"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
The ground shivers. Pale gold and crimson leaves dance slightly, thumping above the earth in time to a silent beat. A puddle grown from Winter’s thaw begins to tremble and then, starts to swirl. For a moment the sky seems darker, the air tense with expectation of something to come, and then the tension bursts -
Two pale claws break free of the puddle’s surface, scrabbling for a muddy edge as they drag the refuse of Sylvian muck back down with them. Each grasping attempt exposes the creature more; first a snout that looks slick as oil, then the shape of a pale, sopping head and two gold-tinged shoulders to match. Painfully slow, Crevan the wolf works to free himself of a water portal before the sucking nonsense can close itself forever.
Halfway through he snarls - spits up a glob of the black liquid that coats his mouth and lets it splatter down his chin and onto the soil of Sylvian earth. “Release me!” He snarls to no one in particular, “Don’t let it get through!”
Yelping, Crevan can feel the sensation of an invisible force shove him, and as a result his hind legs pop free to fly over his head and twist his massive wolf shape into a flip. He slams back-first onto the earth, the air from his lungs expelling with a gust of pain and more black spittle. “That’ll do, I guess.” He thinks, scrambling to right himself and peer back at the muddy hole he’d just traveled through.
He waits, silently, black waste dripping spot by spot from the corners of his jaw, but nothing happens. “Her plan worked, then.” He thinks incredulously, hardly willing to believe it but the longer he waits, the more the silence presses in around him.
It was done. She was gone. Their worlds were safe again.
In the following minutes Crevan can only realize how little time they'd really been given. He’d thought perhaps … but no. He mustn't linger. He’d promised, and he’d make good on his end of that just like he said he would.
“Nyxa.” Is all he can think, and then the forgotten Shade of Sylva loses consciousness.
Her nose twitches delicately in the cold air, little puffs of her breath leaving her leathered nostrils in small clouds as her head thrusts higher, inhaling and exhaling in deep and controlled breaths. The earth beneath her slender paws is wet from the recent thaw, the thick pine needles that cover the ground chilled from the melting of the snow. Spring is here, and Merida can feel it in the shift of the warm wind, and the way the trees no longer are silent beneath the snow’s weight, but now are alive once more. The fox begins to weave throughout the dense trees, accustomed to the closeness of the trunks and the thickness of their golden amber canopies. She is agile, leaping gracefully over fingers of trunks that have spliced the ground wide open, or using the various boulders or rocks to perch herself higher up, nosing in between the crevices to search for grubs and insects hiding there.
With the shift in the wind, a different kind of change finds her and ruffles her thick fur, as if awakening her and stirring her from sleep. She freezes quickly and lifts her head, a single paw lifted from the ground as she stares forward, allowing the wind to bring her the information that she can hardly process. She snorts lightly, placing her paw onto the ground with a tiny stomp, nose wrinkling.
Impossible.
The scent is familiar - too familiar - and that is what causes her to pause for so long. She inhales deeply, remembering the scent from what seems like a lifetime ago, but what also seems like yesterday. She is hesitant, a tilt of her head and a tiny whine vibrating in her throat. It could be any other wolf, she explains to herself. There are no other wolves, a voice reminds her. She holds her breath for a moment, the wind falling silent as the trees, before she leaps forward to search adamantly for the only wolf it could be - Crevan.
The fox finally finds him, a shadow of bulk beneath the darkness of the forest, unconscious and caked with blackness. There is no time for her to be angry or unsure (there will be time for that later), but her little ribcage is rising and falling quickly as she scurries to him, snuffling at his ears and face, applying gentle licks to the blackness that has dried to his eyes. He is large compared to her, a behemoth to her tiny frame, and she flits around him anyway, nosing at his paws with small grunts of desperation, or nipping at the thick muscle of his neck with her small teeth. She whines agitatedly, her tail billowing behind her as she finally stops before him, plopping onto her stomach with her chin resting between her brown paws, her fiery gaze fixed on him.
