"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
Darkness lives, it breathes. With the eternal night, creatures roam without any attempt to hide. He is one of them, canvased by the insidious ring that hangs heavily in the sky above the trees. His cavern is cold and empty, filled with the mournful howls of the winter’s wind and the chitter of monsters. Their claws incessantly scrape against stone, clicking morbidly as they pant in his ears, licking their shadowy lips. He is no stranger to the monsters that flourish in the dark (he is one of them, is he not?) and though years had gone by without seeing them (he had felt them though, and heard them), there is no expression on his face as they writhe around him, their haunting whispers filling the cold and damp cave.
When he breaches the cavern’s mouth, they scatter from him as if something more interesting had caught their attention - or maybe they merely enjoyed the cold darkness against them. Either way, the stallion is suddenly left alone and a sigh heaves from his chest.
Ever since returning from the Plains, the blue mottled stallion found himself growing gaunt - his bones seem to pull at his skin, stretching too thin across his entire body. It made his icy eyes all the eerier, sticking out of his face most prominently. The deep obsidian of his legs grow more every passing day, stretching nearly to his shoulders and flank. His face - worn, tired - is nearly completely black, the deep blue of his jawline still visible with that deep blood-red V that nestles gently against his throat.
The worst, he believes, is that despite his hunger there is no satiating him - the roots and grass normally would quell him of the terrible rumblings in his stomach do nothing. Even now, he digs a single black foreleg into a chunk of muddied snow, searching for anything edible underneath. Food is scarce in winter, he muses to himself, reasoning that his weight loss is merely a seasonal thing.
Somewhere in the depths of the forest that surround him, there is a howl. Not from a wolf, no. He lifts his head, dark ears pressed towards the terrible sound with sad, unrested eyes. The creatures are everywhere, it seems; little does he know that it is not a hallucination.
His head throbs suddenly and he snarls, his black lips pulling up to reveal even blacker gums with yellow teeth nestled within. His tongue does not notice the gentle sloping sharpness that has begun to take shape on his once blunt teeth - the change is slow and painful, barely noticeable. Two black lumps press from his forehead, hidden mainly by the thickness of his forelock, causing pain and discomfort almost constantly - especially when he tries to sleep.
Rage still nestles like a child against his breast; quelled and silent in his solitude. Instead, sadness seems to find the too-largeness of his eyes. He wonders if whatever plagues him will kill him.
You’ll never die, the voices mock languidly as another pang of hunger ripples through him.
Unlike before, she did not mean to be driven from the safety of Taiga and into the depths of Sylva, where, though beautiful, the forests are like a maze of deep red and gold to her in this unending dark. But she had gotten herself cornered by a few of the beasts that rove together in slavering packs, like dogs touched by wickedness and mangled by death, and when they pursued her she had no choice but to run.
She recognized the trees as soon as they changed from towering green pine to a red so dark it might be congealed blood, to a gold so dirty it might be bronze. But she does not know the paths that spiral away from her like cracks in the surface of a frozen pond, does not even know if she’s skirting the perimeter of Sylva or plunging like a knife into the heart of the land. She only knows that home is somewhere behind her, and that if she doesn’t run then the trees will be splashed with new shades of red entirely less beautiful than the leaves that trap so much dark beneath them.
Her delicate chest heaves, and she alternates between complete invisibility in this almost total darkness to flickering with the light that settles like armor over her blue and white skin. The beasts seem drawn to her light, like it is something they want to destroy, something they feel they must consume - but when she casts it from herself she is plunged into total darkness, and already she has stumbled twice over snaking roots.
There are welts on her skin, too. Shapes like mountain ranges raised over the mottled blue roan of her shoulders and hips where branches left signatures in swooping cursive. She can feel a gash on her cheek, feel the warm dampness of her own blood as it pools in that strange new valley of flesh torn a few inches across that impossibly delicate face. Adrenaline keeps it from hurting yet, but she knows tomorrow will be different.
Tomorrow, as though such things are guaranteed in this new world.
A howl rises up behind her, and it’s so close she imagines she can feel the hellfire heat of their breath on her spine as fear tears from her like a million scattered embers. Light ignites along her skin, solid and bright - though less bright than it had been before all this - and so it is that she nearly collides with the thin blue stallion, falling into him like a burning star. “Why aren’t you running?” She asks, breathless and spinning to face him, the fear in her chest lending her eyes a new kind of wild shine. “They’re coming, can’t you hear them?”
Despite everything, despite the wounds like constellations across her skin, despite the blood smeared on her cheek and the way her pulse refuses to steady, she’s already moving to position herself defensively between the man with the sad glacial eyes and the creatures howling promises of death.
The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity.
The ungodly sound that erupts from his mouth as she stumbles into him is something that he cannot help. It’s nearly as terrible as the monster’s howls amongst the darkness, a groan that is eerie and ominous, albeit forlorn. He swings his too-large head towards her with a low and guttural sound, like a hiss, blinking back the stellar light that erupts from her skin. But it is not the light, he realizes, that bothers him the most - it is the slick and deep red that stains her cheek, lucious and inviting. The gaunt stallion swallows hard, the crystalline of his blue eyes hovering lustfully on her wound and her slender, pulsing throat beneath it.
