"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
For once she doesn’t want to be in Ischia. Ever since she’d arrived there it had felt like home, like where she was meant to be. Jah-Lilah had even come to her running, full of joy to see her spirit-daughter brought back into the fold of things and for a moment everything had seemed alright.
Moments are fickle things though, so she spends this particular one beneath the sea. Down here Nyxa is content to forget her troubles and forget them fully. They had no way to follow her beneath the rolling waves, down to the dark crevasses of rocky earth where light was swallowed whole. Her problems couldn’t chase her like so many fish through brightly-colored reefs, or slink from cold shadows with eight grasping arms to drag her down forever.
They remained afloat, where Hod was probably waiting for her in a gentle summer storm. “Dear Hod,” The yearling thinks fondly as she drifts with the currents, her seaweed tresses an undulating tangle of shimmering filaments that wrap around her nose and tickle her cheeks, “my last little tether to this world.”
And he is, so very very much. Weightless, legs immobile and wings yet unformed at her sides, the out-of-place girl simply enjoys the tug and pull without much of a destination in mind. From the feel of it, (she’s quickly learning about her new environment) it’s seems to be a looping sort of motion, tugging her swiftly towards an eddy that was situated offshore of Nerine. “Not making that mistake again.” The growing mare thinks instinctually, blinking open restful eyes to take in the soundless depths.
There. A shoreline looms ahead with steady promise and so she effortlessly gathers the liquid to her sides, waiting until the shape of her wings has fully formed before she uses them to propel her forward with eerie grace. Underneath the glassy surface of the water it’s like she’s gliding, the slow arc of her body every now and then mimicking the lazy flick of a tailfin. A mere few beats and her hooves will touch silty earth; perhaps this time she’s ended up where she was supposed to - in the Riverlands - and maybe the storm she left behind in Ischia has passed.
The river leads throughout all of Beqanna; he had discovered this fact when he was just a yearling, and actively uses its water roads to travel to other bodies of water, to deeper hunting grounds or to shallower ones, depending on his needs. Despite his current stay in Nerine, where he haunts the deep in search of those to add to his growing collection, he will find himself back in the river when he is feeling restless and slightly nostalgic. The river had been his friend during his most lonely days, and was where he refined and honed his skill set for hours upon hours - it holds a special place within him, and returning here soothes the evergreen and pearl stallion.
Beneath the water is where he spends most of his time - submerged beneath its vortex of pressure and darkness, left to his own thoughts and devices. He has yet to find any that call the water their home permanently like he does - he is no kelpie, and does not like to be mistaken for one. His bloodlust is all his own; not genetic or instinctual. He will take to the shore when he needs to, but his life belongs to the water.
In his liquified state, the stallion is nearly invisible; save for when he gets closer to the surface and sunlight refracts and bends through the water, where then the soft outline of a body perhaps will form. Though, sometimes, he materializes himself in such a way because he wishes to be seen. And when his sharp eyes spy a floating and ethereal form pirouetting through the waters, his interest is piqued and a slight shimmer of him becomes visible.
He follows her - and perhaps she realizes it and perhaps she doesn’t - for he has never seen one such as her before. A tailfin peddles her through the river, and watery wings help her glide seamlessly through the current. Unlike himself, who bends the water to his will at a mere thought, and uses his mind to propel himself forward - ghost-like in most ways. She nears the shore, and it is a pivotal moment where he can reach out with his mind and wrap her in the water she so easily finds herself in and keep her from emerging into the sunlight, but he chooses not to force her. Instead, with a voice that is garbled from water, he calls to her:
“Wait.”
A command, maybe, but perhaps she will be as curious as he is to know more about another who shares the water as their home.
Maugrim allows himself to materialize a bit more, the lavender pearl splashed on his shoulders and haunches becoming a bit more clear, his face a little more defined. It is not everday he meets one such as this (there had been others: the jellyfish girl or even the one girl from Pangea, before it was lost to the sea), and part of him wishes to add her to his collection as a trinket, a pretty shining thing beneath the darkness of the deep, but another part of him is attracted to the water that surrounds her and is a part of her.
