"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
12-03-2018, 11:18 PM (This post was last modified: 12-03-2018, 11:42 PM by Tunnel.)
He had watched her carefully when she had reached up to him and wished him goodnight. It was a strange display of affection after her swift education. Shroud had gone into sleep, and Tunnel had been a blue fortress through the night,
In the morning he drew away into the trees and the girl followed without being bid. He ignored her for the most part as long as she trailed along at his shoulder or hip. Straying was permitted to a degree when he stopped somewhere but he expected an immediate response when he spoke her name. He was quick with punishment, but she purchased a little forbearance when she pressed close after taking a second too long or touched her little muzzle to his broad black-shadowed neck. Sometimes that didn’t work, and he grabbed an ear or the back of her neck in his teeth in spite of these efforts. He never harmed the dark little wings, though they could be means of escape. He did not draw blood, or leave behind a mark that lasted long.
Their days went on like that as they roamed the forest. He took the lay of the land, considered the borders of the kingdoms that lay beyond the forest but did not pass into any of them. He groomed his precious thing, taught her where to find acorns, and tender grasses, how to strip the good things from tough and thorny plants. He did not love or care for her, but kept her.
She had disappeared one day, summoned by the dark God. Tunnel could not live among the monsters of this land without learning of Carnage, of Pangea. He’d resisted the call, he did not crave the blood of that stranger nor did he care what befell anyone but himself or his sabino pet. The child had fallen under the sway of the summons, this irritated the creature but he did not pursue her. Already he knew she’d be back, he wasn’t going into Pangea to find her.
The longer her delay the greater her punishment would be.
In the forest depths he roams, heavy deliberate movements carrying him though the thick undergrowth quietly, black mane and tail burred with summer snags. Over the sound of his own movements he hears the approach of another though he is certain she does not mean for him to. “Still too loud, Shroud.” He growls, though he does not yet see the winged girl and is pleased to find he does not smell her either. Still not as fine on her feet as he expects her to be. He stops beneath a diseased oak to wait for her, with what looks like quiet patience. She will know better.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
@[shroud] I hope this is okay, feel free to tweak anything that I assumed in your reply. Also sorry if it double tags I had to edit!
Shroud nestled into his side, as close as she could get without arousing his ire. She had learned his lessons fast but still felt a modicum of something for him as he’d gone from stranger to savior in the span of a few nights.
It occurred to her that he was neither mother nor father to her. His shape and skin was not quite the same as theirs but despite this, her devotion to him has snared her as quick as any noose around a neck. One that once yanked, grew tight and exhilarating instead of suffocating. Beneath his gallows’ hand, she flourished in the dark like a weed denies sunlight.
So she slept, and did not dream.
If she did, she could not recall it upon waking.
Shroud was obedient up to a point.
She toed a knife’s edge with him each time he came to a halt. A few steps here and a few paces there; testing her limitations until the noose tightened with a nip or small punishments that she recognized as such but found a dark delicious pleasure in. She hadn’t known how amazing his little hurts could be, but she learned like the good student that she was.
He taught her much and she flourished beneath his teachings. Grew a little taller and slimmer, the kind that comes not from starvation but from fitness and dedication- to him, to their time together that shaped her, honed her into a thing her original parents might never recognize as their own. She had become wholly his; bound to him through his generous allowance of her not-once-timid touches and hushed talks.
Even the slimness could not hide the feminine softness that cling to the curves that began to fill out. Her flesh grew lush as it aged.
Then came the call; the god-summons and she’d answered it. Shroud knew that she’d come back to punishment upon punishment, a heap of it that only he could dole out and the shiver down her back was a mix of anticipated pain and pleasure. She craved him; craved the way he’d bite into her neck or pinch her ear between his teeth.
Part of her made a paltry attempt at masking her presence m. In truth, she could have flown overhead and found him that way but there was more fun to be had in stalking him through the forest though she snapped branches and broke twigs to displease him. It is a wonder he has not smelled the sickness that rolls off her in beads of sweat, in the leather that gathers in the bends and folds of her skin. Plague-scent alone should have betrayed her.
He comments on her loudness and she laughingly coughs in return. Too loud? She knew it, but the plague made her stumbly and weak as she found him beneath an oak as addled by disease as she is. Shroud does not keep her distance; her fever-bright eyes and sweaty face find his, her breathing labored and loud enough to be a pant as she staggers to him and places her head beneath his blue-grullo neck.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be as quiet as you,” she mutters softly and truthfully. He was just better at it then she was. For now. Shroud was certain she could one day eclipse him but it might take more than practice and a whole heap of magic she didn’t have.
Oh, and not once does she apoloufor her disobedience.
