Let's reinvent the gods - Malis.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He wakes up restless.
Bleary-eyed, the gift-giver moves through the grey-green darkness, through the sheets of fog that bulge around the cold bark and horns, with a pent-up disquiet.

He has shed the coat of aggrandizement, chased into the sulk of invisibility. Forced into old patterns that cut hot marks into his psyche – driving from their regression the demons of his young disgrace, and the pale shades of his northern exploits. His mind stirs with a discontent. Borne from self-loathing, that which he has pressed down neatly into recesses agitated only in the cold rub of night; and from his puzzlement, his struggle to string together the ripped fabric of his memory. Because, it is not his memory at all, but someone else’s. It must be, or else the impossibility of it threatens to gorge itself on his sanity.

He recalls strange fingers, strange weakness – even for him, then, as he was.
He recalls strange voices and headlight eyes, eerie and green, the low whine of steam and machinery. The groan of disfigured monsters, animated mercilessly; the smell of blood, some self-same in its redness and irony tang, and queer, thick, black blood.

He recalls it all. And he does not.

And yet, when he came to – from dream or abduction – his head was heavy with new weight. His feet were dexterous, split in two like a stag’s. His muscles felt warm and readied, capable of more. And in his chest, hanging beside his heart like an ornament from where his spine meets his shoulder blade, was a thrumming darkness. A shard of something, halved and stolen. Grabbed by those strange fingers to gentle his fall. And he knew at once how hungry he had been for it, somewhere and in some passageway of time, and there it was. Pressed past his sternum, apart of him.

He was bettered by what had happened there. Or, otherwise he had evolved overnight into a demigod. He cannot say the reticent nature of the truth did not haunt him, but he was glad for whatever means had concluded this end. Though, after days of wandering, or nights of inciting terror, he limps with the tenderness of his strangely vulnerable shoulder and thigh – he cannot recall having injured them, so they are subsumed by the mystery.
Small prices to pay.

He stops, plagued by the stiffness in his weakened muscles. They disagree with the cold, and cold clings here in the early spring and the dead hours of night. He returns from transparency in a fluid transition, his eyes shot with red and all the more hostile for it. Fog rushes into the still air around him, thick and damp. And still his mind churns over images and he cannot fashion them into anything reasonable. They remain aggravatingly unwieldy.

They elude him, slipping through his hands as he grabs for them like a fool.
He does not don the fool's motley any longer, and so he grows irritated.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.

@[Malis]

[Malis]

She wakes up ravenous, when she sleeps at all, with the memory of bloodlust searing like fire in her veins. It is largely part of why she chooses not to sleep, to use the dark of night instead to wander and wonder and follow trails of what-ifs like the paths of shooting stars. But it is also because she knows a truth that so many others seem not to know, seem to ignore because oblivion is so much easier than the alternative.

To sleep is to be weak, to dream is far worse.

The first had been when she lived in the Chamber with much of her family, and even as this family had unraveled like the thread on a corner of a tapestry pulled too hard, it was still a family worth fighting for. But the not-dream, that impossible memory, it had stolen her family from her. She had known torture and defeat, had known an emptiness as deep and dark as any night sky filled with cold, gleaming stars. She had found a grief that rooted itself so deep in her chest, a feralness that knit itself intrinsically into the marrow of her bone and the fibers of her soul, that she would never be the same again. Still she might have, might have tried, might have lied to herself if not for the blue that followed her back from the depths of that nightmare. That aching indigo that stained every inch of her sullied skin where once she had been plain and brown and beautiful. There had been one, someone who understood, someone who had fallen into the same impossible dream. He had tried to burn the blue from her skin, but even as the fire singed the hair and her flesh had blistered and bubbled, there was still blue. Just blue.

It was then that she discovered the second gift, this one worse than the first and so much harder to ignore.
She was invulnerable, barely mortal.
In seconds her skin had healed, blue and gleaming, and indigo hair filled the gap like nothing had happened.

She had run then. There were too many questions she could not answer, too many things she ached to forget and yet none of her family was willing to pretend she had not changed. None except her father, whose heart was the same as hers and had asked only of truths she could part with and none of what she held buried like a blade in her chest.

Still, she ran.

But it happened again, that impossible moment when she woke to find herself in the realest dream, the strangest truth she had ever known. Except this time when the two who had tortured her the first time had been placed at an arms length and she had found herself with a blade in her fist, instinct came so easily. With just a reflexive flick of the muscles in her hand, she murdered the first. She hadn’t needed to either, not yet. The second however had been expected and Malis had been all too eager to perform, sinking her teeth guiltlessly into the soft of Lena’s fluttering pulse. It wasn’t until Malis was all alone in a dark place, isolated only to her thoughts and memories, that guilt finally came.

But there was a part of her, the part that was so much of her father, that suspected this guilt too was an instinct, a reflex.
It could not come from a genuine place, not when she knew she would do it all again.

She sank gleaming and blue into the dark and fog like a gem dropped between two edges of a narrow chasm. Like every night that had come before and since, she chose to chase away sleep hunting for familiar faces, impossible clues. Looking for the truths that would undo her if she ever found them.

