[AW] you need a big god;

[Lysander]

The gods have trapped the regimes.
 
The note had been an untidy scrawl, the messenger-bird windblown and weary. But Lysander did not need the words to tell him the news; he already knew it, in the deep-dark of his heart. He’d known it since the first shudder that had rolled through the city, knocking vases from tables and rattling pictures in their frames.
 
He had not believed in the gods of this place. If they’d ever lived, he’d thought them long since faded to dust and bones and silent monuments.
 
But it seemed they were awake, and their appetites for praise were all the sharper after their long slumber. And Florentine was not made for bowing.
 
Nor were those gilded and guilty horses of the night court, though they were as hungry for it as the gods themselves, and Lysander did not like to think of the golden girl encaged with such a group. He did not, in fact, want to think at all –
 
And so instead he ran, heedless and harried through the long grasses that whispered against his legs, his sides. It was easier to run, to feel the stretch and burn of muscle and sinew and ignore the world but for the burn of his lungs and the wind in his hair.
 
It was easier because he knew even as he did it that he was helpless to do anything else.
 
 
When he arrives at the temple it is dusk, and the fireflies mirror the stars above, little guidelights in the gathering dark.
 
The building is long-abandoned, and nearly consumed by weeds. Vines trail up one side, a living wall with leaves that whisper like a secret in the breeze. Its walls, once smooth, are bleached to the color of bone and chipped and worn with time.
 
His hooves echo on the marble as he steps inside.
 
Once a place like this was a home to him, too. Now it’s with a stranger’s eye that he appraises it: a long, low offering table with withered flowers and polished stones, empty thurible with the ghost of incense drifting through the empty space.
 
A gleam in a dim corner catches his eye; a rough-hewn face, a horse head cut from stone with blank and staring eyes of marble. Lysander crosses to it slowly, his shadow slanting across the dusty floor, his antlers curved like scythes.
 
It is autumn and his antlers are once again shedding their velvet. It hangs in bloody strips, just as it had when he’d first arrived; born into blood on Novus’s soil. All the blood he’d smelled since his arrival here had been his own, salt and iron and sin.
 
Florentine had saved him before, but he can do nothing for her. He is not a man accustomed to feeling helpless. He is not a man accustomed to the kind of rage, of dark wrath, that unwinds within him as he stares at that impassive stone face in the near-black.
 
Now he leans forward, scraping first one arc of bloody bone and then the other across the statue of the god. His antlers clatter and rattle against the bust, striping it dark and wet and gruesome, and at last he steps back, grimly satisfied.
 
Vespera is a frightening, feral thing with her cheeks and eyes streaked red-black in the dim. Surely this is more in her image. 
 
Men were sinners, but men could change. Gods –
 
He thinks of the black unicorn, then, her voice acrid and black as gunpowder. Blood is to be paid in blood. He thinks of what had been written at the bottom of the summons the bird had brought to Terrastella.
 
“Go in peace,” he murmurs, and then he shoves his shoulder against the bust, harder and harder until it topples off its column to splinter on the floor with a shattering crash.
 
The temple seems to shiver and moan, but it is nothing like when the whole of the world shook as stones from the summit crumbled in.
 
Afterward, there is only silence.

we wake with bright eyes now

all welcome! come share in his blasphemy or accost him over it

[Wormlust]

