"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
11-10-2018, 01:15 AM (This post was last modified: 11-10-2018, 10:58 PM by Yidhra.)
The river is not a peaceful thing, it is brackish and laden with murk and mud: never settles nor clear and its currents batter stone and the rocky edges. Green and brown, with rushing white water breaks there is a bizarre shadow that manifests beneath the surface: an inky darkness whose malleable form slithers between rock and beds of overgrown algae. It never surfaces completely and only flashes of the dark body can be seen, the slightest glimmer of something faint blue and black: of something dusted with grey and white. Yet it stirs for one reason or another, and there is a sudden shape that begins to push the water’s surface and rise without complaint, a creature whose appearance is a grotesque mockery of a horse.
Its head is too perfect, too smooth and too easily made into the shape, and the thick tangle of curls on the neck and where the tail should be seem too heavy and dense. For Yidhra, the creature, this is simply illusion: the shadow cast on her in a way that from a distance- she is merely one of them; but up close?
No, she is a nightmarish fiend.
The tendrils form a false-nose slump and bend, hanging down and writhing as they clutch the hardened shell of a clam and draw it into the center of the maw. The chitinous and dagger-like beak sneak and bite, crack the shell and litter traces as she feasts on the soft… salty-sweat meat: the radula grinding and tearing as she considering returning: hunting, and stalking the river.
A voice, however, intervenes in her mind and Yidhra hears a familiar whisper- a sound, and she allows the hairless, watery flesh to remain under the sun. Stalking along the expanse of rusted Pangea and her rocky crags and plateaus- she hears the shrill wind and its voice… the spirits, or supposed ones, of older years come and gone. Graceful and easy in her steps she guides herself through and around the maze, weaving and wandering all the while tasting the blood that drips from her mouth and awful beak.
She finds him, somewhere, and her teal eyes are impassive in how they stare: her frame unmoving and attentions fixating as she leers over the gray and white, over the blues and purples: the colors of shifting astral-being and all the horror he embodies. “Ah,” she speaks softly- of begins to. “You creep like the darkness between the stars: watching and waiting, ever devouring and spreading your claws and fangs… letting chaos reign. Death,” she pauses only to slither forward, to approach with reverent awe and some ancient form of respect. “Is what you bring now, sickness and infection. Does it amuse you how they struggle, how they rebuild? Homes abandoned and kingdoms left for dust.”
Shrugging at the metaphor and meaning, Yidhra ceases to move, curious and yet restrained as the porous and fleshy appendages sway and move: as the pair on her shoulder lay across her back with the barbed spikes visible near the suckers. “Suffice to say, Pangea is also risen and rising: and she has strength to yet be seen.” blunt, and without question she idles- studying and roving: considering Carnage and his state- all the wonder and dread.
Yidhra thinks of the Stone, of the cataclysms within the Element… and she sees the reflective gloss, the surface and shine. Same and yet? Different.
He revels, in the chaos.
Beqanna has gone into an uproar, scattering to the few safe places it could muster, plenty of them fleeting the kingdom, seeking solace and isolation.
Not all, though.
He’d seen her first amongst the flock that had descended on Rhonen. Not particularly notable – there had been many eager to slake some bloodlust, to obey without second thought. But she had stayed, this one, had even laid claim to his drowned kingdom.
He’d thought of taking it himself, ruling again – but ah, kingship bores him so. He’d had enough of that Pangea’s first go-round. Better to let someone else take the reins.
But just because he has no wont to rule doesn’t mean he’s not particular about who claims this particular throne. Especially after Pollock, who’d been Pangea’s second and last king, and who had – the fool – let Pangea crumble.
He knows why, now. Pangea is his creation, his child as much as anything, borne of his own sick magic. Of course Pollock, whose blood was so diluted, couldn’t have ruled! He should have seen it sooner.
Pangea is for him, for his children. For a particular kind of blood.
This girl and her faint notoriety are from nothing, nowhere. She’ll never rule, like that. Too impure.
Lucky (if that’s the word for it) for her, he’s a god.
She finds him, or, he lets himself be found, a crawling mess of tentacles and Lovecraftian words, and he only smiles, a wicked curve of the lips. She speaks eloquently, as if she could impress him with her metaphors, and he fixes her with an unblinking, bored gaze.
