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 Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:34 pm
 Into the Woods
Cesc heads back to the preserve with Lorin, trying to convince himself that everything will be alright. He's wrong. *
He felt ill, long after the effects wore off.
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Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2017 10:47 pm
 A Snap Decision
Lorin does the unthinkable and lies to his mama about his hike with Cesc in the woods.
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Posted: Sat Jan 07, 2017 10:51 pm
Return to Reality
It was real.
The hunter was real.
Cesc’s heart had not slowed for what felt like hours. He’d blocked it out, returned Lorin to his mother, and then called the park rangers in a daze. It was the woman he spoke with the day before, and she did not sound as alarmed and concerned as he would have had her. Where had he seen the hunter? Was he hunting birds? Was he wearing orange? What sort of equipment did he have? She’d check in on the trail for evidence. She’d let the police know.
Numbness had fluttered a blanket over his senses, putting a buffer between him and the world.
It wasn’t that bad, he said at first, laughing nervously, his skin cold and clammy but somehow beading sweat. It was nothing to worry about. He’d called a park ranger. And now he’d just call the police as a follow-up. He’d just call Azucar, that's all.
But he called Azucar and only gotten his voicemail once more.
Neele. He’d call Neele.
No—no, there was no need to let the hysteria take over. No need. He’d wait for Azucar to call him back, and then they could talk. Then they could take this thing on together. He could be satisfied with that, couldn’t he?
The hours felt like years. Cesc checked his phone obsessively, waiting for a call or for a text, or for a something, ********, anything. In his nervous energy, he texted: This is real and then cursed the dramatic fuzziness of the message, writing afterward an addendum: The hunter, I mean.
Should he tell Vivi and Shepard, or would it only worry them?
Had he even seen what he thought he saw? Was his memory distorting things?
No—that mask, that distinctive mask, he’d seen it too many times in his nightmares after the jungle. It was seared onto him like a brand. There was no mistaking that mask.
He washed his face and checked his phone. His skin felt too tight, his blood felt too fast, his body felt strange and reality felt like it had taken two steps to the right and hadn’t told him. His eyes hurt. His chest hurt from breathing too quick, too quick, the rest of the day.
Azucar had broken his phone seven times since Neele knew him. Seven times. This could just be eight. Breathe.
At two a.m., the numbness began to fade and the world had sharp edges again. Cesc’s eyes snapped open in the dark and his t-shirt was glued to his chest with cold sweat, his eyes wide and looking at nothing. He sat up, gripping the collar of his shirt.
All was quiet. He scrambled for his phone on the nightstand, but there were no missed messages there.
His hands over his eyes, Cesc let out a long, ragged moan. He didn’t want to be here again, these moments that the jungle had given him. He didn’t want to have to feel this horrible swell of nausea, of helplessness.
He fell back against his pillows, his eyes wet.
It was real.
The hunter was real. It wasn’t a figment of his imagination in the jungle. It was something, someone, real and horrible. Someone that wanted him and all stags to die, their antlers to lay in jumbled repose in the forest for all to see as warning.
A wave of despair crashed over him, down onto him, showering him with horror and helplessness. He struggled against it, trying not to drown in the might of that wave that held him down, pinned him to his bed in breathless, crushing horror.
He sat up again, throwing the bed sheets off of him, and dashed to his bathroom. The heated air still felt cold against the dampness of his shirt’s fabric, but when he turned on the faucet and splashed icy water onto his face, it felt good. Clean. Soothing.
Rhedefre took a deep breath. He tensed his muscles, relaxed them. He took another, held it, and then another. He looked around his bathroom, breathing, and counted objects. Tiles. He numbed his mind again with boredom.
Then, suddenly, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
Tired, stubbled, his eyes bloodshot, his hair bed-rumpled, his cheeks red.
But he still looked older, more mature, than he had when these nights were a frequent thing, in those horrible days just after the jungle.
The water of the wave was drying. Embers of anger were starting to clear it away.
He won that fight. He found Dr. Kyou.
Nobody died. Nobody was maimed. Nobody fell prey to the hunter then; not him, not Zeke, not Anya, not Iorek. He hadn’t been there to defeat it, no, but it had been defeated once. This was not the self-same hunter. It couldn’t be. That one was a mirage—a mirage of this one, of this fear. And with all its power, it hadn’t won.
This one wouldn’t win either, Cesc thought. <******** it,” said Rhedefre to his reflection. He gripped the sides of the sink, his knuckles white. “******** him."
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:45 pm
You Have Reached...
He called Azucar’s number again.
Straight to voicemail now.
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Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 8:48 pm
Guardians
Rhedefre went downstairs to the bakery, zipping up his coat, his face still pale, his hair still mussed from his troubled sleep. He fished his gloves out of his pockets and was pulling them onto his fingers when Vivi’s voice disturbed him.
“It is not your shift, cheri,” said Vivi, her voice low and musing, as she exited the kitchen. She had on an apron, wearing comfortable clothing underneath for the morning baking shift. “What are you doing up? And ready to go somewhere, I see?”
