"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
You think I'll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I'll swallow you whole.
She is different, yet in some ways entirely unchanged.
She is still captive in this earthbound body, still limited in her connection with the stars (limited only because she had been one, once; she is sure anyone else would be more than satisfied with what power she does have over them). Emotions are still a mostly elusive thing, too; like fog, they are something that she can see and she understands what they are, but she can’t hold onto them. They slip past her like water over rocks, and while once she had thought they were the key to her learning to survive in this world, she now simply watches them as they drift by, unbothered.
It is only for Tiercel and their children that she is different.
It is only for them that her star-spun heart developed any kind of capacity for love, where she learned what it meant to have something to live and die for.
Because of them she looks to the stars less and less, and when she does it is not because she is trying to calculate a way to get back.
She does not mourn the life that she had lost, does not long to return to a place and time that she could never possibly describe anyway. Now, when she stands with face upturned, with silver moonlight colliding against the starlit glow that radiates off her skin, it is only with a quiet kind of nostalgia. She misses it, as much as she can miss anything, but she is placated by her life with Tiercel.
Loess, the only place that had almost been a home in this place, rested now at the bottom of a newly-formed sea. She should mourn the loss of it but she does not, and instead leaves it behind as easily as she left everything else—her mother and a twin sister, the scorched canyons of Pangea, and all these other earthly things she did not quite understand—but she does not leave behind Tiercel or their children. She drifts with them instead in the common lands, though tonight, she is alone.
Tonight she stands on a small knoll at the edge of the meadow, the sky above unmarred by clouds so that the expanse of stars and moonlight stretches before her. Just above her hovers several small orbs of starlight that she has fashioned into makeshift stars, and idly she rearranges them into various constellations; some familiar, some new, and some that only she knows.
She is alone, for now, content in the quiet around her, and the silent conversation that exists between only her and the stars.
04-23-2022, 07:08 PM (This post was last modified: 04-23-2022, 07:09 PM by Carnage.)
lord, I fashion dark gods too;
A good father he is not.
This is old – ancient – news, of course. He’s played at it, a handful of times with varying levels of sincerity, but he is too easily bored or disappointed with his offspring to have a hand in anything other than their creation. Still, he is more fond of those who bear his lineage than he is of others, even if it means little.
Most of his children, he doesn’t know by sight alone, he has to reach out, feel for his own blood-signature in their veins. But he knows her, because she looks like her mother, a familiar face he knows better than most. He doesn’t know where this one falls in their progression of children and so he reaches out, plucks this information from her, and he smiles.
He’s still smiling when he makes himself known. There are no theatrics, this time – he is simply, suddenly, there before her. She is hurting – he’d felt that much – and he is curious why, because he is bored and she looks enough like her mother that his eyes stay fixed on her.
He doesn’t know if she recognizes him. He is a plain dapple gray, today. So easily, so gravely mistaken for a nothing.
“Islas,” he says, and he makes his voice soft, “how are you?”
He waits, then, to see if she’ll lie.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you whole.
She knows him, but only in the same way many in this land know him—a name, a mostly faceless god that only makes his presence known when it matches his agenda. She knows that they worship him—that even the ones that claim to hate him would twist themselves inside out if it would appease him. That sometimes he calls on them and always, always they come crawling just for the chance of being broken by him.
She had been raised on a different version of him, though.
Her mother spoke of him with an undeniable undertone of fondness, with a certain kind of reverence that Islas did not really understand. Emotions were already such a difficult thing that trying to decipher the tangled web her mother wove around her stories proved to be impossible, and so she stopped trying.
She remembers she had asked her mother if he could put her back; if he could take this mortal form and shape it back into a star, and put her back into the sky, back into her own constellation. She remembers how her mother had gone quiet, thoughtful, and how she had told her no, that was not something he could do.
And she remembers wondering why Ryatah had lied to her.
