But I won't deny I love you helpless - Malis

[Alight]

(Somewhere, in a land of shadows, far-far-away, there lived a wolf – a golden monster – and day and night he searched high and low for indigo.

He searched first for the queen. But she was very good at hiding herself.

He was beside himself, until one day, he found the princess...)

***

She leaps, and when she does, her wings make a soft woooosh that she finds rather pleasant.
She twirls and they crack and spit sparks into the cold, night air – like tiny, hot stars of her own.

They vanish, though, just as quickly as they are let loose.

The winter air chokes them out, limiting their lifecycle to a a few seconds or so – but a blink of an eye to the venerable celestials above. That is fine. She flaps her wings again, forcing heated air around her slim, smooth body, and they belch out a hundred more, flitting up towards the treetops, ringed in moonlight. 

She smiles, watching her own galaxy dance, orange and hot, far, far beneath the cold, dead one that hangs far, far above. She imagines it must be jealous, that solar system, for she has seen that space up close. She has bared witness to the sad, bloated corpse of the moon; the mean, distant savagery of the sun. It had been a dream, of course, though it had felt so real – that clenching, squeezing, choking vacuum; that place without air and gravity, made of such utter nothing and darkness. 
The way the stars spelled out death, in no uncertain terms, because that imagined place was not for her but Giver, and had been so terribly hostile…

But in the following hours, that dream had taken root. Grew. Burned and feasted and then quelled, becoming her own mythos. Alight is, after all, gullible – so easily fooled by fairytales. And what a tale to tell! Of a thousand tragic deaths; a bare-bone maiden, losing her jaw to the sea; a prince and his pretender, that black-bonneted tramp; the true princess, forsaken; a room made of stone, for him and her, towering far above a pine tree ocean…

Fire, bursting forth from a fissure of aberrant thought. A punishment.
A flower-haired being. Her saviour.
A voltaic magician. Her hope, restored!

***

She laughs bright, high, joyous laughs! Like those she used to make when she was but a girl and he was still her man. She dances! Leaps! Twirls! Runs! Hurtling into darkness, leaving tracks of meltwater and charred bark in her wake. Darkness and much more surrounds her, in these places of parables and bedtime stories – places of beauty, like the shore opposite Tephra, where she had come first to stare across at that friendless island. It had not, in the manic frenzy of her mind, felt like the last time. But it felt powerful – like looking across at it burning alive, with everyone she ever loved still tucked inside.

She turned and ran.

***

She slows, giggling and breathing hard. Through the tall, slim birch trees, moonlight drapes like a soft haze, and between their bodies, fog hangs thin and wispy. It reminds her, faintly, of home, before home had been consumed and spat out in a hundred tiny pieces, and turned into a hot, black island. She pulls her wings safely to her sides, hugging herself in their warmth. There is, she finds, a comfort in the deafening silence of this place. It is, to be sure, a stark contrast to the fervent celebration she had sought doggedly since leaving the magician in the meadow.

It is, she thinks, serene.
She is, in fact, a silly girl.

***

(Wherever the princess went, he went, too. The wolf, however, was devilishly sneaky, and the princess never suspected a thing! He watched her with a keen eye. He learned the way she spoke and the way she danced! twirled! ran!

He was, of course, hungry.)

***

Alight hums.
It fills the trees with such joy.

It is a song, perhaps, that she learned from mother, many years ago. Or one of her sisters. Maybe a tune of her own device, but she thinks it is beautiful, and besides, there is such a thing as too quiet. The serenity is slowly mutating. It is clenching – squeezing – her gut, ever so slightly. It is… hardening, like the pit of a peach. She smiles, shaking her pretty, slender head, and hums on.

She thinks – though she tries not to – that she is being watched. A common enough feeling, of course, in such a place and at such a late hour.

That pit grows. Heavy, now, as a one of the smooth, shiny stones she used to dig up from the Meadow’s river bed. She smiles no more and those soft, brown eyes peek nervously around, through the haze and the fog. But whatever is watching her, it seems, is devilishly sneaky. “H… hello?” she means to call out boldly. It is a whisper, instead. From her lips, there is no more music, and in her gut the muscles there are screaming. She shakes, shivers now, for it seems her wings can no longer make up for the ice that forms inside her veins.

