[P] angels separate the wicked from the righteous

[Euryale]

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
SHE LIES IN SHADOW. SHE BATHES IN RUIN. OUR DARK ANGEL, SLEEPS ON SABLE FUR MADE FROM THE BONES OF A TORTURED ( BROKEN ) HEAVEN. THE LUXURIOUS OCEAN LIT LIKE AZURE GRANITE, AND STREAMING COLD AND RAMPANT; AS WET LIQUID ENVELOPES THAT CURVACEOUS BODICE, LIKE SOME CARNAL SACRIFICE WHISPERED AMONG  EVIL. IT IS IN HER SENSUAL IMAGE. IN THE SOFT CURVE OF HER LIPS AND DEADLY, ALLURING BODY.  A VIOLENT BEAUTY, SWATHED IN THE DELICIOUS LANGUAGE OF BLOOD-STAINED HUNGER; I AM THEIR WILD ROSE; I AM THEIR SALVATION - THROUGH ME, WILL THEY FIND THEIR EDEN. 

O, THE CADAVEROUS, PHANTOM SHRINE OF TERMINUS SEA, STIRS BENEATH THE ETHEREAL SUMMITS OF THEIR MOUNTAIN LIKE A TEMPLE. THE SOFT, CARNAL RUMBLE OF WATER, RUNS DEEP AND WET; GLISSADING, THROUGH MOUNTAINOUS CORRIDOR, IN THE DAMP TRICKLE OF BLACK, BIO-LUMINESCENT STREAM. HOW COLD, HER SKIN; TO TOUCH FLESH AS THOUGH CARVED FROM ICE AND MARBLE. AND HER MURDEROUS BEAUTY; HER PALE FACE; WITH ALL ITS FEMININE EXOTICISM, TO RIVAL EVEN THAT OF THE MOON'S ALLUREMENT. OUR DARK ANGEL, IN HER MOMENTS OF SECRECY, OF TRANQUILLITY; EMITS A POISONED SWEETNESS, UNLIKE ANY OTHER ROSE. AND HOW SHE REVEALS IN THE POWER OF HER SEDUCTION.

BATHED IN MOONLIGHT, INCENSE WANES AND SHADOWS DESCEND THE SEAS. CARESS, AFTER COLLECTIVE CARESS. A FERVENT DISPLAY OF RITUALISTIC HUNGER AND ALMOST UNNATURAL (FRIGHTENING) ENCHANTMENT; THE NEEDS OF A SOUL, TO BE SATED BY THIRST AND WRATHFUL INCLINATION. O, HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE SHE LAST ESCAPED HELL?  TO FEEL THE BITTER HUNGER OF ITS FLAME? OR TO TASTE THAT VIOLENT KISS OF ALL-CONSUMING FIRE?  SHE IS THAT WRATHFUL FALLEN ANGEL; OUR SLENDER, SUN-KISSED EURYALE BATHED OF BLACK WATERS. SUBMERGED. KNEELING IN SUBORDINATION BY ITS WATERY ALTAR; WICKED AND ENSLAVED TO THE DESIRES OF A DARK GOD. AND SO, IN THE AZULINE GLOW OF BARELY-THERE MOONLIGHT, DOES SHE PRAY, PRAY, PRAY.

SHE WANTS TO WASH AWAY ALL THE BLOOD.  SHE WANTS TO WASH AWAY ALL HER SINS.  THE WATER HISSES UPON HER BODY.  SHE IS OBSCURED BY THE LAVENDER CURLS THAT LATHER HER BREASTBONE AND GATHER UPON HER GRACEFUL NECKLINE.  SOFTENING, THE SMOOTH LINES OF IVORY CONTOURS.  HER SIRENIC FEATURES WERE BLURRED BENEATH THE AMOROUS FABRIC OF CASCADING WATER. THE BLUE CHIFFON SILK WEAVES IN AND OUT LIKE A DRESS, A SULTRY TRANSLUCENCY, AKIN TO THE FRIGID GRASP OF UNDEAD HANDS. FOR HOURS SHE LAYS IN THE BLACK LIQUID. THE WATER HUMS, AS THOUGH MOMENTARILY ALIVE. BEFORE SLIPPING INTO COMATOSE SILENCE, FOREVER. EURYALE RISES THEN. SHE STANDS IN CHEST-DEEP WATER, WITH THE OCEAN'S THRUM, CRASHING LIGHTLY UPON HER BREAST.  WATER TRICKLES DOWN HER BROW AND CURLS BENEATH HER CHIN.  THE FADED MEMORY OF A DREAM WERE STILL LINGERING UPON HER LIPS LIKE A LOVER'S KISS. OR WAS IT, CURSE? WAS IT NIGHTMARE?

