"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
Its existence is in an eternal purgatory; it's never truly alive and never truly dead. It has no need for air, but it still occasionally draws in a breath to remember what it once was to be normal. To be truly whole and to feel a pulse when it ran is a memory now. As a child it took such things for granted, never knowing what it would become years later. Now it moves when it shouldn't. Decades ago its children tried to murder it and their mother, but they were only half successful. They won a battle, but not the entire war. They ended a rampage, a slaughterhouse, but anything can be rebuilt again. Anyone - anything - is capable of rising to power once more.
With the wind at its back, its eyes stare down the rugged path it once traveled. The scents are different and the trees have since grown, climbing toward the gray sky. There are leaning trees groaning whenever the wind presses against the bark. Underfoot the grass whispers sweetly, enticingly. It glances back once toward the meadow and calculates its next move. It hasn't had a real home in years - not since the Chamber - and it recoils at the idea of a higher authority. It can't be whipped into submission; it is a weapon more than anything. While hesitation pauses its forward motion, do not take it for fear. Nothing can scare it now, not when it has already faced Death and crawled back out from its cold, unforgiving embrace. It doesn't fear losing its children when it has already lost so much. It doesn't fear the loss of love for it has never experienced such a folly thing.
It simply wonders how its kingdom will handle a homecoming such as this.
It left the Chamber as a whole, feared to be forever dead. Now it returns as a corpse, a monster that has been spat from the bosom of Hell. It looks less of a horse than anything. Talons sink into the soil and jagged teeth protrude past its chapped lips. What should be fair, porcelain bone has been stained by old blood and sunlight. Flesh has sloughed off its frame, leaving gaping holes that are windows into its empty chassis. There's no need for organs anymore, not after having lived (and died) like this so many times. It's all shriveled and blackened with maggots and worms squirming through open crevices. A putrid stench follows in its wake as it takes a final step toward the Chamber.
Those sickly green eyes peer up at the mountain range ahead as memories begin to return. A low, pleased grumble vibrates through its core as it slinks another few steps across what borders there are. It has no regard for them; it never did. This was all once its kingdom, its empire. The crowns may pass down, but the land never forgets.
The Chamber will never forget its murderous king.
infection
infection by aeris | html by insane | picture c darkcloud013.deviantart.com
Iona thought she'd seen it all. She hadn't been on this planet that many years, but enough so that the horrors she'd seen had scarred her for life. Iona didn't even know what was wrong with her mental state, like some other horses may have noticed. She thought she was fine, if just a 'little' off when it came to her thought process.
Well, anyways, the chocolate flaxen had been hanging out in the meadow that day, enjoying the peace and quiet. However, she was still heavily unsettled. The mare had been on edge for a number of suns if not moons. Something had happened in the land of Beqanna, something that she couldn't place. The land had changed, somehow... and though Iona wanted to go and find out what the cause was, the strange feelings she'd been getting were enough to keep her within the Chamber.
Perhaps the cause of one of the strange feelings was because of the creature that had just come wandering into the meadow? Iona had never seen anything more unusual; flesh that seemed to be literally rotting off the bone. Blood stains marring the animal's coat. Falcon-like talons sticking out from its hooves - wait, what? Talons from its hooves?
Iona narrowed her eyes to get a better look at the creature. Even from here, she could pick up its putrid stench. The mare fought the urge to shake her head to get rid of the smell; she'd picked up the scents of worse.
Instead, she took a step closer, both intrigued and cautious by what this creature was. Deciding it would be the best option, Iona let out a call to the other members of the kingdom, any horse that could hear her, to come and get a vantage point of the situation unfolding in the Chamber's meadow.
The smell reached him first, an acrid scent, cloying at his lungs with an unpleasant decay. It was thick too, not just some faint whiff of something long gone and easing into its state of decomposition, this thing had been long at it. Whatever it was had been in the process far longer than it should have been and that is when Killdare knew it just wasn’t some stinking forest corpse. This was something else entirely, ancient and unresting and passing through his home. He would not, could not simply ignore this presence so instead he traced that awful smell. The source of it was both surprising and not surprising at all, sure he knew it was something dead but he did not fathom the extent of it.
