the Rift


[PRIVATE] sooner or later God will cut you down

Rikyn the Puppeteer Posts: 549
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie
#1



The pass flies by us, our hooves like the rumble of drums as we wildly dash up a winding, mountain trail.  Stones tumble down the descent, wildly scrambling down the rocky effacements, and rattling to unsteady halts far below; occasionally, my buck reaches into my thoughts, and pleads with me as to why we’re playing such a precarious game.
 
I don’t listen, and even manage to slam the door shut on him, once or twice, causing him to make a vocal bleat of surprise, each time.  I can’t be bothered with his incessant fear of his own mortality, not today.  I need something more.  Something that will finally push me towards whatever it is I feel like I’m being slowly drug to, against my will.  Maybe running like a deranged lunatic through the mountains isn’t the proper method, but I’m not exactly in a proper state of mind right now, either.
 
Sleep has eluded me for days, each attempt resulting in the brief illusion of, at last, falling into rest, only to be met with swimming images of my brother’s face, and my father lying in a pool of his own blood.  Kirchoff’s eyes open, and then so do mine.
 
So I’m running.  Maybe it’s just away from my own feelings, or the stench of the fear lingering where I’d tried to sleep, but the sensation of my heart about to explode from excursion helps ease the awful gnawing inside of me somehow.  Each time my hooves slip, the edge of the world, the end of life, a real pain, not this phantom one, lurches close, I feel my heart soar.
 
Duir insists it’s not happiness, but a natural fear for my own life, and I shove his thoughts away.  What does he know?  His life is exactly as it’s always been!  Mine is the one unraveling here!
 
The rise of the trail flat lines, becoming an open meadow which is not very large, and ringed with boulders, and sheer rises into more peaks.  Actually growling at the sight of the natural stone walls as I slide to a halt, I angrily gust air from my nostrils with a savage lash of my tail, and pivot about, looking for an escape, other than the path from which I’ve entered.  Trotting towards the opposite end of it, hoping that, maybe, that small copse of trees over there obscures a way forward, towards the escape from this horrible feeling inside, I evade the thought that, maybe, this dead end means I’ll have to actually think about it, after all.

 



Image by Ghostly - Code by Tamme

@Enna

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Force/violence is allowed to be used on Rikyn permitted it does not permanently maim or kill him (PM me!).

Enna Posts: 172
Aurora Basin Time Mender atk: 6 | def: 9.5 | dam: 4
Mare :: Unicorn :: 14.1 :: 5 ( TALLSUN ) HP: 61 | Buff: NOVICE
Mehr :: Arctic Wolf :: None kels
#2
caught in a dream i can feel but i can't leave
It comes suddenly on a breath of wind through the little meadow nestled atop mountains that you had discovered while searching for flowers and roots, comes different from the sharpness of the alpine smell, pulls your attention from your meager collections. The sound of pounding steps follows quickly after, and you press yourself closer to the trunk of the nearest tree, watching as a dark man begins to poke above the slope of the trail with a deer in tow.

You watch as he comes to a stop, listen to the frustration of his breaths as he spins and is greeted with the impassable peaks of the cliffs. The (assumed) remoteness of this place had drawn you to it,  lended you a feeling of safety, of solitude, but now as your eyes follow his, your heart thrums uncomfortably within your chest, and only now do you realize that there is only one route of escape. He turns then, towards your trees and his anger washes through you, over you, your body trembling weakly against it as now your entire chest throbs with a twisting pain.

It had been the same when you had been cornered by an angry man with intentions black as sin, and you feel it as the warmth trickles from your blood, the instinct to run even with nowhere to go pressing against the back of your skull,  through to the marrow of your bones. It is the shifting of light or perhaps a pinprick of clarity within your rising fear then that breathes vague familiarity into his features, releases you from the grips of panic.

Your sense of relief blurs the thoughts of danger into something altogether different, though just as potent, just as volitile as it punctures through memory.

Rikyn.

He had left, shed the winter like a skin and sank into wilderness. It had never bothered you until the boy with ocean eyes, a heart filled with promises of better times, with memories of the friends he had lost and those who have abandoned him mentioned black and gold and you remembered his face and the way he smiled when he had looked at you, the insipid child that had practically turned green when she had seen it too. His scarcity had hardly been noticed until you knew that he had left him, too. It had angered you to learn that he could just leave, without reason as far as you understood when Erebos still cherished the friendship shared between them, because you hurt for his hurt, buried beneath all those smiles and wild ways.

