[AW] fatality is like ghosts in snow;

[Acton]

The autumn was growing thinner, down and down to the cold bones beneath. Acton could feel winter coming like an itch under his skin. In the moments he was honest with himself (rare though they were), he felt leaner, too – leaner, harder, worn bare. Maybe it was worry that didn’t know how to properly manifest; maybe it was an anxiety that hummed throughout him like a wasp nest. Whatever it was, he chose wandering as an outlet.
 
It was a long way he wandered, today. It hadn’t been full dawn when he’d left Denocte, the last of the fires still trailing smoke from the night’s festivities, and now the night was coming on again. The wind leaned into him and he leaned back, an orange and black figure against the increasingly stark background of Novus. Only a few colors still clung to the trees, and the clouds promised rain – or maybe it was snow.
 
Either way he wanted none of it. Acton was a summertime creature, all heat and flash, and the cold made him both prickly and restless. Overhead a few crows fought the wind, tipping their ragged feathers and fighting the current. Today was a rare day the stallion was glad he didn’t have wings.
 
When he found the creek, he found it was the only thing that could compete with the rats’ gnawing of his own thoughts, and so he followed it into the trees. It was instantly warmer among their trunks, their black limbs pressing against the darkening sky, and the forest was quiet save for a few scolding jays.
 
He pressed on alone, each step a thick crunch, and it took him a while to feel the weight of eyes on him. Even after he did, it took him a while longer before he paused, turning his head, the vapor of his breath visible in the growing dark.
 
“You’re a ways from home,” he said at last, and his fire-bright eyes were pleased.
 
Through the thinning canopy the first flakes of snow began to fall, bright against the brittle leaves, bright against his coat.
 



 
All welcome! I’d love it if was someone he knows from another court, whether friend or rival or lover, but anyone’s free to drop by. Message me if you have any relationship thoughts. :) 

these violent delights have violent ends

[Faida]

faida

She wades through the shallow waters that run silver beneath the moon and cold beneath the breath of night.
 
She steps through the liquid that gnaws deep into her ankles. Her black eyes are heavy lidded as snow begins to snag upon her lashes.
 
This bone girl’s eyes close as she meanders along the winding stream. Her body is a phantom ship, white, white, white as it drifts eerily, near silently, towards its fabled destination.
 
Where was this ghost girl headed?
 
Faida does not know and she does not care.
 
She is dancer light, her ears crumpling like towers as they catch the sounds of babbling water at her feet. She shivers and steps, trembles and floats along this lovers stream. Amare Creek turns its eyes upon the girl who broke beneath love’s eternal hand. It twisted her heart until it was ugly and bled her soul until it ran black as pitch.
 
She bleeds here, her alabaster skin riddled (to her) with blood that trickles hither and thither. Oh she listens as they drip, drip, drop into the crystal waters at her feet. She knows now that no one else can see them, but it does not stop her fevered lips asking again and again: Can you see my blood dripping?
 
This broken girl had wept once, soul and heart rending for the way she saw herself bleed, the way she waited for all her blood to be let and death to open its arms. But Death was her unrequited love. It had eyes for all but her, it would stalk its prey and she would stalk Death.
 
Once, Death had played her game as it plucked each of her loved ones from her life until her her heart was left scarred and wounded.
 
You’re a ways from home.
 
The bone girl stops, still dripping her invisible blood. Those black eyes lift up and settle upon the boy upon his bank. She blinks, slow once, slow twice and gazes up, up, up across sunburned orange and black, black speckles.
 
“Am I?” She asks with a whisper through dusk pink lips. Her voice is a song, a poem, a lilting chime of insanity. “What do you know of my home?” She questions with a smile that adorns her words with innocent intrigue.
 
This boy is a leopard, the bone girl thinks, with his black, rotting spots and the stench of death so ripe upon him. No wonder Death has led her here, to him, to this boy with his rot-black spots upon his skin.
 
Faida shivers and shakes and rustles like the leaves about his feet. She feels her own decaying soul, encased within her beautiful pearl-white shell. It bleeds and it bleeds and she thinks she feels it crying black, black tears down the inside of her hollow chest.
 
The eternal girl curves toward the bank; a leaf upon a wind that pushed her closer. She is a metal fleck to the magnet of his deathly habit. Keenly her lips reach up, pink to meet black as she breathes and drinks the scent of him, pressing her lips against the blackest spot upon his knee.
 
“What have you been killing?” She hums and peers at the boy from beneath her thick, thick lashes. “You are a leopard for all that death has marked you with his black, black spots.”
 
