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Skulls of the Scavengers [[story, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 04-14-2014
((This post is a birthday present for Naunet. It happens after this thread.))
Fury burned through her limbs like coals smoldering in the night. She could sway her anger was shedding light on the walls around her, the street before her. Her vision shook. Even if she could restrain the tenseness in her jaw, the shaking of her limbs -- even if she could keep her fingers from bundling into fists and her feet from stomping -- the world around her was still cast in a red hue of fury. It shook her as though something outside her body laying over her, hot with power uncontrolled.
She'd felt this way once before. Only once. At Cartenau. The familiar sensations of dark things stirring in her body, ready to burst from her throat and hands and chest if they were called, was at once terrifying and empowering. These feelings, this power, had not helped when she had felt it at Cartenau. Perhaps it would be different here in Ul'dah.
The blood of D'aijeen Thalen flowed thick, even if her mother did despise her. Even if her father was dead, and her sister was deceiving her. Perhaps her blood was thicker than it should be, but no person was permitted to hurt her family. None.
Not even D'ahl.
As D'aijeen Thalen stalked down the backstreets of Ul'dah, well outside of the lauded Hustings Strip and Ruby Road with which she was accustomed, shadows moved with her. They were not her shadow, and yet they were shadows she possessed. Long and thin, pressed into the corners of walls against the ground and roofs, they flickered with light that did not illuminate. The shadows folded and flowed, watched her from ephemeral eye sockets from expressionless white faces like masks.
Baalzephon. It was strange to know the name of a thing she could barely see, had never observed before. It was stranger still to not feel threatened by them. They followed her just like her tail did, green fur shivering behind her legs. They were as natural as the cold of the light. Voidsent. Their presence was comforting, but not calming. Her fury boiled in arms and face like poison in the thickness of her blood.
*
D'ahl was cold. It was not a cold not, but she shivered desperately. Her hands were close to her body, fingers knitted against her chest. Her blonde ears were flat against her head. Her tail wove between ehr thighs and made her stumble. She lurched through the knight, away from the Dodo Tribe's extravagant commune, like an old beggar fleeing charity.
The fountain before the Ossuary shimmered beautifully in the moonlight. She couldn't bear to look at it. The water whispered calm trickling to her but she didn't listen. Her eyes shook about the shadows in the instinct of a person terrified. Her ears thrummed with the sound of her own heartbeat. She didn't know what she was afraid of. She didn't know who would chase her down or what they would do. But she was convinced recompense was coming.
Why had she had the knives on her? Had she been planning that? She had not carried knives on her person in years, and the one day she chose to, she had given in to her frustration and anger and tried to kill someone. Failed. She'd failed like she'd grown into a hag.
D'ahl had never felt so ancient in her life.
The rickety woman collapsed in a corner near the Ossuary. It was a nonsensical thing to do. It didn't matter. Shamefully, she tried to hide herself in the shadow. She would've hidden in between the bricks if she could have. And if she could've done that, she would've stayed there until she were dead.
"What a fine sight I must be," she muttered into the darkness, leaned forward until she felt her head hit the wall. In the shadows D'ahl felt her hair hang in front of her face, but did not see it. She felt her hands in her lap, but she couldn't see them. She imagined that she was a very old woman, with arms as thin as her bones, hands gnarled with black veins. "A fine sight. A hag in gemstones and silk. A perverse old maid so desperate for a child she'll use sex and murder... I'd kill..."
It had not felt premeditated. She had not thought about it. When she'd tried to kill that witch she hadn't even felt her hands. Dahl remembered the terror she had felt when she'd first realized what she'd done, when she'd been sagging in pain from the Lalafel's retaliation and realized what had warranted it. She hadn't known the Sagolii witch was coming, though, so why had she felt she needed the knives?