Cesc started at the sound, his shoulders stiff. Her questions did nothing to make him relax, and he stared at her with round, guilty eyes.
“I’m—I’m going out,” he tried.
“At five in the morning? Where do you have to go?”
Vivi never pressed this line of questioning before. If she asked him, it was curiousity rather than suspicion, but this time, with her lips tight and her eyebrows lowered, there was no playfulness. No lilt, no coo, in her voice.
And he was doing nothing to quell her suspicions. Suddenly, with the knowledge he was acting suspect, Rhedefre could not for the life of him remember what his normal posture was, his normal response. He fumbled, put his glove on the wrong hand, and pulled it back off again.
“Is it that you are going back to the preserve?” Vivi asked. “Is that what you are doing this early?”
Under such a direct accusation, Cesc buckled. He passed one thumb against his eyebrow and squeezed close his eyes before managing out a quiet: “Yes.”
“What is going on with you?” Vivi sighed, dropping her arms. “What fascination is bringing you there so often? Are there lovely does that you find yourself enraptured by, ah? I cannot fathom it.”
Cesc let out a mirthless laugh. “No. It’s not that. It’s just… yesterday, when I went with Lorin, I… we saw something. Someone out there. I need to go back and see.”
Vivi inclined her head, her hair dropping from over her shoulder. “You have already found Ashley, n’est pas? Who else is missing?”
“I don’t know,” said Cesc. “Azucar. I mean, I don’t know that he is. I haven’t heard from him in days and Neele said he saw him the same morning he stopped replying to me, but I haven’t—I haven’t heard from him since then. And Lorin said something bad happened in the forest. And then—“ The stag caught his breath, caught the spill of his words.
Vivi watched him with alarm, but said nothing, waiting for the rest of the fall of his sentences, knowing they were teetering on his tongue.
“…do you… remember the jungle?” Cesc said, his voice small.
“Oh, cheri,” Vivi came forward, wrapping her arms around his torso. “No, no. Do not trouble yourself with these memories, with this guilt.”
“It’s not memories. It’s not—you have to hear me out on this,” urged Cesc, drawing back. “Vivi, do you remember I told you about a hunter in the jungle? Someone in a red and white mask, in all black, who hunted me?”
“It was an apparition, Rhedefre,” whispered Vivi.
“It wasn’t. I thought so, too, Vivi! I really did. But it wasn’t. I saw him—in the preserve. Just as he was in the jungle. He’s terrorizing the stags. They warned me already. And I’m scared—I’m so ******** scared—what if something happened—to—to—“ Cesc caught the word before his fear was spoken, before the completed thought could even dare flutter out into the universe. He put one hand over his mouth, his eyes wild.
“Rhedefre, no, no…” Vivi was saying, coming forward again, her arms threaded beneath his. She put her head on his chest, stroking his back. “My dear one. Cheri. Petit chou. Are you certain? Are you quite, quite certain?”
Cesc nodded, his chin atop her head.
“Lorin saw him. I—I put Lorin in danger,” he confessed, his eyes stinging. “That fear—my God, Vivi, what if I ruined the woods for him?”
“Stop, stop now,” said Vivi, pulling gently away. She looked up at Cesc with a small, sad smile. “You do not know this to be true. Children, they are resilient. And he was as I saw him, unharmed. You did not put him into lasting danger, no.”
“But the stags. Or Azu—they… they’ve got to be in danger. I can’t leave them to this—to him—” Cesc frowned, putting a hand to his forehead. “I have to go.”
Vivi’s eyes were dark, determined.
“Then we will go.”
“No,” Cesc said, shaking his head. “I can’t put you in dan—“
“I am your guardian, Rhedefre,” said the woman, her tone even, firm. “And though you may convince yourself so sometimes, it is not the other way around.”
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Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2017 4:55 pm
The Dog
The park was not open when they arrived, but it was of little consequence to either of them. The sun was still not up, the winter cold keeping any light at bay. Nobody would bother them, regulate them, put them back on the trail. They stepped into the woods and out of the paved civilization.
It was like stepping behind a curtain to Vivi. The cold wind seemed omnipresent and yet there was a feeling of shelter between the trees. There was no silence in the darkness—owls hooted and rodents skittered and all teemed with life, even now, before the sun divided light from shadow.
For a long time, they went in silence. Vivi held onto her phone in her pocket like a lifeline, waiting to call the police if anything seemed amiss. Cesc walked deeper and deeper into the woods, his face white and haggard in the darkness. The moon shone on him and Vivi saw that he seemed to glow, his eyes and horns silver with moonlight.
It was the opposite of the jungle, cold and clear, the pathways marked by long use of the resident animals. It was civilization instead of chaos, in nature’s way, Cesc thought: no hanging vines from the trees, no heat to make the ground nothing but mud.
But the darkness was the same, the same omnipresence, the same horrors promising dark promises in the shadows.
…
There was a dog’s bark.
Cesc lifted his head and Vivi paused. The hair on Cesc’s neck lifted.
“What was that?” whispered Vivi. “A dog?”
