"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
03-29-2023, 11:31 PM (This post was last modified: 04-08-2023, 11:32 AM by achille.)
Achille’s father is dead and there is nothing on this plane or the next that will reverse what happened.
The sky above Achille’s hiding spot churns with the ominous gray that only exists when a thunderstorm and dusk meet. He stares blankly as the clouds shift and sputter. A flash of lightning illuminates the gold swirling across his face. He merely blinks as a single, fat raindrop splashes onto the tip of his nose.
Achille is no stranger to bad weather, but especially now as his melancholy heart serves him more discomfort than the now steadily pouring rain. There was a time when he might be delighted to splash in any puddles or perhaps muddy his hooves; but as he contemplates how the rift his father’s death caused will destroy his family, he can’t find it within himself to sense even an ounce of joy.
Eventually, the Stratosian stallion finds himself aimlessly weaving through widespread trees. The noise of the pine needles crunching beneath his hooves is muffled by the constant pattering of rain and the damp ground.
Achillle closes his eyes often, too tired from a restless lack of sleep to care if a stray branch brushes his face. He stumbles over roots and rocks as the storm above soaks his mane to his neck.
Those often-closed eyes betray him when he stumbles upon a stranger, but all he can really mumble out is a brief oh and then sorry. He barely offers a passing glance before stepping forward to continue on his way.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She could have hidden from the rain, but she doesn’t.
There is something that makes her feel terribly alive, to be drenched in a cold that seeps into her bones, to feel her teeth clench and her muscles ache with the need to tremble. It is an innate flaw on her part, to only find meaning in discomfort and pain—to only feel as if she is living when in the company of some kind of misery. A strange thing, because if someone were to ask her are you happy? she would answer, without hesitation, yes, of course, and might even be confused why someone would think the contrary. Sorrow and happiness and pain and contentment have always gone hand in hand for her—they cannot exist without each other, a careful balance of scales that needed to be tilted just so to keep herself from feeling as if she is falling.
Stardust scatters on the surface of puddles that pool on the ground in a trail behind her, and her pale mane clings to her damp neck, blinking the rain from her eyes. Despite her inward changes—changes she still has not looked too closely at—she remains outwardly the same, haloed and glowing, stark white and gold, with only pitch-dark eyes to break up the otherworldly brightness. She sees him, drifting and alone, like a gilded, earth-bound storm cloud. He is slicked wet just as she is, but a simple glance tells her he is saturated in more than just water, with sorrow dripping from like stardust and water does from her wings.
“Don’t be sorry,” she tells him, with a quiet kind of urgency to her soft voice—not wanting him to leave, taking a gliding step to just barely block his path, or so that she might at least fall into step behind him. She is not often drawn to sadness, preferring instead those that are blade-sharp and unforgiving, someone where her role is always the same and she is only expected to break rather than make anything better. “Where are you going?” she finds herself asking him, trying to anchor him to this place, if only for a little while.
There’s only a muted surprise on Achille’s face when the pale stranger steps after him. His gaze is bright with some emotion even he isn’t sure of when he peers at her. Two emerald eyes stare unceasingly at the angel, as if he cannot comprehend why anyone—much less someone so ethereal—would want to steal his attention. He draws his chin a bit closer to his chest and pulls a short breath into his lungs.
“I . . .”
All the aplomb of drawing a breath and Achille can barely utter a syllable.
With a gruff sort of look on his face, he turns his head away to look anywhere—at anything, any shadowed shape—other than the celestial woman before him. He sees the possible outcomes of their encounter in the darkness that drowns the colors of their surroundings. Incapable of feeling anything other than shame and disappointment, Achille shoulders away.
“Out of the rain,” he grumbles, lying. With mostly his back facing Ryatah, Achille stands incredibly still, head partially drooping. He sighs quietly, then offers a short, sidelong glance in the angel’s direction. His fog reaches out to Ryatah, almost as if to mute her glow to match his mood.