euryale closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.  she embraces the icy sensation that travels like fevered whispers across her spine.  o, how the ocean washes over her body; smoothing down her hips with gilded hands, as liquid seperates lilac curls like floating tendrils upon black oil.  behind her, upon the shore, lies the carcass of a dead stag she has killed this evening. a fire, bright and hungry,  lights across the bloodied sand; their embers, rising with smoke and heat towards the blackness and the moon.

@Erasmus

If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes

[Erasmus]

some fates are written in our bones – slick white testaments to a higher purpose; we are celestial, we are eternal. Two wolves reaching for the sun, the moon. In our jaws, in our eyes, lapped over our tongues with blithering ecstasy the hot press of immortality; each more certain than the next. A dream confined. Night plucks over the remnants in our hallowed grave ; our tomb is sacred, sanctified unholy – risen from a midnight heat, hushed beneath a pregnant moon. Skin is a cage, and oh how cold; our altar is the pale salt spires of a wicked sea, our offering is the outpour of a dying sun. eclipsed – ours are grecian tales wrapped in betrayal and unending misery, ours is a lust that has forgotten the sting of sin. We are made from godless starfire, carved from the spines of back-broken empires – our names are the whispers kissed to the lips of vagrant priests. Our blood pulses with the worship of bloodied palms, night-stricken cries echoed from the pyre embers of babylonian rites. We rise then, bathed in ash and blood and victory. Fore we are things older than the twilight traces of happiness and love. We are things deeper than the trenches of the ocean where the light dare not touch. We are things darker than the limits of the starlit skies. They will know, they will know ; for all devils recall one another, outside of hell.

A BLOOD TRAIL CASCADES DOWN THE WINDING PATHS OF A SEA-FACING CLIFF ; and oh, what hunger crawls in the belly of a heathen prince – its pulsings punctuated by each hinted droplet, gleaming in the moonlight like precious ruby shard. Its flecks mark the granite, smear the disheveled road that leads down, down. Beyond the paths roar the siege of a Terminus Sea, each rivulet of frothing league flashing with veining foam, aglow azure, pearlescent rinds of crashing waves. The smell is sweet – no sweeter in the prairie than on the jagged hills of the Arma, incensed with the seabreeze and the coniferous sap of wayladen pines; so he hunts. And the night is young, fervent, silence falls between each measure of sea that beats against the rocks and in it, there is only the arduous press of adrenaline and need, desperate ravening slaked along the smoothness of a trail. Yet he is not smooth – all vicious angle and seething shadow, all cracked starlight of eclipsed suns and the barbaric likeness of pagan gods – his outline rushes the pallor of the mountain, and it is austere symmetry, feral art. Down, down. Erasmus is the material of dusky miasma, dripping hot shadows thrown abreast in the wild rampants of whipping winds; phantom night, something virile and vicious, black mamba venom webbed on gold fangs.

When he breaks the cypress gate of hill-twisted brush there is only the shore, a stretch of pale sands aglow beneath the tapestry of night – its berth is wide and crowned by the black peaks that surround it, in them the shallow caverns leading into the atlantean halls he dares not trespass. The moon looms above, near outshined by each pinprick of unwavering starlight, and beneath it the waves are sea-fire, frothing with lunar spray. There are sandpipers that gather in small droves, but their beady eyes narrowly counter a glow that emanates from farther down the dark lit surf – they wait warily, though sometimes pluck beneath their feet a misfortunate ghost crab nestled like a pearl. Erasmus follows their gaze – and there, the blood trail leads, but it is not the peppering of deep saccharine that feeds the shoreline. There is a rut carried through the sand, and beside it the lilting dance of hoofprints lightly pressed and glistening in the evening light. It is too much a trap and too much a lure, but oh his core lurches like a feeble thing, and from it an unearthly growl that unsettles his pulse with want. It is unending, the avaricious cravings that teem wildly, insufferably, and he is lost to the machinations of primal instinct. 

