"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
09-07-2021, 09:33 PM (This post was last modified: 09-07-2021, 09:35 PM by Sintra.)
She wakes, slowly, reluctantly, from the sleep of death, breath shuddering and hot in her ghostly breast. Hera pours life into her with that wordless, deafening, warning. Do not cross the gods. Yes, Sintra has always known better than that. Pomegranate seeds and pith fall from her mouth when she opens her clenched and aching jaws, but the vivid red flavor doesn't leave her tongue. A final reminder of Hera's displeasure. Of those final moments biting down on the tree's fruit as the lion closed its jaws around her neck and the world grew hazy-dark.
Oh, she had played the dutiful warrior steed (Boy, he'd called her!), and she had, though accidentally, killed the crab whose stars now twinkle brightly across her cheek and nose, she could not kill the lion, however, trapped there in that pit as much as she and doomed to die a hundred times at his mistress's pleasure. Would not, and so she is justifiably punished even as her life is returned.
Perhaps that itself is the real punishment.
Sintra finds her shaky feet and remembers with a sinking feeling how they had so quickly failed her when the spear broke her chest open, but when she presses her dark lips to the place death had bloomed like some terrible flower, there is no golden scar there, nor to her shoulder or the soft places of her belly that Carcinus had torn wide and fed upon as she watched, dying too slowly in his grip. The only scars that she bears - though she cannot see them - are the ones at her throat where the lion held her; a breathless, bleeding sacrifice. The young mare huffs softly, unsure of what she is meant to do next. She is so weary of monsters and vengeful gods, but they fill into all the empty spaces in her life that she goes nowhere but finds them. It's a thought that makes her steps hesitant, makes her pause between the nodding leaves of the Colocasia around her, illuminating them with the soft glow of her pale bones.
There's a hush in the night-time jungle that feels too familiar, and Sintra wonders mournfully if Hera's curses have followed her even here, to this land that has boasted peace for so long. She's only just arrived, can she have broken the place so soon?
i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me
Life in Tephra has been much like his first few years on Islandres. The air is warm, and the food so plentiful that he has left some of them be, not unlike the way that he and Maziken had kept the deer in the Hyalinian forests. There will be time later to hunt them down, and in the meantime they still dream, and some still feel the terror of his nightmares.
He is looking for a dreamer this morning, can feel her quaking in her sleep as she’s pursued by a slavering beast. The emotions from the dream lingers in the air, thinner than the clouds of mist that rise from the pool where he has slept. The shape of something long-limbed and aquatic is exchanged for a simple stallion, the better to feel the faint eddies of emotion as they shimmer in the air and grow ever more solid as he draws near.
The dreamer is as unfamiliar to him as all the Tephrans. Just passed middle aged but immortal, with the soft glitter of weak water magic. He wakes her with a gentle touch along her shoulder. When she wakes with a gasp, he quiets her, and when his belly is full of meat and his soul of black magic, he leaves her corpse for the flies.
Sated, he turns back to the waterfall, meaning to laze the day away as he had on those black sand beaches nearly a decade ago, growing ever more drenched in Power.
Instead, he pauses at the taste of another nightmare.
This one is not his own. It’s beyond anything he could make - perhaps anything he could ever make. There is a quality to it that shimmers just above what mortals might do, something like fae magic or godhood. But it is not Carnage, and that he knows for sure.
Suddenly starving for the source, he hunts Sintra down without another moment of hesitation. Her fear is marvelous, and he moves toward her as dark smoke, long tendrils twining about her like bodiless snakes. He gathers the blackness that’s leaked out of her, and only when he has it all does he take shape in front of her.
“I am going to kill you.” He tells her. The admission often makes their eyes go wide and their panic taste sweeter. “Will you make it hard?”
He hopes so. It has been so long since he’s had a challenge. And while he doesn’t quite understand exactly what this creature is, he will know for sure after he’s swallowed every last bit of her.
Smoky tendrils writhe across her translucent skin, melting out of the shadows that bulge thickly from the jungle's canopy, and the mare's hesitation turns to a freeze except for the way her heart lurches so visibly, highlighted by the glow of her bones. Is this another test? There are no stars above to see if the Lion found his place among them, only darkness and a soft rustle of leaves, and Sintra turns her head desperately to find the source of the magic, but it remains doggedly in her blind-spot as if that is it's source.
