"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
There's a song in your lung and a dream in your eye.
As her pale muzzle slips softly, unconsciously, along that silver neck, her golden eyes sliding closed, she wonders what if. What if it had been she who had been subjected to such terrible, eternal torment? Would she be as Perse is, a hollow mare filled only with a dark love for one thing? Twisted beyond anything recognizable as the woman (girl?) she had once been? It is a terrifying thought, for it could easily have been her. If He had decided to keep her, rather than releasing her. It could so very easily have been her.
But, oddly, it does not cause her to withdraw as she might once have. Instead, it gives rise to a strange and unfamiliar ache in her chest. One she cannot (will not) name. She should be retreating in disgust. In horror. In something. But she does not. She lingers, eyes closed, listening silently to the confession the silver mare makes.
And when she finally does withdraw, it is only to look at her with a piercing metallic gaze. To whisper a quiet, contemplative inquiry.
”And what if I don’t believe in gods?”
Her next question strikes her momentarily mute. Does she know what it is like to love? She opens her mouth. Closes it. She has no immediate response to that question. She loves her mother, her father. Of course she does. But is that what she means?
No. She is certain that it is not.
When she finally does respond, it is hesitant, unsure, with a faint bewilderment lingering in her eyes.
”I don’t… I don’t know.”
Joscelin
Tiphon x Elysteria
html c insane | picture c mikanicole.deviantart.com
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
There is a strangeness here she cannot articulate (the same way she cannot articulate so much – Perse is a shower, not a teller, words are not her warfare). She shouldn’t covet it, the soft way the mare’s muzzle traces her back, the tender warmth of her, the talk of love and gods and why they stand fractured. It shouldn’t dull the thoughts of Him – He should always be first in foremost in her mind, because she is devout.
Isn’t she?
Do the devout think, because I must when they say they love Him?
The mare withdraws and she feels strangely cold without the touch.
What if I don’t believe in gods, she asks.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, softly, “He is there anyway.”
He likes their beliefs but does not need them – if they won’t bow He breaks their knees, forces them. He takes what is not given freely, if He needs it.
(She always gave. Always. He would break her anyway because He liked the sound her bones made when snapped. So did she.)
Maybe it’s love, what she has for Him.
(Of course it is. It must be.)
Maybe she just doesn’t know how to exist without Him.
But she can’t question this, the very idea closes her throat and speeds her heart. She is not so misguided as her mothers. She is His. Never mind the quiet warmth of these moments, the way the mare looks in the sunlight, a beauty in the fractures, a strength unknown.
“I pray you find it,” she says, but wonders if she does, because there is something in imagining Joscelin wrapped against a form unknown that makes her stomach twist.
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
(should we time jump them? perse could use a little 'absence makes the heart grow fonder')
Sounds good to me! I went ahead and jumped them ahead, if this works for you.
There's a song in your lung and a dream in your eye.
She remembers her. Of course she remembers her. How could she possibly forget?
She had changed her and she didn’t even know it.
She hasn’t seen her in ages, but when she sees her again, there in the meadow, it is as though it were only yesterday. She remembers the fear, the rage, the heartache. She remembers how she had run away like a dog with her tail between her legs. I pray you find it, she had said. Joscelin had stared at her, confusion and alarm rising within her. For she had stirred something. Something she isn’t entirely sure she wishes to acknowledge. How could she?
Her harsh words had torn down her walls while her soft caresses had eased the sting. And she had run. A simple ”I have to go” whispered into the air before she had turned and disappeared. Taking off, into the clouds, where she could not follow.
But she sees her now, her form familiar, lovely. She almost leaves again. Almost runs. But she is not that same coward anymore. She has grown, changed. Strengthened. Hardened her heart.
She doesn’t stop until she is close. Close enough to touch. But she doesn’t. She resists the urge.
”Perse.”
Her name escapes on a soft exhale. There is a catch in her tone, one she hadn’t meant, one that shouldn’t have been there.
”You look as beautiful today as you did then.”
She knows how much she dislikes being called beautiful. She knows and she says it anyway. She says it because she hates it. Because she needs the lovely silver mare to remind her of all the reasons she should not have missed her so much.
Joscelin
Tiphon x Elysteria
html c insane | picture c mikanicole.deviantart.com
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
The broken mare shouldn’t have mattered.
None of them should matter, save for Him. Her thoughts should not wander, because she is devoted, she is branded. And if her dreams are sometimes scattered with memories of broken skin and cracked fissures, what of it? They are only dreams, after all. I pray you find it, she’d said, their parting words, and the mare had gone. And it shouldn’t matter.
(She still doesn’t know if she meant it. She doesn’t know what she meant.)
But time passes. Perse wanders the meadow. No one else interests her, though she does see some who bear His mark (different on everyone, yet somehow universally recognizable to the educated eye).
None of them so broken as Joscelin, though.
None of them so intriguing, either.
Still. She does not expect to hear her name breathed out. She is a stranger in a strange land, and she likes it like that, likes her name a secret.
But Joscelin knows. She knows other secrets, too.
She sees her and the feeling in her stomach is strange – a kind of relief, an exhale to a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“Joscelin,” she says, and the name feels familiar, a queer rightness to it she does not want to examine too closely.
The mare calls her beautiful, and she wonders if the words fit – she is not beautiful as she was for Him, but maybe she can be beautiful in others ways.
Perish the thought.
Instead, she says “so do you.”
Instead, she touches the cracks on her body like it is a map to somewhere she is scared to go.
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
There's a song in your lung and a dream in your eye.
