"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
08-04-2020, 05:29 PM (This post was last modified: 08-04-2020, 07:03 PM by Molech.)
The colt moves beneath darkness like it is part of him - there is no hesitation in his steps, no uncertainty as he walks almost gracefully through a mix of bramble and rock. He follows the gentle curve and twist of the river’s path, drawn to the hushed bubbling of the water over smoothed pebbles and the growing fog that begins to surround him. The lazy mist hangs loosely over this particular calm twist in the large, winding river. It clings to the trees and rocks, as well as his teal and gold body, dipping into the curved lines of his youthful shoulders and flanks.
The fog kisses him and envelops him like a cloak, welcoming him. The pines in the wood just behind him are dark and tall, stretching like silent giants into the black sky. He stops here - where the darkness of night and the dense mist are thickest - and dips his slender forelegs into the babble of the river’s water. A mere child, at home beneath the shadow and unafraid as the night becomes darker, stares into the water that swirls expectantly around his golden ankles, hushed whispers calling him into the deep.
The boy snorts sharply, his gold-tipped ears flipping behind him, deep teal lids narrowing around the soft lavender of his irises. His tongue - thin and forked, like a viper - slithers from his golden mouth, tasting the air. He isn’t alone.
He turns over his shoulder, ruffling the tri-colored wings on his back absentmindedly.
“You can come out,” he murmurs into the shadow of the treeline behind him, his face expressionless as he stares into what appears to be nothing - but he knows it is anything but. I’m not afraid, he murmurs, almost coos, into their mind like venom - whoever it is that lingers in the darkness, or whoever accidentally stumbled across him. He turns back to the water, studying it closely as his head lowers towards it, his forked tongue gently touching it as if it was as delicate as a flower. He lifts his head, tilting it slightly as if contemplating something, before reaching out to their mind once again, this time a thin veil of fear coming from him like icy fingertips, attempting to help him place the stranger within the darkness. It’s so tiny, so minuscule; like the hair on your neck suddenly standing on end, or an unexplained shiver down your spine.
But enough for him to gauge their presence.
Thoughts are delicious and that is what he is seeking; he wonders if they can feel them prying into their consciousness, feasting on their innermost desires and fears, each one more tantalizing than the last. He wants to make all their dreams come true, each and every one of them - though, perhaps, they would not enjoy the way he would do so.
There isn’t enough here - not yet - from this stranger, which is why Molech invites them in, a young and feeble colt merely lost while wandering the river’s path.
“I do not like to be alone,” his slithering voice confesses, lifting his gaze over his shoulder once again to encourage them further, something like sadness in his brilliantly shining eyes - he does try to be truthful.
08-09-2020, 09:28 PM (This post was last modified: 08-09-2020, 10:04 PM by clementia.)
be still, my foolish heart
don't ruin this for me
She had wandered too far from home.
Farther than she ever had before, certainly.
She had ventured to strange worlds. Carefully, of course. Always so careful, like their father had been once, as if one false step might spell disaster. How easily they thought they could shatter. How fragile they thought they were. Built to underestimate their strength. Built for fear.
But Clementia has failed to recognize so many hazards. It is the earth she fears most. She does not know how to fear the darkness within it. It is the holes and the rocks and the fallen trees that she fears. These things that might trip her, send her to her knees, and inevitably shatter that soft veneer.
She is not an afraid thing now, as she reaches the familiar edge of the forest. She knows this forest, even if she does not spend much time in it. The trees are dense here, they keep the sun from her. They do not allow for the rainbows to bend away from her skin, gleaming. The trees here turn her dull.
So she makes for the river where she’d met Pollen and felt some coy flicker of heat for the first time. She makes for the river because it catches the light the same way she does, because she feels at home there. Even more than the meadow, where their father waits tirelessly for their mother.
She hesitates at the edge, peering through branches at the winged figure in the fog. Feathered wings, no doubt functional in a way that hers have not had the chance to be yet. He is a handsome thing, she can tell it even from where she stands, shrouded in darkness the same way he is shrouded in the fog.
It is not fear that keeps her rooted there but something else entirely. Some tremendous sense of wonder, maybe. Because there is no telling the kind of stranger you might happen upon in the darkness.
He speaks to her, so softly that she almost doesn’t hear him over the noise of the river and her own wings. Still, she hesitates, blinking dreamily at the scene before her. And she exhales a sigh, all full of wonder, even when a sharp tendril of fear snakes its way through her veins. It is not enough to deter her, it never has been. And she emerges just as he speaks again.
