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    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


    how much heartache can we take, without hanging from the tallest tree? ANY
    #1

    Is it just me,
    Or do you wonder if we're put here just to see,

    Dreams were dark, tainted. Shadowy figures wove their hands around me, tried to keep me there, lost within the empty space of my mind. They whispered terrible things. Lied, cheated me into staying there, wide-eyed and silent. They had sewn my mouth with stitches, took my tongue from me, my eyes. I could not talk, I could not see, but I could hear their whispering. Darkness, darkness with the thump, thump of my heart. The told me things, things that made no sense, things that froze me to my core.

    I awoke in a foray of limbs, entangled with tree bark and decaying leaves. Somewhere on the outskirts of the Gates, where the enchanted little forests open up and extend to the meadow. Pine cones leave indentations on my neck and swelling barrel. I lay there for a moment, watching the birds above. Inky quills flapping beside them, dark, dark eyes meeting mine. They knew things, they knew the secrets inside of my mind. I whickered up at them but with a loud, obnoxious caw, they flew away; a mess of falling black feathers that fell to my feet. I lowered my muzzle, inhaled the scent of the earth, the cold, late autumn ground was soft in places, deepening mud in others. My teeth picked up the feathers and placed each, carefully in my mane. It was a delicate procedure, one which my hollowed eyes concentrated solely on. Knotted in with the dead leaves and broken twigs, my silvery mane was a mass of dreadlocks, now befitting the deathly chorus of a murder of crows.

    I looked up, craned my delicate head. My frame was still out of proportion. A swelling barrel, with something, with something that Wichita had had when I found her. And my bones still jutted out, chocolate skin curving over each china white bone, stark shoulders, a protruding hipbone. And my mass array of scars, thick, raised salmon skin that was still slowly healing. A tad weepy in places as I've been waking up in the strangest of places, with no recollection of getting there. Like today, I awoke to the caw of the birds, and followed them into the field, where they find another perch and sing their dark delightful song, this time to another.

    I follow them, every step a delicate process. I stop, I continue, I stop, I continue. It takes me a while to find them once more. Hooves sinking into the wet ground beneath. My cocoa dipped ears twiddle atop my crown, listening. I capture their caws, they sing a strong strong, weave lies with their claws and tell secrets with their beak. I hold their song like tentative butterflies, before wheezing, husky and low, my own version of their song. 'The birds. They hide secrets. They store them under their wings.' I say, my voice hauntingly eerie as I bring up my gaze to reach them, a strange sound falls from my lips, mimicking the caw of a crow, rather than the delicate song of a lark. I turn my hollow, empty eyes to the vast, near empty meadow. A spangling of snow promised in the skies. Their dark clouds rolling over above head. The coldness bites into me, but I let it. As I stand there, just below the tree, gazing up with a delicate eye. 'You know my secrets, don't you?'

    Slowly, I see them form beyond the quivering branches. Their naked boughs weaving a tapestry with my past embroidered. Snippets. I remember snippets, but then they bury themselves into my heart, like a cold, sharp steel. Cutting me inside, wounding my already broken soul, tainting my already weakened body.

    How much heartache we can take,
    Without hanging from the tallest tree?

    - resident of the gates -
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    #2


    You’ve made even winter a blessing, for I can wander from the hidden hollows and shadows to walk in your dull daylight. I used to dread the solstice and the long nights, the feeling of my bright summer coat thickening to a blanket. But you? You made it first that these days were the time I could spend longer beneath your thumb, then ruined it in the same fashion. Such is typical. I look for you even on a cloudy day but you never come find me, and I think I’m finally beginning to understand the arrogance and the idiocy you left planted firmly in my brain. It’s been a slow realization, a painful one, evolving day by day from a whispering fear in the back of my mind to an overwhelming truth that I could deny no longer.

    I was never special.
    Not to you, not to them, not to anyone.
    Not to you.

