"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
08-10-2015, 03:06 PM (This post was last modified: 08-13-2015, 03:27 PM by a demon.)
T H E G R A Y
You are likely to never forget the sound of skin being shredded by broken teeth, nor cartilage cracking, nor bones crunching; a quick spray of blood flies above the heads of the horde and then nothing. The screaming has stopped. Your friend’s suffering has come to an end, no thanks to you—you are long gone, escaped with the others. You run across scorched earth until your legs give out, until you lose sight of the mountain, until you lose sight of hope and despair takes hold of the lot of you that lived. You start to fall apart.
The days come and go, as they have been—but they’re worse now, you had no idea how good you had it up there on the mountain; you’re getting much thinner, they’re getting much thinner and you’re all getting desperate. You’re not sleeping very much, either. You know what happens when you sleep. You dream of heaven and it turns to hell. There’s also a massive horde of your undead loved ones out there, somewhere; probably close, probably hunting you. You all start to lose touch with reality and although most of you were once friends, you start to turn on one another; it comes to a head when the Black finally snaps and attacks the Chestnut. Murders them. Feasts on them. You try to stop it, but you can’t. You’re too weak and too sick to do anything at all. The Black sets its sights on you, then. Decides if it’s going to eat one of you, it might as well eat all of you.
You do your best to fight back, you really do.
The world shatters right before The Black can deliver the killing blow, it cracks beneath your hooves and falls like shards of glass into inky blackness and stars; it takes your ‘friend’ with it and you’re grateful to see The Black go, though its screams cause you to shiver. You wonder if you’re falling, too, but you cannot tell; not here, not when you’re caught between worlds in darkness and there is nothing but endless space and constellations as far as your eyes can see.
“Pick a number,” It says, startling you.
You do not know what It means, but you say the first number that comes to mind….
T H E C H E S T N U T
You’re kicking, thrashing around—screaming, running, at least you think you’re running. You’re actually lying on the ground, safely tucked into a little nook that you found for yourself after spending the last month or so on the mountain. All is well, or so it seems. You have only been dreaming again. It takes a moment before you can make that shaky climb to your feet and that’s when you notice something is wrong with the others. They’re too quiet, too still to be asleep. So you go about checking all of them, touching their cold clammy skin and urgently trying to wake them up—but it’s no use. They’re dead. Your friends are dead. All of them are dead.
The days come and go, as they have been—but these are terribly lonely days and the smell coming off the bodies eventually forces you to move to the other side of the mountain. The food grows back in abundance now that there aren’t so many relying on it; but you’ve lost your appetite, you start to grow thin and weary. You can drink as much as you want now, but the entire thing seems pointless. You start to mutter to yourself to keep the quiet at bay, but it’s no use; you have only your own thoughts and memories to keep you entertained and try as you might to focus on the good, the bad always comes to the forefront. Your mind is the next thing to go. Whenever you close your eyes, you can see the ones you’ve lost; sometimes, you can even almost swear their eyes are black.
You start picking at yourself, gnawing little bits here and there until you get used to it and start liking the taste of your own skin; infection sets in, it hurts, but you cannot find it in you to stop.
And that’s when a little voice whispers in your ear: “Pick a number.”
You don’t know what It means, but you say the first number that comes to mind….
S E LF - S A C R I F I C E
You throw yourself to the wolves, prepare yourself for the pain to come and wait to be torn apart—but that’s when you come to, that’s when you realize, that’s when you taste it on the tip of your tongue and a shiver rattles down your spine. There is blood on your face, blood on your chest, blood on your legs and the rest; you watch the life fade from one of your friend’s eyes. You’re aware that there is screaming, there is panic, there is a rush of movement all around you but you do not understand what is happening until the last second: There is no horde, and you have just murdered one of your best friends.
There is a chunk of meat in your mouth, in fact, and you spit it out on the ground—much to the horror of everyone else. You don’t like the way they’re looking at you, though; it angers you, it feels you up with terrible thoughts and your immediate reaction is to lash out, to hurt them. You cannot help yourself. It’s almost as if someone or something else is controlling you. You kill some, you maim others, but the strongest of them manage to chase you off the mountain and you run home—what’s left of home, anyways.
The days come and go, as they always have—but these are different.
You have become something horrible.
You feed on the creatures that escaped the fire, mostly mice and rats.
But one day an unlucky little fawn crosses your path, and, well…
You are hungry.
It’s during your feast that a little voice comes to you on the wind, it’s small, quiet; you almost think you’ve imagined it but then it repeats itself. Stronger, this time, It says: “Pick a number.”
You do not know what It means, but you say the first number that comes to mind….
After much deliberation, Hermia's Gold will be eliminated. Better luck next time. <3
I want everyone who killed the Gray to describe being on the run from the horde. Describe the days they spent starving and thirsty, describe what led up to the escalation and the Black attacking the Chestnut. Describe the Black attacking your character and the subsequent struggle. Did the Black attack others in the group? What was it like watching the world fall apart? What does the voice sound like to your character?
I want everyone who killed the Chestnut to describe their characters' waking up and finding everyone dead, then write about their move to the other side of the mountain and how loneliness caused their descent into madness. What else did they do to cope before they finally snapped? What were they feeling, thinking, seeing? Did they hallucinate beyond seeing their friends' and loved ones' faces with black eyes? Why did they start tearing themselves apart? What does the voice sound like to your character?
If your character sacrificed itself, I want you to describe the attack, describe what your character was seeing, thinking, feeling when it turned on everyone else. Does it regret what it's doing? Is it concerned at all that it feels like it's being controlled? Is it afraid? Does it want to stop? Describe hunting the fawn and killing it. What does the voice sound like to your character?
Your character must pick a number between one and eight. These numbers will determine elimination.
Your character cannot pick the same number as another character, so everyone please mark your number with a red font color so others can skim quickly.
The first horse to respond is immune from elimination in the next round, unless mistakes are made.
You have 48 hours from the time my post hits the boards, failure to respond will result in elimination and a defect.
this one goes out to you;
my little h e a r t w o r m
She runs until there is nothing.
Perhaps there was always nothing. All the sounds are white noise. She sees Judea, still ready to send her back, to spill the magic back into the earth. She had been so ready. She swears she’d been ready. She sees Eve, sees Zebah. They look at her. They did not expect her to survive. No one did. Their lips move like there’s a question there but she can’t say anything.
It’s like she’s deaf, like she’s blind. She’s aware of the others. Aware there are questions, accusations. But they wash over her. She only hears static. White noise. The world is ending.
She runs, and then she falls. The impact hurts and for a moment she tries to get up and she can’t, hooves scrabbling at the ashy earth.
Sound comes back to her like a thunderclap and she hears herself screaming. She wonders how long it’s been going on. She is suddenly aware her throat is raw. That she is swallowing blood. This is the end, she thinks, and she is glad, but then her hooves find purchase on the ground and she is up, running again.
The dead chase them until they don’t.
She wonders why they stopped. If perhaps they crossed some territorial line.
(If so, she fears whatever protects its territory so well that the dead do not cross.)
But she doesn’t care. The realization she does not fear death comes as she stands on aching legs, sides heaving like knives are being stabbed in her lungs.
She tells them what happened, Eve and Zebah. They’re our loved ones, she says. Were, she amends.
It is the first time she is grateful Iris exists in dreams and nowhere else, so that she doesn’t have to see the flesh rot.
(She would have fed every last piece of herself to Iris, if she thought it would have saved her.)
The new life begins. It is somehow worse than the mountain. There is no food. It’s her land repeating itself, she realizes. She is grateful she doesn’t have to watch Iris die again. Only my friends, she thinks, then, maybe I’ll die first.
She loses weight. The skin is drawn so tight that when nighttime comes, when she changes to a skeleton, you can barely tell the difference.
(When her organs tumble out of her stomach, when she survives her nightly vivisection, some of the others try to eat them, bloody mouthfuls of her offal. They fall sick, herbivore bodies unable to process her.
She tries, too. Tastes her own heart and thinks of the poem: I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart. But it is not bitter. It’s almost sweet.)
Judea ends her campaign against Heartworm. She’s too weak to talk. Without her, Heartworm is ignored. She is glad for it.
One day it starts to rain and they turn their heads upward like beggars. Their mouths open like baby birds, desperate. The rain is acid and burns holes in their tongues. They drink anyway. The acid burns. No one cares. They will all be dead soon. No one says it, but they know.
She stays with her friends. There is a glaze is Zebah’s eye that grows worse, something beyond hunger. She should have noticed, but she was dying, too.
(She’ll tell herself that, later. That she couldn’t have stopped it anyway.)
She sleeps less. Everything is less. There is even less of her. She begins to lose her hair. Her body eats itself from the inside out, a cancer of starvation.
One night she dreams of Iris and wakes up crying and her first thought is what a waste of water this is.
She should end it and she knows it, should break her own neck before starvation can finish her. But there is no energy to find a cliff. There is no hemlock to eat.
She realizes the irony of it – that she is too weak and sick to kill herself – and laughs, a dry, papery sound.
There is a noise, a stir of movement. She raises her head (she is laying out, prone. It’s easier, this way. Less weight to support) and sees them. Zebah and Eve. For a moment her dying brain cannot comprehend what’s happening, and then it does.
A feast.
Zebah has felled Eve, tears into her. He shouldn’t have the energy but he does, he tears her open, rips her throat out, stopping her mid-scream.
She struggles to stand. To save Eve.
She is too late, of course.
She walks numbly to the body, to the black creature feasting on her flesh.
“Zebah,” she says, broken, realizing her mistake too late as his eyes lift from his prize and settle onto her.
He is upon her, hooves and teeth. Her flesh is torn away. She moves, tries to fight back, to escape, to run – as if there was anywhere to run to – but her body is a dying thing, a broken machine, and it can do little.
She lands a blow or two, desperate, wild swings.
He lands many more and it hurts to breathe, hurts to exist, and she thinks, I’m coming, Iris.
The world shatters beneath them and her first thought is that dying is nothing like she’d imagined.
Zebah falls from sight and she wonders if he fell or if she ascended. I am dead, she thinks, but her body breathes on instinct and the pain that radiates from her cracked ribs suggests otherwise.
