"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
Daemron moves through the dense forest with singular purpose as he tracks down the one who awaited him. Although she was still some distance away, he becomes increasingly aware of her every move. With each step that brings him closer, it’s almost as if were wearing her very skin as his own.
He can feel her large ears twisting this way and that to catch the squawks of jays, the chirps of sparrows. The rhythm of breath drawn between sharp teeth becomes his breath. He notices the ruffle of black hackles when a fly lands upon a narrow shoulder and echoes the snap of her jaw when she twists to bite at it in annoyance.
When he finally does reach her, the selfsame growl that rolls off her lolling tongue rumbles past his throat, too. The maned wolf had been lying in the shade of a beech tree, dark limbs gathered beneath her – but at his appearance she gets to her feet and pads toward him. Shaking out ruddy fur, she looks up at him with keen eyes that glint meaningfully.
“You’re sure?” He asks in low tones, lowering his willowed head to her level. A scathing huff answers him, but he pushes her side with his nose and mutters, “We need to be sure. I’m not about to risk whatever it is that false hope would do to her.”
Red only bares her teeth in a wolfish scowl. Somewhat cross with the dog’s apparent contempt for his skepticism, Daemron’s grey gaze tightens – but he says nothing more and instead turns about, a growing expectation taking root in his thoughts.
I awake to the sounds of low murmuring, feeling a potent sense of uncertain fear when my buttercream eyelids peel gently apart. It’s obvious at first that this isn’t Sylva, the colors are all wrong. No bleeding reds or fiery orange offset by bone-white trunks and boulders. Only a dingy green, murky enough like the bottom side of a pond, and a strangely humid pressure to tell me that at some point during the night I must have wandered into the Forest. “Impossible.” I think, rising on stiff, perlino-tinted forelegs. “Arthas led me to the spot himself, I was sure I’d come to the right place.”
Again, surveying the dimly lit clearing around me makes it painfully evident that I was wrong.
Instead of debating my problems, it’s just easier to let them go and work my rigid muscles loose. It’s warm and a summer breeze that would normally comfort me leaves me shivering, both odd-looking tattoos above my shoulders twitching with the effort. Once they’d been wings, but now the empty weight serves to remind me that nowhere was safe any longer.
Incidentally I step out from hiding and onto a deerpath, squeezing between overgrown holly and out into the open before I catch sight of them. A little ways to my left stands the talkative stranger I’d heard before, red fur dulled by the shadows of the canopy overhead and at his heel, a rather imposing sort of animal. My teeth clench. I swallow loudly.
Caught in mid-step all I can manage is to freeze, my chipped flint eyes motionless and wide.
I suppose I’ve seen worse.
Wanna step to me better think twice, 'cause I look pretty but I ain't that nice
Having spent most of her life in the presence of both Daemron and Pyxis, Red was little cause for concern to the stranger who suddenly comes into view. Yet while she was accustomed to horses, the maned wolf was both tired and hungry and in no mood for company – and so the canine turns at the sound of rustling underbrush and snarls menacingly.
The sound reverberates through the muffled glen as Daemron glances over to the mare who had suddenly gone quite still. Though he was anxious to get back to Pyxis, his wolf’s aggravated behaviour only serves to irritate him. With some chagrin, he sighs and steps between the dog and the mare with oddly tattooed shoulders. “It’s not you, trust me.”
Red’s tail twitches, long ears laid flat against her angular skull as she peers under his legs at the intruder. She, too, was anxious to be gone – if only to fill her belly. After days gone without a single hunt, she was in a particularly bad way. Growling again, this time the wolf expresses her impatience by lunging forward to snap at a white hock. He knew it was coming – he could feel it in her thoughts – and in the split second before she could sink her teeth into him, the chestnut stallion pitches the targeted hind leg in a well-aimed kick instead.
Just as he could sense her intent, so the wolf could sense his own. Too quick, she narrowly avoids the blow, reeling back and shaking out her hackles at him. She huffs as Daemron continues to block her way from the other woman. Of course, she wouldn’t have truly harmed the stranger – but, given the mare’s obvious trepidation, Red might have appeased her black mood by causing Rey at least a little scare. Daemron knew this, too – and finally his annoyance with the dog’s sour disposition became too great.
“Go, then,” he rumbles, “Find us later. Preferably with a full stomach and in better humor.” The wolf’s eyes turn to slits, but after a last glare she wheels and slinks away into the murky depths; jowls open, tail twitching. Daemron watches her go before he turns his grey gaze to meet the stranger’s own. By way of explanation, he utters a single word. “Wolves.” It is said with some contempt, though in many ways he is more like them than he would ever be to his own kind.
10-19-2018, 09:14 AM (This post was last modified: 10-19-2018, 09:41 AM by Rey.)
Rey
It’s always my fault. He shouldn’t blame the wolf for her nature, or make excuses for the animal. I’m the one in the wrong place, clearly, and the one intruding. It’s always my fault.
Nonetheless my head rises auspiciously in defiance, the backwards twist of two pale ears now turning dark red a quiet indication of my thoughts about his pet and the overeager manner in which it seems to want to defy the stallion. They could be any number of things - familiar and creator, magician, an equine with the ability to wear two skins. So long as they keep to themselves over there and I’m left to my own wellbeing over here, there’s no need to curl back my lips and show my fangs.
My skin is betraying an internally dark mood anyways, having shed its earlier perlino sheen to completely cloak me in a stain of bloody carmine. Only the tattoos and my eyes stay the same, a bold splash of color that stands out among the red. “I’ve known more than a few myself.” My response comes, once he’s shooed the creature away. “Plenty of them.” I don’t say.
