"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
She has shed the weight of motherhood and she is back to her old self. She thinks, infrequently, of her son, and wonders if he survived into adulthood. She didn’t want him to die, exactly, but she was never meant to be a mother – certainly not to a son - and so she had passed him on and walked away, shadows trailing behind her. She is back, now. She flits in and out of the land. It does not love her, nor she is, but when she grows bored she enjoys the expanse of Beqanna and its strange offerings. She has found delightful things here, fools who are willing to let her in, let her pilot their bodies and share their secrets, or simply ones who gawk at the bone-thing that walks beside her. (A waste of her powers, truly – she could summon souls, she could tear their life force asunder, and what does she do? She plays architect, building a golem of bones, horse and deer and wolf and anything else that suits her fancy. But she likes it. It is her companion. She loves it more than she ever loved her son.) And so she is here, again. She doesn’t care about the shifting lands, the strange water-creatures that lurk somewhere in the depths. She moves unhurried through the forest, shadows trailing in her hoofprints, and she scans its offerings. Behind her walks the bone-thing, the soft clatter of its bones a gentle noise she enjoys. She is not particularly beautiful – she lacks the stark angles of her mother, lacks a luster on her coat – but with the bones, she can be noticed. Or maybe she’ll notice someone else, first.
She is drawn to the forest for reasons she can never quite decipher, though she supposes it is anchored to why she has always been attracted to the dark in general.
The way she is so easily lured to the things not meant for her, and she, far too bright, is not a thing made for shadows.
The light that radiates from her—far more vivid than the soft, ethereal glow she'd had when she first became an angel, having now transformed into something that is sharper and no longer a thing of hazy, golden dreams—chases away the shadows that would have been cast by the trees she winds through. The darkness stops short of the light as if it has hit a wall, and sometimes she wishes just once that she had any kind of control over it—a way to soften and blur her edges, a way to disappear into the dark. She could be seen by any lurking with sharp clarity, every detail seemingly beneath a spotlight: from the amber halo that rings her pale head and illuminates the near-black of her eyes, to the stardust that falls in a shimmering trail from her wings, there is nothing discreet about her presence.
She seeks the darker parts of the forest, as if she might somehow find a shadow strong enough to swallow the light of her. A place reminiscent of that black void, and though the thought sends a shiver of something similar to fear along her spine, her steps do not falter. Enough time has passed between her rescue—she prefers to think of it that way, a foolish and toxic romantic to the core—and accidental (she likes to think of it this way, too, as she had only been following Firion) escape that she had mostly recovered to a version of her previous self. The bouts of confusion and tilted reality were few and far between, and she has, unfortunately, returned to some of her old ways.
Because she sees the black mare and the bone-creature that she walks alongside of her, and instead of recoiling she drifts closer. Perhaps it is only because the puppet-like creation reminds her of Stave and the way she had seen him pull bones from their graves, and her chest clenches at the strange familiarity. Of course only she could be stirred to a maternal melancholy at the sight of a mismatched skeleton.
“I have a son that used to have a fascination with bones,” she says by way of greeting, before amending herself with a small smile. “Well, I suppose he probably still does. But it’s been awhile since I’ve seen him.” Some might consider that a failure on her part, that she cannot—does not—keep a close connection with every child. But there are too many of them, flung to every corner of Beqanna, and Stave had never struck her as the type that would seek her out anyway. “I’m Ryatah,” she says as her dark eyes lift from the bones to the mare that controls them, searching for a sign of familiarity—pieces of herself, or anyone else that she might know—in the shape of her face.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
It's hard to miss such a blinding thing.
Violence had been raised to revere the night. This was her mother’s doing, for her magic was strongest then, channeled through darkness and nighttime. The sun had made her mother a weaker thing, which Violence had liked – it was easiest to engage with her when she was weak, more amusing.
Still, shadows run thick in her blood, and she reflects this – herself a deep black, not a speck of marking on her, and now shadows trailing in her wake. So it is strange, to suddenly be blinking against a light, a pale mare with a halo above her and wings trailing out.
She wonders what her mother would make of her. If she would cringe away.
She smiles, at the thought.
(She doesn’t know the rich and tangled history, that the mare before her lurks in her own bloodline, that she is bound to the same god Violence’s grandmother once killed. All she sees is light, and so all she feels is curiosity.)
The woman speaks of a son, of a similar penchant for bones, then gives her name. It rings no bells for Violence, who never much listened when her mother shared tales of their history. But still, she dips her head, as does her bone creature. She can be polite when it suits her.
She wonders if the woman’s son is still alive. Maybe his bones are part of her creature, now.
“Ryatah,” she repeats, “what a pretty name.”
She stands quiet under the mare’s gaze for a moment. She doesn’t mind being looked at. She wonders what she’s looking for. She’s curious, this one – Violence wonders what else she can do.
She wonders how open her mind is, how willing.
(She wonders this about most things she meets, if they have powers she is curious about, or simply show themselves to be weak-willed. She loves the feeling of wallowing in their minds, their bodies, testing their limits. But it’s a hard task if they fight.)
“I had a son too,” she says, “but he lives with his father now.”
Untrue, most likely – he’ll be grown, now, and out on his own, assuming he’s made it this far.
“I’m Violence,” she says. A less pretty name, just as she is less pretty than the light-strewn spectacle before her. She doesn’t mind this, either. She’s mostly just curious what the mare wants from her.
It is a nearly toxic thing, the way her pulse flutters when the other says that her name is pretty. It is a small compliment, and likely just making conversation rather than anything genuine, but it does not matter. She is hard-wired to seek praise, a flaw that she had perhaps been born with but had then been shaped into something uncontrollable as events in her life transpired. It flickers there, in the dark of her eyes, a brief flash of something unnamable and strange, as if there is a war waging within the confines of her chest; trying to decide if she wants to give into the weakness of it. She has been better, recently, about not trying to please everyone, about not trying to change herself to fit everyone’s wants.
For some she still will, of course, but no longer everyone.
And so all she does is smile and nod, and offer a soft, “Thank you.” She looks to the place where the shadows had trailed the mare’s movements, thinks of the immovable darkness in the void and feels the unnerving swelling in her chest that has followed her ever since she left, like the darkness has holed itself away in there and is trying to break free. “You can control shadows, too?” she asks in mild curiosity, thinking briefly of Illum and their daughter and the way they could bend shadows to their will. She has never had much desire to control anything, is usually the thing being controlled. She has always been a painfully obedient creature, until, of course, she is not, because there is a sickening thrill in being punished—in discovering what boundaries exist and exactly which ones should not be crossed.
“Fathers are important, I suppose,” she says, faintly amused. Most of her children didn’t know their fathers, at least not personally. It was hardly a secret that she had developed a distinct taste in men—a taste that did not lend well to fatherhood, but she doesn’t mind. She was rarely interested in them for that reason.
“Violence,” her name fits nicely on her tongue, maybe a little too comfortably for one that wears a halo, but the shape of it—the meaning behind it—is familiar. “Also a pretty name, if not in a different way.” She does notice the strangeness of that comment, her expression unchanged; still openly curious with lips shaped into a faint smile. “Were you looking for something in the forest?”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH — BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