She runs. Hard and graceless through the deep, sticky snow.
She glances behind and to the sides frantically.

The pit is no longer a pit but an abyss. Tears whip back from her eyes, running behind her ears and freezing in the tangle of indigo hair. She wants to scream, but everything that moves to join the night tangles up in the back of her throat. She has known fear, in the moment she found herself separated and alone on the top of a mountain range; the moment she looked death (spelled out in stars) in the eye and knew there was no other way. But this is something different. It is raw. An awaking of something most base and animal in her brain. 

Terror.

She glances behind her, but she can see nothing. She could try to listen for her pursuer, but the pounding of her heart mixed so loudly with the forceful way she charged through the crust of the snow, it would be of no use at all. She moves to look ahead of her, constantly vigilant of a path to shake herself free and clear, but the birchwood is endless and vast. More so than she remembers.

In the corner of her eye, as she turns forward, something solid appears (as if from thin air), in her way. She tries to stop, stiffening her front legs and sliding much father than she might have hoped. She collides with it, hard yet warm. Not something, but somebody (or something, but with a heartbeat, in any case). She reels back, finally letting loose a panicky, shrill scream. She twists around, barely managing to keep to her feet, to run back in the direction she came.

She slams into something solid, yet warm, again.
The second impact freezes her – that harrowing moment when the lizard brain ceases to see a way out. (In no uncertain terms…) Alight gulps, her chest heaving. Slowly, miraculously, her eyes focus on the mass in front of her.

***

“Are you alright?”
His voice is like gravel and dust, further manced by the horrid, dry air of his kingdom come. He looks down at her with furrowed brow, wearing a crown of mighty, curved horns, ringed in moonlight. She is, compared to him, a tiny thing. Like a baby bird. (A fragile thing.) He watches her with flat, black eyes, though she thinks she can see some concern in them. (Hope it a funny thing. So is desperation.

Fear isn’t funny.
But it is useful.)

He runs his tongue over his cracked lips.

“N-n-n… I-I was… am… s-someone was f-following m-me,” tears well in the corner of her eyes. He tilts his head, like a bird might, and smiles… softly.

“Was there?” The man does not take his eyes off her, “are you sure?”

She shivers, nodding. “I… I’m sure t-there was…” slowly, the pit is closing, like a set of teeth coming together. “I, swear…” – the river stones always had a way of feeling lighter when still submerged in the water – “...I felt it.”

He makes a low hmmm sound in his throat and inclines his wide, crude head, “this is not a safe place.. Surely your mother must have told you that?” he clucks his tongue, disapprovingly… gently, tsk-tsk. “In any case, nothing to worry about now.”

She had of course, her mother. It would be unfair of Alight to say otherwise. (Of course she had. Giver had always taken to mother’s warnings better.) She flushes under her bright, golden skin, the fear leaching from her mind, as if being taken from her by this man, graciously, “...stupid of me,” she whispers coyly, looking up rather more boldly now, to get a good look at him.

Alight is, of course, a gullible girl. 
(Oh, the things she has believed! Does believe…)
—but reality is a funny thing, it has a violent streak. And as she searches his strange, lovely face, she finds she cannot deny the similarity...
(So much like my Giver…)

***

(One day, the princess led the wolf to the queen, in their kingdom of Pine! And he was so very excited to see her again.

But before the wolf could tell her the good news, that he had found her lovely daughter, the black king came and chased him away.

But the wolf was ever so patient. The wolf could wait them all out.)

***

The golden stallion watches as her brows furrow, a curious look crossing her bright, brown eyes.
He draws his tongue over his lips.

He remembers the first time he ever saw her. She had been… dancing, with the boy, through his forest. She spoke quickly and ceaselessly. Sung and hummed. She played princess and the huntsman with the boy. 

Had her mother not warned her? Her mother, it would seem, lacked in vigilance. (He had a knack for fucking the irresponsible ones.)
But was that really a revelation, after all? It takes a special kind of carelessness to approach him for a second time. She had. And she had paid – made him pay, too. Though, he’d dare say the price he exacted had been a fair bit steeper. (He can feel, as if they have their own minds and heartbeats, the three knots of gray-pink scar tissue on the underside of the jaw. Three, because the fourth had failed to strike true.

