I WANTED THEM TO LISTEN TO THE WOUND,
HEAR WHAT IT SPOKE
UNDERNEATH
The air is still but full of lazy tension, the way a peach sits in the sun and fills with rot, waiting for the slightest bit of pressure-- a breeze or a gentle touch-- to explode.
The air is quiet but not silent. (But then there is no such thing as silence anymore, not with your blood blood always beat beating in your ears, not with all those creaky doors that line the inside of your skull. Not with the sound of yearning whimpering hungrily, doglike, into the void, craving salt water and flesh and the primordial soup that binds you and the word you use- love- even in the place where words fail) There are few guards today, and the heat has made them lazy. They don't walk around on patrol, or do much of anything at all other than stand there in the shade of the palm trees, eyelids heavy.
Eik has been coming here for several days and nights now, lingering far enough away that it takes almost no effort to deflect any attention on himself with just a twist of his magic. He quickly learned that the day shifts are much smaller than the night. Perhaps they thought no one would be foolish enough to attempt a theft in broad daylight. And under different circumstances, this would probably be true. But the weight of the regime has driven many to desperation, and there are few differences between a desperate man and a fool.
The grey spreads his magic out like a blanket over the oasis. He probes at the minds of the dozing guards, and has a fairly precise understanding of where exactly each of them stands. There is another quietly approaching-- Eik turns to face the stranger with ears pressed to his skull.
If he is surprised by who he sees, it does not register on his face. His ears still twist back uncertainly, but they are no longer flattened. "Mathias." Eik's only encounters with the other stallion had been at the time of the blizzard, and those encounters had not left the best impression. He had not even thought of the man since Seraphina's death, although to be fair there were many he did not think of. Grief and anger did not leave much room for consideration.
Two water pouches (empty) are slung across his back-- his intent here is not exactly a mystery. The former emissary tenses, ready to spring and silence the other man if he makes any motion to summon the guards. Hunger has carved away at his body and thirst lends a dull sheen to his eyes, but there is still strength in the muscle that remains and the bones so carefully built for war. He could hurt, if he needed to.
Beneath the Solterran sun, a figure moved at an unsteady trot -- emaciated, with sweat gleaming over his heaving ribs, with makeshift saddlebags thrown across his haunches that he’d stolen from some poor Solterran’s porch on his way to the Oasis. He is a man on a mission, ears pinned back along his neck, teeth bared into a snarl with every step he takes -- he will fight his way through every guard in the Oasis, if he must, if that is required to get the supplies he and Sam will need in their flight to Delumine.
He had never thought he would be a refugee sent fleeing -- had always imagined he would die fighting, if that was what it took, his pride too stubborn to accept being run off -- except now he has something that is not himself to live for.
His hooves beat out Jet-sam, Jet-sam on the packed sand beneath him as he slows into a trot, eyes narrowed and mouth set into a harsh line when he faces his first obstacle -- a familiar man that he cannot place -- except that he can see the empty water packs slung across the man’s back, and it forces a harsh, rasping bark of laughter from his chest.
“I’m not here to fight you,”and oh, how strange it is that his blood does not sing for war, that he is merely exhausted at the thought of yet more violence. You don’t have time for this, the voice whispers to him, and for once he agrees -- he pivots, suddenly, so that his good eye can face towards the Oasis while still keeping Eik within his field of vision, and his hoof stomps the ground impatiently.
“Are you going to help, or are you going to get the fuck out of my way?”
KNOW THE PRAYER OF FURY, AND
KNOW MORE THAT IT HAS ALWAYS BELONGED TO YOU.
To be honest, maybe a fight is what Eik is looking for. A chance to feel his bones grind against themselves, to feel blood vessels break and bloom into bruises. Everything has been so upside down recently, so achingly unfamiliar, that he's been left to grasp for something-- anything-- familiar. And sometimes (often) he craves the unparalleled feeling of being, for once, in control of something. You could not blame the results of a fight on the gods, or chance, or destiny. It was all you. Of course your opponent had an effect on the result, but really in the end it was yourself you grappled with. Your strengths, your weaknesses, your everything, out in the open and on the table. If you won, it was on you. If you lost, it was also on you. Eik wished, sometimes, that everything else could be that simple.
But ah, the other man is not here for a fight. The slim part of him that feels disappointed is far overshadowed by the part of him that feels relieved. He relaxes a little, ears pricking forward to catch Mathias' next words. From the little Eik knows of him, he is not surprised by the expletives. The grey grins, wolfish, and it looks out of place on his somber face. It lasts only for a moment, that look- you want to see who the bigger man is?
But Eik was never good at maintaining bravado. He just didn't care enough.
