"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
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
The world is not the same.
It has not been the same since Beqanna imploded and drew itself in. Since it spit itself out, reformed and reimagined. But the world is not different because of these things. It is not different because of the years that it took for her to regain her magic that was not magic—that deafening silence that she carried within her—but rather because of what happened in tandem. That boy born of a magician who wove Fear into Etro’s heart. The boy who had sucked in air and left her passed out on the Mountain to find his first kill just a few hours into life, striking Fear into the heart of an innocent women and pulling the life from her.
And she powerless to stop it.
The world is not the same, but she is, in many ways, exactly who she has always been.
She is muddy and unremarkable, her hips sloping at awkward angles, the impossible blending of breeds leading to an impossible tangle of too long limbs and wide chest and plain face. She is neither the metallic beauty of her Akhal Teke mother or the foreboding power of her Percheron father.
She’s just Etro.
She’s just Etro and there are still constellations that spin through her veins. There are galaxies trapped in her mouth, impossible dynasties rising on her tongue and trailing behind her. And there is still him at the center of it all. The impossible monster with crackling lava skin and smoke curling from his nostrils.
He who she had promised she would think of. And she has. Oh, he is often all she thinks about. When she wanders this land that is home but no longer home. The land where her parents do not call out to her and her family does not pass her by and there are no Deserts for her to run to when it all gets too loud.
The only thing that keeps her anchored here at all is the idea of him.
The memory of him.
So when she sees him tonight, so similar after all of these years, she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, cannot find the power in her to do anything but stare—eyes widening beneath the matted mess of her forelock, lips parting ever so slightly to draw in a rattled breath. It is impossible, and yet—
And yet it is not, because he is here.
He is here and she does nothing but watch.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
What began with a broken rabbit grew unchecked, and it festered like rot under his flesh. No, he has never been well, but the sickness consumed him, it rattled his ribs like prison bars and devoured the pieces that once upon a time a girl with an unremarkable face (and galaxies for eyes) had unearthed.
For eons (or seemingly) he has been lost, growing feral - hunting, maiming, slaying; reaping.
Now he is standing, satiated, over the wreckage of something that had been someone once; a pile, at last, of steaming blood, charred flesh, and glaringly white bone, thinly veiled by the melting snow that falls like ash around him. He doesn’t remember what made him hungry for death (that her face resembled one he knew before, that she turned her back to him without hesitation just like in a distant memory), but regardless he is satisfied with the display before him; the cruel juxtaposition of her blackened flesh and bloodied bones against the clean snow.
A rattled breath draws his eyes up across his massacre (his prize), and the sickness inside of him will recognize her before he ever does. It weaves itself through the spacing of his ribs and draws them in tight.
As often as he steals life, he isn’t accustomed to seeing ghosts.
(End her.)
(End her.)
(End her.)
It mewls into his mind, and when at last he moves forward (and here, note the crack of bone as he walks carelessly across the remnants of something that once was someone) he means to end her. He thinks about the blood boiling in her veins, and about her muddied brown flesh heating, sizzling, over her bones (wonders, briefly, if the cooked flesh will fall from her skeleton and expose her raw truth at last). He hears the crack of bone in his mind, a beautiful premonition, and the edges of his lips curl with his sickness.
The snow around him melts
It always makes way for the reaper.
And that’s when he remembers - because the snow stops melting, and the heat in his body simmers then settles, because the cacophonous ring in his mind quiets, and the pull on his ribs loosens. He doesn’t say her name, but his body screams it in all of its awkward inconsistencies. This close he can hear the drum of her pulse and it’s deafening, but he can’t decide if he’d prefer to silence it or drown in the music of it.
She has always made the sickness softer.
She was born to end wars, though she’s only ever started them in him.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
Etro is not blind. Etro knows exactly what he is. What he does.
