There is a monster in this story.

When Vercingtorix finds the chestnut stallion dead in the desert, he is struck by morbid curiosity. It is a soldier’s old habit that ensures he catalogues the dead; he searches for identification and, when he does not find it, he reads instead for the story written in the soft sand. At first glance, there is nothing but chaos and the dark crimson stain of blood (nearly black, baked into the sand). Vultures, too, have found the corpse. The flurry of their activity has masked the signs of the chestnut’s death at first glance. 

But, with patience, Vercingtorix’s eyes track the tale. Turning to follow the direction the tracks had come, Torix finds three pairs of hoof-prints. But when he turns around to follow the journey as it transpired—forward—he discovers there is a transition where one pair of prints seems to disappear. They are replaced by a large cat’s soft pads. 

Yes, Vercingtorix thinks. There is a monster in this story.

He observes the corpse again. The second time Torix glances over the scene, he sees something he hadn’t before; a fine spray of silver liquid. It is dried now, down into the sand, but something about it strikes him as odd. 

It is magic.

Damascus’s voice is unbidden in his mind. Torix, internally, does everything but snarl. He begins to turn away, but already the light of the sun is gone and the dragon, in a flurry of sand, has landed a small distance from him.

“Don’t you want to find it?” Damascus asks.

“Why would I?”  

Even as Torix says it, tensely, he begins to realise all the reasons he would want to. Clearly, the scene is an unnatural one; a magic one. Everything seems more a hallucination than a reality; Damascus has stooped his massive head to appraise his Bonded. Torix refuses to look the great beast in the eyes. 

“I know what you’re trying to do.” 

The dragon sighs, heavily, and stares at the chestnut corpse.

“It doesn’t work like that.” The dragon nearly sounds hurt. “I can’t just hypnotise you. You’re… you’re… mine."  It comes out broken, possessive, deep. The voice of the devil claiming sin. 

Vercingtorix turns away, and begins to follow the trail of silver blood. Behind him, in a sound of horrendous crunching, Damascus devours the chestnut corpse.

Perhaps, Vercingtorix thinks, there is more than one monster in this story. 

He hears the sound of Damascus’s wings beating the air; a sound like a hurricane. And then the dragon is above him, in the sky, higher and higher. They follow the trail of blood, together, through the Mors—with Damascus informing Torix of the canyon in the distance—and the sun beginning to rise on the distant horizon. Their journey is lit by the stars and moon, everything cool silver.

The trail leads them to the canyon; and deeper, deeper. 

Vercingtorix is surprised with the prints (they are often wiped by sand, now, and if not for the blood he would have lost the trail entirely) transition from paws to hooves again.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Everything around them is walled. Everything around them holds the memory of vicious water, carving through the earth. The trail twists and turns and Vercingtorix smells water, now, in earnest. The desert spring is surrounded by foliage, although it is far too small to be considered an oasis.

This, he thinks, is where the trail ends.

This, he thinks, is where the chapter changes.

Damascus lands on the precipice of the canyon above. Beneath his weight, rocks and sand give way and cascade to the bottom. Vercingtorix turns his eyes upon the Pegasus sheltered there."You’re hurt.” Vercingtorix says. And then, in a voice distrustful and guilting, “You killed that man.”

There is a monster in this story.

Sometimes, though, he comes gilded in gold.

Sometimes, though, he comes with words.

"Speech." || @Warset 

Her dreams are filled with tourmaline, and star-fire, and a blackness as bruised blue as a bolt of precious night silk. There is singing in that bright-dark place-- a hum on her lips, a vibration between marrow and quicksilver as they swarm together like wasps, a whisper of wind through feathers and teeth too sharp to be in the jaws of a star. The song has no words and no language but sound. But she does not stop singing not when her form changes to another three times and changes back three times as well.

Warset sings deep in her blood even as she awakens in the oasis with a silver tear leaking from her eyes because she is alone as she had been in that endless red and bruised-black dream. It glitters in the sun like a diamond shard fallen from the crown of a god.

They find her with an echo on the song on her tongue and the weight of a man in her stomach. She feels like a bit of stone as she turns to him, all marble and delicacy with nothing but hard edges. And when she rises, turning her quicksilver gaze to the dragon, her wings snap at her sides like a shawl draped around a lonely statue in a storm.

