"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
While the trees watch, he wanders and he remembers the disaster of his heartbeat as he’d waited for someone to come and send him away. He remembers how he had existed in a kind of perpetual purgatory, caught between the edge of Hyaline and the dim edge of the forest. He remembers how he had learned to disappear.
Even in that terrible darkness.
There had been so many things to be afraid of then and yet the only thing that ever troubled him was the thought that he would be told to leave. How scarce he had made himself then, how keen to run he had been.
And the heart is heavy when he ventures from Hyaline back to the forest today. It’s only for today, not forever because he had made promises and he intends to keep them no matter the cost.
The shadows still reek of death. If he stops and listens, he can almost convince himself that he can still hear the cries of those claimed by the darkness and the things that lurked within it. But he does not stop and he does not listen because the stench is enough.
He just wanders because the heart has clenched and spasmed and twinged and he has not been able to breathe right for days. And he is tired and this is the only place he can almost catch his breath.
It is dark here. Dark, dark, dark and deep and the ground gives beneath his feet just enough for him to wonder what it feels like to fall and his brow is furrowed with worry. Always with worry.
He moves slow, throwing his heavenly glow, and he breathes in all the death that has ever occurred here and he wonders what they’d tell him if they could.
09-06-2021, 10:05 PM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2021, 01:54 AM by Falter.)
these days i'm becoming everything that i hate, my mind is a place that i can't escape your ghost
Silence.
It is all she hears.
Darkness.
It is all she sees.
Empty.
It is all she feels.
Am I dreaming? Falter thinks.
Something nudges her. It is warm and wet. Mostly wet though, she decides. It won’t stop though. Maybe if she opened her eyes, she could make it stop. It was getting worse by the second now.
Can I even see? It has been dark for far too long.
Falter senses she can open her eyes, her determination to stop this wetness—this licking—forces open her eyes. Her eyes flutter open, exposing her nutmeg colored eyes. Her vision is blurry, a dark shadow lingers in her line of sight.
“Stop,” she whispers, “Stop.”
The licking stops and the black shadow backs away. She blinks a couple of times while her mind focuses on figuring out where she is. Dad? Where are you? The yearling feels the ground beneath her, it is hard, and she aches with every bone that mends her together. I need to get up. She knows she cannot just lay here, not alone at least.
A soft growl grabs her attention. She blinks again as her vision becoming clear, and discovers the young black wolf-like creature sitting in front of her. Falter shrieks, she pulls herself up, backing away quickly from the monster in front of her. Was it even a wolf? It was ghastly and haunting with those red and yellow glowing eyes staring back at her.
It barks at her softly. His eyes were warm, not terrifying as she first felt when meeting his gaze. “You’re not going to eat me, are you?” She asks softly. It was a stupid question, but she asked it anyway. The black wolf barks again, but she instantly knows the answer to be no. Strange, she thinks but she doesn’t muddle over the idea of how she knew the answer; instead, her mind drifts to finding exactly where she is and where her father is.
Her nutmeg gaze glances around. A dense forest surrounds the dark bay yearling, tall trees reaching and covering the sky. It is late, she observes, there is barely any light escaping through the canopy of the trees. Falter doesn’t recognize the flora—it isn’t the forest she knows to be near her home. Then where am I? Certainly she was still in Beqanna, but she had been on the mountain with her dad.
Then the darkness had come…
The sound of hooves catches her drifting mind. Falter quickly snaps, her dark ears swivel forward in caution. A sense of fear fills her quickly—the black wolf-like creature growls loudly in a warning. The sound of hooves grows louder, and the darkness begins to fade away as a glowing light emerges.
A bright silhouette keeps the darkness within distance, but as the figure moves, the darkness fills instantly once again. “H-Hello?” Falter calls out softly.
The approaching light figure becomes clearer in its shape, taking on something between a horse and an angel. No, he couldn’t be an angel. It was too silly. Angels only existed in the afterlife, right? Am I dead? She thinks for a split moment.
She is young.
Too young to smell of death this way.
(But it is the kind of death he has never smelled before. He does not know what it means for it to creep through his senses this way. He does not know that it means that she can manipulate death, that she has some deeper connection to death.)
She reeks of death, yes, but it is not the same at all.
He blinks those pale blue eyes, stopped short by the pleading in her voice, the stench of death that surrounds her. The strange hound that watches her. His heart beats out something frantic as he searches her face.
Is she dead? He can’t tell, not really. She looks real enough, but would she dissolve if he reached out to touch her?
