[private] Journey we more into the Nightmare - Malis

[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

When he had returned and found her gone, his anger had been mighty.
(‘You can give me your name, or I can take it.’ It stills hums in his head, mechanical and angry. Silence. Empty threats; you should have taken it! Weakness. Kill it dead.)

He had cleaved great holes in his Forest. Perforated the flesh of the things he had spent such careful efforts feeding.
(‘Don’t be naïve, Pollock...’ Once he had considered the fact that she may be stronger for her brokenness. He was. But he had broken her again, all the same, to test how brittle flesh can be. Naïve.)

He woke like a beast incensed. Like a dragon whose treasure had been poached from.

She had fallen. He had seen it!

He had prayed. Found his absolution in her hips like at an alter! She had yielded herself to him like he knew she would, not because she wanted to but because he wanted her to. It was all the same to him, and if she had resisted, all the better. And when he was spent, dumb and laid heavy on her back – a dark and weary passenger – she she struck. Snapped her head to meet his, pressed against the froth on her shoulder...

That would not do. She had ruined it for him.
He might have let her go. He had thought about the dark, mysterious colour as something he could look forward to. No. She had ruined it all, for both of them.

Sadly, that could not stand.

* * * *

(There had been too many places he could not go… too many places that were not safe, and he could not smell the deepness of her flesh, only the rot he had buried her in. She had disappeared. His thing. She had left nothing behind, so he smelled the air like a whipped hound and bayed. Moaned. Screamed. Roared.)
He paces. Sleepless nights now endless, waking pilgrimages to Hestia’s bones, her funeral mound and headstone. And when he finally drifts off he dreams the same thing

—he falls. Forever, through darkness and strings of multicoloured lights. Bells and whistles sound in the air around him and then are replaced by utter silence.
And then he wakes up on the soft, giving earth. He is different.
He is mighty.

He is surrounded by great piles of earth. Each of them is marked by a stone with strange symbols that he cannot read but knows without doubt that once, he could – Hestia, Thyndra, Astri... – he treads in a circle and stops by each, his heart growing fond as he appraises them. There are many more, unmarked.
Until he gets to one and suddenly he feels bile tickle his throat. 

It is open – gaping, profaned...

He wakes up, and paces. He rubs his horns on soft, young birches and leaves irritated scabs on their pale bodies. The new sun is coming in through the leaves above and in the murky light he catches a streak of colour. Deep, rich and for a second, it is almost as if he can taste it on his tongue.
He chases it, like a hound who has found it’s quarry!

Like a good girl, she leads him to everything he had lost and in time, he understands.

* * * *

His heavy head sways like a bull elephant tied to a tree by his foot. He is agitated, excited – he mutters to himself, cursing under his breath. He leaves her reluctantly. When he knows where she is, he feels in control. He holds his knowledge of her (assumption of who she is) like a dagger to a soft throat.
He must go for it eventually, blade and teeth and horn. He had so liked the way the blood had came out the first time, like delicate pearls on the edges of new wounds.

He snorts. The pine scent stings his nostrils. This had been home for him, too, a very long time ago, indeed. It was here he had found himself helpless, invisible. He paces the edges, the tightrope between enemy territory and the rough escarpments of stone. He can go no deeper than this.

He is not stupid. It would be unwise.

He finds her there, anyway. He knows he would if he waited long enough. This is where she so often idles, he has found. Here, where they meet and speak so softly and he dares not move closer. Not until he had purged the temper out of himself like a blood-letting – slowly and methodically – so that when he moves to meet her again now, he is disciplined.
(He can hear his pulse in his ears and he struggles to control his breathing. That beast anger.)

“Well.” He looks at her, greedy and demanding. “Look at this.”
He cannot control the quiver in his voice. It betrays him. That wanting, loathing, lusting. He turns his head, displaying where he bears furless scar tissue, three old puncture wounds to the underside of his left cheek. Her work. He holds it there, the muscles clenching and unclenching under the skin, so she can get a good look. “That hardly seems fair, does it? Look at you.” He licks his lips and squares his eyes back to hers, "lovely."