I know you, those wings snap at the monster, I sang on the war-field of your ancestors.

Something in her cracks and bleeds-outs, like the fires of her falling had in the desert sun, when the stallion's words break through her wing language. The blood in her belly feels like pounds of stones when she turns to step towards him. A memory streaks like a dead star across her thoughts. She tries to hold on. She fails. Blood falls from her leg, the wound, and she does not know enough to hide it from the thing shifting across his eyes.

“Did he have a name?” Her wings furl and unfurl at her side, anxious for both flight and fury. And she doesn't know whether to lay her teeth at his throat, or cry, or drown herself in the water like a star falling into the ocean.

But she does not deny it, not with a gallon of blood weighing her down like a stone.







@Vercingtorix

Damascus knows her as the lost know the lost. 

But the knowing does not evoke pity; it evokes a wendigo’s hunger, an opening in the dragon’s broken soul as wide as the night, as thorough as an abyss. At the snap of her wings he snaps his own; the wind they create buffets the pair of horses below, a storm of sand thrown into a flurry. Yes. Damascus knows her as the lost knows the lost; and the lost consume those like themselves. 

But Vercingtorix steels the dragon with a glance. Not yet. The great beast’s lips ripple at his dripping teeth; but he settles, settles, settles, a thing tamed by its own brokenness. 

“Of course he had a name,” says Torix. “It was Ezekiel.” He lies the same way most men tell the truth. He steps forward, closer; he measures her with his eyes.

There is a wildcat in her soul. He knows it, because he had seen exactly what its teeth can do. 

“He was my friend.” Vercingtorix states. He looks for her quicksilver blood and, he begins to wonder, exactly what kind of magic it possesses. 

He knows if he were to become a beast it would be a spotted leopard, sun-bright and dappled with obsidian rosettes. He knows if he were to become a beast—if what was inside of him manifested in what was outside of him—they would not be so different.

He steps closer.

"Speech." || @Warset 

Stars, oh stars, do now know how to be brought to heel by things with jagged teeth and dripping spit. They do not know how to lower their heads, their white-fire, and look at the blackness instead of the beasts. And she does not know how to do it now, not even with these mortal bones and these mortal eyes begging to her bow like a flower before the acrid dragon-wind.

Instead she is a fool of a girl, all fragile flesh holding in the wrath of a constellation and a wildcat.

Instead she bares her teeth, and her wings, at the dragon like she's a thing that knows each secret living in his grotesqueness. Deep in her cosmic heart she knows all the black things in his. She knows the color of a dragon's blood, she knows what flowers bloom in the places where it has watered the dirt. Her snarl echoes no less fiercely than his despite the delicateness of her form.

And she's still looking at the dragon (thinking the real danger is in all the places its not) when the stallion steps closer. The blood-stones in her stomach roil and rise up to choke her. “I did not know.” She chokes and wonders if it makes it better or worse that the weight in her stomach has a name now.

One was them, in the end, was going to dies in that alley. And she's glad, viciously glad, that she was not the corpse in the dirt when the dawn came.

But it does not settle the ache, or soothe the sorrow, or cool the fires of her star-soul. It just sits there, another stone to bury her deeper into this mortal world of dirt.

“Have you come to take your vengeance then?” She lifts her head, and her wings rise like storm clouds at her side, because even now she does not know how to bow before men and monsters. Beneath her skin her heart flutters like a sparrow caught in a cage, as hungry for the hand that feeds as it is for freedom. Below the sorrow in her gaze, that dark swirl of quicksilver, an ember start to catch like a newborn comet in the darkness.

And she does not say that she's sorry, not with a dragon perched on the cliffs above them.

She cannot.  