    I don’t know what it was that led me to believe I was anything more than a mere insect to you, one you only briefly allowed to land before you tried to rip off my wings. When I fluttered away, unharmed, you not only did not presume to follow, you almost instantly forgot that I had ever existed. Because I barely had, in your world. If there is any consolation to be had, let it be that I am not alone; blood and bone was sacrificed so freely in your name and you paid them even less attention. Maybe I was prettier by some arbitrary margin. Maybe I was more foolish. Maybe there was already a tear in my wings that led you to believe I would be easier to destroy than the others. A petty part of me hopes that it did hurt, on some level that your favorite moth fluttered away, but reality tells me that I should know better.

    Because you have not hunted me at all.
    And it doesn’t comfort me in the slightest.

    These ramblings distract me, not only in and of themselves but by way of a sluggish gait, glassy eyes in a head that remains low and uninterested. I wander through pathless forest and empty gray meadows, cold and pointless in your wake. Minute purpose is assigned to me through the addition of a pulse to my veins, though the growth does not show yet on my stocky frame. I wonder if there might be a life there after the embrace of the wolf child, but push these thoughts aside in favor of apathy and self pity.

    A sound rents the numbness of the air, unnatural and strange. It piques my interest against this backdrop of listless behavior and causes me to stop, suspicious eyes searching the world around. I see her then, all bones and bare skin, wandering about with her eyes on the crows. Bird-brain, I thought, though it doesn’t occur what one might say about someone who watches a supposed bird-brain with such odd curiosity. I hear her speak, and such strange behavior even further interests me. Not that I’m one to judge odd girls talking to the sky (we certainly have our reasons), but this was no prayer, no knowledge. Or was it? Is she really babbling, or does she know something I do not?

    Unsure what to make of this, the spotted mare followed and slowly approached the other. “I would hope my secrets are never entrusted to those gossips.” She paused several steps back and allowed her eyes to trace the pink lines of flesh cut into the girl’s coat, the way her skin was stretched over her bones. A secret corner of her mind wondered if she knew who was responsible for those wounds, but a twinge of unhappiness from the thought led her to banish it. We are far too distant to report something so strange, for he is a busy man.

    And surely, not so cruel as to let a lamb escape once she’s seen the knife.



    naoi    
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    #3

    Is it just me,
    Or do you wonder if we're put here just to see,

    There is an innocence in my eyes, a strained naivety that is both marred with a darkness. There are reasons behind the scars, behind the bloodied face that had entered the gates in a flurry of legs and gasping lungs. Parts of the memory, like spindles and pins, they penetrate my mind, empty and cavernous. They spin around and around and I'm stuck in the middle deciding to choose one, one path and one dark corner. Every night, I'm taken there. The fire-torn land, the ash clouding the air, the thick, across smoke that filled my lungs with iron. the metallic tang of blood still coats my tongue, my broken body lay bruised, forgotten on the floor. Equally broken, lifeless bodies strewn atop me. It's there, the harsh cry of fury that pulls me up, brings me to my feet in such a fright.

    His eyes were like steel. A cold, heartless iron that broke down all my barriers. He took me, he took me to the brinks of pain and even further then. He pulled me apart, limb from fragile limb, and left me there, broken and bloodied. I crawled across the land, lay in a pattern of deceased friends. Their lifeless eyes as cold and as dark as the sky. Concealed beneath more corpses, I hid, I hid and shook. My blood merged with that of a thousand. He came again, but then someone else grabbed me, pulled at my withers and forced me to run. Run. his teeth left scars, as many more littered my frame, they are as lost as his roar beneath the clap of thunder. I ran, I ran until my legs ceased up and my lungs felt like lead. Until crimson trickled my nostrils and I felt as though my heart would burst from it's ribbed cage.

    I wake up. Every single night, to sweat drenching my body. The cold fingers of fear creeping up my spine, every nodule, one slow trail at a time. I shiver in the cold bushes of the Gates, looking up and seeing the shadows dart across. They are after me. The darkness. Him. He chases me with eyes as cold as winter. I shiver even now, as the wintry chill picks up and with it brings a new scent, the shuffle of hoofbeats. I crack my head from the wistful observations of the secret wielding avians, to find a spotted mare. I watch her, my barrel heaves with a breath. Even now the memory, it clings to me and feels like shards of ice embed deeper and deeper into my heart.

