do i still taste of war. can you feel the battles on my skin stitched across my back
Darkness has a thirst. A face. A name. Ten thousand years in the fire, my soul surrendered beneath their flames. She woke me up with a single whisper of command, and drawn by her ravishing light – I obeyed. The light came from the moon, with wishes on her lips, and desire written in the skies. I took the sky. I took the blood. I took the moon – till my heart, my body, my soul – were overwritten by the devouring of hers. Together, we skinned stars with our teeth and swallowed the dead dreams of mortals with silk whisper, and tainted breath. Her hair was pale. Her skin, snow-white and the rest of her – unholy, beautiful – were bathed blood-red.
Arawn remembers dying. He remembers being consumed by fire. He remembers burning in the fire for thousands of years. He remembers embers eating away at his dead skin, while his immortal heart howled with agony – snarled with rage. He remembers the memories of explicit pain. The lash of violence. The shackles that bound their iron against his wrists. Now, by the gloaming of nightfall, in a body more made than born, Arawn laughs with devilish hunger on his lips. His laughter falls like winter in the dead of night; where evening shadows collect their sins beneath his gaze. When Arawn finally awakens, he awakens to the smouldering kiss of moonlight against his flesh. To the kiss of a too-rough breeze, tangled like cloying fingertips against the disheveled length of his mane. He awakens to the night bleeding silk against his skin. And by the primal glare of the hunter moon – by the swollen luminosity of their tainted scripture, their wild religion, their ancient cries – Arawn stirs. Arawn wakes.
Arawn howls.
His blood pulses with life. His blood burns. Arawn rises with a growl on his breath, feeling his new body with a dark smile. Rising from an ancient slumber, an ancient curse, he stands tall. He feels the curse rolling down his bones – sliding off his shoulders, like thunder caught between his storm-made lips. He feels the sins of his past lives washing like blood down his form. Drowning the earth in whispers of darkness, of memories, of blood sacrificed and legends, curses, untold. The forests remembers him, too. In purring want, the woodland coils before his smooth frame. The woodland hisses his name and presses fervent kisses along his brow, his muscles, his shoulders, his powerful chest. They ache to touch him. To bathe him in tainted light so unholy it could devour warmth, it could devour suns. From the forests, with a low growl he arrives – his muscles flexing beneath taut, male skin; rivulets of crimson hair a wild, dishevelled mess. His eyes were silver storms upon violent seas – cold, savage, weathered by age. Dark, heathen, not meant for this universe. They were the eyes of a man who lived for passion, for hunger, for death.
Around him, darkness falls in vivid wrath – smouldering amaranthine – as the nightsky grew bruised. Blooming blood-red, then black with dusk's approach. The breeze tangles through his too-long hair. Whispered their ancient secrets against his flesh. And like a long, lost lover beneath the ruin of the sun – Arawn breathes in the twilight hour. Tasting, devouring. Wrapping his teeth against each nocturnal melody. Each tainted perfume. Inhale. Exhale. Her. Every visceral taste of rot and honey melts like pools of amber beneath the hungry, ravaging flames of his heart. He laughs. He wants. His soul bellows like a beast bloated beneath its winter kill. His hunger is a disease – a ravening whisper – laughing between the shallow moonbeams of his feral love. It aches in his chest now, like a rotten cavity, a visceral wound. It aches for want, for memory, for touch – to remember the lives he had lived. The bodies he had taken. The souls he had eaten, consumed.
But it is not the sweet stench of flowers that draws him near; the scent of mortals hanging like rot upon stagnant air, or the vestal moon that rises like a pale lover in their midst. That begs his wild heart to command, to still – like blood singing for the touch of darkness. It is not the magic of the meadows, wet with mist and midnight dew, that stirs in want for the nectarous moon. When the tulips hiss from the earth, their tight stems swaying to the alluring rhythm of a saccharine breeze, he sees her then – and the taste of her image burns him, like the moon burns the sun. Like forest religion. Like pagan worship, burying the world beneath the slender, iron crush of her goddess' weight. She is haunting admonitions. She is bone-white scripture. She is curling threat, and graceful reprieve made deadly and soft.
She stands beneath the ashen haze. A girl with the whisper of womanhood sighing down her hips. Between the thin, sparse trees, and empty meadows, she lingers among the flower-ruins of the darkness, the mist. Arawn does not laugh then, nor does he smile. His eyes were smouldering flames, his grin thin and feral – a tight-lipped, wolven snarl curling before the cruel face of winter. He approaches her in a slow, sweeping motion. His rugged muscles, purring beneath scarred skin. His skull were tilted towards the lunar light – his horn, piercing the heavens like a deadly sabre wound unto the battlefield. His mouth were drawn into a firm line. More criminal than gentleman. And his voice, dark, deep – a rich, smoky timbre. Flowing more like darkness than they do words. "I do not know which suits you more –" He begins. His voice rough, low. His lips, a grinning whisper away from her ear.
"The flowers, the moon – or the violence," His gaze falls to her tail-blade then, the way it curls around those rotted stems like a scythe. The way it begs for flesh with a chilling cry of intimacy. And atlast, in the moments caught between moonsong and the swan-stillness of her beauty, he smiles. As if all the allure and violence in the world could not hold a candle to the divine light that pours righteous through her. He almost wants to bow. To kneel, like a knight does to a princess – a queen. To tuck a crimson flower behind her ear with a chaste kiss. But Arawn is a godless man. A man who does not surrender. Not for beauty. Not for love. Not even death. His hunting dogs bay at his feet, bewitched. They bristle, furs sleek as black-blood by dawn. Drawn to the girl with moonlight for skin. Blinking back with drowsy mongrel eyes as they come to an abrupt heel. Obeying their master. Their lord. "Arawn."
@Danaë
