Cobra Starcastle :: Day 4 [CDK]
Jun 22, 2012 19:14:16 GMT -5
Post by wimdy on Jun 22, 2012 19:14:16 GMT -5
My nightmares have morphed as of late. The Games have changed them. Now, instead of being dragged into the soil of a fresh grave and suffocated by decaying limbs, I find myself alone on an island. I am alone and I am cold and I am dying in the sand, screaming for someone, anyone, to find me. And someone does. Someone always does. It’s not the godsend I asked for, but the full manifestation of my terror; Abri. She comes from the water every time, rising from the raging currents unaffected and slinking up the sandy shoals. She has seaweed hair and a dress crafted of thick fishing ropes and a lace overlay of net, starfish stuck to her like jewels on a queen. She doesn’t say a word, but she stares. She stares until I can feel myself burning from the inside until I’m bubbling through my skin, until I’m nothing but foam being washed away with the sea. And she sits, smiling gently in the sand and staring out into the depths in which I find my ruin, the dark currents reflecting the last sparkle of her eyes.
I always wake before Pen, waiting to soothe her desperate gaps for air and hold her until she can function again. My heart aches at her panic, my adrenaline spiking the moment I hear the slightest hitch of her breath. She cannot drown, not here and not now. She simply can’t. My eyes watch her carefully as she rises, not daring to speak a word in the delicate calm that overcomes her waves after the storm, instead choosing to start getting up myself. It takes hardly any time in this place, daily necessities far gone for us children of the spear and sword. Instead, we move. We must always move. If we don’t move now, we make never get the chance to later. I am unsteady as we leave, looking around our night’s home and trying to bottle up the moment of life I felt in it, standing around a bonfire and talking about the girls just on the other side. Unfortunately, my jugs are all full. The feeling is as fleeting as the idea, leaving in an instant as we set off to stalk through a seaweed curtain.
Green ribbons of seaweed stream around us as we make our entrance, the slick slide of the plants against my skin cooling me and sending shivers up my spine. In the last room, you could hardly hold your footing. Here, you slide, it seems. My boots slip across the slick mat of seaweed, the smell pervading my senses and sending a hard jolt of nostalgia through my bones. The docks always reeked of seaweed, the green strands wrapped around the piers in thick, washed-up clumps. It mixed with the stench of rotting fish, creating an unpleasant odor that could make you sick if you stayed in it too long. The smell of seaweed on its own wasn’t nearly as bad. It was just salt and a little hint of decay, but nothing like the piers, or even the graves. This my stomach could handle just fine. It’s the hissing that sets me off.
I never paid attention to the Games all that much, but I especially never cared for the mutts. I made a point to forget them, block them from my head, and hope they’d never enter my dreams. Instead, it seemed like the mutts decided to bring my nightmares to life. Three snake-y creatures were hissing away, slither through the woven camouflage of seaweed, inching closer with every slinky slide. I am frozen within the doorway, my heart pounding away in my chest. Only once in my life had I ever been bitten by a snake(because really, why would we think that an old man would ask his pet snake to be buried with him)and I did not have any plans of getting bitten again, especially not with mutts having the tendency to be more than meets the eye. No, these weren’t just snakes. They were something else entirely. If I believed in it, I’d say they were demons sent from the Lucifer himself. Then again, maybe President Snow is the devil.
Graphics credits to the wonderful South<3
[M:2982250]