    'Never trust. Never trust.' I say, my eerie voice a flutter on the wind. I step forward, weary limbs shuffling. I crane my head, my hollow eyes, dark and empty, stare across the girl. 'White bone. Blood red. The secrets. The secrets.' I babble, the pain coming all too sudden inside of me. My mind first, it feels like creaking heavy doors crack open, and a rush of the darkness slips inside. Tendrils at first, lovingly wrapping around my neck like a noose. 'Cold death. Burnt flesh.' the memories are red hot sears of pain, riveting through me. I quiver, every inch of me a shivering mass of chocolate skin and clattering bone. 'Pain. Pain. Everything is Reuen. Everything is Ruin.' I say, a tone so clipped, so cold. It feels as though jack frost has whirled a parade of snow flakes right through me.

    'Secrets. Secrets.'

    How much heartache we can take,
    Without hanging from the tallest tree?

    - resident of the gates -


    Just stick her in a padded cell xD
    Reply
    #4
    Enough was enough, and Etojo turned towards the ruckus. The carcass dangling from his mouth as he held what he assumed was once rabbit by the dead creature’s ears. What would it take to finish his meal in peace?

    He found her by the tree, scars, skin and bone. Her mane an entanglement of feathers and muck. Her belly swollen with child. Empathy did not suit Etojo, but for a moment there was a twinge of emotion that stirred deep down within the bowels of his conscience, pity perhaps? Whatever it was it moved him, moved him to action, to come closer, perhaps help. He clenched his rabbit tighter, its half-eaten body swaying to the rhythm of his walk. As he drew nearer he realised he was not alone, a spotted mare who stood not far had already rallied to the caw.

    She seemed to have the situation in hand, from what he could tell the communication was flowing. He wasn’t needed here. He would take his rabbit and be on his way, find a nice secluded spot which indorsed silence and solitude so he could consume the rest of his rabbit alone and in peace. It was a good plan, a great plan, until the realisation hit him, the mare was stark raving mad, and the slither of emotion he so uncharacteristically harboured for her evaporated in the same way his warm breath vaporised to nothing in the frosty air.

    Perhaps he was needed after all, perhaps he would help.
    Help clear the meadow of what shouldn’t belong.

    “I wouldn’t bother,” he drawled into the crisp meadow air as he drew up alongside the mare with the spots, the cold chill of his approach suppressed thoroughly by the frostier atmosphere of the season. “She’s obviously not right in the head.” The rabbit made what he had to say sound odd and distorted, but it wouldn’t take a genius to understand his drift.

    “Let’s try this,” he mumbled, his pupil-less orange eyes narrowing with a wicked kind of mirth. And in one abrupt motion, Etojo flung his head upwards, releasing the rabbit he had held between his jaws. The blood and filaments of its flesh trailing the bulk of its mangled body as the rabbit carcass hurtled through the air and towards the dark coloured mare whose sunken flesh and ravaged body made her look like death.

    Etojo watched his carcass fly. Watched as it landed with a muffled thud next to the tree, near enough to her… whose emaciated body could be a match to his own. Although he wore leaves of decay instead of fur.  After a small pause of appreciation for his excellent aim, Etojo moved forth. “Coming?” he asked of spots, as he gestured towards the tree, the dead rabbit and the insane.

    When he stood close enough, he reached around his body and broke off one of the long twigs which formed a part of his tail. A sharp spasm of pain shot through his body. The pain would be worth it, he told himself. And with the twig clamped between his teeth, Etojo lowered his head down towards the ground, towards the flung rabbit. 

