"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
A... lure? The starred girl pauses, letting the thought tumble through her mind like a fishscale lost in the eddies of a wild river, sparkling bright and too small to ever settle. Shipka is guileless and sincere and unused to the deceit that her companion suggests. A lie, he means, and she finds nothing in his voice or his expression to say that she shouldn't believe him, but she doesn't want to. Her heart thuds in her chest like a hammer, like a fist, and if she had time, she might wonder if he can see the outline of it pressing against her skin, but her attention is taken up by something - someone - staggering towards them.
What sort of creature could cause wounds like that?
The creature limps closer. Its progress is slow, hampered by massive injuries, but its keening cries fill her ears, snag at her, drawing her away from the gold stallion's side, and this time she doesn't pause but bounds forward too quickly to hear the irony in his voice. She's too quick, this time, to catch his laugh, to hear his words, because the thing shrieks and Shipka is running to it, and when it lurches forward, the girl is there, catching up the full weight of it on slim shoulders.
And gods, but it's heavy.
So heavy.
The creature's entire weight is falling across her back and Shipka falters, a foreleg curling unbidden.
"Please," her voice is a gasp under the strain, "you have to stand, I- I can't hold you up, I-"
Her bright eyes fall on the face of the creature, and finds no face. The shape is horse-like, but there are no eyes, only melting flesh and flashes of bone underneath. Her stomach turns and her words die away. She's no healer, and if she were, she thinks the destruction wrought on this strange body would burn her up like dry switchgrass in a wildfire. The jagged, broken edge of the beast's exposed sternum digs at her side and she dares not look to see what is dripping onto her back, or whether the burning sensation there is real. Surely not, she thinks, it's only her imagination, like the ice-cold fear that suddenly flares up her spine when she realizes it's not alive.
The thing swings that vaguely equine head around as if to regard her with its eyeless face and Shipka shudders. There is no mouth but harsh laughter jangles noisily in her head like broken glass, flooding her vision with red and black and white, and when she tries to pull away, it moves with her, its sloughing flesh adhering to her skin, its bones shifting, cracking, as if to pull her inside the tarry cavern of its rotten innards.
"No."
The stars here slip away from her when she reaches for them, defiant, cold, they aren't her stars and care nothing for her, care nothing for fools that run willingly into the embrace of the Eaters. There's only her and... and... Her gaze finds her companion's and in an odd moment of calm, it occurs to her that she is going to die on an adventure she agreed to go on with a total stranger. Was this the plan all along?
If there is anything that Ten can understand, it is that naive desire to help. To do good. To rescue the world around them. He had once been in her very shoes - or hooves, as it were - called to save something he probably never should have. And he had died for that belief. Only the goodness and benevolence of the one he had died for had brought him back to life. Not just brought him back, but changed him irrevocably. Woken something buried deep within he hadn’t known existed before then.
But underneath it all, the heart that beats is the same one who had chosen to sacrifice himself.
And it is why he bounds after her when she shoots forward to help the wayward creature shuffling slowly towards them. He may have learned danger lurks in the strangest places, but even so, he could not let harm come to her if he could prevent it.
As she crashes against the creature, determined to use her smaller frame to support the thing in it’s ungainly ambling, Ten skids to a halt before he too ends up crashing into them. Her words fall on deaf ears as the beastly thing lets loose a rattling laugh, skin melting against hers in the most horrific of ways.
“Lure it is, I guess.” Ten’s wry words are muttered from lips already stretching forward to touch her exposed shoulder lightly. Moments later, she is ripped from the rotting beasts liquid embrace as Ten rends the fabric of space around them, pulling her through. The creature’s furious shriek echoes behind them, the last of its clinging embrace.
Moments later, they are deposited far down the beach, undead thing left far in the distance as its unnatural cries fade into silence.
Letting loose a pent up breath, Ten returns his gaze to her, features slipping into a concerned frown. “Are you hurt?”
The moment of clarity ends. Laughter rattles through her bones as the creature stretches its skin around her, she even smiles herself, an empty, manic, smile that doesn't touch her eyes which are filling with horror instead. The corners of her mouth stretch back too far, into a grin bigger than she could manage on her own, but the magic of the creature absorbing her holds her in a painful rictus, turning her head to the stallion that runs to her aid. What hubris he has, the little, insignificant, wretch. What a fool, to think he can pluck prey from Our belly, she thinks in thoughts that are not her own voice, but one that makes white fire flash in her eyes. The laughter feels like it is tearing her bones asunder.
