"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
There is silence all around him.
He is alone in the dark, lonely hour of the night. The canopy of the forest above him shield the light of the moon and stars. He takes a quick breath in, tasting the scent and air. It growls at him, the hunger inside of him—he must hunt.
Tonight he will.
He moves forward, through the frosted shrubs and frozen ground, in his canine form. A creature of midnight black fur and scales with red and yellow glowing eyes. It is the shape he often stays in; the way he was meant to come into the world.
A message, an omen.
They made him into something chaotic and violent. Capable of more things than they might have thought him to be. He was a weaponry, a tool that was created to be used. His will was bent and formed to serve the dark. And he was a prime choice to have and use when needed as he lived by no moral code.
He simply listened and obeyed—wickedness was all that was required to have.
The pace of his movement had picked up some time ago. He twists around the trunks of trees and jumps over roots and plants that come into his path. The hunger is searching, calling out into the darkness for anything.
It wants to play; it wants to eat.
Most of all, the hunger wants to rip bone and flesh and eat.
Suddenly, the earth shakes beneath his paws.
The black hound draws to a halt, sniffing the air around him. The silence no longer feels peaceful as it once did. There is an eerie feeling, it crawls up his spine and makes his hair stand up. His ears flick here and there, searching and listening. The hunger draws in, beating and listening in the eerie silence.
He does not feel afraid though, there is something that quickly brings him to relax as the eerie silence consumes him.
Something telling him to not be afraid.
The ground shakes again beneath his paws.
It’s closer than ever now. A smell draws his red and yellow eyes into the distance, making out little in the forest covered by shadows.
The scent smells of burning flesh and sulphur are stronger than ever in an instance. Then suddenly there is a deep howl, just around the corner.
He whips to the way the howl comes—No, it’s not there.
Then there is a deep growl, several in fact. The black hound turns around quickly. His eyes quickly take in the forms of wolf-like creatures shaped and made out of molten lava.
He does draw back from the creatures of that are dark and frightening. There is something familiar in the way they are made, just as he is made. Something dark and chaotic creature them, just as he had been created. There is some untold relation between them almost, a brother some might call it.
But he simply finds them a comrade—a message and omen just as he is.
And he already knows what he must do, no words need to be spoken, no force of chasing him where he is called to be.
He follows them willingly.
They run together, like he is one of them, a servant to this unidentified thing that calls to him.
He is a servant always though, molded and thrown into the world to serve the dark only.
It is the hunger that drives him forward, the heart of a servant that guides him towards the lair.
Come, and be transformed.
It speaks to him, calling him out of the world of darkness and into the light.
He submits to the call. Not because he is afraid, but because the very will of him wants and desires to serve.
There is something maddening and powerful about this so called stranger.
He must know more.
Eventually, the pack arrives at the lair.
He does not stop in his tracks as they do, he eagerly enters into the lair that lays underground. The scent of the lair stinks with death and smells of dried blood. There are bones laying all around him. Some of them he steps on, snapping and breaking.
He doesn’t stop, not until he is in the heart of the lair.
“I came just as I was asked,” he says boldly, but not arrogantly.
He is here to serve after all.
I have the tendency of getting very physical, so watch your step 'cause if I do you'll need a miracle.
Dahmer.
The starlit sky and the warmth of his body coiled up so closely to her own had been enough to lull her weary body and tired mind into a deep, but restless slumber. The finely preened feathers that line the hollowed bones of her winged appendages twitch and stir, as a soft and restive murmur emerges from her pale, parted lips. The crease of her brow is furrowed, as uncertainty and ire tread through the thick mire of her tireless reverie. She is drawn away into a dream that has begun to sift through the darkness of her insecurities, reviving an old ache within the hearth of her chest that she had long thought forgotten.
(She would never be enough – bitter, broken, she would never hold any heart captive).
Blearily, and with a sharp intake of air that leaves her lungs prickling with a twinge of discomfort, she is roused from her slumber by a willful exclamation of her name. The apprehension bleeding its way into Dahmer’s usually solemn and steady tone is enough to incite her own wariness, as the heavy haze of a nightmare she cannot quite shake clutches tightly onto her consciousness.
