Devil's Dream

[SinVraal]

Vraal felt a dull, aching throb undulate around the swell of his shoulder blade. Having removed the white, collared shirt he stood before the broad scrying pool that squatted in the depths of his temple. White-feathered wings, one terrifically mangled, the other less so, rested peacefully against his back, the tip of one brushing the short basin’s edge. Dirty feathers tickled casually across the cold stone.

Pale hands, tipped by slender, tapered fingers curled loosely over the pool’s rim as obsidian eyes plundered the pool’s depths, speeding his thoughts towards one target in particular. Towards the silver-armored woman who was more than she appeared, who had spurned his servants and maimed his wing. Thin lips pressed into a cool, contemplative smile, taunting with the tilt that bespeaks hidden, hoarded knowledge.

The woman, if she proved susceptible to such, would soon feel the press of his thoughts upon her. Would see what he presented to her – merely himself, seated thusly upon the pool’s edge, clothed only in pale skin and dark pants, boots, gloves.

“Ariane,â€

[Carnath-Emory]

The woman is susceptible. Miles from that temple's depths, in a half-built fortress' chamber; slouched loose-limbed against the edge of a hearth whose small flames she feeds intermittently during the night. This room is at no time permitted to fall fully into darkness. While not a good sleeper, neither is she immune to fatigue, and eventually must lapse into some dozing state, lulled by the ruddy warmth of a safe room. From there it's but a small, sliding step into true slumber...

And she is susceptible to that, too.

***

Beneath her boot, the winter snow is as crisp as fairytales swear to; damp beneath her bent knee, too. Her arms are folded light upon the coarse wood of a windowsill, and behind its glass two bodies fence their way back and forth across uneven floors, one almost twice its partner's size. Her breath fogs shapes upon the windowpane that she can't make out: they change too fast, creeping and swelling from one thing to another and then to nothing at all. Vapour like promises like intents --

She pushes herself away before the chill can dig real claws into her bones.

Beneath her boots, the winter snow is as slushy and grey as two worn heels can make it, but the clean scent of chilly air will compensate. Here, the black trees grow thickly, as cruelly-shaped as anything this hateful land could conjure; a scattering of tiny red berries upon the low bushes are the landscape's only note of real colour.

She notes the transition only dimly: slush grows gradually thin upon the ground, the subtle grey of the morning sky slowly darkens. It is reasonable that the subtle waves of that pool shed soft light across her world; it is only natural that he is seated at its edge, this half-clad figure. It is, she realises, the essential destination of two years, two lives, eight deaths.

"Winter comes," she remarks as she nears -- but not too near. It is not in her nature to offer the wolf her throat. Not often.

"Soon, now." As if all the world hadn't already been some frigid monochrome.

And slightly lifts her chin as she inhales the scent of him; hunts for amber, warm and treacherous; searches for the clean, steel tang of ozone.

[SinVraal]

His scent hangs on the air, a stale oak that strangely lingers on even in the midst of winter. The snow clings to bowed trees as she makes her slow, steady path through the whitened fields. Winter air and winter snow greet her, mute and trodden upon, retorting only in a brief wind that stings the face and clouds vision. A brief gust, a sudden gasp from some slumbering soul lost amidst the drifting snowflakes.

"Ariane..."

A second, a yawn for air followed by the hissed, strangled exhalation and both movements drawing snow across flesh like flecks of stone against soft wood.

"Hear me."

A third, though after the exhalation the snow dust remains tossed into the air, beginning to swirl about itself in a bitter, biting yet contained maelstrom hot with the tell-tale tang of ozone. Ice flecks coalesce into the firm length of an angled jaw, recede from cavernous eyes, arise to form the circular knot work of a particular brand upon the countenance that takes shape before her and hovers in the air at a neck-craning height.

As the dancing ice and snow continue to flow into Vraal's sculpted frame, icy lips twist into a malefic, knowing smile. Hair composed of winter's breath writhes in the perpetually stirred wind that groans its supplication to the graven image that it assists in shaping. He breathed to her a single question, resonant yet coarse with the endless stirring of the winter wind as a quartet of wings took shape, blossoming from between carved shoulders.

