Wapun Meadow i. I can feel ghosts and ghouls wrap my head

 

sorry this took so long!

The man in black also has nightmares. He has them both when he is awake and when he is asleep, though he does not know which is a worse kind of hell.

Tonight he dreams of @Lily. He drinks her smell in beneath him, forehead pressed to the crook of her neck. He works in her and through her with his hips, his girth, and when he throws his head back to cry in release she turns back to look at him. White breaks through the rich dark fur where he had rested at her shoulder and her soft golden eyes crack into lilac. Nadine.

The corner of her mouth curls into a sneer. Loki, she calls him. Somewhere far away, the demon's ragged form seizes as her name escapes from his lips. She had tricked him in life and she tricks him still! In death, from beyond the ether!

It is still early in the night when he rises, hackles raised, scalloped ribcage heaving in shallow, useless breaths. Awake, he dare not breathe her name aloud. He paces in the cave he has chosen to make his den with @Quail in mind and he thinks about seeking her now for comfort... but she has chosen elsewhere to bed and he knows it is because he is what he is. Instead, he finds himself leaving the mountain.

 

 

---

This meadow had seen many beautiful things die. He can feel it seep into his bones like an illness. Behind him rises the sun.  Fngers of illuminated blood spill across the horizon casting him in complete darkness save for those sinister yellow eyes and an uncanny halo where his guard hairs catch the morning light.

Birds gibber and laugh. He can hear her in the grinding calls of the magpies. Nadine. It is of her that he is thinking when he finds another tucked nearly undetectable beneath the shelter of a cottonwood as gnarled and black and twisted as the walking stranger himself.

Heavy molten gaze settles upon the thick ropes of scars that litter over what might have once been a beautiful, lissome thing. Although it had been his birthright to be the author of stories like hers and although he looked like he might still pen them, for better or worse he had left that life behind. Monster knows monster beneath the flesh. The last of the stars wink out behind him as he lingers, unwilling to break the barrier of silence between them.