"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
Flickers of awareness, tastes of days that I can't pin down, they flow across my mind with little impact. It's easy to wade through life in this fog, every decision based on some deep down instinct. I think I have met others on my way, voices clouded with vague connection. I huff and grumble when the sounds collide against my awareness, pressing on my barriers so persistently. Until one breaks through.
Then my feet turn to the edge of the world. Where there is nothing but sand and bones in varying states of decay. The world rushes in with deafening speed. I know where I am. The knowledge is a razor edge to my gut, cold and so sharp I don't notice it until it's too late.
He's there on the beach, a stallion like any other until he fixes you in his gaze. Then it's unthinkable that you ever thought him anything but terrifying. A tremor runs my spine, infinities birthing and collapsing in the space between us. The Dark God. A tale to make foals behave to those who don't know any better. A grim reality to those who do.
He speaks, and I couldn't ignore him if I tried. The words embellish themselves on my mind with searing clarity. The well worn blanket of resignation settles on my back, and I find myself nodding grimly. He asks me to die again. Is that all? To find the weakness in the wall, to be his eyes and ears. The corners of my mouth turn down, ears tilted to a petulant angle. Only when he moves in do I flinch.
Death is not something meant to be gotten used to. It is not a mundane experience, no matter how many times it finds me. Each is unique, violent. Beautiful, in its way. That knowing does not prevent the wet gasp that I expel when the Dark God's teeth sink into the length of wood I've been tasked to carry, a pulls it out with a sharp jerk.
The space of one broken heartbeat is frozen as the shaft falls with a dull thud to the sand. Then the dark chasm of my chest begins to overflow. Blood. Thick, hot and arterial, it pulses out to darken the beach and fill the air with my copper tang. Directly from my heart it pours, and with every weakening beat, I feel myself getting further away. The ache is replaced with a spreading numbness, and then I feel nothing at all.
I feel naked without the spear. Isn't that perverse? The shaft of wood that has skewered my heart for days unnumbered is gone, and with it the Voices that filled my head. All is quiet, and I find myself uncertain what to do with the silence. So I focus on something, anything else.
The stampede of souls rushing through the Afterlife is a haze of greys, a river that begs me to join it. Run with them for eternity. It's a temptation I've been offered more than once, and every time been called back. How foolish would I be to think that maybe this time would be different.
It's nothing to kill a child, a simple thing, and one needn't be a god to do it. It does not require magic, nor any great force, and if it is not extravagant or devastating the way the other deaths are, there is a cruelty and a coldness to the simplicity of the way he kills her.
But that isn't starting at the beginning.
At the beginning, she is lying tucked against the warmth of her mother, strategically separated by the mare's body from her older brother who sleeps peacefully beneath one great red and black wing. The mare sleeps, too, though she rouses when they hear His voice. Manikin does not look to see if Avocet awakens, too, her goldenrod eyes open into the deep blue of a night giving way to the sun and they search fruitlessly for the black shadow of Him propped against the dawn.
Nothing.
She trills a sleepy question and her mother replies, a soft guttural sound, the mare's black-rimmed ears flicking back and forth as the Speaker speaks, and Manikin knows that Popinjay hears the summons but her mother remains prone and murmuring, her nose pressing into the soft earth of their flowering nest. The sickness holds her firmly in its grasp, she will not leave the Pampas today.
Manikin stirs though, because she is not sick, and because she does not know gods or magicians. She does not understand that they can be fickle or careless or cruel, and if she did know those things, she would not care, because the promise of an adventure is enough to pull her from the already-dubious safety of her mother's warm side. She stirs, and she stretches, and then she leaves them without looking back, following the tug in her heart from the safety of the flowering fields an impossible distance. There is no time, there is no weariness, the child finds him at the beach having crossed an insurmountable distance for one so young, she finds the grey stallion where the waves crash dark and thick as blood onto the oily black sand. The sight of so many around him sets her to growling, her voice high as a kitten's, and her yellow eyes flicking from one face to the next.
