"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
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It had been an accident.
This is the one comfort he has, the one he repeats when he cannot sleep at night as the relives what it had been like inside her mind.
(Joy, but darker things too, shackles rising like snakes in the grass, a body prone on the earth, loss echoing in hallways.)
(Flight, the sensation of it, different than the birds, different than anything he’d ever known.)
He hadn’t meant to lose control. Hadn’t meant to take control at all, really, but her mind had been so sweet, at first.
He doesn’t know how she is. If she even lived.
He – they – were falling, then they weren’t.
Then he was back in his own body, own mind, and he did not know where she was.
(He thought he heard a scream, but he doesn’t know if it was real or imagined.)
It had been an accident but that doesn’t mean he won’t carry his grief and guilt upon himself. He is sorry. He is always sorry. But he cannot reach out to anyone, lest he foul their mind as well.
But there is one, who quiets him, whose queer magic smothers whatever curse has befallen him.
He does not know if he can find her, but he knows her name: Etro, who was one poisoned by the place she called home, who spoke to him of dreams and an impossible sun.
He is lucky. For once in his life, he is lucky. For he finds her, bay and beautiful, and with it the restless buzzing of his mind quiets and he is so grateful he wants to throw himself at her feet, worship her as a goddess.
Perhaps she is. He is devout to her, in a strange way, devout to whatever powers she wields that quiet him the way they do.
“Etro,” he says. He does not mean to make her name sound like a sob.
and I ran back to that hollow again
the moon was just a sliver back then
Her life is quiet now—so quiet. In her youth, she had spent so much time in the loud that her ears still ring from it—from the sand shifting the sand to the impossible volume of Kingslay’s rare spoken word. They felt like bullets in her chest each time that they happened—so absolute, so permanent. To have all of that stripped from her felt like more than she could bear. Her father’s death still did not feel real. She could see her mother’s grief and it shook her to her very core to see her mother so affected.
She was without her father. Without her home. Without Kingslay.
She was without.
Etro spent her days wandering the meadow, searching—always searching. She felt it in her breast in ways that she could not understand but somehow made sense. Her motions were always the same and she always returned to sleep fruitless at the end of each day, and yet her searching continued.
So she is relieved, if not concerned, when Sleaze finds her in the midst of her searching and sobs her name. She almost sighs in relief at having something to latch onto, as she steps toward him, pressing her cheek to his neck. “Sleaze,” she says his name softly.
“I have missed you.”
and I ached for my heart like some tin man
when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
What the mare – Elysteria – had taught him was that he was dangerous. Dangerous the way natural disasters are – dangerous without intent or knowledge, but dangerous nonetheless.
(I only wanted to fly, he told himself, remembering the brief moment of joy, of light, before he – they – came tumbling down.)
He is dangerous because he can walk into their mind as if through an open door, he can work their bodies as puppets, chasing their memories of joy and happiness, and he can destroy them in the process.
But not her, not Etro – she melts the possession, leaves him wholly himself. She is a fortress, impenetrable, and he kneels at her walls with rapture.
She touches him like a benediction, the quietness swelling softly as his mind steadies, the motion quelled. She is a hand stopping the rocking horse. She is quiet and softness and she lays her cheek against him, a pressure he leans softly into as he touches his muzzle to her neck, for just a moment, to make sure she’s real.
“I’ve missed you too,” he says, and then he confessing before he can stop himself, “I hurt someone. I didn’t mean to. I was in her head and then…”
He trails off, words clotted in his throat, remembering her – remembering falling.
10-10-2015, 04:09 AM (This post was last modified: 10-11-2015, 03:04 AM by etro.)
etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
There is too many sicknesses in Etro for her to count—too many diseases both natural born and earned that crawl up her throat and clog her mouth. They are cotton on her tongue and sludge in her veins, and yet she finds that she does not mind. She makes her home amongst the murderers of the world and calls them love; she picks up the shattered pieces of glass and holds them to her chest even as her fingers bleed. So she does not shy at his confession, does not even move from the spot where she leaned into him. Instead, she simply made a noise of affirmation in her throat, the sound rumbling and quiet.
She did not fear him, did not fear the black cloak of magic that could pull the strings of stallion and mare alike. Her mind was not privy to such darkness; it was both shield and prison, protecting her from the same wonders that it forbid her from seeing. Both gift and curse. It is a few moments before she pulls away from his warmth, her mud brown eyes wide and calm as she looked at him with gentleness.
“You didn’t mean to.”
She repeats his words back at him, underlining them with soft emphasis. He didn’t need to convince her of his innocence, but perhaps she needed to do the favor for him. She knew in her heart of hearts that he was no viper—and, if he was, that his poison was not his to control. She could not blame the snake for sinking his fangs into a heel that stepped on his tail. Whatever control his mind wielded over those nearby was not his to direct. It was nature. Just as she did not blame Kingslay for the way he smelled of stolen life.
“Are you alright?” she asks in the silence, her voice of silver bells muted, the tension of the conversation dampening it slightly so that it is but a whisper. “That’s what is important to me.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
She might be filled with sicknesses, strange viruses that make her fall amongst and for the murderers and ne’er-do-wells of the world, but to him, she is a cure. To him, she is silence, somewhere in between mortal and goddess.
(He would worship her, if she asked. His knees are bare form when he once prayed nonstop, his lips know the words, his body knows prostration.)
And what is he, amongst her collection of sinners? For he does not revel in the destruction he trails behind him, instead it horrifies him. He had not meant to hurt the woman.
He had only wanted to fly.
She touches him again and it occurs to him she may have touched him more than anyone else (except his father, of course) in their brief meetings. It is an uneasy thought and he doesn’t quite know why, he only knows that there are parts of her bay skin that long to be explored were he not so cowardly. Are you alright, she asks, and he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know what he is with these memories and new powers surging inside of him.