(Will he ever know anything beyond failure? He cannot give her the answer she wants because he doesn’t know what it is and his heart spasms with the gravity of this. How terribly he wants to soothe whatever is troubling her. He wants to tell her that she is not dead or that she is dead, whatever it is she wants him to tell her. But he doesn’t know which answer is the right one and, frankly, he doesn’t know the true answer to the question.)
He drags in a long, shuddering breath, and the stench of death twists down his throat and curls bitterly in his lungs. He knows it so well now that he hardly notices but this is something else entirely.
He shakes his head, eyes wide, and says, “I don’t know.” And his tone is all full of apology. He extends his nose but stops just short of touching her. Still, there is heat that rolls off her skin. Real enough that he can feel it even without touching. “I don’t think so,” he tells her and hopes this is enough.
these days i'm becoming everything that i hate, my mind is a place that i can't escape your ghost
Silence.
It meets her again.
The angel stares at her only with those big pale blue eyes. Her gaze does not shift away from him, they are locked with his, searching them for answers while her mind screams to know.
She feels a heaviness in her chest suddenly, a sharp twinge, a strain in her heart. Falter breathes heavily with each passing breath. She can feel her lungs tightening up, the oxygen she inhalations she gasps for desperately. Her legs tremble, shaking, and giving way any moment the longer she stands there in the silence.
“Please,” she says desperately in a whisper, “Please… Answer me.”
Her chest clenches even tighter. She breathes heavily, gasping softly for air. Falter cannot describe what she is feeling. It is a bewildering feeling, an entirely new sense she has never felt before in a world where she has only ever known happiness.
Fear—it is fear.
The long shuddering breath catches her off guard. She trembles at the whispering sound of his inhale, breaking the dead stillness that surrounds them in the ever-growing dark forest.
His voice breaks the stillness around them, pushing the terror away that consumes her from the inside and out. The angel’s tone is apologetic, there is sincerity in his words despite the uncertainty of his answer.
Falter exhales with relief, finally taking a breath.
There is a silver lining in his next words. She grasps onto it without question, holding it tight because she knows if she doesn’t there would be nothing for her. It is all she has now.
“If I am not dead then where am I?” She asks softly, her mind trying to unravel the mystery of how she even got to the forest in the first place. “My father-,” she stumbles, her thoughts are clouded as she tries her best to sort through them, “I was with him—on the mountain. He took me to the mountain and then there was…” Her words trail off and she falls into silence.
Then there had been that terrible voice and these ghoul-like monsters.
Remember, boy, remember how you wilted.
Wilted in the face of Mazikeen’s ire, collapsed in the darkness.
And he wilts now, too. Wilts while she pleads with him to answer her. It gets the air jammed up in his windpipe, a vise tightened around his throat because he cannot give her what she needs and he can feel the cage of his ribs begin to tremble with the effort it takes to breathe.
She never looks away but he cannot meet her eye.
Look, child, look closely and see how this angel carved from ice is meant only to fail.
He cannot give you what you need from him.
Is this what he’d looked like when he’d encountered that girl in Hyaline and begged her to go? Desperate, pleading, eyes wide with panic. And the girl had scoffed in his face. But he does not shrug off this girl’s panic. If he could take it onto himself, he would. He would swallow it all if it meant sparing her from it.
The most he can offer her, though, is his uncertain answer.
And she sighs.
But she does not buckle.
He stares, eyes still wide, as she catches her breath and then burdens him with another unanswerable question. It is simple, sure—they are in the forest, but he understands that’s not really what she’s asking. The question is this: how did she lose her way, where is the memory of it, where is her father?
They were there, on the mountain, and he can smell the death on her still. His stomach twists. Had she witnessed the death? Is that why the stench is different? He swallows thickly and tilts his head, his halo tipping low over his brow as he studies her face.
these days i'm becoming everything that i hate, my mind is a place that i can't escape your ghost
Her gaze drops to her hooves, and she lets out a long sigh at his quiet inquiry.
What had happened? She thinks silently. Her thoughts are clouded by the darkness, shielding her from the truth. There was a reason why she could not remember (her recollection is dark and hazy with what occurred). Would she regret digging deeper? Would she find a truth she was not ready to face?
The truth was there.
All she had to do was push through the dark clouds.
She needed to unravel it all—she needed to understand why she feels this sensation that flows through her veins, enlightening her with a force she has never felt before.
It was strong.
And it felt dangerous.
“Then there was this dark voice,” she says quietly, “It was angry, so very angry at my father.” Falter didn’t understand why, she didn’t know even who the voice was. “And then these terrible, terrible monsters came. Creatures that should not have had breath, should not have life.”
