"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
08-01-2020, 06:09 PM (This post was last modified: 08-22-2020, 06:59 PM by Balto.)
i’ve been both a saint & a viper
Darkness swells like a storm, sweltering with warm breath against the mottled blue of his dull skin, pulsing and rife with life as it twists around him, prying fingers scraping sharply then embracing him like an old friend. His own breath is ragged and slow, desperate for open air but locked within a prison made of shadow and pitch. They rumble in the darkness, their shadows dancing across the dripping stalactites and damp stone, cackling and whispering and howling. He knows they are beings of his own mind - a broken mind, torn and tattered beyond repair - but it does not make it any more comforting or any less real to him. They are as real as the darkness, as the sound of hooves against stone and the smell of decaying flesh somewhere deep within the dark pit he calls home.
They are like a cloak as he pulls himself forward through the cavern, dragging him down with each shuddering step, clinging to his gaunt skin with their drooling mouths and warm, empty lips. They lick at his legs, making each step more difficult than the next, their ominous whispers pressing in delicately to his ears. Stay here, they say, with us, stay where you belong. But he longs for light - even that of the silvered moon - and the intimacy that comes with leaving his cavern, desperate for company despite the one he keeps far beneath the ground already.
His hooves make a hollow, deathly sound as they clack against smooth, damp stone, echoing loudly.
The crisp air at the mouth of the cave moans against the worn angles of his face and he gasps as if it is his very first breath. They still scramble through his legs and across his back, slithering like serpents against him, whispering and champing their jaws to pinch his skin. His bright blue eyes watch the soft waving of drying vines that veil his prison, the full moon beyond the opening peeking through the entanglement of tree branches. The fresh night air is not enough to shy the shadows away from him and if anything, they crawl more intimately within the moonlight, rattling and twisting like vipers. “Can you feel them?” He whispers, barely a breath on his dark lips, to no one in particular. Maybe to himself, maybe to them.
He is only met with the mournful howl of the night wind (you are alone, she is not here for you tonight) and the despicable sound of their bodies scraping against him, unintelligible whispers echoing the deep darkness of the cave mouth.
It's a bad day. Which isn't to say that I have many good days, but today I can hardly think for all the screaming in my head. I blame it on the meal I had, lush green leaves and sweet grasses that tempted me into a full belly. Without hunger to distract me the Voices rant and rage.
Have you lost your daughter again? Of course she has. Haven't you noticed? The stupid whore has always been better at spreading her legs than keeping track of their product.
I have a daughter? Blinking distressed at the trees around me. Trees in every direction, but no child to be seen. No flash of pink and lavender, no sparkle in the shadows. Or... My eyes lose focus. Is it black and white I should be looking for? A ragged snort explodes from my muzzle as I stomp in frustration.
Fragments of memory weave themselves in a haphazard tapestry. Bits and pieces of my life, with touches I can't be sure aren't just pure fiction. Where I've been, where I'm going. Even where I am right now. Trees, many trees, green as green can be. Thats not right. They shouldn't be green.
I spin in a slow circle. They shouldn't be green. Where am I?
North, East, South, West, which one do you love the best? Not that it matters. You're lost, lost, lost, never to be found.
"I'm not lost," I say, walking with as much confidence as I can muster through the darkening woods.
Then where are you? Not even the gods could find someone as lost as you. Not that they care to. Not that anyone cares.
It's true. I've heard it so many times that I can't disagree any longer. No, not when it's been proven right so very many times. The fight drips out of me, my head dropped almost the ground. Shadows lurk, a deeper shade of black than the ones they emerge from. Not for the first time, not for the last, I wish for the end I'll never see.
The thought teases me. Hangs before my eyes with soft colours and warm light. My body, nestled in welcoming bed of leaves, soft mosses growing over the desaturated remnants of my skin and bones. Even the cursed spear in my breast decays eventually, never to harm another soul.
I blink, and the vision is gone.
It's only me and the Voices in the dark. Mocking, bitching, hateful Voices that never cease. I used to think I could outrun them, starve them, talk my way out of them. It never lasts. Always, they return with their vengeance, and I am weary of it.
"No, I can't feel anything." I snarl wetly into the dark. It's a lie. I feel everything, every shift of the splinter in my heart, every swollen joint and cracked hoof. Why not disagree with the Voices, though. They aren't any kinder when I'm submissive to them.
The vines at the entrance of the cave’s mouth hang like snakes, brushing against each other with an eerie whisper as they twist and sweep in the night wind’s lonesome howls, the light of the silver moon as it peeks through illuminating the gaunt of his blue face, caressing him and calling him forward. Their darkness presses in at all sides, reminding him that they are with him constantly, a cloak that he wears like royalty, fashioned as chains as it falls gently across the sway of his weary back.