Still, there is darkness everywhere like shadows risen up to reclaim the land. There are lights, though – stars, light years away, and constellations. She can name some of them. Others she cannot.
Pick a number, says a voice. She wonders if it’s God. It sounds at once like someone she once knew and like nothing she’s ever imagined.
She is silent. She is dead. Or she is in space. Either way it is impossible to talk. Pick a number.
But—
The stars sear her retinas. The pain howls like a living creature inside of her. I am not supposed to be, she thinks. The sentence should end with alive, but she leaves it. She should not be. She should not.
”Three,” she says. Three, for her family – for Corsair, for Iris, for herself. Three, for her friends, the ones lost.
Three, rhymes with free, which is all she wants, whether the freedom comes from a savior or from death itself.
The horde is coming, but she is calm. Perhaps she has dreamed of this moment, as the seconds tick away before the inevitable comes. Perhaps it's been a silent knowledge, hard as a rock deep in her gut, ever since the moment that the Wherever had spat her out and into the Here so many years ago (had it been years? As the horde approaches, it's impossible to tell). Perhaps it's been building to this, an inevitable crescendo, where she will be absorbed back into something equally impossible as the place from whence she came.
She closes her eyes, but she is the rock in her stomach – she will not flinch, no matter what pain may come.
---
She comes to like one does when waking from a nightmare – disoriented and entirely unsure, as though her entire world has been thrown off-kilter. She doesn't understand at first; why is her muzzle slick? Why does she smell so much like the rotted horse who'd stumbled into the Valley so many days-months-years ago? Why are there others here? Why are they screaming? Why have they not fled? A million questions, and no answers—
That is, until she swallows, and she knows the taste of blood in an instant.
That is, until she feels the warm wet soft-hard chunk in her mouth, and knows that it is meat, and knows that her stomach doesn't turn, doesn't retch – and in fact, rumbles an encouragement for her to swallow.
That is, until she sees the body by her feet, the cold dead eyes of Sheira staring up at her, her friend's face and head and throat and everything a mass of gore, almost unrecognizable. She spits out the chunk of flesh in her mouth – an ear, only slightly chewed, rolls out onto the ground. Aletheia quivers with emotional overwhelm; it is all too much for her to process, none of this is what she had bargained for, none of this was what she had expected when she had given her life for her friends. She swallows hard (bile rather than flesh, and her stomach punctuates that knowledge with a sharp pang of hunger). There is no meat, but she can still taste blood.
But they are looking at her now, the two surviving friends, and a handful of the others. But it's not the others she cares about, it's only Conn and Spiar, and she seeks them out with hungry, desperate eyes. She stands on the knife's edge of madness, some kind of desperate wrongness in her body, and if she can only see them, if she can only reach them and draw strength from them, perhaps she can still be saved.
She finds them within the press of horses, but it's the wrong kind of finding. Conn is shielding the little filly Spiar from her with his own body. as though a meat shield was enough to stop her. As though that could ever be enough to stop her.
Their eyes are a mix of fear and pity and guilt, and that is ultimately what breaks her. She simply can't stand it, can't stand to see them reduce her to something less than equine just by the way they look at her. This isn't how it was meant to be. They aren't meant to be standing here. They aren't meant to be watching her. She is meant to be dead, to be reunited with her mother and her father, to be someone else, something else. It's gone all wrong, and it will ruin them all.
The thought is crystal clear, and she doesn't doubt it for a moment: it's their fault, it's all their fault, and they must pay.
She is fast, too fast, and she strikes at Conn in a moment, before he can even react. Spiar is faster though – perhaps it's a holdover from the time the small girl had been alone on the mountain – and she escapes with only scratches as Conn throws himself in front of her, throws himself in front of Aletheia's wrath. This only enrages Aletheia more: that was her job, to fall in battle so that the rest of them could escape. Ruined, ruined, they've ruined it all.
She is a slave to her blind rage as she strikes at Conn again and again. She punishes him with her hooves, bathing her legs in his blood as she crushes his skull. It is clumsy work – hooves aren't made for striking – but she manages it eventually. And through it all, the rest of them do not run. They watch her as though she is mad, but as though it's the kind of madness that you simply cannot help but watch. A trainwreck you can see coming, and cannot avoid. They watch her with a mix of horror and sympathy, and she feels all the more objectified. She does not think of anything but her rage, her anger at the way things had turned out so very, terribly wrong.
She never thinks of regretting. She never thinks of mercy. She never thinks of anything but the burning hot pressure of her anger, and the desperate need to release it by releasing their blood.
It angers her that they don't all run. It angers her that they are trying to fight back, that the strongest are trying to kick her, to bite her, to scare her off from the rest. Why are they even trying to push her back? Don't they know it will never work? Don't they understand that she has become something more than them? That she hates them, and that she will make them pay? She rends and rips and tears and kicks with an unnatural speed, ferocity, and strength. She loses count of how many she kills, and she can barely see through the thick screen of gore that covers her face.
Sometimes she plunges her face into their flesh and rips chunks of skin and muscle. Sometimes she does not.
But they persist in harrying her, and eventually the strength of their strongest is too much for her alone. Perhaps in some deep recess of her mind she understands what she's become, and perhaps in some deep recess she drives herself off. Or perhaps her animal instincts know that even she can be outmatched when the enemy groups as large as they did. All she knows is that she needs to run, to go, to get away.
She runs without thinking, as though she's a creature of pure instinct, and before she can even consider where she's going she finds herself in the Valley. Her former home is a twisted shell of itself. Bodies drape the landscape, and she notes that many of them have been chewed on. She wonders, for a moment, whether she's been here for just a few minutes, or perhaps for longer. Had it been moments, hours, or days since the massacre on the mountain? Had she discovered the bodies eaten, or had she eaten them herself?
She isn't sure. Time doesn't seem to matter to her anymore.
It's ironic, really; she'd once been the time-lost girl, sitting outside the normal stream of time and space, a law unto herself. And now she's back where she was, an abnormality, a creature existing apart from everything else, caught in a different (and far less pleasant) kind of timelessness. Perhaps if she had emotions beyond hunger, she would care.
But there is nothing beyond the hunger, not anymore. She is a body enslaved by the need to eat, every emotion distilled into the moment of her next meal. Everything she does, everywhere she goes, it's all in pursuit of food. And not the kind that grows from the ground, either – no, here in her domain, the trees and the plants are in full flower, an impossible and hollow echo of everything that she'd had once in her dream. A verdant garden, untroubled by pests – because, well, she eats everything that might eat the green. All the squirrels, all the rabbits, all the chipmunks and the mice: anything that moves, anything that has a heartbeat is fair game. And all the rest is as nothing to her.
She doesn't even have enough of her senses left to appreciate the scenery, let alone the irony.
She doesn't remember how she'd curled up with fawns in the land of her dreams. She doesn't remember how all she'd wanted was for them to be her friends. She doesn't remember any of it. All she knows is that there is meat, somewhere, and she is hungry.
She kills is too easily. It has no way to defend itself against a normal horse, let alone whatever it is that she's become. It's a small fawn, too tiny to provide much meat, but it's better than nothing. She dives into it with an automaton's mechanical relish, spraying gore across the pristine meadow as she rips into its throat, blood spraying everywhere, a macabre scene.
She is so thoroughly engaged in ripping into the carcass that she almost doesn't hear it. Ripping apart raw sinew and crunching small bones is, as it turns out, noisy work. But sounds sometimes mean meat, and she can always use more meat, and so she pauses to listen.
A number? She vaguely remembers numbers. They're like furniture in an attic, tucked away under a dropcloth, long unused and out of sight, but the basic form is still there if you look hard enough. Focusing, she dusts off corners of her mind she hasn't touched in…how long had it been since the mountain?
The memories lumber back, her friends like old ghosts. For the first time since she'd looked to Conn and Spiar before striking down Conn, for the first time since she'd seen their eyes, she starts to remember that she had been someone, once, someone more than this. That she had been one of many. And that she had killed most of them.
A number. "Four." she says, her voice a whisper, the word almost unrecognizable because her tongue is so slick with blood and swollen with disuse. Four, because they had been four – four friends, capable of taking on the world. Four, because it sounds like for, because she'd done it all for them.
Four, because as it turned out, it had been all for nothing.
If only Noah disappeared in the sea of the dead. That might have been better, might have been almost all right. At least then Rhonan could pretend that his friend died without pain. A quick snap of the neck. A sharp puncture of the heart. But none of these things happen. Noah screams. His silent, ghost friend screams.
And the sound is like the screams of those that burned. Like the screams of those stuck in hell.
Rhonan can hear Noah as he runs. Can hear the sound of his bones breaking, twigs beneath the weight of the horde. No matter how fast he runs, no matter how hard blood pumps in his ears, he cannot escape the sound of Noah dying. He puts enough distance between then that he knows that the sounds are in his head now. The screaming follows him like the guilt that weighs down his labored, miserable steps.
Every bone in the gold and white boys body screams. He is too young for this, too untrained, too useless. But the sound of Noah’s pain drives him on. He can no longer feel his muscles. They’ve gone numb with exhaustion. Sometimes he’s not even sure he’s still running. He catches glimpses of Azula ahead though, and he keeps going, keeping her in sight.
It’s only the blue hair that stands out anymore. They’ve left the mountain far behind, racing over gray ash and black earth now. It’s hot as hell here; the land hasn’t quite stopped smoldering beneath his feet.
Finally, he can’t run anymore. His legs give way and he smashes into the ground, skin scraping and bleeding. Well, at least he’s not a pretty pretty princess anymore. He may still be white and gold, but he’s streaked black and red, caked in a paste of death and decay.
Noah.
Everything else could be dead. But no, not Noah. The world is empty and wrong and hollow without Noah. He was just a shadow, just a ghost. But shadows are proof of the sun. Ghosts are proof that there is also life. Rhonan doesn’t get up. There is no point. Noah is dead and the world has burned. What did Noah die for? The earth would not grow back. The dead would walk again, but only to consume whatever life the fire left behind.
He stays on the ground, bleeding and sore, until a nose brushes his neck. He doesn’t jump, doesn’t fight, doesn’t care if they kill him.
