"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
Something shifts in the universe and in some foreign land a stallion wakes underneath a tree, a tree where he had once lain with his daughter, where he had been dying and then dead.
It had been a peaceful death.
His waking is not so peaceful.
Air sears his lungs like fire and he gasps, unused to breathing. He blinks, eyes unable to open in the glare of the sun. He opens his mouth, trying to moan, but instead it’s a weak, mewling noise; yet it still sounds like thunder in his ears.
He closes his eyes again. Breathing is easier now, the pain more ember than flame. His mind is waking, too, and he cannot bear it. Living had too often been an ugly, painful thing.
Time passes. He wakes more, his mind beginning to sharpen. He stands, and looks about for his daughter – he has a faint sense of time having passed, but doesn’t know how much. It had been close to winter when he died, he recalls, and the air feels like spring now. He doesn’t like this feeling, this discombobulation, and so he moves, stepping from the tree, from the land.
He goes back to the only home he really knows. The place he lived and loved.
The differences abound as he makes his way back and his throat feels dry when he begins to realize it, just how many years – decades? centuries? – must have passed.
They are surely all dead. Raendel, their children – his daughter. Mahala, he had called her, named her softly beneath that tree before he poured his magic into her, trying to heal her.
(He doesn’t know that his daughter lives still – a new name, a new woman. Perhaps he will find her, eventually.)
He staggers. He’s in a part of Beqanna he doesn’t recognize, a thick and smothering forest, shadows clotting over his gray coat. He feels the scream in his throat, his chest, his heart.
He can’t do this.
He can’t.
But what can he do? He reaches for the magic he knows he once had, and he feels it, faintly, but when he calls it, it does not respond. He is too craven to drown himself, throw himself from a cliff.
So instead, he walks.
All through the forest, he walks, sweat beginning to glisten on his skin despite the faint coolness of the air. He walks and he breathes and he exists and none of this, none of this was asked for.
you ask me about love and I tell you about violence
jupiter's by my side and we watch galaxies collide
She is the anger in the summer storm, although she has nothing to rage against. There is no injustice for which she thrusts her fist into the air. There is no rightful fury pounding in her chest. Nothing to define the emotion that she carves into her very bones. She is angry because she is the wind and the lightning and she rose today and decided to be. She cuts her teeth in the undefined and unrooted rage; she lets it simmer and boil in her chest. She calls the storms around her and let it crackle across the sky like the tempest she is, feeling the wind roar into her veins with all of the passion she is capable of, lighting her on fire.
It’s exhilarating to hand herself over to the extremes of her moods, and she flings her power low and wide, letting the storm rip through the forest as she walks. There is the sound of a tree branch that falls and it brings a wild grin to her face, the lightning under her skin spreading out with a vicious snap, running down the length of her spine before retreating.
There is a pause as she gathers her energy once more, drawing it close and preparing to throw it out once more, when she notices him at all. He is quiet and still and so blanketed in sorrow that it jolts her from her vengeful path forward. Her foot rises and then falls where it had lifted, stamping into the earth with an exhale, her nostrils blowing hard in either exhaustion or confusion or perhaps merely curiosity. In the end, it doesn’t matter.
The storm ends as quickly as she had brought it, her heart swallowing it up as she makes her way toward him—cutting through bramble and bush and mossed over path.
She doesn’t attempt to hide her approach and when she is several feet away, she pauses to consider him with a wild, vicious delight in her eyes.
“I’m sorry for the weather,” she remarks with a flash of a smile.
He had ever known rage?
He had killed, had fought – he knows this. He had once been the puppet of a dark god (his father, too, but Carnage was always a god first, a father second – or not at all), made to do any number of terrible things. He cannot recall the specifics – they are blurred, as many things are, by centuries – but he recalls feeling ill, feeling scared, trying to burrow and hide inside himself. Piling his secrets in one small corner of his mind, hiding them and hiding them until the day they spilled out.
He lets out a juddering sigh as the memories crawl about. He doesn’t want to remember, he doesn’t really want to even be. He wants that nothingness, eyes closing beneath the tree, sleep coming and never going.
Oh, he is not supposed to be here.
The storm comes on sudden, a gust of wind buffeting his face, the tension in the air of electrivity and thunder. He tenses, listening to the crack of branches and howl of wind, and then it’s gone, and from the forest comes a mare as if she was birthed from the storm itself.
(He’s almost right, just has it the wrong way ‘round.)
He should fear her, he supposes. She reeks of electricity and power and he, once a magician of some power, can conjure nothing at the moment. He is defenseless.
But what of it?
Yes, what of it?
Maybe she’ll hurt him – he’s been hurt plenty before. Maybe she’ll strike him dead, and what of that?
He grins, and it’s not quite healthy – lips curling, too much teeth, madness whispering at its curve.
“Don’t be,” he says, “I’ve been dead for so long, I’m sure I could use a shower.”
you ask me about love and I tell you about violence
