"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
She has hunted and she has delighted in being hunted herself.
She has grown ever more feral. She is a rogue thing, delighting in her own devastation.
She has been away but she has not returned to Taiga. Because there is nothing left for her to find there. The heart – the cold, viper’s heart – has hardened in her chest so that now she does not even long for the mother she left behind. Her nopetiful, vicious mother. Still, the festering wound of her hatred for her father remains but it has begun to heal, too. Because these are insignificant things. Because they do not matter.
What matters is that darkness is falling over Pangea now. The days are beginning to shorten and she has begun to grow weary. She has grown bored of the things to hunt outside of Pangea. Nothing hunts her there, not even the dark things.
It is not difficult to find Ghaul, though they both have changed. Significantly. They have lost the things that made them children. And neither of them were ever innocent, but they perhaps could have passed for it if either of them had tried for sweetness.
He smells of the sea and nameless, faceless women and he remembers how he’d wanted her to bend to his will and how she’d refused. Because she would bend to and for no one. Because she is strong, she is fierce, the viper’s daughter.
“You’ve been busy,” she murmurs. An accusation. She had belonged to him once. Her heart, her allegiance, but she had been a child then and she is a woman now and she belongs to the wilds and to the venom that pulses through her.
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
In their time apart, he has learned that a great many things disgust him in this world. They are each another dousing of gasoline to his fire and he is overeager to unleash his might upon the world. But he bides his time, obeying Anaxarete’s commands and learning from her guidance like a good little pawn. He knows his era is coming, and so he must only bide his time for now.
In the months since his birth, he has grown immensely, and he now towers over those who used to loom over him. His chest is broad and his shoulders look strong enough to cradle the world between them. The sinews of his legs make his talons look less like a baby bird and more like a proper dragon’s claws, prepared to rip open ribcages and crush skulls between them. Ghaul has even earned a nice smattering of scars across his mouth and nose to balance the brilliance of his star-kissed face with some proper gore.
Gospel, though, has grown to be as beautiful as she is terrifying.
But her aesthetics are lost on a blind monster. He can only smell her scales and the old blood on her breath when she draws near, though the outline of her warmth tells him she has also grown. Ghaul grins, rows of crooked fangs stretching too far across an otherwise handsome face. The tyrant draws close to her even if it angers her, even if she lashes out and chances her fangs against his armored scales. He traces his nose up her neck and across her cheek as he breathes in her scent. In her mind, she is free of his commands and his claim, but he knows he would force feed her anyone who tried to challenge his ownership of her.
“I bled for the first time,” he boasts with that endless smile. “I even got to taste it, Gospel. I wish you could have, too.”
His wings shift uneasily against his back at the memory of Sochi clawing his face open. He wants to feel that rush once more, but his soft baby scales have hardened now.
“You were my first friend. No one will take that from you,” he mutters as he softly bumps her cheek with his nose, a pleased clicking emanating from the back of his throat. “Don’t let anyone take you from me, either.”
Ghaul watches her closely, his shimmering horns nearly touching her face in his strange stare.
He touches her and he is no longer clumsy.
He touches her and, for some reason, she cannot help but remember the first time. The chaos of it. How it had delighted her to be studied by something so strange. How it had thrilled her to be touched by his mother’s blood. She had not felt nopetiful then – strangely enough, she never has, has never had any reason to – but powerful. And hungry. And so many other thousands of dark things. Because it had occurred to her then that she was strange, too and there was power in her strangeness. Because he had vowed to make them bleed – promised to sink those strange teeth into the whole world – and yet.
And yet, he had spared her.
And he spares her still. Grins and touches her with his mouth all full of scars. And she lets him. She does not gnash her teeth or throw back her head or roll her wild eyes in protest. She is lethal, Gospel, but she has learned to harness her anger, she has learned how to turn it into something productive. The muscles quiver beneath the scaled flesh, an instinct she has not yet learned how to stifle. Alas, she feels no shred of embarrassment.
He bled, he tells her, and she imagines him bleeding.
Imagines the stench of blood cleansing him of the stench of all the things she can smell on him now.
She wishes she could have tasted it, too. Coaxed it out of him. Let it coat her viper’s tongue, let it wash the rust out of her throat. She could try it now, she thinks. She could lift her head and sink her teeth into his throat. But she does not.
Does it mean anything at all that she was his first friend? Does it matter at all that he is, even still, her only friend? It makes her itch to think it. She resents the softness in it. Finally, she grits her teeth and draws back her head, out of his reach.
“What good are friends?” she asks. “What purpose have I served you?” She does not bother to try and hide the jealousy in her tone. She lets it pulse in her chest, there in the empty space beside her heart, does all that she can to draw power from it.
do you think God stays in his heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?