POLLOCK
the gift giver

I thought we had discussed she might have nabbed him with here horns when he was being a dickbag. If you don't want, I will purge it all from the post.

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

But she had fallen. She had found a lonely grave in cold dirt beside the body of someone who had been ordinary. Malis had been ordinary once. A long, long time ago when her family was still whole and she was brown instead of blue. She had been perfectly ordinary. But that had faded in the years to come, an illusion shattered by impossible truths that hurt to remember, impossible truths she could not bear to think about. She had forgotten what ordinary felt like, but she felt it then with the bones broken in her neck, with eyes like pockets of mangled jelly sitting in a ruined blue face. She felt it when he stood over her to carve constellations of red into the smooth blue. She felt it when she closed those ruined eyes and remembered the weight of him on her back, the hungry pressure of his mouth against her neck. She felt it until she could feel only the pain of being ruined, of blades buried between bones and torn up through quivering flesh.

She felt it until the dark came to claim her, until she had felt nothing at all.

While she slept, succumbed to the unnatural night behind her eyes, Pollock left and her body healed. Bone had knit itself back together, the jagged edges folding like steepled fingers – and without bone to pry the lips of each wound apart, the skin had melted smooth and even and as perfect as it had been before. Her eyes solidified, regaining their shape once the crushed mess of her face had been restored. When she woke she looked no different, no different but for the blood matted and dark against her skin, but for the dirt of a would-be grave buried against the dirty indigo.

She rose and though her body looked perfect, each bone and joint and ruined muscle wept at her, like they were trapped in the memory of what had happened. She hurt like that for weeks and weeks, and then hurt more and differently when her stomach swelled despite the way she couldn’t, wouldn’t eat and the bones were sharp points beneath her skin.

--

She is a stain of bright indigo against the dark of the shadows that pool beneath the immensity of the mountains. This is her favorite place to be because it is quiet, because only her ghosts can find her here – because here, she does not have to pretend to be the Queen that Killdare thinks she can be. The one he sees when he looks at her. It is an impossible thing to ask of her, to give her a throne and a kingdom, to give her those she needs to protect when she can hardly protect herself. But here, here she is just Malis, and it is okay to be a ruined, broken thing.

She doesn’t notice him, not at first, not in time. Not until that scent is wrapped around her like an embrace and she is remembering his weight against her back, his mouth damp on her neck, his hooves buried in her face. When she turns to face him she is feral in her outrage, like liquid spilling across the stone and dirt as she crosses the forest to join him. His voice, his face, it is all as she remembers it and remembering makes her sick, it twists her mouth into an ugly snarl that betrays the fear that bubbles just beneath the surface, just beneath the blue. “You don’t belong here.” She warns, her ears pinned back into the tangles of an impossibly dark mane.

Fear or shock or fury, or perhaps some mixture of all three, boil in her veins and she cannot help the way she burns fever-bright. He lifts his chin to show her something, lifts his cheek to show her the knots of pink flesh where she had buried those horns as far as she could reach (not far enough), and though she should be pleased with this handiwork, she does not smile. She is too busy remembering, too busy being ruined.

Lovely, he says when he looks at her with hungry eyes that live on the ghosts who haunt her dreams, and she wonders if he means as she is now, smooth and blue and perpetually new, or if he is remembering how she had looked with her face caved it. But when she watches him now it is with a face carved from stone, and those emerald eyes narrow only when that wicked smile spreads across her dark mouth. “I think you’re losing your edge, Pollock,” she says at last, stepping closer with languid ease, close enough to press the point of a single horn to his exposed jaw and draw it all the way up to the corner of his mouth, “ didn’t you try to kill me?”

She pauses and pulls away, lazy when she makes a show of trying remember something. But then her eyes fall back on his, burning pin-pricks of green from behind the knots of her dark forelock, “because I don’t feel dead.”

