"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
The first words he ever heard, mumbled like a tired prayer against his damp newborn skin as he shivered in the cold. His golden eyes blinked into a morning that was still dark, a day so new it hadn’t even bloomed into sunlight yet. He coughed the fluid from his lungs and staggered up on wobbling, clumsy legs. The flowers beneath him burst open to reveal their beautiful petals as though to welcome him. The grasses grew a little taller and delicately touched his slender ankles like they remembered this soul. Then Glassheart began to kiss him clean so carefully, as though he might break if she loved him too hard.
“Beelzebub. You are my Beelzebub,” she whispered against his ear before pulling him close. Her monster, she didn’t say. But he felt it somewhere in the vacant spaces of his mind that it was true somehow. His heart is still pristine like an altar’s veil but when he closes his eyes, all he can see is blood stains and looming shadows. Something shaped like rage and built from smoke.
This is all he sees as he stands in the meadow, head barely tall enough to see over the grasses that have thrived beneath his careless touch. Vibrant green patches mark his winding path to this point but he doesn’t seem to realize the strangeness of this fact just yet. Beelzebub is beautiful even beneath the sharp angles of his youth but not in the same elegant way his mother and father are. Glassheart walks the way water slips down a window, all effortless grace and sure of every movement. Even her most simple gestures inspire awe within him.
He, meanwhile, is lovely in the way that wolves and jackals are. Their eyes know secrets they dare not breathe. They are animals not to be approached or caressed, much as the gentle curve of their cheeks invites. At best, he and the jackals may be muzzled and commanded, but never loved. Never trusted. When creatures like him come scratching at your door, it’s better to lock it and pretend no one’s home than to invite him in.
His eyes open slowly, glimmering golden as he waits.
The world can be a cruel place to such special creatures as herself. Her father had made sure to explain as much to her and she had listened with rapt attention. From the day she was born she was coddled and doted upon, for she was indeed something of a gem in her parents’ eyes. She is her mother’s firstborn child and her father’s first child in many years. Of course, Citadelle does not understand this - all she cares about is the looks of awe and admiration they gave her. They would lip her short forelock and praise her for nothing and her heart would swell as she beamed proudly back at them.
Such overconfidence is not exactly safe for children to handle, but that fact seemed far beyond the care of her parents and Citadelle certainly isn’t about to ruin a good thing. She already knows that she can get away with most anything she wants, which is why she is now wandering away toward the Meadow. She’d awoken with a sense of adventure and leaving her parents behind had been a simple task.
She wants to bring flowers back to them, maybe to braid into her father’s hair. She plucks blooms in purple and blue with yellows jjust for accents, and then some others for her mother as well. Her mother has red hair, so she chooses pink and white flowers, meticulously clipping and bunching the flowers with precision. She feels that she has gathered as many as she can find in the Meadow, for there were only a select few of each color that she sought… But then!
Then a rustle and a quiet little clutter of soft hooves breaks past her only a few feet from her nose. The colt runs perpendicular to her and continues on, but right before her eyes there are dozens more blossoms for her to gather.
Rather than hurry to her task, she draws back and blinks in awe, somewhat stunned, before she alters her course. She avoids stepping on the freshly born flowers but keeps her small bouquet in her mouth as she follows the trail that the other foal had left.
When she reaches him, she dips her head to settle the flowers she’d already gathered into a small bunch before she prances around to face the stranger. “Hey!” she bleats in a soft-yet-shrill voice, bright red ears perked forward and a slight frown on her face. Her expression is curious though, not angry. “How’d you do that?” she demands, gesturing toward the little haven of bright green grass and flowers that Beelzebub had left in his wake. “I want to know how to do that!” she adds with admiration.
He turns his head slowly, slowly when he hears a stranger call out in his direction. He has seen other children but he has no siblings that he is aware of and there are none in the wilderness where he and Glassheart wander. Beelzebub watches her with wide golden eyes as she questions him but his attention quickly drifts to the already wilting bouquet between her little hooves. More demands, more of her child-voice filling his ears but he’s only interested in the little colorful bundle on the ground when he steps closer. A brief touch of his lips forces the flowers’ petal to burst back into life as they form new roots that weave down into the dirt at his insistence.
