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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


    Beneath the moon, beside an ancient lake - Etro
    #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

    Sleep doesn’t come until much too late.
    He stands by her funeral pyre – her cairn of bones and detritus. This place is no longer Hestia’s, though it is Hestia that remains and nothing more. It could have (should have) been so beautiful. It had been made to be intertwined. A weave of ribs and vertebrae; the bare waste of old bones, going dark and soft, and indigo. Soft, supple skin. His opus.

    When he sleeps, he dreams the same thing

    —he is falling. Falling. Falling…

    Somewhere in that strange, suspended space between places, he sloughs off the hairless, smooth, pink skin. He shakes the boy off.He becomes mighty and when he awakes he is ready to meet them.

    He is surrounded. Mounds of earth and rock and organic matter cover their modesty; they are marked carefully in a strange language (strange to him now – not always so). Astri, Thyndra, Hestia… He admires them; he feels a fondness for them and his heartbeat accelerates.

    But always, one is empty. Its cover of soil and moss thrown back like a blanket – or like chains shorn from wrists – perverted. Unnamed.

    He had lost one.

    He had been quelled.


    When he wakes it is still night, racing headlong into morning. Black and mauve – still darkness holds it stand. In his woodland greathall, it is cold and green. He is agitated, fitful. Angry. The gift giver moves, slow and solemn, a funeral procession. The first time he had met her, it had been night. He could not see her, nor she him – they could not suss each other out, though he tried in the dark to finger the broken places he felt he could feel, because he mirrored them in himself.
    (He had been right, though. She was stronger for having the make of her being tested. If only he knew. A queen. And he, a queen-taker!)

    He limps, slowly. His single wing, broken so as to look almost boneless, drags like a dirty, white cloak at his left. He reaps the sow of his vigil and sleeplessness – stiffness and soreness, his price to pay for his taste of godliness.
    (When they had first met, he had been naked. Almost naked.) He is worn, hollow-eyed and bent. She has exposed him... addled him.

    The gift giver is angry; the monster is ravenous.

    POLLOCK
    the gift giver
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #2

    etro --

    in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
    I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom

    Months had passed since she had been here. Months she does not remember—an entire section of time ripped away from her, leaving her shaken and unsure. She is not even certain that she would have known that months had passed if so much had not changed since she had last returned. It had been as simple as closing her eyes and falling asleep, drifting away into slumber and rising in the morning. But it had not been that simple. Her dreamless dream had not been harmless or brief. She still did not understand.

    Of course, it is no surprise that she finds herself here again. That she walks this land in hopes that she would find him—that he would smolder beneath her touch, raging fires turning to ash. She knows that it is a fruitless search but one that she does regardless. It fills the void in her heart, eases the gnawing pain that stings and burns and sizzles. It is a physical act that she turns toward blindly, hoping for a reprieve.

    Memories live here, as bright as the constellations, as close as the mulch beneath her feet. She could feel them pressing in on her, against her throat and behind her eyelids. She could see him there with his flat shark eyes and crusted lips, the stench of murder tangled in his coat. He had been a monster. He had leveled cities and burned dynasties and there was nothing humane about him, but she had loved him. Loved him when she first met him and he smelled of life taken. Loved him when they stood there with silence and wind twining between them, when she gave him her heart and he looked toward the rustle of a nearby bush instead. She had accepted that. Took the scar upon her heart, but accepted it. Let him go.

    (Not a day went by that she did think of him.)

    At first she does not see Pollack so much as feel him, dread settling into her heart and then easing, as if it was coming through water. She glanced up, muddy brown eyes searching for Kingslay. She swallowed painfully when she did not find him, almost looking down before she saw the figure stalking the edges.

    Her stomach churned, heart screaming out for him. He was Kingslay, she thought wildly. He was not, she reasoned—knowing he was not. But the danger of him, the jagged edge of him, it called to her as nothing had since he had left. The reason in her belly cried out, but she ignored it, instead picking up her head and walking toward him. If he was the knife, she was the lamb, and she would lean into the blade.

    “Hello,” she said softly as she approached,  her voice the only pretty thing about her. She had inherited none of the beauty of her parents: not the thin, regal beauty of her mother or the powerful strength of her father. Instead, she fell somewhere in between: tall but not broad, capable but not graceful. But, he. He was truly something to behold. Monstrous—golden as the sun but as dark as the night. Dangerous.

