"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
Since the sunset they shared on Ischia, Agetta’s mind has often strayed to Garbage. She cannot shake the sense of familiarity though she is certain that they had only met earlier that day. She's still not too old to blush, it would seem, and she does so when she thinks of the ease with which she had brushed her muzzle across his skin and how he had looked at her when he got his memories back.
He’d left before she could get the courage to ask him if he had any memories of her, before she could truly tug on that knot that she was attempting to unravel. And before she could have asked him to stay just a little longer. She's returned to the river since then, to the spot where they had run into each other. Half hoping to see him there, half hoping that being in that spot will unlock something. There don't seem to be any memories to unlock, though, and all she recalls is the confusing conversation they had before she took him to see her daughter.
Some instinct tells her not to ask Beyza for what she wants today, so Agetta turns her attention to the Mountain instead. Horses come here to seek a great number of things - perhaps she can find answers.
It's a grey afternoon, one that promises rain later. She hesitates at the bottom only for a moment before she takes on a familiar and comforting shape - that of a snow leopard, one built for navigating these rocky slopes. Agetta takes a meandering pathway - eager to get to her destination but intent on sorting out her thoughts a little before she arrives. Right now she has no idea how to ask for what she wants, and that seems like an important thing to figure out before approaching the fairies directly.
On occasion, he haunts the mountain.
He’s never much liked the mountain itself – it reminds him of that time when Beqanna had clawed back so much of their magic. Not his, of course, but he had been ill from the efforts of it, his magic strange and occasionally malfunctioning. He does not like even the barest slip in control, and the mountain is a constant reminder of that.
Ryatah had died here as well. At his hand, but when he had beckoned her back – it had only been meant as a lesson, after all – she had not responded. Though that may have been Gail’s fault, he still blames the mountain for that, too.
Still, he haunts it. He haunts it because they come here, sometimes in trickles and sometimes in droves, looking for things. Power, mostly.
Sometimes he’s the one who answers. He finds entertainment in it, especially if he knows them.
And he knows her, this pale mare turned leopard who walks the mountain’s paths. Not well – a few children shared between them, a fondness for an often-eyeless angel – but enough that his interest is piqued, and he reaches into her mind, searching for what’s brought her here today.
It's a mess, frankly. He skims over the soap opera levels of her angst, the hidden banks of memory. He gleans enough – she was hurt, she wanted her memories gone, and now she wants them back.
He appears before her, in his plain gray form. He could almost be anyone. A stranger.
“What is it you’re looking for, Agetta?” he asks her, though he already knows enough. He wants to see what she’ll say. Wants to see how this will play out.
Though far, far out of practice, there are still some warrior’s instincts in Agetta. Enough that, at least, when someone appears in front of her she does not shout or scream in surprise. The snow leopard crouches in preparation for a fight - her lips curling back.
They barely get the chance to form a full snarl before surprise takes over at his question and her stance straightens.
Out of courtesy, she shifts back into a mare - pale except for just a hint of gold in the star marking on her face. There’s a polite smile in her dark blue eyes that’s fighting with the confusion over, once again, being addressed by name by someone she does not know. Did it mean anything that they all seemed to be men?
“Have we met?” But this feels like a rude start, so her smile grows with her embarrassment. “I’m sorry if we have... I don’t remember you. I suppose that’s what I’m looking for - these memory lapses seem to be happening more frequently. And this is the place to find answers, right?”
Now that grin starts to feel more real as she feels like she’s getting her footing a bit in this conversation. Although she is only vaguely curious, it feels polite to return the question - maybe get the chance to learn a bit about this stranger and how he seems to know her in the process. “Are you here looking for something from the fairies as well?”
A shame, that he has been scrubbed from her memory. As if he was as tragic as her love affairs. You’d have thought that her daughter would have left a few memories of him, for what had he ever done to her?
(Well. Perhaps a few things. He doesn’t quite remember the circumstances of their encounters, if she had come willingly or not. These things have a way of blurring.)
Still. He should have been left in her head, as a warning, if nothing else. An act of preservation. Of course, his ego aside, there is plenty of opportunity here, if he chooses to use it. If not, he can always re-insert himself back into her memory, maybe add a few more, for good measure.
“Once or twice,” he says, “just in passing. But you’re a memorable creature, Agetta.”
His voice is polite, neutral. Walking the edge of kindness, but he has not yet decided which ways he wants this encounter to fall.
He chuckles at her question, does his best to shift his laugh into the same neutral thing, playing at normality. It is interesting, to be unknown in this form.
