[open] one. two. three.

[Malca]

One.
Two.
Three.

Malca lets the water fill her lungs until she isn’t empty anymore. It takes time, she knows, because she is so hollow these days, but she doesn’t mind. The water over her head drowns out the noise of everything else; the noise of him, too. It drowns the static. It drowns the loneliness. It drowns the impossibility of the paradise-like prison he has built for her, with its lilac skies and velvet purple water. It doesn’t drown her.  Here the sea is her salvation, and you can watch her as she ebbs and flows with the tide while her tangle of black hair mingles delicately between the sea-foam and white-capped ocean waves.

She will never look so peaceful as here, the one plane of all existences where he will not follow.

She is no stranger to other worlds, even if she cannot quite remember. 
There are a lot of things that Malca can’t remember.

For example, she doesn’t remember that she chose him, too. That somewhere, far, far away, where the ends of worlds came together and souls would choose souls, where she first watched her life play out in whole in all of its glories and equal atrocities — that he was there, too. The wound of him feels fresh even when it’s eons old, because what she remembers the most in this world (and perhaps any other) is the warmth that she found against her mother’s side, and how light she felt under the careful embrace of her father’s watchful gaze. She misses them more than the water fills her lungs.

But it was twilight when she met him.

Malca had felt his eyes before she had felt anything else. Cheek-to-shoulder, she had whirled around to face the growing shadows he had crept from without fear in her heart, but a burning disdain expecting to find buried between the fractures of his irises that same look of needling pity that she had come to know so well in her short lifetime. She recognized it now — that old, bemoaning disappointment — because she had seen it a thousand times before this moment whenever someone new looked upon her for the first time; whenever someone saw her damage.

It isn’t what she found though, and wrongly, she softened her bristles.

Because the first time that she saw him was when the last rays of sunlight were refracting off the gold of his skin and the silver of his hair, and he looked at her in a way that she thought no one else ever had, or would, and probably ever ought to. Because he didn’t see how her right eye was split by galaxies of white cosmos, or the way that she leaned a little too hard towards her left side. Because he didn’t look away when her lips parted then and a sliver of her pointed fangs peeked out through the gap of her otherwise delicate mouth.

Because it was twilight when they met and she decided then, and instantly, that he was different.

He was.

Different, because he was a viper.
Different, because he was a shark.
Different, because he was a god, he had said to her.

He told her that he was a “collector, of sorts”, and somehow she hadn’t seen the unwavering want that in those moments was seeping through the colour in his cold, hungry eyes. Perhaps it was the sun on his skin that blinded her, because she didn’t realize that what he intended to collect was her — that he would take her, like he took so many of them, to keep; forever. She didn’t realize someone, or something, could want her like that — that he wanted everything like that. Because the swirl of constellations in her blind eye reminded him of the places he had been, and all of the things that he had touched that made him better than the rest of them.Because the gentle curve of her hips, her oversize eyes, and the delicate flicker of her mouth when she smiled stirred in him something he deemed worth exploring. Because he liked her smallness, and the tilt of her incongruent hips as she walked, left leaning; overcompensating, struggling — broken.

Because that’s how gods became gods —  by eating up the weak and the fragile.

And at last, when her body breeches the purple sea and her legs find footing on the shore finally, there’s a cool breeze that runs its fingers down the length of her back, scaling the mountains of her vertebrae, and leaving prickled skin in its wake. It reminds her of him, of the way he would touch her without needing to; like she belonged to him, like she was his. 

And as though the thought alone is all it takes to conjure him, he appears.

It’s nothing new. He visits her often, with a crooked smile that drips from his arrogant mouth like water might. She smiles, sweetly, and greets him on the shoreline with a vacantness in her eyes that he won’t notice. Then he leans his lips against the side of her ear and tells her something that drops her heart into her knees.

“Fly,” he says now, his lips against her ears; too close.

She knows well enough that the only games he plays are the ones that he is set to win — but she has been caged for eons, lonely for eons. 

Dead, for eons.

On the same cheek she turned once to face him in the twilight she feels his warm lips press up against, and at first she sees nothing, before she sees everything; stars, planets, memories, and then, finally, home. He’s touching her until he isn’t, until the light leaves his skin and he dissolves into the twilight suddenly disappeared while she soars alone above the ‘s’ shaped river she was born beside.

She flies.

It’s a rebirth of sorts — just as violent and cathartic as the first. This time is different though.

This time she doesn’t forget where she’s come from.
This time she remembers everything.


TL;DR - Elektrum steals baby Malca and keeps her in a purple prison for a while, now releases her for whatever reason. IDK.

[vulgaris]

V u l g a r i S

When he was young and still so very small, he used to think his father was a god. All children think that of their parents, of course, but not in the same way that Vulgaris did. His father walked like he carried the entire weight of the world on his big, strong shoulders but he kept his head held high like the burden was nothing at all. He cradled the serpent boy close and told him ancient stories of war and famine and feasts. Sometimes, Larva told him of the monsters he had loved and killed and died for. And he had done it all so, so many times.

He used to think the old man would just be reborn any time Death came to collect him again, like it just wanted to see him tear the world apart one more time. But then one day he died and he never did come back. Vulgaris waited at the shore for hours, days maybe but his body never moved even for just one breath. Death had grown tired of its favorite son and he would not return this time. So then why had that eternal slumber eluded him? Why did eternity taste the serpent king’s skin and fling him back into his lover’s arms? It picked little pieces of him to keep and remember him by, but it didn’t hold him to its breast and speak soft vows into his neck.