“I don’t either,” she muses sweetly, the voice bell-song soft, as the moonlight fights to penetrate the fog. Still, she only faintly glints as she moves to the edge of the river. She turns those galaxy eyes on him then, tilts her fine head and smiles. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
It’s a funny thing, he thinks to himself, how just the tiniest bit of fear is enough to send them hurtling towards the edge - towards a future they would have never come to without a push from him. She obeys that sense of danger (they all find it so captivating, awe-inspiring) and gracefully pulls herself from the shadow of darkness so that he may see her and put a face and body to the gently whirring thoughts that he helps himself to so freely.
For a moment, as she becomes visible, he wonders if perhaps she is just a wanderer like himself.
But one quick look into her mind and those sparkling, endless eyes he knows she is not. She is a lost sheep, searching for a shepherd. This star-strewn girl doesn’t know how lucky she is to have found him; especially when the fingertips of his power wrap gently around her, coaxing her forward, wishing to know her fears by fueling the fear himself. Molech finds his golden lips turning into a smile that, had his features not been so naturally charming, one would find devoid of compassion and overflowing with deceit.
He releases her from the shrapnel of fear that he had lured her in with, savoring the taste of her thoughts as they flutter like moth wings against moonlight in his mind. She finds him attractive and he immediately begins to lay the foundation with this piece of information he has been given (taken?). She comes to stand beside him and his beautiful lavender eyes follow, reflecting each fractile of glowing particles that peppers her skin, shining like diamonds - and hunger lies within them, ravenous and desperate.
But he is nothing if not cunning, so he ensures that the lazy smile on his lips remains comforting and inviting as he simultaneously flips through her mind, buzzing as each of her thoughts come rushing towards him without hesitation. They give so easily when they do not know that he is listening.
“The water,” the boy murmurs in a soft breath, his eyes watching her carefully (adoringly) for any sign she might try to depart from him, all the while with that same, enticing smile on his lips. “It calls to me.” He tells her what he has always thought (for he knew the truth kept them here longer, made them want more, made them moldable) even though it might sound like a lie; but it also sounds magical and wistful, and that also is tempting to them.
“Are you by yourself, too?”
Molech refrains from the itch to glance around the forest to search for any companions, so he instead gently whispers into her mind: “I think I would like to be the only one to be able to bask in the glow of a living star tonight.” A compliment, sweet and full of youthful innocence, wrapped thinly in a pinprick of fear, looking for precisely what he could use to make her his.
08-18-2020, 02:17 PM (This post was last modified: 08-18-2020, 02:18 PM by clementia.)
be still, my foolish heart
don't ruin this for me
She understands the pull.
For the water belongs to her just as she does to it.
(But the water does not belong to her the same way it belongs to her father, no. The water does not listen to her the way it listens to him.)
But she so seldom has to go looking for the water when it runs so sweetly down her sides. Rivers from her glass skin, turned to falls when she comes to rest beside him. And she tilts her fine head, trying to find the river through the fog.
She can feel the creeping unease, fingers of fear splintering outward from the center of her chest. Fine, greedy vines twisting themselves darkly around her heart. It gets her pulse racing, but that dreamy smile does not dim at its corners. She still looks at him wistful, wonders if he is drawn to the water for the same reasons she is. Because it lives in her skin and in her soul. Or if it’s something else altogether.
“Are you born from the water?” she asks and then, quietly, “I think my father is.”
She can feel the creeping unease, but she cannot feel the way he shifts through her thoughts. If she could, perhaps she would think something more interesting than how disappointing it is that the moonlight cannot penetrate the fog to set the water ablaze. How fond she is of the way it glints like she does.
She is a hapless victim, coaxed so easily into the web he weaves her. So blissfully oblivious to the fact that she is prey. Eager, despite the pang of fear in the cavern of her chest, to engage. It is not that she is lonely, there is nothing about her that is desperate, it’s that every conversation is a fever dream.
She is on the verge of answering -- yes, she is alone, not such a rare thing these days as it had once been -- when she hears it. It coils itself sweetly into her psyche, the marrow of her bones, as if the words live within her. But the voice does not belong to her.
“Did you do that?” she asks like the flutter of butterfly wings and smiles, “I think I heard you in my head just then.”