“Rhonan,” the voice is female, and he knows that voice. He turns his head a hair until he can see her, black and blue. He doesn't get up. Maybe she’ll get the hint and just leave him here. Rhonan will be the next sacrifice. The horde can find him here, and he’ll be an easier kill than even Noah was.
“Rhonan,” she says again, nosing him a little bit harder this time. “Can you get up?” He nods his head, though still doesn’t get up. “Will you get up?” she asks, with an infinite amount of patience for him right now. Even though there’s likely a horde of the undead bearing down on them. Is Noah part of the herd now? Will Noah be the one to kill Rhonan? He sort of hopes so.
Rhonan shakes his head no. His movements are awkward, sending ash into the air. Azula coughs, but doesn’t leave. After a moment, she lays down beside him. Rhonan isn’t sure when, but Gero joins them too. The three of them lay there, heads on the smoldering earth, flesh burning.
The night passes with the three of them there. The horde does not come. Maybe Noah was enough, at least for now.
The sun is high overhead by the time Rhonan finally gets to his feet. He’s soaked in sweat from the heat radiating out of the burnt ground and from the sun that beats down on them. He never knew how useful trees were. Never thought there’d be a day when he missed the soupy, heavy heat of the Jungle. Even that had been better than this, burning from the top and the bottom.
His friends get to their feet as well. Neither says anything. Neither gives him a hard time for staying on the ground or tries to make him feel better about Noah’s death. They must miss Noah too. But had they heard the sounds of him dying? They couldn't have, or they would not have slept. Rhonan had tried, but every time sleep wrapped him in its arms, the screaming echoed in his ears. And sleep ran from him. Again and again. After a while, Rhonan stopped trying.
The three of them start walking, looking for the others. They aren’t far away, huddled together in their destroyed home. Malene seems to be the leader still, though even she has little to say. What are they to do? At least on the mountain, they could pretend to have a purpose, pretend to have hope. Up there, at least there was food, scare though it may have been.
Kav and Tanner are alive, and they glare at him like the horde was his fault. If Rhonan hadn’t decided to get all high and mighty, they’d still be eating like kings. But the horde would have found them. If not when they did, then later. It might be true that the smell of blood drew the horde faster, but in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Tanner looks like hell. He’s cut and bruised and caked in the same ashy blood paste that covers Rhonan. That must be what Rhonan looks like. Like walking death. No. They know what walking death looks like, and it’s worse than Rhonan or Tanner. But the two boys look like they are just biding their time among the living. And of course, it’s true. They are.
They all are.
Malene decides to send small groups out in different directions. No more than an hour away, and then come back. The entire herd would migrate halfway through the day and try again. Maybe there would be somewhere they could live, some small amount of food.
Ger, Azula and Rhonan set off together in the direction opposite of the mountain. Everything is black and gray. A gray sky, a black earth. The horizon holds no promise. Like always, Gero and Azula walk ahead; so close their sides brush. Rhonan walks behind, but without Noah, he feels like an intruder. Like he doesn’t belong.
Unlike before, Gero and Azula walk almost as slowly as Rhonan. Maybe because their muscles hurt as much as his own. Maybe because there’s no purpose anymore, and even they know it. They are almost silent, and in this and only this, Rhonan feels comfortable. They no longer banter, and he doesn’t have to pretend he cares.
The days go on like this. They set out, turn around, and the whole herd moves. Every day, Azula and Gero walk farther and farther apart. Every day, Rhonan trails farther and farther behind. They are too angry and hungry and miserable to find any enjoyment in each other’s company. There’s nothing left but the papery ash on the ground. Not a tree. Not a blade of grass.
One day, while the herd was migrating, Harold collapsed and didn’t get up. For a moment, Rhonan almost felt bad about having laughed at the guy’s name. But then he decided it was sort of hilarious that the first of them to die was the food scout.
No, not the first. The second. Noah was the first.
The next day, Tanner drops to the ground. Kav leaves him behind. Even Rhonan can’t blame him though. His friends would leave him behind too. They couldn’t carry each other, couldn’t spend any more energy than just walking. Most of them could hardly walk. The hour long scouting trips dwindled down to half that. The herd migrated shorter distances each afternoon. One day, they stopped trying altogether.
That night, he wakes to warm breath in his ear. He flicks half an eye open, waiting for death, welcoming it. Kav stands over him. “What if I forgive you? We could still live like Kings, you know. Eat them now, before there’s no meat left on their bones.” And then Kav is gone again. Rhonan shivers, too disgusted by the thought, and too ready to die anyway. He wouldn’t eat his friends.
The next night, he hears screaming. “Azula! Azula please!” There’s more screaming off in the distance, more begging. But his attention is on his friends, and he scrambles to his feet in time to see Azula rear. Her blue eyes are wild, monstrous, not hers at all. Gero tries to back up and falls, legs tangling beneath him.
“Azula!” Rhonan screams, trying to distract her, trying to buy himself enough time to get to Gero. His voice cracks as he screams, his throat parched and raw. Still, he's loud enough that she turns her eyes in his direction, but she doesn’t lose sight of her target. Her feet land on Gero's neck with a sickening crack. Her teeth tear into his flesh, which gives way like grass.
No. This can’t be happening. No no no.
Azula snaps her head up then. There’s more screaming in the distance, and Rhonan thinks that Kav must be out there feasting too. He had turned Azula against them. Maybe it hadn’t been hard. Without Noah, their group had no glue. Without Noah, the three of them were barely friends at all. “Two boys for dinner. I should be so lucky.” She says, her grin feral, blood coating her teeth and dripping from her mouth. The deep, red liquid dots her legs and chest. But her eyes and her mane are still blue. Such a beautiful, cruel blue.
“Azula. Azula it’s me, Rhonan.” But she doesn’t seem to comprehend, or maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe the hunger drove her insane. He thinks about just laying down in the snowy ash. He’s welcomed death every day. But he doesn’t want to die beneath her hooves. He doesn’t want to be her food.
Rhonan rears, meeting Azula in the air. She shoves, and he topples over backward. He tries to scramble to his feet, but the cuts on his side have never healed. His bruised muscles and ribs scream at him. He can’t do this. He’s too injured and broken and weak. Blood drips on his side as she thrusts herself into a rear.
This is it.
But then it isn’t. The world shatters, crack and splinters at the seams. The burned earth crumbles beneath him like the papery ash, falling away into space. Azula tumbles over backward and falls away with the pieces of the world. Her screams sound like Noah's. Like Gero's. He wants to feel pity, wants to miss her the way he misses Noah. But she killed Gero. She was going to kill him too. And he cannot find any pity for her, for her screams that echo in his head. Maybe he’s just immune to the sound of agony now. Maybe he’s heard too much of it.
The world has become inky, dotted with stars that still seem far away, though he’s certain he’s in space now. He’s in the space that earth used to occupy, though he cannot tell if he’s falling or floating or just dead. Maybe Azula killed him, and he’s actually lying on the ground as she tears him to pieces. Maybe this is death.
Then a voice echoes in his ears. Pick a number, it says. The voice is the almighty voice of god, with just a tinge of Noah in it. Noah. He startles, though he can’t control his movements and his limbs just flail in the darkness. A number? What the hell does space want with a number? He shakes his head, trying to clear his mind, sure he’s dead or crazy or both. Can you be dead and crazy at the same time? He has no idea.
But somehow, a number comes bubbling out of his mouth. “Eight,” he says. At first, he’s not sure why. But after a moment, he knows where the thought came from. It came from a dream he had long ago. A dream of Beqanna, of the Valley. His father had lived in the Valley, had served a king named Eight. The number eight. When you tip it on its side, it becomes an infinity symbol. And that is how many lives Rhonan feels as though he has lived, as though he will live. Maybe one of those lives will turn out to be good.
She runs in her dreams because she thinks they are real.
She runs because the horde has already taken Rouge and will surely take them next. She runs because the sound fills her ears, an angry, unnatural symphony of oncoming death. The smell is there, too, clogging and putrid in her nostrils. She gags and tries to ignore the sounds. All the while, though, she runs.
Noir is alongside her, a black wisp of a colt who she knows will tire far sooner than she will. Already he is stumbling over the ash-covered rocks that seem almost murderous in their placement and intent. She can almost smell the fear rising from the boy (though she cannot differentiate the source; it can just as easily be her terror). The horde of charred bodies grows ever closer as they make their ascent up the mountain. Noir slows her down tremendously. The thought of leaving him behind passes through her brain like an arrow, painful and swift. Painful, because imagining the monsters clamping down on him and ripping him apart (like they surely had Rouge) is enough nightmare fodder for a lifetime. Swift, because it’s not a true thought. Jaide will fling herself into the masses long before they have a chance to snatch a single hair from the boy’s head.
They come still, regardless of her thoughts. Noir’s breaths are more like small gasps now. He looks at her with pleading eyes. “I can’t run anymore. I can’t…do this.” The mountain trail carved by the survivors stretches on, ‘safety’ still far above them. Jaide thinks they can do it, can reach the summit, if they keep going.
“You have to. It’s easy though, no sweat,” she says, trying a smile that comes off more like a grimace. She’s ever the optimist, and even with monsters breathing down their necks, she tries to keep his spirits up. If Noir thinks she’s all right, maybe he will be too. The rocks shrink the further up they trek. It makes it far more difficult to avoid each and every stone. A milky buckskin head appears at the trailhead, watching them with a neutral expression. Alpha, she thinks, he will help us now, surely. The horde is so close now. Noir notices, too, and redoubles his efforts. His feet slide on the pebbles, though. With a sickening realization, Jaide sees that he is sliding backwards, his four legs spreading as he does so. The no-longer-horses hiss in excitement, closing the distance between them. One springs forward, it’s jaws open and sliming. Green spittle flies into the air, coating Noir’s leg as it latches on…
“NOOOOO -”
~
“OOOOO!”
She wakes, her legs flailing and leaving tracks in the ash. Sweat covers her, despite her relatively sheltered spot under an overhanging boulder. Her heart beats to the cadence of the run she’s just undertaken. But has she? The air is still all around her, ashy and grey, but still nonetheless. The sights and sounds of the undead are absent. Nobody scuttles for safety; no one screams with the certainty of their own death. Has it all been a dream, then?