It should have been something to remain in the ground, pieces of skin hanging from its gaunt frame like tattered curtains in a dilapidated mansion. The Chamber King could see through the creature in places, gaping holes punched through it’s body or what was left of the body. Gently the sides rose and fell, a pattern and yet not consistent or long enough to be drawing breath- not quite. Did it even have lungs? He saw none, in fact he did not see much of anything, save for old bones within the breaks of rotted flesh. This being existed against reason, curled claws carving into the forest floor below and sharp teeth set against its dry lips.
In all his years he had not crossed any of the undead equine to canter across the paths of Beqanna, not until today. Oh what a day for it too, what a time to find such an abomination when their world had been overturned and left vulnerable. His first thought was, who is this? What did it want, why had it come, who had returned it? If the bay was left to guess at how such an animal had come to be he would have promptly thought Eight had risen the beast. This was something entirely without reason, so he would not try to make sense of how it had come to be just yet- he would simply accept that it was.
For a moment he watches, his own glassy green eyes taking in the entirety of the horse, the man. Sometimes he had to stop trying to consider how it even moved about, how it was engineered or worse, how it was puppeted. If Killdare wanted to know these things he would have to find out, as he should, wasn’t that part of his job anyways? He sent a nicker in the direction of the other male, because it was distinctly male, he wanted to in no way take this one by surprise. Gods know what it was capable of exactly. His wavy black tail flicked against his hocks, snapping to and fro as he waited to see just how this thing would react. The bay King didn’t need to find out how the Chamber would react, she was already beating a tune against the pine littered earth. A steady thrum- thrum- thrumming against his hooves and with that he finally spoke. “Hello then,” he waited, waited for speech, waited for answers.
They don’t know what horrors – or what greatness – it could bring to them and their kingdom. They look on with shock and disgust. Surely this monster should be buried six feet under, long forgotten by the new generations. Many of its siblings and family have met that fate and yet here Infection is, standing in the thrumming embrace of the Chamber once more. How long has it been? It quietly muses and reflects back on the days when it controlled not one, but two, kingdoms at once; it remembers how hated and feared it was; it remembers the metallic taste of blood on its lips.
Today’s generation wasn’t around then. They don’t know the mayhem that hurtled in its wake, the destruction it birthed. When they open their eyes and see it, they simply see a creature, not the story that it holds in its hollowed chassis. They shy away like the mare is now, it notices. She keeps a distance and bleats like a newborn child, warning her home of the monstrosity that is pushing down their door. A gravely laugh vibrates through its core, but it doesn’t spare her a glance. She’s weak, afraid, and it tastes that on the wind.
What Infection does look at, however, is the stallion that properly adopts his role and meets the obstacle head-on. He addresses the hellhound curiously and somewhat boldly. Infection regards him for that by lifting its grotesque head. A maggot squirms in the gaping hole of the jaw, but with a crunch it is crushed between its yellowed molars, dead.
They are wondering why the deatheater is here at their walls. It can read it on the stallion’s face. Laughter churns but never slips past its slips; there’s a brief silence, a pause, as it considers the kingdom unraveling behind the sentinel. The scent of pines, the jagged mountain peaks, the winding dirt paths; it can’t fathom how much it actually missed the Chamber. Through life, Infection was its servant, its vassal. When the kingdom needed life Infection brought forth death. How ironic, no? Many wanted to serve under the mad king rather than be in the way of its butchery. They were smart. Will this generation be the same? Do they see this nightcrawler as an omen? A gift? It wonders while kneading the soil.
”Hello,” it finally says with a voice like nails on a chalkboard. Neglect has rasped its vocal chords. With no warranting, it doesn’t bother to introduce itself. Its name remains unknown, for now, because it won’t be long until they demand it. Perhaps they will also demand a purpose, but it doesn’t quite have one.