Tonight their whispers are unintelligible, haunting and listless in his ears; perhaps it is their own demonic language they speak so he cannot understand, but he does not misinterpret the almost affectionate way their mouths kiss at his skin, slobbering jowls clicking as they feed off of his broken mind and the terrors that rest there.
A voice - beyond the cavern mouth - answers him and though surprise finds him, the only movement is the crystal blue of his eyes flicking towards the sound, a dark and furrowed brow casting a shadow across his face. Their whispers continue to overlap, but between the white noise of their hellish voices, they begin to command him. Show her your darkness, they moan as he takes hobbling steps forward, his worn hooves clicking against the damp stone until he finds himself passing through the tangled vines. The foliage pulls against his chest until they finally snap and the stallion enters the dimly lit woods with an expressionless, terribly malnourished face.
She is bright compared to the darkness around them and the shadow that welcomes him in the cave behind him. He squints, a groan leaving his black mouth as he finds himself weary suddenly. “You’re lucky, then,” he nearly spits, the sound of his shadows and their intertwining bodies loud and distracting in his ears. “What I wouldn’t give to be numb.” This confession brings a chorus of chilling laughter from his own voices, angrily nipping at his skin at such an idea, their breath hot and putrid as they melt over his face like water. You’ll never die, they remind him heatedly, their laughter turning malicious - how dare he thinks he could escape this, them?
She needs us. We’ll take care of her like we take care of you.
His eyes flash to the worn woman before him, wondering if the thought was theirs or of his own. It bothered him that he could not tell and so his ears fell into the tangled mess of whatever is left of his onyx mane, a grimace on his cracked and dried lips.
Make her feel something.
He straightens suddenly, a dim and almost solemnity in his shining eyes as if he already regrets something he has not yet done.
It's the rustling that gives him away. The dry rasp of dead leaves brushing against each other without wind to move them. My subconscious realizes I'm no longer alone before I register it, freezes my hooves to the rotting mulch without warning.
My skin twitches with the weight of unseen eyes. Always I am followed, but now the Watcher seems closer than they've ever been. In a gust of hot breath, I release the air I've been holding, my chest pinched with ramping anxiety. One way, then the other, my skull swings from side to side to catch a glimpse of the one following me. He's here. I know he's here, I can feel it, I can sense it, he won't escape me this time.
Eyes rolling in their sockets, the leaves shuffle at my feet, whispering their death words beneath me. The glassy pools of my eyes skitter over the shadows, frantic. They skip and slide and then. Slowly, slowly, until they land on a shadow unlike the rest. Darker, or paler, the vaguest gleam of moonlight reflecting from its depths.
"Luck has nothing to do with me," I rasp, mouth dry as ancient bones. Trance-like and shambling, I take steps until the figure is solidified, a horse of night against the blacker earth. Cold fear trickles down the base of my skull, along my limbs, until it burns hot at my core.
I've been waiting to find him. The shadow haunting my every step, taunting me and biting away at my sanity. It doesn't matter that this voice is not one I've heard before. That the one's that usually hound me have gone ominously still. There's only my heart pounding, the steady drip of blood down my chest, and him. Always him.
My patchwork wings spread wide, filling the space and revealing the cobwebs of lightning scars that map out my sides, my throat. Decades of abuse and bad decisions made into a flickering, cracked painting on my skin.
It's my own light that illuminates us now.
I can see myself reflected in his eyes, a shabby, electric skeleton. A vicious grin splits my lips at his suggestion. "I thought you'd never ask," my voice is the crack of distant thunder, and then the lightning strikes. My yellowed teeth reach for the gaunt planes of his face, snatching for any scrap of flesh that I can find.
He will destroy me, I'm sure of it. But I will get my pound of flesh before we're through.
Her eyes have trouble finding him in the darkness and shadow, for that is all he finds himself to be, but once her gaze rests on his, he blinks at her slowly. She stumbles towards him, clumsy and wild, her eyes fierce but unseeing, recognition rattling in their depths though, Balto knows, she is nothing but a stranger. Just like they were, when he was forced to kill them in their sleep.
Quick, they whisper in his ears, vibrating with anticipation across his blue hide, do it quick!
He hesitates, of course, because he is not so easily controlled by their commands, despite the parasite that they are as they dig further and further into his brain, implanting darkness and nurturing the evil that has begun to sprout there. His glassy eyes watch with no expression as her wings unfurl, illuminating with a light that seems to sizzle on her skin and he finds it hypnotic. The stallion tilts his head curiously, like a lamb being led to the slaughter.
There is a single moment of delight that crosses his face as the realization finally clicks in his mind. Perhaps he had finally found it, this death, in the form of this woman who crackles and glows and holds resentment for him. He closes his eyes, waiting for whatever might come as she glows brighter and bolder, a semblance of a smile on the dark of his mouth.
