[P] FABLES AND PARABLES

[Raziel]

H I S T O R Y  H A S  I T S  E Y E S  O N  Y O U


The sun had all but disappeared by the time Raziel and Gahenna arrived home from the hunting trip they had embarked upon at noon.

Deep, red-blue shadows groaned in the corners of Saudager's entrance hall as they swept briskly on -- left, right and left again along endless corridors haunted by portraits of imposing faces and cold, disparaging eyes. It did not matter that he failed to meet their gaze; bitter experience had taught him he would feel their scorn regardless.

The polite clatter of fine china stung the hollows of his ears and even from the safety of his private quarters, far across the pseudo-palace, he could hear the voices of his family -- a moniker he used reluctantly. A furtive glance at the grandfather clock beside his fireplace told him that 10 o'clock was still too early. A grunt, a sigh, "I told you we should have stayed out later".

Gahenna, engrossed in her exacting custom of cleaning her great, crow-black paws after hunting, pretended not to listen. She found that these days it was often the only response he'd bear.

Raziel released the days bounty, along with the stained arrows he had carefully retrieved, from the satchel strapped abound his withers, watching the frail white-tailed bodies as they unfolded like bruised slippers to sprawl upon the coverlet he always used for their kills. Blood was a bastard to get out of mahogany wood and he wasn't about to prove the fact again.

Solterran rabbits were a measly prize for the toil of a sudoric afternoon shoot but in truth, his mind had been elsewhere. It was maddening: this recently-born habit of losing track of time and purpose. He could blame it on the weather or the family or Gahenna but he didn't like to lie, at least not to himself.

What was it about this year? Why was this year different to the other six he'd endured before? The time (the nineteenth day of the eight month) would pass in a flash of aged-whiskey and wanton guilt and memories of his brother's rough garnet eyes. He knew this. So why could he not quell the feeling that this year would be different?

Fifteen minutes passed before Raziel realised he had not moved; it was only Gahenna's low whine that jerked him from that strange sullied reverie. The room, wide and high as it was, dressed in priceless silks and treasured heirlooms, edged in a little closer toward the gold-mottled man as though it were hoping glutinously for a sliver of the contused decay beneath his skin.

He might have bared his teeth had his father not beaten such wickedness out of him. And withal the night had a mouth that gaped wider than his ever could; its single lupine tooth casting moonlight down like beckoning mercy against the vacuum of darkness. 

And that, he supposed as he slid out the door he had kept secret for seven years, would have to do. 

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art by whiteliesart

 

@Obsidian

[Sereia]

Sereia

It is in between the lemon-light of flickering torches that Sereia steps. There is feral salt in her blood and in her skin. Within her she feels the lick of the sea pressing up against her bones. Like a puppeteer the ocean has her walking as waves rolling endlessly toward the shore. Sereia feels endless this night. 


The girl watches how her shadow ripples and splashes up the buildings she passes. The cobbles of the street are still warm with the day’s sun. Their heat is a balm upon her aching feet. She is a creature of the ocean, her body used to its cradle of blue. SHe has spent too long out of its embrace, yet she will not relent. Every moment is a joy upon the land and so the kelpie carefully tips her gaze away from where her shadow undulates as the black sea beneath the moon. She numbs herself to the wash of salt across her bones, her soul, her skin. 


In the distance is the roar of the fights. A season of battles is being hosted by Solterra. Sereia was lured in at first. Arriving at the walls of the colosseum lupine and keen. Hunger stirred in her belly and she moved, beautiful and dangerous, up along the stairs and halls until she emerged out into the sweltering sun and the roar of the crowd at their vicious spectacle.


Even upon the uppermost ribs of the arena she could smell the warriors’ blood. It was sprayed across the sand, it trickled from open wounds, running down the contours of their bodies. It was metallic and bright, sweet and enticing. A shiver slipped, wicked and thrilled, through her body. But oh, the violence. Her kelpie stirred then, it unwound itself, the chains she bound it in clinking along her ribs. She shuddered as if with the roar of the colosseum. 


