"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
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
The darkness set her nerves on edge. It was finally time. She’d seen something - a vision of some horse she hadn’t expected - and the suddenness of their arrival in her eyesight and the obviousness of where they were headed gave her more than enough information. She had accepted Santana’s help against her own better judgement, and somehow it seemed like that one simple action was setting a much larger chain of reactions into effect. Like a tsunami she couldn't avoid or even try to hold back.
Naturally, Eyas couldn’t sleep. She wandered on restless legs through Gale’s home, (her home now) and let the silent cadence of night creatures and the comforting feeling of a heavy, moisture-thick night lull her into a thoughtless sort of walk. When morning rose they should leave - herself and ‘Tana, maybe even Gale too - and head straight for the source of their problems, but for tonight she needed quiet and peace. Time to strategize and watch: to plan and ensure that things wouldn’t, couldn’t go wrong. Too much depended on them, and she’d lost plenty of sleep already for such a young life. What was one more night?
Slowing to a stop, the buckskin pegasus blinked and gathered in her surroundings, surprised to find that she was neither at the edge of the Island nor at the heart of it, but somewhere indescribably inbetween. She blinked again; nothing here seemed … familiar? Where was the grove of grapples she and Gale enjoyed feasting on? Or the faint stench of the bog that should be a few clicks ahead, to the northeast?
A body knows, but her mind was still a bit slow to catch up. “What in the --?” She looked left, then right. When she turned to look behind her the trail had disappeared, and Islandre’s (as she’d come to call it anyways, regardless of her brother’s failed mountain visit) stifling jungle had closed off any chance of retreat. There was only a brief opening ahead of her, and she didn’t trust it enough to step onto its low-cut, welcoming grass.
Eyas stayed put and narrowed her black-gem eyes, waiting with her heart in her stomach.
05-17-2020, 06:54 PM (This post was last modified: 05-17-2020, 06:55 PM by Carnage.)
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He is, quite often, beholden to his own impulses.
It makes sense, of course. His goals are different than most, for what kind of goals can be sought by a god? He has worship, a legion who will fall to their knees if he asks; he has children, hordes of them; he has love, even if it is a strange sort, warped, and spread between women.
What’s left is impulse. Brief flutters of desire to go here, take her.
Reveal this.
Pittances, to him – life changing (or ending) for others.
So it goes.
It’s such an impulse that he indulges, now, as he guides the girl from her land into this other place, this warped version. She is a stranger, but his blood is in her, as it is in most of Beqanna.
He makes the place flat, meaningless. A meadow, but closed off. A pretty cage, maybe. To keep her until he – what? Takes her? Breaks her?
He doesn’t know, yet. He only knows he wants her here, now.
He appears to her from nothing – a blink, and there he is, fully formed. He appears as himself, simply, gray-swathed and noble.
“Hello, Eyas,” he says, “what brings you here?”
A trick question, of course – he guided her here – but he is curious for her response.
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
ah - she should’ve expected the sudden appearance. Really, if she wasn’t so wrapped up in herself, the moment Carnage blinked into her line of sight might’ve been handled with a little better decorum than she shows. Her wings, inky black and dipped briefly at the tips with white markings, flutter at her sides in alarm. Eyas takes a step back, but the tangle of overgrowth prevents her from going any further. She’s left blinking and waiting instead, until he speaks her name.
A million thoughts race through her head, then, none of which alter her expression of astonishment. The first few are logical questions; is this place real or imagined? Fabricated, maybe? No; it’s not. One hesitant hoof rising and swaying over the grass tells her it’s not. The smells and sounds confirm her suspicions as well. Is he real, then? Something tells her she shouldn’t try to figure that out. The gray stallion’s presence is almost like an imploding star, heavy and boundless, dragging everything in towards the center of him - even Eyas. She feels compelled to draw nearer, even if the iridescent dun stripe on her back rises in prickling fear at the very thought.
She listens, fighting the urge without much success. His question has a strange effect on Eyas’s willpower, changing her earlier shock into strong curiosity, and hesitantly she reasons that any further resistance would be stupid of her. Very stupid. She gives in and ambles closer, thinking carefully before replying, “Questions.”
Late-night query’s about her father had kept her up. Perhaps she could blame her current circumstance on that train of thought which seemed to be most pressing right before she’d stumbled into this place. “Questions… that you could answer?” She guesses tentatively, not yet seeing the point of it all. Her eyes, similar to twinkling black stones, twitch every time they try to take in the shape of him. To her, his body is motionless but moving anyway. Blurry and incomprehensible to her feeble, mortal mind. But she feels… something deeper. Something inside of herself that stirs restlessly in his presence.
06-07-2020, 04:03 PM (This post was last modified: 06-07-2020, 04:03 PM by Carnage.)
