"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
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
It is such an ugly emotion, shame.
It burns a hole in the cavern of his chest, thrumming like something alive against his hollow ribs. He could almost mistake it for a heart if it weren’t so black, if it weren’t so vicious.
He was proud once, Kensley.
Too proud, maybe.
And now he may as well be gut-rot. Filth. Waste.
And he’s got some nerve showing his face in Pangea, where he left the woman he loved without any real explanation except he’d inherited his father’s penchant for leaving whether or not he wanted to admit it. Where their son had risen to the rank of Pangea’s champion, inherited a power like his mother’s. Where their daughter still lived, plagued by the same ugly thing that plagued him. (Alive? Dead? Neither and both and neither.)
He has no place here, not anymore. He knows that.
And yet, here he is.
There is no shred of pride left in him.
He’d been proud, even, when he’d found Anaxarete and begged her for help. Anything to ease the pain of being not-quite-alive and not-quite-dead and still eternally choking on a guilt he couldn’t cough up and couldn’t swallow down. (And isn’t it still trapped in his throat?)
But there is no pride left.
And he is even colder to the touch now. He had failed so tremendously in the Alliance, emerging with his flesh covered in frost. Something to preserve him. Something to protect him from rot.
He travels to the land of shadow and death, Anaxarete and their son. He does not expect them to receive him warmly. He does not expect them to want to see him at all. But he finds some comfort in knowing they are close. (Not that he deserves it, no.)
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything
@[The Monsters] please mess with his undeadness and his shattering
03-05-2021, 08:18 PM (This post was last modified: 03-05-2021, 08:23 PM by Anaxarete.)
she's the only one who knows what it is to burn.
Control.
Since the Chamber had gone, and she’d found her entire existence had been about control. Control that the shadows provided her when she needed them most - deadening the emotions that threatened to cripple her.
Too much control.
She hadn’t realized that she’d been suffocating in her own darkness.
Finally, she takes a breath and there is a release. Something stirs - something that’s been hidden away since the last time she’d stood at home in the Chamber. The true Chamber. The one with a heart and a soul - not the the magical bastardization of the land that had been the only true home she’d ever known. Perhaps it had taken an attempt to resurrect what was dead and buried for her to final cut the strings binding her to the past. But now she wore no shackles. Not even those of her own making.
For so long she had run from the past. She’d frozen her heart; hidden her emotions away in a darkness so deep she wasn’t sure that she could recover them.
Until the darkness had come. And for the first time in a long time, she had felt something.
And she did not run from it.
She did not push it away.
She embraced what it was to feel something.
And it breathed life into her bones.
The shadow of feeling flickered within. She’d never been an emotional creature before, nor would she be. But she’d always seen emotion as weakness. Too much, undoubtedly. But none at all? Just as crippling.
Which makes something twist in her chest when she sees Kensley, knowing now that the solution that she’d offered him had not been a fair bargain. For others who asked her for help, she harbored no reservations. They were not him. They did not matter.
But Kensley? She will always want him.
It is selfish. She always has been. And she has brought him little but pain. But she cannot let him go. Cannot stay away.
So she goes to him now.
“Did you ever imagine this is where we’d find ourselves all those years ago?” She asks as she draws near, her cool gaze immediately drawn to the frost that coats him.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
She comes, though he would not have dreamed of asking her to.
Materializes as if from her own shadows and if there were a beating heart in that chest it would have clenched with how fiercely he loves her.
How fiercely he has always loved her, from the very first moment he laid eyes on her so many years ago. It feels like it must have been a century ago now, before the Chamber had been swallowed by the earth. Before so many things.
There is no hint of judgment in those eyes when she looks at him now, no disgust in that voice when she addresses him. It sounds so sweetly of forgiveness. Acceptance. He wants to reach for her but he doesn’t. Instead, he steadily returns her gaze and lets that be enough. This quiet understanding.
“No,” he says, the truth. The heart, though it does not beat, has been thawed. So he smiles, though it is muted, lopsided. Wry. He would not have let himself imagine this. “How could I have imagined this?” he asks, tilts his head, smiling softly still.
(It starts in the heart.)
(A static charge.)
(One sideways beat, a breath that hitches in his throat.)
(And then a second. An electric jolt that takes him to his knees.)
Something nips at his heels and he coughs as a plume of dust settles in his throat.
It is a painful thing, the process of coming back to life. The rush of blood as it awakens the veins and the nerves. The cramping of the heart as it begins to beat again. The lungs seizing as they fill with air and the way they spasm as he coughs up so many years’ worth of dust. His sides heave with the effort and his limbs tremble when, finally, he rises to his feet again.
“Ana,” he gasps, every inch of his living body aching, eyes wide as he seeks out her gaze in the dark.
