"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
12-08-2021, 09:33 PM (This post was last modified: 12-08-2021, 09:35 PM by Aela.)
The Pampas had grown quiet in its last days, but it was nowhere near as quiet as this nearly silent place was now.
She could feel it - the sense that something tragic had happened - as it lingered around her. It permeated the air, cried eerily out when the wind moved past the odd stones, and after a few moments of venturing through this place, Aela shoved the nearby emotions out. The former Seneschal hadn't allowed herself to feel any of the loss associated with the Flower Court that now resided at the bottom of the ocean, and she certainly wouldn't allow herself to feel sympathy for whatever had been lost here.
Aela had come because this was new; this was different; there might be potential.
There had been murmurs across Beqanna about the Southern Kingdom sinking. Stories about the disaster and devastation.
A landbridge - a small sliver of Loess - cut across a newly-formed sea to Tephra. The rest was gone. But while others had talked about the creatures sighted near there, there had been rumors of rock formations and something rising out of the ocean. So instead of returning to Pangea or traveling North (for what? irritate one brother and revel with another?), the palomino had come to learn for herself what had emerged from waves. The Ruins, one nomad had told her with wide, fearful eyes. (Aela had nearly scoffed at that. Horses had far too much time and not enough creativity.) She glanced around as she moved, careful to step so she would make the least amount of noise. This place was open in a way that reminded her of Nerine, and it only deepened the scowl that had begun to surface on her pretty face.
Another place full of damp and cold.
Her thoughts began to turn again, moving back to the Pampas as she turned down another path, remembering the earthquake and the waves that eventually struck. She had narrowly escaped, but at one point, Aela had found herself in the water. She was no stranger to near-drowning experiences, and not wishing to add another, she stopped at the sight of the floodlands, where the ocean seemed to expectantly lay in wait like a predator watching for prey.
She is not beautiful, and it galls her. She is not plain, either, in the traditional sense, because her wine red skin is marked with red snakes that glow ominously even in the daylight, but arresting and stately are not what she desires.
Pangea is not a beautiful place, and for that reason, she abandons it, as she does the silver-eyed mother that lurks through the canyon searching for her next obsession. It had been nothing at all for a girl raised under the crush of manufactured devotion to transfer all that fervor from a brother who jealously rejected her to another who used her no differently. It had just as surely been nothing at all to the Dark God to trace the skinless patterns that etched across Chimera's body, nor to wonder how those spaces would stretch and bleed and ache when her belly grew swollen with the child. Perhaps it was his aim, even, but who can tell with such creatures? Still, there is something wicked and hungry in Chimera's enchantment that makes a thrill of every pain and horror inflicted upon her. It is something that Creatrice cannot understand, and so she shuns the ugly and the dull and the useless.
Like Pangea, this place is also not beautiful, but it had the benefit of being new. The yearling weaves through columns of stacked and toppled stones like a droplet of blood, picking her way delicately between the structures with a scowl rending her lips. Ugly, she thinks, with a flick of her petulant ears. She finds her curiosity about the Ruins poorly rewarded by what they show her. Mud, stone, dead sea life that was too unlucky to avoid the sudden rise up out of the abyss.
A lesson, then. The girl hates lessons, she is not of a studious bent, but she nods her head because she will not be like them, too dumb, too slow, and she turns to leave, her interest quite sated with this place. There is another along her way, not far, and staring out at the sea as though she might burn it all away. She is lovely and jealousy and desire leap up like wildfire in Creatrice' throat, shoving her forward on their feverish thermals to draw up beisde the golden mare at the muddy shoreline.
"It stinks here," is all she says, snorting her disgust into the salt-fish air.
01-17-2022, 05:53 PM (This post was last modified: 01-17-2022, 05:55 PM by Aela.)
For a moment, Aela is thinking of Fyr. Did he get swallowed by the currents, or had enough of her determination been embedded in him to defy the ocean’s might? She can only hope that the boy had swum and washed up on some shore like the wretched things on this one. But he is not on this one. There is no sign of the Pampas or the life she had led there. There is nothing of Obscene or Skandar or Sickle or Wherewolf.
Nothing of the hostages they had taken.
There were no signs of any of that life here on this beach.
Only rotting sea animals and whatever else the tide had brought.
