Ravenous. Famished. Starved. Carnivorous-? No. That one didn’t quite fit. Still Locke smiles at his own mind’s stumblings. A trifle of entertainment did the game serve as he slipped through the woods of old. It was at the moment, an empty forest, lacking the thrill of life he’d lingered in this world to devore (oh, there’s one!). Even the usual sounds of birds, or insects seemed silenced by the weight of snow or shadows. Yet if the foolish son thought it strange, which he had, he connected it to some quality of the land. What the hell did he know about this place. Perhaps long long ago some god up and died here and now all mourn the area as sacred. Young age let the foolish boy believe it mattered not what happened to some long dead god. He was here. The dead god was not.
Of course, there were ghosts...and the slight possibility that it wasn’t the death sanctuary for a dead god. It nibbled at his conscience, nipping, nosing, needling, nesting- and he was off again. The dangerous warning signs for mortals were silenced by the desire of the boy who had a disposition for confusing warning sirens, for siren songs of the deep. And that desire? Well, you couldn’t really work a place, (pretend to) own a place, until you knew it. Even after his blood had warmed to the northern heat, his mind continued to lead him down the rabbit whole of wonder. Just what was around that corner? A buffalo! A forest! Nothing! Or so it seemed now. So much for exploring to fill his fathomless appetite for more.
At least the snow was lighter here. Though it was still enough to leave tracks. Dark eyes scan the white expanse, but so much for that trick. The snow only served to confirm he was nearly the only visitor here. Nearly. Yet the tracks rarely stuck to his deer path, and though he wasn’t past being young, the boy was past the stupidity to follow unknown tracks into a dark unknown wood. Nice try dead god ghost.
PLOP!
The lanky boy jumped nearly two feet straight up with a muted yelp, as snow from above fell upon his back- right onto his shoulders and those feathers. A spine snapping shiver curled his back and twisted his head up and around before he shook the offending frozen crystals from his ever touchy feathers. Damned things. They flexed and ruffled with his shake, fluffing, just as annoyed at the interruption as he. The cold stayed with him though. It was a curse he always thought. A damn god sent curse that they seemed to feel everything ten fold. (Hey look- point for dead god ghost) Not to mention it served to wash some of the dirt from his coat, spoiling the old traveler bit. Bright gold and white revealed itself through the patch the water created. Maybe he was letting his skills slip if this is what it came down to. With a frustrated snort the youth slipped onward, giving his tail a final flick in response to dead god ghost’s rude welcoming.
The word games were just getting to be dull, stale, mundane, lifeless- when he heard water running ahead. Horned head picked up and his hooves found purpose in their steps. Maybe it wasn’t entertainment, but at least he could finish what the dropped snow had started. Nothing revealed a mask like tearing a whole through your own face and not dropping dead. Plus a river would likely point the way to somewhere that was more filled with life. Or at least lead him out of this forest. Point for Locke. Take that dead god ghost.
OOC:: @nestle So excited to thread with you! Feel free to invite anyone else!
For a day she had waited in the graveyard with the blood specked leaves hanging a halo above her furious form. Each bone had whispered to her in tomes of rot, as the flesh turned to dirt and the worms had come to explore their new universe. The bodies beneath her had felt like home, like purpose, like a song she was made to sing in the way of blood, and rage, and fury. And in the silence, with her crown of a winter-dead forest, she had made her organs chant the notes of that song over and over. It was only eulogy she knew how to give the creatures feeding the roots beneath the lash of her tail.
For a day there was no sign of movement, no shadows for her to feast upon, and nothing for her to carve the patterns of all her rage into. Until suddenly there was--
It started as a coo in the leaves, the soft shush, shush, shush of horse hooves in the almost frozen loam. Everything in her, every bit of lingering wrath, opens up to answer that shush, shush of the forest. And when she moves there is still that halo of bloody leaves dancing painfully behind her eyes each time she blinks. Her own steps are not a hush but a war. Thana does not move silently through the copse, she does not need to.
Let them know I'm coming, she thinks, let fear ferment in their skin before--. The thoughts tumble around inside her, between her rot magic and her aching, haunted soul. They are gathering speed, and weight, and gravity like a hundred stones rolling down a mountain. Her joints ache to run with them, to charge through the forest like a rabid thing. It hurts to keep at her steady walk, to hurts to hold her empty spiral still instead of run the world through with it. It hurts.
