"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
My tongue feels heavy, thick and wooly. Copper hot metal coats my mouth and when I can muster enough saliva, I spit.
Blood swirled saliva smacks the ground, my lips rimmed with the same color. I've bitten my tongue at some point. Recently, if the ache in my mouth is anything to go by. And the spear of knarled wood in my chest... The flesh it touches is torn and weeping rivulets of that redness. Bruises bloom all down the front of me, and deep in my body I feel swollen and damaged. The injury I've grown so used to carrying is like new, and worse.
I don't remember... What happened, why the ground is splashed with more blood, why my body is coming apart at the seams. My shoulders quake. The sob that's threatening to erupt is unforgivingly forced back down my throat. Ragged, painful breaths are all I allow to pass through my lips.
Wings lax by my sides I force my legs to move. Forward, one stiff step at a time until I've moved beyond the blood stained grove and into deeper cover. It's cooler here, and that feels right. Dark and soothing, I take something that feels like my first full breath in an age. It hurts. It aches like breathing fire, but it brings me just a little closer to the ground.
Close enough to feel the first chill determination. For all the blood spilled from my heart today, there is blood enough left in me. Whoever did this has written their own death sentence.
The forests of Sylva have become a part of him. He blends into the deep shadows that haunt each crevice, barely heard above the sound of the rustling, never-changing canopies. Suspended in a twilight autumn, there is even a chill that never seems to shake from the trees and their bark. Balto stays hidden, consumed by a hunger that he does not understand and abilities he has yet learned to control. The voices are kinder to him now, soothing and encouraging, beckoning him to give in to those terrible desires.
The scent of blood is what draws him from his hiding. Their lips had curled at the edges at the metallic twinge of it, whispering into his ears until he could no longer bear it. The sunlight barely reaches through the thick canopy but the parts that do play shadows across the blackness of his stretched hide, like fingertips of gold eerily criss-crossing the sharp mountains of his hips and shoulders. His antlers protrude just as grotesquely as his bones, long and spindly things as sharp as knives. Paper-thin nostrils quiver and the stallion (if he can be called that) shudders.
Balto halts in the shadows just to the right of her, hesitation brimming in his abysmal black eyes. Nothing about him would be familiar to Sabra, save for the blood-red ‘V’ that stains the underside of his emaciated throat. Haunting whispers swirl around him, wrapping around his obsidian legs and ushering him forward.
The smell of her blood is too strong for him to be able to restrain himself.
“Sabra.” He says her name quietly, almost tenderly, though the heaviness in his voice is due in part to the bloodlust that now swirls in his eyes. She has always been beautiful, but the rubies that pour from her wounds are now much more precious to him than he remembers. Stopping perpendicularly to her shoulder (yet far enough away from any physical touch), a rattling sigh leaves his trembling mouth. “What has happened to you?”
He hears himself talking but knows not what he is saying, for the sound of her pulse drowns out anything else he may hear.
I shudder, just slightly, when a shape detaches itself from the shadows. Black on black, and cruel in its very existence. A Monster, in every way. The blood drying to my lips cracks as a smile twists them.
"Balto," I answer, my voice whispering over a scream-roughened throat. He is different, and the same. I see the hunger in his eyes and I know that my raw red flesh is on his riddled mind. The skin of my chest is all but torn away, leaving clarifying, delicious pain in its absence. Sharp enough to make me see clearly, and almost too much to bear.
Turning, I press my shoulder into his, bone on bone. Smearing the red from my skin to his, where it hides among the darker black. "I don't know, I don't know," I croon weakly, vulnerable and feverish. The blood continues to weep, and I let it. Even as I see the fires stoke inside his voided eyes, I press closer.
He could consume me and I would thank him in this moment, or destroy him in the next. Was it he who ravaged me this way? I'm sure I don't know, though he could well be the responsible one. Each black-wax tine of the antlers crowning him is a knife that could twist inside me. The gleam of monstrous teeth that flash when he speaks are a vital promise. A captured thing does not escape such teeth.
It has been so long since I played at being caught.
Wings draped useless at my sides, I flinch as the staff so gently knocks against a tree. The barest touch, and I'm in agony. Fat drops of crimson well at the edges, gleaming wetly in the edges of my sight. "Help me clean this up, would you?" I ask, gesturing faintly at the mess between us.
His hungry and abysmal eyes click to her face when she speaks his name, genuine surprise shining in their cold, bottomless depths. Even in this terrifying state, where he fades into the shadows and his very bones seem to break the surface of smooth, black skin, she recognizes the insidious beast beneath. Inwardly he withdraws, uncertain and equally disgusted at the abomination he has become, but the sickly sweet scent of her blood keeps him lurking, hovering dangerously across her pearlescent skin. Even in the settling darkness of Sylva, she remains bright compared to the creature that stands stoically beside her, ragged breaths rattling in his chest.
Pressing against the sharp blade of his shoulder, Balto’s breath hinges in his throat. His obsidian lips peel back to reveal the sharpened teeth that came with his transformation, damp with saliva that shines in the dim light of the now-familiar forest. There is no caution in the way she pulls herself into him purposefully as if his demons had whispered his devilish desires in her ears and she was keen on bringing them to fruition. I am not a cannibal, he would muse to himself, and the dark voices that haunt him would shudder with laughter in response and his hunger would only deepen.
Balto tips his head, curving the slenderness of his dark neck as she folds into him, scraping the sharpness of his teeth ever so gently against her skin. His breath is but a shadowed whisper, heavy and staggered. How much blood would pour from her chest with the stake removed? It is an idle thought, one that fuels him as she speaks again. His tongue - pale and dry - attempts to moisten his lips.
