"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
01-02-2016, 11:28 AM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2016, 10:13 AM by Aurane.)
We have assembled inside This ancient and insane theater,
(Blood follows her like a snail’s trail, slick down her thighs, on the pine needles; shadows press against the viscera inside, and from within that rib-hall, rattles the muscular walls). Another contraction takes her, and the red woman falls to one knee, pressing her flared nostrils to the earth and exhaling.
She is not worth it. Not slick in a cloak of shade; not like her sire, penumbral and strange.
She is small and wet, shaking with the new use of her muscles. Terribly pathetic and hapless, For a long time Aurane watches the newborn squirm for something warm to touch, slick and piteous. Then the red-bay mare expels the last of her nurturing cave on the dirt, and stands up slowly.
Her ears tuck back against her skull, from the piny grey comes a wail... and a scent...
(Wind holds onto a tangle, flapping bonelessly behind her head. ‘I didn’t see her…’ and then he releases his grip and is gone). “Get. Up.” She whispers, it snaps with spittle on her lip and she whips her head around like a snake. “Up.” The blue filly is on her belly, peering shakily from her membrane clothes. Aurane closes in on her, stepping over her birthing feast, and gives a rough shove to the girl’s bony shoulder.
Instinct, fomenting the girl’s need to try and get to her spindly legs. And she does, gingerly placing her soft hooves on the damp ground...
* * * *
Over the ridge of spikes, the sun is bleeding orange, lighting the way with purple shade.
(What is she doing here?)
“I don’t know.”
Over roots and pools of icy meltwater, Lilin stumbles. Her large brown eyes fixed on Her – she disappears for a moment behind the body of a tree, and the little girl furrows her brow, a tear following the path of others down her cheek and throat. And then she sparks back and the girl’s heart thumps against her chest walls, a smile creasing her soft, black lips. She is too fast…
* * * *
Aurane stops, breathing hard and lipping the air for scent. “Are you following me, Crone?” It echoes back to her from all sides. The smell is strong, overpoweringly familiar. A long time has separated her last whiff of that bitch and now, but it still pulls on something ever incensed in her core. “What are you even doing here, mother?” The red woman tracks like a bloodhound; the epicenter is close, burning a hole in the green darkness around.
There is blood. A lot of blood, telling the tale of a struggle in the dragging and splattering. Aurane peers down at it with flat, black eyes, following the smears of violence. Tucked into the folds of bloodshed is a small cut of flesh, almost camouflaged against the dark mat of pine needles and predawn. Aurane’s ears level back, filling with a throng of hums and screams, a mighty swell of unbearable noise. (Take out the pretender!) She moves to it, black and shiny and small. (Why would she leave it here?)
She places a hoof on his pumping ribcage, well defined and inviting under his skin, and presses down to feel the soft springiness of it. “Where is mother?” She applies pressure, watching him intently. He raises his head, turning out of shadow, and revealing an eyeless socket. “Oh...”
Rustling loose from the underbrush, the filly stumbles into the black colt, sucking in breath. “Away!” Aurane pushes the girl to the side, moving around to examine her brother's unfortunate face. Gaping holes, black and strangely leathery looking, where eyes should blink from.
“Well now, brother. Come. Up.”
* * * *
They follow at her shoulders, the blue girl and the black, eyeless boy. She brings them from the jagged forest, into the soft new light of morning. They are utterly new, shaky on their impossibly long legs. She turns to them, head tilting and blinking.
(The black boy yawns open his mouth, revealing vicious, predator's dentition. He leaps at the filly with unnatural agility, sinking into her throat and holding. Holding until her tongue lolls from her mouth and the hint of life runs from her eyes. He drags her, muscles incompatible with his baby form ripple under his coat, and places his kill beside a larger, bay body.)
Aurane smiles, touching his face with her lips, whuffing softly on his cheek.
Two babies makes for one convoluted birthing post. Sooorrry. The TL;DR is like the last part though.
01-04-2016, 09:27 AM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2016, 09:53 AM by Killdare.)
no matter what we breed we still are made of greed
Time is fleeting. So are people. The Chamber, She is constant, She is unwavering.
Among the the shadows and the pine, the Chamber's dragon weaves a path. The earth beneath him is unworn, lesser traveled, unmarked. The tough scales of his wings scrape their song in his wake, leaving music with his memento to their hides. A kiss of scale and membrane to the mottled bark, a camaraderie that few shared or understood.
