[mature] like dreams that turn to dust,

[Ryatah]

The gates opened, and the dead rose. They rushed past the veil into the land of the living, and of course he is not among them.

She watches them all with an ache in her throat but a hardness in her eyes, because she is a fool for ever even hoping, and she knows it. She is disgusted with the way her own heart had dared to quicken, how she had half expected him to eventually appear, even though she knows that he never will.

She stands on the desolate shores of the beach, unblinking and statuesque as she stares out to where the waves break and roll against the darkened sands. She thinks, for a moment, how easy it would be to just walk into the sea again. She has drowned twice before, and once by choice. She knows it will hurt. She knows it will only take a matter of minutes but that it will feel like hours, and she knows that unlike last time there won’t be the slightest hope that someone will bring her back. She will rot at the bottom of the sea like the first time, until the magic of Beqanna decides to spit her back out, if it ever does.

And maybe if wings hadn’t erupted from her shoulders she would have.

Maybe if the pain of bones forming and breeching through her skin hadn’t been so blinding, so excruciating that her mind went black that she forgot about her emotional turmoil, she would have succumbed to the sea.

Instead she is broken, again, and remade again. The blood is bright against her porcelain white skin where it drips from where the wings – angelic, pale, and trimmed in gold –  had emerged, staining the sand, and the macabre of the blood clashes against the ethereal glow that surrounds her. She is left gasping and confused, trembling with adrenaline and the electrifying pulse of her veins.

She forgets Dhumin, for now, and she leaves the beach behind her and a dual trail of blood in her wake.

She finds herself instead in the meadow, standing at the edge of a small lake. The night is quiet and cold, and the snow that blankets the ground silences nearly all the sounds. The blood has dried, but her sides still ache with the freshness of the wounds and heaviness of wings she wasn’t used to holding. Tentatively, she steps closer to the still water, until her reflection is peering back at her. Except it is not her that she sees. She sees her face, and her eyes, but the halo of light above her head and the angel wings at her sides, they are not hers. They can’t be. “I’m not an angel,” she whispers to herself, confusion glittering in her sable eyes. She can feel her fragmented heart stumble in her chest, when she thinks of all the ways she has sinned.

If she is an angel, she thinks she might be the most broken one the world has ever seen save for the devil himself.

Ryatah

even angels have their wicked schemes

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Atrox decides that he rather likes the guards that walk with him now.

They are not always the same. Sometimes, he finds that he grows bored with them, or annoyed, or just decides that he’s done with company—and whenever this happens, he is more than happy to send them back to the godforsaken place where he had escaped multiple times now. But, for now, he keeps them as he wanders around Beqanna. These two are rather large and, if he had any sense of insecurity, he would potentially feel insecure about his own modest height—but Atrox has never cared about such things.

Instead, he finds that their towering forms are rather useful.

They keep several paces behind him (silent always) as he moves through Beqanna, more active and more social than he has been in years. Perhaps it is the familiar taste of death that drives him from his usual interest in the shadows or perhaps it is the electric charge in the air that causes things to nearly taste of the old Beqanna. Whatever it is, he finds that he keeps moving, continues to pad along silently.

Until he catches the sight of her. It is distinctly her, despite the add-ons, and he tilts his head in thought, wondering if the same power that gave him this dark pull on the underworld gave her such radiant new clothing. Curious as always, his roguish grin spreads and he pads over toward her, shifting into his stallion form when he is several yards away and just in time to catch her muttering to herself.

It surprises a laugh from him, husky and rough, and he walks closer, shaking his head. “You won’t find anyone around here who’d argue that, Ryatah.” He grins, lips pulled wide as he stops near her. “You almost let me get fed to a pissed off cat back there.” He gestures toward the beach, thinking about the snow leopard mare, before pausing, “Well, another cat, I guess.” Then the grin is back, unshakeable.

An ear flicks back as he realizes that the two souls had stopped somewhat nearby, always irritable when he gave them no purpose or actionable way to help (which he rarely did). Rolling his eyes, he flicks a tail. “Get lost, you useless sacks of undead flesh.” And without further ceremony, they do.

When it is just the two of them, his yellow eyes sharpen on her.

“At risk of getting into a conversation I don’t truly care about, what has you so…pathetic looking.” He angles his head again as if trying to study her better. “You look better than you have in—well, ever.”

