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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    someone else's gain will be my loss, ghaul
    #1
    gospel
    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 should not be here.
    She can still hear her mother calling for her.
    She imagines her mother choking on her panic, summoning her father, searching for her in the fog.

    Perhaps it is because she is half-monster that she feels no fear as she surges through the darkness. Still, she catches her tongue on her fanged teeth and bleeds heavy into the pool of her mouth. She grins and blood drips down her chin. Maybe her mother will smell her and come to collect her, drag her back into the shadows of the redwoods.

    She is clumsy still, young. The muscles quiver and her skin, covered in so many scales, shudders with them. She is tired by the time she reaches the forest at the edge of the meadow. She is perhaps too young to be so proud, but there is a haughtiness to her as she plunges through the underbrush, impervious to the thorns that scratch at her sides. She thinks herself invincible with the way she can hiss and spit, the blood that drips from her chin.

    It is not yet dark, but the light is as murky here as it is in Taiga. She has no control over the way her vision shifts from that of a normal horse to that of a serpent, so that forms take shape in brilliant colors in the shadows that surround her.

    Even still, she smells him before she sees him. He reeks of blood, too. And she grins that bloody grin and moves quietly through the shadows toward him. When she is close enough, her vision shifts back to that of a horse and she sees then that he has no eyes. Instead, horns curl away from his skull and she cannot tell if she is repulsed or delighted by the strangeness of him.

    Her steps shake with the effort it takes to keep quiet until she is upon him and she touches her scaled nose against his shoulder, hisses, “boo.




    @[ghaul]
    Reply
    #2

    do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?

    This world is not like the dream he was shown when he was still safely curled in his mother’s belly. Everything is a blur of red, orange, and blue. The winter makes the ground nearly black and he grits his teeth at the sight of it as he stumbles around in the cold. His little leathery wings curl tight to his golden sides as he shivers against the wind that ruffles the tiny ridge of fuzz that is his mane. Does he hate this world? He thinks so. Ghaul has not learned the word for it, but this existence summons bile in the back of his throat. Or maybe it’s the liquid he uses to breathe fire? He doesn’t know for certain just yet.

    He hears tiny hooves crunching in the snow and so he swivels one little ear in her direction before turning his body to meet her. The boy is still clumsy and his talons nearly slip in the slush of snow but he manages to stay upright even as she nudges him with her nose. It feels strange, a hint of warmth against armored scales. But it is warmth all the same and he is ravenous for it.

    Ghaul skitters closer and curls his body to hers to leech off some of the body heat rolling off of her in little orange waves. The fledgling croons, pleased to have found something to give him a moment of repose from the chill.

    Boo,” he parrots, crocodile teeth showing between star-dusted lips. He doesn’t notice the way his mother’s blood smears across Gospel’s torso and coats her in his stench. In fact, he’s quite surprised she doesn’t already have the same stink of a vile baptism on her. The draconic child leans in and sniffs at her face curiously, bumping his nose to her cheek on accident as he examines her. She is the first living thing he has come across and he seems eager to learn all he can about his own kind.

    The texture of her skin is somewhat like his, he notes, though her scales seem softer and more flexible. Ghaul traces his nose along her neck and shoulder like an overzealous dog until he finds a patch of fuzz that makes up her normal coat. He snorts, surprised at how it tickles at his nose and lips. Does he also have fluff like this? He tilts his head curiously and emits a soft gibbering sort of sound as he thinks before pressing his nose to her skin again.

    ghaul

    @[gospel]
    Reply
    #3
    gospel
    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.

    He does not recoil in the way she’d hoped he might.
    He does not gasp or shriek.
    Instead, as if spurred by some shockwave, he surges closer.

    He fits himself so neatly into the space around her that she is overwhelmed by the stench of blood. Her head swims with it as he drags his mouth down the length of her side, streaking her with his warpaint.

    How bizarre, she thinks, such a terrifying and fascinating combination of things he is. He touches her, curls himself around her, but it does not occur to her to be afraid. Because she can taste the venom when she catches her tongue on her fanged teeth and she knows that one day she will be lethal.

