some fates are written in our bones – slick white testaments to a higher purpose; we are celestial, we are eternal. Two wolves reaching for the sun, the moon. In our jaws, in our eyes, lapped over our tongues with blithering ecstasy the hot press of immortality; each more certain than the next. A dream confined. Night plucks over the remnants in our hallowed grave ; our tomb is sacred, sanctified unholy – risen from a midnight heat, hushed beneath a pregnant moon. Skin is a cage, and oh how cold; our altar is the pale salt spires of a wicked sea, our offering is the outpour of a dying sun. eclipsed – ours are grecian tales wrapped in betrayal and unending misery, ours is a lust that has forgotten the sting of sin. We are made from godless starfire, carved from the spines of back-broken empires – our names are the whispers kissed to the lips of vagrant priests. Our blood pulses with the worship of bloodied palms, night-stricken cries echoed from the pyre embers of babylonian rites. We rise then, bathed in ash and blood and victory. Fore we are things older than the twilight traces of happiness and love. We are things deeper than the trenches of the ocean where the light dare not touch. We are things darker than the limits of the starlit skies. They will know, they will know ; for all devils recall one another, outside of hell.
A BLOOD TRAIL CASCADES DOWN THE WINDING PATHS OF A SEA-FACING CLIFF ; and oh, what hunger crawls in the belly of a heathen prince – its pulsings punctuated by each hinted droplet, gleaming in the moonlight like precious ruby shard. Its flecks mark the granite, smear the disheveled road that leads down, down. Beyond the paths roar the siege of a Terminus Sea, each rivulet of frothing league flashing with veining foam, aglow azure, pearlescent rinds of crashing waves. The smell is sweet – no sweeter in the prairie than on the jagged hills of the Arma, incensed with the seabreeze and the coniferous sap of wayladen pines; so he hunts. And the night is young, fervent, silence falls between each measure of sea that beats against the rocks and in it, there is only the arduous press of adrenaline and need, desperate ravening slaked along the smoothness of a trail. Yet he is not smooth – all vicious angle and seething shadow, all cracked starlight of eclipsed suns and the barbaric likeness of pagan gods – his outline rushes the pallor of the mountain, and it is austere symmetry, feral art. Down, down. Erasmus is the material of dusky miasma, dripping hot shadows thrown abreast in the wild rampants of whipping winds; phantom night, something virile and vicious, black mamba venom webbed on gold fangs.
When he breaks the cypress gate of hill-twisted brush there is only the shore, a stretch of pale sands aglow beneath the tapestry of night – its berth is wide and crowned by the black peaks that surround it, in them the shallow caverns leading into the atlantean halls he dares not trespass. The moon looms above, near outshined by each pinprick of unwavering starlight, and beneath it the waves are sea-fire, frothing with lunar spray. There are sandpipers that gather in small droves, but their beady eyes narrowly counter a glow that emanates from farther down the dark lit surf – they wait warily, though sometimes pluck beneath their feet a misfortunate ghost crab nestled like a pearl. Erasmus follows their gaze – and there, the blood trail leads, but it is not the peppering of deep saccharine that feeds the shoreline. There is a rut carried through the sand, and beside it the lilting dance of hoofprints lightly pressed and glistening in the evening light. It is too much a trap and too much a lure, but oh his core lurches like a feeble thing, and from it an unearthly growl that unsettles his pulse with want. It is unending, the avaricious cravings that teem wildly, insufferably, and he is lost to the machinations of primal instinct.
His arrival is not without its grace, but his shadow is a disheveled spectre consumed of matting shadows, blotted against the moonlit backdrop. He is all jagged edges, hot rage, and a curious hunger that prickles along his skin like rising hackles. Each curve is marked with a ragged hollow that speaks in brawn the virility of a young hunter, but the coldness of his eyes are piercing, sharp as a blade. They wander greedily over the carcass of a stag, its crumpled form washed in brine and feathered with seabreeze sand; each point a jeweled blade in the caress of light. Is it an offering that pleases him, this nestle of warm meat and stunted arteries? This altar of blood and sand, bathed in the wash of nightly radiance. From its neck he divines the steam, fresh, and he cannot help but graze its flesh with kneading fangs, the scent of musk and salt and slick iron decadent, prosperous. But beyond a shadow quivers in the wind, and he catches another sight as a chiffon ribbon rears like a writhing serpent. Erasmus raised his crown, predator gaze swept over the buxom delineation that rises from the glistening sea – venusian grandeur in sweeping curves and svelte lush; and he thinks, he thinks he has seen her before, in a time deeper than the embryonic dreams of corporeality. So he approaches her while the firelight licks at the sharpness of his features, their angles deepened as shadows pull along their edges, drip down the length of his broad shoulders.
And oh, how she looks like want. How, when she breathes, it is like the intimate lacings of a lover's gasps – the rise and fall is rhythmic, tantalizing, a hypnotic notion of impassioned grace. oh, how she smells of wolfsbane and lilac forests emerged from eldritch seas. How she smells of arduous exotics and fresh leather, luxury and agony; how the ocean reaches, frothing fingers rushed for warmth – and can you blame the sea, to mourn her mortality, to beg her to stay, to sleep forever in its embrace? As it rakes across her flesh, remiss and yearning, tugging softly at lavender mats of plush mane. brine crystallized like starlight on the salt-sweat gleam of blood, bloody red. She drips like wine, dry sanguor clinging to her hips as the moonlight dotes; and oh, does she taste like heaven? Or is it the sharpness of hell that would meet you like a rival, like the deep, prickling tension of desperation? She stands like the effigy of a grecian heroine carved of glistening agate, and oh, does it feel like drowning, to kiss her? Her curves are ethereal softness, and he is lost to muse the cream-like smoothness of her neck. "who are you?" he breathes, and his voice is hot against the cool air that carries it - it tangles on a web of sea-dream, viperous and otherworldly cruel. in the solitary silence, it is almost a sin. but if it is sin to lust after fallen angels with famished eyes and delphic beauty, then he would bathe in the sacrilege.
@Euryale
