"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
11-01-2020, 05:34 PM (This post was last modified: 11-01-2020, 05:36 PM by rosemary.)
She had always loved the strange.
Father with his shadow creatures and Mother with her soft, otherworldly glow. Momma, is there light magic? Like Daddy's? Rose had asked as a babe, rolling around pleasantly next to her brother. Momma laughed and said, yes, of course--but their family didn't know much of it. The girl rolled onto bent knees in response, offering her ever-patient mother suspicious eyes. Sounds fake, she'd muttered.
Rose learned of magic, of its light and dark, as she grew older--but that gentle wash of shadows in her veins always beckoned her sweet nature closer to the night, to the monsters. And while one might take a glance at her shimmering hide and sweet face and think, she'll be frightened for certain, Rose offers her strange surprises in form of a confident sidle closer to a plant creature. He asks for a trick and with an agreeing giggle the shimmering girl turns her face to the questioning spirit.
"Trick," Rose states with a nod, then turns back to Wilt to study his leaves and traps and endless darkness.
11-01-2020, 05:51 PM (This post was last modified: 11-01-2020, 06:00 PM by Evenstar.
Edit Reason: trying to get rid of the giant space in her post but clearly its never going away
)
It is not often that she gives in to all the strange pulls of this land. It tugs its strings and whispers its songs, but Evenstar largely ignores it all. Her mind is haunted enough with its own ghosts that she does not feel compelled to seek out the ghosts of others, but tonight is different. There is something else that hums on the breeze, the breeze that tugs and pulls at the white locks of her mane and seems to crook a shadowed finger as it beckons her from the secluded part of the forest she has sheltered herself in.
She follows it, moonlight falling silver and glowing along the jade-green of her skin, caressing the unsightly scars that decorate her sides from the alien's claws. The breeze leads her to the gates of the afterlife, and she feels her pulse quicken. Is her father here? She has not seen him in years; a fact that she always – sometimes subconsciously, sometimes in a way that is more tangible – blames on her mother. But she dashes her own hope as quickly as she had conjured it, knowing that with the gates open if Skellig had died, he would have returned. Evenstar refuses to think that her father would willingly leave her abandoned in this world unless he had no choice.
Her dark eyes focus now on the figure that looms in the doorway, blinking away her confusion at its rather sudden question. She is silent as she mulls it over, and she does nothing to veil the suspicion in her eyes since she finds it unlikely a gatekeeper of the afterlife would be handing out anything that could be considered a treat. “Trick,” she says carefully, already wondering if she would regret this.
in this hole, that is me...the dead are rolling over
He is no stranger to things that go bump in the night.
As a skeleton cloaked in the constellations and carrying the blood of the Dark God, he is one such thing.
But the bump on this night is not from him, though he does not shy away from it. Curiosity has killed the cat more than any other thing, a fact he knows to be true, but he travels towards the sounds anyway. Like a moth to a flame he goes, heedless of his own mortality but filled instead with a curiosity that makes his bones ache. Fleshless, bleached white bones that are visible to the naked eye. The cool wind does not affect him in this form, and the sensation of pulling hair in briars is not there to distract him. He travels quickly, not knowing what he was searching for but eyeless sockets peeled all the same. And then he sees it, just ahead and cloaked in a slight mist. A gate, though he does not have the word to describe it. It is definitely foreign to the landscape and gives him a pause.
”Trick or treat?” says the voice, and he cocks his skull at the gate ever so slightly. He thinks for a moment, and the lack of muscle and tendon makes it impossible to read his expression.
”Trick.” he says, throwing every bit of caution he has into the cool fall breeze, watching it swirl away into the mist and fall amongst the rotten leaves littering the forest floor.
I once held your soldier heart between my war teeth; shook it like a dog with a bone until it knew the fear of good love.
" Do you remember? "
She had not been around then - when the doors of death opened its great and greedy maw. She had not been around for much of anything, truthfully. Perhaps that is why she is so perceptive to the change in the night; the way the air called just slightly more, how the breeze smelled a bit sharper. So she followed, for what else did she have to do when a command wasn’t thrown at her? There was little other meaning in her life outside of the bidding of others (and isn’t that all her father wanted of her anyway?).
