"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
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
He is not fully grown just yet, but already he stands taller than many his age. Where before he was thin and sickly from his premature winter birth, now he is muscled and powerful from his hunts. Ghaul has traded in his feverish skittering movements for strides that are now fluid and almost feline in their motion. Even his talons have grown impressive enough to leave sizeable tracks that easily identify his path anywhere he goes. That, he thinks, is the mark of a true apex predator – to move without fear of being followed. Who would dare?
(He prays that he is tracked back to his homeland. He burns, forlorn for a challenge.)
The wyrm carries a carcass in his teeth today as he crosses the border into Pangea. Gospel has kept to herself and she never carries the scent of blood or violence on her skin. How long will she last without the flavor of meat across her tongue? Do her teeth not ache when they are not ripping sinewy muscle from blood-stained bone? But she is one of his and so he must provide for her. Ghaul does not know the word for quail but one dangles from his jaws just the same. He likes the sounds they make when they are frightened.
He inhales slowly through his thin nostrils as he searches for the scent of her scales. It’s always more difficult when he’s carrying a kill in his mouth but he manages to sift her out from the other Pangeans with a bit of effort. With his wings curled tightly to his sides to protect him from the winter wind, he alters his course toward the outline of her signature in yellow and reds. Ghaul offers a short croon to her before tossing the limp quail in her direction.
“I don’t like this cold,” he says as a shiver runs fresh down his barbed spine. “Can’t wait to burn it all.”
The demon boy circles to her side and presses his shoulder to hers to leech a bit of her body heat for a while. He does not feel a sort of kinship between them as he does with Clarissa, but he enjoys her company anyway. The chaos in her heart speaks to his own, perhaps.
you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
She thinks of her mother sometimes.
Her beautiful, brilliant mother, miserable with that fool back in Taiga.
Oh, how she delights in knowing that she will never have to lay eyes on him again.
She is bigger now. Stronger, too.
She no longer cuts her tongue on her teeth. She is quite certain that the venom coursing through her now would lay him to ruin. He has not tried to come for her, perhaps because he knows. He knows that she is superior, that she could drain the life out of his eyes without trying now. She thinks about it constantly, dreams about it sometimes. Sinking her teeth into the vulnerable column of his throat. She is a girl obsessed, perhaps she always has been.
Ghaul comes to her one afternoon with a dead thing between his teeth. He drops it at her feet and she wants to turn away. Not because she is delicate but because she is proud and she can hunt on her own, she does not need him. But the scent of blood sets fire to her chest and she takes the bird between her own teeth, her eyes closing briefly as the stench of its fear and its death overwhelm her senses. And then she unhinges her jaw and swallows it whole. She does not thank him when it is gone, merely allows him to settle into the space beside her despite the fact that he reeks of someone else.
They are different now, the both of them, than the first time they met in the forest. Him drenched in his mother’s blood, she drenched in her own. She is not the same impulsive thing she was then. Her actions are deliberate, measured. She does not stink of death or killing because she cleanses herself in the sea. She no longer hisses or spits her disdain, instead swallowing it down and letting it fuel the fire of her hatred. This is what she does now, when she presses her mouth against the peculiar curve of his shoulder and catches the scent of another girl there.
She does not cast him away, though it is her first instinct to do so. Instead, she lifts her head and catches sight of a sickly tree. She nods her head in its direction, unaware or perhaps uncaring that he cannot see it. “Set that on fire first,” she muses. “That will do for now.”
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
He does his best not to think of his parents – of Bible, torn open and bleeding in the snow. He tries not to remember the silhouette of Litotes moving toward the horizon without looking over his shoulder. But in the depth of night when he can find neither Gospel nor Greta, he thinks of them as well as Dawn, all gone beyond these borders. The drake could follow his surrogate mother to the Cove but he does not know how to admit that he is lonesome without her fussing over him. And besides, she deserves a child who is beautiful and soft like her. She has done nothing to warrant an awful thing like him stalking around behind her.
He has learned this much and little else. When he kills, he lets the blood coat his mouth in a crimson mess that taints the stars across his cheekbones. What does he care if the world knows he is a fierce hunter? But perhaps she will share her secrets with him and tell him all about how to lure them close enough that he can hear their pulse through their tender skin. Gospel might even tell him what it’s like to have your prey eating from your palm like a docile lamb just moments before you choke the life from them.
Ghaul watches with delight as the outline of her warmth devours the plump quail whole, feathers and all. His pleasure is evident in the way he smiles with those impressive fangs, glimmering in their crooked rows. She has grown refined while he has grown bolder, more reckless and unconcerned with the intentions of others. Their goals are tawdry baubles next to his. His empire of embers would consume theirs and still be ravenous for it.
