Dragoncrest Cliffs you can’t save me

backdated a bit, single replies welcome. ill archive in a few days. hope the assumptions / pp is ok <3

she found him slouched over his gut, fur and muscle melting into a vat of frozen blood. it was spectacular, truly — this violent image of red ruin against blueish snow.

for a time she studied him; how his skin had sunken against hard bones. how the startling hue of his blood darkened to a strange chestnut along the outer edges, the color preserved only by winter’s freezing bite.

and his eyes — not a glimpse into another world but a reflection of this one. black. surfaceless. aqueous and seeping.

for a man, this was a good death.

and if it were any other man, she’d have left him there. but he had fought and died for sapphique — this earned him a small measure of esteem in the budding misandrist.

she dragged pepper’s body to the great blue vista overlooking the cliffs. and for a moment, as she balanced his stiff corpse upon the edge she had a fleeting image of pushing it — of watching his inverted body spin and tumble through the air before at last plunging below the sea.

but her maman’s voice and stern eyes told her not to; reminded her that this man had done what few others had (and had she known he laid with @Chani, such impulses might have gotten the better of her).

you be buried next to de other idiot. sobeille informed his slouching corpse as she begun to dig, keeping an eye out for @Yura or @Shadess. as she clawed frozen snow back from darkened earth, the exhilarating memory of another death revisited her. it was as if being close to his grave sprung to life the memories of this other ghost’s living moments; the seal skull he’d procured for her. the budding relationship he’d made with @Kheviel. and finally, the red fish he’d trustingly taken from sobeille, never knowing his end sat coiled in a single dried petal packed in the snapper’s folded guts.

as she dug a long wind howled around her. the ground’s topsoil had frozen and by the time she reached softened earth her claws ached with dull pain.

covered in dirt, sobeille heaved until the hole was big enough to welcome pepper’s inverted form. with tremendous effort, she dragged his stiff body over the lip and watched as he fell, stiff and inarticulate, into the dirt.

it seemed wrong to pass that first clump of soil over his face. she wondered if his bones, over time, would mingle with that of her grandmes and val and cayetano, if there was some power there to be appreciated.

she worked until his body was covered by sapphiqian soil, and then as a final gesture, placed a shell upon the disturbed topsoil where she imagined his skull sat.

this would be the last sapphiqian she buried, she vowed to herself — now came the pirate’s hour.

Shadess did not know the man Pepper. Did not associate herself with any man savor her age-mate brothers, one of which had been gone quite some time and the other which had only really come into her life after his other twin-half had gone missing. She would do her best to stick to these limitations. 

Death was a heavy thing. It left a heavy stench in the air, bearable enough by the heavy sea-salt around them. Shadess followed the trail which would reveal her sister and one of their fallen packmates. By now, Sobeille was covering dirt over the body which fell with a thud in the hole at her feet. Even in his aging body, Pepper had fight to protect the women of Sapphique. Her elder brother had ran. If Shadess had any say, @Tousaint wouldn't be here anymore in order to fail them again. 

She watches for a time, quiet as he is buried there near another of their own having gone not long before. Then as the shell is placed, Shadess makes her leave.