His lavender gaze stays on her, tracing and memorizing the delicate swirls of stars and galaxies across her metallic skin. He finds it endlessly captivating and even in the hushed silver of the moonlight she glitters and glows, as if she is the only source of light. Molech wants to touch her, to taste her, to smell her more intimately but he bides his time - he plays the part of a curious colt meeting a sweet girl, despite how entranced he is with each part of her. He must not scare her away; he must keep her close. He must allow her to feel unrest around her and, without her even realizing it, find solace with him.
Her mind is gentle and lays open for him like a book. He is sweet in the way he thumbs through, soft and delicate so as not to disturb the innocent, wistful thoughts that reside there. She is thinking of the water and he likes how the water soothes her. She’s wondering about him then and a handsome smile creases the deep green of his mouth. “My father is, too,” he replies simply, turning his gaze from her just a moment to glance at the clear and crisp water below them. He remembers his father only briefly - he had held their heads beneath the water to see if they had inherited his ability. His sister had, Molech had not.
“Were you?” Molech’s young voice is laced with curiosity but it is just a whisper on the night air, his breath clouding before his dark lips as the chill of autumn rolls in. He is about to ask more of her, but her own idle wonderings give him pause, and the teal, white and gold colt closes his eyes briefly at her imaginings of the moon, silver and soft as its light crinkles across the river’s winding waters. He inhales deeply, her thoughts addictive and sweet on his tongue, leaving him wanting for more.
Her voice pulls his dark lids from his glimmering and pale irises, though now they are much more sharp and cold than they had previously been, falling to her fawn-like smile on her lips. He freezes for a moment, his handsome face calculating and stony. His gentle push into her mind with his voice makes her question him and he cannot hide the flame that suddenly burns in his lavender eyes. His dark teal mouth twitches (the only movement on his body) as he fights the urge to become violent with her by drawing the black of his thin, forked tongue across his lips, reminding himself to be careful.
The colt finally breaks his frozen posture with a dreamy smile, smoothing out the rigidity of his spine with a soft toss of his head as his tongue flicks back into his mouth. The aura of fear he had cloaked her with slowly retreats, learning that perhaps he had pushed too far too quickly. If he wanted her to be willing, he would have to be more cunning than this. While he is young and still learning, she is an exceptional specimen for practice. His voice is sickly sweet with bashfulness as he lowers his head slightly, glancing up at her from beneath his golden forelock. “I’m sorry,” he drawls, “was it too much? I forget that not everyone is used to hearing me in their head.” He lifts his head, eyes widening with a soft concern and a near pout on his lips.
She wonders about his father, who is born from the water, too.
They are nothing alike, the two of them stood by the river tonight, and so she has no reason to wonder if their fathers are the same. She is made of glass, just as her father is made of glass, and it is evident that there is nothing about him that is fragile. He is made of flesh and bone, as her mother is made of flesh and bone, so she does not wonder if their fathers are the same but wonders if they are familiar instead.
She does not get the opportunity to ask, though.
Because he asks her something and she looks from his handsome face to the river.
Their river.
Still, that dreamy smile as she wordlessly edges closer to the water. She feels no creeping sensation of self-awareness as she dips her head, skims her mouth gentle across the surface. The water shudders as she exhales. And when she lifts her head, it follows. It runs down her neck to collect at her sides. With it, she fashions herself wings like his. It is the only magic she has, but it is hers. She cannot make anything else with it, cannot conjure water from thin air the way her father can, but she still believes she belongs to it and it to her,
She turns to him then, her head tilted, the galaxy gaze someplace far away. And when she blinks, the water splashes back into the river from whence it came. “The water does not love me as it loves my father, but I like to believe it loves me all the same,” she murmurs, lyrical, as she joins him on the shore again.
There is still some glimmer of fear, certainly, she can feel it just as she feels the fog that swallows them up. But the voice in her head does nothing to trouble her. She delights in it, the way it licks greedy at the edges of her psyche. It feels like something solid, tangible.
He stiffens and she feels it, too. She peers back at him and it is not lost on her that there is some sharp edge to his gaze now. But she still smiles dreamy at him, because she has lived her whole life in fear, she knows how to navigate and compartmentalize it.
He apologizes and she tilts her fine head, reaches for him as his plea echoes in her chest.
“Don’t be sorry,” she murmurs, skimming the cool glass of her mouth across the heat of his shoulder. What a stark contrast it is, the kind of thing that she will never get used to, she thinks.
