"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
01-21-2021, 12:44 PM (This post was last modified: 01-21-2021, 05:55 PM by Chemdog.)
The cold of Leilan’s frozen isle starts to get to him. In the darkness he picks his way to his favorite spot, the River, more specifically somewhere under the big tree or the soft moss on the water’s edge. Spring’s grip struggles in the crumbling lightless world that Beqanna has become, but it’s still much warmer than the snowy arctic world he just came from. His travel south is not without incident, in fact, it’s treacherous as fuck, really. He can hear the occasional screams of someone being taken by surprise and gobbled up (he assumes gobbled, from the sounds), and this keeps him alert.
It doesn’t help. He still doesn’t see it coming.
He stops to listen – everything becomes so still that it seems eerily so. Too quiet. His ears try to pick up sound, his eyes try to find something to recognize besides abysmal black, his smell finding nothing on the air that he can put a name to. Everything is strange, and very wrong. A slither across the ground off to his left is rapidly followed by a snap on his shoulder, he can feel fangs emptying poison into his muscle before he manages to rip away. “Fuck!” he screams out, for himself, for someone to hear. He scrambles away, rearing at whatever it is that’s attacking him, striking the ground with his front hooves and not feeling anything tangible except bare ground. He summons something, or tries to, and what comes through his first frantic try is something like a headless bunny. “Yee, ghck, no!” he shivers, sending the thing away and trying to bring another forward. This time is an enormous stag, starting as glowing white smoke and then somewhat forming into solid body. It’s antlers long thick, their points honed, and start in on where the suspected attacker lurks. Another soul comes, a rough looking zombified wolf that seems of hardly any help except bait. He cannot see what he’s fighting, but whatever it is, it’s huge and scaly, and has a mouth full of razor teeth and two enormous fangs – all of which ripped through his shoulder. A fang and a few teeth still embedded in his torn flesh. He manages to kill it, he and his modest horde – the wolf, missing an ear, ribs exposed and half a muzzle left and a stag who Chem was actually pretty proud of. He’s not very good with his new power and a lot of time he summons some pretty rough looking pals.
Healing sure would come in handy right now. A rather insulting thought.
If it were not for his soul summoning, he would be dead. Without his healing it only means he will suffer longer. Unless something swallows him into oblivion or chops his head off, he will bend and break only to crack back into place and eventually heal. Dark magic like this will not heal easily – who knows, maybe it will have the ability to sicken him to death slowly. Perhaps when hell rises and grabs ahold of the world even immortality will not save you.
He limps on to the River, which eventually turns into a drag. The cold water stings his open cuts as he tries to wash, squinting at the bleeding wound as his vision starts to blue. “No.” he grunts, protesting what he knows – he was poisoned. He falls forward into the river, unconscious with his head on a mossy stone raised out of the rushing water. The water runs over his lifeless body, blood mixing with the clean mountain water.
some freaky ass a snake creature attacked him.
he used his summoning (for like the fifth time in his life) and he kind of sucks at it but getting better.
THEN he passes out in a river from being poisoned by whatever it was
01-27-2021, 12:22 PM (This post was last modified: 01-27-2021, 12:25 PM by Dretch.)
DRETCH
... and from your lips she drew your hallelujah
I am not sure why Set and Niklas leave me near the river this morning. I am not even sure that it is morning. Niklas had gone first. He had drifted away much like the shadows he loves so much, that maddeningly vacant look in his hollow eyes, nary a whisper of a sound to speak of his departure. Set, the rawboned piebald, always knows when one of us gets too far away, though, and he had stirred to consciousness only moments later, blinking sleep from bleary eyes as he moved out from underneath the dozing pile of creatures that tend to surround us every night. A feline stretch and a yawn, lips peeled back from fangs that resemble my own natural-borne ones, he had winked at me and promptly disappeared.
It took me a few – ok, several – minutes longer to roll to my feet and stretch the cobwebs away, but by the time I did, I surmised that they weren’t coming back. Not just then, at least. In the two summers since my mother disappeared, after which I took to (read: was forced to) roaming the shadows and outskirts of Beqanna with the two magical jackasses, I have learned to appreciate the finer things in life. The most prominent of the finer things being not having said jackasses breathing down my back every second of every day. Erm, night? Several paces from our sleeping quarters, I ease into something more comfortable than my equid form – the small spotted body of a fishing cat. I grit my teeth against the inevitable pain as bone and muscle and hide pull apart before knitting back together. Where once I trembled and raged, I now welcome the familiar ache. It means experiences, adventures, a different world with every shift.
I pad along the riverbank, winding upstream over root and rock. Though it moves much more slowly here where it rounds a bend, the sound of the water still muffles the distant cries of unfortunate encounters with the monsters. It raises the hair along my spine. When the darkness had first come, I blamed Niklas. Now, I am still not entirely convinced that the demon had nothing to do with it, he who loves darkness entirely too much, but knowing where to lay the blame does not help in dealing with the creatures that had come with the darkness. A few nights ago, while practicing shifting on the wing, I was a barn owl on a high bough, with a black mane and tail. A behomoth of a snake had passed beneath me. I say a snake because it is the only this-world creature I could compare it to. Its massive, scaled body rasped across the forest floor with a sound that made me want to lick your lips and swallow. Though certain animal forms afford me some modicum of sight in this never-ending night, I still cannot see as clearly as I had before, and that night, for once, I did not leave my perch until Set had finally come to fetch me.