It still hurts when she finds him by the river. There is youth in him, she can see it the curl of his neck, the whisper of his feathers in the wind, the brightness in his gaze. She moves closer. There is fury chained in each movement of her hooves on the river shore and wrath in the way her tail drags lines in the ground behind her. And there is only something other and primordial in the way she watches him with a wolf-like tilt to her head. She does not move closer, only waits and counts the throb of the life below the curl of his throat.
“Who are you.” Her voice doesn't lift as a question should, it only runs straight as a sword racing for the heart. And were it not for the tightness of her lips every curl of her face, every hollow, looks as if it belongs to a bear snarling in the black-woods.
It's all fun and games to tease a dead god ghost, until one actually shows up at your door. Typical of fables, legends, and the mystical. Makes for a fantastic bedtime story to send you off to dreamland, but gods forbid you ever get dropped into one. A reverse nightmare.
crackAlways a wonder that the shattering of silence can have such echoes through the soul. A small stick and leaf made louder than the slow churning river he stands at. A chained ear turns in the direction of the first mortal (hopefully) made sound he’s heard in hours. Unbidden cold seeps back into Locke’s body, but caused not by ice and crystals this time. Fear was an emotion the youth had long ago learned was only said to be conquered by fools and the dead, but it didn’t mean he enjoyed its vice grip on his spine.
The being's descent upon him came as torrent, wave, rising with his tension like the tide, storm-...Enough. Dead god ghosts or little harmless rabbit, he had wanted this right? Of course it didn’t sound like just a harmless little rabbit. Much bigger. Could ghosts make noise? Wrestling thoughts was never a thrill for the boy. So Locke does what Locke was always doing, and twists it all into something that suits him more. The cold he lets seep into his soul and pour over his head, baptizing his blood into an elixir of the most enslaving sensations. Adrenaline, electricity, and stubbornness seep through his skin so that when his head turns to the storm’s source, it is encased in the molten movement and aesthetic of the surety and twisted lips. Lies. Ever the lies. But when does the truth of fears ever lie down for any other master. Half dust covered body be damned with the rest of his worries, costumes and masks were necessary but could never replace a well crafted lie on your face.
For all the careless noise his dead god ghost makes, it arrives at a walk. Though as he well knew threats, the real ones, never need to arrive in a hurry to make their potency felt. And Locke sees- no, feels the talon dragging, head tilting, sinuously lethal movements in the slow marked time of any animal to ever have the misfortune of being labeled prey. The dark scent (like leaves rotting on a damp forest floor) brings nature’s roles of predator and prey to batter at the gates of his soul, but his lies hold him. Keeping his head up, emerald eyes bright with mischief, and stance steady as the march stops. Lies are a stronger fabrication than steel, and Locke has the black stained soul to prove he is no novice at the forge of their creation.
The dead god ghost speaks (can you blame him for the nickname?), and despite his salved manners, the feathers at his back raise slightly. Blasted things. A voice echoing low and slow upon his ears confirm she wasn’t here for tea, and the reality serves as confirmation of those whispered thoughts that dead gods were not the only reasons a wood could be silent. But though his feathers were not glamoured like the rest of him, he does not pause to let the eyes of his audience wander. “Not someone knocking at death’s door.” (Not your enemy. Not a lamb.) It drifts light, curling, warm, and edged- a hand in the night, which might hold a dagger- throwing the contrast to the other like the warning shot hers had seemed to him. Though it is a whitewashed line given his lack of weapon or threat, lies would have to serve.
Locke steps forward once, seduced to action by the rise of his heart and the tightness in his gut, and tilts his own head to the dark force in the snow. His expression throwing daggers at the tension which hung in the cold with that twisted thorny smile. “Just a...wander.” (for the moment) Only an unassuming nonthreatening creature. Though in the face of dead god, it was hardly just that. Eyes drift to the gem the plane of her head. Now that was a pretty piece. Wonder what it coul-
Best make sure he is likely to walk away first. So he moves again, a few paces to the side, lies smoothing his walk to a graceful I don’t give a fuck. “Do you seek something?” Might as well toss a lure out in the lake. Maybe it would be reshaped to a sharp edged splinter of metal at his throat, but Locke was ever filled with the blessing of youth to be blind to consequences, and cursed with curiosity: what raging reason drove such a creature so tightly bound with reverence. It could be that it was nothing more than his label as a trespasser- but dragging it from her lips would be the silently stolen coin from a purse. The dead god ghost could go hang himself in fictional irrelevance, this was much more entertaining.
