"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
04-20-2020, 11:07 PM (This post was last modified: 04-20-2020, 11:08 PM by Cress.)
cRess
like a house on fire we're up in flames; i'd burn here if that's what it takes
Ravine had begged her to go back; he had told her that she was the strong one, that she would be the one with the ability to help the world. Foolishly, she had believed her young son, and left him abandoned in the afterworld - and what she wouldn’t give to go back to that night, to selflessly choose him over her. Instead she was selfish; her youngest hadn’t even had the chance to live, and she had stolen the opportunity away from him. For what?
For nothing, it seems.
For months after her return she has wandered aimlessly, mourning his senseless death and missing her other children. A new woman has taken over Pangea from her sweet golden child, and Dawn has returned to Silver Cove to lick her wounds, before fading into obscurity. She has not seen Rhaenyra in many years, and though Flamebrand is around, she does not seek him out. Her children have their own lives now, she tells herself, and she will not interfere with them just to thrust her sadness upon them. None of them had even known of Ravine - how can they mourn a brother they never knew?
Fall finds the aging woman laying in the meadow, the long grasses nearly blocking her from outside view. She is thinking back to her own suicide and the relief that she had felt as the Beach greeted her like an old lover, and how she hadn’t even been able to adjust to being dead before having it all ripped away from her. For once in her life, all of her burdens had disappeared, and with it the sadness and the pain. She had been ready to die then, but now she has to ready herself to live. She must fight through the pain and the sadness, for Ravine’s sake.
If she’s going to be for anything, she has to live for that little boy.
04-21-2020, 10:40 PM (This post was last modified: 04-21-2020, 10:41 PM by ghaul.)
GHAUL
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
His eggs are brooding in a warm nest. His father has returned from however far away. He is home for the first time in a year. The world is spinning too perfectly and it sets his teeth on edge. Ghaul tucks his wings to his sides to begin his quick descent to the earth and he lands with a heavy thud among the tall meadow grasses. A quick sniff of the air tells him there are plenty of things to stalk here, but one intrigues him more than the others. It smells like fire and yet there is something else, something familiar about it. A knot forms in his stomach.
Ragged claws scrape up little clumps of dirt with each long stride. The sun is warm across his back but he feels no concept of light and dark. His only concern is the outline of someone lounging in the grasses just up ahead. Ghaul snaps his teeth together irritably until he noses the stalks aside to find her at last. She is not what he had initially thought, however, and his displeasure is evident across his face.
“Who are you?” he demands, not bothering to introduce himself to something that seems unworthy thus far. She has scales across her wings and fire in her throat, certainly, but these things mean little compared to the one he thought he was tracking. She is not the mother who held him close after she found him shivering in the snow, nor is she the mother who crawled from the depths of the afterlife for him. His aggravation builds into a low growl as he edges closer.
Ghaul keeps his small ears turned forward to listen but he tests her by roughly bumping his scaled shoulder into hers. Is she easy to topple? Could he find the soft meat of her belly without much fight? He reaches out and takes a lock of her mane between his teeth to roughly tug at her. “You seem weak. Already on death’s doorstep,” he observes aloud as he circles her. “Do you just need a little push?”
like a house on fire we're up in flames; i'd burn here if that's what it takes
It doesn’t take long for her to be roused from her thoughts. The sound of someone approaching brings her back to her senses, and she climbs to her hooves in one swift motion as he comes into her field of view. He is a monstrous thing, more dragon than horse, with star marks and horns where his eyes should be, and the lines of youth are still evident in his face. He makes demands of her and she bristles at his brusque manner, but draws herself up to her full height all the same. He is taller than her by mere inches, and though his talons and fangs are impressive, she does not fear the bold young stallion.
Maybe she should.
His scaled shoulder bumps into hers, clearly meaning to unbalance her, but she digs her hooves in and bristles. “Watch yourself, boy,” she warns him, her voice deepening as flames rise in the back of her throat. “You may think me old and fragile, but I have taken part in wars too grand for your young mind to comprehend.”
If she had paid more attention to her second youngest, maybe she wouldn’t be in this situation now. She knows that he is dangerous, and probably much stronger than she could dream of, but she forces herself to keep her cool even in the face of danger. She has already proven to herself that she is her own worst enemy - what could he possibly do to her? If only she knew that her own daughter had adopted this boy, and taught him how to hunt in the first place… if only they would make that connection, this would go in a completely different direction.
He taunts her, pulling at her mane and circling her like a predator would, but she doesn’t flinch. Her chocolate eyes watch him with a blank expression, and she forces herself to relax as her long tail flicks casually over her haunches to swat away a fly. “Is this how the kids get their kicks these days?” she asks him coolly. “By harassing older women in the meadow? Is this just a game to you, or do your dragonlike abilities force you to want to hunt?”
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
She seems sturdier than he had anticipated but he finds himself thrilled to learn this about her. But she calls him boy and he feels rage consuming the ink black of his heart. He tries does his best to keep some fragment of control but then she goes on to chastise him as though she were, in fact, the mother he had been searching for. His crocodilian fangs snap together as he lunges for her face in an attempt to plunge her into agonizing darkness like himself. But he was born in this endless night. It comes as naturally to him as sight does to her.