For all her secondary senses and inert predatory instinct, you would assume that Maugrim’s silent consideration of Nyxa’s swim would be easily discovered by the latter party. She should be focused, rather than lax, and should have sensed the change in the water from his nearness.
But she doesn’t. Still young after all, and dumb in the sense that every other situation she’s come across where she fell into dire straits someone else had been there to rescue, right, and put her on her way again. Wait, the voice calls out; Nyxa becomes immobile at the shock of hearing a watery tone and jerks around to peer into the glimmering depths. From her position she can see nothing but the striking glances of light, refracted from the choppy surface above but waving like a golden curtain down here beneath the waves.
Nothing, except for the strange apparition that forms like a sudden ghost some feet away from her.
Nyxa, initially, is terrified. She’s heard of ghosts and those who speak to them but figured it was more of a mystic, mind-to-mind ordeal where the deceased remained incorporeal. The seamare has never considered the thought that they (the departed beings of this country) might wish to make themselves known in order to haunt some poor, unsuspecting soul.
She also can’t begin to fathom why this particular specter would be choosing to contact her. Despite her fear, some moments have passed in silence and with the knowledge that her follower has yet to physically harm her, Nyxa realizes she’s in the spotlight. “What do you want from me?” She mouths, the cadence of her normal voice inhibited by the bubbling saltwater. Still, she doesn’t choke or find the action difficult - technically she could live underneath the sea, deep below where none could find her.
At her sides her water wings flick with movement only when they must, keeping her afloat while the backwards tug of the shore urges her to land. Now though (emboldened by her question and curious beyond belief) they slip down to propel her nearer to him, all while her thoughts battle to untangle the mystery of his origin. “Where do you come from?” She asks, giving up the fight in favor of a straightforward answer.
He has startled her, terrified her, and for the first time in his life he hadn’t meant to.
She glances around frantically, bubbles cascading upwards from the jerky movements of her neck and head, her eyes looking at him and then looking past him, and then at him again. He is hard to see, and even with the brilliant sunlight refracting through the water and onto his liquified form, the water-vixen still struggles to figure out where he is within the water compared to her, and curiously, he inches closer without hesitation. Her voice reaches out to him through the water’s pressure, and he brings it to his ears with one fluid thought of his mind.
‘What do you want from me?’
That still proves to be seen; but it is a question he cannot answer, and will not answer.
She propels herself nearer to him, like the fish he sees within the deep with their fins expertly slicing through the water. It’s curious, ever so curious...
‘Where do you come from?’
To this, he knew the answer.
“The ocean,” he says, his voice warbling with the water that bubbles in his throat. “The deepest, darkest parts...” The blackness of his eyes prove it as he materializes before her, a pattern of pearl and evergreen standing before her. Kelp and seaweed are mangled in his iridescent and green mane, floating hauntingly around him as he allows himself to be fully seen by her - not just the sunlit and warbling form of a ghost. No, he is real, very real.
His abilities allow him to bend the water where he needed and wished it to go, as well as create parts of himself into the river’s water so that he may breathe steadily and as naturally as if he was on land. He tilts his head, the swift pull of the current tugging at his mane and tail, but he remains still and grounded as he forces the water to hold him down. “You are - of the ocean, too?” He asks, wondering how deep she has swam, what monsters she has seen, and if she ever thought she would ever see a creature like himself. She is a stunning creature herself - fish-like in nearly every part of her, and he desperately wishes to keep her here, with him.
The deepest, darkest parts… He says, solidifying with the phrase. “Good god, really?” Nyxa thinks, watching the subtle curve of his shoulders, then legs, then back to his strange face with those unnerving eyes.
But he doesn’t unnerve her. Not anymore, anyways - not now, when she can clearly see the shade of his mane (so similar to her own) enhanced with underwater accessories. The cream and spotted mare hardly protests herself as they drift nearer to one another, though his actions are certain and commanding where her own are in tandem with the currents flow. Everything about him fascinates her; Nyxa has never come across another horse beneath the waves, even her meeting with Ivar had been kept to dry land and nothing more.
