"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
07-07-2020, 01:22 PM (This post was last modified: 07-16-2020, 01:00 PM by ghaul.)
GHAUL
And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire
He paces atop one of the Pangean plateaus. His talons leave deep marks in the dry clay while an irritated growl lingers in the back of his throat. Yadigar was nowhere to be found and yet no one seemed to know precisely where his son had gone. The idea of leaving Virgil and the girls makes him uneasy, and yet he can’t stand not searching for the boy. Had anyone entered the Cove to snatch him, an alarm would have sounded and Gospel would have defended her home. Did he leave on his own, then? Or was he lured away while he lazed in the meadows?
He spits, furious and leaps down from his perch to ground level. His wings spread into an easy glide and then a gentle landing. Ghaul sniffs at the air or whatever path he figures his son must have walked. The air is stagnant with a lack of violence as it is, he thinks. Perhaps he will punish the other regions until one of them confesses to taking his child from him? He pauses in his steps and taps a large claw against the dirt in thought. He could take their heirs, maybe even devour them one by one for each day Gar is not returned to him. But perhaps that is too cruel. He will tear only a limb from the children, then.
But he is plucked from these thoughts at the sound of someone coming closer. He turns his head, curled horns swinging suddenly as he sniffs in their direction. Their outline is difficult to discern from here, but he feels no desire to meet their approach.
“If you don’t have good news, then keep your distance,” he warns, snapping his teeth to make his message clear.
Breach has never been one to think twice about exploring. She has spent her entire life flying the coop to explore every inch of Beqanna. Her mother has never stopped her either. Sochi has loved watching her daughter take to the skies, to the oceans, to the earth. Watching her learn the various forms that her body can take and the many ways that she can explore. Watching her master the gift of shapeshifting.
Today though there is something other than wanderlust that simmers in her blood.
It has been weeks since she has since Yadigar. Weeks since she has been able to uncover the path that her friend had taken and the worry begins to scratch at her incessantly. It is a worry that she cannot ease. A fear that makes her veins run cold when she wakes and realizes yet another day has passed.
It drives her to the kingdom in the form of a hawk, taking to the skies and scanning below in hopes of finding the dragon wandering his homeland. What she finds instead is something that looks similar, so similar in fact that she can only deduce that it must be someone related. His father, perhaps?
She dives down and shifts when she is close to the ground, standing and shaking her neck to release the tension that she has been holding there. “Hello?” she calls before she hears the snapping of his teeth. The sound startles her, but she is too much the child of Risk and Sochi to feel anything but anger at the threat.
“I’ll keep whatever distance I want,” she replies coolly, her dual-colored eyes growing hot. She straightens for a second, her tail twitching although it barely reaches above her hocks. “I’m looking for my friend Yadigar,” she studies the monstrous’ creatures face, looking for recognition to strike.
“Do you know where he is?”
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire
I’ll keep whatever distance I want.
So little ever infuriates Ghaul, but today his temper is raw as burn wounds. Today anything could ignite his divine wrath. He turns to look at her – a small thing, roughly his children’s age. She smells of the Cove and he creeps closer as his talons scrape along the parched earth. Would Yadigar tell her if he intended to flee? Perhaps not; the child was so secretive of his plans. But he would turn to his friends if he were in trouble. Gospel would hear the sirens if someone came to take him. The crooked king concludes he has left of his own accord, then.
But where to? Where would he run to as his escape?
Ghaul bumps his nose to her face and examines her roughly with a series of clicks and gibbers as he thinks. Isilya would alert him if the boy wandered into their home while Lepis would reject the child in fear of breaking their contract. To the north, then? A low growl builds in the back of his throat. Adrenaline seeps into his veins as his rage burns hotter, his limbs trembling to contain the growing storm between his ribs.
“Maybe we can bring him home, if we work together,” he says with a grin smearing across his scaled face. The stars along his cheeks all begin to glow red as little sparks escape the back of his throat. Yadigar is terrified of sacrifice, of bloodshed. While Ghaul expects bloodshed and prepares for it, his heir recoils from the mere idea of it.
“You care for him, don’t you? You would give anything to save him… wouldn’t you?”