    “Look,” he said to her, as he prodded the carcass with the twig he had snapped from his tail, separating flesh from bone, coating the twig in solidifying blood “Look close enough and you can see white bone, blood red, death…”
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    #5


    I felt foolish immediately for even wondering if you were his work, for he was never this sloppy. I could him now, whispering sweet nothings while I looked on to your destruction: ”damaged goods,” he’d say, in that dangerously soft tone, ”it would only be merciful.” So you see, you bring me to a great dilemma, wide eyed and frozen in indecision, for he is not here (he never was) and I do not want to do this alone. I don’t even know that I want to do this at all. I knew how, you know- it’d be easy, just follow the pattern. “Tendons first,” he’d croon softly, “so they don’t leave you.” (like you did.) Soft brown eyes, bitter tears. (Mine tasted just like hers.) “Then, nice and easy,” and he’d move his muzzle up to her trembling ear, whisper lies of comfort and kindness, forgiveness, freedom from pain, whatever it took to ease the terror in her troubled eyes. He’d lay sweet kisses along her jawbone before resting a moment at her soft throat. “Love, do me a favor, look in the sun and tell me what you see.” It was so calculated, that perfect stretch, allowing him to rip through the veins with such ease. They were like sunflowers at this point anyway, thrilled to death (literally now) to turn their hollow eyes to the god above.

    My brain feels sluggish, numb. A defiant part of my mind refuses the instructions, wonders if he was wrong about you all along and there was something of value left in your damaged frame. Another yearns to make him proud, and a further still hates myself for wanting to do anything in his name (and maybe you’ll come back to me if I do, maybe you’ll come back to punish me if I don’t…) I struggle to piece together the stream of words that left your mouth, make logic from the bizarre, but I confess that alchemy isn’t my strongest suit. Your eyes are so empty, unfocused, unnerving. I wonder for a fleeting moment if it wasn’t the discomfort of a hollow stare that led him to such philosophies in the first place. At the very least, you speak of a terrible time, and I wonder if it isn’t your fault- you were only the weaker among us, and there was a time when you were a beautiful girl and not the trembling wreck before me today.

    I was searching for the answer to such lunacy when the stench of death shatters my focus, and his voice and appearance further still. I could feel chills race down my spine when he came closer, and am struck by the sheer irony when the cold man is of such a similar attitude to my god of warmth. He is an impossibility, an unavoidable reality, and it makes me question for a moment whether the broken girl’s affliction may have been contagious or whether I was truly seeing a creature made of the forest floor. It was only his eyes, disturbing as they were, that made me accept that this was a living beast before me and not some twisted illusion. Over and over disbelieving eyes trace his form, taking in every fallen leaf and the stench of rich decay that accompanied. I jump again when he throws the rabbit, splattering my face with flecks of blood and rotting offal. Rude.

    Curiosity gets the better of me as he moves toward the rabbit, and I follow in suspicious silence, a significant part of me now wishing I had ignored this mess and gone about my way (likely the part now lightly glazed in rabbit guts). When he reaches to poke the thing with a stick, plucked abhorrently where a tail hair should have been, I am reminding of the impudence of a little colt bringing a rotting thing home to hear his mama scream about it. It was only when you spoke again that I realized how deeply that immaturity spread, and physically rolled my eyes in annoyance. I must thank you though, creature, for you create the answer for a question that was not yet fully formed. I dislike you, because you seek to dredge the feelings of the broken girl, and I seek to tuck her under my wing, however tattered and pointless that wing may be. “Enough. Leave her alone.” I turn to look at the girl with concern, hoping that this particular interruption wasn’t enough to fracture her further.

    After all, hypocrisy is a hell of a drug.



    naoi    
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    #6



    The smell is what hits me first. The twang of metallic on the winter breeze. Dry, clammy with the last remnants of life. That smell, it clings to my nostrils and makes my lips curl in disdain. Those sharp memories stab me like steel daggers, the doors in my mind are thrown open with the billowing gusts of frostbitten winds. The bare walls peel, the deadened, forgotten floor rumbles with a monster, deep, deep inside. The monster raises it's ugly head. A claw, a hand, it shifts through the encompassing floorboards of my mind, and my body feels numb, as though every nerve has frozen in place.

    He groans. A daring, monstrous sound that rattles me to the very marrow of my bones. The claw curls, ugly talons into my mind and holds me there, forcing me to look at the crimson beads flutter through the air, the deadened carcass land at my feet. The talons keep my head in place, my eyes wide open to fully observe the torn flesh, white bone and peach pulp sinew that has been torn apart. I feel the quiver in my stomach, it rises like acid to my throat, burning all the way. The monster inside, he forces me to look, to remember. and oh, I remember.

