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+---- Thread: [AW] the flood and the fire. (/showthread.php?tid=3024)
the flood and the fire. - Thana - 12-31-2018
The twilight does not come quietly with a whisper of humid summer breezes. The dying day does not go gently into the night with rosy pinks and dusky blues. The meadow does not seem sweetly scented with fresh blooming, night flowers.
In that between time where the world sky and time haven't yet changed over, there is a scent of fermented wine, bitter grapes and crystallized sugars. Instead of rose-golds and silver-purples there is a flash of white light that comes and goes as quickly as a shooting star and feels just as hot. All the long, tender grasses smoke and smolder in the aftermath.
There are tendrils of smoke that spiral up, up, up in patterns that once (long, long ago) might have signaled the start of war. And between all those hazy pillars of smoke there lays a unicorn with skin the color of watered down blood, almost crimson, almost mahogany, almost red enough to burn. Her horn is the only thing about her that catches the last molten and weak golden tones of the dying done. That spiral of bone almost seems alive in that between light, almost as it waivers and sways between the thick dreads of her mane like a snake that hasn't yet learned to detach it's jaw.
The unicorn starts to wake and suddenly her horn seems more like a sword than a snake when she lifts her long, curved neck from the bed of grasses. Everything about her moves strangely as she rises, her limbs like a river, her eyes like sharp talons, her tail like a storm, and her eyes like a moon. She stands as still as a deer and her teeth grind against each other like a wolf standing guard over the first kill of the winter. Her gaze flickers between afraid and enraged and her muscles tighten and loosen like a cobra waiting to spring an a bird waiting to flee.
“Thana.” She says, wondering briefly if that is her name or a world (and if she's a unicorn or a universe). The sound of her voice is nothing more than a dusky whisper, sharp as salt. She chews at the taste of her own voice, wondering why her lips taste like brine and rot and fire. She wonders too at the way she feels as if she has never really existed outside this moment under the twilight sky.
What she doesn't wonder at is the way all the grass she rose from turns black and dies.
RE: the flood and the fire. - Angharad - 01-02-2019
ANGHARAD DAVID BRIAR
SOMEDAY I AM GOING TO WALK
OUT OF HERE FREE
There is no easy way to be brave in a new world. Or if there is, no one has taught it to Angharad.
She wakes up covered in cold sweat, panting, teary-eyed, heart racing in her chest, and the mid-gloaming sky overhead is the only part of the universe she recognizes. Everything else is foreign and terrifying, turning Angharad’s blood cold. A sea of twisting grass stretches out for miles and miles on every side. A mountain rises in the far distance but its peaks and crags are strange and unfamiliar; Angharad does not recognize the taste of the air, the salt on her lips, or the dull, pulsating ache in her head. It is disembodied, alien. It makes her want to cry.
But Una’s voice rings in her head and there is nothing she can do to silence it but complete the task it asks of her. Muscles aching, joints cracking and reshifting, Angharad rolls to her side and scrapes together just enough energy to stand up straight, woozy though she is, black though her vision goes; she grits her teeth and shakes the smear of cotton from her head and hikes in a deep breath of cool air, so cold it burns against the inside of her newborn lungs. A shiver smashes through the vertebrae in her spine.
But that, at least, wakes her up.
The world is strange and unknown and there is only one way to know it, and Angharad scrapes herself together and starts to walk across the plains. Clouds gather overhead, never dropping rain. Wind rustles the grasses until they make a moving sea of green and gold and bronze. The gold circlets on her horns clink together lightly, like a toast being made, like a song just barely being started, and it is the only noise for miles around until one of her swiveling ears catches the end of a word - a name?
She digs her heels into the dirt. Comes to a sharp stop, raises her white-streaked head to look over the grass until she sees that figure, slightly shorter than her, slightly darker than her, silhouetted in light glowing purple against the endlessly dimming horizon. She thinks she sees a horn, too, and a patch of black grass at the girls’ feet (and then she looks down at her own hooves and tries not to notice how they grow little moons of rot into the grass she places her weight on), and though apprehension tightens a knot in her chest Angharad continues forward with less than a pause.
Hello? she calls out into the cool air, and slows her pace until she is at more of a crawl than a walk. Wind tangles her dark-and-gold hair until it makes a maelstrom against her neck, and still Angharad walks, blue eyes bright and watchful.