She isn’t beautiful. Not really. Not anymore. Perhaps once she had been. A lovely thing of red and white, with refined features and soft golden eyes. And certainly, she is still the same red and white tone, still has the same refined features, the same golden eyes. But that once smooth, unbroken skin is now riddled with cracks and fissures, those delicate features now covered with scars and upraised skin, and those gold eyes now hard and metallic. There is nothing of the girl that once had been. Nothing left but light and a shattered body.
But perhaps that is what she finds most beautiful of all. The silver mare who loves nothing more than to be broken, finding beauty in a broken thing.
She’s right. It shouldn’t have mattered. None of this should have mattered. She should look at her only in passing, a smile or nod her only acknowledgement before she moves on. Her body should not thrill in that slight caress, the simple touch of lips on fractured skin. She should not shiver in delight, in anticipation.
She should not want.
That, perhaps, is the worst of all. The wanting. Wanting more. More of those simple touches, the breathy words, the quiet, unspoken longings.
And that, perhaps, is why she would deny it all. With her very last breath, if need be.
She should not want.
”He hasn’t come back for you yet.”
She doesn’t know why this is so important. She only knows that it is.
Joscelin
Tiphon x Elysteria
html c insane | picture c mikanicole.deviantart.com
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
There is a danger, to her.
She is dangerous because her presence elicits questions Perse should not ask. She is dangerous because there is a story told in her cracked smile that Perse wants to know the ending of.
She is dangerous because there is possibility in the way she touches Perse, a possibility she wants to and dares not explore.
Acolytes should not have questions such as these in their lungs, and she knows it, knows in her heart that she should leave her (even if leaving the first time had caused a queer ache in her bones, somewhere deep in the marrow).
But there is wanting.
There is wanting that swims in her veins like silverfish. Her road has never divided until now, the path has always been straight and stick-narrow, has always been a path to Him.
(There has never been a her.)
Two roads, diverged.
(Somewhere she thinks of her mother. Cordis could tell a story much like this one. But they are not the same, Perse is so much more than her.
Whatever happens, Perse will not be destroyed.
Whatever happens, Perse is His, and is not afraid to say so.)
He hasn’t come back for you yet.
No. He came and seeded the land with star-children, purples and blues and pinks, stars scattered across hindquarters like they’d spilled out from heaven, but not for her.
No. She called His name into the void and heard nothing but a shrieking wind that might have been laughter. Or might have just been the wind.
“No, He hasn’t,” she says. Maybe it’s important. Maybe it’s not. She is a patient woman, a devout one.
Isn’t she?
“I think about you,” she says, because it seems almost safe, to say it like that, “more than I should, maybe.”
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
There's a song in your lung and a dream in your eye.
She has always been dangerous, but never quite in this way. Her danger has always been of brute force and unrefined power. She could so easily have killed them (her brother, her sister, her mother) in those first days when her body had been too recently broken and her soul rent beyond repair. She had been dangerous then. She could kill with barely a thought. Even now, she is dangerous. But never in a way such as this.
She is dangerous too. Perse, the disciple of a dark god, a reminder of all the terrible things Joscelin has endured. But that is not why. Joscelin does not want to stop and consider the why. Refuses to, for down that road lies heartbreak and ruin.
If she had known where they would end up, had known where that first meeting so long ago would lead, she might have turned and walked away. But perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps she would not have changed a thing if she could have. She had been so young then.
No, he hasn’t. The words bring the faintest of smiles to her pale lips. With her touch like fire upon her skin and those words like music in her ears, she smiles. There is satisfaction in the knowledge that he had not returned for her, that she had been relegated to the realm of mere mortals like herself. And there is delight too. And the tiniest of niggling hopes that perhaps, just perhaps…
But no, she cannot allow herself to consider the possibilities. She should not feel what she feels. She should not want.
But she does, and it is glorious and terrible all at once.
Her next words cause a shiver to dance across her spine, cause golden eyes to snap sharply upwards, seeking her gaze. She is rendered mute for a moment, so many responses stuck upon her tongue. (Why?) (Me too) (You shouldn’t)
In the end, her lids slide close over metallic eyes as her muzzle inches closer, pressing against silver bright skin. And she tells her the truth.
”I’m glad.”
She can’t resist though. Can’t resist one last barbed question.
”Do you think about him too?”
Joscelin
Tiphon x Elysteria
html c insane | picture c mikanicole.deviantart.com
We could go for a record of slowest thread in history :|
i wanted pomegranates—
i wanted darkness—
i wanted him.
Her power is not strength (indeed, though she shines silver she has no magic), nor is she particularly cunning. Instead, her power lies in this: it is never enough.
He flayed her, burned her, drowned her. She let him. She did not say no. She loved it, even, the pain.
Somewhere wires crossed, tangled, so instead she loves what destroys her.
(She loves Him. Surely, she does.)
And maybe that’s why she’s attracted to the fractures left split across her skin. She knows there is power in this woman – not the kind of power He wields, but it is still the power to hurt and maim and kill, the kind some terrible base part of her craves.
But there is another kind of danger, too. The way Joscelin says beautiful is a new kind of dangerous, a danger that flits in her stomach like trapped birds.
I’m glad, says the mare, and Perse smiles – the slight arrogance of it compels her. Though gladness does not meant there is any reciprocity – she doesn’t know if she sits in the cracked mare’s mind the same way, doesn’t know if she traipses across her thoughts at all.
To the second question, she says, “yes.”
It is quick, and she does not hesitate. Because she does, of course. She is His, branded – her entire self is His doing, molded and shaped by callous hands. He is father and brother and lover and god to her, and she must think of Him.
(Even if she thinks of her too.)
p e r s e
------------------------------cordis x spyndle
