Eyes open - -
Green, as raw emeralds left in the earth; no sparkle, no shine, all hard and dark.
Green, as ivy, that chokes the life out of everything it comes across; beautiful, deadly.
She feels… strange, but cannot place why for feeling is not strange to her but it seems as if she has just come out of a long, deep sleep in which there was no dreaming.
She mutters about blood and bones until her mutterings cease and she tilts her face up experimentally towards a source of light. It looks like she scents the air like a stallion searching for a mare in the throes of her heat but really, she is not. Her lips move but words fail to come out. She has not grown mute in those first few moments, but she feels newborn, swaying and frail until her limbs test their own remembered strength and stretch as she searches still for a thing unnamed.
“I…” she says, her voice scratching at her throat with sharp claws of disuse. She shakes her head, the mane curling heavy on her neck beneath the weight of cobwebs and the bits of bracken that refuse to leave it. She looks upon the glade - her glade actually, that same one hidden deep in the heart of the woods in the meadow. There is her scummed over pool where no fish breaks the surface and it lies flat and green, almost furry looking but she knows otherwise and it is her mouth that breaks the stillness of it - she is the unnatural disturbance within nature, and when she pulls back from quenching her thirst, her lips are smeared green with algae.
“Hm,” she muses aloud, having no true thought (especially none given to the daughters she has birthed in this same dark place that coughed her up again) as to what she will do or where she will go except out, out into the light perhaps though her eyes smolder briefly at that thought - there is no light for a creature like her, of dirt and worm and whispers of death that lick along her marrow, cracking her bones open with dust.
Still small in that thin, sharp, unbeautiful way of the malnourished and lacking, she moves off down a trail that only she knows for it doesn’t exist, grown over with thorns of things that prick and sting. Her sable flesh doesn’t register each scratch in her mind though blood breaks brilliantly against her skin, but it is no matter to Loam, what is a scratch or a few to one like her? She is mechanized now, caught in the repetition of slow ambulatory motion that does not still, even when she skirts the throbbing full heart of the meadow and recognizes none who stand there, then again, she never did all those other times too.
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12-03-2015, 06:18 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-03-2015, 06:18 PM by R A P S C A L L I O N.)
like the sea, constantly changing from calm to ill. As of late the buckskin has found himself longing for the sense of others.
Spare his mother, he has had no real connections to anyone spare the earth that regenerates beneath his hooves. He is fascinated with the fact that year after year, grass grows, grass dies, leaves fall - precipitation changes from rain to snow, to ice. These things are not up to him to decide their origin or purpose but he ponders them still; his mind is it's own hamster wheel. Turning, turning, turning until it one day breaks. Much like his mortal body, who greets the spring weather with many thanks - winter is harder each year he ages. He seeks the meadow because it seems like a place of neutrality, a place he is not so concerned or brimming with hope of war.
Being a sociopath is taxing when you're having a good day.
He spots a small black mare, murmuring to herself as she slips through some thorns or branches (he is unsure) and rips her dark skin - the blood. Oh, it fills his head and the copper scent makes him wish he knew how to smile. It overjoys his body, an adrenaline rush sends him propelling forward to her. His eyes, green too, meet hers - his more the color of light moss growing over rocks by a riverbank but pensive, dilated. "You should be careful, scratches can get infected you know," he says, though he isn't concerned with infection at all - he is simply drawn to that before any other feature about her. "Rapscallion, from the Gates."
He stands idly waiting for her to respond while he internally spins his wheel with newfound motivation.
.r a p s c a l l i o n.
Loam has no sense of longing.
No true sense of it, that is.
She had aspirations once, to be as grand as her second - only, really - mother had been (the first was bones now and bones still, bones in the earth, deep almost-dust talking of death in the flutter of moth-wings and dry leaves skirling underfoot), but not to be as queenly as she was, almost but not quite. No, Loam was not meant for titles grandiose and cumbersome - she was dirt, shadowy, in the shadows, a gleam of eyes and teeth in the darkness that invited none to come close. Even now, they shy away and pretend she isn’t there, thin and dark and lovely as only nightmares can be. To say that she is altogether gruesome is a lie, but Loam is dark, no niceness here except to the foals that swell her belly or those she finds abandoned and motherless, just as she had been.