The Chamber revived its tired bones.
The Chamber wants it again.
The world needs chaos again.
Beqanna needs a purge.
It wants the Chamber again.
It wants to be a weapon again.
Any of those reasons could possibly suffice, but it would raise suspicion, offense, or ignite anger and refusals. For once, it takes care in calculating its words. It isn’t out of fear or anxiety (what would it have to be afraid of? Mortals?) but for tact. ”Funny how the Chamber wakes those she wants most,” it knows it isn’t the first fallen king or queen to return to the kingdom because that is what the magic does; the Chamber will always have what she wants – needs – and so it is here, standing in front of the stallion.
infection
infection by aeris | html by insane | picture c darkcloud013.deviantart.com
08-10-2016, 10:37 PM (This post was last modified: 08-11-2016, 09:23 PM by Smother.)
throw me to the wolves
I have sank into the shadows for awhile, I always do. Like a vampire closing the door on his red satin-filled coffin. And every time I sink into the abyss, I come back a little more ambitious, and a little more annoyed.
Evergreen trees overhang the pathway, like methodical arch ways into an undiscovered utopia. Except this place is discovered, horribly so. And it is no utopia or home sweet home. It is the kingdom of ash, and pine. It is my family tree, blossomed into one big chaotic mess. I have come to clean said mess.
I will deal with father another time. For now, I have come to brush up my fiery family name.
Grass blooms around me, shades of vivid emerald and lime-like green. I like to think it always looked like this, but I remember her in a dimmer filter. I remember snow cold to the touch, and the feel of nervous sweat creeping along my chest like a ghost stalking amongst the shadows.
My tail flicks in annoyance as Turkish rearranges himself into a more comfortable position along my back, the curve of his tail raveled in my mane. His pink tongue sleeks out, “is this her famous ‘chamber’?”
My eyes narrow, and instinctively my muscles tense into fits of anger as flashes of dear daddy Warship erupt into my head and I let out a rushed whisper, “her famous chamber indeed.” Though I am most certain he feels my anger, and suppressing my frustration isn’t necessary. He is, after all, the other part of my soul in physical form.
I do not wait to be greeted at the border. Once a chamber slave, always a chamber slave. It welcomes me with freshly fallen pine needles across my rump, and an irritating hole in the pit of my stomach. Every stride is another vivid imagine of my last memory here.
Every step.
And that is when I am suddenly interrupted with a foul smell of rotting flesh. Something so disgraceful I now understand why I eat after I kill.
He holds himself with an obvious statement of arrogance (fairly cocky for a king already previously dead), and his body is a disgusting mess of corpse verses zombie covered in flesh eating maggots and rotting flaps of skin.
Of course something so hideous cannot go unseen for long, and while I meandered to his company another curious female did the same. I almost feel sad for the little doe-like mare, taken back by the atrocious view of death coming back to life, but this is Beqanna.
The land of ridiculousness.
Oh but arrives his royal highness rushing to her aid (or not really, I don’t care). Hallelujah, someone to guide this abomination back to the grave before he infects the entire kingdom with whatever disease(s) he carries.
I am amused by the trio, so amused it would be unfair to just linger at the sidelines. I feel Turkish slink down my back hind leg and coil himself into a more sustainable, secure position. He knows me too well.
“You say the Chamber wakes who she wants most… I say she kills who she no longer needs, and then fools who cheat and toy with black magic somehow rise again,” Killdare doesn’t know me, he doesn’t need to. I like him. Not in attraction, but in respect. Well, anyone looks respectable standing beside a risen corpse from the grave, “even when no one called them back in the first place.”
Blue eyes, a Kindling trademark, settle on the zombie before her, “now. I am sorry, who are you?”
