"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
She wakes to a sky drenched in red and gold, with bits of burning orange swirled throughout, a sky that promises the storms she’s grown to love so much. The smile that pulls at the corners of her mouth chases away some of the dark that pools in the bottomless blue of her summer-sky eyes. It is small and subtle, a tightening of muscles that could almost be a grimace if not for the soft light that catches in the hollows of her delicate near-grey face. But then the weight of things crashes back down an instant later and that smile disappears, the sunshine gone from behind her eyes.
Mother is gone.
She can feel the loss inside her chest like a hole she will never know how to fill, a wound she cannot stop picking at long enough for it to heal. She doesn’t think she would deserve that anyway, deserve relief from this constant haunting pain that follows her through her days and finds her again in her sleep.
The monsters had taken all the entities, including her own mother.
And when the sun came back without that beautiful grulla mare in tow, that loss had made itself known inside her chest.
Revelrie had known.
It was easier not to think about, she told herself. Except that she did think of it every moment of every day, let it burn through her like fire, freeze her chest like ice. She let this pain ruin her until her face forgot how it felt to smile, until she could not recall the sound of her own laugh. She should have been there. She should have gone when that call came from the mountain to help. But she hadn’t known what she stood to lose, what she had already lost. That in denying the mountain she had denied the only chance she had to get her mother back.
This pain would follow her forever because it had been her own doing.
She deserved it.
She rose with the sun, letting it warm her storm-grey skin despite the aching ice inside her chest. She would spend the day on the southernmost edge of the Pampas, waiting on the open cliff for the storm to find her and sweep her away. If only she had wings she might leap and let it take her somewhere else, somewhere without eyes that knew the pain she tried to lock away somewhere deep inside. Sylvanas and father knew her too well, knew her enough to keep the things she would’ve kept secret pulled always to the surface of her just with the sorrow she found in their eyes.
She runs until there is sweat shining on her neck, until her metallic golden hair clings damply to her face and her throat, hiding parts of the glowing flower wreath tattooed above her shoulders. She runs until she cannot breathe and her lungs are an aching thing inside her chest, writhing and burning and begging her to stop. But she does not slow until she can smell the salt and brine over the aroma of flowers, until she can feel the wind whip her hair away from her beautiful face like pieces of shining spun gold.
And she might have smiled at the relief of being in this place of private solitude, might’ve screamed her pain into the dark waters crashing below if it were not for the sudden realization that she was not alone.
At once she is a maelstrom of surprise and anger, drowning beneath the loss of the day she had imagined the whole way here. Of being alone with her pain and all of her regret, of letting angry tears soak her face for only a second before the wind dried the trails. But she clamps down hard on her emotions, squaring her shoulders to march right past him to stand at the edge as though she hadn’t noticed he were there. As though him being here meant nothing to her. He meant nothing.
But it lasts only until the storm inside her chest thunders to the surface, only mere moments of staring angrily out at the surf with her ears pinned in her hair before she whirls on him with a scowl. She is a contrast in heather gray and dark slate, the latter like a mask over her face to better frame those crystal blue eyes and the constellation of stars stolen and placed over the soft curve of her delicate face. There are single gold streaks that race from the dark beneath her eyes to the pale heather of her cheeks, and they glow like the markings on her legs and the tattoo around her neck. “This place isn’t yours.” She says, and her eyes are meant to be full of fury, meant to be cold like the aquamarine gemstones whose color they match. But she is not expecting him to be beautiful. To be as dark as the space between stars or flecked in bits of gold like shattered sunlight.
She blinks, thrown for a moment, and then sinks back into a pain that feels like home, makes her expression stormy again. “You have the rest of the Pampas for your debauchery.” She says, and her voice is only just barely not a snarl as she reveals too much, that she has noticed him before even while he has likely never noticed her. Too plain, too grey, too much like the unpredictable storms that live inside her chest. There could be lightning snapping in those gem-blue eyes for the intensity of the anger she throws at him. But when she speaks again she has remembered how to temper herself, how to tamp down the tempest roaring inside her lest he see more of what lives in her chest than she wants him to. “This place is mine.”
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
Loss is an old friend to the young immortal. Just one of the many reasons that motivated him to strike hammer to steel and build the cruel jagged shield around him, piece by hardened piece. He assumes his parents are dead. No, worse, he hopes they are. It was the only acceptable answer for not seeing them for as long as he had. For not knowing where they had gone off, why they had removed themselves from his presence and withdrawn their love and affection. He was just a child. And he was left alone. Even the fae family that had helped him survive had vanished in the end. Sure they had left their gift, a rebirth as one of their own. Yet it doesn’t fill that wide empty ocean that churns within him. It’s not enough.
