[private] the sound of your voice in the aching - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: Explore (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: The Common Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=72) +---- Forum: Forest (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=73) +---- Thread: [private] the sound of your voice in the aching (/showthread.php?tid=30228) Pages:
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the sound of your voice in the aching - despoina - 09-08-2021 DESPOINA I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do @Torryn RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - Torryn - 09-09-2021 YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR He avoids her, because he knows that he has made a mistake. He had made Despoina his, and let himself belong to her, even though he had known shadow was impossible to keep. He was going to slip through her grasp no matter how tightly she held and no matter what he promised her, but the way she made his heart swell inside of his chest, he could not imagine telling her anything else. In the moment he had been so convinced that he could do it; he had been certain that he would be able to ignore pangs of want, that he could soothe them by consuming fear and anger instead. He remembers the hurt that had flared in Despoina when she had found out about Breckin, how it had caused all the parts of him to go to war with each other—how he had wanted to gorge himself on her sorrow, but that heart of his only wanted to make things better. He loved her, it was undeniable. But he should have known—no, he had known—from the beginning that he was going to destroy her. He should have let her go, should have not been selfish and let her find love elsewhere, with someone that wasn’t going to find such literal satisfaction from her grief. Finding Beryl in the forest had never been his intention, because he had learned from their previous interaction that if anyone could loosen that already tenuous hold on his self-control, it was going to be her. In the aftermath he would wonder why it had never crossed his mind to walk away, why he had been so eager to step directly into the minefield. He shoulders the blame for it entirely, and there is no excuse for what transpired after; how he had dug his hole even deeper by seeking out two others, as if that would somehow assuage the guilt, or maybe it was his sick way of making sure none of this could come back as being misconstrued as Beryl's fault. It isn't her—it's him. When he finds Despoina in her hellhound form, he does not shift to match her. Instead he only stands, a wavering image of dark and shadow, his ruby-red eyes locking onto hers. “Despoina,” his voice surprisingly soft given the nature of him, and beneath the shadows of his skin he can feel tension begin to build. She knows. He can see that she knows. “What are you doing out here?” he asks her, feigning ignorance as if that would actually work, and refusing to reach and see what storm of emotions he has created in her chest. T O R R Y N
RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - despoina - 09-09-2021 DESPOINA I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do @Torryn RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - Torryn - 09-09-2021 YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR He does not shift for the exact reason that she has shifted—it is easier to be angry in that form. And even though she has done absolutely nothing to earn his anger he is afraid it would become impossible for him to see that should he let that feral side of him take over. He does not want to imagine the cruelties his tongue could speak, does not want to find just how hard he would twist that knife into her simply to make sure she didn’t hurt him back. He has already done enough damage, and it is a miracle he is not stupid enough to make it worse by turning this into an all out fight. So he stands there, watching her with eyes such a harsh color that even when dimmed with sorrow they still appear sinister. He doesn’t think that she can see the pain that hides there, or the regret. She will never understand how much he wishes he is not the way that he is, that he had never gone into the underground and turned into the beast that he is. Her words sting, but he deserves it. If he could wipe her clean of him he would do it, he would release her from this infinite cycle he has trapped her in and let her go. But he is far too selfish for that. Even now when he watches her tremble with an anger that is so unlike her, with a voice so much harsher than the whispering lilt he had grown to love, he knows he cannot—will not—let her go. He is destined to break her over and over, until she finally gets the strength to walk away, and there is nothing he can do to change that. “I told you,” he begins, his voice still a quiet rasp in the dark, “I told you I couldn’t promise that I would never hurt you.” He can’t stop the way that towards the end the words grow sharp, but he catches himself, realizes it is unfair that he is shifting the blame onto her. So he settles back, reins back in the darkness that tried to creep into his mind and voice. He swallows it away and turns his eyes back to hers, daring to take a step towards her. “I don’t love anyone else,” because he doesn’t; there is only her, has only ever been her. “But I fucked up.” T O R R Y N
RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - despoina - 09-09-2021 DESPOINA I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do @Torryn RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - Torryn - 09-09-2021 YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR He hadn’t been looking for it, but he tastes her anguish now. It is spilling off of her and he breathes it in without having to try, it assaults every part of him and he wants nothing more than to drain her dry of it, to let it coat his tongue and fill his gut until he can’t take anymore. But there is nothing to savor in having hurt her like this; her sorrow tastes like poison, bitter and repulsive, and he nearly gags on it. It takes every ounce of his strength to not let it show on his face or in his eyes, to not let her see how she is drowning him because he is so afraid it will drive her away. “I love you, Despoina,” he tells her but his voice is dull, because he recognizes how foolish it sounds. She has no reason to believe him, not after how he had hurt her again and again. “And if I could be different than I am, I swear I would be.” It is not lost on him that she is still beautiful even when she is furious, when she is showing those teeth that he is sure she would sink into him if she could. He would let her, if it meant she would have an ounce of peace. If she needed to avenge her own broken heart by leaving him dead, he would offer her his throat if it meant she would move on from him, from this. “None of this has been a lie. Nothing that I have ever told you about caring about you, about wanting you to be mine — it has always been real. It will always be real.” He takes a step forward, the shadows of his body trying to twist toward her, but they are forced to be contained by his shape. “If I could change myself back into the man I was before that underground hellscape turned me into this, I would do it in a heartbeat, because I promise you, that Torryn would have never hurt you.” There is a desperate kind of energy to his voice, a frantic need to get her to understand, but the more he speaks the more it just sounds like stupid excuses. The Torryn that he speaks of doesn’t exist anymore. “Shift,” it is nearly a command, but the sharpness in his tone is cracked, trembling like it is on the verge of caving in on itself. “Shift so that I can actually talk to you.” Beneath the roiling shadows his own beast is growling impatiently, begging to be let loose, but he refuses to unleash it on her. T O R R Y N
RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - despoina - 09-09-2021 DESPOINA I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do @Torryn RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - Torryn - 09-10-2021 YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR She obeys, and he feels guilty. He should have just let her continue to be angry, should have just let her rage at him until she had nothing left to say. He tells her to shift thinking it will be easier to get through to her this way, and for what reason? Because as badly as he wants her to forgive him, he also knows that she shouldn’t. She should walk away, should tell him that there are no more chances, because he knows he doesn’t deserve a single one. Because a large part of him is so afraid that this won’t be the last time, and that they won’t survive this again. But he asks her to shift and she does, and he realizes he would rather have her fury than this broken sorrow that she is now. He would rather see her strong and enraged than see her wilting before him, like a flower he had carelessly trampled. The way she drops her lovely head, and how he wants nothing more than to brush that black forelock from her eyes and press his lips to her skin—it compounds the guilt and the grief in his own chest until he is sure it is going to split him apart. Against his better judgement he closes the space between them, until he is close enough that the tendrils of his shadow mane nearly brush her cheek, close enough that she would not have to strain to hear his quiet voice. “I am a monster, Despoina,” he tells her, and it is only then that he lowers his head, gently using his nose to brush under her chin to tilt her gaze to his. “And I don’t mean just because of what I did to you.” He slowly pulls away from her, his jaw clenching tightly from beneath his shadowed skin. “I wasn’t born this way. Maybe if I had been I could control it better. Or maybe I would be worse off, I don’t know.” He takes another step back, and he no longer notices all of the emotions that spin around them, can no longer taste or smell any of it. He is too busy watching her, knowing exactly what he needs to do, and knowing too that he won’t have the strength to do it. “If I could change anything about my life at all, it would be that I could have met you before any of this happened to me. So that I could love you exactly the way you deserve.” He pauses, and for a moment his face is utter darkness as he closes his eyes, and when he opens them the red somehow seems dimmer, shadowed entirely by a sorrow that he is not sure he has ever felt before. “I don’t know if I am ever going to be better than I am right now. I don’t know if I will ever know how to not hurt you.” Another pause, and he forces himself to look at her. “And I'm so sorry for that.” T O R R Y N
RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - despoina - 09-10-2021 DESPOINA I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do RE: the sound of your voice in the aching - Torryn - 09-10-2021 YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHADOWS OF YOUR FEAR AND YOU'RE HEADED FOR THE GALLOWS, SIN AROUND YOUR THROAT AND NO ONE'S NEAR He has never spoken of what happened that day, but then again, no one has ever asked. Outside of his family there had been no one else he was close with, no one to notice what a drastic change the blue roan boy from Taiga had undergone. And even they had known better than to ask—it helped of course that he avoided them almost entirely, afraid for them to see the warped, almost demonic thing he had become. He had grown up in the shadows, but he was nothing like his father. Whatever curse had befallen him was not some granted wish to be like the rest of his family, and he had realized that immediately. But she is watching him so intently, asking in her sweet, soft voice, and it burrows underneath his skin until it can slip between his ribs and cause his heart to twinge painfully in his chest. If anyone in the world deserved an explanation, it was her. “There was this cave,” he begins his story, reluctantly returning to the night he had followed the fallen star that would lead him into this nightmare. “And from inside of it I heard my mother’s voice. Only once I was inside and I found her I started to realize that something was wrong. She kept telling me to follow her, but it didn’t sound like her, and the further we followed the maze of tunnels I kept hearing more voices, like my sister.” He doesn’t realize that his heart has started to beat faster, that with each memory that he had shoved down his pulse thrums harder, and he can’t look at Despoina anymore. “It wasn’t her. I don’t know what it was, but I killed it. And everywhere I went inside this underground maze everything kept getting worse.” His jaw tightens, his shadowed brow twisted into a frown. “There was a room, and inside was my entire family. My mom again, my dad, all my siblings. I just remember them telling me what a disappointment I was, because I wasn’t born like them; normal shadow creatures, like Caelum and Racine,” there is a strange crack in his voice, to say their names—their children, those beautiful, perfect babies that she had raised, and he repays her by breaking her apart. “And when they walked into the mouth of the monster in the cave, I followed them. I followed them, because even if they hated me they were all I had, and I didn’t want to be alive without them.” It is only when he has finished that he looks at her again, and he can’t explain it, but he doesn’t feel like the shadow-beast anymore. He feels like the broken blue roan boy he had been, the boy born from love that still felt like an outcast in a family of shadow manipulators. “I was spit back out like this. Changed. Like a shadow creature, but not, because this is something so much worse.” There is a weighted hesitation, because he is afraid of what he is about to tell her; the full depth of how treacherous he is. “I need negative emotions to survive. I crave them, and I feel weak without them. And if I can't find them, I can make someone feel them.” His voice lowers, looking at her so closely, as if he stares at her hard enough she will believe what he tells her. “I don’t want to be like this to you. I would rather starve than keep hurting you.” T O R R Y N
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