"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
This is the most he has ever moved through Beqanna since this curse had been set upon him. Once the entire world was cast into shadow it felt as though the invisible chains he had allowed to shackle him were cut loose. He was no longer a slave to the outskirts and the forests and the night — the sun could not touch him no matter where he chose to go, and it surprised him to learn he preferred it that way.
He was tired of wishing to be one of them again.
He was tired of fighting the darkness that had long ago consumed him and turned him into whatever wretched soul he was now.
With the eclipse in place he no longer had to pretend.
He lets it take over him; lets himself shift into his canine form whenever the anger was too bright to ignore, a relentless ember in the cavern of his chest. He has long since forgotten where the anger came from; maybe from this curse, maybe from all the ways he keeps hurting those around him. By now the emotion had dug itself so deeply, had buried itself into the very marrow of him so that he could no longer see the root of it. There was no beginning and no end—it simply existed, and it ate him alive.
The bodach drifts along the edge of the river, ignoring the two darkened celestial figures that are still suspended in the pitch-black sky. His shadows are shaped into his equine form, having abandoned the canine one for now. Memories of a few hours ago tap incessantly at the back of his mind, begging him to acknowledge them— to remember the panic in the voice of the creature he had been stalking, to feel empathy at the pleas that had fallen on his deaf ears.
He doesn’t feel sorry like he might have once, though.
He thinks of how sweet their fear had tasted, and his stomach clenches in want.
The dark was turning him into the greedy, selfish creature it had always wanted him to be, and he was too tired to fight it anymore.
His glowing red eyes pierce through the shadows at the sound of something else rustling through the brush. If there is an uptick of his pulse it is not out of fear, and when he diverts his gaze from whoever is there it is only to quell the hunger that again gnaws at his gut.
02-14-2021, 12:35 PM (This post was last modified: 02-14-2021, 03:37 PM by Beryl.)
The endless night doesn't bother her. Even without the cat's-eye pupils Beryl would move through it as if it were day, confident of her steps. The darkness is part of her, and if there are monsters hidden away within it, well... Well.
She isn't exactly an angel.
She can hear them stirring off the path, but they have mostly left her alone. Perhaps it is the way she moves between them undaunted that keeps the beasts at bay, or, perhaps, they also feel that pulse of familiarity between her magic and theirs. They have the shadows in common. They have blood and violence in common. She suspects deeply that they do not have the same motives, and that guilt doesn't burn their throats raw like it does hers. They never seem to be running from anything, but Beryl? Desertion and remorse are her constant companions.
She runs her tongue over the point of her canines, lets her eyes revert to normal, large and liquid and nearly black in the unnatural darkness, but the river reflects enough light that she can see well enough without the magic. At the water's edge, darkness meets darkness, horse-shaped but soft at the margins, merging into the shadows around it. She mistakes it at first for Cassian - a silly thing to do, as if he were the only black horse. The memory of his blood staining her teeth and claws makes her stop abruptly, lips drawn back in a rictus of repulsion, but he was never so velvety dark as this. She remembers how even with her walls high around them his skin had held its gloss. Even in this twilight, the sheen of his coat would define his shape.
So this is someone - something - else. They remind her of her own creations, of the lions and the horses and the xenomorphs she has crafted out of magic, and she reaches out from afar, from the place she has paused among the hawthorns at the edge of the forest path, to touch that darkness, seeking answers. The head swings, and eyes red like coals find her as if she is not wrapped in shadows wrapped in the dim, dark, dusk.
Red?
"Your eyes," her head tilts, curious, wary, confused, "they're the wrong color."
He has never met anyone besides his own family that had anything to do with darkness, but he feels it from her immediately.
He feels her touch him and he is surprised at the way he wants to recoil away from her, wants to pull his shadows all the way inside of himself where she can’t reach, can’t try to control them.
The tendrils do seem to shrink, tightening around him and somehow managing to define the equine shape of him. It is a grotesque thing, nearly skeletal, with the red eyes seeming too large without the dark billowing around them. But his curiosity quickly gets the best of him, and he finds himself moving forward. With what little light there was reflecting from the river there is the barest hint of his form detaching itself from the true darkness—the thick endless night they are in, much to his delight and the despair of most—until the shadows around him are only is own. They have loosened themselves back to their usual relaxed stance, with the long tendrils of mane and tail shifting and rippling in a wind all their own.
He is confused because she wields a power over the darkness and yet she is colored unlike none that he has seen. His family—at least the ones that took after his father—were made of shadows, like himself, though he was another breed entirely (he did not like to think about that; did not like to remember that he was not like his father, not like his siblings—he was something worse).