“No, my games involve breaking others. Let me show you,” he rasps as a snarl fills his throat. Ghaul lifts himself onto his hindlegs and grabs the base of her wings with his ragged claws, yanking her to the ground with the full weight of him. And the moment her body meets the ground, he is on her. The left talon shoves her face into the cold autumn dirt while the right sinks into her shoulder. But it isn’t enough. He wants to torment her. The monster lowers his head and takes her jaws in his, pinning her mouth shut to ensure no one hears her cries. Ghaul savors the taste of her blood as it paints across his tongue but he does not pause in his torture.
Instead, his hind talons thrash, perhaps scraping at her hips, until he finds himself positioned perfectly over her. He had thought it might be difficult, with her on her side like this. He bucks his hips forward and it reminds him of the way he had broken Jenova much the same way. But he had been frenzied back then and she had died so quickly. Ghaul has learned how to miss the vital organs and the arteries. He’s learned to keep them barely alive, now.
He lifts a horned head and frees her mouth to let a smog-riddled groan fall from his mouth. Again and again, he thrusts into her until a shiver runs down his spine and his breath hitches in his throat. His wings slump against his sides as his chest rises and falls with labored breaths. Slowly, he slides off of her and staggers up on weakened knees.
“Get up. Get up and look at me,” he commands her, licking her blood from his teeth.
like a house on fire we're up in flames; i'd burn here if that's what it takes
It takes only moments to provoke the stranger to attack, and Cress reels back in surprise as he lunges for her face. His reptilian fangs snap shut mere inches from her eyes and she looses a burst of fire from her throat, hoping to bathe him in flames. He talks of breaking her and she attempts to maneuver herself away from him, but the dragon is too swift for her to avoid.
His talons grab ahold of the base of her wings as he rears up, and he slams her to the ground with seemingly no effort. She screeches as the breath is torn from her lungs and her face is pressed into the dirt, even as she knows that there is no one around who could help her. She had stupidly taunted the boy into attacking her, and there is no coming back from this - just as she had made her resolution to live, life is going to be torn from her grasp yet again. She cringes as his claws dig into her shoulder, but the real pain comes when he takes her muzzle in his jaws, cutting off any nose she would try to make.
She whimpers as the blood begins to flow where his talons and teeth dig into her, and a muffled sob escapes as his hind legs thrash, tearing at her sides and hips. It is only when he thrusts himself inside of her that she truly realizes what is happening, and she finds herself disappearing into herself as he releases her mouth and grunts his pleasure. She finds herself far away, imagining her children’s faces, and the pride that had glowed on her father’s face when she first introduced him to Ravine. She thinks of Missy and Remmy, of the loner Barebone, of the inseparable twins Panic and Dismay, all of the younger siblings she had grown to love and cherish.
Her mind travels to her numerous grandchildren - some she has never even met. Dawn had been pregnant the last time they spoke, when she was still queen of Pangea. They had mused upon names between them; Dawn had liked the name Darkling if he inherited his father’s powers. Her granddaughter, Isilme, had let the Cove in a time of peace, and most of her other grandchildren lived there as well.
It is her family she focuses on, the one thread that draws her back to life.
He is weak in the knees when he finally finishes and climbs off of her, but Cress remains down, with her face pressed into the dirt. Slowly she gathers her hooves under her and stands, her brown eyes barely rising high enough to see the star-marks on his face. You wouldn’t be able to tell even if I was looking at you, she thinks dully, but doesn’t dare say it to him. Blood drips from wounds all across her side, and she can taste her own blood as it runs past her lips, leaving a metallic taste in her mouth. “You’ll have to do better than that if you want to break me,” she tells him, but the defiant tone is masked with exhaustion.
Silently she begins to knit her flesh back together, but she knows that this pain will be something that never truly goes away.
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
Her plume of fire blows over his face and he is delightfully unscathed. There are no eyes for her to burn out and his lungs have long matured enough to withstand any heat that she could muster up. It is so easy to drag her to the ground and use her body in any which way he pleases. He’s almost disappointed that she does not provide him with a greater fight but perhaps her weak instincts tell her it is best to be compliant. Regardless he does not dwell even as he stretches one hindleg now that is has developed a cramp.
“You assume my work with you is done,” he notes with a coarse laugh as he steps closer once more. “I’ve got your scent now.”
He leans his head down to drag his black tongue across her face and taste her blood one more time. A throaty purr hums in his lungs and there is a clear smile forming on his jagged mouth. Anaxarete had told him to practice control but he finds it too delightful to give in sometimes, to remind this world that they are all his playthings. Like Cress, they go about their lives because he has not chosen to end it. Drunk on his own ambition and narcissism, he leans his lips against the place her ears used to be.
“We’ll do this again and again until your body gives out. When we are through, you will not remember a time that you did not belong to me,” he mumbles as he lifts a claw to lovingly trace the length of her foreleg. But how to keep her present in the moment? It’s too easy for her to escape to her precious memories and pretend this isn’t happening to her. He lips at the corner of her jaw and sighs.
“This time, count the seconds so we know just how long I’ve enjoyed your company. Let’s watch them stretch into minutes and hours, maybe even days if you don’t die.”
And then he circles her once more to rest his head along the lower end of her spine, chest pressed against her backside. His small ears remain trained forward for her to begin counting with a content smile across his lips.