------------------I have seen the dark universe yawning ---------------------------------Where the black planets roll without aim, First he is nothing more than what looks like deer, brown like dead grass with antlers that catch the ebbing sunlight. Purples gather in the shadows of his antlers and the tips of them reflect the sun into fragments of golden light as he turns and runs towards a building that juts out from the soil like a bone, as if the ground of this hallowed place cannot stand to keep the monstrosity of its secrets a moment longer. Had he not been running, had he not drawn her eyes by refracting the light into patterns like a kaleidoscope, she would never have noticed him. The grasses, tall and not yet dead by the chill in the air as the weather starts to turn, would have swallowed him up like a mouse. Her eyes, sharp and edged with scales as dark and blue as the parts of the sea, would have slid right over his body as nothing more than a trick of the terrible, teasing moonlight. It's too late now that she's seen him as she rises from between the cresting waves like a dragon made of sea-foam, salt and teeth sharp enough to make the smile of a shark look like a blunt, rounded string of pearls. She banks her wings and turns. Her figure cuts through the dusk like a star. She could be a ray of moonlight, of sunlight, of that light that glows and shines when the day shifts too slowly and both rocks battle over the spaces between the clouds. Her body too refracts the light, the colors of the setting sun. The purples and pinks seem to bounce from her skin as if they refuse to live on the flesh of something so ghastly, so horrible as she. Only the blue and the reds stay with her. She's a rainbow of sea-color and a red dark and thick enough to be blood. The antlered horse dips into the building and she follows, landing on the grasses instead of the stone steps. Inside he's loud enough, angry enough with the way he rages in against marble and other dead, things that might offer no relief for a rage as dark and deep as the one she can taste on his sweat and shedding antler fur. He smells like hate and she can chew the heavy air in the temple as she drags her wings against the marble threshold when she joins him inside the building that rises like the bones of the earth from the weeds. It's not silence that follow his outburst and the walls seem to her as if they tremble not for his sins against a mere statue. It seems that they tremble like the white sharks tremble before her when she swims around their young and licks the brine from their slick flesh. It's not silence at all that echoes on the wreckage he's made but the whisper of feathers. So quiet a whispering that it might be nothing more than the breeze cooing through the cracks in the stone where ivy has grown into places it never should have dreamed to exist.   WORMLUST monster of the sea

@Lysander

[Lysander]

He does not see her fall behind him like a dreadful star, come to bring ruin and light.

He has been hunted before and he knew it, then – knew the pairs of eyes that rested on him, their drunken, jealous weight. But Lysander does not feel the weight of these eyes, eyes that have seen the end of a hundred thousand lives. If he did, oh, would he know to be afraid?

But there is no room for fear in him as the bust of Vespera lies cracked on the floor. It is no god now, nothing but cleaven stone. Reparable, but there would always be a sign of its breaking.

At first there is only the sound of his breathing in the almost-silence, deep pulls of stale air from a holy place long empty. And then there is a new sound. A susurrus like the sigh of the sea. At first he thinks it is only the wind, but there is no wind; and when a breeze does come, it brings him the truth. A partial truth, at least: the smell of brine, the smell of dead and rotting things long beneath the waves.

As the once-god turns around, a strip of hair rises down his back, the only warning his mortal body can give him.

Then his eyes fall on the unholy thing that stands just inside the entryway.

There is a halo of light around her like the moon on the waves and is seems to him that she should be dripping seawater, that her wings and the wolf’s-gleam of her eyes should be weeping it. The taste of drowning is thick on his tongue and he searches his centuries of memory for something like her in all the gods and monsters he has known.

Lysander comes up empty.

She is nothing like the kelpies he had talked with Indra of; she is nothing he can name but monster.

The temple was made for horses and one wall is nothing but columns, but she stands before that wall and the shadow of her joins the other shadows that stripe the floor, reaching for his cloven feet. Lysander does not take his green eyes from her, but he bows his head, angling the bloody bone of his antlers at the creature before him. Still his rage seethes inside him, foreign anger prickling in his blood-bright veins; it feels a little like intoxication.

Perhaps that is why he is not yet afraid, drunk on two kinds of madness.

“Come to worship?” The words unfurl for her like leaves, soft and dark, and he angles his head so that the moonlight slants in, revealing his grin.

Maybe this is the gods’ punishment, and maybe that is why he welcomes it.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust

[Wormlust]

