monstrum.

Luca could never understand the thorns that grew from Jasper’s tongue when he spoke, sometimes. Those moments when his brother’s words would reach his ears prickly and barbed, where even the tiniest of pricks still sends a moment’s pain up his nerves. He has long since accepted that he and Jasper view the world through different lenses, but that, Luca believes, is not in itself a bad thing. He enjoys learning from his brother, to see the world through the eyes of the smartest man he’s ever known. Perhaps it’s that intelligence that shapes Jasper’s world view, shows him things Luca had not even thought to consider. Regardless, he admires it. And so he bears the thorns, knowing that all roses have them. He anticipates the bloom of the beautiful red petals his brother will some day speak to him.

“Yes, I do think fondly of those days, but I also see what a fool I was, to not have realized I was living in a world without my brother. I think fondly of many days, and fonder of those that I have spent with you.” Luca knows well the tragedy that brought them together, and though he wished it were different, that their father might have introduced them while he was living to make them the family Luca so greatly longed for, he could not be anything but grateful for the presence of Jasper in his life. He can only hope the other man knows this.

Luca sits for a moment, silence occupying his throat. He has given himself away, piece by piece, hasn’t he? He considers how Jasper is right, there, and yet he cannot imagine ever expecting anything in return for the pieces he so willingly breaks off. “I am whole because, in return, I am filled with the light of those that I help. Perhaps part of it is for myself,” he muses, “because of the harmony and satisfaction I feel knowing that others are safe and the world is at peace. But I do not consider that selfish. I do not think that is so bad to want. I do not just want it for myself, but for others. For you.” Luca wonders what peace looks like to Jasper. In his mind, he pictures a fireplace, lit and inviting, a warm drink and a book on topics he himself doesn’t quite understand. He wonders if he may sit at the foot of the armchair where Jasper is reading and bask in that peace his brother would feel.

His eyebrows raise at the suggestions from Jasper, and a smile blooms upon his features. “Oh, I would hope you have! And I would love to hear about all you have done. Our names need not be the same for us to uplift one another’s glory. While we forge our own paths, I am pleased that mine has crossed yours once more. Perhaps we may write a chapter for one another, a journey that we share. It is one of the things I am most looking forward to now that I have found you once again.” Where Jasper sees a crown upon one head, and another’s knee bent, Luca sees two shoulders standing side by side, two sets of hands forging the future.

There is no beat of hesitation — Luca crumbles the silence between them swiftly, fells it as deftly as he has Jasper’s contentment. He does not consider his words, does not pluck at the catacombs of his mind to come away with something banal, bloated with sentimentality. It breaches his surface with little difficulty, spilling forward with no restraint. Jasper had always known it to be that way; impossibly simple to scrape the surface of Luca’s mind, impossibly easy to turn away disappointed by the pollen and honey sapped to his fingers thereafter. For once they wish he would stumble, allow a sliver of something broken to coast among the apples of his cheeks, the wide reverence of his gaze.

“How foolish, indeed,” Jasper relents, his head tilting to again surmise the years past, the parts of Luca matured in his absence, and those, too, that did not. He had thought to know what little there was of his brother then, involuntarily of course, inside and out. Though now there threatens to be vast, untouched, planes. Those that could not be banished so simply, it seemed, back to the village he had sowed them. Once, perhaps, Jasper’s prodding would have unraveled something in the boy, severed the commitment he harbored to these heroic notions,  but no more. Luca is resolute to stay, as is he to damn him with distance.

At last, there is a pause. A beat of air that stills, waiting, as Luca considers. He half imagines the man will remain speechless, that perhaps this, the idea of his servitude clasping cuffs and chains about his wrists and ankles could be enough. But then he brushes the notion aside, spins it to gold and offers handfuls to Jasper. For you, Luca speaks, as if he himself is to blame for the nauseating selflessness his brother shines with. For you; as if leaving it at his altar, a God whose language the man does not speak, cannot understand when he yearns for blood where Luca plants flowers. “Peace can never last, Luca, for most do not prioritize peace, and surely not by the hands of one man,” Jasper admits, teeth sinking into what little self-regard Luca has trusted him with, “do you not worry such a legacy will die with you? That you will give all of yourself only to leave behind nothing but the memory of temporary calm? Surely it would be wiser to go in search of conquests less...fickle.”

Gesturing to the Temples, fingers flicking here and there, Jasper allows a smile, “tranquil — I’m sure you’ve noticed. I think the Holy Land should be a waste of your tenacity if I cannot convince you otherwise, for if it is disorder you long to quell then I am unsure any resides here, at all.” Another lie, among many Jasper had weaved for Luca. Though less, perhaps, than others. It was at times a blessing the two viewed the world so oppositely, for often the truth had been enough to dispute Luca, where others needed, decidedly, more incentive. He only hoped the weight of the Tridium was enough to persuade his brother that his efforts here were wasted, that he would have more luck to search among territory that conveniently meant far less to Jasper, instead.

Luca’s excitement is bright, blinding, aching, and an unwelcome reminder of how little he had conquered during his travels, thus far. Tell him of what? How he was watching, and listening, and twisting his way toward a spot at the Round Table? How he had begun to resent the wilting of flowers bit by the chill, gears turning as he held their bones in each palm? There was nothing to tell  — yet. Perhaps ever, did Luca lay roots so vast no other living thing might hope to grow without being entwined with his first. It is what he hopes for, they think. So little did he worry of the danger in planting his crop beside the tangle of weeds, though Jasper would not be the one to warn him of their rot, either. 