And what else could possibly have her down?

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING

[Ryatah]

She isn’t sure at first what it is that floods through her when she recognizes the voice that interrupts her thoughts, but she quickly realizes it is relief.

It was easier to pretend to be herself when it is familiar eyes staring back at her, even if Atrox was one of the least forgiving souls that she knew. She did not expect his sympathy, or even a forced cordiality, and even though sometimes she thinks her tired and trembling heart craves even a shred of kindness she knows she would reject it even if it came to her. “Atrox,” she says with a note of surprise, if only because she had expected him to disappear back into Tephra after their interesting ordeal. Her darkened gaze slips past his face and to the undead souls that flank him, curiosity flickering briefly when she ventures hesitantly, “I like your….friends.” She can only assume that they were his...gift? Punishment? She doesn’t dwell on it, because she isn’t sure what hers is, either.

She regards them for a moment longer before deciding she finds them unsettling, and her eyes flick back to his yellow ones. For a moment she forgets that she is different; that a halo glimmers above her head and that soft, ethereal glow radiates from all around her now. She almost forgets the weight of the gilded-tipped wings that had ripped ruthlessly through her shoulders, because she is shaking her head and laughing ruefully at him. “I’m pretty sure you can defend yourself, and if you’re relying on me as a line of defense, well…” She lets her voice trail off with a knowing tilt of her head.

He sends his guards away, and when his attention refocuses on her she can feel herself grow tense again. The weight feels like it’s back on her shoulders, settling into all the corners of her heart like an anchor. “If you don’t care then why did you ask?” She retorts lightly, a small smile accompanying the words though the motion doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “You’re one of the few that can manage to insult me and compliment me all in the same breath,” it is said mostly in a light-hearted manner, but her eyes drift back to her reflection and her jaw clenches.

“I was thinking about Dhumin. And how going to the afterlife was a mistake.” Something inside her chest flinches when she realizes he had likely gone there for Twinge, and she wasn’t here, either. She looks back to him, her shoulders rolling as she says quietly in her attempt at nonchalance, “Lesson learned, I suppose.”

Ryatah

even angels have their wicked schemes

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Atrox can understand her pain even if it never registers on his flat shark eyes. It is something that he has long ago learned how to bury, how to ignore—turning a cheek to his own agony as though he feels none of it. It was easier to pretend that he does not have the emotions than to try and navigate them. Easier even when facing her with that haunted look in her eyes like she never really did leave the afterlife.

Maybe you never did.

He shrugs, letting the darker thoughts roll off his back easily and giving her the same cavalier grin. “I don’t know. I always need a lady in distress to be my knight in shining armor. I am fairly incompetent.” His laugh is like smoke, husky and thick in his throat, and then it fades in the wind and he is left with nothing but the two of them and the fading scent of sulphur as his spectral guards fade into nothingness.

His wide-jawed head angles in thought as she answers him and, although the grin never quite fades from his dark lips, his eyes sharpen on her. “I don’t know why I do half the things that I do.” He rolls his shoulders, tail flicking behind him. “But that has never stopped me from doing them.”

Like standing in the meadow with one of the only alive souls to have known him in his prime.

Talking as though anything about their life was normal.

“Don’t worry, the compliment was an accident,” his nose twitches. “Won’t happen again.”

But she’s not thinking about him at all. She’s thinking about where they had been and he sees in the strange new lines of her face how deeply it had affected her. Affected her in ways that it had never touched him because seeing Twinge was so brief—so meaningful and yet not. Neither of them had any sort of illusions that he would stay or she would leave so it was just that: a moment.

Looking at her now though, he knows that she cannot say the same.

“Most things involving him were a mistake,” he says with a sort of huff, although it’s more of a guess than anything because he had never known the man well. “What lesson was that?”

It’s a surprisingly serious question and only after does he lighten it.

“Not that I care.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING

[Ryatah]

She used to be good at hiding it.

She used to be good at burying her hurt and her pain beneath layers of light and false tranquility. She used to be able to face the day no matter how she was falling apart on the inside, and she doesn’t know when she began crumbling to the point that it felt impossible to keep up her own charade.

