"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
05-04-2020, 08:33 PM (This post was last modified: 05-05-2020, 12:33 AM by ghaul.)
GHAUL
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
The sun is almost too bright for Yadigar’s eye when Ghaul wakes him. He chirps in disapproval but the elder drake nudges his shoulder roughly to rouse him from the nest. The children should know the kingdom to whom they answer, Ghaul thinks, and so he spends each day touring Pangea with one of his brood. Today it is Gar’s turn, despite his protesting and the sluggish way in which he rises. A soft croon escapes his sire, beckoning him to follow as he begins the short journey from the Cove and into the canyons.
“Why do we have to be up so early? I’m so tired,” he pouts as his little legs nearly trot to keep up with the prince’s long strides. There is a rasping laugh in reply as the blind monster turns to regard him for a moment. The babies all stayed up too late playing each night, he knows, but he doesn’t feel like lecturing the boy about it for the time being. Eventually, waking them up early will set their schedules straight.
His thoughts are distracted when he spots a familiar outline up ahead, though, and he tilts his head curiously. Yadigar follows his gaze to Lilliana, but she is entirely unfamiliar to him. Still, he follows along beside his father and gives her his best first impression – a smile of needle-like teeth and politely tucked wings. His small club tail idly swings back and forth as Ghaul leans forward, sniffing curiously at her before leaning down to his son.
“This is Lilliana, I think. She stole me away to Nerine before you were even an egg,” he explains, laughing at the thought now. The words mean very little to Gar, who just nods and continues right on smiling as though he understands. And then the hellbeast brings his gaze back to her. “Are you visiting for diplomacy? Or just to chat with me?”
The small colt’s smile fades and he gives a soft snort. “I’m Yadigar! But you can call me Gar if you want,” he interrupts, eager for the attention of a stranger. The larger creature shifts his weight and observes her, then, trying to guess what might have brought her here while he was away nesting.
05-05-2020, 09:53 PM (This post was last modified: 05-05-2020, 09:57 PM by lilliana.)
If there had been one thing she had come to learn from Wolfbane was that, eventually, he would leave.
When he revealed himself in Taiga the summer before, that had been her one salvation. At some point, he would vanish as he was ought to do and then Lilliana would take her boys and finally follow the advice Neverwhere gave her years ago: she would take her sons and get the hell out of Taiga.
Well, the copper mare is out of Taiga now and Pangea, to her, certainly feels like hell with its sweltering heat and fractured ground. She spends her morning trying to seek shade underneath a lone Acacia tree, the only company she is willing to keep. (She has learned that the creatures who remind her of Fiorina and Velkan are best.. admired from a distance and Rebelle, the only other Pangean prisoner she was aware of, has already left.)
Pangea has no limits and once, she might have found this place wonderful for its endless (and odd) possibilities.
She can’t possibly miss Ghaul, though. Even against the expanse and wilds of Carnage's kingdom. There is no other ‘horse’ in Beqanna that equals his make and she knows his horned silhouette the moment it enters her vision.
Her blue eyes first go to the child - his son? - and she manages a smile for the boy. It is tight but he smiles through serrated edges and Lilliana tries to return the gesture. She apprehensively lifts her gaze to Ghaul, swallowing down the rising dread that is already threatening stars at the edge of her sight. "Draco stole me from Taiga," she capitulates. It lacks all of her earlier venom, all of her building anger. Her bravado leaving her in the face of an impending revelation.
There is a singing current of terror flooding her veins, already sweeping her away.
"@[ghaul],” Lilliana asks though she already knows the answer, though she grows colder and colder with fear. "Please tell me Neverwhere let you go.”
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
Unlike most monsters, it seemed, Ghaul continued to roost in the same kingdom since the day he emerged into this world. He has only ever stayed away by force and every second away was spent dreaming of red clay cliffs. No one could pry him from this land forever. If Wolfbane terrorized his home the way he does Lilliana, the Pangeans would have put him down like a rabid dog. But this is not the case and so the hellborn king does not understand her predicament.
Yadigar visibly brightens when he returns his smile but he manages to contain that wild, youthful energy as he remains beside his father. The small boy offers a short chirp of delight before quieting. Ghaul laughs softly when she explains that Draco had taken her from Taiga, though he’s rather surprised his brother didn’t inform him beforehand. Normally they shared all their intentions and schemes with one another. Perhaps there is a growing rift between them, now that their children require so much of their time? The thought makes him frown briefly before he looks to Yadigar.
“Sometimes, we snatch people like Lilli so they have to come visit us. But we do not harm them unless there is reason to,” he explains while the boy looks up at him, eyes wide as he nods in understanding. “Do not harm,” he repeats to commit the lesson to memory.
