the deep hums with a trepidation that does not seek to be known. it croons sweetly with an archaic tome that begs to be wanted, an apothic lull of simplicity that yearns its deeper roots. beset to the ground. it is sour. it is rot. and from it springs the valour of spent gods and their empty chalice – from whence name and nature are born again. the ground is built on the back of death. on the back of time. the spine rises from the leagues of torment, and charon grins widely in its art. a sepulcher belches its great, sleeping utterance. is it a thing; a what, or a who? frail questions overlap its existence – they are greedy things, hollow things, great insects of myriad trivials that are bound together in their unspoken grief. death preys between them meekly, hungry and praised by their silence.
disgust still rolls in the titan-bred's stomach.
they are permitted to disappear into their far corners, to which they find meager obstacles to test their mettle, their minds, their mirth. but our thing is of deeper things. far more troubled things. it is owed to us, stolen from us. so we merely pull the strings and teethe along its nerves, biting when it oversteps – but alas! how wrung from our fateful fingers it has spun, and we are useless to its whims. it is no longer boyish. it is no longer innocent. it is no longer an instrument.
it is erasmus. a wolf. a serpent. a rock. a wraith.
what wretched thing we have created. what wretched thing it becomes.
it moves ere beneath the not-moonlight we faced it, despite the warnings of godly intervention and fierce interference. we thought it was carved from the riverbed but it is – it is – it just is – a river, a blackened stygian bed of winding, writhing currents that seethe with wit and sentient violence not unlike the will of a destructive world. it is angry. it is virile and full-breasted with the morals of a slack-jawed jackal, salivating with an aching desire for purpose. we release him unto you. that which was meant to be returned, to be purchased, a stone for a stone. stone no longer. it is shadow and night now, and his veins of gold are simply a gesture of wealth, an omen of what is and what will be. he is wild, wild. and we allow him as such. conqueror.
he is a shadow at her trail, not just at her heels but the farthest tendril shed from her skull – yards apart, separated by breaths and unknowing. all he knows in predatory guile is that she is a part of something he recalls, and it is not isra. it is not eik. it is not raum. and so curiosity becomes him, until he is deeper and deeper into the jungle and it spreads its jaws wide for the ocean at its horizon and the beach that grins its lips at him with a menacing threat. almost enough to remind him. but he is a hunter. he does not care for tempus. he does not care for the relic. not for isra. not for the vulture queen. not for wealth. tonight he hunts nostalgia, and the image of his altars burning with blackened blood alights like a beacon in the dark. white marble halls, silvery, silent. his gold shifts with the night like starlight unfolded into galaxies and he is celestial.
she does not have a face in the disclosure of his mind. she is not a thing, a creature, a trace of moonlight that slinks into his thoughts like tangible meat. she has no name. he does not recall her at the stead of the island where they had all congregated like birds in a frenzied commune. he did not remember her tearing away from them to traipse into the dark alone, irascible, her contempt a thing to be noted as the pinnacle of her being as if – as if anger had a face itself, wrath contained to mortal twine incorrigible and untameable, unhinged and flung to the wilds. perhaps if he knew he may not have pursued her – perhaps he would have remembered her inconsolable rage, her unkempt madness that roved over miniscule offenses that hardly meant anything but a lapse of momentary thought. even to an irascible thing such as him, a heathen, a heretic, her nature was an ambiguous sort of chaos that spurned him as much as it enticed him.
were not all devils intrigued by fire?
he unravels from the dusky emerald treeline, a wolfish delineation of darkened halves studded in rippling gold, unfurling timbre of iberian musculature – bold curves, sharp angles, smooth lines that slid slick as kerosene. his pace is languid as often, all the while a casual militance that speaks of his warbred physique – calculative steps, a roving machination of rolling muscles that bid and bend to each changing quarter of softened ground and hardened rock. a prepared gait on the casual strife. his thick neck is braided by the shadow of his long mane, its length falling in brine-kissed waves that slick along his spine and drip like oil across his square shoulders. the boyish couture has left him. where all innocence once portrayed some feeble beast in the shadow of courage, now outstepped a young man of machiavellian proportions – something less fearful and more feared, something less childish and more monstrous. what danger pressed to the darkness of his features clung to him with a handsome temptation, kissing taboos that plucked his flesh with perspiration. his beauty is black mamba venom. it is everything that shouldn't be and more. so much more.
his eyes – how much like crescent moons in the dimlit sky – pass over her, and while they should be spent with the expectation of her rage they are simply lit with a malignant intrigue, something selfish and humorous that touches his lips with the faint trace of mischief. his gaze lolls lazily, arrogantly, watching as she devours the forbidden fruit of the decadent garden with seeming carelessness he could admire. "i wondered if those were poisonous or not," his voice croons over the hum in his mind, something slick and treacherous and deep, peppered with a humor far too dark for the day, "i suppose i will only have to wait to find out, now." the boy in him that should fear her saucy retorts is gone. it is lost instead to impish delight, a fanged sneer that stretches across his features with a welcome as much as a threat.
@Morrighan
