[Shatter]

Ran from: March 28, 2015 - April 01, 2017

The old renegade sat resting, alone upon a barren borderline. A sagging fern, browning at the edges, sheltered her from the lukewarm rain.

This place was rotten and macerated, yet never quite dead, though its strengthless heartbeat was powered only by a thready pulse she knew would easily be obliterated should someone decide to show it that mercy. She'd fought smilodons once upon a time, as a young volatile girl, hulking roaring brutes that for all the size of her kind could have felled them each with one good blow. Sometimes she'd returned to the battlefield to marvel in silence (silly children new to this world, even she, were still impacted by such things) at how even this gargantuan enemy bloated and burst and decomposed. Gone tomorrow.

That was what this dusty creaking kingdom was, in the end. Just another thing set here to reach its peak and die. It had fixed something inside her once to watch this happen, then to actively make it happen, if only for a while, but here she idled as an uninvited guest prepared for unceremonious departure once her bone-deep exhaustion, an ailment even Isaiah's remedies could not touch, did so as well.

Isaiah. How odd that he, with nothing else to offer her, should still be on her mind. Small, malnourished, crooked little mender. Dragon had no conscience, no reverence for debts and selfless overtures most other wolves would feel obligated to repay. She still planned, in a detached way, to give the regards he'd requested nonetheless. Who knew why? Who could even begin to surmise?

The scent of a native, emanating nearby. A decaying vegetable stink. Dragon turned her muzzle only slightly, facing it with her last eye, the frayed, feathery hairs upon her cheeks betraying her age.

"Salutations," said she, in a flat voice that made a mockery of the cordiality. "I'm looking for a black wolf named Talon. Have you seen him?"

At times, it would be effortless to believe that Alteron was not a kingdom within a forest, but rather that they were all living within the decomposing innards of a bloated, fly-infested corpse; the darkness overwhelming, pouring like inky nightfall from the treetops to drench the undergrowth below. Vultures came to roost where the scent of death was strongest; thus Shatter, vicious, darkling bird of prey, made her nest in Alteron. Her figure almost seemed serpentine as she slithered between the trees that supported the weight of Alteron's canopy, resembling darkness moving within darkness, save for the febrile glimmer of her molten orange eyes.

The dagger-point of Shatter's nose thrust in the air as she inhaled the smell of decay, scenting for something that she, herself, was uncertain of. Picking out a particular smell in a forest that constantly reeked of death could be realistically dismissed as impossible, and yet even that memory she clung to with such tenacity was smothered by what felt like an eternity of slumber. As long as she spent in isolation, repeating memories of past brutality ad nauseum, there were still links missing from the chain. The Beast had felled so many opponents throughout her life that as her fraying memory betrayed her, each experience of maiming insignificants began to blur together into a writhing pastiche of anonymous faces. She picked at the pieces of her subconscious held dangling, mulled over the memory of biting into someone's throat; the gush of blood painting the inside of her mouth.

Perhaps that was why she remained, even when she loathed the stagnation that gripped the kingdom her once-liege had conquered. This place was dying. Or rather, it had died long ago. Shatter ceased to think of it as pitiful a long time ago. She recognized the parallels between her and this rotten, lonely tomb that she called home.

Where she sought the remnants of old Alteron, in hopes of reliving moments of bloodshed that had since blurred together in animalistic frenzy -- she instead stumbled upon the aging renegade. Shatter was so divorced from Alteron's inner machinations that she had no way of telling if Dragon was a citizen or an intruder, but something about her presence struck her as suspicious. She was huge; robust despite her apparent age, with the planes of the right side of her face carved apart by tooth and claw. "Salutations," the old woman croaked, flatly and without inflection. Shatter returned her miserable parody of cordiality with firm disinterest, a calculating spark still dwelling behind her cryptic glare.

Handling incidents on the borderline was delegated to the patrolmen, but since when did Shatter ever give a fuck about jurisdiction? Because she had nothing else worthy of her time, she entertained the mysterious fringe's question; should Dragon suddenly drop all pretenses at diplomacy, her demeanor would just as capriciously reverse. Talon was well before her time, and Alteron's history of escapees wasn't her concern. She recalled hearing something about a lion invasion swooping in to seize control of the vulnerable empire; she supposed that if Scimitar coveted the throne so desperately, he never would have left it vacant to begin with. Still, she almost wished that she found Alteron sooner. She had never killed a lion before.