Her throat tightens with the feeling of phantom fangs, of broken skin and the tickle of blood leaking down her long neck, of the panic that floods her helpless body when she cannot breathe through the pressure; when the blood cannot reach her brain and white fireworks explode at the edges of her darkening vision.
Sweat prickles along the sides of her neck, breath quickening, but when the stallion finally makes himself visible, stepping forward with that snake-soft admission, she feels... relief. All Sintra's fear is bound up in other things, other monsters, in men and gods and guardians, and though there is no doubt in his voice that he will kill her, and she believes him without question, she cannot find any fear specifically for him at first. What is another death except a reprieve?
Will you make it hard? There's an unexpected offer of autonomy in the question. Sintra, so inured to horror, so ready to accept that her life will be full of it, of torment, is prepared to simply offer herself to him as she did Carcinus, as she did the Lion. She is not afraid to die; she is terrified of coming back, and the silken thread of his words promises suffering. Can she make it difficult for him? Does he want her to? Will it be better or worse to try? She has so little power, she is not especially clever, not especially magical, but the colored light leaps to her skin in response, banishing the weakest of his shadowy tendrils, and Sintra, who has already died fighting, already died passive, does the only thing she hasn't tried yet.
She runs.
And she wonders, as she does, if he, too, will find his place in the sky when he kills her.
i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me
The brindle stallion leaps after her, and by the time his hind hooves strike the wet earth of the jungle to propel him forward, they are the paws of an enormous wolf.
A winged wolf, and he doesn’t pause to consider the implications of this shape coming to him so first, and so easily.
He pursues her for some time, venturing far from the more populous areas of Tephra. The air overhead feels heavier as they pass into the thickest forest, where magician-fed trees tower impossibly tall, and he can leap across and can duck beneath the thick roots as he races after her.
Always he is just behind, nipping at her heels, slashing at her belly. Never enough to hobble her, just enough to coat his tongue with blood, to sweeten the way her fear and panic slide down his throat. Gale intends to run her down, and to pull the rainbow from her bones when she finally collapses.
The world narrows until there is only the thunder of her hooves and the wet slap of greenery and taste of blood. There is no room in his head for anything but the single-minded focus of the hunt, and Gale looses an eerie howl, one that summons (the illusion of) a half-dozen other wolves racing through the jungle beside them, all of them with wide thirsty mouths and eyes bluer than summer skies.
There's no room to wonder how long the chase lasts. Teeth drag across her gaskin and she squeals, kicking out at the winged wolf behind her, but her movements are growing more sluggish. She might be built to run across open grassland or desert, but weaving between the trees and roots and rocks is exhausting her almost as much as the way he drives her, on and on, through the impossible landscape. Always he stays just far enough behind to make her think she might lose him. She knows she can't, but her rapidly beating heart, that traitorous thing, whispers hope into her ears, hope that he dashes as fast as he builds it, with nips at her belly and flanks and hindlegs, until she leaves a scattered trail of blood and frothy sweat stained a rusty pink.
When the path changes from soft soil to rough, porous, rock, she stumbles, stubbing her toe against its edge and falling to her knees, skinning them and scuffing her dark hooves against its surface. Her legs react slowly, stiffly, they do not want to stand again now that she's down, but his howl breaks the heavy air, answered by half a dozen calls, and Sintra groans and lunges forward on her bleeding knees, willing her body forward until her legs cooperate at last and lift her, limping, from the ground.
Seven wolves leap from the under-growth and over fallen trees. She has no time to notice that only one of them ever lands a bite. This time, at her elbow, and Sintra veers sharply left, crashing blindly through the wide leaves of a stand of elephant-eared plants. Beyond them, the earth falls away sharply, revealing a ravine glowing red with lava bleeding from the nearby volcano. Instinctively the mare backs away, head rearing back and ears pinned deep into the wild knots of her black mane, but the memory of the blue-eyed wolf is there even before he reaches her and she freezes in place. There's nowhere to go. There's no back.
The sound of wolves slipping through the vegetation breaks through her indecision. Sintra's violet eye rolls back to find them, the few that are not creeping up from her blind-side, and she charges forward. It's not so far away, that other edge. Her haunches bunch beneath her, forehooves sending small rocks clattering down below, but instead of launching her across, her muscles seize up and she tumbles down the bank instead, kicking and grunting. Her momentum stops just short of sending her for a bath in the lava stream, lying flat and still on a flat rocky outcropping, too weary to test her legs again.