When god was alive, she had been sent on tasks with an anger in her eyes. She had resented her existence, resented the fact that she was pulled from the sky to serve a being that took her happiness away, but she had followed through with his commands. She had gifted mortals hope, and she watched as that hope blinded them to the pain of her sword or the war brewing on the horizon. In a way, Jasper was following that same path. She got sent out on tasks, and though she resents it, she follows through. 

But Jasper should know— God’s fate was decided by those given mindless tasks. As her irritation bore into the mortal that stood before her, she hoped he knew that she would be the decider of his fate. 

Her jaw clenched at his question. Perhaps she hadn’t raised the dead before, but she wasn’t sure he was any more experienced. She feared what would happen if they waited much longer. Would Uriel’s soul be content in the afterlife? Would her body be too far gone to revive? She refused to get this far and not get her desired result. Her wings flared up slightly as she listened to the mortal’s words before replying, “I’m asking you for results. Any shred of proof that you intend to keep your promises. Any reason—” she paused, stepping closer to the boy so that her words only reached him, “Why I shouldn’t kill you right now and bury you alongside your fallen star.” 

Jasper had tasted loss. He understood, shockingly, the gaping wound it gouged in a person; a wound that seemingly threatened to exist until the body it ate away at no longer could. Arael, in all her grief and anger, had not experienced an injustice much different than that Jasper had. In a way, he understands, this berating is much the same as his own study — a means of grasping back authority, to blossom stronger, still, from the shroud of death. Her suffering had become a knife, her pain the very urge to press down until carmine pooled wet at her feet. He had noticed this about her, had she thought to notice it in him?

Loss had not made Jasper any more kindhearted than it had made Arael. This deal was a deal, a transaction, a contract — nothing more. Should he lounge in the sheen of his spoils so soon, Jasper would not think twice to cheat God’s most tortured angel. But should he not, Arael was of great use, too great to let slip through his fingers without little effort. 

⋅𖥔⋅ ── 

She ignores his first question, corners of her lips curling upwards at the man’s arrogance; at his subtle likening of their existences — for oh, how easily the mortals forget the inconsequentiality of their lifetime when compared to immortality; how it is she who has watched their beginnings and will watch their endings. It is she who holds the answer for him, has seen the answer for him, yet never him for her — such is the gift bestowed upon her Father’s most beloved: time, in all its arrogance; beginnings, in all its conjectures. 

“Inferum has no shortage of darkness,” Abaddon begins, watching him relax as the moon disappears behind a cloud. “But darkness is most beautiful against the light, is it not?” There’s no laughter in her tone as she replicates the arrogance in his previous question, only a subtle widening of her eyes and the dance of the stars reflected within them, bright against the lush darkness that has settled upon the forest — a question posed and sanctity answered. 

She steps closer still — slowly, as if too sudden a movement will frighten the mortal (though such a result is doubtful and her care is only the natural inclination of a hunter to tread lightly upon forest floors) — until her silver tipped wings brush tenderly against his cheek, like a teasing caress. Or, perhaps, the kiss of a blade. 

“My prisoner speaks of you.” Abaddon offers a small smile in place of a proper introduction; silent acknowledgement that he knows exactly who she is. “He fears you.” The smile grows, gleaming against the darkness like petals of a moonflower unfurling, bloom beguiling — as all poisonous flowers are. “Why?”

Abaddon draws her dagger then, wordlessly offering the hilt in his direction. 

She tilts her head to study him, gentle slope of her neck bared against the open air. Here is my throat for you to slit, the hunter says to the prey. Yet she offers much more, for endings have always held beauty that immortals dare not to achieve. Such is the allure of God’s most cherished creations, of the mortal standing before her — though it is incomparable to the finality of immortals. To end an immortal is to end a world in itself; an eternity of stories never to be told; a cut to infinity. To end an immortal is to be a god. 

Abaddon’s voice is soft. The smile does not stray.

“Show me.”

There is a goading in Abaddon’s words, acid spat from honeyed lips, and Jasper welcomes the sting against flesh. It is malleable, it is tolerable, much more so than those who pretend it exists not in the darkness of their throat at all; those that would choke on its burning rather than lift the mask from their true face for a moment of relief. Jasper, decidedly, cares little for suffering. 

“Do you find it so?” he challenges, hand extending to grasp the shadows between familiar fingers. Or has your heart found better use for its adorations? He does not speak it, but there, deep from the cavity of his chest, it blossoms. So few coincidences appear as they are, and Jasper would be a fool to think this one. Abaddon out for a midnight stroll, lengthy strides carrying her across their same path to look upon murkiness and dark, alone? 

She steps closer, as if to dash his very doubt to the forest floor, and Jasper bites back the urge to turn away from the demon’s prowling. Yet, he remains still, always unable to close his eyes to answers best left untouched, powerless to deny his reach from stretching toward those jaws of beasts unnamed. The brush of a feather against a cheek, so like the touch of God’s finger to the seams of creation — powerful, threatening, all knowing. Jasper would most yearn to pluck one free, to unravel the intricacies of such plumage to its stripped root. He wets his lips.

A prisoner. His chin tilts, as if considering, as if shards of memory do not embed like shrapnel in his mind. Many may speak of him, surely, as a heir to great fortune, and then a soldier, and most notably, a member of the Roundtable. However, there is only one who might know him by these woods, who might let slip a daunting escape through branches and brambles, who may truly be gripped with fear when retelling such luck. There is a slip of pride —Jasper Riche— known even to that dwelling most South of this world, yet it’s eclipsed briskly by disdain, a worrisome tug in the abdomen that warns apprehensively what one knows, others may too discover. 