"Why do you persecute me?"

[Carnath-Emory]

Like small, chill slaps to the cheeks, the throat, these small gusts of winter wind; they'd dragged the breath from her lungs. She'd continued unabated, because this was as familiar as steel clouds and frigid skies, and to walk through such kindless weather was as natural to her as breathing.

Unlike that whispering twist of breeze, a thing so subtle that she could not but notice it. A twist of her head had expected pooled shadows, great, warm folds of them; it found corrugated snowfall instead, and with some shadow of disappointment in her eyes, she continued on.

Unlike that struggling hiss of a sound, and it was towards those ruined woods that she'd looked, and careful eyes would see this thing: the emergence of broad wings, paper-dry and smothering and half-lost in the fall of snow. A rustle of motion dashed them into one thousand tiny cranes. The heavy clouds claimed each one.

Unlike the piercing sting of ozone, and this proved potent, and does even now: this halts her mid-stride, draws the body into new and subtle angles. With lifted shoulders and tilted head she regards this; with a mindful of poison berries and old storms, and the eyes she sets upon what forms here look for malachite, look for frosted jade.

It is glory that they discover instead, bright and potent and striking. She will not kneel, cannot be compelled to kneel, but staggers back a same, and her words are a gasp, wide-eyed and thin:

"Why are you cruel!"

[SinVraal]

Cruelty. The woman spoke of cruelty. The icy elegance of his wings hung still in the air, his snowy idol born aloft by stirring winter wind that hissed over the fallen, packed slush and carved into it erratic patterns. Each winding path a swift snake, soon obliterated by another, all testifying to the servants wrought of iron and flesh of which he had been recently deprived.

“Cruelty?â€

[Carnath-Emory]

The woman spoke of cruelty, as she always had to those who'd come before him: Thadius Dhrin with his bitter vulnerabilities; Michael Renne, with his desperate, reckless lunge for salvation. Cruelty, for wasn't that the currency in which such men as these traded?

Such men as this.

"I think it was not hope that you gave to me," she is breathing, and these are words half-stolen by the bitter wind that has borne him aloft. Even now, it lashes ruined slow into shapes of his own design, sears her cheeks with its cold burn.

"I think it was not strength -- but then, you reserve this for Kinny Fletcherson. Three years dead, and climbing from his grave; three years, and it's to that tavern door he stumbles. If that's what you offer, I'll die to fear instead of it. I'll -- "

But his voice is a chorus then, his voice is some swelling magnificat, and there comes a moment in which she must struggle to be heard; the glory of it has seized the breath from her lungs, has swept the dark hair back from her eyes. Soundless, what her lips mean to shape, soundless and with no weight upon the world whatsoever, except that she is clawing sound from her own throat, she is wiping it from her mouth like golden vapour, and:

"I believe in no thing!" she has cried into the midst of his beauty. "Belief is not for me, and each day I die again, and what I give them is a chance; what I give them is nothing at all. But you, you could say the same, mn? You call these gifts, but all you know is how to take."

Behind him the sun, some thin shaft of its light piercing livid through gloomsy clouds and between monstrous wings. Behind him, the glitter of such incandescence, and she must narrow her eyes against this, must ease back her head and give her throat over to that, instead. It paints bloody colours across her pale flesh; it feathers shifting, shapeless words there..

"I think that light was stolen," whispers Ariane then, because she can be cruel, too.

[SinVraal]

"Stolen," he echoes in whispered tone, even and cool, echoed again by a chorus of vacant voices. "And do you not steal anything, Ariane? Do you not take lives? And on no authority but your own?"

The streaming, fractured sunlight begins to darken. Not obscured but the purity of the light itself begins to falter, waxing dim while wizened, black veins creep, spider-like, through the broad expanse of hovering clouds pregnant with nature's doom.

"I did give you hope," he continued as the sky twisted beneath the weight of his words. "I gave you the hope of life beyond death, of regrets made right, of taking light from darkness. Yet you would not have them. And why? For one who believes in nothing, why do you believe in whatever vestiges of morality that yet cling to your bones?"