Jaide rises then, and it’s still so easy at this point that she takes it for granted (it won’t be later, when she hasn’t the muscles to do so, when both her body and mind are starving). Despite a month on the mountain, she’s done okay. They all have. Her blue roan coat shines with health as she ducks out from the carved space and emerges into the post-apocalyptic light. Grey eyes survey the now-familiar stretch of mountain she cannot bring herself to call home – not yet. The others make it better, though. They bring her closer to the word, to the feeling of belonging. The nightmare-panic fades to almost nothing. She thinks of Noir and smiles. He’s out there, thank goddess, and seeing his face will erase the rest of her worry.
She leaves her little alcove behind and makes her way to the meadow. Their morning rituals will be in full swing: Alpha calling everyone to chores, his mares gossiping around him, Rouge rolling her eyes in the background. Rouge is alive, Jaide remembers with another smile, not even caring that it meant her attitude will be fully preserved and on display as well. She comes around the corner, shining with happiness and a new determination for survival (I will be better, she thinks, we have our lives and that is enough). She expects that they will all be standing at the meeting spot, gathered around the old paint male.
She doesn’t expect that the horses will look more like lumps.
At first she thinks they are new boulders, spread across the heavily-grazed meadow. But that doesn’t make sense - boulders don’t just appear overnight. Jaide moves closer to the nearest one, her curiosity replaced by growing realization and horror. It’s Vert, the amber champagne girl who could’ve been an Amazon. She was brave and ambitious and selfless, all things a Sister should be. Now, though, she will never get the chance. Her once brilliant green eyes are faded and glassy. Her expression is the worst aspect of all, however: a hopeful expression lines her mouth and creases her eyes – like she’d seen past the end of Beqanna to a new start, a good start.
There’s no sign of trauma on her or any of the others. She knows, because she examines all of them closely. She doesn’t cry. Not at first, anyway. Not until she finds the palomino girl Jaune. The tears come then and grow increasingly in number when she finds Gris. The grizzled grey lies awkwardly against a stunted tree, like she’d tried to climb it as the last dregs of life drained from her. Her mouth droops open, her wrinkled muzzle touching one of her lifted legs. Jaide imagines she was yelling at some unknown adversary, a stubborn lady to the end. She stumbles as she leaves Gris’s side; her grief nearly prevents her from finding more reasons for it – of course there is more.
She can make out Alpha’s tawny form in the distance through her tears, but she doesn’t go to him. They’d had enough trouble getting along in life for her to know what to say at his death. She is numb, but not enough to forget Noir. He isn’t among the lumps, isn’t scattered like so many fallen leaves in the field. She walks and looks and screams his name until she is hoarse. Her voice is the only sound on the mountain (and perhaps, in the world) and it feels almost like sacrilege. Who is she to disturb their rest? That’s all they are doing, she reassures herself. They’re just sleeping, just slumbering away until a better day.
She doesn’t really believe it until she sees him. Noir. The black colt lies on the trail alongside the mountain spring. His torso and hindquarters are on the path, but his head is in the water, gently bobbing with the flow. It runs over his face, makes a dark halo of his hair as it flows over him. His brown eyes stare without direction towards the surface, wide and scared – accusing, even. As if it was her fault that he’d died without a friend in the world. She can’t stand the look. She can’t stand the way his eyes look like a fish’s when they’d been so full of life and curiosity before. She jumps into the freezing water immediately, tugging at his mane and pulling his face from the shallow stream and onto the bank. Jaide stands unmoving, her gaze fixated on the body for hours. She doesn’t know what to do. It isn’t supposed to happen like this; he had been meant to live. The words she’d spoken to him that first night echo in her mind, echo in the air around her when she repeats: “I’ll keep you safe. You are still Noir and always will be.” Something breaks inside of her when he doesn’t respond.
She doesn’t leave him for days. Sometimes she forgets to drink upstream from where his body had polluted the water. She remembers, after, but wonders if it even matters (wonders if she even matters). Loss pulls her guts into her throat; she would vomit if she was able to. The urge is there but she can’t. Her esophagus knots itself into a hard ball instead. It makes breathing difficult (she gasps sometimes when she forgets to breath) and eating impossible, so she doesn’t. The grass is coarse here, anyway. Surely the meadows are still growing. There is nobody else to compete with for resources, not now, but she is loath to return to the bodies at first. Besides, she has Noir to look out for.
Jaide grooms him and cares for him as if he were still alive that first week. She pulls the debris from his mane and tail, straightens each strand, and tucks his head into his chest at night. “We will be fine,” she tells him as she kisses his brow one evening, “soon we’ll find a new meadow to call our own.” The blue girl stops drinking (or forgets) a day later. Her mouth is already so parched, but she notices something else, too. “You ought to take better care of yourself, Noir. You’re starting to smell. We’re right by the water, for heaven’s sake.”
The vultures are drawn in by the smell. Six of them come at a time; she counts them every time, not understanding what they want. She’d grown up with the friendly macaws of the Jungle; she imagines these birds are simply looking for company. “One, two.” Their red heads are like a beacon as they land gracefully in the small mountain trees. “Three, four, five.” Three more land on the ground nearby but not close enough to reach Noir’s body. They look, though. “ Where are you, six?” Jaide’s grey eyes finally find the approaching sixth vulture. She can’t help but count. “Six!” She says triumphantly, the only victory she has these days.
Opposite the vultures, the smell eventually drives her away. She doesn’t tell Noir, of course. She doesn’t want to offend him, so before she goes, she tells him, “I’ll be right back. I’ve got to get some food.” Her stomach clenches at the thought of sweet, untouched grass. Her coat is now dull and without shine; her ribs protrude and make her look like a walking cage. She hadn’t minded until that moment – the thought of eating too much for her mind to digest – but now it is a need. She barely misses the sound of flapping wings behind her as she goes.
~
Jaide comes back to the stream feeling better than she has in a long time. Sure, the other bodies had smelled terrible, but the smell had been easy enough to overlook. The grass had been so delicious, so worth the trip that she had put her other losses out of her mind. She can’t even remember their names, now that she thinks about it. “Alone,” she says under her breath, closing in on the stream. “Alone with the flames and Noir.”Noir. She clings to his name as tightly as she can. His name is the mountain, her sanctuary – the only thing she has left. He’s there on the ground ahead of her and she smiles, looking almost ghoulish with her sunken face. But something’s not right. Some of him is there, just not as much of him as there had been before she left for the meadow.
“One,” she says as a crimson-headed vulture flies off, something red hanging from its beak. As she draws near, she sees that the boy – what is his name again? – is gone. His skin is peeled back, ripped from devastating talons and beaks, and his innards are splayed before her. She sees a spongy lung beneath a stark-white rib and looks at it with more fascination than horror. She wonders how it would taste, how it would feel pressed between her teeth. His fish-eye regards her with the same accusation as before, but it’s dimmer in its intensity. “Why am I here?” The corpse doesn’t reply, so she leaves it to the vultures. Six of them, she remembers, starting the count in her head: one, two, three, four, five, six!
The smell of death fades the further she moves across the mountain. It’s tough going with her wasted muscles. She laughs when the rocks trip her and she keeps her balance – another victory to celebrate. She does fall, once. A sharp stone opens a gash on both of her knees. They bleed terribly, and with little thought except her own hunger and thirst, she licks at the blood. The taste of metal (though she’s never experienced it before) fills her mouth, becoming increasingly delightful – a delicacy meant to be treasured. She makes herself bleed in other places, too. Her teeth are flat and dull, but with enough gnawing, she opens fresh wounds across her body. She wonders if she can get to her lungs, wonders if they’ll have the same consistency and softness as moss. “But how will I talk, then?”Oh, she thinks, hearing her voice inside her head. There’s no need for lungs, after all.
She stops talking all together but continues picking away at herself. After a few days on Her Side of the Mountain, the wounds become warm and angry-red. Like the vulture’s heads. One, two, three, four, five, six, she counts her sores, but the numbers exceed half a dozen, and she refuses to count higher. A voice whispers back one day. She thinks it’s one of the birds, because they circle above her now, waiting for her coming demise. It’s almost silent, but it’s there on the ashy breeze. Pick a number. Her thoughts are slow now, her words molasses on her tongue. She doesn’t have time to respond before it asks again, this time louder. ”Pick a number.” She lists them off in her head before reaching the end, her small victory: “Six!”
Upon her first awakening, Nadya had awoken to the overwhelming scent of ash and smoke. Upon the second, all she could smell was blood and the sickly sweet smell of death.
Questions raced through her mind, but the synapses were too slow to fire and she had difficulty processing what was unfolding around her. Had it been another dream? Was she safe now?
The scent of blood only grew stronger.
Nadya came to her senses slowly, and then all at once.
It was not just the scent of blood that had grown overwhelming, but also the taste. She coughed, realizing that the blood and gore had blocked her nostrils and was impeding her airways. The movement caused her to gag at something in her mouth. She fought the impulse to swallow and spit the offending item onto the blood-soaked earth before her. It was only then that the pieces began to click together. A large piece of unquestionably equine flesh lay upon the ground before her. It was then that she registered the screaming - an unpleasant, high pitched screaming that seemed to grow louder with each passing moment.
She turned to find the body of a dead horse blocking her path. The shape was vaguely familiar to her, but that was not what concerned Nadya. It was the others watching her with fear and disgust in their eyes...and they seemed to be approaching her kill. Her kill? she thought, the confusion mounting. A growl erupted from her throat, unable to be contained as others carefully stepped closer. The screaming continued, leading Nadya to more closely examine the body at her feet. It was Cecila. The one who had saved her. She had been butchered.
Nadya was the butcher.
Hilde. You've just made her an orphan.
Somewhere, Nadya felt revulsion in the pit of her stomach. The monster cast off the feeling immediately, replacing it with a sense of euphoria in light of the bloodbath. Involuntarily, she licked her blood-soaked lips. The taste of viscous fluid sent shockwaves through her system and somewhere, something in her mind demanded more.
