Post by Joliette Thorne on Aug 24, 2008 10:43:16 GMT -5
In a jungle of the senses
Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper
Love has no meaning, not where we come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully, correctly wrong
-- lyrics, "Nemesis" by Shriekback
Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper
Love has no meaning, not where we come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully, correctly wrong
-- lyrics, "Nemesis" by Shriekback
Tenebrae's town wasn’t pretty anymore.
Same old Vailkrin it ever was, blood-spattered and grim like the dirt itself demanded to be fed more than rain, like it inhaled hate and fear and breathed it all out again to stain the streets with evening fog and death. She’d been a fool to think she could change it just by laying clean new stone down over the ancient, sullied soil.
In the midst of a green field dotted with flowers, a young child in a white dress and black ringlets raises her hand and waves. All is in slow motion so the white speck in the background won't be noticed right away, but as it dithers closer it is clear that it is a white butterfly. The vision speeds up, and the insect looms of a sudden to fill Caedan’s field of vision entirely. It all ends, just as abruptly.
The thought passed like fog, softer and more transparent the closer one came to it until it was only a damp haze through which to see the world for a time.
Nothing more.
Tenebrae entertained no dismay at the turn of events that had led to this smirching of her new-lain streets, nor at the images that swam like a slow-motion cellose slideshow through her mind as she walked. Or rather, wandered; a lost child upon whom has dawned the first inkling that it may be lost.
Neither would she acknowledge the war that waged inside of her, that occasionally bent her spine at wrong and strange angles, made her stagger or double over, threw her down to stare skyward while something ravaged her flesh until the ravager was, in turn and by something else, ravaged. Even with agony ripping rampant paths through her organs, nerves, throat, eyes, through every part of her, the necromancer’s features maintained an expression as serene as a graveyard cherub when her body allowed it.
Caedan was somewhere far away, somewhere that the terrified thoughts and fears of her clanmates could not reach with such vivid clarity, where all she heard was muffled experiences, dull pain, an overwhelming desire for things to be returned to the way they used to be. It flashed across her mind like faded sepia, but the ocean in front of her was brilliant and blue and thriving with pure, unadulterated life. She didn't know what drove her to seek the coves of Cenril, to remove herself so far away from those that might have need to call upon her. Perhaps it was a nefarious suggestion, or a self-motivated whim. Wile and lantern-green eyes filled her vision, but he was more easily dismissed from her mind than others. But suddenly, something is there, something that bears the mark of her name, a whisp of a communication from a mind she knew, but couldn't fathom. She grasped at the tremulous thread, the vision weaving into her thoughts seamlessly, as if she had been the one to conjure it. Eyes widened and jaw fell slack. She was needed, and she was so far away. So she sat down, and stared blankly off into the ocean, resigned to do nothing apparently, though her lips were pressed in a thin line of utter and complete concentration.
Other than the ripples of pain and occasional warping of her flesh, her eyes too revealed the battle ongoing within; one was a flawless ebon pool, the other a perfect mirror-sheen of silver, though from time to time one would hold more the shade of the other, or silver would reign and then give way to black. In the midst of it all…
“Joliette!”
They were calling her, but she’d run into the fields, where the flowers grew wild and the grass long and sweet.
“We have to leave at noon. No time for your foolishness, girl!”
There were cornflowers, her favourites, more blue than even the sky, or her father’s eyes. Poppies, scarlet heads bobbing in the breeze, and endless, endless flax. The field embraced her like a loving aunt, soft-armed and whispering endearments, warm with morning sun.
She was dressed in white, ruffles and lace that itched --inside her flesh-- her arms and throat. The curls Mother had made of hair naturally lank as the trap-pony’s tail by wrapping it tight in rag strips felt both strange and familiar when she shook her head and set them bouncing like soft, dark springs against her nape and cheeks.
“..this minute, young lady! If that dress has a single speck of…”
“I don’t want to,” she whispered to a daisy. “I don’t like it.” Joliette would never dare speak this aloud. She had a rare gift, they said, was blessed as one touched by the hand of a god. She blushed at her own ingratitude and picked a grass-stem to place between her lips, savouring its green sourness.
“I’m afraid you must.”
