"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
01-08-2020, 03:32 PM (This post was last modified: 01-08-2020, 03:32 PM by Castile.)
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
A magnetic pull lures him into her grasp, and an unwavering curiosity. Since the quest, he has questioned the reality that engulfs him. What is real, he wonders and half expects a desert to rise from beyond the foothills. An oasis, perhaps. There have been days in which he soared above the clouds and fought the wind to find what he thought was truly real.
But there is no desert, not anymore at least.
The land trembles when his claws gouge the soil, but his body shifts and reverts into that of a horse before attention is called to him. Towering trees provide some coverage as the wings shed away and hair sprouts from in between the scales to gradually envelope him. The jagged edges of his teeth recede and his formidable talons condense grotesquely into hooves.
By the time he confronts her – because his predatory senses offer acute tracking – he is a horse, just like her. Their colors contrast, her gold to his marbled. She is lovely while he is baroque. Her eyes are amber and his… his are the reason he stands in front of her with skepticism and uncertainty painted across his face. A fleeting wonderment of reality crosses his consciousness. Last he saw her, it seemed so real and yet so dreamlike. Darting his gaze from her, he confirms their place in the forest. Tree branches rustle beneath the weight of birds and not far off, a coyote cries.
He turns to study her again. ”Craft,” his voice rumbles, similar to a primal growl though not unkind, ”Who was he?” She will know, and she will remember him. It seems orange eyes are a rare trait.
She has begun the terrible journey of acceptance – the knowledge that the deserts is gone. That she was gone, too, for more years than she can comprehend. She knows now the Beqanna she is in is altogether different, recognizable only in a few features, the way animals split and evolve and eventually change into another species.
And she, Craft, is an anachronism here. She is filled with old, useless knowledge and the craving for a kingdom that is gone. Her children are gone.
(She doesn’t know that one of them – the prodigal son – exists, cursed in immortality.)
Another split – she does not know there was a timeline where she was saved. A dozen timelines. She doesn’t know what took place on the mountain.
And so when this creature approaches her, she holds no recognition. She draws herself high, muscles tight. She sees his eyes then – the one orange one, blazing – and air hisses between her teeth. She is not so stupid as to attack him – she is smaller, physically weaker – but the reaction is instinctual.
And then!
He knows her name, speaks it. She doesn’t know how. She is still so lost. He asks a question and she doesn’t know how to answer – doesn’t want to answer, truth be told.
“Who?” she asks. She looks again at that orange eye. She knows, in her gut. But she won’t answer, not until she understands who this man is, what it is he wants from her.
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
He should have known, but he is impulsive and sharp-tongued. It could have all been a dream, or a reality lost in the portal between life and death. To berate her immediately was in poor taste, but his stubbornness prevails and refuses the invitation to apologize.
Castile recoils, but only slightly, when the space between them abruptly closes by the grip of his motivation. Craft hisses, instinctive and feral. A returned snarl plays as his immediate reaction, his body bristling until he finds composure in the depths of his mind. It spreads across him slowly, his muscles unwilling to ease away their tension underneath her scrutiny.
She doesn’t know him, does not remember how he curled his talons around her to pluck her from harm’s way. Everything that elapsed dissipated in the transition. Castile nearly second guesses himself and questions whether he truly saw the oasis and the sand dunes that extended beyond his vision. But he remembers awakening the following morning with bruises and abrasions that signified it all happened. His body screamed with deep aches, but over the hours, everything mended. How strange, he muses, that the memories serve him correctly but elude the golden queen.
Unable to name the cloaked figure, Castile’s body ripples to mirror him. His skin burns like ash into a sooty black and his eyes blaze like the fire roiling in his gut. ”Him,” he breathes, smoke piling from his lungs. The memory is eerie, watching the replay of her death while she stands here in front of him, alive and breathing the same air. A step inches closer, and still he doesn’t revert back. In front of her, he embodies her murderer and embraces the abysmal black of his coat, diving into grotesque need for her reaction. ”Who am I?” He asks in his cruel attempt to understand her memory and her death, to pull answers from her.
And then, he changes back.
Marbled in coat, his gaze mismatched – the right eye remains its usual blazing orange – and steadied on her, he is suddenly quiet. The rhythm of his heart regulates, no longer supplemented by adrenaline to shift and change. ”Craft,” he says her name again after having noticed her surprise that he knew it at all, ”what happened the day you died?”