What have I done? Nayda thought to herself, consumed in her own angst. There was another voice, then. A stronger voice, pushing away the feelings and the consciousness of what was left of Nadya's superego. You have done nothing but survive. They are weak. You are strong. You must feed. NOW. Control was slipping. Another growl rumbled from deep in her chest, shaking her ribcage.
Nadya could see Hilde cowering behind Orleans just beyond the treeline. (Easy prey, the monster encouraged.) Carter stood off to the left with a large paint mare at his right flank. The others lingered just out of sight, but their scent was overwhelming. The blue mare shook violently as she fought the monster that had taken residence within her for control. "Ruuuun," she attempted to hiss between clenched teeth, but she could not be certain if she managed to produce any sort of sound the others would be able to hear.
It was then that many things happened all at once. Hilde attempted to leap forward, towards the body of her disemboweled mother. Orleans stepped in front of Hilde to cut off her progress. Carter assumed a defensive stance in front of the two vulnerable members of his herd.
…and Nadya lost all control against the monster. She hissed and stepped over the body of her once-friend, defending it against her former herd mates. Her conscious can see what was happening, but was no longer in control of her body. The impulse to kill - to feed - was overwhelming.
Inside, she was screaming at them all to run - for Orleans and Hilde to get as far from her as possible - for Carter to take the herd and flee this terrible place. But only monstrous sounds escaped bloodstained lips.
As if a switch was flipped, everything changed in an instant.
She was running and then her teeth were tearing into flesh. She was stripping flesh from bone and crushing ribs beneath her hooves. The paint mare soon lie prone next to Cecila's body. It wasn't a difficult battle, she had been conquered quickly. Carter limped away and regrouped before turning to face her once more. Nadya wasted no time in sinking her teeth into any flesh she could reach. There was no fighting fair with a monster. They struggled, but Nadya did not feel his blows.
The battle ended when she managed to get her teeth around his windpipe, biting down hard and exposing the thin flesh to air - leaving the stallion gasping and pulling the necessary oxygen through a hole in his neck rather than his nostrils. Nadya left him prone on the ground and turned in pursuit of the others. She managed to rake her teeth across Orleans's back and pulled a chunk from Hilde's mane but they escaped through thick trees. Frustrated, the monster returned to her kills - finally landing the killing blow on the large bay stallion by crushing his skull under her hooves.
What a glorious feast it was.
She ate to the point of gluttony before retreating to the ruined, burned-out forest. She could smell the others approaching, and abandoned the bodies. Her surviving consciousness was in turmoil. She had slaughtered her friend, killed two others, attacked the survivors - what had she become? The rational thoughts were fleeting, but excruciating. They ripped through her like lightning and were chased away by the monster as soon as possible. The monster responded in kind with the impulse to destroy.
Many mice and rats lost their lives due to this impulse. The hunting in the deadlands was sparse. There was little that survived the fire. Only vermin. It was enough. For now.
She wondered, in fleeting moments of clarity, if this is what life for mother's monsters was like. Driven entirely by the impulse to feed, to kill. It was a simple existence, really. Uncomplicated by its primitive nature. Had she been cursed to become a member of her mother's other family? The alien creatures she had been abandoned in favor of as a child?
Just as quickly as the clarity would come, it would disappear. Sadness would come, rage would follow. Regret would blossom and just as quickly hunger would eliminate the feeling entirely. It was a hostile environment for thoughts and feelings. It just became easier for Nadya to give into the monster. The regret for what she had done - the true breadth - was just too much to handle. So instead, she gave herself over to the monster when the emotions became too much.
The hunger became overwhelming. Soon it was the only feeling that mattered. The only feeling that was. Hunger. Hunger. Hunger. Nothing else was real.
She foolishly tried to eat grasses to sate the ache but the grasses turned to ash in her mouth. She gagged, spitting the gob of slimy vegetation onto the ground. Movement caught her attention and before her vision could process what she was seeing, she was already moving. In mere moments she was sinking her teeth into tender flesh, pulling away hair and skin and flesh. It was only afterwards that she realized the creature for what it was; a fawn. It made little difference to her. It sated her one and only need.
The hunger persisted. Nadya began to think it was time to return to the herd, but that consciousness was still alive was still trying to rationalize with the monster that it was easier to stay away from what remains of the herd - that meals that do not fight back were preferable to those that do.
However, it was only a matter of time before her resources here ran out. As she made her preparations to return to the upper mountainside, something peculiar happened.
"Pick a number." It was a voice. A different voice. Not the voice that had been tormenting her. Not the voice that lived inside her head. It was not the monster, nor was it her true consciousness. No; this voice had come from somewhere else - it had spoken directly into her mind by an external force. She was certain of this. She knew that she would not find the source of the ghostly voice but it didn't stop her eyes from rolling madly in her skull - jumping around to each and every source of movement surrounding her like a scared animal. There was nothing; she was alone. However, she still felt compelled to answer and before she could think, the number in her head spilled from her bloodied lips.
"Five." Her voice was hoarse and thick with disuse. She hardly recognized it. There was significance to her choice as well. She was the fifth sibling in her family line - the forgotten child. She was the fifth of another kind as well. Her mother surrounded herself with four monsters - four flesh consuming beasts that lay waste to those who cross their path.
Um, all Drow's words are in red. So spoilers, he picked seven.
If this is to end in fire then we should all burn together
Nothing was getting out of here alive.
Drow could still hear the shrieks and moans of the hungry dead, could hear behemoth’s bellow of rage and pain and the sick sound of shredding flesh as he jerked awake, his heart racing, lungs heaving, legs flailing and scrambling for purchase on the landscape of his nightmare. He opened his eyes to the faint light of dawn filtering through the trees, his body shaking from a dream more real than any he’d ever known. Well, any that hadn’t involved the interference of a certain few family members with the gift for walking in dreams. But that had not been his mother’s dreamscape, and little Strange was not so dark in her dreaming. Hadn’t been. Who knew what dreams came to the dead?
Any rush of relief he had felt escaping his newest nightmare vanished into the last whispers of night clinging to the sky as he remembered. The worst of his nightmares was still real. The fire, all his family dead. The end of the world, for all but a ragtag dozen. That part was still real, right? God, he couldn’t even tell anymore, countless nightmares inside nightmares inside dream worlds ending in nightmares, all jumbling together until none of it meant anything anymore.
Maybe he was mad. Maybe this was the darkness that lived inside Dröm’s head, finally come to claim him in Dröm’s absence. But this still felt like the end of the world. Echoes of the fire still tingled in the air, stroking smoky fingers along his skin and setting it to shuddering with the blurry-sharp blend of pain and pleasure he couldn’t sort out anymore. This was danger’s world, and Drow needed to ground himself in it, to sink himself back into the body that kept losing its hold on him. He heaved himself to his feet, his legs still a little too shaky. Took a deep breath of air that still smelled like a world burned beyond the saving even though the fires had died down long ago. And looked around for the man who’d been helping him keep his shit together for the last few weeks.
It was too quiet. Sure, there were only twelve of them left—no, thirteen. Behemoth had not been devoured. It was just the dream. Thirteen. But even thirteen made a little noise, even as they slept. Even thirteen shifted in their sleep, breathed, sighed. Dawn wasn’t a particularly unusual time to hear the old grey and his girl panting and moaning, or the bay’s little bitch crying out in that oh-so-familiar delicious agony alongside bay’s rhythmic grunts and the creepy little toady’s heavy breathing as he watched his master at work. Not that Drow gave a damn what they got up to, even if that tiny little fucker did make his skin crawl. Everyone had their kinks, and if toady’s was watching without touching and it worked for the three of them, well…more power to them. Who was he to criticize?
It was too damn quiet, was the point.
And quiet was never good.
Drow had taken to sleeping alone, a little distance from even danger. He didn’t want to wake up all cozy and happy, wrapped up in a lover’s embrace, only to remember…everything. And he didn’t want to do something stupid like falling in love with yet another someone he was only going to lose. He was done with love. If Zurry hadn’t taught him that, losing Jay had. So no, he wasn’t about to make the extremely stupid mistake of falling asleep next to danger, letting the thud thud, thud thud of his heart start to feel like home in a desolate wasteland. So it took a little searching through the early light of morning before he stumbled across the first body.
Behemoth. Too still, no rise and fall to his massive chest. Drow nudged him, barely registering how cold the chestnut stallion’s body felt as he started to shake. The man wasn’t torn apart and devoured by the hungry dead, but he was still and cold, no breath left in his great lungs. Quiet green eyes clouded over. Just a few feet away, the boys and the wary-eyed girl, twined around each other like lovers crossed by the stars and all unmoving. All still as death, even when he nudged them, even when he shoved them, pushed them, untangled them and pulled them apart just to make them wake up and scream at him for disturbing them. But they didn’t wake. They didn’t scream. No restless spirits shrieked at him for shattering the hold they had on one another.
Sad eyes and green. Cuddled up and cozy nearby, dead in each other’s embrace. He shook them, snarled at them, begged them to get the fuck up, but they didn’t listen. Grey and his lady, coupled up in death just like everybody else, even as he tried so desperately to bring them back. God, he even tried to wake the bay and his bitch and his creepy little toady, all tangled up in each other and all just as dead as everyone else. Cold, so fucking cold, not a mark on them. All just dead.
And danger. Oh god, danger was the only one of them alone, the only one not nestled against a lover, not wrapped up in someone’s embrace. Danger had died alone in the dark, and it was Drow’s fault. He shattered all over again, falling to the ground and pulling his dead lover into him, rocking the dead man’s body as the tears started to fall. If he hadn’t been so fucking stubborn, if he hadn’t been so damn afraid, he could have been there. Could have held him, could have whispered I fucking love you as the light faded from his eyes, could have—done nothing. He could have done not a goddamn thing, because he’d been asleep. But danger wouldn’t have been alone. And maybe whatever had killed everyone else would have taken him too.
But no.
Nothing was getting out of here alive.
He started to laugh, his sobs quickly shifting to hysteria as he rocked back and forth, back and forth, holding his dead lover’s head in his lap. I don’t even know his name. The thought was fleeting, in and out of his mind in an instant, swallowed by the sensation of rocking, of muscles contracting and relaxing, the rhythmic motion and the way danger’s head flopped against Drow’s chest with every repetition. Nothing was getting out of here alive. And no one else.