01-18-2018, 03:56 PM (This post was last modified: 01-18-2018, 04:33 PM by Crevan.)
Our skin gets thicker, living out in the snow
CREVAN
He could easily have slept for a thousand years.
It seems only right, after what he’s seen and been through. A thousand years is just a blink to an immortal, right? A thousand years is just a blink … Circinae whispers in his dreams, the sound echoing through his subconscious to send him racing through nightmares, one after the other. The Underneath rushes up to meet him and then it swallows him whole, erasing his shape to nothingness and then filling his innards with the same liquid Merida was so stubbornly trying to lick clean from his shut eyes.
His body turns to mush, splits like an overfull melon to sprinkle stardust across an empty galaxy and from there, he hardens into stone and is thrown across the heavens. A bright, blazing comet - so eager to streak past unnumbered constellations until, at last, the looming sphere of a strange, blue planet begins to grow in his foresight. Larger and larger it seems to expand but, really, he’s just pummeling towards it, spiraling wildly out of control as that same, strange earth sucks him into its gravitational orbit.
In a final, gallant display he explodes without ever touching the alien soil; splinters himself into a thousand fiery shards that rain down to fizzle out, and that is the last of himself that he remembers before consciousness grips him again with a painful awakening.
“Uugghhh.” He groans, not exactly a sentient answer but her whine had been then noise to bring him back from the precipice of … wherever he was. The she-fox yips; a shrill sound that grates against his ears and has his head throbbing. “Quiet!” He snaps, shifting only to swivel his head around and snap his teeth together at the offending creature but, when he sees her, the malice freezes on his blackened lips.
“ … Merida?” He remembers with a pleasant shock, dropping the snarl for a surprised expression instead. “You’re not dead?” He mutters, blinking a few times just to be sure.
For what seems like hours, the red-eyed fox watches him, her lips curling and twitching into snarls of distraught, then calming as a whine would leave her mouth. There is nothing she can do besides wait, and it made her anxious. Her tail flips behind her back and forth, ears bending back and then forward again listening to the sounds of the forest and of his ragged, tired breathing. Then, finally, a sound comes from him that is not just the sound of his ribcage falling and rising, and her chin lifts from her paws, her head tilting. He groans - a sign of life! She yips out of excitement and relief (not dead!), and is met with flashing teeth and a demand that causes her to bare her own, crouching below his massive jaws with a sneer. And then, as his eyes adjust and open slowly, blinking as if to clear them, he recognizes her.
She is still on her belly, her front paws outstretched in a perfectly poised position, and raises her head as his voice mutters her name, a scoff leaving her lips. “Were you expecting me to be?” She answers with a curl of her black-lined lips, thumping her tail in what would appear as frustration but inwardly, she knows she is anything but. She reaches towards him slightly, nipping at the air between her and his mountain of bulk, not yet sure if she would be allowed to touch him without a swift bite to her neck.
“I’m a scavenger,” she replies matter-of-factly with a flick of her tail, recalling the name he used to describe her and her kin, “and scavengers survive.” There is a hint of a laugh on her voice, but it does not dilute the concern that glistens in the fiery-red of her irises. Her gaze traces the gratuitous amounts of blackness that still lay in heaps across his body, ears flicking back warily. She did not like the way he appears, nor the way he smells. Something has happened.
But Merida is not the one to ask, and Crevan isn’t the one to explain. At least, not in this moment.
“You, on the other hand, look dead.”
She pauses after this comment, and then with a decisive huff, leaps up from her lying position and flits off into the forest.
The fox does not return for some time, and perhaps he has fallen back asleep. When she creeps into the openness of the clearing, it is with a dangling hare in her mouth. She drops it before him, and though it is small in comparison to him, the young hare that she had caught was quite the endeavor for her. Normally she wouldn’t try to hunt after such prey - she kept herself busy with the quick swipe of her paw to a mouse, or finding insects or nuts to satisfy her hunger, but those would not nourish him, she knows. It had taken a good amount of skill and luck, placing herself downwind and sneaking close enough to it to grab it before it took off.
