"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
11-12-2015, 02:01 AM (This post was last modified: 12-07-2015, 02:55 PM by isle.
Edit Reason: html
)
hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
At first there had only been the voices of her family, of her twin, her other half, and of their parents. These voices, they should have just been thoughts, but they had echoed in her mind just the same as the gurgling river beside which they had been born and the cries from the birds flecked across a pale dawn sky. These thoughts, these three perfect voices, they had fit together like puzzle pieces in her head, they hadn’t fought for space, hadn’t pushed away her own voice to make room for theirs. They just fit. Warm and radiant and everything that was right in a world she had known for five short seconds.
And then, like the ripples cast from a stone dropped in a puddle, her reach expanded and her mind imploded. Suddenly there had been too many voices, too many thoughts, an impossible weight for a child who had known only the silence of the womb, of feelings without the echo of thought to burden them. It was like standing in the bottom of a valley, each new mind a splash of water until suddenly she was buried beneath the ocean and the weight was crushing her.
But father had taught her how to mute the world, how to erase one voice at a time until only a handful remained and her mind didn’t ache and tremble and shatter to dust. It had taken months of practicing, months of trying and failing and endless frustration, days fractured with headaches and ruinous secrets she never should have known. But weeks passed and the headaches faded, the secrets ebbed with the tide as the thoughts returned to their vast ocean blue.
Suddenly it was easy.
And as she stood now at the center of the meadow with her eyes closed and a look of furrowed concentration etched over the hollows of her delicate brown face, she realized how much she loved the voices echoing in her thoughts. It was easier now, so much easier, and she knew how to crack a door enough to see inside, to see dark or light or the gray of in-between, knew enough to slam a door when there was only shadow inside. But as she waded through this ocean, floating on the waves instead of drowning in the currents, she felt one mind louder than the rest. Her eyes flew open and her face turned like a flower to the sun as she tried to match the mind to a face. As soon as she saw him, she knew. There was no need to fall back into his thoughts, and oh - she knew she shouldn’t by the hungry shadows waiting there for her.
But she did anyway.
It was chaos in his head though, thoughts overlapping, repeating, ending before they finished. She dug a little deeper and suddenly there was a word waiting for her, a name and another. Etro. Sleaze. It took a moment to realize she was being careless, that he would absolutely have noticed her sorting through the files of his mind, picking at the threads of his thoughts. She pulled back hard, her eyes wide and wild and bright when they landed on his.
Kingslay is not weighted down by the complexities of living. They don’t occur to him. He is not knowingly plagued by the ghost of a bloodied past; no sharp chips carved out from the lines of his shoulders. He does not remember the vivisection, or how he was spilled out along the sands of a river run red, how he bathed in the blood and innards of a mother without a pulse. He doesn’t remember the beginning. He doesn’t remember the first thing that he ended, or the first time he saw life drain from something else’s eyes. He will not remember the next for long either.
There is no burden to his existence.
There is no existential crisis that muddies the catacombs of his mind.
He breathes, therefor he is.
He is crafted of a sinister instinct that holds rule above all else. The purr of his gut tells him that moving forward is ideal, and so he does. He moves until the space between their bodies (for he has noticed her there – he always does) is eaten away, until she can breathe the smoke of his skin into her lungs and feel it choke her. He won’t think about it, but if there was more to his being he might feel the ends of his lips curl up in a smirk of realization that he might be killing her far sooner than he ever means too with every breath that she takes now.
And death comes so easy.
They want it so badly. They hunt him out. They sift through the shadows looking for the muddied, dark things that their mothers warned them about when they were children. They seek him like their lungs seek air, like their bodies seek water, like the moon seeks the tide. And just like the rest of them, she will not notice until he is too close that something is wrong. Like the rest of them she will not notice until he is too close that the air around him smells like death, that mingling in the taste of ash and smoke on her tongue is something more – something heave and sweet, something that will curl her naïve belly into knots.
He says nothing because he never does.
He says nothing because he never needs too.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She is so little like her family, different than her mother and her sisters before her, and it is a blessing. She does not taste the darkness in his mind and the trace the shadows stretched across bottomless eyes and feel a rush of adrenaline coaxing her forward. She does not see the cracks in his skin, bright lines of molten devastation bleeding ash and smoke and soot into the air and think, I need to understand, I need to touch and see if it burns, if it’s the best pain I’ll ever know.
Instead she watches him come closer and there are knots in her belly, tying and untying, thrashing like worms halved by a blade. There is fear, and it is cold and heavy and racing like ice over her lungs, but the dread is worse, like a shadow in her chest telling her not to breathe. Her face darkens, bright lines of brown and white thrown together and held by a beautifully flawed asymmetry. There is an instinct that urges her to speak, a reflex of social propriety, but the voice in her head is telling her that the rules are different here.
She holds her tongue.
She holds her heart in a fist clenched so impossibly tight.
The closer he comes the further she drifts, and when he stops, so does she. But they are still so close, and the acrid smoke drifts to her, adheres to her skin and follows each curve and dip and hollowed out plain of a small body fighting uselessly for a sense of composure. The smoke fills her nose, it tickles like feathers in her lungs and she can feel her breaths coming shorter, more ragged, a cough gathering like a cloud in her chest but she denies it because she must, because when she looks into his eyes she finds she doesn’t want to give him anything.
“I don’t like you.” She tells him finally, a little breathlessly from the shuddering of her quailing lungs, and her voice is small but it does not shake, her eyes wide but they do not waver.