“I cannot possibly imagine,” Jasper hums, his gaze flickering to Abaddon’s smile, cherubic, as if she were not speaking of prey trapped in a cage of her own devising. They have operated most successfully by night, swaddled in dull excuses; studying here, observing there. Never has one plucked so near the ventricles of his own heart, demanding to look upon what it dares thrum for, what hidden and exceptional object may capture his attention so that he must hide it from all else. 

Let her ask for it by name, Jasper thinks, for they will allow no more to slip from their tongue than what Abaddon forces from it. 

               “𝐎𝐇, 𝐉𝐀𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐑, 𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐄 𝐒𝐎!”Raum professes a little too loudly, as she’s suddenly overcome with a bout of melodrama. The back of her hand rests atop her forehead, tilted in Jasper’s direction, as if to shield herself from his suffocating darkness. Once she was satisfied with her impromptu performance, Raum allowed her hand to fall loosely to her side, her other hand bridging the divide between the goblet and her lips.

              “I was under the impression that you knew me far better than that,” she divulges with a disappointed shake of the head.  “Tricks are beneath me— that you assumed correctly.” A pointed fingernail leisurely outlines the curve beneath his eye.”If I were to strip you of your eyesight at this very instance, then it would be no trick. I wouldn’t do that though— I would not want you to be met with a bleak reality in which you are no longer able to see my face.” 

              With Jasper, Raum perpetually refused to back down— so much so that she no longer could remember that initial irritation— only the feeling of flames building behind her eyes. Time and time again she assured herself that there was nothing for her to prove— and therefore no reason for the disdain that clawed up her throat every time he successfully goaded her to irritation.

              She tells herself that even without Jasper’s assistance, she would’ve been just as successful in her thieving escapades. He could not know that he was a valuable asset to her— even if this became something left unspoken between the pair long ago. 

              “Surely you know any game I presented to you would be nowhere near easy.” She retrieves the glass bottle that she borrowed from the bar when she wasn’t looking, and refills her goblet, before turning to her companion, and offering him the bottle. “Perhaps life threatening, but never easy.”

Raum’s voice raises, an octave higher and a beat louder, and Jasper feels the presence of eyes crawl over the length of him. While he best unfurls his own wings in the privacy of night, Raum is content to stretch her own leisurely, to allow the crowd to pluck at notches of weakness and memorize the slope of certain strengths. He assumes it’s intentional — was a baby’s mewling not from the same vein as a war cry, after all? Were they not both pleas for attention, gasps for relief? Perhaps she longs to be fed, perhaps she longs to be ruined. Jasper had plans for both.

“You die on swords of your own making, Raum, you can hardly blame me,” he speaks dryly, the closest he’ll ever venture to starring in her theatrics. 

His gaze flickers toward their audience now, the sly looks cast at her back, to his front, and he considers the weight of their familiarity thrust into the open. At least, until Raum demands back his focus, with a purposeful swipe of her finger. Jasper glances down the bridge of his nose, the curved outline of the demon’s nail dissecting the socket of his eye, carefully, meticulously, as if it’s something she had considered once before. “Is that so?” He murmurs, raising his gaze back to the mischief in her own. It would be easy to push her away, to recoil and spit acid, but there is more satisfaction in knowing that he may not move at all, and still, she would not dare. 

“You think of so lowly a prize. My eyesight is only the cusp of what you're capable of robbing a man of, Raum,” Jasper admits, quiet enough that it lingers only in the space between them, the obligatory hook under her skin, and a tender urging, at once. She extends a bottle to them, her efforts sloshing within the glass as she offers, and Jasper curls his fingers about its neck. “Tell me what it is you deem a challenge, then, hm?” He entertains, sipping from the mouth of the bottle for a moment before returning it to her. He had to keep on his toes, even if Raum was the only one to make it worth his while. 

Jasper looks at Luca as if he is a burden, and yet Luca has only ever sought to make Jasper’s life brighter. He wished to help shoulder the weight of grief and illuminate the world that once seemed to bleak. He wanted to share tales of adventure and make some of their own together. He wanted to feel that way he felt the day he learned he had a brother. “I have existed from you, and I have existed with you, and I must say I prefer the latter. Once I knew life with my brother, I would never wish to know life without again.”

It was a wonder Luca had yet to catch on with the way Jasper aimed to twist his words. One could never imagine Luca doing something purely selfish, and even now, Luca could not name one thing he had done solely for himself. Such opportunities would begin to wind around his limbs like tempting serpents the longer he stayed within this land, but until then, he was simply a boy who wished to brighten the world. “Vanity?” Luca repeats with an expression of shock and confusion. “I have not heard such a response before, and I must respectfully disagree with that, brother. I wish to help people, and here I can help more people than I could in such small confines.” He shrugs. As much as it pained him to leave his town, they no longer needed him the way they once did. He itched for more, and he believed here is where he could do that more that he craved. “It is not about me, I assure you, though the joy seeing you again brings me is a welcome addition to this journey.”

The name my father gifted you with. The Riche name certainly came with a loaded reputation, as Luca had come to find out over the years. Luca could not admit to Jasper the stories he’d heard of their father as of late, the ones he disagreed with. He could not bear to see Jasper’s opinion of their father changed by the brutality and recklessness he had learned of - or perhaps he feared the image of Jasper agreeing with such legends. Luca could not agree with the brutal and perhaps unnecessary actions his father took, that covered friends and enemies alike in deep shades of red for the sake of rare glory. “Then why should one refuse to reach and risk never holding starlight in your hands?” Perhaps the fall was worth that moment. Perhaps Icarus smiled as he fell, having touched the light of the sun for even a fraction of a second. “Our name courts greatness, but can you truly say you are content living upon its namesake when you could make one of your own?” He reaches out for his brother once more. “Imagine the stories we can tell, Jasper. I seek those stories. I seek to aid. I seek to train. That is what brings me here.”