    Her heart fluttered when she looked him in the eye and saw the smoke and ash of Kingslay instead.

    “My name is Etro,” she whispered.

    She knew he would tell her his name and she would repeat it, but she would not believe it.

    Kingslay, her heart sang. Kingslay.

    -- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --

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    #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 feels her, like a leech sucked deep.
    Like a dragging, bitter undertow.

    (Long ago – in two separate realities, both infinitely divided from the here and now – he had been powerless. 

    He had curled up like a wet, stray cat into a ball and wished. And so it was. Invisible. Untouchable because he was unfindable… He waited, wanting. He stayed still, played dead and decayed as he waited for her to come back to him and their nest of her tissue and his vulnerability. It had come to him when he needed it, his sweet escape and his sweeter saving. In time, he found other uses for his vanishing…)
    He flickers – he withdraws. But for the first time in his life, he can feel it failing him. Insubordination, in every pore – he feels the resistance, an anchor sunk deep into weeds and weighing him down. He wants for the strange and easy plunge between sensory plains – that cold sort of breath; that delicious kind of potential. It does not come. It licks at him and teases; seen and then partially gone until in frustration he holds.

    (—he had been rendered feeble; hewn out of soft, peachy skin with long, skinny limbs. He had raised his hands to his face – hands… – and spread his fingers wide. He had examined, in the gaudy, multicoloured twinkle of dying, incandescent light, the anemic cobweb of purple-blue veins under his paper-white nakedness. Those hands he had sunk a blade deep into odd flesh, had painted the images of his future in queer, black blood.)
    His muscles whine and groan and howl. And then they quiver and scream and lash out at his own skin like cornered dogs. His body quakes; knotting and unknotting beneath the bright, rough gold – cramping and stilling him in his tracks. He sucks in breath, cringing and turning on the spot – all too slow; lacking the predatory grace – and squints into soft, heavy darkness. Slaver wets the corners of his tight mouth.

    Her greeting comes soft, breathy; a searching, wanting, waiting mewl. He turns his head to glance over his shoulder and wing, his hard and lightless eyes finding her. Searching. Wanting. Waiting. The gift giver turns, follows his nose around towards her… her… For a second his breath quickens and air fills the thirsty space of his lung. He considers yelling at her, sending her away from him.
    He considers opening her up to palpate the puzzles therein (he can hear longing in her voice, he bends towards it like a wolf to a lost lamb); he considers making her his and laying her down easy. Gently…

    It would be gentle. He is far too worn, too ragged.

    His breath slows. He sucks the saliva back into his mouth and smiles his crocodile smile. “Hello, Etro.” He takes a step forward, searching for her smell and the warm place around her skin. (His muscles chime again, they yearn to pull away from her. He ignores it. Buries it deep beside other things he cannot bear. It cannot be.) He takes a step closer, and she will be disappointed by the paltry warmth he provides. 
    He is not hers... but that doesn't mean they both need by unfulfilled. 

    “I’m Pollock,” he smiles, ever wider.

    He sends himself into her. He plucks at strings – those broken, he has no need for sadness; those humming brightly, he shrinks back from love – and finds the one he is looking for. The Primal One. Fear. 
    His Forest has been bereft of pretty, new things for too long.


    POLLOCK
    the gift giver


    So, left it hanging. He's going in for the fear induce, feel free to totally have her reject him. Partially. But for now, he refuses to believe he's being dicked around by another girl ;]
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #4

    etro --

    in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
    I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom

    She breathes in Fear and it mutates in her mouth, transforms in her lungs—because what Etro had always feared was not the monsters that lurked in the day. She did not quiver when she pressed her muzzle to his blood-soaked shoulder and it came away red. She did not shake when her mother sent demons through the sand or when her father beat heavy dragon wings through the air so that it felt of war in the desert. She did not fear when heat scorched her throat. She did not fear when her belly twisted from hunger or her limbs ached from exertion. She did not fear the blade against her throat—the arrow in her heart.

    The scene around changes, alters, transforms ever so slightly—the edges fuzzy and her balance unstable. Her mouth runs dry, tongue becoming heavy, pulse fluttering in her veins. He is a Monster. She knows it in the way that she knows how to pull air into her lungs and how she knew to search for the taste of sweet grass as a babe. She is alive. He is a Monster. Fear lives in her, but it is not Fear of him. She cannot see him past the image her mind projects over him: a different monster with a different name. He is Kingslay with his gore and his flat eyes and his dead smile. He is Kingslay and he is burning, burning, burning.

