"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
The world is not as interesting outside the Chamber as she had hoped. It is full of wild beasties with dull imaginations who smell like dirt and have big, large moon eyes that are full of nothing. She has hunted them and stalked them and while she liked the fear in their eyes, it was not particularly difficult to frighten the stupid. There was no challenge, no goal, no game. There was no cat-eyed panther next to her beating her to the kill or outsmarting her or hissing insults when she messed up. She was alone. Alone. Alone.
It had been fun at first, but the novelty was wearing thin. Now she was bored—and when Ana got bored, she got destructive. It started small. Rubbing against a tree until it smoked and hissed and melted into nothing in the ground. That had at least made her smile a little. But that wasn’t fun for long, so she had gone back to hunting small animals. The bunnies and the dear and eventually a wolf she had seen prowling on the border of the meadow. It was more fun to hunt the predators. They never saw her coming.
She would follow behind them at night, blending into the shadows minus the sharp brightness of her eyes—emitting no smell, no noise. Then, when she was ready, she’d pounce. The killing part was varied and largely dependent on her mood. Sometimes, she’d tear out their throats with her teeth. Other times, she’d simply clamp down and let the acid do the rest. All the time, she left the bloody carcass behind.
Ana had no use for food. Hunger was an unknown sensation.
Tonight was no different, stalking some dumb creature, when the other caught her eye. Different. Strange. Ana pauses for a moment, tilting her head in contemplation before she used her shadow portals, one of them spitting her out rather abruptly next to the undead mare. “Odd,” she croaked in her husky voice, reaching out to touch the mare’s thin neck, not caring for manners or protocol. “You smell like the things that I kill,” not an insult necessarily, but also not a compliment. “Curious little beastie.” She stepped closer, holding back her acid as she nosed at the mare, sniffing at her unceremoniously. “Curious indeed.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
10-21-2015, 02:58 PM (This post was last modified: 10-26-2015, 04:42 PM by Cassi.)
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
Monsters slumber, and they rise.
She exists in fragments, her life is pieces, stitched together – there are gaps, sometimes years of them, when she slumbered.
(Not that the body slumbered. But her mind was not there. Or, not her right one. If there is a right one, in a thing so warped as she.)
Chantale was here. Then she was not. Blink, and there was a girl, blood-stained, throwing a heart at her feet. Blink, and there was a foal with wings folded delicate and bones as brittle as a sparrows. Blink, and someone is screaming, and there is blood on her legs, on her lips.
Blink, and nothing.
Blink, and here she is again.
She looks as she always does – a thing of plastic, more sculpted than bred. It’s beautiful and horrifying, the way she’s put together, an ideal come to life and sent to walk among them.
(Not that come to life is the right word, not exactly.)
She is gray, a color of wet skies, of dishwater. Her skin is cool to the touch, slightly waxen, like a creature dead and waiting for rigor mortis to lay hands upon it.
(Perhaps she is.)
Nothing brought her here. Only the faint whim of her – a switch thrown, and the monster rises, once more Chantale in the body, once more my corpse masterpiece returning home in this queer gray vessel with eyes that are somehow too bright and too dead all at once.
Something speaks. A shadow. Queer, that they speak now, and my zombie’s ears flicker idly as she processes this information. But then the shadow moves, is drenched in moonlight, and it takes the shape of a girl.
It touches her, ink-black against wet skies, and it is warm. She leans into it, letting the warmth drench across her neck. She lets it speak. It calls her curious.
“You smell like night will come forever,” she replies. Nonsensical, really, and a lie – she smells nothing on the girl. Her senses dull, sometimes, grow muffled.
“I’m curious about you,” she purrs, another switch thrown, and the shadow is something to be tasted.
“What are you?”
She, it, speaks. Anastasia is intrigued, and like a child, she intends to sate her hunger. She continues to sniff at the mare, shadowy muzzle tracing her thin (too thin) neck. It does not smell like food, and she has a feeling that it will not taste like it either. For the first time in several days, she finds that she is hungry to discover it; perhaps she would eat this carcass just to find out. Her stomach would eventually revolt, but it would be worth the temporary discomfort to find out why the mare was alive and yet not.
Why she smelled like the wildlife she killed and left dead under the sun for too long.
Anastasia grasps clarity suddenly and her yellow eyes narrow. “Anastasia,” she says in a voice that is both firewood and ash, crackling along the edges. “I am Anastasia.” Answering the question, however, does not break her concentration, and she peels her lips back to reveal her fanged teeth, the edges of her inky teeth reflecting in the light. “I am going to bite you now,” she says matter of factly. “Shh. Don’t move. Be still.”
