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Quicksilver the Archangel
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 Posted: Wed Jul 28, 2010 1:25 am
Alyssum could faintly hear Mephistopheles's shouts from his darkened wood, but they came from a distance, as though she were further away than a mere few feet. The flam of her heartbeat punctuted the rise and fall of her sides as she lay breathing, feeling that they were more immediate and pressing than the desires of her stranded stallion friend.
Now that she had fallen a small, instinctive part of her mind yelled that she should get back to her hooves. Lying down was not a natural position - it was one of sickness, weakness, one that told predators that she was an easy meal. Another small, but more reasonable voice added that she had given Mephistopheles a promise and therefoered needed to get up and keep it; to do anything else would be not only rude but show that she had weak character. However, the far larger part of her consciousness centered around and agreed with her body; nothing was more important at the moment more than just lying on her side. The sun warmed her coat, the grass cushioned her, and just in her line of sight were some budding flowers stretching up from the earth. Peaceful. Perfect.
"I'll go... when wake up..." Thoughts slurred their way into the real world as the mare struggled to reopen her eyes. A pointless excercise. "Promise..." That would have to be good enough, for now.
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 5:57 pm
Despite the cacophony erupting in his forest-trained ears, the stallion caught her breathy response on the breeze, the words fumbling, melding drunkenly together into near-incoherent babble. Hardly a normal reaction to his temper, and though he might have suspected she was merely taunting him, the way she quickly sank into unconsciousness assured him that it was not an act undertaken specifically to rile him. That did little to pale the fury clawing up inside, falling from his mouth in tight, vile oaths. Rage oiled the rusty mechanisms inside his body that allowed even the slight control he was expelling, bands of latent power tightening in the empty spaces where organs had once resided. But there was no winning this particular battle, the forest unsentimental of his previous role as it hammered against his bidding. It was wrong to stop it, worse yet to assume such defiance would go unnoticed. He sensed the attention of the woods' inner rings shifting slowly and ominously toward the source of the disturbance, invisible feelers of energy extending to remove the threat. His own decayed authority leaked uselessly along pipelines that had gone without maintenance, forming ineffectual puddles along the way. What once would have been an act of little consequence now became an undertaking, made all the more galling for the dim-witted reason he was overextending himself.
The volume of the whispers he so often heard and associated with his domain escalated with every passing second, filling his skull and pushing out of his ears, sap trickling from his empty sockets and the millimeter-thin slits where his splintered jaws did not fit neatly together. A jangling ache began in his neck, spreading down his spine along wilted avenues, infiltrating the extraneous limbs of his saplings until they too pulsed with discomfort. Callow whore-spawn, forcing his hand where it held the least sway, flaunting her fragility without a hint of abashment for the trouble it caused. Any closer to him, and Alyssum would have felt his pain acutely, the demon only too eager to share. But she'd fallen just far enough to be out of reach, leaving no outlet for him to take advantage of, an Atlas-figure struggling beneath his burden.
Despite his enraged state and the gravity of the situation, there was no chance of holding such a stance forever. The woodland was gaining on him, and it had no great affection for his antics. Resentment twisted deep within his muddled anatomy as he felt those intangible sensors brush along his flank, too far gone to acknowledge the flicker of dread that accompanied it. They pressed threateningly down on his body, winding along weakened trails, taking the path a fire might. When they reached the dip of his chest, there was no other course of action but to let go with a harsh sound, his influence waning until the carousel-flow of the forest resumed. The tendrils stopped their entanglement at the gesture, thoughtful and silent as they played over his too-still sternum before carefully retracting, releasing his trembling legs. Satisfied, he supposed, stabbing at the earth with a cloven hoof to vent his own hostilities. Half-feverish from the fight, he wished for smoke and choking ash to rain down, for his prison to burn up, turn black, all the spirits that had nursed him and damned him screaming from their charred beds. It would annihilate him in turn, but he weighed that the loss would almost be worth the improvement, no longer trapped, herded, made to taste his madness. The bottle at his throat would grant him that much, surely, mutual destruction the kind of event it was all too prepared to follow through with.
The thought stewed, thrashed, then passed quietly into oblivion the longer he stood, exhaustion enough to temporarily quell the darkness. For all its twisted logic and wicked malice, the brew would not be greatly pleased to lose its dispenser. If he tried it now, it would only prolong his suffering, no matter the cautious way he worded his desires. It always did, or he would have succumbed to the option long ago. The anger he harbored did not flicker out so much as it was stored elsewhere, waiting for a time when it could be put to use. The forest thought it knew its enemy, but it knew only what he had been, what he had shown himself to be in the past few months. The end was all that mattered, and he could only reach it if he kept destructive impulses in check now. It was proving to be no simple task.
Clearing the foul mix of sap and would-be saliva from his mouth, Mephistopheles raised his head to observe the mare's sprawled form through slits in the labyrinth's edges, hate hazing the color palette of the terrain. Pitiful, the both of them, he reduced from his full glory and her having never ascended to anything more than this, a sack of meat waiting for the first available predator. If not for her calling as the potential key to his freedom, she meant nothing; less than nothing. If not for the name and the promise she carried, he would have hunted her, tortured her, reduced her to rot in brain and body both. In the now, with her head pillowed by grass and the sun's sinking epilogue, his sole option was to wait.
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