"Talon..." she repeated, tasting the word. Nothing came to mind. She had killed many wolves during the war, never knowing their names. All of her victims were just cadavers without toe tags condemned to rot, their remains withering until they vanished into the soil. Whether or not there was a Talon's remains entombed within the earth -- well, she wouldn't know. "No."

Shatter's voice issued in a mangled rasp, a guttural snarl not unlike glass thrown inside a blender. It was the voice of someone who had the life choked out of them. "Look for the battlefield--" A mirthless smile exposed just a hint of fang there, but perhaps Dragon had only imagined it, because it had vanished in the next second- "When you find it, dig. You may find what you're looking for."

The creature that approached her now was far more wraith than wolf, a living razor with eyes that were almost genius in their madness... or, at least that was how Dragon might have described Shatter, had she been one for bombastic judgements on any four-legged pre-corpse that wandered up to her. No -- this barbarian was hair, a face, a voice, a variety of internal machinations tangible and non. A glorified satchel, that might contain something the renegade wanted.

(Perhaps they had that in common.)

In any case, she faced Shatter patiently, watching her search herself, watching her think. She shifted forward, moving closer though she took no step, sacrificing several inches of the shelter, and the lukewarm rain broke upon her ragged head, the drops catching and then disappearing in the long frayed tangle of her cheek ruffs. Here came the denial, and still she waited, suspecting that there was more coming that she ought not to smother with needless speech.

"Look for the battlefield-- when you find it, dig. You may find what you're looking for."

"The battlefield," she echoed in perfect monotone; the repetition might have been incredulous in another's mouth. What sort of battles did a slumbering, rotting, unnecessary place like this have? If the one sought after -- Isaiah's deadbeat, abusive father, of course -- already lay six feet under at another wolf's jaws, then that was simply that. Her investment in him was thready at best, and like a thread, it would snap.

Opaque lime eye slid thoughtfully to half-mast for a moment. That black, mirthless "joke" was countered by a serious request.

"Show me."

Shatter expected Dragon to maybe scoff and let the issue drop, as people were predictable in that fashion, and easily defeated by what she refused to hand to them, or persist on the topic to see if she could offer something more valuable. However she reacted, it wasn't her concern. For all she knew, Talon was gone. Whether he was one of many casualties or was one of the deserters that abandoned the pack at the first sign of conflict, he wasn't in Alteron anymore. Even when Dragon ignored Shatter's cryptically-dispensed "information" and cut straight to the passing mention of a battlefield - there was no hint of surprise in the beast. If you probed her, she never would have admitted that she didn't expect the elder's sudden... fascination with Alteron's history.

Shatter stared in return, inscrutable, unflinchingly meeting the poisonous acid-green depths of the killer's stare as if scouring them for some hidden intentions. Whatever truth she unearthed must have worked to Dragon's favor, because her only response was to turn away. "Follow," she rumbled.

Trusting that Dragon would meet her pace, she began a slow and almost mournful stride toward where the smell of rotting matter was the most prominent, leading her companion into the stinking depths of the forest. Together they'd navigate dark, rotting Alteron, venturing deeper and deeper, with Shatter dictating where they went. (Even if she had no intention of doing so, a vital part of Shatter took observation of their surroundings, noting that in this dense, isolated space, it would have been the perfect place for her to lunge straight for Dragon's throat.)

(She kept that information on hand, just in case she decided it was pertinent.)

What she didn't know was that Dragon wasn't just a curious old woman, and that if such a situation arose, disposing of her would be more difficult than she anticipated.

But, of course, she wouldn't.

Her slow, speculative gait had not changed with her maiming, squandering in necessity and calculation no precious energy. It still never crossed the line into being ponderous, much like the lime eye -- and the other, once upon a time, its memory enshrined in nothing but dark, puckering keloid tissue that formed a twisted hole one could put a thumb into should they wish -- never seemed entirely vacant even in the opaque, painted-on stare it gave the scenery as into it she delved after Shatter. It was difficult sometimes to look at her and not think of a crocodile.

Follow, the soldier had rasped. Dragon pursued the offering in silent, imperceptable greed. If Shatter attacked her opportunistically, if she led the old wolf into an ambush, then she would accept that and act accordingly. Whatever motive lay behind such foolishness could not be personal... and she certainly would not be the first bloodthirsty young girl to want to open up her throat and drink deeply from the wound.

