"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
Freedom is intoxicating. Her choices are limitless, and Ana almost feels overwhelmed with the amount of them. Should she stalk the small children in the playground today? Should she creep into the kingdoms by night and listen in on their concerns? She laughs to herself, and the sound is chilling, her mouth splitting into a smile punctuated by her inky black teeth. Now that the day had bled from the sky, Anastasia finally felt awake; she finally felt alive as soon as darkness stole across the land and blanketed it wholly.
Rising from where she had been asleep, she stretches languidly, her mane matted and lost as it pressed up against her neck. She yawns and opens up a portal before her, stepping through it with the confidence of one to whom black magic came easily. Within a second, she is in the meadow, and it is nearly deserted. Her predator’s head swings from side to side, yellow eyes peering out into the bowl of the land.
It is then that she spots the…other. Male or female, she cannot decide, and she does not particularly care. Shadows cling to her as she drops her head, her step going from curious to predatory, her motions made without noise, her shadow-self emitting no scent. There was thrill in the hunt, although Ana never felt any hunger. It was, instead, a trait learned from her panther-father. The hunt was power. It meant stalking your prey for hours on end if necessary; it meant wielding control over another’s very life.
Like freedom, it was intoxicating.
But, it was also boring by yourself, and when Ana realized that there was no challenge, no snarling father goading her on and then beating her to the punch, she grew tired of it. Yawning, she cracked open another portal and then another, stepping through and then letting the portal spit her out again directly in front of the other creature. “Hello,” she snapped in her harsh voice, lips spreading into her Jack-o-lantern grin, yellow eyes wide. If she did not want to eat, perhaps she could at least get the satisfaction of fear.
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
Freedom felt like an impossible thing. The kind of notion you have in a dream that feels so important, so perfect that you could build a life on it. The kind of notion that when you wake up and try to put it together, none of the pieces fit and it’s so painfully incoherent and irrelevant that it feels like you’ve lost everything even though there was nothing there to lose at all. That was freedom.
Freedom was an illusion.
Malis could remember her childhood easily, back when it had just been mom and dad and the wild green of deep jungle. It was after father had first been sick, after her parents had dragged themselves to the Chamber to bring the dead back to life and after that everything was, for a moment in time, just right. Either their burdens hadn’t existed yet, or she had simply been too young to notice them, to share the weight resonating in their eyes, but she had felt free.
She had known freedom.
Except-
As the years passed and their happy family grew and shattered under its own weight, it became painfully clear that freedom existed only to be taken, only to be denied. It was the world’s way of tangling its fingers in the membranes of your soul until all willpower had been sucked drier than the bleached bones washed up on the beach.
Freedom was an illusion.
The night stretched impossibly dark overhead and stars flickered in and out of view through the leaves trembling noiselessly at their moorings on the branches. When the mare appears suddenly from a portal of darkness, Malis barely flinches. It isn’t that she’s unafraid, in fact the sudden pressure in her stomach feels a lot like the absence of courage, but there was nothing surprising that her demons had at last come to find her, to collect her.
“Hello.” She says, and her voice is low and husky, and she wills the trembling of her heart in her chest not to bleed into the blue of her deliberately stoic face. For a moment her eyes drop and wander first to the black chesire smile, and then to the rest of the creature who seemed blacker than black, colorless – for what claim can a shadow have to any color. But then her eyes snap back upwards to drown in the glow of shapeless yellow. “I always knew you’d come for me eventually.”
Stoic still, but it’s the biggest lie she’s ever told, for she can feel the way her blood turns to ice in her veins and the marrow in her bones turns to dust with the way she forces the tremors to the deepest part of her broken, used up soul.
Fear was almost as sating as an actual meal—or at least, Anastasia liked to imagine that it was. She had never truly enjoyed eating and thus had no way of knowing its pleasure, but feeling the fear of prey was certainly pleasing in its own right for her. So when she sees the mare’s stoic face, feels the tremors of fear in the air, she shivers with her own joy. This was exactly what she needed; this is what she wanted.
“Come for you?” she echoes in her own broken voice, her tongue clumsy as it wrapped around each word—as if discovering the syllables for the first time. For all the ways that Anastasia was graceful (melting through the shadows of night, stalking her prey, bleeding from the portals), her tongue inherited none of it. Her conversations are spotty, jolting, broken from the beginning. She did not mind.
Moving toward Malis, she presses herself against the mare, breaking the seal of personal space. Her nose goes to the mare’s indigo neck, and she breathes in deeply, marking the scent down for future recollection. “Did not come for you,” she grunts, lips pulling back from her teeth as she contemplates sinking them into the other’s flesh before deciding it against it and putting them away. “Can take you though.”
Stepping back, she considers her newest toy, wondering what she wanted to do with it. Finally, she just gives the other mare a grin, lips stretched too tight. “Scream,” she requests, tail snapping behind her haunches. She takes another step forward and she can feel the acid bubbling on her lips, the sound breaking the sound of the silence between them. “Ana-sta-sia likes the sound of screams.”
like the moon, we borrow our light {I am nothing but a shadow in the night}
