"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
I love the way you rake my skin, I feel the hate you place inside.
Few would know it, but she haunts the wood.
Invisible as usual, she can stalk them and all they see is a fanged grin if there is even that to see. Because at times, she cloaks even her sly smiling mouth and lurks, sometimes in light and sometimes in shadow, and sometimes giving them just the barest glimpse of a small horse that might have just been there. There are those few that open their senses so that they can smell her, or hear her but most attribute a fallen branch breaking to the eeriness of the forest despite the ghost-girl’s laughter that floats through it, disembodied and soft.
The forest is not all bad though, and she often hangs out near a charred bit of earth and ash that once held a mighty oak in its place. This is her favorite spot to haunt because it is where he found her, called her ghost-girl and made her his in a way that she never thought someone could make her theirs. Possession is an odd thing but she likes it, feeds from it as if it was the richest fruit on the earth - maybe even that elusive forbidden apple, and in her feast, she grows fat and happy on how he responds to her and she to him, predator and prey. For a moment, her grinning mouth is visible then gone as quick as it had come.
And there, in her part of the wood that she claims as hers and haunts from sunup to sundown, comes a pale stallion with a light lordly stalk as if he owns the place. As if every branch should break apart from him and the moss should cower back from his step. He is not familiar to her but then, none of them ever are and she thinks not of mischief as she looks at him as she would others, teasing them from inside the cocoon of her invisibility until they thought themselves mad and bewitched - his face warns against it, brooding and ruby-eyed. Still, Femur is intrigued and she follows him on quiet unseen feet until there comes a point when he seems to sense her and she stops.
It is as he looks around him, that she can see a tremor go through him as if he is losing patience by the minute. Was he expecting someone? Are they late? She is curious and that has ever been her downfall according to her mother. Too late for mother’s warnings now, she is stepping around him until she is almost face to face with him but still invisible. If he’s smart, he’ll smell her especially as she blows out a warm breath onto his nose and backs up a pace or two, curious to see how he’ll react.
Unlike her, many know where the wraith haunts. He considers this forest his just as much as the autumn lands he now rules.
An extension of himself. But his.
It would not surprise him to know others lurked much as he. The only question would be, how had he not found them yet? He made it his business to suss out those that may be useful in some way or another. To find the tricksters and the talented that may serve faithfully, to be exploited, to be a pawn in his many games. One of the wolves had found the ghost girl long before he but a wraith can connect with a ghost much better than a fanged canine can.
Perhaps he had caught glimpses of her before but always waved them off as unimportant in his grand scheme of things. It should have come to him sooner, that ghosts were real. He had haunted enough graveyards, he should have known better.
He stalks the dark woods with a darkened look hardening the lines of his pale face, a broodiness in the depths of red. Still not satisfied by all he has accomplished, hungry for more. His stride does not break or hesitate even as dewy moss attempts to cling to his coat, as twigs rake against his scarred backside. The little reminder of his brief meeting with Pazuzu, disappointed that he had disappeared so soon.
He’s looking for…. something. He never knows what it looks like, what kind of package it will be wrapped in. He just knows it when he sees it. The feeling of being watched, followed, soon crawls along his backside but he is silent. It wasn’t the first time he had attracted such secret attention. Coming to a halt, a ripple of irritation coursing along the muscles of his snowy shoulder. Grinding his teeth as he glances about. He doesn’t have all day. Surely there was something in these woods he was suppose to find…
A scent, mossy and wispy like fog, suddenly curls about his nostrils and he wrinkles them at the sudden arrival. A hot mist of air hits him, as if someone was breathing against his muzzle. A second of a pause, considering, before extending his neck and snapping stained teeth in the air about his face. There is magic here.
Gryffen
I'm so sorry this took me a billion years to do<3 @[Femur]
10-09-2017, 08:57 PM (This post was last modified: 10-09-2017, 08:58 PM by Femur.)
I love the way you rake my skin, I feel the hate you place inside.
Her father, the gift-giver and goat-king, had considered this Forest his. Thus, by extension, it is hers though she brings no gifts of bone and gore to lay amongst the exposed bark of root systems that break through the dirt. Femur digs no graves here, nor sheds a drop of blood for the trees to suck up like life-giving rain from rent clouds of flesh rather than storms. She has heard the tales her mother told as she suckled from the teat, of how Pollock and Sinew had a bond with this land as much as most of them do.
(This is, after all, where Sinew discovered the very thing that she’d name her daughter - Femur, after nosing about a tumble of bones from some other beast’s slaughter.)
If she considers it further, she could say this land is as much her birthright as Pangea ought to have been but what the gods make, they also unmake and that kingdom is no more. Just a bit of memory, shimmering like a spider’s web in the back of her brain because all her time has been spent haunting the Forest in a state of perpetual invisibility. It is better to scare them with fanged grins that float up out of nowhere because most of them are too caught up in their own thoughts to even notice her by something as simple as her scent.