She knows the scent of death, the stink of decay, and when it finds her in the wind she does not turn from it. Though she is not as close as a few of the others, it is easy enough to track the scent through the brush and trees, easy to wind along the paths she has traveled a thousand times before. She moves quickly, eagerly, though her skin prickles with wonder and she can feel her heart knotting and unknotting in the pit of dark that is her chest. Too much of her family is here, Killdare and their children, and this rot reminds her of something, a memory she tries to keep pushed back and away to the darkest depths of her mind. But now, even now, with the smell so strong and stinging in the indigo of her nose, she can see a body melted with rot, can remember laying their broken and not dying, and when she blinks she is there again.
But all this is forgotten when the trees part and the Chamber opens like a mouth into a broad, flat meadow. There are several gathered already, and only one she knows, only one she trusts implicitly. She slips to his side with all the feline fluidity of a horse that does not age, of a horse who has thus far been impervious to death – though pain, pain she knows intimately. Her eyes are narrow slits when they settle on the one the rots, on the arrogant way he peers back at her king. Unlike Killdare, she is not made for such things that a ruler must oblige by. She is not patient, she is not diplomatic. It is not words she relies on, but action. She may never be the Queen this kingdom needs, but she will always be the guard dog. Even now her skin crawls with impatience as her gaze traces the tattered lip of every wound, memorizes the shapes of the dirty bones inside. Where he is undead, with rotting flesh that regenerates, she is very much alive, made wholly perfect by her own regenerating body. Where he has talons and fangs, each stained rusty with blood, she wears her weapons like a crown upon her head, a row of gleaming obsidian horns that arch from nose to forehead. They are the antithesis of one another; they are well matched.
It is only when the mare speaks that Malis realizes she too is a stranger. At first she prickles and her eyes narrow there also, wary and unappreciative until she hears what spills from those lips. Malis might’ve said more, or she might have said differently, but what the tobiano mare says suffices for the moment and so she holds onto her silence just a bit longer. Instead she touches her mouth once to Killdare’s shoulder betraying her affection for him, and then shifts away to branch out further and block more of the kingdom from the one who rots and festers. Her eyes darken and her face tightens when new breeze fills her mouth will the scent of death. It is too much and she roils like shadow, shifting to block his view with the blue of her coiled body. The tobiano asks one more question, and it is then that Malis adds her amendment, finding that she cares very little who this creature is and more for why he has come. “I don’t care who you are, I only care why you are here. You seem comfortable, but I am certain you must be new or else you would know that coming into this kingdom uninvited is enough of a reason for me to run my horns through your throat.” She pauses and her voice is oddly calm, languid even despite the way her eyes glint like emeralds in a burned earth. “How do you choose to proceed.”
08-11-2016, 02:26 PM (This post was last modified: 08-11-2016, 04:11 PM by Infection.)
I'm rotting inside
My flesh turns to dust
It doesn’t speak, not yet. With a small measure of disinterest Infection watches as the group continues to expand. Everyone is drawn to its odor, its presence, its purpose. They want to know what it is that is fouling their air and tainting their pine-riddled ground. Never before have they seen anything like it. It’s formulated from their nightmares, piecing together what they fear most: death, monsters, immortality. They threaten and they spat, twirling jabbing remarks into ears that are half-rotted. Much to their dismay, however, it remains unfazed by their remarks while waiting for them all to gather like crows. How bold they are, they think, and yet they’re huddled against each other seeking protection and encouragement.
What quaint little birds they are.
Its jaw unhinges in an apathetic yawn before rolling its eyes slowly toward the indigo mare. ”My, my, what a tough girl you are,” it inches toward her and observes the horns protruding down the length of her skull before leveling on her testing and hateful gaze. A noise claws at its throat and rips through the tension among them; it’s a laugh that hasn’t been heard in decades and contains the final screams of so many victims. It isn’t quick. The laughter hangs a long moment and is punctuated by a shake of its head. ”Go ahead, girl, run your horns through my throat. I’ll tell you what will happen,” it slithers ever closer, its breath reaching for her, ”Nothing. You can’t do shit to me, if you can’t tell.” Their closeness isn’t welcomed, it knows, and so it turns away and walks in a half circle to observe all that have arrived. ”It’s cute how you find the balls to speak when you’re in numbers,” it pivots to face the king again with its eyes lit with a savagery unleashed.
