[private] Kagerus, dear

[Khaedrik]

Khaedrik has dreams; dreams of destruction and bright-eyed death.

His vision fade to red. Her body is mangled. Her eyes are sightless. He watches as the blood pool around her congeals. The Dreamwalker is dead. It is his fault. The mighty wave has fallen. The shadows call a mournful note, no longer laughing, no longer joyous. Even they respect this. Khaedrik’s khol-black eyes throb and close. He will lock his emotions away. The Brother is no more. Love cannot be worth this.

All is dead. All is gone. Khaedrik rises. Khaedrik moves on.

Khaedrik stirs. He feels light. His bitter-black eyes open. All he knows is gone – but he will not forget. He will never forget. Even the sucking blackness of sleep did not let him forget. He is still deranged; he is still the son of shadows and ruin. His golden forelock falls over his black, black eyes in an impossible way and he is still impassive. His emotions remained leashed. He remembers what they taught him.

The breeze on his face; the soft pad of earth beneath his hooves; the blaze of sun in the sky at noontime; the cool shadows all sing purpose to his bones.

He forces the shadows from the dark – and they, crude and nebulous pool at his feet – looking to their Master for guidance.

”To Hyaline” he commands – though he doesn’t know why. Khaedrik, self-proclaimed misanthrope has no business there among the rabble of horses – too much time has passed since he called Hyaline home. But something begs him to go today; and his eyes open wide to the sky – but he does not speak. The shadows will know. They always do.

He comes to her in a swirl of darkness – and it is not a ghost his shadows find but a memory. There is pain – wild and relentless in the boys’ eyes – and he swallows, swallows, swallows until he chokes on it.

"How are you alive?" his voice; shadow-smooth and coated in darkness is a lash in the silence. 



@[Kagerus]

[Kagerus]

kagerus

and in my dreams, i kissed your lips a thousand times

Of him, I think little. Of that whole side of my family, next to nothing... My parents, father and adopted mother, they reside still in these sloping Hyaline hills, but they are nomads at heart. Lost to the love of one another, they feel not the need to make themselves public. Father did wish me a heartfelt congratulations upon my coronation, tears gathering wetly in eyes that are cracked with age but still wholesome and wise. Like Kagerou, he whispered, gathering me into himself; I love you, my darling daughter.

Even then, in his embrace, I hadn't dared to ask. About his son, the heralder, the foreseer. When the shadows grow tall and grotesque I always look behind me, wondering if he has been watching this whole time - he'd been so angry when last I'd seen him, angry enough to leave me in a heap in the middle of nowhere, struggling with a news I'd never expected to receive. My heart breaks to remember it, and him.

Little brother. I'd spoken to you in the womb, sung you songs, gotten to know you before you even knew yourself. I'd soothed your nightmares and gathered you to my chest with a motherliness I'd not expected of myself. We knew each other as the dark knows the light, two opposing forces that were somehow and impossibly connected. I loved you, Khaedrik - and you left me. Where are you now?

He comes in a whirl of darkness so intense that there can be no mistaken the source of the shadows today. Whatever task I'd been focused on falls the wayside as my bones seem to liquefy within their muscled enclosures. My children and my wife and my estranged ex lover all seem to dwindle in importance as I am forced to face a brother whose wrath still falls upon me; the lash of his tongue dispels any breath I had left, and so I stand, gasping, not knowing how to react.

How could I? He gave me no time to be ready for this. No time at all.

"I thought you were dead." The words are choked and emotionally clouded; at once they sound venomous and tragic, pleading and joyous. I can't decide how to feel, not as my eyes try and try and try to decipher a familiar shape out of the mass of shadows before me. I step forward, towards him, nose outstretched - please, I beg. Please do not leave me again.

@[Khaedrik]

[Khaedrik]

He is homeless without her - sister, protector, and friend. He watches those eyes; honey-spun and trembling, but they are a stranger’s eyes. He remembers how they used to reflect his own thoughts. He breathes in but the scent of her skin is different – and the gargoyle-brother falls head-first into the pebbles of jealousy.

Words begin to form like froth in the corners of his mouth, letters that rustle and dance in turmoil and tumultuous patterns. He wonders, and here his face grows stern with diligent lies (has he not done enough to bring her distress, is not his existence enough to make her nauseous?) what story she would prefer to hear from him.

Still, the boy is no more than boy, and the discipline that holds dominance over his eyes fades from ocean to brook and runs, cowardly into a grasp. ”I was always dead….”