“She claims me piece by piece.” The yearling bubbles, averting her eyes when the creature tilts his head. “I still have blood ties to the land.” She explains with a shrug. With a simple assumption on her end, she figures whoever this being is will take that information and do with it what they like. She could hardly explain it herself these days. “I don’t want to go there now, I don’t.” She says suddenly, the narrow tilt of her finely shaped lips hardening into a determined line.
“You say you come from the depths, like the sharks?” She asks again, a rhetorical question. “Can you take me there? I’ve heard many stories - krakens, whales, underwater unicorns …” Her thoughts drift apart like so much bracken on the waves. Once shy now sudden, the flash of her amethyst gaze slices upwards through the water to where he stands: the vision of a deity paragon, Poseidon himself.
“Take me there.” She says again, all hints of doubt smoothed free from her features.
12-19-2017, 04:53 PM (This post was last modified: 12-19-2017, 04:53 PM by Maugrim.)
god make me pay like the devil i am
She is drawn to him - a ghost within the shallows, a beast of water and rip currents and a trick of light - and the smile that finds his face (however unsettling) is a genuine one. She is young, fragile…impressionable. She is a creature of his home, a water nymph lovely and sweet, drawn towards the open jaws of a predator. They are silly - they all are. They crave the danger that he brings, silently wishing for their own deaths but pretending it isn’t their fault - as if they didn’t have a choice in coming to him. She is lucky that the wings at her sides are of grandeur to him - she is not safe just because she too can breathe beneath the surface; he can satisfy the hunger in his stomach without the use of drowning.
“She claims me piece by piece.”
I claim you piece by piece.
She claims she has ties to the land and the displeasure on his face is evident, and she quickly reassures him that she does not wish to go to them now, as if displeasing him would make him disappear into the depths. The young woman is curious, ever flitting closer with the transparency of her wings - he wonders if he can control them, since they are made from water? He decides now is not a good time to test this theory - there will be a better time, when the deep no longer calls to her in adventure but in captivity.
The sand-colored mare rambles on, and perhaps he found her daydreams endearing, but the moment she begs him to take her there, he does not linger on what she hopes to find - only that he is happy to oblige to her wishes, a wicked grin spreading onto the pale pearl of his lips.
Using the water to his will, he brings himself towards her - not floating, but walking as if he was on land, at the river’s murky bottom, his movement churning up algae and mud. He forces the water forward and to spiral, wrapping around her barrel and legs in the most subtle of ways, tasting her fragile frame in ways his mouth couldn’t.
“Can you keep up?” He asks, though the answer doesn’t matter - she didn’t have a choice, now; not as his grip slowly begins to fasten onto her.
Ignorance is bliss and plenty of foolish souls have lost their lives under the impression that they were at all times safe.
Young and naive she may be, but foolish she is certainly not. Nyxa sees the oddity that is his ‘smile’; a grimace of sorts that shapes her own features into something that reflects concern. The action looked unhealthy on his face, close to unsettling. “You’d be a bit uncouth too, if you cut yourself off from humanity.” The youngling chides internally, like a lamb forgiving the lion of his nature. She muses that perhaps he needs practise - even fathoms for a minute that they could learn something from one another, but then his form is gliding with austere command over the silt-soaked belly of the riverbed and she knows, knows that she will never be anything but a passing fancy to this all-encompassing, divine being.
So, she smiles in return. A thing of beauty passed on from her mother - the cupid’s bow of spotted lips sculpted into something innocent, something sweet and so unlike the demon approaching, but it’s wholly reflective of herself and for that, she won’t apologize. There’s so much he can teach her about her powers and their shared world that she can’t bring herself to resist him, even as the tendrils of liquid fingers begin to caress her floating legs and undercarriage. Can you keep up? he taunts; the clarity in his speech still unreal to her.
Nyxa responds by rolling her eyes and forcing her wings down, hoping to shoot above him in order to glide back out into the wide mouth of the churning bay. “With you? Of course not.” She scoffs to herself, tiring already of forcing air between her teeth to try and manage a reply. She manages anyways, “Are we going to measure our manhood all day, hmm?” with the tilt of her sallow head backwards.