His arrival is not without its grace, but his shadow is a disheveled spectre consumed of matting shadows, blotted against the moonlit backdrop. He is all jagged edges, hot rage, and a curious hunger that prickles along his skin like rising hackles. Each curve is marked with a ragged hollow that speaks in brawn the virility of a young hunter, but the coldness of his eyes are piercing, sharp as a blade. They wander greedily over the carcass of a stag, its crumpled form washed in brine and feathered with seabreeze sand; each point a jeweled blade in the caress of light. Is it an offering that pleases him, this nestle of warm meat and stunted arteries? This altar of blood and sand, bathed in the wash of nightly radiance. From its neck he divines the steam, fresh, and he cannot help but graze its flesh with kneading fangs, the scent of musk and salt and slick iron decadent, prosperous. But beyond a shadow quivers in the wind, and he catches another sight as a chiffon ribbon rears like a writhing serpent. Erasmus raised his crown, predator gaze swept over the buxom delineation that rises from the glistening sea – venusian grandeur in sweeping curves and svelte lush; and he thinks, he thinks he has seen her before, in a time deeper than the embryonic dreams of corporeality. So he approaches her while the firelight licks at the sharpness of his features, their angles deepened as shadows pull along their edges, drip down the length of his broad shoulders.

And oh, how she looks like want. How, when she breathes, it is like the intimate lacings of a lover's gasps – the rise and fall is rhythmic, tantalizing, a hypnotic notion of impassioned grace. oh, how she smells of wolfsbane and lilac forests emerged from eldritch seas. How she smells of arduous exotics and fresh leather, luxury and agony; how the ocean reaches, frothing fingers rushed for warmth – and can you blame the sea, to mourn her mortality, to beg her to stay, to sleep forever in its embrace? As it rakes across her flesh, remiss and yearning, tugging softly at lavender mats of plush mane. brine crystallized like starlight on the salt-sweat gleam of blood, bloody red. She drips like wine, dry sanguor clinging to her hips as the moonlight dotes; and oh, does she taste like heaven? Or is it the sharpness of hell that would meet you like a rival, like the deep, prickling tension of desperation? She stands like the effigy of a grecian heroine carved of glistening agate, and oh, does it feel like drowning, to kiss her? Her curves are ethereal softness, and he is lost to muse the cream-like smoothness of her neck. "who are you?" he breathes, and his voice is hot against the cool air that carries it - it tangles on a web of sea-dream, viperous and otherworldly cruel. in the solitary silence, it is almost a sin. but if it is sin to lust after fallen angels with famished eyes and delphic beauty, then he would bathe in the sacrilege. 

@Euryale

[Euryale]

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
is it still called love, if love and intimacy, bared its wounds? its teeth? the oceans, hum, with feral veneration; purring, with sacrifice before their goddess.  the water rushes in, a black devouring.  o, how it laps hungrily at the vacant shore. her holiest of temples.  their naked arms, twist. they claw.  they pull her wicked heart, asunder.  they spill around her in all their mangled and groping darkness. their watery screams, shattering like pearls violently torn from her porcelain throat. as the oceans thrash with long, black limbs and sing their eulogies, euryale sings with them in their storm.  

with sensual abandon she gives beneath the tide.  she feels her body pressing into those hungry waves.  do you want me? she feels her curves being held by their demons.  a thousand whispers chant in her mind. in her thoughts, she can hear them all screaming, o, won't you love us! along their waves, her reflection dances like a ghost. her silvery laughter, twisting into a song of spectral madness. spidery whispers, that unravel like silk daggers from her tongue.  each syllable a predatory siren with cannibal teeth.  a hunter that longs to kill.  a hunter, that seeks both pleasure in the flesh and the desecration of the soul.  they all descend upon salty brine, like claws and fangs running through silk-sheets - o, and is she not made for this? to steal the warmth from your lips?  to pull you into her hurricane, where a tempest of passion, takes your breath?

come with us. love us. die for us.