Jasper cannot fathom the fondness Luca nurtures, cradling their shared blood in his palms, how his brother protects it from spilling over with every shove he administers. Surely, his mother had never spoken a kind word of Jasper, and if their father had it was before he slipped away, again returning to his rightful heir and abandoning his second. How that tether wrought with gold from one Riche son to the next had not rotted and blackened in Luca’s mind was beyond Jasper, for its purity had never stood a chance in their own. Had there even been a moment he had not, in his bones, dreamt to know of a life where father had not spoken those two damned syllables of Luca’s name aloud? 

“Surely you must remember the days before my father’s death, and think of them fondly, no?” He challenges, a brow rising as if to remind him of what truly brought them together, to remind him it is the only thing that could have.

There is a part of him that alights at Luca’s bewilderment, as if the criticism has staked him to a part of his heart he did not know to exist. Jasper wishes he had the privacy to twist it deeper. It, instead, rests placid between his ribs, taunting them. “There is no part of you that longs to hear your name chanted, your brave legacy touted, Luca?” He is older now; his shoulders are much wider, his chin raised higher, his spine more taut. Jasper wonders if he notices the same in him, a man rather than the young boy hidden in the shadows of his home. “Surely, some semblance of it must be for your own sake. One does not give himself away to others from the break of the dawn till the dark of dusk and remain whole, after all.” He is not smiling. He needs to know —why? Luca had always been a frustratingly shallow pool to dip his fingers into, but perhaps he had deepened in their absence, perhaps he’d forged motives and aspirations from his bleeding heart.

When Luca speaks of greatness, his own weaved among the stars Jasper covets in his greedy palms, he feels a shudder of agitation. The shadow had been cast, once, any who stood in the way of Luca’s brilliance would be bathed in one, after all. Jasper had only just begun to slough its remnants from his boyhood, now, and it returns like an eclipse, bound to snuff the light from radiating upon anyone else. His jaw tightens. “So you come for more, after all,” Jasper muses, a brow raised, a fist balled as he takes a swift step away, “what is to say I have not made one for myself, already? Do you think I have spent all of my days waiting for your return to create one?” 

Imagine the stories, he considers bitterly, and Jasper envisions a crown atop a head of curls, a smile that is shared only with the brother bowed at his feet, swallowed again by what space his successor has allowed him, and that alone. 

Far from any tentative reprimands, it is quiet words of laudation that reach her ears.  It is, in myriad ways, a great pity - the promise of a fool approaching had been somewhat amusing; a ready opportunity to bare bored teeth. Yet any ripple of quiet disappointment evanesces with each word spoken. Sweet songs of appraisal do not alter a fundamental paradigm: to approach her is to be rendered a fool.

There is a contradiction in her attentions, more quickly given to those she disregards, as if they are unworthy of such a dance. If it had been a voice she recognised, she might have maintained her stance. Yet it is not, so she does not, turning slowly to appraise her new audience no sooner than they had summoned the audacity to address her. Frosted-blue eyes of indolence meet ones of dark depths. Ah. He is sharply handsome - a property she appreciates - but more so, there is a dull flicker of familiarity. She knows him, no, knows of him, and even that is a thin memory. The names and faces of the mortals’ governing table are slippery, tiresome to memorise when the affliction of mortality turns round table to carousel. Even without vague recollections, his stance invites such an estimation - hands disappearing behind a puffed-up chest, the perfect image of a statesman.

His words, however, speak of something entirely different. Delivered through a diplomat’s mouth, perhaps, but shaded by a far more interesting sentiment. So too can she see it in his eyes. They had been glanced at only in mocking courtesy, but there was something unexpected, something not quite discernible, contained within their depths. A hunger, she thinks ( recognises ). Her interest is piqued more than her ego is soothed; true, she enjoys her reputation being appreciated so, but Salome is not the fool here. Tongues that drip their own deceits surely recognise the taste.

“Is it? Beautiful?” she replies, brows raising in exaggerated surprise, “What a strange understanding of the term. I think it’s rather droll.” She carries beauty; her ‘gift’ ( as if she were one of those mortals, burnt and scarred ) is little more than pantomime. Is not its comedy more prominent than its beauty? Still, she smiles at him, as if his compliments have led only to unassuming delight, as if his description had brought a blush to innocent cheeks. He speaks as if he knows the danger he courts; let him be tested.

With a delicate curl of a finger, she pulls once more on the strings of the cat. She can feel its rise; her gaze does not move from the audience to which the puppet heads. Whereas it had danced fluidly before, with an elegance no doubt surpassing any it had possessed in life, it now crawls convulsively. At her will, its steps are disjointed, bones bent out of kilter. “It was curious too. A sweet little thing, like yourself.” The implication is obvious, accompanied by a rueful grin that likewise lacked subtlety. The words were lazy, her very tone mocking the precision with which the mortal had spoken. “Such an admirable trait, and yet so often proved the scourge of ones so young.” Another twist of her wrist and the snake unfolds, concertinas towards his feet with unnatural speeds, where it makes to wrap around the leg. Her grin merely widens.

‘Who am I to deny you?’. He had surely asked the wrong question of himself. “So it begs, who are you to invite me in?”

Droll, she demeans, and it strikes Jasper, as if she’s diminished the earth itself to little more than a stray pebble, walked over and disregarded by its abuser. He has to wonder, briefly, if it’s truly what she thinks of her gift. If she does not, at all, see the enchantment of breathing grace into stiff joints and stagnant bones, more elegant under her command than ever in life. To embed a spark of creation in the wake of Death; challenging him, berating him. There is a beauty in it, he would argue, to be a creature so wicked to damn fate itself. What then, he considers, might she call a beast such as Jasper?