Sometimes in the long stretches of early morning hours before the sun rises, he finds himself heading towards the southern cliffs to gaze over the shadowed waves of the sea. When he wakes from dreams he would rather forget and the nectar cannot remove the edge, he travels and he watches. He comes often enough that the mist of sand and salt clings to the sleek tendrils of gold and ebony that whip against the metallic highlights of his chiseled face, intertwining into the fragrance of wild jasmine and lavender that mark his residence of the flowered lands. When the black waves foam and rage beneath his hooves, matching the storminess of his mood, he loses himself in the heat of his hatred. Feeds it little strips of paper written in the curled ink of names of everyone that had ever hurt him. Every bad thing that had happened. The flames lick around the edges, curls of mahogany that burn until they vanish into ash. The flame rises as it feasts and he sinks into the warmth of his hatred like a soothing bath. Allows it to wrap around him so for just a moment he doesn’t feel so damn cold. Sometimes he stands for an hour. Sometimes, like today, he’s still there long after the sun comes up.
He hates Cheri more than ever. He has to, he must. If he doesn’t drown in his disdain for her then he will drown from despair instead. One hurts less than the other. The ghost of her kiss still lingers after all this time on his dark honeyed lips and it makes his stomach twist in uncomfortable knots, making the corner of his mouth curl in that smug smile. As if nothing bothered him at all. Aela is a presence that he thinks of with more pleasure but even she is terrifying in her own right. Of the little way she presses against the smooth rings of his chainmail as if she might just be able to slip past the links that hold him together, that make him what he is. The chaos she could cause is overwhelming to think of. He thinks about it often.
There is much he has learned having resided in the Pampas for awhile now. He’s starting to come to know his home, to find the secret paths and hidden secrets that lay buried amongst the flowers. She is one of them, one of the mysteries he has yet to solve. Snatches of monochrome amongst the wild sea of vibrant petals. A glint of gold that bounces off the bright sunlight of the afternoon. She always evades him, a slippery ghost of the rolling hills and unruly meadows. The red-eyed stallion knows there are some that avoid him while still calling this place home. They don’t bother him so he doesn’t bother them. Let them haunt the poppies and hide amongst the hills. They were still his people and he feels a strange sense of obligation to them, a family that chose to stay. One that did not abandon him even if they didn’t acknowledge him.
Her scent is one that he’s come across often but has never been able to locate the face to match. Yet now it floods his senses as a burst of cloudy energy pushes it’s way past from where he stands. For a moment his red eyes simply blink in disbelief at the audacity of her boldness. Obviously she has no clue who he is or perhaps she would be wiser. But then she turns to him, a cold blast of ice amongst the fire of his explosive hatred, with a snappish admonishment to his presence and an even further turn of her nose to his recent activities. Oh, so she does know who he is.
Whatever shock on his face quickly fades as the smug smirk curls wickedly at the corners of his impish mouth, the red of his eyes dark and glittering. Besides the cruel twist of his lips, his features are that of cool disregard for both her presence and her judgements. His gaze wanders along the trails of gold, similar in some ways to the molten markings smeared along his own skull and chest. She holds the dewy beauty that most with immortality have and he doesn’t find the storm of her coat or the stellar patterns along her face unappealing despite the lack of appreciation she had for herself. It wasn’t surprising, he had always been drawn to storms.
“Is that why you avoid me?” He murmurs, curiosity staying his biting tongue briefly although he originally thinks of lashing back at her. Debauchery, well, she wasn’t wrong. It’s not as if he can deny it. “Jealous? If you wanted an invitation all you had to do was ask darling.” He sneers at her, his own expression as cold as the crystal blue of her eyes. “And I believe all of this is actually mine.” There’s a soft hiss to his words, one he hadn’t intended to release, but he doesn’t think much of it. More than likely a simple slip of the tongue.
For the briefest moment she thinks she can see his shock etched into the angles of his dark, arrogant face. A subtle widening of eyes red enough to be borrowed rubies, a tightening of a mouth she thinks must not be suited for smiling. It is too cold and too cruel, too much like carved stone. But then she blinks those sky-blue eyes and when she opens them again there is something different gleaming on his face. Glittering eyes that watch her with a dark amusement that makes her feel small, a smirk that pulls the corners of his mouth upwards enough to make him look somehow bored and amused. She frowns, not nearly so good at schooling her expression as he is, to make it something quieter than the storm that rages on inside her chest, and then the frown deepens into a scowl that drags the corners of her mouth downwards in displeasure.
Jealous? The word feels like a slap across her face, an accusation aimed well enough that for a moment she can do nothing but seethe in silent frustration. What in the world could he possibly think she would ever want from him. Jealous? Her pulse is a roaring thing in her ears, drowning out the sound of the ocean crashing below and the wind rising up along the cliffs to tangle knots in the spun gold of her hair. “There is nothing I want from you.” She says, and her voice is something that is both hard and brittle, something she throws like fists against an armored chest. “And I am not a darling.” She is ugly and she is broken, a thousand shattered pieces put back together only halfway and all wrong. She is pain and regret, and it runs like poison through her veins until it is all she can taste every day, until sorrow and wrath are the only companions yet willing to stay by her side. But she is all of this where he cannot see, all of it trapped inside this beautiful skin and these bright burning eyes.
He’ll only see it if he looks closely enough, long enough.
But no one ever does.
