[private] climbed up on your cross, colby

[bael]

bael

Ask him how much time has passed and he will tell you that none has passed at all.
He will tell you neither ice nor death know time.
And, because he is a monster, he does not either.

How meaningless the changing of the seasons, the passing of days.
Born an ugly thing, it is hard to tell that he has aged at all now that he’s an adult.
Nothing about him changes these days, Bael. Except that now he can touch the surface of a pool and watch as the whole thing freezes. Sometimes he will wait for some poor, unwitting creature to wade into the depths before he administers his kiss just to watch it writhe and squirm. The darkness in him is ancient and depthless.

The darkness in him is hungry.

He watches now as the ice splinters outward away from him, watches as the vegetation wilts and freezes. It has always been in his nature to destroy, understand. The first thing he brought to ruin was his voice when his mother, horrified by the ugly thing she had birthed, froze him in place with her own ropes of ice. He had screamed for her, frantic and starving, and she had left him there. The ice had softened more and more the further she got from him, until he could shake free of it. But she was already gone, Camellia, lost to him.

So now it is gravel, strangely stilted by the unnaturally beaked mouth. And only the first of many things he has wrecked.

Because he knows all about hunger.
He roams now, something wicked unleashed on the world more than something birthed into it, though there are much wickeder things here. 

And he comes upon the river in his roaming and is just about to press his mouth into the water when he hears something, though he cannot identify the sound or its source. So he just pauses there, hovering above the river’s writhing surface, and listens. 

( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )

[Empyreal]

who could ever leave me, darling,
but who could stay?

From a shadowy copse of trees, she watches him, silent. Her eyes, large and dark, brim with a curiosity she can hardly contain, purposely keeping her breathing soft. She doesn’t know why she does this — why she watches instead of approaching, as if she is trying to steal a glimpse into the side they show when they think they are alone. Usually, she watches them from above, hidden within the wisps of cotton-candy clouds, crafting stories about them to weave into her daydreams. From up there, they were always exactly as she needed them to be.

She had decided earlier today that she would work up the courage to meet one of them. To see if maybe she has been missing something by confining her idea of them to her own mind and imagination.

There is no particular reason that she chose him, at least, not in the beginning. She listens to the soft rush of the river, wondering what he is thinking as he hovers above it. There is something dark, something strange that seems to cling to him, and perhaps this has been embedded into the very fabric of her making, but his darkness is what pulls her from hiding.

“Hello,” she says to him, her voice soft as the stardust that drifts in lazy motes from her wings as she walks. She does not know yet to be afraid; no one had ever been unkind in her made-up versions of the world, and even in the case of her own father her mother was an unreliable source. Still, she does not close the space between them entirely, her dark eyes watching him from beneath the honeyed glow of the halo above her head. “Did you do that?” She asks, gesturing toward the trail of frozen and wilted vegetation he seems to have left in his wake.

Empyreal

@bael

[bael]

bael

He lifts his head slow, blinking lazy, and turns to look at her. Not at all what he expects to come swimming out of the trees at him, all light and stardust, that halo casting soft light across her brow. Beautiful, certainly, but he has always found himself drawn most strongly to the ugly things. Beauty is too fragile, he thinks, don’t take much to sully it. Much harder to make ugly things anything other than exactly what they are.

He does not respond to her greeting, merely casts his gaze past her to the ruin she references. The answer seems obvious, as they’re the only ones around as far as he can tell. He blinks back at her, thinks that he could show her.

He nudges a strand of ice across the earth between them, watches as it begins to climb her forelimb before he nods it back down into the dirt. He does not stay here where she stands the way his mother had done to him. It is not kindness that prevents him from doing so but a sort of laziness. It would simply take too much effort. The tendril of ice snakes back to him then, disappearing completely at his feet. He rolls one shoulder in a sort of shrug then, says, “guess so.”

He offers no further answer, merely stands and watches her. He does not suspect she’ll flee from him, though the ice he wields is born from terror, there is nothing overtly frightening about it. It had not been meant to scare her anyway, it had merely been a demonstration.

“You do that?” he asks, nodding to the stardust accumulating around her feet.

( they won’t fix ya, they ain’t with ya )
( they won’t muzzle the mouth that just bit ya )