But now that you still watch him from your place among the pine, your lips pressed thin, you find that there is no room for it. No room for the protective shield you wear, for the bitterness you have clutched to because you knew Erebos wouldn't, and someone should. His heaving form only begs the questions why—why he had left him, left the Basin and hadn't come back, if he had ever bothered to pull Erebos from the memories he had left him in.

It has never been your place, never your relationship to fix or mediate, and so you sigh quietly, leaving your questions at that as you pull from the trees, the thought of him not recognizing you not even crossing your mind when the line of your mouth twists into something more playful, more obliging to your hope of curiosity, an inkling of interest, a thought of wickedness that you have no doubt that he at least once possessed in the days he grew so close with your lionheart.

"I heard something about you."

Heard a glimpse of a childhood you know so little about despite your own bonds with the boy who had mentioned him, striking a chord of distant familiarity among a story of sadness and destruction, of things that he cherished still that seemed to have forgotten him and everything that used to be.


image credits


had something different in mind but MEH.
pls forgive if it's jumpy or anything,  its 430 am and i am DONE. XD
@Rikyn


please tag enna in every post
violence permitted barring permanent injury / death

Rikyn the Puppeteer Posts: 549
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie
#3


“I heard something about you,” someone says to me, and I stop charging to the other side of this trap to take notice of her. The voice should be familiar, but all I can hear is the sound of my own blood whirling through me, and the hard beats of my heart, so instead of saying anything, at first, I snort, the way one does when they find something humorless and without meaning.

Slowly, my eyes move to her. Enna, Erebos’ raincloud, fills my eyes with her prettiness. The same sort of weird sensations arise as they always do when looking at pretty girls, even if she is his…side thing? Girlfriend? Wife? Probably one of the latter choices, considering the way Deimos has morosely drug himself on through life without Huyana, never once seeming to even look at another woman as more than an asset to his herd. Erebos is probably all loyal and shit like that too, but, regardless. Whatever she is to him, she’s his, right?

And just what had she heard about me? That I was once important, but was now a nobody, cursed by the God of Time to walk invisible among those who had once seen me? That I served the Old Ways, but that those paths were becoming ensnared, and lost, the longer I walked out here, alone? That I had abandoned my people in search of purpose, and found nothing?

Duir, standing alongside me, gently brushes my shoulder with his nose, occasionally glancing at Enna with beseeching, verdant eyes flecked with gold. He won't hurt you, he wishes he could tell her, he just hurts too much himself.

"Yeah?" I coldly say, no smiles, this time, the bright gleam of my golden eyes shrouded by the raging shadow that wails inside me right now. Sure, my lips twitch, in an attempt to seem nonthreatening, but it’s obviously what it is: a mask, worn for courtesies sake, and I’m certainly not about to divulge anything I don’t have to about what lies beneath. She’d probably already seen enough to surmise I was in a shit mood, anyway, if she’d been in this mountain ring when I’d arrived. "Nothing good, I’d guess."





Image by Ghostly - Code by Tamme

@Enna

Wishlist - Plots

Force/violence is allowed to be used on Rikyn permitted it does not permanently maim or kill him (PM me!).

Enna Posts: 172
Aurora Basin Time Mender atk: 6 | def: 9.5 | dam: 4
Mare :: Unicorn :: 14.1 :: 5 ( TALLSUN ) HP: 61 | Buff: NOVICE
Mehr :: Arctic Wolf :: None kels
#4
caught in a dream i can feel but i can't leave

He snorts as he comes to a stop and you nearly recoil from him, heat rising in your chest in annoyance of his assumed dismissal. It is only as he looks to you, some flicker of recognition beneath the emptiness (tiredness?) written along his face, that you shove your own anger away. His is perverse in the air as it lingers, dark and poignant as it swarms within him. If it had been something you could have ignored before, it is not now, your stomach churning with the familiar desire to run despite having swallowed it moments before. Instead, your mismatched eyes flutter over the deer that pulls from you the memory of Ashamin (another ghost, another someone who had left and abandoned when things grew quiet and still, as if it were nothing) and the strange way his little creature had climbed out of a shell of all things and into the world; of Haldir and his once wolf-king. “Who is this?”

You had always been fond of the little stags, enamored with the canines and the owls, the ravens of others. It is him, the calmness on his face, that keeps you there, quelling the uncertainty that has your heart beating a little faster, your muscles tense beneath the russet of your skin, until the man speaks. Only ‘yeah?’, the coldness of his face echoing along yours as your eyes drag back to him. ‘Nothing good, I’d guess.