Some are already dead. A white mare vomits panicked rats onto the beach and when one passes by her, Manikin pounces on it with beak and claw. Even its blood on her claws is black - so unlike her own, startling and red, pulsing from the puncture wound on her paw where the rat bites her just before being snapped up in a sharp beak and shaken to its death, the soft click of its spine breaking almost imperceptible. The little chimera drops the stilled body and, grumbling, inspects her paw - little hurts, little wounds, but toes bleed like rivers. The rat bleeds as if it is filled with oil when she plucks its head from its body, and when she picks it up again, the taste of the black blood that smears across her teeth is strangely sweet as though it is already rotten.
More faces arrive. They are rent and burnt and bludgeoned. She ignores them all except for the angry way her young feathers stand up along her crest, tufted black at their tips and the rest still sheathed, itching to be broken free of their keratin shells. When she finally reaches him, the child does not stop, not in awe or fear or respect - she has none of these things in her - but she drapes the cooling body of the black rat across his fore hoof and presses her bleeding paw to his forearm leaving a crimson stain.
"Locusts."
Manikin snaps her beaks and smiles her strange smile. She loves locusts, they make up a significant portion of her diet.
You'll have to die first, of course. She thinks that death is like sleeping, and the filly is suddenly weary, suddenly so tired. Black eyelashes flutter like moth wings and she lowers herself to the ground beside the grey, beside the headless rat, and lays her head upon the foul sand with a sigh. Manikin sleeps and thinks that she is dead, but she isn't. Not until a weight falls like stone upon her ribs and her yellow eyes fly open in panic. She screeches and yowls and scratches at him desperately, because like the rat, she will not die without fighting, but she can do nothing to shift the grey hoof that presses, presses, until her lungs scream for air that doesn't come, until their hunger becomes starvation and their starvation becomes darkness.
It is the smallest effort, on his part. Like a snake, he simply outlasts her bodies need for oxygen, and without it her vision goes dark, her limbs limp, though the right paw remains hanging a moment longer where one lion-cub claw snags in his skin, and from the stage of her small body he can still kill those that follow, unperturbed by clacking of her hind hooves striking violently against each other in a cadaveric spasm.
Manikin, dull and dim, her edges blown blurry by a wind unfelt by the mortals still living, swats at her own feet as they rattle together.
08-07-2020, 09:51 PM (This post was last modified: 08-07-2020, 09:52 PM by frenzy.)
You promised to keep her safe, so she is your ward for the rest of your days.
Father’s words echo in her head as she paces the kingdom, her hooves digging deep furrows into the earth as a confusing mix of emotions runs through her. Yadigar was supposed to be her protector, but he hasn’t been seen in the East in several months. It leaves a bitter taste on Frenzy’s tongue, and with Ciri’s abrupt departure not long ago, Frenzy feels less and less welcome in the nest.
She was the child that wasn’t meant to exist, after all. She loves her Not-Mother well enough, and she knows that Clarissa adores her, but there is a resentment that she sees in those golden eyes sometimes. She is Ghaul’s daughter, it is true, but that is the only allegiance that Clarissa owes her. She supposes that with any other woman, Frenzy would’ve been scorned and cast aside to die, and for that she is appreciative to the dragoness.
But it doesn’t exactly inspire loyalty, so Frenzy is the next to abandon the nest, leaving behind a forlorn Phyx and a young Virgil. Perhaps Clarissa will feel some relief, with over half of her children moving on.
It is the call that echoes in her mind that finally inspires her to set off from Pangea, curiosity and fire both heavy on her tongue. Once upon a time, her birth mother had been captured by the Dark God, and so perhaps there is a reason Frenzy is so drawn to the call. Naturally, Cress had not exactly been around to tell the story, but she had been weakened with age. It is no wonder Yadigar had been able to overpower her so easily.
