"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
When she wakes, the gist of their last moment together has been wiped clean. Nyxa remembers the backwards tug of Maugrim’s water-fist, she can recall that he’d been amused … nothing more. How long has she been out?
Her tongue moves; curves up to press against the roof of her mouth where it can discern grit and muck. There’s the comforting hardness of something beneath her, (maybe the earth?) and with her eyes still clamped shut against reality, Nyxa moves her head slowly. It’s sand that cradles her body - she’d know the sensation of it anywhere. Sand and water, her two great loves and now, her prison.
With a broken heart she blinks away the darkness.
God it’s beautiful down here. So quiet and warm. The underbelly of curious fish give movement to the otherwise still sea, a glint of light here and there striking brilliantly off their scales as they flash and flit about. Motionless and prostrate on her side Nyxa tries to sing to them but her voice can’t seem to rise to the occasion; her throat hurts like hell. So they swim away.
The clarity and familiarity of this particular patch of ocean doesn’t begin to sink in until she raises her sore neck to take a look around. Before her, the blue expanse stretches on into darkness; behind her, the sharp incline of a reef crest rises like a natural wall to ring an island. “I know this place,” She thinks, hardly willing to believe it but her heart thumps wildly in response, “he didn’t know.”
The pink of the coral is the sweetest color to her right now, and there! Just there a lazy brown shark glides from the shadows, his dark pattern of brown rings a twin to the rough patches of skin Nyxa sports on each of her points. She knows that if she were to top that foreboding wall, there’d be a flat shelf with the dangerous reef waiting. Past those would be the lagoon (her lagoon) and then the waiting shore … and Hod.
“Hod,” She croaks, and then she screams, “Maugrim!” because she knows he’s somewhere lurking.
He didn’t kill her, (though he should’ve) and now she wants answers.
Every kiss is a door, Can I knock on yours?
@[Maugrim] I combined the closing with the opening, hope that's alright!
She has been here before. The shallow beaches that face the mainland. And apparently a perfect place to leave a perfectly good dead body on the beach. The quiet lagoon that pushes into the crook of the island, and protects it - shields it - from the rest of the angry waves. Decorated with a freshly washed up cream colored lady with... wings made of water.
Ick.
Deathwish watched from the trees, a wide wake of rot behind her - she enjoyed painting her world black. But the look of a dead horse on the beach was enough to make her pull onto the beach. She waited too long, though, because it was a mere moment before the girl woke up, screaming two names. The first was of no consequence. But the second...
Deathwish rushes forward, angrily snorting, coming to face the girl, her green mane plastered unattractively to the side of her face (thank God she's not as attractive as I am) and she immediately seers her pewter gaze on her. Her rot ability grabs the girl by the gut, twisting them and beginning the slow process. Ever so slow. Not visible from the outside, but still enough to be felt. Still painful.
"Who are you, and why are you looking for Maugrim."
Part of her hoped that the girl gave Deathwish a reason to make short work of her.
An angry, jealous, pregnant woman was not a happy creature to fuck around with.
It didn’t take her long to succumb to the darkness as he gripped her tight with his water, and for a moment he watches her face soften, the fear leaving her gentle features as she now breathes peacefully within his grasp. He revels the moment, a fingertip of murky ocean water brushing carefully her green forelock from her sleeping face - she is lovely, and he cannot imagine letting her leave his presence. She is a prize, a treasure from the deep, a jewel brought before him as a gift from his loving ocean - and he will not part with it.
----
The bright waters of Ischia are what she awakes to, and though he is melded within the transparent waters and unseen, he grins mischievously as she calls out his name. He is, however, unsettled by the fact she calls for another, his invisible brow furrowing. The name is unfamiliar, but it is just his luck - how long will he have with his water treasure before another comes along to try and take her from him? No matter - he will enjoy the time he has with her now, and if needed, Hod can join his collection as well.
He begins to manifest himself, a wavering form at the bottom of the sunlit-strewn ocean - not his favorite place, but she is here, so he finds himself bringing his collectibles to this location instead of the darker, deeper parts of his ocean - where she can enjoy them as well. “Water lily, shhh,” he garbles, his now-familiar grip tightening around her. “Are we home?” He asks, though he doesn’t care for an answer and he also doesn’t care to wait. He creates her wings for her, unruly recreations of what she naturally has been gifted, and sets his attention on moving them for her, so that instead of a terrible riptide taking her to where he needed her, she would float beside him willingly (almost) as if it had been her choice.
