12-14-2015, 02:24 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-14-2015, 09:53 PM by Aurane.)
 There is a wild lick of lightening, splitting in two the dark, slate sky. There follows a mighty crack. A whip across the hips of those pregnant and labouring clouds. And then they loose their lovingly incubated burdens — hard, vicious hailstones. Somewhere in the cycle of their maturation, they had solidified. Cold and heavy, they fling themselves from impressive height, gathering dangerous speed. They pelt the canopy above her, testing the safety net, and finding it wanting. Great knots of ice fall around her with soft thumps as they hit moss, and harder whacks on bare stone. Leaves and thinner tree limbs bow and snap under the hail's weight and velocity. The more hardy oaks and beeches protect themselves with their own wooden exoskeletons, unable (or unwilling) to offer much else. She blinks her wide, black-brown eyes, ( the ancient trees withstand the barrage without wound, but around them, lower to the forest floor, younger trees ooze thick, amber blood. The forest swells with fear and pain. Mother Nature is reckless with power.) She smiles, untroubled by the ever-growing volley, pressing around the trees with a foolhardy caper. Carelessness bordering on stupidity — she is young, her illusion of invulnerability are in tact and blinding. Another snap of lightening arouses shivers down her spine. She recognizes near unparalleled power in it all. It is, if anything, exciting. Her ears tuck back and she kicks out aimlessly behind her. Wild violence. Every loud boom sounds more and more like godly peels of laughter. She howls out with them. Her heart pounds. (You can't outrun everything...) The mare nearly stumbles. Flinging, more than running, through the barely beaten paths. (...Everything catches up.) She snorts, contempt in her black-brown eyes. (But we could try... for a little longer. If you'd like?) “Yes,” She whispers, a sweetness to nothing. And then it begins to rain. Heavy, hot rain. In its grip, the icestorm slows, choked out by the wetness. It is over. Bled dry of their ire, the clouds have only the rain. And its purpose is less venomous. Aurane stops. Her muscles shuddering with overwork, she cannot express her lungs as fast as she yearns to fill them. Heaving, the red woman follows a dirt path to a wide clearing. A hall of lichen and sickly sweet wildflowers where she finds some relief. Torrents of rain fall down her back and belly, “I deserve this,” She mumbles, whether it is a punishment she finds delights in, or a reward she soaks up greedily Shiny blackness. So totally naked she was. Totally un-hung-up.
We looked around lights now on to see our fellow travellers.
lines and shading
by bronzehalo
X
 KINGSLAY
In a forest not unlike this one, he became what he is now.
They looked like shadows, because they seemed to move in fragments, because they didn’t behave in ways that he could understand. They were all around him in one second, and beside him in the next. They carved trenches in his flesh like insignias with their gnarled fingernails (when he was flesh instead of fire) and he could not feel the magic hidden in the tips of their fingers until he ran red with it. The forest swells tonight with fear and pain, so of course he has come.
He was born for nights like this one.
He is made for this.
This – when electricity splits the sky into pieces and he winds through a forest that feels darker for it. A cloud of breath rolls off his tongue and between his teeth before it’s lost into a sea of white fog that rolls in like a tide between the ancient trunks of misshapen trees, because he has always been a slave to this instinct. Because he will run until his heart and his lungs collapse, because the thrill of a hunt has always held him tighter than breathing ever has.
He is made for this.
Because this sounds like music.
This sounds like a thousand yells, all at once. It sounds like the rattling scream of a fearful cat newly missing it’s tail. This sounds like the cold prickle that creeps across your skin and leaves the hair that it touches standing on end, like the flesh itself is lifted, like the flesh itself is caught in the breeze. He is made for this. He is made for the moments that look like the colour red – perverted, and sharp. He is made for this, for wild violence.
He is made to hunt where the moonlight cannot touch him, where every now and then the lightening washes the forest in the colour of sight and illuminates the too-sharp angles of his face. He is already a monster. There are angry fists that hold the bones of his ribs curled neatly between fingers and palms. He is already a villain. He is already a murderer, but he has never looked the part more than now in these moments while he runs, head aslant, heavy on the heels of something moving.
“I deserve this,” it says, and he knows only because he is close enough now to smell the sweat on her skin. The lightning splits her irises like glass shatters and he answers, “Yes.”
