"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
with her sweetened breath and her tongue so mean she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
She felt the birth of her sister like a new weight on her soul, like another strand of spider silk webbing outwards from her heart. But it was not until she felt the echo of hunger, the shadow of an ache in her belly, that she chose to follow the pull back to the child. If she died, if anyone died, Bright would feel that loss more keenly than anyone else would, anyone besides Woolf. Death was like poison in their veins, it ravaged the marrow of their bones and bled their magic dry. But even more than that, this one, this hungry little filly who had managed to drift from her careless mothers side, this one was hers. Her blood, her bone, her family.
Rage fluttered on featherless wings in the pit of her stomach.
She could have walked to the meadow to find her sister, could have grown a pair of wings with which to take to the skies to travel more quickly. But Bright did not have any intention of babysitting this new brittle soul once she did find her, and the plans she did have required something quicker. The use of this magic would not come without a price, but Woolf would understand why she had taken so much from him to do this.
Instead of opening new portals, tearing new holes in the fabric of time and space, she found old ones. The places that had been teleported to or from, the rips where magic had left gaps that could not be repaired. Time and space, once ripped apart, always had a soft spot, a flimsy half-healed scab and Bright was both willing and able to tear it back open and reuse it. It took less magic this way, if only by a little, and she would be able deliver this tiny new problem, the fault in their lineage, to her proper place.
It wasn’t the most direct route, but Bright quickly made her way to the meadow, following portals like worm holes to and fro. As soon as she saw the filly, bright white and iridescent, gleaming like an opal or the glaze of ice over refrozen snow, she knew who she was. For a moment she watched the filly, traced the ridge of her ribs like welts stretched across her sides, the corn silk wisps of a mane and tail so red they rivaled fresh blood spattered across fresh snow.
“Mine.” Was all she said, a quiet and intensely possessive word as she strode to the girls shoulder, touched it, and opened a brand new portal. The draw of magic was immense and she could feel the weight of it crushing in on her, knew Woolf would also be stumbling from the blow wherever he was at these days. But it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t kill them. It would just be a very long walk home for Bright. In the half second before the portal closed and swallowed them completely, a shadowy figure emerged from the trees. The elk was immense, a giant among giants and even his antlers stretched like branches over his head. It would have been suspicious enough to see the beast wandering the meadow, but the fact that he was the color of steel and pewter curved her mouth in a frown. There was just enough time to trace the look of quiet amusement on his face, and to watch it deepen when she tried to search his mind but found only stone to greet her prying. Her violet eyes widened and surprise course through her for the first time in her life.
“A pleasure, father.” She said with a quiet, disgruntled hiss just as the portal slammed shut.
The portal opened again and dropped them in the sand, and although the space was wide open, vast and gold and endless, there was one large, dark object looming immediately before them. There was no surprise in Bright’s imperial purple face when she met the gaze of Vanquish with the hint of a smile edging across her mouth. “For you, grandfather.” Her eyes leave his face for just a second to trace the white and cream of her half-sisters disoriented face. “She is to be called Faultline. She is your granddaughter.”
Mine. She thought possessively, the word like a brand on the forefront of every thought.
When dawn shattered across the sky like a pink and orange stain, she had not expected the day to be any different than the ones before it. The first had been good, when she had pressed close to her mother, close enough to feel the chill of ice in her cold chest. But it was a cold Faultline had known even in the womb, a cold she knew better than she knew anything else. But then they had become separated, maybe Faultline drifted too far or Bly could not force a love that would never be, but the days that had followed had been lonely and long.
On the third day, two days before this one, she had finally stopped looking for the mother she had come to realize must not be looking for her. Instead she tried to get close to the large steel and pewter Elk she had glimpsed several different times watching her through the trees. But he never seemed to let her get too close, and each time she stumbled after him on thin, spindle legs, there was only the imprint of his hooves in the mud and the warmth of where his monstrous body had been seconds before.
She watched him now, his antlers like small trees over his head, small but easily larger than her. This time she did not try to follow him, instead turning away to ignore him with hunched shoulders and a hungry belly growling at her like a wildcat. Before she had any indication of what was happening, there was a sound to her left, a nose on her shoulder, and she was being crushed against a warm body as the meadow (and the Elk) disappeared and they were emptied out onto sprawling gold sand.
With wild eyes the color of the palest gold, her attention wavered between that of the enormous black stallion and the far more slender amethyst mare. Although she was too young to understand true fear, to realize that this might mean danger, she could feel cold uncertainty trickling like ice water over her skin. In the next instant the opalescent white fur on her chest darkened to black and blue and the deepest purple, until it spilled further covering her like a bruise. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, so she was not startled, but she couldn’t help but stare at herself when it did. With her concentration now torn between three different things, she started to shrug warily backwards.
But a word caught her attention, and then another, and in a voice that sounded like a jar of broken glass she asked, “I have a family?”
And then as her face softened and her voice barely reached the pitch of a smothered whisper, “and a name. I get to be someone.”
02-16-2016, 09:52 PM (This post was last modified: 02-16-2016, 09:54 PM by Vanquish.)
Vanquish could taste the coming of magic like metal on his tongue, feel the familiar delicate tremble down his spine that he had grown so accustomed to living and lusting amongst magical beings. And so he pauses as he builds his wall, sweat like an oil sheen across his black flesh and he waits for it to come.
