The night was oblique, and dreary, the ivory one returning north from the delightful company of the crimson and snow damsel and the old, old wood that had housed their meeting. This forest, black like fingers suspended before a flame, was not much different than the other, but that it seemed younger and less knowing; there was not the sense of eyes watching one as they walked or the oppressive weight of such elderly branches spanning above her, and as it was on the day that the blue and black mare had salvaged her from the wood and the frightened little mouse of a mare, she finds what little solace such a wretch can find within herself while walking in the orange eve.

The moon wanes, a day since past and her fullness no longer the gluttonous sphere that it had been prior, and the damned one glances at her frock above with little more than an insane giggle, that even the Moon dies once a season and the sky is black, black as her heart. It is coming, she watches her fall; every night she will spy upon the sickening state of the orb as it slips away into nothingness, reborn like a midnight phoenix from the velvety underbelly of the darkness.

Beloved does not know that it is a God that watches high above her, her violet wings spread to tickle at her star kin. She does not know that there were Gods other than those which died in Isilme, and even if she did, she would feel nothing more for the suspended light or her immortal brethren than she did now. A din of mockery, a pointed and cruel sneer that defies their greatness, for she has seen greatness fall, and what a delightful noise it makes as it crushes into nothingness, into ash; she lived while the others suffered and died, slow and agonizing, her laughter a psalm to ease them into eternal sleep as she had danced out of the reach of that wickedness and been reborn to this land.

Ahead is a figure, spied a long while back but mistaken for a crippled trunk, its low boughs warped by ferocious winds or damage caused by forces great and strong. But it breathes, she notes in nearer proximity, it breathes and it sleeps. His horns are like a jagged beast reaching out into the pathway, and she stops with a hard suck inwards on the cooling winds of the night, her bichromatic eyes narrow, so narrow that the ebony one is vanished in the stark blackness of her facial marking. The light catches the angles of her carved features, casts shadows long and oblique across her face as she nervously titters her cherubic laughter into the night air.

A white plume of collective spider strands swishes behind her, dangerous, the arc and weave of a predator tucked low in the grass, a cat hungry for what she sees. That he so rudely juts his crown into her pathway makes her want to snap them off, use them to slice his flesh until her laughter loosed them from her grasping lips – until a memory strikes her, valid and true.

A gift.

"Ooooh, a gift…" she croons with her childlike voice into the shadow, and if she had palms the fingers would curl and twist around another in desperate ringing, in want, in need; instead, her eyes are on fire, the narrowed slits wide and drinking in the visage of the dark one on the tree, her nostrils taking in his bloody smell, the true life blood that stains this one where the Loveless had only been feigning with her beauty.

"Strangers should not sleep in strange places, crown of blood," she says after dancing forward on anxious limbs, maddened eyes searching hungrily the figure before her, his darkness enlightened by the field of snow that lay across his haunches, so beautiful and reminiscent of the stone that stood to the north, tall and oppressive. A warrior, his scars like laces, beautiful and etched into his flesh, visible in their lightness where hers hide in the smooth porcelain of her being, never noticed, never known; he was a weapon leaning against a tree where she was an innocuous, cursed chain, dazzling and beautiful and just within reach.

[ OOC: *cough* So Illynx won't go Thresholding today but Beloved said she was in the area. ;D Feel free to panic and throw sticks at her. ]


Beloved
rust every place that I touch

He wakes, slowly, the peace slipping from his face to be replaced by distrust and annoyance as he eyes her coldly and then cracks his neck sharply in the night. She mimics the bend of his head, though her bones do not pop, she giggles and nearly salivates down her ivory chin at the sight and sound of odd bend that tilts his face. She breathes deeply once, twice, nostrils curving and fluttering beneath the hot wind that is scented, the strange lust to touch that very crown to which she indicates as she speaks.

He snorts, rolling his eyes and looking away. She sneers, savage and dark, her retort silent but for the shaky and ragged breath that breaks the stillness of her watching, her catching of his impudent questions and replies. An ear flicks back, settling upon the fine silk strands of her ivory mane, the wind a low crooning whisper across her flanks as her eyes narrow, lips curl in retort.

