the cost of my desire
A being more made than born, always feels hunger, always feels dissatisfaction, always feels dangerous. Arawn feels both dead and alive, for the sensuous way, water drips like mercurial silver down his toned muscles—for the carnal way the moon races like fingertips, caressing down his spine. The bloodied water kisses his flesh like a forbidden lover. It wraps him in a veil of translucent hue.
It drips, and drips, into the hollow spaces of his neck and chest muscles—it pools by his hooves, as sweat slides along his flesh, risen along the scarred memories of him left by the remnants of war and bloodshed. Arawn lives in those dead memories of hatred and vengeance. Each scar is both poem and threat. His wrath, both aches and purrs, as a lion drawn to violence stretched too tightly and snarling to tear underneath his skin.
He is drawn to her in turn. To the white roses that dapple her slender neck, her shoulders and perfect, crimson complexion. To the blood-red diamonds of her gaze, that echo with that same murderous hunger of death and wanting. She reminds him of someone he knows. Someone whose name he keeps for the shadows of their intimate kiss and desired prayer. She reminds him of roses so red, she could drown the whole world in blood and gore. She reminds him of unicorns with death as lovers.
But this water, this moonlight, this fleeting, desert dream—it is false reprieve; for his skin is soon dry, soon cracked, aggravated by the sweltering, desert heat that eats at him like decay eats spoiled wood. His old wounds, coil like withered serpents upon his flesh. His bones ache with thirst, and life. His skin is crawling with a fever. Demons have carved their sins into his eyes. They seethe as winter seethes, from the steely weight of his near-white pupils. For endless is his want, his devotion. His desire.
The hunger Arawn feels is eternal—it pools like cancerous, black sludge between his lungs—it dives as a monster in the tides of his blood, cooing between the ruinous landscape of his ribcage. Eating, tearing, winding into the marrow of his soul, till it howled and retched in violent retribution. Arawn is without satisfaction. Without happiness. Without joy. Without pleasure—his soul is as dry as the desert, his mouth as parched as brittle soil, and his heart an empty graveyard.
And the hunger he always feels, consumes him. Even now, with silver moonlight splaying like a devil across his back, the emptiness splits his heart wide until arterial veins look more like teeth and eyes, than they do blood and white. Between the flickering scythe-moon of the wild, solterran desert he is here now to sate his want, his eternal longing. But his heart is a beast blind, consumed by wrath and rage—and when he fully turns his frigid gaze to the maiden dressed in vermillion, he does not blink nor smile. But his teeth is sharp, when it tugs like winter pulls for the coffin-black edges of her Death.
"I sleep better at night without the memory of their screams," His voice is dark, and rough, it curls from his mouth like the promise a serpent makes. "Without the scent of their blood on my skin," His stare is piercing when he steps alongside her and tosses his skull like a lion bellows into the night for the promise of the hunt. Bloodied water drips down his chin and curls against his fanged-lips. He watches the way the blackened ash billows at her heels, the way her blade slices knife-like through pillows of soft, gold sand. She is not the moon he knows, but a maiden darker, bloodier, dripping full of decadence. Unearthly, with hell bowing like glory, or torture,before her feet. "Why are you awake?"
@Isolt
