09-03-2016, 12:52 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-03-2016, 10:21 PM by Pollock.)
He returns like a man on pilgrimage. Tight-chested, froth slicking his golden coat under the heat of the sun and climb – each step is a mile long and heavy. Somewhere along the way he sheds those great, shining wings. A long time ago, they were all he would have needed to feel complete. But these? Her paltry offerings are only weighty vestiges of that repealed magic (magic She had no right to take from his chest – but like a thief, She plundered and ruined); unfit replacements for all that he has lost – a poor gift, indeed.
When She had made him, She had made him broken. Now She makes him bear the knowledge of that brokenness heavy on his shoulders, like unwanted, clinging visitors.
(They are so beautiful and so clean. He unfurls them and examines the primaries and secondaries – cream coloured and glossy – and they remind him of… no, that must be killed dead, too. Twice over, it would seem.)
He misses his crown and robe, slung from his left shoulder. Once, it had been Shame to him… not a vestment of dirt and broken bones, but a boulder fastened by thick chains. Until the heft of his own self-contempt was eaten – feasted on, really, like sweet meat and wine – by the godliness that took root. It had been none of her handiwork. (He had fallen and fought in the polar universe. He had reached for it, shaky but sure... no. No, She had no right, at all.) He had been everything – engineer, architect and artist. He had made something fearsome and mighty, a great gothic cathedral, from the nothing but muck and misgivings and a whore’s unloving hips.
Then, the air cools and it becomes easier, he searches for the meridian hungrily...
—he breaches the surfaces and gulps greedy breaths.
—his feet split, nimble and flexible, and his muscles tauten and expand.
—his horns unwind from his head, curling backwards.
(He can hear the faint jingle of bells in the distance, crossing the spires of repurposed Beqanna, coming from within and outside and far-far-away – Her magic is not the only one that lives here, it seems.) The day is paling to dusk when he finds the high-most place he can reach – thin air and craggy, but clear and from all sides, he can see the broken and reset land, stretching on forever in one direction, and in the other, until shore meets uncertain sea.
He breaths in magic and lost things, and grows still and sober.
(That beast anger, muzzled but rumbling from it's cave.)
ooc note - Pollock has wings for now!
Everything was gone.
It was no longer the sandy dunes, her home, that the magic, the gods perhaps, had takena way from her too—from all of them. She had found herself on the very mountaintop early the next morning. It was strange because she had just been in the meadow, and now she finds herself with others—feeling confused and chaotic. No one had understood why all of them had woken up here (a place that did not exist until now).
She knew.
Their greed and hunger for earthly pleasures in this life had destroyed the world all of them had known. The magic took away their homes, their powers, and everything that made them feel so godlike. Lucrezia did not like this one bit – but she knew, even including herself, that everyone needed this. They needed this new start—this blessing of a second chance for commending themselves.
Hope—in this very madness—seemed so lost. Would they remember this blessing? She knows they might just stumble for a while until they found their balance, until they find some sort of direction to turn to. Lucrezia knew even this lesson given to them would not stop them. Some of them would never change—she hopes they would perish, all of them burning in hell.
Lucrezia fears for them (for him most of all). She watches as he greedily takes what he think is his by right. The magic gives him what he wants—a gift she believes was bestowed upon him before the chaos. He was given such a gift again in this new life, this new beginning. She is jealous of the wings he is given here. It did not make sense why she had to suffer through this and he did not.
She wants her wings back.
She wants her home back.
She wants it all back.
She huffs, taking in a sort breath. The air is thin here and she knows she cannot stay much longer. Lucrezia must leave before she withers away here—she would never let herself die simply that way. Her steps are taken forward, lightly, but not out of fear. She is made of a small Arabian build but it has never stopped herself from speaking out. Lucrezia is strong with her words often and does not fear easily when she is feeling over emotional (which happens to be just now).
“Why did you come back?” She asks with a firm voice. It wasn't exactly what she was expected to say first. However, Lucrezia has always been curious of others, their true intent, even if she despised them secretly. After all, she was here to learn from whatever this new life was to give her.
She breaks his peace.
His basking in dusk – mauve and orange and gold-on-gold.
His thoughts – whispering softer here than they do below. Fingering through the leather book of all, searching for the pages that tell of the realignment.
His solitude – and she is not indigo, or star-armoured, or his disciple. She is not the strange, choking woman he had met and last feasted on. She is not the churn of earth and air, gyrating around him, red and white and neck-bitten.
He groans, opening his black-brown eyes and shifts, his single, limp wing dragging in the many-dust at his feet. His muscles creak, even with their grace returned, twisting his neck to one side and then the other, testing the familiar feel of his great, curved headgear.
