05-19-2020, 08:38 AM
The embers rain down, alighting atop the downy fur between the peaks of her ears, but where there ought to be a lingering burn, she feels a cold sharpness in its stead. Like snowflakes falling against the delicate skin of her nose, the sparks melt into her.
Firen smiles, and she frowns.
He talks, and she stays silent.
She feels for him, and he has nothing for her.
“Okay,” she whispers, the gray in her turbulent eyes churned - a contrary thing amidst the stoicism painted across her wolfish features. The flames rose higher, washing the she wolf in a pale golden glow as the uplit shadows warped her features into something otherworldly and grotesque.
When she finally reaches out to him, it is not with words or feeling. It’s an understanding.
Watch me burn, the yellow slitted eyes of the serpent commanded without speaking.
Too slow, she thought, and where he let the fires push forward, she began to pull. With greed she reeled the flames into her from her burning world. The inferno began to swirl around where she sat motionless in the eye of the swelling firestorm, eerie in the calm of its scalding center. Catcher considers stopping, and releasing them now that the world is no longer wilting in the untamed heat. But the fire churning at her fingertips breathes, and sighs and crackles as though it were living and she fears that if given a reprieve he might allow the fires to flood again.
And so she takes. The unicorn calls to the elemental wings upon his back, and with the upturn of the wind, they are released from their binding to eagerly join the vortex.
But there’s something she’d promised. The flames beg and strain, and the weaver unleashes their tethers. Wild and hungry, they consume their master until there’s nothing left of the silvery gray wolf that set at the epicenter. Though in the canine’s stead, the reds and whites and golds of the fire bend and mold - their fluid, dancing bodies weaving and solidifying into something whole. The last of the flames shift and sweep into a long bannered tail, and the large wings of the phoenix beat powerfully against the now quiet night where she rose from the soot and ash.
The eyes of the raptor- cool and gray - are entirely Catcher’s, and they lower to find the hollow boy where he stood. He cannot move, she’s unwilling to allow it, and she holds him in captive audience as if examining a specimen. Something had been off, he’d admitted just as much, she had felt just as much, though she had mistaken it for misplacement and loneliness. The images of pain and monsters and cold had swamped her mind just before the fires had scored their reckless path and the fervent hopeless dreamer in her can't help but wonders, if she still can help the fallen star that had found her.
The phoenix screams, piercing and deafening, and the scorched world that holds both of them fractures and shatters. The pieces cascade with an impossibly pleasant chime, falling beneath them into a void of pitch nothing. Somehow, the depthless black holds them firmly in spite of the lack of footing, and the weaver offers one last downswing of her wings and rueful blink of her eyes before launching.
Her mark is obvious, and her aim true.
When she collides with him, they are both lost, and the flames sigh as if to say, “I’m sorry.”
____________________________
The fires are fed, and they slip away content. They recede, and what remains is the gray painted mare, her head draped across the back of the stripped down, black brindled stallion in a makeshift embrace. Where she his hornless, he is wingless, rendered down to their most basic slate. Her dream still buoys them, but the world remains null and depthless, and her weightless head turns back tenderly, sliding across his back slowly as if in fear to wake a sleeping giant.
“Firen?
CATCHER
caught in the afterglow
@[Firen] she didn't have it in her to hurt him for long DX she basically tried to do a hard reset on the both of them and tried to strip them of their traits - good and bad. temporarily ofc ;]
