Private Familiar With The Beasts

[Valborast Valchek]

Grins of sharpness gleaming from the vacillating gloom were all too familiar to Valborast. He came from a home where no sky did yawn with cloud and light of moon, star or sun, just a canopy of stone. Endless swathes of ridging shadows made home to things unknown that saw and lurked and seethed and smiled. Such grins that did leer huge with tarnished joy in how wrong they were to be that way inclined, Valborast had bared them. Under the ground, far beneath the graves of those who were sun kissed and windswept, were the caverns of Zakron. Host to monsters and those who were monsters to them. And many a time before a bite did seek to reach, to tear a meal from him did Valborast contend in fatal sport and game, many lesson learned and forced to learn to save the meal becoming.

Teeth grown and shaped and revealed to consume and fend and hold at bay, teeth set to task to control and entertain cruel fancies of the jaded, cruel patrons cruel curators, wicked hosts and deeper jaded. These had been familiar. But left behind for a place of sunlight. His salad days had been spent pitted against the carnivorous, both acting in service. Malice in the stewardship that kept them sharp, made so by those did thirst for blood and ruthless games to break their growing endless grey.

Left behind for want of freedom from those smiles of torment and reflections in the maw. Left behind the minds occupied with naught but want of flights of terror, fanciful plots and machinations to set the mortal against the beasts the rulers reared as pets. Just as they did keep the mortals well stocked for their service and humours.

Once again such a beast had grinned at him, this time upon the surface. A different breed, yet Valborast knew the nature of the monstrous when taught to refine it's grudge so natural. Recognised it's bloodline and breeding.

This time, instead of a canopy of stone with a myriad of terrible mysteries awaiting their time to introduce their existence, the night air spanned wide and cold, expansive and uncaring. The moons and stars odd company, silent in their own mystiques and glowing, their glimmering. Valborast did look for hint of agency in their observation. So different from the audiences he couldn't make contact of the eyes with - he looked direct and lived. At the black sky did he look to each source of light in turn, daring to meet the bodies of the celestial with all the impertinence he had never been allowed to flash at his hosts. His benefactors. His keepers.

A testing pull against the bindings within his hand. He blinked, discarding the celestial, a turn of the head, growing sneer reminding the smiling beast of dominance. His sneer a snarl all it's own to those who knew of control, to things of that knew and were of torment.

Valborast did hold lashings of weaving dark and shadow as leash and muzzle about the beast he knew so well in other bodies, other manifestation. It grinned on, wheezing laughters to jokes Valborast had witnessed written in it's kind's mind. Haunches rippling in it's exhausted spite and humour. The two had battled in spates of enduring competition, stretching nights of stalking and quick cut slashing, of leaps from the dark, each of them home within it. Each of them refusing to retreat from what they knew best. Each not running, but relocating. Shifting in the shadows, contesting under the uncaring sky with it's glimmers and glowers of light.

The Crimson Knight did open his eyes. Eyes underlined by sleeplessness, hard etched and bruised by regular night time vigilance. The eyes of beast did look down. Eyes fluttered in deference to the captor, in appeasement of the victor. The Crimson's Knight's dominion accepted for it's survival.

Yet still that grin did remain, contradicting the eyes of submissiveness.

All too familiar, all of it.

To what was in front of him he did look. The openings of a forest, tall with their crookedness and withering vines, draped in the signs of life and tracks of passage that few sought to have find them. Yawning archways of nature did that promise pitfall to prey and paradise to predator. Within, Valborast did think, beast in tow that did huff within it's muzzle did come to distant heel as he did stride forward. Within.

“Your new caretaker is within.”

Or so the hope goes.

Else I'll have to-

Another wheezing laughter audible from within the muffling of the magic, the constriction of Valborast's curse bestowed. No look given. None demanded. No challenge in the laughter. The endless joke retelling in the blood.

Valborast's hand beckoned behind him, full of shadow lash between his digits, his boots treading into the yawning place where one who did track would know how to best keep one he felt all too familiar with.

The Crimson Knight so draped in his colours, sword sheathed and weathered by seasons of the dark, did allow himself to become swallowed by the forest, to find one who might relieve him what was his, for now. The moons and stars becoming less apparent as he submerged into the wild, concealed by the crowd of life that spread their own shadows, grew their own mysteries – that made roost and roaming ground for a mistress of the monsters.

@Cylano

 

[Cylano]

Something beautiful had once lived in these woods. A single entity, behaving as though it were many, filling the expanse with life and light. It painted blue and violet into the bell bonnets of tall lupine, sent shivers through the heart-shaped leaves of trembling aspen, and coaxed milk-cap mushrooms to fruit beneath young birchlings with bark like open, unblinking eyes. Through them, a guarding gaze turned toward an inner meadow -- a sanctuary where grizzled peasant women brought their fresh pink babes to suckle and crawl, as their mothers had once done before them.

