"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
No matter what she does, no matter how hard she tries, she always comes last in her family. She’d started off so well - been the most gifted of the family’s girls (and the youngest), had been the apple of her mother and father’s eye …
And then the faeries had stripped everything away, and Lumi had run into that magician, and Scholar, Hope and Fox had been born …
And everything had just fucking compounded.
She’d at least gained one good thing out of the whole deal, that being that, while the faeries had taken away her snowman shifting, they’d replaced it temporarily with a beautiful set of feathered wings. Rather more helpful than what she used to have, she has to admit.
But everything else had rather gone to shit. Lumi had run away to a Nerine after making a deal with a magician. Mother had started hounding her every fucking move, and Father had started ignoring her (spending more time with Scholar, Hope and Fox, the little shits), and she just has no interest in dealing with it any more. She’s just done with them all.
And she knows exactly where to go.
She’s heard the stories, of course, of the wasteland far off to the west. She’d heard that it was created by a dark god who’d then ruled it for a time, and that he’d eventually passed on the crown to a horned, bloodthirsty demon. Just the right sort of place for making unjust parents regret their actions.
She’s not disappointed in her choice when she reaches the border. The valley spread out below her is a vast, twisted canyon, all cracked grey earth and dead vegetation. The only signs of life are a few patches of green at the rivers edge, and a few sets of hoofprints that trail out before her into the valley below. Perfectly ominous - the exact sort of place a loving and caring pair of parents would want their ‘precious’ baby girl to avoid.
“HEY!” She yells out across the valley, her voice reverberating off the canyon sides as she begins to descend. She knows there are other horses here, the hoofprints she’s now following only confirm it. The only question is who. “ANYONE THERE?”
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
It had been a lovely day.
Okay, it had been a mediocre day.
It was cold as hell and Rhae had wandered off to who knows where, leaving Bruise to worry faintly that he had never paid much attention to her IQ. Was she stupid enough to fall off a cliff? He frowned. He didn’t think so, but then again, she also accepted his 180 personality turnaround without much of resistance so he couldn’t really be sure whether she was just gullible or straight-up unintelligent. Not that he worried overmuch what happened to her, but she was a fun past time—and more, importantly, she was his. If anyone was going to off her, it was going to be him. He’d be in a foul mood if that was taken from him.
Irritated, he walked down a slope he’d been standing on, his attention stolen when he heard the shrieking. His dark ears pinned back to his head and he whipped around, looking for the source of the godforsaken noise. When he saw her, making her way down the path, screaming her head off, he quickly made his way toward her. It was, of course, a faster route for him than others, thanks both to his cloven hooves and his alien speed, but he still made short order of it, coming to hear just moments after she screamed.
“For the love of everything holy, shut up,” he snarled, inches from her face. “There are obviously people here. We just don’t come to heel when young brats come calling. We are not your pets.” His handsome face was distorted with annoyance and he considered pulling the Fear that danced over her head.
He refrained, for the moment. He wanted to see whether she could be brought to heel with a tongue-lashing—although, of course, he would always call upon it should she prove stubborn. Instead, he just fixed her with his flat gaze, wondering if she’d say anything else or if she was only capable of shrieking.
03-13-2017, 11:47 PM (This post was last modified: 03-13-2017, 11:48 PM by Taiga.)
She can’t help but wonder what her parents will do when they discover where she’s gone. Will they follow her here, track her down and try to impress upon her the ‘seriousness’ of her choices? Will they perhaps try to recruit her sister to convince her home (fat chance of that)? Or will they even try to physically force her back to Tephra?
She can just see it … Mother begging her to come home, Father trying to warn her about some of the ‘unsavoury’ characters living here …
She’ll laugh at them then, laugh right in their faces. They should have paid attention to her when they’d had the chance. And if they try to resort to physical force … well, she doubts the inhabitants of Pangea will take kindly to someone trying to throw their weight around here.
Her revenge fantasies are interrupted by the abrupt appearance of a silver tipped horned stallion. Her pleased expression turns to one of scorn in mere seconds. She flares her wings and snaps her teeth at him (refraining, for the moment, from actually making contact). “Shut up yourself jackass!” She had expected the members of Pangea to be, well, a little more coarse, but this is just ridiculous. Here she is, willing to add to their numbers, and he’s about ready to snap her bloody head off for it. “And who the fuck are you calling a ‘young’ brat?! You look the same age as me, if not younger dipshit!”
Her ears pin back to her chestnut head, and her foreleg paws at the rocky ground. Her shoulders roll as she readies her wings for potential flight - not for the first time she’s glad for the replacement. Snowman shifting would be fucking worse than useless in a situation like this. “Now I’ve come to join Pangea. Who should I speak to? Cuz it clearly ain't you.”
Taiga
frosty the snowman was a jolly happy soul …
Surprisingly, despite her immaturity, Taiga is actually older than Bruise, lolol. Not by much though.