The smell of this place -- a putrescent reek, the fumes exhaled by life as it broke down -- became thick and offensive, eye-watering, repulsive. There were more than just dead plants at rest here. Still there was no flinch, just a ripple of lip over massive stained teeth as she filtered it through mouth and nose, embraced what was coming without pleasure nor disgust nor anticipation, shifted gaze to the thin beams of sun that penetrated the foliage and opened the way into --

Ah.

Dragon moved past Shatter, observing the battlefield with a mien that could generously be described as... unaffected. There were cadavers scattered throughout the trampled clearing, in various end-stages of decomposition -- six feet to their left, a big (saber?) lion that was mostly bone -- further away, a wolf with the nest of some vermin in the hollow of its ribcage. Many others, beyond even these.

The renegade drifted between them in investigation, evidently looking for something and each time not quite finding it, moving dispassionately onto the next. "You were involved," she said at last, breaking the silence if Shatter had not already done so -- a simple hypothesis framed as a hard fact.

Some things were easier observed for oneself than explicitly spelled out. People too often just did not pay attention.

The two killers traveled in silence under Alteron's canopy, enveloped in near-darkness that made Shatter flicker in and out of sight with each step. The slowly boiling stench of dying vegetation swelled like the sonata to a symphony, their arrival on the boundaries of the battlefield itself the orchestra's dissonant wailing - the cacophonous climax. Hideous Alteron was forever in its death throes, the impenetrable depths of its darkness sheltering and suffocating, trapping its inhabitants in an eternal state of stagnation. Nothing infiltrated its defenses - not war, not life, and especially not time.

Packed densely throughout the clearing were bodies half-submerged in the soil, some still clothed in the tattered remnants of their skin and fur, others stripped bare of any flesh. Swarms of flies pecked at the putrefying matter, flocking in squirming macrocosms on each ripe centimeter of skin, populating in the sanctuary of the corpses' stomachs until their rotting recesses were thriving with little wriggling maggots. Flies died and were replaced by their descendants, in a cycle of death, rebirth, consumption. Alteron was unmoving, but soon there would be little left of this place but bones.

The pair separated. Shatter impassively allowed Dragon to comb through the garden of cadavers, putting her devices out of sight and out of mind. As the renegade searched with no real purpose, Shatter gravitated to a particular patch of soil she had memorized long ago. "You were involved," Dragon said.

"Yes." Shatter wasn't looking at the woman. She extended a paw, pressing it deep into the decomposing undergrowth, pushing aside the layers of withered, brown leaves and dead, black soil until she was rewarded with the telltale sound of nails scraping against something hard. "I'm not certain as to how long ago it was. I remember all of it." There was no reminiscence in her voice, no sentiment spared for bygone days. She was merely relaying information. "I fought for the sovereign - I won. If any of them knew what would become of this place, there never would have been a war."

She began the methodical process of clearing away the shriveled plants, the insect corpses embalmed in their little earthen pockets, and the brittle and malnourished soil. Shatter gazed into the divot she had carved, meeting with unblinking intensity the stare of the skull sitting inside its tomb. The bone was almost black with flakes of accumulated dirt; its empty eye sockets blinded with hardened clumps of soil. Almost ceremoniously, with a careful and clinical precision to her work, Shatter cradled the skull in her paws and lifted it. The withered remains of an earthworm dangled like a broken limb outside the eye socket, resembling in death a severed root rather than a living creature once supple with blood and life. Shatter turned the skull so it received the full, venomous brunt of Dragon's scrutiny.

"Does he look familiar?" Shatter asked. If there was any kernel of humor to be unearthed from her crypticisms, her monotone delivery supplanted that assumption. The skull's mouth hung agape, the dislocated jaw, almost swinging on its hinge, flashing a crooked rictus of silent terror.

This garden was indeed a gruesome one, the epicenter of a land that once had been beautiful and terrible as an eldritch creature, but now lay barren and inanimate as though decayed by thousands of years. And how alike these two soldiers of fate were at the crossroads, how fitting that they'd end up here, despite an abysmal lack of love or loyalty for the nation itself... hungry things, brutal things, that were not attuned in any kind of emotional way to such sights. Living wolves were objects, props, things enough to Dragon and Shatter -- why would the dead be any more highly regarded?

"Yes. I'm not certain as to how long ago it was. I remember all of it. I fought for the sovereign - I won. If any of them knew what would become of this place, there never would have been a war."