He didn’t mean to, but now the bouquet is planted once more. Beelzebub blinks curiously as the grass around his legs slowly grows up high enough to tickle his chin until he lifts his head. He envies her horn but his eyes remain simple golden voids as he stares at her. Beelzebub keeps all his thoughts in the furthest recesses of his mind so his expression betrays not a single emotion.
Still, little amber scales begin to form along his spine as the jealousy takes root. A little ridge of thorns become vaguely pronounced but he doesn’t seem to notice or care as he just continues on with that soulless face.
“What’s your name?” he finally asks, dismissing all of her own questions without a second thought. “Mine is Beelzebub. My mom calls me Bub, or sometimes Bee.”
The scales slowly spread up his thin baby-shoulders and onto his cheeks, glimmering and pearlescent in the summer sun. If it hurts or itches him at all then he certainly shows no sign of it. His attention remains entirely focused on studying her face while he waits for her to speak. A shadowy thought brushes its fingers through his mind and infects his innocent imaginings. I could break off her horn. Then neither of us would have it. That would be more fair.
His little teeth clack together at the idea of gripping her little horn between them but he says nothing on the matter.
If she had known the potential danger she had just arrived upon, she may have avoided interaction with the colt. Her parents had not quite taught her how cruel the world could be. Her mother, young as she was, had given her little to go by. Her father, in his old and supposedly “wizened” age had left him oblivious. Everclear may have experienced plenty of strange cruelties on his own, he did not imprint an instance of it on his youngest daughter.
Instead, he doted upon her. Citadelle felt like a princess, as if she were the one upon all the eyes would fall upon.
And yet… here is this young colt. He is just the same age as she, and he stares at her with a fixation that she expects and so for a moment she prances and flaunts….until she realizes there is a silence around them after she demands her answers. The birds chirp, the quieter daylight bugs chirp and hiss around them and then the colorful colt reaches forward towards her. Did he think he was going to touch her? She takes a small jolt backwards, alarmed, watching as he reaches his nose toward the flowers at her feet.
Those were her flowers!
“Hey!” She snaps again, nearly biting toward his nose except she stops abruptly with her little mouth agape near his nose. Her pale green eyes are trained instead upon the flowers that are now rooting back into the ground in front of her small hooves, trapped in wonder.
“What did you….?” She stops once her eyes have taken in the newer appearance of the colt, the shimmery scales, the rest of his words.
“My name doesn’t matter to you!” She stamps her little feet once, twice, three times. “Why did you take my flowers back?” She snorts. “Those were for my mother,” she lies.
“You’re mean, do you know that?” She scowls at him and turns a little, an instinctive effort to make herself seem a little bigger than him. “My mother and father would never let you do anything to me, Bub.”
Her horn is small, but it still bears the small carved pattern of a whittled spear, and she glares at him with a smirk and a pale green gaze, hooves prancing. “I want my flowers back.”
He doesn’t mean to let his fangs show when she snaps at him, demanding her flowers back as she stomps her soft hooves on the ground. For her mother? He cocks his head, eyes a little too wide as the tip of his tongue searches the pointed tips of his teeth for answers. He’s mean, she says. Beelzebub snorts softly at the insult and lets it roll off his skin like rain. Her parents treat him like a princess but his mother treats him much differently. She shows him how to hunt and where to bite his prey when they fall. He falls asleep counting her glimmering teeth in the moonlight and warms himself against the fire in her breast.
“Are your parents here?” he asks, scales rising up over his skin and the faintest trails of smoke curling from his nostrils as he watches her. His golden eyes roam her face as though she were some new strange food than a little girl and potential friend. “In fact, I don’t think anyone is here to stop me.”
He steps closer as the scales cover the last few inches of skin on his face and the innocent, round pupils of his eyes turn to paper thin slits. His breath blurs and disrupts the air around his mouth as it creates little heatwaves.
“You should learn when to shut your mouth, otherwise someone might rip out your tongue.”
His teeth clack together to emphasize his words, kicking up little sparks as he speaks. Then he steps back, watching her with those gleaming golden eyes.