He stilled. Rested his head on danger’s big, stupid chest and listened to the silence where a heartbeat should have been. And he finally started to understand. Home was in that silence. When home settled into someone’s chest, it chased away the heartbeat. He chased away heartbeats and turned the whole damn world into silence.
He stayed there, listening to the silence of danger’s chest for days. Even as danger’s body bloated and distended, even as he began to decompose, Drow stayed there, holding him and listening, committing the sound to memory. His own muffled heartbeat as blood flowed through the ear that was pressed against danger’s slowly rotting chest, and the profound silence of his dead lover’s heart. Home was in the silence.
And you cause the silence, don’t you, precious?
The voice didn’t come until after the reek of a dozen rotting corpses finally pushed Drow to his feet and set him wandering aimlessly away from the dead. But the moment he walked away, it came to him, devouring the silence with its vicious crooning. You make your home in their chests, little nothing. You take them over and you squash their heartbeats. Every last one, everyone you love, everyone you have ever called home has turned into that silence. You do it to them. Your love does it. Your need, the way it latches onto them, it sucks the life out of them, sucks the beat right out of their hearts, little nothing. Empty little nothing, stealing the lives of those stupid enough to love you. You see it now, don’t you, precious, how you drain them dry? So empty, even draining the whole world dry didn’t fill you up. You were the hungry dead, little nothing. You were the one devouring the living with an insatiable hunger. You’re the one who turned them all into silence. Isn’t it delicious? My precious little nothing, all grown up and taking lives.
It wasn’t always so bad. But there was no one left to drag him back to reality now that he’d killed danger. It wasn’t always the Voice, though. Sometimes it was crimson eyes in a vibrant orange face, all framed in black. Gentle voice, quiet wisdom, and the love of an older brother who had known him from the start. Or mismatched blue and brown with a cheery yellow forelock draping down between, sometimes covering up the brown one and reminding him so much of the sun when she was shining and happy. She’d been shining and happy once. And Xero had a lot of that sunshine in her. He remembered those eyes smiling down at him, her special brand of love and sass and big-sister-cuddles. His very first don’t-hurt-the girl. I miss you. I’m so fucking sorry. Swore my life to protecting you, and look what happened. Never thought I’d fail so badly, sister-mine. Can you ever forgive me?
She would never answer him again.
Fire, he remembered fire. His family was fire, his blood was fire, they all lived to burn. They’d all burned in the end, even the firstborn, the prodigal, the brother whose loss had shattered them and whose return had made them whole again. If only for a moment. The first one he’d turned to when the hurting got out of control. His brother, but his friend almost more than his brother. The one who okay sure, maybe bitched him out when he took things too far (he always took things too far, why did he always take things too far?) but put him back together again without a moment’s hesitation. The one he talked to, the one he turned to for advice, the one he’d thought would always be there, god, what was he going to do without his big brother?
crack
And Dare, he’d failed his daring little sister, let her burn to ash before she could find herself again. Those sad, lost eyes as dark as the midnight sky had been so fearless and alive once, and he’d wanted so badly to watch her find her adventurous little girl self again. God, and Nish. His Nish was gone, burned away in the fire but the fire was his fault always your fault, precious, snuffing them out one by one. Little Strange always knew it, didn’t she? Called you her volcano from the start, told you herself that you’d be the end of them in her cryptic little way. She always saw right through you, always saw so much more than you wanted anyone to see. She knew you’d erupt, and you’d take the whole world with you but it didn’t make sense. The fire was in his blood, but he didn’t wield it, not like the Sun did. Not like Gendry did. His was inside, and it only ever hurt him and everyone who ever loved you, little nothing. Watching it burn you up from the inside tortured them, just like it tortured you to see the Sun burning for so long. You think you were the only one you hurt? Oh, darling. You’re so much bigger than that. So much more devastating.
Silver and brushed gold eyes, framed in black black black that swallowed the world, swallowed the Voice and the memories and all the pain and made everything else quiet. Eyes the mirror of his own, flashing with hunger. Where did you go, Drow? Come back to me. I need you. I need to be inside your skin, need to feel you pressed against me, need the taste of you on my tongue. It’s been so long, and we need to put the halves of us back together. We fit together, Drow, always have, and I need you. Need to touch you. You want someone to hurt you, love? I’ll hurt you so good you’ll beg for more. We killed them all, Drow, it’s just you and me in the whole world. Just like we always wanted. You wanted it too, didn’t you?
Something was wrong in those mismatched eyes, or maybe he was just seeing all the way into them for the first time. Something dark and twisted and broken, and endlessly, ravenously hungry. Drow could feel his touch, could feel the fire waking up inside him, and he gave in. Flashes of the night they’d spent together swam through him, shuffling and rearranging and repeating, repeating, repeating. Lips and teeth and sharp bursts of pain that kindled the fire, stoked it and fanned the flames higher, higher. He didn’t want it, not really. He’d never wanted it to be just the two of them. But they’d never been about want. He and Dröm had only ever been about need. And Dröm had always known when Drow needed him too much to say no.
It was all in his head. It had to be, because they were all dead, even Dröm. But it felt real. Maybe more than ever, now that Drow could see the darkness in his eyes, eyes that flashed black with something more than hunger. Obsession. Possession. This time he understood how fucked up they were. How deeply they were broken. And he did it anyhow.
Because there was nothing else left.
It’s okay, Drodro. Strange’s voice found him in the aftermath, soaking into him as best it could through the burning and the shattering. We love you. Always. But it hurt, when he’d failed them all so badly. It hurt, seeing those blue, blue eyes looking at him with love when he was…when he was Nothing. When he had to be Nothing, because it was the only way to survive them all being gone. She saw that it hurt him worse than danger ever had, worse than Dröm ever could. She saw, and she stayed away. The others came back, flashes of faces he’d loved so ferociously, and it hurt too fucking much to bear. All their eyes, all the colors boring into him, so heavy, stabbing right through his chest and dragging him down, pinning him down to the earth, to the mountain, to wherever he had ended up after he’d left danger’s bloated, rotting corpse in the dirt.
crack
They hurt, god, they hurt, until they flashed black and the pain eased, erasing the weight of his failure. Time passed, though he could only tell it by the way the flesh wasted off his bones. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t stomach the verdant green that had begun to grow back from the ashes of the old world. He couldn’t bear the thought that those plants grew from the remains of his dead loved ones, or might have. He couldn’t eat them, couldn’t take them into his body and turn them into piles of shit steaming in the sun. Not Nish, not Gendry, not Dare. Not Xero, or Hallows, or Dremmy, or Strange. Not Mom. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. So he wasted away, getting lost in the silence and the sounds of their voices, and the sound of the Voice haunting him. It twisted them up together, until the words they said were words they would never have said before he’d killed them all.
They would never. Right?
I don’t know what went wrong with you, Drow. You were such a sweet kid, and you got so fucked up. So twisted. Tearing your face up, all those fights, sleeping with Dröm? How could you do that to your brother? Begging him to hurt you, when you of all people knew how messed up he was? And you put all your self-hate and your violence on Gendry, too, making him patch you back up and keep you from killing yourself when he’d just come home. Too busy breaking yourself to help out with that baby sister you wanted so much, and then look what you did to Nish! That bullshit training, all you ever did was teach him to beat the shit out of you, told him you were toughening him up when all you were doing was hurting him and warping him. You’re a sick fuck, Drow, and I can’t believe I ever called you my brother but Xero would never have said that. She loved him. Didn’t she? God, but how could she when he’d destroyed the whole family like that, ruined everything she’d ever loved. How could she have loved him still, after all that he’d done?
They should have killed him. The Moon should have killed him before he could draw his first breath. They could have killed him. The Sun, or Gendry, or Nish. Any of them could have killed him, why hadn’t they stopped him?
It wasn’t our fucking job to stop you, asshole. Your bullshit creed, family comes first, don’t hurt the girl? It was your fucking job to stop you. But you never could, could you? Couldn’t kill yourself or you’d be just like Her. But you could try. Over and fucking over again, you tried to make something else do the job for you. And every fucking time, Drow. Every. Fucking. Time. You came to me. Begged me to put you back together and fought me the whole damn way, didn’t you? Do you have any idea what you put me through? What you put US through? And that tiger? That was the night Mom died, you selfish son of a bitch. The night she fucking killed herself, and you’re pulling some bullshit stunt trying to prove you can be just like her. God, you never know when to quit, do you? Even now, you can’t fucking quit. Dragging us back from the dead, sinking your sick little claws into our ghosts and making us dance around you but I’m done dancing to your fucked up little tune. I’m done, Drow. Do what you want, I’m not putting you back together again.
Drow fell to his knees as Gendry disappeared, screaming as his brother’s words tore through him., echoing in the silence with more crack, crack, cracks, leaving gaping wounds in his chest that Gendry would never be able to heal from wherever he’d gone. Drow stared in numb horror at the ground, ignoring the way his throat burned raw as if he’d been talking forever, ignoring the way his siblings’ voices didn’t quite sound right, sounded echoed and undercut with gravel.
You were supposed to teach me, Drow. You were supposed to take care of me and look out for me, and set an example. You were supposed to be my role model. I was the baby sister you always wanted, and you were too wrapped up in your own drama to be there for me. You were a terrible brother, Drow. And I loved you anyhow. Gendry was my favorite. Gendry’s always been my favorite. And do you know why? Because he was there, Drow. Because he cared enough to pull his head out of his ass and be there for me. He’s the one who looked out for me. He’s the one who taught me what I needed to know, even if he did teach me the hard way. He kept me safe. Where were you, Drow? Where were you when I needed you? If you’d been there, maybe I’d have lived my life, Drow. Had friends. Lovers. Adventures. I turned into a hermit, alone and terrified of life, and that’s on you. You failed me, Drow. And you can never, ever fix it. I never even lived, and you killed me. His Dare-baby, night-dark eyes full of venom and pain flashing a few shades darker before she disappeared too.