OOC:: @Thana Sorry for the novel, I'm still figuring him out. Please don't feel the need to keep up. =]
The rise of the feathers so close to his spine reminds her of the language of wolves and coyotes. It reminds her of how wild things are made to greet each other in the dark woods. It is the only language she understands, the way of tooth and claw, fear and violence, promise and wrath. And if she had feathers she still would have greeted him with nothing but the flash of her teeth and the whispering sigh of her horn through the winter chill. She wonders if he can see it on her, the way she is nothing like him, the way there is only an abyss in the glittering, harsh purple of her gaze.
Or can he only see the way she's aching to devour something, anything, to stave off the violence dragging her down like cement in the tide?
“Does anyone ever knock at that door?” There is magic in her voice, the rot rolling white and heavy as fermented fruit below her skin. It is not her way to think in the space between literal and poetic. It is not her way to talk instead of cleave, or feel the way her heart flutters more like a hornet than a butterfly.
What is her way is the steadiness of her gaze on him as he starts to move. She looks all lion instead of wolf now as her tail ticks, ticks, ticks, a metronome against the icy stones on the shoreline. She looks hungry. Her own hooves make no effort to reflect his. But the rot spreading out from her widens in a promise that all the steps in the world could not, cannot, save him should she decide to move.
It's not until he looks at her with his gaze turned hard and weaponized that she does nothing more than track his movements and tap her warning song. Her smile is all teeth, all claw, all violence barely held between the cage of her flesh. It's all waiting, and wanting, and memories of bodies shredded like paper beneath the blood freckled leaves. “No one is just a wanderer.” Everything in her that's god and beast bellows to close the distance between them and peel back his flesh to discover what else he might be.
Thana finds it almost impossible to remember that she's supposed to be more than death now. Almost.
She inhales the scent of the water, and her rot, and the musk that's settled on his skin from her forest. All of it backs up the flare of his feathers and the shape of his voice around the word wanderer. And yet--
Her magic is still roaring in her blood and heart is still humming like a hive of hornets. She has no idea how to be soft, or gentle, or anything but this boy's death looking at him from behind the shield of a unicorn's form. “Tell me what you know about the creatures living in this forest.” Thana demands of him instead of answering his question. The ability to smile, to do anything but become sharper, and harder, and wilder, had gone with the meeting and the grave.
Once she had heard someone say that the forest is alive. That it's watching them all.
But here, by the shore and the river, with the boy who has no name but wanderer it only feels dead. And had she remembered how to be soft, she would have worried that it was dead because of her. She doesn't. She only looks at him with the dead forest all around them and thinks about blood.
Not many would classify being stared down like prey in a dark and quite wood as entertainment, but Locke was ever an optimist in situations which seemed to call into question his mortality. A pervasive, obstinate optimist. It is so easy to smile in the face of death when it seems still a stranger.
So it was easy for the boy to grin back at this wolf of the forest when she tosses his quib back at him in a dry tone. The youth took the signs where he could find them as he tried, and struggled to place her. As entertaining as it was to have a puzzle, the ticking tail seemed like a warning meter as to the consequences of his wrong guesses. A clock counting down to what end he did not yet know. Her expression remained a confounding mixture of frozen cold threat and avarice for something he held- but what? Yet as the boy begins to unravel it, he smells it. The forest was...more humid? Darker? As she cuts back at him again and he moves Locke sweeps his eyes over the carnage of life around him.
Wrong. It was wrong.The rotting leaves, wilted grasses all gaining the slime of decay and sinking into a weeping melancholy of muted browns and blacks. Magic. Must be.The emotion she brandished upon her face with a smile left Locke unable to do much more than maintain his guise, as he resisted the urge to look down and check it was only the forest floor feeling the life leeched from its roots. The spike of cold surging through his nerves the young liar wrestles with, spreading it with the rest to soothe his nature and brand his body with bravado of an acrobat upon a high wire. If the high wire was on fire and death was creeping through every height. Keeping his head up and false face on, the youth marked his potential for one day mastering the skill of illusion.
His payment for all his effort was not an answer to his question, to which the creature (for horse and unicorn simply no longer seemed to correctly classify her), earned a flick of Locke’s own tail. A fracturing of the glass which he had crafted so strongly before, or so he thought. The young thief tilts his head, watching, but nothing more comes. It was a solid real request- no command. Memories pull feelings of frustration, bitterness, and merge into a war with the ever present desire to simply know. The desire to take the world and place it all within his grasp for him to manipulate at will. The feelings of a youth wanting to make changes on the board of his world, but forced to sit on the sidelines. The limitations cause hesitation, until the potency of the memories drain with the inhale of decay and musk. Real. Here. No longer on the sidelines. And a furiously wicked gleam comes into the youth’s eyes at a hunger being finally fed, at an animal at last being loosed to feed on what it had always been forced to watch from a distance.
