"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
He laughs, a terrible sound that is nearly lost in the waves. She forgets, then, his power, must think him mortal, or otherwise weak. He sees the realization flash in her eyes, a moment too late, and he inhales, imagining he can scent fear there, mixed with sea and salt air.
The water continues to rise, at her chest now. She remains calm, but he is attuned to the smallest changes, sees the flicker of white in her eyes. He grins, steps closer, until he’s almost pressed against the barrier. He wishes he could touch her, like this, wet and with death snapping at her heels (snapping, or foaming and surging); but he settles for watching.
“I’m changing your mind,” he says, sighing, “or, at least, trying to.”
He pulls more water in. He’s a bit impatient, now, overly eager for this, spurred on by her begging.
“It’s a lesson,” he says, and his voice is calm, almost scholarly, “on how to respect death.”
The water rises, and eventually swallows her. He watches as she thrashes, as her eyes meet his, and she wonders what she’s thinking – if she knows she’s dying, or if she’s convinced he’ll swoop in at the last minute and save her, a god from the machine.
(It’s a role he enjoys playing, but not now. Now, he is here to teach. To show.)
Eventually, the life goes out of her eyes and she dies, unsaved.
He steps back, almost primly, and sends the water back to sea, drops the barrier. Her body crashes with a graceless thud to the wet floor, and he moves closer. He can touch her, now, and he does, tracing his muzzle over her limp neck, tasting salt. When he gets to her ear, he mutters something, a guttural word in the back of his throat, and life is spat back into her.
(He doesn’t need the words, but they make it easier. Almost like a shortcut. A tool to hone the power. To take and restore life so frivolously requires shortcuts.)
“How was it?” he asks as he eyes blink open, seawater still beading on the lashes, and oh, she is beautiful as she wakes from her death, and he can’t help but smile.
The water doesn’t stop, and the realization settles over her that it’s not going to. It had been a foolish notion, to think that he would put an end to it. Gifting her new eyes had been a ploy, an excuse to have a reason to hold something over her, and she had already known that. Asking him to stop something he had already started, when she essentially owed him, was fruitless.
She has drowned, once before. The second time when she died, when she had really died — and stayed dead, rotting at the bottom of the ocean for years and years, only stirred awake when the lands were rocked by the Catastrophe. The magic here was strange, channeling into unexpected places, sparking dead things back to life that had no business being alive. Like her. She had never questioned it, but she has managed to avoid death ever since.
Until now, of course.
She isn’t sure which is worse, when she had made herself drown, or now, being forced to drown. But the water fills her lungs and it burns just like it had the first time, the sea filling all the spaces where air should have been. It only takes a few minutes to lose consciousness, but those moments stretch on endlessly, until the darkness settles in.
When life is shot back into her, she awakes shivering against the cold cave floor, water dripping from her mane and streaming like tears down her face. A cough wretches her body as she expels the last remnants of salt water from her lungs, and for the second time in such a short expanse of time, his dark red eyes are the first thing she sees when she opens her own — some sort of twisted angel that gives her sight after he has blinded her, and brings her back to life after he has killed her.
There is fatigue, even though she hadn’t been dead for long (she thinks — time didn’t make sense when she is dead), but she forces herself to stand anyway before she answers him, refusing to lay trembling on the floor before him. ”It was like being dead,” her voice is course from the salt that burnt her throat, and she looks at him from behind a saturated forelock. Her eyes close for a moment, and when they open they are soft again, compliant, yet wary. ”I’m sorry,” She says, because she is used to it; used to being obedient, used to doing as she was told without questioning it, and apologizing when she hasn’t. ”I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you.”
She is infinitely foolish, it would seem, as she stands damp and quivering before him, and still the idea of asking to leave has never even crossed her mind.
He doesn’t know which he enjoys more: her death, or her apology.
They both spark something in him, perhaps the same thing, or perhaps there is a line there, thinly drawn. Regardless, when she speaks, still damp from her time with death, he is drawn to her, to run his lips over her skin once more. She tastes of saltwater and death, and it leaves him eager.
“You’re learning,” he murmurs into her ear, a terrifying praise and he draws the dampness from her, the water beading in the air in front of them, shimmering for a moment before it blinks into nothingness. She is dry again, her same smooth white, and the only remainder of seawater is the salt drying on his lips.
He remains close, though he no longer touches her, he wants the space to look her in the eye, to force her to meet his gaze. The lair around them is back to its old self (or, the representation he’s made for her, still cleaner, less morbid), all hints of water gone. You’d never know she’d drowned only minutes ago, that the room still echoes with that final panic.
(He’ll remember, of course, will replay that memory as it comes, hungry.)
“Since you’ve been good,” he says, still kind from her acquiescence, “tell me what you want, Ryatah. The world here is full of possibilities, if only for a while. I can make it so.”