“Not quite,” he says, “I actually happen to be something of a magician myself. The fairies get so busy, with all these requests – I just like to help out from time to time.”
He’s still smiling, one that lasts a bit too long before he remembers to let it fall away.
“Is that what you’re looking for, then?” he says, and tries now to make his voice softer, sympathetic, “those lost memories?”
Agetta doesn’t have much of an ego. As far as she’s concerned, after all, she’s not made much of an impression on anyone except a small handful of friends and a few daughters. She was an echo of a time long since past, and while that had haunted her for some time - she had no reason to believe she was memorable.
But this grey stranger had known her name. And so had Kensley. And Garbage had looked at her like…
There’s a theme here - that isn’t the monochromatic coats - but Agetta hasn’t quite picked up on it.
Her dark eyes widen a little in surprise and interest when he mentions he’s something of magician. She thinks about asking if he knows her daughter - and then realizes it’s not exactly a club so she keeps that brilliant question hidden in her mind.
If his smile lasts too long she doesn’t notice, because the soft voice he uses when he asks about what she’s looking for encourages her to be honest. What does she have to lose, after all. If he’s a magician maybe he can help. “Yes. There’s someone…” Agetta trails off, a smile of her own tugging at the corner of her mouth. It’s all a little ridiculous to say out loud, but she does anyway. So easily lulled by a kind smile from someone who considers her memorable. “The way he looks at me, the way I feel around him, sometimes I think we’ve met before. So I want to find out if that’s true.”
So Agetta tilts her head a little, feeling silly but also feeling a cautious flush of hope that this might be a problem they can solve right here and now.
Love unrecognized has a stench about it.
Though he has not experienced it himself (his love is a strange thing, and not truly befitting the word – he prefers something like fondness, and even that is scarce), he has seen nearly every scenario unfold before him. He’s seen this before, the lovesick, even if they do not know it themselves. Her case is slightly different, of course, her mind carefully cordoning off what she most wants to know, another magician’s doing, another chapter in the strange novel of her life.
“I see,” he says, and tries not to let his lip curl. If she is fool enough not to know who he is, he will keep playing this part, a kind magician who only wants to help. At least for now.
He can’t decide, at first, what to ask of her. Because of course he will ask. He grants nothing for free, loves to gorge himself on the terrible prices they are willing to pay to have their foolish wishes granted.
He wonders what it’s like, to have love haunt you enough that you would stand before a dark god.
(Not that she knows it’s love. Not that she knows he’s a dark god. So maybe it’s not much at all.)
He thinks of Ryatah. She would never excise him from her memories. Not that he would let her if she tried. He reaches out, idly, for her. He does this sometimes, just to check.
He pauses when he cannot find her. When there is nothing of her to feel on Beqanna. He reaches for her vision, for those eyes of his creation, but there is only darkness, as if she has gone blind again. He reaches further, feels the sensation of trapped, of the void, swallowing and all-encompassing, and for a moment his mask drops and a thunderclap of fury crosses his face.
But it is gone in an instant and a new plan arises. It’s fitting, in a way. For the women are friends, are they not?
Agetta should not have gotten herself in this situation, should have held onto those memories, that pain.
Ryatah should not have gotten herself in this situation, should not have let herself be put into a void without his oversight.
Two women, in need of a lesson.
“I can give everything back,” he says, the word everything rich in his mouth, “all I need from you is for you to trade places with someone. Not for very long, I don’t think. And then you’ll know, won’t you? Know if you and this someone have met before. You’ll know who he is to you. All I need is for you to say yes.”
He doesn’t need that at all. He could take her now. But it’s always more fun when they agree to their fate.
Hope mixes with confusion at the request. She knew she’d likely have to give up or do something in order to get the answers that she was seeking. The vagueness of his request should alarm her - or at the very least make her suspicious.
The thing is, with so much of the pain in her life cut out with the memories she’s lost, there are a great number of lessons gone unlearnt. Like being wary of strange, magical stallions.
So really, it’s an easy decision to make, with her mind as it is. She doesn’t know that she had been in so much pain she had gone to her daughter to be killed and that it was Beyza who had wiped her memories without asking Agetta if that alternative was agreeable or not. That white magician had known that her mother would’ve preferred death over forgetting so much of her life - even the parts that made her long to die.
Agetta doesn’t know what’s being asked of her or even what she’s really asking for - so of course that yes is going to be so ridiculously easy to say.