when the veil of lavender curls descends her visage, an alluring smile ghosts upon her lips.  she knows she is being watched, and a wicked giggle almost forms for the amusement it brings.  she can feel their eyes eating her.  she can feel invisble hands tracing her hips in the darkness. o, you know, i'll eat you alive, too. her lilac tresses, elegantly sweeps along their soft, crimson breast.  and when she finally looks away from the water, she can almost see her soul in the reflection of those empty god-eyes.  

she is lost in the abyss of their violent gaze. her reflection within, seems to sneer back at her.  devil, devil.  her lips glides across the water's surface; how it almost looks as if she yearns for a kiss. o, how she seems to whisper with adulation for want of the sea.  if i swallow you; will you bury my sins? will you keep my secrets and drown in me?  the water tastes like liquor upon her tongue.  a sharp sting that glides over her mouth and moves down her throat.  she should shiver for how cold it feels, but she does not.  she only swims closer towards the shore.  following the darkness.  towards the man outlined by only moonlight and hungry, ancient gold.  

when she nears him, she studies the stoic beauty of his face.  she feels a snarl climbing her throat. she feels their transient ache.  the arrogance that curls around her heart is a seething goddess, and it wants to eat.  she knows she is made for violence and tragedies.  she watches the moonlight - soft, tender moonlight - painting intimate silver against the curve of his neck.  are you like me? do you like the hurt? do you crave the soul-flesh?

"maybe i'm just a ghost," her voice becomes a playful hiss, a melodic purr of taunting femininity.  a dramatic sigh cooing from her vampiric lips.  like silk covering an iron hand, she is the lethal softness that glides over his rugged masculinity.  she wants to wrap him up and devour him.  she wants to pull him into her hurricane, and spit out their lovers' bones. "or a queen and a lover, or an arrow and a sword,"  she draws closer, ever so playful.  so close she can feel his breath on her cheek.  the blue smoke surrounding her suddenly manifests into a blade.  it swings higher, and higher, descending upon him in its final breath.  

the ephemeral blade only breaks against his dark skin.  dissolving their phantoms, retreating into their haunting mist. her eyes flicks back up at him, slowly, deviously.  her smile becomes less smile, and more teeth.  beneath a smouldering veil of long, sultry lashes, she taunts him.  and this time, in a voice not so innocent; not so sweet. husky, cruel and maddeningly feminine, she reminds him of not who, but what she truly is. "they all go through you."  they all seek to destroy you.

@erasmus


If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes

[Erasmus]

Even the greatest philosophers have understood that love, despite all its softness and heart-pounding merry, is a carnivorous thing. What is a love that does not destroy you, devour you, break you, bury you; and render you from the ashes? An ache settles in the pit of his core – and crawls, sparking like wildfire, up the base of his spine, his shoulders, his neck; it reminds him of petrichor and blood, of standing on the edge of a battle field or the brink of an impending storm. Is it not? But it is a different ache that blends with hunger and want and need in such a way that it is fury, it is dripping adulation that begs and pleads against the knife. The warmth of the firelight crackles embers across his virile likeness, while the cool jeweled moon smooths her curvaceous delineation in its milk-white ecstasy. Two deities possessed in their lurid dream, and the air smells like war, roars with the distant hum of a forgotten mythos. If he knelt before your altar, would you bathe him in blood?

Will you worship him, as he worships you?

He watches the sea unravel from her quarters as she ascends, angelic in the pandemoniac siege that courses close behind – a furious sea, ravaging her heels with the licking contempt of a bitter lover. The brine crests on her slender back, diamonds cascading into the panting blackness of hungry torrents; they are a veil that glissades across her supple hips and entangles with the warmth of her thighs, the tight curve of her waist. She sheds her thalassic mail, Venus exposed in the donning lunar rays; and in the distance, ships are lost to her beauty. and he feels, he has seen this before, in the tides that time cannot touch – but he stares as if it is the first, he drinks her deeply as if he has forgotten she is venom and hotness and the dark things we dare not think ––– She is the wrath of femininity incarnate, framed by the deceiving grace of the depthless sea which wants and wanes with undulating ardor, its mist crashing against her in their mettle of splintering pearls.

