"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
Discontented with the life she had been given, it should be no surprise that Lillith was discontented with death as well. Instead of some grand realm, death for her had been emptiness. It may have been peaceful, for a spirit that craved less or who had found their way after a long, full life. Floating in a never-changing sea of neutral grey light would have been a welcome rest for such a spirit.
Not for her. Not for a single moment.
Doors back into the world had opened before, always just out of reach for either her spirit or her stubbornness to reach for. Time lost meaning, as it does, and she no longer knows how far away those doors have been in her past or whether they are still to come in her future. Her soul rests fitfully though no dreams plague her. They are a gift for the living, after all. Memories have faded too, though there had been few enough that gave her comfort. A few short friendships, many moments where her ambition crumbled by her hooves and she came out wanting. All of it is just as grey as the void around her where she waits without knowing it for something to begin.
And without warning, it does. A song drags her from the emptiness, pushing her towards the beach. This isn't where she had died — she'd bled into the grass somewhere else — but her soul recognizes this place and knows it well. The grey nothing of her afterlife has been the sand and the water and the mud and the bones.
She recognizes the voices now too as her dark purple body begins to reshape. Voices of her children, of their fathers, of friends, of her murderer. Memories long forgotten bubble up in distorted, uncertain mimicries of themselves. Reinforced by the malcontent rotting her from the inside out.
Most annoyingly — her mother's voice is a part of the call. Had it just been Agetta's single voice, the refusal for the game would've been easy simply out of spite. But it is blended in with the cacophony, the roar that sends a chill across her forming body.
And that, somehow, that simple little sensation makes Lillith aware she'll do anything to live again. To experience anything but the emptiness after all these long years. All those lost feelings, all the possibilities for more and brighter things. To not be alone any longer. Determination solidifies her mind, filling in the blank spaces left behind by a life no longer known except for the disappointment it had rooted in her dark heart.
So she has an answer for those voices from her past with their roaring question. Yes. "If it'll shut you up."
His heart had long ago stopped beating as he passed from living to dead. That righteous, stubborn organ finally set to rest. Maybe that had been his undoing. Perhaps it had run so hard and so fast, that it had used itself up before its time.
And time, speaking of, was now a stranger to him as well.
Alaunus couldn’t feel the many years that rolled on like waves on the shoreline, ceaseless and sure. All he could sense was being outside of them. Other. He wondered, of course, what was happening without him. The children and their children and so on and so forth. The kingdoms and their feuds. The women he loved and the women his body loved, for a time (the ones he admired and revered, too). Mostly, he reveled in the peace of death. The quiet of it. It is so different than life ever was.
So it is jarring and unnatural when he is violently ripped from the sanctuary of the afterlife. But he is also relieved, in some way.
His atoms precipitate amongst the sea-spray in the violent toss of the sea. Alaunus doesn’t register the exact second his eyes form again, because it is already so very dark. He hears the voices first instead. They swirl and eddy around him, pulling his attention this way and that, trying to find the faces that should be attached to them. His mother. His brother. His lovers. Carnage. A sick symphony that pulses in ears that are again-new to this world.
And then he sees. It is impossible, or should be. He wonders if he is still dead and this is the penance part he is finally owed. Surely his defiance and willfulness had earned him some type of retribution after his final breath? Maybe this is it. Because the creature that roars above him looks like it has been carved from the stones of Hell itself.
He manages to tear his gaze away long enough to notice others materializing nearby. Had they been dead just before, too? Or were they unfortunate enough to be sucked out to sea and into the clutches of the behemoth? Beqanna is a land of mysteries and magic, to be sure. But he never expected to be caught up in the chaos so long after he passed on. He also never expected to feel the vivaciousness of being alive again.
It is a subtle thing at first, a warmth blooming in his chest. But despite the creature and the howling voices of his past, it ignites into a fire that soon spreads through his limbs. It’s intoxicating: the way blood circulates through him, the way air expands and deflates his lungs. Alive, he thinks, one corner of his lips pulling into a crooked grin. Alaunus faces the towering figure then fully at last. “Would I ever.”Alive. Alive. Alive.
