"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
01-01-2021, 11:28 PM (This post was last modified: 01-01-2021, 11:29 PM by firion.)
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
The day had always been his reprieve.
It was when he fell into mortal sleep. It was when he could wash the ash from his mouth—when he could rinse himself in the river and feel his body come back to him. It was the only relief in his life and he found himself throwing into each and every day, sometimes refusing to sleep altogether so that he could have the hours of life to himself.
The hours where he was himself.
The hours where he could pretend to be anything else.
But then the night comes. The eclipse blots out the sun. The darkness is swift and thick, and he feels something strange twisting in him. The curse bubbles to the surface, swifter than usual, and he cries out against it as it moves through him. It mutates as it pushes through every inch of him, as it reclaims the body that should be nothing but the picture of health. Strength and youth and healing robbed as the muscles begin to rot, the skin begin to decay, death begin to creep through him, blood growing sluggish.
It is different this time though.
It does not overwhelm him until he is nothing but. It weakens its grasp, perhaps because in a world of everlasting darkness there is no true night. Perhaps because the world is not right side up.
Regardless, it gives him enough control to know what is happening. It leaves him aware enough to know that he is dying, that he is dead, as he stumbles through the forest. And this, somehow, is worse than when the curse stole his mind from him entirely. Because he can feel that carnivorous hunger roll in his belly and he can feel the cold air as it whispers against exposed bone. He can feel the way he is both weakened and decaying and still overly strong all at once—the entirely wrong way that he moves.
He groans low in his throat as he continues to move, dragging his feet.
The piece of his mind that is still his own is thankful that at least the curse moved fast. Were someone to see him, it is almost certain that they would not recognize him—a blessing, he supposes.
How low the bar these days.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
@[The Monsters] - do your worst to his jaguar mimicry
01-04-2021, 03:11 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2021, 04:04 PM by splendora.)
Her world has always been dark. Black stars, black sun, black moon in a black sky. This should be no different, it is exactly everything she has always known, everything she has always been without. Except that the warmth is gone now too. She cannot feel it when she lifts her face to the sky, cannot feel it in the curve of her spine or the hollows beneath her hips, all the places she knows sunshine loves to pool like warm rainwater.
And she is cold, too.
No more is the soft girl of red and tawny and white. No more are the strands of hair like cornsilk over her hocks and shoulders, or the eyes, sightless as they were, as bright as raw green emeralds buried in pale quartz. No more is the flesh or the muscle, the joints or cartilage. Not even a heart in her chest. They left with the day and they have not come back.
She is an elegant nightmare now. Delicate bones that look impossibly brittle - not white or gray but stained faintly in a way that makes them look like pale rust over ivory, and the soft way they glow makes them no less gruesome. It might be beautiful if it were just empty bones, the echo of life carved out in still white and resting eternally in the ground. But the fact that she stands and moves and turns that delicate skull towards a shapeless dark she cannot see makes it all the more eerie.
She is neither dead nor alive, and it is strange to simply be.
In a land overcome by monsters, she is the creature that goes bump in the night, the worst case scenario that creeps from the stillness of deep shadow. The aura around her has only grown stronger, thicker in the fear she feels and holds so close to an empty chest made silent without a heart to speak for it. She doesn’t know how long she’s been lost, but the absence of Sorren at her side makes her feel more brittle than she can bear.
There is a sound to her left, and the skeleton pauses, turning that blank empty face to stare into oblivion. She cannot see what it is that moves through the forest, cannot see from whose lips those ragged groans fall. There can only be seconds between now and the time they look up and see her, and she has no idea what to do.
They will scream, she’s learned, because they always do now, and it will not help when she tries to gift them a name. Nightmares are not to be believed.
So she holds her words and her pain and this ache in a chest that will never hold anything but the webs of spiders between long ribs. She holds her fear and her hope and the way they bleed together to leave her covered in bruises that no one else will see. And she waits for those eyes to find her watching, waits for death if this groan belongs to a monster of the dark, waits for anything because this waiting might kill her first.
And then she breaks because this dark has never been so lonely, this fear never so consuming, and her words are small fragile things like stars set free from their moorings. “Hello?” She might be ashamed of the pain in her words if she weren’t already busy being ashamed of her own living horror. “Please don’t scream.” She won’t tell them that she isn’t a monster, because she no longer knows if that’s still true.
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
The meaning of the world continues to bleed from it. Continues to turn to dust and ash, taking everything in it that would have maybe saved him. He has no one would who search for him, no one who would know his name, and he supposes that there’s no one to blame but himself. He who has chased away any that would have dared to become his friend. He who has only salvaged one relationship his entire life and it was with a girl who existed entirely in his dreams—someone he is not convinced is truly real at all.