A familiar scent fills her nostrils as her hooves dig into the sandy beach, but Frenzy isn’t sure of what it could be. It reminds her of her traumatic first few hours of life, but she doesn’t quite understand it as the scent of death.
Not yet.
There are others here too, of all shapes and sizes and colors, but the only one she focuses on is the nondescript grey stallion - there is something sinister about him, and fear grips the filly as she listens to his declaration, of there being something beyond death and him wanting them to be the ones to find it.
But they have to die first.
Carnage turns to each of them in turn and Frenzy shudders as each one finds death in one way or another, and then finally his gaze finds her. Suddenly calm, she pulls herself to her full (but still fairly small) height, swallowing back the fear in her throat as her world turns to fire. He has taken control of the flames in her chest and manipulates them to make her burn, and she screams until her lungs melt away and her flesh turns to ash.
As it turns out, dying is easy.
It is pure instinct that she draws in a rattling breath when she is pulled back to what resembles life, only duller. She has no need for air in her lungs anymore - she’s dead. They all are. Slowly, she climbs to her hooves in this muted world, trying her best to shake off the feeling of dread that envelops her. What if she can’t get back out?
08-07-2020, 09:52 PM (This post was last modified: 08-07-2020, 10:00 PM by mae.)
he put her out like the burnin' end of a midnight cigarette he broke her heart and she spent her whole life trying to forget
There are worse things than dying.
She has been alive long enough to know (though the actual length is fractured - a few years surviving the Disruption and all its perils to die from a trivial thing like foaling). There are fates worse than the one that waits for them behind the Gates that Carnage himself had helped open. There is living life in various shades of gray, devoid of color, bland as the coat she wears.
The Beqanna she remembers had been colorful enough; the one she has come to know now is practically flamboyant.
Mae feels him in the back of her mind. It flutters there as her eyes flutter shut. She has never known Him but the presence that touches her psyche holds strokes of Magic and genius, an artist just waiting for the idea to materialize into the corporeal. There is something I would ask you, He says and she is quiet. (Even the Shades knew of Carnage. Even in the Afterlife, they knew to waif and wisp away when the Dark God brought shadows into their realm.) Meet me at the Beach.
Oh, she knows that Beach. She has died on it once before, bleeding out from her half-heart and then leaving Coca-Cola’s daughter with the stench of death clinging to her newborn coat.
She comes because he asks. She comes because she is a weak creature. She comes because she is curious. He had been the one who had created the torrents in the Afterlife and it had been one of those stray currents that had brought her back. Carnage has been the cause and creator of so many things and the gray mare finds herself just wanting to know. So she stumbles and ambles across Beqanna.
(She will be one of the last to come because she does not know this new Beqanna. Mae wanders the paths and trail of her memories so they lead her nowhere. Not until she finally gives up on remembering.)
Until she finds a group gathered. They are young and old. Some are burdened with sagging shoulders and some hold their heads high as if they’ve never known they could be shoved into the ground. Some look like they don’t care at all - like her, a blank slate of indifference as the Dark God speaks from the center of his self-proclaimed pulpit.
(Her eyes linger on the curve of his cheeks. There is something of him - from Desecration perhaps? - that makes her think of Pawn and even now, centuries later, the thought of him leaves her hollow. Leaves her all the more vulnerable to this Magic.)
Maybe because she is one of the last to come or perhaps Carnage knows that watching the others die will tear her apart slower, the bloodshed ensues. Some torn by limbs, a child who volunteers, another who vanishes like a shadow. One by one they go down, all offerings at this altar that has been conscripted.
Finally, he looks at her. Mae is wide-eyed but she does not shake. What will he do? she wonders. The pale mare thinks of every terrifying possibility but the Dark God does nothing until he smiles.
Something that seems far more awful than anything she could have imagined (not that she was the most creative of mares). Her heart races and his smile grows, ghastly. The pace goes frantic and wild until it - her heart? - feels heavy. It feels weighted like it is full of stones instead of fear. And then it does the impossible because this is the Beach and here, they are only fit for dying. Because they are in the presence of a God and He crafts their Deaths to his delight.