He treats them like a talisman.)

A fair steeper price, at least in the physical sense. Not that it had mattered a wink. Because here she is, a miracle, from a ruined body.

Beautiful. “You have such pretty hair. What is your name?”

*** 

“Who are you?” she takes a step closer, bringing her wings around in a halfmoon towards him, shedding brighter light than just the moon. “Alight,” she adds, kindly. (And he smiles just a tiny bit wider.) She can see, now, the hideous wing that hangs limp at his side (she would shudder, but it would be horribly unladylike); she can see the grooves in those great horns and the strange way his toes are split. In the darkness of his eyes she can see, past the glaze of her own fire that dances there on the surface, that they are brown. Not black, though almost. She can see the way he is shaped so much like Giver… so much.

She can see, best of all, the smooth, bright gold of his skin.

***

“Who do you think I am?” he looks down on her, that fragile little thing, “I am a king,” he says, with a wry, crooked smile that she does not see properly, “and you are a princess. I can tell.”

[Malis]

Mortal or not, she still does not sleep. There is too much that waits for her in the shadows behind closed eyes. Instead, she spends her nights like a ghost across the landscape, fading in and out of a starless forest until her mind is full of nothing and it does not hurt to stop. It is the forest she has chosen tonight – a place she still cannot enter without remembering, and it such remembering that drives her ever forward, restless and impatient until sweat dampens the hollow of her neck and hips despite the chill of winter all around.

It is the scream that finally coaxes her from her place among the shadows, the shrillness of a voice warped and changed by fear. It does not matter that this scream is one she has not yet heard – that it is strange and unfamiliar and like a thing plucked from the depths of her nightmares – because she knows the voice that hides behind it, knows that it comes from lips like crushed gold and a mouth that calls her mother. She knows, too, that it has come once from her own lips in this same forest, beneath this same sky.

And, she knows why.

She spills like water over the snow, all power and grace, and there is no hesitation in any part of her quivering blue body when it weaves between skeleton trees and beneath the branches that reach out like fingers to hold her back. Small welts appear across her body, against the curve of her neck and the hollows of a wild face – and where once they would have faded, forgotten as soon as the skin stopped its thrumming, they rise now like mountainous ridges with her ribs as the valleys of blue beneath. She is mortal again, the way she had been as a child, but the years of invulnerability have taken their toll and where once she was brave, she is now little more than reckless.

It is not easy to forget what it is to be a God.

When she finds them in the open it is like waking to a nightmare, to a nightmare she has known again and again each night and through the dark. Alight is small, delicate and bright gold, and Malis knows her immediately. The other is so much larger, stronger, and even in silhouette she finds that she can see the arrogance that seeps from him. Their gold is the same, bright and soft like spun gold, except where Alight seems like warmth, he seems like death. She is quiet when she slips closer, languid and vicious, and though he has not turned to face her, though she cannot see those curling horns in silhouette, she is certain he knows she had come.

“Alight,” she says and her voice is as glass, sharp and unforgiving, flat as the expression that warps her face into wild blue fury, “come here, Alight.” But there is a pit in her belly, the abyss Alight had glimpsed at, and it fills with the suspicion that in mere moments, in a river of unraveling seconds, she had lost her daughter to the dark. It is like feeling small fingers loosen in her hand, watching them uncurl and let go to grasp the new hand that has been outstretched. The hand of a beast that is much more at home when buried in the soft, pliant flesh of a throat.

‘Who are you?’ Alight asks and Malis can feel something come undone in her chest, the roaring of great fissures opened wide enough to rend her in half. She is silent only a beat, though she shifts closer to Alight, pressing the blue of her mouth against that brilliant crushed gold. “ He is the beast from the forest.” Is all she says at first, winding close enough that she can feel the blue of her hair wilt in the heat of those fire-born wings. She knows Alight will remember those stories now, even if she hadn’t thought of them in years, that she will remember the warnings of the forest and of the man who hid within, remember why it was that Malis had kept her children tethered so close to the relative safety of the Chamber. Then, in a voice that is as heavy as the stones gathered within her chest, “He is your father, Alight.”

