"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
take me, take me back to your bed. i love you so much that it hurts my head.
say, i don't mind you under my skin. oh, let the bad parts in, the bad parts in.
She is lost, lost.
Tears trail down her cheeks as she calls out for her brother, for Virgo and Caw. Anyone to save her from this awful terror. She’s stumbling and limping like a newborn all over again when he sees her, attracted by the desperate cries for help. When she turns her dark head, she sniffles and asks if he knows where her parents are, but he says nothing. Vulgaris just steps closer as his lips peel back to reveal those awful teeth, all pointed and ready to rip her apart.
“Please, please don’t.. I’m scared to die..” she says softly as she steps back from him and falls to the ground, too dizzy to stand any longer. But her pleas mean nothing to him as he rushes forward, snatching her thin leg between his fangs as she cries out in agony. Acid oozes from her skin but it’s too late for the little girl. His venom is flooding her veins despite the way the acid burns away the skin of his lips. “Scorpio! Mommy!”
She’s horrified when she can’t move her jaw to choke out their names again, as her legs go limp despite the fight left in her. Her body twitches involuntarily when the first bone snaps between his jaws. Vulgaris briefly lifts his head to see if anyone else comes to answer her calls, but the night is silent as this tragedy unfolds. The serpent lowers his head once more and begins to feed, now that her breathing has stopped and the pulse in her throat has gone dead. He had hoped hunting would distract him from the gnawing feeling of loneliness, of shame after encountering the red woman.
But this child’s death does nothing to soothe the quiet ache in his chest. Instead, she leaves his face mangled and burned into something new and terrible. Her blood trickles down between his bare teeth and off his chin.
yay! now quiet is dead and i am BIG SAD. if anyone wants to reply to this, that's fine too.
When she was a child, it was easy to think that life was perfect.
It was easy to step back and look at the glossy exterior: the strong, hands-on father and the sweet, nurturing mother. It was easy to allow herself to be surrounded by them. To be buoyed by their attention. Even when things got rough—when Leliana and her had to leave Loess suddenly and her mother had to tell her that her father was away taking care of his responsibilities—she knew that her family was whole.
But lately.
Lately, she’s begin to feel her fingers around the edges of the picture. She is still young, her mind still unable to fully comprehend the magnitude of pain that washes underneath each moment like the tide, but pieces have begun to click together steadily. Dovev’s outburst. The way her mother had always looked like she had just gotten done crying during their time in Tephra. That scaled boy in the playground.
None of it make true sense. She has no narrative to piece together.
But it is enough to rouse her suspicion.
Enough to make her question all of the things she has always considered to be the truth.
It drives her from the safety of her home into the meadow, it pulls her like a gravity until she is standing in front of her father, his skin charred and the blood still flowing between his teeth.
Her eyes widen, her heart pounds, and she struggles to move—struggles to draw air into her chest.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.
She blinks, shaking, mouth dropping open to reveal the shine of the fangs given from him to her.
“D-Dad?” her voice is hesitant, a question, a thread of hope that this wasn’t what she thought it was.
That she was, somehow, still wrong about everything.
howl at the half moon, radio queen. she's all smoke. she's all nicotine.
01-01-2019, 02:41 PM (This post was last modified: 01-01-2019, 02:41 PM by vulgaris.)
VulgariS
take me, take me back to your bed. i love you so much that it hurts my head.
say, i don't mind you under my skin. oh, let the bad parts in, the bad parts in.
When his first child was born, he had felt nothing. His own father used to speak of the joy and the warmth that came the day each of children were born from Dillan. Vulgaris had expected all that love to fill the holes in his heart and banish the void from his soul, but it left him emptier than ever. The day Cellar came home with him, all scrawny with boy hips and wide eyes, he felt bitter. He sculpted her into a servant, a killer for the highest bidder. But the day Adna was born, he tucked all that darkness away and finally understood what Larva meant about absolute happiness. Everything seemed to click into place for the first time once he looked into her eyes.
But the roles have reversed. All that light and love has been shackled and gagged, left to rot in the recesses of who he truly is beneath all the masks. Those pieces of him grit their teeth until it bleeds when they see Adna, snap their own arms to try and remove the chains keeping them in place. Vulgaris would crawl on his belly across miles of broken glass for her and he wouldn’t even hesitate to do it.
The beast lifts its head, watches her as more blood and burnt skin drops from his jaws as he tries to understand why she calls him Dad. His head tilts a little too far as he considers her. The memories of her manage to convey one thing: protect. Yes, this one is to be guarded at all costs. He moves closer to her, trampling the little black marble corpse with a sickening snap of her bones as the acid finally finishes its work. He bumps his nose against her cheek, swiping a smear of blood across her perfect face as he does so.
His body quickly heals the ruined lips as best it can but his teeth remain exposed in a permanent ghoulish smile. His sage green eyes find hers and he wonders if this one is his child. The name gets all the way to the tip of his tongue before the pain looms over the back of his skull, ready to strike if he gets too close to that memory. He must assume, then, and use only titles.
