"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
02-18-2016, 05:21 PM (This post was last modified: 01-04-2020, 06:07 PM by violence.)
violence
Monsters and mayhem brought her to creation so it should be no surprise that she carries those things with in, a sweetness in the marrow of her bones. (The first time she spoke bones from the earth it surprised her, but from then on nothing had ever felt so instinctual.) She feels them in the dirt beyond – the bones of a hundred creatures, birds and rabbits, wolves and deer. And the horses, of course. She likes to go to the beach and make them dance there, but such a graveyard is almost overwhelming for her, the girl who senses their bones like electricity in the earth. She walks, flanked by a bone-creature of her own creation – it’s a mix of things, bobcat and wolf so it crouches low to the ground. It has a horse’s skull, though she’s replaced the teeth with something sharper. She likes the clack of its bones and the empty stare of its sockets. She’d wanted to give it wings, but wing-bones are hollowed and frail and thus hard to come by, so instead she settles for a pair of stag’s antlers, sitting on the thing’s head like a crown. She has no purpose, today, so she merely walks, listening to the call of the bones.
None of her days have ever had purpose; Shaytan is no one and she does nothing except drink rodent blood and stare glassy-eyed at the burning tree. Straia gave her the least demanding job, with no more responsibility than one might give a child. Guard the tree. Keep to yourself. Stay out of the way.
It could very well be one of Straia’s better decisions, to keep her little bunny-killing monster out of the world and thoroughly occupied by her own one-track mind. But even monsters get the urge to break their leash and wander. This monster cannot control her thirst - but then again, she’s never had a reason to try. The meadow bunnies have forgotten her, so she runs rampant amongst them, striking the slow with her invisibility (it is the massacre they always feared, from the monster they cannot see). Their high-pitched squeals shatter the still air until her thirst is finally slaked. Her mouth is buried in the steaming body of her last victim when she feels the urge to close her eyes and let them roll back into her head.
Oh, but not here. Not surrounded by her handy work.
That would be too incriminating.
Shaytan’s been very messy this time (that’s what happens when you fall off the wagon - it’s a terribly messy affair), and well up to half of her face is smeared with blood. Some dripped down and splattered the graying parts of her coat, adding tiny dots in between the big ones. She stumbles along, following the path that leads to ‘home’ when the clackety-clack of bones interrupts her rhythmic plodding. A bold glance confirms it to be a gruesome, gory thing, and that Straia might like one of her own. She alters her path to walk parallel with the black mare (the mistress, she assumes - here, horses rule even over fanged beasts) and keeps her silence until suddenly, she asks, “How do you do that?”
As if it is something that could be learned
shaytan
when people run in circles, it's a very, very mad world
Somewhere things scream, and she feels their bodies come into existence – small things, bodies torn asunder by teeth not meant to tear so. She can touch them, once they die – once they are killed – and for a moment she does, runs her power over the small corpses like a finger down the spine.
But she prefers bones – prefers her friends long-dead. Old bones are easier than things fresh-killed. Someday, all dead things will be easy, but for now she is young, nascent in her powers. So she does not stop to enliven the small creatures, instead walks on to the clacking sound of her bone-thing, her pet.
She smells blood (a familiar scent – she once possessed her father while it hunted, dug her nails into its feral instincts, all thoughts whittled down to hunt and run and feast). She turns her head to look and sees a spotted mare, mouth tinged with blood, a look in her eyes that’s half-mad and half-hungry. Violence is still small, a child.
She thinks about going into the mare’s mind, nestling there for a moment, but she has not yet possessed a stranger, only dead things (and her father, who is not dead but is not the same as she and mother, is something with a more reptilian brain). How do you do that, she asks, and Violence isn’t sure how to answer – bringing the bones forth has always been like breathing, something instinctual.
“I feel them,” she says, an answer that is not an answer, “I feel them, out in the ground. So I call them. And they listen.”
To prove her point, the bone-thing turns its tapered head and fixes Shaytan with a wolfish grin that does not belong in an equid’s mouth.
Violence doesn’t smile – she lets the bones do it for her – instead watches the mare, quieter now.
“You’re bloody,” she says. A statement. “Were you hunting?”
I will make you understand why storms are named after people
If the girl wanted a mindfuckery of a roller coaster, she could come and nestle in Shaytan’s mind, and the spotted mare might be none the wiser for it. She is often like a feral thing, though perhaps a touch more civilized than her father, whoever that might be. She has thirst and Straia and tree running rampant in her big ‘ol head, and often not much else. It’s an odd sort of life: completely satisfying, occasionally useless.
And yet, no one can fault her for her loyalty; it is her most attractive quality. It is her only attractive quality.
Shaytan listens, her head tilting to one side as she sifts through the meaning. She’s never known any power except invisibility, and that she has to concentrate on. That has nothing to do with feeling, only will power. There is no subtlely to it. She grins back at the bone-wolf-horse, revealing stained teeth and an off-putting expression that is too wide and unnatural. It matches her too-bright eyes, as if the flames of the tree had somehow found a new home in her head. Her attention goes back to the stranger, and she still smiles, never thinking that she should drop the painful expression.
“Yes,” she says with delight. “I was thirsty. Very thirsty.” She says nothing about eating, for Shaytan is not a meat-eater. Her teeth are blunt, and the feeling of flesh stuck between them was enough to drive her mad. It’s a waste, really, to kill all those bunnies and then leave them there for the scavengers. Oh well. It had been a long time since Shaytan hunted. Enough for several generations of rabbits to pass, and think themselves safe again. She’d been busy with her precious tree. But the Chamber didn’t have enough rabbits, and those it did have, didn’t come near the magical flames.
She eyes the bone-beast again. “Does that hunt for you?” She is young, after all. She might not know how to do the killing.
shaytan
when people run in circles, it's a very, very mad world
She’s lived in the mind of monsters; sat pretty in her sire’s feral frothing mind, where all thoughts were condensed into their most basic forms: hunt and kill and meat. Mother had never let Violence into her mind, she’d knocked against it like a battering ram, but could feel mother closing herself, locking the doors of her mind, of her utmost self.
(She wonders at what’s in there, inside the shadowy magician’s mind – her mother, the night-creature made of sharp angles and a cold smile, who Violence despises and loves all at once.)
She does think of going into this girl’s mind, tasting the blood on her lips, feeling the flickering flames of madness that danced in her eyes.
But when given a choice, she prefers the bones.
So she stays in her own mind, her bone-puppet beside her. She draws it up, tall, until it almost floats off the ground.
“Thirsty,” she repeats. Her only experience with hunting was the feasting, tearing into them with her father’s voracious jaws. It had been messy and strange, not altogether unpleasant, but not an experience she’d want to mimic herself. She prefers her dead things long-dead.
The woman regards the creature, asks after it, as if it were a permanent thing instead of a whim created as she walked, made piecemeal by the things that met their fates in the meadow.
“No…” she murmurs, “no, I don’t need it to hunt. It just keeps me company.”