FUCK! I crouch down defensively, sensitive ears downturned at the sudden exclamation, searching the nearby darkness for the sound of the scuffle that now ensues. The stench of the underworld, the one that precedes most of the monsters that I’ve encountered, mingles with the sounds of the scuffle. Rasping and groaning seem to fill the dark and I flatten myself against the damp earth when the snake-creature slides past me. I resist the urge to hiss and growl, my impetuous nature warring momentarily with my sense of self-preservation. They don’t belong here, these monsters, and though I have adapted as well as I can, I hate the darkness they’ve brought with them.
I don’t know how long I wait but my legs are tingling once I finally move from my impromptu hiding place. I backtrack the things trail, the ground churned up and furrowed from the weight of its passage. The stench of death lingers with that of the underworld and caution slows my steps as the trail changes to that of a single – seemingly injured as the prints turn to drag marks – leads me back to the water’s edge. Here the river isn’t too deep here, but it runs faster, the foaming rapids barely visible in the gloom. In order to cross without getting swept away I let go of the fishing cat form, returning to familiarity of my own, and wade into it the water. I cannot see as well in my own body and I don’t notice yet the blank-eyed souls lingering on the far bank.
The stench of blood and ichor leads me to the victim. Its head is held above the surface by a stone. What injuries it might have after its raucous encounter are not immediately apparent, but a closer inspection with my muzzle bumps up against something sharp protruding from its flesh. Back to his head, I trace the masculine lines of his skull, blowing softly. “Wake up!” I shout, my demand not in words but in the deafening trumpet of the elephants trunk my muzzle briefly shifts to. Fully me again, I retreat only just enough distance to watch for a reaction, lips drawn back from my fangs in a wild grin.
While unconscious his spirit feels detached, floating away from his lifeless, cold body. His summoned souls take a moth form and glow faintly, fluttering across the tumbling waters from the opposite bank to float eerily over his body. They do not bother the living being that creeps from the wood line to lurch over him, a shapeshifter that seems to move with the shadows and change just as fluidly. In his dreams the moths move across the bright nebulas with his disembodied self, and from the endless stars he hears the echo of footsteps, breathing and a long wrinkle tentacle – no, an elephant trunk, pierces the starlit blackness, the colorful gases swirling away as it blows a deafening scream into the void. He's sucked from the comfortable floating warmth back into his freezing, weakened body. He growls at the pain, his teal eyes opening to see the dim spirit-moths moving above him, making a small bit of light. A silhouette hovers over him but it’s gone before he can process anything.
He sits up, wincing at his gashed shoulder, a broken fang protruding still. The cold water has numbed him, stinging and numb at the same time to be more specific. He can’t feel his legs much, but still, he tries to hoist himself out of the frigid water. He gets to the dry bank and makes poorly attempt at shaking the wet off of him, grunting at the strong burning bolts of pain moving through him each time he moves.
“Hey, you,” his voice is strained, and his eyes can barely pick out the outline of the stranger who screamed at him, The rest he assumed was a mixture of hallucination and delirium – an elephant trunk and something more than a scream dragging him into consciousness. “Can you pull this out?” he looks down at the mangled meaty mess, teeth stuck in his flesh, poison oozing out of it. His immortality is trying to heal it over, but it’s dark magic, its poison from some other plane – his body is struggling to fight it. His only hope is to remove the foreign body’s, hopefully that will allow him to heal over. He winces as he pulls a smaller tooth out, spitting it on the ground, and another, but he cannot get the leverage to remove the two large fangs stabbed into his flesh and muscle. “Please..” he exhales, his beathing labored and raspy. His body starting to weaken more, wanting to sway and pull him back down to the ground. Being immortal won’t help him much if he stays poisoned. He will only live a long, tortured life of blurry consciousness and unconsciousness, never able to do much but groan in pain and fall down all the time.
“Or just fucking kill me,” he writhes as he pulls more teeth from his shoulder, each word struggling out of him, “if that is easier.” he blows a hard snort from his nostrils, hot blood spurting from them and dripping down his lips.
02-05-2021, 11:49 PM (This post was last modified: 02-06-2021, 12:30 AM by Dretch.)
DRETCH
... and from your lips she drew your hallelujah
He sits up and I track the movement with the wide eyes of an owl. It is then that I notice the dim-lit moths floating above his no longer prostrate form. Strange little creatures. They are not ones that I have seen before. They ebb and float on some unseen tide, but do not stray far from what appears to be their tether – him. If I could only see them closer, I might be able to copy their form … I’m drawn away from my scrutiny when the wakened stallion finally stands, wincing and grunting and groaning in obvious pain. I’m not allowed to show my weakness like that – Set would have my head. How free he must feel. The teal-eyed stranger moves slowly out of the water, finding a level area on dry ground before gingerly shaking water from his coat. The scent of blood and ichor grows stronger now, no longer dulled by the icy waters. I run my tongue over a fang, ducking my head toward the river’s surface, nostrils wrinkled against the otherworldly smell.