D'ahl shivered, felt hot tears on her face. When she spoke to the shadows again, her voice was so raw she could barely understand herself, "Would I have hurt Aijeen? I just... wanted to feel... I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Who was she apologizing to? Nobody was there except a shadow. "I'm sorry. I know I couldn't replace her mother. No one can replace anyone. I could never replace..."
She reached out to the wall and found only brick. How thin she must be. Barren. Perverse. Senile. There was nothing left of the woman who had proudly served her tribe, who the Tias had courted, who had once had... For such brief, beautiful years... "You. I could never replace you."
D'ahl ran her hand over the wall. She felt over the brick as if searching for soft ears, too big for a boy his age. She felt for the unruly fluff of his hair. She pulled her fingers down the brick like she was trying to smooth out his hair, as she'd always done. She tried to touch him, but all that was there was dark stone. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for trying. I knew I'd never replace you, but I never stopped trying. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The prematurely old woman shivered. The hag of Ul'dah leaned heavily against the wall, trying to reach through it to a time that she had lost hold of, to the only thing she'd ever wanted. It was gone far from there, in the shadows. Only Thal knew now. She would never reach there.
D'ahl opened her eyes to watch the darkness beneath her, to watch her teardrops fall from her face. A white mask, strangely luminescent, stared up at her. Teardrops lay on its forehead, slid into its empty eye sockets, as it just stared. The shadows, unseeable, moved behind it. They moved somehow.
A sharp sensation shocked her hand. D'ahl squeeked lowly, voice still choked with tears, and pulled her hand back from the wall. Out of the shadows had grown thin, sharp, white protrusions. Like spikes or teeth. They grew outward to her as though floating to the surface of a dark pool turned on its side, thickening. They were as bone, and their sharpness threatened her features.
D'ahl jump up and back away from the wall, but with her very first step, something stabbed into her foot from below. She screamed at the sensation, buckling beneath it, looking down to see one of those bony spikes sticking all the way through her foot from below. Blood gushed. She felt it pulling, too dark to see. There was something under the shadows, several spikes were rising just as they had extended from the wall.
As the spike in her foot extended, D'ahl cried out in pain and crumbled to one knee. The bony spikes were positioned in elongated semicircles, one on the ground and another on the wall. They seemed to enclose her. They were like the teeth of a great jaw. Like they were...
They were going to...
Terror shot through D'ahl's body, and she ripped her foot free from the spike. Ignoring the pain, not even screaming, she threw herself backwards. But not before the jaw closed. The spikes in the ground flew upward, those on the wall came falling down, and D'ahl was stabbed through the back, stabbed deep in her belly, but ten bony knives on either side. She did not fall to the ground. She hung in the air from the teeth of the impossible beast, felt a tongue made of shadow beneath her legs.
Strangely numb, D'ahl pulled herself to look up into the face of the predator. The teeth were made of what seemed to be dismembered bird's talons. Where the face should have been, a multiplicity of skulls floated in the shadows. Bird's skulls. The death-masks of vultures and buzzards. The skulls of scavengers.
D'ahl collapsed backwards under her own weight, suddenly weak. She felt the teeth tear her body as she moved, but did not feel pain. More vivid was the sensation of blood loss, like tears pointing from her entire body. As though, after all these years, she'd found a way to cry in the way that her young, departed son deserved. The fountain still whispered nearby. It flickered beautifully in the moonlight.
Someone screamed. D'ahl's eyes shook and squinted, blood running down her throat, down her upside-down face to pool against her eyes. She saw a figure near the fountain clad in white, green-haired. She exhaled, and mouthed without sound, "Aijeen?"
D'aijeen Thalen ripped her wand and bladed scepter from her robe, unsure which to use. "Stop! Stop!" She screamed, running forward. Spells shot through her body, found the foci. She swung her arms and the ground broke beneath her. Fire lit along her robe. The uncontrolled, thoughtless spells burst forward with all the power of her anger. Every single drop of anger, all the vengeance and retribution she had been carrying her, poured into a single moment that lit up the night before the Ossuary.