She knows so little of fear. Neither of her parents raised her to know its face, to know the taste of it, and she doesn’t feel it now. She feels war drums in the back of her head, something hot and indignant in the back of her throat as the monster approaches her. If only she knew how her mother had reacted when she had faced off against this very thing. Perhaps she would have the strength or the cunning to shift and not just watch him with a guarded glare, her dual-colored eyes shielded, her mouth steely.
Breach lifts her chin a little as he walks closer. “I’m not sure I want to work with someone like you,” and it sounds braver than she feels, more resolute. She straightens her shoulders and all of the creatures that she knows so intimately flee her when she sees the sparks in the back of his mouth. Because there is no creature she knows that would not be set ablaze at the first sign of a spark.
There is nothing she knows to shift into that would protect her from that.
So instead she remains as her self, pale and blue, and she doesn’t let him see her fidget. He presses against her face with his scaled clicks and touches. She hisses a little, the sound angry. “I would give anything if I thought it would help,” she peels her lips back a little and her teeth have shifted into those of the large cats. It is not much, but it is something, and the touch of predator makes her feel more herself.
“But I have a feeling you won’t ask for something that will help.”
A flick of her tail as she looks where eyes should be.
“So my answer is no.”
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire
Ghaul has never known fear. He has seen it in the eyes of others and watched it flicker out as they passed into that eternal sleep, but he does not know how it makes the heart race. When Breach speaks, a snarl rasps from his throat, and with it comes a plume of flame. Her hiss makes him grit his teeth as he listens carefully for her reply. The wild dragon cannot see her pointed teeth and so they do little to deter him when he pushes forward, testing her ability to resist his strength.
“If you will not give, then I will take,” he says with another snapping of his teeth. The hour of destruction grows near and he has no time to negotiate any longer. He breathes a short stream of fire and immediately follows it with lunging jaws aimed right for her face. With a twist of his neck, he slings her to the ground and plants a claw over her throat. The thick taste of blood coats his tongue. He pauses long enough to lick the red fluid smeared across his lips before looking down at her.
“I will rip your legs from your torso and bring them to him, as a gift. As a warning,” he explains as he lowers his head to hers. “He will obey or he will join you in death, and Virgil will take his place.”
His other foreleg reaches forward then and those ragged caws grip the upper portion of her leg. Ghaul gives a light tug as he tries to discern how much force it might take to simply tear the limb from its socket. “Take a deep breath now. This will be agony,” he says as his grip on her throat tightens and he presses his weight onto her throat. “On the count of three. One..”
But he is not true to his word. He begins to yank at her limb as he sinks his teeth into her shoulder to hold her in place. Ghaul’s head thrashes like a ravenous dog for several long moments until the leg comes free at last. The monster skitters back excitedly and examines the scene before him: a blur of red, a pool of white, and the outline of a warm limb separated from its master.
He grins and lifts his chin, issuing a series of croons and cries until a small colt comes hurrying to his side. Ghaul snatches her limb up in his teeth.
“Get her other leg and meet me in Nerine,” he commands the boy before spreading his wings and taking flight. Virgil turns to her then, his golden eyes watching her with detached curiosity as he edges closer.
Death comes quickly. Quicker than she would have expected.
She doesn’t shudder when he snaps. When the fire touches her. When he lunges. Her mother would be proud, she thinks, of how brave she is when she looks down the barrel of the gun. She shifts into a tiger then because it is the most comforting form that she knows. She swipes and bites, does everything that she can to mark him even though she knows it’s a losing fight—it was always a losing fight.
But she doesn’t beg when he has her pinned.
She doesn’t whimper when his claws are to her throat.
Instead she arches and hisses, blood streaming down her face—staining her coat. “I hope he drags you screaming into hell,” she manages through her gritted teeth. “I hope his is the last face you ever see.”
It’s the final thing she says before her first death.
She feels her leg disconnect from her body in a haze, as her vision goes red and then blurry. She feels her body come apart and she floats above herself, as the veil between life and death stretches, snaps.
When he skitters away, leaving the boy in charge of disassembling her body, she is barely holding onto the connection to her body. She watches in a way that she will never remember. Watches as her first body lies broken and strewn across the ground, her blood feeding the earth underneath.
In the moment, death feels infinite, overwhelming, eternal.
It would be easy to sink into it. To never come back into this body of pain, to never let the weight of the agony sling across her shoulders, but there is a fluttering of something on the edge of her consciousness.
Yadigar.
She thinks of him in death and her eyes flutter open.
Born anew.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in