It is delight that has her smiling and laughing and rattling bones.

@Acton - holy crap she's rusty!!

[Acton]

He had to strain, to hear the whisper through those rosebud lips. It was just as well that he was forced to pay closer attention to her – because Acton had made a mistake.

He loved the prickle at the nape of his neck that said he was being watched. Always he made a game of it – how long could he drag it out, how could he turn it around – but this time he had guessed wrong. This stranger was as pale as a ghost, like the spirit of some winter-white tree. Pure white, snowy white.

It wasn’t who he’d expected, but his interest was still piqued. He can’t tell what’s behind those black eyes (eyes that shifted – one minute guileless and still as a doe's, the next a crow’s) but the softness of her words had him drifting closer. Each step is punctuated by dead leaves, and he stops at five.

“I know nothing,” he admitted, and rolled a burnished shoulder in a shrug. “I thought you were someone else. A friend. But I should like to hear of it, anyway.” The wind rattled and moaned through the bare limbs and the snow had begun to thicken. Each flake vanished from view as soon as it broke his line of sight with her; she was whiter, even, than new snow.

He watched her like a dog watched a deer; head cocked, curious, unthreatened. She was lovely and he could never have guessed at what black-ice thoughts coursed through her dainty head.

She must be from Dawn; she looked that fragile, that new.

That is what he thought as she drew nearer, and only a momentarily line creased his forehead as she whuffed a breath against his knee. He did not withdraw, but that was the first moment he thought strange.

Acton was often the one to make advances.

Her scent came to him, feral and strange, mostly washed clean by the lover’s stream. It told him nothing he really wanted to know, and when he opened his mouth to speak again she beat him to it.

“What?” he said, sure he’d misheard, and shook his wild tangle of mane. But they were too close to one another (he could feel the warmth of her, though she should be warmer still) for him not to understand the next.

He could feel his blood quicken, his interest sharpen. Acton did not laugh but he matched her smile with a grin of his own; his gaze was hungry-wary as it drank her in.

“I’ve been told I look guilty more than once, but that’s the strangest way yet,” he said,  dropping his head so his gaze was on a level with hers. His expression suggested he was not taking this seriously. Not yet. “Today I’m only guilty of killing time.” His muzzle brushed against hers as he lifted his head again.

It had become nearly full dark in the time since she’d seen him; the girl was the brightest thing in view. “And is it a murderer you seek?” There was a laugh in the words; he kept missing the madness in her eyes.

His second mistake of the evening.



@Faida  yassss faidaaaaa

these violent delights have violent ends

[Faida]

faida


I know nothing.
 
The bone girl is disappointed. “All this world and you know nothing?” Faida chastises with a whisper from lips that reach for his ear, and a smile that threatens to cut it like a knife. As she draws back, her gaze sweeps this land of lovers. How ironic that the girl of death and a loveless heart, should find herself here first of all.
 
“I have no home.” And she does not wish for one.
 
She shiver-steps through the cold, cold water, each small foot splashing into the stream with little more than a whisper. The water stains her skin the darkest grey, a grey of roiling thunderclouds. Up and up and up her slender limbs those grey stains crawl. In every place the boy is black the water marks her grey.
 
Her tail swishes and sways and her body quakes with the memory of spines clacking over rock. Oh there is a monster still within her and it roils and rolls and thrashes; an alligator through water.
 
Their muzzles touch, midnight to white, white light and she wonder if he knows how close he comes to death. Her breath is a sigh across his cheek, her lips following the black ink of his mask. He moves to retreat, but keen and wild and dangerous Faida rises from the water, stalking his every retreating step. Her lips stay close with his, her smile turning viperous, even has her eyes still gaze dreamily out from beneath, heavy punch-drunk lashes.
 
As beautiful as a snowflake and as dangerous as consuming as a blizzard, she circles him. This girl, this monster, will smother him with cold as she explores his every scar, orbiting him like a comet seeking its crash-landing.
 
“Yes.” She breathes against his hot, hot skin. There, there she feels the vibrant pulse where death has not yet touched him. “But only a murderer who can keep me dead – can you?”
 
She retreats, the monster returning to the watery depths. Yet she keeps her eyes upon him, her smile fierce as she steps backward into the stream and watches her blood begin to flow downstream. Can he see it? Can he see the jagged holes upon her ribcage? And the blood that runs red, red over Astarte’s even redder skin? Can he hear the water that bubbles in her lungs?
 