“Where are you going?” he asks. His rough voice tumbles out like the rolling of thunder before the lightning he controls.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
It does not escape her how he cannot seem to look at her, but she cannot find it in herself to be offended, or even deterred by it. She knows that she is too bright—that her aura lingers on the verge of uncomfortable to look at, a celestial light that has been dimmed for mortal eyes, but only just so. She is sure she could change it now, if she wanted; she could shed this entire angel persona and let her magic morph her into something better suited for the wretched, hypocritical heart she houses inside, but of course she does not. No matter what kind of power finds its way inside of her, she never changes—her selfishness is resolute, and no amount of light has managed to uproot the darkness she has kept hold of for so long.
Truth be told, she likes being contradictory.
She likes that she is never what they expect when they see an angel; that beneath all that softness is something complex and gray, a mosaic of light and dark that would never fit together perfectly.
She has never been able to be what they want her to be, and now she is the perfect vision to match how beautifully she always fails.
“You’re not doing a very good job of it,” she says, her tone lightly teasing, thinking he will either find humor in her words or she will only succeed at irritating him. It is a risk she is used to taking, and while she does not think he poses much of a threat—at least, not in comparison to some—she is still cautious. The electricity that hums under his skin does not go unnoticed by her, and even if she might now hold the power needed to fend for herself, she is still not proficient at calling it.
He asks her where she is going, and she gives a thoughtful tilt of her head. “I never really know until I find it,” she answers after a moment, watching the fog that curls towards her. She conjures a tendril of golden stardust, much like what clings to her wings, and lets it fall in a shimmering shower through the fog, watching the strange way the light diffuses in the haze. “My name is Ryatah. Who are you?”
04-16-2023, 10:52 PM (This post was last modified: 04-16-2023, 10:53 PM by achille.)
“I was lying,” Achille answers, deadpan. He watches Ryatah with eyes that darken in a rotting, angry sadness.
He remembers the first time he was caught in a lie.
The look of disgust on his mother’s face, the sheer terror trembling in his heart.
“I’ll have to tell your father,” she said firmly. “Lying to miss lessons. You’ll have to lead in the war one day, Achille. You must know that?”
Big, glowing eyes stared up at his mother. Silence was his only answer.
“Achille,” he growls eventually, gemstone gaze trailing the golden dust dripping into his fog. He draws back his head, almost offended that she would mix her magic with his without asking. His gaze is sharp and defensive when he stares at Ryatah, desperate to find some reason to ruin this interaction.
But that anger he harbors is perhaps muted by the pattering rain and dark forest—all Achille feels is such suffocating melancholy. It strikes him with a physical pain, one that mirrors a strike of lightning in the sky. He turns his head away again, sighing a heavy, burdened sigh.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” Achille coughs out. “I’m not from here.”
He practically barks like a scared dog, uncertain and barely willing to admit even that smallest secret.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She has built armor against anger over the years.
His pitch-dark stare and words that long to become knife-sharp cannot find a mark, glancing off the shield that had allowed her to survive in the company she keeps for as long as she has. There may be times that she still withers beneath Carnage’s disapproving stare or feels tension steal through her body on the rare occasions that Atrox’s temper flares in her presence, but she is relatively impervious to the irritation of strangers. She is not terribly concerned with making him like her; she also does not think she is the reason for his resentment, because she so rarely is.
And she can feel it, that undercurrent of sorrow that threatens to pull his anger under, to drown it in something thick and heavy.
It did not matter that a new kind of magic coursed through her now, it is her old magic that sits closest to the surface, and she feels his emotions without searching for them. It felt like an invasion, as if she had opened a door to something she was not supposed to see, or overheard a conversation not meant for her ears. But while she cannot unlearn the information now that she has found it, she does not comment on it. She does not tell him to direct his anger elsewhere; she does not tell him that it is a wasted emotion, that it will do nothing to improve his situation, just as she does not feed him promises of hope that it will get better (perhaps it will not— the world is cruel like that).
She only watches him, unmoved.
“Achille,” she echoes his name from earlier, and she likes the shape of it in her mouth — it feels soft and lilting, nothing at all like the storm-cloud of a man in front of her. “Where are you from?” she asks, at risk of deepening that well of anger he is harboring.
