i am the vanguard of your destruction

[ you're more than welcome to pop in again psilo, I hope you don't mind the way we handled Chernobyl right now :) ]

Dark; brooding. Quiet. Silence was his only answer from the elusive black mare—a tense, quivering silence, the kind that had four ears straining in her direction, twin sets of blue eyes like spotlights. Did their rapt attention close the doors to her soul, or did she not like that he remembered her? To be pinned down to a time and a place? To be contained by parameters, caged by an imperfect memory, defined, not as a creature but as someone who had once been somewhere, at a certain time.. someone who was more tangible than a shadow, and left more traces than smoke.

Mauja had the patience of glaciers, steady as the mountains, a heart of glass and ice. He could've stood there for hours under the level onslaught of her black gaze, and waited, waited until the words spilled out of her velvet mouth again. Wanted to. There was always silence before secrets.

But youth had not the patience of wolves and so her voice startled the moment away as she burst forth too soon, too soon, and Mauja knew the sound—feeling—of more doors of potential slamming shut in his face.

But as always, when one door closes, another opens somewhere.

"How do you know my mother?"
I fucked her.

The bitter venom spread in a thin, curving line over his mouth, a half-formed sneer before he curbed it. What was done was done, and nothing would get better by him trying to erase it from his memory with the acid wash of denial. It would only hurt the more when it caught up to him.

He didn't know how to own the memory, though. Didn't know how to make it his without cringing and wondering and doubting and hating. So he just stared at the little girl who seemed to have so much energy it wouldn't surprise him if she burst into flames, or started to shimmy on the spot. "What is your name? I am Glacia! In case you would want to know." I didn't. But. Now I do. The distance he wanted to put between them, between Liam and Alleshia, was closing. The inevitable was catching up.

Life. Reality. You can't screw a stranger and not expect repercussions, some kind of echo to keep bouncing until you finally came back to it and heard it again.

His white tail flicked, once, the only disturbance in the perfect night.

"I am Mauja," he finally said, the voice of a beast defeated, "though if she has ever spoken of a Liam, we might be one and the same." Briefly his eyes roved the sky, tracing the outlines of the two birds, watching their effortless flight—and envying them their freedom.. and bitterly pitying them the chained weights keeping them locked to him. If he fell, so would they. It was an unspoken truth, something whispered in the spaces between their heartbeats—we are one, we rise and we fall as one.

He let his gaze descend again, carelessly discarding the black mare for now, as she remained silent as the stones anyway, but one ear remained tilted in her direction.. some parts of his senses alert, waiting, for words or for violence. You didn't survive in Helovia by sleepwalking.

"Glacia," he finally murmured to himself, tasting her name, eying her spots, her fetlocks, the telltale proud arch of her neck and haunches, the promise of a build as regal as his. Glacia. Had his Alleshia suspected, then, that the frost of his soul was mirrored by the frost of his eyes? Had she felt the chill radiating from him, and named this hell-spawn after glaciers and snow and everything cold? His calm, level eyes remained on her. The distance between him and the world had always been in his mind, in the way he held back, in the silence when he should've spoken.

"Who's your father?" he asks, nonchalant and cruel, but he already suspects the truth.

[ @[Chernobyl], @[Glacia] ]