• Logout
  • Beqanna

    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


    wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me; offspring
    #1

    She is like a wraith in the night, living dark, living shadow, cruel and beautiful and sharp in her brokenness. Once she had been used to the loneliness, preferred such an isolation over the company of others if only because in the silence she was safe, no prying eyes to notice the cracks in her soul and drag out the secrets she would rather keep buried. Secrets she had only ever shared willingly with one other.

    But he was gone now – because of her greed, because of the world they lived in, because no light can shine that bright without burning out.

    Now all her days and nights are as they were before, jagged pieces of a life carved to be without relief, without pleasure. But she did not deserve those things, not when she had been remade by so many cruel hands, turned into something dark and wild, a beast better left to the dusky landscape of nightmares. Not when it was her greed, her bloodline, her curse that drew Beqanna’s eyes to Killdare to orchestrate his end. It should have been her, her a thousand times over. Should have been her when Pollock took her in the forest, buried himself in her hips and then her in the ground.

    Maybe he would still be alive if only she’d had the courage to stay dead.

    Even in her pain, in the way she strips herself bare, in the feral loneliness with which she haunts this world like a ghost, she is silent and stoic and unreadable, slipping wordlessly through the twisted trees and to a dark shore until she can see the streaks of lava interrupting the dark of deep night.

    It’s been so long.
    So long since she returned to the place she had made home with Offspring and his people, home again when Killdare had been returned to her.

    But when she looks at it now there is only pain, only a void she cannot fill, a weight, an ache, a sorrow that buries itself in the marrow of her immortal bones. She knows she shouldn’t, knows she can’t, but suddenly she is knee-deep, chest-deep, chin-deep in water and swimming hard from the shores of the meadow to the shores of Tephra. Maybe it is because her family is still there. Isle and her children, Exist and hers, Leliana. Maybe it is to count the old faces from the Chamber, remember a legacy left behind. But when she hits the shore and her eyes find a silhouette carved from dark and stone, all else is forgotten.

    “Offspring.” She says, unable to look into those gleaming red eyes without remembering how they had stared back at her from the confines of a stall, without remembering that they were connected by so much pain, so much horror – that she was forever bound to him in a way she was with very few others. She moves to his side, languid and lethal, choosing to hide from him that she is made only of broken pieces now, that without someone to tether to, she is lost and adrift and sinking fast. It is not his burden to bear, she is not his to care for, though she cannot help but furrow her brow and reach out to touch her mouth to his jaw to smooth out the deep lines of tension she finds waiting there.

    For a long moment she is only silent, does not bother to ask if he is alright because she is not stupid, because she knows he is not. They are not creatures made to be broken and used, manipulated and then returned as though nothing had ever happened. There is no amount of forgetting that can make it okay, especially at night when the dark comes and brings with it the promise of nightmares.

    “Three times.” She says finally, stiffly, clenching her jaw so tightly that it made furrows in the muscle across her cheek. “I was taken three times.” Twice by the madman he now knew, once by someone different. “I festered for so long,” she says again, softer now, quiet and bitter, slipping closer and touching her mouth to his shoulder, “thought I must be losing my mind.” Closer still, using her lips and her teeth to methodically soften the knots of muscle rippling beneath his dark skin. When she pauses there is tension in her face, in her body, in the wrinkle of a brow heavy beneath a crown of gleaming horns. “I should have been here for you, Offspring.” Her voice is low and quiet, an apology because she knows what it is like to try to live in a world that no longer understands you, with friends who watch with sad eyes and pitying smiles but cannot possibly understand.

    Then, with eyes that are dark like burned emeralds, full of shadow and quiet and something dangerous, she softens, touches that greedy mouth to his neck and says, “I can give you tonight.” To share such wretched secrets, to lean on one another and heal. Some part of her wishes she could promise more to the man that had always been Killdare's best friend, to the man who knew all of her pain in a way so intimate and purely by circumstance. But she will not lie to him, knows she cannot offer more than one night, more than this night.

    It is a binding kind of promise, a dangerous kind of tether, but she extends it to him like a hand in the dark.

    MALIS

    makai x oksana

    #2
    something has been taken from deep inside of me;
    the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.