Her lovely features twisted as she glanced around. Aela was certainly curious of it all, but even that falls short here because what is she to do with all this muck and mire? The palomino had held no love for the South. There was even a part of her that found its descent to the bottom of the ocean amusing; but its drowning had taken much of her ambitions with it and there was nothing amusing to be found in wasted effort.
She isn’t the only one who seems to find this place distasteful, and her blue eyes come to rest on a red-scaled girl that comes near. Barely past a year, but not without potential, Aela decides.
A gold ear flicks towards the adolescent, and then her blazed head turns to look down at the filly. ”Hardly a paradise,” Aela says with a grim expression. One foreleg struck out at a clump of seaweed, kicking it out of the way with practiced indifference. "You aren't looking for anyone out here, I hope?"
01-26-2022, 11:14 AM (This post was last modified: 01-26-2022, 11:19 AM by Creatrice.)
"Hardly," comes her bitter reply. Creatrice does not look for others, they look for her. Or so she tells herself, having only her mother's sharp-edged infatuation to judge by.
"I thought it would be more interesting than this." The red girl scowls lightly at the rotting seaweed now thrust aside but still pungent, and as if it will make a difference, she plucks it from where it lies limp and disheveled and flicks it back into the sea. That's better. Let the Earless Ones have their garbage back.
"Unfortunately it's as dull as Pangea - just wetter."
A delicate foreleg hangs in the air, anxious, agitated, and covered in the thick salty mud of the place, then falls back down again with a wet slap. Creatrice dares a glance up again at her companion without knowing the mare's history. There is nothing on her coat but the fading scent of wildflowers to declare her former home, certainly nothing of the former kingdom of the East. Born too late to know Pangea's glory, that's Creatrice, and with no one to tell her the stories, even, to whisper of monsters and ghosts and dragons and power. Her family's habit of isolation breeds contempt in her heart for those sandstone ridges.
For a moment, her red gaze seeks to hold the ice-and-fire of the former Pampaian's; stubborn, her thin neck held stiff and proud, but then it veers away, back to the endless, rolling sea just past the palomino's shoulder, and her eyes narrow. There, where the seaweed dropped beneath the waves, a mass of shadows licks at the surface like smoke.
01-30-2022, 06:56 PM (This post was last modified: 01-30-2022, 06:58 PM by Aela.)
Well, Aela thinks, it's for the best that the child isn’t looking for anyone among the Ruins. All she had found were bodies - or the remains of what she assumed were horses - strewn among the barren landscape. By the time she had come across them, there was little left to find. All that remained behind were the memories and the Empath rarely allowed herself to relive that day. (She had nearly died herself, but Aela will never admit that. It would be acknowledging her own mortality, and she will refuse to accept herself as anything but divine.)
The child’s spirit bolsters her own a bit. The girl plucks the rank-smelling plants from the sea and flings it back to where it belongs, back with the other foul things. The palomino gives a quick nod of her blazed head and glances down to the yearling. ”Pangea is hardly dull,” Aela says, remembering the likes of Ghaul and Straia and Eight, the oddly-armored aliens, and the other kinds of monsters that liked to lurk in Carnage’s country. ”You just need to know where to look,” says the former resident.
But the young are so impatient, and what time has the girl truly had to seek out the rich heritage of her home?
”Have you found Jamie yet?” Aela asks, knowing that any encounter with the Champion of Pangea was rarely (if ever) dull, and a slight smile quirks on her pale lips. Her memories linger on the former glory of the East, and yet when glances in the direction that Creatice does, movement in the water causes her to stiffen. Was this one of those water-logged creatures? Carefully shifting her weight, the palomino watches the now still-surface of the ocean with an suspicious gaze before the shadow-smoke rises again.
”It could be one of those… things,” she murmurs while keeping her blue eyes cautiously fixed on the sea, ”but I haven’t seen one move like that.”
Choking. Drowning. Dying. Healing. Drowning. Dying. If he were not already half-mad from whatever the Mountain's magic did to him, he would go mad now.
Whose magic sent him back here? Carnage's? The Fairies? Others might resign themselves or find forgiveness in accepting their fate, but Wherewolf chokes on the saltwater in his throat and thrashes in vain.
How much time has passed? His wings remain dislocated, the pink scars that trace his skin like lightning sometimes tear and bleed and the tears heal quickly yet the scars do not. The Mountain's magic tore him to pieces and its vengeance heals slowly. He drowns a thousand times but the broken fang still remains.