“Why would you assume that?” But as soon as you ask, you know, and despite the storm raging in his heart, you laugh, as if it weren’t a serious question in the first place. For all that you don’t know about him, you assume that it would be like asking the sky why it rains, the seasons why they exist the way they do—because it just is.

“Erebos only told me that the two of you grew up together, about a girl named Aithniel and …” you pause abruptly, ears tilting backwards as you sheepishly glance away. You remember what it was to talk about her for  Erebos, about the man with a gold and a white dragon who had crushed the life from their friend; remember how it made him nearly tremble with rage, how he had unraveled at the seams when he had found you in that cave, drowning in your own blood. You remember the anger, his cravings for revenge that had followed then, the chasm that it had created between the two of you just once more, and all the ways your heart still aches from it.  

Finally you look back to him, a soft smile curling just the ends of your lips, trying to apologize without saying a word, afraid of pulling from him the same rage, the same hurt in case he clutches at the memory of her and all it brings as Erebos has all this time, along with the things haunting him now. You nearly mention that, too, unable to ignore the chill emanating from him, one that had not been there the only time you had met him, wanting to help, to console, to mend, but you think better of it, gathering that he would not have sought solitude if talking is how he intended to help himself. Perhaps distraction would work better for the both of you right now. “What was it like,” (before she had died and he convinced himself of a means to an end, that justice is no more than revenge) “to know him back then?”


image credits


WHAT'S THIS? I FINALLY POSTED? :'DDD
@Rikyn


please tag enna in every post
violence permitted barring permanent injury / death

Rikyn the Puppeteer Posts: 549
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie
#5


"Duir," I answer, and he looks at the mare, his deep, emerald eyes almost glittering with the smile he lets alight on his face, to counter the scowl across my own. His tail flutters behind him in a sweeping motion, his ears lifted, and crown proud, as it always is. A simple image of peace, alongside the coiling visage of chaos unfurled.

Enna asks, at first, why I would assume she’d heard bad things of me. My head lifts, my ears fall even further backwards, and my nostrils curve wickedly as I suck in a breath of air, unwilling to tell someone like her anything of what I have done, or who I am. She almost glows with a halo of light, her heart is so pure; those sort, the kind whose lives have not fallen into dust, spread to the wind, don’t know the dark, and they won’t look into it, either.

They just walk away.

Even when she laughs I don’t feel the tension ease away, her voice trailing ahead, as if she hadn’t questioned a thing, as if she accepts me. It’s a fair enough game, I think, from behind the mask of Calor, of Dristan, or the Boy King wandering wild and free through the halls of winter, only who he wanted to be at that point in time.

But… that stone. It is cast by the moon-maned raincloud and strikes a line clean through the walls behind which I hide, and it seems like she knows just what the word is. Her fretful tilt of ear and crown, as she looks away, makes me wonder why it is everyone goes around, poking their horns into fetid wounds, when its quite plainly the wrong thing to do.

"She has her own path now," I refuse to say her name, wary of the repercussions, feeling my chest tighten with anger and regret and where has that path lead? despite my will to banish it to the fringes of my thoughts. That gold rimmed flake of ash dances through my dreams often enough, without Enna’s help, and there is a brittle, harsh coldness to the single statement I unfurl in mention of her that clearly states I will not talk of my sister anymore.

If she accepts it, who gives a shit, but she continues ahead anyway, this next question more pleasant to think about, even though it brings back other things, too. I think of Adelric, and how he’d come to the Basin in search of friends, and how we had both somehow wound up alone. I think of his sister, and of Arah’s twins, and I think of my mother, standing next to my father, as he worked on the Sentinels, and my blade-brother and I played nearby.

It hurts, as warm as it is here, and I almost don’t answer, simply walking away, to leave her with her questions, as the world so often left me. Yet, I think of Erebos, and I think of how this girl trails after him, and makes him look back sometimes, with a smile, rather than regret.

"He was as all children are before Huyana vanished; whole, innocent, and perfect for it. After she walked into that endless night? Much as he is now," I tell her, because it’s true; he’s always been a bit too somber, and always honorable and brave as any good knight, and he has always been my friend, "he used to laugh more, before what became of Arwen, and before Adelric never came home. Hell, before everyone left..."

The dark anger roars to life inside my chest, and condemns me. I shove it aside, and drown it out in a pool of pity and excuses. I will not be blamed for following my mother, who was the one who truly abandoned Helovia, after all. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. It was hers.

"What’s different now is not so much Erebos," I add, "but Helovia."




Image by Ghostly - Code by Tamme

@Enna

Wishlist - Plots

Force/violence is allowed to be used on Rikyn permitted it does not permanently maim or kill him (PM me!).


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