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
He laughs when she snaps, when she flares her wings as if he could possibly ever be afraid of feathery appendages, as if he could fear at all. The sound is hollow and cutting, slicing across hit tongue and into the bitter air between them. “Your mouth will get you killed here,” is all he says, sooty ears pinning back against his skull. “Especially when you waltz into a land and talk to the prince with a peasant’s tongue.”
It is amusing, at best, and annoying, at worse, but at least the girl has some bite.
Bite but no manners.
Manners could be taught though. They could be wrenched from a mouth, knees broken until she kneeled. Bruise does not often like to take on projects, but he supposes, watching her, fury like magma rising in her, that he can make an exception. It has been a while since he has done charity work; it has been a while since he has bothered to try—to mold clay between experienced palms, working it into something new.
Casually, his fingers drum up the sides of the Fear, tasting the waters, testing her boundaries. Was Fear a companion she knew well? Was it a stranger she tried to ignore? He watches her with flat shark eyes, studying the lines of her, watching for a reaction, his mind reaching forward, eager for a drop of it. He pulls a little harder, weaving in and out of it, the needles clicking and flashing as he begins the tapestry.
Subtle though—easy. He just wants a fluttering of fear, the smallest taste of dread.
Terror can come later. Horror can be for dessert.
“You can talk to me and be grateful for it,” his voice is deadly calm, serrated along the edges. “My name is Bruise, Prince of Pangea.” He looks every inch of it, arrogant, powerful, his heavy horns a crown upon his skull. “We do not just accept every piece of trash that blows across our borders so if you want to have a chance of living here, you’ll learn to say please.” And then he pulls the Fear just a little harder.
He laughs in her face, like she’s some foolish child having a tantrum, and her blood begins to boil. “Well la-di-fucking-dah.” Seriously, he’s going to fucking threaten her? And he has the gall to call her a brat?!
Then it’s her turn to laugh. “Seriously? You’re the prince? Hah!” She breaks into peals of tinkling laughter. “Too bad it’s a title that doesn’t mean much. Means your Daddy’s important, not you!” What a joke!
Now, Taiga has never been afraid a day in her life. From the moment of her birth, she’s never had reason to be afraid. Her days have been spent within the close protective circle of her family, first in the Tundra, then later on in Tephra. Her parents and even siblings have kept her close, and kept her safe. In her relatively short life, the most extreme emotion she’s ever had reason to experience is anger, and that anger had been born of jealousy and frustration, rather than fear.
So when Bruise first reaches out with his thin tendrils of fear, she doesn’t recognize the emotion. Through the haze of anger she realizes that she’s suddenly starting to feel a little more uncomfortable, but she doesn’t connect it with the emotion. Not yet.
She sneers at him openly as he announces his name and tells her, no orders her to say ‘please.’ She’s half tempted to walk away and not put up with this bullshit, but she can’t back down, not now. Not when she’s so close. “Taiga. And you can f-”
And then her stomach seizes in an iron grip. She shifts on the spot, confused and inexplicably nervous. She’s had her emotions manipulated before - her father can induce happiness after all - but she’s so unused to the emotion of fear that she doesn’t yet recognize it for what it is. She wants to hide all of sudden, get away from this asshole, but sheer stubborn pigheadedness keeps her hooves fastened to the blasted earth. “What the fuck?” She mutters under her breath. Is she sick or something?!
I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin (and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
Her laughter, her words—they roll off of him and he shrugs it off. He wasn’t powerful because he was a Prince. It was just a title. Certainly one that he enjoyed throwing down when he felt like it, but none of his pride was rooted in it. He hadn’t even known Pollock was going to lift him up as an Architect of the land, and while he was certainly pleased to have been given a favored spot by his father’s side he knew that it was a temporary one. Bruise did not anticipate living here forever. He didn’t need to for what he wanted.
Instead, he power comes from the very thing that chokes her words in her throat—
That very thing he can feel coil around her belly now, a snake squeezing and squeezing.
His smile grows, colder and flatter on his face as he pulls on it further. “At least you have a little bite to you,” he murmurs, even as he concentrates on manipulating the Fear, moving on from the minor fear to the terror, the horror. He didn’t want her to feel just the soft brushing of it; he wanted her to feel the very root of it, the cold, belly of the beast unfolding within her. He was almost never this aggressive with it, but she had annoyed him and so he pulls deftly on the threads of it, bringing wave upon wave over her.
Were she susceptible to it, the landscape around her would change, morphing to his whims—the cliffs around them growing taller, the sound of voices nearby growing muffled and then disappearing. He himself also changes in this illusion, growing larger, spine cracking and stretching, his jaw distorting to reveal jagged teeth, gore and spittle flooding between the spaces. He becomes a monster as he stares down at her, black eyes hard and unreadable, never relenting on the threads of the Fear, never stopping—
Not until she respected the land, even if it was just a little.
Not by much though.