"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 CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
For decades, he has slept.
(And he remembers now, when some cosmic shift finally rouses him, how sleep had been his only reprieve as a child.
Isn’t it peculiar to think now that he had ever been young?
That he had ever been weak?)
He blinks now into the sun.
There has been some change, though he has no interest in examining it now. The limbs unfurl and solidify. He had slept as a shadow, as a ghost, as nothing at all. He is not only a thing waking but a thing coming back to life.
He had slept in the forest. (Serendipitous, was it not? For Pangea has fallen and he might have fallen with it.) He had tethered himself to the nymph in the water, drawing steadily from her life force, though he hadn’t needed to. He had gone to see her and how her face had lit up at the sight of him. He had feasted on the hope that had blossomed in the empty space around that heart. He had grinned, flashed those lethal teeth, and then curled himself into the earth.
He does not return to her shores now. Instead, he steps out into the light. Into the new ruins.
And he grins, draws in a long, rasping breath.
There has been much death in the time he spent sleeping.
He gathers the shadows around him, remembering.
03-16-2023, 12:36 PM (This post was last modified: 05-03-2023, 01:32 PM by Iris.)
all things are poisons
for there is nothing without poisonous qualities.
Being a child did not amount to being weak. Being alive did not require reprieve. This is not something Iris understands, but then again, she was born to power. Her mother was a magic entity, a piece of Beqanna in a sense now. Some of that magic belongs to Iris now, and the dead have always been more of a comfort than a torment to the black mare. She has enjoyed their company, leaning into the whispers, having conversations, seeking revenge on their behalf. The wicked and guilty made for a good outlet to practice her poison manipulation on, and it pleased her ghostly friends.
Though some might say that Iris has taken her own type of reprieve, avoiding the company of the living for so long. Nothing strange or magical had kept her away, she simply preferred the company of the dead to the living. But like moths to a flame, it seems everyone is brought back to Beqanna eventually.
Perhaps then, as death himself unfurls from sleep, it is no accident that Iris finds herself led to him. The dead whisper, chittering in excitement and fear in her ear, leading her on. Iris has learned to trust the dead - they are not trustworthy, mind you, but they like her and have long since stopped trying to lead her into danger.
It comes as no shock that she finds death in the ruins. The dead here do not know her - they are not Beqanna’s dead, and they are not her friends. They are different, and their voices edge out the ones she is familiar with. Hatred roils in their words, pleas for revenge or simply for peace. Warnings echo from the kinder ones - warnings to flee this place and its destruction. Iris does no such thing.
Even with these new dead crowding out her familiar friends, she finds him, the man of shadow who seems even more at home in this place than she does. Flickers of its history come to her from the dead, though she focuses on the living for once. ”I haven’t seen you around here before,” she says, and there’s an implication in that that suggests she would have been led to him no matter what.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He turns at the sound of her voice.
She, too, is a dark thing. (And his assessment has nothing to do with her appearance, though she comes swimming through the shadows as if she is part of them.
Perhaps there is some small moment where he wonders if he has somehow conjured her, too.)
He turns his sharp gaze from her then, casting it beyond the edges of the shadows to the ruins beyond.
Before, she says.
As if she has made her home here.
As if it had been her home before it had been brought to ruin.
“No,” he muses and allows himself to dissolve then into the shadows.
(He had been born a shadow thing and it is in this form that he feels most comfortable, most himself.)
He grins and the razor-edged teeth glint in the dark, the stark yellow eyes flitting back to her as he considers this.
He draws in a breath that clatters in the cage of his ribs, casting a question out to the ghosts that surround them. He reaches then into her head, for he has never had any qualms about taking things that do not belong to her, finds the memory where she is given a name. “No, Iris, I suppose you wouldn’t have.”
But he offers no explanation, only stares at her through the clamoring dark, grinning.
“Yet you’ve found me here all the same, how peculiar.”
03-22-2023, 09:58 AM (This post was last modified: 05-03-2023, 01:32 PM by Iris.)
all things are poisons
for there is nothing without poisonous qualities.
Sometimes the places she went felt like her home. The dead chittered in her ear, telling her story after story, painting pictures in her mind until she could imagine herself standing there in the midst of the scene. The places she went - even dead places like this (especially dead places like this) - came alive as the past haunted her in such a lovely, beautiful way. So many feared the dead, and yet Iris could not figure why. There was nothing to fear from a life lived and past.