    But he touches her face, if only by accident, and she rears back her head. She hisses and spits her warning. She gnashes her teeth but makes no effort to cast herself out of this tiny circle of heat where he presses himself so close to him that she can smell him underneath the metallic smell of all that blood. It makes her think of how she’d sunk her teeth into her father’s shoulder and swallowed that mouthful of blood, delighted in the way it tasted like hers, too.

    She reaches out then, touches her mouth to his shoulder and exhales a sharp breath. Her mouth comes away bloody and she tentatively licks her lips, swallows down this foreign blood and narrows her gaze. She considers licking him clean, taking all of that blood into her own belly. To purify him.

    What did you do?” she whisper-hisses, giddy.

    Reply
    #4

    do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?

    He can’t see her fangs or the expression of her face, but he again mimics her and pulls his head back as well. His lips curl into something like a smile, little baby crocodile teeth glimmering jagged and uneven as the sound of her hiss. The sound is breathy and angry; makes him skitter back a step with his head tilted curiously. Ghaul returns her hiss, though his is soft and more of a test than anything. The sound lacks the ferocity of hers entirely though it ebbs into a delighted laugh. He’s learning so much so quickly.

    The little fledgling remains still as she reaches out and touches her lips to his blood-caked scales. Her breath is hot and reminds him why he was so drawn to her angry red outline against the navy blues of the snow. A shiver tiptoes up his spine before he curls himself to her side again. His leathery wings flap eagerly before folding contentedly along his small back once more. But her question extinguishes the happiness thriving within him. What did he.. do..?

    A short questioning croon leaves the back of his throat as he watches the red blotch of her head. “I did.. what I had to,” he replies, voice raspy and still soaked in amniotic fluid. He coughs and sends a spattering of all the blood and afterbirth toward her. The red peppers the snow but he doesn’t seem to notice or mind. His tongue snakes from his mouth and tastes the copper coating his lips as he thinks over her question. Did she assume he did something horrible to look this way? Should he have perished there in his mother’s womb instead?

    No, he tells himself. Ripping her apart was certainly the correct path. A mother would want her child to thrive at any cost, even if that meant sacrificing her life for him. Perhaps she knew her child would be great, he thinks as a smile creeps across his small starry face.

    What.. are you called?” he asks, reaching out to touch the fuzz of her mane with his lips. The hairs are a blur of burnt orange to him, a curious thing in a world so new.

    ghaul

    @[gospel]
    Reply
    #5
    gospel
    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 should gnash her teeth.
    She should rail against the sound he rips out of her mouth, takes into his own.
    But the sound is thin, the tongue clumsy.
    And she does not shriek her disdain.
    Instead, she laughs.

    The sound of it catches her by surprise. It injects a certain effervescence into her veins and her eyes – bright green and slitted – glow with delight. She wants to keep him. Wants to curl him around her and make her reek of death, too. They are both bathed in blood and he leaves his on her tiny side and she leaves hers on his shoulder. A brand.

    She swallows her giggle. Tries to loath him for coaxing it out of her. She wants to hate him the same way she hates her father. She wants to want to sink her teeth into him. But he is strange and magnificent and he’s made her laugh for the first time in her short life. It feels like weakness but it makes her dizzy, too.

    But her delight evaporates just as suddenly as it had wedged itself into the space beside her heart when he flaps his wings and a chill steals down the length of her spine. She exhales a warning hiss before the wings settle and the two strange children stand there in the forest and siphon warmth from the surface of each other’s skin.

    He’d done what he’d had to do, he says and she does not understand what this means. She grits her teeth and recoils as he coughs. Coughs up whatever filth had lived in his lungs. She snaps her teeth, because this filth is different – a thick mucus that rouses disgust at the very center of her. She watches him taste his own blood and feels some great thing shudder in the pit of her stomach. This is not disgust, not even a distant cousin of it. It is hunger, maybe and she cuts her tongue on her teeth so that she can swallow down that same iron taste, too.

    He smiles but she is not privy to his thoughts. She knows naught of what inspires it and she feels no immediate inclination to ask. Instead, she folds herself against him again. “Gospel,” she says, remembers her mother calling the name as she’d stolen into the forest and raced through the snow in search of something more worthy of her time.

    Did you kill your mother?” she asks and thinks of her own mother. So beautiful, fearsome. How she could never kill her, could never even find it in herself to want to.

    Reply
    #6

    do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?