She knows that when she leans in, she is only pressing the knife into her belly. She knows that when she skims her mouth over the dangerous edges of his knife that poison is coating her lips. She knows that she dances with darkness whenever she is with him, that she is inviting into her life, trapping it in her breast.
But she doesn’t care.
She has never cared.
Her breath is trapped in her throat, the wings of her pulse fluttering on the edges, and she is trapped in the steel of his shark eyes as certainly as if she was the mangled bones at his feet. She doesn’t move as he begins to make his way toward her, as he cuts his path through the snow, the edges of it melting and folding away. She just watches him, wondering at how time has not seemed to touch him, at how he looks as if he had simply stepped away and out from her own memories, as certain and unchanging as heaven.
Rather, perhaps, as certain and unchanging as hell.
But she does not have forever to spend suspended in her own disbelief, her own joy, because his presence pierces her own bubble and he is near her, as silent and sullen and normal as she remembers.
And she forgets herself.
She closes the distance between them, a soft cry escaping her mouth—the sound lyrical and lifting. She presses into the ash of him, unafraid of how he might retaliate, only able to remember how she had once embraced the Gift Giver in the same way when his gifts had blinded her to reality.
But this is not a trick. This is not a lie.
This is him, and it is her, and she can taste the charcoal of him on her tongue.
He may dream of ending her, she knows, and she doesn’t bother to hide her throat. She just leans up, running her ruddy lips against the angle of his jaw, breathing in the familiar scent of sulphur and the coppery scent that she chooses to ignore. Just as she ignored that which laid at his feet.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters but the closeness of him, and she breathes out a sigh. “Kingslay,” his name a prayer on her lips, a prayer that has lived for years on the tip of her tongue and is finally realized.
“Kingslay.”
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
09-14-2018, 12:21 PM (This post was last modified: 09-14-2018, 12:24 PM by Kingslay.)
KINGSLAY
“Kingslay,” she breathes.
He forgot the way his name on her tongue could prickle the skin along the mountains of his vertebrae; though he is crafted of fire and brimstone, he’s never felt the heat before this moment. A flash of movement, of flesh and fire, and there are pieces of them, then, that come together like Pangaea; a disastrous alchemy of things they dare not name, realized at last. And they could almost be lovers, the way their bodies know one another, the ebb and flow of flesh and bone as they map together all of the forgotten hills and lonely valleys. Almost, until he takes the apple of her throat into his teeth and the wicked curl in his lips spans from jugular to larynx.
They almost were, once.
Once, when she had spilt the contents of her heart out before him and he’d turned his cheek for something better (perhaps if she had written out her thoughts in blood instead he would have noticed). And he had seen the contents of a heart, matter-of-factly, a thousand times or more before that day - dissected ventricles and valves, laughed (if one could call it laughter) against the red spurt of an aorta here or there - but that moment was nothing like the others.
(End her.)
His gut churns; a sickness flexes its knuckles, and clenches fist over every organ he owns. He throws flames against her that whittle themselves quickly into sparks, then smoke. With her pulse in her throat, and her throat in his teeth, the only tangible malice he can offer is the one he holds fast against.
But he doesn’t bite.
He wants to. He wants to bite against her skin and feel her trachea as it bends and folds to his whims - to hear her suffocate, choking against his teeth. He wants to tear her apart from her seams; watch her unravel, and then, to marvel at the insides he sets loose to face their own impending finality (and O, to see the contents of her heart then!). He wants to wear her skin across his own back, hide-to-hide, to feel her against him until the inevitable rot robs him of the luxury as she falls to pieces, hair-by-hair.
He wants to. He wants to bite against her flesh - to feel her trachea bend and fold at his whim, and to hear her suffocating as she chokes against his teeth. He wants to tear her apart at her seams - to watch her unravel, and to marvel at the innards and organs set free to face their own impending finality (to see the contents of her heart then!). He wants to wear her skin across his back, to feel her against him until an inevitable rot robs him of the luxury as she falls to pieces hair by hair.