Maybe he won't risk it, her heart whispers to her between its racing beats and the too fast rise-and-fall of her desperate lungs that makes stars gather at the edges of her vision. Maybe.
i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me
Gale picks at the bit of flesh lodged between two pointed teeth, and stares down at the dark mare below.
The other wolves slowly vanish, fading to shadow as the magician’s attention leaves them and focused instead on the mare with the single violet eye.
His own sides are still heaving from exertion; the chase she’d led him on had been more satisfying than most hunts of late. Swallowing the bit of gaskin skin that had been bothering him, his red tongue then licks at the blood along his lip, then lolls delightedly from the side of his mouth as he edges forward.
Blue eyes, as bright as a summer sky, peer down at her. He rests his blue paws at the very edge of the drop, near enough that a bit of earth and stone clatter down toward Sintra, where she lies near the lava flow.
Is there escape from where she lies? Gale is not certain - he does not go too near the lava. He will wait, and digest the emotions he’s already stolen from her, and when she is ready to run again, he will chase her.
“How long will you stay down there?” He asks, his voice quite pleasant, as though he has not opened the many wounds along her body that seep red blood onto the dark stone of the ravine. “Come back up, and I promise to make it quick,” He lies.
Should he go down? Should he stalk closer, press her back until she is forced to step into the red flow? Gale has not tasted cooked flesh before, but he thinks he might enjoy it.
The river of lava courses just below her, its incandescence competing with the glowing cage of her bones. The men had called her a cursed and horrible creature because of those bones - as if they did not walk every day among gods and monsters already. Shock settles across her and time grows fuzzy and soft, the orange glow of funeral pyres turns the inside of her eyelids bright red and the spear in her heart dissolves like a cough, traded instead for Carcinus' claws digging through her entrails.
Some piece of her disappears into the dark gash of his mouth. She tries not to think too much about it.
'How long will you stay down there?'
Down where?
Pain leaks in from the edges of her awareness. Light breaks through a crack in her eyelid, its lashes clumped together with blood that wells up from a cut across her dark brow, and Sintra blinks slowly, dumbly, and makes no response except to groan softly as the muscles of her haunches spasm and ache. Memory returns with agonizing slowness, reluctant, and when she lifts her head atop the articulated bones of her neck and looks up towards the voice, that purple eye does not seem to see him. Not at first. It's slow to focus, but at last catches on his wild blue gaze.
He seems pleasant enough, but his promise confuses her. Make what quick? There's something screaming in the back of her head but she can't hear it through the mire of her weary brain.
She tries her legs and finds them clumsy, but whole and unbroken, though she sways when she finally stands, looking away from the winged wolf to peer at the lava flow oozing away from her. There's no obvious safe path below, and the steep bank makes her battered and weary legs tremble.
"Can you help me?"
Her voice wavers and breaks, genuine helplessness and confusion still muffling the claxon call of alarm bells that makes her head throb and rings her vision in a shimmering spectrum of color.
i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me
Sintra shimmers, her image blurred by the heat that rises from the lava flow just behind her. At the top of the ridge, Gale rests his head on his blue paws, content to digest the emotions he’s already taken from her while he waits patiently for a more corporeal finish to his meal.
He is not sure what she is doing down there, only that it isn’t dangerous to him. Her vision is blurred, and her thoughts fuzzy and indistinct, as if she’d cracked her head a bit too hard on the porous stone. He smooths the white fur of his forelegs with a still-bloody tongue, and considers flopping to his side and rolling in the leaf litter, as the wolf he wears might in such a situation, waiting for something to happen.
But the cursed creature is not as satisfied by a full belly as a true wolf; he wants more.
The mare on the ground below begins to move, and Gale rises to his feet in one smooth motion. She is slow and clumsy, and he bares his sharp teeth in a smile. Her thoughts are no less a muddle, and rather than tire himself sorting through them, he focuses instead on the way that fear is woven thickly in the words of her feeble request.
“I can help you,” is an offer far less bloody than the lips it passes through. The words are soft despite his sharp teeth, but his grin is no less manic as he peers down at her from the ledge. I can help you, he says, though he's no intention at all of doing so.