She speaks, and he is wont to listen to her confessions, his ear pressed tight against the mesh; he hears each nectarous syllable drip with vitriol and threat, and he sees she is a blade but o, how men with warrior hearts do see the romance in sharpness and the beauty in death. When she speaks, he cannot want anything but to breathe each word from the heat of her lips, and he steps boldly over the discarded stag to catch them in detail, and the decay below is left behind for the chaos above. And he thinks – he prays – that he feels her heat careened against his flesh, and breathes the waft of decadent temple incense and the taste of molten ore. Her voice is a lull that dismisses the listless roars of the ocean that seems so far behind, receding back into the dawn of all time. There is only her now, and the inescapable entrenchment of physicality that no longer seems like a burden but a momentum, as caught within their orbit are all things dissolved.

Would you drink of his blood, as he eats of your flesh? Like wine, like bread; love is sacrifice, is veneration, is domination and submission and the lie of forgiveness –
 
She sings of death and decay, as she once did for the stag, but he is not wont to fear and is a fable in danger, long entranced by the dirges of ruination. He welcomes her lethality, revels in the prospect of eternal agonies, if only it means to burn in the unholy flames of her lapping reverence. Her words chase traitorous syllables around the curve of his ear, and he heeds them as a hunter must, between the devoted pulsings of her arterial pangs and the sweet gale of her breath. His gaze is restless and merciless, hotly consumed of her delicate features, the shape of her eyes and the cut of her pale cheekbone, the lush curve of her lips as they break and murmur and snarl. The sweltering mien of the fire is left to the cold embers of night, and he, cut swaths of hard granite and burnished gold, craves a new art that dances along the sanguine softness of her waist.

He approaches again, and it is hard to say where Erasmus begins and the wolf ends, as hackles rise and fangs knit against the tightness of his lips. He prowls, hunger grating the cathedral of his ribs and lounging along the plinth of his spine; a desolate vagrant of abandon, predatory and cruel. The dance is masculine, raptorial, and he forms himself as a crescent to her burning starlight, his lips hotly teasing the aching space between his teeth and the stretch of her ribs bathed in moonlight brine. It is enough that he breathes her in, the smell of babylonian gardens and the taste of sweetened offerings, aromatic as ale. And when her blade rises, rises, an executioner's axe lingering heavy and menacing above the nape of his neck, he bares it with a vehement grin that is all fang, all sharpness, all boyish arrogance and adonian grace.

When it crashes, it bathes him with the lacings of cool dew over his dark skin, glistening like salt over the line of his shoulders. There is no sharpness but a promise of it that breaks over him like a spell, like a curse, whispers of ancient betrayals and ungrounded rage – centuries of scorn, or bitter reveries, a memoir nuanced with disheveled silk nights and the coldness of empty mornings. No apology meets it – for war is insatiable and lust, eternal. The grin remains, bright as a comet, carved with unblemished desire and the stitchings of peril. "would you?" Each whisper curls itself against her spine, languidly nestling warmth between each vertebrae. he almost remembers her, then - she is every sharp thing in every dream, every hot thing that burns against his touch, every wound that screams for mercy, but only cuts deeper and deeper and whispers, 'for what good is pleasure, without pain'?

"would you haunt me, so violently?" The heat of his breath teases the flesh of her nape, tangles itself among the lilac waves of her mane, his mouth lingering just above the curve of her ear. His grin is palpable, mad, resonating in its sly, teething humor. Its tone complements the lingering ghost of her words, prying each sensible threat with a taunting fervor. Husky breaths, draconian and bourbon slick, pervade his lips like molten gold. His tongue curls about each syllable, presses the point of his fangs that ache for cleaving. "would you crash against me, like waves against a stone?" Tenderly, he brushes violet tendrils from her smooth neck, and as his gaze seeks each undulation of pulse and breath, violence swarms reckless in the depths of conjecture. 

"no," he sighs, and a shadow reaches to trace the suppleness of her neck, gathering at the soft, pale line of her throat. It is uncertain whether it is the imitation of a soft caress or asphyxiating grip, as it breaks in intangible waves against her risen flesh. perhaps, it is both. "what is it you truly want?" his words close like hands in prayer, while starlight hangs from his curved horns. your daemon, martyr me for your revelations and burn. 

