"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
Beneath the ivory blanket lurked the remains of what I guessed was rich emerald blades, tasty, succulent. I can smell what once was and as I pull my head to the side to view the groups coupling up, departing ways along beaten tracks, I realise that this is just where I guessed. Not too bad for an in brain navigation.
But alas, all the journeying, the snow making it that much harder, pushing myself further and further, it was exhausting. Dried sweat marred my ebony flanks, a thin layer of perspiration knotted my mane. Bits of twigs and decaying leaves looked like the latest accessory stop my head, braided by the wind into my locks. That sure is something. Mother preaching on about beauty, how it defines most, how it means so much. And here I was looking like I'd been dragged through a hedge... Well that was true.
I can guarantee she turns in her grave. I shake my head, lowering my muzzle and scratching at my sudden feathers, as I lift my head, my gaze shifts, through the veil of mussed forelock I see the vastness of the meadow, then the broad expanse of what would have been a flowing little lake. It occurs to me, as I slap my lips together, just how dry and parched I was.
Legs twist and slide, falling over myself I charge through the snow, bounding, a mess of black hair and debris, I fly through the meadow, dusty white flying up like torrents as the wind takes a grasp of it all, cold, icy, it kisses my pelt with s bittersweet kiss. Soon I am by the lake, a river, it's solid, the only remnants are frosty reeds standing on end, through the thick ice. I snort, blowing billowed breath in frosty clouds. I lower myself, knees down I crawl down the bank and edge closer to the lake. A tentative foot raises, a curious eye, keen and attuned makes certain I have a sure foot, and my front hoof comes down.
Once. Twice. Third times the charm.
The ice splinters, thick shards spluttering with icy water droplets. The hiss, the icy waters quivering beneath the thick shards of frost. The way it cracked, shattered. It's like a serenade to my ears.
I bow my head, and drink, thoroughly and with the want of a parched throat. A drink that feels like it's my first in years. The cold waters chill my insides, but it's the sort of welcoming, bitter chill that makes you feel alive.
- x -
blacker than the sun, no death can touch the crooked young
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
You always loved the cold.
We could be cliché and say it’s cause it’s like your heart, you ice queen, you cold bitch. But that’s overdone, besides, calling you heartless isn’t quite right, is it? I really believe you loved those girls you left ruined, in your own awful way.
Of course, the swan necked girl would have disagreed as she lay dying and you smiled hopelessly with you bloodied lips. Of course, your desert rose queen would have disagreed when you violated her and later rutted with her king just for a slap in the face, setting back their fairytale romance decades.
But I think you loved them. In that horrible, awful way of yours, you loved them.
So you don’t love the cold because it’s like your heart.
You love the cold because it’s like you – cold, beautiful, dead.
My corpse masterpiece does not quite match the snow. She is gray, but not the pristine white. She is much more of a dishwater gray. But ah, she is beautiful, a plastic queen molded too-perfect, a Barbie doll of a creature. She is man’s image of beauty, which somewhere along the way leaves her strange and warped and not-right. The eye needs a flaw, a contrast to the perfection.
And oh, she has plenty of flaws, but they reside inside of her, in her peculiar and rotted mind. She is a maelstrom of madness, a woman scorned with a memory like wet paper.
She comes and goes here, unchanging (the dead do not change overmuch, certainly do not age). She heard that the old night king was dead, burned right up by his daughter, and the thought of it makes her laugh until her sides ache.
She’s in the meadow, watching, the animal cunning alight in her eyes as they fall on a mare, coal-black and stunning against the snow. The mare is ragged, twig-adorned as she breaks through the ice.
My corpse-girl writhes forward, her gait ungainly as she lays waste to the snow, coming closer. She is too close, now, feeling the heat radiate from the mare and ah, the warmth is lovely (and something she possesses precious little of).
“You must be cold,” she says, voice a purr, eyes bright and glassy, “out here all alone.”
05-29-2015, 01:44 AM (This post was last modified: 05-29-2015, 06:40 AM by Nykeln.)
The ice dribbled from my chin, cold and refreshing, trickling from my whiskers in frosty spindles. The ice is refreshing, sets a little electricity into my throat, a pit of ice in my belly. It feels like an eternity that I've been travelling; a vagabond, a black feather riding the breeze. Throughout my journey I've had time to contemplate and unfortunately time to remember.