You’ll never die, they coo as a desperate reminder, just as the thunder shakes the foundation of the earth and the lightning finds purchase in a pine tree beside them. It creaks and snaps with the lightning’s power, instantly going up in flames - the heat awakens him, his blue eyes snapping open just as her teeth scrape at the hollow of his cheekbone. The stallion leaps back with a residual strength he didn’t know was there, his ears flattening into the darkness of his mane. He sneers at her, his bright gaze suddenly dark with anger and betrayal. She hadn’t killed him.
“Do it!” he shouts at her, the red fire glow burning in his eyes like hellfire. His demons entrap him, anchoring him to the ground and reminding him that there is no way out, that he is theirs forever. “Kill me!” His voice rises, pain and anguish choking in his throat as the dry and brittle leaves from summer’s heat spark and ignite, begging her for release, for sweet mercy. Something like tears turns his eyes glassy with sadness and hope.
His demons squirm, angry and malevolent at his confession; he is no coward, he is a killer. They remind him: bodies torn apart and hollowed, their heart in his mouth, blood on the ceiling and tongue, forever engrained on his insides. His demons recreate their now-dead voices in the darker parts of the woods, calling his name.
He falters then, feeling his weakness and mortality despite the inability to die, whispering: “I didn’t mean to,” into the darkness beyond the fire.
08-20-2020, 01:02 PM (This post was last modified: 08-20-2020, 01:03 PM by Sabra.)
It is a shock to find flesh and blood beneath my tongue. Cool to the touch, and dust-tanged, but as real as anything I've ever tasted. My snarl flickers for a moment, doubt eating sluggishly at my mind. His voice rings in my ears as I stumble back, flecks of red on my lips and panic in my eyes.
This isn't right. This isn't right, I war against myself. I want him gone, destroyed, ended, because that might end my own internal riots. I have to touch something to destroy it, this I know so well, but the reality of it is far away from mine.
Do it! See if his blood is real enough to sooth your broken mind. Enough to chase us away.
They echo him, begging for release that one only finds in the darkest of places. His eyes gleam in the shadow, as blue and fractured as my own. "No," the word leaves me like a ghost, pleading into the night. "NO!" Again, and I swing my head wildly. It collides with the rough barked trunk of an oak. The pain, like hunger, is a clarifier. Again I throw my face against the biting tree until blood runs into my eyes and the ache in my head outweighs the Voices.
"I won't do it again," my wheezing voice whimpers. I'm a wreck of a creature. Bloody, cracked and hanging by the last threads of my mind. My world has dissolved into violence and anxiety, mistrust and fear. Memory of who and what I once was is harder and harder to recall. Through my blood tinged vision though, I can see in this stranger's eyes the same hunted, haunted things. The fragile, spidery thread that weaves us ever tighter to our ends.
She panics, maybe. Whatever the reason it may be, she falters, falling away with the taste of his blood on his mouth, her eyes becoming somewhat clearer as she becomes more aware of what is unfolding before her. His own demons still chant in his own ears, malicious and hungry, desperate for blood whether it be Balto’s or the gemstone woman before him. Their breath is on his neck, hot and putrid, slobbering jowls that click like a crocodile and insectile pincers that prick against his blue skin as they rove along his body. He shudders beneath their touch, anger festering deep within his chest as he is once again failed by a stranger that could have easily sent him to his doom.
She swings away from him, throwing herself against the tree as flames begin to crack around them, furiously eating up the dried pine needles that dampen the forest floor. The stallion jumps at the sound of her skull against the tree, the smell of blood filling the smoky night air. He snorts sharply, silently watching her as shadowed bodies clamor around him, writhing like beetles across his skin. He barely notices them at this point.
Her voice then - a desperate, fragile sound - calls him forward. The stallion’s brow furrows and the rage begins to dissipate, clarity once again filling the crystal blue of his eyes. Stepping towards her is so hard, as he has to drag their terrible bodies with him, but he does and for a moment he merely watches the fireglow radiate against her, the heat awakening him and bringing him out of his reverie. And he asks, like had at the very beginning when he thought he was alone, the same question with a voice that is but a whisper, only now it directed purposely for her:
08-23-2020, 10:00 PM (This post was last modified: 08-23-2020, 10:01 PM by Sabra.)
Electricity sings in my veins, calls out to the sky where a storm is brewing. If it will be enough to drench the burning around us, only time will tell. The yellow light casts tall shadows around us, and I can almost catch a glimpse of the shapes of monsters in their dance. Stretching limbs and gaping, slavering jaws and-
"Too?" I ask, blinking the smear of blood from my eyes. Everything is tinted red and gold and he is no exception. My wings shake and spasm of their own accord, like wringing hands. Yet another nervous tick that I've collected over the years. A step toward him, then away, the heat of the fire touching my back as it nips closer to where we stand.
An inconvenience only, when I look at this stranger with a bloodied eye.
