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