"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
11-11-2015, 07:19 PM (This post was last modified: 11-11-2015, 07:19 PM by Shahrizai.)
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
He is a murderer. This is the only thing he can think as he stands immobile. It is a cadence inside his mind, a track playing on repeat. He is a murderer. It does not matter that it was a different world, that he had been a different man, under the influence of an unscrupulous woman. He is still a murderer. The sight of Killian lying there, pale and lifeless, hazel eyes wide and staring, haunts him still. Will haunt him until the day that he dies. It does not matter that he had not wanted to do it. What matters is that he had.
The sun shines down strongly upon him, bright rays warming his pewter coat, casting a bright glow around him, banishing nearly all shadows from around him. He has discovered, much to his dismay, a newfound affinity for that half-light in-between space of shadow. He is too scared to delve too deeply into this affliction. Terrified that this is a direct result of his newly acquired status as a murderer. That the only reason shadows have grown to love him is that he has fallen into such darkness by his actions.
And that is definitely something he does not want to look too closely at.
So he lingers there, in the strongest patch of sunlight he can find, banishing all such thoughts from his mind just as he banishes the shadows. But the one thing that he cannot banish is the refrain echoing through his mind. The accusations of murder ringing through his head, reminding him of all the things he wishes to forget. He does not realize, as he stands there in silent recrimination, that the faint shadows beneath him (the ones that the sun cannot quite banish) have begun to crawl along his flesh in response to his turbulent emotions.
Anastasia is a killer, but she does not consider herself a murderer. She does not have the guilt and shame that came with such a word—she does not have the conscience to support it. Her father had taught her how to take joy in spilling life and the freedom in power, and she reveled in it as all wild, feral things did. She appreciated the skill it took to hunt, and she found there was satisfaction in the way bones could break in her mouth if she applied the right amount of pressure in the right angle. And she did not feel guilt that she often left the bodies behind, blood slowly draining from them.
She was not made normal.
She did not hunger for grass or wheat or flesh. She did not hunger for anything. In the past, there were times when she had forced herself to try it—driven by curiosity rather than the drumming beats of a needy stomach. She had forced herself to chew. Forced her jaw to work through the hide and skin. Forced herself to swallow and had not liked the way that it had hit her empty, useless stomach. Had not like the way she had felt afterward—full and unnatural—the meat sitting there without purpose.
So there were times when she ate, but she did not like it.
Today is not one of those days. Today, she is enjoying the meadow, jumping through portals and bouncing from edge to edge. In these moments, she is distinctly child-like, yellow eyes bright with amusement. She does not stop until she sees him, and like anything that drew her attention, she moved toward him. She threw up portal after portal and jumped in a zig-zag pattern toward him, following no logical trail.
It was not until she was several yards away that she paused, inky body stilling for a second, eyes narrowing at the sun that beat down. “Bad taste,” she finally calls, shaking her head. “Sun is bad.” She wrinkles her nose at it, exaggerating her features to get the point across. She motions to the shadows that are beginning to swirl at his feet, feeling herself drawn to them. “They know.” She nods again. “They know.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
There are times, like now, when he wishes that he could be like her. That he could have a clear conscience, despite the life he had taken. Despite the numerous ways in which he had failed. His family, his home. Her. He had failed them all, and that eats him alive. The guilt is ever present, a dark blotch upon his soul, spreading and claiming. And sometimes, just sometimes, he wishes that he had no conscience.
He stares out at the surrounding meadow, brown eyes blank, distant. He doesn’t see her at first when she peeks out from her portal. Doesn’t notice the way that the shadows react to her presence. Spreading, reaching, as though they long to be a part of her. Daring to brave the sunlight just for one small touch. He can feel the tug and pull, but he ignores it, just as he ignores his sudden affinity for shadow. He doesn’t wish to know of it, to know why he suddenly has this ability. It is too terrifying to contemplate.
When she speaks, she finally gains his attention, startling him from his reverie. The dark patches that had been reaching for her suddenly scamper back, swarming up his legs and belly. Covering him. Protecting him. Even when he does not wish it, does not realize it.
His chocolate hued eyes fix upon her, wide with surprise. Her words are meaningless at first, but slowly (too slowly) they resolve themselves, taking on the meaning they were meant to have. Sun is bad. Even as his mind clambers to disagree, his body says yes. It knows. It has grown to love the halflight of shadow in ways he cannot begin to comprehend. In ways he does not wish to comprehend.
It has betrayed him.
He doesn’t realize at first that he has taken a step closer to her. Doesn’t realize until he is standing mere feet, rather than yards, away. He stares at her for a moment, trying to understand what he is seeing. Trying to understand what she is, why he is so drawn to her.
Finally, after a long moment (too long), he speaks, his words easing out on a whisper.
They know nothing.
He is in denial. Even he can see that, but he persists. He persists because it is the only thing left to him.