Tunnel’s flat, cold eyes pick his dark pet out of the undergrowth and she comes to him as she has so many times before. He does not notice how tall she is growing or the shadow of future succulence in her curves. What he does see are her glassy hooded eyes and the wrongness in the way she wears her skin. The smell of plague comes to him and though he expects it, it still offends. Shroud takes shelter beneath the muscular curve of his neck and a gentler master would take pity on his charge but they both know that isn’t going to happen.
His nostrils flare and he breathes her in along the ridge of her spine, from the pinions of her wings to the soft place behind her ear where the right amount of violence could sever her spine. Her scent (changed from that infant sweetness that had first made him keep her, but still narcotic) is polluted, thick with some cloying foulness. A rumble of displeasure, and he drops his head to draw her in against his chest. She fits against him in new ways as the months march on, he notes this only vaguely.
“You have brought back your reward for serving another.” His voice is low and his lips wander possessively over the sick-sweat on her overheated neck and back making himself sure his Shroud is whole. She is his, polluted or not. “You seem rather pleased with yourself.” He states as if by observation but condemnation is a rather more appropriate word.
Features ever still Tunnel pulls away from the sabino girl, pushing past her as he does when she has bored him. “Come.” He drives toward the river, there is a slow wide place where they have spent time before, when she was smaller and could not be trusted not to wash herself downstream. At the shore he stops, turns to look at her, looming blue monster. “Drink, and then tell me where you have been.” Perhaps now she is thinking he pities her too much to punish her. Oh no, his Shroud is more clever than that.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
Shroud expects no pity - only pain, the kind that he is so good at administering and the kind that she craves wantonly. She also knows that the plague will offend him but he will not cast her away; he can’t, as much as she never wants him to and this will only bring more punishment down upon her but she relishes it with a sinisterly tinged happiness - the kind that is a thorn-prick of blood from a rose, just a tiny painful kiss.
His breath on her spine is hot. The kind of heat that makes her, a dirty small weed, turn to the powerful sun contained in his look and touch. He’ll burn her in such perfect brutal ways and she waits for it, as he draws her closer to his chest. Even she has noticed how she fits against him in new ways, how his skin feels against her own, and how her looks are less callow and slavish and more girlishly coy - as much as they can be, given the fevered glaze to them and the dark affection she feels for him.
She laughs! He has noticed, but how could he not? The plague is reward and punishment enough for not heeding her one true master’s call. Still, he indulges her with his wandering touch as his lips march over her damp skin. Craven, she shivers - not from plague, though maybe just a bit, but mostly from his possessive assertion that she is whole and his. “Just a little,” she chokes out around laughter and plague-tickles in her throat.
This could earn her punishment and pain, but as she licks a little of the bloody spittle off her lips, Shroud knows she doesn’t mind. It means more time with him, as his. Instead, he pushes past her in that usual way that denotes boredom and she gives him a long dark indecipherable look before obediently following him to the river. He makes his demand and she acquiesces for the time being; the drink long and slurping and maddening.
River-water both cools and burns her arid throat, and a look of pain and distaste mingles on her face. Her reflection of sickness is dashed by her own hoof as she turns back to face him, eyes burning fever-bright. “I have been to Pangea.” she murmurs just before the excitable flutter of her wings, as they shift to thorny extensions of interlocking acacia branch. Pale feathers are gone, replaced momentarily by muscle-memory of the moment she lashed and slashed.
Her entire frail self begins to shake, to split in tiny tears from the wicked bite of thorns that leak beady sanguine tears down her sides. Then the effort exhausts her, pulls a haggard cough from deep inside her as she turns back to the river, contemplating bathing herself or worse, just giving in to the pull of the current in the middle that rushes on by. Shroud can’t leave her monstrous blue master though, and she simply says to him - “I’m tired.”
Her voice comes out small and strained, almost like a plea.
Just a little. She says, and Tunnel’s lip twitches. Shroud’s rarely heard laughter is thick strangled sound she tries not let out as she speaks, but he knows it is there, feels the way she shudders with sickness and wry amusement. Tunnels teeth pinch at the nape of her neck briefly and swiftly. He pushes away, leads her to the river without bothering to respond.
Shroud drifts after him toward the river, its rushing is muted and his attention is more focused on the rhythm of her footfalls behind him, the rale and rattle of her breathing. The river flows clear before them and she takes a long drink that appears to be uncomfortable. His brows are furrowed in irritation, grey eyes intense. The creature lowers his own lips to drink from the cold river. Water drip from his dark mouth as he stares at the sabino girl when she turns to face him.
She has been to Pangea, that risen kingdom naked and dead. Summoned there, unable and unwilling to resist the lure set out for the blood-hungry masses. She shivers and shifts her beautiful wings into a glorious bramble as her body recalls a vicious thrill. His eyes trace the slender dimensions of her, a hungry and slow inspection that is cut short, disappointed by the way she shivers back to herself (showing him a child once more), the memory of bloodlust not enough to sustain her. Crimson droplets on her piebald sides draw his eyes as her lungs heave and struggle against weariness. She is tired, and says as much in a small voice. A weak voice. Tunnel merely rumbles and drops his head to drink again.