Joli sat up, her eyes wide and searching the grass for the one who’d spoken so near and low. “Hello?"
“You must go, and do your duty like a good girl. They need you.”
“Who are you?” She stood up in a waving green sea flecked with reds, blues and yellows, seeking the source of that kindly voice. But no-one stood in the field but herself. A large hare, startled at her sudden rise, scampered off toward the woods.
“Who am I?” The voice sounded almost amused. “Joliette... think of me as your Fate.”
….memories crashed around her, and her mind was full of white, white plumes, white like an ocean’s swell churned to spume and spray on rocks. There were cornflowers, too… blood, and ugly piles of meat... and poppies, spattering a field… blood of the innocents, blood of the children… and
a brilliant light
that cracked through her eyes
as if they’d only ever been opaque shells until
…now.
The silver liquid released a pocket of trapped gas, the bubble bursting to the surface with a satisfied plop. It was nothing different, out of the ordinary -- until it began to relase more .... until it seemed like the fountain was boiling. Surely this was malevolence of the most devious sort. But just at the peak of violence, when silver began to slosh over the sides of the fountain and taint the cobblestone below, it abrupty fell calm, not a wave, not a ripple. The moon was full, silvery tendrils curling about dark alleys and playing along the sides of buildings. And then ...
The fountain glittered, not with refracted light but the shifting wings of thousands of ivory butterflies.
“How pretty!” Little sparkles flew as she twirled, like the time she’d found Father’s tin of gold flecks and strewn it all around the barn, for fairy dust. Only this was silver, or white, or both -- and hopefully wouldn’t earn her a spanking.
“Pretties, for the pretty. Joliette, things will not always be so. Today the sun is high and the flowers nod their heads when you pass. You have stars on the ends of your fingers, and in one hour a very sad old man will find peace because you lifted his burdens from him and set him free. Remember this day, for you will have need…”
The fountain was… the light was… all covered in dead children… all around her…. and sundered animals… and her face shone with it, and her hands….
“Thankyou,” she lisped, to the mysterious and soothing voice of her “Fate”. And then Joliette scampered off like a good girl to do her duty, the daisy tucked behind her ear.
An hour later she would lay it on the chest of a corpse when she bent into the coffin to kiss his sins away and whisper, after, in his cold, blue ear:
"No, it’s alright. You keep it.”
The fountain glittered, not with refracted light but the shifting wings of thousands of ivory butterflies.
Black, white… grey.
Something was desperately trying to make sense.
It was as if she had a thousand eyes, and in each of those eyes a hundred windows to the world. But not the world where water rolled across sand, and sea-grey stared back into slate-grey while the psychic gazed to that distant ocean. What would be most conspicuous to Caedan, in the hurly burly blur of images, was the utter lack of the child she saw moments prior, or anyone resembling the adult she'd become. Not merely an absence-- a -lack- so profound as to draw attention to itself. It was a puzzle, indeed. The kaleidoscope of eyes watched, and waited.
Wile drew on with the dogs of hell at his heels, and so literally they came. A dozen of the wretched monsters paced themselves to the point of breaking in an effort to follow, even though his tread could not have been more patient. Closest to him, one of the horrid things stumbled ferociously on a pair of shattered cobbles. Paper-thin flesh stretched dangerously over twig-like bones, paling as it reached the point of tearing, only to settle as the animal regained itself. A low and mournful cry would echo from one, then another. A chorus of misery and agony that was drawn from them as the shambling horde picked its way toward the Fountain.
“Corruption is the most slow and sweet of evils.” His voice came not from those jester’s lips, but from within the bowels of Tenebrae’s mind. She’d feel the crawling, worm-like piece of him swell beneath her flesh and behind her eyes as he neared. It’s excitement was palpable, and as a conduit it could never have been stronger. “She fought hard, Darkness. It was not her fault. What made you claim it from her?”
