"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
04-23-2020, 06:28 PM (This post was last modified: 04-23-2020, 06:29 PM by City.)
City
A freckled ghoul. Moving quietly between the trees with almost no sound. She's alone, which is sort of odd because she has three daughters out there that need stalking. Rarely is she ever not following one of them around, telling them what they must to, scolding them for what they are doing incorrectly. Olea takes it the best, usually so grateful to see her old scarred up mother that she doesn't protest being chastised for her various downfalls. City is always warmed by that - her mothchild is her softest, sweetest daughter.
Her bones creak as she rolls forward down the path. She moves without the oily ease as she once did when she was younger. Her skin leathery, marred with black marks from previous scuffles and encounters. Her cheek and hip bones show dramatically so. Her bright sulfuric eyes look as tired as she feels. Her age is finding her. She has escaped it for an unnatural amount of time so far - she cannot manage it much longer now.
She's been walking for hours now, wandering the paths along the long river that cuts through Beqanna. Her body aches, though it is accustomed to being on the move. It must be hydration, she thinks. Well, that is remedied easily enough. She brings herself to the shallow bank of the rushing water, stepping in to her ankles, sinking in the soft sand as she bends down to drink.
rushed and filled with all I found more, give me more, give me more
i'm weird with openers
sorry its kinda shitty
@[kensley]
There is no reason for him to venture to the river.
Except that sometimes he still fantasizes about casting himself into the water, surrendering to the current, letting it carry him away to someplace else.
He knows better than to go on believing it capable of drowning him.
Death cannot touch that which is already dead, he knows.
He moves quickly. Not from any real sense of urgency, but because the muscles do not tire. Because the chest does not heave with want for air. There is nothing to slow him down and this is the most natural pace he can find.
He happens upon her quite by accident. And perhaps the heart would have leapt at the idea of company some years ago, but he feels absolutely nothing now, as he ventures closer and drags those dark eyes along the surface of her scarred flesh. By the look of her, she has lived just as long as he has. Which feels like forever most days.
He would have drawn in a shuddering breath some years ago, before death came for him – or he came for it, it’s hard to tell anymore – but there is absolutely no need for it now. So, he merely rolls to a stop and studies her from a few feet away. Remembering in some abstract way what that first swallow of water had felt like after so much thirst.
“It doesn’t appear as if life has been kind to you,” he says, the voice thin without breath to buoy it. And there is no inflection, because the heart in his chest is nothing but a solid block of ice and it is so much better to feel nothing at all.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
01-21-2021, 11:55 AM (This post was last modified: 01-21-2021, 11:55 AM by City.)
It wasn’t until she already started drinking that the old mare realized she was not alone in the darkness. City’s senses have had time to adjust, but still, it is so disorienting to be in such pitch blackness. Fires and random lanterns light what they can, but the shroud is so dark, it almost seems thick. Light comes here to starve and die now. Piles of candles burn and drip from the low tree limbs they’re perched on. She stands out of reach of the dim flicker of firelight, her brittle ankles in the cold running water while she’s bent like a broken crane to have a drink.
He must have heard her old bones creaking, or perhaps smelled the rot of old age on her – whatever it was he sensed, it betrays her. He is right, in a way, but also very wrong. Life has been so kind that she’s sure she does not want it to end. She’s seen much of the darker things, Beqanna is not a gentle place to call home most days and being as old as she is, she’s seen many dreadful things. She lost and loved, though the latter very rarely save for her beloved daughters. She has no desire to let go.
“It has,” she speaks with a tired hiss, her voice hard like stone and barely feminine. “but old age has not been.” She bemoans, tipping one ear back a she steps out of the stream and toward him – not that he can see any detail of what the pale mare is doing. She catches his scent suddenly – he smells of death, but not of that same kind that’s coming for her; no one waits for him with a cloak and scythe. She’s seen it before. “But you do not suffer with such a problem, do you?” she breathes in his smell quietly. She’s not put off by it, or even particularly affected, at least not negatively. The fairies gave the solitary old mare a task long ago – find those with eternal life and learn about it from them, and return. Talking to others is a difficult quest for someone who has no use for anyone’s company.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
He does not fear the darkness.
He has seen death, he has crawled through its depths, he has emerged changed.
Death lives within him now, like disease. It will not release him, no matter how desperately he wishes it would. This is his cross to bear, his price to pay, and he will accept the suffering.
Life has not been kind to him.
He has strayed so far from the light, the softness of his childhood. He cannot remember now where it all went wrong, where it all fell apart. He cannot remember now when the heart started to break or what cracked it in the first place.
He cannot imagine a kind life but there is some part of him that is relieved to hear that her life has been kind. She’s right, he has no concept of old age either. He had aged, certainly. Until he had inherited his sister’s immortality at the cost of her life. Until death had found him and time could no longer touch him.
He offers up a rueful smile (such a foreign sensation after the heart had been frozen so long that he had forgotten what it meant to be moved by emotion) and shakes his head. “No,” he affirms, “unfortunately I don’t.”
He does not know what it is that compels him to go on speaking, but he shifts his weight and turns his focus to the river, just barely visible through the crushing darkness. “I would give almost anything to know what old age meant,” he confesses and then rolls his shoulders, barely disturbing the frost that had begun to spread across his flesh after the Alliance. “To feel it. To feel anything.”
02-22-2021, 05:33 PM (This post was last modified: 03-28-2021, 10:22 AM by City.)