“You can hear them?” His voice quivers dangerously, almost hopefully, as she moves to face off into the darkness where he can hear the monsters skittering in the brush. He moves with her, far more interested in her presence alone than the things that lurk in the darkness. His eyes carve out the shadow of her body as he draws alongside her, clearly not worried about the monsters she was so terrified by, even as one brushes against his onyx legs and then runs back into the darkness.
Balto inhales tremorously, not realizing how fragrant blood could be. He had seen enough of it, of course, spilled in the Plains and when he has killed - but it is different now, for some reason. The metallic and rust scent is replaced with something that makes the hunger pangs in his stomach twist helplessly. When he exhales, he answers her. “Running makes no difference.”
Though the words are sinister, there is no threat in his voice. “I ran for years. They will find you regardless.” Winded, he pauses, licking his dark lips. The darkness of his ears tip back slightly, running his tongue beneath his closed mouth against his teeth. His deep-set eyes are back to the spliced skin of her cheek, lifting his chin slightly where the prominence of red against his throat can now be seen.
Kill her, they whisper to him, and he wonders if she can hear them still.
“Of course I can hear them.” She tells him sharply, her delicate voice made more harsh by the fear that tightens relentlessly in the hollow of her dark, slender chest. But some of her fear is now directed at him, too. That sound he had made was so like the beasts she now fled that some part of her mind is whispering at her to run from him as well. He might be a monster, you know. That voice whispers, reminds her of the guttural way he had moaned at her, the way his eyes had roved her face and her throat in a way that made her feel cornered.
Maybe everything in the dark is ruined now. Twisted and wrong, corrupted. Maybe it is death she has collided with in the dark, death that draws alongside her to watch the distance she had come from.
Death is not what she expected.
He is gaunt to the point of emaciation, with skin stretched over bones that rise in points like ghastly constellations scattered over the near-black of his body. But she can see hints of blue in the dark, a mottled roan along his jaw that is so like her own color that at another time it might’ve made her smile at him. It is his jaggedness that she is most drawn to though, and the wild that flares in eyes made wide by starvation.
She dances sideways, turning to keep her light armored body out of his reach even while her brown eyes stay soft and curious and riveted to his face. There is something in him that wakes her beyond her fear and flight, that draws sparks over her skin because he watches her like a predator and she is too busy wondering what he looked like before starvation found him. Before those bones were sharp enough to cut holes through the dark of his hide. She forgets to be afraid.
She does not know her mother had loved her father this way too.
“It does.” She tells him, breathes the words as she dances further out of his reach. “I’ll show you.” She doesn’t know why she does it, but her eyes are alight with sparks and fire, her mouth a hard slash of stubborn wildness as she reaches out to touch that gorgeous blue along the ridge of his jaw as she dashes past him. She thinks, from the way he had not stopped staring and the way he had crowded closer to her, that he will surrender to the urge to follow her. To chase.
And for whatever impossible reason, she hopes he does.
The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity.
He is a monster. The fact that anyone would think him anything else would mean their undoing.
Perhaps he is also death - some kind of twisted version, an omen to those who fall into his path. Maybe he is suspended between life and death, some sort of terrible undying beast that haunts the silent, sentinel trees of Sylva. But even death does not want him and life itself continues to abandon him. He doesn’t belong here, nor beyond the veil. The way her eyes fall to him - a spectacular blend of concern that melts into uncertainty - he wonders if she can sense it as much as he can, or if the voices have already whispered the truth into the trembling curve of her ears.
The light that so cautiously protects her skin is gentle and soft against the gauntness of his face, the hollowed points created by his cursed body now much more prominent as the shadows deepen and grow, spreading across him greedily.
Her response is only met with a sharp snort, exhaled from paper-thin nostrils. His ears fall into the tangles of his dark mane, wondering how much hope can be within her voice despite the chilling howls of the monsters around her (and the eyes of the one standing right before her). Balto’s wide, hungry eyes bore into her as if searching for something in them, but the only answer he receives is her beckoning him to follow, tempted all the more by the brush of her mouth against the sharp, ugliness of his jaw.
The stallion reels back as she pushes past him, surprised by her boldness and the quickness in which she takes off into the darkness of Sylva. Despite the thinness of his overall appearance, the stallion is surprisingly quick to snake his head towards her, not quite realizing that he is attempting to let the sharpness of his teeth cut through the delicate blue of her skin. His reaction is pure impulse, the quickness of her fleeing bringing the carnivore to the surface. His teeth snap on emptiness and Balto is left in the deep darkness alone, his mind reeling as the echo of her hoof-steps become quieter and quieter.
He shudders, closing his eyes briefly, before with surprising agility, the skeletal stallion begins to follow her.
“You’ll never outrun them,” he calls out into the darkness beyond him, his footfalls eerily hollow against the forest floor. You’ll never outrun me.