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78

[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

He’ll cherish these memories. He’ll hold them to his breast and feed that wanton bauble in his chest with them (it hums its pleasure with the soft throb of Christmas carols.). He’ll store them carefully and gently, where the boy cannot taint them and the colt cannot fear them; it is the same kind of ferocity with which she drives them out of her mind and into that quagmire of forgotten and unwanted toys. (He knows this place well. They have so much in common! 
It is the place where he puts the jigsaw pieces – where late at night he buries them, miles from each other so that they cannot connive and conspire, among the pallid, thin bodies of birch trees. Where he puts strange anatomies and disembodied hands, floating in front of his face; where he puts ice and snow and gaudy, twinkling lights, the rustle of soft, silver bells and the cheer. Where he tries to bury the boy, six feet below, and suffers only his muffled screams and pounding fists, like a heartbeat.

He’d so love to know what she hides there. What ghosts she has threshed from her pretty head, separating them from everything she holds dear. He’d love to know those things, too.)

He preserves the way that blue did not show its bruises, but held it quality beautifully; kept its colour and its richness, so that when it finally broke, at least she could say she had been handsome far longer than some of the others had been. The way that blue yielded and purpled to that sanguinary touch. The way the architecture of her body had felt different beneath him than any of the others – perhaps sweeter, more gratifying, because she had not gave willing or easy. 
The way she had tested the make of his skin and found it mortal. How it had stretched under the pressure until giving in and snapping. The concussion of those horns against his skull, and the rending of thin skin, had made his eyes water. He does not bury this. He cherishes it, perhaps more than any of the others.

* * * *

He had followed her – them, though he had eyes only for her – whenever they came to his kingdom.

They walked side-by-side, like two graceful things in flight, and they talked. She moreso than him, with a voice like crystal and birdsongs. They talked of inane things – of flowers and sunshine; of darkness and of fears (he moreso than her). He followed them, unseen and unheard, as they watched nightfall in his kingdom – foolish. 
The stallion drew queer, bright galaxies around him, and the gift giver gave pause.
(He remembers hard, star-made armour. The tangle of stellar vines and the ready tip of each barb. He remembers Lirren’s jeweled skin almost as well as as he remembers her indigo. But Lirren had come freely – a different kind of delight.)

He followed them, tip-toeing from his forest and past all the places he knew in between…

* * * *

Pollock stares at her with narrow eyes, his crocodile smile spread wide on his lips. “Do I not?” He shifts his weight, letting her come to him. “Oh. Am I to take it that you have some kind of authority to say so? I admit I have no love for this hellhole.” He does not know about her monarchy. They had never spoke of that, not that he had heard. (Nor had they spoken her name, she would be pleased to know – the indigo-haired mare had satisfied herself with ‘mother’, and if the stallion had ever done the same, Pollock had not been listening.)  It would not matter. 
He has profaned under the noses of kings before.
(He has never taken a queen before, though.)

(He let her see her handiwork. He let her look at it, she deserved to see it. He wonders if she will be proud of what she has done. It would be a mistake to try it again, though.)
Then he lets her speak. A mistake.

His smile falters and his black-brown eyes glower, narrower still. He moves, takes agitated steps forwards and around, like a wolf trying to circle. Stopping before he provokes her, but his headgear holds heavy and restless and he bunches and unbunches the unnatural muscles under his golden skin. ‘I think you’re losing your edge, Pollock.’ He loves and hates the way she says his name. Loves, always, the sound it makes around lips. He always hears it like a prayer. Hates it, because he cannot reciprocate. He cannot mouth her name in her ear, not the way he’d like to.

He is breathing heavier, and his face betrays the way she slips under his skin.
“Hmm,” he sounds, gravel and ire. “Curious isn’t it. See, I... I,” he takes a testing step closer still, his eyes and mouth feigning innocent bewilderment, peering to the ground and then up to her, “had been sure that I had broken your... back, was it? Neck? I heard it. Didn’t you?” He frowns, sniffing. “Well, I heard it. Dreadful. And then, well… we both know what comes next.” He splits the last word out like poison in his wine. It should have been sweet.

“Except. Well, I’m a bit fuzzy in some parts, so, maybe you can help me,” he snaps forward with violent speed, almost nose to nose, “you do not look dead to me, either. I know what that looks like well enough. But here you are and… you did not leave alone, did you? You took something with you. It was impolite not to tell me.”
He tuts and meets the blaze of her green eyes in earnest, no longer smiling.

POLLOCK
the gift giver