[O] A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Printable Version +- HELOVIA || The Way to the Sun (http://helovia.com) +-- Forum: Out of Character (http://helovia.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: Archives (http://helovia.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=11) +--- Thread: [O] A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother (/showthread.php?tid=23493) |
A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 04-03-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
For @Mauja please RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 04-04-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
Something hung in the early morning air. As intangible as the filaments of mist, tendrils of fate ( (She was a lightning crack through the bones of the world.) And he.. he was dust and death, shadows, blood, seeping softly into sand and fading; sun-bleached. He was nothing; he had become that which he had always been called—wraith. He could leave, now. He could leave this place, go to ground, hide in the dead lands by Helovia's coast, and in a decade, a century, a millennium, he could return to this place. Come back to haunt. Ghost. The smile curling his dark lips was bitter and broken, like his frostbitten heart. Had he burned his bridges here? He didn't know—he had kept on running dainty circles, dissipating like so much smoke each time someone came near. Coward. And fool— How could he have been so stupid? What grand, damnable notion had struck him on that night? Fucking moon-blinked, thinking he was somehow—somehow special, important, but not quite, more like, he could do something useful for once— The grandeur of it had ensnared his dreamer's heart. To be a shepherd of this world, an ageless, eternal protector, a shield: but what had he done? He had begged his best friend to kill him. Like, faux-kill him because he couldn't fucking die anymore. What had he been thinking? That all of a sudden dark monsters would spring from the earth and he would charge into them, a spear of light in the darkness, a ray of moon-shine to keep his precious mortals safe? Had he, for one fucking moment, believed that the Moon was offering him salvation through eternity, a purpose for his aimless, miserable, wandering self? Had he honestly believed that? (No.) But it had offered him hope: a chance, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in a week, a season, a year... But a chance somewhere down the line to hunt down the scattered pieces of his lost heart and become whole again. Happy. Sighing bitterly, he glanced at the mossy, fog-strewn ground. She had had nothing to do with it; he had damned himself. He had chosen this. No one had forced him. (Though, ironically, the other option had frightened him; it would've put pressure on him to father more children, breed forth a new generation of blessed misery, and he was not that young anymore—) Had he truly chosen immortality out of fear of pressuring himself into sex again? Perhaps. The world works in mysterious ways. Moon had claimed to only have the best interest of Helovia at heart—so where the fuck did that put him? Maybe that was where he had fooled himself, felt needed again— Someone was coming. Someone was coming too fast, too close; he was tired beyond measure, barely sleeping, barely eating, gaunt and fragile and drawn. Too lost in the spring hanging in the early morning air he had been taken unaware, tripped, caught in the noose which had been slowly closing on his throat. He didn't even know if Tembovu had ( But it was Elding coming out of the trees, heading for the border, and Mauja was almost straight in her path. It almost seemed as if he had been waiting for her. [ @Roskuld ] RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 04-04-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 04-07-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
eins og leyndarmálin þín sem þú hélst forðum burt frá mér. En blóðið þyngr´en þögnin er. He came first, and don't ask how Mauja knew who it was; he just knew. There was just something, a hint of a scent, the curling of the fog, the sick pounding of his heart and the tail-end of a thought fed to his brain by other owls, and then it wasn't even an owl anymore. It was this .. thing, standing on four sturdy legs, built like a tiny gray tank, and the only thing that was out of place was his really blue scorpion's tail. Really, he thought, muddled, you couldn't have picked a more inconspicuous color? But then again, when had the damned creature itself ever been inconspicuous? Mauja (Irma) remembered the tiny form caught in sharp, feather-padded talons, its heartbeat a wicked rhythm pounding against her careful, damning grip, and the elation she had smelled on him, and his grin, and staring at the lion-esque guard standing stubbornly before him it suddenly made all the sense in the world that his tail was fucking blue. Like my eyes. What the hell did that have to do with anything? He was off-balance even before he saw her, his heart lurching with the meaningless realization the had the same eye color as Chico's tail—like, the fuck did that have to do with anything? But still it made his heart stampede and world spin and he actually staggered sideways for a moment, threatening to topple over— Slowly, he righted himself; slowly, he pulled himself together, splayed legs coming in neatly beneath him, wild-eyed head rising high upon the proud arch of his neck. By virtue of his blood he was graceful; by virtue of his heart he was a ( “Hey,” she said, and with his heart still attempting to choke him he marveled at the vastness of the world—far up in the northlands of his home, who knew what