After a long pause, he nods tersely. In truth, this was not a task that he could take on by himself. Not if he wanted to escape unnoticed. He could maybe fill half a bag of water before the guards noticed him, but then it would be a long and fast run through the canyons to escape. And he was in no physical shape for running. No, the guards would have to be taken out, and without sounding the alarm. Two could do that far easier than one.
Still, it would not be easy.
Eik speaks quickly, quietly, and concisely. "I'll take the one to the left. You take the right. Beneath that crooked palm tree." He gestures to the dark figure in the shade, and he tries to prepare himself for the inevitable guilt that will follow his actions today. "We take the third together." His saddle bags lower gently to the sand and he steps quietly to the left. "Try to do it quietly," he adds. It seemed obvious, to him, that they would not want to draw unnecessary attention. But it also seemed, to him, that quiet was not in Mathias' nature.
He waits for acknowledgement before he sets off to his task, hoping with a swiftly beating heart that he is not making a huge mistake by trusting the other stallion. Hoping Mathias will make the task easier, and not harder.
BUT BE CAREFUL. IT WILL ONLY MAKE YOU HUNGRIER.
IT WILL ONLY MAKE YOU MORE AWARE OF DEATH.
Between sand and stone they meet, two refugees with a singular goal, and oh, if that isn’t something unlikely in any other time and place. They are two opposite ends of the social sphere, the pariah and the (former) Emissary, but then again, he supposes they are not so different now -- both of them displaced by the dictator who had taken the throne, and, though he does not know this, both of them sent to the Oasis for a still-beating heart in another place.
He thinks of Sam on his knees in the desert, Sam with his voice breaking and exhaustion written on every line of his face -- of a younger Sam, breathless and wild as they had raced each other to the ruined Hospital where they had hidden away from Adriana’s wrath, where he’d postured and shrugged away the bruises and scrapes as just ‘training,’ where he’d lain awake throughout the night with his gaze trained on the vulture that had appeared, that Sam never appeared to see.
He knows, without a doubt, that he would kill to keep Sam safe -- that if he has to, he will fight his way to the very throne of Solterra, would go up against Raum himself, if it meant keeping Sam out of harm’s way.
May Solis have mercy on the souls of any who get in my way.
His shoulder twitches, the only sign of his distaste for following orders, but he will listen for now -- Eik’s plan is at least an actual plan, rather than just charging in and hoping he can get away in time.
“Right,” The word is clipped, short and sharp like a blade, and he dumps his own stolen saddlebags onto the sand after Eik before striding towards the first guard, hugging what meager cover he can find. Along the way, he picks up a decently sized chunk of rock, about the size of his own hoof, and his smile is grim when he realizes the guard seems to be dozing beneath the shade.
Foolish.
His teke is weak, but his throw still strikes true -- the rock wallops the guard in the back of the head, right between the ears, and the painted stallion is right there to catch the guard’s body and ease it to the earth.
(Unconscious? Lifeless? He doesn’t particularly care enough to check)
Task accomplished, he begins the short journey towards the third guard, sparing only the briefest glance to check on his companion’s progress.
The two shadows, one dark and one light, part ways.
The grey steps quiet but quick, long since accustomed to moving across the uneven desert terrain. From behind a curtain of heat, his target looks like a smudge of coal in a field of shimmering gold-brown-grey. The stranger's mind, circling sleep, swims in fantastical thoughts of green. Endless fields of emerald, sage, pine, jade-- even the sky, in that dream world, is verdant.
Eik steps closer, closer, and when he is close enough he draws the guard's knife and slits his throat with it. There are only three sounds: a brief, wet gurgle of surprise, and two thuds as the man falls first to his knees, then his side. The golden sand drinks the blood, turns wet and crimson with thirst. It doesn't make a sound, the blood, somehow it doesn't make a sound as it rushes from its fleshly prison.
It's all over in a matter of seconds.
All the green fades to black.
Eik blinks his eyes, feeling strange to have killed a man with nothing to show for it-- no wounds, no bruises. Not even a drop of blood on him. Feeling wrong. It was not his style, to kill like this. But neither was being outcast from his home, or dying a long, slow death of dehydration. He drops the knife and moves on to the third guard, knowing there would be more than enough time to dwell on this later. Mathias' pied form takes shape from behind a group of young palm trees, each more more akin to a bush than a tree at this point-- oh, what stories they might someday tell! Not for his ears but another's, perhaps...
When they reach the third guard, the woman is tense. She heard the three sounds, and others. She likely smells the blood, the fresh death in the air-- gods know its all Eik can taste now. The bay mare spies Eik through the sparse ground cover, and although he expects her to cry for help (he prepares himself for a terrible abuse of his magic-- to smother her very intent to call out) she does not.
