"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
Tied by the umbilical cord that never truly severed, linked eternally to the palomino mare for...12 years. Decade. Decades? Time did not flow in his mind, in his land. He knew only darkness (before), expulsion (birth), and then After. The great After, where time is a missing thread of pieces strung together like so many run on sentences polluting his mind with its ever stopping ever pressing
But the fog is lifting. It's lifted. The edges of his vision don't blur anymore, the sharpness of his mind is honed and focused and looking forward. In front he can see more than the back of his mother. In front of him is clear.
And he's aging. He's taller than her now, by a head, and growing. Foalish limbs becoming adolescent limbs bending and breaking into adult limbs. One day. For now he ages with the rest of the yearlings, growing like string beans ever upward, ever thinner.
Today he tastes adventure.
He takes the steps away from his mother while she sleeps, and before he knows it he's out of her sight.
Across the wasteland.
Free.
09-20-2016, 10:08 AM (This post was last modified: 09-20-2016, 10:08 AM by violence.)
violence
She hasn’t heard from her parents.
As far as knows, they remain on the mountain – remain powerful. Or perhaps they crossed that invisible threshold, and her father is a horse now rather than an alien (could he even survive, like that? she wonders, but does not dwell); and her mother some useless, ugly thing rather than the magic-sharpened witch she had been.
She misses Charnel, misses that vessel, the body available to her, strong and strange. Charnel’s watery eyes and meekness, the way she had bent to Violence’s will, had opened her mind, let in the possession.
Now, there is nothing – now she does not miss them because they can offer nothing to her. Violence is stupidly powerless, only a horn on her head, a mindless weapon (and she has already used it, sliced open a girl’s face for the way she looked at her).
She’s come here because bitterness is a smoldering fuel, and she is not the begging kind. So when the impotent gray and his sick magic promised things, she stood by. She walked herself into the dust land he gave them.
She doesn’t mind the barrenness of it – rather likes it, really, as she has always been a woman who prefers dead things. She doesn’t mind the lies, because she lies quite often, herself.
She keeps her distance form him, though. She knows the stories.
So her sights settle instead on a boy, coltish but growing, and she strides over. Her eyes are hard, and flat, and she shines like obsidian against the wretched gray backdrop of their home.
“Hello,” she says, “my name is Violence.”
Violence.
What a strange, fitting name he thinks. His name is not fitting - it means nothing. It is an act that is unknown to horses. It's a song that talks about soul, feelings, truth, depth - all things he lacks. He lacks them because of the fog, that rolling insurmountable presence that choked him for years. Even with it gone, even so far from his mother, he cannot help but turn to look over his shoulder for her. She should be there - gleaming yellow gold in the dry morning air.
She isn't.
It's just him and the mare with the horn.
Despite his (apparent) age his voice is...older. Cracked, corroded, like rusting pipes in the spring thaw - but older. Wrong for his frame but oddly fitting for his eyes. They're deeper than they should be, with all he's seen and experienced.
A shame, really.
"Surgery," he says like clanging pipes. And then, with a sudden wild hair - "Where's the border?" How do you escape?
Her name is indeed an apt thing – she is the daughter of horses and aliens named for old gods (Cthylla, Cthulhu, names that beg to be growled from deep in the throat), yet her name is simple and straightforward. Her name is war, mayhem, and she embodies that with her flat shark-eyed stare and wide grin.
His voice is odd – dusty, like the air. She wonders how old he is. He doesn’t look particularly old, but she assesses him, almost instinctually, looks for weaknesses – a limp, a stiffness. She isn’t quite aware she’s doing it. She’d possessed enough predators to know what to look for – though she has not hunted in this body, she has done so in the bodies of her sister and her father (their bodies were primed for such things, alien and feral, snarling teeth and heightened senses).
Not that she’d hunt him.
Except –
Except he asks an odd question - where’s the border?
“Why?” she says, and her gaze grows heavier on him. Truth is, she doesn’t care who stays and who leaves – let them all leave, she’d be queen of the wasteland – but she likes the idea of a hunt.
Weakness could be found all over Surgery - without looking too far. He lacks skills of any sort, he doesn't understand danger, and his mind is painfully childish despite his age. The age he's rapidly approaching as Beqanna plays catch up with the disastrous number Harmonia did to him. He aches everywhere from the rapid spurt and, no doubt, shows the signs of it in his bones and muscles. He can feel the cartilage grind on bone and knows his hair is sparse and sickly.
But he's unaware of these things. He only knows life as a foal (a shadow, a blur, because Harmonia clouded his mind and kept it just as childish and empty as his bones) and life now. This is just how it is, the ache - he reasons.
Violence follows his gaze to the Edges. He doesn't know what's after the Edge, where the horizon dips ever so slightly, obscured by the heat that radiates off the ground. He can see the volcano (he doesn't know what that is) and, if he squints, maybe he can see the sea (he also doesn't know what that is) but otherwise...nothing.
The edge.
"Do you know?" he asks, feeling a childish flair of his temper. He didn't appreciate having someone stand in his way.
Her impassive stare prompts him to speak more, but only after letting out an annoyed, brisk sigh.
"I need to leave before Mother realizes I'm gone."
She could hunt him anywhere - everywhere. He knows this, but some part of him believes if he just...leaves...he can be gone. For good.
“I know,” she says, because of course she does, she isn’t stupid. She followed the dull god with eyes wide open, took in every horrid piece of this land. She knows its borders – knows them well enough, at least – and knows bits and pieces of the other lands.
(She knows the mountain, too, with its awful threshold, where the bones had collapsed in a useless pile. Where the magic was torn from her - vivisected from her.)
She is not a fan of borders. She is not a thing to be kept in. Or out.
“I could help you,” she says. Mostly a lie. She is not a helpful woman.
“But--”
Of course there’s a but.
“Our kingdom must stay strong. We need numbers. You, Surgery, are a number. So why should I let you leave? What’s to keep me from stopping your escape, by whatever means necessary? I’m sure our king would reward me for it.”
Ah, the fun she would have had once – she could have possessed him, possibly (his mind seems feeble enough), made him do all sorts of delightful things. She could have sent bones chasing after him.
Truth is, she doesn’t care if he leaves. But she’s idle, and bored, and in the mood to hunt.