@thana
RE: the flood and the fire. - Thana - 01-09-2019
Thana does not lift her nose to the wind like a unicorn should. It's like a lion that she tastes the wind, teeth whistling as the wind rushes through them like white-water. Every muscles in her body quivers for that flavor of death and gold and bone. She wonders why her heart thumps against her rib-cage-- thump, thump, bang. Each throb of it feels like the strike of an fiery arrow and she has no idea why the wind strikes her with fury and hunger and the shimmer of rage.
She wants to turn with her horn first and her knees quiver with the need, the need---- the need for something. And just as she's ready to lunge forward and make her carved out horn whistle like her teeth the sound of a voice smothers that heavy war-song of her heart. Every tight thing in her body pops and releases and she thinks perhaps this is how a unicorn should feel (as sweet as a dead monster can be).
Then again Thana rarely knows what to think, she only knows that she doesn't want and want and want anymore. Whoever owns that voice is not something or someone that she has come for.
When she finally turns it's slowly and the rot creeps along with her. A petal under her resting blade turns black as soot, a stone at her hoof dissolves down into dust as if a million years have passed in the time it took her to slowly blink like a hibernating bear. The grasses moan in their quiet way beneath her and it's no longer just the wild wind plucking their stalks like harpsichord strings.
But then she's looking at the horned mare with youth in her gaze and small moons of death at her feet and Thana forgets how the meadow sobs and sighs.
She forgets everything but the shine of gold in the dull-light of dusk. Only the flick of one ear suggests that she has any understanding for this language at all. The way she tilts her head like a fox and the way she continues to blink slow as a glacier give little hints to the turmoil of strangeness that blooms like hyacinth in her mind.
“Hello.” The word sounds exactly like the repetition it is, breathy and strange and underlain with an edge of rusted steel. Part of her wants to close the distance between them. The larger part of her is afraid that if she moves that war-song in her chest will come back.
And so she only waits to the young mare to come closer in a tangle of trepidation and the shivering ice of a rage quickly smothered.
@Angharad
RE: the flood and the fire. - Angharad - 01-26-2019
someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
S
he does not think she has ever seen a horn like this girl’s. Then again she hasn’t seen much. But Angharad’s eyes catch on the death-sharp point and the hollow, mathematically perfect curl, and the way it grows smoothly into her forehead like a tree’s roots grow into dirt, and a mixture of awe and apprehension mingles in the girl’s chest. She wonders if that horn has ever killed anyone. She wonders if it would like to.But her gaze falls to the ash-and-rot at the stranger’s feet, and she is not so sure that horn is the only way to go, though she is sure it is the most humane. Angharad remembers what it’s like to be rot. She stills feels it in her bones sometimes, a dull fungal ache. She knows what it is to be choked by darkness, and warmth, and wet, and to look out from between slatted ribs but not see anything beyond them. And, okay - maybe for the grass it’s not so bad - but still a frown, sparkling with something like pity, tugs at her mouth.
Angharad watches. She watches everything. It is her only power, twice as useful and half as strong as her fist-hold on death. Curled horns spiraling forward, head tilted down, she watches and watches, the blue of her eyes a song, a pleading, a great relief and a small admission of defeat. And if those eyes ever waver, well, then it is hard to see in the soft golden glow of the dusk.
She can taste the warmth of the air in her mouth - like smoke, like fire. It pulses lively against the skin of her jaw. Her blood rocks against the inside of her skull but she does not waver: her feet are planted firmly in the dying dirt and her jaw is raised high against the wind and she half-smiles when Thana meets her eyes, slow and hesitant and strange though it is though it is.
Angharad takes a deep breath, and it curls like a song in her chest, tattooing notes of flute and silver against her ribs. She wants to introduce herself but the words are stuck too tight in her throat. Who are you? she says instead, choking it out like a half-assed prayer -
Wind slashes into her hair and she leans back against the breeze, and for a second she wishes she had something better to say - but she is a child, still, and it does not come to her.
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text
RE: the flood and the fire. - Thana - 02-17-2019
The wind sings through her horn because the wind has always loved the horns of unicorns. It laments in whistles the innocence that should run through Thana's blood. In shrill tones it chants of war and rage and blood, blood, blood. This wind sings of dead things, and rotten things.
Thana doesn't even notice that the scythe made of bone at the end of her tail taps out the tune like a serenade. She does not know that every inch of her body sings of death in the wind that loves her horn.
All she does know is that this girl does not smell like whatever it is that she's looking for. The girl smells like rot and bones, blood and sand. Thana thinks it lovely. Even the girl's voice is something sweeter than the way her own voice gathers between her teeth in patterns of dust. She thinks that maybe when she talks motes of decay must pour out instead of broken prayers and sweetness.