And so maybe it was fitting that this gift had been bestowed up on her. Maybe it was not a coincidence that when her own light was fully extinguished she had been given a newfound radiance that glowed from every pore and hid the hairline fractures that threatened to shatter her apart, and a halo to brighten her impossibly dark, broken eyes. She could hide behind her angel wings and ethereal glow and fool the world just like always.

Except sometimes she feels like she is getting so, so tired of hiding.

That could explain why any other day she would be fine with his somewhat caustic humor and teasing, because it is him and it is virtually impossible for him to offend her. And even today, it is not hurt that flashes in her sable eyes at his very last words, but rather something that mirrors fatigue. Like something she has been trying to hold on to, or hold together, has finally slipped from her grasp and she can’t be bothered to pretend anymore. “I would never assume that you actually care, Atrox, so the disclaimer is hardly necessary,” she says in words spoken so softly that it would be difficult to find even a hint of malice in them.

She pushed away the single soul that actually cared about her, and she was paying for it every day.

“The lesson is I don’t know why I go looking for something that isn’t there, in places that I know it could never exist.” Trying to manifest something viable out of the darkness had never worked in her favor, but it has never stopped her from trying again, and again.

“But,” she says after a pause, lifting her fragmented eyes to his with the barest hints of a smile on her pale lips, “Realizing I should stop and actually stopping are two incredibly different things.”

Ryatah

even angels have their wicked schemes

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

As much as Atrox enjoys his sharp tongue—cutting others down to size—he finds that the joy of it is nearly ruined when the receiving end simply absorbs it. So perhaps that is why he pauses, holds the retort that comes so quickly, and instead watches her. He nearly sits back, sniffing lightly, and studying her with a new gaze—trying to figure out the pieces of her that don’t match up, that don’t fit into a near picture.

He puzzles it out for a moment, as much trying to figure her out as trying to understand the strange restraint that keeps him silent. They had never exactly been close friends in their early lives. They had orbited around one another, sure, but Atrox had never been one to build a wall of close friends and Ryatah had her own hands busy with more than enough work and love and drama to keep her occupied.

So it’s not some shared history that stays his head.

Perhaps it is boredom, he reasons. Perhaps after centuries of being simply cruel, he is curious to know what it would be like to be neutral—to abstain from the easy kill. Perhaps he is simply a hunter at heart and does not enjoy taking down a target when it is so obviously weakened. Regardless, the reasoning, in the end, doesn’t really matter. All that matters is what happens, which is that he remains quiet.

That, for once in his godforsaken life, he almost listens.

“Say you did stop,” he considers with a shrug, rolling the velvet of his fur and saying it with the same lethargic apathy that he says all thing. “What then? Do you really think that you would feel better?”

The lazy way of speaking does nothing to dull the sharpness of his gaze though.

“Is there contentment to be found in giving up?”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING

[Ryatah]

She wonders what it would be like to be like him. She recognizes that familiar flat darkness in his eyes, that same unreadable expression that so many of the men that she knew wore. Like them, it was impossible for her to gauge what he was thinking or feeling, or if he was feeling anything at all. She wonders if his lack of heart makes the apathy easier to come by or if it has always been natural.

And then there is her, with light seeming to glow from all the cracks she can never heal from, with eyes like broken glass that can do nothing but watch him. She could hardly hide anything right now, and she felt everything.

Even if she had the choice, though, she doesn’t think she would choose to feel nothing. Whenever she had felt numbness creeping in that was exactly when she seemed to spiral harder and faster in a desperate attempt to shatter through that almost impenetrable veil; she would rather be lit aflame if it meant she could just feel something.

“Giving up?” There is a tone of surprise that seems to lend an edge to her voice, which is a rarity for her and not exactly intentional. She angles her delicate head towards him, the golden light of her unfit halo reflecting off her dark eyes, and a small smile accompanies a shake of her pale head. “I don’t think it’s considered giving up when no one cares that I was even fighting.” She says, as though she could ever stop; as though she wouldn’t  cut herself against their blades and bleed herself dry for just a minuscule amount of attention.

As if she could simply just stop being everything that she is.

The wind stirs the angel-feathers of her wings, and she shifts the weight of them, her muscles taut and aching with tension from holding them. She doesn’t realize yet that she could heal the bruised and sore skin that borders where her wings had broken through, and the dried blood still clings morbidly to her porcelain white skin. “It’s awfully social of you to not be hidden away in Tephra, by the way. You must be bored.” She deflects the conversation away from her and her short-comings, for now, expecting that he would grow tired of her presence soon, anyway.