He does not deserve pity, and he does not expect it.
But neither did he expect the world to turn quite so cruel and empty.
He stumbles through the forest, cold breeze not touching him, and it is only when he feels that faint brush of fear that it sinks into his mind at all. The creature that he is tilts his rotten head to the side, flesh falling from his cheeks—dull golden eyes peering into the darkness and not seeing anything. Intrigued, perhaps, or simply drawn to the feeling of something like like, he groans low and deep and then angles toward it.
When he hears the sound of her voice, something living at the back of his mind wants to return the greeting, but the only thing that comes out is a moan—guttural and rusted. His mind struggles to understand her request, to give meaning to the words and interpret them in this context. They’re empty and meaningless, much like him, and he wishes that he could protect the thing that draws him forward.
He wishes that she would never have called him forward.
He lurches into her space, head swinging slowly as if trying to find her.
His mouth opens and he coughs, sputters, and then croaks in his strange, disembodied voice:
“Run.”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
Of all the things she had expected to happen, from her tamest thoughts to her wildest worries, this was not one of them. The sound that answers her is so wrong, so inhuman, a growl turned groan and rattling through skin too wet to hold the sound steady, that she all but freezes in place like a startled doe to listen for it again. It is not that she wants to hear the sound a second time, in fact she is quite certain she could spend forever forgetting the way it had felt when it reached her and still never manage it. She wants to be sure that when it finds her again it comes from somewhere further.
But it does not.
She can hear movement before she hears anything else, can hear the leaves churning underfoot as he turns to the sound of her and she turns to the sound of him, twin images in a mirror split only by time. He a rotting zombie, she an empty skeleton. He lurches forward and she knows because the sound is so close now, because he is a symphony of all the sound found in any good nightmare. She recoils, stumbling over her own feet as she is simultaneously grateful to be blind and desperate to see.
Run. He says, and he sounds so like death that she would’ve done anything he asked of her. But she cannot do that. “I’m blind.” She says, and she doesn’t know why she’s telling him this except that death feels imminent and she feels lonely in it already, unwilling to go quietly in the way the sun had. “I am just as likely to run into a tree and break my neck.” She is fragile like this, but probably not that fragile.
Still, she is trying so hard to avoid him, and she is grateful for the way he is neither delicate nor graceful, for the way all of his movements are like a map in her ears as she steps cautiously aside, moving until trees appear at her shoulders or hips and redirect her back towards him. The forest is a maze, it is a trap, and she hadn’t realized it until now.
Fear explodes from her, knitting itself around her like a barrier as she continues to back away from him. She puts all of herself into it without realizing, all of this horror and fear, all of the pain in her chest threatening to strangle her long before this slavering creature can reach her. She builds it up like a wall, not even aware that she is the architect of anything more than an endless series of bad choices. And it might’ve kept her safe, too. But what do the dead have left to fear?
splendora
how can i put it down into words, when it's almost too much for my soul alone
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
The smell that reaches his decaying nose is so different from what he expects, that it nearly pulls him up short—nearly catches him off-guard and takes him down a different path. It is something alive and yet not in the way that he expects. Alive but without the flesh and blood that he would anticipate. It is, instead, something caught in between (where he in his right state of mind, perhaps he would think that he is like that, caught in between life and death) but half-crazed as he is, it only serves to confuse him even more.
He pauses, his rotting teeth gnashing together and cracking under the pressure.
He continues forward in a blind momentum kind of movement, lurching forward on feet that barely can stand to hold the weight of him, and he is stopped short by her confession. His breath comes in rasping noises, scratching up his throat and over his swollen tongue, and his golden eyes sweep over the land in front of him. “Blind?” he croaks, trying to figure out the meaning of it—searching his mind for the hook.
“Blind?”
He asks again and he laughs, a gurgling kind of noise that hurts as it bubbles up his throat. “Why come alone?” he manages to string the words together as he pauses, trapped between the boy that he could be and the monster that he is—this cursed being that hungers and thirsts for unnatural ways to stave it. “Why—“ he starts again before her fear slams into him like a physical force, knocking the air out of him.
It twists and contorts in his body until he is afraid of her, afraid for her, afraid for himself. Until he can barely breathe around it. He croaks out a death-rattle breath. “I—“ he starts before coughing, dried blood flecking his lips, breath rattling in his half-dead body, “Why—“ he stars again but then pauses.
He looks unseeing around him, not seeing the skeleton amongst the trees.
“What’s happening?” he manages, quivering beneath the weight of her fear and his shame.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