Was he doomed to rise and fall, then?

Leliana plucked him from the noiseless gray beach and told him to live, so now he wanders the river wondering what that means anymore. Used to, he thought it meant to hunt and take and devour the strength of his enemies. He thought that the killing was the only living he could do. But when he sees Malca there, dripping wet and still so young, his breath catches in his throat.

To live is to protect, to serve the ones he loves more than anything. He would find a way to smother Death for them, he thinks. He would hold the sun in the palm of his hand swallow it whole if it meant that they would be safe forever.

Vulgaris moves forward and pulls her close in his embrace, her icy skin pressed tight to his burning hot neck and chest. She had been lost for so long that he had carved out a hole in his heart in the shape of her, named a thousand constellations after her just to feel like she wasn’t really gone. He closes his eyes and his breath shudders from his lungs at the smell of forever in her mane.

“Malca, I’ve lost count of the days,” he mumbles against her small face as he peppers her with kisses. “So much has happened. I’ve missed you so much.”

He doesn’t know where to begin and so he doesn’t begin at all. Instead, he just keeps holding her tight and trying to convince himself this is real.

In this shook-up, twisted world, I'm gradually growing transparent and vanishing
Don’t look for me; don't look at me

@[Malca]

[Malca]

Malca doesn’t know that a mile below her, her father is winding along the same bends of the river, contemplating an existence that has only just been returned to him, too.

It’s a moment that it’s felt as though she’s waited years for, a moment that she’s envisioned inside her head again, and again, and again, during every lonely day that bled into a lonelier night — and she almost misses it. She’s thinking about him. She’s wondering how long she can outrun him, or if she even can. She’s flying hard, and fast, but she’s only a chess piece in the end and gods or kings will always do what they like with her. Blinded by the concept of escaping Forever Malca almost soars beyond the gnarled, weeping boughs of an old oak tree and the river bend that sang to her the first songs she’d ever heard — beyond her father, too. It’s only a fluke, or circumstance, or stars aligning, or fate, that she notices someone below at all; a gust of wind that sweeps the boughs of the ancient tree up in it’s frigid embrace that’s enough to catch her eyes.

She still doesn’t know that this moment is what it is.

When she lands at last it’s beneath the gently swaying boughs of that same ancient oak tree that she was born beside, parallel to that same, tight ‘s’ bend of the gradually curving river. Nostalgia floods her senses until all that she can feel, or think, or taste, or smell, or hear, or see belong to the memories of a simpler existence when the only things she ever needed or craved were her parents. Standing here, she can almost taste the sweet-milk on her tongue again. The thought makes her want to cry.

And she still doesn’t know.

Malca doesn’t see her father behind her, or hear the way that his breath catches in his throat when he realizes his discovery beside the riverbend. Pools of water gather round her feet and ankles from the purple lakewater that still beads and rolls off the lengths of her dark eyelashes, stored temporarily from the tiny rivulets streaming from her tangle of dark forelock, and it’s only in their reflection that she notices his presence at all.

“Malca,” he says, and all at once and without needing to see she knows it’s him — she’s dreamt his voice every night in her sleep. The seconds are stones, and they build bridges across the spaces between them until they are side by side, fire and water. She notices immediately that he’s up against that same cheek Elektrum had touched and there’s a piece of herself left instantly grateful that he is now the last one to have touched her there. The smell of him is something she’d thought she’d forgotten, but when she inhales he is the same as she’d left him; a tangle of sweat, wildflower, meadow grass, and the impalpable tinge of iron, or metal. Blood. She leans her small body against the warmth of his side and cannot recall a time she’s felt more peaceful, or safe. She could spend forever here, she thinks.

“I’ve lost count of the days.”

Malca swallows hard and wonders how long it had really been. She’d kept track at first, dutifully crafting jagged markers from tangled, lavender seaweed that she would pluck herself from the ocean floor. She should have drowned a hundred times over, but she kept going back and keeping tally. She had wanted to be able to tell them how long she had been out there on her own when they finally came to bring her home. She had wanted to brag about her independence, having not fully realized the gravity of her situation in Forever at the time.

She can’t remember when the hope fell away, only that it did.
She can’t remember when resilience became desperation, or when even that fell away into numbness.

She can’t remember when she stopped marking, or screaming, or begging — only that she did. If she had known about the constellations it might have helped.

“So much has happened. I’ve missed you so much.”

Malca doesn’t tell him that she’s missed him too, but the way that her slight body dissolves against his lightest touch will tell him everything that words won’t. Of course she’s missed him — she misses him still; she misses every second of every hour of every day that she has endured without him.

She misses every piece of time they both lost to Forever.

She wants to let him know about the seaweed. She wants to tell him about every lonely night she curled into the long, lilac grass and dreamt of their faces. She wants to explain how she never meant to leave, but the words are smoke on her tongue and when she moves to speak they drift out between the gentle parting of her lips and lose themselves into the air. “I’m sorry,” is all that she manages, and the syllables of those two words alone are tangled enough that they are nearly beyond recognition, sitting heavy in her mouth near the back of her throat where they threaten to choke her.

Can sorrow truly kill you?

And she is sorry — for his worry, for the days he has lost count of, for all that has happened in her absence.

Most of all she’s sorry for the twilight.

“Please, don’t leave me again,” she asks him, pleading as she finds her way back from numbness to desperation.

“Please.”

@[vulgaris]