Upon his flesh the blush-red petals are soft, coiling, as tender blooms may, against the warmth of his shoulder. The thorns beneath brush and rake curious patterns against his coat – jagged pictograms of movement and life, upturning the velvet like tilled earth. Between their rows, gold grins like a sleeping dragon. They lick the sweat from his skin, tie his pores in hexes and omens, but never mar the stitchings to know the taste of his blood beneath.
On, and out, and on, the music carries between the trees and the vines and the thorns, there and gone again, when at once one may grow suspicious of frog-mouthed owls crowing in the cold.
There is only this and a comfortable silence that alternates through the garden, as though sound were weaving untimely between the troubled, quiet commotion of haunted guests. It is not unpleasant but it is not mirthful, a tragic sort of beautiful as one could only expect from graven ground. He delights that it is not entirely holy.
A flutter of moth-white wings loosen from the growth behind him as, rattling an echo that quickly blends with the ballad, the trellis on which the roses entangle is shaken against the veranda's beech-silver pillars. With it a muted sound of distress and the hisses of foliage, and a single thorn (presumably upset by the impact) cut him thinly across the sacred marks on which its brethren had previously doted. Beads of blood welled and glossed like ruby shards, complementing each tone of gilding gold they blemished.
There are words then, but words are futile. The hunger of feral things do not bow to the weight and power of words, which are ultimately useless to the gravity of a growl or a gesture. “Apologies,” the man says, and were the thing that was Erasmus to care about words then, he may have supposed it was genuine. But between them, beneath the faithless words, there is breath and sweat and blood, and it is these things alone that move the whims of godless creatures.
The movement is smooth, predatory – as wolfish and leonine as a silhouette may be: Erasmus, pulled from the venerable roses that kiss their bruise from his flesh, turns on a heel that he may become a wall. Beyond him the haunting beauty of the garden watches and waits, above them the moon grins. He is a titan pulled from the night; a void, a nothing in a grand place, exact and treacherous. He watches the blood pull from the man's jagged wounds, wastefully depleted on the cold stone walk. His mouth becomes a desert place, and there is a feline threat in the way his tongue draws a glossy sheen across his teeth.
He speaks intimately, artfully, as if to the cuts: “Sometimes,” a lull, somber and smooth, curtailed by subtle notes of savagery and wilderness, “pain is owed to beauty.” The whole of him, the deep, unseen of it, shivers and unravels like the fibers of nestled serpents. In his voice, a hundred suns are martyred to a widening abyss cut into the belly of a god – and hunger is retched in the shadow of each syllable. Erasmus watches the slits clot and darken with little despair, though his expression is free of everything but the hint of obsession.
When his gaze meets the copper-glaze of the man's eyes, they are not devoid of an amused cruelty like gallows humor, noose swinging. The grin that tugs one end of his lips is sharp and slick, and his angles do not soften to imitate anything reminiscent of civilized. He stands like a hellish prince, framed by the blur of garden-sweet peonies and bruise-purple lilies, an entity suited by the midnight hymns. “Is it beauty that draws you to this place, then?” he asks, and the way he tilts his head makes the curve of his horns look curiously menacing in the moonlight.
into the ashes of no return
@Atlas