So the boy answers fully. “They are hiding or gone, or perhaps never where.” Head shifts to the path where he had tread, and down its trail, where it spread wide enough to allow a parting in the canopy and a blanket of snow. “There are few tracks, and never are they straight.” Locke then looks up to the canopy. “It is not normal. No birds, or sounds of life.” The last word brings his gaze back to the creature, the one standing in the center of all things wrath and ruin. “It is dead.” The words were weighted, slow and leaning to nudge she who took what he witnessed through his senses of observations and made visibly real before his very hooves. Puzzlement and fear may have twisted and morphed by his preconceived emotions about commands such as she gave, but the idea that there was a creature causing the difference in this wood rose in his mind as a real entity, no longer fantasy. Dead god ghosts simply became death bringing queens, and though the boy did not shy from her (in that twisted way, it thrilled the young heart), Locke wondered if maybe he might soon prefer the figurative dead god ghost to the very real reaper before him.
If there is a gleam that grows in his new-leaf gaze, there is one in her own that answers back. And maybe this is only how the two of them will really communicate: a shift of a hoof, a look in their eyes, a tap of a blade and a shiver of feathers. There is a coldness to her look, stone-hard instead of embers, twilight instead of spring. She is ticking down the number of his bones like seconds, and each one, each tibia and rib-bone and tooth, is a piece of him by which she might scry for the truth in his marrow.
This is how Thana decides, suddenly, that there is no place in all of Novus dark or deep enough for the poachers to hide.
He talks of the creatures of the woods, and death, and everything hungry in Thana cracks and unbinds itself from the aching places of her soul. She moves, finally, and it's quicker than the rot circles spreading out in arcane apocalypse patterns around her. And when her blade rises up behind her, like a cobra, there is only the sigh of it through the air and the whisper of movement in the tangles of her mane to suggest any gentleness in her movement at all. She remembers how easy it was to hold her weapon at the throat of her Regent, how easy it was to imagine rivers of his blood filling the cracks of the library floor.
It feels like it would be just as easy, to kill this boy who talks about hiding creatures and dead woods. Who says, never were, as if there is nothing left in this forest to save.
She thinks it might feel like coming home.
“Ah,” The sound of it falls from her lips not like language but like a gavel, or a guillotine, falling hard and fast for a spinal chord. She feels it wrapping around her throat like a noose even after the sound of it has faded into the silence of the fearful forest. “And what do you know of the tracks not running straight?” Each word is another gavel, another blade, another bit of her that's unbound from the parts that have learned to miss budding trees and unfurling flowers. She can imagine his blood too, leeching into the forest and the river like rain.
Because Thana knows that nothing being hunted in a forest can run straight, not through the thick trees and the bits of ice caught between bare roots sticking up like bones. She knows that the poachers understand the flight of hunted things. How else are traps and graves set down like maps on tables?
She moves closer still and lifts her nose up towards him. She inhales him like a lion inhaling the feast at the watering hole, she inhales like a wolf when a mountain cat is too close to her den. She inhales like she needs all the secrets of him more than she needs air (and like she needs violence more than that). Part of her, the one that Ipomoea asked to stay, knows that she should step away from him and do something more befitting a council member.
But--
To the marrow of her bones, and the wrath of her form, and the glacier of her magic, Thana is made for killing. So there is only the thought that perhaps she should not tilt both her weapons towards him like offering to a false god. There is only the thought, that stays caught in the tiny bound part of her, that dissolves to dust with her rage that has done nothing but grow, and grow, and grow.
The chance to escape the sidelines and step into the game had almost cost him. And still might. Get a question wrong to a tutor and he might find the flat of a blade, or at worst, a laborious task that even Hercules would turn down. Yet, he hadn’t gotten this one wrong. Locke was secure in all the confidence of a quick student that this forest was indeed silenced by death. What he forgot in his blind security, was that since this was no longer the classroom, getting an answer right did not mean you got the question right. The youth had tried to apply the logic of the sidelines to the real world, and it was about to be thrown back in his face, or in this case, held against his jugular.