Memories are as cold and as unwelcoming as the falling snow, especially as they fall into unprotected ears. I toss my head thrice, pawing at the ivory blanket, digging more of the bank, plucking a few reeds from its depths, thoughtfully gnawing but not hungry. It can't be hungry when I remember what happened before, what happened back then, what I left behind.
They say prisons are steel cages, but sometimes you don't need four walls to be imprisoned. The chill from the snow, from the memory runs along my spine, kissing each vertebrae with a bittersweet touch. My knitted tail slaps at my hocks, my loins with s satisfying snap.
The taste of freedom was delightful, even if I was out in the snow, the cold embracing me like death's unforgiving touch. Coffee bean eyes observe the surroundings; there's just so much to look at in winter. Mountains of white, crystal glass castles of ice. and then there's me, an inky blot, a stain upon the wintry wonderland.
I catch the mare's scent before I see the silver form shift between the wintry backdrop; camouflaged and invisible to the eye. It's her scent that makes me take a step back. I remember that acrid touch, Cardinal and sweet but sick and twisted. I pique my lips and my nostrils twitch. Curiously my eyes follow her; my mother would have liked her, beautiful, elegant, flawless. Like some magnificent ice sculpture she then stands before me, a bittersweet twang in her voice, a sadistic purr from her lips.
'Cold? How can you not embrace the cold when all you've ever known is stifling imprisonment?' my voice is cool, crisp, yet feather light, just like the gentle kiss of the falling snow.
'Freedom. It often comes at a price, don't you think? Loneliness gives us time to reflect, perhaps that's not the wisest choice in the end.'
A torrent of black mane whips past me in feathered splinters of twigs and dirt as my voice gets lost like a haunting whisper in the stolen breeze.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
Memory’s a prison, isn’t it, so should you be grateful you can’t remember?
Can’t remember the way ol’ Prince Charming hurt you in every way you can hurt someone. Can’t remember the thing you gave birth to under the willow tree, his only get, that alien creature who couldn’t breathe our air, that thing you left there, the one they said you killed (but surely Herd was lying, Herd always lied). Can’t remember what you did to that swan-necked babydoll, the one whose blood made you sick because you drank so much of it.
Memory’s a prison and madness is a gift, isn’t it?
And oh, you darling, you bitch, you’re just so fucking gifted.
My corpse masterpiece laughs, a little clotted rumble in her throat – she laughs like the dead, you could say. She’s certainly close enough to it, well-acquainted with the enclosure of a coffin and the pallid ways of flesh – for she creeps close to the edge, skirts it. Her own skin could be dead, wax-cool, the only warmth being what she steals from contact.
Her eyes, too, have the sheen of death – glassy and vapid, but ah, there is a wicked cunning there that has not died, a special breed of whimsy and slaughter.
She likes this one, likes her melodrama, her fire.
The black mare replies nonsensically (though to her mind, rotted thing that it is, most of what tumbles from their pert lips is nonsense). Speaks of imprisonment, freedom, loneliness, concepts too great and abstract for Chantale – a creature of the Id – to grasp.
So she doesn’t.
Instead she smiles with too much teeth and comes closer. She wants to touch her but she knows touching makes them wrong and she is not done yet.
“Indeed,” she says, speaking like she comprehends, like she cares, “it wouldn’t do to be alone too much. The brain can just come up with awful things.”
She sighs histrionically, as if her brain has never dared to mull upon anything awful.
“Nykeln,” she repeats, the word awkward in her mouth but she likes it nonetheless, “I’m Chantale. I think.”
She doesn’t always remember her name. There have been other names but they are gone, baby, gone. She likes this name because it’s the one her desert rose spoke back when maybe there was some sort of consent and love between them, stretched out in the meadow and drawing lines down backs and withers, because everything – as it always does – went to hell.
“Yes,” she affirms, more to herself than Nykeln, “yes, I’m Chantale.”
I talk too much, my words a lullaby of a warm deception longing for release, I realise too often that my tongue slips too much, my mind too vacant. I realise not soon enough that it's been a year since I've seen a other, let alone converse. The door that I'm meant to be holding open, its hinges are rusty and creak in protest. I could always slam it shut and leave the haunting ghost before me. Retreat and rest, hide and lick forgotten wounds until my tongue bleeds black.