She had been successful.
She walks past him a few steps and sits on her haunches, the snow-white of her chest brilliantly bright against the darkness of Sylva.
Every last one of them. Generations gone, in fact. Crevan finds it hard to believe that the feisty little shifter he left behind has barely aged - how long has he been gone? Or, how short of a time has he been away?
His head begins to throb again. Merida could be immortal like him, after all. She could simply be passing the time while another century has come and gone; not one of the flat-toothed pack animals here would consider her much of anything, if she chose to remain discreet and purely Fox. He means this in the nicest way - Merida was as crafty and witty as the second soul nestled close to her first.
She, like so few of the shifters around here, appreciated the freedom of a different skin. “It’s not the first time I’ve looked like this.” He mutters in a gravely tone. “And it certainly won’t be the last.” The wolf exhales as his companion flits away, feeling (for the brevity of a second) a tense sadness at her eager departure. Sleep is heavy on his eyelids though, so he readily succumbs to the darkness again and, this time, sleeps blissfully free of dreams.
Quiet paws bring her back to him, but it’s the smell of a fresh kill that has his eyes flicking open to glow hungrily in the encroaching darkness. Faint starlight swirls around her slender body, the halo of an expectant moon ringing her outline with silver fire. As she drifts away from him, Crevan adjusts; like two partners mimicking a dance he rises slowly on his forepaws and twists a stocky head over one thick shoulder to watch her present the hare.
“Some things have changed since I was gone.” He notices with stony composure - only, the tight press of his lips could be interpreted as a ‘smirk’. “I remember an unblooded curiosity; Now I see a rabbit killer in fine form.” He huffs, an attempt at laughter. With a delicacy he’d not mastered before, the taupe wolf hunkers down and gingerly relieves her of the prize. His wide jaws hold the meat limply, like Merida had before, and then his chin flexes and in one motion, he sears the animal entirely in half with a solid crunch of his teeth.
Both sides flop lifeless to the earth.
“Thank you.” He says afterwards, his nearly-black eyes rising to peer at her face. “Where are the rest of them?” Crevan asks as he slides once more to the ground, belly-flat. The one half of hare that belongs to him disappears beneath his looming mouth, a pleasant sound of tearing skin and snapping bones accompanying the action. Again his attention rises to the fierce she-fox, inquisitive eyes reading deeper into whatever she might say. His molars grind the bone to a soft paste as he chews; almost nothing is wasted when he eats these days.
His words find her with the crispness of his familiar voice, yet somehow, there is an edge of darkness that weighs heavy on them - something that she did not particularly like. It is not unlike Crevan to speak the way he does so now (at least, the Crevan she remembers), so she doesn’t question it; but she cannot help the feeling of foreboding that clasps around her small bodice as she wonders silently to herself why he had been found in the shadows of Sylva, slumped over and unconscious, with blackness clinging to his fur.
She had crept towards him with wide and burning eyes, dropping the hare carefully before him with a tender mouth. As she sits before him, she pants heavily - both from the exertion of finally sneaking up on the rather large hare, and from dragging its weight to him. It had been hours since she had left him, though he doesn’t seem to mind - it took her a lot of tracking as well as many attempts to finally kill one. He is surprised, yet pleasantly so, and though his face and voice do not show it, perhaps he had even sounded impressed. Her white-tipped tail curls around her dark legs, tapping on her paws as she watches him roll himself towards the brown hare, his large shoulders protruding from the thick of his back as he crouches his massive bulk over her kill, her eyes curious.
With a powerfulness that perhaps Merida will never feel in her own jaws, she gives a quick of her brows as he splits the hare clean in two, the smell of blood making her salivate. “With you gone, there was no other shifter here for me to steal scraps from. I adapted.” She tells him simply, eyes burning. There was no one here, for a long while. She doesn't tell him this - nor that it is the reason she has remained in her fox-skin for so long, and how learning to hunt had finally come to her naturally.