     Hardened with resolve, his piercing red eyes are the only source of color as the starless night falls, staring out across the seemingly endless sea – where harsh, wavering saltwater presses along the seamless line of the distant horizon, melding with it – swallowing it effortlessly. The firm, rigid muscle that lay beneath his skin is wrought with tension, as his mind is lost within the dark shadow of dusk, with nothing but the faint silhouette of a hollowed-out moon to accompany him.

      He could still remember the way frost so gently encased his heavily muscled body, or the way it seemed to branch out from the very depths of his cracking, fragmented soul, filling every void and crevice within him with ice and snow. It was a sensation he longed to feel again, but fate had dealt him a cruel hand - where ice had once lingered, he only burned - his flesh tingling from the simmering heat that threatened to burst from within. 

      Though it had only just begun to seep back into the sordid filth of his veins, and though he had never wielded its power, the flames continued to flicker inside, warming what had once been so frigid. The contrast of hot versus cold agitates his nerves, which dance wildly within the descending darkness, evoking a grunt of frustration from the pit of his chest.

      It is beneath the blanket of darkness that he cannot ward off the nightmares. Each one more bittersweet than the last, he can only hide away the darkest of his secrets for so long before fatigue and weariness force him to yield to sleep. Every time his heavy lids close, the fire burns again, scalding him, reminding him of the way his own searing flesh had bubbled and melted away from the sinewy tendons and hardened bones of his body. Each dream draws forth the image of the Cerberus, and the way he had so unceremoniously torn it apart, tasting its acrid, metallic blood on his tongue, leaving carnage in his wake. 

      The soft lull of the distant roar of the sea water pounding against the shore; the only rein that held him tightly within any semblance of reality. The weight of his thoughts is heavy – a burden that lay between the taut, knotted muscles of his shoulders, anchoring him to the world that had betrayed him time and time again.

      The image of his closest friend, frail and whittled down to nothing but skin and bone, crumpled up against sand and stone, is burned within his mind. The sound of the briny sea rising and falling against the jagged igneous rock that lines the shore is a stark reminder of what he has lost, and he can feel the delicate thread of his sanity being pulled out to sea, unraveling slowly with the steady ebb and flow of the tide.

      He is roused, finally, by movement in the corner of his eye – a glimpse of dark indigo against the blackened night, and his breath is caught within his throat, as his name briefly touches her lips. A shuddering anguish settles within the tight confinement of his chest, and he is rendered breathless as she quietly moves to his side, her mouth pressed along the stiff and unyielding line of his jaw. His eyes, a festering, brewing storm, close then, as his cheek is turned towards her, finding solace in the warmth of her breath and the softness of her words.

      Three times, her confession comes, I was taken three times, and his heart lurches beneath his breast. The torment that had so easily burrowed into the marrow of his own bones had enveloped him after only once; he could not imagine a second – or third, and slowly his eyelids peel away from his piercing crimson eyes, observing the tension within her face and the anguish lining the vibrant green of her irises. I thought I must be losing my mind, and then, it is his own lips pressing against the length of her neck, as his cheek brushes lightly across her skin, tasting the salt of the ocean that lingers there.

      ”I feel like I am losing my mind most of the time,” he murmurs roughly against her skin; his rich baritone ragged from disuse and with emotion. ”I can barely remember a time that these nightmares did not plague me.” Her mouth is traveling, tasting the sulfur and sweat that lay across hard muscle and tight, puckered scarring, that lay across the darkness of his flesh, and he savors it – the comfort of her words; the soothing feel of her teeth and lips pressed against him.

      A quivering of guilt tugs at his heartstrings, knowing that there is only one that he should give the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind to, knowing that there is only one that can hold his heart. I should have been here for you, she breathes apologetically, broken and beautiful, and a longing ache he did not know existed urges his guilt away, if only for a while.

      ”You’re here now,” he says softly, quietly, a soft confession of needing her, needing this - whatever it was - etched into his words. A longing for something to tether him to the world that had spurned him, scorned him – a yearning for someone to make him feel like more than a flickering ember; a wayward flame in an unruly hurricane. ”Tell me it was real,” he pleads of her, pressing his cheek to her own, his dark mouth pressed along the crease of her jawline and neck as his voice reverberates against her throat, a simmering heat stirring somewhere within him. ”I don’t know what is and what is not anymore.”