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He drinks in the brief flash of her fear, her confusion, when he first manifests. He will grow tired of such things someday, he supposes, but for now, there is still a momentary pleasure in their fright, in his own intrinsic knowledge that he could undo her with a word, a blink of the eye.
He adds to the atmosphere, calls in a fog, thick and suffocating. Makes this an empty place, like some awful dream. He keeps the space between them clear, though. He wants to make sure she can see him.
He considers, briefly, making himself larger, more monstrous. But that is a cheap thrill, easy. He’ll settle for the fog, instead. Keeping her in this awful, unescapable dream.
She stumbles over her words, and he almost pities her. She was never meant to face a god – few were. It would be a mercy, to leave now, to blink out of existence and leave her breathless and questioning, able to convince herself it never happened at all.
But he, of course, is not a man of mercy.
“Questions,” he repeats – mocks – and he steps closer. All around them is white, and his voice echoes faintly. Questions, questions, questions.
“Questions about your father,” he says, “And I have your answers. To all those things you wonder to yourself.”
A pause, a breath.
“Of course,” he continues, “I’ll need something from you, first. You can offer, or I can decide for you. Quid pro quo, Eyas. Quid pro quo.”
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
Eyas had been in a dream not of her making before. A beautiful dream, one that Catcher had made for them, nothing like the gray void that this strange stallion called around them. His fog made this less of a dream for Eyas and more of a nightmare, and as the curling mist closed in on her and poured into Eyas’s black nostrils, she choked down her rising fear and anguish. He was everywhere. Everything. Inside and outside of her, outside of all time and thought. But he kept himself visible to her while the dark God turned Eyas’ soul inside and out, and though she felt a new sensation of indescribable pain coupled with the deepest regret and agony, Eyas locked her black eyes onto Carnage’s and she stared deep into his gaze.
Her words tumbled out of her mouth, betraying her, but the little mare waited and looked deeper. She knew better than to test her limit. She saw the fault in what she was thinking even while Carnage’s voice echoed through her bones, but Eyas knew most of all that she would continue to suffer anyway. He’d come to her. The small pegasus mare had to make it worth his while or risk a dark God’s disapproval.
If this is the case, she reasoned, I have everything to lose no matter what. Her thoughts sounded just as loud as any voice. Nothing was secret from Carnage.
“If what you tell me works,” She replied, her voice thick with monotony, zombielike, “I’d give you anything to have him back. My heart, my soul, my powers. Anything.” The unmoving buckskin admitted.
“Even my freedom. Would that work?” She questioned him, suddenly curious. She bore into him with her pitch-dark stare. “If what you tell me works, and I get my father back and the curse lifted, you can limit my will to one place and I’ll give up my freedom to leave. Forever.” She breathed, too little aware that she’d forgotten to mention where exactly she’d be stuck after all was said and done. The white void around her pressed into the edges of her vision, and Eyas felt that constricting feeling of being trapped forever in this nothingness. She saw Carnage’s depthless face and without a second thought about the possible repercussions, she fell right into it with her power.
Eyas saw unmitigated horror. She saw what could only be described as infinite hell, existing on so many countless planes between so many countless worlds. Depravity and torture assaulted her mind, the suffering of souls without end, on and on - she saw things no mere mortal should see, and her feeble brain completely rejected it with a blank wave of white death. Comatose instantaneously, the pegasus foamed at the mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head.
“That will do,” he says, “for the time being.”
He will reap his favors when he chooses, of course, in whatever manner he sees fit. But she does not have to know that – for now, he will take this promise of her freedom, feast upon it.
But then –
Eyas is rude, as he feels her touch upon her, her paltry powers at the feet of his godly magic, and he crushes her beneath it. He looses horrors, the cosmic madness that he’s known and tasted, the worlds and deaths and rebirths, the monsters, and he watches with grim pleasure as her body shakes under the barest glimpse of these things, as spittle gathers at her lips, as she falls.
He could kill her for this transgression, this vain attempt at touching him with any power that is not his own. He considers it for a beat, but decides to keep her alive, for now.
Instead, he chases her into the void of her unconsciousness, appears there, too, in the blackness. He is not seen, but he speaks, his voice echoing in her mind.
“It’s me, of course,” he says, “it’s my magic, that does it. It’s why it rots like a cancer inside your line. It’s why it can’t be removed. Except by me, of course. But why would I want to undo such a delight?”
He pauses, and his words echo, as if they are in some deep, terrible cave. Delight, delight, delight.
“I can be bargained with, but I don’t come cheap,” he says. Plants that diseased seed of hope in her mind.
Hope isn’t the only seed that’s planted in her, when he recedes from her mind, from the dark, he leaves her with more than the knowledge she’d sought. A child, meant for death but fighting through it, a tangible reminder of her promises.