The blind monster follows her gaze but he cannot discern her target from its surroundings. Its shape blurs into the other trees just inches above its base. Still, he spreads his wings momentarily to part from her side, inhaling deeply through thin nostrils. He extends his scaled neck and opens his jaws wide to let loose a billowing flame, far greater than the flickering plumes of heat he showed her parents. Despite the cold and the bit of snow gathered on the thin branches, the dry bark catches easily and begins to crackle as it burns. Ghaul watches, excitedly gnashing his teeth as the flames climb up the naked branches of the tree. Now, he can see the thing for what it is.
He turns his head and the ridge of spines down his back glow orange in the reflection of the fire. All those shimmering galaxies across his face and legs seem to dance and rejoice in his first real case of destruction. “Kings will walk gladly into the pyre I will build for them,” he purrs, stepping back closer to her now as his nose searches the fearsome angles of her face to see her expression. “But I’ll save your father for you.”
He croons softly as he thinks of the way an entire kingdom would look, plunged into his flames. Would their screams echo like the quail or would they shriek as they smoldered? His breathing quickens at the thought of it, to see a world painted from only yellows and orange instead of the cool blues and greens he sees now.
ghaul
@[gospel] he's only like. kind of turned on by fire.
She remembers.
Remembers how enamored she had been by him.
How she had delighted in his peculiarity.
How she had shrieked with a dark mirth when he spat flames at her parents.
She had belonged to her parents first, and then to him, and now to no one.
He is still a dark and peculiar thing and there is still a delightful twisting in the center of her chest when he touches her. But she does not need him. She does not need anyone. There is venom where her blood should be, a clenched fist where her heart should be.
There is a shimmering glint of that old delight in her eye as he turns from her, heeds her instruction without hesitation. She touches his hip as the wings and the nostrils flare, watching in muted fascination as he sets the tree – and a few surrounding shrubs – ablaze. Heat rolls off the burning thing in waves and she shifts her focus to his face as he turns to her but does not lift her head. She wonders if she looks like a part of him, her nose pressed firmly against the sharp jut of his hip, wonders if their heat signatures are the same.
She does not lift her head until he turns to face her again and she does so grudgingly, gritting her teeth and flaring her own fine nostrils. He touches her, drags his mouth along the curves of her face, and she jerks back her head, gnashes her teeth. There is nothing in her expression that gives her away, nothing that betrays the saccharine taste of the fantasy. Her father’s throat caught between her clenched teeth, his blood pooling in her mouth.
It is only then that she grins. But it is a faint and far away thing as she turns her gaze back toward the burning tree. “Just think of all of the things that we will accomplish,” she muses, the tone cool, expression passive. The fire casts her, too, in a ghostly glow. “Great things,” she adds, tilts her head, wondering what it might be like to swallow the flame.
we're nursing on a poison that never stung
our teeth and lungs are lined with the scum of it
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
He does not know quite yet if he likes this Gospel who commands him or doesn’t melt into his embrace anymore. There is something that keeps him in her orbit, of course, and perhaps that is because he likes the way she dances just beyond his reach now. She gave him a sample of her submission and her devotion and now she has ripped it from him without any hesitation at all. When she places her lips to his rough scales, he does not initially turn back to see her. When he does, however, the blur of red that forms their outlines conjoins into a single entity. They are one in their ravenous lust for chaos.
Before the fire, they are one beast with many names.
His lips curl into a feral grin as a strange purring-hiss escapes his throat. When she pulls back from his touch, he briefly lunges his head forward to catch her with his teeth. But instead he pauses there with the awful edges of his teeth to her skin. Ghaul tolerates defiance but only to a degree. Everything in him wants to snap her legs between his teeth for rejecting his gentle touch. Still, she is more entertaining to him alive than dead. That strange noise echoes from his lungs again before he pulls his fangs from her throat.
“How will we drink of glory when you deny me?” he whispers against her skin. His lips trace down to her shoulder where he finds another patch of scales not so coarse as his own. She is a sleek, refined predator while he is loud and brash – two sides of the same blood-stained coin. “We are unified or we are doomed.”
The stars across the high points of his cheeks glimmer as he lifts his head from her shoulder. Ghaul has always been hungry for another’s warmth, though that is all he has ever desired thus far. His touch is chaste, gentle despite his bruised ego when his chest presses to hers so lightly. She is his first friend and he holds her above most others for both her strength and her loyalty. The dragon prince listens patiently for her reply as he tries not to focus quite so much on the pulse thrumming in her veins.
