"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
the wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight [ drunk and driven by a devil's hunger ]
The day was cold, but he didn’t know it. His body was an inferno, raging with magic as it boiled and simmered within him, as he padded through the Forest on massive paws. He had, for a while, enjoyed the form of the stag, had enjoyed racing through the woods alongside that young, ethereal doe. The instincts had been primal, easily understood, and he had easily slipped into them. The enjoyment, however, had been short lived, and he had stripped himself clean of the prey’s body, embracing his predator form again.
Today, his wolf form was massive, not quite as tall as his normal 17 hands, but he could have easily stood shoulder to shoulder with most of his equine comrades. His thick coat remained his familiar mulberry color, his eyes emerald, as he slunk through the trees, his step graceful, quiet, paws finding silent purchase on the thin covering of snow. He was thankful for the coat he bore in this form, for the undercoat that kept his body so warm, for the top coat that kept the flakes of snow from every reaching his core.
It was convenient, and comfortable, and he could appreciate both things.
As he reached the edge of the forest, the trees thinning, he looked out into the more traditional meeting area. It was quiet today, and he could only assume it was because of the snow drifts that swept across the land, the wind picking up the old and mixing it with the new that fell from the sky. If there was ever a day to stay home, to find comfort in some tucked away alcove, it was today—but Woolf had no home, had no where to go to seek such primitive comforts, and so he snorted and turned back to the woods.
03-05-2017, 03:16 AM (This post was last modified: 03-05-2017, 09:01 AM by Nyxia.)
my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
To most, it would be terrifying.
It is scary to her, too, but not in the same way and not for the same reasons.
There is nowhere to hide. As a girl, this forest was easy to tuck herself into. She could wriggle behind hawthorns and wild roses and watch the dust motes dance in rays of warm, gold sun as she waited for her friends to seek her out. She could lay flat on her side, suck all the air deep into her lungs to flatten out her belly and bury herself under thick, autumnal detritus—fallen leaves, all orange and yellow, and dropped, half-wilted flowers, leaving her coat thick with grime when finally she reemerged. But she is not a girl anymore. She knows this because every morning she checks the knobs of her knees, the lengths of her legs and her height against all the places she onced played. She is big (as her father had been before her, though while he filled every inch of his body, she seems to sink into hers); she is long-legged, but proportioned.
Womanly, now, despite everything.
She has grown up, though that process seems to have passed her by.
(Time is strange and stranger still.
Time is, above all, unstoppable.)
Even as a girl, it was hard to hide in winter. Is it bleak, quiet, hollowed-out—bereft of birdsong and leaf-languages; she stands behind the broad, perseverant body of a deep green pine tree, peeking from behind its spiky, unkind fingers. (But if she can smell it, it can smell her.) She blinks, tears slipping down her pale, lavender cheekbones. (If she can see it, it can see her.) She breaths out, dragging raggedly past her quivering lips.
But it does not scare her because it could wrap its cruel, toothy jaws around her throat with ease.
It does not scare her because it could hunt her down like a dog does a rabbit.
It scares her because she does not know from where it came.
She does not know if it is real.
She does not know if it is escaped.
“H-hello?” she calls, still buried in the arms of an evergreen. When the sounds lifts from her mouth, white and vaporous, she cringes back, muscles seizing like pinched up springs. Still and silent, she can only wait. Wait, of course, for it to answer her back in a tongue she does not understand—like one of the many she had heard in mother’s creation, a cacophony of despair as their world was rent apart, or with a voice like a string symphony—so that she can pass it by like that many walking escapees that already crowd her periphery.
(Bejeweled tigers, pastel-colored bears;
Manticores and shellycoats.)
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
the wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight [ drunk and driven by a devil's hunger ]
He tastes the fear on the air as one might taste the coming seasons, and he lifts his massive head to sniff at it gently, contemplating. Of course, he does not hunt for it with these senses (sharp and tuned as they may be); no—instead, he hunts for it with the magic that he releases from his mouth and into the wild. He pulls upon it and it hums low and melodic, riding upon the crisp, biting winter air straight to her.
Slowly, he drop his head and turns it toward her, emerald gaze sharp and unrelenting.
Methodically, he changes his path and although he considers simply teleporting to her side, he decides that he likes the ache that travel in the winter brings to his muscles, the sting of his lungs. So he walks, as normally as he can, until he reaches her, until her fear is thick and palpable, the tears on her cheeks real.
“I am not from where you think I am,” he answers her thoughts, dismissing her fears and ignoring her greeting. “Although I have, perhaps, visited.” He has visited many places in his young life—cosmos that spilled out, heavens that called to him, dimensions he had no business calling home. He does not know exactly where she thinks of, what pulls upon her heart so, but he cannot say that he has never been there.
He, however, does not leave—not yet.
She fascinates him, although not for her beauty or the many ways in which young mares fascinate young stallions such as him. She fascinates him for her reaction, for her calling over that which terrorizes her, and so he does not change back to his normal form—not yet. Instead, he transforms into another creature befitting her visions, his coat starting out as a cacophony of hues and then simmering into pastels. A stag, this time, the same one he’d worn when racing the forest alongside Fur. This time his coat is not mahogany and cream. Instead it shimmers and changes, and strings of ice drip from his antlers.
my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
“No no no,” she whispers, her pulse thudding loudly in her ears. She reels back a step, slow and delicate despite her size. It had been a mistake to pursue his nature; a dangerous dose of curiosity to invite him to her from the Periphery—real or dreamed-of, he breathes and he stalks and he is coming. He is coming in a way she knows is unstoppable and inescapable.
