"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
Tangerine awakens. A dark yet beautiful dream haunts her as she glances to the cloudless sky above.
It had been urgent, it had been clear and she rose from her bed of leaves without hesitation - thus she fulfilled her own prophecy. The wild mare had grown up in a world steeped in mysticism and she did not have the courage to deny such a dream. Before she has time to consider she is moving quickly away from Tephra, away from her children.
She stands in the middle of an open grassland with the sun and moon swirling around her, stars have come and gone and an age has passed in a moment. She inhaled and galaxies fill her lungs - another age passes with her exhale. She was content, to spend eternity this way, glowing like a dying star... Until. Until she sees the Super Nova. She is intertwined before she realizes she has drawn so close, she floats above the world of mortals reaching for the embrace of the heavens. But the starlight is so heavy, too heavy. She is not a warrior queen, she is not a goddess. The weight cracked her open fills her with starlight. She loses control, falling back to the earth in a cloud of space dust, the cracks in her body glowing with supernatural light.
She didn't know what it meant, but she knew where it took place, and she knew she had to go there.
By the time Tang reaches the meadow the night air has dried her gold and cream coat, leaving patterns of white salt like lace over her skin.
The air around her seems to crackle, ripe with the nearly metallic ozone scent she struggles to place. An electrical storm comes to mind as she halts, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. A cool wind rips through her mane, violently pulling her head back and up. She doesn't resist as a feather her son had tied there flutters away, tumbling across the meadow. she stands unmoving except for the fluttering of the thick vein at her neck.
Stardust.
That's what that smell is, she knew it from her dream.
A time of falling.
Stars fall, and he falls with them, tumbling back to the earth smeared in soot and stardust. It’s rare, for him to stray from his usual gravestone gray, to appear to them so lurid and colorful. He’d long thought such displays below him, when he was a weaker thing, when his image was one of a blood-soaked warrior.
(Now, what is he – a thing apart, a thing that rarely appears, a god who vomited forth a land only to have it sink back into the ocean when he left it, abandoned it as he had so much else in this mortal plane.)
But he’d fallen – in love, that is, though that particular word sits ill on the dark god, however we use it – as he drifted, timeless, in space, as he watched constellations form and collapse, a beauty so whole and terrible that of course he wanted it for himself, and he took it the only way he could, in imagery, painted across him.
And now – fallen – he walks, and spreads the stars, the colors, leaves a legion of them, lets Beqanna know her dark god persists and pervades her.
He sees her, and she smells like the sea, like earth – like heat. And that old, bestial wanting, the one mortal desire he has not shed, rises its head. Want.
Not for her – she could have been anyone – but for the smell of earth, for the heat, to leave behind some star-stricken child as a reminder of the worlds that exist beyond theirs.
She is waiting, and he does not wonder why – he is a thing worth waiting for – and so he goes to her.
“Hello,” – he tastes her mind, finds the name there – “Tangerine.”
The Supernova.
Her eyes flutter open to reveal his starlight reflected back to him in the glowing amber of her eyes. A chill passes through her, her blood runs cool on the insides of her legs. She takes a deep breath to steady the quaking she hopes he can not see.
She had never heard his name, she knew nothing of his relation to Beqanna and the way he had sculpted her through the ages, but she knew him. Tang knew a god stood before her. But there was something more to him, he was not all god, he was also man.
She can see the want of flesh, unabashed, on his face he can hear it in each syllable of her name. She does not flatter herself to think she he yearns for her specifically, no she does not flatter herself when this stranger speaks her name. But something in her changes as she gazes into the soft spiraling galaxy upon his brow and she can not seem to remember any mortal she has ever known before.
She steps closer to him, her nostrils flaring to take in the scent of the heavens. "Yes, I am Tang." What does one say to a fallen super nova? Whatever your mouth spits out before you can even think if it the right thing to say or not "I dreamed about you." She dares to smile as the words leave her pale lips, as her heart hammers in her chest. "and you gave me something."
She thinks of the starlight which had filled her, she thinks of her future child, and she does not know if she should feel exhilarated or afraid.
Tang--
It brings to mind a sharpness on the tongue, a puckering of lips. But also sweetness, a flavor indiscernible. And there is certainly such a scent in the air now, as the season shapes their minds, crass and wanton, the air between them heated.
To him, she is a body, a promise, one of many to breed stars within. Something to be had, and perhaps forgotten (many of their names have slipped his mind, or he never bothered to learn them at all), but some remain, certain summer-sweet memories of a moment exchanged.
And what is he to her? A body, swathed in stars, or –
He invades her mind, and does not hide such an invasion, lets her feel the way he parses her memories until he finds the vision of himself, reflected back in such brilliance for a moment even he feels the wanting in the back of his throat.
A god, then. A supernova. Brilliance made flesh.
I dreamed about you, she says, and he smiles, as if he is kind.