It was a simple smile she offered, as a child might give a kind stranger, when that mocking voice came ratcheting through her mind. She did not quail before his fouled and staggering dogs, even when they bayed through rotting throats to give off sounds like a hundred murders of crows panicking at once. Indeed, they were difficult to see, swarmed with butterflies of white as they were, though whether those existed anywhere but in her mind she didn't know, and did not ponder. The wriggle and thrust of the Trick's distortionate matter writhed within her, but she had endured .. not worse, but she -had- endured... and there was a kind light that shimmered over all she saw, and the dog's flesh bloomed with sores as red as poppies.
Caedan 's brow furrowed into a twin dip. An absence where there should be a presence, and a great presence, at that. Her eyes squeezed closed just a bit tighter, and a seabreeze blew a tousled lock of auburn across her forehead. In Vailkrin, just before the fountain that oozed a sickening silver, a strand of scarlet would crest over monochromatic eyes, as if stirred by the same breeze. Yet, there were a thousand butterflies suddenly streaming from the fountain, and whisking themselves around the immediate periphery as if to cleanse it -- of course, such deafening silent commotion stirred a bit of a frenzy. A whirlwind of butterflies descended upon the hounds bred from the trick, other lepidoptera constricting and forming a writhing mass of white, like a sudden blizzard, just behind Tenebrae, where they too, waited. Caedan watched. She went deeper, crawling along the tentative contact she had established. The link was there. There was something on the opposite side; she couldn't quite make it out.[/color]
"I wanted to save her." The eyes that met his flickered obsidian, as though inner lids of it had closed across silver, now and then green. "But then.. " She felt the chasm yawn again, and she was Joli, in a field, and had no other words to describe it. "I got hungry."
There could have been no other answer, and in this alone the Herald seemed assured. It was not expectation that made it settle so easily with him, for she had surprised him. If there was a word it was fate, a cruel twist of irony’s lauded bitch that seemed utterly and divinely perfect for what he had stretched out for the Lady to suffer. He spoke now with his own lips, letting that silvered fragment buried within her to arc a quickened path toward her mind. There, slick as oil and cold as ice, it would run across the very surface of her thoughts and settle upon them. It was a cold and evil thing, the way he could burrow within her. Pulling the images she was feeding herself, the mantra that afforded her that mask of calm, would take time. But, inevitably, he would succeed. “Of course, Darkness. To that, of all things, I can understand. Have you a question for me?”
The butterflies gather and bunch, like a sentient white cloud, acting and re-acting unto itself as the dance continued. The kaleidoscope burst forward, consuming the fountain again, whispering against it, circling the taunter of the Darkness. They fluttered against him like snowflakes, a frigid cold, something inpenetrable despite their delicacy. They surround him, circling appendages, mapping each ridge and plane of the body he's assumed; when finished there, they return to Tenebrae, and complete the same transcription, a veritable blueprint in lepidoptery.
The woman shook her head, but it was the child who reached for the pocket of her cloak. "Well.. a little one. But I have these..." She drew out that perfectly painted deck of cards, carefully tied round with a soft leather strip to keep them from scattering. ".. you left them behind."
Swell, push, the silver bludgeon rose and crushed, swam and strained against her thoughts, a recurrent and caustic tide she bore as the sand bears the sundry tempers of the sea. Somewhere, there was a part of her that knew it, but it was silent now.Joli tugged the binding, let it fall free to the black stone below, and her fingers splayed the cards in an illuminated fan. A single one was plucked, and hidden behind her back. "Now you pick one."
Some awful thought would ripple across the Lady’s mind, an acknowledgement of desire. The game she had afoot was a tempting one, even to the creature before her. In these nearly human moments it was the most awful, subject to whim and fancy and all the great and terrible things to which humanity could be born. Against her fingers, so perfectly shaped and spread, were the keepers of the warrant served upon her. A hand reached to steal one of those beautiful and terrible things, but the fingers melded upon contact. The mercurial strands began to run a swift course over Tenebrae’s ivory flesh, crawling and sliding toward the arm of her linens and beyond. “I’ve something for you, Darkness.” It was a thought or emotion stirred within her, played upon the chords of her mind by that evil sliver buried there. And as the cold of him crept along her arm and onward to her throat she would feel that monstrosity on her brain howl and tremble, stitching at every nerve and synapse in her body in an effort to set her howling in agony and fear. For it was straining toward its master, ripping at her, and seemed likely to tear her from within on its effort to reunite with the Herald.