Without really knowing why, perhaps to make amends for the scars he has ripped asunder more vigorously than any predator could hope to do, he is by her side and his body speaks apologies. The shadows part now – for no business have they in the sweet reunion between brother and sister. And he; he is the little brother, the shadow that slept in the wake of his sister’s watchful eye, the little boy with nightmares who still wore eyes brimming with aspiration and admiration – he, if anyone, knows that hurt that simpers deep and well-rooted in Kagerus´ ocean-deep eyes.

”I never meant to hurt you…” Strange how few things change, even underneath the tolling, marring forces of hurt.

”I want to get back what we lost.”

Nevermind that he doesn´t quite know what it is, or why. He and she and they are incomplete; it is the one thing he will not forget, more than a lover, a scar, a child.


@[Kagerus]

[Kagerus]

kagerus

and in my dreams, i kissed your lips a thousand times

"Then by that logic so was I," I choke, tears gathering in my widely spread eyes as I consider the mass of darkness, terrified to think of my brother as anything except real and warm and mine. We are lovers quarreling, unsure of this world without the other by our sides, but stubbornly pushing them away with each attempt at reunion. But this time feels different - I flinch as he materializes, emotion overwhelming my body, but in the next heartbeat, I am pressed flat against him.

My baby brother.
"I'm right here, please, please stay..." The words are murmured into his mane as my neck, slung across his, tightens and pulls him closer. He's taller than me now, more muscled and distinctly smelling of other places. But despite these differences I do not change our usual posture, with me wrapped around him, drawing him into me with the love only a sister knows how to give. "I missed you so much Khae."

I never meant to hurt you. The words leave me breathless, and my eyes squeeze, shutting out the rest of the world. There's only us, blood-bonded friends, finding solace in each other after an eternity spent in the storm of solitude. Suddenly, without realizing it, I'm shaking my head, no, no, you didn't hurt me, I promise, you could never. "I know," I choke out instead. "I - I didn't mean to hurt you either." I let you down, I stained your image of me, I should have been better, I -

I want to get back what we lost.

As these words tumble from my jaded brother's pale lips, I feel my feet slowly returning beneath me, gravity righting itself until I can stand without the support of his body against mine. With a shuddering inhale, I unclasp our bodies but our souls remain tethered, stubborn in their union now that we have given them even half a chance to rejoin. Taking a careful step back, I twist my neck to try and catch his fearfully black gaze - but I am not scared when I drown in their shadowed pools. I bask in them, finally at home again.

"I want that too. And - I think we can."

I inhale again, strengthening myself for what I need to tell him - a part of me wants to ask, do you want to know?, but the other part, the greater part, already knows the answer.

"I dreamt my son into my lover's body. Rapt - he gave birth to Abysm." I stare at Khaedrik, a solid dread building in my stomach until it feels like I might tear from its weight. "I abandoned them." Though I wear an emotionless, vacant mask across my face, I wonder if he can simply understand why, if he can read the reasons in the fibers of my skin. "But - they are in my lives again now. And - I've a mate. Solace. You know her - we're..." I trail off, not knowing how to say it - lovers, wives, soulmates.

I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head, violently shattering the calmness I'd presented during these phrases. "But it wasn't right without you here." I try a smile, worrying whether he'll resent me for it, not knowing how to go forward from here but desperately wanting to.

"I want you here, by my side. Always."

@[Khaedrik]

[Khaedrik]

Her tears are a knife at his gut – a twist of pain and remorse and he swallows hard. But the pain; wild and relentless is a welcome respite from the void that festers behind his sternum. The liquid-smoke of apathy that gushes through his blood like virulence. He has stumbled through life without her; bow-legged and worn, a sculpture of a man; the figure of defeat. Lost, lost, lost

She sculpted him once – took from him the terror and insecurities and here, buried within the soft slopes of her neck he can almost believe her capable of saving him again. How many times will you fail her? The thought rises like bile in his stomach, mingling with the pain and he grapples for the white of her shoulder. He is home, made crumbled by memory – he does not deserve her forgiveness.

”I let you down” he mumbles – into the virtuous-white of that very same shoulder. She is a vision – of biblical rapture – brought to life by his blindness and faith. His khol-black eyes find no flaw in her; his ears are deaf to her misdeeds. He is the storm; a shadow-snarl of thunder and unforgiving wind but in the wake of the dreamer’s watchful eye he is harmless. A trembling reprieve from the monsters panting doggedly at his heels.