Her eyes fix on his sneer for a moment, and she can feel the way her own mouth changes to match it. The curve of displeasure, a tension in lips pulled tight in disgust. But she isn’t sure that all of this disgust is for him - or at least not until he speaks one last time and the hiss of his murmured words coil around her like writhing snakes. “Then you’re even more of an idiot than you look.” She says flatly, those eyes shining like burning sapphire. “Which is honestly quite a feat.” She hadn’t noticed when it happened, but her shoulders are like knots of coiled muscle, her ears buried like flat silver in the metallic gold of her hair. There is something about him that unsettles her, something she does not trust. But she tells herself that it is because he is an outsider, because she does not know him beyond the debauchery she has seen on her walks around those particular flowers.
She forces her muscles to relax again, not wanting him to realize how much of an effect he has on her, not wanting him to realize anything about her at all. She will remain a fortress behind the mirror of her cold expression, and she will ignore the groan and crack of the fissures racing up her walls. This place is more than home. This place is an ancient tether in the story of her lineage. She’d been raised on stories of her mother growing up here - of her grandparents and their family and the adventures they had so many decades ago.
Revelrie belonged to this land, she had been born with the reflections of these very same wildflowers dancing in the dark of her shining eyes. To have him here, to watch him so besotted with those damn flowers - she sighs and the sound of it is like all the fight rushing out of her, all the fire drowned. “Whatever you came here looking for, you won’t find it in those flowers.” Her voice is hard because she knows what it feels like to forget, to let go of burdens that feel too heavy to bear. But those flowers take more than they give. She turns from him without another word, walking the last ten steps to the edge of the cliff where she can feel the wind tracing the shape of her delicate face, can feel the faint spray of the misted water from below her. She realizes she had never denied that she was avoiding him when he accused her of it, and she wonders if he will recognize that lack of acknowledgement for a truth she would never willingly share.
Of course she had been avoiding him.
He is dark and beautiful and she is certain that he might have been someone she would’ve loved to know. That it would have felt like a challenge to draw some of the ire from his eyes, to coax some delight into the wicked curve of that beautiful mouth. She would have wanted to explore the shining smears of gold across his skin - were they warm like sunshine or cold like flecks of ore? Her eyes wander with her thoughts, and she hadn’t realized she’d turned her face back around to look at him, but suddenly her eyes are all over him and she’s forgotten to frown. For a second she is one single unbroken fragment of herself, unburdened, unchanged. There is laughter in those summer sky eyes and delight in the wisp of her smile at having such beautiful company.
Then she blinks and it is gone again, and she frowns and turns her face back to the lightning she can see illuminating the clouds in the furthest place along the horizon. There’s thunder but it isn’t yet louder than her heartbeat. “Have you ever been up here when a storm rolls in?” Her voice is something quiet, almost dull, and she cannot decide if she wants him to have heard the invitation in her question or not.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
It’s a different sort of blue... the eyes of the sour gray mare. Not like Aela’s that start as a reflection of ocean waves but seem to turn darker the longer you stare into them, like the bottomless ocean deep itself. Revelrie’s remind him of clear mountain lakes covered in frost. They are hard as ice and just as cold. As his words grab hold of her, they almost seem to crack as her scowl deepens over her features. She’s rather pretty when she’s angry.
There is nothing I want from you. She spits and his amusement lingers, seeing that he had managed to get under her skin. He basks in the aftermath of her venom, radiating nothing but smugness. “Whatever you wish… darling.” Curls form in the strands of radiant gold and black, salt from the sea evaporating the moisture from his mane as it crimps and tangles over his forehead, a glimmer of red beneath the fringe. She continues to scoff at him and something animalistic seems to respond deep within, it writhes and responds to her hiss like a call. Like a summons.
He shifts his weight with discomfort, his lips tighter as his own grimace deepens. This one is like a viper, ready to strike. He wouldn’t even mind if she decided to bite. “And yet you’re still here.” He responds with that twisted smile, a glitter in the depths of red as they narrow on her. Thinning into slits. The history of this land was as evasive to him as the better high he was constantly seeking. He cared little for history and even less for stories. Stories were fairy tales for good children to keep them scared straight, kind children who needed a reminder of a moral, loved children who fell asleep to the sound of the warmth in a parents voice during the telling. He’s not sure he’s ever been told one. Not a good one anyway.
The tension slightly releases with the tide, with her sigh, but he is still coiled tightly like a spring. She had managed to find a little crevice in his armor, had managed to pinch some exposed skin. “What would you know of what I look for?” His voice flat and clipped but he can’t help the whisper of curiosity that maybe she knew something he didn’t. He wasn’t really sure he was looking for anything amongst the heady fumes, powders, and liquids he consumed. It still irks him, however, that she has the audacity to speak to him like she knows him. She knows nothing about him. Nobody did and that has always been their choice. Beyond the Prince, beyond the parties, beyond the cruel words. They have only seen what he has wanted them to see. Uncaring, mean, spiteful, unpredictable. What better way to keep them all from discovering who he really was beneath the surface.
That primal feeling slithers within him again but he fights against it, whatever it is.
