[private] Mesmerized Skeletons || Lepis ||

[Wolfbane]

WOLFBANE

Outside of himself, Bane is as perfect as he could hope to be. He doesn’t suffer any ailments. Over the years he’s only gotten quicker with his thoughts, slower with his tongue. Everything Lepis is looking at and contemplating certainly is him - Wolfbane in the flesh. But that’s it. Only flesh.

Inside of himself, he’s got a rare type of curse. Custom built for revenge beyond the grave and fitting, given the circumstances of what’s going on in Beqanna right now. The entire truth of it evaded Bane and his ancestors before him; the giver (the one who had the power to explain and possibly remedy the situation) is just a lonely shade in the afterlife, some character nearly forgotten. Lepis couldn’t have possibly known about all that but now Wolfbane thinks she does. Or she’s beginning to see it, like others would soon enough.

Defending Lilliana had been a low, acute thrust meant to distance them. If he’d respected her at all, none of this would’ve happened. She’s not blind to that fact. Just ignorant of the true nature behind it and so is Wolfbane, even though his face seems very determined and very suddenly dry when the smaller dun pegasus manages to gather her wits (and words) about her.

But… who hears them?

Not the husband she’s hoping would. A stranger; some horse much colder and much less concerned. He sneers at the idea of her coddling their youngest all that time, unable to find an ounce of pity because he believed she’d deluded herself along with the children. That fantasy Wolfbane she’d spun out into a storybook hero for Celina and Elio was also a comfort to her, the stranger supposes. How utterly sad and pathetic, he thinks. All the while it looks like her husband and certainly feels like him, the way he reacts to her touch. His nose tilts into her face not away from it, lips pursed to taste her skin and feel the warmth of her blood underneath.

The absence of her touch when replaced by the distant control of her dusty gold feathers yields something strange, though. Lepis pulls her head away, still holding him steady and Wolfbane frowns, staring back. She calls out for him - her Bane - and in reply the shade of his eye color, once handsome and mossy green, changes roughly. Blue for the left eye, not Heartfire’s blue but just as frigid and unwelcoming, emerald green for the right. Heterochromia iridum; a violent-looking mismatch of colors.

Disgusted by the sentimentality he doesn’t want and unaware that he’d adopted a new look, Wolfbane jerked his head away angrily. Lepis was wasting her time and energy, pumping raw emotion into the body of a creature who slipped further and further away from those types of things. Her efforts are like a reed bent underneath floodwaters: she can plead sorry and beg for a message to be sent but it won’t reach any sort of destination. Wolfbane’s spirit was changed irrevocably, it was tangled and only happy to finally let the darkness in.

So her pain and sorrow translate to ragged, visceral anger on the shape of Bane’s mask. All of her love in its little shapes and forms come out in the rolling thunder of his voice, changed to rip out of his throat like some wildly enraged animal. He is utterly sick and tired of her feelings and his own feelings as well.

He doesn’t want to feel anymore and that’s the literal end of it. The curse notices Lepis’ little pearl of memory-linked projections and subtly covers it in a thick, oily slime. It finishes a job half done and oozes into his battered heart victorious, claiming his mind with a final sweep of dark intentions. Wolfbane gazes down at her again, gone away to someplace neither she nor anyone else can touch, and smiles as lazily as someone who’s had complex problems suddenly lifted off their shoulders.

“Whatever,” He says, hoping that she could sense the same sort of freedom radiating throughout him as the one she’d just given to him moments ago, “blame me or the made-up version of me, whatever helps you sleep. Just take Elio and go.” He means this: only Elio. If Celina were to disappear she could expect he’d come knocking. Bane is still Champion of Loess and that affords him rights in their mutual homeland. “And tell Castile -” The looming stallion breathes, a glittering symbol of fresh hell shrouded by Taiga’s dark night and lined with silver from the faint light reflecting off a white layer of snow, “- that I’ll be in touch.”

Commandant of Taiga // Champion of Loess

@[Lepis]