------------------I have seen the dark universe yawning ---------------------------------Where the black planets roll without aim, “Perhaps.” The sea speaks from her lips, oozing syllables as much as it oozes brine and salt-water. She is as coarse as the ocean bottom, jagged with corral and a graveyard of bones long since picked cleaned by all the scavengers of the depths. Each syllable sounds like a tentacle, crawling out from her smile and across the gruesome shadow she paints. Out, out, out to wrap around that humming pulse of his life vein throbbing beneath the broad arch of his cheekbone. He lowers his weapons and she chuckles. It's the roar of the sea as it thunders against the cliffs, the crumbling echo of those cliffs when they can't hold against the tides. Those antlers of his, peeling and on the cusp of some evolution are little more than picks she'll use to dig out his flesh from between her teeth when she's done slaking her hunger. Outside this temple, soon to be turned into a  feeding ground, the stars thicken and brighten, a primordial, celestial silk under which she will turn this shrine into something more, something as holy as she. The marble will run red, as if all the earth has been broken down to the core of its being, disintegrated into molecules and blood. Already she can see it, see the way she might dash his bones upon the sharp edges of the broken statue to crack him open like a gull might crack open a mollusk or spear out the insides of a crustacean.   “I shall worship on the altar I will make of you.” Oh, but her words sound holy and promise more than any god of this place might offer. She promises freedom from the mortal cage of these horse bones, freedom to be tethered not to earth but to the entire cosmos. Wormlust promises that she might pray upon the very core of him, whisper her secrets of revelation as she etches words into his bones with the points of his own evolving antlers. And when she moves, lifting up those heavy, world devouring wings the marble seems like nothing more than a cloud to pillow the heavy weight of all that she is. The shadows of him, of her, of the pillars of stone are swallowed up in the blackness of those wings. They blot out the stars, the moons, any light that might have filtered past her to highlight the dripping fangs that appear as she gapes wide her smile. Already she salivates for the sweetness of his rage, his hate, all the dark things that have seasoned him better than any brine might. Her wings never beat enough to take her up, up, up above him, up to where she might land upon his back like a falcon, a dread hawk, a carrion bird to pluck apart his demise. She only walks forward, wings spread wide to swallow up all the memories of any world outside this one of hunger and survival, of a monster older than Novus, older the any world he might fathom with the limits of his mind.   He has fought against the wrong sort of god, shattered her image to dust in an empty show of fury and suffering. She. She is the thing they should worship and fear.  For she needs no stone statue to inflict fear and adoration, she only needs the harsh snap of her teeth, the suffocating weight of her wings and the way she seems like the first thing to ever have been created. Her hunger could create religions. WORMLUST monster of the sea

@Lysander

[Lysander]

Lysander hears the ocean there in her words.

It is not the shoreline sea, that soft susurrus like a lullaby, a thing that soothes. No; this is the truth of the waves, the deep-dark beneath and beneath that, where the light doesn’t reach. Where things are born and live and die without ever being seen because there is nothing but darkness, nothing but devour and be devoured. What waits below that word, he thinks –

Nothing but teeth and blackness.

Her laughter is nothing at all like Florentine’s. It is not a bell that rings high and clear or a brook that leaps and glints with light. It is like the crumble of the god-statue behind him, like a slick vine that wants to pull him in. He will remember that laugh tonight when he closes his eyes (if, the mortal part of his mind insists, but Lysander is still an arrogant thing in his heart-of-hearts, and he pushes the thought away).

Like a statue himself he stands, neck still arched and antlers a neat cage, still smeared bloody. They scent the air with iron like a spell against the salt of her, but he knows this is no fairytale. Later he might think of Indra, of the scars on her neck and her wry words - sometimes too close.

Now he doesn’t think at all. If there wasn’t that black rage running hot in his blood, a new bloom of heat with each beat of his heart, he might have tried to reason with her – the once-god had always enjoyed such a challenge with monsters and with men.

But he is wrathful and she is ravenous. And there is no gleam in her eye, not when she blots out the light, and Lysander’s breathing is too loud in the echoing stillness.

Yet he smiles at her promise, and scrapes a cloven hoof against the marble just to hear it ring out beneath him like a sword being drawn.

“I’ve been to that kind of rite before.” His words are rich dark earth, all fearless and full. The kind of soil where anything might grow.

Blackness falls across him as she lifts her terrible wings, and the bars of sky behind her are cut away by the veil of them. Maybe it is a blessing that he does not see her teeth.

When she steps forward he does too, and it is something like a ritual in that desecrated, holy place. Her wings blot out the autumn breeze and all he smells is rot and brine. It is easy to imagine what his bones might look like once she is finished with them: half-covered in silt, crawling with barnacles, a heathens’ kind of art. Would his bones still be holy with him no longer a god? Would they remember being cradled in ichor, not in blood?