@Euryale

[Euryale]

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
the stars hug her curves like a sultry evening dress. those lilac curls fall in luxurious waves. silk tresses, that slip like bone-white talons against a girly, porcelain neck. she wants to fuck with his mind. dip her metaphoric nails into the golden cracks of his skull and, twist, twist - snap. all in amorous humour, ofcourse. fore it's the darkness she knows so intimately. his darkness, that she knows so well. at the sight of him bristling like a wolf, her lips only curve upward a triffle more. she laughs her cold siren laugh, tasting his savagery and loving every minute of it. her feminine mirth bubbling sweetly, like sugar dust upon a cherry-tart tongue. euryale, you sweet bitch. here for the passion. gone before the next.

she enjoys moments like these. moments where she ached to string the devil up high, if only to tighten the noose, and watch his beautiful angels hang. when she moves around erasmus, it's a coy swagger. a female fox that struts, with batting obsidian lashes and an impossibly slender body made for killing and desire. she shadows his footsteps. her hooves sink like stilettos in the sand. her gait is precise and even. a slow waltz to contrast his powerful masculinity. even when he breathes down her neck, she does not flinch. only looks up at him in beautiful defiance, glaring almost. "rather watch you burn," she whispers hotly into the narrow space, churning between them. touching. not touching. touching. not touching. does it matter? with euryale this close to you, how can you not wonder? get lost in the promise of her body; get hooked on the fragrance of her skin. the taste of her lips. the warmth of her thighs. she is all sin, sin, sin.

"you'd enjoy my violence far too much," she is taunting him. wishing him neither dead nor alive; o, for why dead? torment tastes the sweetest when delivered in the moment. and she makes this moment hers, as a subtle shove is given to erasmus. just enough to step around him as she makes her sumptuous way back to her feast. when euryale leaves the ocean, the salt still clings to her skin. when the drops of black water roll off her supple hips, the night only descends with her; madly, tenderly, wholly. her breath is a warm mist as it leaves her parted jaws. half-bedroom, half-feral;

"you aren't allowed to ask anymore questions. but if you must... i want to choke the entire universe, and give it a squeeze so violent, a supernova is born. i want to catch each falling star and skin the light from it, until my jaws begin to glow like halos. even while my mouth is shut closed. i want to tear the milkyway from the heavens, wear her tenderness like a dress. so that when i dance and spin and strip, the shards rain down like a billion arrows flying into earth from outerspace. i want to pull the heavens down to earth, so that they collide like two lovers, hurling down mountains. where the flames of hell become our bed, and i want to lay in its fire, beside my beloved. i want to tear worlds apart. smash each piece by piece. destroy what i don't need, yet keep the rest. i want my soul to be the first drop of blood in the sea of creation. i want, i want... i want too many things."

euryale's words drift inbetween the flying embers and smoke. her words tangle like stardust, playing covetously against the raw spice of his swarthy skin. beneath the moon's opaline glow, her breath ghosts his lips in the dark. even as his own breathing spills around her, and the silk tendrils of her mane gets caught in the heat of his shadows, euryale ignores the gathering blackness that binds her throat. "you see, i want too much. i want what no mortal man can hope to give."

@Erasmus


If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes

[Erasmus]

She moves, and he moves with her, against her, almost in to her, with each passing crescendo of grating intimacy that begs closeness, passion and maybe – maybe even death. It screams like a harp from heaven, or a bellow from hell, searing up and down his spine like lightning wound tight in his bones. He does not doubt her intentions or capabilities – he is not foolish. And so when she turns, swirls, dips from his touch, he follows both in want and ware, the first just as equally as the next. He waits for another axe to drop, but one not made of mist and venom, he waits for the thing that lurks beneath the placid surface of her patience and bedroom-glances. It's something he almost lures, craving it like a junkie, strung out on this heroin(e).

He feigns hurt when she expresses, “rather watch you burn,” a sore expression wrapping the cupidity of his adonian features, and his lips curl in a way that mocks silently, o, my heart - but though it swoons like the hot, hungry thing that it is, it only swells with the threat. Erasmus burns now in the throne of her eyes. And that is almost exactly where he wants to be. But he wants more, needs more, more flames, more chaos careening in the sacred places between her malicious eyes and her sharp teeth. So he dances the flames into the ground below, hooves hissing as they pass gracefully over the sand. Closer. Her shoulder narrowly grazes the hollow of his waist. Closer.

