The endless night doesn't bother her. Even without the cat's-eye pupils Beryl would move through it as if it were day, confident of her steps. The darkness is part of her, and if there are monsters hidden away within it, well... Well.
She isn't exactly an angel.
She can hear them stirring off the path, but they have mostly left her alone. Perhaps it is the way she moves between them undaunted that keeps the beasts at bay, or, perhaps, they also feel that pulse of familiarity between her magic and theirs. They have the shadows in common. They have blood and violence in common. She suspects deeply that they do not have the same motives, and that guilt doesn't burn their throats raw like it does hers. They never seem to be running from anything, but Beryl? Desertion and remorse are her constant companions.
She runs her tongue over the point of her canines, lets her eyes revert to normal, large and liquid and nearly black in the unnatural darkness, but the river reflects enough light that she can see well enough without the magic. At the water's edge, darkness meets darkness, horse-shaped but soft at the margins, merging into the shadows around it. She mistakes it at first for Cassian - a silly thing to do, as if he were the only black horse. The memory of his blood staining her teeth and claws makes her stop abruptly, lips drawn back in a rictus of repulsion, but he was never so velvety dark as this. She remembers how even with her walls high around them his skin had held its gloss. Even in this twilight, the sheen of his coat would define his shape.
So this is someone - something - else. They remind her of her own creations, of the lions and the horses and the xenomorphs she has crafted out of magic, and she reaches out from afar, from the place she has paused among the hawthorns at the edge of the forest path, to touch that darkness, seeking answers. The head swings, and eyes red like coals find her as if she is not wrapped in shadows wrapped in the dim, dark, dusk.
Red?
"Your eyes," her head tilts, curious, wary, confused, "they're the wrong color."
She isn't exactly an angel.
She can hear them stirring off the path, but they have mostly left her alone. Perhaps it is the way she moves between them undaunted that keeps the beasts at bay, or, perhaps, they also feel that pulse of familiarity between her magic and theirs. They have the shadows in common. They have blood and violence in common. She suspects deeply that they do not have the same motives, and that guilt doesn't burn their throats raw like it does hers. They never seem to be running from anything, but Beryl? Desertion and remorse are her constant companions.
She runs her tongue over the point of her canines, lets her eyes revert to normal, large and liquid and nearly black in the unnatural darkness, but the river reflects enough light that she can see well enough without the magic. At the water's edge, darkness meets darkness, horse-shaped but soft at the margins, merging into the shadows around it. She mistakes it at first for Cassian - a silly thing to do, as if he were the only black horse. The memory of his blood staining her teeth and claws makes her stop abruptly, lips drawn back in a rictus of repulsion, but he was never so velvety dark as this. She remembers how even with her walls high around them his skin had held its gloss. Even in this twilight, the sheen of his coat would define his shape.
So this is someone - something - else. They remind her of her own creations, of the lions and the horses and the xenomorphs she has crafted out of magic, and she reaches out from afar, from the place she has paused among the hawthorns at the edge of the forest path, to touch that darkness, seeking answers. The head swings, and eyes red like coals find her as if she is not wrapped in shadows wrapped in the dim, dark, dusk.
Red?
"Your eyes," her head tilts, curious, wary, confused, "they're the wrong color."
@[Torryn]
@[The Monsters] y'know what? lets see what happens to that super speed she never ever uses, but please don't mutate up