Another bark, from deeper in the woods. A bark, like any dog’s bark, indistinguishable by distance. Cesc’s ears swiveled toward the noise, and suddenly, before he knew exactly why, the blood began to drain from his face. No—that wasn’t right, that wasn’t quite true. He knew that bark, he knew the radiating feeling of confusion and loss—he knew—he knew—!
He grabbed hold of Vivi’s arm and pulled her forward into a sprint.
“PERP!” he yelled into the woods, blindly dashing forward. It was Perp, he knew it, he knew it! And if it was—no, it was, he knew it was—then why was the dog here? Why didn’t he feel—didn’t he feel another—another call—another cry for help—“PERP, BOY! COME HERE! COME HERE!”
Vivi went forward with Cesc, although her legs kept her from keeping pace with him. Her feet beat on the path, almost too quick for her mind and breath and lungs and blood to keep up with, and she tried to speak, but saved her breath to spur her speed. Her eyes were wide and her hair was wild, and she let herself be half-dragged. She looked up at Cesc’s face, but only for one second—he was so pale, so frightened, his eyes so wide—
She saw for the first time the resemblance to the stag she’d met so few times, the stag she’d seen the best in a downpour, the last time she’d run so fast.
“PERP!” Cesc’s voice was hoarse as he yelled. The dog barked again, closer, and although their movements seemed to Vivi to be haphazard and panicked, she could see that Rhedefre was leading them, taking shortcuts that favored speed rather than safety, and soon she could see the moon glinting off of black fur, reflecting off mirrored eyes.
The dog bounded forward to them, barking. Cesc began to slow and Vivi staggered to a stop, tripping and falling as she did so, her phone flying from her hands and clattering into the darkness. She let out a cry as she fell to the ground, but quickly Rhedefre pulled her back to her feet, then dipped and retrieved her phone from the blackness, instinctively.
The dog closed the distance between them, rushing into Cesc and then into Vivi. Burrs clung to his coat and he panted and paced between them, but his relief hung in the sway of his tail and the tiredness of his breath. Cesc checked him for injuries and Vivi grabbed onto his collar and smoothed his brow, making quiet noises: “Oh, oh! Perp, little one, Perp! What do you do out here? What is it? Where is he? Where is Azucar?”
Cesc straightened, his throat constricting. He searched the darkness, with his eyes, with his aura, with every fibre of his powers. Azucar?
“He wouldn’t have left Perp,” he breathed. “He has to be out here.”
Vivi looked up from where she crouched, swallowing. “Do… do you not feel him?”
Rhedefre shook his head. He squinted. There was movement in the darkness.
“He…” Rhedefre started, but the movement took all his focus then. There was something glinting.
Something…
… something coming toward them…
The wind whistled and heralded the arrows before Cesc recognized them. One sank into a tree beside him as he started, and Vivi cried out, swiveling toward the sound, her hair splaying in all directions with the movement.
“RUN!” Cesc bellowed, to Vivi and to Perp, throwing his hand behind him to shoo her.
“YOU RUN!” Vivi screamed back, grabbing onto Perp’s collar. The dog barked again, trying to lunge for the arrow, his teeth snapping at the air.
Another arrow came, but this time Cesc was ready for it, cleaving it from the air with a hardened pinion he snapped off from his wing. He whirled on Vivi, a terrified rage contorting his features. “GET OUT OF HERE! TAKE PERP AND GO!”
He dove forward, snapping another arrow that was coming too close for comfort, his eyes wide, his heart beating so hard it seemed like it would burst through his lungs, his chest. Vivi cried out and pulled the dog, indecision gripping her.
“I cannot leave you!” she yelled and Cesc half-turned, his eyes becoming pleading.
“I can’t protect you,” he gasped, his voice rough. “Please. Please! To the end of the forest—I’ll find you!”
She opened her mouth and an arrow splintered a tree between them, and then all conversation was at an end. Cesc left her and her arguments, his wings splayed, and he dove forward into the forest, toward the source of the arrows.
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Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2017 7:32 pm
The Hunter
As he went forward, then, through the darkness, he could see them moving.
White in the darkness, bodies and bodies running, fawns close to does, running in a stampede through the forest for their lives. The sound of their hooves on the forest floor was deafening, drowning out Perp’s barking and Vivi’s cries. They were running, running from the certain death the hunter meant to give them.
Where was he? Cesc narrowed his eyes as he flew forward, above and against the wave of retreating deer.
All the stags were dashing away, barely stopping to look at him who would try to save them, but it didn’t matter. Cesc didn’t try to stop them, stop to look for Bucephalus or his fawns or the golden Adonis.
He only thought, Azucar.
The hunter—had he gotten him?
As Rhedefre went forward, a hail of arrows rained—not aiming for him, but for the running deer. Cesc’s wings grew, hardening, and he snapped as many arrows as were in his reach. He heard the bleated cry of a struck deer and turned his head, his eyes widening at the sight.