Then, without ceremony, she sinks her teeth into the mare’s not-so-meaty shoulder, tongue flicking against the flesh before she yanks backward. “No, wrong,” she spits, taking a step back, offended that Chantale had not stopped her. “Awful,” she spits again, shaking her dark face. “Who are you?” she finally questions when she is several feet away, her yellow eyes narrowing in suspicion and irritation.
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
So Ana decided to do this. :| If you don’t want her to take a bite out of Chantale, feel free to ignore that and say she missed.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
My corpse masterpiece knows too well how the herbivore’s stomach turns at the ingestion of too much flesh. After all, she once drank blood until it made her sick, the bile rising in her stomach like a tide but her body unable to sick it back up. She was ill for days.
It’s not the same, now; death dulls the senses in more ways than one. Now, she knows the rubbery texture of a heart the same way she knows the curve of a once-queen’s back, she knows these particular sins and none of them make her sick after.
Now she wants for so little – she eats, sometimes, but idly. Her mortal hungers have faded, another thing given over to whim, to whatever force of nature has transformed her from a strange girl to a corpse masterpiece, a wax doll, too perfect and too horrible all at once.
The shadow speaks her intent and my corpse queen smiles. Her own flesh is cool and rubbery, the blood oozes rather than flows (she knows this, having bitten pieces off her shoulders, leavings wounds that should have scared but ended up somehow seamless). It has none of the reward that live flesh does. The living flesh is sensual, erotic with warmth and wetness, hers is a blow up doll, cool and strange, emptied.
“Yes,” she purrs, encouraging, lets the teeth sink in. They feel both like and unlike her own – they are sharper, made for this, the flesh incises much cleaner, none of the raggedness her own blunted teeth cause.
Her own flesh is spit at her feet, and she wonders briefly if she should find it insulting, to have her very self rejected.
Ah, but there is no time for wallowing in self-pity, not when a shadow stands before her, warm and wet, a smudge of dank blood on her lips.
“Chantale,” she says, “I am Chantale.”
Her own muzzle skates across the girl. She is liquid in her darkness, and Chantale feels like she will draw away stained. Her own lips draw back, a corpse’s rictus, or perhaps a smile.
(It’s always hard to tell, with her.)
“You’re darling,” she breathes, biting down, and finds the girl quite warm indeed.
11-01-2015, 07:55 PM (This post was last modified: 11-03-2015, 12:42 AM by anastasia.)
What transpires between them reeks of sin although nothing has been committed yet. Instead, there is tension in the air—something like a promise of what is to come. Anastasia was too clumsy in her social interactions to fully understand it, but it ran like a live wire under her skin, and she was intrigued. Enough so that she did not leave through a portal even though she had discovered that this mare tasted rather rank.
“I am?” she questions, because no one has ever complimented her like that before. Atrox was not cruel to her necessarily, but his compliments were always purposeful and directed toward the rather unexplored nature of her gifts. He appreciated the perfection of her ability to hunt, but he had not necessarily appreciated her. Ana finds that she rather likes the attention, and she preens slightly beneath it.
She moves alongside the mare’s unnatural side, rubbing her darkness against it like a cat, before using a new portal to transition to the other side. “I like that,” she says in her thick tongue, finding that the more time she spent around Chantale, the less she found her undead odor to be offensive. In time, she imagined she wouldn’t even mind it at all—or notice. “Chan-tale,” the name is broken in her mouth, but she likes it all the same, repeating it with childish awe: “Chan-tale.” Her yellow eyes brighten. “I like Chan-tale.”
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
She walks like sin, and it’s fair enough, for it was an integral part of my corpse masterpiece. Bred from it – mortally, she is of a dark god and his own granddaughter. Made of it – her becoming was one of blood and madness, watching her own mother lurch from the cliff’s edge. It lives in her, embodied now in the slick swell of her hips (hips that have known her own father, known kings, known men and women alike).
And she leaves it smeared across them, marks them as she drags her lips across such keen flesh.
Yes, sin hangs between them even as their interactions remain innocent (what is the sink of teeth into flesh, but a greeting?).
“Yes,” she affirms, because the shadow is darling, and warm in a way my corpse has missed, ached for. She is warm and she promises things, promises heat and yielding flesh, and a darkness that she has not quite named.
The shadow mangles her name but Chantale has always liked things broken, and she finds the ruined syllables charming as they dangle from the ink-dark lips of the mare.
“Chantale likes you, too,” she says, touching her still, noticing the divots of her, the power lying dormant in the coiled musculature.
“What’s your name, pet?”
No one has touched Anastasia before—not really. Her father had once ripped his claws into her flank, punishing her for being careless with a meal, for being arrogant in the hunt. She had screamed then (screamed until her throat was raw and then screamed after), but this does not draw blood across the impossible darkness of her hide and it does not bring screams to her throat. Instead the sound is dark, husky, rough as it vibrates up her throat, the closest comparison that of a purr. She leans into the undead one’s touch, and she closes her predator eyes, enjoying the sensation of the closeness between them. She does not mind the smell at all now, she thinks idly.