Falter lifts her nutmeg eyes to meet the white angel’s gaze. “Terrible things that were dead—ghouls, perhaps ghosts—and they came for me.” She trembles at the thought of them, their faces lighting up in her mind clearly. (Almost as if they are right in front of her again, reaching for her, taking her back into the darkness.)
A soft whine, a whimper of concern breaks Falter away from reminiscing the horror. She glances at the hellhound, remembering he was still there. He whines again, and she feels a strange sense of comfort deep within her. Still, Falter was uncertain where the wolf-like creature had come from. Was he here for me? She thinks now remembering her father had once told her about her hellhound bother. It was a strange coincidence, or simply nothing at all.
Shaking her head, she focuses back on the boy in front of her.
“I don’t know what happened after that really,” she says gently, “Everything went black. My father was screaming.” And I was screaming for him too, but she does not say that part because what good would it do. What good would any of this do? “And I woke up here in the forest, and with him at my side,” she indicates with a nod of her head towards the hellhound that still sits at a distance from them.
He could save her from the grief of remembering.
All it would take is a simple shake of his head, an apology, a lopsided smile.
But he cannot help her piece together an explanation without knowing the story and how his heart aches to help! Because her pleas had cut right to the core of him, sunk teeth into the meat of his heart, tethered him to her whether she had meant for them to or not.
He had not been able to give her a real answer and he is desperate to make himself useful to her in some other way. The same way he had been desperate to make himself to Mazikeen.
(This is different, of course, but the feeling is the same.)
She does not meet his gaze when she begins to speak, recalling the sequence of events that had led to the separation, and he listens intently, those pale blue eyes fixed firmly on her downturned face. A dark voice.
(He thinks briefly of his own father, the dark god, and makes a conscious effort not to attribute this voice to him.)
A dark, angry voice. And then creatures had risen from the darkness. He thinks of the things that had lurked in the shadows during the eclipse, how they had ravaged the landscape. How every corner of Beqanna still reeks of death because of the devastation they had wrought, but he does not mention them. He merely listens.
He remembers how the dark things had come for him, too, once and his heart twinges and spasms with sympathy. Had they killed her? Had they killed her and somehow dumped her body here in the forest? Had a healer come along and breathed life back into her, the same way his mother had breathed life back into Mazikeen?
She calls attention to the hound and he follows her gaze to the creature, nodding to indicate that he has digested all that she has told him. He hesitates in the silence that follows, throat tight, uncertain if he should tell her the truth.
“I can smell it,” he murmurs, as if saying it quietly will somehow protect her from the gravity of it, “death.” He meets her eye briefly before he slides his pale gaze away again. “You smell of death but not in any way that I have ever smelled it before.” He pauses to take a breath. “I don’t know what it means, I’m sorry.”
09-12-2021, 10:43 PM (This post was last modified: 09-12-2021, 10:45 PM by Falter.)
these days i'm becoming everything that i hate, my mind is a place that i can't escape your ghost
His hesitation does not go unnoticed in the silence between them.
She clings desperately to his every move. Her heart beats frantically, and eyes wide waiting to hear him speak. Waiting for him to make sense of something she could not do.
Death.
It is all he mentions.
Death is all that she was.
Her nutmeg gaze falls away after his last words. “But I am alive,” she whispers quietly, trying to untangle her own thoughts once more. “If I am not dead, then…” Then what? She scowls at herself.
She felt helpless.
Weak.
Unable to figure anything out.
Why was she here? Why did she feel so strange?
Death.
Why did he keep saying that?
The dark bay mare blinks, tears welling up in her eyes. She shakes her head in frustration at how powerless she felt. The tears keep coming, filling her eyes, and rolling down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, looking back up to the angel with tears filling her eyes.
How desperately he wants to wilt beneath the intensity of her focus.
She looks at him as if she truly believes he has the answers she needs, studying him so intently that he feels laid bare beneath the scrutiny.
But he does not have the right answers, he knows that. And it becomes even more clear when the words come falling out of his mouth and the tone is apologetic and the brow is furrowed with worry and it doesn’t matter. Because it’s not what she’d needed to hear and he has failed at this, too. Just as he has failed at so many other things and he had come here to escape this horrible feeling and here it is again, even louder, and his breath hitches and his throat tightens while her eyes fill with tears.
And he can’t help her.
No matter how fiercely he wishes he could.
She is alive but he does not know what it means either and he can offer her no semblance of comfort.
Then she apologizes to him and he opens his mouth to speak but no sound comes out at all. Not until she has already brushed past him and he has turned to watch her go and he says, “wait.”