Ryatah

even angels have their wicked schemes

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

He has no reason to still be here, he knows. Nothing tying him to this woman or this moment and yet he settles into it all the same. His yellow eyes remain trained on her, despite the impassive features of his nearly slack face—save the tension that lives in the cavalier smile that pulls tight in the corners of his mouth. There is an edge to her voice that sharpens his gaze even more, wondering at what lives beneath it, and although he doesn’t show it pleasure in getting her to bite back, it simmers beneath the surface.

“You cared,” he yawns, shrugging his shoulders. “I cared, I guess. I prefer you fighting instead of being all,” he pauses, considering her with an intentionally lazy glance, “sad and pathetic.”

He sniffs lightly, catching the fading copper of wounds that dry on her, but he says nothing about it. Instead he just continues to relax in her presence, wondering what it must be like to care so deeply. There are few things that Atrox have cared about in his life and they are all dead or long gone by now.

Or no longer know that he exists, he thinks with a scowl.

But this, he tucks away into a place where even he can’t reach it.

Her next sentence catches his attention, dragging him back to the presence, and he focuses on her again. “I don’t live in Tephra,” he snaps, suddenly angry at her for forcing him to say it but his anger is a quick thing, It flashes, bright and furious, and then dies out, leaving him simmering in the aftermath of it. He takes a deep breath and then smiles again, the motion just a little cold. “And I’m always bored.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING

[Ryatah]

“Easier said than done,” comes her quiet reply to his lazy, apathetic response. “But thank you. I think.”

She can never quite tell if he is purposely trying to get under her skin; if he thinks by being so nonchalant and casual that it will frustrate her. And maybe to an extent it does, if only because she thrives on heat and fear, on things that make her adrenaline surge and her heart race. A mere glance of Carnage is enough to send her pulse jumping and cool fear lacing across her skin, and Ashhal makes her ache with want because she always knows what their interactions will bring. 

But Atrox is eerily calm, nearly unreadable. She doesn’t know what he wants – from her, or from anyone. She cannot fight that sick, twisted part of her that needs to be wanted, that needs to feel like she is doing something right, but his lack of emotion does not hint either way. 

When he snaps at her she is internally repulsed at herself for the way she reacts. Her heartbeat rushes like a wave meeting the shoreline, and instead of recoiling away her nearly black eyes lock briefly with his bright yellow ones. Her gaze rests there for one heartbeat, and then two, and she hopes he cannot sense the way want was the first thing to rush through her veins before fear followed suit. “My mistake.” She says softly, and only then do her eyes cast momentarily downward apologetically. When she lifts them again he is simply simmering, and though her heart is fluttering in her throat she is placid when she says, “It seems like it would be dangerous, for you to be bored.”

Ryatah

even angels have their wicked schemes

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Atrox prefers to be unreadable—prefers to keep his motives close to his chest.

It is easier to gain the upper hand when others are left guessing at your next move, at your end goal, at the things that drive you. It is easier to twist the world to your own liking when others never know where they stand with you, and it is something that he has perfected over the years. He hides away his interest and the things that set him on edge. He holds back his temper and instead keeps his carefully neutral mask in place. He laughs and watches—he pursues his own pleasures, but he never slips on what lies beneath.

It it is protection in a world that is constant warfare.

And, if he was being honest, there is pleasure in knowing how unsettling it is for others.

But the way that she reacts is not the way that he expects. He nearly laughs in surprise when he sees that rush of her pulse in the way she flicks her gaze up, the hunger that lives behind her impossibly dark eyes. He tilts his head, curious, his lips pulling into a lazy grin. “My boredom is always dangerous,” he says with his characteristic drawl, “but I believe I found something that just may sate it.”

His eyes spark with that kindled curiosity and the next time that he smiles, his teeth have elongated into something sharper. He takes a step closer to her, sniffing lightly and smelling the way that the blood dries on her coat. He explores it for a moment, not waiting for an invitation, before he almost gently cleans it, wondering at how it still tastes almost fresh—as though she had been wounded just moments before.

“You bleed too easily,” he muses, teeth pressed against the angelic skin.

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING