"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
Iska always seems to find her – it is Blackwell that the shadows ignore, shunning his flames, but his sister has only to ask and they guide her to their golden mother. Not that Beryl, often brooding, much minds her daughter’s quiet, serious, company, but today she does not want to be found.
Do not bring her to me tonight, the golden mare commands the yellow-eyed wisps, pressing on them with her magic, drawing their leaf-smoke promises, their loyalty. Tonight she wants to be lost.
She doesn’t know how to be content. No matter how hard she tries, no matter how hard Cassian tries to reassure her, to comfort her, and, occasionally, make her laugh when her guard is lowered, that sense of well-being is forever outside her grasp. So she runs, and she returns – sometimes alone, sometimes with Iska – and she runs again.
Will she always be this way, unable to clutch at happiness? Will she always be left standing just outside it, just next to it, too cracked to hold its glow inside her?
Her haloed head falls to wither height as Beryl ducks beneath the flame-bright tendrils of an autumn-struck creeping vine, dropping into the tannin-dark waters of the creek there. Downstream is the hidden meadow where Cassian and Blackwell are probably trading jokes, brightening the dimming light with their halos and their laughter. Upstream, the creek’s source is deep in the murk of the Forest where the shadows are wildest and speak strange tongues when she draws them out. It is deeper than her family is wont to go – at least together, she does not ask where Iska goes when the girl disappears.
Run, her anxious brain screams, deafening her. Yes, go, her traitorous heart agrees, dreading the way it knows it doesn’t deserve peace waiting for her at home.
She turns upstream, seeking that unfathomable darkness.
09-07-2021, 11:27 PM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2021, 11:42 PM by Torryn.)
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
She comes to his part of the forest (he is not arrogant enough to think he actually owns it—it is just the part that the sunlight cannot reach and crowded by gnarled, twisted trees, making it a place so few ever want to go), and he cannot deny the way it ignites his curiosity, or the way something stirs to life in the abyss of his chest.
He was positioned in an especially thick area of brush and trees, where the limbs and leaves hid the red of his eyes, allowing him to watch, undetected, for anyone that felt like venturing into the deep dark of the forest. It was an easy hunting ground; the darkness and the creak of the trees, the sudden rustling of birds startled from their perches—they all came together to set nearly any who passed through here on edge. It was a rare thing for him to need to inject his own shot of fear; by the time they reached him they were already afraid to the point he could nearly feel their racing pulse on his tongue, could taste the adrenaline that radiated from them.
Like a spider sitting patiently in its web, he simply waited for them to come to him, and rarely did they ever see the red-eyed bodach that siphoned all their fear away from them.
But Beryl comes, and any pang of hunger he may have felt is all at once forgotten.
He is reminded of her shadows and the way she had reached out to touch his own, as if she had expected them to bend to her. He is reminded too how she had accused him of trying to frighten her, which oddly enough, had not been his intention.
She has been a thorn in his mind ever since, small enough that he could mostly ignore it until something brushes against it to remind him that it is there.
“Beryl,” her name itself curls like a shadow from his tongue, and he is almost nothing but a pair of gleaming red eyes stepping toward her as he peels himself away from the utter black he had been hiding in. He watches her for what seems like a long moment, ignoring the reflexive urge to search for fear that might be lurking inside of her. Instead, he sweeps his gaze up to the warm glow above her head, and in his coarse voice there is almost a smile when he says, “You look different from last time I saw you.”
The tannic water of the creek is black and cold, trickling out from those deep, dark places where some venture but never return. There are mysteries within the forest, hidden behind tangled branches and vines and ancient trees whose bark is twisted and tortured, their limbs reaching out for those brave or foolish enough to come too near. Beryl has never feared the darkness, but she has never purposefully sought out the mysterious and strange before, either.
They find her anyway, the strange things, and the dark things. The golden mare turns away from the shadows ahead to disentangle herself from a hawthorn branch that's snagged a knot in her mane when she hears her name on a familiar tongue and freezes. It all started with him.
(That's not true, it all started a long time ago now, but she is too wrapped up in her most recent troubles to remember.)
Warm light follows her when, slowly, she turns her head to face the stallion that is nearly inseparable from the tanglewood around him. She remembers trying to pull him towards her, and how his darkness had rebelled, recoiled away from that intimate violation. And perhaps she has been too much in the company of her own shadows because even now a whisper in the back of her mind tempts her to try it again. Caution tamps that desire down; the last time they met, the world became a graveyard.
"Torryn," she replies, warily, "You look the same."
He, like everyone else, is still just bones. Black bones made of shadow, but bones nonetheless. She should leave - what good can come of meeting a Bodach in the woods? - but the anxiety brewing in her chest drives her further away from the warmth and safety she's left behind her. The dread sense that she does not deserve them - and that they do not deserve her black moods - overwhelms everything else, staining her thoughts as dark as the water rushing around her golden legs, so she lingers instead, and she drowns her misgivings with sarcasm.
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
He does not know that she blames the changes in her on him, and even if he did know, would he deny it? Would he be able to confidently say that he did not have the ability to generate such a change? He does not fully understand the depths of his curse, but he is certain that there is nothing good that comes from being in his presence. Would it really be so far-fetched to think that he, dark and treacherous, did not have the ability to turn everything she sees to bone, to force a certain kind of misery on her simply because he could?
It is for the best (for him) that he does not know, though, because surely the guilt would eat him alive. No matter how hard the monster inside of him tried to consume him there were parts of him that it simply would never be able to touch—the parts of him that would always set him apart from the other dark things that called this forest home. There was still a heart in his chest, connected to a conscience that sometimes he wishes he could drown out, but he also knows it is the only thing keeping him tethered.