”It wasn’t your fault.” He coos into her ear; and his voice is the calm that lulls the waves into cresting. Beneath the cloak of collected calm and glacial stillness she is a fire-blast of sorrow and guilt, and he wants to wipe the feelings of hurt away. His soul is a sprawling wound – thick with monsters and shadows and doubt, but her presence is the soothing kiss of a mother, and he wants her to know that whatever life she has led; whatever misdeed she has committed she is always enough for him.

”Hush” says the brother; sinner, monster, shadow ”You did what you could. You always did” and though his voice is trembling at the edges there is a smile there; hideous and broken but a smile nonetheless. ”I just want to know that you are alright – are you?

@[Kagerus]

[Kagerus]

kagerus

and in my dreams, i kissed your lips a thousand times

In my misery, I don't even consider that my brother considers himself to be the one who failed us. When last we spoke, it had been him to abandon me, and that act solidified his place in my mind as dominant, as right, as the one to whom I am indebted. As he rests curled to my chest, beneath the ever-tightening embrace of my neck, I don't even consider the possibility that maybe he feels as I do.

Most all I know right now is that I love him - and that I will do anything, anything to keep him.
We may not be twins like Solace and Svedka - but our bond is equally as powerful, if not more, made stronger by our identity crises in the realm of light vs darkness. We are two lost souls wandering through a storm, and for some time, we'd been without the grounding force of each other's presence: but as he stands with me now, it's as if the rain has lessened, a light blooming not far ahead, the storm begging to break as we stumble slowly forwards: together.

"No you didn't," comes my immediate response to the words he presses soulfully to the alabaster plane of my shoulder. I'm frowning, willing the words to be true, as if by sheer power of will I can force him to change his mind. Even if he is the storm I find myself in, there is no place else I'd rather be than the tempestuous onslaught of his rains, than the electrifying crackle of his lightning. We are the chaos that reigns in the other's lives, and yet, we are the peace we find in each other's arms, too.

It wasn't your fault. This time, I have nothing to volley back at him, instead allowing my heart to break and reform over and over again as his murmured words calm the catatonia that has enraptured us so. Sniveling, I shake my head and clutch him closer, feeling as though healing for us both is nigh on the horizon: as our catharsis ebbs and our rational minds slowly reawaken in the wake of its wholesome destruction, my tears subside, and my grasp on him loosens.

As my muscles go nearly slack against him, relief flooding over me, my ears twitch with each word he speaks. And as I look through my wet lashes, I can just see the tremulous smile that hesitantly builds upon his cream-shadow lips, broken but steadfastly there. At his last question, I release a shuddering breath that I hadn't realized I'd been holding. Taking a moment to compose myself as I rest against him, brother and sister once more, I try to find the right answer: but in the end, it finds me.

"I am alright, brother." Whispers in the night, as we have become used to, as we will always share. "And I will be alright as long as you are, too." My mouth finds his mane, and I gently pull it through my lips, detangling it piece by piece as our tears lessen and our breathing slows. "...Will you stay, brother? I wouldn't blame you if Hyaline is no longer your... home. But mother and father will be happy to know you're safe." I cringe a little to be mentioning Insignificance and Kavi, but it is something he must know. Not wanting to press any farther, I fall silent in my grooming of him, allowing him time to consider my words.

@[Khaedrik]

[Khaedrik]

He revels in the stories of her skin, the blood that simmers beneath the motley shoulder. The same blood that seethes in his own veins. Her presence is enough to build a brittle bridge over the chasm of insecurities and regret in him. He needs her, he thinks. The eye of the storm – the hearth to his icy darkness. His shadows croon contentedly– a masterpiece of shapes and silhouettes against her skin. She has ever been made to walk in his world.

A breath hitches behind his teeth – he does not think he can get any closer to home than this. But Khaedrik is a spiderweb of cracks and severed hopes. His heart is a barren wasteland and his soul a shaft of monsters and ruin. He is vulnerable now – when night holds him close, and the sweet smell of familiarity slows the beat of his heart, but Khaedrik is a riptide – commander of monsters with unhinged jaws and fanged mouths. How long can he save her from the madness that creeps, serpent-slow, through his mind?