It bursts in serrated shards. It cuts her from within. Her weak, fickle heart is no match for a Magician's grasp.
Like before - with Ashlynn - she bleeds out on this Beach. Mae is dead before her body even hits the sand.
When she opens her eyes to the haze of the Afterlife - back to into the world of mists and half-light - the others are here on this desolate beach standing with her. And now, perhaps, some of them know as she does (or will come to know): there are far worse things than dying.
Maybe if she hadn't been wandering the red-clay wasteland, she wouldn't have come to his call. Maybe if curiosity about her father hadn't sparked her fickle interest, her future would be entirely different.
But because it suits her fancy that day, she heeds the summons like an obedient dog. She doesn't mind playing by the rules now and then, and the beach isn't far from where she wanders - a garish, teal speck on the red plains.
Tangerine had said her father was a god, but when she sees him, Celest is vaguely underwhelmed. Underwhelmed, but not surprised. Her mother had always possessed a flair for the dramatic and an attachment to long-winded stories.
As she arrives Carnage begins to speak, almost as if he had waited for her. But as his intentions register, she realizes she may have made a mistake. This was not a place for a girl like her; she wasn't one for quests, and this wasn't how she was supposed to die.
She had seen that.
With a snort, the gem-toned mare tries to step back, but finds she is rooted. She is helpless as the ocean reaches up, snapping iron-clad shackles around her delicate ankles. She no longer doubts the power of her father as the screams begin to echo around her, but the others seem to fade as the water continues to rise around her legs.
Taking it's time, the deadly tide inches higher, slowly covering every place of her, haunches, withers, throatlatch. The iron-rich dust of her travels colors the water around her a sickly-orange, and the air is thick with the scent of her fear. Relentless, the sea ranges on, covering her eyes and finally her mouth and nose. Violet eyes wide below the surface, her head lifts, her muzzle reaches for the grey sky. Of course, it is not enough. She fights for one last, deep breath, but as her heart hammers, less than a minute passes before her body is forcing open the passages of her throat and nose in a desperate attempt to get her the oxygen she needs. Her body overrides her mind. Gasping, she drinks deeply of the saltwater as it snakes down her throat, filling parts of her that should never have been filled.
The panic fades with her consciousness; on her cheek, she feels the gentle warmth of a kiss from her mother, the soft, I love you, from a should-have-been lover.
For once, her gemstone eyes are softened as she casts hesitant glances left and right, and sees nothing but the ghostly-plain, and the spirits of those she had just stood shoulder-to-shoulder with in the life she lost.
She has known the silence for as long as she has known anything - known the existence of it but not the absence, for how could one miss a stranger they’ve never met. She has seen the evidence of it, too - a roosting bird set loose from a low branch long before motion warns that a predator is nearby, or the small brown mouse that scurries away into its den seconds before a wide-winged shadow streaks past like a phantom beneath the sun. In the wildest storms she has even felt sound, felt the vibration of stone against her shoulder while she waits in the gut of a cave for the rain to pass.
Sound is a ghost, but she does know it exists, even if not for her. And it’s okay, because she’s come to believe maybe she is a ghost, too.
So it feels like a dream when suddenly her mind is filled with something she can barely fathom, with noise that is like melody, sounds all strung together like shining lights and etched at all their edges with a vibration she imagines she can feel in her temples and her cheeks and those violet lips that part in quiet wonder. ‘There is something I would ask of you. Meet me at the beach.’ She clings to each word like one might cling to a lover, exploring each curve of every syllable before moving on to marvel at the next. She tries to repeat them back, like saying them aloud might forever carve them into her memory, but when she speaks there is no sound. There is nothing at all and the loss is an agony that is entirely new to her. The beach. She thinks, almost feverish with the need to hear more of that voice in her head, more words she understands when she has no right to.
The beach.