She did not know what she expected to happen next, but she did not expect a nightmare. Her nightmare, made corporeal, as his skin goes black and both eyes blaze orange. Their bodies aren’t the same, but it’s enough, and she cries out, unable to stop herself, a memory of orange eyes rolling on the sand. How does he know? - the question thuds in her brain, pounding like a headache. Because to her, she calls what happened a dream. She does not call it death, still refuses to entertain the notion, stubborn in her insistence. Of course, she has no explanation as to what happened instead, why she remembers the world fading into blackness and then reappearing in the meadow decades later.
He inches closer, this grotesque mimicry of her son, and she flattens her ears as her heart pounds, her baser instincts calling to her to run. But she doesn’t – stubborn, she stands, confused and furious at this stallion who plays at knowing her.
“Why should I tell you?” she hisses, and though no smoke comes from her lungs, the words have their own scorching ferocity to them, “what makes you think you deserve to know?
He changes back, then, and asks another question. Another attempt to provoke her, she’s sure.
“I didn’t die,” she says, sure in this, buoyed by a false and foolish confidence that she could not have been felled, that the sound of ribs breaking was just a dream. Too stubborn, too proud.
“Who are you?” she asks then, as if she, too, is owed answers.
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
Craft is a viper, hissing with matched ferocity as Castile toys with her memories and replicates her murderer. It’s cruel of him, but with the subsiding of his aches and abrasions, there is a newfound determination. A sick lust for answers poisons his mind, clouding his better judgment. This is wrong, a part of him says, but an overlapping darkness masks across further hesitation as his eyes bore into the fallen queen. ”Tell me,” he whispers, his voiced strained through his clenched jaws. Why, she asks, and it gives him pause for a single heartbeat though the intensity of his present doesn’t falter.
Answers pound in his head, one after another, and he realizes how selfish they all are.
Why did he have eyes similar to mine?
Why did he make me hesitate?
Why did part of me want to take him instead of Craft?
There was a magnetic pull and unrelenting curiosity when he first saw the cloaked figure loom above the fallen queen in her final moments.
But she claims that no such thing happened, that her life never bled from her body. Craft denies having her bones bleached by the sun and the air ripped from her lungs.
Castile observes her now, quietly. Tension grips his muscles, steadying him as she snaps back with her greed for answers. He does not deny her of the information, reveling in who – and what – he is and the reality they find themselves in. This world is new to her, unfamiliar, but to him, it’s all he has ever known. ”Castile,” he growls, his voice a gravelly baritone. Still bristled, still agitated, he musters every ounce of strength to settle himself, but it’s still apparent in the terseness of his words. ”I saw you, both of you. I saw the hate in your eyes, and then I saw his…” he doesn’t ask outright because there is no way she would know, but it’s a thorn in his side. ”I almost took him… I almost left you to bleed.” to die, he doesn’t say as her stubborn denials ring deafeningly in his ears.
A tilt of his head, and then a deep sigh, all while his eyes continue to pierce her. ”I watched him crush you.”
He insists, still, on this fake history that has settled in his mind. She does not understand it (does not accept it), but she stands square before him. She knows, in the back of her mind, that he could hurt her, overpower her. But she has been a queen too long, and she will not yield.
He gives his name – Castile – and it, too, is unfamiliar. Of course it is. And then he says more, and her jaw clenches, because there was a dream, when she saw that black stallion mounting the horizon as the sun burned down around them.
When she saw her son, coming to end her.
But that had been a nightmare – a not-unsurprising one, given that she lives with the fact she abandoned her child in a fit of hated and fear. But she doesn’t confess this to anyone. None of them knew what happened, in the Deserts. She told them the child had been born dead, and spoke nothing else of it.
“Then why didn’t you?” she asks. She is prodding him, she knows, still foolish. Poking the bear, or the dragon.
So stubborn, in her refusal to believe.
“Yet here I am,” she says, “uncrushed.”
Unspoken: here she is, in this world that is a strange distortion of a world she once knew. But here she is, nonetheless.
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
She is just as proud as him, standing defiantly against his word. There is only so much he can do, so much he can say, that will make sense of the dream (reality?) in which he participated.
In that Desert, he saved her. Is that why she is here today? Did he resuscitate the memory of her and bring her through the portal, or was it pre-conceived and it would have happened either way?
(Stop with the what-ifs. Just stop)
A deep, calculating breath races past his lips as an otherwise silent moment captures him. She refuses to believe him or to accept the scenario he offered her, as though he is a worn storyteller making his rounds. The reactions radiating from her are not of incredulous awe, but in fact weighted denial and skepticism. There’s a sharp edge to her question; all it needs is a lift of her chin and a dismissive scoff. For a long moment, Castile waits for that. A few heartbeats pass and he expects her to turn and abandon him in the murky shadows of the forest, but to his surprise, she remains here with him. ”Because I thought you could give me more answers,” there are reasons that the cloaked murderer sought her out so adamantly and destroyed her so mercilessly. A killer hardly reveals such locked intricacies. The victims though… they have insight.