“Daughter,” he says, brows briefly wrinkling in agitation. He wants to remember her, wants to know why she inspires this warm feeling in his chest, but Vulgaris knows the moment her name leaves his tongue it’ll be bashed right out of his skull again. “Can’t.. remember..”
The pain has grown too great and he must look away now. His eyes shut tight as he waits for the searing agony to end at last, though it leaves a dull ache in its wake to remind him. He would rather have half of his face burned off again than try to remember anything.
Her father was kind. Gentle. He was strong and she knew he was fierce, but never with her—never in front of her. He was the man who took her on diplomatic visits and then guided her through them with quiet whispers and tender nudges. He played tag with her until she could no longer run. He pressed kisses into her neck and told her stories and took him with her when he patrolled the border.
He was a good man.
This couldn’t be him.
Horror rises up her throat as she realizes that the mangled, half-eaten thing on the ground is a child—a baby—and she feels her stomach twist painfully. She remains locked in place, her scaled legs trembling, her sage green eyes wide and brimming with tears. When her father reaches her, when he runs those burnt lips across her cheek, she trembles and fear races up her spine, clenching her heart painfully in her chest.
“What have you done?” she says softly, barely whispering the words.
Finally, she angles her head to look at him. This great stallion who towers over her still, his face mutilated and his neck turned from her. “I don’t understand.” She echoes the same words her mother had said, and her face wears the same expression of disbelief, of an entire world being torn asunder.
“What can’t you remember?”
This time, there is more heat, an anger that flares in her chest, something for her to hold onto. Something for her to white-knuckled grip as the world tilts precariously beneath her feet.
“You can’t remember abandoning us?” the accusation is white-hot and only bordered with hesitation. Her mother had never admitted that her father had left them, had kicked them out of Loess, but as she had gotten older, it had been a nagging sensation in the back of her mind—a festering wound she did her best to ignore. “You can’t remember killing this innocent child?” This one is more certain, a stronger barb as she glances toward the crumpled body and gags. “What can’t you remember exactly?”
She takes a step back, shaking her head.
“I-I can’t. I can’t anymore.”
She watches as her hero of a father turns to dust between her fingers.
“Did you ever even love us?”
howl at the half moon, radio queen. she's all smoke. she's all nicotine.
take me, take me back to your bed. i love you so much that it hurts my head.
say, i don't mind you under my skin. oh, let the bad parts in, the bad parts in.
What have you done?
He turns his head to look at her face, watching the soft lines of her face turn sour in fear and rage. Even the part of him that remembers her had no idea she had inherited his wrath and his sharp tongue. He regards her with a sort of clinical detachment, however, and continues to turn his head from side to side like it will help him connect the dots. Abandoning them? He runs his tongue across the point of one of his fangs and casts a fleeting glance at Quiet’s corpse.
Centuries ago, Leliana tore down the walls that kept him safe from safe pain, but they begin to find a home around his heart once more. Brick by brick, word by word, cold stones pile up until a fortress shields him from the heat of her words or the sharp ache of her eyes. They don’t understand the hunger or the agony, the ecstasy of release once he sinks his teeth into something. And how could they?
“I don’t remember your name or even mine. I know that I love you, but I also know that I am hungry,” he explains, voice flat and bereft of any warmth she might have known it to have a month ago. The summer of his kindness has come to an end, giving way immediately to a winter of isolation and bitter self-loathing. “Everything I eat is someone’s child. You and I will carry that with us every day, Daughter. Our survival spells someone’s doom.”
He turns and looks back at the little corpse once more. Maybe he would have avoided devouring a child before, maybe felt a slow spiral into dread at the realization of what he had done. But the winter churns on, silent and uninterested in such woes.
and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs
It doesn’t make sense—none of it makes sense.
Losing your memory wasn’t a thing that really happened, was it? He must be speaking metaphorically. She argues with herself, reasons. Tries to make sense of this image of her father standing over a child’s corpse. This cold-eyed snake who doesn’t draw her close and comfort her. Who does nothing.
She shakes her head, confusion clear in her eyes.
But nothing sinks in as deep as when he tells her that she is the same. That she carries this same curse in her. That what she is, what she has inherited from him, is not something to be proud of, something to rejoice in, but a curse—something that spells someone else’s doom. Someone’s child.
“No,” she spits out the word as tears spring to her eyes, her serpentine face hard. “No, I won’t be like you.” She takes a step back, shaking her head, feeling her stomach twist. “I won’t be a,” her voice trembles a little here and she chokes on the word even as she throws it in his face. “a monster.”
Her vision goes hazy, her mind struggling to keep up with this rapid fire twist of events, and she knows she can’t go back home. She can’t go sleep next to Sabbath and pretend everything is okay. She can’t let her mother press kisses into her neck and lie—continue to lie. Continue to pretend this is fine.
“Don’t look for me,” she says, nearly choking on the words as she takes another step back.
And then, without another word, she spins on her hocks and catapults forward into the meadow, leaving the scene of gore and heartache behind her as she rushes into somewhere she doesn’t know.
adna
we're setting fire to our insides for fun collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home