Her lack of social graces also mean that she does not comprehend conversations well. She does not pick up on the subtle cues of someone who would rather be alone or someone who is wrestling with internal conflicts. After all, she does not comprehend the concept. Life was so simple—so black and white. Things were either a yes or no; she either liked something or she did not. You were dead or you were alive. There was no room for areas of gray in her world. She did not understand those shades.
She frowns at his denial, and her lips pull back over her sharp teeth. “Liar,” she hisses in her broken tongue, her voice thick in her mouth. Her yellow eyes wander toward the shadows that scamper up his legs and cling to his coat, and she feels sympathy for them—feels sorry that they have claimed this stallion as a master when he so clearly wants nothing to do with them. For a second, she feels anger.
It is not foreign, but it is rare. The way it flares in her belly.
“Say sor-ry,” she demands, as she portals near him, at his side in a blink of an eye, baring her teeth at him as she nudges the shadows around his neck, her own way of comforting them. “Apol-o-gize.” Her ears pin back against her skull, and she considers ripping into his throat, but she also knows what that would mean for the shadows. They were given life by something inside of him, and ripping that from him would mean that she was destroying them. To Anastasia, they were innocent in this. They did not deserve death for it. “Sha-dows like you,” she hisses. “Why you no like them?”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
11-23-2015, 12:44 PM (This post was last modified: 11-23-2015, 12:45 PM by Shahrizai.)
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
Once, his life had been very black and white. Good was good and evil was evil. As a naïve child, it had been only one or the other. At least, until a plain chestnut mare had stumbled into him in this very meadow and challenged his ideas about life. Had forced him see that shades of gray exist. And they had become the closest of friends then.
But he thinks that perhaps he had not truly seen. He had not truly understood what she was trying to tell him. He is a murderer now, and everything has changed. He has changed. He does not see the world in the same light, others do not exist in the same space as they had before.
He had been so stupid when he was young.
Liar, she calls him. He jerks his head back, surprised by her vehemence. He is a liar, but he cannot admit that now. The shadows push and he pushes back. He is so caught up in his internal war that he doesn’t notice when she disappears. When she reappears at his side, her demand for an apology ringing in the air. He flinches away from her touch, ears flattening against his poll.
He is confused and frustrated, foisted into a world he does not know and does not want, drawn to the darkness like a drunkard craves alcohol. And now she is here, demanding he concede, demanding he accept his fate.
Why?
The word is torn from his throat, reverberating in the air like a gunshot. His wild gaze fixes on her, pushing back against her in the same way that she had pushed him.
She cannot pick apart the threads of his internal war, she just knows that there is something boiling within him—something that keeps him from accepting the shadows as his own children. His power over them is so similar to Rhonan, but he is nothing like the other stallion. Rhonan loved the darkness; he asked the shadows and made no demands of them. He wrapped himself in them willingly. There was a give and take to his relationship, and she understood that. Theirs was a natural synergy—the same balance that made up the entirety of her world. But Shahrizai? She could not understand his relationship with the shadows. This was different. This was wrong.
He did not give, and he did not take. He simply was at the receiving end of the shadow’s battering affection. She frowned, confused by the entire ordeal. “Be-cause you are them,” she growls, frustrated. She did not like feeling unsure of her surroundings, and she felt her fuse getting shorter and shorter. Anastasia was not a particularly cruel beast, but she was completely feral; she was not above killing something just to make it quiet. “Are you stu-pid?” she finally asks, blunt to the end, eyes narrowed at him.
She nudges him again, looking at the shadows like small, mewling creatures. Her ears are pinned against her skull, and she fidgets underneath his wild gaze. He was becoming more and more of an unknown, a variable she could not control, and she did not like it—did not like it for one second. “Be-cause you are act-ing stu-pid.” She clucks her tongue against her teeth as she reaches down to the ground, letting the darkness wrap around the inky blackness of her own nose. “You hurt them. Stop.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
She accepts herself so easily. The darkness within her and the pull of shadows, a part of her in a way he cannot understand. But he cannot accept himself so easily. He had been one thing, not so very long ago. A happy, carefree man with a full and rounded life. And then things had changed. Those he loved had died, had disappeared. He had been sucked into an alternate universe and changed irrevocably. He had been turned into a stranger, made into a man he does not know and does not understand. And that thought terrifies him.
One day, he might grow to embrace it. One day, he might become like her, accepting himself as easily as he breathes. But today is a struggle. A fight to simply be in his own skin. A skin stretched thin and taught over a new, strange skeleton; one that frays and cracks as he fights it.
But perhaps a push is all he needs, someone to tell him he is being an idiot. And she obliges, in the most straightforward way.
He can feel them stretch, feel the burn and ache of fighting the bright sunlight. It wearies him, to fight the sun and shadow in equal measure. He does not even realize how hard he is fighting until he feels exhaustion begin to creep up on him. He can feel the shadow of the trees nearby, calling and pulling, stretching for him. To cover and protect. He shakes his head. Even as she tells him they are him, that he is stupid, he shakes his head.