    He is Kingslay, and he is leaving.

    The once-desert princess, royalty of a land no more, feels her heart thrashing against her ribcage with all of the ferocity of a caged bird. She takes another step forward, desperation clawing against her. His power was not particularly strong here, muted and muffled by her presence, but it was enough. It was a match, and she in her loneliness was already dry kindling. She lights up with her Fear that was not fear.

    “No,” she practically sobs, broken against the back of her throat. “No, oh god. Please, no.” She pushes forward, seeing him leave, clawing out for his presence. She is against him, flesh against flesh, and his skin is not cool but hot, feverish, as if the flames had just left. “Don’t leave,” she whimpers, constellations exploding in her chest as she goes blind with her need. Her mouth reaches over and touches his skin, against his jaw, down his neck. But it doesn’t help. Her mind practically fractures with the reality and fiction, both Pollock and Kingslay dancing in her vision as she trembles against him. “No.”

    She strains against the pull of his barriers and then, finally, collapses against them, falling into the undertow.

    -- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --

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    #5
    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 waits in anticipation, quavering.

    He licks his lips, craning in ever so slightly.
    —he watches her pupils dilate, searching for light…
    —he tastes desperation in the way her breath quickens on her lips…
    He drinks hearty draughts and feasts on it. It could have been enough to sate him, but just as he goes in to tear another mouthful, it sours in his mouth like ash and worm-eaten fruit. His brows knit together and his mouth tightens as she lurches. He pulls his head back, chin tucking towards his chest. He wants to retch and send her away. He wants to put her down, not gentle but forcefully. Finally. Kill dead the things she stirs up from the silt in the pit of his gut. Place her carefully at the roots of a tree and let her feed some other tongue.

    It is pining, not fear, he realizes all too late, that he fingers in her mind. Pining concentrated, boiled down, into something mimicking dread but he knows it too well to be fooled. He hates it too much.
    He tries to withdraw from her, but like his body would not surrender to his will, so do his claws seem hooked impossibly into her psyche. “Stop,” he warns, too quietly, as she mouths the word, ‘no’, ringing it off like a desperate prayer to a cruel god, ‘Please… don’t leave.’ “Don’t...” 

    He wrestles with control, but he feels resistance in everything he does. She diminishes him, he knows that now and the knowledge makes him blind. That beast, Anger. That thing of recklessness; not like fear, he wields like a weapon – but that black, roiling passenger. (He remembers hanging heavy on her, spent – she had sunk three of her dark horns into his jaw and had called on that beast.) He freezes, caught in the violent suck of where her pleading pulls him, 
    (the boy presses his face against the ribbone-bars of his cage, rattling and raging, his only company the strange, dark and pulsating ornament that hangs from his scapula in his breast; the colt wails and calls out, his words lost to the expulsion of things the monster needs no more. But these two are harder to kill. They cling, incessant.

    She touches his face, her breath against the scar tissue there, hot. He cannot seem to pull away, glued to the contact. (As he had found something strange and other in the brush of that star-hardened flank; the sturdy architecture of hips. They ease over the phantom touches of brutality, like a balm and an ablution.) She traces downward in hopeless throbs until he feels her weight and he unravels his faulty powers from her mind. He breaths heavy, flinching from her body and the unsettling ferocity of her grief. “Leave me. Get out of my Forest,” he pants, snarls. It is not his way to let them go.

    And then just as suddenly, “What have you done?” he bellows. He pushes her away from him, swiping towards her with his great, curved headgear, stopping just before they collide with her shoulder, heaving. A warning shot. He turns his brown-black eyes to her, bright with demand.
    But, there is fear there, too. This he brandishes like a weapon to her throat.

    POLLOCK
    the gift giver
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #6

    etro --

    in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
    I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom

    She almost forgets that he is there, although they are flesh to flesh, she pressing against as she had always done to Kingslay. (And he had left, as he would always do—again, and again.) She can almost forget that he is there before he is not—not to her. She is young again and her hips slope awkwardly, her body an impossible blend of breeds. She is carved from mud and there are entire galaxies trapped in her mouth. She is fearless and curious and all things that young things are. She is a princess. She is just a girl.

    And he…

    Oh, he.