Every time his bloodshot eyes open up on the watery grave he's been buried in, every time he's ripped back from the edge of death, he brings shadows with him and they curl around him in the water, useless things that follow no instruction, perform no tasks, but seem to match his frenetic emotions with their whipping and pulsing. The creatures living here seem to avoid the shadows. The drowned man prefers this.
It never occurs to him to ask for help, so he drowns, and he dies, and he heals and he chokes, trapped beneath seaweed and rubble. He suffers and he does not find forgiveness. He does not seek it, either. Wherewolf nurses the bubble of hatred and anger that grows like cold fire in his breast, and waits for the day that he reaches for the magic well that contains his multitudes, and the duplicates leap forward again. When that day finally comes, the broken, drowning, half-mad, half-dead stallion uses the weak backs of the two hairless doubles he manages to summon to free him from the toppled stone and derelict, and to thrust himself toward land.
The shadows rise first, excited, poorly constrained, still useless. Wherewolf comes shortly after, tangled with seaweed, with red algae turning his coat the color of old blood and barnacles clinging to his skin. He comes in a rage, wings dragging, shadows wild, and his anger sets itself on the first thing that catches his eye. The red girl shies away from him, but she's too slow. He rushes her, catching her up in his fangs like a rag doll, her slight body thrown backward beneath him. The flotsam she snatches up and throws at him only fuels his anger, he wants to crush her, to bleed his own pains onto someone else, anyone else, and so clenches his jaw, waiting for the rush of blood to spill across his tongue.
He wants her to die, but something else happens when that broken fang punctures her jugular. There's no tide of blood, something surges out of him, instead, so forcefully that he stumbles forward and filly and stallion crash together in the muddy earth, his teeth still embedded deep in her neck, his own convulsing.
Creatrice opens her mouth to reply to the blue-eyed woman, but no words come out, only a startled exhalation as what she can only describe as a monster dredges itself up from the sea and falls down upon her in a fury. She barely notices the feeling of his fangs, only the way the force of his bite makes her breath turn raspy, and how he lifts her into the air as if she is nothing at all. Rock and bone and shell fly up in her defense, bouncing off his reddened skin. The small cuts heal before they even have time to bleed. The larger boulders slip out of her grasp - panic makes her grip on the magic too slick and they fall mere inches from where they had lain before.
Those awful fangs do something. She doesn't know what, for a moment her brain screams that something is so very, very wrong, and in the next moment she is full of fire and the Beast collapses, crushing her into the mud as he twitches and grinds his teeth even harder. The shadows that follow him wrap around them, they writhe and seem to hiss at her. The girl's eyes roll, her vision is full of static and darkness and the fire burning her veins turns to heaviness. To stone. She's so, so heavy, and cold.
And she's furious.
She throws that heaviness back at the seizing creature without thinking, rolling eyes turning marble-white. It's an uncontrolled, accidental, blow that glances off his clenched jaw. The skin there turns to pale, brittle stone, cracks, shatters, baring muscle underneath. The force - if not the injury - is enough to break the throes of magic transfer and the creature's jaws part suddenly. Creatrice scurries back to wobbly feet, darting behind the palomino with ragged breath and blood on her lips, her neck, her chest.
"What--" she gasps at the mare, drinking the air in with thirsty sobs, "What?"
01-31-2022, 07:31 PM (This post was last modified: 01-31-2022, 07:32 PM by Aela.)
It all happens so fast.
The movement on the surface of the water stirs again with bubbles rising in a peculiar way that Aela has seen before. She has been dragged under the waves multiple times, and she knows what it is to have the air ripped from your lungs. There is something there, and Aela continues to stand perfectly still. She hopes that the yearling beside her will follow her lead. It was something that Kota had taught her when she had been younger than Creatice is now: ‘Never run from anything Immortal. It only attracts their attention.’
She has no way of knowing if whatever down there is some type of Immortal, or Baltian, or perhaps some other monster. But experience has taught her to wait and so she does, keeping that thousand-yard-stare on the shore. What happens next is chaos and confusion, but Aela doesn’t move from it. There are shadows and a creature that smells as if it had died a hundred times over. There is something familiar about the way it lunges forward. Even bogged down by debris and seawood, with barnacles clinging to its sopping skin, she begins to recognize him. If there had been any doubt before that this was Wherewolf, it fled the moment Aela sensed his rage.
