I clutched my life
And wished it kept
My dearest love
I'm not done yet.
How easy would it be, he wondered, to just slip beneath the ice and allow the breath to leave his lungs? How easy would it be to melt into the shadows one final time and never return, to cast everything he had ever worked for into the fire?
The answer was simple. So, so simple. It wouldn’t be hard at all. It would be easy. It would, more than likely, be the easiest thing Vikander had ever done.
Forlorn pools of ice blue gazed sidelong at the frozen lake, his posture hunched in on itself as the snow fell down in fat white flakes to collect and melt along his ebony body. The curls of his mane and tail were a tangled mess, hanging about his downcast face in a curtain. Once again he had forgotten his cloak, the bundle wrapped up nicely from a fresh washing in his chambers at the Scarab. For some reason the realization didn’t bother him as much as it usually would.
The cold seeped beneath his skin, but still he breathed. Silent, stoic, stationary, Vik stood at the lakeside like a statue. Were it not for the gradual melt of the collecting snow upon him, he was certain that he would truly look like a being made of stone. A statue. A sick, twisted version of some madman’s artistic expression, the ‘freedom of creativity’, tossed out and forgotten to endure the elements for seasons to come.
He had come out to the lake for a reason, but now that he was here, Vikander honestly couldn’t recall why he had bothered making this trip out into the snow. An ingredient, perhaps? A sprig of balsam fir? Maybe some strips of bark from the himalayan hemlock? He had no idea. Everything was empty, barren, and dark. No recollection would come to him. Why?
A voice, soft and lulling, beckoned him. It cut through the silence and steady song of the falling snow, guiding him like a siren. Icy blue eyes glanced downward to the pendant upon his neck, ears tipping back into frosted sheets of ebony curls.
”Come to bed, darling,” his dead wife whispered, the memory of her voice causing his heart to clench tightly in his chest, stealing the breath from his very lungs. Vikander believed that he would prefer the mercy of the bottom of the lake rather than this. It came from the necklace, the enchanted pendant wrapped around his neck upon a silver chain. Their voices were inside, trapped forevermore, just as their bodies were protected and hidden away where only he knew.
Their ghosts would forever haunt him. They sung to him endlessly, his beloved wife and daughter, driving him on a steady course to madness, yet he was not strong enough to toss away the pendant and be rid of his demons. He didn’t want to. Selfish, masochistic, greedy, desperate, foolish… Oh, but there were so many words one could use to describe him. Vikander was a man drowning, purposefully gulping in mouthfuls of water instead of air. He built his own pyre and stood upon it as it burned. He was the creature of his own destruction, the master of his own demise. Dark, wretched, terrible…
”Please, Vik, my love.” Her voice echoed in his ears once more, and Vikander’s eyes glanced once more towards the icy depths of the Vitreus Lake. Come to bed… A bed of ice and freezing water, wrenching the air from his lungs and the life from his veins. It sounded like heaven. He would be free. But…
”You’re dead,” he whispered, his freezing lips numb to the words that tumbled forth, “Both of you. You’re… You’re…” They were dead. Both of them. He swallowed, both parched and sodden, his breath heaving as he began to shiver and shake from standing out in the cold for, for… For how long? How long? Had anyone in the Scarab noticed his disappearance? Did they care?
Another voice. Repeated. His wife and her sweet, loving voice, beckoning him. Let her be the siren that drowned him. Let her be the one to end this misery, to seek justification for the sins he had committed.
”Come to bed.”
Vikander swallowed hard once more, defiant and stubborn to the very end. “No.” Not yet.
Open to anyone, but I can’t guarantee how amicable he will be!
04-22-2019, 01:07 AM - This post was last modified: 04-22-2019, 01:15 AM by Vikander
It seemed that both of their demons would be haunting them that evening.
Her room in the Scarab altered into a smaller thing, closing in on itself and the red-rosed girl as she lounged and flipped through pages of contacts she once knew. Some were dead. Others merely slipped so deep into gnashing and rasping shadows that they morphed into a part of them, unable to tear themselves away from the sweet siren call of darkness, held so tightly in their embrace that it became increasingly apparent that they might never resurface. She was like them, save for the minute details; she wasn't in so deep, she knew how to separate herself before she, too, got lost in their guttural songs and swaying promises of greater things. Greater, she would have scoffed. They could offer her nothing she couldn't take for herself save the sense of peace of finally being free--if falling off the deep end of the ocean gave anyone the redemption they were looking for.
And so she sat and flipped, name after name either homeless or adrift in the lands as her own had been. While time passed and told her it had only been a couple of months, her mind stretched itself thin and screamed inside the confines of her skull: enough. She was ready to end the hiding, to go dance back into the arms of reality and face all she had missed. Too many moons passed, too many empty nights, accomplishing nothing. She wanted change, she begged for the monotony of sticking to shadows to end, she desired to bathe beneath the sun's lips... and she yearned for the saccharine taste of the hunt, the only satisfaction she knew to quell the madness raging in a too-insipid heart.
Then a moon rose that saw her diamond-plated face.
It was over, and she was let loose to subdue the rage once more.