There is an edge of annoyance ebbing away at her patience, frustrated that what little rest she had finally been able to obtain had been stolen away from her – but as the golden flecks of her watchful hazel eyes finally begin to adjust to the insidious darkness that has hidden away the celestial display that had lulled her to sleep only hours ago, her heart, too, has begun to hammer in her chest.
She can sense them – the malevolent wickedness seeping from the skin of the otherwordly wolves, carved of fire and magma and exuding the very fervent heat that so often enveloped the volcano itself as it rumbled and poured thick, pluming smoke from the crevice of its peak. Slowly, cagily, she is stirred from her complacent composure, pulling herself to stand on her slender, but shapely legs, as a shiver traverses the length of her spine. Dahmer has already begun to press against her, interlocking the stark ivory of her feathers with the deep sable of his own, and she can very nearly feel the ferocity of his frightened heart thrumming against her gilded shoulder.
Her breath is taken by the sight of them – blistering, snarling and prowling closer. Their mere presence is a warning to her of the potential that each of them had to lunge forward, seize her throat beneath their dripping, magma-encrusted fangs, and spill the metallic copper of her blood onto the moist and fertile soil below. Go, a voice urges her, thick and laden with urgency, and her heart is thrusting so ferociously against the restraint of her ribcage that she does not immediately recognize the bellowing voice as belonging to Dahmer.
Go! -- he cries, she has pivoted, fleeing away from the molten creatures with shrill screeches and oozing magma blossoming from the fissures of hardened rock that lay roiling across their bright, white-hot flesh. Her gaze is fleeting, flittering between ensuring each footfall is made with precision and might, while clutching onto the familiar, but bleak and dim silhouette of her once lover against the sordid, shrouded cloak of blackness as it slowly fades into the ether – leaving her alone, petrified – with a slowly creeping rage engulfing her in its entirety.
Her golden skin parts for thick, bony spines that begin to protrude from her shoulders, along the length of her spine and up across her withers, rising from the tangles of her flaxen tresses. Her bone structure had reshaped itself with each broad and sweeping stride, enveloping her in a tight formation of elongated bone spikes, emerging from her parted flesh at varying lengths across the surface of her body.
A shrieking scream of seething wrath is brought forth from the column of her throat as she lunges forward, sprinting toward the dark and humming shadow of the stirring volcano itself – with the unbearable heat of the wolves birthed from the scorching heat of the Earth’s core grazing the back of her hind leg - and her breathless charge is closer to the hidden cavern carved into the side of the towering mountain, closer, closer -
And then, (suddenly!) there is nothing, and she is entirely still.
She cannot move - abrupt and rigid, she is held captive in place by an unseen force, frozen within the stifling humidity of a darkness that her desperately searching gaze cannot quite see. The wildness of her terror and her fury surges the heavy blood through her pulsating veins, fueling her thundering heart and nearly consuming her. She is ensnared, powerless to break away from the dark and devious magic holding her in place, while her lungs fill rapidly to and fro with a large intake of oxygen, her rage and vehemence filling her chest cavity with the bitter, acrid bile of hopelessness.
”Dahmer!”, she cries out into the endless abyss of the dark and dank cavern. A heavy haze of dread obscures her sensibility, and her simmering anger is lit like a once extinguished flame, rousing a frantic and frenzied storm within her rapidly racing mind. What had become of him? Had he made it? Was he .. alive?
”Ledger?”, she whispers, not knowing that he, too, has been taken, with fear and uncertainty gripping her heart. Would she ever see him again? A sorrow she had never known before, enveloping her and threatening to swallow her whole – the thought of him, wrought with anguish and wretched melancholy, coiled up around the small and lissome bodies of their newly birthed daughter and son – her heart is aching, her heart is torn –
And an echo penetrates the broken affliction of her mind, come, and be transformed -
Her ire is a scalding inferno, burning brightly within her mind, as a long and deeply suppressed breath of air is released with a deep and powerful roar of frustration, her rage engulfing her in the fury of its flame.
You want to stay but you know very well I want you gone; you're not fit to fucking tread the ground that I am walking on.