They all disappeared. Nothing was getting out of here alive.
He was Nothing. But he was stuck, anchored to a body that should never have lived. Not when all it left in its wake was devastation. All he had left to hurt himself with were his teeth, and he started in on the ragged holes all their words tore into him. He bit down on the skin of his chest, and as he tore a bit away the pain cleared his mind, drove the ghosts away for a little while. Left them content in his suffering for as long as he was suffering. And because he was so hungry, and because he of all of them deserved to be turned into nothing more than the shit that he should have become around seventeen years ago, he swallowed the mouthful of skin as blood trickled down his chest.
It sat wrong in his stomach, but he was the perfect combination of desperate and apathetic. So he carried on, gradually picking away at his skin and reveling in the hurt, in the quiet trickle of blood, in the nausea and the bile that rose in his throat, and the way the blood crusted on his skin and the wounds turned wrong somehow, turned angry and red and inflamed. Gendry couldn’t heal him now, and wouldn’t if he could. It was right that the parts he left behind as he slowly devoured himself turned putrid and rancid and infected, because it meant he could no longer hide his toxic nature from anyone he met.
Good timing, now that he was the last one on earth.
The infection triggered a fever, and the only reason Drow even noticed was that he started to flash between hot and cold, and he kept shaking, and the world felt a little too wobbly. But still he slowly ate away at himself, offering each bite up to the ghosts of his family to show them how goddamned sorry he was, and how sorry he would be for the rest of his hellish existence.
He was mid-bite when a new voice tickled the inside of his brain. Pick a number. Female? Maybe female, it was a little too quiet to tell. Not soft, not gentle, just quiet. Coarse, sardonic, distant, but with a hint of amusement. The new voice was fire and brimstone and pillars of salt, and once upon a time Drow might have been intrigued. Instead, he just turned dull, mismatched metallic eyes toward the direction he thought the voice was coming from. Pick a number? Fine. Easy. Hallows, Gendry, Xero, Dröm, Dare, Nish, Strange. Seven siblings lost to the fire. “Seven.”
If we don't make it alive, well it's a hell of a good day to die
"No. No. Noooooo!" The steel girl jolted awake limbs thrashing and knocking painfully against stone. Another fucking dream. They were so real, the lines of reality blurred probably by her own small madness. The wolf laughed. Cackling in the recesses of her tortured psyche. Oh girl. As if I would ever listen to you. Ha, that should have given it away right there that this wasn't real. With a snarl, Tyrna straightened herself out and squeezed between the fallen boulders that served as an entrance to her little nook.
She felt like she was in that hazy twilight zone that occurs around midnight, when the bumps in the dark are monsters and everything feels on the cusp of tumbling into madness. Her latest dream lingered on the fringes of her mind. The battle with the undead and the screams of her friend playing on a loop. Her wolf laughs and laughs. The sound of screams like music and the blood and pain a heady wine. This was what it wanted, the pain, the sorrow, the bloodshed. This was why it had followed her home. It reveled in the chaos.
With a snort and a deep breath, Tyrna left the confines of her rocky hideaway and stepped out into the early morning sun into another nightmare.
Everywhere, they were everywhere. The friends she had talked with as the herd bedded down for the night, lay motionless on the ground. Mares that had sought shelter among the boulders as she had, were splayed grotesquely outside the mouths of their caves, and everyone else was still and scattered. Comfortably resting on the ground. They were so still. So, so quiet. Tyrna could hear the breeze whistling through cracks and crevices, and no more. She walked over to the nearest body, legs trembling, eyes losing focus and not truly seeing what was in front of her. "This is another dream, another test", she thought to herself, "surely I will wake any minute and everyone will be right where they were last night." It didn't matter that most of them were as she left them last night, when she woke it would change. It would all change. Tyrna could feel her heart rate speed up, her adrenaline telling her to run but her mind stuck in the realm of disbelief.
Reaching out one shaky hoof, She nudged the corpse before her. It looked so fresh, any minute surely it would wake up and all would be well. The flesh felt cold and heavy. The kind of heavy that hangs and clings to your skin, making you feel tired and worn. She nudged it again, eliciting movement only at the point of contact. All the while the wolf crooned in her ear. Dead, dead, dead. They're all dead. No more moving, no more fighting. Alone, alone, alone. It's you and me love, always be.
Tyrna snarled and screamed, now kicking the limp body hard as she could, willing it to breath. Her strength proved too much for the corpse, and soon, too soon, she was merely smashing bits of bone and eat to a pulp beneath her hooves. Each stamp of her legs causing blood to spray and stain her legs. Only when she had pulverized the body was she convinced it wouldn't get up, so she moved to the next. Her mind blank and numb, retreated to that place of disbelief where everything would eventually get better.
She continued for hours, smashing the corpses to dust in the attempt to wake them up. As the last stroke fell, ironically on Sunny, the girl made of steel fell heavily to her knees and wept. Over and over she heard the screams of her chestnut friend and the shatter of glass. She saw the hope extinguished in the eyes of her child that never was, and paper skin of her soul mate torn and bleeding. She cried and howled, and felt the wolf roiling under her skin ready to break free. She gave up.
The gibbering madness that was always lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment to strike, was set loose. In the face of so much grief and loss she snapped. Legs like a newborns slowly heaved her upright and she walked away. The smell of death and blood, decay, rot, usher her forward into the mountain.
When the herd woke up they would be so mad at her, she knew. It was only a matter of time they would be after her howling for blood for what she had done to them. Butch, Cassidy, Sundance, all of them would list after the chance to rip her throat and watch the life drain from her eyes. They would be angry, so angry. She left them behind, alone in the dark, scattered like crumbs. All this and more she thought to herself as she scrambled up the broken rock and shifting soil of her mountain. It was hers now. She had killed the others and claimed the territory for them. For her and the wolf. The wolf would never leave her, it was her only friend. It always was.
The walk to the other side of the mountain was hard and food was growing scarcer and more repugnant. Oh how the mighty have fallen. As days grew longer, she grew thinner. Her once bright eyes dull and wild. Her moonlight mane tangled and ragged. Her gunmetal hide pocked and stretched tight against sharp ribs. But the wolf was there. Always there, urging her on and laughing at her anguish until the howl became a comfort, it's laughter soothing her.
It whispered such wonderful ideas. When water grew scarce it suggested that she drink her own blood. For surely since it was a liquid it would slake her thirst. When the grass no longer sustained her, It reassured Tyrna that since it are flesh she could as well. Since she was the only flesh around it only made sense that she take a bite. Her legs no longer needed it and it would fill her right up. So she did. The wolf laughed and laughed, encouraging her that she was doing the right thing.
This continued for a week, then she couldn't get up. Infection had started. Her legs torn and flayed, a motley collection of ragged wounds and half healed, pus filled scabs. At last they had simply list the strength to carry the weight of her thoughts.
The wolf came to her then. Solid and smiling. After so long in the confines of her mind it was finally free. Her madness giving it form. The wolf was sleek and plump, feeding of her fears and sorrows. It's coat the color of the midnight sky, dark and glittering with stars. It was born of a god so why shouldn't it look the part?
Oh Tyrna it crooned to her, so sweet and safe, it's voice gaining volume until it was all that was left. Just the voice and the stars. You have done so well, so well, carryingfeedingholding me high in your head. So tell me, pick a number. Pick a number before you feel the bite of my teeth. It smiled at her, so impossibly wide. Wide enough to swallow stars, swallow galaxies, and she grinned back. After all they had been through together she would be happy to lose herself in that smile. "Two I pick two." After all, it had only been those two, the wolf and steel girl, from the beginning.
The victims screams and the tearing of flesh filled the air and chased after their small group. Never before had any of them heard such shrill calls of pain and fear. The smell of death and rot was even worse than before. It grew stronger as they fed and spread out wider, covering more land.
It made them move faster. Each moment that passed, they pushed themselves as hard as they could go, until their hearts were racing so fast their bodies shook and their lungs felt like they were on fire with each and every ragged breath they took. They ran as fast as they could until finally each of them began to slow. First Juliet, then Leiland, and then finally Elliot.
Slowing to a canter, and then a trot, the group finally realized that for now. If only for now.... They were out of harms way. Glances were exchanged as they continued to push forward until they finally caught up with the rest.
In silence they approached, heavy breaths and harsh wheezing the only noise that traced the surrounding air.
Leiland looked over them all and then slowly looked behind him, eyes wide as he looked over the mountains. There was not a trace of the horde in sight, yet he could hear their movement, and feeding echoing across the barren land. And then he realized this is what their life had become... A race to avoid the grisly deaths that many of the rest had already met. And it had only just began.
"We must move," growled in Juliet and Elliot's ears and when they made eye contact he knew they understood. Silently they pushed through the small crowd of others before finally they began to trot and then canter. Their race needed to continue. The break may only have lasted seconds but they needed to lose sight of the mountains, and of everything else.
And then they're running again. Pushing themselves even harder than before. The wind stung their eyes, causing tears to flow down their cheeks before finally one by one they began to drop again.
"Leiland!"
He heard his named shouted as Elijah crumpled to the ground and coming to a stop he turned to look at the Chestnut stallion.
"Leiland we must stop! We are going to run ourselves to death! We need to find food! Water! Anything! But most of all we need rest!" Her anger radiated towards him and it almost made the silver stallion recoil. Ever since he'd met the black mare he hadn't known for her to ever be the angry type even when things were at their worst.
With a cocked brow he stepped towards them, legs shaking as they struggled to hold his weight.
"There is nothing, Juliet. Nothing around here anyway. We will find something. But we must rest first. You are right. We can't continue. Not right now."
With a heavy sigh he looked down at Elliot who had laid down on his side, body outstretched as he wheezed ragged breaths and his chest rose and fell in shaky inconsistency. He had fallen asleep the moment his body had hit the ground.
"Go on Juliet. Lay Down. I will watch over you. If anything happens and we need to move, I will wake you both. I promise."
It took a few moments, but finally Juliet gave him a slight nod before laying next to Elliot and resting against his back. Neck outstretched she laid her head his copper shoulder before quickly falling asleep herself.
