"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
02-16-2020, 05:54 PM (This post was last modified: 02-23-2020, 03:19 AM by Aislyn.)
She steps through the forest, and she is different.
It is not just the weight of the antlers that she wears on her head – large and brilliant white, with tips dipped in black. There is a different weight, too, one that no one else can see but that she can feel. It settles like sand in all the crevices of her heart, sinking it like a rock further behind the confines of her ribs. All her innocence and naivety had been left on the plains, when she had spilled the blood of a friend without a second thought.
When the red-lit dome disappeared, and her adrenaline had the chance to fade, her suspicions of it all being fake had been confirmed. And yet, this eased none of the guilt.
She had fought Voracious no questions asked, and then killed a likeness of herself without hesitation. The antlers that the pillars had gifted her with had been christened with bloodshed almost immediately, and she wavers between whether that is a good thing or not.
From the day she had been born she had not been made for soft, fragile things – she had been born surrounded by ash and shadow and flame, she had inhaled war before she ever knew what peace was. But she had never seen herself as ruthless. Had never thought herself a murderer, or as one that would deliver the first blow.
It is late in the afternoon when she walks towards the edge of the forest, and from where she stands she can see the amber glow of the sun as it washes across the emerald fields of the meadow in the distance. Their voices are a faint hum on the wind, but she does not go towards them the way she usually would. She lingers there in the shadows, eyes vibrant and sharp as she simply watches, and though she had never known her place in this world to begin with she cannot help but to feel more lost than she has ever been.
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
If there is anything to which Voracious can boast a keen knowledge of, it is loss and pain and bloodshed. His youth had been filled with it. He had fought and bled and killed and even nearly died pursuing freedom from it. And he had succeeded, against all odds. But it leaves behind a crack in one’s soul. A fissure that bleeds darkness, even when one isn’t focused on it.
Perhaps especially when one isn’t focused on it.
It’s all he had ever known though, and so a different life had always been an alien concept. Something he had only ever been able to dream of, and poorly. But the echoes of his past will forever haunt his present, even in this impossibly peaceful realm where he has yet to find a thing to fear. Too many times he has found himself on the verge of impaling a perfect stranger, simply because they had startled him. Perhaps one day he even would.
Regret though? That is truly a foreign concept to him. He is as he is. As he has always been. Maybe that is why he is so easily able to wander this surface world, blithely happy despite the darkness of his past. Because he had never seen the point in lingering.
So when he sees her, recognition coming after a moment of confusion, his reaction is immediate delight. “Aislyn!” His voice is bright on the wind, no doubt annoyingly cheerful in the face of her dour mood. But, whether regrettable or not, he remains completely oblivious to the darkness that plagues her heart. “You look different.” Pause. “Why do you look different?”
He is perhaps the last face she wanted to see right now, and that thought brings with it a twinge of guilt. It’s not his fault. She knows it had not been him in the dome, she knows that it was not his face she had mutilated in her attempt to get his antlers untangled from hers. It was a twisted illusion of him, and the logical part of her brain desperately tries to grasp that.
But she cannot deny the way her skin suddenly turns hot at the sight of him. How her muscles draw tight beneath her skin, twitching with a reflex that hadn’t existed prior to the plains. There is a suspicion that clouds her brightly colored eyes, because for a moment she cannot help but to wonder if this was a trap too.
“Voro,” she greets him in a voice that is strangely detached for someone that is usually so animated in nearly every way. She is still watching him, studying his face, his antlers, and sweeping her gaze back to his body – searching for any sign that this was not really him. But eventually her eyes make their way back to the vibrant aqua of his, and she offers him a taut smile when he mentions that she looks different. “I have antlers now. Just like you,” she accentuates the statement with a tilt of her head, and she wills away the memory of what it had felt like to have her antlers locked with his – pushed away the echo of ivory crashing against each other.
There is a pause, and she knows that she is acting strange, but she hopes that maybe he is still too oblivious to social cues to pick up on it. She clears her throat anyway, though, and forces her tone to sound more upbeat she asks him, “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in awhile.”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
Were he cleverer or more socially adept, he might have noticed the subtle cues signifying her discomfort. Might even have paused to question it, given how amicably they had parted after their last meeting. As it is however, he is neither of those things. And so, much as she had surmised, he remains oblivious to her clear agitation.