He had almost hoped she would fight, a little. But she is hopeful – such a dangerous thing! – and so she agrees, ignorant as a lamb to slaughter. And still, even if a fight would have been fun, there is an indulgence in her consent, as well. Because he will take her, and he will say this is what you agreed to, this is what you wanted and that, he knows, is a kind of exquisite cruelty that he cannot inflict alone. He needs it, that yes, to really twist the knife.
He doesn’t answer her question. Instead, he touches her, briefly, his dark gray muzzle against her white coat. He’s known her body before – several times – but this is more intimate than any of that.
“Follow me,” he says softly, but of course there is no following – instead he takes, he transports them both into darkness, into a place in-between.
The darkness around them is suffocating. Even though he knows he can take himself back at any time, there is a moment where his throat tightens. It’s too much like death, this void, and he has died enough, does not plan to do so again. He casts a light – a weak, sickly glow that the darkness seems to consume hungrily – and he looks at Agetta.
“This,” he says, “this is where you have to go.”
He pushes the light out further, even as the darkness seems to fight him, pushing back against the light. But his efforts are rewarded, for into view comes an angel, his own foolish, disobedient angel whom he will take nonetheless because she brings out a kindness in him, even if it doesn’t always look like that.
“Ryatah,” he says, and his voice feels too small, in his void, “I’ve brought a replacement. She’s lost her memories, and needs some time to think.”
He looks at Agetta, her pale features in the sickly light. He won’t leave her here long, probably. Time does get odd for him, of course. Or hell, perhaps she’ll find her own way out. Maybe she’ll remember how.
“Your memories,” he says, and unlocks them, lets the memories flow back to her, those loves and losses. He lets his own memories come last, takes a pleasure in the realization and horror dawning on her face.
“You’re welcome,” he says, and he moves away from Agetta, his movements strange in this nothingness, floating and walking and drifting all at once, grasps onto Ryatah, his teeth on her withers. This is not kind. The kindness is in saving her, and that enough.
He twists, and tastes blood, and then the void is gone, and once again he is back on the mountain with a white mare, and he is shaking his head, sighing as he releases her from his grasp.
“You shouldn’t leave like that,” he tells Ryatah, “it’s really quite rude.”
c a r n a g e
@Agetta @Ryatah hello if either if you would like for me to change anything please let me know!!
Agetta does not have the imagination to be able to guess where they might be going - but if she were to attempt, it would have been somewhere in Beqanna. Even when she had felt like a ghost, things had always taken place here. The afterlife she remembers had been a shadowy version of the world she knew.
The surprise of being touched by the stranger is quickly eclipsed by the surprise of where they end up.
That time when the sun had disappeared would be positively radiant compared to the darkness they find themselves in. Agetta’s eyes try changing from equine to feline and a few dozen other options, attempting to find something that will enable to see, before she gives up. No matter how powerful he ability to see in the dark might be, there just simply isn’t anything to look at.
Almost.
“Ryatah?” Agetta whispers softly in the same instant that the grey stallion says her friend’s name. The surprise of seeing her - one of the few faces that were spared from her memory purge, saved by the grace of being female - is almost as overwhelming as the darkness.
Even when the stranger is looking at her again, Agetta still only almost understands what she’s gotten herself into. For a few precious seconds, she’s just happy that whatever she’s agreed to will be helping out her friend.
And then she gets her memories back.
They slam into her and she gasps in the darkness, recoiling from Carnage and half-falling, half-twisting away because she remembers him all too well. Everything that she has forgotten is flashing through her mind at once and the intensity of it dulls even the nothingness around them. She doesn’t notice when Carnage and Ryatah leave her, she is far too busy choking under the weight of her entire life.
Agetta had gone to Beyza to die, and now… now…
Death would've been kinder. That was why she had wanted it. It was a way to stop hurting, to stop being stretched out over more and more years when all she brought to herself and others was pain.
There are pieces of her past and more recent ones she sees with clarity. Like how Garbage had gotten his memories back of her and hadn't said anything at all - politely putting up with her for as long as he could before disappearing into the night.
Had he been doing it to be kind to her? Or had it been such a convenient scapegoat for him, a way to finally get her to stop hanging around without having to go through the mess of a break-up?
It's likely the first of those, knowing him, and it's too bad she's sure that she's stuck in this void forever because she'd like the chance to tell him he's an idiot one more time.
And that she loves him anyway.
She doesn’t know how much later it is when she finally looks for Carnage with anger in her eyes, only to realize she’s entirely alone. The only one around to be mad at is herself and, as she recalls now, she’s gotten rather good at that over the years.
