"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
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
She hunts.
She does not always hunt – though she is much more predator than prey, it is not an all-consuming thing – but today she wakes hungry, wakes full of wanting and the need for warmth.
Such a strange thing, my corpse masterpiece – the wreckage of beauty, a sort of terrible, plastic perfection to her. All this, of course, well-marred by her terrible, lurching gait, by the way she is cool to the touch, like a thing fresh-dead. She is not quiet as she comes through the forest, twigs snapping underfoot, leaves rustling at her feltlocks. She has no stealth – shocking, for a hunter – and she draws eyes, ones that linger, tracing the curves of her with a lurid appreciation, but eyes that turn when she meets theirs, when she unveils the fever-brightness there, the madness laughing in her eyes, a parasite nestled dark and wretched in the pupil.
She is looking for something, but she can’t define it. She never can, only knows she woke with a gnaw in her belly and a restlessness in her feet.
There is a noise like a whip-crack, and then, a figure – a woman.
A gift, proffered.
My corpse queen smiles, a grin that belongs on something dead and rotting.
“Hello,” she says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
oh, my love, don't forsake me. take what the water gave me ..
Blinking, like a newborn babe still adjusting from the watery depths to unbound light, Circinae steadies herself and gasps for air. Confusion settles, coils like puckering tentacles around her mind to drag sense and reason below dark, clouded waves and she wonders just where or how she got here. She feels … drowsy, stumbling forward while the earth beneath her tilts against her will. A sound tethers her, draws her heavy head upwards so that those pale lapis eyes might sway and rest on the source from whence it came. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
A phrase she’s always longed to hear.
There’s laughter, but it comes to a sudden halt when the blue-green dame realizes that the noise has materialized from her own, sweet throat. She sucks the sound back in, feels a throbbing pressure like a stone pushing against her skull, and says instead, “I hope you weren’t waiting very long.” A strange excuse for strange bedfellows but there’s one thing that rises to the murky surface of her thoughts: There is something very much beyond her power happening here and she’d do well to simply play along.
“My memory is a bit sporadic at the moment,” She hums, a smile striking vivid contrast to what emotions toil beneath, the picture of untainted innocence with a saccharine voice, “so you’ll have to forgive me - I’m drawing a blank on your name.”
It is only then that the multitude of images before her adjust and solidify into one shape.
The creature painted with a waxy smile makes Circy sick with fear.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
Moments like these seem to come to her often, for such a monster, she is also a lucky thing. And it must be luck shining upon her, to have such a girl materialize before her like an apparition.
Except my corpse masterpiece doesn’t consider her luck, she considers it a sort of right, a course of nature.
The girl laughs and Chantale smiles, sickly-sweet as honeysuckle. The girl eats up the lie like a cat and clotted cream, and it’s easy, this hunt, this game.
Closer – just a bit – a half step, closer to her, to the green richness of her coat, the heat radiating from it, closer to that laughter (like bells, it is, like bells).
“Of course,” she says, when the girl professes that she does not know her name, “I’m Chantale, remember?”
Still smiling.
“And you’re…?”
She doesn’t really need the girl’s name, but she’d like to have it – a trinket, a thing to cradle against her chest. She wants to whisper it, purr it, use it to grant her closer access.
She is patient, though. Sort of.
She is patient, and she is cunning, and it is the cunning part of her that reads the moment of fear writing itself on the girl’s pert features, and Chantale shakes her head, a stiff movement, rotating dead joints in their sockets.
“Don’t be scared,” she says, cooing, though it’s more demand than request, “I’m very kind.”
