dart out of my lurking place, darting left and right, then right again.
Sweat dampens my skin and the tips of my coat glitter with frost before I slow my wild pace to a casual walk. My throat swells until I can’t hold it in any longer and I meet the cold moonlight with a soft laughter that belies unrestrained turbulence of my aura. Something tugs me in its direction, an intangible draw that I follow without qualm. Snow crunches underfoot as I draw deeper into the shadows, the slower pace giving my lungs a chance to recover. When I can hear more than my breath in my ears, the overwhelming sense of …
I pause, adrenaline again spiking under my dark hide and this time I embrace it, drink it in. Stilled like a doe caught out in the open, my head snaps around to the sound of a wheezing death rattle. For a moment I think something has died, succumbed to the frigid darkness, but there it is again. And again, drawing closer. Something wicked this way comes …
Resisting the urge to shift (not fully, at least; there are a lot of animals that see better in the dark than my natural form can), it is the yellow eyes that I spot first. Niklas rarely wears that color; his creatures do, but the shade is wrong and – I tilt my nose, sniffing at the cold air – they do not reek of brimstone. They don’t smell of anything, actually. The air is thick with death and dark promises, though, and I find myself edging closer. My intrusion on the shadow creature and his companions’ path is deliberate, a tilt of my head and rove of my grey eyes preceding my question. His smile is a familiar one and it probably says something of me if I find twisted comfort in the familiarity. He is so dark he swallows my gaze, a walking black hole that threatens to pull me in, cold and predatory. “Are you as hollow as you feel?”
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He feels her before he sees her.
The only living thing for miles in any direction.
The pair of elk see her before he does, turning their great heads in her direction, leveling her with lethal stares. And then he, too, shackles his stare to her form there as it comes swimming out of the darkness.
(How it makes him long for the crushing blackness! How vicious the yearning in his gut for the strangeness, the violence the eclipse had wrought. How he despises the sun.)
He expects her to skitter out of their path as the strangers so often do. (Will he send the dogs after her if she runs? Will he swallow down the soul when it leaves her?) But she does not flee. No, she stands there and the three of them (the Darkness and the pair of elk that flank him) stop, though they could easily pass right through her.
Is it boredom that has him stopping?
Or something more sinister?
She speaks before he gets a chance and the shark-tooth smile deepens, the freakish eyes flashing with something wicked as he takes a step closer. The elk stay behind. The fog comes for them then, slithering thick along the forest floor to curl sweetly around his legs and then hers.
“Why don’t you come closer and find out?” he suggests, the voice breathy, every bit as raspy as the breathing. And the fog tugs just barely at her ankles, beckoning. Come, it says, come see.
He had wondered as a child if he was hollow, if there were bones beneath the darkness only to find out on the battlefield that he was as real as the rest of them. The bones broke and the skin bled. But that had been before.
09-07-2021, 01:45 PM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2021, 06:48 PM by Dretch.)
DRETCH
... and from your lips she drew your hallelujah
There is no real reason for her to be out here, where the cold beckons from the void; shadows wrought in the fantastical and the supernatural. She has no affinity for darkness, takes no pleasure in the sting of winter’s kiss in her lungs and on her skin. Her tongue worries at the inside of her lip, calloused by the rub of her fang. At least, she thought that she had no affinity for darkness and its cloaked horrors. But here she is and there he (they) is and she cannot say why she does not turn and run … The temperature drops. Unsure whether it is him or otherwise, she shifts her weight, ears swiveling back and forth as the fog creeps in around them. It winds closer, no doubt answering his presence as it caresses him first. Like a flood of rats to their piper, it spills around her ankles with a clammy touch, and unbidden, her skin stretches and tingles as his smile grows.
Her grey eyes dance with mischief at his reply, her legs giving to the pressure of the fog easily. She does not drop his gaze as she steps closer, her vision momentarily tunneling as the unnerving yellow of his eyes fills it. Blinking, she finds herself just within reach, her tail flicking once against her hocks. There is something animal, something visceral in her that wants to know this stranger – to pick him apart piece by piece, taste him; to patch him back together and make him hers. Power – akin to Set’s, only more lifeless – entwines his darkness like a purring feline, but it’s not that which attracts her, draws her to him like his fog and his shadows …
To distract herself from these unsettling urges, she stretches her nose out as if to bump his own, stopping just short of actually touching him and withdrawing. Her pale eyes hang on his alien one again, an impish smile caught up on her refined features. “I think you’re just as hollow as they are. No more, no less.” She does not bother to elaborate who “they” are, instead denying herself and stepping away from him with an ease belying her suddenly thundering heart. Ducking her head, she squints, weighing him. “Disappointing, really,” she laughs, the sound softer than one might expect. He is no doubt dangerous - it oozes from him like a sickness, and there is something off about him, but his eeriness is nearly lost on her. Spawned by the worst, raised by the worst (at least, as far as she can tell), it is not his darkness that has her masking her disquiet, but rather the promises it holds and the way they beckon to her …
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Once, he had tried to convince himself that he was no monster.
He knows now that he has always been a monster.
It takes nothing at all to convince her to come closer and the ink-black mouth twists greedily, the freakish yellow eyes briefly glowing a burnt red before dulling back to yellow as he watches her.
And he thinks of Balto and how sweetly the old stallion had caved beneath the gravity of death, the color bleeding out of him and pooling at their feet. How Jamie had kissed his brow and promised him salvation and Balto had been reborn something as dark as the void.
She starts to reach for him and he does not retreat, but the fog stirs, ready to stop her. He had once craved touch because when others had reached for him, they found only empty space. Vapor. The rumor of something. And now? Now he gnashes his ugly teeth at anyone who comes close enough.
(It had been a hard lesson to learn: trust, loyalty, betrayal.
As a creature incapable of love, he had no loved Beyza.
But he had trusted her, he had been fond of her, and she had plunged a blade into his back.)
But she stops herself short and the fog retreats, if only just barely. He tilts his peculiar, featureless head at her appraisal. No fear in it, no. Is it boredom he detects in her tone?
Disappointing, she says and laughs.
And he takes the sound of her laughter and echoes it back at her from the trees, from the mouths of the elk standing behind him. A low din that continues long after she has stopped laughing.
“Where did you come by such high standards?” he asks. He could make himself hollow or not or any number of things in between, but he feels no overwhelming urge to entertain her boredom.
jamie
