"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
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
He had played games with her. But they were games she didn't enjoy. He had carved her flesh and created monsters to torment her just to see what she would do. Then he had left her to fend for herself and find her own way home.
She felt betrayed.
After wandering Carnage's wasteland, she had found herself on the shores of Hyaline. She had scaled the mountains and given birth to Celest, in a summit meadow, as close to the stars as she could get. She was still His daughter, after all. And from what she had seen, the child was more of him than herself.
A cluster of women had come to support her for the birth ritual, they had given her strength and herbs when she needed them most. But as quickly as they had appeared, her protectors were gone. And she was alone again.
Well, not truly alone.
She had left the birthing site as quickly as her body would let her and headed for The River where she could heal in the shadows, nursing her wounds and strange child in solitude.
She couldn't face @[Amet] yet, and a return journey to Tephra was out of the question.
Amet's judgment of her interactions with Carnage had irked her. She had been secretly enraged that he would presume to question her judgment as boldly as he had. But he had been right. She had the scars to prove it.
"Did he hurt you?" He had asked, so sincerely, and she had to make an effort to keep her anger from surfacing. He didn't believe that she would ever willingly go to the bed of the dark god.
Her answer had been 'No' at the time. But now, it was quite a different story.
She needed to be alone. She has kept to the shadows these past few months to process her trauma without the necessary pleasantries and smiles of kingdom life. Her days had been spent tending to her daughter and avoiding others, traveling to the riverbank once a day to watcher her Celest play in the bubbling clean waters, and quiet stories whispered to the child in whatever shelter they could find. Her wounds are scaring over, they no longer drip and burn- she had always healed quickly.
Today, they linger here by the river - the teal and purple child and her gold and cream mother. Two that do not truly seem to fit together. Celest wades up to her ankles slashing and making waves with her muzzle while Tang lays in a patch of sunshine by the riverbank. A scent drifts to her then, she stands, and for the first time in months, she chooses to stand still instead of disappearing into the protection of the shadows.
10-01-2017, 06:22 PM (This post was last modified: 10-01-2017, 09:31 PM by Cassi.)
There are some things she would know anywhere.
Some of these are sweet, like the exact architecture of Spyndle’s body, the lilt of her voice, the way she smells like flowers Cordis has no name for.
Some of them, well – they are not so sweet.
Other things she would know anywhere – the chuffing, wet breaths of a hellhound, the sound of heavy paws on a pine-carpeted forest floor, the way His laughter reminded her of rats scampering on broken glass.
All this, and – the way His brand looks.
It doesn’t matter that it’s different on each of them, she knows it, the way a body knows a fever, it’s a visceral and disgusting knowledge, and the kind of knowledge she cannot unsee.
She shudders when she sees it embossed upon this woman. She sees other scars, too, wonders if they are His.
It shouldn’t matter – He’s touched many, He has no limits to what He exacts on Beqanna’s population. She can do nothing to change it, and nor would she, even if she could, for last time she drew His attention He walked away with her daughter, and it was the last she ever saw of her.
And furthermore, she shouldn’t care, because she is not the caring type – she is the loner type, the type who dresses herself in lightning and walks too fast, eyes flashing and fixed on some distant point straight ahead. She shouldn’t care that the girl wears a brand so like the one that graces Cordis’s own hip, because that is her past, and even if she can recall all too well the fetid, rotten-meat stench of His breath as He told her awful, wretched stories, it’s the past.
It doesn’t matter.
But it does – it must - because Cordis slows. She stops. And she looks at the woman on the riverbank.
“Hello,” she says, then, “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” But I am already so disturbed, she thinks, but doesn’t say. Instead, she is quiet, save for the faint hum of lightning on her skin.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
10-01-2017, 10:16 PM (This post was last modified: 10-01-2017, 10:25 PM by Tangerine.)
Tangerine
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
Electricity.