“I find amusement where I can,” he says, “and, stripped of the metaphors, all this is rather gratifying.”
He steps closer, considering her – the monstrous curves, the feverish eyes – and he does not disqualify her. Not yet.
“You want to rule,” he says. It’s not a question.
“She’s mine,” he tells her, “she was borne of me, and reborn of me.”
(Him, and the blood of a dozen others, the ones who had swam the murky depths and sacrificed more of themselves than they knew. But he takes the credit.)
“However…I have no interest in ruling. You do. Yet, to lead my kingdom…you must be of my blood. And you, Yidhra, are from nothing.”
He breathes, deep. She smells of the sea, just like his drowned kingdom.
“We could change that,” he says, “if you’re willing.”
A fog in her memories has long made it so there is only blur and vague shape shape of her experiences formed in picture, and whispers speak to her in voices she cannot recall and belonging to those she cannot name. Ancient and forgotten these are long and distant stars with a vast darkness between: a crawling chaos that seeps into everything, and Yidhra does not recall the last time she stood before something or someone like this.
Imperfect geometry, a form so indistinct and otherwordly her mind struggles to understand the curves and the endings: the beginnings and all the ways it moves. Yet there is a blessing in all her gifts and state, in her change- and the barbell shaped irises narrow into little more than slits before stretching and darkening the eyes completely.
Light filters in various ways and the kraken-witch finds the refraction off of the oily skin to be a hint of where to look: his mouth, those eyes- and all the mass of appendages formed into shadowy and bizarre tentacles that bend the very light around them. He lacks metaphor and subtle, no time or no preference: she cares little either way, instead she only listens and notes him with her posture shifting. On her maw the porous tendrils lay still as she answers- as the beak forms voice and chatter.
“I do not want to rule,” she lacks purr and carries only an astringent coldness in her tone: a sureness that grows more so even when Carnage himself slithers and floats- moves close. “I will rule. If I must I will take any in my path who wish to prevent this- and I will lay them bare before their maker and then drag them to the leviathans below to drown eternal.”
Her mind is rampant in the thought of them, with flashes of teeth and gore: with memories of bioluminescent glow in the darkness and hooves that walked atop broken shells and husks of chitin long festering with worm and barnacle. She shivers from fever, the porous flesh pulled over muscle and her spattered-gray and black, blue, body resumes its stillness.
“I have made endless pacts with Gods and Monsters, I have long burned away the soul I was born with: broken numerous times, and always prepared to endure the consequence of my belief.” she is more forward in these moments, direct and yet? She still carries a degree of flourish to her words.
Calm, aware, and watching her tendrils reach but do not touch: slither and wriggle along the brine soaked skin and earth. She considers, recalling shadows of memories wherein hers was ruined and remade: where death became her first and only broken promise. Yidhra is quick to meet his stare: to run the radula coated tongue across the beak in her maw.
“I have no blood that I yet belong to, you are correct: mine is flesh and body carved from earth and magic: given to the sea as part of the price. I will do what I must to rule,” devotion, and assuredness she lacks any sense of hesitation. “If that means I accept your blood, than so be it… I accept it. After all, I’m already working so very hard to make sure the first steps of my plans are in order.”
Magic, she knows it’s feeling- the pull and corruption… the want and ambition: a hunger for power, but, more so now than ever she burns for something, for control.
She makes promises – empty ones, but he likes the attitude behind it well enough. There have been legions before her with such promises, of course, but he still appreciates the effort.
“Atta girl,” he says, and laughs, a sound like rats scampering over broken glass. He steps closer, touches her, then, his muzzle riding over the gelatinous mess of her tentacles. Like some half-formed eldritch thing, and he appreciates the effort.
(When the afterlife was first made, his devotees faced true monsters, true Great Old Ones, with consonantal names and non-Euclidian angles, and he’s had a fondness for such atrocities ever since.)
He continues to appraise her, running his muzzle over her, a combination of workmanlike and lustful, over curves and beak, considering.
“I don’t give a fuck about your other pacts,” he says, mouth close to her ear, breath hot and fetid, “if you want Pangea, I am the only god that matters.”
He steps away, but keeps the air around her hot, uncomfortable. He presses in with his magic, nothingness bearing down on her, like the gravity of oceans.