Maugrim floats beside her, a firm and solid being now, with seaweed in his mane and tail and the slight hint of barnacles beginning to grow on crest, right behind his ears. He is easier to see in the brightness of Ischia instead of the murky brine of the river, or the dark trench he had shown her - his evergreen patches are strewn with opalescence of lavender, a beautiful sight to behold save for the terrifying grin on his pale and cracked lips. The shark that she had seen upon her awakening now trolls slowly behind them, unaware of her predicament. Brightly colored fish swim by them, picking at the corals with tiny crunching, their scales glittering in the warm sunlight that filters through the surface that is slowly getting closer and closer to their heads.
After what seems like hours, the malevolent beast presses his pale lips to her throat, humming against her water-logged skin happily, before disappearing into nothingness. His crude attempt at recreating her wings falls away, though his grip is still on her most presently - his disappearance would not mean her freedom. He is in the water, always, and if she ever wanted to leave Ischia, he would be waiting for her within the deep.
The shallows of the lagoon gave him a small space to disappear into, and as he watches a familiar figure approach, he immediately turns his liquefied form into a solid one, his tobiano coat slick with algae and salt, rising above the waters just in time to hear the venom in Deathwish’s voice - his body shivers in delight. “Don’t kill her,” he muses sternly, well aware of Deathwish’s grip now upon Nyxa. He watches his water lily from beneath a dark gaze, staring down at her as he joins his partner, his cracked lips pressing tightly in a kiss on her slender neck.
“I have brought us a gift. Her name is Lily. I found her at the bottom of the river, all alone. She’s ours now.”
His voice is unwavering and emotionless, blinking slowly as he christens the water-filly with a name, never having asked (or cared) for her real one.
m a u g r i m.
@[Deathwish] @[Nyxa] Hope this is okay!! Let me know if there's something you don't like and I can change it! <3
Maugrim’s phantom arrival causes her gut more revulsion than Deathwish’s eventual rot. The way he names her (such a lack of imagination), the way he fixes two awkward wings to her side without much care for accuracy or beauty - he is a sloppy God; content with dragging her to the shoreline of her beloved Island, the same place her mother had breathed such life back into.
But she is not her mother, nor is the woman who rushes to greet them with the pestilence of death at her heels. Nyxa, still dazed and not entirely sure what’s become of her life, can’t seem to answer the strange broodmare because she is fixated on the way Deathwish leaves trails of ruin on Ischia’s beautiful landscape. A feeling distracts her; something like indigestion or the pressure of building flatulence, but she cannot find the time or the breath to comment on this either.
Nothing rouses a response from her hardened lips until she watches the two (whose matching coats give her reason to pause) come together. Maugrim, lord of the ocean and water itself, is quick to placate the thick-bodied female at his side with a kiss reminiscent of the one he shadowed beneath her own jaw just moments before. Nyxa cannot say why, but she quirks her mouth into a disbelieving smirk and coughs, “Are you her lapdog, then?”
She’d been wrong about his knowledge, why should she be so surprised that Maugrim lacks the ability to even be his own sort of demon? “It’s that absence of imagination you were thinking of earlier,” her conscious supplies inwardly, lacking the fear Nyxa was so tightly bound with. The thought causes her grin to freeze. “Forgive me,” She says, though she knows full well that she doesn’t mean it. Her legs work hard to lift her sodden body upwards, the weight of saltwater and the clinging brine of the sea cascading over her supple shoulders as she tries hard to ignore the sharp pangs in her belly.
“I was looking for Maugrim because he brought me here, of course.” Nyxa says, her breathing labored as the tangle of her dark forelock settles over the curve of her brow. “And I wanted to thank him for bringing me home. Obviously.” She concludes, her teeth grinding against each other. The water filly doesn’t find it hard to meet Deathwish’s eyes when she says this; they were truthful statements in a sense. It’s when her purple gaze slides sideways to land on her counterpart, Nyxa’s jailer, that the growing girl’s eyes darken with the hint of secrecy.
“Why are you looking for Maugrim?” She starts again, the fine point of her nose jerking back to face the muted gray woman.