He dissolves into the shadows as he speaks, and she wonders faintly if he does it out of habit or in some vain attempt to spook her. If the latter, it does not work. If the former, then she does not blame him. He grins like the Cheshire Cat, teeth and eyes glowing from the shadows, the only indication he is still there. Well that, and his magic poking around in her mind.
Her mother had taught her this sensation too, and moreover, had taught her how to construct walls should the need arise. Without the proper trait, there was only so much Iris could block, but she had no secrets to hide and did not really care. He could poke around all he wanted - there was nothing exciting to find. Still, because she cannot let him do so as if she were some unsuspecting fool, she lets her own poison creep into her head, wondering if her power would work on such an intangible thing as magic. There’s no effort to make him sick, or even uncomfortable, just a desire to make sure he knows that she is not a thing to be toyed with. She may not be stronger than him, but that did not make her weak.
”The ghosts found you. You…excite them. Though apparently not enough that they know your name. Perhaps you would care to share it?”
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
How it delights him to feel that flicker of poison.
The grin deepens around something sinister as he searches her face for a thing that might give her away. Some set of her jaw that might show determination, flared nostrils that might indicate insubordination. But there is none, her expression remains smooth, her gaze steady.
He wants to draw it out of her, make himself sick with it. It reminds him that he had been a child once, that he had been weak. Perhaps he could lie down at her feet and let her push it through his veins.
He sinks back into his own head (what a miserable place).
“Jamie,” he tells her, because there is nothing he feels the need to hide either, certainly not this.
He had believed once that he had been the bringer of the darkness, that Beyza’s sacrifice had plunged the world into that terrible black as soon as he’d been crowned the Alliance’s winner. He knows now that there had been greater forces at play, just as there are now, but that does not change the fact that he’d been born a monster and a monster he’d remained.
“I kept ghosts as companions once, too,” he says. He sees them still, turning those strange, yellow eyes on the apparitions crowding in around them. “Though I can’t say that they were quite as fond of me as they seem to be of you.”
Because he knows that to be excited about something does not necessarily mean that you like it. He knows that his use to them comes almost exclusively in the form of necromancy, the idea that he might resurrect them. And he might have if he’d been something kinder.
04-11-2023, 01:51 PM (This post was last modified: 05-03-2023, 01:34 PM by Iris.)
all things are poisons
for there is nothing without poisonous qualities.
She does not miss his grin, and if she’s not mistaken, it seems like he might be enjoying the poison. She might be mistaken though, might just be foolishly hopeful that someone else can enjoy something so sickly beautiful as poison and death. While Iris certainly does not think she’s the only one to enjoy such things, she nonetheless feels alone in her preferences. Even those who walk in shadows and darkness rarely dabble in the world Iris lives in, surrounded by the dead and capable of causing death with little effort.
She lets the poison seep into her mind a bit more, offering a taste that is tantalizing and just a bit more than teasing, though still probably not enough. A taste never is enough though, but leaves a ragged, bleeding hole in the place that desire and hope filled for a brief, flickering moment. It’s easier not to feel those things at all than to feel them only for a moment.
His presence disappears from her mind, and she calls the poison back into her blood and her bones, the place where it lives. That is what Iris is - a poison, a waiting cancer. That is exactly how her mother would have wanted it.
He offers a name, and then more, and her lips curve into something of a smile at the words. She chuckles slightly, amused and remembering. ”They weren’t fond of me at first either. Some of them still aren’t. But we found a mutual friendship in revenge. Revenge for them, target practice for me.” The grass around her begins to wither slowly, poison leaching from Iris into the ground, a slight demonstration. Her relationship with the ghosts of Beqanna is why she is so at ease with her own powers, having spent days and weeks and months and even years chasing down those the ghosts wished to punish. She’d sometimes been the bearer of kinder messages as well, though she found that the ghosts who were still around were usually those with an agenda. And Iris wasn’t meant for the kinder messages anyway.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
Revenge.
Those strange yellow eyes flash and he sinks closer, an instinctive reaction.
Target practice.
And he understands, as the poison spreads across the earth, killing whatever it touches. It had been her, she had done it on purpose, she had felt him and responded in kind. (Had it been something defensive or merely a warning?)
He turns his focus to the ground underfoot, the way it rots. He knows nothing of poison or how to manipulate it, but he wills it out of the earth. And he feels it as it travels up from the soles of his feet, tunneling through the veins, hits the meat of his heart with an electric shock. (The eyes roll closed and he exhales a rasping, shuddering breath.)
“Remarkable,” he murmurs as he releases his hold on it, lets it seep back into the earth. He does not engage in a war of wills, does not try to draw it directly from its source, he has no interest in enemies. Instead, he moves closer still, as if to inspect the source instead.
