"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
It (she!)
has escaped. She was not imprisoned, not in the traditional sense – there were no walls, no razor wires, no cages to speak of – but she is too often prisoner of another, a dark girl who makes bones dance, who can stride into Charnel’s mind and make her do things.
And sometimes, really, it’s comforting, because Charnel is strange, with her armored body and metallic wings, with her beaked mouth and trilling language (she can speak like them – she can - but it’s slow and stupid), and when Violence is in her mind everything makes sense, there’s an order to the world that does not exist without Violence.
But.
(There’s always a but.)
But sometimes she wants to know what things are like on her own, she wants to grow and talk and be, and Violence finds that boring, Violence does not like others unless they amuse her.
Charnel is different, more curious. There is a word - friend - that she learned but does not say, because she said it once, to Violence, but Violence only laughed and laughed, said there’s no such thing. And Violence is never wrong.
But Violence is gone, today, and Charnel walks a path she half-remembers into the meadow. It’s strangely crowded here, and there is an overwhelming smell of meat that makes her salivate, but she pushes the thought down. She is not so feral as her father. She is not here to hunt.
She knows she is strange, here, achingly so, an alien in their midst. She tries to smile but her lips can’t quite obey. She shares a similar form to them, but not quite. Almost, she thinks. This is another word she knows. A word for being close, but out of reach. Almost almost almost.
Everything’s in its place or he tells himself it is, the steps match, the places the beings. He has done it he has to remind himself, he can do it, he needs to say. How on earth did Fart ever make a herd, claim a land? Coincidence, chance, fate? If any of those matter, if any of those are true, it must be one of them- mustn't it? As much as it does not make sense, somehow it does, somehow he knows it to be right. A male makes a herd, a male keeps them safe, makes a home, makes a life and a family. Typical and yet here he was, scouring the fields and meadows and still doubting himself. Likely he would never truly stop that, would always put himself down inwardly, have that small grain of what if lurking in the back of his mind.
Today, today he could try to focus though, could attempt another friendship.
He finds something curious even, something dark and different and he is reminded of Grumble again. Always. Something always steers his mind back to the place and there is no exception now. He killed it, smashed it over and over though it could not fight back. It was unnecessary then, just as the thought likely is now and he could not forget it, could not siphon it from his mind. Was he dark then too, in that moment? He was capable of great darkness sure but it is not something he wished to practice, to feed the evil wolf and starve the good one. No, not Fart.
Still, she beckons him somehow, the strangeness to her body, the alien shapes that form each curve of her silhouette. It is perfectly plain that she is something to be feared, that before him is a feral being because his mind tells him it is so, just as it tells him many things. Yet Fart knows differences if he knows anything and thus he approaches her before all others. Offers an awkward, “Hello” through the split in his limey lips.
Her mind is still too feral to comprehend such abstract concepts as fate and destiny. Things simply are, in Charnel’s world, and they are not things she often questions. Violence sometimes comes into her mind, makes her hunt and hurt (both others and herself), because it is the way things are. Charnel is a monster because she simply is.
Mostly, it’s easy, to live this way, accepting and unquestioning.
Sometimes – like today – there is something rattling in the back of her mind, a stone in her shoe, a nagging sense of something she does not have the words for. Something missing. Something wanting to be found, unearthed; if only she had the tools to dig it up.
She watches him approach, and for a moment she catches his scent and her fetal mind cries out in hunger - meat! - but she quashes that thought immediately, buries it back down where it belongs. Once the initial assessment is gone, she notes the gender - male, unique, for Charnel lives with women and a monster who is known as it - and notes the color, a green that hurts the eyes, unlike the earthy greens she is used to. She notices other things – like her, he lacks a mane, though there is no armor in its place. Like her, the lips curve oddly, though where her maw is harder, almost beaklike, his is merely split and strange.
“Hello,” she says the words carefully, for the language still feels heavy and strange in her mouth, then, “I’m Char…nel.”
Her name is not meant to be said from her odd lips – a cruel joke, really.