      Then, softly, his mouth touches hers, the burning ruby of his eyes meeting with the endless emerald of her own, his breath mingling with hers – soft and sweet. ”Real or not real?”
    wounds so deep they never show; they never go away.
    like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.
    Offspring
    #3

    He is so tense beneath her wandering mouth, carved sharp and stoic from dark obsidian. It is a reflex when she pushes harder, further, following that line of stiff muscle across his jaw and along his neck, past his shoulder and down to the soft skin behind his elbow. She has not forgotten his presence at the beach, has not forgotten how he stayed with her the night to curl around her in the dark, to hold her broken pieces together when all she knew how to do was fall apart like dust in the wind. She had been so broken then, so broken still, but it had been him who stopped those great fissuring chasms from undoing her completely.

    “Offspring.” She says again, presses something like a kiss, something dark and ugly and sharp enough that she should worry it will flay him open, to the impossibly soft skin behind his foreleg.

    She is quiet when he turns to look at her, when he uses the knowledge of the secrets she had just shared with him to peel away the layers of a mask that had become her new face, her true face. He finds a tension that matches his own, identical furrows drawn in their cheeks like the furrows left behind in the sand from long, splayed fingers. Then his lips are against her neck, following the currents of smooth corded muscle that take him deeper into the blue oceans of her rippling body.

    Stop this. A voice whispers, but it is neither his nor hers and so it falls upon deaf ears as they sink dangerously deeper into the wounds that bind them together.

    He is ragged when he speaks again, breathes his brokenness into her skin in a way that makes her flesh tighten and quiver and ache with what she has lost, with the memory of other words, other whispers, other lips pressed to such eager blue. I feel like I am losing my mind most of the time, he confesses even as her mouth returns to his skin, needing movement, needing something to distract her from the grinning dark that blossomed suddenly in the pit of her belly.   “Not lost,” she says quietly, tracing the slashes of pink scars with a strange rigidity, “stolen, maybe.”

    Something knots and clenches in her belly, a warning, an echo, so she starts to turn away from him, away from the brokenness of his face and the need in those gleaming eyes, away so that he will not notice the same reflected back on her own indigo face. You’re here now, he says and stops her, speaking softer than the damp starlight around them, tell me it was real.

    He presses close again and she does not push him away, taking instead a knot of his mane between her teeth and pulling him deliberately closer. She knows what it is to doubt like this, to lose faith in the veracity of a memory that seems false and strange and entirely impossible. She knows what it is to be hunted through sleep by beasts from the ugly beyond, by the things that can’t be, couldn’t be, and yet are. “It was real.” She tells him quietly, honestly, knowing exactly what it is he needs to hear, wishing she’d had someone to do the same for her years ago. “Not a dream, you aren’t crazy.”

    She is gentle when she brushes his forelock aside, uncharacteristically soft when she, despite the vast differences in their sizes, pulls his neck down and his head against her chest where she can hold him quietly against the beating of a very real, very wild heart. “There was a man,” she starts for him quietly, opening an old wound so that the infection can drain and he can finally begin to heal, safely, pressed so close to her like this, “he made you someone you are not, remade you for himself.” She presses empty kisses along the curve of his dark, beautiful neck, shifts again to pull him closer still, possessive.

    When his mouth finds hers and there is only heat, only want, she caves to him, softens beneath his touch until her eyes are dark and round and wretched, beautiful in their wanting treachery as she pulls back to let them wander drunkenly across the plains of his quiet face. “Offspring.” She says, she whispers, confused that it sounds so much like an invitation when she meant to ask it like a question. So she finds a second name, clutches it in sad, broken hands, brandishes it like a sword between them because even now her mind wanders where it shouldn’t, wants what it must not have. “Isle.”

    MALIS

    makai x oksana

    #4
    something has been taken from deep inside of me;
    the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.

