• Logout
  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [open]  they will build me no shrines, any
    #1
    kensley
    i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
    It had happened in the night and when he woke the next morning he’d thought himself waking in a dream. Because, as he’d slept, the fog had crept in and replaced his skin. Because an early spring rain had begun to fall and it stopped when he willed it away. And when he’d clambered to his feet and exhaled a startled sigh, the breath that had left him had been enough to disturb the grass at his feet. 

    But it was no dream. 
    He had awoken something other.
    And his head swims now with the overwhelming way things have changed and how he has lost sight of the penance he was meant to pay. The yoke he had been meant to carry. The guilt has carved itself a home in the walls of his chest but it has become so familiar that it is comfortable now. It no longer holds the same weight it once did. It no longer feels like a vise tightened around his windpipe. 

    He has been distracted.
    And this is no different.
    How he had ached simply to be alive. How painful it had been to come back from the dead! And this! This seizes him with panic because there is no explanation for it. His chest heaves with all that panic as he stumbles along the riverbank. The body still moves the same, though this does not seem possible.

    Will you touch me?” he asks the first soul he encounters. Such a strange request, but there is a kind of desperation in the voice, an urgency in the dark eyes. “Will you tell me if I’m real?

     
    i worshipped at the altar of losing everything
    Reply
    #2
    I shine only with the light you give me


    Seven flowers.

    That is how many it took to weave a crown for his mother.

    ‘Why don’t you wear a crown, mom?’ He asked on a spring morning. ‘Aren’t you a queen?’
    ‘A crown alone does not make a queen.’ She responded on a spring morning. ‘But if you made me one, I think it could help.’

    And on a spring morning, a boy made a crown for his mother. Seven flowers, woven together.

    And on a spring afternoon, he placed it atop her golden head.

    And on a spring evening she still wore it, for the smile it sent upon her son’s face.

    And on an autumn evening, there sat the golden mother, clutching that crown, the flowers were still bright, watered by tears.

    He passes seven trees, but forgets to count them. He passes seven more, remembers, counts, passes seven more, forgets again. He follows the river, blue eyes move like ocean waves, watching each rock that pushes up and out of the water, staining against the current. They must grow weary, he knows the feeling. He knows the feeling so well, it has a color, a sound, a name. It slips his mind though when not a rock pushes before his vision, but a soul. 

    Will you touch me?
    Will you tell me if I’m real?

    He would think it strange—he should think it strange—he would think it strange if he were not so strange himself. Benjamen presses a pair of youthful lips into his chest. “As real as I am,” he concludes. But, if that says much, if that says anything at all, the boy doesn’t know.



    Benjamen; my feet knew the path, we walked in the dark, in the dark
    never gave a single thought to where it might lead

    image by Gary Bendig
    @[kensley]
    Reply
    #3

    come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

    There is a knot inside her chest where her heart used to be. A tangle of dark roots that twist and bend and bury beneath it the beating of that thing she had once believed in. She had been someone soft and delicate, someone quick to smile and laugh, even quicker to love. She had been made of light and dark, of stars and the empty spaces between them. She hadn’t realized that this beating thing inside her chest was something made more fragile than glass, more brittle than bones eroded by great lengths of time. Hadn’t realized she’d been made so utterly wrong.

    The harmony of twilight beneath her skin had started to fail, and where once the light and dark had coexisted in tangles of dusk and dawn and all the in between places, an imbalance grew. The dark thrived and it festered, it stained the light until it withered inside her, until the clashes beneath her skin left her feeling raw and ragged and entirely unrecognizable. In its lack, something new grew. Something that fed off the wild violence of the pain inside her chest, the highs and the lows and the constant state of chaos that always left her running for someplace new. To find something that felt like home and belonging and all the things that had been taken from her. First by a nameless magician, then again by her own sister.

    Most days it feels like the ground must have opened up beneath her. That she is falling forever with nothing to catch her, nothing to hold onto.

    She thinks that must be why the twilight inside her skin turned feral. Why the sound of that thing beating inside her chest is the echo of thunder, of the storms raging inside her heart. If there is still light inside her, it is only in the violent flashes and crackles of silver-gold that spill like static along the arch of her spine and down those slender legs. Only in those silent stars like pinpricks of cold silver light that drift around her in a tiny galaxy - always close enough to be indisputably hers, but never near enough for her to touch.

    She can feel him, this man of fog and mystery, can sense a sameness in him that had been strong enough to coax her closer. To pull at her curiosity instead of her pain. But now that she is close enough to see that shade of desperation in the night of his eyes, she wonders if it isn’t pain after all that draws her near enough to watch quietly as a boy reaches out to touch his chest and make a promise he has no right to.

    She drifts closer without ever making the conscious decision to do so, taking steps as silent as the fog that drifts behind him, more ghost than predator. There is something hidden beneath that beautiful roil of gray that calls to her, something same and unknowable, something that has her nearly reaching out to touch her mouth to the glistening frost on his neck. She refrains, but the lightning dancing across her skin does not. It leaps through the space between them, finding home against the gray of his body and over every curve and angle until it climbs down his legs and disappears into the ground beneath him. She watches, and she does not understand that she had willed it to touch what she would not. Instead she wonders once more at their likeness.

    “Do you want to be real?” She asks him after a moment, and her voice is the sound of wind promising rain to the trees it passes. A whisper-hush of spectral promises. Then, to the boy whose face she can only look upon for a moment before his youngness reminds her of her own children. Of Drakon and Lanterna who she knows she will fail at some point - if not now or already, then certainly soon. She is made too entirely of all these broken pieces. Too sharp and too brittle. The wind rises to a howl, tearing leaves off of branches that bend so low some of them break. It howls and it shreds and it is identical to the yawning horror that howls inside the emptiness of her own chest. “You’re too young to be meeting ghosts.”

    Luster
         i can't help but love you
    even though i try not to


    @[kensley]
    @[Benjamen]
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)