The dance between the Trick and the Darkness is a deadly one, but not without a certain savage passion and lissom grace. Joliette, in her field, is humming a soft elven tune she will not learn for almost a decade yet. In an underground tomb, more than a century later, a woman covered in a mass of bites and other wounds curls foetally, and tells herself she is nothing, no-one, not there while agony infests her entirety like maggots, feasting on her living... no, her body is not living, exactly, but her flesh still has -feeling- and it’s clear she cannot bear much more. The lines are blurring, and haste is of the essence.
A little girl sets a daisy on a dead man's chest. "No, it's alright. You keep it."
"And I, for you." She was beatific, in that moment when the strands of his matter wended across her skin, rivulets that climbed as strangling parasitic plants flourishing on the boughs of a young tree. The mass in her brain constricted, and for a moment she buckled at the knees, though she felt nothing of its pain or horror. The arm bent behind her back was brought forth --as if she had a choice, when his strings drew it toward him, though she did not struggle against it-- to reveal the single card she’d drawn from the pack still clutched in her opposite hand. The surface of it gleamed dully in the dim shine from above, the card as wholly silver as the moon itself. "You forgot this, too." And the corners of a rosebud mouth tilted upward and then spread wide when she opened it to loll her coral-hued tongue. On that rested a tiny thing, bright as a new-minted coin and winged, which fluttered from its haven toward the monstrosity, though it seemed to harden mid-air, falling to the paving with a tinny 'clink'.
Tenebrae closed her mouth again then, and sighed a gentle breath while her eyes shifted shades of white through grey and black, monochromatic kaleidoscopes. And when she opened her lips again it was wider than a scream, to vomit forth a stream of matter through which blended all those shades in a rampant twist and writhe that seemed to diminish the threads that bound her to the Trick, even as they were given back to him. The tendrils wound about his form, not so much an attack as a caress, half-smothering limbs and features like sweet potato vines upon a frame.
Her voice was a little hoarse, when she uttered at last, "Now..." If there was a strain on the fabric of her being, this was the time it would begin to show. But her mind was once more filled with cornflowers and light and tall grass, and a gentle, kindly voice that sounded much like the one she used now:
"Show me yours."
Caedan was managing to watch each and every one of these stories unfold. There were windows all around, snippets of past events, lives lived long ago, sometimes forgotten. The butterflies were what she kept the closest eye on, each image painted into the window in the most pristine of whites, while black and grey interlaced and clashed for dominance. But it was undeniable the white dwarfed the rest. Caedan watched the white very carefully. There. There is what she had needed, a clue, a piece of a puzzle, the end of a riddle.
Another window flashed a magician's grand finale, but it wasn't paid any heed. The psychic, sat cold and alone on the shores of Cenril traced something in the sand with her finger, and murmured a triumphant, exhausted, "Yes." Suddenly, the butterflies were in a flurry, enough remaining around to cloud vision and distort reality. The segment of flutters descended behind the Trick, and formed a writhing carbon-copy of what Caedan had drawn on the beach, what the butterflies had seen on Wile's arm. They circled and traced the outline in the air behind him, in front of Tenebrae. As she spat that great silver evil from her, Caedan seized the opportunity, and let a piece of her go with it, sucked into his body, his mind.
On the beach, each hand curled around a shard which dug into her palms and drew drops of blood so fierce was her grasp. The windows were kept in steady surveillance, the girl, the girl-no-longer, the butterflies, and finally, the Trick's own mind.
The Thing that had once been a handsome young man named Brendan Strong had realized that this was the moment to which it had been working toward. It was the culmination, a terrible collision, between he and the sleek-framed vampriss before him.
It recognized desperation and the fading spark of hope that drove her, dancing in her kaleidoscope eyes with the furious beats of color and darkness. She was making her last gasp. It may well have been a cry of mercy, a helpless plea for the horrors to end. It was the wretching of defeat and despair, and it stunk of victory to the Herald. It was oh so sweet.
As the great tendrils of black and silver detonated from Tenebrae’s cherry lips, the soft tiers blushed in raw and ferocious calm of her efforts, it had to fight a tremble of what may amount to lust. It lacked the desire for sex or comfort, and was it incapable of love. But the need to consume, to devour, to lay claim to something beautiful and make it some part of its own was something utterly masculine.