And the demon made a chittering sound as it jumped to one side, stone slamming useless against its hindquarters, fire lighting up shadow and burning nothing. As the beast moved, D'ahl's body shook and bounced in its death, flesh tearing audibly. The predator of shadow ducked its head down and slammed D'ahl against the stone, ran towards D'aijeen dragging her, and her body bent gruesomely.
"Stop!" D'aijeen didn't hear herself, but she emptied her breath into the cry. "I command you to release her! I command you!" All that was left where the anger had once been was fear, was an overpowering desperation. She didn't want D'ahl to die. She didn't want that!
The monster slammed into D'aijeen headfirst, and the girl clung to it. D'ahl's limp body swung from its teeth, and the green-hair girl wrapped one arm around it. Her opposite hand pride at the black, shadowed lips of the ephemeral beast. Incredibly feeble, her thin fingers wrapped around the teeth and pulled on them. It was useless, but as the beast ran, she used all of the strength in her body to hold on.
"I command you to put her down! Please!" The monster ducked its head with every step, slamming D'ahl's body to the ground. Her arms skittered limp beneath her like macabre pennants. Her face bent backwards and scrapped on the ground, reddened and ripped apart until it was almost unrecognizable. D'aijeen begged, "I don't want this to happen! I don't want any of this! Stop!" D'ahl's belly ripped open, spilling thick red threads of gore, exposing pink-white bones.
The monster didn't stop running until there were away from the Ossuary, in a secluded place. D'aijeen felt only that they were in a dark place. She sensed Baalzephon in the corners and winged beasts watching from above. Getting her feet beneath her, she continues to pry at the beast teeth. Her own hands were bleeding. The tendons in her fingers were torn. She didn't stop.
With a sick, wet sound, the mouth opened. It part slowly. D'aijeen watched they teeth being exhumed from the meat, her mind noting each organ visibly impaled. When the beast's tongue ejected D'ahl, the woman did not fall in the shape of a person. She was a bundle of human pieces tethered together by threads of flayed meat. In some places only sparse threads. Blood, dark and pungent in the night, filled D'aijeen's senses. She stood and stared. When she put her hands to her face, she painted her own features in blood. She could taste it running over her lips.
She felt the vibrations of her screams in her skull. They hurt her ears. They drew the sparse breath from her sickly lungs. She screamed so greatly that she collapsed from the strain of it, her body shivering and cold. Her legs felt dead. Her tail was soaked through with blood and numb to all else. Though she lay her hands over D'ahl in an attempt to cradle the woman, in instinctive need to take stock of the damage, there was no longer a person in the body she touched. The damage was too great. Even if she had the means to bring the dead back to life, the body was too damaged. It was just meat now.
D'aijeen swayed, her vision darkening. She found it difficult to breathe. Her chest swelled, her shoulders shook, her lungs hurt. The harder she tired to breathe, the more difficult it became. Everything was darkening. She tried to breathe. She tried to see.
The predator dropped its head into her view. The vulture skulls, the bones like teeth, the basilisk spine that she had assembled into a monster in her youth, presented themselves before her. It moved itself forward and pressed its hideous, shadowed head against her face, like an animal showing affection. It bore her backwards and pressed her against a wall, but not painfully. The beast was gentle with her, now.
"I commanded you..." D'aijeen managed, her shoulders still shaking, her breath thin and words just whispers. "You're supposed to do what I say. You're supposed to do what I say. I told you no. I told you." She shivered, curled her tatter fingers into fists and pushed them against the monster's face to try and drive it away. "Why are you here? Go away. I command you to die."
The monster shifted its face against her hands, and remained where it was. The many skulls of the scavengers stared at her.
"I command you to die," she whispered. She shook. She wanted to cry. She wanted to breathe. She wanted to go home, but there was so much blood. Everywhere. Everywhere she had ever called home, there was just so much blood.
RE: Skulls of the Scavengers [[story, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 04-14-2014
((You give me the best birthday presents. <3))