"HahehaHELP-ahahahaheehahaha"
It takes everything she has to break through the psychic link with a single word lost immediately in a fit of giggles that makes her jaws crack. She doesn't feel him touch the still exposed skin of her shoulder, but the way his magic rips her away from the Beast makes her shriek. Fear and anger and and a red flood of pain. Her brain feels like shattered glass. Something solid strikes her feet, strikes her knees and her chest and the breath leaves her body for so long she thinks she might be dead. A feeling like loneliness flares up unexpectedly, emptiness, and if she had the strength to stand, Shipka knows she would find her way back to the hungry thing wailing a hundred miles down the beach.
When the tentacles of its magic begin to wither away the young mare convulses, rolling up with a choking sound, sending the murky sand flying. She leaps to newborn legs and wobbles, sidesteps, clipping her own hooves with a sharp smack and falling against the champagne stallion.
Are you hurt?
"No." She lies, black fluid trickling from her flared nostrils.
"I'm fine."
Her head feels too heavy without the Monster's strength flooding her veins like rancid fat and she lets it hang against him, breath filling lungs that feel half-drowned. That desire to rejoin curls in her brain like a beckoning finger.
"We should go back. Please let's go back. It needs our... our help. It needs help. Our help." Her voice dies away, but she continues to mouth the words.
In so many ways, his death had opened his eyes to the whole of existence. He had seen for the first time just how very small they were in the face of the cosmos. Had understood just how much more existed beyond the small world Beqanna clung to. Had seen that not all viewed life in the same way he did. In the same way they did.
The creatures like these? They existed to devour. To turn all of life into a macabre image of themselves.
It had been foolish to ask her if she was hurt. The ‘no’ that rolls off her tongue is a lie exposed in the black liquid that dribbles from her nostrils and unsteady flailing of her limbs. And just like that, the guilt rises. He had brought her here. He had made this happen to her.
Swallowing a lump in his throat, he mutters a low apology under his breath before reaching out once more to wrap her in his magic. He should never have brought her here to begin with.
When he drags them through the crack once more, he is convinced he had somehow done it wrong. That somehow he had glanced off, landing them in yet another mirror dimension. But as he lifts his head and tastes the air, he knows he hadn’t. As his eyes rise to the eclipse, a slow horror burns in his throat.
Without second thought, he grabs her again and flings them forward in panic. Had he inadvertently led to the destruction of his home? But when they land again, the sun shines brightly onto the beach around them. The relief is nearly instantaneous. Whatever it was, it clearly passed.
Turning to the girl at his side, Ten presses his nose to her once more, feeling the flood of her illness as he once again sacrifices his own health for the sake of another. As black fluid begins to trickle from his own nostrils, a small, shaky smile stretches his lips. “I hope that… you’ll be able to forgive me.”
She doesn't feel the sickening lurch when he drags them back, or when he leaps forward again. She doesn't notice the way the sky is so dark, that the seagrass is wilted and browned by the long night. All Shipka knows when he tears them away from the entity and from the other world is the crushing horror of abject loss that claws at her. This isn't what she'd meant when she asked him to take her back. Not here. The Beast's taunting lure coils in her brain like fire.
No, no, no, no, her soul shrieks, and maybe she does too, she doesn't really know. In the haze of that impossible distance, she's adrift on a sea of anger and hatred and a thousand white-hot emotions she's never known before that make her ears pin back into the galaxy of her mane and make her lash out at him with white teeth bared and snapping. They catch only air though, coming together with an auditory click and sudden confusion. He draws his muzzle away, strange black fluid trickling slow as Death from his nostrils, gleaming and gruesome in the bright light of day, and he asks for forgiveness.
She is not sure what there is to forgive, the sickness in her heart has drained away so abruptly that it leaves her weak-kneed and perplexed. She remembers... No, she isn't sure what she remembers, the ardent need to rejoin with the creature is gone like a nightmare that evaporates on waking. Her sides are slick with sweat and dark, oily, blood, but the disease rages in a different body.
His.
With breath shuddering in lungs that feel half-drowned, she reaches out to him again, more gently than a moment before, brushing faintly freckled lips over the curve of his feverish eye as if with a touch she can take back what he's stolen, but her abilities don't extend so far as his.
"I... I'm not sure what you've done," she thinks he's apologizing for something else, for whatever he's taken from her (and perhaps he is, but they are thinking of different things,) "I'm sure it's not worth apologizing for."