They are so close, now, he can smell the sour sweetness of her breath. He can smell the tide on her scales, and yet he still smiles.

“It’s never as fun as it sounds,” he says, and Lysander leaps forward.

He had never been a man made for fighting, but he is tired of bleeding his own blood – here where it is so limited, so precious. Like a stag he leaps, not toward her fearsome center and waiting jaws but for the endless sail of her left wing. He will tear a hole in it if he must, with his antlers so new-sharp they are still smeared with red – even now he tosses his head for the stretch of her feathers and prays to feel the catch and pull.

With his hooves, too, he lashes out, a rear that becomes a lunge. If he had thoughts at all, they would be praying for an opening, for a split moment of daylight he might flee too – there from the plains back into the relative safety of the woods, if only he can be swift enough.

Maybe this is why men loved violence so –

Maybe their bodies craved it, remembering when there was no other option to survive.  

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust

[Wormlust]

------------------I have seen the dark universe yawning ---------------------------------Where the black planets roll without aim, He acts like a stallion might, a man, a stag corned on the cliff-side who thinks that the wolf before it with snapping, dripping jaws is nothing more than just a wolf. The ring of his hoof against the marble sounds slick enough to be a sword drawn between them, a testimony to his courage to bleed and ache. But she no wolf and she smiles for the patterns of promise that his whittled and bloody antlers might brand into that pale, hollow curve of her shoulder. Come. Those titanic wings seem to coo as they reach towards his weapons, speaking in tones of down and light eagle bones. Come, coat me in your blood and horn. They speak as no wings should seem to, fluttering so heavy a way in that dusky, star-dusted wind. A hymn roars from those feathers and her teeth scrape out a sharp ring when she grinds her grin fang to fang, bone to bone. In the moonlight, she thinks, his blood would be like luminescent, ancient spirals of a dread language on her bone-white skin when she takes herself from this temple and leaves his corpse, clean and hung with only ribbons of his sacrifice behind. “Ah.” It sounds like wave from her lips, white-water carrying up eels and sharks and things that feed. The word could be a sigh for the way her ribs expand and contract like the tide over a rock set way out past the shoreline. “You must know little of sacrifice.” Perhaps it's the wings that chime the words. Perhaps it's her lips that stretch and pull and sting over her ravenous fangs and form sounds louder than that rumble of hunger that beats from her belly like a pulse. He moves, lunging towards her wings and she forgets everything but the promise of the weapons upon his head and the hunger, the need of her nature. She needs as holy things need, without end, like the abysmal darkness of space that reaches on and on and out behind every universe that has ever been. Wormlust only needs. His flesh calls just as much as his rage does, that blackness beneath his skin that wants to bleed her out. She welcomes his rage like a mother, tossing her wing against his antlers ever as he plunges towards her. She embraces him that left wing, cocooning him with all of her. His hooves do little more than glance against her leg and scrape her skin like a dull knife when she lunged towards him with those rabid feathers. His antlers feel like fire as they run through the edges of her feathers, plunging deep into the salt-licked down. There is no defense against his attack, no step away from his violence. There is only consumption, only devouring, only sacrifice. She moves against him as a holy thing might, a monster that cares little for the sanctity of her own flesh when there is so much more blood and bone in her that one mere wing cannot hold. A mistake to think she cares for pain, for the sound her feathers and the drip, drip, drip of her blood make against the marble when pieces of her fall like meteors. It's her gaping jaw that follow as she drops her wing and lets him bear the weight of her mighty span that has once blotted out worlds. Let him carry her holiness, she thinks, let him feel the weight of wings that are too heavy even for a monster as eternal as she to hold upon the earth for more than moments at a time. He will taste sweeter for the salt of his sweat and the red, red violence of his blood that made him think he fought a monster that knew how to be mortal. She will season him with the tang of her own iron blood, coat him in her own suffering, tie them together in a fury of survival that might have but one end. WORMLUST monster of the sea

@Lysander

[Lysander]

One of the great marvels of mortality is this:

The way a moment can stretch out into an eternity, a single heartbeat pulled into a great black sea with no beginning and no end.

Lysander is in such a moment now. This is why men could laugh at the gods: their whole worlds, their very existence, compacted down to the ragged pull of one breath into warm lungs. Each movement, each red wash of blood through a canyon of veins, mattered more than anything.