She follows the night, it’s beck and call, the way the wind danced over her skin and tasted her fears. How foolish to follow something based on a whim - but she is nothing if not naive and new to this world of Beqanna. She does not know the death and decay that it can bring, nor the delights and desires it can grant. She simply follows, occasionally lifting her nose to the night sky to stay the course.
The course that brings her to yawning gates and a creature before them. Creature, for she has no better word for it. Its voice cracks sharply throughout the night - a mix of a manic scream and a childish delight. Greta starts, her head shimmying back and her body taut. This was not what she was expecting - it asks her a question. Not a command, something to direct her inner obedience and tell her what to do. But a question asked of her - something to allow her to make her own decisions for once. “ Well.. I um. I suppose a trick?” Her father knew lots of tricks, and it seemed her new friend Straia did too. They had shown her lots of tricks in her little time here - and perhaps there were still other mysterious tricks that she had yet to have seen. “Yes. A trick then - I have seen quite a lot of those from Father, and I would like to see what yours are like.”
Use of minor power playing is allowed in regards to commanding her obedience.
She hears the call and it is a curiosity more than anything that drives her forward.
Her coltish legs carry her deeper into the shadow and the murk, the sheen of effort building on the curve of her thin neck. She is young, which is apparent, but there’s something else to her that hides just below the surface. Something oily and thick that slides almost imperceptibly beneath the glassy exterior. From a distance, she is as beautiful as an unfurled rose. All promise and hope and youth.
But there is a vicious poison on her tongue.
A wicked gleam behind her sweet simper.
She hides it as best she can, now, moving forward amongst those who gather until she sees the figure. She watches, silently, as others answer. Her plain brown eyes study him, pale and seemingly innocent, sharpening ever so slightly as she considers the question that booms out toward it.
After the silence has reigned for a moment, she angles her head.
Arachna does not know a world where the gets to the afterlife have been firmly shut. The gates have been open far longer than she has walked the lands of Beqanna on still spindly legs. She doesn’t know what the gates represent – what the implication is behind them.
To her, it is nothing but a childhood curiosity. The shrouded figure is not menacing, but fascinating. It is unlike anything she’s ever seen – but she’s seen so little of the world. How is she to know this is something that is not normal?
Regardless, she is drawn to the doors and the figure that stands within them. She bounces along on still-new legs, obvious to the dangers. And it is obvious she was not the only one who had been called here this night. This only seeks to deepen her own curiosity. There would certainly be no turning away now – not with this mystery unfolding before her.
The girl takes a moment to ponder what should be a simple question. Trick or Treat? She cocks her head to the side as she thinks. She’s fond of both, perhaps to a fault. However the girl decided that perhaps she only liked tricks if she was the one doing the tricking. So in her small, trilling voice the girl finally makes up her mind.
”Treat.” she says simply, blinking those eerie orange eyes as she watches the others who have been drawn here with mild interest.
Autumn leans into winter, the world of the dead leans into the world of the living. Sintra, on spindly legs black as iron and bedecked in the darkness of her baby-down, does not know a world where the dead cannot pass easily across that hallowed boundary, but neither does she know that they do, because she is small and new and as unfamiliar with the concept of death as she is with this new concept of life and consciousness.
She is coltish and clumsy in the sharp air, and the strange breeze that parts the thick curls of her hair exposes a curious thing, exposes pale places at her flank and hidden behind her elbow where glimpses of the skeleton that moves beneath her skin can be seen. It's as if she is wreathed in smoke, a ghost, a ghoul, and perhaps no more alive than the souls that hold back and do not return to the living world, but there, at her chest, the pulse of red just barely visible between her night-black forearms belies this theory. Her heart beats, and she lives.
