The night is not gold but silver in the reflected bits of moonlight and starlight between the sand and the water. Everything is dark and silver and Veer cannot help hate the way he is nothing more than another shadow in the blackness. He could be a cloud made of feathers and ink as he rides the currents and his perception of the world shifts rapidly from stark clarity to fog.
Somewhere Najjad flies above him, flying lazy circles above the cloud cover as the gryphon waits for something he's almost forgotten to remember. Veer can feel the way Najjid's impatience rises as the moon sinks and his blackened skin shivers with predatory violence.
But the sands and the line of vegetation are as silent as their wings tonight. Both of them swallow the recklessness crawling like disease in the places of them deeper than muscle and deeper than bone.
Tonight is not the night.
So they drift down like loose feathers on the spring breeze, circling downward in patterns that make sense only to the two of them. The sand swallows up any sounds made by hoof and claw or feather and fur. They are careful to land between the rays of silver-light along the shore of the oasis and stick only to the dark places between where they are silken shadows that whisper soft enough to be made of dreaming.
When the stallion and the beast wade into the water the coo of liquid ripples is the first thing that might be classified as real sound to break up the desert night-song. Together they duck under the surface and drag their wings across the sand and grit at the bottom of the warm water. The night swallows up the strange blackness of the water that spreads out from their bodies when they surface.
And suddenly the night is not silver but gold. The rays of moonlight reflect off the brightness of their feathers and off of the wickedly sharp beak of Najjad. Everything looks brighter when they smile at each other-- pegasus to gryphon, monster to beast.
Tomorrow They promise each other as they brush wing to wing when they collapse upon the sand, look up to the stars and wait for the dawn.
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
He arrives as any good monster should: in the dead of night with the stars as his only witness. They smile down at him, winking in tandem with his heartbeat, and for a moment it is as if he’s sharing some grand secret with the heavens, and has a million co-conspirators.
For a moment he smiles back, a wicked, toothy grin that flashes in the moonlight and shines near as bright as the stars.
Then he ducks his head again, as if in reverence for the heavens, and continues his trek along the desert.
He has only the word of an underground merchant to guide him, something that could easily have led to his death amongst the endless dunes and sands of the Mors. But Toulouse is patient, persistent, and will never accept failure. And so it is that he finally, finally, arrives at the banks of the oasis.
Just in time to see a shadow drop from the sky - or is it two? He can’t tell for sure, but he knows the mystery fell right into the oasis like a gift from the heavens, wrapped up nice and pretty just for him.
The water is warm as he dips his fetlocks into it, breaking the shimmering mirror that is its surface with two quick steps. The splash he makes is loud and careless and intentional above all else. The ripples go running in even directions, smooth and even, and it seems to him that the water is black, not silver as water should be. Unperturbed, heedless and uncaring, he pulls the scarves from his body, leaving them in a red pile on the shore behind him.
He takes one more step, than another, and another, until all four legs are sunken up to the knee. His eyes cast back the moonlight like a wolf’s, predatory and hungry as they scan the surface of the water. ’It’s smooth,’ too smooth, he realizes - but the figures on the opposite bank answer the mystery for him.
“It is a nice night for a swim.” It is not a question, nor is it quiet. Toulouse takes another step, wading now through the water. “If only it was not quite so, so, dark.”
A smile twists the corners of his mouth with delight, small and toothless and wicked.
the divine beasts ' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
The figures on the shore barely lift their heads when the splash sounds. They are the definition of lazy arrogance, like lions sprawling beneath the cool of the moon who could be drawing the shapes of antelopes between the specks of starlight. Everything about them suggests folly and their feathers whisper across the sand in lazy patterns until angel wings arch above their shadows.
But they are not lazy. They are not slumbering lions.
Each of them have counted the exact number of steps the interloper has taken through the water. They have already named him male and listened to the silken coo of his cloths as he removed them. And they knew the water was black against his belly, black as night, black enough to make him seem like a shadow if the stallion happened to drown. Veer and Najjad are hunting even while they look up at the stars like two lost boys in an endless desert.
Veer is the one to answer the stallion (for Najjad doesn't bother to lift his head from his feathers) and he replies with laughter. Each tip of his feathers shine like golden arrows when he shakes the rest of the water from them. “Haven't you heard,” Each of his words drips not with threat but with youthful, wealthy arrogance. He talks like the King of the black waters, and his smile is silver-white when he rises up to watch the stallion in the water. “that this water is a gift from Tempus himself?”