He has not forgotten his original question and he’s not as stupid as she thinks, having noticed it unanswered. Was that intentional or not? Before he can press her, she seems to melt before him into something softer, something kinder then the severe creature that had stood before him seconds ago. Her crystal gaze wanders over him and he refuses to back down under her scrutiny, his own scarlet eyes flaring darkly. Taking in the sudden brightness as the ice thaws in her veins, at the ghost of a smile that caresses the corner of her lip. A canvas that has painted itself into something new. It catches him more off guard than her annoyance. What was she thinking, looking at him like that? What had drastically changed?
Whatever it is fades as quickly as it comes, she is once again all frowns and bitterness, but her hackles don’t seem to quite rise like they use to. She turns to the swelling ocean that churns beneath them and he comes to join her, regardless if he’s invited or not. Her question isn’t quite drowned out by the crash of thunder in the distance. “It’s when I like it best here.” Every word is truth, unable to tell anything other but honesty. He doesn’t bother to phrase his candor in the usual trickster way that Faes are known to do, hiding their true intentions behind clever riddles of words and multiple meanings. It doesn’t seem necessary when they are merely commenting on the weather.
His eyes remain on the horizon, on the incoming dark clouds and the thrash of waves in a choppy sea. His voice low but knows, as a long pointed ear swivels slightly towards her, that she will catch it. “Do I at least get the name of the ghost that haunts my land?”
She is almost set on ignoring him - his goading amusement and the way he calls her darling yet again despite that she had told him not to. It is a word that carries a certain kind of implied fondness, a word that makes something in the back of her mind wonder at what it would be like to be called darling unironically. But the curiosity is a vulnerability that she rankles at, a vulnerability like a weak spot in the armor she’s thrown together so haphazardly. It is no wonder that he is so good at finding weak spots, she must be full of them, made of them.
If she were more clever she might realize that this was a battle not worth fighting, one that he is almost certainly guaranteed to win if only because the wounds on her heart are too raw and too new and breathe a wild kind of recklessness into her not suited for his level of verbal sparring. But she is not clever, or if she ever was it is now drowned beneath a stubbornness that forces those sky blue eyes to an almost glacial fury. Except that it is only partly fury, only partly wrath. That shade of blue belongs to broken things, to pain and hurt and the kind of despair she does not know how to escape. It is a blue that carves her sharper than any blade but does not know how to wield her.
“I stay because this place -” But she cuts herself off abruptly, that roil of blue almost writhing in the bottoms of those sad eyes. She had been about to tell him what this place meant to her, this one last sanctuary in a world so good at collapsing around her. But certainly if he knew that, if he knew anything more intimate about the workings of her heart, he would find ways to use it against her. To wound her. “I didn’t stay for the company.” She says instead, and her soft voice is a little too jagged to be barbed as she had meant it to be.
Her eyes had wandered from him again as though if she stared long enough at the approaching storm she could just fall right into it and be gone from here, from him. But he speaks and there is some kind of new unnameable emotion like a shade of copper among his streaks of gold. She frowns, and the expression softens something among the broken glass of her face until she looks almost gentle in her shared curiosity. “I guess I don’t know what you’re looking for.” She says, studying him for a moment. “Only guesses.” Only her own purposes, her own truths. It hadn’t occurred to her until just this moment that maybe he found something else in the flowers, something besides time erased. “You know some call them the forgetting flowers?” It is the closest she can come to saying what she had meant, what she herself had used the flowers for at one time so recently. The closest she can come to being any kind of vulnerable with him.
But she is growing softer without even realizing it. The tension has drained some from her face, and the ire has faded so that her eyes are a shade of blue like early summer morning as he comes to stand beside her. All of it fades away though when he speaks those seven perfect words. It’s when I like it best here. Her face turns sharply to him, and she doesn’t know what she’s looking for until her mind decides that it doesn’t seem like a lie. There is no amused smirk on his mouth, no laughter in those nearly predator-sharp eyes. So she has absolutely no reason to lie either when she finally says, much softer now, “Me too.” But she finds herself unwilling to look away from him now, especially when this close she can see him in so much more detail. He truly is something beautiful - but beautiful in the way fire is, or a storm. Not in the way flowers are when they bloom throughout spring.
He is something wild, she thinks.
And there is nothing more beautiful than that which is wild.
She’s still watching him in this quiet way when he murmurs, low beneath the wind and waves, a new question that makes her hesitate. He wants her name. There is a soft furrowing of her brow beneath her forelock, a shape of worry to the roundness of those thawed glacial eyes. An observant man might notice the weight of her silence for the gift it is when she finally whispers back, “My name is Revelrie.” She doesn’t expect a name back but she asks anyway, finally letting her gaze drift from those burning lantern eyes of his to look out with a half-smile at the turmoil of clouds nearly to them now. “What about you?” She says, timing the question after a boom of thunder she swears shakes the earth beneath her feet. “Who is the Prince of the Pampas?” She wants more than a name, wants a story to go with it, but as her gaze flicks briefly back to his face she knows she could be content with just a name for now.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
06-07-2021, 12:35 PM (This post was last modified: 06-08-2021, 07:15 PM by Obscene.)