And then:
“Kingslay,” he says, not because he is saying hello, but because he is saying goodbye – because he feeds them the last words on their lips before the line runs flat, before the light falls away from their eyes.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
The sky ruptures again—the clouds are a thin layer of skin, peeling off to reveal the bright, voltaic vascular network below. But just for a second. And then the blood runs out of them, hemorrhaging into the dark sky. And it is dead. All of it. Everything above and around and below, cast back into grey darkness. Bloodless, impotent and damp. It holds her for a moment in warm, sticky embrace. But the further away it oozes from those electric veins, the colder it becomes. Until she is shivering. Until she is soaked to the flesh, deeper still. To the marrow. That deluge bites into her, cooling the air in that wooded chamber. (We deserve this.) She blinks rainwater from her eyes. And then she hears that voice. That death rattle. Or that phantom whine in her head. In the space between the white noise of rain-patter, in that strange and empty non-silence, it feels singular. Pressing against the cup of her ear. The only thing, with her, in the world. She does not turn to find its source, only closes her dark eyes and surrenders. The reaper. The gift-giver. (...Everything catches up.) But it is not her name he calls. And so she exhales all that she has trapped in her lungs, her breath a wisp of white in the stormy air. (But we could try... for a little longer.) She turns her black-brown eyes, through the grey-green air. Peeking past the watery quality of her vision. What have we... Her heart pounds in her rib cage—excitation! Fear. The raw joy of discovery. He is alike and dislike Death and Dying. Where one man lacks warmth in place of utter autumnal cold, this one smolders. But they are both unnaturally formed. Orange. Where she is a like an errant ember, red and growing redder; he is a wild blaze. An odd, infernal body. And when she blinks ( the rain douses him... or so it tries. But his internal heat source rages against the ebbing of that wetness. He flickers, wanes, but burns on. Never burning out. Never melting. Just burning, inside. Shedding off delicate, white ashes... And when she touches him...) But she does not. She slinks forward, until her chest meets the heated air near his shoulder. Those dull, wily eyes inspecting the hot fissures in his black coat. The hiss of steam as the rain meets the impossibility of his skin. “How deep does it burn?” She murmurs near his haunch, curling around him. Never touching him. Resisting it, though barely. Desiring it deeply, but that's why it is fun. “Would it hurt?” She wonders to herself, aloud. She is all alone, writhing around some improbable but arousing find—a scavenger at a carcass, or a magpie to a red diamond. She covets his flesh, feverishly considers how she can blister against him. Take some from him. (You'd burn out. You are not like him. Stop thinking these unholy things are yours to collect, silly girl. They just want to see you break at their feet.) She runs her nose close to his side, inhaling the unique scent of his fire and meat; the steaming turn of his shoulder, the smoke of his mane. Then Aurane meets his eyes, her own reflecting the orange and yellow and red. “Aurane, Kingslay.” In the quiver of titillation is fear. And it feeds her, fills her. Drives her to extend her neck to him, in the backwards way she so foolishly consents to misplacing her instincts. She does not touch. Above the gods laugh. And for a millisecond, they reveal them in cold, naked light. Hey you, out there on your own
sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me?
lines and shading
by bronzehalo
X
KINGSLAY
‘How deep does it burn?’
To the bones. To the marrow. To the black void that lies neatly in between the ribs where his heart should live, where instead a wild-thing stirs, curling and uncurling sharpened claws that flash like steel. It burns, until sweat beads and falls from their haunches like rain. It burns, until small fires sprout on the branches of even the dampest saplings in their vicinity. It burns, until the air feels so heavy it chokes.
It could be over so quickly.
He could pour her out like rain until the forest was wet and red beneath the blackness. He could open her up and spill her yellowed fat and innards in the earth, like some twisted homage to his childhood. He could add the crack of bones to the sounds of chaos, and it would be done. It would be done, but it isn’t what he likes. It isn’t what he hunger for, why his tongue licks at the edges of his lips. It isn’t what tangles his insides with knots of expectancy.
Sometimes the slow burn is better.
He spills hot breath across the nape of her neck, because she’s curled beside him now too close for safety while he wonders about the colour of her bones.
‘Would it hurt?’ She muses.
It would. It would feel like breathing flames into your lungs, like burning from the inside out. It would cauterize the blood in her veins. It would boil her alive. So, when she breathes the question the answer waits ready on his tongue: “Yes.”
And then she breathes a name when she isn’t supposed to, breathes it out between her lips and the syllables are as electric as the lightning. She is meant to run. She is meant to jolt forward so he can follow in her shadows, close enough that she can feel the heat of his breath and far enough that a trace of hope still lights up her eyes.
But she doesn’t.
She doesn’t move, so he doesn’t either.