These were the small miracles and protective shroudwork of a garden-variety forest guardian, its motive and purpose unknowable, yet glimpsed in the way this place remained untouched by evil or rot for centuries. Perhaps it had once been the quarry of royal hunts, but it was nothing so mortal as red vulpine or white hart. It was of such pure spirit it could not be killed, just as impurity could not be destroyed. Yet purity can be driven out, just as corruption can be bound and made captive.

What had chased the green from this forest was no mystery. It came on a day no different from any other, as though borne on a wind that had gathered its foulness from the earth and waited a lifetime to defile the mecca of innocence thriving here. She arrived as one entity, and left no doubt that she belonged to no greater whole. She carved her presence into the land with changes as swift and certain as the turn of a season. The forest wept to see her coming, dreading to be unmade in her grand design.

Its guardian, a coward, fled.

So the hardwood weald, once known for its abundance of flora and the gentle temper of its fauna, fell to wickedness and now kept only wicked things for company. Twisted limbs of dead aspen and even deader birch leaned inward where the mistress passed, knotting themselves into strange shapes, their lichened branches interlacing like conspirators whispering in the dark. Vines hung from them in large arcs like the shed skins of serpents -- the morbid, tangled festooning of a wild grape once planted by a peasant mother and left to sour. Along the broken footpath, small, suffering chokeberry bushes strained for light, and hardy stalks of monkshood nodded their violet helmets like sentries awaiting orders.

It was into this shadowed corridor that Valborast and his homuncule pet were drawn, as though led by some unseen, taloned hand cupped gently beneath his chin, guiding him deeper into the erebus of her domain.

Assessing him. Measuring his worth. Claiming him.

“Oh yes. She will like that one. Very much. Heeheehee!” A voice wheedled, giggle tittering, everywhere and nowhere at once, pitched so high it could be mistaken for the squeal of gas leaking from a bloated, rupturing corpse. It needled into the eardrums of the Crimson Knight and his tethered anomaly, persistent and maddening, like the phantom of tinnitus grown alive, gnawing at an any which old memory it could shake loose.

 

[Valborast Valchek]

Much as piercing spears of light did rescind their punctures and lapse darkness in lieu of those plunging illuminations, life here had withdrawn a mindful presence to make verdancy abound and flourish. Signs of that old reign in the hallmarks of the absence, compelled to writhe in the undoing and render themselves entangled in the quietude of the halted and hushed. The stewards of the shade groves did nurture in the absence, and their works were not in want of a guiding hand that knew their potentials well it seemed. Yearning for the sunlight and adapting to new abundances of struggle, nature did survive in the means allowed to it and became more unique for it Valborast did think.

To be within such a place that did coax a challenge to nature's expression, nurtured by tough love and allowed to adapt to commissioned hardships, brought the comfort of a burden much known to Valborast. He did not know the word homesick as others might associate it. But he felt that echo in the chamber of his heart all the same at the sight of the abundance of that which grew in the conditions of decay. Survived well in the absence of the perfect and idealised nourishment, the things that found themselves he felt kinship to as he witnessed the progress of the residents of this place.

Into the gallery of the shadowed corridors with it's alcoves of culminated strugglings, the quietude deepened. Those that did not mourn a sight they did not welcome easily found refuge from expectations here. Valborast felt as if his pet grew more patient as it was given such enrichment akin to it's nature, padding the ground as if soothed with each step. Gentle tethered, harbouring it's laughter and wilfulness for when distractions pleasing to it's nature grew scant. When the need to renegotiate the situation did itch it's collar to yank at Valborast's hold, to issue the growling snickers again to make it's displeasure known again. All in due time.

Yet the soured grape did cause a mourning for potential by habit, shrugged away by proper perspective. The insects were afforded what would burst and fail to fill a bottle correct, suited to their palettes. The tyranny of thinking that potentials were being wasted was beside the service of this place, Valborast did think. The rejection of common vitalities was clearly the dominant attitude here. Not all caretakers did garner what they sought to grow with caring gestures. And that was no lapse in decency to Valborast, no call to action and no imperative to soothe the land. Neglect could be mindful and precise. Much like a hungry mind that could ruined by satiation to halt the pursuit to progress, from strange places did the unusual thrive, it's diversity ensured by adversity. Such did Valborast appreciate, his brow softening even as his grip upon the tether did not fail it's vigilant hold.

Yet the high pitched tone of words that did dopple in their camouflaging ripples, providing sensation and causing doubt in their interpretation by their nature. Downplaying themselves even as they became insistent, the duel dwellings of existence and imagination flaring. Yet Valborast was versed in such whispers, knowing their utterance well.