A doe had been hit in the haunches by an arrow, and, as blood blossomed from the wound, the white of her flank drained, drained, darkening her color to a mousy brown. She cried out again and fell to the ground, but her herd did not stop for her, leaping over her body.
A breath caught in Cesc’s throat. There was no time to stop.
He turned, and as he did, he caught a glimpse of the red and white mask the hunter wore, his lithe body hiding back between the tree’s branches, in his blind.
“HEY!” Cesc roared, his wings flapping once. He flew directly to the blind, moonlight gathering around his hands, around his arms, and hardening. He didn’t have Zul’s power, nor Iorek’s strength, but he channeled them as he battered into the blind’s camouflage, trying to surprise the assailant into making a mistake.
Twigs, leaves and dried branches splintered around them as Cesc crashed into the makeshift structure, and then their bodies collided, falling from the sturdy branches into those below. The hunter scrambled, trying to grab onto something that would give him purchase as he fell, but Cesc was safe, his wings denying the pull of gravity.
It wasn’t a long fall. The hunter grabbed onto another branch and managed his recoil as his feet swung below him, gripping the branch with both arms. He pulled himself up and reached a hand back into the remaining arrows in his quiver.
Red blinded Cesc’s vision.
He was real. The ******** from his nightmares, the horror the jungle had shown him—there was no denying it now! There was no denying the physicality of the body he’d smashed into, no denying the blackness of the eyes behind the mask. With a bellow of rage, Rhedefre wound his arm back and punched him, smashed his fist right into the hunter’s God-forsaken ******** face!
The hunter staggered, his arms swinging out to regain his balance. There was an unreal sort of grace to his movements, but Cesc had contended with his solidity—and that it also meant that he was mortal, not some ungodly, otherworldly creature incapable of being fought. Cesc grabbed the hunter’s arm and punched him again, seething.
“Who the ******** are you?!” he demanded.
The hunter’s head snapped back with the force, but he whipped forward once more, his free hand pulling a knife from an unseen pocket.
“Tell me!” demanded Cesc, leaping backward and out of the knife’s arc, letting go of the man’s arm. The hunter said nothing, his mask unmovable, unreadable, inhuman. He held out his arm for balance and the other hand held the knife, black-bladed and sinister in the moonlight. He stood, waiting for Cesc’s move.
Below them, the stags were gathering.
The stampede had stopped. Timid, curious, they came to see the fight.
Cesc felt their eyes, a hundred golden eyes, upon him.
The hunter stood, ready.
Rhedefre’s hands trembled with emotion and rage. He stared at his living nightmare, his jaw tight, his eyes wide. A flash passed through his mind, the memory of Igan, of a man desperate to kill him, desperate to end him. This was different—there was calmness in the hunter’s posture, readiness. Cesc was not his object. Cesc was simply in the way.
Pulling another pinion from his wings, Cesc jerked his arm back, allowing a sword to form from his wings’ light.
It was now or never.
Silent this time, he dove forward, sword up. The hunter swung down, parrying the initial hit, but Cesc put his shoulder into the man’s chest, trying to knock him off the branch again.
Nimbly, the hunter took steps backward on the branch, absorbing Cesc’s hit without much reaction. He lifted his knife and Cesc swung away, narrowly avoiding it.
There was something horribly, terribly familiar, Cesc’s brain registered slowly, about the hunter’s movements. His posture.
Cesc raised his blade and put it to the hunter’s, swinging his arm up, and did what he had done to Igan, using the opening to land a blow to the man’s chest. He was going to end it. He was going to make the hunter show himself, make him crumble into dirt and nothingness, the way Anya and Iorek said he had in the jungle. He was going to prove the hunter was nothing, nothing, but a nightmare.
But even as he reached in with his blade, Cesc managed to catch the hunter’s eyes at close quarters.
Even in the dark, the shade of yellow-green was unmistakable.
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Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 2:25 pm
Crash
Time stopped.
Cesc’s sword flickered as it was about to land between the hunter’s ribs, undoing itself and the magic that made it. He swung nothing but a pinion feather, one that fluttered through the hunter harmlessly, and tried to remember how to breathe.
There was no such sentimentality on the hunter’s side. He brought down the knife and he brought it down hard, just where it seemed destined to be: in Rhedefre’s back.
Pain electrocuted Cesc. His head threw back and he let out a roar that shook through his lungs, and then all air, all sound was gone. His mouth was open and gasping, his body cold, all breath strangled from his lungs.
He stared at the hunter without comprehension, the world tilted on its axis. He held onto those yellow-green eyes, to the lack of recognition in them, even as he began to fall.
No.
No, no.
His wings faltered shrinking, sinking into his back like a flame that had been extinguished. Blood was starting to spread across his shirt, onto his jacket, in replacement of his failed wings. Cesc grabbed onto the tree’s trunk for support. He lifted his sword to protect himself, but no—no, that was right. There was no sword in his hand. He tried to flap his wings to retreat, but he had no wings. His back was starting to become wet and warm.
Something was desperately wrong. Everything was desperately wrong. Cesc’s fingernails scraped on the bark as he tried to gasp for air, tried to understand what was happening. The hunter stood and waited and did not attack, eyeing him with soulless, detached interest.