“Of course you did,” he says – he has never been humble – and he closes the space, too, “but it was bigger than a dream, wasn’t it?”
Writ in the stars, you could say.
He is close enough to touch her, now, but he doesn’t. It would be too easy, to take, a quick and unsatisfying moment. No, he prefers them to ask for such things, to welcome it.
(He’s always preferred a bent knee to a broken one, though he’ll take both kinds.)
He pretends to ponder her question.
“And what was it,” he says – purrs, really – “that I gave you?”
She feels the pressure of his presence in her mind, it washes through thoughts she had long forgotten and memories she held dear. She can tell nothing of what he thinks of them from his ageless face, as he carelessly sifts through what makes her her. Tangerine's perception of the world, her dreams and fears, lay raw underneath his touch.
It is unexpectedly comforting.
To know, that there is another creature who knows everything there is to know about her. She would never feel that again, she would never again be so exposed or so comprehended. Her powerlessness, his seeming indifference, is liberating.
But he coos to her and echoes her step bringing them to nearly touch, the god and the girl, with nothing but atoms reverberating in the sliver of space between them.
The Super Nova questions her, baits her with his sweet breath, and she understands him a little better. She stands before a god yet she holds a small amount of power.
He wants to be wanted - how mortal.
You don't need to ask that - she thinks but doesn't say. But then, as she looks into his dark eyes she knows he already has heard her thought. You probably know more about our child than I do, she thinks to him if thoughts can be thought in whispers.
Again, she inhales the mineral scent with her muzzle hovering below his cheek. He is terrifying and irresistible simultaneously but something stops her from closing the gap. That is... until she does. Her teeth gently bring the soft skin of his throat into her mouth, her eyes closing against his brilliance.
The children mostly cease to matter once they are created, once the making of them is done. He tried, earlier, to be a father, to favor them, but the children were ultimately such disappointing things. The few that rose to power never took to it the way he did, and they fell for girls or boys beneath them, and thus their castles crumbled.
(He recalls one son in particular with a distinct bitterness, the son whose body he’d possessed, the son who’d hide his deviant desires somewhere where the dark god had not looked, and it had been the fact he’d kept a secret that had repulsed Carnage most of all.)
(And, well, another son, so aptly named - desecration - who had – well. Never mind that boy. Never mind him, or what he may have wanted from him.)
Her thoughts are aimed at him, now that she knows words are decorative, but he likes the way his voice sounds, so he speaks still.
“No,” he agrees – he needs nothing from her – “but that’s the fun of it, isn’t it?”
Gods grow bored, as men do, so he creates games for himself, exercises in wanting and being wanted.
And he feels wanted, now, as her teeth graze his skin. The stars alight on him as his blood warms, neck arching, and he lets his lips find her crest, and the pulse there, the warmth and life of her, this woman who found herself a god, whose name is sweet and sour both.
He bites into her flesh then, though all things considered, it’s not cruel – just a scrape, a moment to feel her blood on his tongue, and that, too, warms him. His teeth are the blunted ones of a horse, and do little damage – perhaps it will scar, perhaps not – and he withdraws, lips red, smile all the more gruesome under the macabre coloration, and then his lips trail down her spine, bored of waiting.
When the child is made, percolating inside of her, he is ready to drift away, dust in the wind.
“Tang,” he says, and the blood, now dried, cracks on his lips, “she’ll be all light and color, and you’ll be unable to forget me. Name her for the stars, won’t you?”
He can see the girl, patterned like the woman before him, but with his colors. With her own set of powers thrumming in her skin.
CARNAGE
if you don't want him biting her PM me and I'll edit <33 also this might be the last post from him because the next few days before my trip are busy!!
Under her tongue, his flesh is impossibly warm - raging with life blood. But her touch does not last long. It sets off a violent reaction, the suspense is broken, and his movements come to life with a new urgency.
She gives a small cry as he takes her gesture and multiplies it, champing the cream of her flesh, pulling skin away from muscle opening thin red channels to feed his appetite.
A god has a hunger.
But by now the adrenaline in her veins and the chemicals firing in her brain prevent any pain from registering. Where Warrick had placed gentle kisses down her spine this stallion leaves a trail of blood.
Two become one become three. Lust begat love - love for a child yet unseen. The painted mare gives him something, he gives her something more - it is a fair trade. And anyway, it would be a lie to say she didn't enjoy it. As he distances himself from her Tang blinks, unsure if he is fading away or her vision is blurring. She takes a breath to steady herself.
"And what shall I tell her, this child of light, what is her father's name?" Her voice is ragged, far from her usual strong clear contralto as she grasps for one more moment with the dark god of starlight
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@[Carnage] No, it's great! Thank you for posting with her, no pressure to reply... if he doesn't I will just assume he says"Caaaarnage" all creepy like and drifts away. Unless you want to PM me something different, of course