Yet here I am, she bluntly quips, uncrushed. The muscles in his jaws clench similarly to hers, but then he pulls his eyes from her and looks around them. Birds sing high above, punctuated by the occasional caw of a raven. There are foxes shuffling through the leafbeds in the distance. These are sounds he has listened to his entire life. This Beqanna is what he was raised in. There are no deserts, especially nothing quite so vast as where he first saw Craft.
When he looks again at her, amusement twinkles in his mismatched eyes. ”Tell me then, where exactly you are,” he gropes for something, anything, to unbalance her confidence, ”and how we can go back to the Desert.”
castile
@[craft]
false. you never forget how to write lol always perfection
He speaks of answers, and it is perhaps one of the first commonalities she recognizes, or acknowledges, between them. She, too, looks for answers, though hers are of a different sort.
(What happened to her? Why can’t she find her way back to the Deserts?)
(Are the Deserts real, anymore?)
She could give him answers, though. A taste of the history she knows, and with enough honesty, it would give him the pieces that would no doubt allow him to male sense of what had happened. But she does not. She is not often honest about what transpired between her and her ill-begot son, the one she hurt, the one she left for dead.
Craft, their benevolent queen. How little they speak of her sins.
(For yes, the dark son she abandoned was a secret. What was not secret was that Craft had blood on her hands long before that.)
“I was a powerful queen,” she says. She hates the past tense of it. Was. What is she now? She doesn’t know.
“Power begets enemies.”
Part of her hates him for his next question, echoing what she has thought, over and over again. She keeps holding out some stupid silver of hope, as if one day she’ll find the right turn and simply stumble back into the Deserts, will they where rejoice for their lost queen.
There is still no explanation for what happened. Why one day she was watching the sunset, and the next she was stumbling in the meadow, lost and alone.
(Oh, but there was that dream nightmare!)
“I don’t know,” she says, and despite her furor, there is a weakness in the words, a desperation. For all her pride, she would fall to her knees before this man if he could bring her home. She would beg.
There is a moment, then. Craft is divided. She is angry, yes, and still lost, frightened (though she will not show it she will not. And here is this man – this monster – who speaks of her death as if it were a fact. Who stares at her with such a horrible orange eye.
She shouldn’t ask. It was a dream.
She should turn away. What good would it do?
“Castile,” she says. Her throat is dry, like sand. What she would give for an oasis.
“The…thing you saw crush me. What color were its eyes?”
05-07-2020, 01:41 PM (This post was last modified: 05-07-2020, 01:41 PM by Castile.)
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
I was a powerful Queen.
Castile’s skin prickles to life, invigorated by that single confession. Immediately, he pictures it – her regal head boasting a crown underneath a hot desert sun. He can see it so well now, and it answers the quiet question of her nature. She didn’t – doesn’t – bend to his demands; like the largest redwood, Craft stands unyieldingly before him, tall and defiant against the raging storm. ”That it does,” Castile agrees, subdued in his thoughtfulness. If nothing else, her murder alone affirms her statement. That’s more than Castile can fathom; he has always experienced opposition, but never murder attempts.
Countless more questions arise like bile in his throat, but Castile refrains when he sees the strain deepening her frown. A part of him wants to revel in cracking her wall, no matter how miniscule the victory, but there is another piece of him that falters in her uncertainty. A lump forms in his throat now, a quiet hesitation as he searches the lines of her face. Truly, she doesn’t know. What old world she once ruled has since crumbled into ruins.
Eloquence escapes him – it always has.
Castile swallows.
”There is not a desert here,” he pauses to consider it as though he hasn’t explored the far corners of Beqanna, ”at least, not anymore.” The barbs of his voice have dissipated, softening for feeble empathy as he tries imagining himself in her situation – a lost child in a world once known. This is the only Beqanna he has known. How different did it used to be? How old are these rolling hills and gnarled oak trees? A swift glance of their surroundings tries to give him an introspect, but her voice beckons him more strongly than the ideations of a world long ago.
There’s no warmth in the way she says his name, in the way it falls past her dried tongue, when she pulls him from the heaviness of his thoughts. She wants answers – like him – but he doesn’t deprive them of her, doesn’t hold the tantalizing treat outside of her reach. Perhaps its because he feels a connection to her tale that he so willingly replies, like he has the same mind and blood of the man that killed her. ”Orange,” he murmurs, casting his gaze to the ground for a moment before lifting it to once again meet hers, ”… like mine.”