As they slept he watched the direction in which they had come, staring out across the land covered in ash and soot, tears rolling down his cheeks. "Elijah, I'm sorry," he whispered into the passing breeze.
Somehow he knew that his friend was still out there. Yet somehow he knew that Elijah was one of those things. He had seen how the bodies of those he loved and the rest had crawled from the earth after the fires had killed them. He had witnessed that bodies reanimated after they died. The stories their parents had told them in order to scare them to do right were finally coming true.
And like he knew the answer to Elijah, he knew that food and water were nowhere to be found. Common sense. That's all it took. To realize that the next weeks were going to be ones full of desperation and suffering.
--------------
Weeks passed and he had been right.
The trio had spent hours of the passing days in search of food and water resorting to chewing the bark off still standing trees. Even though it had been burnt, it helped to satiate their hunger if only for a little while, yet still they grew weaker and more malnourished.
Starving, weak, dying of thirst.
Three pangs that began to dull and become a part of every day life as they all continued to wander aimlessly.
Then it was Elliot who fell first. Knees hit the ground and a soft grunt escaped his lips as he began to allow himself to lay down on the ground. He was done. And he was ready to end this. In honesty he had been done when they were able to escape. The fear had already killed his spirit. And without it he had known then, he wouldn't make it through this. He was weak, and he was ready to admit he couldn't do it.
"Leiland,"
Elliot's voiced whispered quietly towards the silver stallion and with a slow look behind him, Leiland found himself turning unsteadily towards the chestnut. "Elliot, you have to get up. You can't give up." The once muscular stallion, had become a pile of skin and bones. His eyes seemed to bulge from his skull due to the way the skin around them sunk down into his face and every time he shifted or moved in the slightest of ways, you could hear the young man's bones creak and grind against each other. 'Is that what I look like?' The thought danced through Leiland's mind as he desperately looked over Elliot. "Elliot, get up. Please. We're going to find water, and food. It will happen. It can't all be gone. We just got to keep going!"
He tried his hardest to encourage the copper colored stallion the best he could with a crackling voice, worn from the lack of water and misuse.
"I can't! I just can't anymore. I need to lay down! I need to rest! I just want to sle---" suddenly Elliot found himself being cut short by Juliet whose voice shrilly rang towards them.
"OH SHUT UP!" breathing heavily, her sides spread in and out as she breathed heavily. Sweat coated her body in a soft milky foam down her neck and over her shoulders. For the last hour it had been spreading. The heat that had started in her head began to take hold over her body, slowly moving from one end to the other. Her head was splitting and the sound of Elliot's exhausted and weak voice was driving her mad. "Do you ever stop complaining? Jesus Christ, man. You are the most pathetic fucking moron I have ever fucking met!"
Staring at Juliet in shock, Leiland found himself quickly pinning his ears as he glared in her direction. "What the hell is WRONG with you, Juliet?! The man is clearly spent. We are all tired and exhausted. But that doesn't mean you have a right to be a downright ass about it." Snorting shortly he pursed his dry and cracking lips as he stepped towards her, "It's not like you can force him to do anything. You are not the leader here." Turning completely he found himself between Elliot and Juliet, standing over the copper man protectively.
It was her laugh that made Leiland realize something right. It was hysterical, uneven, obnoxiously loud. It was the laugh of someone having a manic episode unable to control their actions. And it was this that made him take a step back, a look of worry passing for only seconds across his features. "Juliet, are you... Are you alright?"
"Of course I'm alright, silly."
Her tone. It had changed. Deepened somehow, almost as though it had began to decay. Her nose was running, her breath became rank. When it had done that he wasn't sure but from atleast five feet away the silver man could smell it's putrid stench float through the air towards him and Elliot whenever she spoke.
That smell was so familiar. One that he knew he'd never forget when it had first reached him all those weeks ago. Every morning it danced across the charred lands of Beqanna being carried from the Horde.
And that's when he realized what was going on. Though at the same time he realized it she started to slink towards Elliot, the smallest of devilish smiles playing across her lips. "I can help you," she cooed to him. "I can make it all go away." Her promises were weak, and even though Elliot was ready to submit to grim reapers grip he wasn't ready to meet him by another's hands and he knew almost instantly what Juliet was wanting to do. "Juliet, no."
Slowly he stretched his front legs out infront of him and struggled to push himself up. Muscles strained, legs shook, but before he could get up he found himself looking up at Juliet as she rose her upper body up into the air and lashed her front hooves out. One met with his face, causing Elliot to let out a hoarse yell of surprise as it widely split open his left cheek, while the other met with his left leg. It was this blow that caused him to scream shrilly as bone broke under hoof. Tears streaming down his face he looked up at Juliet pleadingly "Juliet stop! Please stop!"
He wasn't sure how he did it. One moment she was standing infront of him laughing and the next she was behind him, causing the shrill screams that shook Leiland out of his daze. Looking behind him, he turned around as quickly as he could and found himself stumbling towards Juliet. "What are you doing?! Stop! Juliet, stop!" He shouted before pushing her with his shoulder. Every step he took seemed to have no effect. Somehow her strength was returning, or so it seemed. But he continued to try.
The memories of Elijah being torn apart danced through his mind as he struggled to push Juliet away from Elliot. "Juliet, please stop. This isn't you, stop, please." His voice became more pleading as he tried to push harder, his breathing becoming laboured as he was forced to follow her in the circles she paced around Elliot. He was almost grateful when she stopped to stare at Elliot. For a few fleeting seconds he was convinced she was going to leave him alone until he noticed one thing.
She was staring at Elliot with a hunger unlike he had ever seen anyone wear. "Juliet," and she snapped. Suddenly she was rushing forward, her hindquarters turning and with quick but twitchy movements she kicked Elliot in the head knocking him cold. But it didn't stop there. Slowly she turned. Almost like she was a cat getting to make the final pounce. And before Leiland could make it she reared up just enough for her hooves to come raining down on Elliot's skull. Over and over she did this, occasionally skirting away from leiland inbetween his pleas and desperate attempts to push her away.
And then the laughter turned into screams and she found herself shaking as they passed through her lips. Shrill screaming calls paired with the different blows at different parts of the chestnut's body. And then it happened...
Leiland watched as Juliet, sweet innocent and always optimistic, Juliet, lowered her head down to Elliot's throat. Her lips brushed against the bottom of his neck before suddenly her head twitched and her teeth dug into his throat. With one swift movement she tore the chestnut's esophagus clear out of his throat. With wide and crazed eyes she slowly looked towards Leiland and when they finally made eye contact she smiled before beginning to chew as though nothing she was doing was out of the ordinary.
Pure Horror. Pure Shock.
Two things that could perfectly describe what was going through Leiland's head. He stood there frozen as he watched Juliet eat away at Elliot until finally it seemed as though she grew full, or even at this rate, bored with the meal that lay infront of her. Covered in her victims blood Juliet turned towards Leiland.
Through the haze of the shock, it took him a few moments to realize the black mare was staring at him with dark and unblinking eyes and slowly he took a step back. Deep down he knew there was no outrunning her. There was no escaping. Somehow he was stuck again, desperate, afraid, and alone. Once again, he was without understanding of what to do next.
"Juliet, it's me. It's Leiland. I'm your friend. Don't you remember me?" It was then she began to move towards him. Her body had began the similar twitching of the horde and a gutteral growl came up and slowly passed inbetween her lips as she bared her teeth and creeped towards him.
Taking a step backwards, he used these moments of separation to decide what to do. He knew he didn't have the strength to run. Or the ability to fight back for long. But it would be his best chance, though he knew logically he would most likely die at the hand of the once kind and gentle mare.
It took seconds. She was next to him, her hindquarters turned towards his shoulder and then she bucked. Hooves met bone and skin and with a sharp gasp and grit of the teeth, Leiland fell to his knee before slowly pushing himself back up.
Pacing. Pacing. Pacing.
She seemed to be spinning circles around him before she started to sneak in from behind like the snake she was becoming. And then he kicked... Leiland sent a sharp blow to her chin before trotting away from her quickly. Turning back towards her, he stared at her bulging eyes and then her dry, cracked and swollen lips. He watched as the blood dripped off her chin and he realized with regret and even deeper fear that there was nothing he was going to be able to do. Even after he fought his hardest, she would take him down.
And so he did. He fought against her for those he had lost to rest. But especially for Elijah and Elliot. Rushing forward, he pushed himself to barrel into her chest, and push her aside before turning and giving her a square kick in the chest. With each blow she tried to deliver he did his best to dodge and avoid until finally started taking the hits due to his lack of strength and quick patterns of exhaustion. He was too weak to keep up with her growing strength.
Hit after hit, his body shook.
She directed her blows to his chest, taking the idea from him before chasing him back. Pushing him towards Elliot. Like the copper stallion, she was going to take him too. And so she continued on until finally a sharp blow to the center of his chest caused him to fall down onto his knees and slowly fall over on his side. His body shook and his eyes widened as he looked up at Juliet as she stepped up and stood over him. Her saliva dripped down onto his cheek, and grimacing slightly, he groaned from the pain that shook throughout his body.
Silence once more took over him as he lay there trembling, accepting his fate. Eyes closing slowly he stretched out his chin before she rose into the air until the ground began to shake. Eyes opening suddenly, he watched as the earth began to split and disappear from beneath and behind Juliet.
And then it took seconds for him to realize it was all shattering. It had happened quicker than he realized. She hadn't been the only one to be swallowed and spit away into a completely foreign place. When he opened his eyes once more, he looked for her. He searched for Juliet before taking in his surroundings and with a sigh of relief, he realized her far away screeches and screams were the result of her disappearing farther and farther away. Somehow the universe had separated them at just the right moment.
It was now he realized he was basically floating and staring at the most beautiful sights he had ever seen. Constellations, nebulas, large stars... The colors were so bright and beautiful. And for so long he had been devoid of beauty. Beqanna had become a death pit. As he stared in awe at all that surrounded him, he enjoyed the silence, the peace. He wasn't sure if he was dead or alive, but he knew he wasn't sure if he was ready to leave. It was as he felt the peace of this deafeningly quiet place that the voice came to him. 'Pick a number...', it instructed and with calm decision he whispered quietly, "one."