Creeping forward, the fox slinks towards the half that he deems is also hers, carefully tearing into the warm flesh with her slender snout and small, sharp fangs in tiny gulps. She does not say he is welcome for her gesture, but instead lays down before him to focus tentatively on a bone that is now showing, gnawing on it and the tender muscle and sinew that still cling to it, a soft vibration of satisfaction in her throat.
“Little nests, at the base of the trees. Spring has brought them out. Quick little things,” she answers him, murmuring between her mouthfuls of tissue and bone. She licks her lips, the whiteness of her chin now stained with blood and marrow, chewing thoughtfully on the piece of bone that she had finally broken off. “I was quicker,” she tells him with perhaps a hint of a laugh. She places her paws on the fur of the half-eaten rabbit, leaning in again to pull at a tasty morsel of fat that satisfyingly pops as she pulls it away from the body. She can’t remember the last time she ate a feast like this (to him, only a small snack), and she savors its heartiness on her tongue. Rodents and insects (even berries and nuts) were her normal delicacy, especially with no other predators in the forests.
Her half has much of it left, and most likely she wouldn’t finish it - normally she’d bury the remains somewhere in the depths of the forest, near her burrow, and would return to them later. She continues to work on her piece, wondering if perhaps he would expect her to try and fetch him more. “What are you covered in?” She finally asks, her eyes diverting from his gaze as she focuses fully on her meal, ripping the tender meat from the lithe bones.
“With you gone, there was no other shifter …” Merida tells him.
In her own way, he doubts she meant it negatively. In his mind, though, the words transform themselves to steel knives, each one plunging hungrily through his heart. He knows that what he’s done can’t be forgiven - not by Merida, not by his sister (a filly he’s never even seen, shame, shame on him) and certainly not by his father or twin, wherever they were now. His choice … no, their choice, for it’d been Circinae’s as much as his, had been irrevocably selfish.
He’d had friendship here; Merida was that, if not something more. Purpose; Celest had looked up to him, he realizes that now. Family; Canaan and Jah, Corvus and Nyxa.
Why had he left in the first place?
Chewing, ripping, the reddish-orange female fills in the blanks and draws him out from inside the prison of his thoughts. “Little nests, at the base of trees -” She rambles, I was quicker.”
Her laugh isn’t followed by one of his own. She reminds him too much of the things that hurt, things that mattered. Reminds him exactly why he’d left. This place - Beqanna - had felt too small to house his great bulk, too weak and delicate to withstand his violent nature. (The squirming, fleshy ‘babie’ rabbits, nestled in their spring dens as he devoured them one by one) He swallows, done with his half though Merida now works on a bone.
His tongue flicks out from the shadow of his mouth, running smoothly over the the oily substance covering his lips to clean the final, bloody residue, and Crevan has a feeling they will come around to the subject he wishes they would avoid. Merida, reading his thoughts, asks anyways. His mind drifts:
(They were staying in each new world for short bursts of time, aiming to outrun it. When once they’d been leisurely and involved, working hard to assume new lives and try new things, now they were harbingers of death - unintentional or not.)
“Some … thing.” Is the best answer he can give in regards to the black shit matting his fur. “My dam, Circinae, had the ability to teleport. She was never meant to stay in one place, but she wasn’t exceptionally powerful. I wasn’t meant to be a father, to be a lover, but I couldn’t stop myself from hurting people. So we left.” He explains briefly, before the memory sweeps over:
(In the beginning it was perfect. The first world they’d encountered had perpetually been a Tundra. Wolves ruled, and then he and his mother came to rule them, gods among their own kind. But that space was too small, too limited, so they left. And then, once that new place had become small, they would leave again, and again, and again. Over and over, starting from nothing and together, soon outgrowing every place they’d teleported to.)
“I think her ability was what drew the thing to hunt us. It … hungered for total destruction, ruined everything in its wake.” He frowns, the lines of his immortal face growing tight with anger. “Her gates, our jumps - they were like footprints behind us. No matter where we went, it would tear reality in order to find us.”