The smile that held dominance over his face fades to memory and myth as she speaks of mother and father. He thinks of mother – who is all that is giddy and unwanted, everything unnoticed save for the lavishes of contempt – spindly legs, small eyes, a coat of dullest brown. And father – regal, proud, and sensible. So different from the likes of him – as though the great palms that had shaped his sister had grown careless at the making of Khaedrik. His shadows twirl around them, as if his sisters’ words have stirred some archaic restlessness in them. He snarls; a low growl from the pit of his stomach – a warning, eldritch and bizarre.

”I will stay as long as I can” he answers (where has he learnt these half-lies?) because it is part truth. He will not part from her so soon, not when they are finally together – when she is the part of him that is benevolent and true. He kisses the tears away from her cheeks, a brotherly gesture, and it almost makes him feel normal. As if he could, in fact, spend the rest of his days here with her.

”I have an old… friend… I need to visit first. In Nerine.” he says; as if the fact that he has friends should somehow surprise her like some great and terrible secret. ”But first I need to meet your family!”

A reassuring bump of his golden nose against her skin, and a tendril of whisper-thin shadow around her neck – ”You know you can always call for me whenever you need me, right?”


@[Kagerus]

[Kagerus]

kagerus

and in my dreams I've kissed your lips a thousand times

I have ever been made to walk in his world, and yet at every turn, I find that world perfectly tailored to myself. The drapes of his window flutter against the breeze of his words, and from my place not far away, I bask in it. When endless storm clouds have passed by his window and left me drenched and shivering, it is not hard to be grateful for a few rays of sunshine; even temporarily; even if they cannot be sustained.

He needn't save me from his madness, for I cannot save him from mine; together we are raw and vulnerable; seething masses of shadows and light that don't make sense to any except ourselves. Our unhinged jaws clamp and snap open in unison, the twisting of our demented figures strangely beautiful as we improvise a dance that our hearts know every step of. Here, as he breathes me in and remembers who he is when he's by my side, Khaedrik is whole, and so am I: two halves of the same coin, rendered next to physically impossible without one another.

As my words tumble out, too real for this, too here and too grounded, his shadows burst forth, as if to counterbalance the reality that I have injected into our hazy, druggish reunion. I gasp upon seeing them, and though he growls as if from a 'notherworld, I lift my neck off of his to greet the twirling, twining threads of nothingness.

Hello old friends, I whisper to them, nuzzling the obscure darkness as my eyes try to decipher a shape. I hope you have forgiven me... For it had been they to see through my skin and into my womb, into the truth of my immortality and at the last, my the truth of my doomsday. When Khaedrik speaks of his own accord, I blink away from his magic to turn my attention back to his answer. He will stay - as long as he can.

"Then I will cherish every moment." It's a gift to be seeing him again at all, and I won't press him for more than he is ready to give right now. I'm leaning in to him just as he reaches to brush away my tears, and I smile ruefully to be the subject of such a tender affection from one so deeply troubled. "I never knew I needed a little brother until the day I met you, Khae," I mumble into the warm throbbing of his throat latch. "I love you so much."

He slowly goes on to mention an old friend, and I can't help but to secretly smile into the soft waves of his palomino coat. It doesn't surprise me that he has friends - but I know him perhaps better than he knows himself, and if this friend is anyone at all, they are someone he has more than a slight interest in.

The day I find out that it's Wishbone of all people will be a doozy; but for now, I don't pry, content to simply be held and swayed into a peaceful silence.

At his enthusiastic insistence of meeting my family, I peel myself away, inhaling with a big grin to speak - but his face is calm, his eyes meeting mine with an intensity that most siblings don't share so abundantly. Feeling my heart quicken as his shadows curl around my neck with the comforting weight of an old friend's touch, I nod, overcome by emotion. A minute passes before I am able to collect myself; to find the words to express how raw my affection for him is.

"I know now," I whisper, not dropping his gaze though a part of me wants to. "I was scared before - but we've been over it now. And I will never forget again." I reach for him, sliding my muzzle along his tenderly. "We are each other's. Always."

Resting there, face to face, I forget about my family; for the only family I've ever needed is here again; returned from the dead; my beloved brother.