09-27-2026, 05:47 PM (This post was last modified: 09-27-2026, 08:42 PM by Arik.)
Image by Artistic Pineapple
When the darkness receded his mouth was full of sand, his eyelids crusted with it, his ears so full that the boom and rush of the tide rumbled soft as distant thunder instead of the crash that he could feel in the trembling earth beneath his shoulder and ribs. Nothing screamed of urgency, his pale eyes flickered open, lazy, sleepy, and alighted on, well, nothing. Billows of soft green-grey sighed past, leaving salt on his lips and reminding him, queerly, of blood in his mouth.
A strange thing, that.
He blinked, suddenly unsettled, and rolled sternally, his joints groaning beneath him as his weight shifted upright. The pressure in them was strange, flesh too soft, bones too brittle. He felt sea-rotten, salt-cured, like driftwood left on the beach, his thoughts no more than scratching sandfleas, digging themselves deeper and deeper when he tried to grasp at them and see what they were made of. He stopped trying. Instead, the stallion lifted his strange body up onto its creaking limbs and staggered numbly towards the dark water where further from the shore something even darker yet rose up, leviathan-high, and called him to service.
And what answer could he give? Words died somewhere between breathless lungs and blackened tongue. He could do no more than nod his heartless and sluggish assent. Yes, yes, he knew this game, though the memories still evaded him. It was something deeper than thinking; some instinct, some muscle memory, that dredged him out of his deep slumber at the ancient call to arms. The cacophony of its voices stung him, but he could not remember why.
"Welcome back."
Welcome; to where? From where? The stallion's fine head tipped to the side with a quiet, dry, snap, his gaze pulled back from the crowned entity to slide against the blurred landscape. He would know this shore, if he had been on it before, he is certain of it. And yet, he could not say where else he might have been. A hollow sound, like wood under hooves, echoed in his still-clogged ears; a child's laugh, a stallion's baritone bugling, and always, always, the lapping water. Meaningless.
"Would you like to play a game?"
His stilled heart shuddered in its quiet cage, sending him back to his knees.
yes
i am here
Not real thoughts, not real words, he was not yet capable of either thing, but he was capable of obeisance. It was, in truth, all he had left, though it rankled some small and nameless thing in his rotted mind. Perhaps, once, he was not someone who followed instructions well. That half glimmer of understanding felt real, if not whole. It was not everything. His attention returned to the wine-dark demon then, still bowed, still weak, his chest a growing ache bleeding slowly into his belly, his feet, his grey and bloodless lips.
"Y..." He gasped, the air a fire in his throat "...es."
He does not remember his unbecoming, does not remember how many eons he existed alone in the dark. His sense of knowing feels wrong, incomplete in the way he is less tangible than a thought, more brittle than a memory. It is, after all, impossible to persist in memory if you leave no one behind willing to hold you there. He thinks–and even this feels eerily unfamiliar, this sense of growing awareness and the way it binds itself to a distinct lack of understanding, an urgency to know–that he ought to be more than this. More than a notion, than a concept. He thinks, and he is soothed by the way this already feels easier, that certainly he must be real.
When the thrashing tide races away, pulled toward the gravity of the behemoth that rises from it, so too is he pulled from the nowhere. He can feel those fingers wrapped around every atom of his being, feel the siren song in the ache of his mind. He can feel himself, too. He is the dust that lifts and whirls, solidifying into the bleached white bone of a decidedly equine skeleton. He is the coalescing shadows that settle in the eerie dark to drape over bones that bend and groan beneath the weight of flesh made solid once more. He is all the light eclipsed and compressed into fire that spills across his silhouette like burning armor.
He is Sundered.
There are several things that come into focus all at once, and though he should be overwhelmed by it, he is curious to find only a sense of numb acceptance lodged like a weight within the cave of his ribs. Is this familiar? He hears the screams of the many, feels the way they climb into his head and settle there, the way they persist with no notable nexus - and that part does feel wrong. There should be… something. His jaw clenches hard, and he is suddenly frustrated by the pieces that do not quite fit here, by the way it feels so familiar and yet still wrong. He lifts his head and his dark eyes find the sky overhead just as it should be without sun or sky, without star or moon. It is just black, just nothing, and that is right.