The fine hairs around her muzzle tingle and Tangerine stomach churns with apprehension. It had been so long since she had faced another. "Jah-Lilah?" Tang whispers low enough to easily be missed. She wouldn't be surprised if it was the nomadic midwife who found her first, but this mare who approaches is silver not red. And although the air around her seems to crackle, she is not the far-traveling and electricity-manipulating friend of Tangerine's mother.
She is a stranger.
She has power.
She is dangerous until proven innocent.
Tang swallows her anxiety and stands still as the other approaches them, waiting for her to first interrupt the sounds of nature with a greeting or a threat. But the words which she speaks are not threatening, they are subtly flavored with compassion (or is that camaraderie?), and Tang finds that she desperately want's to accept that this stranger has good intentions or even no intentions at all.
But she has her daughter to think about.
The sight of the brand on her silver hip causes an electricity of her own creating spark in her chest. This woman, she knew what it was to have her sovereignty stolen, to be taken, to be left. She knew already what the painted mare had no idea how to verbalize.
But that kind of hurt could turn a victim into a villain, and she had no idea if the mare was here to host her own violent games.
With her thin legs still in the river, Celest stands a wide-eyed sentry. Her solitary play could not hold her attention after the appearance of the mysterious silver mare who interrupted their daily custom. She finds her first stranger so fascinating she forgets to wonder why they are not running away from this one.
Tang takes a step forward, the gravel crunching below her pale hooves.
"You haven't." Her voice finally finds its way, but it comes out too soft. She can't seem dull and broken like little rough pieces of something that used to be beautiful.
"You haven't," she tries again, stronger this time.
And she realizes as the words leave her - she doesn't want to be alone with her sadness.
Tang decides to take her chances, she had already told Celest one hundred times what to do if something happened to her.
"You can stay if you want. This is our favorite place." The words tumble from her.
Too forward, too desperate - Tangerine silently reprimands herself. And Celest shoots her mother a curious glance, intrigued but the strange interaction unfolding.
The mare whispers a name, and it sounds like the mare Cordis met, briefly – most of her meetings are brief – but she cannot be sure, so she does not answer. Not to that name.
There’s a child, too – Cordis hadn’t noticed, at first – who stands on spindly legs, and she feels a distant, long-ago hurt. Her own children are things grown and gone, who have not returned to her (not that she can blame them – being a mother never came easily to her). She tries to smile at the filly, but the attempt is weak, and it comes off more as a grimace.
You can stay, offers the mare, a kindness. And Cordis shouldn’t stay – because she is dangerous, because she is lonely and hurting, because two branded women have too much in common for any good to come of it – but she wants to. She is so sick of moving.
Her attempt at a smile is better, this time, though the effort is still weak. She is not used to smiling, and indeed, has not had much to smile about in recent times.
She doesn’t tell the stranger her thoughts on this place – that rivers make her heart (her hearts) ache in such terrible ways, because it was in a river where she first followed Spyndle, where something pivotal and inescapable was set in motion.
Love in the water, love underwater, love, love, and so on, as a poet once said, but now it’s only sadness that she feels when she looks at the river.
“Thank you,” she says, and what should follow is I really can’t but instead what she says is “my name is Cordis.”
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
Tang is so lonely she achs.
She had never been one to seek shelter in solitude; she had filled her nights with friends and would-be-lovers, secrets and kisses. She didn't like to sleep alone.
The other mare's words only widen the chasm, reminding her of how friendship and new acquaintances used to come so cheap.
Reminding her of how she had run from Hyaline and the residents there because she had been rendered inadequate by the dark god. At first, Tang had chosen the river for convenience - it was the furthest she could travel with her newborn and injuries. But she too had memories intertwined with the tributaries and mist, those memories had kept her anchored.
Here, she could be close to Warrick even though she is not ready for him to see her yet.
She misses him more than she has ever missed anyone. She would have followed him to the ends of the earth, but he wanted to stay at home - that was the only place she couldn't be.
Tang had been the sunlight, and Warrick had been the night sky, dark and vast. He had enveloped her and tamed her for a time, they were incapable of coexistence, but in the moments they been intertwined, between dusk and dawn, those moments were filled brilliance.