In this small way it was still that boy, endowed with the most base and faint of his instincts and desires. A perversion he remained, but there would serve no greater cautionary tale to the evils inherited in mankind. It relished in this simple and disturbing truth, having been born aware of it and the sentience it gave him from the very start.
Foolish slut, his thoughts screamed triumphantly. I’ll show you - everything -.
She was bare and spent before him, empty of his evils and the strength that purging him would claim from her. This would be no pauper’s penance, for his taint was the most deep and dark of things. It seeped into every crack within her heart and wound within every memory, promising that even in the absence of that parasitic piece of himself her dreams would on occasion be haunted by his face. And when she expelled him? Well, he’d rip at the very seams of her soul and take great parts of her in return. Great weeping, sobbing, parts of her that she would never reclaim.
The shifting tendrils of ebon and mercury coiled about him, constricting under her efforts as if to bind him.. The slivered, liquid cords that had strained so hard to rejoin him seemed to harden, as if to mimic wire, and bristled with thorns and malcontent.
Here, at the head of all things, he was going to claim what remained of Tenebrae’s life. She would be the first before the others, though certainly they would fall soon after. There was nothing more to be claimed of this game, and she’d brought it to a sudden and impatient end. He could marvel at the inevitability, and how correct he’d been when he’d perceived that helpless impatience and girlish weakness within her.
She had emptied herself in a breath, forced what Darkness she could suffer to lose from the depths of her soul and onto his flesh in a futile means to bind him. He devoured it with a parting of his own thin lips, letting the great and silvered strands that had once invaded the very crevices of her mind crawl across his jawbones and pour themselves along his tongue. He swallowed them up, reclaiming that fragment of himself, tasting the victory over Deilakrion as he did so and tearing of his essence from her when Tenebrae decided that finally she could watch her companion suffer no more.
It was half as sweet as this one would be.
And then he drew harder, and the tendrils of ebon that haplessly clung to him were pulled away. They fought weakly for their master’s deed, set to fulfil what had been charged to them. But Tenebrae held no real power here, not over him. He knew it, and that smile grew, even as the last of her efforts slid over his horrible teeth and disappeared within him.
“You’ll be the first of my meals.” He revealed, the haunting flicker of those lantern-green eyes blazing. The excitement of it had gripped him, locked itself within him and now thrashed mercilessly through his features. They were suddenly and shockingly predatory, and he stalked the distance between them in a series of short, purposeful strides. “I am but young to this world, born of a thing far older than we both and yet here I am, conquering the most sweet of treats. You will help me rush in an age of horrors the likes of which this realm has never seen, to which my creator could not find or imagine. Show you? My girl, I will let you live the very thing that I have become. I will take you as I was taken, I will foul you as I was fouled. And then I will devour every last breath of you until your name is lost, your purpose lost, and your very existence will live for me. And then, when you are truly corrupted and freed for it, I will set you loose on those you love to watch you crush them as I have crushed you.”
All these words pre-empted a great gathering of the pool’s mercurial waters, a great drawing that began before her very eyes. It was a quick-silver storm that twisted through the air in a tight spiral before arcing to his lips and beyond, even as he extended those great hands and claimed Tenebrae’s face in cold, metallic palms.
The kiss was a searing mockery of Tenebrae’s “gift”, a sordid perversion of something brilliant and terrible in the mortal world. All at once the color would drain from her, the peace she’s fought to maintain ripped away by blinding panic as it feasted on what it could savor. Around them the fountain’s mercurial waters twisted in a cyclone, sloshing malevolently through the air before streaking in toward the Herald’s mouth. The union was a terrifying flood that rushed past his lips, his silvered essence and the writhing ebon of Tenebrae’s own now weaving together. He drank of it. The very life of her draining away, each tiny fragment of what and who she was being slurped away by the creature whose mouth was fixed so ferociously upon her own.
A terrible moment built close, and still she waited, and the Thing was so very sure of victory.
And then Tenebrae released her hidden companion, and the Trick’s eyes shot wide.