It is always the same, it is always different, and in that paradox Killdare finds solace. The girl had left, just as quickly as she had come, blending in to the backdrop until she was a memory. Leaving only her scent behind as a reminder that she had ever really been there to begin with.
The same, always the same, people left. They came as well and here is where he finds the red female, a ghastly looking black colt at her side.
Where the young thing should have had eyes, he had ill appearing sheaths of black. Leather like the membrane of his own wings, tucked at his sides. He's never met the two, the one for that matter, perhaps he made a poor Lord indeed. It's never an easy task, keeping up with the comings and going of the Chambers subjects, the oddballs and horrors the pines call to. Even to this day those of gentle nature, are a rare finding in his home, but he wouldn't trade it. Not for anything.
And because he knows them not, he begins with a hello, a welcome. "Welcome to the Chamber." The sticky afterbirth of the child suggests they had been in residence for a time, at least long enough to see through breeding. Else, one of the residents had wandered, spread their seed and the woman saw fit to bring the children here. Child. Just the one, the odd dark thing with no eyes. The one with not only his or his Dam's blood and gore on his person. A young blue at their feet and not an eyelash to be batted. Killdare reserved his own sentiments on that matter, instead remaining statuesque as he observed the two.
01-04-2016, 01:35 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2016, 06:30 PM by Aurane.)
We have assembled inside This ancient and insane theater,
There is not the whisper of new-motherly demeanor.
She does not tuck her ears into her tangle of mane, and does not make to chase him off with the fury of teeth and hoof.
She does not tuck them in behind her; and if there is any tenderness in her, it is only in the way she lips the black colt’s wet forelock, muttering to herself softly. The little blue girl looks at him with unsure eyes and pushes herself into the crook of her mother’s belly; the black boy presses into her chest, his nostrils flaring for his scent, his sockets searching hopelessly. She has seen him around (his unusual wings are a curious thing). He has an air of authority about him...
(Maybe he knows where we can put the girl... for good…)
The red woman smiles at him, uncharacteristically soft – it is not right, it is a perversion of that parental glow. A predatory quirk of her soft, damp lips. “Hello.” She is not new, but she has yet to encumber herself with loyalty or affection for this place; so she is more like a wandered here than anything, and her pregnancy had kept her well occupied throughout the winter.
She would be caught by his reptilian wings, examining the edges of his scales, if she weren’t more fixated on her most precious find to date. Maybe next time. Maybe as the light of the sun further peaks the piney horizon and she can better see the magnificent and cruel leather and bone.
Her new curiosity is not more cold and strange than Death And Dying. He lacks the hot fissures of fire like the Firegod. Without shadows, like Michaelis’ wanton friends.
But he is unnatural and unsettling looking all the same. A skull, wrapped in slick black fur, rounded at the nostrils and flat along the bridge, but lacking the careful craftsmanship of those around him. Where his blue niece is unfortunate in her normalcy, he is a prince in his grotesquery. And he is yet revealed in full, still hiding something inside that coltish body.
The red woman takes a half step back. She eagerly tucks her nose into her chest and behind the boy’s side, pushing him forward and away from her. Even on his unsteady legs, and without his sight to orient his body, he manages to stay upright, just. “Interesting, isn’t it?” But he is not really, in the grand scheme of things, as is. Only a bit disturbing in his incompleteness. But that is enough for now, after the disappointment of her own progeny. She holds him at nose length so the dragon can get a good look. Her black-brown eyes peering up at him with a glint, so unlike their regular dullness.
01-06-2016, 10:45 AM (This post was last modified: 01-06-2016, 10:49 AM by Killdare.)
no matter what we breed we still are made of greed
If anything about her was soft, it was lost on him. As lost as maternal instinct appeared to be on the woman. Nothing passes between the group that suggests they are all strangers, that suggests they are as unfamiliar with each other as a newborn babe is to the world. The children on the other hand melt into their dam, pressing their young forms into her body for protection. It’s a sight he’s seen a time or two, one that reminds him of his sons, of Engelfors and he shakes the thought away.
The misshapen boy scents, nostrils prying at the air for something to grab on to. For something to hold with a sense that had not been robbed from him, this Killdare can understand. Often he considered just how much more important one’s sense of smell was compared against the others. He shifts slightly, lifting a wing from his side and waving it forward. A rush of air to follow, like the waving of a fan on a summer day. Throwing his own smell at the child, one filled with musk and pine. With a faint reptilian base, soot and ash as well. Killdare knew he smelled mainly of the Chamber, he so rarely left it.
