06-25-2020, 01:52 PM
The shadow passes overhead, drawing a long and low growl that rolls in his chest like thunder as he lingers at the water’s edge, his claws clenching in the sandy red mud. Amber eyes flash upwards, his avian head tilting sharply to scan the sky, but the creature has already passed out of sight hidden by the canyon walls. The mimic draws breath slowly, the curling growl continuing to tumble about him, dancing in the hot air like the flies that hover around him, ever-present, ever-buzzing, attracted to the blood smell that wafts thickly from his tattered hide. His tail snaps against his flanks, the cords of it gnarled and filthy with clotted blood and clinging red sand. The knots sting as they slash against bare muscle, leaving streaks of grime and flicking blood back across the rough cliff face beside him and the flies lift away with an agitated hum before settling again to feed like gluttons on the places his flesh has been peeled away by the Beast. He does not seem to notice them, a thousand tiny feet marching over him until the black patches of hide seem to move unnaturally.
Dreamscar lowers his head to the water and the blood that drips down from the horrible star ripped into his forehead stains the water as he drinks, tinging it with the taste of iron. He dips his beak into the rusty water repeatedly, each time filling the dangerous curve of it with a mouthful and tilting his head back so the water rushes down his throat. It is a slow, laborious, way to drink, but he is used to it. After each swallow, he pauses to scrutinize his surroundings. The fears of his childhood have smoothed their edges to constant, cautious, awareness.
Shadows catch his attention again, the sound of feathers and the smell of something sharp like the air before a thunderstorm. His ears flatten and he hisses, anger trembling in his breast, but one ear soon lifts and turns forward, skeptical, tracking the strange sound of hoof and claw that crunch and scrape on the sandstone floor.
Her thunderous wings bring her low, then, hoping to find within the winding cliffs someone worth entertaining a moment of her time, and her eye is keen for unfamiliar shapes, but it is her nostrils that find the fellow first. The scent of blood drifts into the air well above him, and she angles her head down where the water cuts through the canyon, where he stands against the shining stream, coloring it with a stain of crimson. Red dust, and red blood, and where he is not red, a strange, dull, sticky, black. Her shadow flickers over him, and as it does, his head lifts sharply and the sun gleams off a large and cruelly curved beak.
Before his amber eyes can find her shape in the sky she has landed, wings dissolving away into her skin, but she keeps her beak, and she keeps her dark, sharp eyes. She keeps the claws that scrape the earth in place of fore-hooves and lets her mane become a crest of mottled black feathers that lay smooth and flat down her crest. He is waiting for her around the bend, a hiss cutting across his tongue. She returns the unfriendly greeting, the feathers on her neck lifting against the threat that slices the air between them, but her avian eyes are alive with ever-present laughter.
After a moment, the hiss is returned in kind, much to his consternation. What comes around the bend to meet him is the last thing he expects. The bay wears his features, beak, and claw, but feathers ripple down her neck, lifting as if in alarm, and to find his shape mirrored back at him brings him pause. A querulous lyric trills from his throat, and then a rough-voiced question.
“Who?”
She is dark, but not like him, her belly bright like fire and her shoulders dark as the rich soil of the forest. The feathers in her hair are mottled black-and-white, and her eyes glisten, dark and shining with laughter. It’s the laughter in them he dislikes, the laughter that makes him tense his claws. The strangely avian mare mirrors every move, but she moves more stiffly than he, her bones all horse or all bird. She is less a hunter than he, only plays at it, and Dreamscar, though momentarily fascinated, quickly finds the lie in her. She looks like him, but she is something else entirely. His pupils dilate, the scant feathers across his breast stand on end and he draws his beak into his feathered chest, setting back slightly on the bunched and visible muscles of his hindquarters.
His rough voice grates across her ears, but Popinjay does not reply, except to draw closer when he tucks his beak in close to that broad chest. His movements are more fluid than she can copy, there is a strange sense of something vaguely feline to the way his skeleton he shifts his weight, and despite the gore and rot and flies that are layered thickly across him, she is desperate to touch him. The feathers of his chest stand in threat, his pupils dilating, but she reaches out with her smaller beak, heedless of his warnings.
The bird mare seems not to recognize the threat, or she chooses to ignore it, he is not sure which, but she presses him into his space. He responds with an explosion, leaping forward with a wide-open beak that seeks to tear her throat, his grasping claws reaching out to slash the flesh of her shoulder and clawed forearms. She tries to dodge but their talons grasp and tangle, and he is larger, stronger, has the benefit of experience, and he yanks her toward him roughly, even as she tries to pull away, as the air around them vibrates and he feels his hair lifts and seems to spark.