Something was draining from him, something that went out with his blood. He could see his hair out of the corner of his eyes, and the pink was fading, fading, fading into a dark color, like it was leaking along with his blood.
The vision of the doe, struck by the arrow, spun through his mind. The blow, it had taken the whiteness of her coat away…
It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible It wasn’t, not any part of it, not any more than it might be possible than the creature from his nightmares was… was…
Before he could even think the name, the hunter took two steps over, put his boot to Cesc’s chest, and pushed him from the treetop.
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Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2017 9:46 pm
Betrayal
Rhedefre crashed into the forest floor heavily. He let out a strangled cry as he felt the full weight of gravity for the first time, his ribbon tangled and splayed beneath him. As he fell, through the splintering crash of the leaves and branches, he swore he heard a woman’s shriek—truncated and cut off—was it Vivi?
No, no, please, he thought. She’d heeded him, hadn’t she? She’d run away.
He should have run away.
He looked up, his vision blurred through pain, pain, pain that radiated from his back and would not quiet, a pain that made him double over. Cesc saw the hunter standing still, high above. The world circled around him like the swell of the tides.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.
What was wrong with him? His wings would not regenerate. He was unarmed and without defense, surrounded by the stags. In his hand was only a feather, a single feather, from wings that had abandoned him.
“Get out of here!” Cesc yelled to the herd, pulling himself up onto his arms. He waved an arm wildly, still staring up at the hunter. “I can’t protect you!”
The stags did not move. They stared at him, eyes quiet. A few of the does averted their gaze and shuffled their dainty hooves, and some of the fawns hid behind their mothers. But they did not run. They did not stampede, as they had before.
Cesc tried to grab at his wound, to put pressure on it, to do something, anything that would alleviate some of the pain. He looked at them without comprehension, panic constricting his throat. Couldn’t they see him? The hunter, there, in the trees? He was going to kill them—all of them.
No, no.
He was starting to get dizzy. Dizzy from blood loss, from the color of the hunter’s eyes, from the motionless stags.
“I know you can escape—” he gasped, his voice faltering. As the adrenaline began to slip into numbness in his veins, a cold and horrible realization crept through him.
They weren’t afraid.
The hunter crouched in the branches. He swung down lower and then sat, looking at Cesc, his arms relaxed on his thighs. A posture Cesc knew, knew from so many mornings at the bakery, knew from so many conversations…
He half-waited for him to say it. For his voice to come out, slow and steady and even, honey from a jar.
Are you alright, my friend?
Cesc stared up at the hunter. His eyes stung. The world’s edges began to blur, and a sob rattled his ribs. It was impossible. Impossible.
“We can escape,” affirmed a voice. Adonis stepped through the stags, and a murmur of respect rippled in his wake. He held his head high, and he eyed Cesc with an imperious gaze. “But you, Lighbreaker… you cannot.”
The hunter did not move, and neither did Cesc. He remained, curled over himself, one hand on the ground. His shoulders shuddered.
“You see now what happens to those who would threaten our herd,” said Adonis evenly, patiently, his hooves stopping close to Rhedefre’s head. The breath from his nostrils tousled the sweat-damp curls on Cesc’s head. The pink had faded from the hair down to the roots, leaving it ash-brown. Everything, from his eyebrows to his stubble to the hair on his arms, was the brown of a deer’s coat. The brown of his ears. Adonis smiled in satisfaction.
“What did you do to him?” Cesc’s voice was small. “Why?”
“I would tell you to concern yourself with your own fate,” said Adonis. His hoof lifted, then settled quietly on the ground. “You are at your own sentencing, not his.”
“He didn’t do anything to you,” Cesc breathed. “He never—we never would have done anything to you.”
“Can’t it be,” said Adonis, his voice thick with smugness, “that he’s hated you all along, Lightbreaker?”
Cesc shook his head, silent. His shoulders shook.
“You know what you’ve done,” said the stag evenly, although there was a burn to his consonants, a gravity to his tone. He eyed Cesc with a rage that allowed itself only to flicker in the heat of his eyes. “You have put us in danger. You have sought us out and tried to pull us back into a profession that would destroy us. You have deliberately tried, Lightbreaker, to make Sertorius’ curse reality.”
“I don’t know what the ******** you’re talking about,” seethed Rhedefre, finally tearing his gaze away from the seated hunter. Tears had traced trails down his face and down his chin. His eyes were, for the first time in his life, without light. His face was becoming white, his gaze unfocused. “I just wanted to know you. I came here to help you. That’s all—that’s all I ******** wanted.”
“Your words do not sway us, Lightbreaker. You will be punished,” said Adonis. “Like those who broke ranks before you. Your rack will hang with the others in the woods. All herds will see that we have quelled the Lightbreaker who sought to destroy us. Who sought to take our light!”
He roared his last syllables, meant for the watching herd instead of Cesc: a show of power, of strength, of might.
