02-15-2021, 10:19 PM
stifled the choice and the air in my lungs;
better not to breathe than to breathe a lie
Tiercel has been waiting for this moment since the eclipse first began. He has wrapped their home in a thicket of peace to dissuade the predators he has heard in the darkness. He has starved himself from sleep in favor of keeping watch, eyes flickering between Islas’s sleeping form and the heavy shadows around them. He has pinned his ears and armed himself with weapons of emotion when rocks chip from their brothers and sound like monsters in the night.
During all this waiting, fear has been creeping in the back of his mind. Would he be able to protect them if the time came? Could his meager, mortal body and nonviolent emotions be enough to keep his family safe? After all, Tiercel’s body can heal itself, but he would not be able to push death away from Islas or their child. He has been plagued by this potential event since the darkness first descended, and now that it has finally arrived, he finds that the fear gives way to a powerful surge of adrenaline.
Islas’s voice is a whisper among the clattering of the rock-lion’s form, but Tiercel catches it. He clings to it, using those four words as a catalyst to fuel him. For a moment, the creature’s head swings toward her white-black form (and two souls would be much better than one, for whatever purpose it might have), and Tiercel does feel terror grip him then. But he yells a strangled noise that carries no words and charges the beast, feeling his muscles tighten beneath the instinctual force of a dance between fight and flight.
“But I’ll protect you with my life if it comes to it.”
Those words echo in his mind, on his lips, within his heart as he springs.
Tiercel feels everything happen in slow motion, and yet there still isn’t enough time. He is springing toward the rock-creature, ears pinned into that black-white-blue mane and a snarl darkening the sharp edges of his face. The lion’s glowing eyes face him again, and though Tiercel can’t sense emotion within the thing, he feels as if those twin flames will burn him alive.
He catches a flash of Islas’s face — a snapshot of her soft face that makes his heart splinter into a hundred pieces — just before the rock-lion springs to meet him, to shove him off-balance with a force much too powerful for a typical feline. And Tiercel is falling through the air to the left, slipping through space in slow-motion, and he feels his stomach drop.
The lion’s eyes glow brighter suddenly, expanding into balls of fire that seem to ignite the lake below. The pressing darkness bursts with color, and Tiercel realizes the lake is not exactly a lake anymore. It is swirling with colors — so many colors, but the most obvious one is a prominent shade of blood-red— and so brilliantly-bright it hurts his eyes. Though it seems liquified, the lake’s core swirls downward into the earth as a tornado turned upside-down.
It is all he notices — Islas’s ethereal face, the swollen eyes of the lion, a swirling portal of blood — before gravity pinwheels his body, and he blacks out. When Tiercel’s limp body reaches the lake and seems to be sucked into the tornado, the lion crumbles into a dead pile of rocks.
And Tiercel’s unconscious is an endless song of Islas’s voice (“I can’t leave you”) echoing in the realms of a place he might never get away from.
During all this waiting, fear has been creeping in the back of his mind. Would he be able to protect them if the time came? Could his meager, mortal body and nonviolent emotions be enough to keep his family safe? After all, Tiercel’s body can heal itself, but he would not be able to push death away from Islas or their child. He has been plagued by this potential event since the darkness first descended, and now that it has finally arrived, he finds that the fear gives way to a powerful surge of adrenaline.
Islas’s voice is a whisper among the clattering of the rock-lion’s form, but Tiercel catches it. He clings to it, using those four words as a catalyst to fuel him. For a moment, the creature’s head swings toward her white-black form (and two souls would be much better than one, for whatever purpose it might have), and Tiercel does feel terror grip him then. But he yells a strangled noise that carries no words and charges the beast, feeling his muscles tighten beneath the instinctual force of a dance between fight and flight.
“But I’ll protect you with my life if it comes to it.”
Those words echo in his mind, on his lips, within his heart as he springs.
Tiercel feels everything happen in slow motion, and yet there still isn’t enough time. He is springing toward the rock-creature, ears pinned into that black-white-blue mane and a snarl darkening the sharp edges of his face. The lion’s glowing eyes face him again, and though Tiercel can’t sense emotion within the thing, he feels as if those twin flames will burn him alive.
He catches a flash of Islas’s face — a snapshot of her soft face that makes his heart splinter into a hundred pieces — just before the rock-lion springs to meet him, to shove him off-balance with a force much too powerful for a typical feline. And Tiercel is falling through the air to the left, slipping through space in slow-motion, and he feels his stomach drop.
The lion’s eyes glow brighter suddenly, expanding into balls of fire that seem to ignite the lake below. The pressing darkness bursts with color, and Tiercel realizes the lake is not exactly a lake anymore. It is swirling with colors — so many colors, but the most obvious one is a prominent shade of blood-red— and so brilliantly-bright it hurts his eyes. Though it seems liquified, the lake’s core swirls downward into the earth as a tornado turned upside-down.
It is all he notices — Islas’s ethereal face, the swollen eyes of the lion, a swirling portal of blood — before gravity pinwheels his body, and he blacks out. When Tiercel’s limp body reaches the lake and seems to be sucked into the tornado, the lion crumbles into a dead pile of rocks.
And Tiercel’s unconscious is an endless song of Islas’s voice (“I can’t leave you”) echoing in the realms of a place he might never get away from.
tiercel.
@[Islas]