Her smile is nearly convincing, would be a beacon of hope for his twisted machinations if only he knew not of Salome’s tempestuous legacy. Instead, they see it reflected in the twist of her lips, the indentation of fools before them lost to warnings veiled by tenderness. He will not let her will his shoulders to slacken and his breath to escape — Jasper was born with a knack for great difficulty, and he would curse Salome with its vision long before he allowed her to carve the light from his eyes. She would have easier meals, would she think to unhinge her jaws and usher Jasper onward. 

Yet he does not lean into it, his temperament or his bite, just yet. Though his longing, macabre and dreadful, does not resist clawing to the surface with the curl of a single finger. Bones pull in unnatural angles, limbs twitching as if in a sort of pain; a wounded bird trying to fly or an animal pulling hopelessly at a trap, and there is a striking element of defacement. A sort of cruelty, as if inflicting nature with her own spoiled children, taken apart and made something anew, a thing most terrible and horrific, a thing she herself would be too fearful to blight this world with. There is no fear in Salome, however, not the slightest in the drawl of her threats, or in the mangling of a corpse that pledges its allegiance to only her — for now, anyway.

Before he can argue, drape honeyed words and glowing accolades across the stretch of her collarbones, she attacks. Vertebrates leaping and hugging Jasper’s ankle, cinching at the calf before he can move to kick it aside, before he can think to disguise his awe from contorting in surprise and perhaps even, for the briefest of moments, discomfort. Though there is little fear, little terror to be scraped from the part of his lips when its spine settles at last, tethering him to her by creation; the proof of it, the desire for it, the weight of such clasped around bone. 

When Jasper’s widened eyes look upon her finally, and away from the hollow stare of her droll plaything, her smile has only deepened, unsheathed at his expense and catching dangerously on the light. It reminds him again why he’s come, why the peril she delights in teasing him with is why, exactly, it must be Salome he covets. 

“A contrarian then, perhaps,” Jasper answers carefully as he reels back his composure, the toe of his shoe angling to glance more thoroughly at her work as if to prove it, “for I find plenty droll, but this?” He gestures with his chin, serpentine gaze meeting serpentine gaze, “is nothing short of breathtaking.” His fingers, separated and spread in the jolt of being rushed, interlock again behind his back, where he may best bear his breast to her, as if giving the illusion he’d allow her the chance to root in his ribs did she find little else of him so worthy.

          𓆸  The light has long ebbed away, but the MEMORIAM OF THE LAST TWILIGHT resists in drawing its carousals of celebration to a close. Azazel has been passed prayerfully between admirers, and while she finds herself worn from the revelry, her belly is not yet full. She alights upon JASPER RICHE as song bleeds from one day to the next.  ↠  @jasperiche

With the exception of the scent of burnt flesh, it is a night like any other. Hand after hand has reached out to embrace her, fingers creeping wantingly over her shoulders and, like a pebble made smooth by the vicious nursing of the sea, she has been scoured raw, eaten to the bone, made perfectly round. In the festival’s backwash, it is easy enough for her to forget Gabriel’s words of warning; it is easy enough for their secret, already hidden, to slip from view. The thought that there may well be a killer amongst this sea of celebrants comfortably eludes her; as does the notion that the butcher might touch her with one hand, and wield a knife in the other.

The angels bat their feather wings at her, and she soon forgets Cador; the demons leer darkly up at her, and she ceases to think of the lie she and Gabriel have left in the shadows. The mortals weave their fingers between hers like molten gold fit to a cast, and they whisper their worship. They had been God’s favourites, once, and now they are hers, splayed at her feet like beggars praying at the foot of an altar. 

For tonight, however, she is tired of their wheedling and honeyed words. As the sun begins to stir, she seeks something less contrived; less coy. She seeks Jasper Riche, and she finds him standing sullen, sandwiched between celebration and carousal.

She seeks out the one who denies her, who takes great pleasure in belittling her—who seems to despise her but whose eyes she always feels, following her. He means nothing to her either, but that is not the point: there is nothing particularly special about Jasper, nothing that seduces her, but he pays her no mind, and Azazel can only answer this cruel aberration by paying him every moment of hers. It is her desire to be admired by all, even the impervious, who regard all good cheer with dark scorn, that compels her to approach him now.

She does not wait for him to fill the silence, for she is soundly convinced that he will not. “I will not ask you to dance with me,” Azazel says, petulant, with the tone of a woman who desperately wants to be danced with, “For I know you would deny me.” She takes her long hair in her hands and holds it there, as if wringing the wet from a towel; then she loosens her grip and lets it go, a river of black billowing down her spine. “Even if I commanded it, I think you would still deny me. That is how committed you are to not giving me what I want, no?”

Of course, he had noticed her; a man too ravenous to deny the hungry pit of his own stomach, desperate to gnaw away until he was spitting that of the divine’s from his teeth. Upon arrival his roaming eye had caught on the dark strands of hair parted over narrow shoulders and lithe hands outstretched, accepting tithe paid in saccharine coos and eyes wide with reverence. Her steps that never slow, each admirer a steady foothold to the next, unexceptional anchors that exist only to root her to the rot of this earth, and worth little else. It nauseates Jasper, the grace with which Azazel’s fingertips pluck the dignity of the pious for herself, uncoiling it so deftly in the briefest caress of her touch. Even more that there, concealed just beneath the nail bed, did she ever think to look, hid the inky stain of Jasper’s own, and he intended to scrape it loose before she put a name to its weight.