Her eyes, beetleblack and as empty as a cave, remain fixed upon him as she smiles and smiles and smiles, “How do you kill?” The white girl asks and invites him down from the bank as her scar begins to chafe. “Come down, if you don’t mind the blood,” Faida sings, pure and white and radiant from within her crystal clear stream.


@Acton 

[Acton]

“Then I was right to know nothing of it,” he said, and shook his neck as though it were full summer and the flies were thick. Her lack of a home did not strike him as strange; not Dawn, then, but it was hardly rare for horses to be from nowhere. Especially lately, when strange winds seemed to be blowing all sorts of new horses to Novus.

That, to Acton, was not such a bad thing. New blood was always welcome.

He did not follow her into the water but tracked along the bank, keeping amiable pace with her. The stallion was not remotely interested in getting wet; he wasn’t yet cold enough to shiver but he didn’t think it’d take much. She was a madwoman to bear it, with the snow falling thicker now and the trees clattering like teeth in the wind.

When she drifted near again it seemed half an accident, like she was pushed by that same wind. She closed with him until she was climbing out of the water, tail and limbs dark and dripping, and the image of a beast he’d heard stories of as a child rose unbidden in his mind. Kelpie.

He wanted to laugh. A couple days of solitude and a heavy late autumn night and he was flighty as a girl.

Then she spoke again, more madness. The first he’d taken as a lark but this…for just a moment, his ears flicked back. Not long enough to hide in the tangle of his mane, just enough to show his uncertainty. “It’s not a murder if no one dies,” he answered flippantly, with a snort, and reached to nudge her cheek away.

But he is too late; already she’s slipped back into the water, doing nothing to dispel the myth in his mind.

She had all of his attention, but there was no blood: just a kelpie in the stream, or a ghost, or a madwoman.

He was mentally reprimanding himself when her question caught him, and this time he greeted her smile with an arched brow. “I’d be a piss-poor showman to so easily give up my secrets,” he said, but his grin made clear his pleasure at her interest. Maybe she wasn’t mad; he was just being foolish, here at the onset of winter with his head full of old mares’ tales -

if you don’t mind the blood.

Acton stamped a back hoof, flickering once more to uncertainty. He was too unguarded to play a role, or maybe she was just too strange – but either way, he furrowed his brow at her, even as he took a step forward, then another, so that his hooves were at the edge of the stream that chuckled and leapt below. “It’s the cold I’d rather avoid,” he said, peeling his gaze from the water that parted around her legs to her dark, dark eyes. “But there is no blood, sweetheart. How did you get here?”

At once he remembered Akeli, and her strange tale of arrival; maybe this stranger had arrived in similar fashion, some world-ending rift, some tear in the sky. Maybe she’d hit her head.

It’s a good explanation, accounting for a lot, and it settled him.




@Faida  

these violent delights have violent ends

[Faida]

faida


Faida does not answer him, though the smile she wears is so slyly full of secrets. Eyes that have seen dynasties crumble and gods fall to mortality, watch him like a hawk would its prey. They are eyes that have been other, eyes that still hunger for such terrible things. The porcelain girl shivers with their memories for they are as sweet as sugar upon her tongue.
 
The sun closes its eyes; shadows passing across the sky. The stream turns black as ink the moment the sun’s gaze is gone. The shadows pass their erasing hands across Faida’s pallid face and when the sun returns its gaze upon the Crow and his companion, the girl’s smile is gone.
 
“You do not listen.” She chastises him again with words that tighten like a serpent about his throat. “There is always a death but never an eternity of it.” The bone girl sighs, suddenly whimsical as she slither-steps closer to the boy. “You see,” Faida breathes as sweet as sugar, as clammy as death, “They can kill me, but I cannot stay dead.”
 
Lashes fan against her cheek, fluttering there as soft as butterfly wings. Her smile is back, curling her silver satin lips as her gaze snags upon him: a hooked claw sinking deep, deep into his skin and a feather to forget she was ever there. “Then make me one of your secrets, showman.” She breathes so gently one might almost forget that death lurked between their words.
 
He steps toward her and for each he takes towards the water’s edge, so she retreats to make him space. Her neck arches, graceful and shy; so terribly shy. Disappointment clouds her gaze as she peers up at him, every part the girl rejected by her crush.
 
“There is always blood.” Faida hums, her eyes earnest as she watches his feet intently. One more step, One more step  her poison heart sings to him. “You should know the blood never washes clean. It never goes”
 
He drags the conversation on and she sighs, disappointed. “I do not know how but it was the beast that brought me here.”

@Acton