@[Khaedrik] If you want to continue this thread we can? BECAUSE I LOVE IT AND MY MUSE EXPLODED? Kag still has to tell him she's queen and a lesbian lmao

[Khaedrik]

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He is made and unmade under the gold of her eyes. He is drowning, always drowning, but there in the infinity-depths of her gaze he can almost see the shoreline. Khaedrik is an ocean of tumultuous darkness; he is flotsam in a sea of monsters. Her affection is both benediction and a knife at his gut. He knows he must leave her again – for it is his curse. Khaedrik is a ghost – a half-nightmare and there is shadowsong humming with the beat of his heart. She belongs to him just as much as she belongs to this world and his shadows croon against the steady pulse of her throat. They would swallow her, had he let them, take her with them to that other place, the place she visits only in dreams. But he knows she does not belong there, not fully. Khaedrik has walked too long with shadows that he has unknowingly become one – but she, she is still real, made of flesh and bone and dreams.

”I love you, too” they whisper; the boy and his coiling darkness, a susurrus of torment behind the syrup-sweet words. He turns away from her then, briefly, for he thinks he might break if he stares into those eyes much longer. His heart – torn from its place in his chest and cast out to sea where those hungry, hungry monsters wait – trembles with the impact. He wants to sink into the depth of her gaze, beg her to show him dreams of hope and sun-bright future like she did when he was a kid but his eyes are clouded with shadows and doubt.

”Tell me more about your life” he begs instead, ridden by sudden clarity. ”Have you seen….. a pause, swift, but there ”Mom and dad?” He knows he will not see them, not this time. He cannot bear to look into his mother’s fearful eyes. He is the monster, the aberration, the constant disappointment. Plain Insignificance never understood Khaedrik and his tragedy. He is the long, black shadow at her feet. Riot-black and heartache and he knows better than to prod at healing wounds. The shadows sigh around them, made restless and distempered by the rift in his soul.

”I tried…” he stops – wordless. She had always been easier for them to love and understand, even in the wake of her disasters. Not Khaedrik - shadow-spun and hollow-eyed - the shard of glass cutting spiderweb-cracks across their hearts.

Khaedrik has ever been destined to tear apart their world.


@[Kagerus] Sorry this took forever to write <3

[Kagerus]

kagerus

and in my dreams I've kissed your lips a thousand times

He says it back, but not long after, his gaze breaks from mine as if some part of loving me hurts him. My gut twists with this realization, beginning me to find some way to fix him, to change him, to protect him from his nightmares like I did when he was young: but the wiser part of me now recognizes him as his own entity, one not needing fixing or repair. Although we walk different paths in life, I must acknowledge that mine is no more right than his, simply different: and though our paths may often drift apart, some piece of me knows that they will always intersect again, someplace ahead. We must simply continue forward, trusting the fates to realign our stars.

He speaks again, towards the dirt, but his words are distraction enough for my frazzled, too-full brain. He asks about my life, and then about his parents (my parents). My heart crumples a little further when I realize that he asks because he will not see them; but a part of me fully recognizes why he is incapable of such a task. He has never been alike to them in that way that I always was; he is an outcast to them, not because they hate him (in fact they love him more than he knows); but because, in their elderliness, they simply cannot understand.

"Mom and dad are doing well; growing old together in the deep recesses of Hyaline. I don't see them often, but Dad sometimes comes to play with his grand-children." A weak smile colours my expression at the thoughtless mention of multiple grandchildren. Should his eyes pop up in concern, I shake my head slowly, a soft, bemused laugh trailing behind the motion. "Solace's children with another stallion, and Abysm. We are one large, confused family: if you'd like to meet them sometime, you are more than welcome to."

"Of my life..." I pause a moment, eyes toying with the sinews of his muscles and the flick of his shadows as he continues to drop his eyes from mine. "Well, I ascended Hyaline's throne, and now am seated upon it alongside Solace. Benefits of being her lover, I suppose," I say in what I attempt to make a lighthearted and joking tone, though the sound comes out strained. "But really, that's all that there is to know... Hyaline has absorbed most of my free time; her and her other Queen."

I'm about to ask him how his life has been, when suddenly he interjects two simple words, followed by a devastating silence. He tried. Again that twisting feeling in my stomach brings bile to my tongue, but I swallow it back dutifully. I've burdened him with enough of my tale of woe; I mustn't show any more brokenness that he could potentially have caused.

I am whole where he is broken; isn't it my job to meld us into one?

"I know you did," I whisper, stepping towards him and pressing my mouth to the curvature of his neck, allowing him the eye-anonimity he so needs to survive this encounter. "And I am proud of you. What you are, Khaedrik - what you are is enough. You don't need to worry about that with me; no ever."

@[Khaedrik] Nope now it's my turn to be sorry, holy moly! Sorry for the wait!!