     Her lips are warm, soft – pliable against the hardness of his taut muscle, which flexes slightly beneath the feather weight of her touch. A shudder courses the length of his spine, unwinding the tightly bound nerves that lay just beneath the dark, pitch black of his skin, coated in a thin veil of dried sweat and shame. She can taste him, every piece and part of him, under the hot warmth of her ravenous mouth, as her lips and teeth graze across his anxious, trembling flesh – there is something simmering inside of him, becoming as fervent and scalding as bristling iron. Beneath her careful, wandering touch, he is unbound, breathless and vulnerable – a stifled pain so suffocating, he can hardly swallow.

      Offspring, she murmurs again, pulling him back from the insufferable weight of his own mind, drawing him back into the present moment and soon his searing gaze is searching for hers in the darkness. Again, her lips press against the tender crease of sinewy muscle and skin, and the stagnant, deafening silence that follows is nearly enough to drown him in the tousling movement of the sea churning inside of his head. His eyes search hers, the narrowed pupils and bright, seeing eyes – a glimmering sheen of emerald against the shadow of evenfall, and hidden within the rivulets of her irises, a sorrow – thinly veiled, alongside a weary, tired tension, not unlike his own.

      Her mouth touches the old, worn scarring that lay across his flesh – where wounds many years old have faded into thin lines, a vague reminder of the obscure, malevolent emotion that so often filled their crevices so evenly. Not lost, she utters against his skin, and he can feel her voice reverberating through him, vibrating ardently against the tendons beneath her mouth. Stolen, maybe, she decides, and the word settles within the flayed, gaping wound, burning and seething - yet still, it settles, filling it with implicit belonging. Stolen, the word echoes. Stolen, as he had been, as his body and mind had been, left powerless in the wake of falling under the wanton, greedy control of another.

      His breath is soft, and subtle against the deep indigo of her curves, drawing her nearer, pleading with her silently to stay - to stay, to be the anchor he so craves in the tumultuous, violent seascape of his furious memory. When her teeth begin to work along his knotted tresses, the girth of his neck lowers to her mouth, pressing against her cheek – seeking her comfort, and the soothing consolation of her knowing. It was real, she affirms, tugging at the feeble thread holding him together, toying with it in her clutching grasp. there was a man, and the immense effort it requires for him to maintain control of himself is immeasurable.

      He made you someone you are not, remade you for himself, and he is suddenly unlike himself, lost in the deeply buried memory of a winged beast that had slain so many, spilled the blood of so many, and suddenly the bitter, metallic taste of their blood is on his tongue again. He was powerless, yet a force to be reckoned with, riddled with a lust and longing for approval from the man – the bane to his existence, this irrefutable need to be wanted, needed - etched into his tired, angry soul, always.

     And still, she kisses him, voracious, heartening, bolstered with a delicate tendril of hunger that he can feel enveloping him – swallowing him, as he was so certain the sea would one day do to him. When his lips meet hers, and their breath mingles, he is so lost – the ridge of his brow line wrought with confusion, the tension of his jaw tight with an unbound desire, and her whisper draws him closer, as his own mouth presses to hers, eagerly. Offspring, and then, Isle, and the very same pang of guilt bursts forth from his chest, causing his pounding, needing heart to ache so deeply, he is certain it will disintegrate, and fall away into dust at his feet.

      ”She has my heart – she has always, she will always have my heart,” he utters, uncertainty written across the usually stoic features of his strong face. ”I love her, but I do not deserve her,” and the words are breathless,  bent and broken and festering with a once unspoken truth. ”I have never deserved her, and she does not deserve this, me, whatever shell of a man I am now.”

      Still, his lips brush across hers as he speaks, and as his gaze bores into her own, his own anguish mixes with her own, and the faint ember flickering inside of him threatens to boil over into a hungry flame, scalding and zealous in is heat. Softly, quietly, ”You are the only one that knows,” his voice, it trembles, as the longing grows hot and impatient. ”you are the only one that can see what has broken me, as I can see what has broken you,” open, exposed, unguarded, as he had never been with her.

      ”I haven’t felt this alive in so long, Malis. Stay,” he urges, pressing his coveting mouth to the corner of her own. stay with me, I don’t – I can’t –“ I need this.
    wounds so deep they never show; they never go away.
    like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.
    Offspring




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)