flightless birds — vargen & nico.

Post by gunner, d9 ₊⊹ 👹 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Oct 2, 2019 0:56:01 GMT -5

there's blood on your lies
the scars open wide
there is nowhere for you to hide
the hunter's moon is shining

There’s a god in my throat, and it is screaming.

The air here is almost acetic, thick with chemicals and bleach. I longed desperately for the winds that brushed through the cypress trees and became pregnant with their scent. As clean as spring-water too, they were, drifting through the forests wildly, no border to define them, no walls to hold them inward. Here, the air was as still as stagnant water—and as pungent too.

I whirled through the dimly-lit halls, a specter in form and sound, trying my best to navigate through this labyrinth of steel and glass. Everything was an alien sight—the walls crowded with filigreed animals, the floor underneath my bare feet that was as cool, as silver, as dewdrops on grass.

As I turned a corner, I put a hand against the wall to steady and stop myself from drifting further. I had come out here for more than a breath of fresh air. When the Peacekeepers escorted me to the carriage, they had stripped of me any personal belonging I had, of the amulets my sister and I had spun in the warm dark of summer nights, of the moth-wings I couldn’t part from, of the herbs and the draughts.

Now, I was left with one blunt, nicked tooth of a wolf we’d found dead in the woods one autumn.

It was smooth against my grasp, the ivory surface sanded down by palms countless times. But, this tooth meant nothing. I needed to cleanse myself, and to offer my gods things in exchange for their divine protection. Gods always demanded a price for their endless divinity—and it was selfish, but if I were a God, I surely would do the same.

When asked, the lady in the banquet hall, with a crossed look on her face, handed me the animal liver.

It was iced over so finely that I couldn’t tell what beast this was harvested from, but it was enough. “May you join the faeries in the underworld,” I told her with a tiny smile and left her to her own rumination. The organ burned cold in my hands. There were no candles to light, no incense to burn, but I only needed the moonlight as my sacred torch.

The moonbeams were honed to fine shards in the entrance hall, each one sharper than the other. Everything glinted silver and chrome, including the man that laid there.

Nico Thorne was the only victor whose games were the ones I wasn’t completely in the dark about. Look, my sister once hurried me over to a silver screen, his name is Francisco Bloom. He was dying, I saw, blood crusting at his head. I marveled at the way the sunflowers twisted around his limbs, that clean throat, the way ivies crawled up his skin and thorns splintered it. What a beautiful end, I thought.

Horrible, and beautiful.

Nico Thorne’s grin was only horrible—sharpened and feral. He was a worn armor, mostly edged shadows, resignation in his posture. I almost scowled. “Nico Thorne,” a curt address, “You were Francisco Bloom’s partner, yes?” Sunflowers nodded pliantly in the back of my eyelids. I let my gaze towards him be pointed—let it cast his sins alight, let it become skin-deep, let it be a cruel blade, let it be as cold as the liver I held in my palms. “He had so much magic,” I say, and do not add the words ‘you have none.’

But, it was uttered in my tone and shone in my eyes.

i'm running with the wolves tonight
i'm running with the wolves
i'm running with the wolves tonight
i'm running with the wolves


lyrics: aurora — running with the wolves