Still, he could not will his mind from grazing against her.

It gnaws at him now, the burden of seeking what she’d charmed from him, and even sharper did its teeth grind at the sight of it bestowed in the hands of another. It went without saying that Arianne could not have been taken by the demon’s allure, alone — Arianne was not taken so simply by anyone, except perhaps the face staring back from her own glassy reflection. So why, then, had Jasper looked on as she’d clasped their hands so assuredly, the dark of her eyes pierced by the glow of Azazel, many moments before? Why, still, did his nails bite against the flesh of his palm at the recollection of it? There is a door she demands to be opened, then, he understands, and yet he knows nothing of it beside Azazel’s being the key, refined and forged by Arianne’s interest to fit her just so. But what of his own?  

As if omnisciently heeding to the unspoken call of her name Azazel looms nearer, a shadow cast against the  planes of Jasper’s face touched by the break of light. And, as always, the lick of an ember grows in his stomach at the nearness, white-hot and insistent against the entrails as her discontent finds clarity in his peripheral. Lips purse, and the words coaxed from between their pout breed a satisfaction so deeply buried in Jasper it surfaces not upon the apathetic lines of his expression, yet the hint of what he most longed to suffocate still wavers in his gaze, fixed far from that of the demon. He would dig up and snuff out that spark, could he only find the means to.

“Is that the most you can want for?” Jasper wonders aloud, tilting his chin away from her and into the last remnants of dark. He whets the edges of his words before speaking them aloud, won’t allow such curiosity free without the taste of blood to remind him how masterfully it has ended lesser men. “How they have rotted your brain with their pampering,” he muses cruelly, a dry smile twisting the ends of each lip. She meticulously weaves the rungs of her trap, they can see it from the corner of their eye; long fingers cinching black threads together, coaxing Jasper to lose himself in them. How easy it would be to reach out to her, to entwine his knuckles — he swallows thickly, the imprint of his smirk deepening in tandem, contorting into something wrong as he pulls at the reigns of control.

Whilst Jasper felt the world splitting apart, Luca felt his own mending. The universe had taken up a needle and thread and begun to stitch the fragmented Riche brothers back together, and this was simply the first puncture of that needle through flesh. Luca welcomed the sensation, knowing any ache of the journey he had completed would be worth it to see his brother at its conclusion. He’d known a world before Jasper, but to know a world without him once he’d known his brother was something Luca could not quite adjust to. He looked up to Jasper, wished to share glory and secrets and tears with him, and to have lost someone he trusted, no matter if Jasper deserved such trust, made him only yearn to unite with him again.

The journey was not entirely about Jasper, but the older Riche was certainly its catalyst and part of its reward. Luca had always heard stories of heroes, and had been shaping up to be something of a local one, himself. He wanted to train. He wanted to learn more about what it was their father achieved and perhaps bring their family name to new heights. Ignorant to the reputation the Riche name carried in this part of the world, it didn’t seem to matter, for Luca was always become a beacon, in spite of his family’s reputation or in love for humanity. The first of that love he would extend to his brother.

“There is plenty for me here!” Luca counters cheerfully. He wonders what Jasper may have seen here, and for a moment wonders if his brother is protecting him from some unseen dangers that go unnoticed in this city. But Luca had become perfectly capable on his own, if his journey has proved anything, and if there was danger, he and Jasper could face it together. “There is you, after all.” Jasper had always been enough for Luca. If only Luca had ever been enough for Jasper.

One step backwards from Jasper was often met with another step forward from Luca, as was the case now. He wanted that closeness, that brotherly reunion, no matter what reality might have truly had in store. Luca had dreamed of a warm embrace between himself and Jasper, one full of all the stories they had to tell each other after so much time apart. But reality was creeping in, and Jasper seemed to still lack that fondness for touch as he had as long as Luca had known him. Luca would settle for a handshake, at least. “What troubles you, brother?” Luca asked, concerned. But Jasper’s correction distracts Luca from focusing too much on the sour mood Jasper all but spat. “Oh, no, I’m here for much more than that. I would have written you my intentions, if I had known where to send correspondence, so I sincerely apologize for the surprise. But I am here to train as you do! I could not stay home for long, you see,” Luca explains. “I felt I was perhaps meant for more than helping our neighbors with their farm work and keeping wolves from the village. And, most of all, I missed you.”

His brother, predictably, cinches the fabric tighter across closed eyelids. He’d wondered if that would decay with age — a gaze stained by petals of the same rose that bore Jasper his thorns. He had so hoped it might curdle in his absence, poison that petulant hope Luca had so foolishly interlaced his fingers about. Instead, he holds it over his head proudly, a victory, a won trophy, and Jasper’s lips tighten at the very sight of something quite like excitement plain on the man’s expression; a beast too steely to penetrate with any blade in Jasper’s vast arsenal.

He had tried, after all — though not for years. Not since he had escaped a tumultuous battle with it, hands clutching at all that had ever meant anything to him in the dead of night. It was then, bathed in moonlight, that Jasper had abandoned his greatest adversary, the weight of Luca sliced loose in place of scrolls and scribbles and old family heirlooms that Jasper had resolved not to share. He’d not missed his brother since, nor the dull ache in the same spot he’d always seemed to reside, feverishly digging a place for himself in the hollow of Jasper’s ribcage. With each spoken syllable they feel it deepen, as if he had never been quite tugged free — only delayed. 