Sereia had arrived like a wolf, but she fled as a doe. Light and nimble, the stones sang with the rhythm of her feet. Even now, with hours passed and sunset long gone, her kelpie still seeks to turn her lupine, leonine, aquiline, anything to taste the blood that decorates the arena and its warriors. The adrenaline, the fight, the violence, they all still cry to her across the citadel.


Yet she sinks into the cobbled streets. They are vibrant, alive, Solterra still feeling the festival highs. Children play, a boy falls as she passes. He cries as the road bites into his knees. They bloom pretty petal red. Still her famished kelpie has not fallen into slumber, still it will not be bowed. Not now, not when hunger brings the black shadow of death looming over Sereia’s too-thin form. A kelpie needs meat, no matter how much Sereia resists herself, detests herself.


She is still staring at the boy and his wet blood as she skitters wide-eyed aside. She does not hear, does not see the door open until she collides with another body. In surprise, her grip slips upon the chains, they slide like oil through her fingers and her kelpie rises. It slips into her veins, her muscles, it commands her bones. Slowly he gaze tips up through midnight black, bled through with gold. He is the midnight sun, she is the midnight sea. Her too-wide smile grows as the air feels warm with the pulse of blood and the heat of vitality. 


It is a kelpie who watches Raziel through golden, famished eyes. Her gaze is teeth across his cheek, lips parting over his pulse- The boy screams at last, his pain registering. Seriea rouses, tortured and chastened. Her grip is slick upon herself, yet she shudders and breath and staggers back. Apologies pour like the salted sea from her lips. Corals and seashells chime in her hair and she tips her chin down until her hair hides the monstrosity of her too-wide smile. “I am sorry-” She breathes, adding to the litany of apologies that had gone before it. But now her gaze is fixed upon the weeping gold that falls like tears from his body. “Is your blood… gold?” the kelpie asks in wonderment as her gaze tips up, up, up through darkness and firelight until it meets the bruised amethyst of his gaze and the tears that trickle golden from his eyes. No, not just his blood but his tears too. Sereia may be filled with saltwater but he contains the ichor of the gods. 


She thinks of the tale of Apollo whipped until he bled his blood slick and gold across the floor. The sea-girl takes a breath and wonders aloud, “are you god-born?”

@Raziel - I am sorry you have a novel!


 

[Raziel]

H I S T O R Y  H A S  I T S  E Y E S  O N  Y O U


It is a questionably brisk pace that carries him toward the bosom of Solterra. Strange that he finds himself leaning toward the capital tonight, as though he had not loathed it his entire life prior. 

It takes twenty-seven minutes for Raziel Nazaret to reach the city and only fifty-two seconds for him to wish he hadn’t bothered. The gauzy lantern-light does not well enough conceal a man with cracked skin and ichor-blood. It seems instead to clave like beaded salt upon damp cloth - it is a rash, an itch, a nerve pulled tight.

The gates are open but they do not welcome him. Their iridescence is proud and sugar-sick; sending a jolt of envy through his clenched jaw: oh to be an inanimate object. At the thought, ludicrous even for his standards, Raz snorts coolly at himself: things really had hit a new low. 

The festival is drawing, at last, to a close and from it he feels the city overdrawn. She does not oft let sunless-hearted men into her marrow and Raziel thinks these wandering souls, whom caw and trill on the streets his forefathers built, might never have known the sun before.

To say it irked him would be a marked example of restraint.

So rather than bear the sight of tourists once more he turns away from the main street and lunges on lupine limbs down an alley he remembers from years ago; like everything else, his brother had been the one to show it to him. 

But he swings out of it all too quickly, surging onto a back road that rises up faster than he had anticipated (You see, he hadn't been concentrating. His violet gaze had lingered fractionally too long over a decidedly misshapen cobblestone that Raoul had once pointed out) 

They collide likes stones caught in a stream: slippery. A grunt forms in his throat slower than the insult, but it is the latter he swallows as he spins on a sixpence to snatch a glance at the other. He could not have been prepared for what he saw. 

There is a warship in the space where a woman should be. Brine licks the air. Everything else is lost to a murmur and Raziel loses what is left of his breath.