Nobody has ever attacked her before. The little bay bird-mare squeals sharply and rears back when he lunges, only the sharp edge of his beak scraping at her neck. It leaves a welt there, and a droplet of blood, but no more. He is fast and fierce in his movement, but she is nimble. She is, however, inexperienced, and nothing in her history has prepared her for a prolonged attack. A warning, sure, but he thrusts himself forward at her once again and she is too slow this time to avoid it, eyes rolling as she shies side-ways, her clawed forelegs rising up defensively against the stallion’s gleaming talons. His grip is crushing and her cry turns shrill when he pulls her forward, against him.
“No, no, no!”
Something like anger lights up in her voice, electrifying it, and the air crackles between them.
“You. Stot.”
His beak is not designed for speech and he struggles to get his tongue around the ‘P’ in ‘stop.’ Stop the magic he can taste in the air like pennies. He casts his net, entangling her in a web of adoration that dulls her struggling. The buzzing of the air ceases as his snare wraps around her like a snake’s coils, starving her of the breath of her rebelliousness and replacing it with the sudden bloom of infatuation.
Her head hurts for a moment, but not as much as her heart, which feels a sudden aching sadness that makes her drop the lightning that had been charging within her and leaves her weak and whimpering softly. There is a sense of being torn, a yawning, senseless, chasm of… of what? Her heart skips with a foreign feeling, it shreds itself to pieces at his touch, her mind dull with thick adoration like a honey-bound hive. In the drowning combs of her mind, some memory of Herself struggles in vain through the mire, screams bite and kick and fight but the most she can manage is a soft nicker and the laughter in her eyes is lost beneath the waves of devotion he presses on her.
The laughter of her eyes grows dull and Dreamscar trills victoriously as it dies, reaching out to drag his beak across her smooth skin, hard enough to leave a welt. Slowly, he releases the grip of her bleeding foreleg, testing her reaction, but the mare does not move except to lean forward into him. For a moment, he considers killing her, but his hunger leans in other directions today. He slinks forward, rubbing against her to relish in the screaming fire of her body scraping his livid wounds, the way the clotted places break open and red blood drips audibly to the thirsty ground. He leaves a fetid stain on her side, but she makes no complaint, only chirps softly at him. It’s an invitation he does not need.
His chest leans against the mare’s rump, and here he pauses a moment to study a small constellation of scars on her flank, the flesh twisted as though melted, but long healed. He presses the side of his beak to her, his black, pointed tongue brushing against the scar tissue curiously, and then with a grunt of exertion, he lifts himself atop her. The grinding pressure of his weight over her is agony through his belly, the flaring pain blinds him, makes him growl and grab greedily at her with his claws. His talons pierce her side where the burn scars already mar it, ticking against the bone of her hip, making her squeal and start and try to leap forward, but she is pliable under the spell of his magic and easily pulled back. Dreamscar leans forward and grasps her neck in his beak, burying it in the meat of her crest, subduing her. His is claws clench and crush her soft flesh until her blood and his intermingle and run freely down her legs. Her shining hide is slick and dark with blood and frothing sweat when he grows still at last and slips from her back with a jerk and a shudder. The flies that droned in circles around them as they were coupled suddenly mob them both, clinging to their skin as he melts back into the depths of Pangea without a word or backward glance, leaving her bereft and still reeling from the rush of his withdrawn magic.
When he leaves, she is left blinking and shivering, the wind that whistles through the echoing canyon walls leaves a chill on her filthy coat and carries away with it the stench of him – of them. Her chest aches dully, and her hips throb where talons pierced them, and scream when she takes a tentative step forward, shaking her head clear of the magic that had held her so strangely. Poppy snorts, confused, grimacing, his absence like forgetting and the taste of hollow devotion a fading bitterness on her tongue, but she is not so bewildered that she does not hear the scraping sounds of somebody coming closer, drawn from downwind by the scent of blood. She shifts - it is agony to feel the way her bones change beneath the torn skin of her neck and haunch – and thrusts herself skyward to freedom.
Dreamscar lowers his head to the water and the blood that drips down from the horrible star ripped into his forehead stains the water as he drinks, tinging it with the taste of iron. He dips his beak into the rusty water repeatedly, each time filling the dangerous curve of it with a mouthful and tilting his head back so the water rushes down his throat. It is a slow, laborious, way to drink, but he is used to it. After each swallow, he pauses to scrutinize his surroundings. The fears of his childhood have smoothed their edges to constant, cautious, awareness.