No, she is not any of them – his things – so what the fuck does she want?
Maybe the air has thinned the quality of his discomposure, because when her pointed voice demands of him, his ears pin back towards his flank and he turns his body to face hers. But he does naught but consider her – pretty... insolent, perhaps – examining the hard lines of her face. Though, here, in this place She gave them, he could make art from her bones as easily as ever. Though he could, he does not, because he is weary from his journey up and up, and she is not a thing of his. His lip curls and twitches, parting and incredibly dry – “is there more than one reason to come back here?”
They see this too differently – she sees a harsh penance, exacted, and rightly so (and yet she had coveted his provisional wings before he had shed them, happily; she longs and she wants – different things, to be sure, gentler things, but wants them nonetheless); he sees a being scorned, trying desperately to halt the evolution of the monsters to which She gave breath. He has little sympathy.
She may be puzzled by his unbridled appetite – he is equally so, by the way she concedes to her own ruination. But then, he had learned to built as soon as he had dropped, gurgling and alone. He learned to discard home for what it is – fickle and unkind. He had learned to make himself from nothing but the broken thing by his side that his progenitors had managed to form in their copulations and the sweet plunge past the markers of sight.
And he had learned to bury deep the vestiges of his former selves – so deep, that everytime he falls it is like the first time and so it feel manageable, until night comes and he is chased from his sleep by their ghouls.
(This, no doubt, stands second only to the wintry nights spent peach-skinned and flushed by northerly winds. But he remembers none of that. He buries it deep.)
“I am here for my things. Otherwise I would not scale this infernal mountain.” His jaw is tight, flexing and sore, “and, you have come back for what exactly? Just to prod the bereaved?” He tsks and shakes his head.
“Unkind.”
Unwise.
He is a monster—a monster just like the one that had shaped and loved her from the beginning of her time.
He is greedy—for power and things that did not belong to him.
He is hate—he is her father, her family, everything she has hated about them (but somehow loved deeply buried in the corners of her heart).
She watches him carefully as he enjoys the familiar feel of his gifts restored back to him—the one wing, the great curved horns, and something else she cannot quite pinpoint. For now he can bask in the delight of such pleasures until there is little air for him to breath. She knows not even he can stay up here this long—and she cannot either, but she is not yet ready to leave into a new world.
His question is strange, but it is something she considers, ponders on just for a moment. “Maybe. I don't know for sure.” She says softly, loudly to herself. “Maybe it is for someone like you to remind you of what you had and can never get back.” She cannot help but smile at that. Her words are unkind, but she does not see why she cannot say them—he is a monster, he is just like her father (that fucking devil, she thinks).
There was no reason for her to come back here – at least not until she finds out exactly what this place is. She only knows that the greatest of magic in Beqanna lingers up here on the mountaintop. But what she doesn't understand why she couldn't have been given wings, why must she be left with nothing when she had given everything.
Maybe it wasn't enough. Perhaps she had been too greedy to think she deserves a set of wings, a home to protect her. This was her downfall – wanting something that she did not deserve. It could only be the reason why.
“I have only arrived,” she says harshly, “but there is nothing for me up here.” She should not stay much longer but she cannot help herself—he has captive her curiosity. It was always the stranger ones, the ones she hated the most that caught her interest. It killed her a little to be around such creatures like this monster. Yet, it was part of whom she was, to learn about the world and everyone’s intentions in it. “You grieve for what? The loss of one wing and a set of curved horns? Pathetic.”
Monster. Yes. She isn’t the first to think of him like that.
And if he had not always been a monster by design, he has always been a monster by intention.
(Always? Oh. No, that must be killed dead. No, that is a forgotten thing. That long and bruised colt – new minted gold, soft-bellied and wide-eyed.)
His mother had been a monster-thing – a sad, ruinous, whorish thing, but monsters come in many shapes and sized. She had made him, with forceful hand and scathing tongue, the bitter slug he had been as a younger man. (All things in good time, he had spent those youthful hours watching, hips and copulations and meaty feasts – perhaps it was then that he showed his penchant for learning.)
As he matures, he has come to realize the things he has to thank her for – so he does so by the sea, now and then. He baptizes near the shore where he had found her already perished (unfair, but such is life), and lets it run pink off his forehead and horns. And he remembers the many more he has left to despise, to feed on, deeply and wolfishly.
From the moment he had been brought forth – messy, unkind birth that is was – he had been destined to be this. Maybe not for greatness, but for shadow. Perhaps not a master – he had always been a monster, he had not always been proud – but a malignancy meant to be excised from healthy tissue eventually, just not until he had knotted a few vital systems up, choked them out. Made them black and oxygen-starved,
He serves a purpose. A thinning.