Her starlight dissolves into stardust, flickering and fading as it falls to the ground as he appears before her. She knows who he is immediately, owes it to the way her mother had so carefully described every shade of gray that dapples his skin and the exact color of his eyes. She stares at him in that silent, unreadable way that so many others found unnerving, as they did most things about her—she had learned quickly that the residents here did not like not knowing exactly how another is feeling, and liked it even less when they learned she largely felt nothing.
“You know my name,” she comments in that strange way of hers, in a voice that borrows the softness of her mother but lacks all the depth—clear but flat, silvery and somehow unpleasant all at once. She does not address him back, does not even know what she would call him, because somehow ‘father’ is ill-fitting.
“I’m looking for Tiercel,” she answers him honestly, because she is not built for lying, though a small frown shadows her face. “I haven’t seen him in awhile and….” she trails off, spinning together another orb of starlight and watching where it hovers above her in the sky. “I thought he might see the constellations and follow them.” Here, her purple-black eyes find his, and for the first time a flicker of hope rises from their dark depths when she says, “Perhaps you can find him. Mother says you can do anything.” For a price, she had cautioned, but Islas has already lost everything.
If Ryatah had asked, he might have listened.
He likes the stars, has spent many decades in their midst. It was a fight, at first, to be among them. The first time he tried, his magic was weaker, and he himself still tinged in mortality. It had hurt, had drained him, to traverse galaxies and wear them on his coat. But he had overcome that as he swallowed more magic down and learned better how to bend the universe to his whims, and after a day or a year or a century (he doesn’t know, doesn’t care, time is all but entirely meaningless to him) he found it easier, to do what had once nearly destroyed him.
And so there would have been a pleasure in it, in turning his daughter into a star, setting her somewhere in the night sky where Ryatah could look upon her, be bathed in her faint light.
But she hadn’t asked. And so their child remains mortal – or something like it – and so they are here, with her hurting, and him, merely curious.
He sighs when she speaks, names the source of her sadness. Another mortal failing, the pain of losing another can bring.
(Never mind the way his own emotions have sparked when he is defied, he is conveniently hypocritical in his remembering, and is rarely questioned on it.)
“Tiercel,” he murmurs, but the name means nothing to him, as the boy himself means nothing.
He reaches out, briefly – a kind act, one of a doting father – and feels for the stallion, but there is nothing. It is a cursory search, and one that does not extend far. He shakes his head.
“He’s not here,” he says, “and he’s not worth your time.”
He could reach further, of course, drag the stallion kicking and screaming back here, or reanimate his corpse if the thing had the indecency to die. But it seems tiring, to do so, and besides, Islas will be better off learning to excise such whims from her heart.
“I can make it easier,” he says. Perhaps he is feeling kind today, or fatherly. Or perhaps he is simply ready to carve something up, and her memory would do just fine.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you whole.
Not worth your time, he tells her, and where some might have been offended by the implication that someone they loved was not worth their time, Islas is only perplexed, and she again lets the orb of starlight dissolve to pin her father with a confused stare.
A star ripped from the sky, she has studied the earth-born creatures around her closely, trying to understand their mannerisms so that she might mimic them better. One of the first things she had noticed about them is how they were steeped with emotion. They wore it plainly on their faces—in their smiles and frowns, in the reflection of their eyes and the tension of their jaws. She marveled at how they were both quick to laugh and quick to anger, and wondered why she never felt even a fraction of what they felt.
She learned that she could fake a smile but she could not fake actually caring, and she soon gave up trying to appease any of them.
She had never been meant to be here to begin with, and perhaps it was a cruel form of destiny that she remain an outcast.
She watched her mother fall in and out of love as easily as she breathed, meanwhile Islas choked on it.
Until she met Tiercel, the man that had shown her what it meant to feel. They had been fabrications at first, emotions that he projected onto her using the powers he had been born with. But it had been exhilarating, to actually feel something; to feel her starlit-veins alight with anger, to feel her chest clench with sorrow, and the ache-like coiling of desire. Over time, the emotion she felt in regards to him and their children became more authentic, even if they were often still locked behind a mostly expressionless exterior.
