[open] forty-six & two

[Niklas]

my shadow's shedding skin ...

The sun finally sinks beneath the sandstone horizon and the desert breathes a sigh of relief as dusk presses into a sweating brow, cool and soothing. Everything goes still now, the world in limbo between sunset and dusk. Even the earth seems to hold its breath. Then slowly, ever so subtly, the world exhales … and life slips into motion again.

It is only a few at first. A trickle of eight-legged creatures, bathed in shadow save for their impossibly bright eyes. They make no sound, peeling from nothingness to clamber over one another in fits and starts. One, three, eight, now twenty. A trickle becomes a stream, the stream a flood. Thirty, dozens, hundreds … The larger clamor over the smaller, glowing eyes and silence, a limb flailed occasionally as the shadow-arachnids hasten for their master. Over rock and sand they march, until they’re bathed in the light of the full moon and the silver water of the northernmost cove laps gently at the bank. They stack on to one another, still without a sound, a growing, hulking pile of limbs and bright eyes, humped and rocking on the shoreline like an unsteady sea. A heartbeat, a draught of air, and Niklas emerges from the seething mass, his creatures disintegrating into a waterfall of smoke that drips away from him like black sand.

He’s a tall, plain, angular thing, with void-eyes no matter their current shade. He blinks, slowly, almost owlishly, taking stock of his surroundings - the ocean that laps quietly at his heels, the metallic glitter of its surface. He’s been in this kingdom before, he thinks, though he could not tell you when that was. Time is a construct that he’s never knelt before. He takes another breath before turning west to look out across the black water, in the direction he knows the Chamber lies. He understands the penchant his father and half-sister have for the pine kingdom, but his is a soul far too restless to stay put for too long, with no affinity for or loyalty to any particular land. He pulls his hellhound from the shadows, a creature somewhere between wolf and hyena, her black void eyes set in a powerful skull her presence forever accompanied by the scent of one’s impending death. She’s annoyed with him - even hellhounds need their rest - and slaps the water with a thick, scarred paw. The sea water sizzles and steams from the heat of her ire but Niklas ignores her tantrum with that irritatingly placid expression of his, shaking out his mane before starting southward.

[Lillia]

The sunsets here beguile the nomadic angel. Orange, red, pink, a stunning display almost nightly - and on the cloudless evenings, resulting in a star-speckled sky rivaled by no other land in Beqanna. The featurelessness of this obsolete, cavernous land lends itself to the beauty of the heavens, calling to Lillia in a kind of siren song that she sees no worth in resisting. What else might she attend to? The quietude of the land at present begs little of its meager inhabitants. So, she enjoys the small things.

She feels his presence before she senses its tangibility. Kin of her kin, a brother in spirit if not in blood. Demon. In the gasp of cold air that predicates his arrival, Lillia clutches her downy wings about her sides, their mass obscuring the golden swirls on her underbelly. The movement comes not as an act of fear - surely, her miniscule hooves remain rooted in the shale-strewn shore of Pangea, as ever-present as the angels are in heaven. That thought does ruffle her feathers. Why am I here... she wonders ruefully. Years pass and she is not called back.

Her blue eyes flick to the angular black creature approaching along the shoreline. He exudes darkness just as she exudes light. As is her intrinsic wont, she begrudges him nothing, not the demonic essence, nor the hellhound prowling by his side, nor the void of both sets of approaching eyes. They are as they are, made by the gods, crafted in nature and in nurture along a predestined path. As these two opposing creatures come into speaking range, the winds blow firmly across the black ocean as the sun sets, indeed, on a cloudless evening. Black, green, navy, cerulean. Stars peaking at the summit of the firmament. It is an apt setting - heavenly and hellish, all at once.

"Hello, brother," she says. Her lilting voice matches in pitch the smallness of her corporeal body. Though she stands unmoved from her original watching place, she stretches out a wing, inviting contact in whatever form the demon sees fit. "How long are you of the material plane? Of myself, too long - but I have done nothing with my time." She takes this moment to turn her head, to meet the demon's gaze head-on. In her eyes, total neutrality, with perhaps a glimmer of familial adoration, masked in the knowledge of their divine juxtaposition. "I am the angel Lillia."