“Chew on that, waterboy.” She thinks, the purse of her lips hidden by the action of turning her head back to the open water. A thought strikes her then and she speaks aloud, not bothering to turn and face him because she doubts he needs the direct attention. “Do you have a name?” The filly ponders, awaiting his instruction with a patience even she was unaware she possessed.
For some reason, it seems unlikely that he would. How could something like him sprout from the loins of anything at all? No - to Nyxa it seems more natural that he’d always been a product of the sea.
He doesn’t need to hold onto her, he realizes - she is willing and ready, more accepting of his offer than he had ever anticipated. The realization intensifies his hunger, his need, and he continues to hold her in his grip anyways - just in case. He couldn’t let a prize like this suddenly slip from his grasp, not like the victim he had dragged across the corals and rocks of Nerine. This one he would make sure he kept.
Her pretty head turns towards the open water from whence she came, and with expert skill of his hydrokinesis, he rests beside her, eyeing the enticing movement of her wings that billow at her sides, translucent and clear and calling to him. She speaks to him but he does not hear her - he thinks she is trying to be funny but it is hard for him to care for jokes or teasing. He simply ignores her, though now that she is speaking he makes sure to swirl the water before her mouth just so, so that her voice could easily reach his ears next time it left her lips.
She uses her wings to propel above him and to begin their journey, and though he has his mind around her body he has not attempted to tie her down with water pressure, so she floats easily above him - it is like she is on a leash - one that is invisible and potentially deadly.
He follows her, transforming parts of his body into the same brackish water of the river, with only his head remaining fully intact. He propels the liquified parts of himself forward with the soft press of his mind, moving steadily beside her with a haunting appearance. His smile is gone, for there is no need to entice her any further, and he doubts his smile had been anything to do with her curiosity anyway.
“Maugrim,” he bubbles, dark eyes tracing her body quickly before meeting her gaze, swallowing hard.
Without hesitation, he spins himself into nothingness, completely invisible besides the unnatural rampant current that is obvious he is creating, a riptide strong enough to pull her out to sea with him. The current could swallow her gracefully or it could be as roiling as a sea’s tempest - perhaps other creatures are pulled out to sea with them - it did not matter to him.
As soon as they are in the open sea, the spiral of current he created shoots down as he dives deeper and deeper, the sunlight from the surface quickly dying as darkness suddenly begins to enshroud. The pressure deepens and presses in on all sides, tightening around him as he pulls them between a trench. It is here he slows and begins to materialize - they are not low enough yet for complete darkness, but the visibility is low and murky, save for the glinting eyes of eels that survey them with open, gaping mouths.
He is merely a figure of seawater, barely outlined as he appears as a ghost before her again, his eyes, mane and tail the only solid thing about him.
Maugrim wonders if the pressure will harm her, if her insides will explode or her eyes would bulge, so he watches her wordlessly and curiously.
m a u g r i m.
@[Nyxa]
I did that thing again where I post Maugrim as another pony. ;_; My bad.
12-22-2017, 01:11 PM (This post was last modified: 12-22-2017, 04:33 PM by Nyxa.)
N y x a
In a strange turn of events, she feels sorry for him.
Where the emotion arises from she can’t be sure, but as Maugrim’s voice rises over the silence of the sea, Nyxa detects an absence of feeling or depth. There’s the sharp prick of being watched that causes an itch to form between her shoulders and, gliding almost lazily into the waiting ocean, her head flicks back once more to confirm the suspicion just as the strange, green stallion fades from view.
“How long has he been down here?” She wonders, the sadness in her chest constricting her airways. “What is the sea without her trenches, without her creatures and corals and treasures?” The paling filly thinks wistfully as the tug of his powers begins to grow in strength. How could he have come to be like this, so empty and mute? “Does the absence of love spark the beginning of evil?”
These are childish thoughts, though. Ones that keep her company as soon as the tide rips up from behind her in a swell of glorious magnitude. For the brevity of a second she feels the thrill of riding the underwater wave - catching the current beneath her fluttering wings to ride it as the seahorse pushes her further from shore and out into the unknown - and then the uncanny gathering of things he’s upset in his wake begins to swirl around her, over her, and Nyxa can sense her initial excitement quickly turning to dread.
