"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
07-31-2016, 09:55 PM (This post was last modified: 07-31-2016, 09:58 PM by Karsi.)
karsi
What am I doing?
When did my body decide to hijack my brain and drag me away from my house of bones and skin? The jungle heat seems to saturate the black of my coat. I notice how my hair is forever stuck to my neck and strangling me in the softest possible way. I want to find this annoying, i know that I should, but I am unable to feel. The chunk of ice that is my heart feels nothing, beats to no drum.
I find myself coming into focus as I am walking over the frozen crust that was once the meadow. Some horses linger around, clotted together for warmth and other possible motivations but I pay them no mind as I walk. The fog of my breath forms in front of me and I find my skin jerk in response to the chill of Beqanna. Since moving to the Jungle, I have not know anything other than the thick blanket of permeating warmth.
I want to have a purpose for being in the Meadow. I am not one to go seeking friends, lovers. I have surprised myself by simply leaving my home at the beach but secretly, and unwilling to admit to anyone, I do prefer the scent of flowers and jungle heat to that of the beach and the stink of rot and death. And so I am here. I catch the others not too far off from me whispering, looking at me with their silly eyes. I could open up the earth and watch them be swallowed up if I desired. Any other day I would just to hear their screams, just to make myself smile.
But-
But I don't. I should feel disappointment but I don't. There is a void of grayness, floating and foggy. Maybe I need to fuck something. Maybe I need to sleep. It had been far too long that I have done either, honestly. I expand my lungs in a sigh as I halt my trek to catch a few frozen strands of grass.
07-31-2016, 10:31 PM (This post was last modified: 07-31-2016, 10:31 PM by Lokii.)
I was born sickbut I love it
The chill of winter sears his skin and burrows into his bones (it rips him open like a novice surgeon to their practice patient, it numbs him better than any medication, it crawls into his body like infesting spiders) but he doesn’t seek warmth from others. He slinks across the ice alone, playing tricks on his mind to force the cold away. A recent snowing scattered the remains of decaying leaves and leftover crumbs from the trees from his skinny body (hiding the evidence of his slumber, erasing the physical proof of his bedding).
Leave it to the jokester for a woman to catch his eye (especially in the winter, just after breeding season, when the sluts were either filled with children or hiding from the bastards); granted it’s one who looks relatively pissed off. Gangly legs bring him closer (bowlegged, scarred forelegs with internal stitches from a magician’s sewing) and he finally exercises his tricks on a waking mind.
Suddenly (as she’s grazing, lips reaching for the frozen blades, mind roiling with boredom) she will feel a difference within her brain. A slight shift, a light being switched on, an invading sense (and his dark fingers creep in, slender and shadowy, twining around her senses and flirting with her conscious). And then she will taste the grass and it will disintegrate in her mouth. It will feel rotten and sandy and juicy and hot and crunchy and filmy and freezing all at once and her surprise will make her pull away. The distant gaze of a murdered fawn looks back at her (an un-breathing, blood-seeping, rancid-smelling, rib-showing, tongue-lolling fawn).
Resisting the urge to giggle maniacally, the graying silver bay sneaks to her side and gasps at the mare, bruised eyes (the right blue and black, the left blue and white) opening wide comically. “Wholly shit, did you just eat that?”
There is a strange sensation boiling up my spine like the blobs in a lava lamp. The slow rise of something thick, heavy, and non-malleable. The feeling murks up my brain and I wonder briefly if I have been poisoned.
I feel my mouth experience a level of chaos that I have yet known. The texture confuses me and I am almost certain I have poisoned myself in one way or another. The reality of my situation is off kilter and as my steel jaw unhinges to tumble out the vegetation, I see the half consumed and rotted corpse of a small deer.
A fawn.
I feel the far off emotion of disgust. I never truly feel anything. All the emotions are ghosts of themselves, surfacing like paper in the water before disintegrating in the vastness. As I catch a glimpse of whatever it is appropriate for me to experience, well, it slips away to be replaced with the graying void of nothing.
So when the gangling looking male saunters up to my side in a jagged hoping walk, I turn my own sky blue eyes to meet a blue and black one, a too wide of a smile on a too thin of a face.
Maniacal.
My attention returns to the maggot infested shards of bones and skin and I give it a thoughtful gaze (perhaps for too long but I have seen many, many worse things for my first few years of life at the Beach). The glossed eyes filled with flies, the torn flesh and tiny broken limbs, twisted and snapped in it's death shriek. My tongue darts outward to run over the cracks of my lips before I look back to the jittery male. "I suppose so." The tones are flat, matter-of-factually. My own eyes blink rhythmically as I offer nothing else up and wait for his reply (if he even would have one).
The jokester is surprised by her calamity (the way her face remains drawn firm, the way her sky eyes are unyielding, the way her tongue moves slowly across her lips), but he doesn’t show it. He stares down at the faux fawn, focusing his attention on the tricky fingers crawling in her mind. It has been a long time since he last let his tricks out of their box and they are a bit rough around the edges.
