[P] it's only slaughter, only blood

[Wormlust]

------------------I have seen the dark universe yawning ---------------------------------Where the black planets roll without aim, It's between the doomed hill of corals that she lingers in the tides, swaying both closer and further away from those violent, sharp edges with the currents of the deep sea. The anemones reach out when the currents bring her closer. They devour the fat ocean worms that cling to her skin, bedding down in the hollows of her cannon bones and the spaces between her wings.   All the sea ebbs around her, breaking against the edges of her form until she looks like sea-foam drowned in the deep, impossibly white and thick enough to drown. The sharks swim circles above her, a halo of fins, slick gray and toothy smiles that never manage to quite close.  She's dressed with the predators of the sea, cloaked in the darkness where the only light that filters through is black, black, black.  Wormlust grazes on those anemones, relishing the sharp sting of their defenses against her tongue and lips. She feels as if she's alive with their electricity, full of the power of the sea and she can almost forget that the steel of her bones is nothing more than brittle, mortal marrow now.  Her wings are nothing more than fins in the deep, stained blue and drifting with the tide. That blackness that might be a 'thing' for how it seems to breathe against the silken weight of her wings. They reach out from her side like koi fins, butterfly like, ragged and thin enough to be made of the membrane that spreads over eyes that were made for the atmosphere, to behold the cosmos in all that wonderful and massive glory.  Soon though, she grows tired of the sting of anemones and the shark-flesh over head. She's had her fill of sea-creatures, of predators too tiny to soothe her hunger for more than a moment. And so she takes to the tides, to the currents and she slices through that living darkness like a comet full of blazing fury, set on a course to devour the entire world in ocean foam.  He is nothing more than another predator in the sea when she comes upon him, slick with water and seaweed. A kelpie, a monster of the deep that came after her, after the cosmos and the below beheld the terror of her form and knew that another of her kind should not be made.  “Oh,” Bubbles take her words and encase them with the air from her lungs that's she's stolen from the gills of an orc and a dolphin. “you are not quite the same as I.” Closer she swims, circling him like a shark, fangs glimmering in the moonlight that trickles in this shallower place where she found him.  Oh, she wishes she said the words, let the waves tangle about him like teeth, like currents that flow deep, deep, deep. Oh, do you think you taste as the sea might, salted and sweet? But instead she only circles above him, his own halo made of predator wings and flesh and weeds.  WORMLUST monster of the sea

@Taisce

[Taisce]

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It came with the threat of a waning moon And the wail of an ebbing tide, Dear Wormlust,   In the black of a whispering sea you both did meet.   In the deep where secrets hide and bodies lie forever entombed within a watery grave so deep, so dark, so cold. That is where you two monsters convened with lupine teeth that catch the rippling light.   He thought you were a ghost, with your phantom fins; thin as gossamer. They caught a light that should not reach as deep as you both had sunk. Taisce did not tell you, but oh how he knew, even then, just how fragile your wings are. Already he could feel the way they would rip beneath the sharpness of his teeth. It set his jaw to tingle with electric anticipation. His teeth clacked and bubbles blew; hungry was the monster here.   The corals, sharp and wicked, reached out to cut and draw first blood. But Taisce did not stray close to them. He did not even dash a limb against the growing reef. Though it was a beautiful landscape beneath him, made to frame the beauty of the ocean’s terrors, it could not draw his gaze from you, another kelpie. In that world of secrets and colours, with a blue like midnight and corals like the gold marbling his skin, Taisce watched you, Wormlust.   His pearl eyes, full of foam, full of savage waters, watched only you. In the dark your wings flared wide, pulled by the tide, made grand and ghostly by the white of you. Gills upon his face did flare, drinking air as his eyes drank in the whole of you.   He might have thought you were beautiful then, if he had a heart to care. But oh, Taisce is a tiger of the sea. He is too content to hunt alone. The bone white of your skin made of you the froth and foam of a riled sea; but Taisce is the deep, consuming dark, where gold treasure glitters upon the corpses of the dead.   As he watched you that day, he thought of how that it was you who strayed, Wormlust; it was you who strayed into his territory. Words rose from your lips in bubbles large and small. The smallest of which still clung to your ivory lips, too afraid to leave, to ever be spoken.   As the midnight to your starlight he hung, suspended in blue, with his mane and tail aloft, drifting like seaweed. As he floats with the restless waters, much the same as you, his ears fall to his skull. Like an eel he struck forward to clack his teeth as a riled fox might. There was nothing tame about Taisce, despite the collar of servitude that rusts about his muscled throat.   You rose above the reach of him, an angel ascending with a body as aloof as flotsam caught in the tide. You circle and watch, hungry and rabid, distant and beautifully savage. He was content below, for that is where he belongs. He circled you too, his chin arched up, his eyes watching, watching, watching. Silvered teeth gleamed sharp and savage, a haunting cry – more like a song, more like a harpy’s screech – rises from his lips like air.   You circled together, water swirling with you, about you. You were both sharks in that moment, hungry and savage but waiting and tasting. “And what are you but flesh and bone?” He asked at last and his tongue thought it already knew the taste of you. T A I S C E

[Wormlust]

------------------I have seen the dark universe yawning ---------------------------------Where the black planets roll without aim, The ocean feels like a cosmos around her, a whirlpool made not with the circling swimming of her body by the churning of all the worlds that might live inside her. They are wholly alone in this part of the sea and the sharks and fish and squids have drifted away in fear of the hurricane the two of them make below the waves as they circle, circle, circle like the snake that both lived in the old below and circled a hundred different universes at once. “Are we both not more than flesh and bone?” Her words drift down like bits of brine and sand and they foam like a shipwreck crashing into the deep still full of all its treasures. Those massive wings upon her shoulders throb like a sail full of storm-wind when she dips lower and lower and lower. She's close enough to see the way his teeth look like bone coral in his sneer, and how his skin is darker even the dark part of the sea that holds them. Wormlust smiles back at him and ripples flow out like halos around her when she gnashes her razor-teeth together. “I am the sea and I am the cosmos. I have seen how all flesh was knit together and how the sea made monsters and nightmares out of all of us. I am both the first of my kind and the only one that ever was. The heavens and the deep have both made altars out of my wings and the blood of more species than you could name has run rivulets down my throat and across my smile.” Oh how she smiles and drifts upon her circles until her tail tangles with her mane and both float like rain that falls up instead of down and makes things holy when it sinks into pores. And where the sea meets the edges of her it seems darker and almost purple and looks not at all like what the sea looked like before she swam around and around and around in the current deep below the surface. And where he meets the sea she sees not blackness but something both brighter and darker that looks not like water but mystery that might be strange enough to be sentient. It's a desolate sea that surrounds them, tempestuous as the words that float like revelations from her lips and fold back to reveal only death and decay, death and decay and salt. “And what do you think you are that you might be so like I?” Laughter bubbles out from her teeth in blooms of salted water that seem as reluctant to pop as air trapped in a sea of oil. And still she swims round and round and round as if she is that great snake of the cosmos, bother larger and brighter than any star that ever was. WORMLUST monster of the sea

@Taisce