A wolf among sheep – a shepherd of those sheep who come bowed.
There is a strange, subduing up here. Perhaps the thin air, but though she rankles him (about that, there is no doubt – as far as he is concerned, they are both enjoying a small bask in their own self-righteousness), he is content to stand and hope she leaves. Exertion would only shorten the time he has. “Ah, how very noble of you.” No, it will run thin. He has only ever had so much patience for this – little brother Chessur, if he was not busy flagellating himself, had from time to time fancied himself similarly virtuous.
“But I am afraid your arrogance might get you smote on his very holy of all mountains. I believe She,” he gestures over-emphatically with his great horns, all around them, “would not take kindly to the idea that you think you know what I can or cannot have back. No,” she shakes his head, “not your call. You’d be wise not to assume you know all of this damned Land’s intentions.”
He could have felt sorry for her, because what she has lost, unlike him, cannot be recovered.
Not here.
Nowhere.
But he is past that. He has buried the colt and the boy and all the worms in between that stirred up the silt. He had weighed them down and sunk them deep, unrecoverable and forgotten.
“It took me many years to get these things. I traveled – long and unforgiving miles... And,” his lip curls and he scrapes a pronged toe along the craggy stone. (No, these geese cannot be chased in daylight. That is for the night). “They, most of them, are the products of work,” (he knows this, only by intuition – he had awoken with them, fastened to his head as if by string, his scapula, his feet split and his mind a claw in search of Fear – but all the rest, buried deep) “not birth. The wing is a momento. That I was so graciously given.”
He shifts out, feeling the cold, wonderful plunge between the sensory plain – invisible. Ah. “This is how I survived my whore mother’s ineptitude at being a satisfactory broodmare.”
He slips back into view, still unmoved. “You have nothing here. That is your fault. Or, perhaps your parents. Or both. Or nobody's fault at all, but I’ve come for the things I earned and the things I bear beside them, to remind me. You seem to have a problem with this. So honestly, is it envy?”
She struggles to find herself in this moment and all moments before the mountain had come. Her words and actions lately do not even feel like hers, or that she is even really living and breathing the air she breathes. It’s hard for her to recognize which way to go, which direction is the one she wants to follow. There are a million paths she can take, but to decide which one is the right one is the hardest decision of all. She does not want to be like them—her family and those that have caused this chaotic change in Beqanna.
But, in all honesty and something she would never admit, she might be one of them. She might be the thing she hates the most, the one that she tries terribly not even be. It would break her, when and if she does realize it, knowing that she is the monster deep inside her own heart—in the shadows that holds all her secrets and lies. So instead of facing herself, which she should have been doing long ago, she turns to those she finds horrible and selfish (but might be likely in their own right to be and have the things they want) and wishes to destroy them all.
She only stands in silence in his words—his accusations punch her in the stomach, and she is choking for the thin air around her. Lucrezia struggles to find the words because he tells the truth. Never did she have a right to say something, especially since she has jumped to the gun and accused the monster of things she doesn’t even know about. Then again, she could be right, but it would be terribly off if she was right in the first place.
“No, I don’t know what is planned for this-,” she pauses for a moment, unsure of what to even call it, “new life of ours.” She doesn’t even know what even caused it, what gods determined the magic of Beqanna and everything that held it together. There is only one thing she knows—she cannot be who she was before the mountain came. “All I know is there is something we, maybe not all of us, that need to change.” She says softly, wondering if there was even a chance to make up for everything they, them, or her have done.
Envy—it coiled her heart, straining it tight and hardly letting it beat. It was a dangerous emotion to feel, and likely so could kill every part of who she was. But, Lucrezia, feels, and hopefully knows, she would never do that. Maybe that is why she must get rid of all the parts of her that hold her back now. She must remove her frustration and grieve for the loss of everything before she can began anew.
“I thought I had given everything and deserved what I had achieved,” but she had been wrong in that matter. She had her wings, her home, and friends taken from her. She was part of the problem to begin with—she had forgotten their warning, their lessons to her all those years ago. “I am jealous because I don’t know if I can ever get back that was taken from me. I lost everything.” She pauses just for a moment. “I lost my home and the wings that made me feel free, but what I don’t know is why or what I did to deserve this.” And she wants someone to tell her why, but she might never know that.
If only he could read her mind.
Oh, the sweetness he’d find in her own self-doubt!
How he would love to feel the soldered edges of that armour (that gentled, polished plate that keeps her secure and contained, just so) for the place where it peels back, just enough to get a finger in.
(Pick, pick pick. He has all the patience in the world as he waits for everything to fall back into place.)
To search out the chink in it all, where, unprotected, he may pull at the tail of her yarn until it unravels and pieces of her fall from their protective skin and onto his feet, bloody and meaty and bare.