He says this as if it is a gift, and not the dangerous wish upon the monkey’s paw that it is.
“Tell me what you want,” he repeats, voice pitched low, his own wanting a dark and cloudy thing in wine-dark eyes, and he waits, patient.
When his lips run against her porcelain skin, it evokes another involuntary tremor, from the top of her neck and down the length of her delicate back. Fear and want once again melded together, until they were so intertwined that she could no longer discern one from the other. His approval arouses something else, too, as it continues to stir to life that part of her that flourished under another’s control. She has been chaotic, recently, spiraling with no direction, desperate to fill a bottomless void, and her neverending search for what was missing continued to come up empty.
With him so close, with her life dangling at his mercy, she is suddenly remembering what it was like to to have that incessant need to please someone, and every fleeting touch is tipping her closer to the edge.
There is that same confused appreciation as the water is drawn from her skin and suspended in the air, before evaporating. Another unexplainable act of kindness, and all she can do is utter a soft, ”Thank you,”, and though the chill finally leaves her bones, there is still only a tentative gratitude, as she is becoming used to his double-edged favors.
He withdraws, again, leaving her hungry and wanting, and when her dark eyes meet his she wonders if he does it on purpose. Wonders if the way he pushes her out and draws her back in is part of it all, or perhaps the way he sprinkles the torment with peculiar bouts of generosity. But she does not reach for him, even though he is so close, close enough he would still be able to smell the the previous scent of death and feel the sudden kick-start of her pulse as it flutters beneath her pallid skin.
He asks her what she wants, and it is so tempting to say you, but she keeps the single word trapped on her tongue, and instead she asks for a much simpler desire, ”The Valley.” Her true home, the first place she had come to, where she had been the lamb living amongst wolves and yet somehow had fit in there better than anywhere else. ”I never got the chance to see it again, after going to the Dale.” And here, a small twist of an almost amused smile, her sable eyes holding fast to his red own.
He could keep her like this indefinitely, he thinks. He could give her purpose – to be his, and his wholly – as they wile away hours or days or weeks in here, in illusions, in death, in rebirth. She might even like such a thing, a willing captive, fodder for the illusions, a body to take and break and make and a mind full of memories to be picked apart.
He smiles at her request, pleased and surprised. He had not known what she would say when asked of her desires, but this was unexpected. His own eyes flutter closed for a moment, remember the old kingdom - his old kingdom. He keeps a fondness for it too, even after all these years - it was where he first ruled, after all, a king crowned in blood.
(It was where Gail had ruled beside him, their mortal kingdom. He wonders, then, what Gail would think of Ryatah, of all this.)
“A wise choice,” he murmurs, and he sifts through her mind again, for whatever hazy visions of the Valley that she retains. He mixes these with his own memories, and around them the world shifts again, into his recreation.
It is not the true Valley, there is a dreamlike air to it, smudged by the time-weariness of their memories, but it is his best recreation of the old kingdom.
“I miss it too, sometimes,” he says – and a part of him does, though it’s not the place so much as the memories it held. The Valley played host to his becoming, in many ways, where he first knew power, where he first spilt blood. He moves through the familiar land, and then pauses, letting her take the area in.
“I made Pangea to keep a kingdom that was of my blood, but it’s proved a poor substitute,” he continues, a strange honesty. Pangea was made from his own sick magic, made in the throes of the reckoning, when he should not have had magic at all. And it shows – it had never been a healthy kingdom, had not survived its abandonment, and even after he brought it back, it faltered.
“The Valley, though…there’s nothing like it.”
He touches her, lips to her throat, her neck, her back, in the faux-lushness of the grass, and this time, he does not withdraw. He has been patient, but the gnawing awareness of her body has lurked ever since he brought her here – it was why he’d waited until she’d birthed the last set, was it not?
He prolongs the moment still, not on her yet, savoring the strange nostalgia of being in the Valley. It makes him almost feel young and stupid – he’d been a bloodthirsty, reckless king, so impatient, but there had been such a base satisfaction to the acts.
(There is such a base satisfaction in her, so pliant beneath his touch, so eager. They’ve done this before, and there is nothing about her that is unfamiliar, but he is edged, drawn out by their time in his lair, spurred by the Valley around them.)
“Our children will be heirs to an impossible kingdom,” he murmurs, though the children are yet unmade, he can see them in his mind’s eye already – daughters, a pair of them.
Further back now, to the slope of her hip, the planes and valleys of her body, and then he is done waiting.
She feels as he remembered her, yet not, made different by the new history forged in them, by his intimate knowledge of how she looks, drowned; the act changed by this dream of a long-gone kingdom.
(Changed, but the same. He bites at her withers, leaves her marked and pregnant.)
“A good choice,” he affirms again, casting a final look at the kingdom, “I hope it was as you remembered it.”
