kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: OOC (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=24) +--- Forum: Archive (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=81) +---- Forum: Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=98) +----- Forum: Tephra (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=85) +------ Forum: Islandres (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=42) +------ Thread: kill your darlings - Aedan, any (/showthread.php?tid=27555) |
kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Crackjaw - 08-12-2020 She comes without intent, drifting across Beqanna like a bit of spiderweb caught on the wind. There is little more to her than that, little more than skin stretched tight across bones, but Crackjaw never dies, she simply starves and strays and doesn't grow. The bones that carry her are as brittle as they are evident, and so it is lucky that when she clambered over the rocky foot of the volcano and stepped blindly into the sea that the tide was low, the sandbar just covered by an inch of sparkling blue water, or she might have simply washed away. The tide is coming in, now, though and the thin girl cannot cross again - she does not know how to swim - but her attention is elsewhere. Here, even more than the jungles of Tephra with their grid of magma that burns her feet, fragrant, delicate flowers perfume the warm air, and, when she investigates them, she finds the soft tropical fruits growing there without season.The trees here do not know winter, they bloom and bear fruit year-round. Crackjaw, though she has been, up until now, a rather empty vessel wandering the world yet retaining none of it like a cracked vase, knows that this is a Good Place, and she settles to remain at least until being driven away. The smell of mangos is bright and rich, and their skin is so soft that when she laps one up from the dirt like a dog and presses it against the jagged edges of her upper teeth, the flesh splits easily. Juice runs like a river from her jawless maw as she extracts what she can, until all that is remains is the pithy husk, too fibrous for her. She lets in fall with a soft noise back into the sand and moves on to the next, and the next, until her belly grumbles with the sound of too much sugar, and then she grows still, almost unnaturally still, and stares blankly out at the water, her alabaster ears twisting like antennae. It's almost as if she's paying attention. Crackjaw @[Aedan] have this weird creature. RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Aedan - 08-20-2020 aedan the night is more alive and more @[Crackjaw] RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Crackjaw - 08-26-2020 lazy table She leaks all the time - mainly memories, tumbling in through her eyes and her ears and dropping out from the bottom of her skull like the discarded mango pits scattered in the sand nearby. If she cannot taste them, cannot catch them up in her tongue, she so rarely remembers. Is it a relic of her genes, imperfect and repetitive as they are - or the hoof-strike that nearly killed her in her first hours? It was, perhaps, the days, the weeks of lying still in the early spring snow, left for dead? It might be impossible to separate the effects of one from the other but together combined they leave her rather empty on the beach like the seashells littered across it, cracked skeletons and broken homes vacant of their tenants. The young mare does not seem to hear him, though his hooves crunch in the white beach sand so deliciously. It's a lie, sand has no flavor of it's own, but it has a horrifying texture, one particular inclined to wedge in every crack and crevice between your teeth and stick unpleasantly to your tongue, so though she hears his footsteps, they drift away from her like ghosts. She refuses to remember them. His soft call washes over her like a gentle wave, and because she knows so few gentle things, like a fisherman, it reels her rambling attention off the hypnotizing sea, all the way back to the shore where two horses stand, a lovely stallion and a strange skinny girl-- Ah, no, that's just her again. Sometimes, she forgets, thinks she's someone else, yet it rarely turns out that way. Actually, never, that she can remember. Yellow eyes seem to focus slowly when they turn to trace the star-speckled stallion and she eats up the space between them. He wears those stars so beautifully, not like the connect-the-dots that curl across her own body, a thin mockery of his night-sky skin. Are you okay? If her father had given her more of himself, perhaps she might have a better talent for mimicry. Alas, the pink, fleshy tongue curling against the ridged roof of her mouth is entirely equine - clumsy, at best, tripping over syllables made by creatures wearing a second jaw. "Nah," she has never been okay, she has only been not dying, but her thoughts don't stop at his polite concern. The fisherman reels her in beyond their conversation and she wonders what the night sky tastes of, what are the flavors of the stars, "Nah. Taste?" It sounds like a question but she doesn't wait for permission, or for him to puzzle out her meaning, instead she stretches forward to run her tongue over the slick stars that dust his ribs. Salt, she will remember, Stars taste of salt. Crackjaw tastes like water spiked with strange @[Aedan] RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Aedan - 09-01-2020 aedan the night is more alive and more @[Crackjaw] RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Crackjaw - 09-06-2020 She presses the taste of the stars to the roof of her mouth and finds herself surprised - she did not expect this. Yet, the scattered stars that rest across his shoulders like a magician's cape do rather look like salt rime gathering on rocks at low tide and so she nods and decides it is right. Stars are another kind of salt. Like sweat. Like the sea. What do I taste like? "Lahk teahs." The words form slowly, carefully. She is not fully without language. Bits and pieces come to her, sometimes enough to be understood, though she avoids long sentences. It becomes too difficult to remember the words she can say and the ones she will only mangle. It becomes too difficult to remember what they are discussing, too difficult to keep her thoughts from skipping the tracks. His tracks in the sand have filled with glittering seawater and catch her gaze, leading her away like sugar drops, and she has followed them several paces past him before stopping as if she has hit a wall. No. Whose tracks are these? They're not hers, she doesn't remember that her footprints ever led her anywhere - they have always been followers, too shy of the world to ever go ahead. It is exhausting, sometimes, to always have to lead, a burden she feels most heavily on longer journies when the weight of them drags down her feet and makes their impression long and lazy. No, certainly not hers. She places her own foot into the deep well of one and finds it larger than her own. Seawater bubbles up around the shell of her hoof, the damp sand bows and cracks, falling in around, and Crackjaw is lost in a universe of tiny details. She turns to see how her inattentive tread has broken the trail and finds the night sky watching from behind. Stars. Salt. Tears. "Helluh," her head tilts on its knife-thin neck, "Ah knuh yuh?" Yes. She can taste him still on the roof of her mouth. "Yuh nest heah?" Crackjaw tastes like water spiked with strange @[Aedan] RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Aedan - 10-17-2020 aedan the night is more alive and more @[Crackjaw] RE: kill your darlings - Aedan, any - Crackjaw - 11-18-2020 @[Aedan] edited for HTML sorry lol |