Her eyes turn on Pollock, bright and furious, bleeding green with the hatred that spills from her chest – and it doesn’t matter that this will only fuel his hunger, that it will only feed the beast in his belly, because it is all she has left for him anymore.

MALIS

makai x oksana

[Alight]

His nostrils flare, wide and hungry. She knows he can sense her presence.
She is right.
That smell is undeniable – cruel, even, because he has smelled it many times before. Except, like a ghost, those were figments of her damage and despair, writ inerasable all over this place. In broad, beautiful strokes that kept him up at night – restless and heckled. It had found a way to animate itself, to become insidious and ubiquitous – separate from her skin and tongue, forever sending him on wild goose chases.

Perhaps it had been she, even more so than Beqanna Herself, who had soured this place for him.

For everywhere, he saw her colour like the banner of his failings and her blasphemy;

He hopes she does not see it, the little princess.
He has waited so long for this.

Too long for this bitch to ruin it all with her mouth.
(Those lips, which he had stilled and left cold and… bluer, even than they were made to be –)

Then again, was this not the end goal he had been anticipating?
Had this not been exactly what he wanted?
In perfect working order, he would have her thoroughly. Entirely. Body and mind, she would be his and so, when it came time to set his bait, she would do so willingly. Graciously and loyally. She – Alight – would be the thing that brought them together again; she, maybe (with any luck), without the sorcery that bound her flesh together the first time around.

He is not a stupid man. He is a simple and base animal, to be sure. But the moment he had found his horns ripped from his head and set like a topper for a Christmas tree on that mountain, well…

—he used that big brain of his.

***

(In a wide, dark pine woods there sat a tall tower, made of brilliant, white stone. In that tower lived a beautiful princess and her guardian. ‘To keep you safe,’ said the queen, and she locked the door behind her.

The beautiful princess did not mind, for she loved her tower and she loved her guardian even more – from time to time, her family would climb the stairs, a hundred feet up!, to visit her there.

She wore a crown of rosebuds and he wore beautiful chains and shackles of silver and starlight.

There, the children played and danced, without worry...  until, one day, that tower groaned and trembled and one-by-one, the stones began to crack!

The princess screamed out, but before anyone could come to the princess’ rescue, her tower tumbled to the ground.)

***

Alight can smell the dust and stale air on his coat. She does not find it unpleasant, though she prefers the smell of prettier things. (She does not say this, either, nor crinkle her nose... Terribly unladylike, indeed.) She finds herself distracted by the lines of his nose’s velvet, where she can swear she has planted soft kisses (like butterflies) before.

Giver, she thinks, and it draws her nearer to him still, craving the places that look most like her keeper: the flat of his cheeks and the curve of his neck; away from the dirty, old wing. The thing she feels now is related to the one that elicits such devotion in her for Giver. Except, of course, it is a much different affection she has pledged to Giver in her heart, now bound by the moorings of magic.

‘I am a king’ he says.

She smiles, giggling lightly, so very close to his chest.

***

His lip curls. (The girl is so close, now, he can feel the breath of her mirth cross his chest.)
His jaw clenches tight, the tension flexing the muscles there, pulling on the inelastic scar tissue.

He watches her, with flat, hard, angry eyes as she shifts from the trees. Not a figment, but hot-blooded and hard-bodied – here. He has no name to curse, so instead, he festers in silence. He lets that demon, yet unrevealed, eat at him – spur him; but stops it from devouring the parts of him that seek to keep his composure.

He can salvage this.
He is so close, now.

‘You,’ that unblinking, devoid stare says.

***

(...free from her tower, the princess was lost. She wandered very far away, looking for her guardian.

Instead she found the wolf.

He was, of course, hungry.)

*** 

“Mother?” 

She hears her name, and the voice that breathes it is undeniable. She turns her pretty, slim head, blinking. The voice is, indeed, one that is an inerasable part of her constellation – it is the single, first thing she ever heard when, from her malformed head, popped two, tiny ears. It had been muffled, then, spoken through layers of fat and muscle and bone. But yet, it had been a powerful, internal, almighty rumble.

It had soothed her.
Then she learned the way it scolded, praised, laughed and cooed.