The first truth she has spoken into the night is like a prayer to him, a comfort, a salve: he would, in truth, enjoy her violence. Too much. Too greedily. And he grins when he does not deny it, because he can't, only smile as sharply as any devil never has – because violence waits for him at the bottom of the only romance he has ever known. It waits like a pit of knives, of vipers, of fangs, and he wonders which of them is pain and which is pleasure, after all. He assumed, fleetingly, that she had been the deity of pain, anguish, torment. But now, when he wanted nothing more than to fall in to the sway of her curves the way the moonlight does so greedily, he understands that he may have been wrong. Is he pain, then, tonight? Closer. As she passes and he thinks about the steadiness of her pulse, he becomes less and less like a wolf and more like a shark.

Each time she moves from his touch, he dreams of moving too fast, or just fast enough – of rushing her over, and closing his jaws over the softness of her throat, for a taste just for a taste.

Oh, what a lie that is.

He watched the brine drip from her like diamonds, the waters pour from the crook of her spine over the delineation of her curves, delphian, svelte, and the effect is bloodlusting. There is the hunger again, roving, the curse at his core that is snarling, closer, and he turns against the roaring ocean as it hisses behind him. In the space between her command and her desires, Erasmus narrows his eyes and teases, less than benevolently: "am i not?" and when he grins, it is a defiantly boyish thing that has no masters, no gods, the gold in his eyes sparking violently when it reflects her like dripping blood in the moonlight. 

Erasmus dreams as she speaks, as she weaves the death of worlds and stars and suns, and is reborn in the cataclysmic burst of their fire – in blood, and woe, and tragedy spun. She tears the canvas of the sky from beneath Caligo, renders it asunder, dives deep into the depths of the Terminus Sea between the clenched jaws of her teeth. And from it, anew. The madness in her eyes is almost tangible when it dances from the lights of distant pyres to the full-moon wonder of Erasmus's gaze, and he finds that he has paused to listen. It cannot be helped, and he thinks he too has dreamed this dream before, but he is far too avaricious to share. His grin diminishes, but the shadow of it still lingers when the fading light of the embers catch a glint of fang. A fly settles on the glassy sheen of the stag's eyeball, and even in death it stares up to euryale in horror. waiting.

"yes, i cannot give you those things," He breathes, finally, a murmur unto the darkness that has coveted the sound and bears it to her tentatively as a hiss. His gaze dazes past her into the pines that climb the mountainside, dismissive, though not despondent. There is something that leans in his voice like but, and he lets it hang there like an empty noose. Who the noose is for, he can't be sure, but he knows that she wouldn't hesitate to place it on his neck. And he couldn't say he wouldn't do the same to her. They were too alike, too different, too volatile for this beach, these mountains, this continent. She, the stargazer supernova and he, the hungry black hole. One would swallow another. Violent delights and violent ends. "because there is too much in it that i would want for myself." this one more sinister, more jagged, more threat than a tease - darkened by the fact that he still doesn't grin, though his eyes have returned to her. They bear into her own, through the netting of shadows.

They return her hellfire. he moves closer.

"perhaps the hopeful men can build your altar, and bleed on mine."

@Euryale

[Euryale]

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black

"never again, darling," the witch snaps at his devilish grin in a playful glitter of lithely, sharp fangs. her lips are crimson sin and they glint with switchblade smiles. the feel of him pressed hard against her drives her wild. euryale wants to wrap her lips against his neck and make him bleed for her. she wants to steal the life from his soul, the breath from his lips and call it a k i s s. the hunger that brews within her is ancient sacrilege. it curls around her heart like writhing pythons come to mate. each squeeze gives her pleasure. each exhale delivers her pain. she needs both, desperately, to survive. love is never enough. it will never be enough. theirs were an ancient romance, crossing universes and unearthly decades; centuries old lust, kindling like fire and tinder fed to the thrones of immortal gods.

she wants to be his funeral pyre. she wants to devour the skeletons and souls he collects, and make her bed in the earth right next to him. he is her altar. she is his blood. he is her true god. she, his only goddess. religion so believable it's as easy as breathing. like moon and sun, one cannot exist without the other. she needs him like dragons breathe fire and hoard gold. he is darkness. he is golden. he is wretched smoke, yet wears the tattered garb of a risen king. when the night is over, she yearns to sleep in the ashes of their bedroom; where the bedsheets are nothing more than gauzy strips of faded destruction and eternal heat. euryale laughs again and her laughter is a hot, soft and hungry thing full of wicked, wicked desires. "i look to the stars. always the stars. even in darkness, i hunt for the glitter of galaxies. can you say the same for yourself, o death? o devourer of worlds? you nightmare of a boy, with a gunmetal heart. i ought to kiss you, but punching you might do, too," she snickers wickedly, flashing him a vulpine tongue full of sharp, sharp teeth.

