midnight mass
a crimson pool so warm and deep
lulls me to an endless sleep

Crouched among the reeds, Gauthier surveyed the gathering of creatures that rimmed the wide gape of the pool, the indigo-hewn thick of storm-ridden sky rippled faintly across its muddy surface. The prey had begun their slow creep back into the hunting fields, and with them the hunters; the flowers began their budding in the rich soils, and with them the gatherers. The island began to thrive, of life and fruiting bounty abound – the menu slotted with growing choices.

Meat, the lot of them. He is unfeeling for their lives beyond the watch of a spectator: the joys that blossomed in their chests, the sorrows that wearied their bones. It would all be minced in one way or another, in one mouth or another it was chewed and crunched and digested with the savoring appetite of a grateful gluttony. Words as big and bold as successes and tragedies, feelings as tumultuous as passion and misery, all comestible by the shape and size and flavor, texture, tang.

His tongue probed the spaces between teeth, temptation. As unprejudiced as the crocodiles who watched from their shadowy shallows with delight, kin to their festering eternal hungers. To their reptilian malice, their cold-blooded ardor. The antelope, the wildebeest, the lion, the shrew, a communion at the edge of pain’s ministry – their cathedral is arcing glass of sky through the gnarled acacia, pews tufted with violets and hissing grasses, the word of gods touching slivers of movement through ambiguous waters.

At once, a pair of scaled jaws thrust from the muddy shoreline and crack their vice over the frail neck of a doe.

Gauthier lounged on his side, his tail curling amusedly at his heels as he watched croc and prey roll, toss, roll, floundering viciously as the indigo stain of the reflective pond are immersed in red. He rested his chin over his paws as he entertained himself on the show: the half-witted creatures watching in terror as their fellow is thrashed and pulled beneath the surface, returning to the edge of the water the moment it stops. As if they had learned nothing.

It goes on and on, and none are ever happier than the famished crocodile.

@Louve

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(set shortly after rykers challenge, before the snow)

Slipping from the bluffs with a crown that sits heavy on her head Louve seeks escape from the stifling politics. Away, where she need not be a Queen or mother and may merely exist for a moment. Time to catch her breath and process everything that had happened in the last months.

Peace was, perhaps, the most fragile of concepts. It was prone to shattering without notice, dissolving in to a thousand pieces that could not be put back together by even the most skilled hand. Louve's entire life had been enmeshed in war; she had seen so many, now, that moments of quiet were almost too much to bear. There was the constant sense of fragility, of wondering when the next blade would fall, and it was easier to simply sink in her teeth and give herself in to the bloodlust.

Still she dared to hope for the cessation of fighting to last if only to give her children time to grow and her husband time to live. His would be a life ended in bloodshed, she knew. A life that one day would be snuffed out when he marked the wrong target, or made a simple error that spilled too much of his blood.

The water is not quiet, though. Wild thrashing greets her ears and she knows instinctively that it is a fight to the death, certainly an unfortunate animal gone too close to the hungry jaws of a predator. A wry grin twists her lips as she is reminded that such things are impossible to escape, that she will always be a queen, a mother, a warmonger.

When her gaze sets on @Gauthier that grin widens and she moves, easily, nearer. "'ungry?" As her gaze flicks to the blood that spreads in the water, the widening pool of red that makes her own stomach tighten and saliva flood her mouth.

DEVILS-MAKER

midnight mass
a crimson pool so warm and deep
lulls me to an endless sleep

He turned an ear to the sound of approach, watching the shift of the grasses with the icy cold of his peripheral. Patient, tensed, and ever ready. Though they had too few enemies to regard in the world of Amaryllis, one predator does not discount the hungers of others – what wanton appetites for violence and wholeness reprieve the lonely existence. But the voice that peruses the shifting shadows through ebbing dusklight is not one for cautionary temper; lest the twinsoul have a bone to pick. Gauthier grinned, his expression teemed with an unrelenting malefic humor, flicking a claw that dangled over the edge of the water-eaten loam.

’Ungry? As if he had ever known anything else to dissuade his desires, unable to pronounce one trembling string of feeling from the next. It is always hunger, always want in one way or another, always a blood-soaked line between craving and comfort. The skin crawls, the flesh pines, the heart in its complicated thrum exorcises its kneading rush with the machinations of its own carnality. It is not so lonely to consider the realm of meat and circumstance, contentedly resting on top of its adamant cycle.