Shadows catch his attention again, the sound of feathers and the smell of something sharp like the air before a thunderstorm. His ears flatten and he hisses, anger trembling in his breast, but one ear soon lifts and turns forward, skeptical, tracking the strange sound of hoof and claw that crunch and scrape on the sandstone floor.
She has seen Pangea from afar, from above, as an eagle would, its details sharp, hard-edged in the blazing sun, and the high contrast shadows that cut across the sandstone cliffs. She has seen many of the country's strange inhabitants from above, which is not the best way to examine them, but the only one available to her powers as she soars high, high overhead. Unless she would like to see if they are resilient against her lightning, though it's not much fun to see the way they jerk and die beneath her bolts when they are not.
Her thunderous wings bring her low, then, hoping to find within the winding cliffs someone worth entertaining a moment of her time, and her eye is keen for unfamiliar shapes, but it is her nostrils that find the fellow first. The scent of blood drifts into the air well above him, and she angles her head down where the water cuts through the canyon, where he stands against the shining stream, coloring it with a stain of crimson. Red dust, and red blood, and where he is not red, a strange, dull, sticky, black. Her shadow flickers over him, and as it does, his head lifts sharply and the sun gleams off a large and cruelly curved beak.
Before his amber eyes can find her shape in the sky she has landed, wings dissolving away into her skin, but she keeps her beak, and she keeps her dark, sharp eyes. She keeps the claws that scrape the earth in place of fore-hooves and lets her mane become a crest of mottled black feathers that lay smooth and flat down her crest. He is waiting for her around the bend, a hiss cutting across his tongue. She returns the unfriendly greeting, the feathers on her neck lifting against the threat that slices the air between them, but her avian eyes are alive with ever-present laughter.
After a moment, the hiss is returned in kind, much to his consternation. What comes around the bend to meet him is the last thing he expects. The bay wears his features, beak, and claw, but feathers ripple down her neck, lifting as if in alarm, and to find his shape mirrored back at him brings him pause. A querulous lyric trills from his throat, and then a rough-voiced question.
“Who?”
She is dark, but not like him, her belly bright like fire and her shoulders dark as the rich soil of the forest. The feathers in her hair are mottled black-and-white, and her eyes glisten, dark and shining with laughter. It’s the laughter in them he dislikes, the laughter that makes him tense his claws. The strangely avian mare mirrors every move, but she moves more stiffly than he, her bones all horse or all bird. She is less a hunter than he, only plays at it, and Dreamscar, though momentarily fascinated, quickly finds the lie in her. She looks like him, but she is something else entirely. His pupils dilate, the scant feathers across his breast stand on end and he draws his beak into his feathered chest, setting back slightly on the bunched and visible muscles of his hindquarters.
His rough voice grates across her ears, but Popinjay does not reply, except to draw closer when he tucks his beak in close to that broad chest. His movements are more fluid than she can copy, there is a strange sense of something vaguely feline to the way his skeleton he shifts his weight, and despite the gore and rot and flies that are layered thickly across him, she is desperate to touch him. The feathers of his chest stand in threat, his pupils dilating, but she reaches out with her smaller beak, heedless of his warnings.
“No, no, no!”
Something like anger lights up in her voice, electrifying it, and the air crackles between them.
His beak is not designed for speech and he struggles to get his tongue around the ‘P’ in ‘stop.’ Stop the magic he can taste in the air like pennies. He casts his net, entangling her in a web of adoration that dulls her struggling. The buzzing of the air ceases as his snare wraps around her like a snake’s coils, starving her of the breath of her rebelliousness and replacing it with the sudden bloom of infatuation.
His chest leans against the mare’s rump, and here he pauses a moment to study a small constellation of scars on her flank, the flesh twisted as though melted, but long healed. He presses the side of his beak to her, his black, pointed tongue brushing against the scar tissue curiously, and then with a grunt of exertion, he lifts himself atop her. The grinding pressure of his weight over her is agony through his belly, the flaring pain blinds him, makes him growl and grab greedily at her with his claws. His talons pierce her side where the burn scars already mar it, ticking against the bone of her hip, making her squeal and start and try to leap forward, but she is pliable under the spell of his magic and easily pulled back. Dreamscar leans forward and grasps her neck in his beak, burying it in the meat of her crest, subduing her. His is claws clench and crush her soft flesh until her blood and his intermingle and run freely down her legs. Her shining hide is slick and dark with blood and frothing sweat when he grows still at last and slips from her back with a jerk and a shudder. The flies that droned in circles around them as they were coupled suddenly mob them both, clinging to their skin as he melts back into the depths of Pangea without a word or backward glance, leaving her bereft and still reeling from the rush of his withdrawn magic.
Dreamscar v. Popinjay