"we pull apart the darkness while we can" Summer was well on its way and the long days simmered with an impossible heat that kept her shoulders damp with sweat. Nights were easier, when wind raked across the open meadow to break the stale heat. She hated this weather, this unrelenting fever that had crawled beneath the bright aching indigo of her perfect skin. It had been a long time since Malis felt comfortable in her own flesh, but the swelter of summer made it so much worse. She could feel a strange restlessness growing in the pit of her stomach, climbing to her chest and clawing its way out.
It was worse since she had left the Gates, abandoned it as she had abandoned everything before it. But Magnus was why she had gone at all, the strange gold stallion who had reminded her of something she could not place. A feeling or a memory, or just a twinge of suspicion she could not resist tracking. But by the time she had appeared like a ghost at their door, he had gone. There were rumors that something had taken him, rumors she believed only after she drifted across the land coaxing secrets from loose lips. He was simply nowhere. She had not bothered to go back after that- he had been the hook in her belly drawing her painfully close to a place she might call home. She hated him now, hated him for letting her think even for a second that anyone like her could belong anywhere.
Something wild flashed in the depths of those raw emerald eyes as she disappeared into the trees bordering the meadow. For a second she paused and turned her head, the rows of horns on her face glittering like obsidian in the waning light. Behind her, in the meadow she had just abandoned, the color of the sun bled out into the grass until everything was doused in orange and gold. The beauty of it was wasted on her. She turned from it once more with an expression as cold as stone and steel and buried herself beneath the branches of the trees.
But the steel slipped from her face almost immediately to be replaced with a wicked smile when the trees parted to reveal a very familiar palomino stallion with curving horns and mismatched wings. She moved close to him, unconcerned until the stink of death and decay filled her flaring nostrils. She halted her momentum with a frown twisting across the curve of her blue mouth, peering around him to notice the carcass rotting on the ground by his side. Disgust curled and thrashed wild in her belly. She slipped closer anyways, her mouth pressed dangerously close to the curve of his ear.
“Friend of yours?” Her mouth twisted with a sour smile and she pulled away from him in such a way that the point of her uppermost horn would leave a faint welt across his neck if he chose not to shift his weight. She drifted from him again, settling beside a tree whose trunk was too wide for her to see around. “You keep strange company."
MALIS makai x oksana
okay so i'm more awkward than i thought i'd be, oops. also i left it vague so you can pick which murdered body they are hanging out with. <3 @[Pollock]
I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
It still stings his nostrils.
Somehow, despite everything, he is not used to it. Not until he has stood with it for a while.
The hot air takes on the putridity readily (almost greedily), making it impossible to turn from it to find a mouthful of fresher air; he chooses not to look away. He has watched it go through many transformations – once new, bloody and meaty, his thing re-broken and remade; then, full of things feeding on it, sunken-eyed and falling hollow in on herself; now papery skin stretched on bones like pieces of rag here and there, only the foul scent of long ago death left between the ribs and cavities once made for speech and digestion.
She would be desiccated by now, he imagines, from the heat and time – if he had taken her to the desertlands, perhaps (a thought for later days). But the moisture of the forest floor has kept her plump and putrefying. Soon there will be nothing left.
Bones and then bones buried beneath encroaching underbrush.
And then, in time, it is as if he cannot smell it at all.
He smells salt instead, and grass, rich soil and the cocktail of all their blood combined conveniently into one memory. Then he can enjoy, finally, the fruits of his efforts. Like an artist admiring his work. Damaged as it is now, he still feels a sense of pride and ownership over it. He wonders how close she is. In moments like this, when he cannot see or feel her near (perhaps pulled back to that grey and shrouded land – perhaps somewhere hidden in green shade too crowded by his vigil), he wonders if she disgusts herself.
Certainly, she disgusts many others. A now rather putrid landmark.
No amount of smugness makes this vacant body any more dignified.
He could admire her humor. He had left precious little for her.
He hears her, but does not smell her. He will smell nothing but this for some time after he leaves. He stops in mid-motion, his ears twisting in her direction, then runs a great horn down the rough knots of bark. He leaves these everywhere, his little token: trees with bare patches, white skin like fat bared in the wound, dead things; wreckage and ruination, and in one case, he thinks quite possible, a little life.
