[open] the nothing war, any

[jamie]

jamie

I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT

He’d heard them.
Their feeble cry.
Their foolish plea.

He had not needed to travel to the Mountain to know what it was the faeries were after. Perhaps he should have gone. Gone to try and stop them, at least. Because the things that lurk in the darkness are not monsters. Because he belongs to them and they belong to him. Because he is comfortable in these long, impenetrable shadows.

Because it fills him with such terrible anger to think that this darkness might not stretch on forever.

His mood is foul as he sulks through the forest now, gnashing his ink-black teeth. There is nothing to discern him from all that darkness save for those freakish yellow eyes. Let them try to take the shadows from him, he thinks. His edges (soft, rumors more than anything real or solid) shiver with the thrill that comes with the thought of ruin, glorious destruction, revenge. 

He pauses just long enough to summon things from shadow. He has to stop, channel all of his concentration into their construction. He is not practiced enough yet to conjure them with a mere thought. It is only a pair of them, two great, horned elk that flank him as he moves through the forest, made from darkness with freakish yellow eyes just like his. Shadow creatures, like him.

And when they hear something nearby, all three figures stop and turn their great, featureless heads in unison, seeking out the source of the sound, nostrils flaring. But it is only the equine figure that steps forward, toward the sound. 

AND IT LEAVES ME COLD

[Aela]

She shouldn't be out here looking for him, but she is.

He would be impossible to tell from the other creatures. Skandar was as skillful with that shape as any other - (and some prideful part of her knew he would be, he was the son of a God. How could he be anything less than supernaturally adept?) - but there is a frenzy of anger seething off her while she searches.

Maybe that is why the monsters give her such a wide berth.
Maybe that is while her glow grows from dim light to a piercing flame, nothing creeps or crawls from the shadows. It is nothing but obscurity and her frustration rises the longer she spends wandering the empty dark.

The longer she searches, Aela even reverts to their old childhood game.

Projections fill the air - borrowed memories and hers alike - in an attempt to fill the vacant spaces around her. The night becomes a brilliant flash of magic while it blasts Nerinian stone apart. The silence is broken by the trill of unseen predators. Daylight blazes as flames consume a forest. Over and over again, she pushes the images out. Hoping that perhaps one creature will remember.

Hoping that one creature will know.

Because those memories are easier to recall than their last one. Because the last memory had been about playing with fire and tampering with Magic and while they hadn't been swallowed, she thinks something far worse happened.

Skandar - who can be terrible and terrifying - had been neither.

(He had been himself and had done the unthinkable.
He had offered her his throat.)

Finally, after hours of searching and finding nothing, the Forest finally offers a sound.

Her mind instantly reaches out, hoping to find a trace of memory. A glimmer of what might be nearby. Aela knows the moment it looks at her - the unsettling yellow that stares through the darkness - that she hasn't found who she is looking for. There is nothing to this monster like the others, though. It's different in a way that makes her blazed head tilt as she stops and lifts towards the hazy creature (in greeting? in warning?).

@[jamie] remember that time we had three threads together?

[jamie]

jamie

I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT

The thing is silent as it moves, freakish yellow eyes unblinking. It flickers in and out of focus like a hallucination as it advances, head low like a predator. The shadow-elk watch it go, twitching. The thing works its ink-black mouth and flares its paper-thin nostrils as the pale gold figure tilts her head. The thing lets loose a rattling breath and continues its advance, if the tilt of her fine head had been a warning the thing does not heed it. He has loved death too fondly to fear anything at all, this thing that emerges from the darkness, crafted so lovingly from it. His mother had crafted him so tenderly from her shadows, his mother had made him a monster so a monster he became

The thing reaches for her. Not with his mouth or his nose or his teeth. But with fingers of fog that wrap themselves so sweetly around her ankles and then venture up to her shoulders. Lick so tenderly down the lengths of her sides. 

“Child,” the fog whispers in her ear, (or, at least, it must seem like it does), “run along home now, child.” 

The thing has stopped now and the shadow-elk watch still from a distance. Three pairs of freakish yellow eyes trained intently on her face. 

“This darkness is no place for a child,” the fog says as it strokes her face. 

The thing still seethes. His sides still heave with all of his sordid resentment. Someone will pay. It is not the fog that warns her, no. The warnings are his alone because the thing is a father now himself. But these are the only warnings he will offer. 

AND IT LEAVES ME COLD

@[Aela]