She had not thought this through. What was the saying they had always been pounding into her head since she was a tiny thing? Never talk to strangers, right? And now she’s gone and given herself over to a complete unknown, (a missing ghost, transformed into the water completely so that when she struggles to glean his form out of the tumbling fish swirling about her, she comes up empty) someone who’s drug her farther out to sea than she’s ever been in her life.
There’s a first time for everything, she supposes. “And a last time for everything too.” Her conscious supplies, working against her once bright and hopeful feelings.
Nyxa swallows her doubts as the darkness rises to engulf them.
At first she hardly notices the absence of her wings; they’d been irritating her at the start of this journey, bumping into the clutter of debris and sea creatures Maugrim had forced along with them. So, naturally, she had wished them gone. It was about as extensive as she’d managed to grasp the power of them - summoning, creating, shaping … none of this has ever been an option, she’s only ever thought of them as I want my wings or I wish these annoying things would get out of the way and, subsequently, her body reacts.
Now, though, as they plummet through the gaping cavern of a low trench (perhaps a tectonic plate, is this the true edge of Beqanna?!) and the eels slip with eerie grace from their nooks and crannies she notices how they’ve left her sides. A grateful sigh bubbles past her lips; nothing more. The deepness of this trench does little in the way of making her uncomfortable - Nyxa feels the satisfying *pop* of her ears and then, she’s drifting softly down to touch her hooves against the black earth beneath them. Silence envelopes her on all sides, the dim bit of stray light lucky enough to reach this far hardly enough to offer her anything in the way of visibility but she settles nonetheless, blinking softly into the dinge as Maugrim finally chooses to reveal himself.
“Is this …” She hesitates, shuffling softly as the faint lines of his eyes become clearer, “ … your home?”
She wouldn’t feel bad for him, if she knew what he’s done - what he plans on doing.
As they slow to a stop, to float eerily at the bottom of the dark abyss with specks of silt and dust showering around them as his current settles, he notices her wings - the beautiful, infatuating wings - are gone. He frowns with displeasure, already missing their greatness, and with a certain solemnity that is incredibly foreboding, the stallion grips tight his watery abilities and attempts to reattach the ethereal beauties to her withers, though the shape he creates is nothing like what she had before.
He had not wanted to make them disappear.
As he fumbles in his attempts, his face becomes clearer and more solidified, especially the pearlescent splashes of his coat. She mentions home and he freezes, his dark eyes locking on hers. Home? He snorts with amusement (though being underwater it only came out as a few bubbles from his dark green nostrils), his brow furrowing. He has no home - his home is wherever he decides to make it, whether it be in the ocean between Ischia and the river, or beneath the rocky crags of Nerine. In the ocean, he is king and all of it belongs to him.
All of it. All of them.
He’s given up on trying to recreate her wings, frustrated that he cannot create something so beautiful with his own abilities. A curl of his lips in a snarl show his displeasure, and he focuses his attention on telling the water to move him towards her, their stillness now inviting a myriad of deep sea creatures to come out of hiding as tiny squid flit past them, their translucent bodies barely visible in the murky blackness.
“I have many homes,” he says to her, coming towards her so that his chest is nearly pressed to hers, wondering if she’ll bring those beautiful wings back to try to escape the closeness, or if she will allow it. “This is one of many. Much more beautiful than anything on land.”
A pause, stretching and yawning like the deep stillness of the ocean’s floor.
“Have you been this far before?”
He’s interested, truly. She’s young - just a guppy - and he doubts she had ever even thought to be out this far, this terribly deep. The water-equines that are strewn throughout Beqanna are a weakness of his - he is enthralled by their abilities and partly feels as if they are the same as him. He remembers the jelly-fish woman with stinging tentacles - he had taken her into the deep as well, and then vanished. He remembers a water-winged girl from when he was a colt, and she had vanished into the yawning abyss as well. The ocean takes back what she gives, or perhaps Maugrim had something to do with their disappearances.