She loves it.

Now she hears it tremble, as unsure and sullen as she has ever heard it. Even when they first found father (and each other), and he has acted so strange and distant – even then she had been strong.

Mother, she has always thought, is strong. Above all. Present; a rock. She had been too... distracted, as of late, to recognize her mother’s distance and dissolution. Alight is a selfish girl, unfortuately.

‘come here’ she beacons, and Alight has never denied it before. She lingers, loath to distance herself from this King, then takes a tiny step back. 

‘He is the beast from the forest.’

***

(the wolf)

***

Alight’s chest clenches and her head jerks away from the King, as a matter of instinct. “He says… he is a king,” she echoes, confusion heavy in each breath between words, she can feel (distantly) her mother’s touch and it is comforting still, even in her daze.

“A King cannot be a beast… besides…”

***

He cringes, his eyelids closing tight for a second.
He makes a small, exasperated sound from his throat.

Those lips.
That mouth.

The girls draws away, coaxed back by her mother-dearest. 
The way his claws unfurl, forcibly, from her neck is nothing like the passion in which they desire to take the woman by her own. The girl was never the target. The girl was never the end goal.

But this had not been the plan. (How very… capable she is of fucking up his schemes.) 
“Beast?” he says finally, in that low, glowering voice, though she will know how even he tries to keep – how much ire and slaughter he holds back. “Is that it?”

He does not move forward. It might scare her – Alight – away, poor pet. He stays, firm and somber, his eyes unmoving from the mother. “Is that how you speak about me to her?” He clucks his tongue – tsk tsk – “unfair. Unkind.” He shifts and turns, again, to the girl 
(a perfect mixture of them both – it was inconceivable that she would be anyone but who she is, even if he could not understand how she came to be)
“I was never given a chance to meet you, Alight. Your mother chose to raise you away from me. And my kingdom.”

***

(The wolf knew the princess was his. She had his fur and the same love in her heart.

But the queen, she stole the princess from him, raised her with a pretender, in a tower he could not access.

This, the wolf did not like. But he was patient.)

***

‘Father,’

her brow knits together, bewilderment passing over her bright, brown eyes. She turns to her mother, lips slightly ajar. Before she can speak, the King retorts, his own words adding to the flail that jellies her brain for a moment. (Alight is a gullible girl – she believes anything with a good story.)

She thinks of her brothers and sisters – of Victra and Giver and Ivo and… but if, indeed, this is true…
(Alight clings, desperately, to her stories. She finds a way to reattach the torn pages of that leather bound volume.)

“Giver and I?” she stutters, tears, once again, wetting the line of her lashes, “we… we…” She closes her mouth, lips trembling, her eyes darting around her own feet. “Why would you lie?” she demands, suddenly, in the surly tone that mother will be no stranger to. She wants to be gentle – she loves her mother, even now; that foundation is stable as a rock – but like a child, she can only ever take so much stress.

It cracks.

“I… I. So… father?” he had played the part so well. She could not hate him for it.

She turns her ire to the one she loves the most. 
It is a strange predilection of the brain.

She takes a few awkward steps towards her mother, her back now squared to the King. Her wings spark and hiss at her sides.

“If he is such a beast…” she says, in a low, reasoning voice, “then… why…” Alight flushes, dropping her eyes for a moment in shame. (In her stories, such things do not happen. In her stories, such things are explained as such: Mare and stallion love each other, and then there comes the idol of their affection. The end.) She knows better, she just chooses to jilt that unsavory reality.

“I,” she shakes her head, resigned for the moment. Her eyes close and when they do she feels a strange tug from her gut, and without her urging, something yanks free from down there. Her lips part to gasp, but it has been done. That strange magic from that stranger mare, in the strangest of moments, slips loose from the girl and passes through into the mother. Alight’s lips move slightly, worriedly. She knows what has happened and because she has sense enough to keep quiet about it, she does.

Magic is strange. It knows, sometimes.

*** 

He lets it go. He watches, quietly.
Soon, a smile splits his face wide open, like a crocodile.

***

(The wolf was not only devilishly sneaky, but horribly clever. 

He could find ways to turn any plight in is favor.

He had his ways. He just needed time to think.)