[P] [M] bruising as bruising does under blue light

[Ark Coara]

WARNING: This thread contains material exceeding the general board rating of PG-13. It may contain very strong language, drug usage, graphic violence, or graphic sexual content. Reader discretion is advised.

Specifically, this thread is marked mature because of: potential violent and/or sexual themes.

you cannot hide from destiny

They waited, and waited, and waited.

Occasionally, as Silivren served her cups of tea and molded the young minds, another sort of visitor graced their camp. Under the cover of darkness and with no witnesses around, they approached his tent with secrets only committed to memory. The odd-eyed woman was perhaps the most useless in this task, just about melting into a puddle every time she can to him; but he knew that the darker female wouldn't continue without her. He would allow it.

There was another, however, that he put more faith into, even if she had routinely disappointed him, time and time again.

It was Ark's fault that she was so pitiable, really. He seemed to bring the worst of it out of her. Sending her off well before the rest of the group had been a blessing in disguise, a small reprieve from her suffocating coddling and delirious devotion to the Lady.

But soon, she was due to return, if only to let him know well beforehand that she had failed at her task so that he wouldn't have to stand around waiting to hear it from somewhere else.

The trust he placed in her was superficial, having been tested many times. She did not deserve it. But he would placate her anyway, if only for the good of his cause.

An eerie silence fell over the camp, the only sound being the occasional snap of twigs from the lone fire in the middle of their shelters. They had already moved once, never staying in one place for too long; not now, that the Kingdom had caught onto their game.

But it was too late for them, Ark knew. They had fallen long ago.

[+2]

we can date this whenever works best!! (code for 'i forgot when this was supposed to be dated' LOL)

[Éna Lanthir]

She had known him as one knew their monsters – ever present, wrathful, and twisted with greed. He was marred by war. Darkened, from the inside outward, tainted by horrors and demons innumerable and unknowable.

Regardless, she had loved him.

Or, rather, she had loved him in the only way that she knew how, intertwined with fear, the way deserts loved the rain despite the destruction it wrought, and so too did Ark drown her unquenched thirst and left her yearning for that fleeting taste, never quite enough – yet, sustainable. To love was to loathe. To love was to blind yourself to faults.

To love was to subject yourself to an unending torture.

When she moved, it was wraithlike, silent and gliding along the earth as she coalesced with the dark, flickering shadows stretched between the trees, cast out by the fire. Éna announced herself with information, cutting through the diatribes and pleasantries alike:

”Their court has a fissure.”

She did not lift her gaze, pulled into Ark’s orbit without ever laying eyes on him directly, in tune with his eldritch and cosmic weight. She found her place before him, her face turned downward and the curtain of black shrouding her face, hands clasped together before she dipped herself down into a kneel – from here, she had always assumed, it would be harder to strike her.

More often than not, this assumption had proved incorrect.

OOC: hi honey i'm back from the store i'm sorry they were out of chocolate milk :c

[Ark Coara]

you cannot hide from destiny

She approached on his side where his sight failed, the dead eye staring uselessly outward. There was a rustling of leaves, as if tickled by wind, and there the Lanthir woman stood, but not before falling onto her knees before him. She teemed with a familiar, anxious energy, the sort she sought to hide from him by doing each and everything asked of her without question, without complaint.

When his hand fell upon her, she flinched out of habit — but his palm calm to rest on the crown of her head, fingers tussling through her hair. To an outsider, it could have been mistaken for affection, though it was a far cry from it.

"A fissure," he mused aloud, a thoughtful waver in his voice.

It was an expected answer, but no less pleasing. Still, Ark could not help but to find some fault in it; Éna was cursed with a mediocrity that he could not come to terms with, not now, not ever.

Enclosing his hand into a fist — he did not strike as she had feared — the warlord yanked her up by her mane, bringing her eye-level with himself as he bared his fangs at her like a common beast.

"It took you this long to report this? A fissure?"

With a scoff, he tossed her aside like trash, some disgusting, forgettable thing. In some ways, she was: long ago she had been spoiled by another, a man whose withering touch turned every good thing into dust.

In his mind, Éna would never recover from her brief dalliance with Rand Coara. She simply couldn't. This was a sin the Goddess could not wash clean, even in Her pure, untainted waters.

As she attempted to collect herself, Ark sneered. This was where he desired her to stay: battered down and broken, completely at his mercy.

"Tell me something I do not know," he demanded. "What of the stores? Their defenses? Have they increased their patrols? And who do they suspect — what causes this fissure?"

[+337]