A thousand unblinking eyes watch from a group of curious white birches as the blood drips, drops, drips, drops, from a coursing black river which paints the gold-cracked shoulder of the dusky fiend. Each droplet folds into itself against the earth, and the earth accepts its sacrifice thirstily: it wells then sighs, then veins itself deep into the rich loam, wherein the worms and the beetles have hungered for countless ages. The roots feed. Cherry-white blossoms, dotted in vibrant red, bob their heads in giggling rows.
Long behind, in a thick overgrowth of thistle and thorn, curious vines gnarl beneath the weight of a body as its warmth gives and gives until there is only cold.
A lake forms at the pit of his collar bone, a boutonniere fragrant of metal and salt. Its tributaries dry and its stream is dammed, until the drips, drops, drips, drops, become patters, pats, puts, pits, then silent needle-prick blots veiled in the thickness of moss and lichen. The forest opens to him as he breaks a line of ash saplings: a garden that sways to a choir of locusts, sphagnum whispers dripping from green webs among the willows, the drumbeat of a creek paddling pebbles down its bed. In the distance, violins swell and counter the rhythm, swooning and felling into the echo of crickets and chorus frogs.
His tongue, smooth and feline, flashes to slake a gloss across the gleam of his fangs. They catch a glint of the moon reflected against smooth river-rocks, flashing impishly then gone. His horns rake the hanging moss as he passes beneath the cathedral of sallows and caress the bulbous blossoms of a blooming cherry – pinks and bone-white, their centers a blushing red. They remind him of hunger again, and of roses and hyacinth and silver lilac, but the choir calls him on.
A wall fettered with bluebells winks at him with devilish couture before nodding in the breeze. The castle, its gaping arch ghostly in its emptiness, grants him a note of ethereal pleasance. Moonflowers nestle in crags. Honeysuckle waits at the gates like lounging gargoyles, sickly sweet. Primrose buds between bricks, phlox in the eastern corners.
Though Erasmus darkens the silvery gate of the castle, the tiger-lilies dance in the weight of his shadow like sprites. He enters with all the grace and poise of a wolf in winter, feral lines and roving shoulders, lean and smooth and virile, predatory. Passing between the guests like a dark eidolon, he roams to the end of the hall, where moonlight spills into the rose-edged veranda. There, he closes his eyes as a group of blood-red roses brush against him hungrily and listens deeply to the music of the night.
You're colder in the afternoon and cozier at night
The bannisters are covered in cut wildflowers, the quicksilver knobs and marble pillars woven with threads of green and crowned in starred milkvetch, sugarbowls, and thin stalks of columbine in both red and blue shades. Sickly sweet air presses moisture into the flesh and casts swollen teardrops against Atlas’ golden skin. Around him mill groups of whispering individuals who duck their heads and murmur secrets and misgivings into the clusters of fairyslipper. A peacock calls accusatorily from his perch above, his tail drifting down to create a vibrant green skirt for a stone cherub. Atlas ducks his head and tightens the pallid gray scrap of fabric around his neck with a mental tug.
Bouquets of night-purple roses and emerald foliage have been cut and gathered up into artful displays around the palace foyer. Far above, flickering golden chandeliers threaten to drop hot wax on unaware party-goers that pass beneath them; but then, it is not truly a party, and it would surprise no one if someone got burned.
Atlas enjoyed the Dawn Court perhaps more than any outsider. He found amongst their like great scholars and even better thinkers, and he counted more than one of them amongst his good friends. It was from one of these friends he found himself Though this land was not technically his home-- did he really have one, truly?-- he felt a kinship to it, and to it’s bright leader who called the flowers to his feet and brought the land to bear.
But tonight, of all nights, he felt like more of an outsider than every before. He had been promised a celebration was instead given some somber mockery of a coronation. No one seemed truly happy for what had come to pass- they just seemed to exist through it. It was a droll theme for an event.
Out in the yard the stairs spill forth like mercury falls, frothing at the bottom with stone effigies and bushes of blood-red roses. Atlas has escaped from the mirthless, oppressive castle air in order to breathe, but outside he finds bone-gray skies and even less cheer. The air is thick with ghosts. He rounds a corner, pivoting on a bead of panic which makes his steps pin-prick light on the earth; he has his own ghosts, silvery and acid-eaten, riding on his shoulders. He does not need these as well.
In his haste, he does not see the rosebushes have shifted. He does not see their boughs reaching out as though to grasp and claw for dear life. He blunders into them, stumbling aside with a yelp as sharp thorns rake hot red lines into his gilded pelt. Across his chest and down his left shoulder he is marred. He sucks in a hissing breath and finds himself face to face with golden jewels, small and sharp enough to ride on the tip of a dagger. Rather, they ride above him, like a crown; the body they direct bleeds out like ichor from an old wound behind them, strapped and crossed and fused back together with seams of golden kintsugi.
Atlas finds himself swallowing hard in his throat as the sting in his skin is smothered by rippling muscle and the strange gravity of this horned beast.
“Apologies,” he manages to force out after what seemed like an eon of fishing for his breath. “I hope I didn’t-- disturb anything you had planned. With, with the roses.”
The sound of his own dumb voice breaks the spell and he hisses again. Droplets of blood well up along the slices in his skin, stinging most at the joint where his fine limbs pull and corner. “I’m no florist but I’ve seen-- ah, less painful arrangements.”
This whole affair is a painful arrangement. He never should have come.
Upon his flesh the blush-red petals are soft, coiling, as tender blooms may, against the warmth of his shoulder. The thorns beneath brush and rake curious patterns against his coat – jagged pictograms of movement and life, upturning the velvet like tilled earth. Between their rows, gold grins like a sleeping dragon. They lick the sweat from his skin, tie his pores in hexes and omens, but never mar the stitchings to know the taste of his blood beneath.
