01-16-2016, 02:41 PM
The lamb returns, birthed in the queer stillness that envelops them. It stares at each of them in turn, and when its gaze falls on her she stares back. She recalls a quote, somewhere: if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.
She thinks that’s what this is like – a lamb (an abyss) staring into her with a gaze she couldn’t in a million years fathom.
She waits for it to speak but it does no such thing. It moves – glides, really – and for the first time Hickory realizes what lies upon the ground.
Four stones on the ground. On them are old runes, a language that seems both familiar and impossible at once. Her eyes trace the curves and lines, try to realize the language she knows is far too archaic for her, feels like somehow, if she could decipher them, she could make it right.
(Whatever this is. Whatever right is.)
But she cannot speak the ancient tongue writ across the stones. She cannot decipher the lamb. So she does the only thing she can – she watches.
The bells don’t toll, but she thinks she hears them all the same.
The lamb moves far too quick for a mortal creature. It looks at her again. She shudders.
The abyss will also gaze into you.
And what will the abyss see there? A mare carved out and filled with history, a destiny she doesn’t fulfill. A woman emptied, a creature of anhedonia and little else.
A vessel, waiting to be filled.
The excitement comes again, fills her throat like liquor. The air is both dead and alive at once.
The lamb touches one of the rocks – one of the seals.
(It’s so obvious, now. But what are they sealing in?)
The seal shatters as if the lamb’s hoof had been a grenade. Shrapnel flies everywhere, rips and shreds through the unerringly still air. Someone gasps. Maybe it’s her. The noise sounds too loud, here.
Before she can move, perhaps creep closer to investigate the shattered seal, laughter fills the air the way the bells had. But the laughter is filled with a macabre delight.
A flash, and Hickory blinks.
Another.
From the trees comes a stallion, yellow eyes like lanterns. His head is high, a triumph in his stride, and he is terrible and beautiful both.
He whispers a word - conquest - and Hickory doesn’t know if it’s his name or a demand.
The word repeats itself, seems to gather strength, like a stone rolling downhill.
She senses the strength of him, the power, and the same queer excitement still in her veins. A part of her wants to kneel before this strange and horrendous thing, this monster churned out from the trees and ashes.
Conquest.
More creatures come, as if beckoned. They are astoundingly normal and monsters both, like somewhere a nuclear bomb had gone off and they had spent decades drinking radiation.
A wolf snarls, a bear growls. A coyote yips, a high screechy sound that is somehow the worst of them all. She feels her own growl grow in her throat.
The Seal.
The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere. The stallion hisses and coils back as if struck.
The epiphany is brilliant.
He wants out.
The choice lingers, unspoken in the air. He can be helped, or he can be stopped.
The darkness is like a song, beckoning. He exudes power and pain and it’s is hard to be immune from it.
Kneel.
And what would she have, if she kneeled? She sees a warrior woman, dressed in armor and thorns, escorted by a giant millipede. Another one speaking to him, and then a consummation that makes her turn away, bile in her throat.
Kneel.
Her knees tremble. She hasn’t moved. Some of them cry out each other’s names, but she knows no one’s names, no one’s faces.
She is the last of her line, and she is alone.
The warrior woman stalks forward, the millipede writing between her legs in a macabre symbiosis.
“Are you coming?” she asks, but Hickory doesn’t respond. Can’t, maybe.
Kneel.
Kneel, and there will be power, will be prestige.
(The darkness is like a song.)
Her shaking knees would love to kneel, would love to join them - it seems most have gone to him.
The stallion - the monster - comes to the warrior’s side. He regards Hickory with a gaze that feels like spotlights. She smells death on him, a putrescence that makes her recoil.
“I’ll ask once more,” he says, his voice like knives, like poison.
Her knees shake.
Kneel.
(Somewhere in her is steel. Somewhere in her is a thing that won’t kneel, not like this, not before such a filthy and despicable god.)
“No,” she says.
(It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.)
He doesn’t respond, instead lunges at her. She expects his teeth to rip her skin, but instead it’s merely a touch, a pressure that’s almost light and sweet.
Immediately her skin feels like it’s been set aflame, it begins to slough off where he had touched.
She senses the poison will spread.
(Pain is an odd thing, to her. It almost doesn’t matter. It’s been so long since anything mattered.)
The stallion turns and walks away, but the warrior does not. She fixes her with an unwavering gaze before bursting forward like a snake.
Her wounds do not leave her skin sloughed, but leave toothmarks raked across Hickory’s bay back.
She doesn’t fight, instead she runs, and the warrior and her minion turn their attentions to someone else.
Another piece of skin falls, hits the earth without a sound.
He wants out.
The Seal had kept him in, and maybe - maybe if it’s pieced back together, he will go back to whence he came.
Maybe.
It’s worth a try.
(The darkness is like a song.)
She searches, desperate, muzzle to the ground as she hunts for the pieces of shrapnel. Someone's cries out not far from her. She flinches, waits for an attack, but nothing comes.
Blood from her back wounds trail down her ribs like fingers running across her skin.
Finally, her hoof hits something hard with a clunk. She nudges aside the grass and there it is, a piece of the seal.
She places her lips over it, brings it into her mouth. She will take it back. She will make the seal whole again.
(She will try.)
And if they catch her first, she will swallow it.
Let them tear it out of her.
She will not kneel, not today.
Tl;dr - Hickory was touched by conquest and given an undefined disease that makes your skin fall off, was also attacked by Lagertha (per Sarah's ooc note that we may use her), is fighting against conquest, and has a piece of the seal in her mouth.
This was also all written on my phone so apologies for the disaster.