He can feel the beast’s disease coil through his blood in burning ribbons, clawing at his mind as it attempts to bend him to it’s will as it had her. The desire to find it grows as his sanity fades, shredded by the will of the Other. She reaches out to touch him, and his ears flatten against his crest, teeth baring in a macabre mirror of her from only minutes earlier.
In the end however, Ten’s heart and soul are not his to surrender to this parasitic thing. They belong to the cosmos, and the universe keeps what it has claimed. The beast would find no true purchase within him. Even as it shrouds his mind and tries to claim him for its own, his own body fights back. Every cell of him had been replaced the day he died deep beneath the earth, and these cells burst with the energy of all existence.
Ten groans as a war rages in him, unable to hear what Shipka says over the fire now racing through his veins. As the healing light of suns and stars race through him, burning away the creature’s black touch, it is all Ten can do to keep from dropping to his knees. Outwardly, he appears to have given in to madness. Only the sun-bright glow of his amber eyes reveal the truth of the silent war being waged.
When finally the beast is purged, his blood and organs rebuilt anew beneath a skin that still looks the same, Ten is left spent and trembling, black blood drying where it had dripped from his eyes and nostrils. Blinking to clear the film from his eyes, Ten draws a shaky breath as his gaze falls to Shipka with surprise.
It takes him a moment to recall why she is there. Why they are here together. He offers her a tremulous smile then, as though he could feign wellness after everything she had just witnessed. “Did you say something?”
The freckled girl doesn't recoil when he bares his teeth at her, when the forest fire of Sickness rages inside him until the fuel is spent, and when it's finally passed and he asks what she's said she only shakes her head because it doesn't matter.
"You shouldn't have done that," she says, ruefully, brushing her lips against his sweaty cheek, "but thank you."
Shipka's earnest voice belies the worry in her heart that this has all been too simple, though why she feels any misgivings at all, she isn't sure. Maybe it's the way the beach has changed in the time that they've been Elsewhere. The dismal saltgrass wilted and brown, the bones strewn violently, as if the bodies here were ravaged. Looking at the strange destruction wrought on this already ghastly stretch of shore makes her uneasy.
The only relief is that when she calls for the stars, they sing back, even though the cold fire of their light is far away behind the sun, she feels their sparks in her soul. She sighs, turning her attention to the sky, bright and blue with clouds slipping through like smoke, and ponders aloud.
"Were we really gone all night? It doesn't seem like it," she could have lost hours in the darkness of that fever and longing, though, "Oh, look!"
Silver eyes widen and look to the golden stallion, then back to the horizon where the crack that was there no longer shatters the sky.
"It's gone!" her voice is too bright for the deadened land around them, the mutilated bones and the white sand turned rusty with blood, "The crack is gone! That's... We didn't do that, did we?"
Doubt creeps into her voice as she turns to him again. Surely nothing they did was enough to heal the awful grinning wound that had stretched across it, yet what else could explain its disappearance?
As she reaches out to brush a gentle touch along the pale gold of his cheek, Ten is reminded anew of what had drawn him to her in the first place. Of what it is he should have been protecting, and instead placed directly in harm’s way. A curious regret seizes his heart as he peers at her, small, sad smile on his lips. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she says, and Ten can only respond, “I needed to.”
Straightening, Ten finally takes the moment to inspect their surroundings as she had been doing. The breeze drifting from the ocean is cool on his sweat-marked skin, smelling of salt and sea rather than the death and decay of the world they had left behind. For a moment, he closes his eyes, allowing the universe to crash around him. To tell him the stories he had missed.
Her voice is a shock of reality, the wonder at having been gone all night a dismal reminder. He knows it had been far, far more than a single night. Would she blame him for the oversight? She must. After all, he had been the one to drag her away from it all.
Opening his eyes, he looks at her, the first hint of regret settling into those pale amber depths. “All night,” he replies slowly, eyes searching hers, “and many of the following nights.”
But even as knowledgeable as he is, he could not tell her all the things that had happened in their absence. He is not omniscient, and what brief glimpse he’d had of the preceding days was not nearly enough to form any conclusions. He would need to go back. Though all appeared well now, he has a sickening sense deep in his gut that much has changed. And that perhaps he is to blame.
As he follows her gaze to the space in the sky where the crack had been, he considers it for a very long moment. When he finally does reply to her doubt-laden question, his answer is simple. “No, that was not us.” Returning his gaze to her, his lips twitch briefly, as though trying to form a familiar smile but not quite able to. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any good answers for you. About any of it. Not yet.”