He comes to her slowly and when he does it is to groom her sweat soaked neck with his wet lips, teeth scraping, tongue rasping. He has not done this before, leaving her to attend to herself unless he is meting out punishment. He is rough as he has been rough the night she found him, muzzle butting her tired body heedless of the way she might be put off balance. Shroud’s blood tastes of copper and sickness as he cleans it away from her shoulders and sides. There among the tangled willows on the river bank and it would almost seem a tender moment if it weren’t for the way he drops his teeth against her neck, just above her withers, hard and insistent, to drag her to the ground. To drag her to the soft green earth with its close growing grasses and wild strawberries, their leaves red with pearls of blood dripped from her wounded sides.
There is, even in her smug return, an absence of defiance and of attempts to placate him that angers Tunnel. If he could tear Shroud apart to satisfy that anger he would, but the illness clinging to her is what inspires his fury and there is nothing he can do to punish it. If she settles near him he reaches out bathe and nip at her, needing the softness of her beneath his teeth. “Did you kill him, Shroud?” He says at last, voice a soft deep rumble, like he is asking a child about their day at play. “Did you like disobeying me?”
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
@[shroud] poor tunnel, his little puppy is sick so he is bite her to help his worrying.
She is too tired to care that her antics elicit little in the way of a response from him beyond the pinch of his teeth at the nape of her neck. Maybe not that tired to feel the quick flare of pain and pleasure that always seem to mingle together around him. For just a moment, she is renewed by his little nip that she contemplates stoking his ire further by splashing him with just a bit of water from the river but the fevered conflagration of mischief leaves her as quick as it had come, and she is dull-eyed and tired once more.
Each ounce of strength is sapped from her and she just wants him to… maybe to hold her close, though she is no longer certain it would be in girlish innocence and ignorance. Neither of which Shroud has really ever been. But his flesh is a hearth that beckons, except she knows better than to mar the rich blue of him with the filth she is wearing from her sins and travels. Bathe first, snuggle later - play the docile obedient sick girl and maybe, she’ll feel his teeth on her again.
She had burned beneath his look.
The kind of look that makes wax melt and fires smolder. But he dropped his head back to the river and took another sip. It made her start to smolder in a different way then before. Before it was desire - that feeling of being desirous and looked at in a new light, and now, it is anger that summers and spits in her because she is a child again in his eyes. Shroud’s tolerance is a pendulum that swings precariously between an even keel and a wild temper.
Right now, it surges towards temper and hellfire as if he’d scorned her. He’d done no such thing of course and her tired plague-battered self tried to tell her as much but she wasn’t having it after the fires of desire had slowly but quickly been lit. Except he surprises her by coming to her of his own regard and in his own time - -
So unexpected!
There is the slightest quirk of her lips in a manner most coy as he begins to groom her neck. His teeth are rough; his mouth is rough - he is roughness incarnate, and her eyes shut in a blend of ecstasy and hopelessness. Even the shove of his head against her is deliciously rough enough to unsteady her but she maintains her balance. Shroud waits, patient and impatient for the bite she knows will come and anticipation makes her shiver beneath and against him.
Her flesh seeks his for strength and warmth and his sheer masculinity. Shroud leans in his direction always, like a flower listing after the hot bright sun. Knowing he’ll scorch her to dust but it will have been worth it. Just as she knows that some tide in her had turned from filly to mare, young yet but Shroud knows what she wants and that’s him - it’s always been him since they first met. He’s that shadow of doubt; that alarm that sounds in the back of her mind the moment her disobedience kicks in.
Then, his teeth on her neck -
A small gasp escapes her, pleasant and surprised. Her knees grow weak, she might stagger for a moment, then she braces herself in sheer foolish resistance - she’ll not submit unless he is right there beside her. Unconsciously, her wings are shuddering back into their favored form of brambling lashes and the thorny bits lift in open defiance - the only warning she gives him as he looks at her, and the look is one full of anger that she knows all too well and adores because she inspires it in him.
Her laugh rasps out of her throat as she falls against him, “I helped.” His teeth nip and send little jolts of pain ricocheting through her that leave her tingly and spent. Even her wings reassemble into feathers that brush against him as they tuck back up against her sides, soft as kisses. Shroud had undeniably taken pleasure in the mindless mass slaughter that unleashed the plague upon the lands. But he then asks about her disobedience and she laughs again; “You never said I couldn’t kill someone.”
Part provocation, but also so much truth. He had never said directly that she couldn’t stray from his side, couldn’t bask in the sins of the earth. There had been no further instruction on his part so as long as she came back to him, to their haunts in the forest each time. Hadn’t she? The disobedience came in the fact that she rubbed his face in her caveats; sauntered them about like the sashay of her virgin hips - to provoke, to displease him, to rile him up until he broke over her in waves of teeth and torment.
