"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
10-18-2015, 03:50 PM (This post was last modified: 10-18-2015, 04:02 PM by Makai.)
She had children with another.
The truth of it stabs at him relentlessly, and it drives him mad—and he wonders if it possible to die from sheer pain. He runs until he can no longer catch his breath. He picks fights with passing strangers. He throws himself against the trees and rocks until his coat is a map of scars and puckered flesh. The sickness is beginning to creep up on him, but he ignores it. Even though he is losing weight and his coughs are flecked with blood, he does not venture to the Chamber where he would be able to heal himself. Instead, he defies the kingdom’s one rule when giving him life. Perhaps dying would not be so bad, after all.
Today is no different. He is slick with sweat and froth, his eyes wild and his nostrils flaring. His normally wild mane and forelock is tamed with the exertion, and his sides heave, only emphasizing the illness that has begun to strip him of his youthful vitality. He is still handsome, but it is a shadow of his true self. He is a carcass that is still animated. He is living a shell of a life, and he knows he has no one else to blame.
It is afternoon when he finds her, and at first, he almost does not stop—would not have stopped were it not for the blood smeared on her. It fascinates him, and he forgets his manners, if he had any to begin with. He is a wild, feral thing as he comes up beside her, pressing against her side, sniffing at the blood on her. “Is that yours?” he growls, the crimson smearing on his own coat. The metallic tang of it drove him a little over the edge, and he found that he hungered—for what, he didn’t know. “Who are you?”
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
I was looking for a breath of life another taste of divine rush
Straia already had Erebor when Shaytan joined the Chamber, and ever since then she’s been obsessively infatuated with the tobiano Queen. Luckily for Shay, Straia indulges her to a point, and never paraded her blossoming relationship with Weed in the spotted mare’s face. But there will probably come a time when Straia will have another child, and Shaytan will have to face the fact that Straia loves someone else more. But until then, she can live in a little fantasy where the two of them are secret lesbian loves and every other favor she bestows on others is purely due to Chamber politics.
Shaytan is Straia’s favorite until proven otherwise.
Nevermind that Gryffen. He is useful. But Shaytan is whom Straia secretly adores.
Did she not plead for human-Shay to save her, whilst Sayaa peeled her lovely, beautiful coat from her own muscles? She didn’t ask for Gryffen or Weed or Kushiel. No, she called out to Shay. But Shay couldn’t save her, even after beating herself bloody on the windowpane - and that vision has stayed with her. It is what drives her to the shadows, skirting all light until the sun goes away. It is some sort of stress that sends her tongue salivating over everything that takes a step into her domain. Bigger creatures - horses, turkeys, deer - she obviously can’t kill. Squirrels are difficult, too, they’re already super skittery. But Shay knows how to kill the bunnies. Oh yes, Shay loves to kill those bunnies.
She even saw a moose once. It took her back to her first days after the nightmare, and the crazy mare she met. Ha! How anyone could kill a moose is beyond her. The lying, stupid, girl.
Bunny! She freezes, muscles locking into place as the furry little critter comes into view. And then, with the most discipline that Shaytan has ever demonstrated, she slowly, deliberately moves towards it. Sometime she wins and sometimes she loses - but this happens to be a winning day, and this wascally wabbit will join its brethren in a discarded pile half a mile off - a gift for the foxes or coyotes, or maybe just the vultures. He catches her after she’s drained the blood and disposed of the carcass, reeking of sweat and man and something else (the thing that drives him like that).
He is all stallion; thus, Shay’s initial reaction is to recoil. But he persists, drawing her attention to her blood-stained mouth and hot, metallic breath. She laughs, dismissing his question with a single word. “Rabbit,” and while she isn’t always the type to give her name, she does. Because she can, and because why not? “Shaytan. Who are you? Why run… like that?”
What she means is - why run as if you want to kill yourself?
He laughs at her answer, and the sound is grating—harsh against his lips. “You kill rabbits?” he is almost incredulous at it, delirious with exhaustion, but he does not give her any space, continues to press against her. “Why?” She is fascinating—a diversion—and he finds he wants to, needs to know more. He needs to know what drives her to rip life from a small, helpless creature; why she needs to gorge on its life.
Makai noses at her neck again, nothing if not persistent. “Shaytan.” Her name feels right in his mouth, heavy as gunmetal. There was nothing feminine or soft about her, and he does not expect that from her. She is harsh lines and crudely drawn, and he finds that he appreciates that about her in this moment. There is not a single thing about her that reminds him of Oksana. There is nothing here to draw forth his ghosts.
“Because it’s the only thing left to do,” he says and his voice is raspy. “My name is Makai.” What he wants to say is that he is death, that he is dead. He wants to tell her that he is coughing blood now, and he wants to say that he kills everything that he loves—that he has a habit of tearing apart everything that he had once held dear. His own brother had killed him; he had deserved to die. So now he runs until he can no longer breath in the hopes that he won’t. If only he could run until the life bled from his body.
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
I was looking for a breath of life another taste of divine rush
His voice is on edge - it reminds her of the nightmare so she pins her ears back for a hot second, and shakes her head to dislodge the thoughts. Shay’s found it’s better not to dwell on it. Push it away, like it never happened; as if she never saw Straia skinned alive, and she was never ever ever ever ever changed into a little white rabbit. The stallion has desperation and mania on his breath and in his eyes. She should be frightened. She dislikes the closeness, but the rest of the red flags aren’t popping up the way they normally do. Pffffft. What is normal anyway?