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
“I stay..” She hesitates and there’s a moment where he wants to press her, to make her more forthcoming but it passes as quickly as it comes when her words come out duller then she probably intended. She is smarter then he guesses, he would try to find a way to use that knowledge against her... If given a reason. As she speaks of the flowers, of what they truly are called, he simply says nothing. He knows well what they are, what they do, and why he uses them. It’s his inability to lie that keeps him silent for she had guessed too closely. Had figured him out from the moment she had brought up what he sought from the pollen. To not care, to forget. Only a glint in the hard glass of red gives away the acknowledgment of what she had said as his gaze turns from her and follows her line of sight out to the sea.
He can feel her searching eyes on him (those frosted lakes cracking into something brilliant) as he comes to stand beside her but stubbornly refuses to look back, keeping that vermillion gaze locked on the waves. She already saw too much of him, had managed to peel back the layers of himself he would rather keep locked away. He tightens that armor around him as his expression turns into something smooth and harder to read. Wind whips unruly strands of black and gold around his visage, wind stinging at his face and threatening to bring tears to his eyes that he successfully blinks away. He still refuses to look at her when she finally gives her name. How fitting, an obscene "revelrie" is what happened nightly amongst the wildflowers but in this moment they are far from festive and wanton. “Who is the Prince of the Pampas?” A more complex question then she realizes and one that gives him pause.
The storm is coming closer, a gale that threatens to sweep them out to sea, but he stands steadfast beside her. If she will not flinch then he certainly will not. It’s becoming harder to tell if it’s the thunder that’s shaking the granite beneath his hooves or the sudden rush of adrenaline that crashes through his veins. Something about the storm (and something about her) makes him feel increasingly reckless or maybe it’s just that strange twisting flame within him that refuses to settle, something slick and coiled as if ready to strike. Despite never hearing many stories before, he thinks he might try one on for size. “Do you like stories Revelrie?” He asks her quietly after another clash of thunder rumbles overhead. He doesn’t wait for her answer and begins to tell her one anyway.
“Once there was a King of Fire. He was a decent king and his people were loyal to him but he was lonely, his fire burned too bright and too hot. None seemed capable of withstanding his flames. He found that as his loneliness grew, so did the weight of his crown. He looked high and low for someone that could handle his flames but all he seemed to do was burn the ones that tried. The weight grew heavier until he thought he might simply fall beneath and become nothing but ash. He gave up looking and accepted his doom.”
“Once there was a Queen of Sisters who had fallen from grace. She lost her crown, broken and splintered, when another took from her what he didn’t deserve. She withdrew from the world, withdrew from herself, and succumbed to the loss of dignity, loss of control, and loss of what she once had been.”
“One day the King of Fire met the fallen Queen of Sisters and found that she did not recoil from his flames. One day the Queen of Sisters met a King of Fire and found that his burning touch was cleansing. Through trial and tribulation they fell in love and he gave up his crown for the Fallen Queen and the son that grew inside her. One day the King of Fire told this story to that son, thinking he might be filled with the same fire that filled him, a love story of his creation and a warning. Something his boy could hold on to when the nights were long and cold.”
“But he was wrong. The son listened to this story and found it lacking. For the weight still seemed to hang heavy on both their shoulders, ex-King and ex-Queen. They seemed to be nothing without their crowns and whatever love they felt for him they seemed to keep for themselves. Not long after the story was told, the King of Fire seemed to withdraw into his own flames and disappeared and then the Queen of Sisters followed. The son was left to fend for himself, becoming a wild and feral thing with not a flicker of spark to be seen that his father had warned him about. Instead of fire something colder began to build in him instead.”
He falls silent, coming to a sudden realization.
He really hated stories.
“Is there a moral there? I wonder.” He asks her, eyes glittering like dark rubies as rain begins to stain his dark pelt into something blacker, oily and slick. The gold smeared along his face and chest remains, stubbornly clinging to his skin no matter how hard water tries to wash it away. There is a bitterness he hadn’t intended to seep into his telling of the tale but it lingers now with that simple question, his lips pressed tight against each other as his gaze turns back to the gloomy churning waters that froth before them.
It hadn’t been his intention to give her so much but now it was there, a part of himself exposed in the bits and bobbins of a story twisted to hide so many truths. With a small grunt of exasperation at himself he finally turns his burning eyes back to her. “Obscene.” He finally says after looking at her, hard. “Do you find my name fitting? Others do.” He can’t help but recall the way Cheri had laughed, drunk on nectar, when she had realized what he was called and that violent thing within him seems to spasm and coil again.
He asks if she likes stories, and she has only one beat of her already drumming heart to realize that this question is rhetorical and he means to tell the story regardless. It’s good, probably, because he may not have had much patience for her answer if she’d had time to give one. That she liked some stories but had found not all of them were worth hearing. Yet somehow she is sure this one will be different, though she isn’t certain why.