Crushed sand, gas fire blue: a mosaic of something, someone, that should be beautiful. But there is horror in the twist of those bleached curls; a monster crouching in that water-storm gaze. He blinks in one slow movement, as though he might bat the myth of her from his eyes, but when his lids rise and she still stands, wraithlike, he is out of ideas.

The nymph speaks, then, though her voice is too soft for that blade-ridden mouth; they become tangled in cuts as they fall between white teeth and Raziel cannot feign surprise when she turns her attention to his blood. He thinks, for a moment, he might like to look away but only a fool would turn their back on a shark. 

So he holds those wide amber eyes between his own, with the darkness snapping at his heels and wonders if this night should be his last.

"Why? Do you eat gods too?"

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art by whiteliesart | @Sereia 

[Sereia]

Sereia

The child weeps still. His cries shout across the cobblestone street, ricocheting off buildings. Yet Sereia’s gaze is full of gold on ebony. The colours as startling as a bee sting.


Their collision had been rough, jagged. His body had felt blistering against hers. The scent of dust and sun and gilded gold. Everything about this man was hot from his skin, to his scent to his temper.


How much a fool he makes her. How he crushes her with a look. So swiftly she feels childish in the way she had stared at him - the gold of his blood - so much like ichor. SHe had thought him a god. Yet there is nothing divine about him. 


Her heart is a fretting gazelle within her breast. It flees and her blood surges like a storm through her veins. His words had come like silk, but they steal the breath from her lungs as if he struck her. 


There is still a siren song in her breast, it keeps her kelpie close, close beneath her skin. “How dare you.” Sereia breathes brackish as the water in which she was birthed. Horror twists within her gut yet the kelpie in her bones laughs like a lioness. She slides along Sereia’s ribs, it is her eyes who hold his, tight as Icarus might have clung to his melting feathers. Her moments are brief, when she is set free, so she relishes them, clings to them. Uses every second. 


She limns Sereia in fire. Sets her skin aglow with a vitality she staunches. “You know nothing of me,” The words tumble from her lips like a leonine growl, yet her nape arches graceful as a swan. Few have ever realised she is a kelpie so fast. And even fewer have ever struck her as he does. Still she feels raw with his words, the sharp prickle of tears gathering hot and anguished behind her eyes. She does not let them fall but tips her chin up, until her hair falls back, the ugly line of her lips exposed. She moves like a dancer, her body gilded in gold. All could be beautiful, it should be beautiful. Yet she is a cacophony of sharp angles and endless anguish. Sereia lets herself gleam, famished and ugly before him. “I would rather die before I eat anything like you.” Self-hatred and ire are kerosine in her veins. She feels like petrol and he the spark. A part of her longs to burn and scourge the monstrous side of her out.



@Raziel


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana

[Raziel]

SUFFERING FEELS RELIGIOUS IF YOU DO IT RIGHT

He thinks of the rabbit lying beside his fireplace; its ears wet with death. He thinks of his first kill (hot, bitter, moist) and how it had made him feel hungry in ways he'd not known possible. How easy it had been.

But when he looks now at this creature fashioned from ancient lust and rockweed born of thunder, he sees the true insignificance of his depravity. She is elemental. The very constitution of violence gives life to her second-spun body; hiding her secret behind a mask that sags and rots and smiles like bamboo as it rises through flesh.

It had been winter and he had been three. Wandering the dunes in search of something he could not name, he had happened upon the remains of a child. What had once been a child. He was not quick to forget the sight of torn infant-flesh masticated by sand. There was only one thing that could negotiate such horror and he had seen it, or perhaps the shadow of it, disappearing over the crest of a hill. 

So as he stands before Sereia, with his mouth set blade-straight, he cannot stem the tide of instinct as it blooms like hemlock in his chest, weaving between his ribs to grapple at his heart with moth-eaten hands. It tells him to run, to forsake this creature he cannot transcend and leave her alone in the dark with her starving torment.

He stays.

There is nobody to call him home, nothing to lead him into the light. So he stays; in the darkness and the peril and the brine that stings his eyes.

