when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
He’s lost his wings.
Where they once were are now gaping wounds. Beqanna had taken them back, the magic rescinded, had torn them from the joints.
It had hurt to become, and it had hurt to give them back, too.
But he is used to pain, the boy who grew on a diet of soured milk and bruises, whose mother was a corpse, dead woman walking, who spoke in tongues. The woman who left his skin tender with bruises, who kissed each one after, who said this, darling, this is love.
He’d believed her then and he still does, on some level, the fundamental parts of him constructed in that queer childhood, an unshakeable foundation. Though he would never hurt Else, never even think it, his mind buzzes with crossed wires and memories of his mother, how she’d been, how they’d been.
He does not miss the wings (he could never fly well with them; he had none of his father’s grace). The wounds haven’t healed yet and he wonders if they will. They will leave giant scars when they do, but his body is no stranger to scars.
(It befits a warrior, but he is a solider in rank only; no, these scars are from his mother, from love.)
He’s lost his wings; and somewhere along the line he’s lost his purpose, too.
Somewhere along the line the Deserts changed hands, to leaders he barely knows, who know him as the black boy, the bygone prince, the failed solider. Somewhere along the line Else went and Elanor with her and he does not know what’s become of them.
Loss, loss, loss – it all aches heavy in his bones as he moves along (gingerly, the wounds still bleed readily, a hair-trigger). Loss, loss, loss, and he finds himself in the meadow, blood where there once were wings.
c a i u s
vanquish x chantale
|
|
so my chantale muse is officially dead and im letting her rot in the closet awhile BUT i thought caius meeting his half sister would be fun.
(caius was basically a spite baby, yael rejected chantale so she seduced yael's king/crush and had him)
love is the red the rose on your coffin door, what's life like bleeding on the floor? Where my mother's were merciless, cold in places that should radiate warmth and love and a passion all to it's own, I am merciful. I dig the graves for those lost, forgotten bones and place stems of wildflowers atop each, silently wishing them well. Perhaps part of me was fantastical, to believe that where they would go would be far better than here. It is sweet, bitterly so, how life can be taken with a seductive kiss and a deathly blow. All their memories, flooding the ground with their crimson life. That thought alone is enough to send shivers across my ebony frame. Would their souls cling to me, thinking me some form of a saviour, against the beasts that lurk within the shadows?
Being around the tang of scarlet, has made me quite immune. The scent of death and decay is like rose petals to me, and yet, yet I long to feel the sun warm my cold, cold bones. Where the shadows kiss my skin, I long to feel a shiver of light stroke me with it's delicate fingers. Ah, but I was not born of grace and light or roses and wildflowers. I was born from sin and magic, dark and seductive and rot and decay. The thought is enough to potentially drive those off of cliff faces. Well, from what I have seen. Indeed.
But I do not. Instead, I walk away from the kingdom of blood and of bone. I'd covered my tracks and the entrance with the remnants of autumn's large leaves and large branches. Forgotten for now, until later. My steps are small yet purposeful as I go, and it is then as I breach the tree-line, I detect the twang in the air. Of life, of crimson. Silver eyes, like the moon's many mysteries, scan the meadow. Many lingered in groups in the vast expanse, some idled beneath the trees, whilst others parade with egos the width of the skies, never-ending. Ah, but then there is he, the one that scarlet touches with it's cruel caress. watch him for some time before deciding to approach. He is another, a breathing one, and yet, he seems as broken as those bodies that line up beyond the trees.
'Did it hurt?' I say, breaking the silence with a haunting whisper. Eyes surveying him, noticing the wounds, gaping holes were something used to be. Perhaps pride, perhaps purpose. but now, now he seemed to sprawl against the backdrop with very little, and it is that observation that touches my mind, and claws at the throes of my insides. 'It always hurts, though. Doesn't it?' Whether it be mental harm of bodily infliction, it hurt, it hurt right down to the wick of your soul. And burnt, oh, it burnt. The deadened eyes that stared right through, the lick of a bloodied tongue and the harsh snap of sharpened teeth.
'I'm Vaermina.' Because, in all of this broken up world of sin and of trouble, there is always someone worse than you, always someone just like you. Perhaps it is them, those that I desire to find, to see. To not feel like the outcasted one, the one living on the edge of society, like a glimmer of the mysterious moon, but fading into the cold, winter's night. 'Who are you?' he could be anyone in the world, anything he wanted and yet he is here, bleeding and broken and purposeless.
v a e r m i n a
chantale x nykeln
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
Unbeknownst to him, they both stem from the same rotted thing (though he spilled from her rancid womb and sipped soured milk whilst she was created from an ill magic).
