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+--- Thread: [OPEN] You are only a small child and feel afraid [SS] (/thread-765.html)
You are only a small child and feel afraid [SS] - Machete - September 21, 2017
The solstice washed his home in a sultry haze and ended its days later than usual. Were he but human, that chubby cheeks could flush and the beads of sweat upon his brow could cool him down, but as it was, the boy was stuck panting and shedding and whining to his mom about how hoooootttt it was. She was always sympathetic to his complaints... last time he'd tried it with Avery, she'd promptly picked him up and tossed him into the fairy pools with a gigantic sploosh. When he'd surfaced, dog-paddling and yowling indignantly -- godmuuuuum!! -- the Cavalier had laughed and shrugged her broad shoulders. Cooled you off, didn't I?
Godmum was so funny. A little scary sometimes, in her intensity. But always funny. And always gentle with him, despite her tricks.
When the dawn came, Machete was out of the family den, forfeiting his usual sleeping in for a chance to beat the sun to his little puppy adventures. Today, he stood stargazing, staring with his mouth open in wonder at the great wall. It was so big, so very big, and they'd made it all by themselves, those other grown-ups here? How did they do it? The boy stood on his hind paws, pressing his front ones against the rock and bouncing off with an oomph. Maybe he could try and build something, too. His brothers and sister would be so jealous!
He had just began to root around the base of the great wall, looking for good sticks to start with, when he felt something
encircle his downy neck
and caress his cheek.
Spooked, the boy yipped in surprise and stumbled backwards, almost tripping over his feet as he looked frantically from side to side. What was that?! He was the only one here, wasn't he?!? Don't be such a scaredy, he reminded himself, though still he put his paw in his mouth and started to chew, some wolf equivalent of sucking one's thumb. Movement, in the distance -- he could see shapes forming in the early morning mist --
He croaked, quiet but hopeful, "Momma?"
RE: You are only a small child and feel afraid [SS] - Machete - September 21, 2017
In the end, Serrate was right: being dead wasn't better. It wasn't even easier. The insects that devoured every twitching nerve inside of him were gone, but in their place was a deep, cosmic ache that sometimes felt like awe, sometimes felt like dread. All the world was stardust, and stories, and contradictory laws crafted by a faceless someone with a hard-on for child sacrifice. Tragedy could be beautiful, but it was still a sad story, and he didn't know how to take that.
They tell you, "you leave everything behind". They tell you, "you can't take anything with you." That wasn't true. The space in his eye that once housed a red flaw was now a slice of the starry sky (or was it the deep sea?). Within it and its sparkling miasma that leaked, from time to time, into a black mist about his face, he carried everything. It was heavy. But that was fine. The weight reminded him it all meant something. Sometimes he wished it still hurt, too. Sometimes he wished it hurt so fucking bad that he could cement the memory, that he could hold onto the fact that his life and everything within his life was worth fighting hell for. Blood and tears, man—they make the light count.
Kariya walked the white sands of the far shore and left ebbing wakes of black behind him. He followed the skinny yellow wolf carrying a bell to a pool of moonlight, lapping the edge of a pit. Tauro had gone already, eager as always to dunk his head (literally) into the unknown. Kariya held back because even the thought of more incomprehensible bullshit made him tired.
He thought it was kind of stupid how dying didn't make him any less tired. He thought it was kind of stupid how dying didn't make him any less sorry.
So, so, goddamn sorry.
Ring, ring.
The Prince glanced to Anvil, saw him gesture towards the pool, and then shrugged. Yeah, alright. He stepped a paw onto the surface and it threw him into familiar depths. Whalesong echoed in reverse. Shrouds of bubbles sucked down into the dark as a body drew up from its grave at the bottom of the sea.
He saw a white eel.
------------------ ☾☀ ------------------
A little white moth fluttered to the end of Machete's nose. All about him were moths, tiny and fragile and pretty in the light. They didn't whisper. They didn't say anything. They didn't hurt or bite or foretell bad things. They were just there, and they were just nice to have.
Kariya laid lazily nearby, yawning.
"Momma?"
"Hey, kid." he said, waving a paw. "You cool?"
RE: You are only a small child and feel afraid [SS] - Machete - September 21, 2017
She was not welcome at the far shore. She would never touch its fine white sands or see the faces that formed their boy-king's army. They were people, not angels, and some were more stained than others with what they had done in life... but these things were forgivable. These things did not ensnare them like a string around the foot of a bird that tried instinctively to reach the sky.
She would never see them. She would never see anything ever again. Her empty skull hung upon the great wall. Her skin lay upon the back of an old lord. Her insides were long soaked up by an earth that was always hungry. Was it just, this sentencing, for a sick little girl and her sick little friend? Was it deserved?
(Such quandaries were not for the likes of her.)
To become Aware again after death, after a place with no memory, was indescribably disorienting. The veil shimmered and thinned; she moved to it like a moth atop a baby's nose. She moved to what she recognized, a drowning animal reaching for ground, a lost traveler deep in the woods for something familiar to lead them back home. She emerged from the barren holes of her bones and found something she'd once liked. She touched him, just once. It frightened him. Why?
He was moving too much. She coiled around him like a snake, looping about his limbs, his belly, his neck. The crying, the wriggling, I can't move I can't move, someone help me, oh you selfish brat I just want to touch just for a while please you're so warm so alive --
A ringing bell could not dissuade her. A flock of moths could. She hesitated, loosening her grip, and looked around wildly, though she had no eyes to do it with. But she could hear them just fine, like she'd heard them Before, infecting her, eating her, flapping white wings and little scratchy legs coming closer, closer --
Lilith retreated back to elsewhere and nowhere as Kariya arrived to see a little boy he'd left behind.
~
Something weakened. Machete squirmed and kicked frantically, trying to slip away, but it was not needed; the hold on him uncoiled like the tail of a serpent and slid away. All at once, he could move again. All at once, the suffocating dark of that presence faded away to be replaced with --
Fearful eyes, pale and yellow, gaped upward. The moths above him were full of light; they moved as though weightless and free from all that restrained or controlled their counterparts in life. They were there, and though Machete could not understand why, the sight of them filled him with a profound sense of peace.
He wasn't afraid anymore. He stepped closer, curious. One landed upon his nose and he crossed his eyes to see it.
"Hi," murmured the boy quietly, unsure but trusting, to the little white bug. A nod of his shaggy head. "I'm cool."
Very slowly, he reached up one paw as though to touch his tiny and mysterious visitor, as though he still was not certain it was real, but thought better and set it back down.
"You're talking to me," said Mach, blinking owlishly as he stated the obvious. "I-I thought... only wolves could talk..."
This world was so much bigger than he'd ever imagined.