What's a king to a god
The thing that is erasmus bides, despite memory glaring like a beacon in the night: it remembers the firefly colt, the gathering of mist things that jeer and laugh in the dark, sharpening their teeth on a blood moon. It remembers death crawling like ivy up the piston-black bones of his legs, spiraling and whirling through his veins with venomous encroach. But it thinks, as a predator might, as such things that linger in the dark are not so unlike predators, that it would know better than to lure him once more into their throng of ghosts. Or perhaps they will be waiting for him, all firelight smiles and glittering mist-eyes, and the colt will chide the life out of both of them, laughing, a grating sound that slips reality.
When the gathering of fireflies breaks into a run, it is deja-vu, and Erasmus slows his course instead of following. Euryale stirs beside him, and the sound of her laughter makes his skin prickle in a way that begs – hunger, perhaps, hunger is all it knows. Hunger for starlight and soaring things that whirl in the great black unknown, hunger for her, for the air, for the moonlight which drips across her curves like melted candlewax. It does not know love or hatred or anger, though it savors the taste of each from the Erasmus-that-was's mind as fondly as any may, it is his appetite that greets it. It is his appetite that greets her, when he looks to her and remembers the curious way Erasmus's heart once caught in his throat like a wild thing when he looked to her.
Now there is hunger, or a thing that feels like hunger, something that aches for satisfaction in a world that does not know love and romance is pain.
It reaches to grate his teeth along the serrated edge of her vertebrae, teething in each hollow and teasing blood to the surface. Not enough to break the skin – but enough to threaten, to coerce her veins to sing to him, as the rocks and the rivers and the snakes once sang to it. The hunger trembles in his core like a feral thing rocked by a wave, and it rises hot in his throat. “save distress for more terrible things,” it coos, it moans, it growls, it chuckles, thunder beneath the ground. He moves past her and thinks that when his skin passes hers it alleviates the pang in his belly, or his ribs, or perhaps it is the singing of her blood after all that pleases it deeply. And when she gripes of flying spiders, he looks back to her, and a thousand ink blots sail from the nestle of his mane to her like careening spiders, or dying stars drawn to her moonlight web but vanish when they kiss her flesh.
That is when it notices the mist pouring from beyond, and the firefly-thing has disappeared beyond the trees with a buzz or a rattle, and the singing, he thinks, does not come from her blood at all but a graceless ohm peeled from the surrounding forest. It closes his eyes for a moment, drinking in the song deep, but it is a flawed hymn, one that does not pray or harmonize. It is faulted and sick, a depravity that was never available even in the worst moments of ruination. There are more between, but he knows they are not meant for him – not songs but voices, whispers, distant laughter that call to Euryale. The blackness opens ahead, moonlight shifting eerily through the fog, though spectral shapes yearn to shut it out. He looks to her again, but his face is starless as a void. It searches for the words in what mind remains of Erasmus, and gestures toward the break in the fog. “they lie to those who listen. There,” it looks to the waft of moonlight that is thinning between huddled masses of gathering mists, peering through hollows that look like eyes, “we will go that way.”
Who don't believe in anything
♤♧
@Euryale @Official Dawn Account Euryale and Erasmus are continuing into the light.