happened? What did his brother do? Had the fragile peace broken, or had they kept their words and hopes, striving for a better, unified tomorrow? And here, in Helovia, somewhere in this misty, godforsaken forest Tembovu lurked, with stars knew which questions buried like glass shards in his lungs, and far, far away lay Gaucho and the Throat, with the tall Dragon's Blood tree spreading its branches skyward, mourning the forest which had once stood there with it— And in this small, insignificant corner of the world— —they met again, at last. And his heart was doing all sorts of back-flips and excuses, snatches of conversation (—memories) blurring with the silence of reality as he stared at her. (She had touched him, in the north, bringing him home.) She had run, when Hototo had died, and he had run after her, and witnessed the helpless fury of her grief. He could've screamed the sky down that day on the beach, but it wouldn't have helped. Too jaded, he had kept his.. what do you even call it, when you realize something you hold dear is taken from you? It had not yet had the chance to grow into mourning, it was simply—frustration, anger, the sheer impotence of your own meaningless existence in that moment enough to drive you mad (because no matter how much you screamed, how much you loved, it made no difference). “I missed you.” How long had he been staring at her in silence, tracing vague parallels between their lives? Minutes? Hours? Lifetimes? The words were hammerstrokes falling upon the nails of guilt. Wasn't that how it always went? I missed you— (Where were you, where were you, where were you...) Would he have to weld himself to someone's side in order for them to not miss him and greet him like he'd not been away three years or ignored them on purpose? (But maybe, this time, she's not accusing you of something—) It was almost surprising that ice didn't flake off of his form as he began to move, a sluggish, drunken amble, bringing him closer with no regard for the manticore; perhaps, in some distant corner of his mind, he attempted to brush it aside and not merely trample it, but he wasn't sure. "I missed you too," he said, breathed, tear-blurred eyes closing as he made to fling his head over her back and hold her. rista dýpra en nokkur sár. Brotin bönd aldrei verða söm. Lygar eins og nöðrubit. [ @Roskuld ] RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 04-10-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 04-13-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
Something felt odd. Weird. Wrong. (False.) Detached. He felt like he was watching a moment between strangers, an interloper on the scene of a reunion between (—what?)—a puppet mimicking the normalcy of life. Pretending to be fucking normal when the truth, the truth he held so close to his heart, was that he hadn't had the sense to miss her. (Until now, until she was here, and he realized how long he'd stumbled through the darkness, and then the breath rolling down his neck smelled familiarly of guilt—) Mauja missed people in the abstract. He remembered them at odd times, thinking fondly of moments shared and futures lost, and his heart hurt a little, and perhaps he wept in the lonesome darkness, but then it fell back beneath the surface and he forgot again. And it went on.. and on.. and on. He missed Psyche, but how often did he think about her? He missed d'Artagnan, but now that he was out of the throes of his grief and hurt, how many thoughts did he spent on that cherry red bay? And let's not talk about Kahlua— The words were spoken, too loud to take back, too dangerous to contradict, but they left ashes in his mouth and he couldn't spit them out. 'I missed you too' was what any normal person would've said, but she deserved more than that—she deserved truth, and the truth was simple: I care about you a fuck-ton but I didn't actually miss you yet. But how do you say that to someone holding you with such genuine affection and warmth that you're close to melting (heat-cracks, pressure-cracks, ice blowing apart—) in their embrace? Her (when had it become so difficult to think of her as female?) short, stout body pressed close to his, shoulder to shoulder, awkward in their different proportions, neck warm against his withers, heart heavy beneath his head; he had a responsibility here, to protect, to shield, from harm. Even if that meant being silent about his slip of the tongue; the truth was rather arbitrary when the words had simply tried to convey some sort of 'I care about you, too'-esque feeling. It was just.. semantics. (A feeling like lying.) "Mmh," he breathed in response, guilty eyes closing. Gods, she was so warm, so.. safe in some way; she fucking held him and it was nearly enough to make his knees buckle and crash him to the distant forest floor. This was— It wasn't the tip of a horn rupturing his heart, but it was damn near the same. Maybe he shouldn't have asked Tembovu to kill him. Maybe he should've asked him to hug him. Too fucking late— He was sure his head became thrice as heavy across her broad back, the muddled confusion and her question a weight he did not want to bear—thoughts he did not want to think. He had no clarity. He was lost in some.. fucking gray fog, somewhere, running around like a blind mule and he guessed the only thing he might do was trip and fall off the edge of the world, or something. "Well," he began to say, but came up short. How were they treating him here? There was a certain memory, a certain thread of envy, of bitter resentment, curling through his existence; the memory of that Aji on the meeting, of ranks handed out, of .. Mauja's eyes clenched shut harder. "Well enough," he finally said. It wasn't their fault; they had no obligations to fix him. They.. they.. he was just some old, dusty relic of the past, a mistake someone had made. Yeah. Just a mistake. Just a— He didn't notice until it was too late, and by then he was already halfway to the ground. [ @Roskuld - he's just kinda collapsing at the end xD ] RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 04-16-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 04-27-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
