come together, fall apart; Malis/any

[Erebor]

fire burns brightest in the dark

He smells her before he sees her, and he feels her just as he always does, feels her approach through his bones. He has dreamed this so many times, he knows how it goes. He knows how she rounds the corner, indigo and just as perfect as when he'd left her, smiling and lovely. And so it happens now, the dream runs its course and he sees her –

And it's then that he realizes. It can't be a dream. It can't be a dream because he has never known her to have three horns on her head. He has never known her to smell of the Chamber like she does, not so deeply, as though it's worked its way through her bones and become part of her. His face is raw emotion as he processes all of this, shifting with a profound understanding that she's here-

And for once, the man with the answer to everything, the boy who's always been so precocious, who's always got the right words, is speechless.

He looks at her like a starving man looks at a banquet, like a man lost in the desert looks at his first glimpse of water. He still can't believe she's here, can't believe she's real, can't believe he's real, can't believe any of it. She speaks his name, and it's every nerve in his body alight with bliss and pain in equal measures. Pain because even now he hears it, something broken in the voice he'd hoped would never break again. And still he wants to talk, wants to tell her everything, but he doesn't know what to say and his voice doesn't work.

When she presses into him, closing the distance impossibly quickly, his reaction is pure instinct. Despite his weakness, despite the impossibility of the situation, he folds her in and they fit just like they always have. His brown eyes close as he returns her gentle embrace, and she is his whole world (was she ever not? Was there ever anything but her and the Chamber?) Her touch is light, feather light, as she traces his pulse and oh god how he has missed this-

But as suddenly as it begins it is over, and she is facing him with ears pinned and teeth bared. And the transition is so sudden that he doesn't know how to react. She keeps him on his toes again, speechless again, and he is stunned, silent. Her words are like a punch to the gut, each accusation a kick harder than anything he'd ever sustained in his battles. She speaks and he can do nothing but listen, his mind struggling desperately to process. Had he left? He tried to wrack his brain – he remembers being there, and then he remembers dreaming. But how long? What had happened? As she speaks, as she paces, a horrible reality starts to crystalize in his mind, and he begins consider just what he might have done to her.

And just as she makes her final statement, just as he's about to try to react, to try to explain what's happened, the whole world goes haywire.

His first instinct is to lunge forward, to protect her at all costs, but the world is having none of that. The ground is heaving beneath them, and as much as he tries to fight it, something sharp strikes him and he feels himself falling, falling, falling. The last thing he knows before unconsciousness takes him is that Malis' name is on his lips.

He comes to with a start, finding himself in a totally unknown meadow. His first instinct is that he's been unmoored again, that he's once more floating in nothingness, and that perhaps this has been nothing more than a dream again. Perhaps she was never real; perhaps this is just part of the most cruel twist yet. But he can't chance it, can't risk it, and so he calls for her. His voice is hoarse, lousy with disuse, but he screams for her nonetheless. "MALIS!" He coughs several times, like a heating system during the first days of fall. "MALIS!"

He is so consumed with finding her, with everything that's happened, that he doesn't even notice what's just come to pass elsewhere. It doesn't occur to him that he was tossed around by the world. It doesn't occur to him that he felt the warmth that has been a constant companion drain away while he was tossed and turned. He'll discover all of that later. But for now –

"MALIS!"

erebor

lost servant of a lost land

warship x straia

Author's note: immortality for his temp trait, please ^_^

[Korbin]

the world dies over and over again

He has the worst family. Seriously. First, his twin brother is a creepy bugger, what with that eternal youth nonsense. Boy literally doesn’t grow up. Which, for Korbin, is great cause you know, he gets all the ladies. Well, he would, if he didn’t live in the mountains of the Chamber with his crazy ass family. Why doesn’t he leave? No clue. Laziness, mostly. What’s he gonna do? Recruit? Steal? Nah. He just likes popping up out of nowhere and scaring the crap out of people when he turns into a skeleton. Granted, his family is getting sick of this little game, and it really doesn’t work on them anyway.
 
