"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
It isn't the first time that she has gone to the Mountain and come away less, although when she had followed Grandfather's call, she had come away more, too, and that made up for the temporary weakness of the new bones he grew inside her. This time she came away with nothing, and it occurs to her that the fairies are rather less generous than Grandfather. Yes, it's true she had not gone to help, that her aim had been to impede their progress, but she does not think that Beqanna knew because it left them all a similar shade, stretched too thin, the earnest as well as the insincere.
And then, the glorious morning dawned and she had hissed and hated the way the golden light filtered through her flesh, and she had felt emptier than ever without the creatures of the night to track and hunt and fill her belly with their petroleum skins. Color exploded across the night-dulled Pampas in a breath and Manny had despised it. Her claws ached to rend the happy grasses, her beak to decapitate every flower bud and seedhead and rabbit she could snap up in her grip, but each eluded her ghostly grasp. She learned to dislike the fairies more with each passing day.
But at last - oh, at last! - the year has ended, and she celebrates by starting a vicious fight with a Pampaian elkear - a fight that leaves an acreage of the grassland scorched, the beast short an antler, and her tail almost entirely gone. Manny is desperately outmatched physically, bloodied and bruised and winded. A year of haunting has done her no favors. The hulking fire-red beast charges and she clumsily evades it, stumbling from its charge at the last moment, slow enough that the sharp tines of its single antler leave another tear in her skin and the physicality of it makes her shudder, ecstatic. But she is tired, and she does not wish to die again today, so soon after the last time, so when it turns to charge again she plucks the strings of its memory and the elkear forgets instantly what it was about to do. And she casts the wide gillnet of her peace and subdues it in a miasma of calm. When she approaches, the enormous creature sits and turns to peer at her with confused grumbling, unsure why it is bleeding and tired. Manny purrs softly and plucks those strings again.
You saved me, don't you remember? She doesn't speak their language but she feeds it lies in images. A heinous beast that shouldn't be, one of the merged horse-demons of Nerine lies dead just behind her, a sharp-tined antler broken off in its shattered breast. The elkear cranes to look around her at the Thing it has killed and the little liar strikes, sharp beak ripping into the soft place in its throat. The beast strikes her heavily, knocking her hard enough that her vision swims, but it is already dead. It just doesn't know yet.
Suffocation gets it first, the windpipe torn wide so it dies gasping endlessly. Its blood stains her pristine paws and the broad blaze as she gorges herself on strange meat still warm and alive, and when she can eat no more, she finds her way out of the burnt Pampas crossing unceremoniously into Sylva, still bloody and concussed and over-full.
It's not every day a blood bathed hippogryph walks into your house. I can help but stare as the oddity wanders over the boarder and into my woods. It's strange enough to pique my interest, and lure me away from my lounging. Truthfully, it was the noise that first tipped me off to the intruder. Hippogryph, I have learned, are dreadfully noisy creatures.
I should hesitate when I approach. A little caution goes a long way when encountering something as volatile as this. It really does. I've long since discounted caution, however, and saunter up to the beastly thing without much thought.
"You need a bath," I declare. On closer inspection, this proves exceptionally true. Gore is drying on the feathered head, blackening the beak I can only assume is responsible for the mess. My nose wrinkles delicately at the stench of blood and bowel. "Come this way," an order, not a request. If this thing was going to spend any amount of time in my domain, it would be clean about it.
Still, a bit of mess was acceptable. If it came with this kind of entertaining interjection to my day.
05-28-2021, 03:41 PM (This post was last modified: 05-28-2021, 03:41 PM by Manikin.)
It seems the elkear has slowed her down more than she knew because she doesn't notice the intrusion until the Sylvan has pressed well into the clearing and is nearly on top of her. The smell of electricity is a familiar one. Manikin glares at the blue mare, the black feathers of her mane lifting from their flat place along her neck to match the threat that curls soft like thunder in the bright red bay of her chest. She does nothing more than threaten, though, remembering too well the flavor of lightning on her tongue like mother's milk, and because the elkear's final blow has left her vision blurred. In Sylva's ever-golden glow, Sabra is incandescent, an awful, shifting halo of multi-colored light surrounds her and makes the meat in Manikin's belly feel too heavy. Bile surges against the back of her throat and she swallows thickly in response to the thunderbird's commands, the muscles of her jaws quivering. Something behind the words makes her want to comply, but she is a stubborn thing.