It isn’t until he blinks again and the hazy film of death fully sheds from his eyes that he realizes what he had taken to be spires of stone in the near distance is something much, much more. “Demon.” He breathes, and this too feels right - feels wrong in a way that reawakens dread in the pit of his stomach, because it is right.
This is hell.
This is where he belongs.
Dread builds like bile in his throat, choking him until he pushes it back down and reaches for that sense of numbness, of what he now recognizes to be obedience. His eyes, bright despite the shade of them, extinguish with the rest of the light as the demon monolith greets his summoned hounds. Sundered is careful not to stare openly, he knows his place as a dog, knows his role here. But he is certain that this demon is not one he has known before. This thought settles like a barb in his mind, and he acknowledges his own uneasiness for less than a heartbeat before pushing that away too.
It does not matter what Sundered thinks.
Welcome back. It says, and the roar of voices, of sorrow and anguish and torment he is sure he has known before drowns him until even he must close his eyes to shut it out. It is better this way. He does not need to see the faces of the others who have gathered lest he recognize one and become unmade again. Would you like to play a game? And that is new, he thinks, to call such things a game. But he merely bows his dark brindled head in stony obedience.
sundered
i'd give anything to hear you say it one more time
you'll bury me again, you'll say it's all pretend;
She is meant to stay in her place.
She, for whom the Afterlife was made, part of some grotesque love story. She, who once waited on the shore at the world’s end, time repeating and folding over on itself.
The forces that condemned her to the Afterlife were supposed to be impenetrable – something beyond dead, because she is Gail, she is the dark god’s queen, she is full of her own strange powers.
But magic is an organism, in its way, and it adapts. It changes.
There are things that can slip through whatever prison was made for her, new magics, infecting the world as a virus might.
The waters stir, and roil.
Above the noise of the water, though, is the noises – the macabre symphony of death. She is used to such noises, of course, but is aware their volume has risen. She turns her attention back to the water, and gasps.
She watches as the veil that had so long precluded her from Beqanna suddenly parts.
She moves toward it, telling herself this is some joke. A cruel trick played by Carnage, a punishment for some slight he perceived, and she will be stopped by the veil, just like every time.
(She doesn’t try to escape – not often, at least. She likes the place well enough. Or maybe this is merely what she tells herself.)
She steps out into where the sea had been moments before. Her hooves sink in the damp sand, and a fetid, damp stench hits her nostrils. But once she has begun to walk, she does not slow.
She does not look back, either. She is not Lot’s wife, she will not turn to a pillar of salt, she will walk and any moment she will find that edge again, that thin, maddening membrane that keeps her here.
She moves on still and the parted waters soon tower above her head. Something wet and slick thuds against her again, she spares a glance down and sees a dully colored fish, thrashing in the strange, deadly place it has found itself.
Not that Gail knows what that’s like.
Enough time passes that finally, she stops, and she looks back. The water has closed the path only ten feet or so behind her. She cannot see the Afterlife.
She knows she should probably feel fear. At any moment, this strange path could cave in, bury her under crushing pressure.
But she is dead already, is she not? Dead women are so terribly hard to drown.
The end to the path comes sooner than she’d imagined – she is not a woman accustomed to having much of anything quickly – and she finds herself almost disappointed. She hadn’t had much in changes of scenery, lately.
As she fixes the rocky shore in her sights, the sea finally gives. The water crashes around her, sand suddenly swirling upward. Saltwater fills her lungs and she sputters, churning her legs forward, hooves finding purchase in the sand. She pushes forward, head emerging first, stepping out into this place dripping wet and salt-stained.
Would you like to play a game? asks a voice, and she chokes out a wet laugh.
She is very used to a devil’s game.
“I’d love to,” she says, “let’s begin.”
Gail
(this is late but Venge nicely let me enter late THANK YOU. or you can eliminate me for being late that's okay)
