The story's all wrong; Killdare/Malis/any

[Erebor]

fire burns brightest in the dark

The world is strange and nothing makes sense.

It's all flashes of nothing, and something, and something even stranger. As though he's simply been plucked from the world, and then just as suddenly, he's back. But his body feels strange – weak somehow, as though perhaps disused, like a thing that's sat upon a shelf for far too long. Like the broken thing that gets thrown away.

When his eyes first open, he isn't even sure that it's real. It almost feels like a memory, like déjà vu. He knows this place, knows it in his heart, but everything is strange – it no longer knows him, perhaps. These are the trees - his trees - but they don't caress him like they once did. They seem tentative now, touching him gently, almost as though they don't believe it. And it's a lucky thing that they're so gentle – he can't see himself, but he's a shell of his former self. He never got to recover his strength after the illness that had almost claimed him, and his once-muscular form still looks more skin and bones than substance and sinew. He can rebuild himself in time (had he not once built himself from much less?) but his physical power now is nothing. And months (years? Decades?) of inactivity has not helped the cause. His brain skips through the time, like a record that's been scratched. He's still recognizable – the blue and green are still present in his mane and tail, and the band of runes still encircles the top of his left foreleg – but otherwise, he could be a stranger in his own skin.

Still convinced he's dreaming, he presses forward (when had he started walking? Had he ever stopped?) His feet still know the way (how many times has he walked these paths, both when he knew what was real and when he knew nothing?) but he's still a little surprised when he finds himself exiting the pine forest and entering the clearing. The dirt and grass crunch beneath his hooves, and he can't help but think that perhaps, perhaps, wherever he's been, this really is home.

He wants to speak, but his breath catches in his throat. He's dreamed of this, he's sure of it, although he can't quite pinpoint when. He's dreamed of this, and it finally feels so real, that he can't – doesn't dare – speak. Say something, and the spell might break. Say something, and he might know for sure that this is a dream, a delusion. He is a man waiting for the other shoe to drop, but facing it bravely – he's lost many things since his disappearance, but his core of iron is not one of them. He does not let himself believe, not yet, but the longer he stands there, wide eyes drinking in a scene that's achingly familiar and yet subtly different, the harder it is not to be deceived into thinking he might really be home.

erebor

heat manipulating servant of the chamber

warship x straia

So, um, hi guys I missed you? Fair warning: posts will come at the speed of a snail tunneling through a glacier, unless they don't

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

The last scent to find her where she hid among the shadows of the trees had belonged to an arrogant stallion. He had reeked of death and rot and the things that waited for her in the dark of her nightmares when she bothered to sleep at all. When she found him, as had several others, drawn to his wretched carrion smell, she had been greeted with gaping holes filled with wriggling maggots, the putrid smell of meat left out too long in the sun.

The scent before that had been worse, though. Pollock - a ram-horned stallion the colored of wet sunshine, a creature who had existed almost exclusively in the dark that waited for her when she let her eyes close for too long. She remembers bucking beneath his weight, how his mouth had hung hot and damp against the side of her dark neck when he took everything from her. She remembers how it felt when her spine cracked beneath his hooves, when her body broke in the dirt beneath the battering of horns and that ugly, crooked smile. His scent haunts her still, even now, and she wonders how he had found her again.

But the scent that finds her now is possibly the worst of all three, and the very instant it touches the skin of her nose with its strange, muted familiarity, she is only agony inside. Something dark builds in her chest, both a pressure and a pain, and she finds that she cannot breathe around the weight of it. She turns, spilling from the shadow solid and blue and rigid with an intensity that boils in her veins, with a fear that this scent is just the whisper from a dream, that no matter how long she looks she will never find him.

She has already looked for years.

But as she peels from the trees, feeling the bite of bark when it grabs at her indigo flesh from moving too quickly, too carelessly, she finds the scent is more than just the echo of a memory. Her face darkens, a mask of pain and shadow and fury, a mask of relief, because she would know him anywhere. Even ruined like this, trapped in a wasted body. She remembers the soft black of his skin, the band of shapes (and how she hates those particular shapes) around the base of his foreleg, she remembers emerald and navy tangled in the thickness of his dark mane. She remembers innumerable nightmares chased away in the warmth of the curve of his powerful neck.

“Erebor.” She breathes his name in a broken way, frozen several strides from him in her unwillingness to move closer. They are different now, she as much as he, though in very opposite ways. Where he is just a shadow of who he used to be, she is brilliant and blue and wild. There are long horns arching from the curve of her nose, horns she had earned from a different set of impossibilities, horns she had earned in his absence. She slips closer, softening, languid in her uncertainty, in her disbelief. “You.” This word is the echo of a memory, but somehow it forms on her tongue and pours from her lips.

She hadn’t meant for it to happen, but the distance between them disappears and his faded scent of forest and dust is all she knows in the whole world. Everything fades. Pollock, death, the Chamber, her kingdom, all grey and quiet in the back of her mind. She touches her mouth to his neck, to his shoulder, tracing the fluttering of his pulse beneath the smooth satin black because at least this way she can be sure he is real. But this only infuriates her, this pulse beating against her lips, his tangibility, and she pulls away with ears pinned and the flash of gleaming teeth.

“You said it would be easier together.” She throws this accusation like a punch, and those aching green eyes gleaming like emeralds trapped in a burned earth never leave his face. “But you left.” She turns from him, furious, pacing, but she never strays too far lest the lines of his body grow soft at the edges and he disappear into nothingness again. When she loops around again she is sucked into his gravity and so she drifts, coming close enough to touch him though this time she will not. Instead she watches him with that wildness she has come to be known for, with a darkness that bleeds into every hollow and curve of that indigo face. “I trusted you, Erebor.”

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78