"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
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
This is not night.
She can tell by the glaring absence of stars.
And this darkness is so much deeper, almost impenetrable. It makes her immediately irritable as the reptilian eyes flash red as her vision shifts from equine to something more draconic. There should be stars in such darkness but the only celestial bodies that exist here are the stars that tangle themselves up in her mane and tail, that wink weakly in this strange darkness.
She finds him by the galaxy that glows and shifts across his chest. This particular corner of the cosmos that she visits so often in her sleep, practicing as she has been to take him with her someday. To take him, too, to the place where it all ends.
She does not think that the underworld has risen, that monsters -- true monsters -- walk among them. She is too young to remember the gates being flung open, Altar, too young to have any concept of the terror these things might wreak upon the world.
It is not fear that drives her to him because there are so few things of which she is afraid, but rather a need for a beacon in the dark. A compass, her true north, something to orient herself around. She goes to him and touches his shoulder and turns those reptilian eyes into the darkness and murmurs, “what is this?”
01-02-2021, 07:50 PM (This post was last modified: 01-02-2021, 07:51 PM by obelisk.)
The darkness almost bothers him as much as the cloud that follows him. That has followed him ever since that strange day when he woke in the forest far from Pangea—when he had seen the rabbit jump and then disappear into the fog. When he had woken the next day, it had been to the strange cloud on his heels and no matter how he had run or flown or lumbered, it had been there after him, terrifyingly large.
He can feel it still, even though his vision is not as sharp in these darkened hours.
That massive presence, always lurking, always there.
He shivers a little, calling out for his brother and sister. He cries for them in his throaty voice, the fear that he feels not quite making it to the rumbling noise. And before he can call out again, she is there. Dim in this darkened world but bright all the same. He wraps around her in his typical protective stance, his wings flaring slightly and draping over them. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly, although that is not such a strange thing. There is so much of this world that he does not understand—this is no different.
He thinks that he can imagine the sound of them rumbling nearby. The sound of scratching and clawing, the sound of heavy breathing that is abnormal even by Beqanna standards.
“Are you okay?” he asks, even though he knows she will be.
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
@[The Monsters] - okay, go to town on poison secretion.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
Had she heard him call out for her? Is that what had drawn her to him?
She does not remember the sound of his voice traveling heavy through the darkness. She does not remember it sinking its teeth into the meat of her heart to coax her through the shadows and deliver her to his side.
But that must have been it.
Were she aware of this dilemma, she would have thought it must have been the voice that beckoned her.
Anything to conceal the fact that she had sought him out because he spells safety, because she finds sanctuary in the soft glow of the galaxy splashed across his chest.
He doesn’t know, though she had not expected him to. She had not asked because she wanted an answer but because it gave her an excuse to be there. Because curiosity was not a weakness.
The nebulas (dim in this strange darkness) shudder beneath the weight of his wing, but she sinks her weight against him again the same way she had some weeks before. She draws in a steady breath, watching the shadows, watching them writhe and move and tremble.
“There’s something out there,” she tells him without answering his question, still without an ounce of fear in her voice.
ALTAR
@[obelisk]
@[The Monsters] do your thing with altar's water immunity
He barely feels the monsters, if he’s being honest.
He does not feel the way that the claw around them. Does not hear the way that they breathe and drag against the ground. Does not understand the danger that they bring with them. He is too focused on the way she draws him in like moth to flame—the way that he cannot stop himself from trying to find her in the dark, trying to piece himself together so he can come crawling back to kneel at her feet once more.
“Something—,” he begins to say. Begins to try and ask her what something could be, when he feels the brush of something ice cold in his lungs. The poison that has always existed beneath his flesh begins to twist through him as the monsters find him, as they manipulate the very fiber of his being.
A sharp exhale as he tries to blink it away.
But the feeling remains.
“Altar,” her name is the first thing that comes to his lips, like a prayer, and he wants to reach for her but he stumbles away instead. Something like agony in his gut and then relief. Something that feels both wholly right and entirely wrong. He spits and the poison burns on the ground, sizzling on contact. His head falls back and then, as quickly as it started, it’s over, and he’s left shaking, trembling all over.
His impossibly dark eyes remain closed, his horned head hanging.
“Altar,” her name again and then silence.
How could he possibly explain to her what just happened?
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
It is the suddenness of it that finally grips her with some semblance of fear.
He abruptly goes staggering away from her.
A vise tightens around her windpipe.
The change in her is not as obvious, not to her. She cannot feel the monsters, the thing they take from her, or the thing they replace it with.