She is surprised to find that he is a good story-teller though, that his voice is the perfect kind of evenness, his tone it’s perfect match. She watches his eyes flash like rubies, the surfaces so bright it almost feels like they are reflecting everything but the truths hidden away inside them and she finds she cannot look away. He has her enraptured in a way very few things can, and for several long moments her delicate gray and gold face is as open to him as any evening sky. She listens to his story, and there are moments where a smile starts to curl in the corners of her mouth only to disappear again at what can only be a reflection of things that seem not quite right - a love story in every way except the secret truths only the boy knew.
There is no question in her mind that the boy is Obscene, for he is certainly not the King of Fire and who else would know this story so intimately.
She feels so quiet inside when the story is done, and there is a gentle kind of frown on her lips that pulls furrows into her delicate brow. “Maybe it’s better that they left,” and she pauses there, torn for a moment between saying you and him. But she chooses the word he had used because the implication of you holds an unbearable kind of weight even on her tongue. “Better that they left him behind with just a story, so that he could find something more than the weight of their legacy. Find a family of his own choosing.” She frowns, and for a moment the story burns through her like a fury to which she knows no equal. “No. He deserved more than that. They should have done better.”
But then she is quiet, fighting a storm inside her chest as wild as the one that rages around them and hides her face beneath a fury of whirling golden mane. In the growing storm-dark her tattoos glow even brighter, almost as vivid as the lightning flickering across the bellies of the clouds as she glares up at them. It is only the sound of his voice that pulls her back to him. She turns, and her eyes are bright and burning, an aching blue every sky in every world would be jealous of. For a split second she thinks he’s calling her obscene, and she rankles at the insult until she realizes that this word is his name. Obscene. Suddenly this word is more than an insult, more than ugly, it is a beautiful dark face with jewel-bright eyes and a cunning smile that lights fires inside her chest. “No.” She says, and she’s half shouting over the wind and rain as it darkens them both. “I’ll wait to decide that until I know you better.” And in the wildness of the storm she doesn’t realize that this is like a promise to stay, a promise to know him if he’d ever be brave enough to let her try.
It is too hard to be guarded when the storm that unfolds around them is the twin to the living pain inside her chest. She steps closer to him, lifts her mouth near his ear where he can hear her voice over the thundering gale. She ignores the way he smells like summer and salt and something that must be distinctly him. “Sometimes I wish I had wings so I could just jump.” She tells him, and her eyes are as alive and wild as the lightning flickering in her periphery. “Sometimes I think I might jump anyway. Maybe I'll become a bird and fly away, or a fish and swim.” She steps away from him so that her toes are at the very edge of the cliff and she is looking down at the dark, frothing waves below. “Maybe I’m lightning and the storm will take me with it when it leaves.” But he’ll only hear that last part if he had been foolish enough to follow her to the edge. She turns to him, searching his face with that unspoken question, her face almost beautiful in the wild carefree way she watches him. Is he brave enough to jump with her?
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
She is quiet in the telling, opposite of what he was expecting. She had been jagged knives and sharp needles before, as prickly as a cactus and as biting as the wind that now brutally beats against them. Now those edges seem soft and thoughtful as she merely listens. He doesn’t expect an answer to his question of morality but she gives it none the less. He still refuses to look at her for he knows what he will find there. She isn’t a stupid creature and she had already figured him out once. The thought of her pity makes him squeamish and sick and that thing inside of him flails wildly as if caught in a noose.
“Maybe it’s better that they left.” A scornful scowl takes the tightness of his lips and twists it into something mean and hateful. It eases only slightly when she amends her opinion before he can jump in, before he can show her just how cruel his words can be. Still something acidic lingers in his mouth and his disgust is evident as he follows up her thoughts with some of his own. “He did make a family of his own and they left him too.” His words are a rumble that mingles with the storm but he knows she hears him. He just knows. Christ, why was he telling her so much? For a moment he blames it on the looseness of his tongue surely spurred by heavy drink. Forgetting that his buzz had worn off hours ago.
There had been no sign of the fairies that he had once known and grown up with since that day Cheri had gotten drunk amongst the flowers. All that remained was the nectar that they hid deep within the bowels of trees and roots, in fallen trunks flaking with dead debris. Easier to find for him since he had ascended to Fae but it didn’t make the hurt lessen, that they avoided him. Deep down he adds it as another point against the girl of green and onyx, another reason to feed to the flames of his hatred. Hatred and love were so hard to tell apart at times and since love seemed such a foreign concept to him, he cannot recognize it for what it is.
Revelrie thinks she is ugly but she isn’t. The strands of gold (not unlike the ones that weave within a tapestry of black) are as wild and feral as the boy in his story as they blow across her face in the tempest. The tattoos that glow across her body are as bright and bold as Light is when he dances across the stream at night. As bright as the stripes that wind across Aela’s sunlight limbs. He cares for the golden mare more then he was willing to confess and the tightrope they walk is a dangerous one.
He could care for Revelrie too (a raincloud mare streaked with lighting) as she reserves her judgement for a later day. As she doesn’t laugh at him. As she looks at him with eyes as bright as the sky when the sun has risen high and clear. Unclouded and light compared to the deep ocean of Aela’s. That is also something he is loathe to admit.