He is kingly in his misanthropic repose – that place borne of shadow and flame, the draconic coil of unfeeling madness. And so few are welcome, so few untouched by that unprejudiced taste, that even Louve has known the bite of it. Yet in this space there is no odds between sins. She is absolved, the co-matriarch, by the tentative familial bonds he had ironically ever tried to escape. And forever pulled viciously back into its orbit. Gauthier does not mince the particulars of his place. In the end, they all bleed red, red, filling one mouth or another. And he, the Tsar of bloodied, gnarled thickets and immortal thirst is as ever too proud to bow.

@Louve knows however – does she not? The arrogance that is undying and unapologetically male, the cruelty he wields in a glance. Even its warmest gaze is filled with winter’s hard cut. He looks to her as the crocodiles look to the gazelle at the edge of the water: admiring, patiently famished and smug. Is there an offer? he probed, hunger disguised as a tease.

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There's is a relationship impossible to define. Once she might have been naive enough to call them friends, or at the very least kindred souls cut from the same cloth. Age and experience had taught her differently and she knew how easily an ally could become an enemy, how mistrust could skew even the most pleasant of memories, casting them in a shadow too thick to pierce. Even the sharpest claws could not cut the shackles of blame, even the bloodiest truth was not enough to lift the burden once it is cast.

@Gauthier had been many things in her life and as her eyes rest upon him now, again, she is not certain which title fits best. Still there is the innate and instinctive pull, or at least the recognition of like meeting like. For a spell she watches the spread of blood in the water as the surface grows still once more, masking the true horrors that lurk beneath. Eventually the red dissipates, too, clear only in the memory that lives behind her eyelids.

"Once," she mused, with a sly and dangerous grin, reflecting back on a bloody tussle and the sting of salt in fresh wounds. Yellow gaze slides from the water to him, burning with the memory of hunger as it wanders over the masculine lines of repose. "But I cannot 'elp you now." These words lack any true emotion, though perhaps there is a flash of amusement in the look she gives him.

Without moving from her spot she sits and now her gaze remains trained on him. There were whispers of dissent in the aftermath of her husbands revival and so she is reminded that she does not know where they stand. Louve does well to mask her uncertainty but does not say a word, allowing her at ease position to speak for her.

DEVILS-MAKER

midnight mass
a crimson pool so warm and deep
lulls me to an endless sleep

Their past is woven in a complex tangling of thread, its frayed edges drenched in the murk of what lay in the desolate in-between. He would be arrogantly unsound to claim that no tension lay in that space, the webbing between sea-salt, red un-graves, and the dancing precarity of the place they now occupied. Those small scraps of sedge between them may have well been miles, and the silence yawning between words an unsettling eternity. There would be no apology for his impugnations in the red desert, unearthing nameless rots for the sake of misjudgment. He was too proud, too stubborn, too consumed by the bittersweet events that followed their return to utter a word of it again.

Once, she breaks, her voice tranced on the cease of bubbles in the shimmering pool. But I cannot ‘elp you now. There are flickers of that younger Louve beneath the wisened ache of scars and trials, flashing through the glint of yellow. Gauthier chuckled, stretching his claws over the tremors of the water’s surface, remembering when they once carved Dieu-flesh and dark sands. I suppose not. he mused, his eyes turned over the ripples that lapped at the edge of the overhang, trembling reeds and sedge. The silence that fell into the void between one word and the next was as long and chilled as their recently departed winter, but he left it to loom, swell, suffocate.

When he looked back to @Louve, there remained some form of breathless query, given life only by the hints of unknowing bled into the dilation of her eyes. As though he were some uncontained force, some unrestrained factor that could tip the scales against anyone’s favor – the look he received in the heat of the desert while accusing her of a conspiratorial murder of her kin. The suspicion was warranted. But had she not been kind? Had she not allowed Ludivine her life, and now, a crown of crowns? That shining tiara of a Matriarch, a rightful halo of power of which she would wield gloriously.

Still Gauthier could not rid himself of the memory of disrespect on their claimed grounds, the inauguration of their much deserved sovereignty in Firnen, celebrated only if they pledge fealty to the power of Wolfbron. Apollinaire’s words cut through that bliss like a scythe, unforgettable. As though Ludivine had been weighed, measured, and found wanting in spite of her proven worth. It was no sin of the Wolfbron matriarch, and whatever filth fettered her namesake by its passing un-grace was finely absolved by the partnership forged in a renewed trust between the most powerful women of their blood. Yet, how tangible was that bridge? Was there a flicker of some flame beneath, stoked by those that had seen his wife as unworthy? Unorthodox?