(who manipulates who here?)
Shroud begins to rub the side of her whiskery mouth against his chest before delivering daring little nips here and there to the sleek folds of his skin. “You never said I couldn’t…” she murmurs, biting hard before jerking her head back and managing another coy look at him.
@[Tunnel] haha she’s likes bite me more but I’ll bite back! ❤️❤️❤️
Who is this creature he has created? It cannot be said that he does not remember her as she was when an infant. He does. Tunnel remembers how plain and scrawny she had been, and the snuffling stumbling way she sought him out in the dark like a blind pup. Small, sweet smelling, stalwart brown eyed babe. The beast had considered killing her and has wanted to destroy her many times since that night. Her skin and bones and flesh make him clench his teeth against the buzzing sensation in his jaw, he hurts her because he wants to pull her apart. He does not forget that he has ‘raised’ her, but her image flickers ever more clearly into that of a woman. Shroud has never been his ‘daughter’ even if she is other than what she would have been without his abducting her.
Tunnel shifts himself away, using his weight and sheer strength to try and drag Shroud to the ground but she resists him. A promising stumble is quickly corrected and his exhausted pet plants her feet and bears up. She expects his fury and he nearly releases her to pull her down by an ear. No part of her ever escapes his violence but her wings and her face, a face that she now stubbornly turns toward him as the wings curve into scythes of acacia once more.
Irritation does not melt out of his look, he is not a fairy tale beast. The unsettling grey of his eyes only darkens to hematite or the shadowy part of storm clouds as she inspires something more. Relinquishing his grip on her neck happens just as suddenly as the shift from feathers to thorns. Tunnel demonstrates no intention of surrendering to the will of his plaything. Black limbs shift quickly and heavily and the stallion pivots close to her again, his muzzle dragging up the side of her arched and sweaty neck. The wings and their thorns do not drive him away should they fall against his blue hide and draw his blood when he sidles up against her. Shroud’s scent has always appealed to him, but this time he’s actually looking for the opiate richness he finds beneath the sickness and familiarity. If he had missed it before or if it had only risen after he’d begun to touch her is not for the monster to know. His skin is hot where it presses to her feverish side, but she may not notice for how hot she herself burns.
She settles to the ground once he is close and the stallion follows after with controlled ease, heedless of any wounds inflicted on him by her vicious pinions. Tunnel’s limbs are tucked beneath and close beside himself so that the sabino girl might lean into his larger frame. Her pelt is whorled and scraped from his earlier ministrations, a pattern as mindless as that he now leaves behind. Black barred ears laze and shift as he grooms her, her words, meant to annoy him, falling into them as he grooms her back and side. Breathing her in surreptitiously, tasting the change in her scent, he does not let it so distract him that he cannot take time to provide her a growling reply. “No, I didn’t. You haven’t ever needed me to spell out the rules.” His teeth pinch the relaxed muscle behind her outside shoulder but he lathes his tongue over the place shortly after, unclear to the hypothetical onlooker if it is something akin to grudging affection or the doting of a lion on paralyzed prey. There is actually distant amusement in his voice when he continues abruptly. “That isn’t one of them.”
As if the rules were written somewhere within either of them. He is a monster and few distinct rules exist beyond the whims of his tempestuous and violent temper.
She is not a girl again when the feathers return (leaving his skin twitching in the wake of their trailing). Tunnel considers demanding she rest, but there is still an itching need in him to touch and bite, to know she hurts in silence, obedient and possessed. Shroud’s muzzle rubs against the velvety skin of his black shadowed blue chest, she nips and he ignores her though his muscles twitch in chest and shoulders. You never said I couldn’t… A snort is interrupted by the bold force of her teeth against his skin and his eyes are still dark when they flick to her brown ones. A snarl wrinkles Tunnel’s lip though and he does not say a word only snaps his teeth at her coy expression before drawing back, powerful neck arching to allow himself to regard her in silence. If she has another quip for him, or more teeth he permits it but his gaze smolders. Before she can annoy him too much the stallion reaches his muzzle out to roughly meet her own. His mouth is beside hers, and he angles his head quickly to nip at her lips, breathing his words against the corner of her mouth. “Go to sleep Shroud. When you are free of this pollution there will be a great deal of time to determine the intricacies of what you can and cannot do.” He is rarely so verbose, but on the occasions that he is, it seems to coincide with a shift between them. From foundling to pet, from pet to…
Black nostrils flare, violence that is not violence writhing beneath his skin and tingling in his lips and tongue... Not violence, though what it is feels close enough. It should be a brief thing beside his need to dominate and rend (it usually is when he desires a woman) but instead he burns.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
Also sorry if it double tags I had to edit!