But now, she could feel herself growing colder.
She doesn't know who to be if she can't be the girl who walked on sunshine anymore.
But Tangerine doesn't have her blue and rust lover to whisper these things to - what she has is Cordis.
It is better that way, Cordis never knew her before Him and therefore she cannot be disappointed by what she has become.
Tang's amber eyes give in to the magnetic pull of the other woman's brand. She had known there were others in His lair with her, but the silver brand she sees is not fresh - that brand was made years ago. Her eyes grow hot and refuse to look away. How many were there? What was she, one in a hundred, a thousand?
"Tang." She horsly manages.
And then Tang sobs because she had never been good at holding back, because she has no pride left to lose. Like tempered glass, she had been crazed, but now she breaks - she is so fragile this simple kindness, which would have been inconsequential a year ago, cracks her open.
She wasn’t the first to tour His lair, but she was perhaps its longest inhabitant.
It’s one of those memories burned across her mind as vividly as the brand is burned on her hip. The memory of a child (Mahala – she had been Mahala, then; a mousy brown girl) who woke to find her father dead, who walked away from his corpse without knowing how to grieve. And then, He had appeared, had regarded her, and asked that fatal question: are you alone?
Yes, she’d said. An answer that burns her tongue still when she thinks about it – that she had, in some way, invited this.
From there – a lair, a stink of sulfur, years and years of Him taking her apart and remaking her, telling her horrific stories of His deeds. He left her alone, often, as He has little concept of time, but He always returned with new stories, one whispered in her ear accented by the fetid stench of His breath.
From there – she’d escaped, or perhaps He had grown bored enough not to care. From there, the magic He had kept dormant within her emerged, and she grew silver, grew electric, grew into a woman who fell in love and ah, what a different kind of agony that was.
The woman gives her name – Tang – and then breaks into tears, and Cordis bristles in her discomfort. She is not a comforting woman, and compassion does not come naturally to her. But there is a kinship in the woman’s grief, she suspects (she’d cried too, in the lair, and many times after, the memories refusing to stay buried).
It does things to a person.
“He hurt you,” she says. Not a question. She is sorry that she is not alone in knowing this type of grief.
“But you escaped,” she says. Possibly true, and besides, it sounds better than He grew bored of you and let you go, because killing would have almost been kind.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
The torrent of emotion which racks her body is powerful, but it is brief. Quickly, Tang grows embarrassed by the outpouring, although it was beyond her control, and she raises her chin back to the level of the other. Her face is damp and there are sticks and leaves tangled in her once luxurious mane, but somewhere deep inside the truth of the other woman's words resonate.
From anyone else, Cordis's short sentence would have enraged her, closed her off, but she remains supple and weak before the stranger - the stranger who she shares more in common with than any of her friends or lovers. The mares measured words lend her strength.
Tang's mind quiets, but the peace is soon filled with questions and her mouth opens to ask them in a hurried stream.
How do go on, when everyone smiles and says 'nice to meet you'? Do you have to pretend it never happened to be happy again? Is happiness beyond our reach?
But the question which bubbles to the top is not the one she would have asked if she were thinking clearly, but it is the most important to her.
"Did you ever love again?" She draws a breath, the first one since her sobs had ceased. Were you ever able to feel alright after he found you unworthy?
The painted mare didn't want to live outside the gates of the world forever, flitting away from any chance of interaction like a songbird, terrified of seeing someone she knew - before. She wanted to feel the way she had felt before she had melded with the Super Nova, where her heartbreaks had been bittersweet and smiles came easy. Love had always been her language, but some days she struggled to love her own daughter, his daughter, and if he had taken that capability from her... well, then she didn't know if she even wanted to try and rebuild her life.
The mares tears don’t last, which Cordis is grateful for – she could not have offered any paltry comfort for longer than a moment, not when comfort is so hard to come by. And then she looks at her, and asks a question - the question – and a shudder runs unbidden through her.