Finally, a grin spread again across his lips as he tilted his cheek to the receding dusklight, an ear flicked to some bleating babe that curiously edged the water behind. The time waned for it, its foolish proximity within those scaly beasts that lurked just beneath the surface, for all its naivety and engrained inanity. How has your family taken news of your alliance with my mate? he asked pleasantly, as if it were the passing shift of a red-lined smalltalk. Your mother? Your husband? His tail curled idly at his heels as he stretched his forelimbs, cutting his claws into the crackling edge of limestone.

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Amusement flashes in the spaces between weighted words, a silent and invisible tension that strung along beside it. Balancing at the edge of a precipice she cannot fathom, a depth filled with tarnish and ruin, of teeth and claws and sand and red, red rock. Of petulance and naivety, youth and inexperience, selfishness and misplaced accusations.

It is far too easy to imagine the slip of limbs over that edge, a scramble of claws as Death looms, watching. Always watching. Is it mercy that keeps the ground beneath her? Is it luck? Louve cannot imagine that it is skill when more times than not she feels no more capable than the floundering babe cast in to the depths, forced to swim or sink.

Easier to give in to the sucking black, isn't it? Loosen the limbs and surrender to the icy cold, the endless depths, finding peace in the quiet.

Survival is chaos. Flailing limbs and splashing, droplets cast asunder, wild and uncontrolled. At the heart of it a need to breath, to rise from the depths and spit in the face of the ever present Death, to deny Him the life she holds most precious. Ironic that she would fight so fiercely when she guided Him without thought to so many others.

Perhaps they should have fought harder.

Louve does not dwell on the errors she has made, nor does she stop to question her choices. What was done was done and no matter the fallout she would stand by them, including the decision to paint her throne with blood, or to spare a life, or to place a crown upon a sister head.

"Z'ey would not question me," she answers him with a sharpness, reaching out a scythe-like claw to disrupt the surface of the water, watching the ripples spread and disappear. Chaos and then stillness, and with a flick of her claw chaos again. For a moment she is a cub with a shiny new toy, her mind considering the simple act and all that it represents, before she speaks again. "Adaptability ees necessary to thrive; possibilities abound eef only one opens z'eir eyes to eet."

Possibilities such as cheating death, even.

@Gauthier

DEVILS-MAKER

midnight mass
a crimson pool so warm and deep
lulls me to an endless sleep

They would not question me. An assurance with its full certainty, the word of a queen. An unquestionable bond, seemingly, so that he may find some consolation in its curtness. He hummed in an agreeable acceptance to this notion, watching the ripples quiver their way from the point of his claw, their silver lines muddying his ravaged reflection below. I would hope not. he replied distantly, idly observing as one lap of wavelet devoured the other at the crease of their extent. There need be nothing more to tide the ambiguity of the implications – what she would do with naysayers was her own event.

Gauthier himself was of lesser patience and even less shame. He had placed his wife above all but himself, and the sanctity of her well being was worthy of a defense not excluding death. It was a selflessness that needed no regret; his only selflessness, even if in its grandest form. If his last breath was spent in securing her last of dignities, it was a breath well spared, and he held no doubt that she would do the same for him.

Adaptability is necessary to thrive, she added, another commendable memo of which he knew all too well. He, having survived the shift of a many faces, a many skills, a many blend of manners and wants and triumphs and failures, all of which were pieces of that wholeness formed the monstrous thing he had always been. The Dieudonne were no less monstrous, a byproduct of their equal hungers that drove them into the heart of Amaryllis like a reckless stake. Yet they kept afloat, whether by this adaptability or sheer ambition, outlasting the trivial battles between the Miroslavs, the Sigrun, the Rike.

Wolfbron had weathered many storms and with it, their ilk, and he was satisfied that they had seen the potential in reaching beyond ego to touch the heights of abnormality. What was it, two heads were better than one? So long as one did not eat the other.

He grinned, his eyes passing off to the ridges of the mud-backed crocodiles that lay in the shallows, briefly startling the flock at the edge of the water before they would test again and again just for a tentative drink. I will hold you to it. he mused aloud, brushing a clod of dirt into the water from under his claws. And then, with a laugh that startled a small flock of nearby ibises to flight, I am glad I didn’t throw you into a desert pit, after all.

Gauthier looked back to @Louve with all the darkness of gallows humor, his smile teethed with impish charm.

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I would hope not.

He does not mean it to rankle. It is a mere observation, an idle comment, spoken in a laissez faire way that jolts unexpectedly down her spine. There is no sense to her reaction, to the way her blood runs ice and then burns hot, a chill followed by a fiery anger that has no place, here. Wicked claws flex against the earth edging the watering hole, a quiet indication to the tempest that rages beneath chartreux fur.