He wants.
Instead he mumbles, teeth to her throat:
“Are you thinking of me now?”
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She is not surprised when she feels the pressure of his teeth against her, when she feels the way his mouth wraps around her throat, the threat of it clear and writ into the moment. She should be surprised, but she is not, and she doesn’t move; she doesn’t fight the moment, doesn’t fight the pressure, the way that he hungers for her blood to spill silver across the muddy meadow floor. She has known from the very beginning who and what he is. She had known from the first time they met, the coppery tang in the air biting into her conscious, of the blade in his hand.
So she doesn’t fight it—doesn’t pretend that this was not always where this was meant to go.
Instead she just takes a deep breath, tipping her head back so that she can look at the stars, so that she can take in the heavens, relishing this moment where he takes his life between his teeth and cradles it instead of crushes it.
“I am,” she whispers to his mumbled question, the motion of her voice causing her throat to ripple between his teeth, the pressure uncomfortable but not unwelcomed. “I always think of you, Kingslay.” She wonders how many different ways he has imagining undoing her. How many different ways he has seen her strewn across the floor, her heart taken apart and still beating for him, forever beating for a monster who does not know how to love in return.
For a moment, she imagines that she feels the heat of him increase, his teeth warming and she doesn’t reach for her gifts any more than normal—does not wield it as a weapon like she had against the Gift Giver—but still, its smothering effect calms whatever brews beneath his flesh. “You can, you know,” she finally says, her eyes still on the sky above them, her pulse slow and looping. “You can take my life, if that’s what you want.” Part of her wishes that she could look him in the eye while she says it, but she supposes that if she is going to lay it down before him, it doesn’t matter.
“It’s always been yours to take anyway.”
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
There are a thousand ways she could come undone, and he’s imagined each of them. Fire is often his first choice, but he’s thought of other ways, too. In his dreams he’s watched the earth devour her alive on a whim. The ground under her feet became sloppy, and the mud would suck at her legs, then belly, then neck. He’d watch her go down, down, down - until all that remained were maybe the points of her ears, or a tuft of her mane.
And when the air was electric, and lightning split the skies into halves he would wonder what would happen if it lit her up instead. He would imagine the air reeking of singed flesh and ozone; fresh and foul all at once. Or he could undo her in the rain that followed. How beautiful she would look with the water beading off her back and eyelashes as her eyes rolled white with fear when it became too much, when it choked her.
“I always think of you, Kingslay.” She says, and he can feel her pulse.
(She lies.)
His disease is a dying animal inside him - it rattles his ribs, it screams, and it howls, thrashing as it fights for the footing she’s gaining. If she’s lying, it’s a lie that Kingslay wants to believe, even if he doesn’t know why. With her neck strained and extended, and the roll of white in her eyes as she swallows against his teeth, she’s never been less plain. And he has never wanted something so completely.
“You can, you know,” she says, then. She must be sick, too, to call out to him again, and again, and again.
“You can take my life if that’s what you want. It’s always been yours to take.”
(She lies.)
(She would have come for you.)
(She reeks of someone, something, else.)
It isn’t wrong entirely. He’d come for her once - nosed through the deserts like a lost dog looking for its master, and even stood ground with Yael opting for mercy instead of murder. And all she did was disappear into the horizon. All she did was reek of Him.
But theirs is an impossible gravity; a monster and its master.
And as quickly as he took her, he lets her go. He could lie, too.
“And I’ve never taken it. I’ve never wanted it, Etro.” He says, reeling backward from her, from the alien feelings she stirs in him.
“I’ve never wanted you.”
And for the first time in his existence, he’s cruel just because he wants to be.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
His words should cause her soul to crumble. They should cause her to thrash in agony, coming apart at the cruelty, breaking beneath his heel. She is but a silly girl, after all, and her heart beats for him—it beats for him and he has discarded it, he has tossed it to the side, so callously shrugging off her offering.