Thoughts! Where did they come from? Madness sparks in her eyes, the gleam sudden and bright and fades as fast as a star shooting across the sky, leaving her gaze raw and dark again. She remains aloof, practicing no small disdains towards them as she slinks through the thorny undergrowth until he stops her dead in her tracks, struck dumb with memory and a feeling she has not thought to feel ever again. She could not say what that feeling was, but the memory sped up her heart and flushed her veins with a delicious heat that made her shiver until his voice came out all wrong and his eyes flashed green like moss on the underbellies of rocks. No, no, this was all wrong! It wasn’t him and her heart sank, subsided its pace a little to a slower cadence of disappointment that showed briefly in her emerald gaze then passed like it had never been.
She was about to scoff and say “What do you care?” but something about the color of him (as if that mattered at all, but in the back of her pathetic brain, it did) stopped the meanness from slithering out on her tongue. “They’ll either fester or heal, makes no difference which it is to me.” and that was true, because Loam knew death and it would not come from infection, that she knew without really knowing. She eyes him suspiciously, not sure why it should make a difference to him if she was careful or not, and she almost asks him who he is to caution her like so. Again, she bites her tongue, out of sheer stupid deference to a long ago that doesn’t exist any more and that buckskin fur that encases his muscles and bones and beating heart.
“Loam,” she mutters, since names never mattered except to go with faces that often end up forgotten anyway. “Of nowhere,” and she smiles, a bare-bones kind of smile because there is no malice nor goodness in that slight curve of her lips.
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like the sea, constantly changing from calm to ill. He can read that she is slightly irritated, a side-eye glance perhaps, at his concern but it was not a true concern for her. The concern was placed with him and how he would act or choose not to act on it. If he's in the right state of mind to make a conscious decision, that is. Loam, he thinks is a different name. It seems so neutral, unlike his. What was his mother thinking? It means mischievous...lately, he has not lived up to that name but it is not because he isn't capable.
As her observes the mare a little longer, he calculates that she appears disappointed with his arrival. She mentions 'of nowhere' and he wonders how that can be, you always are from somewhere; even if you're on your way elsewhere. Sarcasm? Perhaps, it was a gift lost on Rapscallion. The buckskin finally decides that it is a social norm (he's learning) to respond to those you meet. "You seem to be a little disappointed," he says, bluntly, "Not finding what you want? And really, you can't be from nowhere - even the magicians here spawned from atoms and other assorted things."
Always so technical.
.r a p s c a l l i o n.
Loam was not misnamed and like her namesake, she was earthy and neutral to an extent. Like her name, she was baseborn, claiming no greatness ran in the thick red soup of her veins though she was once told she could be anything she wanted to be by the queen-mother that saved her from the despair of the Den. Nera said she was a princess, that because she drank of the queen’s milk meant for her twins, that she was now a princess - how laughable! Loam never forgot how she got her start in life, newborn and starving, nudging the cooling flesh of her once-mother’s flank as the mare lay dead on the ground. Isn't It ironic that she can no longer recall the color of the dead mare’s skin?
Why is it a brawny buckskin hide can shake her neutrality, her certain aloofness, and make her sink into a strange and thoughtful mood?
She is aware that her disappointment is palpable on the air, discoloring the mood and moment between them - neither of which really existed beyond the terse conversation they had. Loam does not care that she has been nothing but sarcastic and rude to him; it was the damn fur of his, so alike to the one she stops her brain from naming in her mind and pushes the thought far into the cobwebbed corners of memory. She can see that her sarcasm was lost upon him anyway - he was far too blunt, and she was beginning to think of him as socially stunted.
"Really, how could you tell?” her tone is airy and indifferent; a mere affectation of feigned shock to match the droll expression on her face but her eyes give it away with their lack of feeling - everything is fake, except the way her eyes see past his and get caught up in the tawny color of his skin. He mentions not finding what she wants, and that is true of the creature who believed she had no wants or whims. She almost answers him but dwells too much on the thought that he isn't who she wants (and who is Loam to want? The allowance of such seems entirely ludicrous), but he'll do because he's a buckskin and damn this weakness for them that she has!
Loam catches him on his own technicality; “You said where not what I came from.” This is the first time her eyes hold a glimmer of something in them - mirth, maybe. “I came from the same place all horses come from, sliding out between their mother's thighs. But really, I came from nowhere because I've always been right here.” She alludes to the land around them but makes no mention of the scummed-over pond hemmed in by hemlock and hidden deep in the forest - it is hers, only hers. “Where do you come from?” she asks, devoid of any curiosity.
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