But that is what my mother would have done, and on her dying eye, with her fleeting voice she told me I was the key. Back then I was unsure. But today, looking into the deadpan eyes of the ghoulish mare, I have an epiphany. Cold, it hits me, perhaps it's a large chunk of snow running down my shoulders from landing on my withers. But it entices me like a snake charmer. I'm the key, the key to something, life, death. It's an endless circle, an ouroboros of sin and repent.
I stand like stone, my breaths come shallow, smooth. My only ears turn, twitch, listening to every word. She's a beautiful ghoul in the night, a siren at sea. Her words are like a haunting lullaby on your deathbed and I can help but stare in wonder, a little fascinated, s little in awe.
'The mind is a dangerous thing; it's best to leave alone.' I pause, inching a few steps to the side, my coffee bean eyes curious and curious. 'One can go mad when faced with the company of themselves. You learn far too much and far too little.' Riddles and rhymes, a song of dazed might.
'Chantale.' My lips taste, smooth, haunting. I ingest her name like my eyes ingest her form. I'm almost bewitched. Enchanted like a fawn looks up at an imposing predator. So much they want to be like them. To forget the past, to grasp the future.
That's precisely what I'm doing.
'You come like death's angel. What, Chantale is your purpose here?' I ask, my question fleeting, my mind reeling. I feel the scars on my neck burn, the memories like a fire, which thankfully the ice is dowsing.
'Myself? I'm drifting, lost, but found. I'm here to find the key, the key to life... The key to death.'
Morbid little mind tricks. I'd learnt some things from my sire long ago. Life's s riddle, you solve it, you die. You spend decades trying to solve it, you die. Quite frankly the only horizon you see in your future is dark and foreboding, the grim reapers scythe angling for your pretty little neck.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
You always talked too much for Herd’s liking, didn’t you? They preferred the mares be seen and not heard, Prince Charming’s quiet little harem. But of course you were loud, you screamed and signed and shouted, always causing a ruckus. You babbled on and on and you said just how damn beautiful that new girl (the one with the swan neck, the one you loved so) was.
Well that was a Bad Idea, wasn’t it? But you were always chockfull of those, weren’t you?
Now I’m not sure if you talk too much or too little but none of it’s right because none of you is right.
Ironic, that the mare should speak so.
My corpse masterpiece has long sense gone mad. It was not facing herself that did so, rather, it was a purging – a way to immortalize herself, a way to forget that she’d killed everything she’d loved (and that hadn’t worked, because she remembers – most of the time – but she cares less). Madness had always been in her blood, bred there by dark gods and their insane daughters, so when it raised its ugly head and sniffed the air, scented blood, she embraced it. Embraced it like a lover, opened her legs and mind to every madcap thought, remade herself in the name of the Id, of whimsy and want and little else.
“I faced myself,” she said. She did not. It is a lie. She is a vessel, she is madness, she is dead and gone but here and fixated on the prize before her, dark and dirty and delicious.
“Do you think doing so made me mad?” she asked, the question already answered in her eyes, glassy and feverish and bright.
The mare says her name and it’s hot and wicked in her lips and Chantale smiles, though the grin is too-wide, more corpse’s rictus than an expression of merriment.
“The key,” she murmurs as if in assent, though in truth she knows nothing of puzzles, though she does know sometimes her body fits against theirs like it’s meant to be.
“Sounds tiresome,” she says, and reaches out, touches her soft like a prayer, feels the warmth beneath her muzzle and marvels at the veins beneath.
“I could be your key,” she says, though her suggestion is far more innuendo than anything else, “I know a bit about life and death. Giving and taking.”
Puzzle pieces don’t fit right sometimes, most blame the one trying to solve it, trying to push the parts in when they know it won’t fit. I am one of those that could sit there and idle over the thousand pieces, lose time, lose life, just sitting and trying to figure out the masterpiece beyond the shattered pieces. I spent a childhood solving my sire’s endless riddles, and often it ended in my wrongs and always his rights. I also learnt a long time ago that the old anecdote, two wrongs don’t make a right, well that is equally as wrong. I saw many wrong puzzle pieces thrown around, aimlessly stabbing an trying to fit them in place.
It’s like a King sitting in a Pawn’s place, a Knight hiding behind the Queen. A chessboard of life, white, black, black and white. I’v observed so much in my life, however short it may have been so far — or be in the future. And still I long for the taste of knowledge, the spice that sits in my tongue and hangs sharp in my throat. If I am to be that key my mother was so rigid about, then I must know all. I must see all and I must.. be all.
