"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
02-24-2016, 11:41 AM (This post was last modified: 02-24-2016, 11:52 AM by Cassi.)
He remembers dying.
Remembers the wolf’s snarl on a woman he loved, and the screams of a woman he does love. He doesn’t remember much after that, only waking alone, and when he says her name, there is no response.
(She went to the witch-woman and made promises that would come back to haunt her, but they were bound in the womb and they are bound now so it doesn’t matter, none of it does. The witch smiles and agrees, and thus Contagion is brought back.)
Alone, he rises. He is still a thing made of glass, a thing impossible – doubly so, now, for an early death had been inevitable for such a fragile thing and though he should walk no more he defies it, defies the logic and law of nature to live again, walk again, say her name again, even if it’s just to the wind.
He’s not aware he’s weeping.
(He is his father’s son.)
He stands alone in the meadow and feels an odd sense of déjà vu. Last time he was here, he walked on to his death, though said death had ultimately taken place in the falls.
(The sound of rushing water, once beautiful, will forever send shivers down his spine.)
But they are gone. All of them are gone and Contagion exists, alive again, standing frail with paper wings folded at his back.
I can still hear you saying -
you would never break the chain
At first glance, she cannot believe that he’s real. Who could? He looks like something nightmarish, something only one of Beqanna’s famed and rather illusive magician’s could dream of. But as Dacia lies motionless, camouflaged with her gift, watching the inner workings of his body and seeing the breath of life that escapes him, she reasons he must be real. The red of iron, of blood, of muscle gives him some sense of color, like rust newly formed over steel. There are the splotches of white: of bone, sinew, fat. There, beginning just under his jaw and running together to form the fate’s eternal string of life is a thick, blue vein. Dacia dares not move; she’s too close to him anyhow, but her eyes watch the imperceptible flicker of that very vein for what seems like an eternity. So, he must be real.
He has wings. She wonders if he can fly? And then it hits her, the idea to simply stop her charade and ask him. So her chameleon skin adjusts, like a solitary wave running to shore, and where once there was what seemed like only the rush of dying grasses, now there is a mare cloaked in black from head to hoof. She rises from her resting position, front legs splaying first so that she can push herself upwards. Her hind legs feel numb, so she stretches her inky neck and shakes loose the tautness in her spine. Surely he sees her now, and their proximity to one another is shocking - if she wished it, Dacia could take a few steps forward and the two would be tangled together, but she blames herself for hiding so long.
Once she’s settled, she looks him over, noting the waste that lay in his own eyes. There was loss. Dacia knows this because she’s harboring that same, endless sense of loneliness. “Why do you cry?” She asks him, and the question implies that somehow he would know that she’s cried too. But he can’t know that, it’s impossible. And she guesses, of all horses, he would know of impossible things.
He tried to fly, once.
The wings are strange things, a delicate membrane stretched thinly over hollowed bones. They do not bear him aloft, as wings are meant to do. So little of his body functions as it should, it should be have been no surprise to him when he once saw horses take flight and beat his wings to join them, only to hear a thin crack, like a twig snapping, and feeling the agony radiate from his left wing and into his skin.
(The fracture had long since healed, leaving only a slight twist to the line of his wings, unremarkable to the untrained eye.)
He still thinks of flying, aches for it in the same indefinable way he aches for so many things.
He is a glass house is a world of stone-throwers, a boy who should not exist – indeed, a boy whose existence was snuffed out, fate met whilst torn between two women he loves – love d – and should not have.
He is resurrected, now, through magic he does not begin to understand, but he could not tell you why, or to what purpose. He is no stronger now, he is still the same frail glass thing, with papery wings and skin so delicate it’s translucent, a network of veins and arteries mapping his livelihood.
There is movement and then there is a girl, camouflaged like the woods. He had not realized anyone was so near – an embarrassment for a prey animal such as he. The tears in his eyes burn as she calls attention to him and his heart beats out a mantra: weak, you are weak.
“I came back,” he says, and his voice feels strange in his throat, broken from disuse, “I was broken, then I came back.”
Yet there is another confession, deeper down, one he does not say: and I am not sure I wanted to.
03-08-2016, 01:32 AM (This post was last modified: 03-08-2016, 01:34 AM by Smother.)
throw me to the wolves
She is a ghostly presence. Her aura is one of coldness and brutality, but calm and surreal. It is the cold air that lingers before the downpour of a storm. Smother has always been the tension in every conversation, the eeriness in every dark meeting, and the unknown variable in every experiment. Her unpredictability is the only thing truly predictable about her; if she is anything, if she can be explained as anything, it is that her personality is unforgivably impulsive.
Her eyes are snake-like, mostly because she decided to “half-shift” in a way that allowed her to keep full horse form but have the decoration of lines for eyes. They are set on two bodies both radiating heat in yellow, orange, coral, and sky tones. They are emitting warmth that appears vibrant in her sight, and part of her wishes she could circle her body along their frame and hear the soft crumble of bones shatter beneath her suffocation. However, there is a time and place for such actions.
