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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  I'm a mess but I'm the mess that you wanted, Atrox
    #1
    Ryatah

    — there's something tragic about you, something so magic about you, don't you agree?

    She should have known better.

    She should have known when she had that moment’s hesitation going to the mountain when the memory of Carnage killing her had sprung to her mind that she was making a mistake. It was a warning sign, but after a lifetime of ignoring them, she no longer had an intuition to trust. Whatever compass she followed did not match the rest of the world; she had no true north, and a spinning arrow that was impossible to track. 

    And still, she should have known, because never in the history of her several lives has she ever managed to solve a problem—she only knows how to make them worse. 
    She could take love and turn it into a nightmare.
    She freed a kingdom but not without losing lives, and she tried to find Atrox’s heart and all she got was herself killed—she is nothing but mistakes and failures, and she has always known this.

    She went looking for the light in the dark, only to come back a ghost.

    When she had been spit onto the beach she had waited for that familiar electric surge of her pulse.
    She had waited for the breath to rush back into her lungs, waited for the racing of a once-dead heart.
    She has died and been brought back so many times, and she knows what it should feel like.

    It never came.

    But unlike last time, she is not hesitant to come back to Hyaline. When her chest began to tighten with an intangible panic, when she gasped for a breath that could not reach her lungs, all she could think was getting back to Atrox. 

    He was the closest thing to north that she has ever had, and the only time her arrow ever steers her straight.

    She finds him, and if there is a heartbeat in her chest it is so much slower than it should be. The once golden glow that she has been surrounded by for years now has become muted and pale, with wings that are nearly transparent and a halo that can hardly be seen. But the ache to her dark eyes is vibrant and clear when she finds his bright yellow gaze and holds it and doesn’t let go. “Atrox,” his name is hushed, and her voice feels strange, like fog. There is no substance to her beyond the pain and regret as she comes closer to him, and when she tries to explain what happened she finds that she does not have the words to say it.
    there's something wretched about this, something so precious about this, oh what a sin —
    #2

    hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

    He was not surprised when she had left—he so rarely is. After years of settling into this existence with her, of learning her patterns and letting her learn his in return, he nearly expects these absences. There is a part of him—a part that still surprises him—that worries after her, but he is able to quiet it usually. He knows that he could no more keep her from leaving than she could keep him from the hunt, and he knows that he would not love her as deeply as he does if she was any different than she was. So he watches her recede in the background and waits for when she returns, hoping that she returns in a single piece.

    This time though, the worry is deeper.

    It has more teeth.

    So he finds that his aggression rises to match it. Violence that comes up his throat and lashes out. He shifts into his panther form and lunges into the darkness. He finds the monsters that thrash in the darkness and he gladly finds himself into their midst. He is all teeth and claws in these moments. He finds that some of them are more physical than others and he can sink his teeth into them and rip and tear. Others he moves through like water. All of them though leave their mark on him—some shredding his coat until his blood splatters the Hyaline floor and others leaving him icy cold and shivering when they move on.

    It is only when he feels her coming, something in his empty chest reverberating in response, that he pulls back, bloodied and sore and exhilarated. He snarls as he tosses one off of him and limps forward toward her, shifting into his more familiar form, one yellow eye swollen shut. “Ryatah,” her name has a tangible relief as he comes closer, but there’s a panic that quickly follows when he focuses on her, when he sees that she’s not as she was before—that there is so much of her now missing from the last time he saw her.

    He swallows, hard, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

    He comes close enough that he could reach out to her, but his nose passes right through her.

    Pulling back, breath catching on his tongue, as he realizes he cannot pull her close. Cannot hold her and tell her that it’s going to be okay—that they’re going to be able to fix this somehow.

    Instead he just stands there, breathing in unison with her, bleeding and aching.

    ATROX | THE PANTHER KING


    @[The Monsters] - I feel chaotic. let's mess with his soul summoning.
    #3
    @[atrox] nothing happens to your soul summoning
    #4
    Ryatah

    — there's something tragic about you, something so magic about you, don't you agree?

    He comes to her, wounded and bleeding, and while she is somewhat used to the sight—because there are parts of him that will never be tamed down, not even for her, and all she cares about is that he comes back—it still inspires an ache in her chest. Only the ache is cold and empty now, like her heart is encased in ice. Like it is trying so hard to beat, but instead the movement is going to cause it to break.

    She catches his eye when he tries to touch her, sees the way he pulls away and she tries not to let that sharp intake of breath to cut through the ghost of her.

    He confirmed what she had already known to be true, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

    She has always been a creature that craved touch, that needed to feel the heat of someone else against her. Over their years together she has grown used to him, especially, to the weight of him against her when they slept, to the hungry way his teeth and lips found her neck each day.

    The fear that she will never feel that again is nothing compared to the fear that he is going to eventually leave. She would never expect him to remain tethered to the side of someone he could never feel, a love that could never be made tangible.

    She could live with her own ache and want, but she could never force him to live with it too.

    She looks at him with dark and haunted eyes, behind the wispy strands of a stark white forelock and below the muted glow of a dying halo, and somehow her mouth twists into an almost smile. “Honestly, I can’t leave you alone for a second.” She closes the small space he had put between them, and she reaches for him. Her healing feels shockingly warm when everything else about her feels so cold, like gold illuminating her veins, and suddenly it is the most tangible thing about her. She wraps him in it because it is all she has, erasing the marks across his body and removing the swelling from his eye, and she can almost pretend that she is actually touching him.

    She heals him slowly in comparison to what she can usually do, purposely lingering, relishing in this only intimacy they have left.

    “There,” she says softly once she is done, withdrawing just slightly to look at him. The ache returns, heavy and frigid, and with the warmth of her healing gone they are again left in the wake of her own destruction, her mistakes.

    “I shouldn’t have gone,” she begins, suddenly desperate to explain it to him, to beg for a forgiveness that she doesn’t deserve. “I thought I could help Este, but…” her voice fades with a shake of her head, her eyes on the ground before looking up to him again. Her words become unsteady with the tremble that takes hold of them, a sudden flood of panic washing over her, “Firion was there. Firion was there, and I couldn’t help him either, there’s something wrong with him and he didn’t even come to us for help.” Her words cut off suddenly, recoiling away from him slightly, recognizing that she was spilling out problems that he could not fix— he could not make her whole again, could not bring back the sun, could not explain why their son was dying and avoiding her.

    “I’m sorry,” she finally whispers, and she knows she does not have to explain what she is sorry for. She is sorry for failing him, again, in new ways that she has never failed anyone before.
    there's something wretched about this, something so precious about this, oh what a sin —




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