It seems impossible that this monster, too, might be a living thing – but cradled in the dark shadow of her wing, there below the smell of brine and the tang of salt thick on his tongue, there is a smell of iron, of blood not his own. He clings to that scent over the gnash of her teeth and the dread flood of her words, the rustle of her wings like a hundred carrion birds on a whale carcass.

Lysander needs, too.

He needs her blood to live as much as she needs his. Her wing drops down over him even as he rises to meet it, and her blood is hot hot hot where it speckles his skin like holy water. Each breath he pulls in tastes like a shipwreck, like an alien beach at low tide.  

She drops her wing.

It covers him like a shroud as he tries to tear away; it threatens to bow his copper neck, to buckle his dark knees. It is a killing embrace and he feels her begin to curl in to press teeth to skin, a kiss he will not recover from.

Lysander wonders if the gods must be laughing and his fury swallows his fear.

There had been no struggle when the Night King came for him, when he was surrounded by men with laughing mouths and glinting knives. There had been no time to fight back. Now the stallion makes up for that inaction: he is teeth and hooves and antlers, black rage and bright blood and panting breath between dark lips.  

And nothing is coming of it. Closer come her jaws, until he can feel her hot breath on his side; at last Lysander stops struggling beneath the weight of her wings and drops his head as if vanquished. There is a hint of dusky light against the marble floor, filtering through the tips of her feathers; he sucks in a breath of autumn night and kicks out with his hind feet.

He is too close, too wrapped in her wing, to be sure of the angle. If he is lucky, a hoof will catch her in the chest, in the neck, along her curving cheek. If he is lucky it will be enough for her to withdraw, just for a moment, just long enough for him to tear himself from her wing and flee like a stag, like the hunted thing he is, carrying a few feathers and the suffocating smell of her.

If he is unlucky –

But he is a man now, and there is no room in this eternal moment to consider such an outcome.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust

[Wormlust]

A fever takes hold of her; one of boiling hunger, lips cracked and dried from the salted brine upon them. She feels like a fire of baptism, a flame of reincarnation to char him down to dust and recreate him with the mortar of her blood. To be defiled by her is to be 'made', to live inside something who might whisper stories of creation by the pulse of organs and the thrum of blood. Burn, burn, burn. She's burning up in the licking flames of his fury to live, the rushing blood-water that moves like white-water inside the cage of his skin. He calls to her like an oasis, the salt of his death-knell as he sweats in  the killing madness. He is water to the desert of her, fresh lake waters to her ocean-salt. He lashes against her and she forgets the suffering of her wings, the drip of her blood as she oozes out on the stakes of his horns. For her the moment whips by. His sweat runs rivers down his flesh and she licks her tongue down in the hollow, dipped skin between his rib cage when he finally stills and bows underneath the shrine of her wings. Below them, under the cracks where the marble has been pieced together the worms, the carrion beasts of the soil, gather beneath the altar. They feast on her blood where  it has dripped and gathered and promised to rot the sanctity of this forgotten, ivy covered shrine. There are no gods here, no immortals who have forgotten how to suffer, to bleed, to lay broken in pits of sin. Here there is only Wormlust: the cosmic predator. There is only suffering, only dark rituals made in survival and wildness, only prey digesting in the bowels of her belly. And oh, oh, oh! Oh, he tastes like wine. His skin could be a fermented garden left abandoned by the sea and rotted by the salt and moisture. Her teeth feed deeply, sinking into him, dipping deep inside the tender muscles between his  rib bones. He is as cosmic as she, aged and flavored by all the secrets his blood cannot keep from her. The could be an obourous--wing to horn, teeth to bone. They are knotted and bleeding as they devour each other. His struggles resume, his memories perhaps flickering like the sun upon the waves. Wormlust reacts by rearing back when his hoof brushes her chest. She is made rabid but not foolish by the drunken headiness of his flavor. It's enough to draw her wings from the crucifix of his antlers. They are a fury of feathers as they peel back from him, spraying him with a sea-spray of blood. A star could have imploded inside her for all the heat that fever still burns into her flesh, writing patterns of need on her bones. She's mad with the need, the fever, the rabidness for his blood-water to slake this beastly thirst of her. She's mad enough to take  to the thin air between this cage of marble of holiness. Her wings brush the ceiling and her blood rains down like the start of some flood, drops that promise more, more, more, death. Those wings are large enough, massive enough to still take flight without the use of the torn up, bloody feathers that bathed him in her. It is no horse-like sound that falls from her lips as she moves to swoop down upon him and grab his neck between her teeth like an crocodile might. Wormlust makes the sound a moon might make, ivory stone that screams as it burns through the atmosphere when it falls. WORMLUST monster of the sea