The Valley blurs and bleeds then, and they are back in the lair, the last noises of the Valley’s birds and crickets fading to nothing.
It is not the same — could not possibly be exactly the same — but it is incredibly close. She is not typically nostalgic, almost always caught up in some new whirlwind of self-destruction, but on the rare occasion that her mind is too quiet, she thinks of the Valley. This version is different — still vivid as it blossoms before them, but muted in some ways, and hollow with the notion that it wasn’t entirely real. It is enough, though, to make her heart twist in her chest, at the sight of the familiar grasses and trees that had served as her only real home. It is empty, of course, devoid of any of the faces either of them would have associated with it, and perhaps that is the only thing that tethers her to reality, that keeps her from fully feeding into the illusion. The Valley reminded her of Dhumin (he wasn’t here, not in reality, not in fantasy, and most nights not even her dreams) and there were still days she hated how intricately he was threaded into the very fibers of her. Without him, the Valley, even this reborn interpretation, could never be the same.
“None of the new lands can really compare,” She says as her eyes sweep across the apparition of the lost kingdom he had created. Her experience with the current lands was limited, but it didn’t keep her from developing her own biased opinion. She had tried accepting them, but they were lackluster in comparison to what she had known.
It was easy to forget about them, though, with the Valley around her, and with his lips tracing a path across her skin. Finally, he does not pull away, and it is a breath of relief and an ignition of heat all at once. The fear that had been lingering dissipates the further back his touch travels, and that edge of desire she had been so precariously balanced on is ripped from under her. “Everything about you is already impossible,” A hushed assertion, as her pulse races at the feel of him against her hip. She quivers beneath him when he takes her, and even though it is not their first time together, it feels brand new. Perhaps it is her newly given sight, or the seeds of control he had sewn by drowning her and bringing her back, but by the time they are finished, she can already recognize there is a small part of herself that has dislodged itself and become his — in whatever sick, twisted capacity that may be.
The land around them slowly begins to disappear, and she stares at it until it was entirely gone. “It was,” because even with it’s differences, the dream-like kingdom almost served as a new memory for the old one. “Almost exactly as I remember it.”
But she casts her gaze to him, then, and with a guarded intrigue, she asks, “What are you going to do next?” The lair was noticeably empty once again, and quiet, after the waves of the beach, and then the sounds of the valley had faded away. She has become too aware of the space around them, now that she knew how easily it could shift and change at his command. “You’ve been such a gracious host, for the most part.” It is said with a sliver of a smile, as though she hadn’t been dripping with seawater not long ago, but even the beach had been decidedly tame in comparison to what she knew he was capable of, and she could not help but to wonder if she has fully satisfied whatever need he had for bringing her here.
He can feel himself being called away, the tug of other worlds. It is not wanderlust, exactly, but he never exists too long in one specific place, he must keep moving, he feels. So though there is a certain temptation in the idea of keeping her here, of spending more time taking her apart and putting her together, he will prolong this no more.
He could keep her here, of course, for whenever he deigned to return. He could create some illusion for her, keep her comfortable – or he could leave her here as is, in this unglamorous prison, with the full weight of knowledge of what had been done.
But he is fond of her, or something like it, so he decides he will turn her back onto the world, to wreak her own particular king of havoc there. Besides, she will have the children soon (in months is soon, to him, a god to whom time barely exists).
“I’m returning you, for now,” he says, though he cannot resisting touching her again, where she smells of sex and seawater.
“I do hope you found your time here memorable,” he continues, and grits his teeth against the remerging desire to keep her here – it’s too easy, too obvious, and he does not play so cheaply.
He’s at her hip again now, the curves which had supported him so shortly ago. His teeth graze the skin there, testing.
“I won’t have you forgetting, Ryatah,” he says, as if she’d resisted, and then his teeth change, grow sharp and magic, and he carves a mark there on her hip, a twisted symbol.
Claiming, branding – she is his, in this way if no other. Marked.
He makes his leisurely way back to her face, lips brushing her forehead, where he’d given her eyes not long ago.
(To replace the ones once torn from her, true.)
“I’ll even let you keep the eyes,” he says, a dark god who could be almost benevolent.
“Though you’ll see only when I want you to see,” he says, and his magic penetrates her once again, forging yet another connection. He can blind her intermittently, should he choose – wherever he was.
“Know it’s under my control.”
It’s a threat, or a promise, or something in-between.
(It’s almost romantic, you see.)
He steps back to admire his work. She is lovely, and though their children are barely sparked inside her, he can imagine a glow. The brand at her hip shows fresh, and he knows she will feel an ache, a burn, whenever he thinks of her.
She is wrecked and remade and wrecked again, and he thinks she is a masterpiece.
“Goodbye, Ryatah,” he says, and with that he sends her back to the meadow, and himself to who knows where.