None of them introduce themselves. Why would they to such an abomination? So it returns the secretive notion and offers mere glances to the outspoken mares and curious stallions.
It can’t help but find the monarchs again and again, studying them, roving over their bodies. It can nearly taste their pulse and imagines the metallic taste coating its tongue. All the while it stands entirely still, staring with empty eyes. ”I know this kingdom far better than any of you so you can shove your arrogance up your asses and shut up. What can you do that I haven’t already dealt with?” It’s able to reach back to its shoulder and rip away flesh without even a flinch. The skin hangs limp in its jaws as it faces them indignantly. It waits for their reactions and feeds on their looks of disgust and surprise. Then the meat falls away and it chuckles, low and gravely. ”You’ve caught me on a bad time of year,” because it isn’t always like this; it isn’t always a skeleton with hardly any skin to cover the stained bone.
”I won’t die,” it murmurs into the piney air with their eyes planted, ”I can’t.” It savors the taste of the truth, grinning to itself as it allows them all to accept that horrid fact. Its son once tried to kill it; he had succeeded in murdering his mother, but not the father, not Infection. Its scars are what it carries now. Its body is dilapidated and a shadow of what it used to be. Tiphon didn’t realize what power he had actually given the nightcrawler (and yet it still wants more). An offhanded glance flickers toward the initially outspoken female before finding the ruling couple once more, speaking to them though directing its reply to them all. ”Don’t you know that legends never die?”
infection
infection by aeris | html by insane | picture c darkcloud013.deviantart.com
I cannot help but see my father in every glance and shift in attention. I smell him oozing off the ebony bark, hardly masked by the persistent smell of death rolling into my nostrils. I am angry. Angry that I smell him. More angry that this monstrosity is trying to hide him.
Heat sets in around, the thick roof of pine attempting to shade our positions, but I feel her seep in. Turkish coils tighter, I feel his frustration with the corpse in how my leg begins to numb under his grasp. I can see him, I can see his bones break, Smother. I want to break his leg.
Hush, Turkish. He is already broken.
“She must be tough, her heart is still beating unlike yours,” I am nonchalant in my response; he talks enough for everyone. Speaks like he is of some sort of importance: no one of Beqanna is important. We are all chess pieces in her dangerous game. At the end of our match, we all will fall.
My dear friend slithers up my leg, vibrant albino yellow tones slithering aboard my coat, all twelve feet of him coiling as he moves with gracefulness before wrapping himself around my neck like a tacky scarf. His head rises, yellow eyes focusing on his surroundings, a pink tongue darting in and out analyzing his senses.
“You’re right, death is rock bottom and I have no need to dig you deeper. Certainly you will stay, like that fly persistently circling your skull, oh holyness,” he wants to appear intimidating, godly, untouchable, but he is no more than a bag of bones come to wake; one whom talks too much of nothing at all. “However, your annoying banters will become irrelevant, ignored, and much like before, you will become forgotten again. No one cares to listen.”
Turkish lets out a violent hiss, the noise so loud a few ravens trick from the trees with his fangs protruding from his jaw. Regardless of the obvious fact the monster will remain unfazed, I applaud my co-half his warning. Turkish is my guardian, my shield, my right hand, my hunting friend. Together we kill, and together we die. Everyone is aware this creature craves a reaction, longs for panic, anger, fear—he comes back seeking what I can only assume to be power, and what a fool he is to think he will earn it. No one cares of your past, what you’ve done, it gets washed away with time like the tide washes away footprints along the sand.
Wash away, let the bones float into water and be fed on by sea life.