On, and out, and on, the music carries between the trees and the vines and the thorns, there and gone again, when at once one may grow suspicious of frog-mouthed owls crowing in the cold.
There is only this and a comfortable silence that alternates through the garden, as though sound were weaving untimely between the troubled, quiet commotion of haunted guests. It is not unpleasant but it is not mirthful, a tragic sort of beautiful as one could only expect from graven ground. He delights that it is not entirely holy.
A flutter of moth-white wings loosen from the growth behind him as, rattling an echo that quickly blends with the ballad, the trellis on which the roses entangle is shaken against the veranda's beech-silver pillars. With it a muted sound of distress and the hisses of foliage, and a single thorn (presumably upset by the impact) cut him thinly across the sacred marks on which its brethren had previously doted. Beads of blood welled and glossed like ruby shards, complementing each tone of gilding gold they blemished.
There are words then, but words are futile. The hunger of feral things do not bow to the weight and power of words, which are ultimately useless to the gravity of a growl or a gesture. “Apologies,” the man says, and were the thing that was Erasmus to care about words then, he may have supposed it was genuine. But between them, beneath the faithless words, there is breath and sweat and blood, and it is these things alone that move the whims of godless creatures.
The movement is smooth, predatory – as wolfish and leonine as a silhouette may be: Erasmus, pulled from the venerable roses that kiss their bruise from his flesh, turns on a heel that he may become a wall. Beyond him the haunting beauty of the garden watches and waits, above them the moon grins. He is a titan pulled from the night; a void, a nothing in a grand place, exact and treacherous. He watches the blood pull from the man's jagged wounds, wastefully depleted on the cold stone walk. His mouth becomes a desert place, and there is a feline threat in the way his tongue draws a glossy sheen across his teeth.
He speaks intimately, artfully, as if to the cuts: “Sometimes,” a lull, somber and smooth, curtailed by subtle notes of savagery and wilderness, “pain is owed to beauty.” The whole of him, the deep, unseen of it, shivers and unravels like the fibers of nestled serpents. In his voice, a hundred suns are martyred to a widening abyss cut into the belly of a god – and hunger is retched in the shadow of each syllable. Erasmus watches the slits clot and darken with little despair, though his expression is free of everything but the hint of obsession.
When his gaze meets the copper-glaze of the man's eyes, they are not devoid of an amused cruelty like gallows humor, noose swinging. The grin that tugs one end of his lips is sharp and slick, and his angles do not soften to imitate anything reminiscent of civilized. He stands like a hellish prince, framed by the blur of garden-sweet peonies and bruise-purple lilies, an entity suited by the midnight hymns. “Is it beauty that draws you to this place, then?” he asks, and the way he tilts his head makes the curve of his horns look curiously menacing in the moonlight.
You're colder in the afternoon and cozier at night
He bleeds like any mortal; in this land of the blessed and benefited, he is a simple, plain creature. Perhaps, once upon a time in a distant land, his flesh of spun gold had meant something, to someone. Any flowers which marred his gilded countenance would have been hacked and burnt away for daring to spill the blood of a Sand Prince. But there had been no laws of fealty or fairness in the desert, and the horrible tricks of nature had torn more from him than stinging lines in his pelt.
Beside this creature of vulcan magma and width and force, he feels much like a daisy in a windstorm.
The music has done little for him but make his stomach turn. It seems much like a funeral dirge, peaking in the wrong spots and hollow and reedy. Now it makes him sweat more than the clinging summer heat; or maybe it is being under those molten eyes. He wishes for Nashira’s cold, silver wit to slap him into shape; or Nathely’s plain, comforting presence. He wishes to feel unseen. He wants to be wanted.
He realizes, belatedly, that this behemoth of vaulted earth has also been injured by his blundering into the foliage, and all at once the rakes in his skin fall away. He feels lesser. He is negligible. He feels fatuous and unconscionable all at the same time. He opens his mouth to apologize profusely for his inexcusable actions and belligerence but he realizes here, under the incense smoke and cumulus perfume of dying flowers, his words are insignificant. Dust in a pungent wind.
He swallows, instead, and fights tooth and hoof against the urge to slink away. He is small and he is stumbling into somewhere he does not belong, some rabbit wandering unwillingly into the maw of the wolf. He feels hunted as this creature, this beast of the old earth spins and turns and circles him. He is a shark and Atlas is some gutted fish. Streaks of red spiral down his left front limb, mimicking the garland of chokecherries spread in arcs from the beams of the distant palace balconies above.
Atlas is ever small, ever smaller. He is nothing. He hates this.
He loves it. Somewhere, deep within him. The attentions of a ravaging devil make his gut curl and his heart pound.
“Perhaps,” he says, finding his voice, a whisper and a waver, “but one can love the roses without braving the thorns.” He swallows. “Though the temptation is there, always.” To reach and grab the bouquet in full palms, gods be damned the consequences.
His eyes are something distant and depraved. Atlas is reminded of his brother, watching slaves tear themselves to pieces. It drags him back to himself, a bit. “I was invited by a friend. Kinship is what I seek, beauty or no.” He tears his gaze away from horns, garish in the moon. “Though there is little of both to be found here, I feel.”
Something loosens his tongue and makes him reposte the demon. “And you? Did you come to gravely upset the florists? I’m sure there’s an interior decorator nearby whose ears are burning.” He forces a smile. He finds it comes naturally.
I have seen the devil and his smile through opened throats. I have lived in a house formed of the blood of his offerings. I am not scared. I am not scared.
SPEECH ! @ERASMUS ! CRIES IN GAYER AND A LITTLE KINKY