“I won’t leave,” she vows, the voice airy, untroubled. The vague air of fear dissolves and she sinks closer, huffs a soft breath into his skin. “I think it’s wonderful.”
He visibly relaxes, listening carefully to thoughts as he gently unfolds them, wondering who her father is and if he’s anything like his own. Molech snorts softly, a slight tension in his jaw as he clenches his teeth at the thought of Maugrim - a fearsome entity who had berated him in his first few days of birth only to be left alone when he did not possess the same manipulation of water. And for a moment, when she pulls water from the river, there is anger in his eyes - it is quick and a flash across the lavender of his eyes, but it is there nonetheless. A violent anger, one that is bottled up and kept on a leash, kept quelled by the young boy’s own ability to control the dark thoughts that twist and turn inside his mind, thankful that he is the one that can read minds and not the other way around.
That flash of rage is quickly replaced by a look of awe as the water follows to her sides, grasping and clinging there as if the droplets itself belonged to her - loved her. The soft look on his face is perhaps the only genuine and true emotion from him in their entire meeting; she is even more spectacular than he had already deemed her being and now even more so does he wish to make her his. As she comes to join him, her tinkling voice sending shivers down his spine, the young boy reaches his muzzle to hers, the white of his searching for the cool, clear, and sparkling of hers. He’s nearly forgotten to continue to read her thoughts, enraptured with this beautiful girl that so willingly spills his heart to him, almost flattered that she would find him so trusting. “You’re so lovely,” he tells her, his lavender eyes finding hers with a gentle click.
She even smiles at him when he knows he has given himself away; perhaps she has chosen to ignore the break in his facade or merely missed it, but either way, Molech is grateful for it. Especially when the coldness of her mouth finds the heat of his deep teal shoulder, awakening something terrible and deadly within him. With a soft tilt of his head, he wonders if it was possible for her to shatter, to break into such slivers of glass and stars that she would simply cease to exist, or if he could keep a shard of her beautiful blinking eyes just for himself to stare into.
This thought gives him a genuine smile, handsome and charming. Her confession is something that he can relate to more than she could imagine, but Molech is not one to share the vivid and violent details in his young life. The aura of fear that he had entrapped her with dissipates and with it, she comes all the closer to him. “You do?” he asks innocently, though he cannot concentrate with the crystal of her sparkling body curling in beside him - it should not have been this easy, but he feels as though it just might be. He encourages the contact she gives him by softly whispering to her, “You can’t leave,” with a gentle sigh, his eyes reflecting the gurgling waters of the river before him.
“Tell me your name.” A command, as luscious and flowing as the river before them, masked with gentleness in his voice. You can trust me, he adds delicately into her mind, placing it there like a rose on a coffin.
She is oblivious to his anger, Clementia. Though she likely would not have recognized it for what it was, even if she had seen it flash brilliant across his face. Even if she had seen it fester in his eyes. Even if she had smelled it on his skin. No, she has only ever known the soft things. Love and tenderness. Unbridled joy.
The same things she feels when the river curls itself sweetly against her, kisses her sides so gingerly. And still she smiles, caught up in her fever dream. Even when the water falls away and she returns to him. Even when he reaches out to touch her and, rather than pull her crystalline nose away, she huffs out a soft breath.
The smile does not flicker or fade with his compliment, only shifts. Deeper. More darling. She blinks those galaxy eyes at him, tilts her fine head. She knows but she does not say so. Instead, she remembers a girl with bees in her hair who had looked at her as if she’d hung the moon. Who had stared at her in wide-eyed wonder while Clementia’s skin threw rainbows into the space between them. She knows she is lovely, but it still spurs her fragile heart into a frenzy to hear him say it.
And her heart beats harder still when he smiles. She is enraptured, ensnared in the web he weaves, unaware. But she, soft and malleable, likely would have gone willingly even if she had been aware. Dangerous, certainly, for such a tender thing to be so inexplicably drawn to the dark things.
She sinks closer still, wearing that dreamy smile all the while. And perhaps she should recoil, show the whites of her galaxy eyes, let her heartbeat carry her far away from him. But when he whispers to her, she merely blinks and nods. If this is her coffin, she will slip happily into it. “I won’t,” she murmurs. Perhaps sealing her fate without realizing.
“My name is Clementia,” she tells him without a glimmer of trepidation. Soothed, maybe, by the promise he whispers directly into her head. It fills her with delight, certainly. Shifts that dreamy smile into something else. Something solid, vibrant. “What’s yours?” she asks, touching her mouth to his shoulder again, exhaling softly against his skin.
