"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
04-07-2015, 12:58 AM (This post was last modified: 05-06-2015, 06:50 PM by Nihlus.)
His every aspect is attuned to her. To her cryptic words and dull appearance. To the way her breath smells bitter and her eyes taste like agony when he speaks to them. The boy lean's his soul against hers, tests its strength, absorbs its sadness. He intertwines his existence with hers so powerfully, it seems that he will never stop staring at her or the way she breathes and blinks. But of course, it is only for a moment.
He comes closer to her, looks at her, melts into her. They are inches away, and he wonders if she tastes as dull as she looks, like a stone. She surely will not taste like Noori - like sap made into syrup and flowers ranging from bitter to sweet. Noori is her own restaurant of emotions and auras - this Cordis of Nothing is the dime pressed into the homeless man's hand without meeting his gaze.
"You could kill yourself." He mused. "That would give you power - or at least take some of it away from the universe." The child looks up to her eyes, enjoys the way they are shattered. "But you'd still be nothing." A crease comes upon his forehead - that will be a problem. He's trying to help her, you see. Trying to use the darkness of his mind to cure the nothingness of hers. For he knows she is lying - perhaps her spirit eyes are blind. For where her life is a universe, his is a void.
Breaking their gaze, he closes the gap between them, and suckles softly on the flesh of her shoulder. His pink tongue is light against the silver of her skin, a finger's brush of the spin. They stay like that for a moment, together in the ways only freaks are, before he pulls back. The crease has gone from his youthful forehead.
"But you don't taste like nothing." She tastes like tears and pain, like knives and painkillers. "So that makes you a liar." What a thing to be - glorious. A universe with more layers than content. A book with pages so thin it takes minutes to separate them. Nihlus wonders if he will ever be a liar. If he will ever be nothing.
Looking upon Cordis, he decides against the notion.
It would be lovely to indulge the lie – the wish? – that she is nothing. To purge herself, make herself into a silver shell, heartbeat echoing in the hollows where her ribcage once was. She wants sometimes to forget, the good and the bad. To forget the way He would breathe smoke in her ear, tell her how the cities defied him so he burned them to ash. To forget the way He would break every bone in her body, take her apart piece by piece to the sound of her screaming and begging.
(funny that the boy says kill yourself, not knowing you’ve died a hundred times over, are practically on a first name basis with death)
The good, too: to forget the love so sweet she would kill for it (did kill for it), the way Spyndle’s name tastes right in her mouth. Forget the children, one celestial and one damned, the alchemy they begot in a breathless frenzy years in the making.
But it’s a fool’s errand, such thoughts. She cannot forget any of it.
She is not nothing, rather, she is too much. Too much death and hurt and love and lightning.
She is – as we’ve said before, many times – an Atlas, worlds on her shoulders, knees shaking.
“I don’t think I could,” she says, when he suggests that she kill herself. Lord knows the thought’s crossed her mind, but she’s died so many times, begged Him to kill her, let her die so many times – she would not give Him the satisfaction.
The colt surprises her by moving closer, by reaching out to taste her silver skin, and she jumps back.
Her skin flickers, the lightning rolling over her like a wave, a warning sign in neon.
Very few people have touched her and two of them – the wayfarer and the prophetess – are dead now.
“Touch me again,” she says, and her voice is flat, thinned out by years spent shrieking in His lair, “and you’re the one who will be nothing.”
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
i'll pick up these broken pieces 'til i'm bleeding
if that'll make it right
A reply is on his tongue when she leaps away from him, suddenly illuminating the night-field. The glow in his pale blue eyes is momentarily electrified, be it by the reflection of Cordis, or simply awe. His breath catches in his throat at the thought of what danger he is in, of what she must have gone through to be so against a simple touch, an innocent one. For a moment he stutters softly, staring at her with a newfound curiosity, intensity. Another moment passes, and his little black voice returns to existence.
"My apologies," He breathes, the scent of her suddenly thunderous and no longer dull. He figures that the two are interchangeable, when one knows no better. But he knows better now - what appears to be nothing, is in fact, everything. "But Cordis, what's keeping you here?" He's come full circle, touching base with their suicidal topics as though they are nothing but the grass beneath their hooves.
"I have my family, the rain, my skinchanging..."
His shapely bay head tilts slightly to the side and upwards, as the mare is far older than he. If only she knew. "...What do you have? Besides the lightning."
An obscure, unbalanced smile breaks the solemnity of his face. If only I wanted her to. "I know you have the lightning, as I have the rain."