She wonders if she regretted that once, the way she only has bitterness and rust on her tongue.
“I am Thana.” The wind howls through her horn until it's easy to wonder if this world wants her in it at all. Her tail quivers when she lifts it like the tip of a lion's tail before a herd of antelope. The meadow sounds quieter (more dead) without that staccato tap, tap, tap of it against rock and root. A hoof pauses in the hair, a gesture that is in the very genes and magic that made her. It lingers there in the gloam of the twilight and black rot drips from her hoof like tears.
Each tear is blacker than night, blacker than the holes in the universe.
It lowers after a breath, that hoof that sobs rotten tears made of liquefied, dead grass. The wind settles too and soon her horn is no singing thing. It becomes a dead thing. Soon it is nothing more than a hollow spiral of bone jutting between her eyes like an accusing stare. “Are you like me?” Thana asks and her horn still holds that dead, pointed stare.
And maybe if she didn't close her eyes in a slow blink she would have seen dust rise from her lips like smoke.
@Angharad
RE: the flood and the fire. - Angharad - 02-25-2019
someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
W
hen the girl says her name, like a curse, Angharad falters a little in her confidence. She feels the earth around her intently, too intently - like it is an extension of her, like her locked legs have become roots running deep - she breathes in the smell of impending doom, somewhere between fire and fungus, and tries desperately not to think about just how far she is from her homeland.
Thana. Is that supposed to mean something? Would the people who live here know her? Like they know Bexley? She wants to know but she can’t seem to ask, too embarrassed to relay her own foolishness so quickly. At the girl’s back the sun lingers in red and purple like it is begging the moon not to make it leave, and it washes the both of them in a light that looks too much like blood to make Angharad comfortable.
She watches the slow rise of Thana’s hoof.
The way black starts to drip from it like tar, singing the grass underneath her feet. How the air fills with the smell of something newly dead. How it glistens in the light. How the space that stretches between them has evolved, in only the last few moments, from bright green to rotting and dark. She is surprised to see that Thana has no shame in it; if it were up to her, Angharad would leach the magic out of her blood like oil from water.
Are you like me?
And she would love to say no, more than anything, but she can’t. For every one of her childish faults, none of them let her act in dishonesty. And the way the dirt between them leaves no marking between where one’s reach ends and the other begins means it would be foolish to lie anyway.
Yes, she answers. Tightens the hinge in her jaw a little. I suppose so. It sounds weird in her mouth, too formal, but it is the only manner in which she’s ever heard someone talk. So she repeats it, like a parrot. Like a slave. Like a girl who has been told, from the very flurries beginnings of her consciousness, even before birth, what to do and how she should do it.
I’m Angharad, she says, although Thana didn’t ask, too self-conscious to talk any longer without introducing herself. The light has deepened to a semi-bloody carmine, striking Angharad’s golden skin in red and red and more red so she looks as though she’s been dipped in the thought of murder. Where are we? And if her voice breaks a little, or even wavers, it’s lost against the defiant stare she does not let move from Thana’s.
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text
RE: the flood and the fire. - Thana - 03-07-2019
“Angharad.” The name reaches out in the small death void between them. There is a song to it and a smell, like decay upon which moss and flowers learn to grow. Maybe when they leave this place moss will bloom upward from the rot like a mausoleum blooms out of grave-dirt. Thana hopes so and she's unashamed of her part in the cycle.
She was born from sickness and light, although she's not sure if that makes her reaper, god or something in-between. To her creating a hundred small deaths is still creating.
Thana wonders if the other mare dreams of moss beneath wilting flower and ivy pooling out like veins from sun-dried skulls. She wonder if she can see the beauty as well as the horror.
Angharad looks at her with something sparking like fire in her gaze, a fire that consumes and recreated. That look makes something other than dreams of moss bloom in Thana's chest. It creeps up like a weed through the dull, deep and dark fury that roils aimlessly inside her bones. The weed curls around her spine and reaches out for her heart with hungry, black roots. She steps closer and her horn tilts away so that the point reaches towards the twilight as if to say, look there, look at the colors of the sky and not the black rot and death between us. Thana takes another step closer.
And suddenly she has a name for the weed and it terrifies her. She should not feel. She should not feel--
Lonely.
