"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
No, that’s not entirely true, he thinks. The last time he was here - at least, the last time he can recall from a mind clogged with the infinite memories that comes with immortality - it was his mother that drew him. The bloody-shouldered Queen had risen from the dead, restored to this plane … but she had been different, not just imbued with magic as he had been following his Alliance victory; magic had been stitched into every fiber of her being - she was magic. It was unnerving, given she had scorned it for as long as he could remember, and their reunion had been short lived, ash on a tongue wanting for water.
The last he remembers talking to was a young mare with a dry sense of humor and affinity for the dead. Though, talking to is not entirely true. She had remarked on something about the morning being lovely - though it had indeed not been - and rather than reply, he had fixed her with a hollow-eyed stare for a few moments and then simply … vanished. Likely it was that had no desire to wallow in his miseries in front of a stranger, and the capriciousness of his spirit does not accommodate for the traditional rules of “civilized” society, so he had just disappeared rather than engage.
He is not sure where he has been since then. In the past, his sense of adventure had led him beyond Beqanna to experience other worlds. He’d even followed Niklas to the underworld once or five times. A chuckle rattles in his lungs at the memory of their last visit, more mischievous brothers than father and son. He inhales and the scent of the pines and home floods his lungs.
His eyes snap open as he starts to run, shaking his head from side to side before crowing with youthful exuberance. He thunders past the scorched tree, hoofbeats thrumming along with the distant drum of a stallion’s sacrificed heart as they find familiar paths again. He is drenched with sweat and foam when he finally reaches one of his childhood haunts. Chest heaving, he thrills in this feeling of being alive, after so many decades spent feeling untethered. He has his back to the mouth of the familiar cave up the side of the southern mountain, (nearly) the entirety of the Chamber stretched out below him. It is just the same as it was before he was forced from her borders; and yet, there at the end of a pine-scented lungful is a warped ripple of unsettling nescience. True to his nature, he tamps the unwanted feeling down. And waits.
The thing (for she is a thing) staggers, graceless. The patchwork knees, cobbled together by magic, bleed where she has sunk to them on the stones. (How strange that she should bleed, both where the skin tears and from those strange, unblinking eyes, when there is no heartbeat. No pulse. How cruel that magician’s design, how sadistic. The blood springs, not from veins, but from other, deeper well. It never stops.)
She travels, not because she wants to but because there is nothing else at all to do. She travels and she calls upon the dead and she sinks herself into the Underworld, flaying the souls there. And she delights in it for the reaper had created her to be this thing of death.
But she wanders aimless here now, oblivious to the horrified looks of those she passes on her way to no place in particular. She wanders, bleeding, and passes through the place where the creator had lived, where the Fates had been designed, conceived. (The Fates after which she had been fashioned. The reaper had taken the black, the gray, the pure white, tethered the pieces together with magic. Animated the thing and let it loose on the world. It is not beautiful, this thing, not as the Fates are beautiful.)
She does not recognize borders, does not know that places have changed, does not know that she has made it to a place that itself has risen from the dead. (Would she find it delightful? Would she know what it meant?)
She wanders and finds him quite by accident.
“You,” she rasps, the voice garbled, all wrong. She says it as if she knows him.
And perhaps she does. Perhaps she had seen him in the Underworld, perhaps she can smell it on him.
She stops there, goes so impossibly still, bleeding from the knees and the eyes, the blood pooling at her feet. She stares at him, unmoving, unblinking. But she says nothing further.
“Me,” he replies, the clack of his teeth nearly snapping off the end of the word, a wry smile softening the blow. He rounds on her with the grace of a predator, his head lowered and tilted to the side, yellow eyes curious as they track up and down, then back up again. One corner of his mouth jerks when he blinks, a subtle gesture of approval. Some might find aversion in the gaunt lines of a creature such as she, and while there is a grotesque sort of air about her in a way he cannot entirely pinpoint, his fascination with the unnatural pulls him closer.