Even if she had been able to feel them, she likely would not have noticed, so fierce is her concentration as the reptilian eyes flash and narrow as she struggles to pull him into focus. He is so little more than the galaxy splashed across his chest in this light, dark as the shadows that collapse and writhe around them.
Her gaze falls heavy on the puddle at his feet, pulled there by the hiss it makes as it lands. The sound is followed by the shape of her name but she does not look up, merely goes on studying the scorched earth.
She breathes steady, though she tilts her head and the heart has begun to rattle itself against its ribbed cage. Her nostrils flare and the reptilian eyes slide back to an electric green from that urgent red. “What’s happened?” she asks without looking at him, still oblivious to the way her own skin has gone dangerously cold.
Finally, she slides her gaze from the earth to his face and finds his eyes tightly closed. She draws in another steadying breath and moves toward him, reaches for him, touches her mouth to his shoulder.
The world spins around him, and he is not certain how to navigate it.
Not certain of anything anymore.
All he knows is that the poison that had once lived only on his skin, a buried secret that he could easily ignore, now lives throughout him. He feels it in every breath that he takes. A whisper of a thing that feels like a crook of a finger—a shadow that tempts him to step further into it. It’s a need, a dangerous desire, and his nostrils flare as he tries to mentally scramble back away from it. As he tries to avoid it entirely.
No, he wants to scream. No.
But his protest is without purpose, because it’s too late—it is his burden to bear now.
His eyes open as she finally steps toward him and there is a weak part of him, still childish and needy, that wants to collapse against her. That wants to hold her and be held. To know the comfort of her. But just as he reaches for her, she reaches for him, and the contact of mouth to shoulder is not the familiar warmth that he knows so well. Instead it stings and he yelps, taking a stumbling step back, his eyes wide.
For someone else, he might have lashed out in fury. Might have blamed them for the pain, but even as his shoulder aches—burned from the cold—his eyes only widen, his body beginning to shiver in pain.
“What did I do?” he asks, low voice tight, wondering why she had punished him so.
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
He recoils. He draws away from her so suddenly that her breath hitches violently in the long column of her throat. Anger flares sharp and bright in the cavern of her chest, displeased with the way he has pulled away from her. This the most unsettling thing of all.
She can feel the way he shivers even from a distance. As if he is cowering. As if she has sunk her dragon’s teeth into the meat of his flesh and made him hurt. She is impervious to the cold, oblivious to it, unaware of whatever has changed in her on a cellular level. She bares her teeth.
His question sounds like a plea, which serves only to compound the anger that festers in the pit of her gut as she moves to eradicate the space he has wedged between them. She does not touch him again, though. As if there is so part of her that understands that she has done something to harm him, even without meaning to.
The dragon heart beats out something dark and ugly as she studies him through the crushing darkness. The fear nagging at the base of her skull feeds her anger. How she despises weakness and fear, she thinks, is the greatest weakness of all. There is nothing here worth being afraid of except that her beloved brother had recoiled from her and been reduced to something that quivered. The sound of his yelp echoes dully in her head. How she hates it!
“What have you done?” she asks, an altogether different question than the one he’d asked her. She is not immune to her anger, cannot swallow it down and spare him from it, does not know how to protect him from all of the darkest parts of her. So she cannot stop herself from blaming him.
He wants to whimper beneath the sharpness of her gaze. Wants to fall to his knees in prayer and beg for her forgiveness, but the screaming in his head is so loud that he can barely hear around it. There is the sound of rushing water, howling wind, and he is nearly consumed with the roar. The noise that reaches and reaches for him. That wraps cold fingers around his throat and crushes until he squirms.
“I don’t know,” he manages, his voice strangled and thick.
His wings fold over him and he glances up, his black eyes nearly rolling back in his skull. The power that writhes in him lashes out—uncontrolled, vicious. There is something bitter on his tongue and he barely comprehends the way he spears the poison straight at her, his gift doing its very best to inject it straight into her veins. He shivers, the coldness of the poison lacing through him and then he flings his head back.
A sigh, dark and guttural, something like satisfaction at the act that he cannot name. He doesn’t know what he has done, just knows there has been a perverse pleasure in doing it. Just knows that he has felt some kind of release when he had pushed the poison outward and his vision comes back slowly.
He swings his heavy-horned head to the side, looking for her again.
“Altar,” he says, his thick voice steadier. “Altar, something has changed.”
He forgets how she had lashed out at him, forgets that she had just chided him, and he doesn’t even know his poisonous attempt in the first place. So he looks for her with an innocent face, searching for her eyes.
turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along