My scraped jaw clenches in a rictus grin, lips stretched over worn teeth. "Who are you?" I demand, a spector of my old imperious nature lifting its weary head. "Give me your name or I will leave you here with Them." A threat if I'd ever made one. Because if he hears the Voices too, that means They aren't only in my mind. It means They're real.
That realization shakes me to my hollow core.
There are a great many things in this world far worse than death. I know it, and it seems that so does he. If They are real, then we are in greater danger than I had ever guessed.
Or else this is a trick. One They have created to unhinge me further, and it makes me bare my teeth again to think that he is Theirs. A puppet or a slave, an enemy or an ally. They bicker behind me, dulled by the throb in my head, but never really gone. By the Dark God, what I wouldn't do to have them gone. Any means, any price. And perhaps this haunted stranger feels the same.
The sky and the ground vibrates with the echoes of thunder, reverberating in his hooves and through his very marrow. His lids close momentarily as another roll of thunder breaches them, the soft pitter patter of cold rain against his blue skin. He shivers, feeling alive beneath the force of nature that is above him and the one beside him. It’s enough to distract him from the terrible demons that prowl in the shadows, salivating and snapping their jaws just by his ankles.
She steps closer and he does not move, indifferently watching her as she hesitates forwards and back. There seems to be clarity in her eyes now - but, as he looks there, he only sees the stain of the blood on her face that the flames gratefully illuminate in their fierce dance. Balto snorts sharply, watching the pearlescent woman and the way his shadows clamor over her, drawn to her sickness just as they were drawn to the one in him.
She demands him his name and he is not one to disobey, even without a threat. “I am Balto,” he informs her wearily, wondering if she would see that he is really no one at all. “At least, I still am. For now.” Each day left him questioning how much of him was truly left. He blinks slowly at her as her next words confirm his suspicions - his demons are her demons, it seems. “Leave me or save me, there is no escaping them.” His voice is even and flat, filled with a defeat that only years of darkness and loneliness could create. There is nowhere he could go to escape them and their monstrosities - even death did not separate him from them.
How soon, then, would he let them in?
How soon would she?
They slither across his hide as slick as oil, their insectile legs clicking and catching on his skin. He wonders if she can see them, or if hers appear to her in a manner far different than his own. He continues to watch the fire glow illuminate her and the surrounding darkness, trying to ignore the sound of salivating hounds in his ears.
“Will you tell me your name? Or will they tell me?” They seem to know her as intimately as they know him.
09-04-2020, 04:42 PM (This post was last modified: 09-04-2020, 04:43 PM by Sabra.)
My lips are sore and cracked when I lick them, iron taste sharp on my tongue. I'm not sure if it's my blood or his that's being tasted, but it doesn't matter. It's red and it's mineral-edged and I consider taking more of it. Why not? When we stand here illuminated with fire and flags of lightning and the sheer exhaustion of being seen.
My legs shake erratically, never still for long. Being still is being trackable, being findable, and we can't have that. No no no, we can't. I can't be found, not unless I want to be. My teeth grind against each, the anxious thoughts milling in my mind endlessly. But the fire is ganging up on us, and I am unwilling to burn. Not when I will only come back again, as lost as ever.
The length of my tail is scorching, hairs curling and turning to white ash where the heat touches it. Another few moments and the whole thing will ignite. My eyes flicker with the firelight while Balto watches, while he bemoans his fate. Burning debris falls from the blazing trees. Sticks, clusters of leaves, pinecones glowing with red eyes only till they crash into the ground and explode into showers of sparks and flame. Hungry, starving flame that will consume whatever it touches.
My gaze fixes on a kindling brush. On the way it catches with aching slowness only until it is engulfed, and then it burns like it will never go out. My name... I turn to him like a sleepwalker stuggling to wake, eyes far away from where we are now. With slowness that argues against the peril surrounding us, I move close enough to press my face lightly to his. To run my tongue across his cheek, where my teeth caught his skin.
"Sabra," I answer, and I think I had forgotten it until it left my mouth. "My name is Sabra." I whisper it like a prayer, insectile humming in my ears. A tree cracks behind us, sap boiled past the point of bearing. I flinch at the noise, fingers of rage reacting to the sudden sensation. I am tired of this place, of the scent of smoke and charring feathers. But. I do not think I am tired of him. Not yet.
A smile like glass cracks my lips, and I take in a searing breath. "Follow me. Or don't. You could see how you like your skin split and blackened, for all I care." My head falls to one side listlessly, eyes drifting to some place past his shoulder. "Or. You could come with me. And we can see exactly where this fire burns out."
My feet lift as a branch comes crashing down, and I'm moving. Running. Smoke floods my chest, the staff in my heart waving at everything we pass. The Voices screech like a murder of crows, louder than the roaring flames. Louder than the question that asks so gently what I am doing.
