"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
Dusk coaxes me to the forest. I tremble with excitement to dance naked under the moon's silver eye. The blue of my skin practically glows as I seem to float like a white haired ghost. I consider tossing aside the dead trees, so I may clear a path but instead I weave between them on nearly silent feet.
Not many creatures dare to seek the heart of the forest. But I do not fear...am unable to fear. I allow the suffocation of musty leaves to fill my throat, the scratch of thorns to tug at my tail and press down the length of my precious ribs.
The sound of vermin reach my ears. They scurry away on dirty claws and shifting eyes.
Run away, little beasts, run.
But then the scent reaches me. One not much unlike myself but equine and masculine. It tangles on the clean, cold air. Pollution. Smog. Saturation. I know he is out there but I can not see him and so I coax, "Come out, come out, wherever you are." The scale of my voice lifts only the slightest as a smirk suddenly appears upon my dark lips as I bath in the blood of the moon.
Feast must take care in how he moves through the Forest now;
The tip of the longest pinion feather barely scrapes the ground from the one broken wing that juts from the right side of his back. Twigs and thorns both try to catch at the feathers, dirtying them and tearing them loose so that there is a scattering of pale feather-fluff behind him, almost like a trail of breadcrumbs so that he cannot lose his way through the labyrinthine trunks of the trees. But even the wind is against him and blows his trail of feathers away until there is no remainder left of his passage through there, or so the wind thinks because it cannot undo the cloven marks left by his split goat-hooves. So he creeps ever on, slow and steady.
Fixated;
Feast is fixated and his head is a compass that points to a specific direction, except that the colt cannot say if it is further North that he goes or elsewhere. Just forward, towards the sliver of moonlight that begins to pierce the darkness all around him. He is unafraid - the son of the gift-giver and brother to the krampus-prince has nothing to fear, not now. Not from the scurry of dirty pest-paws to the gleam of hunger in predatory eyes; he is unafraid in his strange creep-crawl that serves a slow purpose in getting him there, wherever that is - apparently, towards the singsong chant of “come out, come out, wherever you are.”
It makes him pause, considering;
Come out, the wily feminine voice beckons.
(Beneath the girlish persuasion, there is stony command that intrigues him.)
She ought to be careful whom she calls from up and out of the dark, like him - flat black eyes fixate on her, devoid of fever or interest (except for the faintest spark of it in their empty depths), as the palomino overo steals close and closer yet. “You should be more careful who you conjure up out of the dark,” he cautions, his tone curiously devoid of reprimand or mischief as he circles her, looking over the sky blue points that blend into the black of her skin and end in the pale bits of hair that cascade down her neck and over her rump. She could be pretty, he supposes, if he was given to appreciating beauty but there is nothing beautiful in the plumpness of the living beyond what they can offer as carrion.
(He’d taste her if he could but he lacks Famine’s fangs to devour her by, and has only his grim black stare to kill her by. That and his boyish charm.)
Feast smiles up at her, craning his head to get a better look at her blue-blazed face.
“Looks like the sky rubbed off on you,” he tells her, his eyes more believable in their farce now - they look almost kind, almost.
My eyes witness the way the shadows begrudgingly give up his milk and honey form. He is is soft, delightful. But his voice gives way to something much more sinister.
I feel my lips crack and split into a wide smile. Pretty, innocent, flashing.
"It is you who has heeded. Do you talk to strangers often?" My voice is low, hushed, inanimately close between the golden creature and myself. I feel my jowls creak and ache but I can not swallow the too-wide smile. I watch how the boy child moves. He is slippery smooth and too clean for the grit of Beqanna. Too young to have feasted upon the body's temptations. He is but a lone child away from his mother's breast.
I do not give a fuck.
"You are one of Pollock's." Matter-of-factually. Point blank. Mypale ghost eyes know the bloodline. How could one not? Creamy gold coat, horns, split hooves. "Does you father know you are out after dark talking to strange women in the forest?" I muse with an almost coy glance. The smile has long since eased off of my features. I slip easily into the stoic cloak of my typical nature, curious of his response.
He gives no thought to the fact that he heeded her summons, only that she looks innocent but isn’t. How he knows she is not is a mystery, but something in the too wide smile on her lips might have told him as much.
“Often enough,” he muses, because strangers like her do not scare him.
Little does, really. Sons of the Krampus-king are almost born lacking a sense of fear (though he’s tasted it, suckled painfully from fear’s terrible tit more than he has his own mother’s dried up teat since she cast him and his twin off of it).
“Yes, you know him?”
His black eyes turn up to meet her pale ghost-gaze; he is curious now, as to how she knows the Krampus-king and could so easily pick out his children from all the rest. Feast could have toyed with her and lied - lied that Pollock was not his sire but some other stallion that managed to throw cloven hooves and golden skin. Palominos are plentiful from what he’s seen. Not all of them are Pollock’s strain of gold and goat.
He laughs;
She is being coy and womanly and it has no effect on him. He is likely too much of a colt still to react to her natural feminine charms, so he ignores her look and her curious patience as he answers her. “No, nor do I think he’d care. He has other matters to address than the wanderings of a wayward son.” It occurs to him, that she might be a spy - a gatherer of intelligence and the more she gleans of him and Pollock, the more harm she can do to Pangea, that angry sore of a land that he and others like him, call home.
“What’s it to you if he does or doesn’t know?”
Princes are a hefty coin amongst the realm; this thought occurs to him, a little late, but she looks harmless enough (like he does, like they are not).