And that was that—a cascade of sparks, a fortress tumbling down, glaciers crashing into the sea to send up a spray of water as the secrets tumbled into the deep (—like blood soaking into sand). His vision was split into darkness and her (but she was dark, too, looming above him like a warped memory of something—), and for some reason, his mind whispered 'sunshine'. But there was no sunshine, just a morning too early to be bright, and a seeping sense of heartache—as if the roots deep below him fell apart and with them, the world. Black rot at the heart of everything. And her eyes— He frowned as they seemed to spit sparks in his vision, pulsing drunkenly to the throb of his heartbeat. Her eyes had always been weird, sort of.. inverted, in a way that wasn't normal. Brown around the edges, spark-blue in the middle; as if she needed a sign hanging around her neck saying 'my pedigree is more impressive than yours'. She didn't need anything. She was ( A highly biased opinion coming from someone half-unconscious on the forest floor, but hey. Spark had had his chances and thrown them all away— His freewheeling mind was brought up short against the solid walls of her voice, his far-flying psyche fetched back by the tangibility of a question: of words forming a cage for his mind to scuttle about. “What happened? What’s wrong?” And, in a somewhat absurd fashion, his mouth opened and began to shape the words: "I'm fine." Except—he wasn't. Everything he had ever tried to be had landed him here: fallen by her feet, spitting out the same old lie. I'm fine. I'm perfect. I can do anything. I am the machine you want. I am the heartless killer. I am the pinnacle of evolution. (I am the vanguard of your destruction.) A broken, smoking ruins, concrete pillars blasted apart and the stumbling mess of his bloodied heart suspended between them, pulsating like a creature dying. "I'm not fine," he was saying instead, voice dribbling out between his dark lips as his neck struggled to lift his heavy head. He was barely aware of himself; the furthest reaches of his body were dim, lost in the fog somewhere. Wild-eyed, he stared at her. "I keep saying but it's never true, I've never been fine—" What the hell am I even talking about..? [ Well fuck you tag, @Roskuld || Uh I have no idea what I'm doing, k. ] RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 05-01-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 05-12-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
Truth was difficult. Truth was unlearning twelve years of bad habits and shot-down, broken and burnt dreams. Truth was listening to the erratic spikes of pain pouring from his pulse. Truth was accepting that he was lost: in this world, in his past, in himself. Truth was accepting that which he had forced upon her by the Rotunda: I do not exist. Truth was forcing it upon her again, until she, too, would accept it and understand it, that— (“Your heart’s still beating.”) It wasn't even stampeding through his chest anymore; it was just pulsing a little, struggling weakly against the black tide of darkness scourging his soul. A wounded thing struggling in the jaws of its inevitable fate—a ceaseless, endless struggle, for he would never find rest. A curse he had brought upon himself. A curse wrapped in sweet promises (made by no one) and dreams and shiny silver gift-wrap papers, and riding high on the idea of a purpose he'd stumbled headfirst into. Swallowed it. Sink, bait, hook, line. Heart and soul, he was owned, and the only thing he saw when he stared ahead was darkness. Limitless, fathomless, infinite. A guardian, he had thought, but of what? He'd fought all his wars on the wrong side. A ghost, he thought now, one blue eye staring vacantly up. It seemed an eternity ago that Sarazheha had looked at him and said Honesty, brother. And where had that honesty gotten him? Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. What was the meaning of peace? Why did he exist at all? Had he ever been anything but this, a broken vessel aspiring for things it could not be? “I know,” she said. Twelve years of untruth. Twelve years of chasing ghosts and sealing up his heart. Twelve years of pretense. Twelve years (—I have a heart)— He knew that he had a heart. It was raw and rugged, had scratched his chest until it bled from within, and now it had given up. His heart wasn't the problem, not anymore, not compared to that wave of darkness rising higher and higher above his head (—like a noose, tightening). The problem was that the years had scraped away and scraped away and scraped away until the thick walls around his heart were bloodstained with the splatters of his dying heart, and the weight of the world had snapped the framework around his mind. Mauja the Frostheart—Bane of the Plague—had died, but without that persona, without those well-known habits and ways of speaking, thinking, acting, interacting, Mauja the What The Fuck Am I had no idea how to exist. And perhaps that was why he gravitated towards familiar things—bitterness and hate, anger and violence. Grief and shame and guilt. She laid down next to him. She, who had found a myriad pieces of him throughout the years, and put them together; but what did she see? What moved her to lay next