Hey, you. The taut address stretches between us, earning him pinned ears and tight lips. Still, I wade closer. Curiosity and the cat and all.
Can you pull this out? comes his request, and I follow the glance to his shoulder where the evidence of his encounter is all black and red, where immortality battles supernatural. He cranes his neck about, tugging one, then two, bits of hell-snake from his hide. I’ve not seen the aftermath of a monster encounter before – not such evidence as this, at least. Tufts of hair, feather, and bits of blood – black and red as this stallion’s shoulder – to be sure. The torn up earth of a struggling, pleading victim, the alien stench of ichor, yes. But always my guardians – pah! – would pull me away, drag me to some different part of the commonlands. Only engage if you must, he would say, my nature (curious) and whim (strong-willed) would vie for supremacy. Though, I do prefer to keep my hide intact. It is a lovely one, after all.
Smiling faintly, the laughter that dances in my gray eyes lost to the darkness, I wade even closer. No tremble touches my lips as I nose at the discarded teeth. I wish I could carry them away with me, a remarkable souvenir … Please, he exhales, and my eyes snap to his, easy to see through my own eyes now that we are so close. It is a foreign word, one that I’ve only overheard, never one directed at me before. His voice is low and raspy, and I study his mouth as he sways unsteady on his feet. Again, like a preening bird, he goes to pulling out what hell-teeth he can reach, discarding the little trophies at our feet. Or just fucking kill me, if that is easier, he says and I respond with a short bark of laughter. “Somehow you don’t strike me as an easy kill,” I say, my voice husky with disuse. A shrug rolls through my shoulders, pale eyes flaring as he snorts and covers the immediate vicinity and his lips with bits of his own blood. “I mean, I can if you really want me to - ” in this I am utterly confident, my words emphasized with a hyena’s smile and distinctive sniggering laughter “- but that may be a waste.”
I nose about his mangled shoulder, huffing softly until I find one of the larger fangs. I grasp it in my shifter’s mouth, careful not to crush it with the strength that ripples through my hyena-jaw. It’s buried deep and offers no doubt painful resistance, but finally comes loose as I tighten my neck and take a step back. It tastes of poison but I do not dispose of it as he has the others. Instead, I place it carefully on a bit of rock near my feet. “Finders, keepers,” I tell him, grasping the other and tug-tug-tugging before popping it free of his flesh. Setting it carefully next to the other, I look back at him expectantly, my muzzle back to its own form now that the hyena’s had served its purpose.
02-20-2021, 08:40 AM (This post was last modified: 02-20-2021, 08:41 AM by Chemdog.)
In such darkness he cannot really see her, but the air she brings with her has an odd feel to it – one he would like if he were not so preoccupied with the wrenching pain in his pierced shoulder. The sound of her body moving through the water, her peculiar breathing pattern, it all creeps ever closer until she’s beside him and her voice slithers forth into the abysmal black. He asked her to come nearer, but he’s little surprised the girl crept forward, heeding his whimper for help. He doesn’t much like his vulnerability waving around like some torn flag, asking to be swallowed up by bigger, hungrier monsters than he (no pun intended). The teeth he removes clink off of the smooth pebbles at their feet, chiming like glass as the tumble to rest on the ground. They pulsate with a red glow, poison still wicking from their intact hypodermic perforating tips.
Chem pushes out a groaning chuckle when she first speaks. Again, not what he expected. Her voice is serpent smooth and still it slices, making one’s bones feel a bit cold under their skin – sending a familiar tingle down the spine. How lucky is he, he ponders, to have an eerie shadow-girl materialize to assist him in not perishing? Ah, yes, so lucky, as long as she doesn’t morph into something a little more sinister than a hyena-mouthed equine.
With a clearer mind he would make sure to stand at a decent distance from those jaws – the air she brings, it feels like a warning... It’s a feeling that makes absolute sense when he spots the bit of glow from the fang reflecting off of her sharp teeth as she yanks it free from his bloody sinew. The poison won’t allow the wound to heal like it should, but at least the fang is gone, even if his shoulder is still flayed open.
“Thank you…” he huffs, pushing the words out with great effort. The relief is overshadowed by the remaining pain and he limps back into the dark water, finding a deeper pool to submerge most of his body into the chilly river water. Poison lights lime green as it mixes with the water, draining with surprising volume as it flows out of his wounds like illuminated blood. “So,” he groans, breathing as best he can under the clench of pain. “Angel or demon?” he chuckles, wincing at the pain it causes to laugh. “I’m guessing you’re neither – something in between.” he sucks in a deep breath, he body feeling a little lighter as the poison continues to drain.