Light ran bruised, as if the gray star had been crushed like rotten fruit and the dark juice now began to paint the sun's illuminative tears. Black, vellicose veins raptured the clouds and chained them from within, bleeding a purple light into their outer, gaseous bodies.

"I don't ask much," he continued as the sun stained itself entirely, pure illumination consumed beneath the bruised, pulsing fury that now rained upon the world with a vibrant, royal violet hue. "Only that you be honest with yourself. What chances have you given these people to be free from their fear? Chances that you yourself admit, are nothing."

The last word hangs and carries upon the cool, stilling air that prostrates itself into lowly gusts about ankles and toes beneath the rising potency of the violet dawn.

"The serpent asked nothing of you save your will be done. I ask nothing of you save that you be honest with yourself. Indeed," he hesitated then, his words dropping to a singular, resonant purr that played about the edge of emaciated lips and tightened lean, harshly angled features constructed with leashed and tamed snow.

"I have been very generous. Even now, I offer it to you: meaning, purpose, and understanding. I see what the serpent saw," he whispers through a sudden breeze,shrilled by stirred ice. "I see your desire for murdering cultists, and other... regrets... long since buried."

A snowy hand, pure and white, reached out for her. A slow, graceful extension of mercy for the troubled swords woman, clad in silver and thoughts of grim war. "For a man, perhaps. For one man in particular, for a chance at what might have been had you not lost him. But, I tell you."

His feet touched upon the snowy earth, disturbing the ground with the delicate splay of toes while four symmetrical, feathered wings folded gently against the breadth of a bare back. Slender lips poured into a promising smile, eyes alight with silver fire from a forge that shaped lost dreams and cast them into substance and reality.

"Nothing need be lost to you, Ariane. Nor do I ask for anything in return."

[Carnath-Emory]

Stolen, she has charged him, as even are the voices with which he speaks; there is a loveliness to the rich rush of them that cannot be his alone; there is some feminine edge, golden-warm and compelling. It reaches her like steel filings on glass.

"I take nothing, not even those. You would toy with what you've murdered; I ... I end them, and I do not pretend that it is a kindness."

But isn't this world they share a testament to that doctrine of ruin? The atmosphere cannot remain intact; it must rupture before their eyes, corrupted by sickly, bruised light. Nor can this landscape of tumbled snow and burdened trees; lashed into obeisance by this graven thing's will, it knows only to reflect what sickness the clouds shed over it.

"It was never life that you gave," she breathes into stilling air. "It was never an end to regrets; you know not even the shape of mine!" And all the while this edge of cruel frost, which has sunk claws through the thin leather of her boots; which has crept upon her narrow legs with death's own patience. It means to stumble her, just as he does, and it would surely succeed except that when she takes this forward step, it is not with her legs but with her will.

The world accomodates, because it is hers.

The resonance of his purr is a tangible thing, a brush of subtle warmth to thaw what has cooled the colour from her pinched features. The substance of his words is the cold to temper it, so that she has stepped very near to this frigid creature, but already she has turned her face aside from him. Shoulder to shoulder they must stand, with some glossy slash of her own dark hair as curtain between them.

Grey eyes pierce that black shroud, when he speaks that offer.

"It was no loss at all," she must whisper then, this silver-clad thing, this very ambiguous construction; her breath fogs the air between them. "I know when I am discarded. I know that there is ever a cost."

But like docile snowfall, such colourless eyes are susceptible to what light assaults them. A subtle coil of violet has penetrated these.

[SinVraal]

"I toy with nothing," he resolutely defended himself from her charges. The chorus agreed, their voices flowing into his own in a continuous river of heavenly, united strength. Overhead, craled in the gentle parting of snowy wings, the throbbing, violet sun began to crawl out fromb ehind the clouds like some edlritch monster wakened to the world.

"Those whom I have liberated flocked freely to the assistance of Foggy Bottom, have given freely to the poor. They think me nothing more than their guru, which, indeed, I am." He spared Ariane a poor, sad shake of his head tossled by unbound hair whose waves coiled and tightened with every minute gesture.