    She is violence but the undertone of hers is different, fueled by some newborn rage for so many aspects of this world. Ghaul simply hungers because it delights him. The taste of blood – his own blended with his mother’s – gives him a sort of joy he will yearn for the rest of his life. But he could snap her trachea between his awful jaws right now and it wouldn’t give him the same sort of delight. The first kill is the greatest for any true hunter, he will learn. The first wound is just on the horizon though and something in his bones hums, arches for it with an outstretched hand.

    A second hiss reaches his ears and his little black-rimmed ears swivel forward to catch the sound. This time, he simply purrs in reply. The sound of her disgust with him stirs up the same sort of elation that a good joke might. Ghaul shuffles to maintain their bodies pressed to one another, relentless when she tries to squirm from his hacking cough and the phlegm that comes with it.

    He can’t smell the blood on her tongue over the nauseating stench of iron and tissue coating him. Otherwise, the wretched child might try to kiss the taste from her mouth ravenously. Gospel. Ghaul blindly presses his lips to her face, feeling the angles of her cheekbones as they curve up into the corners of her eyes. Did you kill your mother? He pauses, lips against her temple, as he considers the question. He is certain he knows the word ‘mother’. But ‘kill’?

    The young drake thinks back on his dreams, the echoes of the past and the future overlapping as he slept. To kill was to destroy, to slaughter. Did he, then? He exhales slowly over her face.

    Sacrificed,” he answers, shrugging his small shoulders as he dismisses the notion that he simply murdered her. Her death served a divine purpose. “Have you killed?

    Focusing so much on his mother leads his thoughts to drift to his father. Where was he? Was he looking for Ghaul or did he even know he existed yet? When Bible still carried him safely in her belly, he had never heard a male voice nearby. He turns his head and stares off at the swirls of blue and pale green somewhat sadly. The only clue of this emotion brewing within his chest is the faint downturn of the corners of his lips.

    ghaul

    @[gospel]
    Reply
    #7
    gospel
    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’ll know what it means, someday.
    She’ll know what it means to sacrifice.
    She’ll know what it means to bleed.

    But she does not think to wonder what it means now. Because she is fixated on the way he touches her and what a thrill it is to be touched at all. Her mother has touched her, certainly. Even her father has kissed her downy head and made her the edges of her vision strobe with rage. But he is something strange and magnificent and he is stuck to her in a way that makes her skin crawl in such a delicious way that it both confuses and delights her. Because she does not understand what any of it means. All she knows it that her anger tightens a vise around her throat and she finds some perverse satisfaction in this.

    He turns the question on her and she shivers. She remembers how she’d sunk her teeth into her father’s shoulder. She remembers the bitter disappointment when her venom was not enough to take him to her knees. But trying does not count, she knows. Wanting it so badly that it had made her ache does not count. She’ll make good on it someday, she thinks. She’ll destroy him for thinking himself worthy of her mother.

    No,” she says and she feels no shame, no embarrassment. One day, she will. And this knowledge is enough to buoy her.

    He turns his gaze toward the horizon and she follows, pulls back her lip to drag her teeth along the curve of his shoulder. “Ghaul,” she murmurs because he has not told her his name. Because his mother sacrificed herself for him and maybe he doesn’t have one at all. “Ghaul,” she says again, with more conviction, and she giggles.

    And then plunges herself into a stony silence at the sound of bodies crashing through the darkness. Her vision shifts instinctively and she turns her head in the direction of the sound, watching on bated breath as the figures approach. A hiss gathers on her tongue and she sinks even closer still into Ghaul’s side, teeth bared.

    Reply
    #8

    I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher

    She feels nothing but the panic.

    Nothing but that sheer panic that finally bites through everything else—even the jaw-cracking, mind-numbing agony of knowing he would never love her. She knows nothing except the fear that sends her racing through the dark, nearly blind save for her thermal vision, the trees reaching out and scratching against her scaled sides as she continued to catapult herself forward.

    When she finally breaks through the clearing, the moon is bright enough that she can make out the shapes of them. Her vision flickers and then shifts back to normal, and her serpentine eyes narrow on her daughter. She studies her, analyzes her, feeling a sharp pang of fear when she notices the blood on her chin before her head whips to the boy. He is a strange thing and her eyes narrow in instinct.

