[P] where the wild things go

[Boudika]

EVERY HEART'S A HURRICANE, EVERY SOUL A STARLIT SEA

Sharper. 

It is as if everything is honed by some invisible force, as if she is now a blade whetted to a new edge. The air is more poignant, colours brighter—so bright, she has to blink them away—and sounds more austere, more telling. A voice is a song. A whisper is a shout. Music is harmonious, intoxicating, brazen and resounding and echoing and rising, rising, rising. Scents assault her nostrils with stories, and there are now shapes in her mind that form to tell them—she can envision their source just from different tangs of the odour.

She runs, and she is faster—faster, she thinks, than she has ever been. Boudika is quicksilver sleek through the ragged terrain, pushing past the prairie and into the mountains, wondering how far she can go before the sea calls her back. 

(What kind of question is that? Boudika already feels the seductive pull, the reminder that the only freedom she needs is in the deep, dark, beneath the waves—) 

Yet, she feels a hunger she has never known. It gnaws at her gut and demands more. More what? Her teeth, sharp against her inner mouth, are still unfamiliar. They cut at her lips and tongue, and the iron of her own blood makes her feel frenzied, feverish, halfway to another state. She runs faster, and suddenly, her flaring nostrils fill with a distinctive, heady scent and it screams life, life, life. 

She wonders if it is so very different from battle-killing. 

Her thoughts, however, come in abstractly. An animal part of her, dominant until now, has awoken and rages—it demands her to run faster, faster, and there are the cache of deer that burst free from the undergrowth as she charges through them, and there is the sickly-sweet scent of rot, the deer that is too-slow, the lameness of an injured leg preventing it to leap from her crushing jaws as they split draconic, wide, reaching and then closing. 

Boudika retracts her blow at the last moment. Her teeth click together, and the deer escapes. She thinks: 

this is nothing like battle-killing. 

The water horse comes to a stuttering, halting stop. She is breathing heavily, and what fills her senses is the fact the sea has followed her. It is in each inhalation; it is in the way her nostrils draw the odour of brine and fish and the crisp, crisp scent of the oceanside. There is no ocean here except for what lingers on her skin, in her hair, in her mind. Boudika listens to the birds and stares up at the changing leaves, marvelling at... at...

At the way life flows through her. There is a snap then, a branch breaking underfoot--and she starts, ears erect, nostrils flaring. All of her movements are feral, abrupt. But what leaves her mouth are words. "Whose there?" They sound nearly accusatory, but there is a part of her, new and wild and sharper than a blade, feelings a longing open up in her like a chasm. A longing for what, she does not know, but it speaks to her in the tongues of ancients, a drumbeat dance of her heart, that says more, more, more. 

"Speaking."

@Raymond 

ooc things

credits

[Raymond]

Because history exalts Only the pornography of force,
That of murderers and psychopaths. The rest of us, of course...
Stricken from the narrative wholesale.

***

The soft, rhythmic snikt of blade against whetstone itched at the edges of Raymond's attention as he absently recited an old, nameless war shanty. Preparatory noises, the ticking of a clock tumbling nearer and nearer some dreaded Beginning - but no battle awaited him at the end of the final verse. All the wounds had long since healed. Just grey ghosts remained, etched like maps to nowhere in the rich red of his hide. Only scars, and they ached all the more for their superficiality.

Ruth's slow, slumbering breaths welled up around him as the last bars of his tune faded out. She, too, bore new and frightening scars, though the ranger imagined she thought far less of them than he did. A comfortable sigh spilled out from between her jagged fangs and tousled the flyaway strands of his mane. He pursed his lips.

How many months had passed since he saw a face that was not hers? How many months since his ears twitched at a voice not his own? He had become as wild and overgrown as Ruth, a thicket of brambles and tripwires stretched precariously across the gaps in his own mind. And he could not even bring himself to care, because the totality of his own isolation was proof enough of the reality he had spent the better part of a year trying not to face: he was wholly and frightfully alone.

As he deserved.

If any of them remained, perhaps they would still recognize him beneath the unruly mop of hair draped along the arch of his proud neck. Perhaps they would mark the jaunty smile, the lazy arc of his tail blade that spoke as readily of his deadly proficiency with the weapon as it did of his cavalier attitude. Perhaps, too, they would see the shadow cast over the cool grey of his eyes like a storm aching to break loose.

Raymond arched his shoulders in irritation and, with a few swift thrashes of the freshly-honed blade, a thin cascade of severed locks tumbled down the contours of his neck. Abruptly the rolling atmospheric thunder fell silent as one bright, jewel-blue eye rolled open to regard him quizzically.

"It's time, my dear."

Well past time, in fact. The tarrasque's consciousness stirred more violently awake in the red stallion's mind than the loose hair caught in the swirling eddies of her breath. Her agitation would have quickened his pulse enough without the shudders that her shifting weight sent through the stone beneath his hooves, and the steel of his heart could not quell the prickle of primal unease that traveled down his spine as her shadow swallowed him and the enclave alike. The anxious grinding of her jaw set Raymond's teeth on edge.

His body fell in line with the vector of his thoughts - south, south, beyond the Armas, south toward great feathered wings and the tyranny of dragons.

Stay, Ruth chirped into his skull, as if an apocalypse machine could ever do anything less than demand.

Raymond tilted his head impatiently. "You stay. I go."

She huffed and, to her credit, watched with perfect stillness as the sinuous arc of his tail vanished behind stony slopes and overgrowth. She watched with perfect stillness the space into which the red smear of his flesh had disappeared until the seconds stretched into minutes, and the minutes into hours. And when at last the weight of his words dawned upon her, the roaring cacophony of her anguished rampage shook the roots of the very rift that had ruined her.

***

A flurry of activity interrupted the red stallion's southward trek deep in the heart of the Arma wilderness.

The trappings of nature - the gnashing of tooth and raking of bloody, bloody claw - had long since depleted whatever sense of horrific wonder they had stirred in a younger version of himself. Predator he was not, but he was born a weapon: he had hunted and been hunted in his turn, all the way down to its bitterest and ugliest denouement. Were this merely a reenactment of life's conventional melodrama, Raymond wouldn't have spared it more than the moment's thought it would have taken for the scene to play out - but the wild-eyed horse, reeking as she was of sweat and brine, that erupted from the overgrowth like a beast unbound only to stop short of the killing blow was far from conventional even after compensating for his own perfect isolation.

So Raymond lingered.

He observed in grey-eyed silence the shuddering of her bowstring-taut muscles, the quivering of flared nostrils, the eyes wide and bright with a hunger bordering on confusion. The sight of her bloodlust stirred the primal prey-wariness in the pit of his stomach; his tail twitched, freshly honed and keen to be set loose.

With a sober frown, the red stallion shook the tingling inclinations from his flesh like a cloud of biting flies and announced his presence by taking as much care to step loudly as he had been taking to be still. Who's there? came the accusing cry, layering a quail's trembling alertness over the intensity of a lion's golden gaze. He pressed forward into the light, sinuous and confident in the way that the deer she had so nearly slain was not, savage in a way that brooked no argument. He understood at least what he was capable of, even if neither of them was nearly so certain about her.

"You know, when a fox flushes a rabbit in these parts, he usually gets what he's after," he replied jauntily in lieu of an answer as he drew nearer, breathing more deeply of the brine and softer scents of civilization that kindled distant memories of his ever-so-brief and often bloody visits to the Night Court proper. "Or is a warm meal not what you came for?"

***

Raymond
But as for me, I was not Put upon this earth
To subjugate or serve.

@Boudika | hi i love her