She had thought that she had finally achieved what they all were after—to find someone to live and to die for, to finally understand why they had these hearts beating in their chests.
“I’m not sure what you're saying,” she says, confusion clouding her face, because she does not think Tiercel would simply leave. She remembers the way the darkness had swallowed him during the eclipse, and she can feel the first threads of worry trying to work themselves loose. “Make what easier?”
He can remember mortality, faintly – being young, knowing already that he was strange, that he was powerful. Knowing he was different. He had not known what that meant, of course, had thought no further than the garish shows of power – killing an old king to ascend his throne, one measly kingdom amongst several. He’d thought that the apex of power, with this throne earned through bloodshed, the women eager for his children, Beqanna shuddering at his actions. He'd dreamed no further than that, really, not until his first death – fire, it had been fire – and then he had his taste of godhood, of other worlds, and so the story really begun.
He had wanted to love. He remembers that, too. He and Gail, children, each other’s first, her saying I love him and him saying nothing but listening to the thrum of her heart, the song of her blood, and she said it again, I love you.
Later, he would destroy and create worlds for her. He would rip her back from the dead and build her a kingdom of her own.
Maybe that was love.
He doesn’t care, now. He knows there are certain individuals to whom he is drawn, who he will touch softly – though he’ll wound them, too. They are few. They are often short-lived, but sometimes they stay, sometimes they find each other again and again and they still surprise him.
Maybe that’s love. Or it’s the echo of it, the way he was once a mortal thing. A faint tinge in the blood.
But none of this matters. It is not his affairs that are causing pain. She, who had started as nothing, who had been chipped and worn by the gradual erosion of emotions, is the one who hurts.
And he, the dark god, is the deus ex machina who can reset the clock, take these things from her. She may not be better for it – he long ago learned he cannot fix their emotions, you take one thing away and something else crumbles – but he can solve this issue now, can rid her of the fool who preoccupies her mind.
“The pain,” he says, “I can take it away.”
Not his usual thing – in pain, he is a giver, not a receiver – but he is curious to see her reshaped, remade as a star-thing who no longer recalls a soft touch.
He steps closer. He’s close to touching her.
“Just ask,” he says.
As if he needs permission.
You think I'll be the Dark Sky so you can be the Star? I'll Swallow you whole.
There had been a time when he could have asked anything of her and she would have readily done it without the hesitation that he so often found in her mother. Where Ryatah’s sense of morality was wavering but clearly present, Islas had been born with nothing, and that deep-seated indifference that kept her from feeling anything at all could have been weaponized if the right individual had stumbled across her. The idea of life and death had been strange, because while she was not infinite in the way of a god, the expansive lifespan of a star made mortal life feel short to the point of being insignificant. She would have ended life without a second thought if someone had directed her to do so, without even a ripple of guilt.
There is still a part of her like that that exists, because not even love could change her into something else entirely. Not even love could fully reform someone that had always been so detached into something teeming with emotion.
If it could she would have understood better what he was implying.
She would have learned to recognize the way darkness threatens to strip love away, even when it hides in plain sight in the light.
She would have been able to decode the true meaning behind his offer to rid her of the pain that had taken up residence in her chest, because she would have learned that love was something easily destroyed and required safeguarding.
And perhaps if she would have paid closer attention to the stories of her father not told by her mother she would have known to be wary of anything that he offers.
But she is still too much the same, marble-cold and unable to sort through all the possible outcomes that could result from the choices she makes. Fear of consequences came from emotion, from weighing out which pain you thought you could withstand the best, and fear was still an emotion Islas is the least familiar with.
Her mother had never told her not to trust him—because Ryatah never could find the words to explain how she both trusted him entirely and also somehow not at all—and so, after a moment of hesitation and contemplation, she at last relents and asks him, “Will you take it away?”