It is another thing she knows to exist, but not from personal experience. Her home is among forests made of trees instead of bones, with branches instead of broken ribcages. There are flowers full of butterflies instead of bellies full of rot and festering maggot. But these are not things that seem to hold any kind of weight in her thoughts as she makes her way towards this new true-north her heart clings to so naively, towards the potential for more of the voice that had filled her mind and built a home there like a cuckoo, chasing everything else away. It is her own gratification she thinks of as she follows the river west to the ocean, and then further still. And though she has memorized every word he carved into her mind - every pause and syllable, the exact tone and shape of every word - she has neglected to consider what it is that he might ask of her. In her gentle wonder, she thinks there is nothing she wouldn’t give him in thanks for this gift.
She knows she’s arrived more by smell than anything else - it is a cloying kind of stink that greets her readily, climbing her legs and over her dark skin until it touches the violet points of her delicate face and climbs into her nose to fester. It is the first warning, the first feeling of doubt creeping in as those quiet brown eyes slowly take everything in. There is a crowd gathering together like drops of dew in the belly of a leaf, pulled together by the gravity of a man who isn’t a man at all. Does she even belong here? But then he speaks, and even though the rest of the world is entirely silent, the waves crashing soundlessly and the scavenger birds with beaks hanging open in a noiseless, perpetual shriek, his voice is exactly as she remembers and she is soothed again.
But these words are different than the ones that came before, and even though she finds herself still bashfully enamored with the sound of his voice, with the fact that sound even exists at all, she can also feel the start of unease prickle along her spine. She catches like a burr on the phrase see what things lie beyond the world of death, feeling warmth drain from her body as though someone has filled her with holes. She wants to tell him that she is sorry, that she isn’t made for a task like this. Isn’t strong or clever or brave, isn’t any shade of remarkable. But no one else moves, no one speaks unless they are doing so without moving their lips, and so she is quiet too (as if she has a choice, as if she had any idea how to build words and string them together in this beautiful way that he can). She has already decided she will not go, but her head turns and that gentle gaze wanders along the beach in the direction he tells them, wondering not how one might enter the afterlife, but instead what a buzzing noise might sound like. It is a curiosity that makes her smile in a quiet, secret way.
Or at least it did, until he pauses and looks at them and tells them to die. It is nonsensical and surreal, and she frowns and steps back, uncomfortable but unafraid until the dying begins.
When it is her turn, she is like a doe beneath that gaze of stone, trapped by his immensity and her own insufficiencies. She can hardly stand the way he watches her, like he knows things she does not, like she is a cockroach he’s just found hiding in his home. For a moment nothing happens and she wonders if she’ll be free to leave after all, if he can see that she is not strong or brave or special, that she is no good for this task. She takes a step back, turns, though her quiet eyes have found a gravity in him that feels wholly impossible to sever.
Then she hears it, hears everything in sudden, soft clarity. The wind in her own hair, the wind in his, in the sand and the bones and the wasted bodies she is so earnestly trying not to notice. She can hear the carrion birds and those cawing, shrieking sounds, the ones that must go with those gaping beaks she had noticed earlier. She can hear the ocean and all of its immensity - the distant waves like a whisper, and the nearest ones like a whoosh-shush as they collide with the beach and disappear. It is so beautiful, so painfully perfect that she is finally able to tear her eyes from him so she can turn and look to take it all in. There is such a gentle kind of love in her eyes, such a wistful smile on those pale violet lips. She almost doesn’t notice how the sound is climbing, how the serenity of the world around them is creeping towards storm, and then from storm to inferno as she winces back and away, all wild eyes and pain. The wind is a whistle in her ears, the birds a blade with their screaming so amplified. The ocean has given up whispering for shouting, for a sound that even now continues to change as she backs away mindlessly, the whites of her eyes flashing.
She has known the silence for as long as she has known anything - known the existence of it but not the absence, for how could one miss a stranger they’ve never met.