He doesn’t want to care for anyone just as nobody has ever cared about him.
He had taken this crown, this place of leadership, as if he had been born for it. And in a way, he had. The responsibility was not a crushing weight like it had been for Offspring but he can feel the shackles of it fall in place. There was always freedom in the nectar, in the pollen he spitefully inhaled, and it eased the bite of steel that he had willingly placed on himself. Whatever he made in the Pampas was his and whoever decided to linger here (regardless if they liked him or not and regardless if that feeling was mutual) was his to look out for. To defend and protect, to annoy and crucify. He had to care to an extent. Nobody else needed to know that though.
“You might regret that.” He yells across the squall as he breaks from the intensity of her gaze but his scowl has faded into something less harsh, an uneven smile that coaxes into a smirk. The ones he gives when his feelings are uncertain and the heat of his hatred cools. She is close to him now, her muzzle reaching to a long pointed ear and he can’t help but inhale the scent of her. A mixture of the wildflowers that make this place what it is, a mixture of the salt of the sea, a mixture of something feminine. These are confessions that fall heavily on to him, wishes he doesn’t want, and his gaze hardens when she steps away. As she dangled precariously close to the edge. All it would take is one buffet from this hellish wind to take her away. To jump and see if she grew wings or scales when her body hit the water (unless she was unlucky enough to hit the jutting rocks instead).
His teeth grit as his immortality fights against the ghostly remains of the mortality he had once owned. Before he steps right up beside her. There is a thrill running along his spine, enough to make his fur raise with anticipation. It would take a lot now to make him die. Immortal and a healer besides. Was this what it felt like when Crowns came close to death? There is something wild and mad in her gaze and he hesitates. “And what if we are simply what we are?” He asks her above the thrash of the storm, yelling enough to make his voice hoarse. He does not want her blood on his hooves and it’s merely a question now if he will jump with her and allow her to die or pull her back from the edge. The trickster in him wants to watch her fall (wants to jump himself) but the scared lonely mortal boy from the story wants to grip her mane and pull her back to watch the storms with him another day.
She is still shouting to be heard when she says, “Pick better next time.” She forgets all pretence of pretending that boy in the story wasn’t him, and there is no hint of ire or judgement in her raised voice, no shade of pityin her eyes because she understands what it is to have your parents carve out your future with the choices they make. Maybe her mother hadn’t chosen to go, but right now riding off the anger of his own story, it is a relief to hate her mom for leaving. To blame her mother instead of mourn her, to let fury carve Revelrie into a blade instead of allowing sorrow to reduce her to jagged shards. “Try me this time. She doesn’t really know why she says it, and maybe later she will blame it on the adrenaline of the storm booming around them, but in this moment she means it. She would like the chance to know him, to be his friend.
But there is no time for being soft, no time for anything but the thrashing rain that lashes her face and the wind that leaves her mane in wild faerie knots. “I might regret it.” She agrees, and some wild kind of laughter bubbles up helplessly from her chest when he steps up to join her. She does not think about it when she reaches out to touch his neck, tracing her lips over the shine of those golden flecks scattered like bits of shattered sun against the dark of space. It’s gratitude, maybe, that he can see her unravel like this, come completely undone, and yet he does not turn away from it in disgust. She has absolutely no idea why he doesn’t leave either, and if the situation were reversed she can’t be sure she wouldn’t be yelling at him to stop acting like an idiot. But he is better than her, maybe, and he is here. She touches her lips to the corner of his mouth so fleetingly her touch might be nothing more than the wind that traces the dark and damp of their bodies.
“Then we sink or we swim.” She says, and her face is turned not to the sea but to him, their eyes a clash of dark red and blue so bright they might be jewels. “But I don’t think I’m simple, and I’m sure you’re not either.” How could he even think that while they stood together at the edge of a cliff with water roiling below. “I might be insane.” She amends, and for the first time there is a hint of wariness as she breaks from his gaze to look down again. There is no desire inside her to die, and this is not about giving up or giving in, but about letting herself be carved into something entirely new. She is so tired of the relentless pain inside her chest, and the nectar of the flower had only led her further into ruin - she had found none of whatever it was that kept calling him back.
She shifts carefully closer to him, close enough that the curves of her hips and shoulders press into him to lend her delicate body some steadiness in this rushing wind. She starts to lift her mouth to his ear again, but then something inside her chest comes undone and she realizes this is a truth she needs to shout into the wind, a pain she needs to set free inside this storm. “I lost my mom when the dark-beasts came. They took her into the night and when the sun rose again, she was gone. She IS gone.” She is glad for the rain, because it washes away the angry tears that race down her cheeks, illuminating only for a heartbeat where they intersect with the glowing line that disappears under her jaw. “I need to feel more than this brokenness inside my chest or it’s going to kill me faster than this jump ever could.” She realizes too late she shouldn’t have told him that last part, shouldn’t have bared herself to him so readily, and when her gaze leaps back to his face it is with eyes now a shade of blue like bright wariness. “Don’t ever use my pain against me, Obscene, and I’ll never turn any of your truths against you.” It is some kind of threat and some kind of promise, and she finds herself searching his face for any hint of how she’s just damned herself.