@Vercingtorix

They never tell you Souls are a delicate gossamer, weaved by the spiders of time and fate with the same delicacy of a real web. No, too often in myth Souls take on a shape of mortal translucence; the shape of the being it inhabits. They are glowing, and light, something belonging to water or air. But no, the Priests of Oresziah would say. The Soul is gossamer silk; woven into an intricate, irreplicable pattern by the masters of destiny, whoever they may be. And this Soul is woven into everything one is and will become; it is woven into past, present, future, into forever and never, today and the abyss that follows when the stars fall from the galaxy and the light decays and all that is left is entropy, the memory of life, a droplet into the lake of eternity rippling, rippling, rippling—

and they never say when a Soul is shattered, is broken, it cannot be replicated. It cannot be repaired through diligent work, or fate’s kind hand. The gossamer strands hang lank and dull become cobwebs rather than art, and the connections drawn to them break upon relation. Where once strands might have entwined and become a furthered extension fo art… they become connected to something decayed, decrepit, a forgotten piece of a person. 

This is why Vercingtorix and Damascus will ensnare and break all that they will ever touch. It is why the hunger in Damascus’s eyes is fathomless but not flesh-based; the hunger of a black hole and oh, if she is a star, that is a state of things she ought to recognise. It has never been Damascus’s fangs that are threatening. 

I did not know. She nearly sounds contrite. 

Vercingtorix isn’t. The lie almost tastes sweet; her mercury blood is fresh in his mind. 

Have you come to take your vengeance then?

So defiant. She reminds him of the Last Prince, of any last or fallen thing. The pride is there like the edge of the sky at dusk; a different, haunting colour. He has always confused sorrow for pride, sentiment for weakness. 

“No,” Torix says. And rather then draw nearer, he steps back. “Only justice.” 

The justice wrought upon all those who cannot control their inhibitions. Magic-users and beasts, the star-crossed and fallen. 

As if on command, Damascus parts his jaws and breathes cool fire. It will not burn but instead dances in hues of indigo, purple, and deep blue. The “fire,” which behaves more like smoke, shines with true iridescence. A thousand colours; incomprehensible shades. When they hit the sand they pool and begin to rise into other shapes; into horses and stars, dragons and men, swords and spears. The shapes take on feeling; the shapes take on sentiment; a trio of smoke-horses begins to dance and swirl around her. They are running, and twisting, and dancing and each horse (though baseless, though formless) presses against her, as if to rush her toward Torix himself.

Perhaps, if she breathes in (and how can she not, when the smoke is so concentrated, when the vapour hovers in the air all around her?) she will begin to feel the effects of Damascus’s mild poison. A dissociation with reality; a heightening feeling of euphoria and trust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine, serotonin the chemicals of love; oxytocin and vasopressin, for attachment. But multiplied. A love beyond all love. If she breathes it in, she might begin to feel an immediate disassociation; a disconnection from the sand beneath her, the dragon above her, and instead Vercingtorix does as the dragon had taught: Torix looks into her eyes as the dragon begins to speak in the hypnotic, carnal voice of all things primordial, of the heartbeat, the pulse, the ecstatic summit of life, the painful throb of its end. 

"Are you tired?" Damascus asks. 

The great beasts clambers down the cliffside; four enormous wings stretch out above them, until the sky becomes a distant memory and instead they are privy to the black, black of obsidian membranes, highlighted through with the colours of titanium quartz. The vapour drifts from his jaws; the poison drips.

“But,” Vercingtorix amends, waiting for the effects to take hold. “You might find I am a merciful judge.”

The dragon continues: "Perhaps you should rest... you are safe, here, with us. You are safe." 

Vercingtorix repeats, "You are safe." 

"Speech." || @Warset 

“Your justice will be the same as your vengeance.” Warset corrects him around her mouth full of snarling teeth and her belly heavy with blood-stones. She is too old, too knowing of all the songs she never forgot how to sing over a battlefield of the acts of dragons, and gods, and cosmic snakes. There is a song in him too, she can see it trapped in the darkness of his cold and mortal eyes, and each note is a trill of iron and heart-string.

She hates every note of it. Every. Single. Note.

And like all stars that know how a song is to be sung, she knows the moment the stallion steps back that time to run has slipped past her like a river current. Her wing flare violently at her side, and she rears up as the dragon exhales clouds that are nothing more than a mockery of all the incandescent and cosmic colors she knows how to name. When she trills a battle-cry it's a tangled melody of wrath, warning and fear.

Warset knows she shouldn't inhale the smoke. She knows there is something wrong with it in the same way a star knows how wrong it is to wish upon the life of a sister. But her mortal form, this cursed cage of bone and skin, does not know how to breathe song and darkness instead of hair. She inhales because she must, but her wings do not stop whispering a warcry to the dragon climbing down the canyon like a spider down a web.