The seawolf flinches as though he had struck her with a belt. She mistakes his curiosity for conviction; he does not correct her. A kinder man would have lowered his gaze at the choir of her snarl, but Raziel has never been kind and he stares, stares, stares into the jaws that condemn him. He feels no shame. Even as her eyes begin to cloud with tears, even as she bares her body stained by hunger, he does not stir. She is hollowed out; empty; a soul denying itself of its very essence.

"Well, if death is what you are looking for, I think you have almost found it." As the unicorn's bruised gaze lingers coldly on her bowing bones, a single drop of gold blood falls from his horn into the space between them.

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art by whiteliesart

[Sereia]

Sereia


 He leaves no inch of her uncovered by his scrutiny and his cruelty. And so Sereia tips her chin up as if it is pride and not blood that runs through her veins. 


The stranger thinks of death, of the harrowing things he has seen and the wet death he has brought to innocent animals. Even without knowing how he hunts and the myriad souls he clasps with his claw-like hand (those he has severed from their bodies as he delivers death with golden tears and cruel, impassive eyes), Sereia has already begun to think that he is the most villainous creature here.


This man drowns, he sinks into his cruelty, he sculpts himself by it. He kills and it is without a fragment of remorse. Yet before him, the seawolf weeps for those to whom she has brought an untimely death. Her heart would tremble to know how a rabbit lies as its blood leaks out from its lifeless corpse. Even if death looked peaceful, she would not wish it to be by her doing. 


His gaze presses upon her exposed bones, the shape of them, sharp beneath her skin like roots rising out of the earth. He blurs, through her tears and her outrage. He is definitely the more cruel. This ebony dragon cuts her down with words that slay her pride. To think she had thought him divine! To think she was awed by his savage beauty. 


He bleeds his golden blood, it leaves drops upon the cobbles at their feet. It scents the air, warm and sweet, delectable. Sereia does not flinch with want, she does not stir from the statue of skin and bone she has become. Instead she holds the stranger with a gaze that sinks teeth and claws into his soul. “And I will wait for you in hell,” Sereia snarls, her voice a swan’s hiss as her nape arches, beautiful, regal, furious.  “You think to cast your bitterness upon others. You are no god with a right to belittle others. You bleed not ichor but poison made from your twisted, hurting heart. The smell of your soul is bitter.” With every word, every breath she steps toward him until her ire and her hurt brings her teeth to his cheek. He knows what she is, so she does not hide herself from him. He has exposed before himself her every horrific, shameful, edge and piece so now she curls into it, she lets herself glow, dangerous and feral. 


“Tell me what killed you and neutralised your compassion as it birthed that monster of cruelty within you.”



@Raziel


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana

[Raziel]

H I S T O R Y  H A S  I T S  E Y E S  O N  Y O U

What he should have felt was shame. Bone-deep, yellow-bright. It should have felt like drowning. For she is all ocean: every inch abyssal, ever curve Neptunian. And it is an angry sea; one that seethes beneath a hastily-sewn tide of skin. He should have died then and there in the very grip of her briny gaze like a seal under the shadow of an orca.

But there are no margins left for anything to quell his contempt; not here, not now. He is swollen and blackened and the insidiously watertight.

He doesn't know how to die twice.

Truthfully, he has never meant to be cruel and maybe that was all the worse: that it came naturally to him, from the pit of his small dimpled heart like blood from a wound. A mother tongue that felt easy and familiar when all other sensibilities felt quite uncomfortably out of reach.  Almost childlike. Stunted by the privilege and the loss and the litres of vodka. He had closed all the doors left open by his brother's love, quietly, in the dark, his throat collapsing under an implosion of restraint -- a vow to crush the grief.

And so her words are wingless birds damned to fall. A tragedy, he thinks. Their weight drifts down to dance gently across his skin as if to mock the way she burns; a matinée before medusa, a kiss upon a monster. He feels the fever of her anguish as she writhes so close, too-close. Perhaps, they are already in Hell. To Raziel, this feels something akin.

Because it is not easy. This moment, in the streets where he lost everything, under a moon he cannot forgive. He feels a tender heat radiate away from her skin in waves and realises he had forgotten what that felt like. It is not easy to stand here like a man bearing strength, when he all he has ever known is weakness. Though his eyes might raze Sereia with the bruise-dull shine of lead, set high above a mouth drawn horizon-straight -- his grief crackles like a fire lit anew.