“Go ******** yourself,” spat Cesc at the stag’s hooves. The world was fast becoming dark. He struggled, looking back at the hunter. He let himself think the name as he looked at the red-streaked mask, at the eyes beyond it.
Azucar.
Adonis bent over him, his breath hot on Cesc’s skin. He bent further, locking one of his antlers onto Cesc’s. It tilted Cesc’s head upward as the rest of his body flagged, his throat exposed to the hunter.
“Enjoy your exile, Lightbreaker,” he whispered. “Tell Sertorius of his failure. Now, go and live long and die alone. Try to return and see what we will do to him—and to your black-haired murderess.”
Cesc opened his mouth, but the heavy velvet curtain of oblivion crashed down upon him.
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Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2017 3:52 pm
Threats
Vivi ran.
More than once, her footfall slowed, and she whipped her head to look behind her, hoping to see Cesc coming quickly behind. Beside her, Perp was struggling to breathe but anxiously running. He whined when they stopped where the tree line thinned, although he gasped dryly for air. He sniffed the air behind him and cried, and Vivi stroked his head gently.
“We will get you water, my love,” she said absently, her worried eyes scanning the forest for movement.
It could be someone other than Rhedefre who bursts through that line, she thought. It could be the other.
Impossible. Impossible that her Rhedefre should fail at anything. Impossible that he could be taken down.
A flash of white drew her eye, and her heart rose to her throat.
“Rhedefre!” she cried, rising from the dog’s side.
Perp growled and snapped at the air, and it was not Rhedefre who stepped from the trees. It was a stag, lit like a star, with eyes bright as the moon. Vivi straightened, her lips parting. The figure—he was smaller than the stag she’d seen years before, but his lines just as regal. Hope bloomed in her eyes, and then wilted at the sound of his voice.
“This is your fault, Vivette,” it pronounced. “Know this. Blame no other. It is your fault.”
“Where is he?” she demanded.
“Do not look for him,” intoned the stag. “He has had his punishment.”
“What have you done to him?” Vivi’s voice grew cold. There was no weakness, no fear. “Bring him to me.”
“You will not see him again,” said the stag, holding his head high. He lifted his hoof and turned toward the trees, dismissive. “Bear this punishment as your own.”
“If you hurt him—“ Vivi began, but the stag rejected her word with a flick of his ears, and in a step he vanished into the trees like a streak of moonlight in the darkened woods. She let out a cry, running forward, and but there was no soul-bottle to slow the stag’s progression now. He was gone into nothing, and she could only scream after it, her voice filling the tree canopy and startling the sleeping birds within their nests.
“If you killed him,” she shrieked, a banshee. “Do not dream that you will live! I know you hear me! I know it! I have seen you die before, do you understand me? You will never be safe from me if he is dead. Never!”
She stood, shaking with fury, her hands as fists beside her. She whirled in place, waiting for an answer from the trees, waiting for a response to her threats, for the hunter’s arrows, for anything.
But the forest retreated back into quiet night and nothing, and she was alone.
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Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:34 pm
Into the Woods
Claire and Vivi go on a search for answers. *
The police, they would do something, thought Vivi grimly. And she had her own to do...
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Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 6:01 pm
Exile
Heat.
For an eternity, there was nothing. Rhedefre felt only oblivion, nothingness scraped up against his existence so close he felt as though he would lose himself. Like he would break apart, splinter to his core, and join the darkness. There were wisps of things holding him back from the abyss, nameless where once they held both call and sound and emotion. A black haired girl, a man with muddy eyes. The feel of chill against his arms. The scent of a flower. Of tea.
Then, suddenly, there was heat.
There was no time to rejoice in the sensation, the solitary celebration of being able to feel anything. Almost immediately, it became overwhelming, like dying of thirst and crashing headlong into an ocean's wave. Rhedefre could feel the heat scalding him, a wind tousling it into the threads of his hair, his scalp. His ears were burnt. He was dry, dry, and scalded everywhere.
He tried to open his eyes. He felt a jolt through his body at the movement, like the lights were coming back on inside. His back felt like murder, a thousand festering cuts along his gash. His eyelids cracked open, his eyes red and shot, his vision blurred. The wind rifled through him again, sand burying itself between his eyelashes. He tried to groan, but it came out as a dry, rattled cough.
The ground was soft and shifting. Cesc pushed against it and it crumbled in his touch. The heat seared against his hand but Rhedefre did not flinch. There were grains in his teeth, his mouth dry, a metal taste of long-old blood on his cracked lip.
Still in his hand, clutched like a drowning man’s straws, was a single crushed pink feather.
He tried to focus. Where was he? This was not the beach of Gambino. He remembered Adonis’s farewell to him: the word ‘exile.’ The stags did not deposit him in the salt air and the backyard of the bakery. This was something else. Something foreign.
He blinked, lifting one hand to try to rub the sand from his eyes. His skin glittered gold from it—so much, so much sand. He looked around.
Everything was gold. Everything in his unblinking vision, close by to miles away, was rolling golden dunes.