art

[Lysander]

Her tongue against his skin is a profane thing, enough to make a god shudder and wail. And tremble Lysander does, each touch of her mouth wracking him like a fever even as he wonders if she tastes her own blood, scarlet on the copper of his skin. Oh, she is so near the silver scar that nearly caused his killing – how many more will he have, if he keeps his life tonight?

Lysander will always be haunted by the sound wrenched from him when first her teeth close on his side. It is an awful thing, a terrible thing that should be muffled by the great cocoon of her wing but instead echoes around the barren temple like an unholy chant.  

Now he is slick and dark and gleaming with blood and wishing it were ichor. Man and monster both smell of iron and salt and he thinks, wildly, of stag skeletons long bleached beneath the winter sun, of antlers locked and two feral things so needful of their own survival that they died for it.

He could sob with gratitude when first she draws back, when clean evening air reaches him and silver rims his vision with pain or starlight. Even the heat of her blood as she tears free of his sharp tines is nothing against that whispering breeze that promises freedom. Nothing could keep him still then, not even the way blood wets his side in furrows from teeth that have torn through muscle and scraped against bone.

The once-god is not so foolish as to look back. There is only a great pulling of air like the wake of a comet or the pause before a tornado, the held-breath of the universe to tell him that she is rising, rising, ready to fall.

Lysander runs. Whether gods or luck his feet did not slip on the blood-slick tile and each bright flash of pain as his lungs sucked in breath and his hooves touched the ground was beaten back by adrenaline. He forgot everything except for the blood that rushed in his veins and the singing of his torn flesh and the silver promise of moonlight, the smell of the late-summer wind.

Her scream is like the end of the world.

Almost at that he glances back, wondrous at the shape of her fury, but he knows his curiosity would well and truly damn him. Instead he only forces himself onward, leaving blood behind him like a breadcrumb trail, as marble turns to dirt turns to grass. Never has he pushed a mortal body so hard; he can feel the heart of it shudder in his chest, mournful of the blood it loses through each frantic pulse. The only thing in the world he wants is the treeline dark against the sky ahead, pines like stakes that jut toward the stars. The only thing in the world he fears is the shadow that might fall over him if he is not fast enough.

Lysander reaches the cover of the trees and still he does not stop. He might never stop until there is no more blood in him, until the world is out of air for each hungry breath he draws.

And even then he could never forget what it was to be hunted like nothing more than an animal.

we wake with bright eyes now

@Wormlust until next time xD

[Wormlust]

They are eternal for a moment, horse and winged one, and the world quiets in the space between them. Blood is the only sound, rushing through their wounds and dripping upon the marble below. Then there are breaths to break up the silence broken up by blood and Wormlust breathes him in just as he breathes in enough air to swallow his pain and run. And she, when their movements start up once more, lets him breathe and turn to run between the pillars of stone and the shadow of her wings under the moonlight. She watches him go and licks his blood from her lips and from the bits of flesh between her razor teeth.   Her throat feels warmer for the wine of him, spiced with oak and moss and forgotten things that she might be the only one but him to remember. His blood is like a map of him, tangles of splendor and opiates and she's almost swaying with want and need and something else. It's the something else that should worry the world. Lysander runs and she turns to explore the temple and all the broken stones of the statue. The stone feels cool beneath her tongue and when she lifts her broken and bloody feathers to paint strange symbols on the walls and the floor words pour profane from her lips. “Hail.” The sea says to dead stone as she paints the words out in violence. Outside the temple the night carries on through the hours of her ritual. @Lysander (forgot about this D:) WORMLUST monster of the sea

art