Perfunctory and uninterrupting, the renegade kept the younger she-wolf in the periphery of her limited vision, even as Shatter herself turned and began to dig while she lamented the forgotten war in her toneless, faintly tempestuous way. Only fools believed that civility and violence were separated by a stark line; Beryl hadn't taught her that, but she'd surely reinforced it. I will heal, I will survive, the inarguable mantra that had replaced burn the mother down, let neither chance predator with an empty stomach or terrorized victim with an ugly grudge have the pleasure, have the CLOSURE --

Shatter was holding aloft a skull, cradling it derisively, so that the old monster could see. She did so, tilting her ragged head, staring down the long bridge of her nose; someone who didn't know better might liken the gaze to an appreciator admiring a work of fine art. "Does he look familiar?"

Yes, would have been the honest answer, for the mandible hung broken, its jarring dislodgement like so much accusation. She touched the severed skull gently with the end of her snout, scenting it carefully, and very briefly felt the drop of an old memory. A rival alpha, all black and white, queen of mercenaries, whose keep she and hers had raided on the dawn of Eschaton's rise into power. Dragon remembered sinking her teeth into the face -- she'd never even learned her name -- and mauling until it resembled so much pulverized meat. Remembered trapping the lower jaw and shaking and hearing a sickening crunch. Remembered what that woman's skull, stripped of flesh, had looked like months later... just like this one. Exactly like this one.

"I'm afraid not," was the answer the renegade actually gave, drawing back with that same faux-cordiality. She knew name and pelt of her quarry... bones possessed neither anymore.

"Such a war was before my time here," mused Dragon in continuation, and this was technically not a lie, of course. She had started deeper in on the graveyard now, the soft hoarse voice somehow carrying well even though it did not raise to be heard whether or not Shatter chose to follow. "I am sorry to have missed it." An actual lie, to make up for the not-quite she'd just rasped; it was subtly integrating. Manipulative. "Was it a coup of sorts, then?"

Dragon analyzed the skull, scrutinizing the features not weathered away by the passage of time, such as the distance between eye sockets, the shape of its muzzle, the slope of its brow ridge... Perhaps she envisioned a dark pelt adhered to its surface, if only to imagine how such a skeleton would look, clad in Talon's skin, and determine the rest of its likeness through guesswork. Alas, when Dragon broke the silence, it was to announce that the skull did not belong to the one that she so tirelessly sought. It was more out of cruel amusement that Shatter had bothered to desecrate the skull's grave; she never reasonably expected for her new companion to confirm that she had uncovered Talon's remains. Shatter passed over the skull, offhandedly admiring its handsome profile. Despite the fact it had been rotting away in the earth's clutches, it had barely eroded. An interesting keepsake.

"A shame," Shatter said, with too much flat indifference for the sentiment to be mistaken as genuine. Dragon, most likely, didn't care either. Why she felt the need to chase such an impossible ordeal was either out of obligation, or a need to fill the void left in her life after her defeat, rather than truthful commitment. It was worth wondering -- why did terrible, inscrutable women like Dragon or Shatter do anything at all?

Dragon's interest had been piqued, and Shatter felt like indulging her curiosity. Shatter could recite the whole wretched affair like it had been inscribed on the back of her mind; she had so much time to ponder the details. Speaking them aloud felt like a way of vicariously reliving the experience, if only in bursts and flashes; intermittent moments of remembrance.

"A power struggle. The old queen died... Under mysterious circumstances," she added introspectively, musingly turning the skull over in her paws. She entertained the idea of keeping it, now that she had gone to the trouble of excavating the anonymous slab of bone. Shatter set the skull aside for the time being, and made a mental note to return to that spot. "She outlived her usefulness. No one took credit for her death."

From what she had gleaned over her stay in Alteron, when Shatter consciously chose to involve herself in its history, Rapier had been a dreadful queen -- in every possible interpretation of the word. She had been temperamental, quick to anger, quick to sentence her subjects to death, and, unbeknownst to Shatter, had died subsequently after murdering her lone sycophant in a fit of rage. Quite frankly, it had been a disastrous oversight that no one had tried to assassinate the slovenly old hag. Rapier's legacy had been something addressed only in hushed whispers, mentioned only as a bygone age whenever Azuhel needed to make herself look greater. Alteron had been the culmination of two megalomaniacs' insatiable need for acknowledgment and power, and Rapier herself had delivered the death blow that ended her rule.

"There had been three of them," Shatter continued in the same foreboding tone. "An old man, the queen's son, and a revolutionary. I thought that if I joined the latter, I would have a greater likelihood of success." She paused. "I needed a change."