Instead, his attention is entirely focused on trying to recall exactly what she had looked like at their last meeting and why she seemed different. While his ability to notice and react to stimuli in the immediate present is nearly unparalleled, his memory… well, that’s an entirely different story. Perhaps it is a consequence of one too many knocks to the head as a child, but whatever the case may be, he struggles committing those details to long term memory. On the battlefield, such a thing had been largely irrelevant. Now however, in the face of social expectations, it seems those things matter a great deal.
A concern for another time. Assuming he remembered it, of course.
When she reveals her newly antlered state, his gaze flies up to the pale horns stretching skeletal fingers above her head. “Oh!” he exclaims before offering her a sheepish grin. “Right. Of course. I forget sometimes most of you lack them.”
Closing the distance between them, he stretches his nose forward, sniffing curiously at the new appendages. To his surprise and chagrin, they prove no different smelling than any other set of antlers he’s ever sniffed. Which, as it happens, is a larger number than he’d care to admit.
Her forced cheerfulness goes unnoticed by the peryton as he accepts her friendly small talk at face value. “Oh, well enough, I suppose,” he replies blithely, still focused on the unconscious sway of her antlers as she speaks. “Your world is endlessly fascinating.” He pauses for barely breath before abruptly returning the subject she’d just tried to abandon. “How did you get antlers?”
She tries not to tense when he steps towards her. She fights every instinct that tells her to lower her head and force him away before he can get the first strike in, she does her best to chase away the memories that still clung like cobwebs in her mind from the battlefield. She doesn’t move, but she is rigid – she inhales and she holds it, she watches him with untrusting eyes and a tight jaw as he nearly touches her antlers (and she hates herself for noticing how the movement had left his throat exposed, hates herself for thinking, even fleetingly, how easy it would be to duck her head and thrust and tine right into his skin).
When he again withdraws she releases her breath, some of the tension disappearing when she shifts herself backwards to lengthen the space between them. “I guess fascinating is one way to put it,” she says a little dryly. There had been a time when she, too, had found it fascinating, but now it all just seemed twisted.
Like maybe this land was meant to break them until they were bitter and jaded; until their wonder and hope dissolved into indifference.
“I fought for them,” she answers bluntly at first, and she considers not elaborating. It would be easier to forget, she thinks, if that memory lived only in her own mind. It would be easier to move on from it and regain the beginnings of their friendship if she was not planting seeds of doubt into his own mind, too.
But her heart twists cruelly in her chest, and when her gaze sharpens onto his face she cannot hide the accusation that finds its way into her tone, “I fought you.” The heat of anger flushes in her cheeks and her pulse suddenly elevates, and this time she takes a daring step forward as she continues with a tip of her head, “Or some version of you, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
He should be as dissolute and jaded as any other who had learned of the true nature of the world. He should be, and yet somehow, he is not. His life until recently had been, by any definition of the word, hellish. There had been little joy to be found in the endless, brutal training to be a defender of a forgotten city. Despite this, he had retained a naivete that allowed him to find pleasure in the simplest things in life.
The fact that he had been forged in the fires of damnation seemed only to enhance his stubborn determination to achieve freedom. Had only served to fuel the fires of his impossible belief that there must be something better.
He cannot read her thoughts as he reaches his nose to her antlers. A good thing, in all likelihood. For all that he trusts her, it is something that would only hold him so far. Endless repetition had honed his instincts, and no matter that he would not wish to respond in kind, he would have. In the end, her restraint is a blessing. One he doesn’t even know he’d been granted.
Her blunt response to his curious questions brings his aqua gaze down to find hers. The flatness of her words might not have registered had she not continued, clarifying what she meant by fighting for them. Brows furrowing, he tries to recall fighting her. Without thinking, his own head tips as well, bring his antlers forward to clatter faintly against hers as he peers at her with a baffled gaze.
“I do not recall us fighting,” he finally replies, uncertainty coloring the edges of his words. Abruptly a thought occurs that stirs alarm deep in his breast. “It was not one of my brother’s was it? I did not think they would come to the surface so easily.”