"P-please--" The guard stammers as she backs up towards the copse of young palm. "Please let me live. I won't tell anyone." Eik inclines his head, looks just past her to Mathias, and though he does not speak, not even with his magic, the question is clear: shall we be merciful fools?
Perhaps it is the heat licking at his spine, the sun beating down endlessly, perhaps it is simply a trick of his own treacherous mind; as he approaches the third guard, her bay coat shifts to a painted golden color, to the shape of his mother before the fire had stolen away her original body. Around him, he no longer sees sand, but the castle walls of Zion filled with smoke and ash, can hear the crackling of the flames as they edge closer and closer to the room where he and his mother faced off against each other.
“Please, let me live…” Adriana had begged, too, and it only strengthens the hallucination’s hold on him. After everything she had done to him, every attempt she had made to ruin him -- how easily she had resorted to begging, how quickly she had realized the monster she had created and set loose upon herself. He remembers -- he remembers the crack of breaking bones, so that she couldn’t escape the flames, except she had, hadn’t she?
She had burned and she had been reborn, except here was his chance to do it properly, to make sure she wouldn’t come back to plague him ever again.
Every step towards the guard brings back another memory of his mother’s hatred, of every word she had ever sneered at him, every attempt she had made to break his spirit into one of her willing pawns; they flash through his mind and fuel his rage into an inferno until he finally shatters beneath the trauma. The piebald leaps forward with all of his weight, grasping at her throat and wrenching until he hears the tell-tale snap of her neck breaking, until he can taste blood on his tongue when his teeth tear into her aorta, and when he releases his grip the guard collapses onto the sands with a gurgling gasp.
Despite the heat, he begins to shake, fighting off the grip of the hallucination until the sands swim back into view. Above him, the vulture caws in delight, swooping down and beginning to feast on the corpse before him; his stomach turns, and he clenches his eyes tightly closed, turning away from the sight.
He is supposed to be learning how to be gentle.
He is supposed to be trying not to be a monster.
Perhaps that is what he will always be, deep inside.
FIRE, DELUGE, AND DEATH
STRUCK ME AS EXTREMELY FRIENDLY GHOSTS.
Most people think they would never stoop to begging.
Fools.
It shouldn’t take a knife to the throat to realize how little your pride is worth. But that’s what happens, sometimes, when ego is all you have.
The guard’s pleas are pitiful but, as it turns out, pity is in short supply these days. Solterra was at war, if you could still call it that when all the players and the sides and the goals were unclear. It was brutal, unorganized, and violent. Eik resented it as much as he would a bit or a cage– for that is what Solterra was to him now. Even at night with the open sky above him and the endless sands of the Mors before him, a view unchanged for decades, perhaps centuries, except for the shifting of the dunes– everything was different now.
It brought him down, down, down.
Eik has to brace himself to keep from shuddering as the woman’s neck is snapped. She made a choice to be here. Eik and Mathias made choices too.
“Are you all right?” Eik has to force neutrality into his voice. He has to try to temper his bleeding heart because such a thing was dangerous at a time like this. Such a thing was a terrible, terrible weakness and he was not allowed to be weak. He could be lonely and starving and dehydrated but he could not be soft of heart, not now. Not for a long time, maybe not ever again.
(he shuts the doors, locks the windows on all the voices that cry out in anguish– in mourning for all the soft warm sand that he paves over with concrete. It was home to tortoises, and coyotes, and over fifty kinds of cacti. Now it’s just cold, hard efficiency.)
He grabs a fallen frond with his telekinesis and drapes it over the fallen body, and then another. Then he takes a step toward the other stallion, reaching out his nose as though… as though to what? What possible comfort could the scarred grey stallion, more stranger than not, give?
What was the point?
He turns toward the water, and begins to fill his bag. “We should move soon,” his voice is sand-dry. “Which way are you going?” As soon as he asks, he wishes he could take it back. It would probably be better not to know.
His sides heave, violent, and if there had been anything in his stomach he might have lost it upon the sands. Instead, bile burns at the back of his throat and makes his eye water, acidic against his tongue as he hacks it out upon the sands. He has killed before, had torched an entire kingdom, and yet his stomach still turns at the sight of the corpse before him.
He has always thought it a weakness, this aversion to killing things, but perhaps it could be a sign that he is not so much of the monster he might claim he is.