She has met both of these things; she has been intimate with both forces, pressing hard on either side until she is paper-thin and weightless, and fails to exist. She waits, then (for minutes or days), for a wind to come along and push her further on her endless, unstoppable and inescapable search for them—
‘father, sister’
(Anyone?)
Her chest clenches as he speaks—her tongue, she understands it instantly. Not in the slow-burning, building way the nature of the manticore’s words had made themselves known through his song, crowding her hearing with meaning. Her ears flick forwards (excitation over the prospect of contact, finally)—but her body reacts instinctively, healing back from him again, her golden eye avoiding his own piecing green and the hulking, strange body he lives within.
She keeps him in the periphery, tucked safely away to her right side and good (only) eye.
He answers her thoughts—he denies being one of mother’s escapees; he says he is not from those barren, still, timeless universes, but still he rattles the cage of her anemic sanity, slipping in and out with ease. “Y-you must be,” she mutters back, stepping away from the breath that bellows from his toothy maw, “you m-must be. H-ho-w did y-you...” That is safer, she reminds herself. Something she can pass by like an illusion painted vividly. None of them have ever laid a claw, hook, or hand on her—at least, not after resurfacing here.
(Here. Here is home.
Home is real.)
When he shifts forms, however, that golden eye flicks to him, wide and wet with new tears, facing him fully, her jagged, broken and poorly healed left side peeking around dumbly. The colours pull at her throat and guts, she sniffs, searching his soft hair and antlers for the visible signs that he has been severed and rearranged—‘I’m sorry,’ she almost whispers, before he asks her that question.
Her brows, one smooth and one crooked, come together, “I-I don’t d-dream,” she lies, her words quavering. She dreams endlessly. She walks in dreams. She wakes and drifts in dreams. She rents dreams in two, devouring whole words like some apocalyptic colossus. “Go back,” she insists softly, turning her eye away again. Back to the Periphery. She deserves his haunting—all of them.
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
the wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight [ drunk and driven by a devil's hunger ]
Woolf is many things, and while it could be argued that he was unfeeling, he did not take undue pleasure in her fear, in her misery. Still, he did not work overly hard at easing her pain—not immediately, at least. There was too much to learn, too much to study, too many things for him to discern for him to simply leave her be. Instead, his sharp emerald eyes study her face, knowing without seeing what the other side of it looked like, but not yet knowing the cause of the distortion. He could, of course, simply reach into her mind and pull out the information, but it was more interesting to earn it the hard way.
His mouth quirks at her lie, and he just shrugs. “Of course you do.”
Still, he gives a small kindness and shifts again, one more time, returning to the form of his birth, that large mulberry stallion with the heavy head and the serious eyes. He is still fantastic in color, but he is real in shape. “Why would you try and pretend that you don’t dream when it is so obvious that you do?”
There are so many questions sitting unanswered on the end of his tongue, so many things that he wants to pull from her—stories, data, information. So many ways for him to learn from her, to piece together that which cleaved her face in two, that which brings tears to her eyes when she observes a monster with changing shape and color. But, for now, he withholds them, knowing that to overwhelm her was to not get any answers at all. So he remained still, quiet with the snow drifting down and dusting his haunches.
“My name is Woolf,” he finally offers, and then nothing else.
my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
He holds her in a way that she cannot unbind from.
She has felt this kind of fast fix before. She has been this helpless before—time and time and time again; infinitely still and beholden—but it does not make it easier to stomach. Each time, it is like a claw reaching all that much deeper, to find more things to feast on—on and on and on—until there is nothing left but a husk of fractured bones and half-lived dreams, half-dreamed realties. Single-minded seeking, a ghost tracking down her last earthly business before she can finally rest.
(If he will not go, then, perhaps, that makes him real. As he had said he is.
But if he is real, why does he mean to frighten her so?)
She knows the escaped things, dreams and walks with them; she does not remember (nor dream of) the native beasts. She represses those—horns curved back, in her sleep they are only symbolic constellations set in a final and forever blackness; the powerful coldness that numbed the left side and pulverized, forever, her ability to leave freely. She has no friends, but the furred and feathered beasts of this very forest, but they are old friends and often the raise their hackles at her; she has no connective tissue to this woken world, but for the two, Irisa and father, and she has not seen either for years.
As he shifts to that equine form, she begins to unravel, lulled more and more by the curious bait he sets for her—he is real, and that makes him an unknown, but he continues to show her forms like honey, gentling with each transformation. She begins to accept his flesh and blood as something like hers (probably; much more than she knows), and his sharp, green eyes as kind, though they bore and contain a strangeness she cannot grasp.
Nyxia is a cautious creature, so like the deer her father browbeat into nursing her, but she is lonely and soft as a babe, over-willing to visit friendly shores wherever she can find them.
“I-I… I dream of dreams. Is that the same t-thing?” her lips quiver as she talks, her golden eye still working slowly on moving to him, “s-sometimes, I-I… I am d-dangerous when I d-dream.” She blinks a tear, dropping her head and shaking it mournfully.
“I dream of dreams and d-dreams follow me w-w-when I wake. So… I don’t think I dream. I just f-f-float.” Her vioce is airy and dazed, having never shook the cobwebs of all the in-between she has visited, each one muddling her more than the previous. “I live,” she concludes, “under the waves of my mind, I think. I d-didn’t always.”
“I was just a girl once.”
She inhales, her bright eye finally resting on his face, and in it she sees something enticing—in the flat spaces under his eyes and the the round places on his chin and nose. She frowns and blinks at him, the realization surfacing in a muddy way, “Woolf.” She’s met wolves before—father kept all things at bay—but never Woolf. “I’m… N-Nyxia.”
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