Just ahead there was a flash of pale gold, the rustle of a wing and the swirl of fog as it was displaced around a large body. She tensed imperceptibly, her eyes flickering like green fire as they locked onto his pale silhouette. Still she said nothing, instead inching forward so that the fog spilled like shadow across her perfect skin and the row of curving obsidian horns glittered like knives in the cold, silver starlight. It was impossible for the predator in her not to take not of the single wing and its downed brother, or the dirt in the feathers that led her to believe it had been that way for a while. She might have even noticed the stiffness in his legs if it weren’t for the shadows she thought she saw dancing through his eyes when she glanced there. Shadows she had come to know so intimately. Her jaw clenched and muscle rippled like cord along her blue cheek. “Who are you?” Her voice was quiet and threaded with stiffness, her expression unfriendly but still a far cry from hostile. “Why are you awake.” She says again, just a little quieter this time, and there is only suspicion etched into the lines of her black-masked face.

MALIS

makai x oksana

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Would that he could sleep without fit. 
Tucked into the safety and warmth of his demi-godliness and rebirth, dreaming of the chase, or of her body in a state of rot; or of the soft baby-stuff that does not disturb him, but suspends him in that homely womb, a time of lovelier nothing...

He is disturbed by the clinging ashes of his cravenly past; the thing he finds most contemptible of all, setting his hackles upright. When he skulks in the night, unseen and wearied, it is only because he cannot seem to slough from his bones the relics of his boyhood or his dream-time. Unlike her, he does not find weakness in sleep, but he does finds it here, in good measure – in himself.. His inability to move on with his life. His powerlessness to quicken the slaughter of his former self. His mulling and wandering do not sate anything. But does it gain her anything either, really? 
Maybe that confusion is insatiable, and that colt is dying, albeit slowly. And the time he spends awake only seems to lengthen the stay of his execution.

In the nakedness of light, bloodshot and limping, he feels no more or less fulfilled. If he could, he would hibernate. Sleep through the glut of his excess self, wake up thin but unhindered.

His dreams are full of strange, green headlight eyes. The heft of a kitchen knife, and the sensation of plunging it into black flesh. The queer bipedalism. And yet, even there in that place, she had come. Not in the flesh. He never got the scent of her sweat and sex, but her voice had curled in on him like a constrictor. Phina's rebukes, and her abuses, tracing the wounds of his past and present life in that faraway place. (Here. Where he is now, where he has always been.) And when his dreams are not animated by these things, they are sad. Or they are empty. He would be so lucky as to have more of the latter, but he has never been particularly fortunate.

Like her, something unsure had taken him and turned him inside out. Reached into him, but it did not leave him empty. It left weight and newness there. He had lost nothing up north, as far as he was concerned. By gaining his darkness, he might have lost the remainder of his softness – is that loss? It had taken from her everything, and what she had been left with, she resented. How regrettable. He revels in the tokens of his mystery. They have made him better.

He paces, his single wing dragging like a cloak at his left side, so limp it might be mistaken as utterly boneless. It is only shattered, broken in a thousand places at birth. Not the doing of his dear mother, surprisingly. She had given him the loneliness of his one appendage, an incomplete set – unbeknownst to him, between the two of them, his parents had four of their own. It would only be a twist of the dagger to know the true mathematics in their meager offering. Nature had rendered it a grotesquery. 

He halts for a moment, running his curved horns down the hard trunk of a bone-white birch. Something about the sound comforts him. Reminds him they are there, his enormous weaponry.

He does not hear her come through the fog, he is too entwined in his own piteous feast of exhaustion and agitation. It is her scent that he finds first, and his nostrils flare wide and pink for it. As it hits the sensitive network of receptors there, he blinks out like a lightbulb for a second, a habit he can conceal at night and so he only indulges it here. He turns to look at her square, the hostility in his eyes diluted by fatigue. But the antipathy is still there, as he is revealed the feminine turns of her haunches and face. The horns that stud her bridge, and even in the hush of dark, the richness of her tint. She is a pretty thing, if he could see pretty things. Even in the grey of night and fog, he can see her suspicion. At another time of day, he might have drank deep, with intemperance, on even the tiniest hint of worry. Things like that sustain him, like chinks in her armour, flashing delicious skin below. For now he is only annoyed at her intrusion.

“Why?” He snaps, his voice a touch raw.

Pollock takes a half step forward, peering harder into the dark. His eyes moving, with a dangerous kind of greed, over the indigo and black. Into the roiling of her own dark eyes. “I prefer to spend my nights pacing this godforsaken woods.” He takes a step forward, pressing his cloven prints into the earth.

“And you? Do you need someone to help lay you to sleep?” His eyes glint, and his muscles shiver – were it not for her gift (or burden) he could do something for her. A mercy, perhaps. As she is, he only has an endless place to test the sureness of his new self. A kindred spirit, in some way, but she is... oddly enough, perhaps the more wretched of the two. How very novel that revelation would be for him.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.