Life would be nothing without her daughters – and her mother before them, the one who taught her how to be a humble daughter and a powerful mother. She urges her lovelings along like her mother used to. Like her mother still does in her dreams and in the corners of her blurred vision. It is no strange thing to the freckled woman see the old bay mare, her coat no longer riddled with deep scars and no gray marring her bright mahogany coat; standing in her peripherals or walking beside her.
Emotion* is always in the background of her daughter’s life even from the afterlife. City does the same for her children, but among the living…so far. And it’s for her daughters that she seeks eternal life. Her mother has not left her, and any ancestors before her, they drift to and from – but they’re never here. You can see them, even talk to them, and in dreams they can weave the feeling of their warmth against you or the sound of their voice but a ghost is never truly there. Not enough – it is not enough. A cold breeze curls between them just before he speaks and her attention is brought back to him.
“It means leaving,” she looks down at the river, both horses watching what bit of sparkling waters they can see in the matte black. Her voice is as far away as her thoughts, no real life to them. It’s evident that his statement makes her mind turn and whirl behind her bright sulfur eyes. “..and decay – you leave and there is nothing but memories and carcass to show for it.” She knows it’s much deeper, but the surface of it gauges enough that the deeper things don’t mean much. She brings her eyes to sweep over him, “Have you no one you would leave behind?” the question came into her mind and out of her lips, meeting no sorting process beforehand. She knows the question is rather rude, even a bit intimate, she means to be neither but doesn’t mind him thinking one or the other either.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
Old age meant leaving, but leaving is the only thing he has ever known. Leaving is the only thing he inherited from his father because leaving was the only good thing the father had ever been good for. He does not want to bristle at this, he does not want to think about the father and all of the ugly things he felt for the once-king. He does not want to dirty this encounter with his bitterness, so he swallows that down. He does not tell her that one does not have to be old to leave, though he understands that she must mean a different kind of leaving.
The kind of leaving one does not come back from.
Like the sister who’d died and left him her eternal life when he’d kissed her brow.
A curse more than a blessing. She’d deserved it more than he ever could.
He shifts his weight, which feels even more cumbersome now.
Hasn’t he already been reduced to memories and carcass? He is covered in a thin layer of frost now and perhaps this prevents the decay. For that he is grateful, grateful for the dignity of it. (He is still a prideful thing, Kensley, though he wishes he wasn’t.)
He studies her a long moment through the dark and considers her question. It does not strike him as rude. He has lived so long now that it does not seem as if there are any things left off-limits between strangers. Were he still an alive thing, he might have drawn a breath to buy himself enough time to gather his thoughts. Instead, he merely pauses and it might read as hesitation but he has no control over this.
His mother, of course. His siblings, those who remain. Anaxarete. Their children, including the son who may or may not be responsible for the darkness that has descended so aggressively around them. He rolls a frost-covered shoulder now.
“Of course,” he says finally, pausing only briefly now before continuing, “but I think I would prefer only losing them once to having to endure the pain of loss a thousand times over.” He turns to level her with that plain brown gaze and asks, “which would you prefer?”
03-25-2021, 05:57 PM (This post was last modified: 03-28-2021, 10:23 AM by City.)
City greeted the descension of darkness with an eerie casualness – like a serial killer looking down on a bent, dead animal they’ve taken the life from without empathy. She’s not immortal yet, and still see feels like she’s seen a thousand years pass by her here. The freckled mare has watched the world change, twist and writhe as it rises and cracks open, crumbling and reforming – always shifting. She’s never trusted the land to stay the same, you cannot even trust the rocks and trees you see in this world. Tiring, really, if she thinks too hard about it. Its absolutely exhausting, truly.
“I prefer to never leave them.” her sulfur eyes catch distant firelight in them, glinting toward him as they stand on the river’s pebbled shore. His words weigh in her mind though, churning like a tide as she digests it to its extent. And what suffering will she witness? Only to never be relieved with death, betraying the natural wheel of life. She pushes the thought away, in the back with the others like it. “I am their mother.” she whispers to no one, looking down at where the trickling water could be seen if all the light hadn’t been snuffed out of the world.
“So you are cursed then.” she breaks the silence left between them after she stopped talking to no one. It isn’t really a question, but a declaration of her assessment. He does not enjoy his eternal life – but who can blame him? Frosted skin held in place, the rot at bay but waiting like wolves to decompose him into remains. She does not desire that. She reaches for rebirth, for the spirit of a phoenix to mix into her blood. She does not say so though, and leaves her statement to hang between them in the darkness.
i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
There is no hesitation in her answer. She delivers it without pause and he wonders if he should be ashamed of his. Is he selfish in his want to spare himself the suffering? Does this make him a coward? There has been so much suffering already and he knows that he has deserved every moment of agony, but he is so horribly tired.
He has to wonder, though, how a father’s love differs from a mother’s. How would Anaxarete have answered the question? There is a spasm of pain deep in his chest, though it does not seem to originate in the heart. He swallows and nods his understanding. Of course a mother’s love is not the same as a father’s. Of course a mother will endure things for her children that a father could not begin to imagine.
He thinks of his first daughter and how he had left her and hadn’t even died to do it. Guilt festers in his gut like a wound. He is drawn from his thoughts only when she speaks and he nods again, slowly this time, distracted.
“I suppose I am,” he muses, head tilted. “But if I’m cursed it’s only because I’m a coward.” He rolls his tired shoulders in a shrug. “Because I’m not willing to suffer for my children.” He had learned how to live with the knowledge that he had never been the best son or brother or lover but he does not know how to come to terms with this newfound truth, the understanding that perhaps he is not a good father either.