If he had known that she thought he had inflicted any kind of damage on her he would not have called for her when he saw her. He would have disappeared back into the shadows, let her live in whatever peace she could find without him hindering it.
And it would have been for the best, for her, if he had known all of that, because it would have kept him from closing the distance that existed between them the way that he does now.
“They are still wrong, yes,” he tells her as he slips closer, trying to ignore the anxiety that ripples off her in subtle waves. It makes something inside of him clench, makes him want to see what else he can coax from her, but he resists. “Along with all the other things that are still wrong with me.” The bitterness is mostly lost in the shadow-like chords of his voice, as he has moved past the self-loathing stage and begrudgingly accepted that this is the fate forced upon him. It was still there though, that anger, settled in his very bones and sparking to life at odd moments, such as now.
But he is still at his heart the blue roan boy born in Taiga, the boy that never would have forced his hurt onto anyone else. She is already wary of him, and he does not want to give her further reason to disappear into her own shadows, and so he ensures that whatever anger he feels, even though it was directed at himself, never reaches his tongue.
He remains stoic and impassive, and very carefully, he drains just some of that anxiety from her—enough to possibly dull her edge, to maybe see what she is like when she is not afraid of him.
His eyes again focus on the sunlight that haloes her head in its warmth, before looking back to her with another crooked smile.“You should be careful bringing light into the dark. You might attract something you weren’t looking for.” He steps into the water with her now, the shadows that make up his legs seeming to recoil away from it, the tendrils of his tail floating on the surface like oil. He watches the galaxy marking on her shoulder, notices the way the light of her halo brings out the gold of her skin—night sky and sunshine, all rolled into one. “Or maybe you’ll find exactly what you were looking for.” There is a subtle tilting of his head, and a strange softness to his now lowered voice when he asks her, “What were you looking for out here, Beryl?”
She stiffens at his approach but does nothing to stop it, eyes following the smooth curl of dark bone that pulls away from the shadowed woods. It's almost a relief - not really, but almost - to know who she is looking at without having to study them, and it's this that keeps her still long enough to half-heartedly wait for his reply, even as that anxiety he tastes in the air turns her teeth to wicked points. She catches the venom of his words and, without catching herself, flicks her gaze up to the dark hollows where his red eyes must be. For a horrible moment, she forgets that she won't see them shining back at her.
Mistake follows mistake; though he dulls the edge of his tongue, she recognizes the meaning behind what he says as something that too closely identifies the image of herself she holds close to that treacherous heart in her chest. It strikes a nervous pattern, fast and irregular, its heaving makes her choke sometimes in the golden happy meadow of her home and her family, but here, in the tea-brown creek, it quiets. Something lifts away and what it leaves behind is slightly dazed, confused enough to not react when Torryn steps closer than she should allow, but she does allow it, with her lips and her brow twisted into a small quizzical frown.
She has never been good at being careful.
"Escape," she replies, bluntly, without seeing the way he studies her skin. And then, as if the word was the floodgate lock, there's guilt to drown the space he's emptied because she knows that she has no right to her unhappiness. She knows that others have suffered far worse than she ever has, that her family is comfortable and content and perfect and it's only this place inside her that refuses to heal breaking everything to pieces, "Because even the things that are right, aren't. But there isn't one, I think."
He isn't wrong about bringing light into the Deepwood. It makes her a beacon, yes, but it also strengthens the darkness that remains. Like the noon-day sun makes the shadows strong and sharp, her halo makes those black bones of his even blacker, the haze of gold makes them more obscure, more impenetrable, warded against the softly pulsing glow. She cannot forget the way the pieces of him reacted to her magic, pulling away from her grasp, and, full of her own self-hatred, she plucks recklessly at his shadows again just to see what will happen.
YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR
“Depends on what you’re trying to escape,” he answers her evenly, trying to not notice the way her guilt floods across his tongue. This was the part of himself that he hated the most, he thinks; the part that detects all their sorrows and negativity and instead of wanting to help them he thinks only about how he will siphon it away.
But the way they always seem to find him is the real wonder.
Rarely does he cross paths with anyone who is happy. Rarely has he ever had to invoke the negativity in them to get what he wants, because they come to him already broken in some way. And every time he feeds off their fragmented pieces he hates himself just a little bit more.
“In my experience, no. There is no escape.” Because if there were he wouldn't be like this.
He feels it again, the way she tries to pull at his shadows. They don’t listen, but they understand her—she speaks their language, but they are too bound to him to be swayed by anyone else. They billow and lift in response to her tugging before recoiling away from her, seeming to wrap tighter around him and sharpening his hazy edges. He laughs, then, the sound more a low, rumbling kind of humming that never leaves his chest than an actual laugh. “It didn’t work,” and he pauses, before adding pointedly with an amused tilt of his head. “Again.”
The space between them is entirely closed now, and he stands with his mouth hovering just above her golden neck, close enough that she would feel the ghost of his breath on her skin when he asks, “What would you do if you could control my shadows?” Most of his voice is swallowed by the dark around them as he glances down the curve of her neck, and that knot of want tightens in his gut. Carefully, he lowers his head just enough that the shadows of his mouth brush against her, the long tendrils of his mane rippling with the movement and skimming just over the surface of her skin. He isn’t sure if she has ever felt shadows besides her own, isn’t sure if his will feel cold and strange because they are not hers, and slowly he pulls himself away, once more widening the distance between the two of them. “You always try, but I can’t quite figure out what your intent is.”
There is another half-turn of his lips, and his tone is nearly taunting, teasing, when he asks, “Does it bother you that they don’t listen to you?”