His expression is bottomless as evenly he steps backward, setting distance between them once more. Empty of malice, of melancholy, of anything at all.

"We are owed no kindness in this world, by mere extension I owe you nothing. We live, we die. There is no mercy. I would have thought someone like you would know that." 

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art by whiteliesart

@Obsidian

[Sereia]

Sereia


He speaks. 


And she wonders what thickened his skin to this unyielding, tough leather. It makes him ugly and worn, even as his beauty is in his indigo black and the gold that pours like tears from his eyes. 


The fact is, his beauty steals the breath from her lungs. But beyond the vision of his body, lies a soul and a personality twisted, bleeding and wretched. She has never met a man like him. A creature as broken as she. They are broken in different ways, the shape of their fractures do not match. Sereia and Raziel collide like tectonic plates, they eat of each other, turning themselves into molten hot ire. The cut each other with the fractured edges of their brokenness. 


The Solterran turns her into a weapon. Not the kelpie within her, surprisingly. No, he turns her into a sabre of words. Even as she fills herself up on the ugliness of his words, even as she watches him with anger burning bright, still a part of her feels his hurt.


He hides it better than her. Yet she feels it, she knows it is there, deeper than this shallow plug of dismissive hurt and anger.


The kelpie inhales him. The sweet scent of his skin and the heat of his body are a delight to her. She lets it slip down into the baser reaches of her. Those places where a kelpie prowls, wicked and hungering, savage and without forgiveness. Sereia takes a piece of her and lets it rise, lets it infuse her every part until she tips her lips to him, until she relishes how soft his cheek is beneath her lips and the words they are about to speak. He is breakable. She could fracture him into a thousand more pieces, beyond the pieces of him he has already made. 


“By your logic no one owes you any kindness or mercy either. You condemn yourself to a lonely and dark world absent of love and compassion. Keep sewing your hatred, it will see you dying, cold and alone and heartsick.”


She delivers her words like a satin noose, soft as silk, but inescapable. Yet, Sereia is not made like him. When she peels herself from his body, when she pushes her kelpie back down, down, down, she is too filled up on goodness, on light, upon hope. 


Retreating from him, she looks back, still the unyielding, hungry eyes, but softened, softening, “But if you want something you are not owed. If you don’t want to be heartsick, lost in the darkness, dying alone... find me.”


And then she is gone.



@Raziel. (More please? Always more with you.)


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana

[Raziel]

SUFFERING FEELS RELIGIOUS IF YOU DO IT RIGHT

Raziel cannot remember what it felt like to be free. Only the deafening absence of lucidity among years of transition; an alignment of past and present whereby the native blackness of his hallowed heart merged with an ever-so explosive chaos of grief. It was slow, insidious, Machiavellian. 

Sometimes, upon catching the bleached throb of a sunset he should never have seen he wonders if his ichor-thick blood would drown out the horizon. He isn't afraid of to die; to hear his body sing in pain.

It is the fear of what might be waiting on the other side that keeps him so doggedly tied to this mortal plane. That Hell eternal might harbour a fate worse than the transient precursor he was passing through now.

So it is with an amalgamation of resignation and foreboding that he allows his jugular to tilt but fractionally upward in the face of this ancient sea-beast: just enough so that when she steps into him, with vengeance and hunger roaring like banshees in her hair, there will be an answer to her question that had hung in the air since its exodus from her lips. "What killed you... What killed you... What killed you..."

He will say, "you" and it will be a release. An end to this purgatory he has negotiated on the breast of his brother's corpse. He does not think of Gahenna. What is he but a creature selfish unto his dying breath?

He waits, violet eyes heavy with the desert, fixed behind a threshold that will not come. Greedy, wanton. But there is only the sound of her voice in the big black night, growing dim and gauzy until it pales into oblivion and he is left all at once alone. He stumbles on his disappointment, staring into the space she had left behind with nothing but the knowledge that the night will end and it will be morning again and he will still be here. 

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art by whiteliesart