And there is a part of her that recoils from it, shuddering within her, seeking shelter from the hard edges of the monster that she has always loved. There is part of her that nearly turns and runs, turning on her haunches and racing toward a skyline where nothing awaits her—no family, no home, no love.
But, she has never been ordinary and she doesn’t respond normally. She doesn’t flinch and no tears stream down her cheeks. Instead, she laughs, the sound silver bells—rippling as it escapes her mouth and swells in the space between them. She shakes her head with mirth, plain lips upturned into a hint of a smile.
“Of course you have,” is all she says, because she has seen the way that their souls have collided, she has seen the explosion that it detonated, the constellations burning between them. She watched it in the Deserts and in the meadow and she watches it now. She has always known the truth of it, and regardless of the space and time that stretches between the detonations, she recognizes the purity of it.
She doesn’t fear the fire and the fire of him.
She doesn’t tremble before the icy indifference.
She sees straight to the core of it, and she looks there now, her plain muddy eyes piercing him as she watches, her gaze both sharp and loose, a casual hand keeping control of the conversation. “You can’t lie to me, Kingslay,” her voice is softer now and for a moment, she almost takes a step toward him, forcing him to live within her immediate proximity, but she doesn’t. She lets him have his space.
“I’ve wanted you,” she confesses, although it doesn’t feel like a confession when it is so obvious. “I have always wanted you.” She laughs again, shaking her head and looking upward to the heavens that reel as they look down on them. “I remember when we first met,” the memory causes an ache to spread in her. “I would have sacrificed everything for you—right then and there. My family. My home. My birthright.”
It didn’t matter that she was to be a princess.
It didn’t matter that she was part of a loving home, the powerful kingdom spread out before her.
None of it had mattered from the second he had stepped into her life.
“I loved you immediately,” another truth, almost casually handed to him.
"I suppose I will always love you."
Let him do with that what he will. Let him live with it.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
A noise in the distance (leaves rustling, and snapping twigs) means that his ears quiver and pivot, lost in the flames that craft his forelock and mane. It’s happened before. Why wouldn’t it again? Here and now, they’ve come full circle. He feels his muscles winding tight, coiling like springs. He feels thirsty and hungry all at once, and if he were capable of it surely now he’d be salivating from his aching jaws. He slants his head to better view the meadows edge from his peripherals. He is mere seconds from leaving her again.
It’s happened before.
But then she laughs, and somehow everything is different again. He’d forgotten the way that her laughter could sound like music in all the noise and static. It was the only remarkable thing about her.
(End her.)
And something happens that hasn’t before - he forgets the rustling along the meadows edge, smothered it with the sound of her laughter. She is speaking, and he is listening, and somewhere inside of him a monster is choking. And when she laughs again it devastates him. He remembers when he turned the sand into glass, left a monument for her in his wake.
Was it love?
(End her.)
She’s spilling truths. She should be spilling blood. It’s a waste because most of it means nothing to him. He has never sacrificed anything before. He is a god. He is a reaper. He has no family, no home, no birthright. The weight of all of it is lost.
“I loved you immediately,” she says, at last.
“I suppose I will always love you.”
If she’s looking for a reckoning she’ll only find disappointment. This is not some grand culmination of all of the years they’ve spent desperately wanting the things they didn’t understand. There is wreckage all around them. The only ending she is likely to find is her own.
(End her.)
It’s a desperate, whinging plea now. He listens, partly.
The skies above them grow dark and angry. Clouds come together at his beckon, and a quiet rumble fills the spaces between their breaths. The air becomes electric, because he asks it to be. Slowly, the snow and ice around them recedes as his flames grow hotter, stronger, and the earth under her feet becomes soft, and wet, and sloppy. For a moment the mud only shudders, and then it begins to crawl forward, finding footing on her legs and spiralling up, and up, and up until she is belly-deep and stuck fast.