Then, stilled again in anticipation, he feels her breath against the back of his ear. He picks up some modicum of her living scent in that closeness, but it is choked out by her. He turns his head in the indigo woman’s direction, searching for it with wide nostrils as she draws away, catching the faintest rub of those black studs. It takes a moment, a blink, as he searches his mind (not bloodied nor bruised, he has not tasted this one in any way; not of stars, but of night...) A grumble, or growl, rumbles up his throat and he shifts.
In dying light, he can better see the way she is blue and purple, dark and made to be split open and investigated. Before, there had been too much dark, and much too much fitfullness, to get a good hold of each other. He had been sore and sent off contemplating impossibilities, she had been much the same.
He is different now.
“I knew her briefly,” he does not smile back. He does not find Hestia’s incessant goading pleasant, but he wonders how much she has enjoyed his hunting expeditions. “She was prettier once but, alas.” He looks her over for a brief second, then pushes off a tree and steps closer, “does she bother you?” In the dark, he thought he could see something broken about her – that fragility had been infuriating and enticing. Now he wonders. Sometimes broken things are stronger than they seem, otherwise they would not have endured.
He had endured.
POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s
"we pull apart the darkness while we can" She looks down at the rot and decay below them. The stretch of ugly discolored bone peeking through tatters of flesh that, in places, had seemed to slip from the body to rest on the gray and brown ring of dead grass around it. There was nothing beautiful about death, nothing that softened the tightening she felt in the pit of her stomach. But the longer she watched, her eyes drawn to this decay with the same pull of a swirling, billowing fire, the further her thoughts slipped to herself. She could regenerate, but to what extent. Would this be a fate she ever knew, a bloated body full of stink and rot and parasite, a disturbance that strangers sneered at in passing. A spectacle even in death.
Her face darkened as a frown twisted across the delicate curve of her tense mouth. She was remembering that first day she had realized something had changed. That day with Erebor. Malis had confessed the turmoil of fury and disgust she felt for the flash of indigo on her skin, for the way she wore the color like an impossible, all-consuming scar. It was like being trapped in a memory she only wanted to forget, a memory that seemed far too impossible to ever be true and yet it was. It was as true as the blue on her skin and the impatient way her flesh knit itself back together. They had tried to burn the color from her that day, to melt the indigo from her skin in the same way Hestia’s skin had melted from her bones. It should have worked, and on anyone else it would have. It would have even worked on Malis had they tried it before the impossible memory. But something, everything, had changed then and when the seared pink flesh had faded instantly and new indigo hairs had filled the hole to erase its existence forever, Malis had been lost to the impossibilities.
She had been running, hiding, ever since.
The sound of his voice draws her out of the misery of her musings and she turns her stricken face to him. She feels his dark eyes on her, can feel the way the rove her shape as if he is both damning her and trying to understand. He will see stone and steel and the jagged edges of broken things, he will see the glint of cruel obsidian and the flash of blue and purple like a fresh bruise bleeding across her skin. He will never know the bright emerald-eyed girl with plain brown skin and harmless secrets hidden in a delicately wild face. That girl had died a long time ago.
“When she was alive?” She questions with a glint like flickering green flame in the pits of her eyes. “Or did you find her pretty when her skin swelled and maggots swam in the jelly of her eyes.” Her tail flicks uneasily against her hocks as she watches him, the tension in her mouth tracing fingers all the way up her cheek to settle in the mask of black around her eyes. He eases closer and her eyes narrow a little when she answers his next question. “I don’t love the smell.” It is a simple answer, elusive but simple, and then, “Did she bother you?”
Is that why she is dead, she wonders silently, did you do this to her.
MALIS makai x oksana
I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
‘When she was alive?’ He makes a contemplative sound in his throat.
No. Not when she had been alive. He had barely seen her at all. In fact, he cannot even remember what she had looked like with her face intact. He had not seen the eyes, like emeralds, until be had made them a terrible consistency and by then they were only blood and pulp in broken sockets.
