"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
Time had been unkind, life even less kind still. There may have been a point in her life, a time before the piece of metal wedged in her forehead, before the magic that had driven her to madness, that Cy had been average. Usual. But that was a self long lost, long forgotten, a memory that had died decades past. There was only the madness now, only the old mare with the piece of copper protruding from the burrs and tangles of a pale, dirty forelock. A hunched creature with cloudy eyes and spittle dried on her sun-calloused mouth.
“The boy, the boy. He had no hair. Too close to the sun, it burned away.” The old mare muttered as she hobbled amongst the sand and bleached bones.
“The girl was worse. Worse, worse. Dead by her heart.” Her thick, arthritic joints creaked and groaned and clicked as she continued pacing through the stony, bony beach.
“Others. Too many, too many. No better than stones.” She paused for a moment, crooking her head awkwardly to the side as she peered into a shadow created by a cluster of rocks.
Magic crackled like static in the air around her, impatient, hungry, but she made no effort to use it. Instead she turned back to the stretch of unwelcoming beach and stumbled forward into that same uneven rocking motion.
“The wings, the wings. Alive as me.” She cackled and spittle flung from her leathery lips. “Love is ruin. She is ruin. Tear out the wings. Bright like fire.”
She stopped again, pausing, turning to look at a different shadow buried between bodies. Her head tilted one way and then the other, those cloudy eyes narrowing as she leaned in. And then abruptly she turned away again, hobbling away at a crumbling walk.
“New flesh. New bones. Gold, gold. Better this time.” Her head swung left then right, sweeping back and forth, and then she stopped again.
Without grace and without speed she turned around. Her cloudy eyes squinted at every shadow, faintly curious and impatient, but there was no room left for unease at being followed by ghosts in the land of the dead.
“Time, time, it’s all run out.” This time she didn’t turn back to her path, walking among the bleached white bones and tufts of leathery flesh. She waited. The magic crackled and poured into her ears. She ignored it still. “Dead, dead. Just like you. Love is ruin. Just a fool.”
TAKE ME UNDERGROUND, TAKE ME ALL THE WAY
BRING ME TO THE FIRE, THROW ME IN THE FLAMES
I am a monster.
The thought is the only thing swirling in his mind—the only anchor that he can cling to. It grounds him in a strange way, the truth of it both bitter and tangible. He remembers the way that she had looked at him, with her mouth slack and her eyes blank; he remembers the way that she had curled into herself. What had once been sunshine between them had turned toxic—poisonous. It had gone from heaven to a hell, and the worst of it was that he knew he had no one else to blame but himself. He had caused it.
In some small corner of his mind, he clings to the belief that it had been for the best, that she would eventually heal and have a bright life because of it. But that doesn’t ease the ache in his gut or the flare of self-loathing that threatened to overtake him. It does little to soothe the temper that begins to grow more wild by the day, the fury like sludge in his veins—blurring his vision until he couldn’t think around it.
That is not different tonight. He is slick with sweat, his mane roping around his neck, his nostrils flaring pink and his eyes rung with white. He can feel the sickness creeping along the edges of his mind, and he knows that it will not be long until he needs to steal to the Chamber again to stave it off. It shames him every time that he has to return, the chains clinking as he falls to his knees on her rotten soil. He knows that he owes her his half-life, but it is not without a cost. Every time that she pulls the noose tight around his throat, he knows that he is living on borrowed time. His days come with a heavy cost.
But he fights past it today, ignores the blood that flecks the ground when he coughs and instead concentrates on the mare who appears in the corner of his vision. Cutting his gaze her way, he frowns, the same hunger that Loam had awakened in him growling and biting at cage doors. Giving into the instinct, he begins to skate along the shadows of the beach, trailing her with a graceful, predatory gate. She is babbling, and his stomach churns with a recognition he can’t name. There is something about the way that she holds herself that strikes all of the wrong chords; there is something that stokes his flames higher.
'The wings, the wings. Alive as me.”
He does not know that she is talking about Oksana, but suddenly all he can hear is the roaring in his ears. All he can think about is the way she would shift her wings from soft downy feathers to steel edges, how they could go from caresses to slashes within seconds—how he loved her all the more for it. Suddenly, his throat is dry and he is heaving for breath because it is all too much (too much) and he can’t stop it. She is cackling and babbling and all he can think about is her and him and how he had ruined it all.
Suddenly, he is moving. (I am a monster.) He comes to her and he is fighting before he even has the chance to stop it. He is thrashing, and his hooves are flying, and his teeth are snapping at the air in much the same way that his brother had once done to him. He chases death in the same way that it had chased him, and if only he knew the symmetry of the moment. There is an otherworldly tug in his belly, but he chooses to ignore it; he falls upon her with blow after blow, giving into the need to taste blood.
(I am a monster.)
It is only when she is limp before him that he stops, his body shaking and his face flecked with her life. Looking down, he hangs his head, his body suddenly drained from the exertion. “I-I’m sorry,” he says in barely a whisper, the noise the only thing that can be heard beside the waves crashing along the shore. He doesn’t know her name—has no idea her relation to Oksana. Has no idea that he has sealed his fate by giving into the worst of him. He just knows what he has always known: I am a monster.
(Somewhere, deep beneath the ocean, something stirs. Storms begin to brew on the horizon as Makai turns from the battered body on the sand. He slips into the shadows, smelling of metal, and he does not see the other take his first breath. Again, Makai feels the tug in his belly, the alien feeling of connectivity, but he ignores it and picks up his pace. He is running, running, running, and he does not look back.