She reeks of Death; not the decaying, maggot-infested sort of death, but the cloying, moth-eaten perfume of dead souls … His gaze shifts from her hollow stare, following the rivulets of blood down her face to her chin, where it drips and gathers at her feet, saturating the earth. The dark stain spreads rapidly, as if it were sentient.
“You’re bleeding. Quite a lot.” He points out the obvious with a jerk of his chin, mismatched ears flicking back and then forward again.
In his perusal of her, he wonders if she is another former denizen of the Chamber. This kingdom has a long and storied past. Though his time here and his family's time here had lasted for generations, there are dozens of bloodlines and individuals who can lay claim to some of its memories. He takes another deep breath, wrinkling his nose at the after-scent of the underworld and not so subtly shifting upwind of her. “You didn't happen to see Niklas where you came from, did you?” he asks, as if they are old friends, absently minding the edges of the bloodstain on the ground.
His expression registers no shock, no abject horror, though it makes little difference to her. Even if he had turned only to shy away, she would have grinned a bloody grin and followed. (Because she is a one-track minded thing, rotting, wanting. It is not lust, exactly. But it’s not all that different either.)
The ribs heave, though she does not draw breath, like there is some kind of life roiling just beneath the surface of her skin but it does not belong to her. She glances down at the blood that pools and spreads as if reaching for him and tilts her own strange head, blinking. (The blinking, of course, serves only to displace more of the blood that collects along the edge of her bottom eyelids. Serves only to send it more quickly down her gaunt cheeks.)
She smiles, stains her teeth red, and lifts her focus back to his face. “I hadn’t noticed,” she answers. It is merely a fact of life (or death, rather, in her case) at this point. She bleeds because she was designed to do so. She bleeds to remind others what it means to be alive, to remind them that they, too, are always standing at the edge of death.
Niklas. She does not know them by name. She knows them by the unnatural way they bend beneath her pressure. She knows them by the way they either cry out for mercy or don’t. She knows them by the scars of their deaths and the way that their souls have teeth.
“Niklas,” she repeats and the name dissolves on her tongue, comes apart at its edges. “Tell me how he died.”
Tell me how he died, she says - demands, in a sickly drawl - and he gathers up the pieces of his son’s name with a scowl, as if her speaking of him as dead could somehow permanently remove the devil from this plane.
“He’s not dead,” he says matter-of-factly, casting his gaze out over the Chamber. Autumn is in full swing, the reds and golds of the deciduous trees crowded by the perpetuity of the evergreens. Turning back to the bleeding stranger, his eyes snag on the corner of her smile, lingering on the ivory stained red and where grime cakes and gathers. It is only a moment or two, though, and then he is moving back to meet her red stare. “He is like you … but not the same as you,” he continues, cryptically, rolling his shoulders as if to shrug. Remembering the unbidden way her undead flesh heaved with life not hers. He knows what he means, but his mind still buzzes with the return of the Chamber, his blood humming with a sense of purpose he has not felt in decades; he does not bother to further elaborate, instead switching subjects.
“Why are you here?”
He shifts his weight, restless. He is distracted and it’s obvious. A deep sigh. When the Chamber rose, he answered its siren’s call. And though his history is rooted in the bedrock of the resurrected kingdom, there are still years and dozens of magical changes that yawn between then and now … his stare traces the blood’s path as it runs down the fine bone structure of her face. Life spilling out over death’s canvas … he blinks, mentally recoiling from that particular existential brink.
(How many had the thing encountered in the Underworld who had no place there at all? How many had been impervious to her manipulation? Precious few. And so this creature who was like her but not like her should stand out in her mind as something worth remembering.
Because it angered the thing, certainly, when they did not bend to her will.)
“How?” The thing asks and tilts its head, bleeding, so that a river of that bright red blood spills into the corner of the patchwork mouth. But she does not swallow it, she has no taste for blood. She does not hunger for much, Miseria, because the dead want for nothing at all. The dead know neither feast nor famine. These worldly things simply do not matter.
It is a fair question. Why is she here above ground? Why is she here in the Chamber? Why is she a thing that exists at all? Each version of the question has a different answer.
