Divinity clings to nearly every being lingering in Beqanna.
A dark God bestows his blessing upon any creature that asks, even if that blessing comes with a sacrifice. His children have grown from a devoted disciplehood into a complacent majority. With that divinity came a normalcy, perhaps even an ungratefulness. Magic—the Divine—colors every inch of their world.
Hysperia hates her father for that. She was one of those embarrassingly delusional little girls that thought she was so special. That her life had some grand purpose for it, some ashen means to a shiny end. She believed she was written into some holy book—destined as a prophet, a leader, a savior.
Hysperia was God Herself.
Divine.
And so Hysperia spurned the Sacred. She burned at the splash of Holy Water. She was struck down when she step foot in a place of worship. She was to be hunted for her heresy.
But within that blasphemy, Hysperia found her religion. She worshipped at the feet of the hurt little girl burrowed deep in her chest. She offered blood. She offered tears. She offered life itself. At the altar she nearly bled her wrists dry.
Out of that dark temple she came after, cradling the little girl as she died.
Something important—something intrinsic—left with that child.
Abandoned, Hysperia blooms into something monstruos, something so selfish and scared. She feels the weight of all of herself when the cold breeze of late autumn tangles her hair, unable to shake her head to move stray strands out of her face.
there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream
Rapt has always found it easy to worship.
He is built for it, he thinks, or at least he has adapted to be built for it. He can tear himself open, bleed at their altars (or, better - be bled, let their teeth rend flesh, take what he so freely gives) and the wounds heal themselves, knit back up with almost no scar on his skin. He is beautiful enough, and gold, a living thing to be given in worship.
Never mind his worship is odd, that what he loves most are the monstrous things. All faiths are monstrous, in their way.
He moves in the forest with the rest of them, his own strides moving faster, waking with the rest of the world. He is not thinking of monsters, not now, he is merely enjoying the wind at his mane, the stretch of muscle as he passes beneath the trees.
He sees her from the corner of his eye, and almost keeps moving - he is not in the habit of approaching strangers - but something makes me hesitate.
The divine calling, or a monster. They are often one and the same, to him.
He moves closer until he is well within her vision. He pauses, then, does not rush to close the distance.
“Hello,” he says, then, belated, “am I bothering you?”
but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever
Something intrinsic is missing from the dark green blur of Hysperia's gaze. Deep in her well of hurt, there cries a frightened empathy, a bleeding heart. A vicious hunger saps all of Hysperia's resources until there is nothing left but the maddening drip, drip, drip of a trickle of water. Devoid of empathy, of anything other than the crushing weight of her existence, she watches Rapt. She watches the emptiness of him yawning before her.
Hysperia's mouth opens slightly, an old split in her lip opens and blooms blood across her teeth. She tastes the air, the crispness of it, the importance, the decadence. The rot and decay of the falling leaves mingling with something hot, feverish. All the cold of the air sucks into her lungs and suddenly she is gentle, she is smiling, she bows her head even as her eyes sharpen like twin blades on butcher's steel. Even as the warm crimson still stains her teeth.
"No," she answers, simply. "I was just looking for company." It is so easy when she lies, as natural as air slipping into her chest.
Hysperia slips closer to Rapt, shaking out the tangled locks on her nape as her flesh shivers with a cool breeze. The Hunger lifts its lazy head, appraising and purring, eager. Hysperia cannot stop herself when she drifts closer, when she feigns a cold shake, when her eyes follow all of the lines of his body too eagerly.