Maybe it’s whatever she finds there that sets her free, or maybe it is cowardice that makes her need to run from him this moment before something new detonates inside her chest. But she steps close enough to leave the briefest kiss at the corner of his dark, scowling mouth, just one second of reckless bravery, and then she turns and leaps out over the edge and into the waiting ocean below.
REVELRIE
it feels like falling, it feels like rain, like losing my balance again and again
I can see through you, see your true colors Cause inside you're ugly, you're ugly like me
The anger that flares within him curls itself into ash when she looks at him and says simply, Try me. "Try me next time." She doesn’t know that he has already done so. That he has chosen her and everyone else that called this place home even as he denies it to himself. There is a moment of hesitation, where she almost manages to pry a piece of steel from his hardened reserve. It becomes lost in the thrashing of the storm as she insanely moves towards the cliff. Her laughter becomes lost in the boom of thunder and then she is reaching out to trace the smears of golden makeup that line the curves of his body and he cannot help but be swept away in the wildness that she is. The thought of leaving is unthinkable, this ghost of a woman that had evaded him since he first stepped foot in the Pampas and now appears, unhinged and mad, threatening to sink or swim.
There is beauty in her brokenness and as Fae he has come to covet beautiful things.
The smugness of his lips deepens as a whisper of a kiss brushes against the corner of his mouth, his mane clinging to his drenched body with the dampness of the downpour. Every inch of him is soaked as the storm breaks above them but he doesn’t care. He never cares. Not even now as she presses closer to him to steady herself, as she screams her pain and hurt into the storm that also does not care. It takes her words selfishly, swoops them up in wind and rain, and deposits them into the ocean where they fall deep within the waves. But he listens. Listens to her as she berates the world for her loss, as her angry tears mingle with droplets of rain, as she releases her own storm from within herself into the tempest that swirls around them.
Part of him is jealous that she can admit things so freely, that she can understand these parts of pain about herself. That she can cry freely and with abandon. The rest of him is hardened to her plight, to this sense of loss from a mother that had surely not chosen death. One that would have fought to stay with her and love her. Love, if it even truly existed. Her gaze looks back to him with this last weighted confession of dying and he finds that for once he isn’t sure what to say. There are lies that bubble beneath his surface that he wishes he could speak but they all become lodged in his throat, choking him into silence. She is searching him for something and he’s not sure what it is she finds there. “Revelrie..” He starts but then she is pressing a kiss once more to the corner of his mouth and he without thought meets her soft lips with his own dark ones. A brief kiss, one that's only a whisper of the hungry ones he had placed on Cheri and explored along Aela’s body. It can’t be anything more because she has moved from him and before he can even make some sort of exclamation she has jumped.
There is a rushing in his ears that’s not purely from the storm. His mind seems to buzz like bees as his skull snakes out and teeth snap to catch at… something, anything… but finds nothing but air. Obscene was far from a selfless man. He would make you cry simply because he could. He would find joy in others pain because surely nothing could ever feel as bad as what he felt. If you tripped and fell, he would laugh and probably have been behind the reason you tripped in the first place. So when he steps off the cliff it is not because he wants to rescue her (although it is a thought in his mind, subtly hidden beneath the claim of responsibility).
Something dark, vicious, and ugly seems to explode within him. A whitewashed wall of anger that has been smoldering for years but has come to life as something… other. The anger that floods through him is at her for being so stupidly reckless and intriguing him to begin with, at himself for even giving the tiniest shit and for this inexplicable need to protect the people of his home, at Cheri for making a fool of him, at Aela for whatever secrets she kept from him, at his family that had abandoned him both horse and fae, at the stupid scared boy that he still was that even as this immortal being he could not escape the mortality of others. There is so much of it, this rage, so much of it for the entire world. An anger that burns through him, a fire that seems to wipe away all the coldness he had built around himself, and becomes something completely different.
When he steps off the cliff his hoof has already started to morph and disappear. He doesn’t register the fall, doesn’t register anything at all except a poisonous hunger that fuses into the flames of his hatred. Hatred for everything and everyone regardless if he knew them or not, if they had hurt him or not.
He had dreamed of this, a realization and the last thought that he has before this creature overtakes him. He has known what has laid dormant beneath his skin the whole time. This strange writhing sensation he has gained since he had become Fae. He had seen it in his dreams. A terrible prophecy of what he would become, what he had always been. If he could still laugh he would have then. The faeries had played one last trick and even he could appreciate the casual cruelness that had come with the gift of immortality. He was Fae after all.
What slaps against the water isn’t horse, an impact that manages to part the churning waves with a mighty splash. It is a large black twisted thing, scaled with a smattering of gold, fanged and venomous, with the angriest slitted red eyes that seem to burn a hole into whatever it looks at.
It is there and then it is gone, feral and writhing, as it sinks deep within the ocean.