Long after she thinks she should have died of starvation or suffocation, after she's accepted that this will not somehow be a way to speed her way back to the afterlife, Agetta drifts with the ghosts of her past and loses herself in the darkness.
im prefacing by apologizing for writing literally 1,000 words about a fake horse being in a black void
Ryatah
She has never done well being left on her own, but to be alone in this infinite void has bred an entirely different kind of madness in her.
The fear and panic still came in waves like the most unwanted tide, but the way that they wash over the inescapable numbness is almost a relief. It serves as a reminder that she has not entirely evaporated into nothing, that there is still a bit of her soul clinging to what it can.
That maybe there is still a light at the end of this endlessly dark, god forsaken black hole of a tunnel.
It’s the hallucinations that she can’t handle. The way their faces flash before her as if they are really there, the way their voices sound so close she thinks she could have felt their breath on her skin. Mostly they are a mere glimpse, something that flickers in and out so fast she knows it couldn’t have been real—usually familiar yellow eyes and the haunting echo of his laugh, though sometimes she sees wine-red eyes set against storm-cloud gray, and that vision brings with it a hope that quickly shatters into despondency as the fragments of her broken reality settle back into place.
Because if anyone could find her it would be Carnage, and she thinks he would have been here by now if he had any intent on coming.
She isn’t sure which is worse: the idea that he knows she is here and has chosen to leave her, or the idea that she is so far removed that not even he can find her.
So as the time passes in this strange void—years packed into mere days and months—she builds her own worlds and delusions, and numbly waits for the day that this vast nothingness swallows her entirely. Waits for the day when she will no longer be haunted by phantom light stretching through the dark and ghostly visions, or familiar voices saying her name for the millionth time, and she almost does not even look at them.
She isn’t surprised at all that her delusional mind is trying to convince her that he is the light that will drag her from this darkness, because she thinks she must be one of the last few in all the different dimensions that will always see him as a savior.
But their voices sound different, lacking the clarity the hallucinations tended to have (how ironic that it was the fake voices that sounded more real). Instead it was as if the dark was trying to smother the sound of them, to keep her from looking up and finding the pair of them, and it is the strangeness of this that causes her to turn her head. She does not respond initially, staring unblinking and confused, because the two of them here together did not make any sense at all. It isn’t real, she reminds herself, even though Carnage is eerily calm and poised as always, and Agetta is just as confused as she is. It isn’t real, because even if anyone was coming for her the odds of it being the two of them together didn’t seem likely.
She only registers it is real when a look of sudden comprehension dawns across Agetta’s face and all at once she is trying to wrench herself away from Carnage, but it doesn’t matter because he is already reaching for her. He grabs her in a way that implies he is irritated with her and even though a tug of fear hooks in her gut she cannot bring herself to care because he is here and he is real.
When they are back on the mountain the air feels like a shock to her lungs, and though her body is seemingly whole there is an almost fresh looking wound marred across her chest; no longer a gaping hole but still angry and bloodstained and a reminder of what Gale had ripped from her, what she isn’t even sure her body can regrow. Her withers ache from where Carnage’s teeth had broken her skin but when he lets go she still wishes that he wouldn’t have, because his touch, violent though it could be, is the first thing she has felt in what seems like an eternity.
It takes all of her self control to not immediately press herself into him, and it is only the way that he is looking at her and the fact that she is still trembling with shock that keeps her rooted where she stands.
“I didn’t mean to,” her voice sounds weak and breathy, her dark eyes still far away and confused even as they look at him, as if she cannot comprehend that they are both on the same plain of existence in a world built on solid ground. “He ripped out my heart and I couldn’t get back.” Her teleportation, the astral projection, her resurrection—none of them could find anything to ground themselves to, leaving her unmoored and helpless. “I’m sorry,” comes her almost desperate apology, unable to keep the chaos of her emotions from seeping into her voice. Her chest, though still hollow, is a turbulent sea of relief and fear and panic, afraid that this is not real while also afraid that this is real and that she has somehow managed to anger him even from another dimension.
“You found me,” she says in quiet disbelief, still marveling at the fact that he had brought her back, because while a part of her maintained a foolish amount of trust and faith in him she is still always surprised when he doesn’t simply leave her dead or broken or lost. “Thank you,” this is spoken more cautiously, the worry in her eyes now illuminated by the golden glow of her halo, stardust drifting to the ground as she pulls her wings closer to her sides. He shouldn’t have had to save her, she knows this, but of all the things he has done for her this is the one that she is unsure if there is any way to repay him.
![[Image: Agetta-by-Star-smaller.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/bvb9bQBR/Agetta-by-Star-smaller.png)