They could scry in what remains, together.
He could help her love that monster. Show her how silly it is to resent it.
His brother begrudges it. His brother is weak. A perfidious dead end to be consumed one day, bones and organs whole, into the abyss that he so fights against. Some things are not worth resisting; some resistance is futile. He, too, thinks he can turn his back to the void. To the things that bump and croak in the dark (to Pollock and Warring; Birkenau and Pheper, all; their mother, may she rot in the hell she deserves for having wrought both power and impotence with such negligence). And that blood that fills him, red and blue, even if he’d rather bleed himself dry of it – or thinks he would rather bleed himself dry of it.
The gift giver will sate himself with the doubt he knows, instead.
He smiles his wry smile, “life,” he scoffs, off-hand and quiet. She expects too little, from life and from herself, perhaps. (He could mend that, too, if given a night.) He’d rather live life as he had been – bloodstained, sure. There were flaws. But in pursuit of pleasures, colour, art and skin. “And what do you need to change?” He could tell her he needed to change nothing – she would not believe him, and it would be a lie.
He has nothing he is willing to change, not this freshly removed from this weaponry.
(He has bodies buried in moss and he has secrets, like she, buried deeper still. But these things have already been interned, prayed over and mended with earth and windflower; more bones and flesh until what remains are many tombs intertwined. Until names lose their meaning, so does life,
—and there is the void that stares so lovingly back.)
“Hmm,” his lip curls with an unmistakable disgust.
Weak. (It must be killed dead, that insidious thing called weakness.)
“You surrender too easily,” he jeers, and for him it is like sweet wine on his lips. He has his proclivities – he has his needs; he likes things that bend. “You let yourself doubt too easily. These are dangerous things.” He smiles, his wide, crocodile smile, but does not move. Though he’d love to. He’d soo love to. “What did you do?” his flat eyes twinkle, perhaps, a bit as he fishes for her. For anything. For the woman to tell him something he can be quenched on. To curve towards him and brush, for a just a moment, against a monster of a different cloth. He tsks and shakes his head, fixes her with those black eyes, suddenly hard and judgmental, “whatever it was, it must have been awful, to deserve all that. I only lost one wing and a set of curved horns.”
He can have his hopes up here, on this false peak for dreams and lost things.
He can hope that she breaks when she bows.
Or that she finds some comfort in her bitterness (as he had, so many years ago) and then in him.
He has needs. Beasts to feed.
Life—it had felt so simple once.
It had become sort of a puzzle to her though. A puzzle that became too big to put together despite the many times she tried to get all the pieces in their places. It seemed every time she got to the last few pieces there would be more. The puzzle became more complex and larger. The pieces shaped into something else, something that did not quite fit together.
But she, years ago, began to understand that everything was linked together in this so-called life. It is what has made her so curious about the world and that all it entails. She wanted to know everything, old and new, good and wicked. And it is the very reason she stands here before the gift-giver; the monster she is beginning to feel like is her father.
“What do you need to change?” He asks, and she’s not very pleased about the question. It’s too much for her to answer because she isn’t quite sure what she needs to change. Well, she does know parts and pieces of who she is and wants to be but that’s about all she knows. “I don’t know really,” she says honestly, “I just know I don’t want to be the person I was that let go easily of everything I had.” She doesn’t want to see the things she loves and cares about to be gone—taken advantage of again.
She looks at him with disappointment when he tells her that she surrenders too easily and also doubts too easily. However, it was the truth. Lucrezia did surrender herself into the doubtful thoughts of her mind. She overthought much of the over, looking for the underlying motives in even the simplest of things. It had never been uncommon for her to lose sleep, asking herself why someone did what they did, what it might, and what to do about it. Sometimes it was for the greater things though, such as her home and family. She is very sensitive and cares deeply for about others.
Her eyes then narrow when he tells her she must’ve deserved everything she has lost. Lucrezia was not stupid though, she saw the crocodile smile – the one her father often gave her when he lied and pushed her to do things. “No.” She says firmly to him, cutting him off when she talks about his wing and set of curved horns. “I didn’t deserve what I lost.”I didn’t deserve any of this that has happened to me, she thinks to herself.
“I did everything that I was told to do. I listened to what my father wanted me to be and did as I was told to do when I went to the Deserts. I did it for all of them, but they did nothing for me. They broke all their promises.” She huffs, her voice becomes louder and she becomes angrier as she speaks. “It’s their fault all of this happened. I became who I am now because of them.” She hates them. She hates her father. She hates her sister.
|
![[Image: kkN1kfc.png]](http://i.imgur.com/kkN1kfc.png)