He had watched her for some time, too. He had watched the way she moved, the way she spoke so cordially and had fed on the interminable darkness that had snapped like a twig and sent him off in blind chaos. The same thing that reaches for Malis even now, pushing clawed hands through his ribs, like iron bars – he cannot say for sure why they are stayed, enticingly short of raking her pretty, blue skin. Or, on the other hand, why he had felled the stranger mare in between airy little breaths and laughs.
It had not been because she bothered him.
He could have passed her by like a ghost and never seen her again.
It is a wild and strange thing, his dark magic piece. It is his (coveted and grabbed to break a fall as metallic mesh had fallen from beneath his feet and sent him tumbling through time and space, or dream and unconsciousness), but it is made of foreign, northern stuff.
It beats in the center of his chest, jingling like bells in his ears when he listens close enough; that shard of nastiness had transfixed him as a boy and impaled and adorned his ribs as a stallion.
But it is oddly subdued this evening. This moment.
Maybe for the same reason he did not let his horns try at the solid surface of Lirren’s stars. (Maybe he knows the impossibility of her skin like he knew Lirren’s, somehow without even being told and spares himself the frustration.) She had got a taste of his gift, just enough to wet her tongue. But nothing more. It had stumped him even then.
Another thing to irk him from sleep.
He had not liked the way he felt disarmed by that teal-pointed woman.
He does not like it now. By all accounts, both should be bruised. Changed. But he had let this one go at least once before. He had not even let her feel fear, maybe because unlike Lirren,
—unlike Elve…
he could tell she knew fear already and that was half the fun gone.
“No.” He finally says, “when she was alive she had been ordinary.” He looks over the deep blue and black of her face, features troubled by the unearthing of memories (some truths to dig for, in time), those dark studs. Down the curve of her neck and shoulders. Belly and haunch. A vulgar eye, sizing her up – he might even see that she is beautiful, if he could see beauty without first conquering it. He cannot know she detests her own skin, the indigo and the defiance to splitting, cracking and burning. He can imagine her fractured (he is a visionary; it would displease him to find her regenerated as if untouched, her bones back in their order – they would be an eternal tide, pushing and pulling) but better sees her as she is, but on her knees. Broken and his, differently than Hestia is.
“She had been prettiest just before the flies laid their eggs. That does not take long, I’m afraid.”
He nods, thinking of moving closer, still. To find her smell mingled with the rot, a bloom pushing up through the hearty feed of remains. “She smelled better once, too.” He keeps his features tight when she finally asks him. He can tell she suspects him the culprit – she would be a fool not to, and he suspects she is not foolish. “I hardly knew her. She might have been lovely,” his answer is casual, he does not need to dress it up; the flatness of it might be a blade through the guts to Hestia. Maybe even to her. But it is the truth.
“I’m not sure we managed to exchange names before. I’m Pollock.”
POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s
"we pull apart the darkness while we can" Her question seems to force him back inside his head for a moment and she feels instantly glad that she is not a mind-reader like her younger sister. The thoughts inside her own head, memories of small violent hands forcing bodies past their limits, of skin turned to cold blue plastic and then snapped apart like brittle bones. She can remember too, the feeling of being trapped and lucid within a body she could not control. These are the memories that surface in moments of uncertainty, these thoughts that hold the blue against her skin like a flame and burn her from the inside out. She is glad she cannot hear his thoughts, glad she does not know the sinister workings of a mind she presumed to be as dark as the shadows sitting in her empty chest.
Ordinary. He says and Malis can feel something shift inside her, something he bent without realizing, something broken that she had no desire to fix. You see, she looks back down at Hestia and she thinks she understands. This woman was no one. She was plain and unimportant to him, conquerable and thus sought after instinctually. This woman could have been any of her sisters. Sweet Ilka with sad eyes and a heart so big she carried the weight of it on her shoulders, or even Pyxis who was as wild as Malis but without the same dark and steel. This could have been, could one day be, someone Malis loved.
Rage bristled like barbs beneath her skin, slow and convoluted with the urge to bury all emotions before they had a chance to become a weapon used against her. But this rage, it would not abate and so she sank into it like a broken ship in the belly of the sea. “Prettiest when she was bloated and raw and entirely broken-” there is venom in her quiet voice when she pauses over the word broken to stare pointedly at the wing he dragged through the dirt, “prettiest when she looked just like you.”