Carefree, she follows that strange breath of wind. Mama would surely stop her, but some magic keeps the mare from noticing her wayward daughter as she disappears from sight, lost to the darkness. How often is this the way? Sintra chases the wind with all the excitement of her handful of days, with her spidery, long, limbs and her too-large violet eyes. She follows the curl of mystery that hooks in her heart with ill-advised eagerness until she finds that dark doorway with the gathering crowd and its silent guardian, and even here, while others mill nearby, curious or cautious or confident, here she approaches the guardian giddily, imprudently, unaware of the things that make others hang back or smile their slow, venomous, smiles. She reaches out with toothless gums to taste the shadow cloak the figure wears - it tastes of nothing, or perhaps it is Nothingness, instead - and looks up brightly to where its face should be.
"My name is Sintra! What is a Tricker? Can I have one of those? What happened to your face?"
She prefers the night because that’s when the world takes shape. Her eyes, which glow faintly the same way the auroras splashed across her sides do, cooperate in the dark. And, because night is the only time she can really see the world stretching out around her, she is uncharacteristically bold.
So when the breeze finds her at the edge of the river, she follows it. Skips along behind it with an air of youth that follows her only in the nighttime hours. She is plagued with hesitation and nervousness during the day when the eyes fail her and leave her vulnerable.
She even grins, the girl, as she trips along after it. It is something small and secret but there all the same. She knows so little of the mountain, too little to know that she should be sufficiently troubled by the figure she finds when the wind finally goes still.
She studies the doorway and, quite naturally, the figure standing before it. It does not move or speak and she begins to think it a mirage, a hallucination, some kind of lifeless sentinel. But then it speaks, asks her a question she doesn’t immediately know how to answer.
She blinks the pale glowing eyes and tilts her fine head.
“Trick,” she answers, not knowing any better.
the moonlight, baby, shows you what’s real
but there ain’t language for the things i feel
The walls had shuddered and the ground had lurched.
And screaming.
A nightmare.
I had dismissed it as such. Even now as I walk into waning darkness - the grinding of stone still ringing deep within my ears and broken stone littering my back - it feels as though a distant memory would, years ago unfolded and pieces lost to oblivion.
I wanted to forget.
The wind churned lazily at my sides, lifting the dust that had settled over me like a grimey cloak. As it rises, I watch first, then follow the gauzy spectre into the wood speckled with so many others.
The dark thing before them waits, and I join them along the fringes. Skin and bone and pale, my body groans as it settles, but I hardly notice. The dark thing inquires and awaits an answer from us.
“Trick.” The word sounds strangled and grating as it’s forced through lips dry and cracked enough to rival the bark of the birch nearby.
Us.
I’ve never been a part of us.
I have forgotten.
I wanted to forget.
A pale moon hung in the sky, casting a glimmer of silver over the land. The trees mostly bare now, though some fought to cling to their fiery hued leaves. Though many an equine would be fast asleep by now, Whisteria was restless. It had been so quiet in the afterlife, a mere reflection of the world she had once known. After having come through the heavy doors of the afterlife, she had forgotten how loud the mortal realm is. The night was so full of nocturnal life, predators sliding through the shadows, small animals scurrying through the underbrush. It was much too overwhelming for the pale woman.
Whisteria found herself walking around the common lands, following the path she had taken when she had come back to the living. She wondered if the door was still open. She never encountered any other beings in the afterlife, though she always wondered if there were more than just equine in that vast misty realm. As she approached the foggy clearing where the door stood, she noticed others already surrounding the door. She wondered what drew them all here this late, and hesitated for a moment. hmm ....what are they doing? No one seems in distress...oh what the heck. Curiosity won, she strode forward cautiously. She wondered if this was some sort of meeting she was intruding on, this probably wasn't the best idea. Though as she got up beside another horse she realized why these horses had gathered here. Whisteria's eyes widened as they fell apon the strange figure in front of the door. After what seemed like forever, the figure finally spoke.
Trick or treat? Whisteria looks to the others as they give their answers to the figure, and she nods to the creature as she gives hers. "I would enjoy a treat very much, thank you!", she says with a kind smile. She wonders what this treat will be? Or will she get a trick anyway? Either way, she was curious to find out.