Deep within a beast lifts his head and sniffs the air, desperate for any hint of torn out throats and burning blood. Ah but her features are too still, too practiced, too careful. Exhaling a rumble of discontent the beast returns to slumber and she breaths her own soft sigh. "Not eef z'ey value life." A quiet threat, a shimmer of instability, followed by a grin that is shaped in to something playful.

A desert pit -- it is enough to heat the mask of that playfulness, creating something more permanent. Lasting and real and genuine.

"You think eet would be z'at easy?" Now she pointedly flexes those claws, an exaggerated action that is meant to draw his attention. "I am much trickier to fell z'han I look." Oh and she should swallow the next words as they crash against her teeth, desperate to prod and poke and play risk with her own well being.

Just ask your wife she wants to jest, to drive home the stake that appears as if by magic in her fist. A cruelty, a foolishness, and somehow her sense wins out and she swallows them down with a shit-eating grin that says more than enough.

@Gauthier

DEVILS-MAKER

midnight mass
a crimson pool so warm and deep
lulls me to an endless sleep

Not if they value their life. He appraised the comment with an agreeing hum, dragging his tongue along the sheen of his fangs. Gauthier would not see it as such a shame – after all, they held no use for graves did they? There was purpose in every slice of traitorous meat for them and he was witness to its testament. No admiration found its way into his heart for any that stood against his newfound family, even if they were the curling tendrils of that very tree; bittered by the fragments of a once-loyalty, the ghosting tug of a bidding leash.

His gaze had wandered back to the prey at the edge of the water. They’d begun to disperse for one reason or another, the crocs still lying in wait, and the tilt of the evening drawing shadows over all. But his skull swung acutely at the sound of Louve’s voice when she drummed over his former comment with a quip. The draw of her claws gained little more than the snide, brief pass of his eyes, cold and darkened. Were there more to her words playing the minced edges of her drawling syllables, he decisively paid little mind to the hovering threat. Had she expected him to shy from the temper in her voice, after all? He wasn’t some tail-tucked subservient, even when he had been under the banner of her blood.

Dismissed with the roll of a shoulder and the flex of his broad paws – from one, his claws ticked a beat along the hard-packed edge of the overlook. As much as he’d known the greater successes of more desperate battles, he well knew the sting of loss and the humility to numb their sore tremors that followed. He was not so bold to assume himself, or anyone for that matter, infallible. That was the mentality that had many finding themselves in such shallow graves, or one so shallow as the belly of another beast.

Once, he would test that theory.

Easy? the tune of his baritone lifted from the pocked corner of his mouth, grated through the carving sharpness of his teeth. The curl at the edge of his lips was ever arrogant, knowing the value of blood in its finest triumph and still satisfying loss. Whatever lingers in her grin is reckless and perhaps foolish, but he is not wisened to the inner machinations of the woman’s mind. If only. The tide of tension had pulled in the other direction, and he was not so keen on relenting to the drag.

Not as though he would hope for it. Whatever blood-soaked bed either of them made, they’d lay in it. A brow raised as he surveyed her expression with an air of aloofness, unbothered by that shift. No, I wouldn’t think you would disappoint me so poorly. Perhaps it was the only consolation to the Dieudonne ego he had to offer, some small sharp compliment that she could swallow however she pleased.

@Louve

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drag my teeth across your chest
to taste your beating heart

An ear flicks back at the sound of his claws against the hard-packed earth. Hearing them and, eventually, lowering her gaze to study the press of weapon to the ground. A click that is strangely appealing, if she were to be entirely honest, if only for the memories that it evokes. Not of him, particularly, but of the damage they can cause, the ease with which they can tear through flesh. That of friend and foe alike. Two vastly different experiences.

For a second her mind travels to the past, to blood stained sand and ocean froth tinged pink. A second, only, before she tugs and returns her thoughts to present where they grab hold and dig deep. Putting down roots in a stubborn and defiant way, for what good does it bring to revisit the past?

@Gauthier does not take the bait and while she had not expected him to she felt a crushing swell of disappointment. Her own claws flex once more, grasping at the dirt in a needy sort of way that tells of the ever present desire to destroy. Him, even, friend or not, if only for his timely presence.

"Non," she agrees, with another flash of teeth, yellow eyes flicking back to his face, "i do not make a 'abit of eet." Disappointment was the most deadly poison, after all, and should she go down she would not go down gently.

There, then, is a lapse in conversation. A lull she is not certain how to fill and so settles for companionable silence, watching as the hooved beasts wander away from the water, seemingly learning a late lesson on what dangers lurk beneath. Or, perhaps only because the shadows have lengthened and the night is reserved for those with sharper teeth.

art