to him? What moved her to remain with him? What did he give her? What had caused so many to follow him, so blindly, so willingly? What had inspired, ensnared, enchanted? Wherever he went—and yet she was the only one here, now. She was the warmth against his back, the weight across his neck, pushing the fragments of his heart a little closer to one another, so the blood didn't have quite such a way to fall. She was life. (He was death.) She was hope. (He was defeat.) He was tired beyond the point of feeling: he was numb, as if the snow had worked its way through his fur into his skin, settled like frost in his marrow. "Once," he began to say, his voice too level, too calm, too dead, "there was a man known as Mauja the Frostheart. He was King of the World's Edge half a lifetime ago. His kingdom was built upon arrogance, his vision steeped in blood, and his story built upon much the same. He was three years old." Because Mauja had been six—but that Mauja had not existed until that night when he was three and it was just a mess how he'd come to become what he'd been. "He began to die three years later. A year after that, he was all but destroyed—and yet he remains, like a skin I can't slough off." Weakly, his head rose, one blue eye swirling to focus on Roskuld. What had he done to deserve her? (What had he done to miss out on how to share?) How much did he know of her; how little did she know of him? "Without him, I do not know how to be," he finally whispered, an edge of fear in his voice; an edge of white around his eyes. His breath smoked into the still-cold air, and his head fell back down into the snow. A perfect grave for the one who is frozen. [ I'm a scrub and I literally have no idea what I just wrote @Roskuld ] RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Roskuld - 05-21-2016 Roskuld & Zchiraxicon Where there's no Law tying my heart from the start..
RE: A Joke, Your Knight, or Your Brother - Mauja - 06-05-2016
i am the vanguard of your destruction
It trembled. His pulse was a shiver going through aching veins—just a flutter forcing blood around. Some heat slipping just beneath his skin, trying to keep a glacier warm. But they just don't melt, not even with her life pressed against his back. And he wondered, if there was fire burning deep in the bedrock, a roaring furnace somewhere below a hundred feet of ice and a hundred feet of stone. He had a heart, because he could feel it beating (trembling). He had a heart, but what if it was empty? Shriveled up, dead and black? What if he was what he had been called—Frostheart? Maybe it had died in the long winter which had reigned in his soul, frostbitten beyond all recognition—beyond all salvation. (All hope—) Could you fill a cold, dead thing up with life and have it be the same as when it had truly lived? (Cold, wild nights under distant stars, a fire in his soul, easy laughter in his throat.) Or was it once dead, always dead? (All those stars reflected in his bluer eyes.) Their sky was breathing dawn-air, a chill hanging in the shadows like the stubborn winter, and with a warm body pressed against his back and that foreign sky easing up a little above him— He whispered to his heart, 'Isir is dead'. And he could make that list a whole lot longer. There were many things he had not forgiven himself for. “Do you want to be without him?” Mauja's eyes closed. He almost seemed peaceful, bathed in the gentle starlight and dappled with shadows from the evergreen trees. The lines and planes of his face were smooth, his forelock strewn with haphazard elegance against the cold ground. He could've been asleep—could've fallen into some witch's spell and would sleep (a nightmare) for a hundred years, until some unfortunate soul found him and kissed him, freeing him from his tomb of ice. Her voice lingered like a memory in his mind, a jumbled mess asking all the right questions but supplying no answers. And, deeper, as his tired heart began to remember something of strength, he wanted to shake it off—say, enough about me, what about you?. Turn away from the messy spikes going through his heart, turn a blind eye. Weren't they merely house decoration, anyway, with how long they had been buried in there? He was used to them. But try running with a heart full of sharp shards. It doesn't work very well. "He was charming," Mauja said after a moment. He still felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with lying on his side on snow. "He was supremely confident, but cautious, unwilling to come off as a narcissistic asshole. And somehow, he commanded loyalty." Strange, to think that that driven, blood-thirsty King had been him—that these two vastly different souls had inhabited the same body. (And on the tail end of that, Gods, I was so stupid, whispered with a groan and swallowed with shame, guilt.) "He was easy, always in control, always so sure, steadfast like a mountain—no doubts, no quarter given, no mercy, just an iron sword going straight for your heart," he was whispering now, summoning the ghost of himself, "but ultimately, he was a fucking idiot." Mauja's eyelids had gone from peacefully closed to a littler tighter, a little tauter. It was a rowdy ghost lost somewhere, still vindictive, still bitter, full of fury. "He was balanced enough, but at his core, he was hateful, and arrogant. He wasn't a brute who relished violence, but he was disciplined, skillful, detached..." His eyes opened again; one staring at snow, the other at the sky. "When there is peace, I am restless. When I am not drowning in duty—a role—I am drowning in anxiety and frustration. It's like I don't know how to exist without an ulterior motive and something to hate." And he laughed, bitterly. [ @Roskuld ] |