    He is savage and fearsome and beautiful. He is a predator: wolf among lambs. He smells of life and tastes of death, and from the first time that she was around him, she is addicted. He was heroin on her tongue.

    He clogged her senses—made her blind to the truth.

    She loved him as the moon loves the sun. She chased him, eternally. She let him go. She spent the years of the in-between waiting for the rare moments of solace in his presence.

    Pollack is against her chest and beneath her lips but he is not he and the fear will not leave. It will not leave her alone. It beats against the back of skull, incessant in tempo, relentless in beat. She is shaking like an autumn leaf, and she is only a second away from falling. Everything she had known. Everything that she had always accepted crumbling beneath this false reality that he was crafting for her.

    He pulls the knife back from her chest, and she rises from beneath the muck of her fear—gasping for air, eyes wild. She almost does not notice the warning shot that he takes at her, at least does not flinch. The reprieve, as brief as it was, was enough for her to grip onto the corners of reality, to feel around her.

    Anger surges through her veins, as unfamiliar of a feeling as any, and she realizes that the reprieve will not last. The fear was coming back, she can feel it. The way that it rolls across the ground like fog in the early morning, waiting to choke her. Waiting to pull her down. She can feel not-Kingslay there, along the very corners of her mind—waiting as predators do. The illusion of him waiting and cold and dangerous.

    She takes a step back, muddy eyes narrowing. “Enough!” she bellows, her voice forceful, commanding. She calls upon her very nature, wielding the negation in the same manner that she had always suppressed it. It was a curse, a defect, a disease, and she had no love for it, but she needs it now. She reaches out her mental grip and calls—and it rises like a phoenix to her demands. Her eyes glitter with fury as she looks to the stallion who was not Kingslay, the illusion peeling back to reveal the reality of him.

    “How dare you,” she finally spits, derision and disgust apparent in every word.

    -- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --

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    #7
    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

    If he were him, he would have seized the opportunity – a butterfly stuck in honey.
    If he were him, he would have worn that coat and mask – those fissures of fire and smoke – and he would have let her come to him, heart and soul and desire. He would have thrown his head back and drank deeply.

    It needn’t always be a fight. He had let the teal woman come to him, stars and whip-like tongue. She had muddled him and fascinated him. She had tested him, stellar barbs and cracks of wit and wry sexuality like flickering matches. She had yielded to him, and though he would never see it like this, perhaps he to her.
    He could be good.

    But he is unnerved. The colt – he cries and reaches up through Pollock’s throat, towards the heat and solace of her emotion. The gift giver winches, fighting back retches. (There is no comfort, there. Kill it.) The boy wails, he scratches and bangs his head on his prison walls – rib and intercostals. (He is a more mysterious thing. He is shadows and strangeness; his motivations are not clear. He is cold and shivering; he is broken and bleeding from a hole in his chest. He is scared and angry...
    —they are relics of weaker times – northern memories and baby moments.
    Buried in a hole, deep down and covered over in peat and moss and stone, is a storybook. Bound in leather, recorded in hoofprints – single-toed and split like a goats – and in the strange, looping hand of man:

    That he was not born a god-monster. That he was born tiny, slick with mud and pine needles, a lowly thing. A small, dirty, loathsome thing. That he was first fashioned by a trickster maker, who broke one wing clean off, sanded the shoulder smooth, and rent the other into a million peices. Who abandoned him to a sow and her muck.
    And then he built himself up like a stonemason, an architect and an artist – he found his invisibility, and he thrived in it. But he was weak. 

    He was bitter.

    Until he fell through time and space, and in the polar kingdom, he earned his crown of horns...)

    “How did you do that?” he demands again, too softly. He moves to flank her, to circle like a predatory thing. His eyes are slits of dark brown. They are not angry, they are demanding. They are fascinated and wild in their own way. When she bites out with her own howl he halts dead in his tracks, lip quivering. He searches her face (pretty, he thinks, with some rearrangements), his mouth fading to a queasy frown.
    “...who did you think I was, woman?” his voice is strangely even, tempered by some genuine curiosity and antipathy. Who had driven her to madness? (Such weakness. Kill it.) He could almost pity her, but unlike his Rapt or his young things, she is too far gone. Whoever he had been, he had taken her heart and squeezed it too tight.

    She is too damaged to be brought back. No gift he could give could change that. Only his mercy, “You were… sorely mistaken. We’re in my forest, now, Etro.”

    POLLOCK
    the gift giver
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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