Lady in gray offered an single lamentation, as lifeless and insincere as anything the renegade in her long life had ever spoken, and took a long, predatory moment to indulge in viewing the skeletal cadavers that surrounded them. Considering what this one anonymous head might look like adorning her heinous den. Dragon was ever the warrior who'd walk over the dead, crushing ribs or pelvis or tibia beneath her trod, because they were in her path and she cared not to alter it. She was ever the assassin who'd rip apart the bodies of her prey because it so distressed her enemies (poor Elias, poor good-for-nothing boy) to see them in such a state. But taking one's victims apart, making crafts from their various parts, displaying them artfully in her quarters... oh, that was a special depravity she'd never demonstrated.

In any case, the old wolf never mused upon this. She was not looking at Shatter at all right now, in fact. She was several feet away, the frayed hairs on the backs of her lean legs fluttering in the dank wind, observing a most unusual sight. Look at this, someone else might have called over, wanting to share this sight, this strange experiment, but the silence hung heavy around the sides of her head, almost tangible for how oppressive it sometimes felt. The massive bony hull of a wolf, its flesh and swampy purple pelt long have sagged and rotted away, lay spread out among the equally decomposed corpses of several lions. Its limbs were wild as though in mid-thrash. Its jaw was still open and furious somehow. A gaping puncture wound in the back of the huge skull was all any coroner ever needed to see. Inside stirred a cluster of maggots, should one look. Inside the ribcage, an anthill in progress, thriving and unceasing.

Nature, red in tooth and claw. Nature, always hungry.

Nature, needing a change.

"Did it help?" was all Dragon inquired. She'd turned her head to peer over her shoulder at the soldier, green eyes probing behind the flat, drifting, vacant film. Had it changed anything, knocking over one pointless despot and inviting another to take her place? Had that been the filler for the void she carried with her always?

"I am Tanith." Offered impartially, a token dropped into a cupped hand, curling the fingers over it. "Thank you for what you've shared."

Apropos of nothing, nary an explanation given, Dragon knelt down and begin to chew the head from Kotake's corpse.

Dragon strode quietly between the bodies, a pallbearer in a garden of wolf limbs and lion waste. She drifted away from Shatter, whose attentions were divided between the patch of dirt-stained bones (protruding upwards from the black soil like shoots of bleached grass) and Dragon herself. Inquisitive molten eyes followed her passage as Dragon proceeded past the lions and the wolves towards something overlooked, almost automatic, yet with too much deliberation to be likened to a moth gravitating to a flame.

Shatter rose to her feet and came from behind her, leaving behind the skull. Dragon stopped a short distance away, reflecting beside a corpse which was somehow of particular interest. The body of what was once Kotake had been stripped of all her hallmarks and was now just a naked framework; nothing of substance but that bounty of bones. A nest of maggots was squirming in the cavity of her skull. A fat black widow was weaving a diaphanous web between the curve of two rib-bones, crafting a canopy for the ant society below. Shatter's head ticked to the side, and she watched Dragon circle the fallen knight.

Kotake was from before her time. Before there the Thing In The Forest, there was the Soldier that stalked the trees. Even if Shatter knew of the Weapon, there was nothing left that made Kotake, Kotake. She had become the fertile breeding ground of the insects that were once her familiars.

"Did it help?" Dragon inquired.

"Not yet," was Shatter's measured reply.

Shatter was not filled by a void. She was a void, and a void was always hungry.

Silence filled by the grey droning of flies' wings.

At last, Dragon would offer her name, and she was not Dragon, but Tanith, and that was how Shatter would know her from henceforth. Shatter felt it appropriate to give her own name in return. "I'm Shatter," she said. "I hope you find who you are looking for."

If Tanith sought to kill this Talon, then she hoped that she would be successful.

With no words or explanation offered, Tanith shifted to the skeleton's head, fangs brutally worrying at the vertebrae that still kept it connected. Inside one empty eye socket, Shatter could see the knot of maggots squirming frenetically as their haven quaked and jostled. Not once did Shatter question Tanith's machinations. Where Tanith set upon the body's head, Shatter similarly occupied herself with Kotake's unattended lower half, latching teeth around the remnants of one great femur, age and decay allowing her to easily separate it from the pelvis. Joints and bones were splintered, old flakes of marrow tasting like glue on her tongue, but she devoured it anyway.

She pried Kotake apart, piece by piece, and made her way towards the sacrum, the grand centerpiece of the cadaver.

A skull was a paltry token of commemoration for a memorable encounter. She would take this instead.