The woman then greets him, hello, his eyes wander from the boy to the red again. Remembering her presence as she shoos the child forward, the dim light leaking through the pines playing on his features. His mess or lake thereof anyways, he would never be handsome that’s for sure. Not in the sense that Killdare regarded the word, yet he cannot fault the colt for it. No one ever chooses their fate, let alone their appearance. They simply play the hand they are given, and take what they can with it.
“Interesting. If you say.” He comments, voice deep baritone and coarse. In truth the foal was like a train wreck engulfed in flame, and he was unable to revert his eyes from the horror. Remembering his manners for a brief moment he tethers his name to their ears, “Killdare.” His brow furrows as he looks them over, glassy green eyes passing over each form with a sense of study.
We have assembled inside This ancient and insane theater,
The black colt raises his nose up, taking the scent from the flap of his leathery wings and is appreciative for it, pulling it in and then tucking his chin back towards his chest. The red woman watches with ever widening eyes, holding him still before lifting her head and releasing him.
He stumbles a bit in towards her chest, catching himself with splayed, ungainly legs. He snorts, his ears twisting on his slender, strange head. It bobbles as he orients himself, slinking across her warm shoulder and back to her side.
The blue girl peeks after her mother’s thigh, chuffing at the lord curiously.
“Yes,” she mutters, blinking at the boy a few more times before looking back up. “Born that way. No idea why...” Mother must have done something heinous enough to warrant the scrape of the contents from those sockets; she’s unsettled some humourless god, and he left her tattered and bloody. And childless.
She looks back at the blue roan, a little tag-along at her hip and then back to Killdare, rolling her black-brown eyes. “We are not all so lucky.” Irony is lost on her, that complete and plain creature ‒ red and black hair, bones of calcium; the clean lines and curves of her body uninterrupted and unadorned. Self-awareness is not a strength, so she curses her daughter not for the ordinariness of her own womb and material, but on the lacking virility of her father’s penumbral friends.
She tilts her head, examining the scaly wings. “But you,” her dark eyes are shameless, tracing the edges of his scales and the claws at the ends of the bones, light enough for flight. “These are very interesting.” She takes a step, her brood in unison, through the colt always slow to react.
“What did you do it get these?” She looks back at his eyes, squinting curiously, (she sees some great, plated monster, felled behind him, it's back curved to the tops if those grey-green pines. On the stallion's shoulders it’s great reddish wings are now welded, like trophies. Spoils for the victor.) But, though the carcass is curiously absent a second later, the wings remain. She lengthens her neck, her head snaking in the air towards them. “Beautiful.”
no matter what we breed we still are made of greed
The burst of air passes the babe, and the colt only breathes deep his musk. scenting the rush of air much like Killdare would do himself, taking it in for what it was worth. The lord watches him almost curiously as the child takes the scent, as if it is a gift, and tucks himself back into his Dam. Fumbling momentarily against his shortcomings before melting into her shoulder and side once more.
His ears twist against his coarse black forelock, noticing the growing boldness and inquisitiveness of the twilight colored filly. His glassy eyes find a place on the girl, her head curving around her mother’s side. Already she has an explanation on her lips and he waits, listens, eyes almost hard as he takes in the information though he does not feel cross on the matter. it is only that his features betray him as he retains the information, the cause of the child’s appearance- which is in whole, unknown.
Still, he can’t fault them, any of them, for something that is so out of their control. Surely, someway, somehow the boy could serve the Chamber still, could be useful. Isn’t that what children were good for? Wasn’t that their purpose? To carry on their parents legacy, to make their family proud, bring honor to their names?
He’s not certain this particular mare would quite agree with his way of thinking. Her passive demeanor towards her female child speaks well to him, though he doesn’t boast to be good with young girls. Usually they were far too clingy for his liking but he had been trying with Raelle, that,he could say with certainty.
Even the grown ones cause him a level of discomfort from time to time, as this red was doing now. A forward progression of herself, her progeny, all with eyes on him. The study of the scaled appendages that emerged from his backside made him feel like a spectacle. “Nothing as glorious as you have in mind, I can be sure. I’ve served, remained loyal to the Chamber, to those who took me in.” He can remember vividly that day, Straia had in a sense tucked him under her wing(though then she had no trace of raven feathers), and took him for her own. For the Chamber.
All he had done was serve. Even now he continues to do the same.
"What should We expect from you, from yours?" It is evident that by We he does not mean he stands alone. That by We he means, he and the Chamber.