Not, for example, among viewing eyes.
With an adjustment in her shift, she rids of her snake-like iris’s and replace them with her typical crystal blue eyes. Judgment is laced within her stare, and she watches their cautious—for lack of a better term—introduction. It would always be apparent that unlike her usual belligerent way of communication, others tend to side with a softer form of socializing. Her voice tends to be bold and vivacious, while most other equines were husky and light.
She views the man and feels his sadness waft into the air like a pungent smell polluting the earth. His body is intoxicating, so fragile and weak. Seeing him is like fixing a high long overdue. He is her heroine that she needs to fill her veins. He provides this sense of power to her, this feel of strength that she so seldomly has felt. While the female, well… she is irrelevant.
The female is unmistakably swooned. Her softness, her politeness, the way she carried herself to meet him and the way she holds herself even now. Smother has always been a watchful eye, has always found her talent in analyzing—while they appear to be lost in their own conversation they are unfortunately playing a sickening reality show.
Smother finds herself wafting to the presence of the duo, seeming to want to entangle herself in the aura of the male, wrap herself in his impression and fix the high he is so willing to feed. She is in so many ways the python she has become.
Her arrival is cool and quiet. To them she must appear psychotic; the heavy weight of a python looped four times around her neck with his snoozing head resting just behind her withers. The tattoo of the jungle, two swords indulged in the body of two snakes curling up their handle placed elegantly along her chest and branching as low as her front hooves. Her mane is a windblown mess of tangles and knots, her two toned chocolate brown and porcelain white frame overwhelmingly clean.
“If you were broken, why wouldn’t you wait until you were healed to return?” A condescending tone lifts from her tongue like native language, Smother would always be better at negativity; she was born this way. Not a choice, but yet a consequence of her written history.
A history she didn’t get to write herself, but was written for her.
He is a beacon for predators, across his skin is writ every weakness. The delicacy of his bones beg for breaking; the paper-thinness of his skin, for tearing. He is not unaware of these stares, their gazes resting on him like a tangible pressure.
He’d even loved such a predator, once: a wolf-girl with bones like steel beams, strong everywhere he was weak. They’d been a laughable pair, a lamb with a lion, and it has ended as one expects these things to: with broken bones and shattered skin, blood pooled and cooling under a heathen sky.
He had come back – somehow, he had come back – and he wonders sometimes if it was a dream but there are scars he cannot account for, like he was remade hastily, carelessly.
They are a reminder, as if he needed one: you are prey.
He feels the familiar weight of a predator’s gaze as he speaks to the first women, cranes his roaned head. She is easy enough to spot, and his eyes widen at the sight of the snake draped across her neck like it was meant to be there, as if she did not exist in defiance of nature, wearing such a terrible creature as if it were nothing more than jewelry. She’s tattooed, too, snakes and swords and for a moment he remembers the sky-blue streaks on the wolf-girl and his heart clenches.
She oozes a question and he tries to take his eyes from her, she is dark and dangerous and strange, this snake-woman.
“It wasn’t my choice,” he says, simply, and it speaks for so much – he had not chosen to die, nor had he chosen to return.
(Though loving someone who would damn you was perhaps a choice in its own right.)
And so, the prey eyes the predator, feeling the weight of her gaze as his own bones cry out in their fragility.
I can still hear you saying -
you would never break the chain
She’s not surprised at the other mares negativity - vanity always had a strong voice, where virtue came as a soft check to pride. So in turn, she remains silently observant (her hidden power) and watches the two interact with a tilted head. Yes, she agrees that the snake draped around the mare’s neck is somewhat unsettling, that is, if someone were to find themselves unsettled by such things. But she’s a sibling to a skin-shifter, has seen his destruction cover the entirety of a kingdom, watched a murderer end her dams life. Unsettling things were few and far between these days for Dacia. Contagion murmurs back to her, the snake woman, and Dacia’s head rights itself, eyes narrowing in suspicion at his claim.
“What’s done is done then.” She smoothly orates, a single ear tipping in the direction of the third-party member. “There must be reason for it.” No one brings the dead back to the living without ample design or plan in mind. This stallion, paper-thin with eyes that weep and a body made for desolation, seems far from capable of any grand scheme. Dacia, however, knows better than to judge a book by its cover. “Unless, of course, you’ve no idea what that reason may or may not be, it seems to me like you’re avoiding your destiny.” She quips, finding humor in that statement alone. Destiny. Fate. Worthless nouns that steal breath and give false hope to the weak-minded.
Astri had taught her that destiny was nothing short of one’s own effort. It was your own duty to strike out, make a name for yourself. Lupei had done his part, now Dacia was biding her time to make the correct first step on her own path. Her attention wavers, gaze circling round to the oddly-tattooed mare. “From the Jungle?” She guesses aloud, waiting patiently, ever patiently, for a reply.