He turns back to her when she speaks his name. Her words confuse him and this much is evident in the way he stares at her for a short while. Let him go? Ghaul had served his year and returned home months ago. There is a quiet clicking as he rolls her question back and forth across his mind.
“I do not understand. I returned home in the autumn,” he says, retracing the timeline carefully in his thoughts. “Was I to stay a second year?”
The fledgling looks from his father to Lilliana, then back to Ghaul as he tries to make sense of the conversation. The elder gives a short gibbering to the boy that sends him skittering back from the direction they came, back to his mother and the nest where his siblings nap. Gar is too young to learn harsher lessons in life just yet and it would suit Ghaul just fine if he never learned them at all.
05-08-2020, 08:42 PM (This post was last modified: 05-08-2020, 08:48 PM by lilliana.)
Had her panic not been rising with each heartbeat, she might have delighted more in Yadigar than she did peering up into the pointed face of Ghaul. Each moment she stood there, the shadows that dwelled in the corners of her mind started to unravel. They started to roam through and stain each (and every) thought.
Darkness.
That was all she saw.
He speaks of snatching and stealing for visits and parts of her wants to rage in anger. She has two yearlings in Taiga without their mother. It almost snarls out of her - there is nothing about a visit in this. It’s when she looks down to Yadigar again - listens to his lovely chirps - that she reminds herself that she was prepared to do the same thing.
The crime she would accuse Ghaul of is the same she is guilty of herself. His son at his side is physical proof of that and had her mind not been filling with those shadows, as if it wasn’t rolling with thunderclouds and realization flashing like lightning strikes in her mind, she would have been sick.
@[Ghaul] is looking at her as she staring at him, both looking for answers that Lilliana doesn’t need anymore answers to. His physical presence answers everything.
The Pangean leader is careful in his words and Lilliana can feel the fear creeping everywhere. Whatever she has suffered in Pangea, this realization is by far the worst thing that could happen. A punishment not inflicted by the East or any other nation, not by some demon from her past. "You were stolen in retribution for stripping Taiga of her entities,” the Taigan says with just as careful measure. Without Craft and Anatomy, it had left the Redwoods bare of any protection.
"You were to come to Nerine for another year,” and she does look down to Yadigar now, feeling the full weight of that sentence. The boy is trying to make sense of the conversation and Lilliana has no explanation to give him; there has never been any sense in this. There has never been anything but darkness and chaos there and now it was unleashed in Nerine.
It was with Neverwhere, with Brazen and Ruthless and Eurwen and Fiorina. With the new generation born the previous spring. With her boys.
"Please,” she starts and once the words start coming, they pour out. "You have to let me go. I need to go to Nerine. There is a monster there, Ghaul. A real one.” Looking at him, begging him as she promised she would never do again. His boy is gone but there is something in her pleading blue eyes that say the chaos does not simply belong to just Nerine; it is all of Beqanna.
And Lilliana, perhaps as foolish as ever, is still trying to find that shred of humanity.
What will you do? a voice taunts, reminding her of her attempt to protect Ruth and Fiorina. How powerless she had felt with her sons, trying to defend Nashua and Yanhua from their fathers' spite. How she had thought she could still outrun him. Ghaul, though, might be able to do something. "Or if you could go. You could go North and warn them. Please.”
i can take you there, but baby, you won't make it back
A snort is drawn from his nostrils when she says he was stolen and his wings spread wide in an instinctual threat display. He would not be taken from his brood during their most formative years, leaving Clarissa to raise them on her own. They are small and soft, vulnerable without their father to keep them safe from the rest of the world. Ghaul had been fortunate to be taken under the wing of a shadow queen like Anaxarete, and he worries they would not be so fortunate.
And then she asks to leave, a plea that causes him to snarl softly as he considers her words. It feels like a ploy to simply shrug off her sentence or to enslave him once more. His talons anxiously paw at the red clay beneath him as he circles her closely. Others had called him a monster and spit at him, cursed him for living out his divine purpose. The rage building in his muscles makes his jaws ache to take her by the throat like the coral deer of Pangea.
He pauses beside her when she gives an alternative. His teeth are inches from her face, hot breath spilling over her skin.
“I will go north, and you will remain here. If there is truly a monster, then you are safer in Pangea than in your homeland,” he decides, retreating from her side as he turns toward the north. “If this is some trick, I will feed your offspring to my brood while you watch.”
And with a flap of his wings, he takes off. It doesn’t take long at all for him to become a dot on the horizon, and then he is gone entirely.