The pair appeared before him - smelling of blood and hunger. There was nary a mark on the pearlescent filly but he could smell the malnutrition on her breath and see her ribs protesting out against her delicate skin and he frowns deeply - such was not meant for a child of his lineage. “For you, grandfather”, the amethyst mare says and a smile replaces the displeasure on his lips when he recognizes that it is her that smells of blood, that it is her that smells like Woolf had. The pair shared the same cold reservation about their gaze, the same emotionless tone in their throats – but Vanquish smiles nonetheless. “You are my granddaughter as well,” the dragon says, reminding her as he closes the gap of space between them, although he does not press the matter. There are more immediate concerns that begged his attentions.
These were children built of Tarnished’s blood, he could feel Nocturnal’s presence especially poignant in the twins that smelled of blood, Woolf and Bright. Memories start to slide through his thoughts before they are steadied by the filly that had begun to change before him. The titan chuckles out loud as she changes from black to blue and then finally resting on purple – like her siblings, he notes.
A dragon’s wing branches out from his side to envelope the girl – still shifting colors in his embrace. He peers down at her, “You aren’t just part of any family,” he admonishes softly, “you are of Nightwalker’s blood,” he says – voice hard and heavy, “of Dragon’s blood,” he says, gaze reaching out to Bright’s now as he spoke of Nocturnal. “And your name is Faultline,” he reinforces the purple mare’s christening of his grandchild, dipping his head down to rub against her small cheek, “this is your home.”
Vanquish’s gaze lifts to catch Bright’s, it was obvious that bringing them here had taxed her powers which were still growing in their youngness. “You should stay for a moon or so, rest yourself,” he says and his voice lacked the usual authority it held – replaced instead by hopeful suggestion.
with her sweetened breath and her tongue so mean she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
She meant to leave immediately and would have done so if not for the first words Vanquish spoke to her. They were blunt and possessive and she could feel the traitorous way her being wrapped gleefully around them. At first she was as still as stone watching him, but a moment later a small, reluctant smile slipped across the thin line of her mouth. “Yes.” She says at last, agreeing with him with a nearly imperceptible tilt of her refined, imperious head. “You are mine and I am yours.” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully and she turned to look at the small child cowering uncertainly beneath an impossibly large and dark wing. “Family.” But this word is spoken with less reverence as she notes the way her ribs swell like welts above her skin.
Her attention lingers on Faultline a bit longer and her eyes narrow again with a strange sort of clinical curiosity. It was so intriguing to Bright that this girl who must have been hungry for days and alone for even longer than that had not been frightened by the enormous cervidae stalking her, their father as Bright had come to realize, but now shrank away from two horses. Granted one had pulled her through a portal and the other was distinctly reminiscent of an imposing dragon-type creature. Bright sighed resignedly with a furrowing of her brow. “You know, you’re scaring her.” It wasn’t really a question and it certainly wasn’t an accusation, but there was something there that glittered knowingly across the surface of her pale violet eyes.
A thin smile spread across her mouth when the filly scowled at her and allowed the enormous stallion to drawn her into the space beneath his wing. “Family.” She said again with a smile that glinted like the edge of a steel blade as though that explained everything.
Vanquish addresses Faultline, pulling her closer still with a story of words meant to enchant, a story of words Bright already knew well. Still she listened regardless, pleased again with the way he was so saturated in the pride of his ever-growing family. Mine. She thought in agreement with him, conceited in a way he was not and yet completely unconcerned. And then to him once his attention has turned on her as though her possessive thought had tickled his consciousness, “I’ve already stayed longer than I meant to. I can stay one more night.”
It isn’t quite what he had requested but it was more than she conceded for most. Her exhaustion would not have kept her from dragging herself all the way back to the meadow to look for the elk-stallion, her elusive father, but it did provide a good excuse for her to delay her plans. What’s more was that she found a strange feeling of want itching beneath her skin as unwelcomed curiosity traced probing fingers at the innermost workings of Vanquish himself. She had not expected to see so much of her own possessiveness in him and now that she did she was unready to look away.
02-22-2016, 09:38 PM (This post was last modified: 02-22-2016, 10:52 PM by faultline.)
chances are we bruise the same
Uncertainty fluttered in her small chest like a jar of trapped butterflies. Not for the first time in the past few minutes, Faultline finds herself wondering if perhaps this wasn’t all just a part of some strange dream. After all, the mind of someone half starved and wholly lonely was not the soundest place to be and currently she was both. More-so was the fact that dreams tended to take impossible routes that made sense in the moment but became impossible to explain immediately afterwards. Like portals for instance, or an elk the size of a tree, dragon wings on the largest horse she’d ever seen. Once, twice, her heart stuttered in her chest as she looked wildly between Bright and Vanquish.
But then the purple one had the audacity to point out the way Vanquish had her rattled so deeply that the blood in her veins ran cold like ice and her bones clacked together like stones. Faultline felt her chest puff a little as she allowed the black giant to tuck her close beneath the cool leather of his wing.
Immediately, she thawed.
His warmth was intoxicating after so many days alone. She can smell sand and sun on his skin and she buries herself against those thick legs as he tells her impossible, fairytale things. His nose touches her cheek and she tilts her small face up to him, pressing the soft of her delicate nose to his cheek in return. Some part of her stills, the fluttering in her chest and the quiver of bone, and so too do the colors shifting like a bruise across her skin. They fade away completely and are replaced by her birth colors, the shimmering opalescent white and champagne, the imperious crimson of a blood red mane. She didn’t feel like hiding herself from them anymore.
But then a thought creeps back inside her mind, latching on like a parasite and she sways just a little beside him. Her color remains the same, but dark shadows appear in the depths of her eyes when she turns suddenly to look at them both. Her voice is impossibly small and sad and there is something so close to heartbreak there that even Bright seems to flinch with displeasure.