He remembers the first time he met her, drenched in Bible’s blood as he had nosed his way to her neck. She had kept him warm and cackled when he breathed fire for the first time. Something about Gospel felt safe back then and even now as her rage threatens to spill over the brim of her, he feels at home. It draws a dreamy sort of sigh from him as she trembles with all the hate churning inside her chest. This barely contained chaos is his cradle, his coffin, and he treasures the moments they share. Even if she sank her fangs into him, he would call her friend and make room at his table for her.
When she draws back, his lips form a frown. It is unclear if it is out of anger or sorrow, what with his lack of eyes to deepen the expression. A forlorn little croon escapes his throat as he watches he outline of her warmth shrink away from him in disgust. What good are friends? He tilts his head and those curled horns turn with him. The stars of his cheeks shimmer bright red as he thinks on her question while the next is asked. What purpose has she served? He has no answers. He has never needed anything of her except her simple existence.
“You named me. I am Ghaul because you made it so,” he says finally as he closes the gap between them. He was always destined to become this but it was her voice that spoke him into existence. Without her, he very well may have died in the snow. He knows this. “What purpose have I served you, Gospel?”
He touches his nose to her cheek and feels the way her jaw clenches with the wrath it bites back. But he wouldn’t mind if she took a piece of him for herself. It is the least he could do to begin repaying his debt to her, after all. Ghaul touches his fangs to the scales of her face – a hunter’s promise that he will not crush her, though he easily could. And then he lifts his chin to expose the soft of his throat to her.
She remembers.
There is so little she does not remember.
Remembers how the name – just a word then – had bloomed and burst in the shallow pool of her throat.
Ghaul, she had said and she had not known why.
It had come to her like a fever, just as he had.
Unlike the fever, though, he has stayed. And her jealousy is petty and vicious and she should know better, Gospel. But it has teeth and it has sunk them into every vulnerable piece of her (few and far between, certainly, but still there all the same). She is not so easily swayed, this proud thing, with her head tipped back and her teeth gritted.
He is Ghaul because she made him so. And shouldn’t this be enough to snuff out the stench of the women she can smell on his skin? He does not belong to her and she does not belong to him because such strange and terrible things are not built for being owned. And yet… and yet the envy still festers like infection in the pit of her gut.
But she allows him to touch her again. She does not twist out of his reach. She remains, steadfast, acutely aware that he cannot see the flicker of whatever dark thing it is that passes across her face when he touches her. What purpose has he served her? She feels quite suddenly as if she is teetering on the edge of some great precipice and should she peer over the edge she would see nothing but absolute darkness. She drags in a shuddering breath feels a violent darkness swell in her throat when he tips back his own head to expose the only vulnerable piece of him.
She can feel, still, the phantom brush of his teeth against her own scales and there is something wicked that twists sweetly at the center of her. She could sink her teeth into him, too. She, too, is built to destroy. But she kisses him there instead. It is neither sweet nor chaste. Just her lips, once dripping with blood, pressed against the place where his own pulse thrummed vibrant beneath his skin.
“Teach me,” she murmurs then, draws her mouth away, “teach me to destroy in all the ways you destroy.” She sucks in a sharp breath, resentful of her weakness, this insufferable vulnerability. “So that I might be useful to you.”
01-15-2020, 08:14 PM (This post was last modified: 01-15-2020, 08:26 PM by ghaul.)
GHAUL
why does it burn when i pee
Why does he hold her so precious, above so many others? She does not yield when he commands and yet it does not infuriate him. His jowls don’t ache to crush her trachea and listen to her wheeze through her last breaths feebly. Ghaul has never even thought of what it would be like to flay her in front of the entire Pangean court. But maybe that is why they are friends. Maybe that is why they are safe from one another – for today, at least.
If she asked, he could not promise her a lifetime of mercy.
And she could not promise it to him either.
He is mildly pleased when she tolerates his touch but his ego remains bruised at her previous rebuking. Ghaul coils tightly around his soured heart and stiffens when she presses her lips to the soft flesh of his throat. One flash of fangs and she could end him. But she mimics his promise and her mouth retreats, leaves him unscathed. Even he would have delighted to see himself squirming in agony at a death by venom, but this result is equally thrilling.
Teach me, she says, and he wonders if he ever could. He destroys only what is not freely given to him. Ghaul has only ever hungered for the things he has had to fight for. His head tilts as he watches the blur of her for a while, thinking and meditating on her request a while longer before his wings settle more comfortably across his long back.
“I seek out weakness and devour it. This world has no place for soft spines or fragile minds. There will be no sanctuary for those who feign strength,” he answers finally, his voice rasping over crooked teeth and scar tissue lips. “Take them by the throat and bite straight through. Rip a trophy from their corpses and leave the bodies as a warning.”
He thinks of the kills he has made so far: the mare in Loess, the prey of the forests. It is not enough to sate his hunger and even thinking of it makes him salivate. Ghaul swallows hard and shudders as he tries to brush the thought away for now. There will be time for hunting later.