That was familiar, more familiar to her than the uncouth mass that charged at the girl beside her. It happens quickly and though Aela rises on her hindquarters to strike a fiery foreleg out at her aggravated half-brother, he already has her in his jaws, shaking her like the palomino had seen him furiously attack his foal-sized mother before. Her gold ears pin and the slender mare half-rears again, snaking her long neck towards the pair in an attempt to separate them.
But then they are crashing, and rolling, and then the girl is up. There is pain that causes Aela to recoil away from the writhing pegasus; there is a glimpse of something odd and pale on Wherwolf’s neck; there is the girl behind. The former Seneschal lifted her refined head, glancing briefly back at the red-marked filly. Not a what, her knowing stare implies (though perhaps with the heightened emotions surrounding them, the girl can hear Aela’s thoughts in her mind), but a who.
The rest - whatever the filly has done to him - they can figure out later.
Turning her attention back to her brother, Aela scowls at his melodramatics.
02-03-2022, 11:10 AM (This post was last modified: 02-03-2022, 11:24 AM by Wherewolf.)
Let's be better strangers
Minutes pass. There's a high-pitched whine in his ears that refuses to fade and it makes the voices lingering above him sound as though they are underwater - or maybe it's him underwater, still - and it makes them sound like they are in the heart of the Mountain where the Fairies' and their magic caught him up like a fly with blood pouring from his nose, his eyes, his ears, and the only thing he can do is strike stiffly at his own head with a clumsy forehoof. It leaves a smear of rotting mud across that skinless cheek. Then, like a newborn, he is finding his feet, all power is gone, rage quieted, forgotten in the postictal haze. He doesn't remember the fine red fog of his blood filling the vengeful cavern, but he does the moments just before, the sense of something crawling, just under his skin, skittering across his brain and his blood-blackened eyes, tearing and tickling and insistent. Something of that feeling overcomes him now, as blurry eyes find cold blue ones, familiar ones. It should put him at ease, yet it doesn't - after all, Wherewolf doesn't have any friends.
Trying to remember feels like screaming.
Trying to breathe feels like drowning. Saltwater streams from his nostrils every time he exhales, rusty with old blood.
Whoever owns the familiar eyes stands over him, waiting with an aggrieved sort of patience and the soot-and-salt stallion blinks and shakes his head, desperately trying to chase away the blur of eyes that are unused to the sun and the air. It is painful how slowly Aela comes into focus, and there's an irritating sense of deja vu when she does. How many times will they come together this way? How many times will he find himself again after a rage and wake up to those blue eyes staring down at him? Anyone else might feel ashamed by her condescension, angry to be made so vulnerable - and certainly, anger is a favorite emotion for him - but he, filthy, bleeding and bloodied from the red girl glaring over Aela's back, with bright crimson hairs still stuck to his teeth, grins viciously at the pair of them and swaggers drunkenly forward.
"Awful lotta eels hangin' around for dry land," he rasps, his unused voice catching harshly on the rough edges of his salt-sore throat.
02-09-2022, 02:15 PM (This post was last modified: 02-09-2022, 02:15 PM by Aela.)
It turns out that she had been right, and while a part of Aela is pleased with that revelation, she isn’t pleased at the state she finds Wherewolf in. He’s alive, but just barely, she thinks. He is encrusted with mud and sand; he smells foul, as if he really had died and had been rotting on the shore for days. He isn’t Fyr, and while her half-brother is right in that they aren’t friends, he is a recovered piece of her sunken Court.
They aren’t friends; they barely acknowledge their shared blood; but Wherewolf is useful to Aela, even in this dismal condition.
He is a piece on her chessboard, and to his credit, he’s a piece that isn’t Cheri or Obscene.
Feeling the heat and the anger radiating from the girl behind her, a golden ear flicks one way while the other swivels forward. Aela keeps her cool, calculating stare on the splayed pegasus, carefully watching as he tries to find his footing. It’s a silent compromise: she won’t encroach on his space so long as he is done with the theatrics. He looks like a mad-man, grinning wildly with the girl’s torn hair stuck between his fanged smile and the dried blood running from his dark nostrils.
Keeping her part of the bargain, Aela remains where she stands and only raises a brow at Wherewolf’s statement before quipping cryptically back ”I didn’t expect to find a snake on the shore. Wouldn’t you prefer the long grasses than slithering out into the open?”