"There is no hierarchy with the Violet Dawn. There is only yourself, and your community, and your inner god. Where was the church when Foggy Bottom burned? Or where were you?"

He raised an elegant, slender hand whose long fingers parted gently through which flowed the bruised sunlight. His gesture to forestall biting remarks and cool whatever temper might even now flare inside veins poisoned with quickened silver and iron. "I do not comdemn you, Ariane. Only offer to help you, again and again. Do you fault the Ashfiend for ruining any hopes that might have existed between he and you against me? Is it not meet, then, that I should fault you, and your companions, with rejecting my assistance at every turn?"

She shifts, gestures, and moves with her words. Closing and peering through the pitch shroud of her hair and her misery, her anger running through the roots of her being that alights upon the corner of his lips as a sudden, spasm and smile. A shapr intake of air punctuates his perverse, crawling pleasure.

"I feel... I feel you move," he whispered through the exhalation, relishing some last ecstatic moment while pale palms slowly course along the length of his arms, climbing to cup against the smooth circle of his shoulders.

"And I feel you breath," the words softening further liek the distant crunch of virgin snow being trod upon.

"I will feel you live again, if you will permit me to serve you."

[Carnath-Emory]

He wears the pestilent sun like some gleaming crown, that breathy chorus like an cloak woven of sweet adoration. One might ask a woman her opinion of this sight and experience a truly virulent response, but amongst Vraal's virtues such particular curiosity does not number.

Beauty does: bright with all the contusions that a violet sun can lay upon it; melancholy with the memory of a town's teeming madness.

"I was searching for the means to end you and your black-eyed whore," Ariane has responded to that, but such is the quality of that beauty that within an instant of speaking, she almost regrets those words.

Violet-lit eyes allow for some very fine edge of penitence.

"But do not weary me with your talk of churches; what gods have I? Do not waste yourself upon community, not for my sake; I've two allegiances, and I do not add to that number -- "

Towards this creature of gesture and motion, he raises a hand, and the sight of it kills the words upon her lips. Voice becomes exhaled breath, becomes a whisper of fogged air that dissipates, twisted gently into pieces by a writhe of violet light. Such contused beauty cannot reach the iron that rushes her veins, that subtle body within her own, but it may trickle freely across her lips, and does; when she inhales, its taste is sweet syrup upon the tongue, ashen bitterness at the back of her throat.

But she listens, even when her senses lurch in displeasure. With the dark hair clung to her cold cheeks still, and with her head slightly bowed, and with eyes like lavender to hold his own; speaks only when his narrow smile permits it of her.

"The Ashfiend has had so many centuries to learn caution. I blame circumstance. I -- " some testing glance discovers a place between them where confession would fit. "I was so angry," she whispers then, and very quietly; between their shoulder, space narrows by some hairsbreadth fraction. "I was always so angry," and her gaze is given over for a time to the brush of his palms across snowy shoulders, to the indolent tilt of soiled wings. "I wonder sometimes if it will devour me, I wonder what would be left... " and here is a hand that has loosened from her side, here are pale, narrow fingers which travel a slow, whimsical path through cold air. A short one as well, for they grow very close, very close --

'I feel you move,' speaks this glorious thing now.

I hear heart-beats and the rush of blood, answers memory.

'I feel you breathe...'

I also hear when breath is held.

'I will feel you live again,' and these are not new words, these are by no means unfamiliar, except that the voice, the voice is entirely wrong, and the sentiments are not quite right.

And the sound of your blinking is soft, you see. A tiny wing, except when you are upset.

And she suddenly, terribly is.

The sound of her blinking is soft for true, but when her eyes open there is no distance between them at all, and her cold, cold hand has lunged for his throat.

[SinVraal]

A hand for fury, fingers curling for wrath and blood. A sudden, darting hand that mirrors the serpents that had waylaid her at their revisiting of the Battle of Snowstill with fewer in number yet far more monsters in their numbers. A gesture of endings, to silence the chorusing fallen as they sing through their mouthpiece.