“I just--” he begins, unsure how to finish, “I don’t want to hurt anyone again.”
He touches her, a moment of bravery. His mind quiets further at the contact.
“I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want it,” his voice is tight, “not when I can’t control it.”
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
His mere presence calms her mind, clouds her senses, and she is grateful for the distraction. She is grateful to not think about Kingslay’s shark eyes or the death of her father or her own horrible injustices to her family. He touches her, and she shivers, leaning into him more, closing her muddy eyes and breathing in deeply. “I know,” she whispers softly, and she does. She knows that he does not intend to hurt the people around him; that whatever he did was as involuntary as breathing or his own heart beating.
There were some souls in the world that could not help the way that they slashed; there was some that simply hurt by being alive. Her heart bled for them. She picked them, and they picked her.
She understood.
Her mouth wanders on his neck, lingering at places where he is so dark that the purple fades into inky black. He is a wonder, and she does not understand how he cannot see it. He is a marvel, and she pays him homage like he deserves, her touch soft and hesitant as she mapped the constellations on his flesh. “Perhaps you can learn to control it,” she suggests before looking up to catch his gaze, feeling the turbulence within him reflected back at her, the tension both sweet and aching. “I could help you.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He doesn’t know what this is, doesn’t have the words for it.
He’s never been a particularly smart boy, and the circumstances with which he came about were odd ones, to be sure. Born of men, made of magic and a love that soured before he was delivered, he had grown up alone with only Garbage for company. There had been no one else.
And even in his travels, there was no one for long, fleeting conversations that never meant much to either party.
And then, the dream, the reality, the cleaving of his mind – an existence too impossible to be true, too true to be impossible. (There was a girl. There was not a girl.)
All this to say, he doesn’t know if he wants to worship her or love her, and isn’t sure of how to go about either.
All Sleaze really knows is there is a great comfort in the way her muzzle feels against his neck, in the warmth of her. That, when he awoke from falling (from being Elysteria, moments of joy and flight turned to fear and a descent), she was the name echoing in his mind, the one he sought like a solace.
But he doesn’t have the words for it. Barely even knows what it is.
He’s never been a particularly smart boy.
“Perhaps,” he echoes, touching her, “but I don’t think I’m meant to be magic.”
He’d give it up in a heartbeat, this queer ability, his mind jumping like a rabbit in a cage. He barely knows himself, to know others as he does is surely a violation.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
sleaze is being difficult today forgive the lackluster post
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
Love is both an intimately known and foreign concept to the mare. She feels it in her breast, and she has watched it from afar when her parents had cradled against one another. She knew what they had was love: powerful, fierce, all-encompassing love. The kind of love that was to be eventually written into the stars for everyone to stare upon and sigh heavily, wishing for that kind of magic to touch their lives just once.
Etro had felt love before, but it had not felt like that. Her love was alien in her chest. It was the love of a flat-eyed boy who she had, with age, learned smelled like death. It was the love of a land that did not love her back. It was the love of the broken and bereaved. Her love was a twisted thing in her chest, and it was just enough to cause her to question it, to look up on it with uncertainty. Could that possibly be love?
She feels that uncertainty in her chest now, leaning against him. She feels it when her mouth lingers on his neck, and she draws away just slightly, mouth folding into a frown, muddy lips pressing together. “I think you are magic,” she says quietly, feeling almost ashamed for how childish the statement sounded when left alone in the open air. She cannot bring herself to look him in the eye. “Doesn’t that count?”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It should be in his blood, the love and fervor of his fathers – both men had loved recklessly, irresponsibly.
Sleaze had done no such thing, had barely skirted the idea. Garbage had once laid his neck across Sleaze’s back in a way that had been warm and strange, but it had only been a moment, and Garbage had left soon after. He does not fall in the way his fathers did, he is a stupid boy but not a particularly reckless one.
And she does not make him feel reckless or irresponsible – instead, she is a balm, she soothes. She strips him of the possession (a nakedness he wears gladly, gratefully), she lays her muddy lips against him and makes him believe his worlds will someday come together, that he will no longer be a man torn asunder.
I think you are magic, she says, so quiet he wonders if he misheard her, or if she said it at all.
“No,” he says, but softly, “you’re the one who’s magic. You’re the only one who’s stopped…this.”
The relentless mind, leaping like a jackrabbit into a hundred minds and bringing home piecemeal memories, some sweet and some horrid. She stops it.
“That’s magic, Etro,” he says, and his voice is thick with all the things he wants to say and all the things he does not know, “the quiet, that’s magic.”
She was not magic; she was the anti-thesis of it. She was the quiet void that sucked the magic from the world and spat it out as plain as she looked: a black pit of nothing. The truth of it stings, and she does not even comprehend the fullness of it. Etro knows that there is something about her—something that erases, something that smothers—but she doesn’t know what, and she doesn’t know how. She only barely believes that her ability (her curse) is tied to the illness that had driven her out of the Deserts the first time.
Tears spring to her eyes at his confession, and she aches to throw herself against him, for her knees to give out, but she manages to stand tall. “No,” her voice breaks on the word, and she shakes her blocky head violently. “I remove the magic from the world,” and it is the saddest confession she has ever given, her voice so small that she wonders if he will be able to hear it at all. Then, she wonders if perhaps she had not wanted him to. Perhaps he could just go on believing that she was indeed magic.
Sighing, exhausted, she pressed her head against his neck, breathing in the musk and scent of him, finding it warm her belly like a quiet pull of liquor. “But I am glad it quiets you, Sleaze.” She says his name as she always does: like a prayer. She says his name, and the silence between them stretches on for another moment, Etro finding solace in it until the moment she breaks it. “What now?” She wasn’t sure.