But this stranger is a blade buried in each eardrum, and she is on her knees as every single beautiful sound reaches a fever pitch decibel that saws her open. There is blood streaming like plasma from her ears, bright red and beautiful if it were a color that belonged to anything other than this moment. There is blood in her eyes too, and she blinks rapidly at a world tinged crimson and shrinking small around her. She tries to cry out, but he has given her no sound of her own. It was never a gift, never a blessing, she realizes too late. She is crumpled now, her legs crushed beneath her and the sand all stained with her rust. The sound has gone beyond volume, and she can feel it now in her bones as it vibrates to a point of detonation, reaches a tangible pitch that shatters her bones and shreds every blood vessel in her body. She feels like paper, like the wing of a butterfly.
She retreats to a place inside her head where pain turns the dark behind her bleeding eyes the same shade of burning black as the sand beneath her. She might’ve apologized if she had any strength left to do so, any strength left to even pick her head up off the ground where she lay. But there is just nothing inside her now, and even as the sound finally fades there is nothing left inside her heart to feel relief. There is only this new silence, familiar but for the one thing that stays soft in her dying ears. It is the sound of her own shredded heart thumping wetly, slower and slower, and then there is nothing at all but a death she now welcomes readily.
When she opens her eyes again, it is like waking from sleep, and for a moment it is easy to believe that it had been nothing but a dream. But as her quiet eyes focus on the world around her and the details begin to take shape, she feels that deep emptiness swell again in her chest, a cold fist wrapped around her heart. It must be wrapped tight, because she cannot feel it beating inside that cage of bone anymore. She blinks, and part of her just wants to close her eyes again, but she is not foolish enough to think that He is done with her. So she stands, and she finds that she is glad for the way this world is only a few shades of gray, because at least it means she cannot see the stain of bright crimson splashed beneath her body anymore.
He is compelled forward into the unknown by the unknown.
He is not willing, but he goes anyway. He goes, and he resents every step that brings him closer to the unnamed voice inside of his head. Hasn’t he survived long enough without the pull and pulse of others around him? Hasn’t he made it clear that he wants for nothing, wants only the freedom of the clear skies and a strong wind at his back? Don’t they know to leave him be, to leave him to his own devices or risk getting burned?
What is it they say about dancing with dragons?
Sabrael drags his feet the entire way, but he cannot deny the magnetic draw he feels towards this particular spot on this particular beach. He’s never been. He’s never felt the desire to linger on the shores of the damned (though surely countless carcasses have washed ashore by his own doing, at least those of the deer and boar and other assorted animals). But today that changes. Today, his molten gaze levels on the living myth that stands before him as his own feet sink into the ashen sand. He sees what has brought him here. He sees who has brought him here. But he still doesn’t see why.
“Fuck you,” another stallion offers helpfully. Sabrael is inclined to agree, but is perhaps wise enough to keep it under wraps. At least for now. At least until he figures out the why for himself. He knows one thing as he feels the chilly breeze rise off the surf and tousles his black mane – he’s not meant to be here.
Just as he thinks it, the bay roan feels a low pressure begin building in his head. You’ll have to die first, of course. Then, in no time at all, it expands like a shockwave from the very center of his brain. Light pools out of his every orifice, gold beams that blind him, deafen him, and make him mute by vaporizing his tongue all at once. A fire he's never tasted before and only for a second, then. He wavers on the spot, suddenly senseless. But in the next few seconds, the pressure travels down into the meaty center of him and explodes again, poking holes in the rest of him. The wounds are cauterized instantaneously, but there are too many of them.
He falls and dies, there in the sand at Carnage’s feet.
~
On the Other Side, he finds his legs. Death had been mercifully quick, but he is sure this next part will hardly be the same. He sees the faded forms of the ghosts haunting the shoreline, wonders if he knows any of them (wonders if he will be relegated to his own monochrome dune in short order).
![[Image: celest_by_cowgirlconrad-dcolc1l.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/bc93/f/2018/277/3/d/celest_by_cowgirlconrad-dcolc1l.png)