“You tempt me,” he growls, not unaware of how his demons dance in the shadows, howling gleefully. Balto’s mouth ghosts across the plane of her chest, careful to avoid the javelin that sprouts from her heart, staining his lips with her blood. The shining black of his eyes disappears as his eyelids fall across them, swallowing what little of her he could taste on the tip of his tongue. Hadn’t she always tempted him, though? It’s nearly as if she knows his capabilities far more than he does and, in most cases, Balto doesn’t mind.
He’d rather not think about anything at all.
When his eyes open, he is surprised that his mouth is flush against the paleness of her skin, greedily tasting each morsel of blood like a starving hound. There is no caress in the gesture, no thought behind it - almost as if she were no longer there as the taste of blood soothes the ache in his stomach. With a hiss, as if regaining himself, the skeletal stallion throws his head upwards suddenly and staggers backward, his eyes glinting darkly. He may not be able to stop himself if he continues.
As if i could forget? It was much the same now as it had been the night we first met. A shadow detached from the rest, silent as the grave. He looks different now, it's true, but this is not a change that came about all at once. No. I recognize the shape of his skull stretched tight beneath black skin, and the way his brutal mouth forms my name.
I recognize the silver-dark needlepoint prick of a scar on his emaciated chest. The mark that made him mine.
My blood, red and warm, now glows softly as the night falls, as fickle moonlight begins to take the sun's place. As it should be, as we thought it always would. I can't help but glare upwards now to where that silver face peers from behind the skeletal leaves. As untrustworthy as the rest of us, the moon is.
Still, I let my face fall back to where we are now, my crystal bright eyes drinking in the dark. The ache in my chest throbs beneath his lightest touch, a sigh of anticipation coaxed from my lips. Our thoughts are mingled, each blood tinged and hungry. It is his darkness that has long drawn me to him, the way our monsters play. It is a recognition that goes deeper than skin and bone, I'd like to think. The way the moth eaten fabrics of our souls align.
I twist beneath his touch. Every patch of skin that finds a new bruise when pressed to his bony frame, brings me more awareness of how fragile I am. Breakable and beautiful, as much as any stained glass window. The fractal veins of scar tissue pulse in time with the drip drop pattern of blood, with the rise and fall of my ribs. I smile, a frightful, red toothed thing, and it is all for him.
"Isn't greatness always a temptation?" I breath, the curve of my neck angled just wide enough to display the wreckage. And he takes it, the taste of me shining darkly on his lips, red and phosphorous. There's no love in his touch. No sweetness, but the hunger I can feel crawling through his veins is close enough in this moment. What would I do with sweetness, anyway? What use have I for tenderness when there are things like fear and adoration to be had.
That makes his withdrawal all the more painful when it comes.
The patch of my chest that he had laved and scraped is cold now, and my eyes harden in turn. "Are you finished?" I ask, the question a softly flavored thing, even as my electric fire stoked. "Because I wasn't, and it's so rude to leave before the lady finishes." My deer-thin legs move me closer, the flicker of something violent in my eyes as I close the space between.
My own mouth reaches to sweep the length of his jaw, the hardness smooth beneath my teeth. A desire has overtaken me, to see just how far this goes. To explore this shadow and its depths until we're both drunk on the darkest of wines.
The abysmal black of his eyes are shining and without pupils; dark and twisted and never-ending as the parchedness of his blackened tongue moistens with her blood. He swallows hard, fractiles of moonlight spilling across the spikes of his worn body, alighting the peaks of his bones in swathes of silver amid the utter black. Balto’s ears flatten against the hellish curve of his slender neck, void of muscle as each vertebrate clicks with the lowering of his head. She baits him further despite his innate attempts at clinging to whatever morality still stutters within him, shattered and barely breathing.
She doesn’t hesitate to close the space that he had created, sweeping her mouth against the deep dark of his protruding jawbone. The stallion’s blood-stained lips curl, causing those terrible teeth to flash darkly in the dim and horrendous light of the haunted forest. He returns the gesture with a scrape of fang along her neck and to the sloping of her slender shoulder, pinpricks of blood rising from the gentle punctures. Those terrible antlers find her skin almost tenderly, pressing at her urgently.
Something sinister wells up inside him, completely overtaking him. Something primal and otherworldly as a hiss of satisfaction escapes his paper-thin lips followed by the sound of a growl that was not in any sense equid.
No, he is not finished.
With a strength that seems out of place on such a skeletal, fragile-looking creature, Balto’s antlers suddenly dig deep into the hollow of her shoulder. An unearthly yell comes from his throat as he brings his head upwards, slicing the pearlescent blue of her skin into beautiful, rubied ribbons. When his antlers run out of skin to rip through (leaving her shoulder, neck, and underside of her jaw cut in haphazard red rivers), he dives for her again with his head low.
A chorus has taken up somewhere in the darkness of the shadows, his demons chanting and wailing until it nearly makes him deaf as blood stains his eyes and skin.
He does not know how long it lasts, only that when he has eaten his full that his mind truly feels clear for the first time in decades. No, not clear (for they still dance in the periphery of his dark eyes, their once cajoling voices now silent with satisfaction) but merely undisturbed. His hunger has ebbed and the weakness he felt in his bones no longer ache.
His entire head is dipped generously in her blood; he had not hesitated to dig through her ribcage and feast on the soft organs that lay beneath the bones. His forelegs are encased in blood and tissue as if he had feasted on her like a starving animal. The beast gazes down at what was left of her body with indifference, at first glance. Then, the antlered creature tilts his head, his sunken eyes softening. His brow furrows, confusion revealing itself in the void of his eyes as something like regret swims through his chest.
“Sabra?” he calls to her uselessly, his demons’ laughter now permeating the silence.