Cesc's heart quickened in his aching chest. The heat bore down on him, anchoring him to the impossible reality. He tried to open his wings and gasped from the pain of their disappearance, his back screaming at the motion. He doubled over, grasping the sand once more.
It was real.
He was in a desert.
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Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2017 7:15 am
Exile
Several hours passed. Rhedefre could tell by the trailing of the sun in the sky, burning comet racing to be extinguished by night. He sat in numbness, staring at the shifting of the sand without comprehension. Part of him urged that he move, find shelter, but deep, deep within himself a voice spoke: he knew if he could die of the heat and the light, he would have already. Light could burn him, yes, but it could not extinguish him. Twilight would replenish him as it could. He had thirst, and he had pain, and he had shock—but he did not fear anything further than that. Not as of now.
How did he get here? He remembered nothing, no matter how he tried. Flashes of light, the feeling of his weight lain across a moving back. Nothing further. Nothing after that first blackness.
The sky went red as the sun sank low on the horizon, and a feeling of faint relief came over the stag's aching limbs. A meal, small but all he had the strength to take in. And with it, a touch of clarity.
The landscape shifted but did not change. The dunes were the dunes. He was not being rescued. If he wanted to be somewhere other than here, he would have to take his own self, his husk of a body, there himself.
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Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2017 7:16 am
Exile
For so many hours, he did not want to go.
You are in exile, said Adonis’ voice in his brain. This is what exile meant. Nothing, nobody, as far as the eye could see. There would be dry air, sand under his eyelids, cracked skin and blood. A single feather. That was all he had now. Under pain of Vivi’s death.
His hair was matted to his head. He could see the color was still the dull brown, and that blood had caked it to his scalp. He had no antlers. Cesc felt his skull and could only make out scabs where his antlers had been snapped off. His stomach lurched as he remembered Adonis clicking his antlers into his own. As he understood what must have happened after he’d passed out.
Had Azucar watched impassively? Sat on the lowest branch in the forest and merely watched?
Cesc forced himself to picture it, to float over his body and see Azucar’s figure, relaxed and unconcerned, watching. The eyes of all the herd on him, watching, watching, probably rejoicing.
Could there have been joy in Azucar’s heart in that moment? Elation as Cesc crumpled, dark-haired and vacant-eyed, his back slowly bleeding black into the mud beneath him. His antlers clipped, broken off.
And could there have been true hatred hidden behind those opaque, unreadable eyes, all those years? So many mornings, coffee and a croissant; so many times he’d come to him for advice, for comfort, for common sense. Behind his slow smile, had Azucar silently cursed him, degraded him, wished him all the agony the stags had delivered?
Cesc’s eyes stung as he closed them.
Go back to the oblivion, his heart whispered. Lay back down.
The sands shifted and the sun lurched, and Cesc surrendered himself without fuss.
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Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2017 7:17 am
Fever Dream
The sun never set.
His eyes opened into the sand, but it was not quite right. The air was still but the sands moved like wave, like water, shifting over and through him but not quite below. His back ached and his brain felt like sandpaper against his skull but it was foggy and veiled and far-distant. The landscape faded a few feet from him, like a game that hadn’t fully loaded.
He was dreaming.
He blinked and tried to push against the sand, but his body felt as heavy as lead, like a weight was sitting on his back. He couldn’t move.
What’s the use? he thought. Isn’t this the point? Stay here until there’s nothing left. Just stay here.
He put his forehead to the ground. His hair flickered through the sand, as though it were made of floating light. He breathed, and coughed out dust.
Lifting his head, Cesc saw a figure, strange and green and small, incongruous with the omnipresent yellow. He frowned and opened his mouth, but only a faint groan slipped out from his throat.
The figure gazed distantly off to the side, watching something seemingly out of sight - the Sigel was within its line of vision but it did not turn fully until the groan tumbled out. Tiny hands held fast to the green cloak as honeyed eyes landed on Cesc's face, watching curiously beneath the shadow of the hood. Leaf-like protrusions poked free, rusty brown against the vast desert. The hands dropped from the hood and clenched into small, determined fists, and he took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak.
The words and movements looked sluggish, as though it were a film running in half-time, but the voice carried at last across the short distance between them: "You gotta get up!"
Cesc stared openly at the figure, his brow furrowed, his eyes round. His heart quickened at seeing the small figure, but he soothed himself: no, no. It wasn't possible that he was here, in this godforsaken nothing. He hadn't dragged him into this much trouble, no. He was at home, safe, with his mama...
The hunter wouldn't go after the kid, not there.
The figure turned toward him and spoke and Cesc felt part of the crushing weight lift from his back. He struggled to his forearm, trying to ignore the shooting pain in his shoulder. He drew in a breath through his teeth. He was afraid to say the name, lest his dreams were being watched, lest it put the boy in danger.
"Lo—I can't," he managed. His eyes began to water. "I can't. Let me stay here. Let me just stay here."