His steps are noisy as he walks through the sand. He seems almost eager, almost young when he joins the stallion in the water. And when he's close enough he whispers, “They say that it might even be the wellspring of immortality.” Beneath the water his joints lock and at the shoreline Najjad lifts his head and his jaws clack just once. The sound could be a warning or an agreement.
Soon. They say silently together in that space where their souls tangle together like snakes. Maybe tonight.
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
The laughter drifts across the oasis like a ripple across the water, and Toulouse has half a mind to laugh himself.
Instead he only smiles, and perhaps he is showing too much teeth because the moonlight reflects off of his enamel and casts a bright reflection down over the black, black water. His eyes burn brighter, brighter than the stars, so that they too are no longer made of the green depths of the ocean, but rather cold, bright starlight. If the pair on the bank cared to look close enough, they might see the hunger in Toulouse’s eyes and mistake him for a madman, come to wreak havoc in the dead of night. But he is no murderer, only a wolf, disguised in a sheep’s skin.
”Haven’t you heard,” the stranger asks, and Toulouse notes that his voice is as smooth as his laughter. ”that this water is a gift from Tempus himself?”
Of course, this was the horned stallion’s first time ever setting hoof upon the golden deserts of Solterra. He had heard rumors and legends and fables alike, it was true; but most of those had been centered around the Court’s many rulers and its fearsome Davke. ”Forgive me,” he says, hardly missing a beat after the stranger’s declaration. ”I did not know Solterrans were so pious.”
But nothing about the stranger whispered of a pious nature - not that Toulouse could really blame him for that. He wore the same easy brand of arrogance. After all, why would they worship a god when he could wield power just as easily?
The other stallion rises then and wades into the shallows, and Toulouse sees his eagerness and matches it stride for stride. His hoofbeats quicken, feeling the water sloshing against his skin, the waves rippling outwards and away from his body. Only when they’re close, close enough to touch had they a want to, does he stop and wait.
And listen.
This one time only, Toulouse would allow a stranger to make the first move.
His words are almost-careful, but true caution wouldn’t fit his narrative. So Toulouse seeks out his gaze instead, and all the violence and hunger he finds there is reflected in his own moonlight depths.
”And do they say the price of such wealth?”
There was always a price, he knew, he knew, and Toulouse didn’t need to hear Veer’s reply to know also what he would be.
the divine beasts ' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
They look at each others like wolves and lions (although he would like to say, like wolves and god). It's the way the night seem heaviest in that space between them that makes Veer almost regret that it's the stallion's throat that catches his eyes instead of his pale skin against all that black water. “When it suits us we are.” He says as he forces his eyes away from that pulse. Instead of blood they find moonlight and starlight and he wonders if the stallion would taste like silver-sugar or like ice.
“What good are gods,” Veer laughs again and there's a certain fervor to it that seems black, black and spoiled. “if we cannot take from them?” And as he dips his smile beneath the black water and drinks deeply of the soot and ink salted water his eyes seem to suggest, gods are made to drink.
And then it's not black water they stand in but an altar of blood and rot and ash.
Veer badly wants to close the small, fragile distance between them. He wants to lay his feathers across the stallion's spine like a funeral veil. It's only that wolf and silver gaze that stops him. That and the questions of prices and wealth. Suddenly they are speaking the same language-- gods and wealth, sins and souls.
“If there was a price to pay, would you pay it?” When he lifts his head from the water, when drops of black water fall from his lips like meteors and rot there is no flash of teeth to break up the black darkness between them. Only black and gold and mortal skin that's made to bleed.
Perhaps the stallion is no murder but he is, he is.
This time he lifts his wings up (he's done resisting) and they sing a promise, a bond. They sing like paper coins made out of flesh (stamped with points of bone). The sing like religion, like immortal blood turned to black-water.
This time he closes the distance between them and there's something hot on his lips that makes the water steam and dew on his cheekbones. One before he spoke of prices with a stag instead of a wolf. And oh! He thinks a wolf might know how to really live.
Because wolves and lions are predators and predators are gods.
Behind them Najjad, another god, lifts his wings and those feathers seem to sing too.
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
”When it suits us we are.” The words bring a smile to Toulouse’s lips - perhaps he’s found a kindred soul out here in the middle of sun and sand after all.
“Aren’t we all,” he croons, and there’s something loving in his tone as he sidles closer, the water rippling about his skin and darkening his pelt.
“Perhaps gods are only there for us to take,” he suggests, and the water is stirring around him as he moves. “Blessings, miracles, promises of wealth and good fortune. All we ever want from the gods is something good.”