You, Luca beams, as if he were something to orbit, flesh and bone he might make a home of. Jasper wonders what it is the sun might see when gazing upon the moon, and if it’s anything like the affliction he feels himself when faced with the width of his little brother’s rays, far wider and brighter than he had once remembered, even. “There is me, after all,” Jasper echoes him, a downturned gaze singing holes into marble floors, “and you need not stumble over my shadow as to remind me.” Dark eyes flicker side to side, alert for curious stragglers as the acid eats at  their tongue. “I exist here without you, Luca, as surely as you have existed far from me. I see no reason for you to follow when we live just as well apart.” 

The blue of his eyes brim with stretches of sadness, an ocean of tears that threaten to spill for Jasper, alone, though, it does little to send ripples through the icy resentment clouding that of dark tides staring back. What troubles him? It’s an affront Luca should spend nearly a decade at their side and still have to ask. But before the daggers beneath Jasper’s tongue prematurely unsheathe, a stretch of silks unravel from Luca’s, flowing and delicate from the space between his teeth. How he longs to reach a hand into the darkness of the man’s throat and sever it at the root, for even Luca’s apology, dripping with honey, saps his knuckles more tightly to the palm. 

“You were meant for more?” Jasper breathes, a brow rising incredulously as they search his expression, grasping at the appearance of gentler words that might propel him back the way he’d crawled, “you trade the safety of your village for such vanity, Luca?” He loathes that it takes such effort to twist the words of his brother, to dull the glow of a beacon so bursting and inflamed with light. “Is your missing me so important to warrant the abandonment of your people who need you?” A tongue clucks, and his gaze falls from that of piercing blue. 

𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍: the fourth week of the new moon 𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄: unspecified  𝐖𝐇𝐎: open

              𝐑𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐘 𝐃𝐈𝐃 𝐑𝐀𝐔𝐌 𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄 outside of the shadows of her solitude alone. She thrived in the tumult of others— it nurtured and caressed the pandemonium within herself. Today, the occasion happened to call for it. This was the only remedy for the gnawing within her, to answer for the moments in which Raum knew herself the least— as if she’d awakened a soul tasked with spectating the everyday happenings of her body. These were days that Raum relinquished all control to the void festering within her. It demanded feeding, and the demon was burdened with its fulfillment— lest she herself wanted to become its next casualty. Where others threatened to collapse under the weight of their histories, Raum was perpetually at risk of drowning in her lack thereof. The semblance of what once was preoccupied her at every moment. Neither God nor Lucifer looked kindly upon the demon. Stripping her of a legacy was not enough— Raum was then cursed with spontaneous, unintelligible fragments of a past life she had no way to make sense of. And as if that hadn’t been enough, they’d died with the answers she sought out.

               Complete and utter satiation was the only answer. Indulge, Indulge, Indulge. Raum gave herself over entirely to hedonism— as what better to fill the void than with things? The finest clothing, the best-imported jewelry The Holy Land had to offer were all at her disposal. And during the most turbulent of times, the beating heart of some stranger. All of these things aided her in the burying of her void, and buried it would remain until it unearthed itself once more— demanding to be fed; demanding more and more and more—

               Surely, it’d been clear that Raum was up to no good. Any who dared entertained her must not have known her, or simply went where chaos called. Presently, she’d been unattended, with only the finest rum to keep her company, but her attention immediately captured by the warmth of a living body lingering nearby. “It must be my lucky day— or so the mortals say,” Raum coos with a wicked smirk, bridging the space left between them. “Fancy a game of sorts? I’ll make it worth your while.”

—

A well placed smile rests upon Jasper’s lips, but fades before it may reach the dark of his eyes. He had mostly avoided the pains of small talk, bidding his condolences here, and there, before slipping back from the press of a raucous crowd. A few had captured him briefly, resisting the urge to gnaw at his own ankle to break free from their boorish traps of idiocy, but they, for the most part, avoided Jasper as diligently as he did them. With the exception of one — 

Raum’s voice digs beneath the flesh like a well placed sliver; aggravating for now but capable of great infection, of a rot abated only by the carving of oneself. Jasper should know, it was the only reason he often stomached its grate. The mortal had sought her out for no other purpose, after all; plucked by him specifically when she was little more than an irksome grain of sand beneath his heel, rolled in his palms until he glimpsed the greatness she might grow into, the ruinous pearl he might pocket before she knew herself to be one. 

The curve of his lips do not falter at her prodding, though something in his gaze shifts, something very nearly resembling curiosity. “Some of them might,” Jasper counters slowly, as if to remind her that he is not to be lumped in with the simplicity of his own kind. “You know how little games interest me, Raum.” He angles his chin to set dark eyes on her at last, noting the gleam in her own that suggests Jasper’s interests mean frustratingly little. If only she knew. “Parlor tricks and petty hoaxes are beneath you,” he elaborates, crossing wrists behind his back, “I don’t trust even you could make peanuts worth my while.” 

There was the cusp of truth inlaid in Jasper’s baiting — a warning — did Raum ever think to search for them. She used her energies so frivolously, gluttonously drinking her divinity down to the marrow for fleeting whims. It would do her better to fashion goals, aspirations, weapons, from those hungry bones — to steal crowns and kingdoms rather than scraps and pennies. With Jasper’s guidance she would learn to fasten her empty stomach to larger feasts, but he dared not bestow her with the inkling of them before making certain that wanting appetite bent to suit his own cravings before her own.

Who: Salome & Jasper Riche [ @jasperiche ] Where: A square in the Holy Land When: Fourth Week of the New Moon; the Coming of Spring.

The children watch, enraptured.

At least, Salome believes them to be enraptured. There are no young amongst the ranks of Infernum; she is ill-versed in the wandering expressions of juvenile faces. It could, she supposes, be fear that they wear - perhaps terror. It mattered little.