The creature switches on so abruptly, it jolts the young stallion back a step, for he hadn’t realized she’d been switched off. Weapons raising, dark sleek body coming forward (so that all the reaper was missing was a dark cloak of shadows), Locke grabbed every nerve by the throat to hold himself steady, yet he still could not prevent the raising head and pinning ears as she stepped well into his space. Never forget Locke was a youth. An experienced one in life’s emotional and physical hell, but still a youth. Still young and fresh without lessons such as this one learned. Without realization that while he had learned a great many things, and could do even more, that did not mean he knew the rules of this world. Of course, it didn’t help when Reaper Goddesses of this wood decided she seemingly didn’t want to play by the rules.
Madness, he labelled it, as his narrowed eyes met hers and they came to a hold up. His expression lacked the playfulness of before, but managed to still hold up a wall of distant concern. It was of an individual who bore her threat like a knock at the door, and asked them merely to leave a message after the beep. It was, most of all, a bluff, seen by the feathers at his back ruffling. (One day he must really master those bastards.) Inside all manner of bone aching cold seeps into his blood, labeling each muscle with commands to move and prepare, blockading resources of masks and amusing thoughts as it walled up its defenses. Every humorous thought he’d had only seconds ago was defenestrated by the her single syllable ‘ah’.
Yet, as you have well been told dear reader, do not underestimate the young bastard. For all the toss up and internal chaos she had just caused, the young thief still had wit and cleverness just as sharp as her threats, and while inexperience may be a weakness, it is also a strength, for Locke didn’t know what he should not do. He did not know he should not threaten her back. “I know that yours are the only ones so far I’ve seen that lead straight in chase.” Defiance flares like a small flame in the smooth tones of before as his head tucks down slightly with the weight of the accusation.
He inhales to speak again to find that smell of rot shoving itself in his lungs so forcefully his mind questioned if oxygen was even mingled in it (and little thoughts nipped at his heels that she smelled like that for a reason and distance no longer protected him from it). “That I merely arrived in these woods today to find them already dead.” The last words slowed as he tried to bring his own gavel to bear against the echo of hers. (Could his, so newly minted, do such though?) “That you still haven’t told me what you seek, reaper.” At the name he forces a brow to light, and head to tilt, taking all he could manage to hold it steady. Oh how he mourned the ease with which he’d been calling to a dead god ghosts as he named the death he saw along her talon’s edge.
"Speaking."
OOC:: @Thana That was rough, so sorry lovely, but I really go into in the end, their accusations of each are fun to write!
That small part of her, tangled in the growing rage, starts to wither. Like a birch in a forest it is the first to die, melding down into rot as all the light around it gets swallowed. Each time she breathes and each time her heart drums a war-chant, all the softness, all the aching suffocates in the rage. Every inch of her begs her to move closer, and her magic (that blood-borne magic) lashes against her muscles begging to be let out. It feels like a hurricane caged in her form, a wrath eager to make something new of this world.
At the tip of her tail, her blade trembles like a shard of bone should not, it rattles like a dead branch against a storm. Thana knows something important has been carved out of her. There is nothing more than a fiery, black sun blazing in the place where her heart should be. Each flame of hers, each wrathful flicker, burns colder than the spaces between stars. And it's that missing part, where there is only black ice, that would have seen more than joints locked together in a puzzle she only wants to desiccate.
She wonders if his feathers would sound like leaves when they hit the ground.
She wonders if his blood would sound like rain or like mist.
But she doesn't wonder how easy it would be tear him apart piece by piece. It's always easy, the flaying, the killing, the wrath. It's always easy, and she reads no innocence in the tilt of his head at her. It's only insolence she sees. Like a god she knows that his will, with his rippling feathers, is not the one in the world strong enough to resist her. The void always looks back, someone had told her that once.
And so she opens up her mouth and bares her teeth like razor blades. She looks through him and answers him at all once.
“My tracks came straight towards you.” A leaf behind her, falls to the ground dead. Worms rise out to feast on it, to feed the only cycle the forest knows. Like death it's the only thing the forest really knows. The winter belongs to Thana. “But it's not you that I'm looking for.” She offers no explanation but the lowering of her horn, the hollowness of it whispering in the almost-not-there breeze when as she angles it straight for his heart.
She wonders if he will sound like rain or like mist rolling in between the birch.
Her blade has not stopped its tremble, its death-knell-whisper. It's only crept closer and closer to the curl of her hip, more touch than weapon. And it's the last part of her alive in the suffocation of all this rage, that looks at him from a place beyond her thick lashes and her bared teeth. It's that part that screams at him. “Run.” It says.
And when it dies the void starts to close all the space between them.
There isn't much time left for wondering. The time for knowing has come and Thana doesn't know if she's praying he'll stay or if she's praying he'll run far, far, far from her forest.