“I think we are to call this place home.” Her voice sounds like rust and magic and petals unfold on the weed in her heart. Thana wants to sound like anything but lost and full of nothing but hollowness that feels like hunger. The wind picks up again and she cants her horn to stop the singing, wanting nothing of weapon song between them. “Will you walk with me?” Her hoof slides across the ground, dragging all the rot with it. Her tail cuts the grass shorter. There is no helping the way a hundred ends begin around every inch of space she fills.
Thana wonders if they would each start to slowly die if they touched. Would it it be worth it to dissolve down to dust and smoke just to feel something other than that weed in her heart?
“Just for a little while.” She whispers, because surely nothing wants to walk with death for very long.
@Angharad
RE: the flood and the fire. - Angharad - 03-24-2019
someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
W
hen Thana’s horn tilts toward the sky, the bright blue of Angharad’s gaze follows it. The twilight has deepened; now it shines with streaks of bruisey dark mauve, and blotches of bright, aureate yellow, and hazy, soft-edged spots of warm, simmering coral. Even in her anxious misery she cannot bypass the beauty of the scene and how it makes her heart race against the inside of her chest. In her homeland it never looked like this - was never pretty, merely useful, and young as she is Angharad could have never imagined that this is what the world would be like.
She does not even feel the crumbling of the earth beneath her feet as green turns to black, grass to rot.
This is not home, it’s not, it never will be. But it doesn’t hurt like home does and when Angharad sees the warm shine of Thana’s eyes, she cannot find it in herself to argue. It isn’t home for her. But to someone else it could be.
Will you walk with me?
Angharad admires the way the sharp edge of her tail cuts through the flora like butter, wonders if, in the right circumstance, her horn might be capable of the same thing: if pushed, could she kill something with muscle instead of magic?
Sure, she answers, her mouth awkward around the word. Unsure if it is the right thing to say, if she should say anything at all, if she should have walked away when she had the chance. But the way their magic meets in the swath of bright grass and turns it to mold, perfectly matched, without a seam, settles the nervous pulse of her blood just a little. To where?
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text
RE: the flood and the fire. - Thana - 04-02-2019
Her spine is starting to feel like a snake uncoiling. It feels like a tangle of sinew and hunger that is only just now waking up from a deep, dark slumber. When she lilts her head up again the young moon starts to reflect in her gaze. Thana thinks of snakes and god-rivers that run like serpents through the nothingness.
The cold of the coming night is starting to settle in her bones. It feels like snowflakes of death running through her blood, tiny diamond shards that sink in along her lungs. She shivers and thinks that maybe this body is already starting to die around her. Maybe she was not made to last. Like a star she's blazing now but she's already falling, falling, falling.
Thana takes another step through the planet of death around them. Her tail drags a track through the rot and she doesn't let herself think of the way snakes leave marks in the sand. Like a diving rod she turns her horn towards the East and the moonlight. She wants to feel heat. She wants dead sand that cannot rot.
She wants the death frost inside her to melt.
“We could go East.” Thana says and the words rattle at the back of her teeth like storm-winds. What she doesn't say is that, and we will bring death with us with every step. The blade on her tail makes an almost sigh when she curls it away from the ground and from all the black below them. The sound makes her think of blood and that dark beast inside her telling her to keep looking, keep wanting, keep destroying.
But when she brushes their shoulders together, and turns towards the east, that chorus of violence in her dies like frost before the fire.
@Angharad
RE: the flood and the fire. - Angharad - 04-27-2019
someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
T
he moon bristles overhead and washes them with silver. Angharad is sort of aureate already, at least in the places she is not soot-black or bloody, but the light turns Thana into something totally strange, her dark skin glowing pure red. It is admirable how quickly she can shift; Angharad does not know enough about herself yet to change any of it. She only knows the steady beating of her stolen heart in her chest and the terrible permanence of the world dying underneath her hooves.We could go east, Thana says, and Angharad turns her broad head sideways to the place where the open fields slope into a hard, dark forest. The trees make a black mountain-ridge against the deep purple of the now-night sky. Angharad feels a thrill of something in her chest - bright and toothy, it could be excitement or it could be raw fear, and either way it wants to set her limbs into motion regardless of direction. Antsy, she scrapes a hard, dark hoof against the ground. Her tail lashes. Her pulse threatens to burst -
Then their shoulders brush together, and Angharad breathes out a sigh of something like relief. Warmth floods through her ribs. Thana turns toward the edge of the plain as if she hasn’t even noticed the way they’ve touched, and Angharad is both grateful for and jealous of it. It is with a sheepish, admiring smile that she bumps her own shoulder against Thana’s like a song put on repeat and follows her into the darkness.
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text