Over and over again she inhales. The smoke, the horses, the snakes of colors pressing in against her like vines to a willow tree.

Her blood grows sluggish, her heart sleepy and sorrowful, her bones fill with satin instead of marrow. She blinks, and blinks, and closes her eyes. But she does not answer them, her wrath might be slumbering but it is still wrath. Her mind tells her she is safe, but her wrath and her soul know that she is not.

Dying is never safe.

Yet she almost welcomes it as their terrible song turns to lullaby.

“And you will find--” She warns with the last of her fury, and her pride, and her war-song that does not know how to heel. Her eyes open, one last time, to see the dragon smiling with a mouthful of spit and smoke. She does not see the man (and hardly senses him now).

She smiles. It it almost as hateful as it is sweetly full of sorrow. She tries to finish her warning...

Nothing comes out. Her eyes close.

She is safe, the darkness tell her.

But why, she thinks in a stuttering mess of thoughts, can she hear a leopard and a star screaming in this safe darkness?



@Vercingtorix

Your justice will be the same as your vengeance. If Vercingtorix were the type of man to feel contrite, he might have paused; he might have taken stock of those words, and what they meant, and changed his mind.

Instead, he hates her as she hates him: as something other, as something dark—as a monster, with magic in her veins, with a leopardess prowling beneath her flesh. A shapeshifter, amorphous, not to be trusted. A woman, with magic ebbing in her blood.

Not to be trusted.

Only contained.

Just breathe, Warset. Don’t fight your mockery of stars; let them be like a welcome home. Vercingtorix watches her through the incandescent vapour; the swirls of shapes like curses given form. Damascus spews hate; Damascus spews every condemnable thought, whispered into something other, wrapped in silk and honey.

And you will find—

“That your words don’t matter.” Vercingtorix chides. He watches her fall with the power of a young god and Damascus, with a steady pulse of his wings, banishes the lingering vapour. 

“Damascus,” Vercingtorix calls—and the beast steps forward to collect Warset in his gemstone claws; he cradles her with surprising gentleness, a star in the palm of a dragon borne from Tartarus, the pit of titans and demons and darkness, of planets and black holes and sin. The pit of all things breaking, or broken.

Damascus kneels; and for the first time Vercingtorix walks up the dragon’s arm and shoulder, until he rests safely between the monstrous beast’s wings. 

“To the mountains,” Vercingtorix commands. And with their new prisoner, Damascus takes to the skies. 

"Speech." || @Warset 

This is not my darkness.

There are no stars gathered around me in patterns whispering to me of song, and fable, and future. I can hear no music in the blackness. I can taste no blood on the comet's tail that signals the readiness of the war-field. I do not taste the sugar of a harp, or the acid of an arrow whistling almost sweetly between the scattered brightness of my sisters.

All I can taste is bitterness, herbal and acrid, as I wander the nothingness of this strange darkness. Ahead there is black, behind there is black. And I wonder if I am nothing more than a shadow here, a thing reaped down into cells and tossed into the furthest reaches of the cosmic darkness where there is no sun to light up the asteroid fields. I wonder if I have wings, or form, or a heart beating frail and frantic as a hummingbird in my chest.

Am I the hummingbird?

I start to run and my hooves (are they hooves, or do I move with nothing but trails of dead-light in the black?) make no sounds in this oil-thick darkness. This is not the cosmic darkness I remember were the blackness was full of so much light that it looked like it was fat with nothing. There I made sound, and song, and whispers of feathers, as I sang bright and loudly enough that I turned from star to mother-sun.

There I was--

What was I?

What I am?

I think I'm lost, as my gallop turns frantic. I think I'm blind as I turn my head sharp as a whip and never see a sliver of light. Left. Right. Blackness. Nothing. I think I'm-

Oh I think I'm dead.

And like a dying star, I open my mouth and scream loud as a stone falling through an atmosphere.

I don't want to carry wishes anymore.

I only want freedom.

I only want light.

I need light.

And I don't think I'll ever stop screaming. Even when I'm dead I'll scream until the blackness speckles with constellations again.



@Vercingtorix