He knows he is acting stupid. Even if he doesn’t want to admit it, he knows it is foolish to tire himself so. To demand that his body perform feats it was not meant to. He thought the sun would keep them at bay, would weaken them. But it weakened him just as much to fight this internal battle, for they respond to him, his emotions, drawing on his energy so that they might do so.
Jerking his head up, he takes a step back. Away from her touch, her pull. And another. Unwittingly, unintentionally, he is backing towards the trees. Backing towards the deep, cool darkness that longs to shield his skin. But he stops before he reaches it, shaking his head violently.
She is more predator than prey—designed from birth to be one with the darkness and uniquely adept at hunting things she would never want. So when she sees that she has him, at least partly, retreating, every instinct in her rears its head and gnashes its teeth. She lowers her head, bright yellow eyes narrowing, and she follows him. She snaps her sharply pointed teeth near his feet and drives him backward. “Stu-pid,” she hisses in her thick tongue, her mouth wrapping around the syllables. “Stu-pid boy. Stu-pid.”
The shadows are jerking now, dancing around between them, and while she feels affection for them—her kindred spirits—she knows he does not feel the same, and a rare anger heats her breast. “Do not. They love you.” Her voice is brittle now, and she shakes her head when he comes to a stubborn stop, the shadows of the trees calling to them. “They love you and you hurt them. Stu-pid boy. Mean boy.”
Anastasia opens up a portal next to them, the darkness sucking into it, and she lets him stare at it, the seemingly endless blackness of it mirroring the own shade of her coat. “Stop figh-ting.” She takes a step forward, letting the portal stay open for several minutes, and she presses herself against him. The motion lacked any sexual edges and was instead a motion dripping in frustration and confusion. “Stop be-ing stu-pid.” She noses his neck, his jaw, sniffing at him and trying to understand him. “Foll-ow me.”
And then she steps into the portal, hoping he would follow her into the darkness.
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
she is just taking him into a more shadowy part of the meadow, so no need to post anywhere else. :)
All things are possible, even the worst of things.
He had always been a dichotomy. A man who should have been one thing, but ended up being something very different. He should have been a warrior. He had been born to it, his body designed for it. But he hadn’t the heart for it. He had always been too soft and kind. Too good. He might have been built for war and death, but his spirit had been the very opposite.
And still those two halves of him battle, but the battle is far more real now. He can feel it splitting his soul in two, feel the rending of the two opposing parts of him. His body thrills in the touch of the shadows, in their gentle caresses and sweet temptation. His mind wars with the man he has become, the murder and the darkness that has found him. It still wants what it once was, the jovial innocence of the boy with the rose colored glasses.
He is at war with himself, never realizing that he cannot accept himself unless he makes peace.
In retrospect, he should have been afraid of her. She is a predator. He is prey. But he cannot bring himself to be. He knows now that there are far worse things in this world to fear than she. Even as she follows his retreat, gnashing her teeth in frustration, he cannot stir himself to fear.
‘They love you,’ she says, and he merely shakes his head. If they loved him, why would they do this to him? Everyone else that had loved him had only ever left. Why couldn’t they follow suit and do the same? But even as he thinks it, he suddenly doesn’t want them to go. A small, selfish part of him wants them to stay. Wants something in his life, even if it is only the shadows, to stay and love him. To never leave him, like all the others had.
And perhaps that is why he follows her. Why he abruptly stops fighting their pull. Or perhaps it is simply because he is too exhausted to argue any further.
Whatever the reason, when she presses against him in confused determination, he doesn’t withdraw. And when she opens the portal, he hesitates for only a moment before following her into the unknown.
She is pleased that he follows her; she had not expected him to. Truthfully, there had been a part of her that was hoping that he would resist. She did love a good fight—and it had been a long time since she had been able to do just that—but she could not deny that she is happy that he makes the journey easier by simply following her through the portal. Together, they are spat out deeper into the tangling trees of the meadow, the darkness more complete here with light barely filtering to where they stood.
Here, Anastasia is in her element, her body blending perfectly into the shadows. The only part of her that is visible at all are the round, yellow eyes that peer out at him—even her inky black teeth lost in the shadows that sweep over the both of them. “Good,” she huffs lightly, visibly relaxing in this environment. Taking a step away, she circles around him, measuring him up. “Good.”
She had no real experience controlling shadows—only what she had seen Rhonan perform in their time together. After all, she did not wield any power over the darkness, she simply lived among it as its equal. She was dangerous, but in a completely different way than the shadow manipulators that she was beginning to accumulate. It helped that acid bubbled beneath the surface of her skin.
“Prac-tice,” she demands, motioning toward the darkness that covered the ground. “Ask sha-dow to move there.” It was a start—albeit a small one—but if focused, she was sure that he would be able to accomplish it. “Ask. No tell,” she warns him with a frown, lips pulling back slightly. “Sha-dow no like when you tell. Be nice to sha-dow.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