Above ground because the Creator had set her loose there, summoned her from the depths of hell to unleash her on the world. (He had not understood, though, that her power would be weak here. Barely there at all. Someone cheap facsimile of his own power.) Here in the Chamber because she had set out without any real direction at all, moving simply for the sake of moving. Because it was what he’d programmed her to do.
Why is she a thing that exists at all? Because the Creator is greedy and cruel.
“What reason would most please you?” she asks, tilts that ugly head, grins.
05-07-2023, 07:53 PM (This post was last modified: 05-07-2023, 07:55 PM by Set.)
“It’s not really about pleasing me,” he says to her with a seemingly self-deprecating grin. “Not here, not anymore. There was a time that I mattered to this kingdom very much.” He is back at the edge now, lowering his head out over empty space, as if he were drinking from the valley below. “And then not at all …,” he finishes. Though he mumbles it so quietly, with his back to her, that she may be hard pressed to hear it. He remains there as if in suspension, the bright gold of his eyes dull and unfocused, no breath in his lungs - oddly still given his restlessness just moments ago; as if he were a bit of painted rock, a statuesque ode to an old, long forgotten, king.
A rogue breeze, one with a chill on the back end of it, picks listlessly at his dreaded locks, breaking whatever spell holds him captive. He is back now, chucking her under her bloodied chin with casual familiarity as he moves past her gaunt form, ignoring blood that now stains the white bit of his muzzle. On second thought … he pauses, cocking his head back in her direction, meeting and holding her gaze from the corner of his, thoughts hidden behind a lifetime of guarding them.
“I hope you’ll stay, Red,” and he chuckles at his very obvious nickname, his face bright with youthful mischief. He runs his tongue along the inside of his teeth. “Though if you do, we will have to do something about the trail you leave behind,” he fades off, frowning. By stay he does not mean here, in the Chamber - though he has no intentions of leaving it any time in the near future, not now that it's back after so long. No, by stay he means with him, in his orbit. She is a curiosity, no doubt, a great power forced to be a shadow of itself here, outside of the afterlife. He cannot help this habit of being drawn to such curiosities, following some innate urge to surround himself with the powerful and interesting alike; even the grotesque and unnatural. Albeit, fewer and fewer pass for unnatural these days in Beqanna.He reaches out with just a bit of magic, a featherlight touch, enough to confirm his suspicions and to arouse new ones. “Who created you, love? Why aren’t you with them?” His tone gives little away, all the restlessness of moments ago gone.
The thing does not know what it means to matter and she certainly does not know what it means to have mattered. (Perhaps there is some piece of horse-flesh that comprises her that had once belonged to someone who had mattered, someone who might have ventured to the edge of something and looked out into all the nothingness and remembered what it had been like to matter. But this thing dragged up from hell and cobbled together by magic has absolutely no notion of what it might mean to have any relevance at all.)
It watches, though, intrigued by the way he stares, quiet. By the way he seems to come back to life as the wind stirs and he turns back to face her. She blinks, bleeding, uncomprehending. She glances past him to all that kingdom stretching out through the valley and wonders what it means to have meant anything at all to a place.
“You miss it,” the thing observes. “You miss mattering,” it adds and tilts its ugly head, studying the face, the far-away gaze. She is a thing, certainly, and there are so many things she does not understand about what it means to be alive, but she is not stupid.
He touches the thing without recoiling and his mouth comes away stained by its blood. (Whose blood is it? Had the Creator had to take it from someplace else? Is it the Creator’s blood or someone else’s entirely?) It is the first time she has left her mark on anyone else and there is some sharp thrill that snakes its way through her gut at the sight of it there.
He considers the thing and it goes on staring back at him. Red, he says, and the thing grins something grotesque, pleased. Is this what it means to matter? It is not her name, not even close, but what a wonder it is to be called anything at all. It glances down at all that blood and shifts its slight weight. There is nothing to be done about it, the thing understands, you cannot stop the bleeding of something that’s not meant to bleed in the first place.
The focus shifts back to his face at his question and it grins another bloody grin. “The reaper,” it answers plainly. “He did not create me to be kept.”
Set