The Scarab had grown too quiet, her room too modest for claws that needed flexing. She craved more than the mundane increasingly scrawled out names. Abandoning the pocketbook, retiring from her rose-painted room, the ghostly girl tread through dim hallways. Room after room hung back, somber without their occupants, including Vikander's with door cracked. Shock blossomed in her breast as technicolor eyes wavered over his chamber (it was never left open, never with his cloak hanging left behind, never...) and she worried. A usually cool, calm heart pounded lightly against blood-stained ribs as she brashly grabbed the robe and demanded from the nearest patron of the Scarab where he headed.
Outside of the bustling Night Court Marketplace, his broad tracks were easy to follow in the falling snow. If he was going to leave, she at least would make sure the cold wouldn't kill him; that would be too dishonorable of a death.
Her room had grown too small for a seething soul and so she would find someplace bigger for it. The ground opened wide and swallowed her whole, just as it had done to the black spectral body of Vikander. She spotted him, a pinprick of an onyx mass amid the rest of the darkness, and it was no wonder to her that he wandered there. She hadn't seen him since her return to the surface, and perhaps it wouldn't have been wrong of her to assume he grew madder with the passing suns. The voices in his head became a cacophony that spilled over into their world; he spoke back to them, but she said nothing while she approached with his coat gathering snow as she advanced. She didn't care if he noticed her or not, small-framed figure gliding to stand beside him. The fabric she pulled from his suite was gently laid across his back--his back that was almost white from the flurries soon to encase them all.
Manon didn't look at him. She looked out instead at the breadth of the lake frozen over, a winter wonderland that, perhaps on a better day, she would have dared to skate through to feel the thrill of something other than her mind cracking beneath her. The last of Vik's words had long been lain to rest when she finally made her voice break between the lines that threaded together to create them. "My room was too small." Words that didn't belong there, a speech that seemed to shatter the fine serenity that made home for the night against his shoulders.
Her crystals and necklace shone a beacon to deserted thoughts much like his own pendant.
Their demons were out to play under the radiance of the moon.
Nights are numb, days are dead Tried to fix you, broke myself instead
I clutched my life
And wished it kept
My dearest love
I'm not done yet.
It would not have been hard to sneak up on the troubled warlock, not as he was. Aloof, distant, distracted, drowning in the demons of his own mind, ice blue eyes staring vacant and empty into the recesses of the frozen lake. Any enemy against the Scarab, for surely there were many that lurked in the shadows, could easily stomp brazenly through the snow and slit his throat only to slip away into the shadows, leaving the world none the wiser.
Perhaps Lady Luck was on his side, for it was no enemy that found him, although calling her an ‘ally’ might be a bit bold.
Vikander was first aware that he was not alone when the feeling of a thick, familiar fabric sliding over his snow-covered back stole him away from his mad musings. He blinked, slow and distant, his mind as numb as his very skin. Ice blue eyes glanced down, seeing the fabric of his very own robe now hanging unfastened around his shoulders. Mouth parting, the warlock made to speak but forgot what it was that he wished to say, and then turned his head with a painful, deliberate slowness to see who had come.
The name would not come, not at first, lost and clogged beneath the buildup of spiraling thoughts of his constantly churning mind, although he recognized her immediately. It was hard not to. Those of the Scarab knew her well, and knew her by many names; ’the Red Rose’, ‘the Rose', and once he had even heard her referred to as ’the Crimson Spear’, although Vikander did not know the truth of that one. Regardless, her crimson-kissed body was a familiar sight, but he did not feel relief upon seeing her feminine face and captivatingly bright eyes instead of the face of a stranger. Quite honestly, he felt nothing at all.
Slowly, as though trudging through chest-high slop, the name came to him.
“Manon.” His voice emerged on a rasp, a greeting of the more lackluster variety. It wasn’t that he was unhappy to see her. Quite the opposite, actually. They had worked together many times in the past, although it was more that Vikander would request Manon’s assistance in collecting various items or ingredients from across the entirety of Novus whenever she was out and about. She was diligent and dedicated with an eye for detail that bordered on impressive, and no mission ever went uncompleted. The Scarab were lucky to have her.
Vikander turned his gaze back towards the frozen surface of the lake as Manon began to speak. He didn’t move as she did so, seeming to completely tune out the words she said. They reached his ears, they did,, but… ’My room was too small.’ Vikander understood. Cloying, clawing, closing in, it was easy for those four walls that once seemed so much like a sanctuary to quickly turn into a prison cell. The black shadow finally moved, inhaling deeply, drawing air into his lungs as his body gradually began to warm from the weight of his robes. Manon had been considerate to bring it to him.
Letting out a long breath, the warlock rasped out an answer, not tearing his eyes from the lake, still standing like a hunched, wretched creature. “Mine was too loud.” It wasn’t, of course, but he knew that Manon would understand. Sometimes the silence spoke louder than any word, real or imagined.
“Thank you. For the cloak. Aghavni and August would be quite displeased if they knew.” And Vikander knew that he could trust the Red Rose to keep this secret between them. It would certainly not be the first.