She finds a cold wind circulating through her fingers, whistling about their tips, and the vengeful imprint of her hand that lingers, disturbing the beatific vision shaped from rain's delayed waste that hovers and grants him dreamlike shape. Save that his eyes, leashed granules of winter, regard her with arctic pity and stern warning.

"There will be no turning aside, after this," he begins as the first of the outermost snowflakes begin to fail in maintaining the shape of a wintery avatar. "You know as well as I that with my destruction, there will be no satisfaction for the Ashfiend. The fires of his hatred wind about the skeleton of Penroll but they reach for the heavens themselves, to sear and burn all into ruin."

Lightning flashes in his gaze as the wings begin to crumble. His form begins to corrode as if beset by sudden decay. A pillar of violet sunlight befalls and encircles the pair, wreathing his dying body in a bruised halo.

"There will be no ending for him until all creation is silenced and he is no longer allowed to remember. With my destruction, the means to end him shall be lost to you forever."

Penetrated by the searing, royal purple sunrise his frame fractures along massive fault lines that course from shoulders to hips. Feathers descend in a dry cloud of dust, snow dispersed by a great, unseen hand that sweeps ice across the swords woman in careless play. In the wake of such brief, biting cold he is gone. And with him the warmth offered by the alien sun that yet lingers with her dream as testament to his legacy for the world. A legacy that she may insist upon choosing.

Either a final end for the Ashfiend.

Or the promise of his never ending fury.

"See, today I set before you light and darkness, life and death. Now choose life, that you and your descendants may live."

[Carnath-Emory]

A hand for fury, for death and bitter ends. A hand for the chill of his throat, because she knows no crueller thing than this, conceives of no demise more absolute. She will feel the struggle of his waning breath beneath her palm; he will feel the tender flesh of his throat crush and buckle, obedient to the strength of her touch. His dying lungs will spill out one last breath and all of his monstrous secrets, and in these final moments he will learn to kneel --

But what her hand discovers instead is an arctic maelstrom that she cannot seize at all, but only brand with the shape of her touch. It is insufficient. Her fingers grope through those icy winds as if they could rend them apart like claws through silk. Fingers silver-clad and thick with gluey quicksilver plunge into those cold depths again, again, now bristling with gauntlet-iron; now incandescent with stung flame; now broken; one hundred ways to die, and all in a single moment, if only he'd had flesh that could perish at all.

It's words that he wields instead, words that he drives like nails through her ears, through her skull. The world recoils from these certain deceits, the world falters and fails around them, and:

"You would say this!" she shouts into the fracturing core of him, and her voice is gone hoarse with cold and terrible anger. Live again, he'd whispered to her nerves, and this was an obscenity beyond compare.

"You would say this," she cries, "who fears no thing in all the world save one, and I know the look of that fear in your eyes." She persists, because she must: because this soul does not know how to surrender, and because words must do where flesh has failed. Their world is cold flame and shuddering, dying earth, sick with the flow of molten, filthy gold, and: "I know what put it there," she is whispering then --

But he steals himself from her then, collapses in a cloud of tainted snow that drives its icy chill into her from throat to hip. When she draws breath, it is to half-drown in the taste of the stuff; when she stares, it is with sickly, violent light leaking through the edges of her eyelids, penetrating through widening eyes.

She is filled with the glorious light of him.
She is drowning in the bitter cold of him.
She is



[INDENT] waking in some tangle of borrowed bedding and coat and her own dark hair. With a hand flattened to her throat as she retches; with a hand to her mouth, inadequate to quite muffle some horrified, aching moan of sound.[/INDENT]

[SinVraal]

He sat in the dark. He sat alone, upon the edge of the scrying pool, her silver-coated fingers leaving ghostly indentations about the pale flesh of an elegant throat. Slender lips pressed into a bitter smile as he turned obsidian eyes over the cool, shadowed depths of the temple.

The people of this land proved remarkably stubborn, far more so than the last which had served as battleground between he and his immortal enemy. One unable to die, the other unable to weep, both unable to destroy the other. There was, perhaps, only one recourse left.

After all, he considered while rising to his feet, the problem with seeing things through raging flames was the smoket hat filled and dried one's vision. It made everyone look to be dead.

Particularly a corpse.