He doesn’t even see her, the mare with some faint resemblance to himself (he takes far more after his father, stocky and black, only a snip of white across his nose). He doesn’t see her because he is inside himself, thinking of blood and loss, those near constant companions. He is thinking of the deserts and wondering if it’s even home anymore, with his parents and half-siblings mostly gone from its dunes.
He is thinking of the ghosts, who perch at the edge of his mind, the low susurrus that is a constant, now. He’s learned to block it out, to mute it (never entirely, but it becomes a sort of white noise he’s learned to live with). He lives with a constant sense of dread that one day he will hear Else’s voice amongst the ghosts, and know his worst fears have come to pass – that she has died, and he has failed her.
Did it hurt, comes a voice, and then he sees the filly – black, like him, though grey peppers at her skin and he thinks she will not be that way for long.
“Yes,” he says, before she continues on (it always hurts though. Doesn’t it?), to which he says, again, “yes.”
Yes, it hurt. Yes, it always hurts. He’s a boy who’s known hurt all his life, who isn’t even sure how to live without it.
(He almost likes it, sometimes. God help him, he almost likes it. Like it’s something he deserves. A stigmata.)
“Caius,” he says, and dips his head slightly in greeting. He tries to fold his wings back out of instinct, but there is nothing there, instead the flex and tension of muscles cause a rivulet of blood to trace a path down his shoulder, gentle as a caress.
c a i u s
vanquish x chantale
|
|
love is the red the rose on your coffin door, what's life like bleeding on the floor? The wild roses wither and die, akin to the shrivelled skin of those that lay forgotten beneath the soil. I replace the flowers, silently willing them to find a path on the hereafter. Part of me wonders if the years will shape me like they had shaped my mothers. Perhaps in time my coat will grey to the dishwater colour of my corpse-like dam. Forbidden are the signs of the mottling in patches on my shoulders. I am wearing away like the teeth that grind and wear the flesh from the bones.
I watch him, the bleeding, the broken. I watch him with the same curious gesture of a bird, looming from above a branch. He has been spared from rotting beneath soil and bone, and yet he looks as withered as those dried roses stop the graves.
'Caius.' I repeat his name. My tone lilts against the frost bitten wind. 'You bleed, Caius.' I offer, my tone hauntingly quiet, barely above a whisper. The lulls of Crimson that roll like tears from his wounds, they call to me. My steps are careful. Tentative in their movement to his side, where I lengthen my neck, attempting to press my dark nose to the drip, dripping life.
Where they destroy, they take. I attempt to give, to patch wounds too far gone, to sing a song for those lost, forgotten. The twang like copper, I breathe in. It is home, and yet wrong. So very wrong.
'They'll find you. You leave a trail. They'll find you.' I say, my voice quite meek, weak like the crushed bone beneath my corpse mother's hooves. I swallow the suspended breath in my throat, and say again, 'You're broken.' like the rattling bones that hang from trees, the fresh skin turning to leather in the sun. I shake my head, silver eyes like gloss, filling with the unshed tears of a hundred victims and for s hundred more. For Caius, for what he has had and for what he is. I cry because they cannot, and I can.
v a e r m i n a
chantale x nykeln
when is a monster not a monster?
oh, when you love it
He is no stranger to blood.
Indeed, when he had wings (large and black and foreboding, like his fathers, though his were feathered rather than taut skin), they had always hurt – growing them had hurt, their unfurling had hurt as they’d burst from him, unnatural, a malformation of the anatomy.
He had assumed they’d heal, did not realize he was an anomaly until he notices the soldiers around him get their wings, how they sprung fully made into being, a kinder magic.
(They disappeared the same way: there, then not. He is the only one with whom the wings were ripped from their joints, who was left bleeding.)
He doesn’t know why it happened to him differently. He wonders if it was because Beqanna sensed he was not meant to be a solider (he is too cowardly, much too cowardly), and treated him appropriately.
He wonders if it is because he is marked, somehow, that he is a creature who should be bled, whether by mother or magic.
She repeats his name and touches the blood there. He lets her, though he is wary. She is macabre, there is a graveyard promise about her, something he senses but cannot fully articulate.
“Who?” he asks, softly, “who will find me?”
He has no real enemies (no friends, either, and a lover whose location he doesn’t know). Even his dubious mark of prince is gone, stripped with the changing of the guard and Vanquish’s death, he has nothing to offer anymore.
You’re broken, she says, and her voice quavers and Caius doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to comprehend her.
“Yes,” he says, because it’s not a lie – he is a broken boy, always had been – but then, “the wings hurt when they were there, too. It’s not really different.”
c a i u s
vanquish x chantale
|
|
|