There’s something about the mare before me; her endless eyes that are bottomless, enticing. Like a well that goes on and on and on. Cold, dark and forever and ever. She draws me in, a siren’s glance, a mermaid’s touch. I can’t help but step forward, close, inch by curious inch. Coffee bean eyes holding Chantale’s far longer than I’m sure is even possible, before finally I blink, my ears swivelling underneath her words.
”Mad. Mad?” I question, sharp poison lingering on my tongue, I chuckle, low, a witch’s cackle lost within me. ”The best ones are Mad. They know all, they see all.” a deliberate and harsh intake of breath. I’m astounded, in awe, lost in a gaze of star-struck amaze. ”they are all.”
I’d grown up on riddling song, damning rhyme and a concoction of death’s serenade. Black as night and cold as winter’s breath, I recall many things, seeing many things, but this creature, this deathly beauty before me was something else entirely. I was besotted. Obsessed. She reaches out and I do too. I inhale her, bittersweet poison, it coats me in a blanket and I just wrap myself up, feeling warm, pleased.
”What are you, Chantale. Who are you? Really?” A reaper, a cold and merciless sword at the back of necks, a glittering eye that lures them in. I’m hers within a heartbeat, she’s my future, my ticket to learning all I need. Like a wild deer I’m trapped, gazing at her with fond eyes and a heart that beats in rigid, unkept patterns. Slowly, I’m dying, slowly second by second, it’s excruciating but I cannot look away. I cannot be away. I must know. I must have what she knows.
Life. Death. She transcends time, space. She is a nightmare, a dream.
”I must know everything. I need to." my voice is crisp, falling leaves in autumn, warm, like the sun in a dying summer’s eve. A whisper, a dying breath in a loved one’s ear. ”I’d do anything to know.”
I’m the key. Without a lock. A Key on a chain that hangs loose from a jailer’s hip. To a cell of a mad man, or woman, rusty old chains and bars won’t keep me at bay. I’d knock them down if it were to find the answer. Anything. Everything.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
Herd tried so fucking hard with you, didn’t they? Jammed and crammed you into a mold never meant to old madness, never meant to hold killers like you. Of course, you could argue Herd would have been killers if you’d given them the opportunity (instead you left, a feverous whirlwind, her blood on your hooves and his on your lips, your terrible smile.
We can use all the similes we want – you were a square peg in a round hole, the wrong puzzle piece, a pawn in the wrong fucking game – but what it all boils down to is you didn’t fit in, you were never going to fit in, and nobody realized this until your baby was dead and she was dead and Prince Charming was dead and you were there, laughing and screaming and dead, too, in your way.
Dead she might be, but only barely, for the doesn’t rot – instead, she exists perpetually like a fresh-killed corpse, cool but not cold, stiff but not in rigor mortis. Dead she might be, but the years have passed since Herd and Prince Charming and in those years there have been children and women who smelled like saffron and a black king following her into the shadows.
And now there is a girl, dressed in her own weighty past, full of philosophy and questions too grandiose for my corpse masterpiece’s febrile mind to answer, especially when she preferred to watch her lips move rather than listen to what came out of them.
“I must be all, then,” she murmurs into her ear, close now, feeling the heat, letting it leech from her into her bones. The warmth is so sweet for a moment she thinks she might weep. What are you, who are you, beseeches the woman, who is breathing her in like a dying man, and it makes her old heart flutter at the bitter tannin sweetness of it all, dark wine across the tongue.
“I’m dead,” she says, “I died so I could live.”
That’s my girl, always so dramatic, proclaiming poetry to the sky.
“I died because I destroyed everything I loved and everything I hated and the madness rose up up up and the only way to survive it was to go down down down, into the crevasse, into it, and it changed me, it fixed me, it killed me,” she’s babbling, but there’s a frisson of coherence in her words, a hint of what happened as she lay across the swan-girl’s body, her coat stained with blood, saying do you love me now, do you love me.
“That’s how it started,” she says, and that’s half a lie because truth be told it started in her blood, when her mother leapt from the cliff to chase madness, when the baby died beneath the willow. It started every time Prince Charming took her, struck her, left her with bruise-jewelry across her withers, tears in her skin almost to the bone.