Thoughts of further apologies cloud his head, but a shake of it clears them. He is merely curious about her lightning, about her life, about her love, Spyndle, who he has yet to meet but oh, meet her he will. The volcanic smile dwindles back to the blankness of before, the canvas of black. Only his eyes betray his desires, for he shall never be able to control them. Just as her eyes taste like ash created by her lightning, his taste of drowning. Ever drowning, be it in curiosity, love, or sorrow. As he gazes at her, expectantly waiting for diligent answers, he figures that perhaps she is drowning, too.
(He touched her, in every awful way you could imagine. He touched her, sometimes with hooves, crashing down again and again until she was a patchwork of bruises. Sometimes with teeth, raking trails down her neck, her spine, sometimes coming so deep raw nerves here exposed. Sometimes He touched her with magic – breaking her bones without ever touching her, forcing her to her knees, flaying her open with invisible whips, spilling her guts out on the stone floor, until she’d finally die and He would revive her and the cycle would begin anew.
Worst was when he touched her casually, like they were lovers. Worst was when he would breathe the stories into her ear, the same stories He told her again and again, tales of those who wronged Him and what He did to them. He always smelled like smoke, like rotting meat, of everything wrong and stomach turning.)
He had touched her so many times that it took her decades until she could even allow Spyndle to touch her (and even that had taken death, had taken magic, had taken her realizing how much she needed her, that they were fate, as much as anything is).
He had touched her and sometimes the thoughts come to her unbidden and she is sick, her skin crawls.
He had touched her and when she finally escaped and the next horse came (the wayfarer, black and lusty, taking her in filthy ways) she had been able to do what she never could to Him, and she had discovered what He had always known: that it was a pleasure to burn.
(The incident had given her Ka, her silver-haired girl she’d tried to love and failed, who had left too early. She’d touched Ka, held her often enough, but Ka had been different, Ka had been her blood.)
She still feels hot, the lightning sitting under her skin, begging to be used (she hadn’t used it since He had come, since He had come like a natural disaster and taken their girl away, her silver daughter who had only looked at Him with the same curiosity she’d greeted everything with).
But she does not. He has not given her reason.
(Part of her – that secret, dark part, the one she does not speak of, does not acknowledge – wants him to try again, wants him to justify the wasp-buzz of lighting singing under her skin, wants to set him aflame.)
She hushes these thoughts, quiets them, turns her mind to his question.
“My family,” she says, even if the word is sour in her mouth, “I have her. I have our children.”
(our child, now)
“They’re everything. I have them, and they’re everything.”
c o r d i s
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
and she learned a lesson back there in the flames
i'll pick up these broken pieces 'til i'm bleeding
if that'll make it right
His time has not come yet. He is a blank canvas waiting to be stained, a freshly made bed waiting to be crumpled and soiled. Where Cordis is jaded, he is smooth. Where he is learning, she is wishing she hadn’t learned so much. Wishing for the reversal of time, for the return of the nativity and innocence of youth. He sees it in her eyes which taste like agony, but he is naïve and innocent and youthful. His interpretation of life will always be flawed until he himself grows up; even then, perhaps he will always see Cordis in the wrong light.
The whirlwind of her mind falls into silence when he questions her. It’s disquieting in the way that her quietness should not be so. Everything about her is loud; the colour of her coat, the chaos of her mind, the agony in her eyes. Screams swell in his throats, manifesting into words which would shatter Cordis, or perhaps the impression he has of her. In these brief minutes, he has gathered but pieces of her nightmare. And from what he has seen, from what he has felt on her skin, he decides against his harsh words. She may be loud, but she is also quiet. Delicate. Unbreakable.
"Then return to them. To her.” He twists his neck, blue eyes trying vainly to catch hers. "She would not speak her name but I know of whom you speak.” The woman who was a universe, a vast void filled with seemingly tiny stars which make up her soul. The woman who would only say that her name belonged to Cordis. "Go now. She needs you like the dry forest needs the lightning. She needs to be set afire, if only to regrow into something more amazing.”
He steps forward, as though to touch her, to encourage her to go. He stops short, eyes searching hers. He knows what she has said. He knows what she has felt.
And so, he leaves.
Nihlus
rain manipulating, rabbit shifting son of Sinder & Noori
reply if you want, or not if you dont I LOVED THIS THREAD THANKS FOR THREADING YOURE AMAZING AND I LOVE YOU
I LOVED THIS THREAD THANKS FOR THREADING YOURE AMAZING AND I LOVE YOU