His eyes rove her body and oh, how she aches to burn them where they land. But hers is a defensive gift, one she cannot use to maim with just a simple, well pointed thought. So instead she lowers her chin a little, lowers the row of horns on her face so they glint and wink at him like pin-points of promised pain.
“Don’t be naïve, Pollock,” she says in a voice like a snarl, latching onto the name he had offered to her so freely, “no one is lovely. Life makes monsters out of all of us. You should know that better than anyone.” She makes no effort to move closer and wills the same of him. It is only now that she has realized her mistake; she should have kept walking. But it felt too late for that, so instead she leveled her stony gaze at him, her mouth a cold slash of blue against her face. “Pollock.” She repeated stiffly, lines of tension tracing up her dark face. “And who do you think I am?” Her face darkens further as she vows to lock her name away from him in the darkest part of her brittle soul.
MALIS makai x oksana
I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
She seethes and he can almost feel heat come off her blue skin.
She thinks that it could be any of her sisters. She is not wrong. Sisters. Daughters. No matter how doe-eyed or wild – his horns have tasted both kinds of meat, sweet and gamey, and found it all satisfying. Hestia had been no one to him – a lover to a king. Thyndra hadn’t heard him coming – she had been a new mother, it turned out. The green was a mystery to reveal, or let stink unknown in her own corner of these woods. They were all, each of them, intimate moments to him. He was the last thing they saw, the last breath they shared and the last touch any of them had ever felt.
He is not known for his gentleness.
If she could, she would scour the flesh from his bones. He can tell. Muster everything (all the darkness and violence she holds, the impossibilities and the dreamy way she remembers being fractured) and rend his systems apart, leaving him like he had left Hestia (and all the rest).
But that is his thing.
He is reminded of Lirren’s beautiful defenses, that barbwire of stars and that armour like diamonds. It had been infuriating, like looking at a puzzle made of a million solid, same coloured pieces.
She has none (or she is hiding them from him, waiting like a serpent in high grass). It is exciting. She bends her back like a cat; she squares her black horns at him and he watches anger take her jaw and her lips and the black circle around her hard eyes. She could leave bruises and blood down his neck or across his face, one, two three, four – little marks to join the many rough touches on his body…
If she could catch him unawares. If she could strike fast enough.
He watches it dawn on her (watches it take her), like darkness reaping the last light, and he licks his lips, shifting on his split hooves. ‘Prettiest when she was bloated and raw and entirely broken… prettiest when she looked just like you.’ It comes out quietly sinister. He was expecting something more savage so he leans in to listen to her mouth form around each word. “Like me. But more defenseless,” he interjects, like a dog cornering that cat, “obviously.”
And then he feels her eyes on his shame and his own jaw closes like a vice and ripples. ‘...no one is lovely. Life makes monsters out of all of us. You should know that better than anyone.’ “It does,” he mutters. When she says his name he tilts his head and steps closer, despite how much she wants him to stay away. Their flesh is bound to meet, they both know that now. This runs too deep. She may think she knows the shame of his wing, but she has no idea of the depth of that chasm.
He could tell her that her blue is lovely, but would it have the same bite? Would she live long enough, for him to uncover her secrets and let her finger some of his, now that she has put pressure on that aching spot?
Let her have his name.
“Oh,” he takes a step closer, anticipates that she will draw back from him, “Wouldn't I love to know. But, not knowing hasn't stopped me before.” He remembers that green body's collapse; those black and white hips in sync. Both nameless, and he had taken them both, in different ways. Maybe, he thinks, she can be his place of coalescence. He glances up and behind her at the dark, like her flesh, overcoming light. Night is theirs, it would seem. Pollock steps closer again, reaching out his lips and glancing her cheek, boldly close to that line of weaponry.
“You can give me your name, or I can take it.” He is a beast incensed and aroused. He might underestimate the solidness of her guarded places, but he is prepared to hammer away until something gives. He continues, blowing warm air across her neck.
POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s
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