His eyes are glinting in the moonlight, silver pools against the ivory of his face. There’s a fervor in them, a hunger that only grows at the mention of gods, a hunger that can only be satiated by one thing and one thing alone. He wanders slowly past the other stallion, choosing his steps carefully, his words wisely. “Even if they rarely have something good to give, it doesn’t stop us from trying.”
He’s on the other side of him now, between the monster in the water and the monster on the shore. His eyes flicker between the gryphon and the man, catching the way the moonlight reflects off the dark water and pools in each of their eyes.
He ought to be afraid, when they both raise up their wings. It seems like an omen, like a promise, the way those feathers sing to each other across the water. But he isn’t afraid.
Toulouse’s laugh is light and breathy, pouring from his mouth like a million falling stars.
“Would you?” he counters with a grin, his teeth flashing brightly. He’s walking again, approaching the shore this time, as if that had been his destination all along, and the stallion in the water merely a detour.
His thirst is sated, but his hunger grows stronger with every second. He’s ready to disappear back into the dark any second now, but the water whispers in his ear not yet.
He stops before the gryphon, but tilts his head back to the water one last time. “Ask me again tomorrow, and I may tell you.”
the divine beasts ' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
“That is not all I want from gods.” Each of his eyes blazes like gold bleeding into the darkness of night, a black so dark that nothing gold cannot die. There is the fading black-water and then there is him and somehow it seems almost easy to believe all those shadows running dappled and rippling came from him.
Veer is thinking about all the wealth that might be carried in a drop of god-blood. He's wondering how much more might be carried in a single feather fallen from his wings. He's wondering, wondering, wondering like a pit that ends only in the center of the earth.
The stallion moves slick as a water-snake towards the shore and Najjad is there waiting for him as quick as a hawk. His wings curl back towards his sides, golden, silent and oh so ready. His beak parts in something that looks almost like a smile (if wild beasts could smile). The feathers on his head are a whisper quieter than silk when he cocks his head and just studies the stallion that has wandered too close to him.
Back in the water Veer is moving towards the shore, back to the place where the oasis laps at his hooves and nothing more. His wings are still lifted and water is still dripping from him like tears of the earth. When he catches them upon the air each beats like a heartbeat (as if the wind lives because he wills it to). “I would not pay the price.” He says and his words are a bade rendering the darkness in two. Each bit of sound from his lips is a weapon rested upon the throat of god.
“I would make someone else pay it for me.” His blade swing and his wings beat like organs on the wind. Water moves away from him like shadows moving away from the light.
Najjad and Veer take to the skies and they are the first to dissolve into the darkness. Their laughter still rings in their wake and that is slower to dissolve than their forms (one brassy and one as deep as a war-drum). The sound of their amusement lingers like the sand lingering between their feathers even as they fly back towards the city boldly blazing in the dark desert.
home is behind the world ahead
there are many paths to tread
”That is not all I want from gods,” he says, and Toulouse’s eyes are hungry for more, hungry to know. Silence stretches like a tenuous cord between them, a cord he wants only to snap not once, but a hundred times, until nothing remains of it. He wants to press further, wants to ask what it is the strange pegasus and his stranger companion want, wants to know how they’ll get it (because their eyes and their wings and their laughter promise that they will.)
But something in the way he moves and the way his eyes blaze tells Toulouse already. So he doesn’t ask, not yet - maybe tomorrow, his mind still sings, even though he doesn’t know which tomorrow it sings of.
He drags himself out of the water, and it falls like rain in sheets and droplets as dark as blood. It spills across the sand, a dark streak on a darker shore, a stain across the face of the earth. It turns his coat dark, dark and silver in the moonlight, his frame wrapped so profoundly in shadows that for all means and purposes he could be as black as the pegasus still in the oasis.
The griffin flares his wings then and Toulouse stops - but not from fear. No, his wings sing the same promise as his equine bonded, and Toulouse does not think he’s imagining the smile that glints in the light of his eyes and fearsome beak. Toulouse smiles back, and his teeth are sharp and cruel and bright in the moonlight.
”I would make someone else pay it for me.”
As the two take to the skies, matching tones and matching wings, Toulouse lets laughter be his answer. It drifts into the air after them, oddly light and boyish, like the sound of glass shattering. They disappear quickly into the darkness and still he laughs, even as he turns back to the water and this time, slips past the surface and lets the oasis consume him.
The smallest of splashes, and a quickly-dying ripple is the only sign, before the surface of the water goes quiet and still and reflects only the moon and stars.