Ever aware of the differences between himself and Ether and the rest, her accusation of his eyes being the wrong color incites a flash of irritation. The rest of his family’s eyes were yellow, or the very least a warm gold. Even before he had been turned into this nightmare his eyes had been brown—still the wrong color. “I know,” the words snap in the air, surprisingly sharp from his shadowed tongue. But he regrets them, and though he cannot draw them back after they’ve already been spoken some of the smolder to his eyes seems to dim.
“You’re the wrong color entirely,” he decides to tell her, his tone still clipped, though now dulled from its previous knife-sharp edge.
Curiousity mingles with caution and the strangeness of him. She is still reaching out as if he is one of hers - or perhaps even if he is someone else's, she can grasp at him, pull him away. She doesn't know if it's possible, but brushes against the pulsing darkness of his skin as if to weave a rope of shadows round his neck and draw him to her. She's never had to catch a shadow before, and there's something intoxicating in the attempt, despite the soft voice in the back of her head that tells her she is doomed to failure.
Nevertheless, she tries, and he recoils swiftly, drawing into himself until there is nothing left but dark flesh drawn taut over bones and red eyes that flash confusion, curiousity, irritation, and yet somehow hold no emotion at all. No, she thinks, it is not his eyes she's reading but his darkness. Those too-bright, too-large, twin lights are empty and proffer no more emotion than the cold, quivering, stars hanging above the Isle or the flickering red of dragon-struck trees whose hearts are burning beneath their charred shells.
I know, he says, coming closer (drawn by her magic, perhaps, but not its power,) and his voice is sharp as dragon scales. It is full of the sound of cold smoke and dry leaves and she knows that rasp well, knows the soft scratch of it in her ears when the shadows speak their broken messages, but not the rich resonance underneath. Not the weary exasperation that still colors his words when he tells her that she is the wrong color.
Her curved ears, pressed forward until they shape a heart above her head turn back slightly now, and the golden mare draws her chin to her chest as though to look within herself. It is dark, and the shadows that cling to her skin sometimes make her coat dusky, but she is still the color of ripened wheat and the forelock that bends over her eyes is still pale and silvery in the dim reflected river light. The stars gleaming softly on her shoulders are unaffected by the cursed eclipse. She is exactly the right color. Nothing has changed.
"I am the same color I've always been," it's her turn for her words to be clipped and tight, "are you?"
Needled, Beryl digs in her heels, turning her simple curiousity into an insult which she wields like a club, skillessly. When she steps forward into his challenge, the dim world turns dark. It's only a moment, a blink, half a breath, but it's darker than anything she's ever known (for her shadows are ever full of those golden eyes, spinning away in a tunnel to unseen places.) It makes her stop abruptly, and then it's gone and the muted world returns except...
Except that instead of a red-eyed shadow-stallion, there is a dull gleam of bone, black as obsidian, as stag beetle shells, and the coal of his eyes has gone, replaced with empty shadow. Her grey lips twist into a frown.
He does not know why, but something about her answer to his comment about her color causes his lips to quirk into a boyish smile, a flash of amusement reflecting from his bright red eyes. “I’m not, actually,” he tells her truthfully. He has stepped forward again, ignoring the irritation that reads like a map across her face. He is half-tempted to see how far he can press that—to see how she might react to the icy tendrils of a fear aura being sent towards her, but he refrains, for now. “I was born blue roan, until the shadows took over.” He does not try to hide that he is at their mercy; that they embarked on a battle against him and they won.
He is not a master of shadow and darkness but is instead a captive forever trapped in their horrifying game. The darkness that shifts over his bones and wraps around him is a prison, not a sanctuary.
She steps forward to meet him and there is a sudden rush of darkness, and his face contorts into one of suspicion. She can clearly manipulate the shadows, and this feels like some attempt on her part to remind him. Thankfully, whatever darkness he is made of, it does not yield to anyone else—not that he has found, at least. Just as quickly as it had come, though, it then leaves, and he is surprised to find her glaring at him as though he had done something.
His head tilts, regarding her carefully. He is not very good at reading the more complicated emotions—he prefers the stark ones, like fear and rage, sorrow and despair. The kind that cannot be mistaken for anything else. She is too guarded to pick out which she is feeling, and while he is sure he could encourage something, it does not seem to be necessary right now. “I’m not trying to,” he tells her, and a short laugh rasps at the back of his throat, “if you’re already afraid, it seems it’d be entirely unfair to actually put effort into it.” He is needling her on purpose now; he thinks she is not the type to buckle beneath the fist of fear, but the temptation of implying that she is was simply too much to resist.