“Ana-stasia,” she murmurs her own name in the same broken tongue, and she feels the acid of her being playing in the back of her throat. She does not know that Chantale’s father is her own maternal grandfather; she does not know that her birthright is the legacy of a family that spans across the land of Beqanna once, thrice, and forevermore. She is related to most of those who wander the field in one way or another, although she did not care overmuch for relatives. Her father was the only one she had ever known.
“I am Ana-stasia.” Such a pretty name for an unpretty girl, but she does not mind. She does not dream of being pretty. She does not dream of love-filled eyes and whispered confessions of the heart. She dreams, instead, of things she does not understand but hungers for anyway: for the same screams that had wrenched out of her own body when Atrox had ripped open her flesh; for the fascinating way that flesh peels away from bone; for the intoxicating feeling of knowing you control the lifeline of another. These are the things that fill her head in slumber.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
The shadow makes a noise, something dark and throaty. My fetid queen likes the sound of it, the rumble like thunder somewhere inside of her. She continues to touch her, half-expecting her muzzle to sink into such stygian blackness, but she is delightfully solid, delightfully warm.
It breaks out a name, syllables slapped from the lips. Anastasia, a princess, a name bespeaking beauty and hooded eyes, a certain demure nature. Laughable enough, for her dank flesh bears the thing’s toothmarks. She is beautiful, but my corpse does not know if others would find her so – the strangeness might be hard to stomach.
Chantale herself is beautiful in a way that is not beautiful. She should be beautiful, by every right, her body has been airbrushed to perfection, every scar (and oh, there have been many, my lunatic has too often wanted for blood) melted away to create this plastic corpse masterpiece. But she is beauty that has stepped too far, beauty that has cycled around and back into something odd and terrible, ruined by the lack of flaws, lack of something to contrast against. She is too sculpted, a thing of wet dreams but not life, things like her don’t – shouldn’t – exist in reality, only in the wet-hot imagination.
But exist – persist – she does, and in her time she finds things, collects them – kings and queens and acolytes, and now, a girl with sharp teeth and a shadowed tongue.
“Chantale likes Anastasia,” she begins, “because Anastasia is pretty, and warm. Chantale likes things that are warm.”
Ah, for we ache for what we cannot have, and things made dead and alive again have no warmth about them.
She decides that she likes these compliments. Does not believe them, does not care enough to believe them, but decides that she likes the way that sound on Chan-tale’s tongue. She likes the way that the other touches her and likes the coldness of her touch—unnaturally cool, unnaturally smooth. Ana cannot help the thoughts of bloated bodies left too long in the sun, but she shakes the thought away. This was different.
“Chan-tale is pretty,” she tries her hand at returning the compliment, but shakes her head, wrinkling her nose in distaste. It did not feel right. “No,” she says simply, although she is not sure whether Chan-tale is pretty or not—only that she is not in a place to say it.
“Chan-tale is some-thing.” She pauses, thoughtfully, nudging at the mare casually, prodding her as if trying to figure it out. “Chan-tale is…”
Her broken tongue fades off here, and she narrows her yellow eyes, “Chan-tale is…cold.” She smiles, delighted that she had thought of the word. “Like dark.” She touches her again, unabashed in it, “Chan-tale is cold. Hard like stone. Like sha-dow.” This pleases her greatly, that the mare who was not steeped in the darkness like some of her latest companions was still somehow similar to the shadows.
“Ana-stasia likes Chan-tale.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
She should be one of those bodies, dead and rotting on the beach somewhere.
My corpse queen exists as a glitch, a plastic-made thing vomited back into existence when death should have long ago claimed her. Yet she carries only a hint of death, a waxy coolness, blood that oozes rather than spurts.
There is no rhyme or reason for her existence – her persistence – only the solid fact that she exists, an affront to nature, her lips against a shadow-thing’s skin, looking for all the world like she could love her.
Like dark.
Like shadow.
She likes this, likes the idea of herself being cold and hard, a statue built, an idol cast in stone.
(She lacks the megalomania of her father, but who among us doesn’t want to be worshipped, on occasion?)
She rewards the girl with a smile, though her smile is often less a reward and more a prelude to something strange and horrid. Her lips have a way of curling back too much, more rictus than smile.
“Good,” she purrs, though she is not surprised. Though often mad, often forgetful, my corpse masterpiece knows as if by instinct how to draw them in. She is like rotting meat to the flies.
Sometimes, she almost loves them back.
(If you can call it that.)
“What else does Anastasia like?” she prods, still curious as to the thing’s powers.