And then, suddenly, Erebor is gone. Stoic, mopey Erebor who thinks he failed at life just cause he let down some dirt. Yea yea, the Chamber is important to his family. It’s not like he hasn’t heard the stories. But honestly, it’s freaking dirt guys. Dirt and trees and ravens…though the ravens followed Straia, so there were probably none left.
 
But at this point, with Erebor gone, even though he’s a mopey ass, Korbin isn’t entirely sure what to do. Because he can’t stay with them. Bismark is fine, sure, but he’s still literally a child. But the women in his family? Dear god. Erebor might technically be scary with all that heat shit and blowing things up and whatnot. Hell, even Korbin is technically scary, given the whole un-dead thing (it’s really damn hard to hurt a skeleton that can’t feel pain anyway, as it turns out). But neither one of them holds a freaking candle to Straia or Weaver.
 
So he leaves. And he’s just about to interrupt some reunion (yea, Korbin is actually all for playing cock-block on his big brother), when the world goes to hell. Or something. He doesn’t know, because he’s knocked out almost instantly, and when he comes to, he’s on the top of a mountain.
 
Dammit. He was really looking forward to pissing Erebor off.
 
Oh, but it’s not long before he hears a familiar voice. And it’s also not long before he’s figured out he can’t shift anymore. That…well, that sucks. Where’s the fun in that? He wants to scare all these panicked, uncertain strangers around him. Just POP, skeleton. And then skitter away. But he can’t. So instead, he follows the voice, which is loudly screaming MALIS as if the girl who’d nearly beaten the crap out of Erebor was worth finding.
 
Though it makes him like her instantly, whoever she is.
 
“What, no KORBIN?” he says, yelling the last bit as he comes up behind his brother.  They look so alike it’s sort of freaky, honestly. But his whole family is freaky, so ya know. “I’m glad to see your worried about me and all. I’m fine, thanks. No thanks to you. I can’t believe you freaking left me with them.” It’s entirely clear he means Weaver and Straia. His mother, with her army of spies so even if he wanted to hit on the girls, he couldn’t. She’d be watching. Ultimate cock block – but from your mother? Not cool. And his sister, with that glowing mark of freaking Death on her chest. Korbin may be undead, but she literally died. And now she can’t die. The Queen of Ravens and the Mistress of Death.
 
“So who the hell you screaming for like a fool?” Cause he might cock block, but he’s also a half decent wingman when he wants to be.

korbin

but the skeleton always gets up and walks

Um....I don't even know. Sorry guys.

[Malis]

if truth is north, then i am true south

This pain makes her furious, the fissures opening along the surface of her heart the longer she watches him. He left her, he promised it would be easier together, and then he left her just as everyone else had. When she turns back to him, she does nothing to hide her heart in shadow, to hide the hurt and the pain and the fury from him. He will know anyway, even if she did show him only that stony blue mask carved from dark and fury, because he knows her better than anyone.

Except, perhaps, Killdare.
He had seen her beautiful and he had seen her ugly, and somehow he still found a way to love her.

She turns away from Erebor once more, and there is so much power in the straining of the musculature of her legs, so much fury feeding into the way she weaves away and back, pinning her ears and flashing her teeth. In this moment, another moment as impossible as the dozens that had come before it, she is wholly at war with herself. The dark in her heart urges her to push him away, to doubt anything he will tell her, to doubt why he has returned at all. Surely, not for her though. But she is weak and greedy and the idea of losing him again, of not tasting the pulse where it flutters in his neck or the dust where it sleeps in the brittle black of his coat, is enough to undo her.

This time when she turns back to him she is soft, there is more pain than fury and it is perhaps the most honest she has ever been with the darkness that fills her chest. She reaches out to touch him again, press her nose to his jaw and tell him how cruel he’s been, how she is too selfish to lose him again, and the world falls out from under them. She has enough time to trace the horror in his face, enough time to know that her own expression must be identical, before the world goes dark.