Now that she has stepped back a pace from him, she can see him all the better with her black gaze. He is scarred all along his backside and it makes her wonder what he has tussled with to acquire scars in such a multitude and manner. What beasts does he know of? She can’t imagine those came from a bear or a cougar, let alone a wolf or a fellow stallion. Before she realizes it, Femur is inches from him when he snaps his stained teeth at her. His hot fetid breath hits her face and she in turn, wrinkles nostrils and jerks her head back, forgetting all about maintaining her invisibility in the midst of his sudden flash of menace.
Femur forgets that not all of them are tolerant of the things that go bump in the dark of the woods, nor are all of them even the slightest bit scared - like him, pale and scarred and full of snapping blunt teeth. She cannot help herself now that she is for the most part, visible to him and because of it, she lets out a little laugh. “Oops, guess I got too close.” she chuckles, sly as a fox as her black stare meets his red one. Femur ignores the fact that he seems irritated, or in search of something - she’s not quite sure which and it makes no difference to her and her fanged grin.
There have been many strange encounters in these woods with all sorts of dark beasts and shadows. The moment with Pazuzu had been short and sweet (spilling his blood as claws slice against the pearly skin of his back, all in the name to entice him to his cause) before the demon had disappeared just as quickly as he had come. He hadn’t left completely empty handed. Perhaps Zuzu would remember if he ever appeared again, the way his crimson plasma had been bled to appease him. The various strange criss crossing of the scars along his spine. The curious stirrings he had brought out with him, the sensuality of being seduced by one of his own sex. No, it hadn’t been worthless.
The other scars tell different stories. A handful speak of the Alliance he had once fought in, before he served only himself. Some speak of murder, defensive wounds as they fought for their life. One curls along his neck where Deimos had placed talons as he determined his worth. Some are more recent, affectionate marks in his flesh made by his ravenous bluebird. In the end, they all found that his barking confidence matched his bite.
His teeth make no contact except with the air, however they seem to stir his stalker enough that she is suddenly standing mere inches before him. Just a head and a neck and some slightly visibly legs. His irritation fades quickly as the crimson of red bore into the endless black of her eyes. Lightly tracing the protruding fangs that peek from beneath her upper lip.
Now that is exactly what he’s been looking for.
She laughs at her little joke and a slow smile trails along his own pale lips, the bleeding iris’s glittering slightly in the pale light. ”Now what’s a nice ghoul like you doing in a place like this?” He teases lightly despite the hungry gleam in his eye. Seeing her worth instantly and craving to add her to the ever growing collection of useful trinkets he owns.
I love the way you rake my skin, I feel the hate you place inside.
Beasts and shadows are the least of her worries in these woods; she’s never had an encounter that set her teeth on edge and made her think never to come back here again. Besides, her best encounter happened here with a beautifully lethal stallion whose skin was a combination of an abalone shell’s insides and the blue hour of dusk. Nevermind his teeth on the skin of her neck and how her pulse leapt against his tongue or that he took from her a few precious drops of her own sweet ruby-red blood. Oh how she remembers it! Strange but passionate, and she had aligned her fate next to his whether the stars desired it or not.
Now it brings her another encounter that has begun strangely enough - -
Her eyes become overly familiar with his scars and she imagines all sorts of ways that he came by them. She’d ask how he got that one and this one if she could but something makes her bid her tongue and keep the quiet just that much longer. It is a sort of eerie suspension of thought and precarious quiet, strung tight as a wire that binds her to the spot before him in the fullest extent of her existence - meaning, that Femur is for once entirely visible and not winking in and out for the hell of it like she so often does. He has fresher furrows in his flesh that speak of some kind of tussle, nevermind that it has been one of a sexual nature and she does not recognize it as such.
He needs neither to bark nor bite for her to know that he is not one to be easily trifled with. The scars attest to that much as her black gaze roves back to his face. He is looking her a little more keenly than Femur thinks she likes, it has a different appeal to it then the way Longclaw looked at her but there are similarities. His slow smile might not be meant to frighten but it has that kind of effect. Not so much so that she is scared and shivering from ear-tips to hoof-tips, just that it is kind of chilling how their gazes lock and she sees the hunger come into his eyes. It is a familiar hunger but she’s not sure which kind, as that has yet to be determined.
He teases back and calls her ghoul, this puts her a little more at ease with him. If only because Longclaw called her his ghost-girl. Ghoul or ghost, Femur knew she was an odd little haunt and her answering grin showed that she knew it. “I hardly think anyone who is here at this hour is nice.” What she doesn’t know is that he finds her worthy or useful, she’s never been either of things in her life thus far except to Longclaw but that is a different kind of worth that she holds like a secret close to her dark little heart. “Besides,” she adds. “I like the woods at this time of night, don’t you?” It is meant to be a little challenging, just to see how he responds.