The figure's hands drooped and the fists loosened as Cesc struggled. The fingers opened and flexed uncertainly. It drifted closer with the cloak trailing behind, gliding soundlessly over the sand, before they stopped a mere foot away. The hands, once so tightly balled when urging the stag to rise, rediscovered their determination and clenched anew. It bent over, wearing a concerned and anxious frown—a lock of blonde hair fell into its eyes but it did not seem to notice.
"But you gotta," it insisted in a softer, anxious tone, "you still got more stuff to do."
Cesc hung his head, his ears dropping. He looked up into the boy's face. It wasn't quite right, was it? Imperfect memory, blurred at the edges, more pristine than reality. But the expression felt real, and his speech felt true. It was what was left of his goodwill that Rhedefre had fed from, stored away, left within. As he burned through his energy now, it was resurfacing.
So you could ignore it, he whispered traitorously to himself, if you want to.
No—not this one. Not the boy. Real or dream, it was too much to ask to rebuff him. The ally of Justice.
Cesc pushed against the ground, against the feeling of hooves pressing him into the dirt. He let out a cry, his jaw tight, his face contorting. His dark hair, slick with sweat, clung to his forehead. It felt impossible to rise, even as he tried, from his forearms to his hands.
The figure bent lower and watched. The brow knit in concern as Cesc pushed, cried out, struggled. The hands laced together with the fingers locked tight, still uncertain of what to do next. The intense gaze of the small figure lessened as it cast from the Sigel's face to just above his hunched shoulders.
A tentative touch fell on Cesc's bicep, feather-light for a beat before it grew firmer, warm. The hand was much larger than the green-clad figure's, and a face came into view behind the slender hand, pale and partly hidden by a curtain of shoulder-length blonde hair. A pale pink skirt was tucked around her legs and she knelt in the sand next to him.
At the touch, Cesc's face fell, the tension moving from his jaw to his brows as they lowered and he squeezed his eyes shut, his vision blurring. He gasped; another weight lifted from him, and he pushed onto his hands, looking down at the sand still shifting below him. His mouth tightened and he drew in a breath through his nose, trying to steady himself.
"You won't accept it from here," he said miserably, his fingers curling in the sand. His voice was rough and pinched as he spoke. "I can't apologize from here. I'm sorry—I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to make him part of this. I didn't mean to ruin the forest for him. I'm so sorry."
He tried to look at her, but she, too, was imperfect, and his eyes could not focus through the warm and stinging wet of his tears.
She was silent as he spoke, grey-blue eyes ever watchful and her hand unmoving on his arm. Once he paused, she flexed her fingers and rubbed once, trying to imbue a steadying warmth into him as he strained himself.
"It's alright." Despite her closeness, the voice was distant and just above a whisper as she encouraged him. She smiled. "Take your time."
His shoulders dropped. Cesc closed his eyes and he swallowed and tried to hold onto the warmth and kindness that was in her words. A part of him, snake-soft and biting, whispered: it isn't real, it isn't real, but he closed his ears to it. He wanted to believe it. Wanted to hear the dawn's voice in hers. She was good and kind and gentle. She had pain and longing and had come out—not unscathed, but still with happiness to help heal her grief.
She'll hate you for putting him in harm's way.
Rhedefre rejected that sound, too. It could be true. There was also a possibility it wasn't.
There was a possibility she wanted him to live, that the boy wanted him to live. That these whispered far-flung words held truth to them.
He sniffed and let himself cry, let tears slowly trail down his face, down his chin and into the hollow of his throat. It was precious water but it was more precious to let it go, to let himself sag under the weight of betrayal and crushed hope. The last weight fell from his back and he sat up, feeling young and small and beaten. His hands hung at his sides. He looked at her, his nose and the rims of his eyes red.
"I'll try," he murmured. "I can't promise. But I can try."
She waited, as did the other in front of Cesc. As he sat up at last, there was a collective breath of relief that seemed to come from them and yet all around them. Her hand slid to his shoulder where it lingered with an encouraging grip, and then moved up to run through the back of his sweat-soaked hair in motherly tenderness. It was a familiar action, and the smaller figure brightened in response.
"Take your time," she repeated as her hand came to rest on the opposite shoulder, the other touching the one closer at hand. "But you must get up." Her tone strengthened as the words departed, filled with purpose. "You're not done yet."
"You can do it," chorused the green-cloaked figure, and their smile grew.
Cesc nodded. The dream shivered but did not break; it began to fade, its edges dissolving like steam into air. He put his hand over the woman's. He looked at the boy, his young, determined face.
"I will," he said, and his voice seemed underwater, the vowels drowning.
The real world was bleeding into his dream.
Someone was turning him on his back. His brow furrowed and he tried to protest—pain, the splitting pain from his spine through his heart, stop, stop, stop—but all that left his mouth was a murmur.
Wet. There was something damp and warm on his face. His throat ached. Water. Water! It was glorious, revelatory, beautiful. He had forgotten the feel of it. He struggled through the darkness, trying to wake, trying to drink.
“Shh,” he heard through the veils, through his sleep.
There was breath on his face. Pressure on his lips. First the wet, then something warm, dry, comforting.
A kiss.
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