(The scars of those experiences – of all her experiences – are gone now, made smooth by her plastic prettiness, as if she is a blank slate begging to be writ upon.
I taste memory like the sour tang in the back of my throat; it’s long and dark and hard and cold, it whips across my face like a sharp smack against my eyes. I suppress is, the dull ache in my brain, the maggots and worms making their way out of the confines, the labyrinth lost within. My inky tendrils fall across my eyes, concealing, hiding the world through the — like little glass orbs an oracle might bend and bow over, they glow and they fuzz, cloudy memories jumbled and faded, some know nothing of them, but others see exactly what is being shown.
I see what is in front of me; she is death’s beauty, a taunting lie upon tantalising lips, she is everything I need to know, she is all I want to see. It’s deception’s ugly kiss upon my brow, just looking at her, feeling her close; there is a dullness within her, an ache like my own, but she hides it well, beneath the corpses and bloody trail she must leave behind in her wake.
’A Goddess, the keeper of the gates of hell—‘ my voice is spurred on with an excitement, a strange whimsy that piques me inside, it tears at my soul with wanton greatness and I let it bow and break me down inside. I’m all puzzles and questions, riddles and rhymes. I’m not like the ghostly queen before me, I’m a shadow, that stray ink blot upon that very important contract. I’m what you forget is there, but listens, sees. I listen to her, my ears twitch, black tips turning in, turning out. they absorb her energy, her song. And they hit me, knife-like and sharp, right through my heart, and I feel. it is the most I’ve felt since I lost the one within me; my blood, my flesh — gone.
’You are a sacrifice for something greater, there is more and more than meets the eye. Chantale, death’s angel, you are the missing piece in life’s great design. For what starts with life, ends with death.’ my voice is haunting, a lullaby to the dead at sea. I inch closer, her scent, decay, death, it invites me in, like the morbid little creature I am. I bend to her will, I feel her touch, I embrace it and outstretch my own velvet nose. Shadows and night, darkness and despair.
’That’s how it started — how will it end?’ My voice trails off into the dying breeze, even the air becomes stagnant and deathly suffocating. ’I’ll be anything you need, I must know all, I must know.’ obsessive, deranged. I am unsure but all I know is this ghoul before me, of whimsy and witchery, of death and decay, she is what I need, what I want to know, become, feel, surpass. I am a design in someone’s flawless plan, all I need is a job, all I need is a little encouragement. I’d bend the metallic will of man, I’d taste the blood of innocent children, if it gave me the answer, to find what I’m meant for, what lock I fit in; a key is useless without it’s lock after all…
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
What is it about you, that they fall so easy?
Maybe you have a nose for the macabre ones, the ones who’d wear black roses in their hair and romanticize death. Maybe they see in you a glimpse of the void and they want it, the same way they want death (and sometimes they’re one and the same because sometimes you kill them, you burn the things you love).
You’re beautiful, sure, but beauty isn’t hard to come by here, and besides, you hurt the eye ever since embracing that Playboy aesthetic. Too fucking plastic, too perfect, it makes you ugly, makes you strange.
What is it about you, that they fall, that they let themselves be cupped in your palms like baby birds, never realizing that your fists are iron?
A Goddess, a keeper of the gates of hell, she calls my corpse masterpiece, but she is not so grandiose. She is no goddess (can creatures so purely and queerly of the Id be deities at all?), she keeps nothing, guards nothing.
If anything she is goddess of whimsy, of slaughter, but those, too, are overly grandiose.
She is Chantale. A woman mad, a woman scorned, a woman dead.
“Yes,” she purrs like velvet, not because she agrees, but because she wants Nykeln here, pressed against her, she wants the warmth, wants the raven-black locks to spill across her body.
“Be mine,” she says, because she wants the woman prostate before her, wants to shackled to her, wants to have them belong to her again. (Just for the moment, though, surely this is just a moment, a heartbeat, ships passing in the night, crashing in the night)
“Say it,” she says, presses against her, cool skin warming from the girl’s heat, pressing tight like she could burrow into her, tunnel through veins and arteries to her heart, “say you’re mine, and I’ll tell you.”
She doesn’t know what she’d say but she doesn’t care, what she cares about is how slick the skin is beneath her lips and how the mare stinks of mania and it’s the sweetest thing she’d tasted in years.