“Now stop talking, you’ve given me a headache,” my attention completely changes, for this intruder is far beyond entertaining by now, solidifying my statement with a frank flick of my tail. Killdare and the blue female is who I wish to focus on, my own frozen eyes settling on their strong frames, seeing their aggravated pupils focused on the creature from the ground.
“I am Smother, and this is Turkish. We are here to pledge ourselves to the Chamber,” a passive tone, as if the grim reaper is not actually reeking up the kingdom and as if images of my dying father are not on replay. Oh, how I love imagining that one. “I would like to be placed wherever you need me, however I would like to give you the knowledge that I am here to earn my roll of High Priestess, and I will earn it in whatever way you seem fit.”
My agenda is unclear, not yet written. I am a stranger, an outsider, a women with a murderous history and a habit of falling into blackness.
There are few things that stir enough interest in Atrox to walk down the mountains. He was content to spend his years hunting amongst the fog, napping in the low branches of tangling trees—comforted by the external sound of his own pulse thudding beneath his paws. He spent more time in his panther form than stallion these days, enjoying the feel of the feline body, the slick coat and lean muscles fitting him like a glove. It was hard to untie the two forms now; they had become so intertwined that it was easy to forget whether he was horse or cat or something in between. Some heartless sentry long forgotten.
The truth of the matter was that Atrox was still getting his bearings. He had been ready for war, preparing for the drums of it that sounded in his chest, but it had been stripped from him. One moment, he had been standing on the edges of the craggy mountain and the next…the next, he had been nowhere. He was no stranger to the unknown, but this was different. Whispers had told him he was being protected. Whispers had told him that he could not lose his life again. Something about family. Something about blood magic.
He hadn’t cared. He had fought, raged, furiously.
Then, the whispers told him it was the Chamber’s will.
And he had quieted.
Since returning, the panther-stallion could not help but feel like perhaps the whispers had lied; it was a feeling in the back of his skull, an anger in his veins. Not necessarily at him, but outward. It created an unease in him (a mission uncompleted, a job left undone) that in turn left his mood black. He did not know why he was pulled from this reality and trapped in another. He did not know why he was denied the chance to fight for the Chamber, to spill blood again in her name—and there was nothing that he could do.
It was this black mood—this adrenaline—that stirs him to action. He scowls at the group, unwinding from the tree and then stalking down blanketed in shadows. His motion is fluid, yellow eyes flashing, as he walks around the group’s parameter. He watches the indigo girl, his granddaughter, and marvels at Twinge’s sharp tongue coming out of her mouth. He was not overly biased toward his children, it would be impossible with the size and breadth of his brood, but he did pay extra mind to those who came from Twinge. She was harsh and cruel and the only thing that came close to his love for the Chamber.
Still, he says nothing—instead watching in his silent rage, tinged with amusement, as the conversation unfolds around them. He tilts his large, flat head toward Smother as she speaks, wondering idly at the odd feeling of remembrance before brushing it off. On one hand, she was one of his own, although he did not know it. On the other, it was perhaps for the best that he did not recognize her own maternal grandmother, Kindling, for their was no love lost between him and the once-Chamberling. His history ran deep here.
Finally, after silence fell momentarily, he padded toward the group, shifting effortlessly as he became the broad, well-muscled, and well-scarred stallion. His yellow eyes flicked with noted boredom around the group before settling on Infection. “Well, aren’t you rather disgusting.” One corner of his mouth curled up into a sardonic grin before lips peeled back to reveal the panther fangs, slightly yellowed.
“Before we start arguing about who is a legend and who knows the Chamber best, let’s first get some names.” His eyes glittered and a laugh sounded deep in his throat. “I’m Atrox,” he practically drawled, lengthening the normally bullet-short syllables to a languid pace. For a second, he glanced around the group, nodding briefly at Killdare and Malis, mostly ignoring the rest because that was just the kind of bastard he was, before moving back to Infection. “What does the rotting meat bag call itself?”