(Black death, and so much of it. The fabric of time would shred and it would spill free from the makeshift portal, shapeless and silent in its pursuit of them. Sometimes it would not find them for months, sometimes it was only a few days. Near the end, they had precious hours to plan. That was when Circinae had decided to stop running.)
“We went to a dark place.” Crevan breathes, just above a whisper. His eyes are gone, travelling through space and eternity to see that horrid darkness again, a world so much like the Underneath it was agony to think on it now. “I fought and for the first time, I felt true fear that I would die.” He mouths, remembering the way it had enveloped him completely and begun to drink his gifts away like a man stranded in the desert, lapping up drops of water.
(“It’s me you want!” Circy had screamed, not once but twice. Behind her, the portal that Crevan was supposed to be escaping into was already formed, mouth open and waiting. But the thing had been unsure - tasting Crevan had given it second thoughts, perhaps. The green mare wasn’t deterred - she never was, in the face of impending doom - and had fallen in to attack. That was all it took, all ‘it’ needed in order to free Crevan and turn to the object of its true desires.)
“But I stuck to our plan; I managed to make it through the portal and her move was to take the Creature … nowhere, I guess. A death sentence. To go ‘nowhere’ was to become ‘nothing’, and that was her sacrifice.” He rumbles, blinking softly before jerking his head away from Meridia’s inquisitive stare.
Silence follows. Eventually Crevan rises; one fluid, graceful motion where all his limbs worked in tandem because his thoughts were aligned on one purpose. “I need to run.” He snarls softly, choosing to avoid her gaze still.
@[Merida]
It's a novel
I ain't sorry
#ShesThePBtoHisJ
She wonders if he can tell that she’s missed him - even pined for him. She would never admit it (not in a way that would be clear and precise), but she had stared out into the evening sky for weeks after his disappearance, hoping to hear the deep and lonely howl that would only belong to him. Without him, she had been isolated and alone within Sylva, seen by others as a simple, dumb fox. Only Dahmer had realized she was a shifter (kin calls to kin), but she had been careful not to let the others notice her residency had been not only one of a wild fox, but with an equine soul. Even the current queen here, Sabra, knows nothing of her fox-skin and only the ebony and red woman she revealed herself to be to the pearlescent lady, ready to fight and defend her forest for a perfect stranger.
She notices that he is not laughing nor as quippy as she remembers, though she doesn’t expect him to be as she remembers; just as she hopes he doesn’t expect her to be as he remembers. She is indifferent towards his change, though she can tell that somewhere beneath his cold gaze that something within him had broken off, or had been peeled off of him. Something irreplaceable.
The fox continues to eat, chewing pensively on sinew and tendon.
Her question gave way to silence (a silence that is familiar within the ember-colored halls of her dark forest), and she can feel him recalling memories, the stiffening of his muscles beneath flesh and the sharp intake of breath.
She continues eating.
But all the while, she is alert; listening.
There is immense pain beneath his story, veiled by the sharpness of his snout and the hardness of his gaze. Even she, emotionlessly staring at him as each word ties into an even sadder sentence, can feel the welling up of sympathy in her chest - she had long stopped eating and now is looking up at him with the final bits of her hare between her paws, her lips in a thin line. His story frightens her, though nothing about her would give that away save for the idle twitch of her white-tipped tail.
She says nothing (what is there to say?) and soon he rises. She follows suit, lightly finding her feet with ease and poise. A run. Yes, of course. His gaze, however, causes her to hesitate. “Darkness proves that there is sunshine. Dawn is coming.”You will not be in darkness for much longer. Of course, she knew not of what she spoke of, nor could she truly grasp the futileness of his experiences, besides perhaps that it had latched onto his soul, determined to remain a twisted and black thing beneath his skin.
A snarl of her own finds her black-lined lips, stepping forward to nip lightly at the empty air beneath his neck. A gesture of friendship, of understanding, of empathy. It is brief and fleeting, and the movement is fluidly followed by her lightly leaping into the forest, a flick of her white tail sending her into the depths.