It happened terribly fast, so awfully fast that even had it been cautious it most likely could not have avoided it. The girl had tricked him, and worse, she had done so at the most terrible of times. The images of the butterflies was a fleeting one, for in the eyes of The Herald he saw their essence and their properties and past that seemingly harmless shape. It was their meaning that horrified him. The blinding white gathered on his lips and in his throat like quickly-drying concrete, a gullet-full of the brilliance finding its way inside him before he could tear himself from the female and shatter the connection. He sent himself tumbling onto his back, wide-eyed, as the white-winged apparitions that he’d denied danced over his head before dissolving away.
It had been vain and arrogant, but the greatest of mistakes came in its inexperience. The desire for its first conquest had over-ridden its sense of danger and it had allowed itself to be struck a blow more serious than it could have surmised. What it –did- know was that the horrible things were bonding to parts of it and trembling. No. They were –vibrating-. It was not a quake of fear, but rather the dull throb of magic set to work. And, despite the rapid searching of his mind, the Herald could not imagine how to be rid of them.
And then the pain started.
It began in flashes that lengthened and stretched, and was soon a steadily piercing assault upon the Thing’s very core. The sheer intensity of it all brought him back to that day when the mercury-water had penetrated the helpless boy’s ears and begun its terrible work. It was a bonding. It was an invasion. And it was awful.
The Trick had not been alive, not now or ever. It had merely been. But it could not have imagined that gaining life would ever come this way. He lay shrieking a horrible sound into the air as his body turned, losing its elusive quality and hardening with the beginnings of manhood. And no longer was it it, but now he. A masculine thing that sucked in breath not out of shock or fear, but because life demanded it to do so. He thrashed, his body contorting in protest as the psychic bore herself down within him and sought to finish this task. The exhaustion she would suffer he could not know, but some small part of him hoped she died doing this thing. That her efforts were one of sacrifice. There was a terrible rage building in him, accompanying the slow and dawning realization that he was being changed. The shifting fabric of his existence suddenly hardened, as if hit with plaster and left to dry. A panic spread through him as the sickness she had unleashed, those awful butterflies, turned his greatness into mortality. Bitter mortality.
And when his eyes snapped open, wide with shock and rage, the Herald was no longer the Herald at all. Once again he’d been born new to the world, but no longer was he a handsome thing. It was merely a shattered creature in the shape of a man, choking on each word as though he must get it out. The Mortal Coil, thrust upon him, drove his mind away and sharpened all things to rage. He lashed out, still capable of summoning remnants of its master (though how weak it was now!), and sent a bladed spear of ethereal energy through the connection between them. He felt it strike Caedan like a spear’s blade, driving into her mind and fragmenting horribly within. The connection mercifully severed, but not before the ambush had succeeded. He was indomitable no longer. All that was left was a mortal thing with lantern-green eyes, and the shattered vampire with whom this awful thing began.
And he would make her pay for this. That he would.
They were merely fists, but they would serve. For his strength was not a natural strength. He would never be human. As Tenebrae sagged under the strain of her efforts, of his foiled assault upon her, he drove his hands into her stunningly beautiful face.
The bones would give like twigs to his strength, shattering and splintering as he fell upon her with a terrible vengeance. He rained hammer blows upon her, great spatters of blood lifting in the air each time a hand drew back from its work. The fountain, now empty, would afford her a harsh break as he threw her down within it and fell upon her. He split her brow with a savage blow that clicked her skull back against the granite basin of the fountain, and still received only a hint of satisfaction as the blood spilled from it. There was no doubt he’d pound her face into oblivion, detonate her skull like a pumpkin and end her. But before that could be done she had to suffer, she had to suffer for it all. The Thing that had once been the Herald, now some different monster entirely, lay waste to the beauty that had been Tenebrae. Already she would be impossible to recognize, her nose a crooked and bent thing that lay against a shattered cheekbone. Her brilliant, stunning green eyes now swollen shut and the blood vessels within shattered. He was a howling, shrieking, rage-filled thing and he clawed at her face with raw hate.
The calculated words and chilling ease of it was gone. All that was left was a monster, now trapped in the bowels of a mortal.