Her first few strides are some strange kind of jubilation, and for a moment it is almost as though she has forgotten the state of the world around her. She is running, and it is not because death chases her, not because the dark that touches her skin is something evil and salivating, something eager to consume her. She runs because she wants to be followed, because she has found someone in this not-so afterlife that is the same blue as her, the same wasted body as her father. He is things that feel like home, and for just this moment it is easy to feel like she has been reunited with someone she misses so much it carves entire wastelands out of her chest.
The dark is dangerous like that, it revives all those broken pieces you thought you buried so well. It takes reality and bends it until everything feels like dream and nightmare and entirely unreal.
It makes her forget that there are consequences, that this man who turned and lunged to follow in her wake did not do so out of play.
She remembers though. By the fourth, fifth, sixth stride she can feel the dark seeping back into the quiet of her chest, feel the weight of it like universes plucked out of the sky and dropped onto her shoulders. Seven, eight, nine strides and she remembers that she runs now because if you don’t then you die. That this night is long and dark and all the stars broke open to reveal that they were hiding death inside them all along.
“I’ll never stop.” She calls back to him, but the words are hushed and wary, and if he hears them at all it is only because they drift back to him on a stale breeze that whispers through her mane. She doesn’t think about slowing, not even to let him catch up. But she also suspects that there is more to him than there appears to be - and maybe it is only because her father had been thin in this same way, all sharp angles and sharp bones, and he had never for a day in his life been made weak by it.
Something hurtles past her, and it isn’t the man at her heels. It is something the size of a boar and just as vicious, and she nearly loses her footing as she spins to face it with an expression of frozen wariness on that delicate blue and white face. It is something twisted and malformed, a creature made of gleaming shadow with no eyes and no discernible ears, yet somehow it halts and turns to face her. She has exactly one moment to pick between two different beasts. This chittering, gnashing thing before her, or the man at her heels who she thinks would love nothing more than to catch her.
She chooses capture.
Chooses the evil she knows over the one she doesn’t, and when he is near enough to reach for, she does so with a kind of gentleness that belongs to nothing that survives in a world as broken as this one. Her mouth touches his neck, touches the black and the boniness, touches death and wonders what choice he will make in turn.
Her, or the creature slinking nearer.
The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity.
Somewhere, deep within the recesses of his hollow chest where a pulse faintly beats, his heart breaks. It breaks for her naivety, for her hopefulness - for once, not so long ago, he had thought the very same thing. He’d run from them - those sinister voices, the demons that only he can feel and hear and see - and one day he could be at peace. He only had to be strong enough, brave enough, good enough. But nothing could erase the terrors he had done and nothing could wipe their ghoulish voices from his mind.
Even when he closes his eyes, he still sees the cavern bathed in their blood, standing knee deep in their organs.
Perhaps she is right, though. She may never stop.
That is fine, for he will never stop chasing her.
It has already been set in motion and upon reaching her, he doesn't know what will occur. All he knows is that his stomach feels so empty, so cold, as if he is nothing but metal on the inside and the warmth of her, of her skin, of her blood would ease the ache. It could be a balm to his parched throat, like honey against the iron in his soul.
The shadows of night allow only the faintest outline of her silhouette, trembling in the darkness. He snorts sharply, slowing his pace, as he realizes that she has already broken the mantra she had whispered into the wind only moments ago. The sharpness of his face remains expressionless but there is something glistening in the depths of his icy stare - something out of place on such an ugly, brutal creature. She touches him lightly, brushing her mouth against the roughness of his dark, stretched skin and his breath rattles, catching in his throat. Dark lids fall across those pale eyes, mouth agape, as the sweet scent of her already clotting wounds become more aromatic than ever.
She had chosen him - this harbinger of death and nightmares - and, like they all will eventually, stopped running.
There is only a brief passing of seconds until he realizes the true reason she had turned to him. With a loud chuff, the stallion’s eyes flash open, meeting the shape of the monster that attempts to hide within the shadows. Balto’s ears pin, not unfamiliar with the atrocities that haunt these woods, and a low hiss slithers from the beast’s mouth. The stallion lowers his antlered head as it lurks closer to them with gnashing teeth.
With something like a roar, Balto leaps forward to catch the boar-like figure with the spindles of antlers that branch from his forehead. It is heavy and though he pierces it (shadow, flesh?), the stallion falls to his knees with the weight and writhing of it. The two tussle for a moment but it quickly passes, leaving the stallion standing over a bloodied heap with a frown.
“You stopped,” he rasps, lowering his head to inspect the creature, paper-thin nostrils sniffing at its corpse. He lifts his thin neck, turning his face over his shoulder to look at her, his frown only deepening at the realization that the smell of the dead beast did nothing to curb the appetite that aches in his bones. He follows the turn of his head, coming to stand before her with something sticky and dark plastered to his face and antlers - something like blood, but from those monsters, it could be anything. “Do you see now?” He begins, brushing the roughness of his mouth against her wounded cheek, tasting the blood there with a kiss. He groans, furrowing his brow as he grimaces, finding some kind of understanding in the hunger that seems to bury him.
He traces her jawline, then her neck, reveling in the mottled blue that reminds him so much of himself. “There’s no point in running.”