As if to inspect her.
“And what made you someone who is wont to carry out someone else’s revenge?” he asks, tilting that strange head. He draws a curtain of fog around them then, lets it press in close so as to shield them from the prying eyes of all of those ghosts. (As if it’s at all possible to hide from ghosts.)
04-17-2023, 09:33 AM (This post was last modified: 05-03-2023, 01:34 PM by Iris.)
all things are poisons
for there is nothing without poisonous qualities.
She watches as comprehension finds him, and then as he calls the poison out of the ground to himself. The poison seems like the kiss of a long lost lover to him, and she watches with interest and a slight grin. ”What’s it feel like?” she asks? The pain, or perhaps luxury, of her poison is not something she can experience, immune to it as she is. She can hurt in a way she’ll never comprehend, for it does not hurt her in return. Perhaps it should, perhaps that would be appropriate penance for all the pain she leaves in her wake. Would she mind? Would she use her power at such a cost? It’s hard to be certain, though she thinks she still would.
He releases the poison and she calls it back to herself, letting it settle back into her blood and bones, a piece of her returned. The grass around her does not come back to life. She could remove poison, but she could not undo its damage. Not that she would, anyway. Not when she’d been the one to cause it in the first place. Besides, sometimes things need to die in order to come back stronger.
He moves toward her, and she does not flinch, her amber eyes watching him without fear. "I was young, and bored. It seemed like a useful hobby.” As the fog draws around them, she finds a strange sense of comfort in the isolation, as if for one brief moment she might actually be alone. That’s not something she has ever known - she can dull the ghosts, but she cannot shut them out. She cannot leave them behind, a lesson she learned early in life. They did not appreciate her going away entirely, and so, she has stopped trying. But here, in this moment, they are strangely still.
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
What does it feel like.
He blinks slowly, laboriously, and grins that ink-black grin. How do you explain that the only thing that truly feels like living is dying? Because he had never been more alive than when he’d dragged himself through each day struggling to breathe, to exist, to understand what it meant to be a thing made of nothing at all. He had been a child and yet the joints (if they could have been called that) had ached and the lungs had felt filled with rot.
He studies her and understands now that she must be immune to her own poison. He wonders, briefly, if he might construct some new poison to push through her veins just to show her what it feels like. But he doesn’t try, not yet.
“It feels like living,” he tells her in that old raspy way, wishing now that he had held onto it long enough to let it take him to his knees.
(If he had let it make him so weak, he would not have been able to call upon the fog. He would not have been able to pull it around them, to shroud them, to protect them from things that neither of them needs any protection from.)
“And?” he asks then, probing. “Has it proven to be useful?” he tilts his strange head then, the edges blurred in all this fog. “What do you get in return? Something more than practice, I hope.”
05-03-2023, 08:26 AM (This post was last modified: 05-03-2023, 01:35 PM by Iris.)
iris
She is dying, of course, but in the same unremarkable way that everyone is dying. Slowly, inching along each day toward that inevitable end (which really, in Beqanna, is not inevitable at all, but rather something fluid and uncertain at best). And so she does not really know what it is she inflicts upon others. Iris knows pain, of course - the pain of cuts and wounds and bruises - though she’s not quite so macabre that she inflicts such on herself outside of the occasional experiment. She knows the pain of the wounds the ghosts used to inflict, long ago when they were her target instead of her ally. Ghosts are not truly the friendly sort, but they have come to a place of peace, maybe even friendship.
She chuckles at his response, a low and amused sound, so much like her mother’s. “I could ask the same question again - what’s that feel like?” The question is rhetorical this time, for she doesn’t really expect an answer. Iris is never quite certain where the line between living and dying might be. She is alive, of course, but she stands with a foot in the world of the dead that will never be free, and so she can only wonder what it might be like to never touch the world of death at all. Does it feel different?
“Of course I do,” she says in that smooth, easy voice of hers. Also like her mother’s, though not exactly. Iris and her mother share many traits, but they are not the same mare. Straia commanded the world of the living. She sought power and fear. Iris has less power and cares less for it, seeking rather to bend the world of the dead to herself without breaking it. She sees no need to break the things around her when they can be shaped and molded. ”They don’t try to kill me, for one. I feel like you of all people ought to know that ghosts are hardly fond of the living.” Some of them were less spiteful than others, but still, they were here because they could embrace neither life nor death fully. “But I get information too. The ghosts know much and they see even more, and they are eager to share with their friends.”
jamie
