What color is the sky, mi amor, mi amor // nazghul

[Strega]

I am... a breath of air on the breeze. Insubstantial, immaterial. Transparent in the way that happens when you aren't even sure you actually exist. Only a concept of a girl, born into a dark world. There is no supernaturally fixed moon in my sky. No shivering beasts at the peripherals of my existence. Only darkness that comes when the universe declares you unfit for the gift of sight. It is pure and it is complete. 

And I am drifting along. Quiet as a mouse, as the leaves, as my mother who let me go so easily. She has no talent for the living, what with our need to eat, to be kept warm. Bones don't ask so much of her. One day she just.... never answered my calls. My whimpers. I don't know that it's fear of my grandmother that lead her to this choice. Not lack of love for her flesh-and-blood daughter. Too much of it, maybe. The belief that her fragile young thing would be better off too wander the dark world alone, than to face what remained asca member of that darker family. 

So wander I do. Stumbling, fretting, alone. I haven't bumped into anyone yet. Maybe I'll walk off the edge of the world before I do. Blinking empty eyes at the world that shines with light I'll never know, I shiver. The air has gotten colder lately. I miss the hot summer days, when the sun was a tangible thing in the way it warmed my back. 

I hum a note or two, thinking of warmth. It's the sort of thing you don't realize you need until it's painfully absent. I don't know when or even if it will return. A mystery, as everything else in my life is. 

@nazghul

[nazghul]

i could be your favorite monster.


He never goes hungry in a world that offers him bountiful misery to gorge himself on. To hunt, all he ever has to do is shift and run. The scent of something delectable is never very hard to find. In fact, he has been searching and sniffing for all of five minutes before the air near him is tinged with fear. His small clawed paws carry him through the tall meadow grasses until he sees her standing off by herself.

Nazghul slips closer, snapping his jaws at seemingly nothing as he begins to feast on all that fretting and worry just oozing from her. She doesn’t seem to dread as much as the older ones wandering past them, but he doesn’t eat as much as an older bodach, either. Her suffering is just enough to sate his hunger for the time being.

“Why are you so afraid?” he asks, tilting his dark head as he circles her. The cold doesn’t bother him in this form, it seems. The breeze cuts right through this body and he hardly seems to notice that winter is creeping through the world. But he notices the way her body shivers and he remembers the way his own muscles tremble sometimes in the desert night. A kinder boy would perhaps offer some of his own warmth. The thought never crosses his mind.

“My name is Nazghul. What’s yours?”

NazghuL

@Strega

[Strega]

My heart pulses faster as a rustling announces the presence of another. Ears twisting to catch the fleeting noise, I stumble back a step and hope there's nothing to trip my feet as I do. The spike of fear catches in my throat for one sharp moment. 

Then, strangely, it ebbs away. The anxious feelings siphon away like water sucked into bone dry clay, leaving me hollow and peaceful as they go. When the sinuous voice comes, the jerk of fear it summons flows away with the rest. I am not a terribly brave creature, and to have this detached curiosity in place of nerves is unsettling in its own way. 

"I think I might die," I answer, and facing that thought shakes my bones a hair harder. I haven't been alive all that long. I know that, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm alone, lost, and clueless when it comes to surviving cold and hunger. It's not a very promising collection of truths. Even I can see that. 

Terrifying realities that I've cried over before, but today they feel like distant things. Less pressing than the voice of a stranger who decided for whatever reason, to talk to a wandering fool. The truth is that I am still afraid, moreso with this voice prodding at me in the dark. He is absorbing the fear as quickly as I make it, as hungry as I am even if his diet is a stranger one. 

"Strega," I say in that same dull note, fearless, but without any other emotions to replace it with. "What are you doing here, Nazghul?" A pointless question, when I don't even know where "here" is. I don't want to end the conversion so soon, though. Not when this is the first voice I've heard in days, the only one acknowledging I exist. 

@nazghul