"No." She croaks, crafting the word as a crow does with the practiced flex of throat and tongue. There is nothing melodic about that voice, none of the sweetness she saves for tripping up Avocet's memories in carefully laid traps. Instead of following, instead of bathing, she vomits at the Sylvan's cotton candy feet - a swirl of foamy bile, and her barely-digested meal - and hardens the sharp edge of her eagle-eye stare while stained strings of drool stretch from beaked mouth to ground.
She has no interest in bathing, indeed prefers to avoid deep-water entirely, though she is a reasonable swimmer. The spring rains will come and wash away the black, dried, blood sticking her feathers together, so rather than follow, the monster sits (the awkwardness of the position a hard emphasis on her open rebellion) and returns the speared mare's imperious glower.
I am less than impressed. Closer to downright disgusted, if we're being truthful, and I see no reason not to be. Not with a streaming pile of guts at my feet and an impudent monster glaring me down. I look between the two with no attempt at disguising the contempt in my eyes, contempt that is matched by the leery creature.
"What do you want?" I ask after a beat, weighing the risks of simply running this thing off my lawn like a pesky cat. Knowing cats, however, there's a good chance it would only return later, with that same pretentious look on its face. My jaw sets in a cruel grin, teeth exposed in a way that indicates anything but friendliness.
I have no use for unbiddable creatures. Ravage, destroy, do what ye will, as long as my word holds final sway. That is my law, and I will tolerate nothing less. Freedom for devotion seems a fair exchange to me.
I step closer, eyes on the rending claws and jagged beak, but asserting my ground nonetheless. Because this is my ground that she tests. I'm unwilling to give it up to some strange ragged thing that wanders in unannounced, much less anyone else.
"Do you know where you are?" I ask, my voice silken poison on the tongue. It has proven capable of speech, and so Ann answer is expected in turn.
06-24-2021, 10:21 PM (This post was last modified: 06-24-2021, 10:21 PM by ratty.)
What the hippogryph wants is a difficult question. Right now what she wants is for the forest to stop spinning, and for her body not to sway with that spin every time her foggy eyes close. What she wants is for the candy-bright mare to turn off her colors because they shimmer in the haze of her vision and if there were anything left in her belly to expel, she almost certainly would. But these are passing desires. Transient, and in a day or two she will not care about any of them.
The hippogryph is a patient thing. Can be a patient thing. She has had patience forced upon her more than once; an unwanted lover teaching her restraint, to bide her time.
She bides her time now, stretching her claws, sheathing them again, still seated in the leaf litter scattered across the autumn forest's floor. The air is smokey crisp, not laden with the heady scent of too many wildflowers, and, slowly, the fog that presses against her brain lifts - just a little, just a bit. Enough. The Sylvan comes closer still and Manikin lifts a white-toed paw, extending it delicately to reach for the wooden shaft that swings and wags with every step, every breath.
"I am home," the words are a declaration and leave no room for argument. This is her home. She has always lived here, her manner seems to imply, though she does not bother with the magic to make the stranger believe it. This time, she lies simply for the sake of lying. It's blatantly untrue, of course, but that's never stopped her before.
The bloody stump of her tail stings as it lashes, leaving red streaks across her hindquarters like war paint and the low steady growl shifts imperceptibly to a curling purr as she looks away from the spear and the glowing blood that wells around it. The corners of her lips curve ever so slightly, a hard thing, smiling, but the cruel shape of her beak already sculpts much of her mouth into something close to a smile. The corners are soft though, and the way they turn up is wicked.
I can't help but raise a brow at the declaration that runs gravelly from the creature's beak. Home, is it? I'm certain I've never seen this hybrid wandering my trees, have never caught the scent of musky cat and dusty bird mingled in quite this way. She is new, and a stranger, but I hesitate to strike at her.
