and I pray to blades of grass

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

A vicious peel, the sudden rending of air – a sharp, single crack; a bright cleft in the sky – so impossibly close that she feels her fur stand on end, pulled in by the immense charge of electricity expanding the air.

She is a sweet, untouched thing. 

A face that has never been creased or careworn, save for moments at night when she is wrested from sleep by strange images brought on queer, dark wings. These last for a second or so, as she blinks and breathes; reality hastily pares off the skin of illusion – and there, all around, is all she knows. The soft touch of moss and the brush of air, like fingers intertwining with a tingle; the convivial gathering of animal friends. 

She knows dreamlike things, though barely and only distantly. Like something that has been but is not anymore. Perhaps never was. Perhaps she doesn’t know them at all; knew and know have been violently rived from one another and all her memories of that womb shaken loose.

She knows her father’s voice and for a short time, she has known the warm yield of sand.

She does not know war, nor tidings of war.

She squints, peering past singed blue sky into the bright, white of the sun and its companions… Lightening. Her brow furrows and in her mind she goes over all she knows of the sky. That mauve, orange and pink can mean either the head or tail of a day; that bright red means good promises and darkness in day means ill winds. 

But clear and clement skies, those do not often beget lightning…

* * * *

Tears find their way down her cheek, leaving damp and darkened stains. She presses her lips to the Oak and stifles a sob, her body wracked with a shiver. She cannot bring herself to mouth the word again. Father? She closes her golden eyes tight.

Faraway, over mountain spires and badlands, angry cries came from lungs, the likes of which she cannot even imagine. Dragon’s lungs; great, ironclad organs. Vengeance and anger had roused her muscles and sent her stoking her belly like a furnace and bellowing inferno. Across Beqanna, a hundred souls reap the harvest of their chaos and dragonfire. The sky filled with caustic, dark ash and it looked as if it could have been early evening, how darkness ebbed out light the way storm clouds do sometimes; a sort of violent kind of sundown.

And when the wind had brought the scent her brain had squealed in white hot panic.

For a long time she waited. Frozen and smelling the faint scent of singed horsehair and sand. Waited among a herd of dorcas gazelle, nervous and pacing. Waited for the yells to die down and then waited a bit longer still. And then she had tiptoed, quiet in the give of sand, to the place where she thought the first spark of electricity must have been conducted.

She had seen only the briefest glimpse of lifelessness. One body, slumped like a rock or felled wood, but flesh and bone like her. And she had run to the Oasis. Run past beautiful pricky pear, orange like a sunset and passionate paintbrush, red like good promises.

She hears a stirring and her head jerks up, she turns to the noise and sniffs. “Father?” There is relief in her voice, thick like honey.

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

“Ooooh.”

He clucks his tongue and shakes his head. He watches as she curls back and lets the airy release that she had saved for her father choke back into her lungs like poison; her eyes dart around, golden and watery. Fear. Sadness. 
A carnage of hope and breath spent in vain – he had not come, pity – and now her heart beats fast. A dinner bell to a feast. Poor thing.

“Afraid not.”

He stays invisible. He’s risked too much already. He has too many enemies, even if he doesn’t know the half of it. Bloodhounds snorting his trail for a fix, fiending. Or at least, he’d like to think that is the scene playing out somewhere in his forest – wolves, dragons, measly girls gripping retribution to their chest as it were a shield that could protect them. Foolish. But scarier things, too. Monsters. More monster than him, at least in the way their meat can reshape into savagery.

Glorious. 

He envies them and admires them. They are all the pantheon of minor deities; they are the bumps in the night, though not all of them use their gifts for a higher, cleansing purpose. That’s a shame. He’d made the most of the things the northern magic had given him.

How many of them will actually muster the will to break their comfortable inertia and seek him out, when it comes to it?
He’s a betting man, and he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a single one of them yet.

* * * *

He had paced like a caged elephant. Adrenaline spiked his blood, heady and warm.
‘Knowing of your capabilities, I think I may have a proposition for you.’ Demian’s words had been sweet. His proposition…

Oh.

How fun.

The palomino stallion stared at the wall, rising high into the sky – ash and smoke and the gathering darkness of evening. At the opening, dug deep into its belly. A hole to the tender place inside.
He had always pictured one of his things drying out. Desiccating and keeping some form, dry leather on bones. It would be beautiful. It would never spoil and it could be the centermost jewel in his crown.

He left a squall of sand in his wake, and the strangeness of his two-toed prints were not given enough time to form clearly at the speed he was travelling. He leaves leaving nondescript craters in the soft, giving ground and shallow, white scrapes in the stone tunnel from his horns.

He bellowed, a wild and guttural call, and listened to it bounce off the stone around him. The utterly unguarded pathway into the heart of their home.

* * * *

He places his lips against her ear, breathing down her temple. “Don’t be too scared. No point really. Just breathe and think of old daddy, hm?” 

He has her quivering. (The Oasis is dark, to her. Impossibly dark – darker than it really is, but just as dark and lonely as he wills her to see it – and strewn with shadows that move. Though she cannot see him as he is, she can see dark vapors where he shifts and stops to peruse the softness of her skin, or the hardness of her cheek, with his flexible lips. In that dark vapor, two eyes like white headlights blinks and turn over her. A monster.)
“I guess there’s nothing to be done,” he speaks sadly, pressing his bridge against hers – forehead to forehead, nose to nose and she is helpless to pull away – and closes his eyes, “once it’s there, it’s so hard to shake. Normally, I’d like to leave it with you, a little gift. But I don’t think you’ll get to unwrap it. It’s a shame, it really does just keep giving.”

She whimpers. He feeds on it. To him, it is erotic in a strange way, and the arousal he feels is a many-headed beast but tonight he’ll taste just one part of her. That end part. The bottommost place of life where she sees herself letting go and he releases her. They dance, bodies of flesh and keratin, until hers is heavy and there is nothing in her network of nerves and synapses left to keep her standing.
And he wins.

There is always a winner and a looser here.

He makes quick work. He has been sent here for younger morsels, and he must find them and their barbed cell before the dragons return to their roost, and see if he can’t pick them out like mice by their tails. 

She had been his.

He whips her head with his curved horns, his double scythes, cracking against her flesh and rattling the bones apart. (More than once, because skull are thick.) She falls, limp across the roots of the large oak tree, blood peeking from cuts on her face. Her mouth gapes open and closed, sucking in breath or simply giving to death shudders. The left side of her face is swollen, bruised and misshapen.
He takes everything and leaves nothing.

But this is war.

Okay, done talking to myself.
@[Tarnished] and anyone else. Pollock is gone, by the way. Definitely from the scene, and possibly from the Desert entirely. Possibly.