as she strides back to her kill, euryale pins the slain stag down with a single front hoof. like being impaled by a stiletto heel, one of the ribs crack. she leans over the carcass and taunts him viciously, sweetly, unapologetically female. her pale breast heaving in sweat, silk and blood. "mine!" she bares her canines, she barks. her soft snarl a smooth, wolven chatter of grinning, glittering fangs. but the next words she chooses are softer, more tender, shrugging a delicate shoulder in a whisper of playful invitation yet. "I'll be happy to share only if you teach me how to skin this stag. I wish to make a fine pelt out of him and mount the antlers above my bed frame. i've skinned everything else except for deer.  will you, darling? for me?"

@Erasmus
to fade...

If I look hard enough into the settin' sun
My love will laugh with me before the mornin' comes

[Erasmus]

She laughs again and it is stringing starlight in her teeth – menace a glimmer in her eyes, glistening frost netted over her flesh. He listens to the way it leaves her throat, listens to the song, watches the way her breaths rise and fall and the hitch of her pulse narrows in the veins drawn taut, smooth, ocean water slipping down her neck in rivulets. Erasmus swallows, teeth sharp against his lips when they gather the warmth from her closeness and he breathes deep her scent of ancient woodlands, oceanic coves, fragrant spices of incense and succulent pyre flowers. It is not enough but to taste and feel, as what silk or velvet must feel, against the harshness of a desolate touch – but sacrilege, as to taint, to blemish, as one's touch may. If not to bruise – as desire is to gather her deep into an oceanic embrace, suffocating and full and wrathful, tenderness only in violence. 

When she moves, he too moves, a dance he learns as she persuades; tempo for tempo, step for step, close enough for torment to allow. The ocean crashes against his legs then, all salt and sand and seashell that threatens to batter him down, and he lets it roar and hiss for all that it is, an envious lover left to the wane of moonlight. He watches only her, her every movement, her every word, each rise and fall of her chest. Hunger wakes in him like spite unfolding in his belly, all ire and need and lust as one can have ever known. Heat unlike any but hell, a furious and contemptible thing of which passion has no comfort – but in desire, in volatile ways. He dreams of their vehemence like a budding nightmare shuddering in the wake of dawn; of folding into her, of carving into her, and allowing the ocean to drag them both into the dark, icy tomb that they deserve. Is it love then, the word that moves death to crush and possess? 

He does not dream of hazy, plush bedrooms in the allure of warm spice notes and lavender silk unraveling tie by tie. It is of the disheveled ground and hickory smoke, sweat beaded in the reflection of a raging fire – a bed of nails, the embrace of sharpened teeth, gasping secrets kept beneath a waning moon. There is roughness, coldness, a wildness that moves his intrigue from the softness of lovers into the war of intimacy. His passion is raw, visceral, madness, the steely vice of obsession and the feverish throes of upended salvation – a fervent, zealous devotion not without its price and thirst. worship me, love me, and I will rip every star from the heavens if it is what you desire. 

He grins at the wit of her retort, though there is some truth to it. He would sooner let her kiss him with a blade than not at all, but he is a cultured devil, though devil nonetheless. He relents his pursuit as she returns to her abandoned kill, hovering madly over its crushed ribs, white eyes beholden of her reflection. red, red, wine. When she snarls, his own lip curls over a fanged sneer, but he does not engage more than with a small chuckle. “I'll be happy to share only if you teach me how to skin this stag–” the unkempt waves of his mane fall across the curve of neck as he raises his skull, firelight flickering over the sharpness of his angles. For a moment, he feigns arrogance – as if he would deny her, and return to the night that has bore him. At last he nods softly, his grin returning. “I can. You must cut it open, first.” He states patiently, awaiting the blade.

“I can mount the antlers over your bed frame too, if you'd like.”

fade.

@Euryale