The movement of her fingers was barely perceptible, even an audience of more careful observers might have missed the light, idle movements. With the slight bend of her jewelled index finger, the curling of a delicate thumb, the objects of their youthful stares continued to dance onwards. A snake, even colder now than it had been in life, bows to a cat with disturbingly unseeing eyes. The cat, in return, rises to its hind legs and spins around and around, as the snake weaves repeatedly through its legs. It is mere child’s play, requiring but the minimum of her attention and barely curbing the edges of her boredom. 

It is no great pity then, when a mortal adult approaches her audience. They too make to watch, but Salome can see the moment they realise, glancing briefly to her before ushering the young away in hurried movements. She watches with lazy amusement - such a spectacle was more entertaining than such minor puppetry could ever be. 

The cat and the snake collapse to the floor, rigid and unmoving.

It is only that she senses a different pair of eyes trained on her, demonic ears pricking at the sound of careful steps. It seems she has gained another audience, or perhaps some little mortal has gathered the courage to berate her - that, at least, would be entertaining. “No need to be so shy”, she drawls, head only fractionally turning towards the light sounds, “We don’t bite. Often.”

Art was a fickle thing — so subjective, so nuanced — Jasper had never quite pinned his own heart to canvas, or choked on words drank from thespian lips. It fluctuated too greatly to hold his interest; creations that would wither and die in importance come the following year. Art may move the soul but it would touch little else; it could never raze the earth, it could never spill the blood from the veins of his enemy. It was a dull tool, its weight comforting in the palm of a hand but otherwise futile.

Yet, Jasper is sure, no painting or sonnet he’d stumbled upon could ever compare to the beauty of Salome’s craft. If art was little more than a blunt axe in his grasp, then she is the whetted dagger, encrusted with menace and efficacy he longs to wield. Dark eyes follow in time with the lazy flick of her fingertips, poised at carcasses, drifting elegantly at her will. As surely as they dive to grant her impulses, so too does Jasper’s hungry gaze, as if there is something quite dead in the dark of his own pupils she has summoned again only to look upon her living, breathing, greatness.

Gasps arise in the crowd as a cat finds its footing, and Jasper resists the urge to step nearer, to join in their wide eyes and open mouths, but he is no fool. It is because her web is so intricate, gossamer threads stretching this way and that with every curl of a finger, that Jasper recognizes the threat of being trapped in it. The stories of her poison are well documented, tales and myths wrapped in deceit and glutton that transcend darling party tricks. How he yearns to watch it take root, to canker and corrode sickly before his eyes.

He’s nearly grateful when a weaker stomach disregards her performance, rushing their youth from the sight of Death, and how absolutely malleable Salome has proved it. Are they so afraid of making a fool of its legacy, so frightened admitting it might disrespect those that allowed themselves to fall victim to its touch? Not Jasper; he would not go because those before him had, and he would not shy from Salome now, because the others did. Truthfully, he had been seeking a way to make her acquaintance for days now, weighing his options so as not to seem as if he had ulterior motives, for if he did they were best kept out of her reach. No, Jasper wants to appear as the fly circling her web, rather than a rival spider looking to unravel it, to steal her serpentine silks for itself.

It’s only when the others have abandoned her, the stillness making the demise of her marionettes all the more evident, that Jasper steps into its silence. He trains his expression, abating a smirk away at her words before taking root a short distance away — near enough to let his interest be known, but not so near he suffocates. “Fortunate for us all,” Jasper speaks, fingers interlocking behind his back as he tilts his head to mimic that of Salome’s, “a bite from you would surely be more ruinous than that of any other.” He places his throat on her chopping block — weak, simple, mortal — and attempts to steer her from loosing the rope. 

Patience had never been the angel’s virtue. During god’s reign, she had been dispatched to Earth enough times to satiate her impatient. Her mind would focus on instilling heretics or other mortals with enough hope to cloud their minds instead of her own thoughts. Now, she’s been left to her own devices and she found herself growing irritated at the thought of simply waiting it out. The boy had fed her promises of a life reborn, a hope restored, and yet she found no results to justify his claims.

 And she was beginning to wonder if her trust had been misplaced. Had she been so blinded by the thought of her beloved returning to her that she allowed this mortal to drag her into his clouded beliefs? Had she let herself be led astray over a false hope that she had desperately latched onto?

Had she been someone else, she might’ve felt bad for dragging the mortal so harshly. Sadly, Arael had no sympathy for his kind—- not when she held the firm belief that one of his own ripped her hope away from her. “You tell me you can bring her back to life, but I have yet to see any proof that you can bring even a simple flea back to life.” Arael accused, arms crossing over her body as she analyzed his body language. “I don’t respond well to lies, boy.”

Arael was a loose canon; it was what made her pliable but also, regrettably, difficult. Jasper was counting down the days, the exact hour, or second, she might combust, sending shrapnel into anyone near enough to suffer its bite. He planned to be quite a distance away by then — if only she might let him. Yet, Arael followed Jasper like a shadow, inquiries dropping off her tongue as often as promises fell from his own. Her insistence was beginning to grate on his nerves. 

It had seemed simple at first; rage curdled beneath her flesh, desperation in her bones. She was a bomb searching for more fuse, more time, and Jasper knew he was destined to uncover great answers, perhaps even that to sate her beast. Yet she ticked more viciously with every passing day, and he had to consider which would come first — his finding divinity, or her finding the last of her patience bled dry. 

send me a ✧ and i’ll bold all that apply to your muse.

send me a ✧ and i’ll bold all that apply to your muse.

send me a ✧ and i’ll bold all that apply to your muse.