Something more causes a bad taste in his mouth than the stench, brings such unwanted displeasure to his palette. His curiosity for the creature wanes as it continues to banter, his herd, his family, gathering around them. It reminded him far too much of something else he did not like, someone else. Though this irritance was not wrapped in a pretty purple package, was not adorned with soft lavender feathers. There is much to be said about the Kingdom, his Kingdom mates because he considered them his ‘subjects’ very little. They were not his, they were Hers, the Chambers, just as they had always been.
Most of them he knows, the uncertain mare to first breach the clearing, his Indigo Queen, the pyro and a dark wildcat. It’s just the one that is new, well, two. The tobiano mare that slips in with a snake coiled precariously over her body. Aside from the dead one she is the only thing that is unfamiliar but he watches her speak, he listens.
It is quite the calvary that comes and he knows it is not for him, it is not for his blue Queen- it is for the Chamber. They are her servants, just as this undead beast claims to be, some long forgotten totem. Killdare knows he is often rubbed the wrong way, less so lately than in the past but he knows himself well enough to admit it. This is so much more than that, it is as if it has come simply to stroke their fur backwards and tell them to like it. He snorts, the heat from his lungs bringing a burst of clouded moisture to the world from the dampness of the cool forest air. They all talk, long, far longer than he would have expected but he listens quietly for a time.
The words of his love bring a smile to his lips, curl the corners of his sooty mouth and part of him wishes to see her do just what she offers. He didn’t need his Queen to practice careful diplomacy, she was a no nonsense being and was quick to offer punishment to those that had earned it. Once he was brash like this, coarse in the mind but Killdare had bloomed into something far different than he had ever expected. Gone against the path his own Father had tried to set for him, a level headed warrior of sorts because the Chamber King had not gone soft. Ask the Deserts, the Jungle, he knew all too well they would attest to his Warmongering but truly he was far less simple than that.
Loyal, to his word and to the Chamber. It was not simply for the taste of blood that he had gone to the colts side, if he said he was going to do something, he did it. Even if that was a fool’s chore of overthrowing a Kingdom for a boy that did not deserve it. The Chamber King was tied true to his word and sometimes his words got the best of him.
“She wakes things she wants, you’re right, toys she wishes to play with,” he comments off hand as they all finish their parlay. “You think you are different, that you are not merely her pawn if you are anything?” So very like Kirin this creature was, thinking himself above them, greater for the simple fact that She was being greedy with overuse of him. He himself only hoped that She would not run him into the ground time and time again but if She asked, he would answer.
The painted female turns to them then, Smother she says, wants to pledge herself to the Chamber she says. “I see,” he muses, looking her over and the critter that hangs coiled against her throat. “It’s your funeral,” he suggests, “or maybe it isn’t, ask our friend, it seems he has yet to be offered a proper one.” A pointed jab at the rotting nuisance that fouled the air. Then he nods, dipping his earthy head and without saying it she is permitted to live among them if she so wishes, to caste herself as a pawn to the whims of the Chamber. Sleek as night the panther doth come and his amusement is not wasted on this either. If anyone was to claim to know the Chamber it would be the cat slithering into their group, the one shifting into a hardened warrior, quite overused himself and yet She had not called on him for the War, nor the raid.
One would be left to assume that he was a tool not meant to be blunted by trivial matters. So Killdare could only wonder what was truly at work here with the undead thing if Atrox was to be brought down from the mountains. “And I am Killdare, please do tell us what exactly you’ve been called forward to do?” He glares, watching carefully the unkempt man before them with his glassy eyes. “Perhaps you mistake Her own wishes with your own.” Greed, so much greed thrown around as of late and Beqanna had made herself very clear. “If you seek blood lust I’m sure you can find it elsewhere on your own. I’ll no longer entertain nonsense bickering for naught, Beqanna has made herself quite clear on that matter. And, far as I am aware there is no news of some useless blood feud brewing in light of recent events.” No, they were all better seeing to their own and minding it too.
![[Image: atrox.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/XBppy9VY/atrox.png)