i’ve been both a saint & a viper
He trembles, dark nostrils flaring and his eyes rolling white. That moment of reprieve is now gone; fallen away like sand on a turbulent seashore. His time of clarity is waning, more so than it had in the beginning of the night. Their voices are screeching and chittering, louder and louder, drowning out his labored breath and his pitiful pleas with their own chorus; the moment they had been grooming him for years is finally nearing the precipice. Balto had been so close to salvation, to reprieve, and now it sinks back from him, leaving him to succumb to the insanity he had fought so long to keep at bay.
He cries out, helpless, reaching out for the darkness but finding nothing to cling to. The walls are crumbling, the foundation cracking as their talons and claws dig and dig and dig, trying to squeeze beneath his skin and live within his very marrow. He is still there - a part of the shadows, completely now - and he watches Balto with those same piercing eyes that are now seared into his memory forever.
Let go, he tells him when his blue eyes find yellow. Balto’s face contorts into pure terror as the command rattles through him, his dark demons echoing in haunting whispers all across his skin. He tries to call to him again, to save him, to help him, but nothing comes from his throat. The devils fill his mouth, pouring into his body like smoke; he chokes and sputters on seemingly nothing, those crystal blue irises wide on the fierce yellow of the darkness.
The last one enters him, its tail like a sliver of a viper in the way it wriggles down his throat, and Balto’s sounds of turmoil immediately cease. The stallion’s head lowers for a moment as if gathering his bearings. For a long time, it is like this - silent and still - before the blue stallion’s head finally lifts, meeting the shadow beast’s eyes with new resilience in his own, glimmering with madness.
“Thank you,” comes his voice - and it is his voice, of course, but the actual sound of it is nothing like it had been moments before. The words are venomous and ghastly, absent of all the weariness and the sorrow that had been there. “He will never rest.”
And then a smile - dark and morbid and full of hellish secrets - curls carefully into the dark of his cracked lips.
Balto
@[jamie]