Or perhaps he is simply unable to do anything properly, even when he is doing what he is best at,
“I’m fine,” The words snap out with razer-sharp precision, so practiced he almost doesn’t realize he’s going to speak until the words have left his mouth. An admittance of his own weakness would be a fatal flaw, one that he’s built up an armor against; if nothing else, he’s certainly practiced in the art of pretending to be okay, pretending that his mind isn’t tearing itself apart each day.
The vulture laughs, and the sound claws at his ears. It knows, it knows the way he’s struggling even now to keep a solid grip on reality, every shake step forward threatening to send his mind hurtling back to Zion. “Don’t touch me,” The words snarl out, his teeth baring in a warning -- he doesn’t know what he might do, doesn’t know if he’d shatter apart beneath the comfort or if he would simply turn on the grey stallion as well, like the wild animal that he is.
He wishes he knew how to be something that wasn’t made of teeth and violence.
When he finally steps towards the Oasis, his legs are no longer shaking. He snatches up the saddlebags he had dropped onto the sands, retrieving the canteens from within and beginning to fill them, keeping a wary eye on the grey stallion. Would his companion realize that he is gathering supplies for two, not just one -- enough water to get two horses far away from Solterra and this wretched war?
“--Delumine.” He grunts out after a moment of pause, keeping his gaze firmly focused on the canteens as he arranges them within the saddlebags he drapes over his gaunt flanks. In his mind flashes an image of Sam’s face, and he lets out the breath he hasn’t been aware that he’s holding with it, some of the tension leaking out of his shoulders.
They’re not out of danger yet, but the hardest part is over.
FIRE, DELUGE, AND DEATH
STRUCK ME AS EXTREMELY FRIENDLY GHOSTS.
When Eik unwinds his magic just a little bit, just to feel if there is anyone approaching, he hears a vulture laughing.
There is no vulture.
Still, Eik hears a vulture laughing. A rough cackle, almost less like laughter and more like the regurgitation of the ribs of a sand fox. The grey stallion’s ears lower--
(a chorus of laughter rises from the back of his skull, it harmonizes with the hacksaw laughter of the vulture that is not there. no. no– not this, stop– stop laughing)
-- and they pin to his skull when Mathias snarls “don’t touch me.”
“Gladly,” he says with his own halfhearted flash of teeth. Eik didn’t need to be asked (no, commanded) anyway, he had already decided it was a fruitless effort.
(Eik knows how sometimes kindness, in its own strange way, could be a cruelty. But it would never stop him from trying, as stupid and foolish as it was, to be kind. (He hated his kindness. But so did the voices, the laughing, snarling, mocking voices, and it gave him such satisfaction to shock and disgust them.))
The grey stallion kneels to maneuver the full, heavy water bags over his back. Nearby, flies gather at a wet-red feast. The mad flutter of their wings creates a buzzing, frenzied song, thick enough that within its darkness other sounds take form-- crying, laughing-- each fast and subtle, come and gone before the mind can identify it.
Eik shakes his head but they keep buzzing, louder and louder, the inescapable madness.
Anywhere but here sounds like a fine destination, especially Delumine. Plenty of water there, and food. A notable lack of dictators, too. But it was a lot of sand to cross, and an empty stomach would make the desert seem three times as big as it was. "Good luck," Eik grunts as he stands on starving legs. "We should split up. I go south, you go north?" He does not fail to notice the other man carries two skins, and he does want to ask more but-- it doesn't really matter, does it?
And so it became one more exercise in learning how to not care.
I FELT I WAS A GHOST
FROM THE SAME FAMILY
@Mathias thank you for this thread <3 I'd love for them to randomly stumble across each other someday! Eik will be so very pleased to know Mattie made it
If Eik had brushed against his mind, he would have heard more than just the vulture’s laughter -- the chorus of voices in Zion still played like a broken record, the screams and the flames crackling, the way Adriana had begged for her life, looping over and over again in the background until the tobiano had learned to just tune out the constant noise, until it almost seemed normal to never have any sense of peace within his own mind.
He wasn’t entirely sure he would recognize peace when it came to him, if it ever did so. Did other people live with their ghosts constantly haunting them, hunting them, the knife of regret in their ribs and that howling laughter a soundtrack to their life?
“Sounds like a plan.” There is something wry in the way his lips curl upwards, almost the hint of a smile except for the way his teeth still flash a warning, in the way that he is always a cornered prey animal even when he is the one hunting. For a moment, he considers his companion, and something almost like brief sanity flashes across his eye, something hinting at clarity.
“Don’t fuckin’ die out there.”
It’s the closest he comes to camaraderie before he turns with sweat already beginning to gleam on his flanks, bursting into a hard gallop that would almost certainly tax him beneath the heat of the desert -- but it would be worth it, to return to Sam all the quicker, to get them both out of this hell-hole.