But a noise, it draws them both away from one another, and he smells of snow and wandering. Golden with crisp, pale details, she rummages his figure with accusatory stares, her eyes sharp and cold as the ice from which they both have hailed on this ruddy evening. Grim, her expression is one of judgment, one of dislike of surprises, one that wonders why some arrive with words that flash and bend like the teeming masses of fish in the spawning season, leaping and striving to reach the peak of the stream.

Both ears have fallen, and like a serpent she bends and weaves her head low and neck shapely, silvery eye reflecting light in all the ways the darkness of its companion swallows it hungrily. Any logic in his words is lost in her momentary irritation of being intruded upon, of having stolen her precious aloneness with the bloody crowned one.

Still, the sound of a tail striking flesh and the wickedness with which the beast replies to the strange one who had followed her in steals her attentions, never long alighted, swift and unstill as gnats upon decaying flesh in the flitting of their hoard. He is being unkind, uncouth; it simply will not do, not for someone who loiters in the wood of the nameless, of the unwanted, the unclaimed. She is not branded, nor owned, but she belongs more so than crown of blood and the golden man is arrogant and foolish but worthy of more than what he receives for his jester’s bravado.

"You wander the wood of the wandering," she croons, face a devilish caricature of darkness and beauty, decay and everlasting grace, "head of nothing, you need more help than you think." She snorts and glances over at the talkative man who descended from the stone as well, her eyes no less harsh or full of judgment, no more inviting than they are to the dark one that she should be enticing, who she has forgotten such things of until…

Strange mare, gifts. Gifts.

Oh, oh yes.

He was not for her, he was never hers.
Sharply, with cryptic speed, she returns her eyes to the one adorned with such lovely gore, a giggle rising out from her lungs in a sweet and seraphic symphony of sound before it abruptly dies in the delicate notes of her words. "More help than you think, crown of blood," she snaps, "we were all gifts, once. You are no different."

Haughtily her delicate face lifts, eyes cast above to the dark imprints of leaves against the pale glow of the black sky.

"We can offer things to you," she croons to the night, "is it so wrong to be wanted?"



Beloved
rust every place that I touch

The golden one speaks boring truths, truths that can been seen, and touched, and tasted. The harder the realm of one’s residence the harder they became, and the mountains could be spied even from here, she can see them violet and indigo in the distance, white and dappled with starlight, strong and towering. And as all his words have been until now, they continue to bend and weave, their pitch switching and their tone a dance of verbal blade, and after a while she decides that it isn’t so bad, this one who talks so much, whom leans so hard on the supple flesh of his tongue.

The glass crowned beast answers her first, as is proper, as is her due. The maddened one lowers her eyes, glazed and emotionless, back to him as he speaks, her smile growing in its vastness that never touches her soul as he speaks more truths than the golden one had in more rapid succession. He wants motives, as she wanted motives when asked for her name before she was willing to give it, as she wanted motives when also being called a gift.

She sucks in a breath of cool air, tasting the decay of the leaves heady and luscious against the satin of her maw, lining her nostrils and mouth with its flavor.

She is horny, she always is; the scent of their blood so close beneath their thin veils of silk is too tempting in too many ways, the richness of the night intoxicating as the company of two men and their pheromone stench. He doesn’t need to know that.

"He has a nice ass, shame to waste him," she retorts, girly voice echoed with her eerie laughter, "and you? You are strong, however daft. It marks you now, or you gored an already dead thing." This time, the giggle that takes her is soft, a whisper, haunting and dead even as its first notes meet the air, her crown tilting hard to the right, a hideous pop sounding in the sudden wrongness of the bend. "Beloved would not blame you. Blood smells sweet."

As if the truth of her statement draws an irritable urge to the surface, her pale nostrils expand, the contorted way she holds her crown reinstating its proper positioning as she leans forward ever so slightly to drink in the smell of the drying smut upon his brow. Metallic, luscious, she can taste it on the back of her throat, a low purring noise guttural and wrong slipping from her lips as she descends into silence for the continuation of the man’s words.

He’s now talking to the golden one, the one with the delectable hind end and the annoying chitter chatter that is useful if only to distract the man from the deranged nature of the pale woman. She hisses at the roll of the dark stag’s eyes, disliking this secondary display of disrespect, holding retaliation at bay for the simple fact that he had not been so uncouth to she.