“I suppose so.” Her tone is flat and unsurprising (he senses she is used to death and the showing of ribs, unlike what he thought of her originally) and he twists his right ear to hear her better. The fawn begins to move before her eyes (broken limbs moving across crackling blades of grass, distant gaze suddenly focusing on her sky blue one, ribs shaking as they inhale a rancid breath), decaying body rising into a zombie-like stand. It whispers out in a gravelly, throaty child-like voice, “Have you seen my Mommy?” before crumpling and fading away until it disappears.
Angular face stretches into another creepily satisfied grin. “Well, I hope she found her mom because she’s got some booboos that need kissing.” He finally chuckles, slinging a skinny shoulder against the mare beside him. “The name’s Lokii, babe. What’s yours?”
I can not tell by his features whether he receives the response he had hoped for but I am not concerned with pleasing this stallion. Instead, the shift of the carcass catches my focus. I gaze down at the exposed bones working to move the fawn before me. The lids fall over the milky eyes, stirring the infestation of flies but only briefly. I see how the gnats disappear in all the exposed crevasses of ear holes, nostrils, and anus alike.
The thick knotty 'wump' of sagging entrails fall when the death-child raises itself upon bone spears and detached tendons. I still continue to watch the creature even when it's black tongue lolls from it's broken jaw, asking for it's mother.
Pitiful thing.
There is a few moments that I actually look to see if I can find a wreckage of of a doe's remains to reanimate for the maggot clogged fawn. Perhaps reunite them even after death but then it crumples, broken heap of ugliness. Before I am able to use my own little gifts to reanimate the child, it is folding inward unnaturally, imploding into itself and fading away.
I continue to look where it once was, blinking my eyes when I feel the jagged angle of the stallion's should digging against mine. I look to see where he has touched me and for a moment I believe I can smell singed hair before I look to his almost skeletal face with it's toothy, wolfish grin.
"Lokii." The duet of syllables are produced slowly as I enunciate, the tip of my tongue appearing on very edge of my incisors. I can feel wire hooks tugging the corners of my lips in a bit of a curve. "Karsi." I have not said my name often, in fact this may actually be the second time in my life. The dead do not care for names. "I am guessing you did that." My voice still flat but with sharp precision of each word, "would you like to see what I can do?" I now smile at him. The wires are replaced with hooks and are curling my lips up higher and higher and higher. I like this man and his neat thing. I want to show him my very special neat thing. Only those who would understand can ever see the neat little things I can do.
Death is something the jokester considers to be a fickle thing. It changes, it morphs, it degrades or restores. He has seen new life blossom from nothing (torturing young creatures in the woods to develop his tricks), he has seen failure but also strength (losing in the battle against the rest of the land, but growing stronger in his lust for chaos), he has seen those come back from the dead (his own self battling against the zombie version, a powerful magician calling him to follow her league). Death is not a permanent fixture in life. It can change, it can disappear, and it can birth new life. Death is a mere portal between two dimensions.
Thankfully, the trickster doesn’t have to worry about death himself. Since his first murder under the supervision of the monster, his body has stopped aging. The gray around his bruised eyes and near his smirking lips has not developed further. He feels perfectly content after slumbering for years (his bones do not ache from lack of use, his stomach does not moan for energy, his mind is not drowsy with sleep) and it excites him. Death did not scare him before, and death certain does not scare him now.
She answers her name and he hides it. Names are a powerful thing, when used in the correct context. They can be used to build someone up or tear someone down. They can be used to encourage or degrade. If a name is mentioned to the correct soul, it can ruin the rest of their life or perhaps make it all the more better. At this point in his life, the trickster doesn’t care if she knows his name (there was once a golden-eyed warrior who played games to know his name, like it was the greatest mystery in her life); in fact, he wants her to know his name. He wants her to have a name to put with the face that will be in her nightmares (although he doesn’t think she is the type to get them).
Her voice is barely dipped in the threshold of curiosity. He can hear the sharpness of her relatively flat tone and it interests him (in the same way delectable grass might interest his wearily starving stomach, if he were ever hungry for herbivorous things anymore). She perks his curiosity in her next question (he has a brief flashback to the days of standing in a pit dramatically filling with water, of twisting his tricks around a Jungle warrior’s mind to think he is next to her, of spending that same night sweaty and rough under the glow of a Valley moon) and he tips his good ear closer toward her.
The trickster briefly wonders what she might have that is so unique. He has seen many things in his life (an entire kingdom burning around him, half alien half horse creatures devouring other horses, a lightning strike nearly missing him and imploding a mare, a zombie version of his own gangly body, watching his mistress’s face as she is transported to new and exciting places) and he wonders if she thinks whatever she has up her sleeve will dazzle him. If anything, he might laugh. He nods briefly, bruised eyes dancing with amusement. “Please, indulge me.”