She is unique, in my knowledge. Interesting, in a way that so few are. I can afford to keep such an oddity around, for a while. There is a feralness that seems to show no interest in being tamed. That can grow tiresome, but we'll see. Stepping to the side, I turn my head in consideration of the feathered face.
And then she speaks again, with that mouth that seems to resent the task of forming words. It's enough, though, to bring an answering smile to my own cold lips. So we do have something in common. How odd. "That can be arranged," I say with a soft laugh, eyes brightening in the sunlight. Too bright, when I shrug one bejeweled wing. "However," my gaze travels the ring of this grove, as I feel my engagement slipping.
"You want to live here? You want the freedom to hunt, to prowl, to live as you like? Fine. There is very little I ask of my friends. Only loyalty. Your unending, unquestioning loyalty. Give me that, and you can have everything your little bird brain desires." It is the offer I give them all. My protection, my home, in exchange for their hearts. The next best thing to their love.
06-29-2021, 10:43 PM (This post was last modified: 06-29-2021, 10:45 PM by Manikin.)
Has Manikin a heart? She held the Monsters within her for so long, they've eaten away so much and left her empty when they tore through her skin. Left her bereaved. What would Manikin do with a heart, if she had one? Who would she love? Her list is short and it is mostly herself, with a share for Grandfather because who can deny a god of anything, if he wants it? Now Sabra declares it as her own and the chimerical mare can only shrug as if to say that it doesn't matter to her who claims the questionable thing. She shrugs, but then she nods, though the consent of a liar is dubious at best.
(But she does make note of this penchant for hearts, it may be useful at another time.)
The Sylvan tells her to worship at the altar of Death as if she isn't already its servant. The hippogryph laughs, and, like her weary voice, the laugh is rough-edged and cruel, and she passes one paw over her poll so it leaves a smear of glowing blood across one eye. Death is a grey stallion with claret eyes, it is a creature made of darkness and claws and teeth and grasping arms, it is an enormous black rat with blood as thick as molasses, it is a shimmering blue mare with a spear in her chest and hunger for hearts as if to replace the shattered one in her breast. Manny knows this face despite the unfamiliar mask.
She stands at last, as though the deal is done and sealed between madwoman and liar. Will the Spearbearer take it now? Will she rip the shriveled thing from her feathered chest or pluck it out with spears? Manikin should not want to be torn apart, but she has grown up dying. Her feathers, even sticky as they are with gore, shiver not unpleasantly with the thought and the purring grows ever louder until it fills their golden clearing.
I watch her, expressionless, as her permission is granted with no coersion or threatening. She agrees, and I take it to myself. One more soul for chaos' sake, bound by threads of loyalty that weave in and out of its tattered fabric, stitch it to my own. A moment more, and my expression changes.
A slow, sultry smile paints my lips. "Good, good," I murmur, almost through. It's more true than this strange beast knows, that she has tied herself to Death. Who's death remains to be seen, but I know it can't be mine. Maybe it will be hers? We'll see, in time.
I trail off, though I think I'm forgetting something. I usually am, let's be honest. In this grove the scent of carrion is growing. It's odor is trapped beneath the canopy, like many darker things. Just as raw and bleeding, though. Just as cruel as a meal deemed unfit to be digested. My eyes fall on the fly-swarmed pile again, catching on still recognizable shapes. Scraps of thick, bloody fur and fragments of bone.
"In due time," I murmur, denying her the ecstasy of being undone. The power of surrender is a heady one in the right circumstances, and these are not them. No, first there must be some familiarity, some knowing. Some obedience.
I turn my electric gaze upon her raptor's face, a challenge and a demand on my tongue. "Clean up your mess," I drawl at last, a far lesser request than the beating heart from her feathered breast, but one I know will chafe more. Hearts are easy enough to give. Submission is harder, and it's what I require in this moment. Tomorrow will likely be a different story, one I'll know only as it comes.