Still, he accuses her of being rude, and she spits and sputters audibly at the ground between their hooves in restrained aggression, tiny hooves dancing gracefully beneath her lithe frame. Blindly? Blindly?! She’d show him fucking blindly when she poked out those arrogant little eyes from his head and dried them as baubles to hang from her mane. Her neck curls up, her horn pointing with shivering resilience in the darkness at the ground, silver eye flashing while the dark swallowed the world in its burning fury. "We told you once," she whispers, dark and broiling in tone and temper, ears flat upon her head.

But the words continue, her anger losing edge as it seems that the golden one has struck a chord of harmony with the arrogant idiot who doesn’t listen and doesn’t know where he is and that he has a giant sign blinking above his head that reads “bother me.” Her rage escapes in a snort, ivory hoof scraping impatiently at the earth before her as her emotions ride the maelstrom they are so known to course upon.

"Unicorns, too many for counting, one of bronze tall as our bodies combined, his fledgling brother learning to stand," she croons, obliging the foolish one with his pride vast and without bounds, "a Lord of darkness incarnate, ruling among snow and stone, beneath a prismatic sky; children, lovers, black knights and wicked damsels, but mostly a throne, a throne of ice that watches all of this land from its heights."

She sighs, the soft utterance fading into peels of laughter that usher gently upon each other, her expression vapid and empty as the haunting melody that strikes from her pale lips. "It is good to be wanted by Beloved, truly."



Beloved
rust every place that I touch

Crown of Blood does not waver in the face of her aggression, soothing to the chaotic demons that resided within her, a balm to her enflamed ego.

As swiftly as the tantrum takes her, it fades, his interest in her words drawing her into a more poised stance, her grace leaned upon rather than her ferocity as if she had never shown that within her tiny bodice resided more than one might assume from taking in her slight build. She does not notice that the transformation is odd, that to replace the grimace of murder with a sugary grin is wrong; she does not care.

He will love her.

They all do.

The golden one with the delectable rump speaks up, and she rolls her mismatched gaze over towards him, missing the grimace of distaste that crosses the dark stag’s features at the mention of snow and cold. She does not mind discomfort, the chill, for she is white and the mountain hides her in the most obvious of places. She can watch while others think they are alone, she can know what others thought went unseen, and even to a mad woman, such a thought is titillating, enough to lend her crazed mind into a stupor much like drunkenness when she thought of the power she might accrue in secrecy, in shadow.

No one questions the snow?

The odd statement draws her interest, the damsel tilting her face at a grotesque and curious angle to drink in what else falls from the mouth of the flamboyant Spaniard. Why do they not question it? Is it the Lord of Death that watches them with his cold blue eyes or the living statues that adorned their borders? Is it her, is it Beloved, is it the shadow in her heart that frightens them away?

Are they all wielders of wickedness?

Suddenly her eyes broaden, a sharp gasp taken in through pink lips, her tongue lazily tasting the fringes of her mouth.

What death there would be, if it were true. She had seen so many in her short time there already, so many with blades drawn and bodies toned by the steep pathways of the land they called their own. The imagery of the war that is sure to come from such an amassment of forces makes her lips curl upwards in the most twisted of smiles, a ream of twitchy giggles blubbering from her in the delight of the image roused by the promises of the Golden Boy.

Names slip by while she stands still and enraptured by the massacre that plays in her mind, the trees red and dripping and the fields ablaze and littered with corpses, punctured and torn. She can smell the blood, rusty and brilliant, she can almost taste the succulence of that aroma blending with the acrid rise of ash and smoke. She has seen it before. She will see it again.

Crown of Blood pulls her eyes to him with his sigh, though she is still held by her laughter and a visible struggle to silence the sound crosses her face, an odd combination of loathing blended with manic glee; does he say he will come with her, and the golden one?

Her battle is lost. The giggling wins, another row long and joyous songlike as it dangles from her cruel mouth and her head shakes side to side in insane mirth; after a time, she manages words in between the sounds, her pale tail swaying in pleased motions behind her as she arches her neck and bats her long, silvery lashes.

"All good things are born from pain," sweetly croons the demoness, her body gracefully stepping towards the path that leads north, a long glance given the other who lives in the snow to see if he will follow, "come, come. It calls us home."



Beloved
rust every place that I touch