“So eager,” he says, voice more melodious now, sweet as rotting fruits, “I won’t keep you waiting.”
He steps back, then, and between them a crevasse opens, a maw gaping in the earth. A sickly green light emanates, Pangea’s same sick heart.
“If you trust me-”
(She shouldn’t.)
“then jump. Let Pangea decide if you’re worthy of my bloodline.”
Something inside the crevasse groans, an organic, awful sound. He watches her, gaze unwavering.
He could push her, he knows. But it’s just so much more fun to let them choose, let them do this to themselves.
Primal terror is a hard thing to shake, a fear so deeply ingrained in blood and body: in the mind, that when it arises all the senses burn and rage like wildfire. It compels them to run, to fight: to struggle… even when the provocation for such a thing is spawned entirely from something impossible- intangible, seen only in the corners of the eyes. It stirs in her, oh yes- she feels fear, but Yidhra for all of her purpose and intents is not a creature who is prone to bending to even the primal of urges and feelings.
Patience, subtly, truths twisted and manipulated, and observation above all, these are what she knows and these are the tools in which she employs; but the feeling of fear is suppressed only by small graces and she remains still even at the touch of the malleable and ectoplasmic-like tendrils and maw… at the feeling of sudden warmth pressing upon her skin in form of breath and whisper. Fetid, yes, and something akin to stale salt smell of drying seawater… the coppery suggestion of blood, and the sharp tang of rot and its sourness all breathed upon her.
This, however, is something she is more accustom to than many could ever understand. A Leviathan made mortal shape and she recalls feasting on the bloated and rotting corpses of whales as they amidst the seabed. She remembers the fatty and rich blubber, the bizarre meat that felt little more than gelatinous mess and often writhed and breathed with worm and parasite. For these memories… these experiences, it is how she begins to unwind the labyrinthian abomination made God as he speaks and whispers unto her flesh.
He is blunt, without subtly, and she considers this a charm of the moment.
To herself she finds the dream again taking root in her mind, the dreary and miserable faces of ancient beasts and gods: of powers beyond her own ability, but, in a way- he right. All others are yet gone, vanished into the annals of history and left without devotee or domain. Yet? Carnage, ah, Carnage- he breathes: he lives, and he walks in his own domain… a place she has laid claim, a place that feels more home to her than even the bottom of the sea.
This is the place in the depths she has traveled, where boiling water spills from vents and the glow of molten rock bleeds faintly through cracks in the sand and earth. Hot, heavy, and unbearably dense: riddled with ash and broken shells, with worms whose vice-like jaws clatter and bite, bone broken and flesh torn apart. Eloquent though she may be, there is a sudden poignant nature in her speech and Yidhra… Yee Tho Rah, ah she finds a serenity in even this discomfort.
“Mhm, the Gods are dying and all the powers fading, you are one of the only ones left Carnage, yes- the only one that matter right now, right here. To me.” she purrs and trembles: a mixture of both panic and excitement. “All others have found death in one way or another… why bother being devoted to those who can no longer dream.” he comments to her eagerness and has she the ability the might’ve smiled; but such a thing is lost from her face and thus leaves the beak to click and chatter as she comes to silence.
He mentions trust, and she would’ve snorted had she the ability; but alas this too is stripped from her and she finds herself instead turning to words. “It is never wise to trust a God or a High Power in any form, you may get what you ask; but the price will be much higher than you expect. This pact is not trust, Darling,” she mires in the moment- in the seconds: her gaze falling the split in the earth… to the bitter edges of Pangea’s crust broken like a wound.
It seethes, and she hears the fleshy squelching of organic matter as muscle and tissue work in tandem- as blood boils and festers well within. “But it will be made: consequences are things I am well used to, and prices are things I have always seen to their end.” she ends her pause with a step, with a leg slowly drawn and bent- moving forward in step towards the scar he has ripped open and the pulsating heart well within, and she looks down: stares into the cancerous mass without hesitation.
Some might’ve mistaken it for arrogance when she leaps, when the compact and bizarre figure springs forward into the organic mass; but it is not that, no, this is necessity.
‘I will rule.’ had been her words, and Yidhra knows the moment her skin slides into it: the moment the pulse of magic hits her… that this was what had to be done.
