wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me; pollock

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

Summer was well on its way and the long days simmered with an impossible heat that kept her shoulders damp with sweat. Nights were easier, when wind raked across the open meadow to break the stale heat. She hated this weather, this unrelenting fever that had crawled beneath the bright aching indigo of her perfect skin. It had been a long time since Malis felt comfortable in her own flesh, but the swelter of summer made it so much worse. She could feel a strange restlessness growing in the pit of her stomach, climbing to her chest and clawing its way out.

It was worse since she had left the Gates, abandoned it as she had abandoned everything before it. But Magnus was why she had gone at all, the strange gold stallion who had reminded her of something she could not place. A feeling or a memory, or just a twinge of suspicion she could not resist tracking. But by the time she had appeared like a ghost at their door, he had gone. There were rumors that something had taken him, rumors she believed only after she drifted across the land coaxing secrets from loose lips. He was simply nowhere. She had not bothered to go back after that- he had been the hook in her belly drawing her painfully close to a place she might call home. She hated him now, hated him for letting her think even for a second that anyone like her could belong anywhere.

Something wild flashed in the depths of those raw emerald eyes as she disappeared into the trees bordering the meadow. For a second she paused and turned her head, the rows of horns on her face glittering like obsidian in the waning light. Behind her, in the meadow she had just abandoned, the color of the sun bled out into the grass until everything was doused in orange and gold. The beauty of it was wasted on her. She turned from it once more with an expression as cold as stone and steel and buried herself beneath the branches of the trees.

But the steel slipped from her face almost immediately to be replaced with a wicked smile when the trees parted to reveal a very familiar palomino stallion with curving horns and mismatched wings. She moved close to him, unconcerned until the stink of death and decay filled her flaring nostrils. She halted her momentum with a frown twisting across the curve of her blue mouth, peering around him to notice the carcass rotting on the ground by his side. Disgust curled and thrashed wild in her belly. She slipped closer anyways, her mouth pressed dangerously close to the curve of his ear.

“Friend of yours?” Her mouth twisted with a sour smile and she pulled away from him in such a way that the point of her uppermost horn would leave a faint welt across his neck if he chose not to shift his weight. She drifted from him again, settling beside a tree whose trunk was too wide for her to see around. “You keep strange company."

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78


okay so i'm more awkward than i thought i'd be, oops. also i left it vague so you can pick which murdered body they are hanging out with. <3  @[Pollock]