"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
She is more predator than prey—designed from birth to be one with the darkness and uniquely adept at Anastasia likes many things. She likes the moment when the hunted see that it is being hunted; she likes that fear that floods their eyes—the way their muscles freeze when they should run. She likes the way that the shadows do not wrap around her, but instead sink into her; she likes the feeling of home whenever she is in the cool, cool dark. She likes the feeling of power she wields when her acid slips through her mouth and bites into material not made to sustain it. She likes that feeling of disintegration.
But that is not what she says.
That is not her reply.
Instead, Anastasia leans against Chantale, sighing, enjoying the sensation before she breaks from her. “Wait,” she orders, unaware that some might take offense to the abruptness of it. Opening up a portal, she steps through and appears several yards away, hiding away in the shadows—invisible except for the bright shadow of her yellow eyes. Looking back to Chantale, she nods, before turning her attention to the wolf that was prowling around the edge of the meadow. Large. Beautiful in his own right. Alone.
Anastasia was beautiful too in this moment, stripped clean of societal expectations. She lowers her head and stalks forward, making no sound and leaving no scent. For several steps, she follows the wolf, who was completely unaware of her presence. The kill was quick. Before he could have noticed, she is on top of him, and her teeth are sinking in his neck—but it isn't the sharpness of her incisors that does him in—it is the acid that slips from beneath her tongue and into his veins, eating away his flesh.
Grunting, Anastasia grabs his neck and opens a portal, dragging him through to where she had left Chantale. She pulls him near the other mare and then stands back, looking at her masterpiece. He is still grand, but his fine coat is now damp and matted with blood, his neck dissolving and bubbling from the acid that remained. “This,” she finally replies, black smile too wide. “Ana-sta-sia likes this.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
She was born as all horses were, in a body meant as prey.
And my corpse masterpiece was prey, in a way – back with Herd, back with Prince Charming, as she was shaped into a mold that could not contain her even then.
(She left them bloody, smoke and salted earth behind her.)
But the years and whatever macabre, deathlike magic bred into her worked their magic, smoothed her plastic-clean, shaped her.
The heart slowed, the blood slowed, the mind went.
(The mind may have already been gone.)
What’s left is a thing in limbo, dead but not. What’s left is a thing with a cunning predator’s smile.
Wait the shadow thing orders, so she obeys. She watches idly as a portal opens and the woman steps into it, disappears from sight.
There is a noise in the distance, sounds of a scuffle. She knows the tune well, and smiles to herself. She looks, for all the world, quite peaceful.
And then the creature is before her again, a wolf clenched in her teeth. The body is thrown at her feet and my corpse queen is reminded of another acolyte, a mare with a heart in her mouth.
Blink, and the memory is gone.
She looks down and watches the creature’s flesh bubble like a hot spring. Curious. She wonders what the poison might do to her, and for a moment she salivates at the idea.
“Good,” she says, finally, voice a purr, “Anastasia is very good at that.”
Anastasia had been told many things growing up. She had been told how to shake prey just right so that the neck snapped between your teeth and the body went limp. She had been told how to hunt downwind so that the currents did not carry your scent to the target (a lesson that had ultimately been futile when her father had learned that she carried no scent). She had been told how to stalk for hours, how to follow behind your prey—studying its motions and its behavior and learning its motivation. The act had always seemed like an intimate one; in her own way, she loved everything she killed.
But she was not often told that she was good—her father was not casual in his compliments. She purrs beneath the attention, opens up like a night rose beneath Chantale’s prompting, and her shadowed face is exposed as she glances toward the mare. Leaning against her, she shifts her weight so that they are as close as possible. “What is Chan-tale good at?” she questions, her voice quiet as it slips between them.
Glancing upward, she memorizes the lines of the other’s face—the beauty, the otherworldly other-ness to Chantale’s form. The other mare looked like an echo, something designed to resemble life that was close and yet not close enough, the difference startling and exciting and wonderful to Anastasia. She reaches over and her mouth rests on the mare’s rubbery neck, but she does not sink her teeth into her, instead letting the velvet of her own mouth linger there and breathe in her sickly scent.
“Mine,” she finally decides aloud. “Chan-tale is mine.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
What is Chantale good at, prompts the shadow thing, and my corpse masterpiece wonders.
She is good at everything and nothing – she is a predator, a thing defiant of nature (where Anastasia was born to hunt, slick and dark and sharp, Chantale was made so, by years and death and madness). She is a succubus, a thing with too-smooth skin and strange curves that draw them in like a whirlpool.
She is good at making them think she loves them.
(Though maybe she does, in the moment. When she is that self, a cool body wrapped around their warm one, she loves them so. But her love is as alien as the rest of her, fundamentally incompatible with them.)
“Chantale is good at taking,” she tells her. She takes hearts, takes lives, takes everything she can and gives them her shell of a body in return.
She lets herself be claimed, the rubbery lips warm on her crest. She has belonged to so many, to kings and queens, to a strangely wicked woman who once threw a heart at her feet.
Nothing quite like her, though.
Nothing quite so like a monster, full of darkness, made to hunt rather than be hunted.
She tells the lie we all do: it is different, this time.
(Besides, she will soon enough forget her name. She forgets all their names.)
“And Anastasia is mine,” she confirms, tilting her head to stroke the stygian expanse of the mare’s neck, “all mine.”