“Yours is unique, though.” The comment slips out, raspy and weak. Since returning to Beqanna from the horrors of Pangea, I’ve yet to shake a persistent cough and the continual damage is beginning to erode my once feminine, soft voice. “Not the image I’d first think of if someone told me to imagine a wolf.” I admit, softening my hardened expression into one that seems less suspicious and more exhausted as I slip away from the holly at my back and closer towards him.
I notice his mane isn’t just a flat green, like I’d originally supposed from afar. It’s literal vines, or whip-like strands of growth, covered entirely by budding leaflets that layer atop one another to give him an earthy mane and tail. How unusual. “It seemed rather irritated too.” I muse, slowing to halt nearby, “Lover’s quarrel?”
Wanna step to me better think twice, 'cause I look pretty but I ain't that nice
10-23-2018, 12:01 AM (This post was last modified: 10-23-2018, 12:15 AM by Daemron.)
Having been somewhat distracted by Red’s antics, the chestnut only takes notice of Rey’s changing pelt once the wolf leaves. The irony of her crimson coloring was not lost on him, and the edge of his mouth twitches. Still, it doesn’t truly startle him to see her flesh turn from one shade to another. Having been raised by a magician and a manipulator alongside Cerva and Nihlus, very little in the way of others’ powers had ever surprised him.
At her initial comment, however, a spark of humor flashes in Daemron’s faintly-glowing eyes. Her voice seems like one roughened by smoke, and he watches as she relinquishes some of the stiffness her garnet frame had brazenly held while in the maned wolf’s presence. “Not too keen on them, then?” He observes. The mare’s flagrant reaction had piqued his curiosity for the moment, and as she steps forth from the forest’s cover his willowed tail flicks about his hocks.
She goes on speaking of Red, though by the end he is making a reproachful sound in his throat. “Careful,” he says with a look of some amusement, “She could still be within earshot.” Truthfully, he knew the ruddy wolf was already well out of it (long limbs churning up musty earth, running low across the forest floor) but he felt somewhat inclined to test the colorshifter’s reactions further, if only to see what shade she might turn next.
A quiet is in the woods now, lying thick and heavy about them after the short scuffle that had taken place. “Daemron,” he intones once a weighted pause has passed by way of introduction. Unwittingly, the phrasing she’d used had struck a nerve. He is reminded of the years he’d spent in desolate seclusion after those he loved most had abandoned him, and his tone becomes somewhat caustic because of it. “While I’m tempted to call you Red, that happens to be the wolf’s name.” His teeth flash. “So if what you saw really was a lover’s quarrel, it might be best to avoid that sort of confusion.”
Hah, there’s very little I’m keen on these days. The emptiness of life spans ahead and behind me, Daemron before me, and black oil muck sunken deep, deep beneath me. Whatever had been suspended above me at some point, (that thing which is hope) is now cut loose and forever gone. I never want to see it again.
So no, I’m not keen on his wolves and I’m certainly not keen on the edge he’s beginning to hone with every word. Only one in particular enlightens me, and that’s his name: Daemron. That word alone has sufficient enough weight to it, so I spare him a nettled glance and let my head drift listlessly aside. “Ahh, don’t tease me. So many shades of red in this world and you focus on only one.” I sigh away from him, as if he were but a statue. Perhaps it’s partially true; I know my arch behavior will fall on stone ears anyways.
Bloodred, blood root, root brown, rot. I think, quiet and stoic because my comment on shades of red has somehow catapulted me into a memory from infancy. I’d sang the colors to myself, making them up as I went and trying them on for countless crowds of imaginary spectators. Back when hope had tethered itself like a joyous balloon to my heart. “I was born without a name, so call me whatever you want.” Comes the eventual reply, bitter and carved raw from someplace hidden inside of me. I suddenly hate that word: Daemron.
I don’t know why but he’s the first I’ve ever told this to.
My coat deepens in it’s color, boils itself ebony and spreads, spots, splotches my skin until I’m a dark smudge with pale eyes and two pinprick canines. I feel the proverbial burn of my markings as evidently as they show themselves. “F*cking around out here like you own the damn forest, threatening me like I’m some common criminal …” I swear darkly, half mutter and half curse. “Just who do you think you are?” I hiss, purging a life’s worth of bottled hate and rage onto the stallion who made himself the “one straw too many” piled upon my back.
Wanna step to me better think twice, 'cause I look pretty but I ain't that nice
While Daemron had been tolerant of the mare’s presence and had harboured at least some interest toward the nameless colorshifter, the encounter quickly takes a sour turn as her remarks become more volatile. A short bark of laughter slips from him even as his gaze narrows. “Was I threatening you?” His voice might have sounded more incredulous if it weren’t suddenly laced with sarcasm, and his ears press backward against the willow of his mane.
If not for his pressing need to return to Pyxis with the news that they’d finally located a member of her family, compiled with how Red’s antics had grated at his nerves, perhaps Daemron might have felt more lenient. However, the outburst from the now-black stranger had also brought his own shortened fuse to the point of combustion. He steps forward, his eyes steely. “Whether you’re a criminal or not, shifter, you can rest assured that I don’t really care. You’re free to go about your own business in the damn forest as you very well please.”
He turns away then, brimming with irritation for the scenario that had unfolded as his willowed tail whips about his hocks. Had he known, he might have let Red have her fun after all. He had half a mind to bring forth others, if only to show her what a real threat looked like – but it wasn’t worth his time. Instead he growls, “In fact, I have somewhere to be.” And with that, Daemron does not spare the darkly woman another glance. He simply leaves.
daemronlost to the hunt as I was to you
@[Rey] in light of the version change I hope it's okay to have wrapped this thread up <333
not to say they can't bump into one another again for more inflammatory fun >:]
