The night beckons, cold, the heavens blank of the silver light of the Moon, the white world, crisp, clean, caught in the shimmering shadow of the night.
 
Appearing from the shadows the glacial caverns, sentinels beneath the diamond-encrusted, ebony sky, is a wraith, her diminutive body dancing on graceful limbs that sway with a slow, cryptic cadence.  Gaunt, gaunt as death would be beneath the heavy, dark draping of his cloaks, her bones are outlined through the perfect, snowy velvet of her pelt.
 
Even things like she cannot thrive on the darkness alone, she has discovered.  Her heart writhes with pain to leave the throne of Beloved alone, but her belly gnaws with equal drive to torment her, pressing her further, further into the snow, her hooves devastating the perfect blanket with wrathful strikes.  No laughter bubbles from her lips, no ghostly song or rhythmic chanting; only snarls, savage, bestial, the clicking gnash of her teeth as she seizes the very air.  The Queen of Nothing is more of a wolf than woman, her displeasure at having been forced to unearth herself boundless, but her path…
 
It is direct.
 
She does not tarry, does not waste the flawless shadow of the world in this evening hour (how she loathes the brightness of snow in the light, and the very light itself), slipping across the landscape with her rage in tow, seeking the tall, behemoth peaks of the northern men, and their hidden vale.
 
The Dark One, the Reaper (such a title, enticing, curious), had let her in once, beneath the watching eyes of the metal titans, allowed her to traipse the shores of the still, haunting lake, to wander the dark recesses of the caverns that riddled the mountains like veins.  He will let her in again, she thinks, a snarl suddenly lilting into a babbling giggle, quickly devoured again by the disgust still pressed tight within her breast.  She had not done him any ill, after all…
 
Yet, when she slips through the secret passage, ghostly, her temper quieted for the sake of diplomacy, a cage she shudders to put herself in, that shudder becoming full fledged horror, as the path yawns into the valley, and she sees the titans.
 
Rotted, the bronze is maimed by rust, patina, filth.  Quavering, nervous, her chattering giggle is a whisper, a dark, wet sound, diminutive ears falling back, bi-chromatic gaze narrowing contemptuously upon such waste.  Who has slain the magnanimous beasts?  Who has such might within the many realms of this Helovia (a kingdom to be burned, to be lost, torn apart)?  Turning her twitching muzzle in the direction of the heart of the realm, she inhales their scent, their smells; the golden bitch is gone, her perfume vanished entirely, but the Dark One remains, and Beloved's wild, peculiar grin twitches about the corners of her pale mouth.
 
Doubt still marks her features, beneath the superficial pleasure.  The result is a hauntingly strange expression, an endless stare of twisted bemusement looking out into the Spark’s hide-away for the arrival of the Dark One, or one of his minions.

 
 [ OOC: Anyone is welcome! ]
Beloved
rust every place that I touch

The waiting is not long, in the Valley of Time.

Across the bleak veneer of shadow encompassing the verdant greens, pristine ivories, and proud steely grey of the world beyond, comes another. Her gaze tilts curiously towards his arrival, the stench of war staining the air, the properly acrid, salty layer of sweat denied to her with each deep inhalation, though the ruddy wine stains each breath prominently. Her ears twitch nervously, her lips pulling away to reveal straight, white teeth, her nervous laughter a haunting chatter as she nervously dances in place.

Blood, blood on the wind. Where does the blood wind come from? She has seen the world in ruin, flames, swallowing, gnawing, with vibrant hunger, and entire kingdoms were scattered as ashes, maimed as a shredded corpse. She had never been among the ruin, abreast it, a Queen of Nothing, of Night, of Endings, and this one would not take her, either.

Closer though, closer still, the sentient obsidian one crawls across the snowy vale, until she sees his pale eyes shine like moons from the pitch of his pelt. Beneath him, the trail of his passing is left, dark dollops staining his trek across the world, descended from, what Beloved sees, his skin, a network of scars, flaws, cryptic brands of failure. She wears no such things, forgetting her half starved state, remembering only the warmth of her victories washing down her breast. He is not dead, dying. He is merely broken, marked, defiled by those who called him foe, suspended by some heathenish and pretty magic, forever in his moments of failure.

She draws in a succulent hiss of winter air, that air rattling into the laughter of greeting from one such as she. Her bi-chromatic gaze narrows, pins, onto the black one who approaches. Not the Reaper, but one of his soldiers, she surmises, her pale lips curling into a smile, her crown tilting, tilting further still, until it seem unhinged, her black eye nearest, roving, curious.

"Mmmm," she sings in acknowledgement, her strange stare never severed from the soldier, though her nearest ear tilts, bends as if it can see the fetid metal beings he speaks of. Gone, gone is the one who smelled greatly of his own musk and mountain dirt, overhung by the brittle, sharp smell of his metals, and the spark that burned within, who seemed to endlessly toil at the hooves of the titans, as if he were a servant to the behemoths of bronze. Where did he go? Did they…

Kill him?

Her lips curve into a full smile, one that times itself with the flattery she pays little heed, no mind, because she knows, she knows. He needn’t tell her of her grace, her divinity, her right to what-so-ever she pleases, but the purr which rises from her chest, as she rights the wrong angle of her head, does not suggest he must stop, either. Roiling, the sensuous sound rises into a lilting giggle, a dancing song of sound, which abruptly becomes words, before swimming in her laughter again.

"Beloved does not know you," croons the maiden of midnight, an affirmation, "but she knows this place."

Her whole body leans, tilts, precariously angled from her ankles to her pale horn, to look about the bloody frame of the massacred stag. Suddenly righting herself, her gaze latches back onto the dark one’s moony orbs, her tittering laughter stilled.

"The Reaper is here, yes?" she questions, softly demands, her voice dropping into a reverie’s droning, her twisted cherub’s voice stuttering with bemused, bounding giggles, "Beloved will stay still, if the Reaper does too. He..."

Her voice is a whisper now, a staggered hush perforated with her twisted little bleats of laughter. Her curved lips angle again on that peculiarly tilted crown, her silvery eye flashes in the overhanging shadow, its pupil gone, devoured by the molten metal pool in which it is suspended, with her desire.

"He kills with a touch."

[ OOC: I'm rusty too. <3 Tho art forgiven if you forgive meeeee aha. ]




Beloved
rust every place that I touch