Barrow Fields empyreal.

e m p y r e a l.

there was a promise of a fresh winter morning in that blushing amber sky. gulls wheeled and cawed and caterwauled in frank complaint, chirruping at a solitary menace. she sits like a feathered gargoyle, all crooked teeth and abhorrent blue eyes, tongue lapping hot, red and wicked. the air is prickly; rolling briney off the sea with the smell of salt and sea lions hot on the heels of molten pyrite clouds. it was whiskery; the coming whisper of day blooms into view with a frightful chill and a breeze just blustery enough to wrench that wintery hide from her jittery bones. the moor was a rabble of heather, violet, hugged by rocks and shivering trees, bedraggled and withering in the wind; naked, like the gale had stripped the things of their clothes. 

the dawn was a chorus of colour and sound, giggling and mad. 

she was the savior, the vulture; a queen, in all but mind and manner. grimacing and crude, her wraithlike body seemed perpetually tangled in a knot of disquiet that murmured in its aberration. a rattle shook her throat when she spoke to herself, a shake knocked her shoulders when she was still, reddish saliva coddled her sword-like mouth when she winced her goatish grin. she was a stranger here; but stranger still was she. there was no beauty in the savage body of this creature; a ghost muddled by grief, strangled by an ominous call. 

she is clearly weary, this birdish woman. her skin is the supple colour of off kilt chalk, muddled with a twinge of a greyish sickness. an earl grey sensibility peppers the way she sits, but her head is low and crowned in molten iron, her lips a mountbatten pink, yawning with clattering yellow teeth. her legs wobble, lamed by exertion; the road was long, the way was bloody. savior is among them now; and so is she. 

 

He was a child of night, and the glowing disk of light in the east was one of the few foes he could not defeat. From his kill — a pathetic meager, feathered thing tasting of salt and fish — the strigoi squinted at the growing light, crimson beads dripping from his pearl-like maw. His tongue seeks out the wayward drops as his eyes cut over the plains, searching for some shelter. He was a bastard of the light; it weakened him, and weakness was something the strigoi despised. 

His dark amethyst eyes locked on the waif in the distance. Luckily for her, he had already saited his bloodlust, and as he grew close, her gibbering deterred him from her presence. He was not sure how sane she was; he trailed her silently, her frame locked in his gaze.

the savior was not a woman of much prudence - her pale gaze set low on the blooming carnation-pink horizon - intent on some far off squabble between the gulls. she would not have noticed that she had an audience, and whether she paid any mark if that same lurking foe was inches from her face was another matter. she was not a creature of today, now, dissociative and bleak. her mind was cast away, far away, over the ocean. but there was blood in the air, she knew that much. her mouth curled into a keen snarl, tasting with her fat tongue, her woefully pallid eyes dark in searching. she had a shark's eyes, terminally watery, but focused, desperate. the growl that clucked in her throat was more a whine than much else. but it was near.

what a lolloping thing she was, as a hacking cough gurgled up to her slobbering mouth; her neck snapped right. the creature shuddered to her too-big paws and padded off towards the far off trees, her ungainly trot like that of a lamed hare, limps and hops. her nose slammed to the ground in her quest, smelling and tasting the dirt and chewing on tussocks of grass. find, find, find, find; eat eat eat. the clawing breeze cloyed at her long mane and her shoulders rocked in merciful delight. near! her head snapped far too quickly upwards, her head twisting and twitching furtively in her desire. the savior's thick lips trembled with a grotesque glee, and then there it was. her look was monstrous.

While he was a monster in spirit, she was a monster of body. She lumbered, not walked, her body shambling in search of something. He speculated at what one thing would bring such a primeval creature to life. He looked towards it, the salted feathered creature, his darkened tongue swiping the last of his meal from his face. He had drunk all it could before it coagulated, and now it was left in the grass, blackened and torn as he watched the creature tear at the grass in search of it. When her sights landed on it, trotted to the corpse, snatching it and returning to her, depositing it at her feet, watching her reaction. Have it, monstru nenorocit, He nudged it towards her. You have more need of it than I,