She doesn’t move, but he still thinks about the colours hidden underneath her skin.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
Cold red. Oxygenated. Feeding the shivering panic of her muscles; fueling the working of synapses: ’Run!’ A familiar wild shriek from everywhere. From behind and below, but above all, from within. It fills her ears and crowds her. The red mare shakes her head, snorting heated breath across his chest, ’Run! But she cannot obey. She is stuck examining the fissures of fire splitting his skin, and the acrid smoke from the crest of his neck. She is still, staring at ruination; a violent wreckage — her own. And blue. Depleted. She blinks, ( and he stands over her cremains, the last vestiges of herself slavering from his mouth. Ashes fill the air like snow, blanketing the ground and his back. The burn-black forest is razed, and he stands in the center of it like a king, reigning over the splendor of his annihilation. The smoke-grey sky cracks with light, for fractions of a second the pure loneliness of it is bathed in bald light.) She blinks. The damp forest is limp and green but he is a god of conflagration still. She presses her fine head down low, to the height of his breastbone, nostrils flaring. The subordination feels almost effortless; an outright surrender. But then he speaks, and in a blink it ruins her moment of sweet submission. She jerks her head up, her muzzle close to his own, side-by-side. The waft of air from his mouth is astonishingly hot. ’Yes.’ But she is angry that he has shattered her moment of thrilling gratification and does not think, only sends a gnash of teeth at his lips. She stops before they make contact and squeeze, because she is young and naive, but not suicidal. She watches him with a wild black-brown and fire eye, her neck craning away from him. But the distance overall is not safe. Their shoulders are a breath apart, separated by a thin layer of wind and steam alone. “I could have found out on my own,” Her low whine is petulant, girlish if not for the hint of lust she wears like a familiar layer of grime. (You have so much to learn. And learning is half the fun.) Aurane loosens the flex in her neck a moment, allowing her muzzle to fish for that heat again. Testing the boundaries of his ill-will; his space and his patience. She riles them up because it is more fun that way — like Death and Dying's angry spittle and volatile predator's hunger, she drinks it deep, and it is an intoxicant. She operates dangerously on imagined infallibility and assumed restraint. He wants to feed fire down her throat. She wants to taste it, but only if the burn is mild. “Your name?” She demands of a god. Hey you, out there on your own
sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me?
lines and shading
by bronzehalo
X
KINGSLAY
It still sounds like music.
Because the rain is constant. It’s relentless, and it’s violent, and it pours around them and fills the spaces between their bodies, and their breaths, and their syllables. It coaxes steam and smoke from the fissures in his black almost-flesh, and the only sound gaudier than that is the low breath of thunder that rumbles overhead. And their bodies are writhing; magnets, yes, but with the same polarity – two bowed heads, and two sets of flashing teeth. They squirm like dying animals in these self-made forest trenches where gluttonous mud sucks at their legs and surges of electricity, white-hot, split the sky into halves and rattle the hunger even deeper into the marrow of his bones.
“Your name?” She asks – wants, needs.
He doesn’t need anything more than the flavor of her blood on his tongue, and the melody of her guttural cries sang against his ears. So, when he answers he will not be obliging. He won’t recognize the way her voice curls as though it’s slick with sweat. He will only think about her skin peeled back and the image will echo in the blackest fractures of his eyes.
And he’ll move forward to press his teeth against the soft patch of skin behind her ears. “You didn’t listen well enough,” he will chide, and as the corners of his lips quiver the will rain find access and wet his tongue, and it won’t be enough to quench a thirst like his.
And if she leans in it will be a mistake.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
She closes her eyes tight.
She smells smoke and ash, and her eyelids are warm. And her fingers are digging into her brain, like searching for rat’s tails to drag them from their hiding holes – but when she pulls, their little pin-claws scrape across her grey matter, making her nerve endings sing and confusing her further. Smoke and ash. Had he told her?
Lightning cracks the sky into a single, bright piece.
Had he told her? When?
She remembers the fissures of fire in his skin, like hot wounds. Her face is warm. Without realizing, she is leaning into it a bit, into the steam around his body. She is pulled back, by the singeing of her eyelashes, a warning show across the bow – and she obeys that, at least. Maybe he had said it in the quiet moment when she was considering the merits of death by wildfire. Or, when his breath and graveled voice became indecipherable from the chorus of raindrops on her back and hips and on the muddy ground at their feet, and she couldn’t figure out how deep that flame settled under his bones.
“Did I not?” She wonders aloud, her ears flicking back towards the hot squall of breath, and she dare not move them any further.
Is there a punishment for that where he comes from?
That deep-down place of molten metals and stone, acrid and all too hot.
“Kingslay,” she mutters finally. A placation.
She exhales, in great relief, “that was it.”
Of course it was. She holds, breathing slow and steady, ( the pressure of his mouth and teeth dent the soft, red place on her neck. Kingslay. It burns for a moment, fire surging in to sear itself black under her skin. Kingslay. The intimation of his power and her foolhardiness.)
“I’ll listen better,” she says, between tight lips, for once in their meeting, hoping for space between them more than anything. “I can be hard to focus when...” She stops, her brows furrowing and gritting her teeth, (don't say it!)
Weakness, gnawing at her belly.
(He will not get the satisfaction of it.) Hey you, out there on your own
sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me?
lines and shading
by bronzehalo
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