She has known dark before, true dark like this. Dark without possibility or reason, dark without end. She knows it well enough not to fight it, not to feel fear for herself when it swallows her – though, she does know fear for her family and it is far more endless than even this true dark.

When she wakes, if you can call it that, stumbling forward in a stupor to find bruises and cuts and various other insignificant wounds that will not heal, she knows something is wrong. She slows to a halt and for a long moment she does nothing more than turn her head (the weight of it is so wrong now, so bare with only a strange, single horn) to identify the faces nearby. None of them mean anything to her and so she turns, frowning at the frailty of her dark indigo body, and disappears into the cacophony of voices calling for those that they know. Her own lips are still, frozen, and she calls for no one.

‘MALIS!’

Her body curves towards the sound, those emerald eyes scorching like green fire. The voice does not belong to Killdare, and she can feel her belly tighten with the nausea of not knowing. She may not deserve him, but she does love him, and nothing of her vow to protect him has changed. Nothing would ever change that.

‘MALIS!’

The sound of her name as it falls across the broken world is enough to spur her into action. She turns, moving quickly, if not stiffly, across the side of a mountain littered with root and rock, until the ground flattens into a meadow and she is relieved for the even footing. The third time he yells her name, she is close enough to see him, to see another stallion approaching from behind. Adrenaline burns like fire in her veins, it boils beneath the blue of her skin, and in an instant she has torn apart the distance between them to weave close against Erebor’s dark side. She is none of the languid grace she had been before, but she is feral in her lack of understanding, wild when her ears disappear into the tangle of mane at her neck.

“Me.” Is all she says to the stallion she does not know, a stallion who looks suspiciously similar to Erebor himself. But she has no time for anything but wariness, and when she weaves between them again she pushes her mouth possessively against Erebor’s hip as if to claim him as hers in this ruined world with a landscape she does not recognize. Her chin lowers a little, and the point of a horn that is not hers dips toward the stallions neck. “Who are you?”

malis is claiming a horn for her temporary trait <3

[Rodrik]

Rebirth—that is what this new life has given him. He is no longer a servant to the constant hunger to live. He is longer chained to the master of the darkness, his supposed creator. The voices do not scream out for him. The souls of the others did not drive him to madness. There is only one thing he feels—silence. This silence is his blessing. He rejoices in the very peace of it. It has its own rush of adrenaline, almost like the first time he felt the life go out from another being. The first time he murdered someone had been phenomenal—how wonderful it had been to take something so precious in this world, something so lightly taken. A second chance—how long would it last? The question crosses the red stallion’s mind briefly. His creator, his master, would not stop until he had him coiled up again (more tighter than before). The red evil, the monster he is, would never be free from the darkness. But, for now, he is not a servant to the darkness. He is free from it all. ”MALIS!” He hears the screaming voice. It is the first word he hears coming down from the mountain. The red devil does not linger at the outskirts of the meadow; instead he turns in the direction of the stallion that keeps calling out for some other horse named Malis. He does not think about the mountain, it holds everything he had been before he came here, but instead of what lays ahead of him. A new life to begin that is full of opportunities and new things to discover. The red stallion, adorned with a new horn (it’s beginning to become an nuisance with constant want to itch it) eventually finds the stallion that is screaming at the top of his lungs. His nutmeg eyes, masked by a warm nature, see at last the stallion has found whatever he is looking for. But he cannot help to take a closer look at the black older stallion. There is something familiar about him—maybe that is why he had been drawn to the voice in the first place. “Hello there,” he says with greeting, a warm and neutral grin spreading across his chapped lips. “I think I know you,” he says looking towards Erebor. The memory of the black stallion are blurry, but so are the many memories since he had become a servant to the maker—ever since he had killed Aryeh on the beach all those years ago. “I’m Rodrik.” A simple name in reality, but it holds so much more for others and once in this land called Beqanna.

Rodrik

angels banished from heaven have no choice but to become devils

character info: here | character reference: here | image © uribaani
Jenger said I should join :|