Did you ever love again, she asks. It’s almost right.
Except there was no again. Just once. And god, is once enough.
“I didn’t love before Him,” she says, “I was too young.”
Maybe she’d loved her father, in the abstract way nature and instinct bid of us, a survivalist kind of love, but she can’t recall it. All she remembers is the river, and the mare she followed there.
“But after…”
After, her gold girl. After, the river and the laurel and the lightning and a hundred heartbreaks; the full catching breath of destined lovers, on display in all their wretched glory. Leaving and coming back. Always coming back.
“After I escaped, I found someone. Spyndle.”
Her breath catches on the same, like a piece of shrapnel on her lips. She’s not used to giving her name to strangers, only breathed it to its owner, with reverence, like some holy incantation.
Naming things gives them power, Cordis has often said. It’s why she doesn’t speak His name, even now – the stupid fear that if she did, His ears would prick and He would come, as if summoned.
If only she could summon Spyndle so easily. Death is a much wider divide if you are not a god.
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep
The ghostly quality of the silver woman captivates Tang, causing her to forget her own sorrows, briefly, as she watches the silver mare's face and waits for the words she sees forming.
I didn't love before Him, I was too young.
And Tang finds herself holding her breath once again because it sounds like the start of a story too terrible to relay. She glances to her own daughter, his daughter, wide-eyed and innocent still, who watches them without leaving her place in the shallows.
But Cordis speaks a name, drawing her face back to face her, and Tang knows it is momentous. She had learned the power of words from an early age, her mother was a storyteller, she knew words could hold more power than magic. There is a flicker of curiosity in her eyes, but it is a quiet and sad - a different kind of curiosity than that which had guided her in her impulsive youth.
Spindle.
Those two syllables, the love and the heartbreak behind the name, causes goose bumps to cascade across her skin. She doesn't dare to touch that name with her own tongue. But despite the way the other's breath catches, there is a flicker of hope in her gold and cream breast.
Her statement assures her that there is a way out for some, even if she can’t see it yet.
And suddenly, for the first time in years, Tangerine feels truly homesick. Not for any kingdom in Beqanna, but for the roaming herds of her ancestral home, the endless meadows, the rolling golden hills of the Great Mare's back.
"How can you stay," she sighs with a shake of her head because the way Cordis says the name Tang understands that they are no more, and for her, love had only been the only thing which could anchor her. There is no judgment in her question which comes out sounding almost rhetorical, but the idea of making the return journey to her mother's homeland has already taken root.
She feels a spark she hasn't felt since Carnage called her name six months past.
"This place, I need to clear my head of it." She wants to believe she can run from Him like she has run from all of her other problems.
Something she never wonders – was the love greater (more terrible) because of Him?
Because she knew such despair, all those deaths and torments at His hands, because her life was darkness for years and years and years, what did she make of light when she finally saw it?
Would her love be so ferocious, so all-consuming, if she didn’t know darkness and misery so intimately?
It’s the kind of question that haunts, and it’s not one she ponders –not one she dares to ponder.
All she knows is – oh yes, she loved. Loves. Will love. Every tense of the word, and she feels it. All towards a woman who is gone. To a woman whose heart beats inside Cordis, now.
(She’d wandered into the river that had taken Spyndle, and it had slipped inside.)
(I carry your heart. I carry it.)
How can you stay asks Tang. Cordis wonders this sometimes, too.
She stays because there is nowhere else to go. She doesn’t know any other place.
She stays because this is where everything occurred. Because the memories were made here, and she walks among them, a ghost in the museum of every heartbeat and heartbreak she felt.
“I don’t think I had a choice,” is what she says, a poor summary of why she truly stays (it’s hope, or it’s fear, or it’s some amalgam of both).
She asks her question, then.
“How long?” she says, but that might not be enough, it might be misconstrued, “how long were you there?”
c o r d i s
I’ll touch you all and make damn sure
that no one touches me