    Blood. Red everywhere. What used to be green was now a landscape of bloody rivulets. Flesh, it stank, decay and rot, maggots and flies. The field had become a graveyard, bone atop bone, flesh upon flesh. I walked through them, picked my way through the debris of what used to be family. friends. My hear tears with every wayward glance. A boy my own age, we had played, gotten lost in the trees for hours. His head lay mangled, ears torn and eyes gouged. The piercing cry flooded my ears, made my spine taut and tingle with every little bit of fear. My skin ran with gooseflesh as I stood bolt upright, my eyes finding the source. The blackened beast, a monster. Eyes as red as the crimson rivers. Scars running over him, prizes won, tales to tell. He meets me with a cruel smirk, and that toothy grin haunts me. It haunts my dreams, it chases me in the shadows. All I see is teeth and blood. torn flesh and bone. Pain. everything is pain. Ruin, all is ruined. and it was my fault, Reuen ruined somehow...

    The flesh, the bone, it lies mangled at my hooves. the corpse forgotten, as those that lined the battlefield. My eyes tear from the mangled corpse, my body now becoming a shaking shell of chocolate skin. Bones rattling, taut against scarred skin. Hollowed orbs finding the leaves, the way they swayed in the wind, he smelt of death, decay. The monster within and the monster back then. 'You found me.' I whisper, my teeth chattering, my skin rampant with gooseflesh, my matted tendrils taken by the wind. I shake, I shake until my knees bend and bow and I totter. He gawks at me, those dark, dark eyes. No. He's found me, the shadow, the shadow has found me. He stinks of death, he is death and he throws the offering, a sacrifice before me.

    I'm next. I'm next.

    I bow then, my legs buckling, my shivering uncontrollable. 'The shadows eat the land. The land eats the bodies. Graves. So many graves. Bones. Bone upon bone. Flesh atop flesh. Blood. So much blood.' My teeth grate together, an awful sound. I peel my gaze from the small mammal (or what looked to have once been a small mammal) to look upon the spotted mare. Her voice breaks my babbling lips, my faraway glazed eyes. 'They never leave. They leave when the heart stops it's beat. The flesh stripped from bone. until the grass runs red. Until the grass runs red.'

    Reuen
    the little ruined girl
    resident of the gates


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    #7
    The prompt had only been small, a seed which wasn’t really a seed, because from what he could tell, her mind already ran rampant with whatever gory delusion she had going on in her head. It was almost too hard to contain the laughter. The muscles of his belly clenching with involuntary spasm, and his stomach ached not with the familiar pang of hunger, but instead with fatigue, with silent, heaving laughter. 

    But he held it together, and a mischievous sneer spread his lips curled at the corner with malice. She seemed lost to the world, and a part of him wondered how aware she truly was of what he did. He didn’t torment her because he was cruel, he did so because he knew know better. And really, where was the harm in harming something that was already too broken to fix? Shadows eating the land… What the hell was that?

    “Enough. Leave her alone.”

    The breath of her order rustled his leaves, and for a moment Etojo didn’t quite understand what he was hearing. When Spots had followed him close to get a look in on the action, he had thought he had found in her a kindred spirit. No matter, it was not the first time he had assumed wrong of a situation, and nor would it be the first time he didn’t listen.

    “No” he said simply, she was not the authority. And he jabbed his stick defiantly between what was left of the rabbit’s delicate ribcage and strands of flesh. There was a sickening crack, his brittle stick snapping from the force, useless. Etojo cursed, he spat the half that remained in his mouth to the ground and snaked his head around to face her as if it had been her fault. His orange eyes penetrating even when the intention was not to pierce into the soul.

    “She’s not like us.” He hissed at her. His ears the only part of his body not covered in dead leaves lay flat against his skull. “What does it matter to you?” But in a way, Spots had already answered that question, and he read the concern from her features. It disgusted him, an expression he wore very well on his face.
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