His ears quick fixed to refuse disarming his understanding. The wind did not cackle, the pitch knew much sibilance, the puncture of intent recognised in hints of consonants. To listen to long would invite the madness of nothing becoming something. Yet to be numb to the message initial would make one dumb to what was being said. And such would never do, Valborast thought.

Knowing the nature of those that did speak in the translucencies and overtones in hints of remarked sound, like a paint dipped much in water and turned to streaks subtle across a canvas, Valborast paid mind to those broad sweeps of what was gifted to the air. Brow did flex it's irritation, craning down into firm entrenchment of annoyance that was his regular mask for the consternations of the world. The tinnitus regular pulsing, probing and cracking his patience, yet a deep well of exposure to such things honed his response well. Attention could be drained through attrition, be it from sly sibilance barely perceptible in the white noise screech of nothing charitable.

He breathed deep of the forest, set his brow to politeness and acceptance. And set to giving unto the sound his own in similiar style of susurrant wail, sussorance sought in the issuing.

From the redness of his mantle, sweeped broad to below his arms outstreched, his trailing affect set to services and snapped taut into appearance of the full sail, the active wing. The appendage of his clothing did snap and relax, offering his own response to such whispering pressure against his ear. The language of the bat, the echo location delivered in the place beyond his human ears. Setting his own tone to proper identify the words that did shift in the wind, catching the air with the ripples of his own pinging. Verifying that there had indeed been words, crack snapping the signal, knowing it better.

Still, the pressure did remain, whittling his patience in slither cuts.

So, Valborast did set his cloak to rippling further in performance, sound rising in shepard tone barely perceptible yet sympathetic to the living waves that worked to erode him. An auditory illusion to play it's part to provide chorus to the one rippling about him, against him. Soothing himself with the understanding he would never resolve, harmonising with that was beset against him, the frequency did work it's revolving ascent. Within that rising tone the whispers of his mind did sally forth as creeping bites of words, chewing muchly and freely in the space now smothered in high pitch emanations, a blanket of smothering whines that he did probe with his response in bounding resonance that never resolved, never ended, repeated, layered, dissonant to the ear yet pleasing to those that found most sounds saccarine. The ether layered with his response to that call that pervaded him.

'GUEST-AND-GIFT-AWAITING'

This was not the first time he had spoken to the nothing that spoke much within the spaces within itself. To reach out with hand invisible to shake another's that did conceal belief that it could ever be out there. And courtly and with defence to that language did Valborast offer his shibboleth, no alarm against the imposition working upon him, merely an understanding that in the land of the whispers, one must defend against the hushed with guiles that heard true, without shock of a peering behind the eyes.

As if Valborast possessed a deck of cards that was his memories, and a hand of seven from them ready to play, each card as if the sound was looking for a tip of that hand, teasing this way and that for better view. Understanding the nature of the sleight of hand encouraged in this game, Valborast was neither shocked or hurt by the memories encouraged to reveal. A single card, given in full display upon the table was his offering, playing honest at a mind taker's cheatful game, providing no shame at the effort to make him light of his private possessions of memory. He knew the nature of the game, and marked himself a fellow player by boldly giving what was asked of by mind trip work and hazard with grace and without begrudging the act of sly asking.

A vision of a place under ground and long behind him, yet present in his mind for the reshuffling and request here within the forest of decaying. A memory of dark draperies and scant light, of stone within the bowels of rock, of the pinging bat above and the cruel smiles of beastly things that told conspiracies of shadows in their glares, fashionable leanings of cruel leanings, the broad strokes of attitudes sinister that he find himself not fighting, but swimming within and surviving. A gathering singular of motes of red to mark himself within a place of eyes that leered and promised much growth should the culling from the nature of their civilised gatherings be met without reserve or failures.

Valborast ceased the shepard tone once the memory had been revealed, snapped away and sequestered, new cards within his hands to bestow. Held tight against his chest, the first card given for the insistence of annoyance. He hoped to receive any sign of mutual understanding from the forest that knew the end of things more than most. Tithes to the dark were known to him, and given that he was here to ask that the hound be catered for, he gave morsel of what was gnawed at freely, understanding the tolls that the bridges did demand to become material.

The beast did begin to huff and became encouraged to snicker. Sensing insubordination regular, Valborast clicked his free hand's fingers. Words from his mouth talking in contrast to the subvocal and mind ripple communiques so given.

“Now now, we're talking,” Valborast lightly chided, as if slyly speaking to a child without looking for interrupting a dinner party's opening course with tugging on the sleeves ill timed. His eyes to the dark, curious as to the next play, or if the corridors of the forest would have more things to show him and his leashed gift by what made this place a haunt.

He listened, observed and waited for attendance, and patient to let the forest have it's further moments within itself as it gathered what welcomes it deemed right.

@Cylano