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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    And we laugh like soft, mad children - Rapt
    #1
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray

    (‘Or did you find her pretty when her skin swelled and maggots swam in the jelly of her eyes.’)

    Her bones are still here.
    Some of her bones are still here.

    Some of all (most; not all) of their bones are still here.

    But his things are remarkably terminable. Bound absolutely to the friction of time and nature – diagensis and decomposition. His things are being taken away from him. Slowly, and rapidly; his things are easing into the earth and moss and birch roots. His Forest has always been insatiable.
     (His things are getting up and shaking off the binds of his labour. This will not do.)

    Once she writhed and she stank. They all (almost all) had. He remembers them fondly this way. They crawled and their lips pulled back against their teeths. Their skin fell like such soft cloth inwards over their bones. He could see inside!

    (‘Not one for a decent clean up.’) Then she had become something other, Hestia had. Something stuck and clung like incessant hell. Then she had gone. Maybe it was the violence over her own bones – the crack and snap of spinal connections; the renting of skin – like sacrifices over an alter that had pulled her back to death.
    One by one, his things are slipping from him.

    He swings his head, unnaturally fast, and he enjoys the violent rattle of the impact. Crack, scrape. He bellows his furor and listens to it echo through his wooded hall until it is silent. Birch bark falls to the ground near Hestia’s old bones and the mushrooms and detritus that are trying to take her back. From him. (Bitch. The intenseness of her skin, blue-purple; hips. The sharp bark of her horns. He takes a moment to feel the place where she had drew his blood and banks it somewhere deep and hungry.) 
    The gift giver lurks on, and one by one, as day breaks hot and then lowers, he surveys the damage. Astri. (Softened, but whole.) Somewhere beyond in the clear of the Meadow, he know Thyndra’s decrepit remains are nearly dust and teeth already. It is not as gentle as the Forest is. It reclaims much quicker if it can.

    He sighs. Gazing over her bones like an artist, disappointed. She had been so beautifully green – Astri.
    So beautifully unsuspecting – Hestia. So beautifully vulnerable – grandmother. Mother.
    So distinctly festive – Elve, he had called her.

    So beautifully his, for a moment… 

    Ungrateful. Are none of his things loyal?

    POLLOCK
    the gift giver
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #2
    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream
    ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    He has never stopped dreaming of the monster.
    And sometimes that’s all it feels like – like a dream, something soft and indistinct, an unreality to the way fear curled tight fingers in his ribs and the monster breathed things while Rapt promised to be good, so good. He wonders what was real and what was augmented in his feeble mind.
    He finds others, but finds no one. No one like the monster, they are plain and boring, the conversations idling like stalled cars.

    He hears a bellow in the beating heart of the forest and for a moment his breath ceases - he, for just a moment, before a brilliant, wild hope takes over. He cries out, as if in return, though his cry is less fearsome and more one of surprise, of relief.
    It’s real, it’s real.
    He moves to the sound, follows it like a string, then: him.
    The monster.

    His heart is pounding like fists on his breastbone but he doesn’t care, he runs, a wild and desperate thing. He wants something indefinable: wants this. Whatever this is.
    He halts before him, drops to his knees. Always such a good boy.
    “You,” he breathes. A rock digs into one bent knee, but he ignores it. His eyes are on the monster, on the curved horns and blazing eyes.
    “You came back.”



    rapt
    caius x else
    Reply
    #3
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray

    He had, long ago, come to think of himself like a god.
    Like an old testament god, he bringeth destruction.

    But then she had, he supposes, stood up on lovely legs and she had left her blood and her boney coffin and she had walked out of his firmament of soil and birch trees. She had shirked his blessings, his wrath and his miracles. She had spat at his altar and profaned his good works. That wild, broken, heathen thing. Not so like a god. It made him feel impotent.
    So like a god of ill-temper and thin skin, he rained down devastation.

    He’ll find her daughter. Blue-haired and gilded-skin – them, together, like a perfect work of art. He had made that, too. (How could she let her into his kingdom like that. So foolish. As if he couldn’t tell from her hair that she had come from those loins.)
    Like a god, he has no compunction about exacting his payment from the girl. The indigo bitch will feel her absolution, one way or another. One day.

    For he can be patient. He had waited soo very long to be the man he is today. 
    Yes, he could wait.

    But to him, he is not god, but Monster.
    (That will do. He can abide by that. He’d like the taste and the bite it has. He’d like the long-lasting and slow-burning way it wormed under skin and brain and stayed there like a stigmata.) “Ahh,” he turns, brown-black eyes surveying the similarly golden body. Older, larger, he no longer needed to dip his head to meet his eyes like he had to the first time they met.
    Grown and come back! Kneeling as if at prayer. He smiles (and it is crocodilian; it is large and a sick mimic of fondness), “my boy. Of course I have.” The gift giver moves forward, reaching out to touch him on the top of his head, like the gentle and loving hand of a shepherd. Rise.

    He needs this faithful.

    Once he had told him his mother had been careless. Loveless. He had hooked his fingernails into that sacred, intimate, familial space and pried at it. Released from the hole made, he had hoped, some resentment and alienation. If he had not succeeded in that, he had succeeded in making an apostle of the boy, now man. “You have grown, Rapt.” There is an air of judgement in his gentle, almost paternal, gravel, but have you grown mighty? “And I have not forgotten what I promised.” He would show him how to be.

    He would show him how to kill the boy.

    POLLOCK
    the gift giver


    so Rapt never got to tell him his name, but Pollock would have asked, I'm sure. so i just pretended he had, if that works? if not, ignore.
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #4
    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream
    ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    Monsters and gods are intermingled in Rapt’s feeble mind. He isn’t even sure there’s a distinction – all he recalls is fear, curling hot and heavy in his heart, his ribs, and something else, too, unfurling like a rose. He hadn’t had a name for it, then, he’d been too young, too awe-struck by the monster who’d loomed before him.
    Now there’s a name for it: love. A sick, twisted breed of it, sure, but love nonetheless, love for the god, the monster, the thing he kneels before with such a rapturous expression on his face.

    Foolish, foolish boy.

    My boy he calls him, and Rapt glows at the praise. His, he is his, a possession, a gift, whatever the monster wants him to be. He rises when touched, thrilling at it, though even when he stands his knees want to shake, want to tremble before the monster as he is meant to be trembled before.
    As he is meant to be beheld.
    “Yes,” he breathes, though the actual details of the promise barely matter – what matters is that the monster still wants him at his side, “I have not forgotten, either.”
    Have not forgotten you, he means – all his actions since their first meeting have been imbued with the monster, meant as acts to bring him back. And it’s worked, has it not? For here they are, reunited, Rapt on shaking legs and Pollock with blood on his mind and mouth, a monster, a god.



    rapt
    caius x else
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