And then he moves forward, imagining her blood heating. It would be uncomfortable at first, unbearable next, but he is careful not to kill her. He still wants her alive.
“Is this love?” He growls against her ear, his teeth finding a patch of soft skin just behind them and raking across it. He draws a line of ash across her body where he moves, not all of it his own.
“Is this what you’ve always wanted?”
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
Etro has no expectations.
Not with him.
She never has.
She’s always known exactly what he was. She loved him for it. Loves. She knows the disease that seeps underneath his veins, dragging his eyes from her and a future to the immediate satisfaction of snapping bones. She knows that he has tasted blood the way that she tastes water. That he has drunk from the fountain of life and been unquenched, always hungering and thirsting for a destruction beyond her scope of understanding. She knows that he is the reaper and one day he will come for her.
She knows.
She knows.
So she doesn’t flinch when the sky above them begins to to grow dark, the clouds snapping with his own anger—bare in its simplicity, raw in its primal nature. She tilts her head up slightly to consider the way that the wind whips around them. She feels the negation within her stirring and she inhales it deep, taking it into her belly and trapping it for a moment. Let him have this. Let him have this moment.
The mud crawls up her muddy colored legs and she welcomes it. Her blood begins to simmer, and she allows it. Once, when she was a star-eyed girl, she would have been frightened by this. But not now. She is not the same girl she was when they had first met and although her hips still slope awkwardly and her proportions still don’t quite line up she is stronger, more certain, more confident in it.
At his question, she just looks at him, calm in spite of the way he presses the knife to her throat, the way that it nicks the flesh, the blood that wells. Is this love? he asks and she just smiles, the expression almost dreamy. She inhales at the feel of his teeth against her, the ash he leaves behind, the slight burning of hair and flesh. “It could be,” she answers breathlessly. “For us it could be.”
Is this what you’ve always wanted?
She laughs, silver bells in the middle of the summer storm.
“I told you - you’re all I’ve ever wanted.”
But then the power in her ripples and she laughs again, the sound taking on more of an edge.
“Enough.” The word is powerful in its own right and she releases her gift, letting it balloon within her, reaching out to smother the fire in him. Her eyes are brighter than they’ve ever been when she looks at him but she doesn’t say anything else, just lets the fires smolder in their wake.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
The lightning grows it’s crooked roots into the sky, and the roll of thunder follows with a crash immediately. He’s held her to the dirt, but she throws her head into the sky and lets the wind touch her. She’s an angel in the chaos, and even he can see it. His teeth and lips are still against her skin, and if you ask him he will deny it, but there are pieces of him creeping in that can’t bare to move away.
“It could be,” comes the answer he isn’t ready for - the answer he’d never be ready for. “For us it could be.”
And then she laughs, the bitch - she fills the air with music between the lightning strikes and clash of thunder. It’s a sound that ruins his resolve, that leaves him quaking at his core (and reapers never tremble). This is it. This is the culmination of everything they are. These are the moments they say goodbye. He can feel it.
Because he’s never noticed her power before - that she is a god, of sorts, too.
He’s never had a reason to.
They came together like these flashes of lightning, intermittently and without notice, and never long enough to know more than the feeling of an immediate electricity. He doesn’t know she’s feeding him pieces of humanity just by being close. If he did, would anything be different?
“I told you - you’re all I’ve ever wanted.”
And then the laugh warps.
“Enough.” She says, and at first he won’t understand.
At first he’ll still think of a thousand ways that she can come apart, but then the power in her will swell between their bodies and hit him like a brick wall - and suddenly, he’ll be exposed. The flames along his body, the fire in his wake and burning up the trees around him, it will smother, become nothing but pitiful pyres of smoke and ash. The mud holding her fast will recede back down into the earth. The monster in his ribs will silence.
He doesn't think about the witches, and the trenches they carved into the skin of his ribs. He doesn't think about anatomy, or sickness, or heat.
And Kingslay will say:
“I love you, too.”
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