    “Gospel,” her voice is a whip as it cracks through the air and she doesn’t even have the time to make sure that Beth has followed her here. Another one of her failures. Just stacking up. “What do you think that you are doing?” Her voice is nearly strangled with her relief, with fury, with fear, and she doesn’t know how to dull it—she doesn’t know how she can possibly soften it to react as her mother might.

    Instead she is all angles, all sharp edges—keen and predatory.

    Her voice comes out in a hiss as she finally addresses the boy.

    “Do not touch her,” she bares her fangs although she guesses he cannot see them.

    Still, perhaps he can hear the sound they make as they click together furiously.

    in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire

    Adna
    Reply
    #9

    do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?

    He feels her skin shiver beneath his lips and it reminds him how fragile all the others are compared to him. In his fitful, restless dreams he saw them burn and age and crumble while he remained the same throughout the ceaseless passage of time. Nations will rise and turn to dust before he finally falls. Empires will be forgotten when he begins to gray. The thought soothes him but it is interrupted when she says no, she hasn’t ever killed before.

    The blind boy presses his lips to hers and feels the point of fangs against his delicate skin there. What good are these if she has never tasted life leaving a body? A strange clicking emanates from the back of his throat as he thinks and pulls his head back finally, allowing her space. He could teach her to kill. The little drake could show her how it feels to snap a spine in two and choke the life from something weaker than you. She speaks and his ears swivel forward to catch the noise she makes. Ghaul. His head snaps to a tilt, curious at the mention of it. Somewhere, some place, he had heard that name but he had never known it was his.

    Ghaul,” he repeats, savoring it and smiling delightedly. He turns his head at the snapping of branches and twigs, watching the red and yellow blurs of bodies scrambling closer to them so suddenly. The first blur speaks the other child’s name and Ghaul skitters backward at her oppressiveness closeness.

    Her voice is angry and mixed with other emotions he does not comprehend, but they make him furious. She commands him as though this is her domain and his small, leathery wings spread open suddenly. Ghaul’s talons dig into the dirt as he opens his small mouth in a hiss that flings spit from his throat, crooked crocodile teeth bared at the woman. The second blur does not move, does not speak. He hates the way it looms there as though it mocks him. Why does it not cower in fear of him?!

    He pulls his head back as his rage boils up into his throat and then he leans toward them, jaws wide as he breathes his first plume of fire at them. The jet is short and bright red, cooler than most dragonfire. His small body trembles as he stops and watches the three blurs now.

    No one can command me. I am divine. I will devour kings!” he screams, little wisps of smoke curling from between his teeth. “I am Ghaul, and you are nothing!

    ghaul

    @[gospel] @[adna]
    Reply
    #10
    gospel
    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.

    It is a strange scene that unfolds before them.
    He sees his daughter curled around something.
    Something that skitters away from them as Adna crashes into the clearing and he follows after.
    But he is not a fit parent and, seeing that his daughter is safe, although painted in blood, he forces himself simply to watch. Certainly any effort he made to draw Gospel back to them would only be met with violence.
    So he lingers in the periphery, chest heaving, teeth gritted.

    There is one singular stab of guilt.
    A blade slipped beneath her breastbone at the sound of her mother’s panic.
    Her beautiful, lethal mother.
    And then she sees her father and the edges of her vision strobe with rage. The boy scurries backward, away from her, and she hisses her disdain, nostrils flared as she watches him go. She gnashes her teeth, the fangs he’d pressed his lips against.

    But her fury is forgotten, her petulance falling by the wayside as he opens his mouth and lets go a stream of fire. Her rage dissolves around the soft edges of delight, the slitted eyes widen and a grin alights on her face.

    He is insane, she realizes, and the realization is so delicious that she wants to thrust herself back into his space. Wants to anchor herself to his side. Wants to fuse herself to him. But she takes a step toward him and her father reaches for her, catches her baby withers between his teeth and she shrieks in protest. Writhes and hisses, her attention temporarily arrested, ripped away from the object of her desire. She rears back her head and thrashes her limbs, venom dripping from her mouth.

    I’m staying here!” she says. Bethlehem lets her go when the chaos of her limbs connects a foot with his knee.

    She hurls herself across the clearing then, scurrying across the middle distance to thrust herself back into Ghaul’s orbit.

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