There is part of him that finds his eagerness to infiltrate their minds as a kindness; he only wants to shepherd this lost sheep, care for and nurture her in ways his own family couldn’t do for him. There is nothing wrong in the way he tries to guide (control) her, even though there is something far more vulgar and obscene that lies beneath the surface. Something that, at his young age, has not manifested itself fully - it is only a feeling, simmering and dull, but noticeable enough to where the young colt answers to it’s call, ready and willing to be the author of her story. Perhaps she will be the first to experience the terrible relationship between puppet and master, or maybe he is still too young to enforce much of that just yet.
He does not, however, deny himself the gentle way she leans into him, her breath but a whisper against the deep green and white of his shoulder. She needed him, he deems to himself, finding that the resolution to vibrate forcefully in his own mind followed by the incessant willingness to see it through. She needed him and no one else. He would be enough or there will be nothing else for her to live for.
Molech is lost in those galaxy-soaked eyes, wondering if they have looked upon anyone else in the way that they do for him. Rainbows dance uncontrollably against the dark patches of his skin, shimmering with each tender inhale and exhale of her delicate lungs. He sets the bed for her - soft and warm and welcoming - and all she needs to do is lie down. He makes it easy for her, he tells himself, because he is so very kind.
The pastel purple of his irises hides behind dark lids for a moment, reveling in the way she promises him with such finality - I won’t - without knowing she wouldn’t have had a choice anyway. He would always find her; their thoughts always give them away. Her mind swells with delight the moment he lays his promise there (was it a lie? He cannot tell for certain) and that same handsome smile graces his dark lips once again in satisfaction.
Clementia.
Perfection rings out into the chilly air like the sound of clear bells and the young colt’s eyes gingerly open, those enticing lavender pupils coming to rest on the spiraling and starry depths of hers. “Clementia,” he repeats her name like a song, melodic in the baritone of his voice. “My name is Molech.” Silence engulfs them, the darkness of night and the frigid cold creeping in like a fog.
“If you ever need to find me, Clementia,” he says her name again because he enjoys how it sounds in his throat and off his tongue, and to secure the possession of her name to him, “I’ll always be at the water’s edge.” He smiles at her, taking a single step forward so that the river’s water now runs across the deep goldenrod of his knees. Like a wave, the clear water runs up his legs and then his shoulders, draining the color from his coat and melting his skin into the water itself until he is a completely translucent being, completely liquid. It’s at this moment that he would normally succumb to the water’s path, traveling down the river to other parts of Beqanna as quickly as the river would take him and even to the ocean - but she would not be able to accompany him, so he remains suspended, half equine and half water, with that same dreaded smile on his face.
With a breath he becomes solid again, the color returning as his skin reforms to what it once was, dry as it had been only moments ago. “See,” he explains, “you were meant to find me tonight.”
She does not echo his name the way he had echoed hers (and it had, in fact, sounded like a song but then it always sounded like some sweet melody to her). She keeps it caged in her chest instead, lets it beat against her ribs. She can feel it, too, as it seeps into her bloodstream. Is it it the poison or the antidote? She is too distracted by the sound of his voice to recognize it as either.
And she watches, intrigued, as he moves into the depths. Away from her. She is alone again on the shore, but she feels no pang of desperate loneliness. There is no panic when he speaks and it sounds like goodbye. If she needs him, she will find him here. (She has to wonder what it means to need someone. She has needed her mother, certainly. And father and sister to some degree. But she does not know what it means to need someone who does not share your blood.)
How sweetly her breath leaves her as his edges go soft. As all that vibrant color leaches into the water and is carried away on the current. And he looks back at her, but he is something she has never seen before. He is born of the water, certainly, perhaps even more than her father, and she cannot help her wonder.
And how desperately she wants to touch him, her want so potent that it drives her into the water, too. But she cannot reach him in time. He is solid again by the time she reaches for him. Though her glass mouth comes away wet, he wears the evidence on his skin.
“You believe in fate?” she asks him without lifting her mouth from his neck, murmurs it directly into his skin. “I think you are mine.” Such a simple girl she is, fashioned around the dream at the center of her. The galaxies beneath her skin spin around that fever dream. Her heart pulses around it. Foolish, too. Naive. She does not realize the danger of saying such things, not when she believes them.