But attention is attention, and given that no one else has any for her, she’ll settle for this weirdo (ha! the pot is calling the kettle black), who is oh-so-invested in her odd little tendencies. Her hobby? Yes, let’s call it her hobby. Her only hobby.
Shaytan snorts, because the answer is so very obvious. “Because I have to.” The spotted mare hadn’t been born with the inclination, but she must have some sort of obsessive personality, because there are a few things that have grown on her to the point where she can’t even think of living without them. She licks her lips, catching the tang of dried specks on her whiskers. “And I like the sound they make.” She chuckles deviously, a deranged sound in the back of her throat. If Makai couldn’t tell before, there is definitely something a little off with this one… a little off, indeed.
In a fit of inspiration (what idiot is not the occasional genius?) she presses back. Not in a sexual manner, obviously, but in a… see, i can play this game too, kind of way. “Want to see something cool, Makai? I’ve got a tree on fire, but doesn’t burn.” I mean it’s not her tree, it’s the Chamber’s. Which means that it is also hers. But not just hers.
He does not notice that something is off about her; he is in no place to notice anything deranged about anyone when he was so clearly falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. Mania races through his veins, and it controls his thoughts, and he does not notice anything except the fact that she smells like metal and she does not push him away when he leans into her. In fact, she pushes back. For a second, just a single one, he remembers how he had collided with Oksana in much the same way. He remembers how he had devoured her because of how she had smelled like the Chamber—like the father that he had thought dead. He had been wrong, of course. His father was living again.
One of the many wasted hours of anguish in his life.
His mind snaps back to Shaytan from the memory, just in time for her to tell him of the tree, and that is when it clicks—that is when he smells the Chamber on her coat. His eyes narrow, his mouth pulling tight, and he leans back from her. “You are from the Chamber,” his voice is flat now, the emotion bleeding from it, and it is not a question. He would recognize that scent of pine on anyone. He curses at himself for not recognizing it from the first second he had crashed into her. He curses himself for being drawn to it.
“I will never go back there,” he growls, but of course, he knows that is a lie. Eventually, he would have to return to it if he wanted to live. Otherwise, the kingdom would bleed his life from him. She controlled the strings to his life and the second that he assumed he was safe, was the second she’d snip them completely. He may want death, but he was not ready for it again—not yet. He was not ready to concede to her.
MAKAI
I'm a dead man walking here but that's the least of all my fears
I was looking for a breath of life another taste of divine rush
She’s never encountered anyone who is repulsed by the Chamber; by her - yes. But by the Kingdom itself? All she’s known is respect and occasional fear. Unless they’re from the Gates, in which case Shaytan expects anger - not disgust and - whatever else he’s got going on. Self loathing? This is weird for Shaytan. And Shay has a hell of a lot of weirdness in her life already.
Shaytan does not ride an emotional rollercoaster like so many others do. She follows her wants, and when she doesn’t get what she wants, there is frustration. But other than that, her heart is tied to love only in the way of lust, and even that is a fickle creature. An ‘out of sight, occasionally out of mind’ creature, specifically. A bewildered expression crosses her face, and she takes a step back from the black stallion. “Yes…” she answers, trailing off in obvious confusion. Dude. Chill out.
”Ok… well…” she looks around, weighing her options. She could leave. Or he could leave. This didn’t really go the way she’d planned and without a clear path, Shaytan is about to flounder in shallow water. Social skills may not be Makai’s forte, but it sure as hell isn’t hers either - and she doesn’t have a philandering lover as an excuse. “Then what do you want to do?”
Makai’s feelings toward the Chamber are complicated at best. It is the land of his father and the land that was responsible for bringing him back to life—but it was also the land that held the strings to that same life. He was grateful for the air in his lungs but resentful that he did not control his own destiny; he did not like that he could be called to her side at any given moment. He did not like that she simply had to snap her fingers, and he would be helpless to say ‘no.’ She had given him life, but it had come with a cost.
But her clear discomfort with his reaction is enough to drag him back to the surface of his thoughts, and he can only shake his head at her—can only stare at her with the intensity of his gaze. “You tell me,” he demands and coughs, blood splattering the ground beneath him, his coat clinging to the skeleton of his ribs. “You tell me what I should do. I am clearly not making good decisions for myself anymore.”
He presses against her further, and he turns his teeth onto her coat, closing his eyes and imagining she is Oksana. He tastes the blood and the sweat and the pine-needle scent of the Chamber. He is not shy about the way that he curls around her, and he does not ask politely. His mouth wanders from her jaw to her neck and he is breathing hard—his poisoned lungs constricting painfully in his chest.
She is not Oksana, her coat is not the same burnished copper. She does not have wings curled dangerously at her sides, and she does not smell of fresh grass and mountain air—but he is sick enough to pretend that she is. He is sick enough to taste Oksana when his mouth lingers on her neck. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he finally whispers, eyes still closed, body still pressed against her. “Just tell me.”
you're the fire and the flood and I'll always feel you in my blood
