#amberedcorpse

            „Is it how you imagined?“

Black water crashing against black rock and lapping on black sand. The waves' soft sighs brushed against the shore was a stark contrast to the image itself. Or the feeling of the air. There was a buzzing of a dormant strength, filling all that was around them, mantled over by the calm and the silence. The slow and metronomic sound of the waves hitting the soft sandy shore — typically a comfort to the mind — different now. Odd. Wrong. A soft noise with a low frequency and a rhythmic nature meant to tell the brain that one was safe felt more like a looming danger. It was an unspoken threat to everyone abiding. Even the typical sulphury smell of decaying algae was stale, dilute.

The sky was disturbing, dark and motionless. Black, as the water, as the rock, as the sand. The horizon was covered by a strange fog that began after a good stretch across the water. Behind them the beginnings of dark grass and dark soul and a treeline of shadows standing tall and unfretted, from which the same peculiar fog seemed to creep their direction. Wafting then recoiling. Something alive.

To one side the shore stretched. To the other the rock-formation-mother of all the runaway stones belonged to stood: a cliff, adorned by what must be man-made ruins of a stone structure, long neglected. Fifty feet above ground, its sharp contour cast a shadow onto the sand below. Unnaturally so, with no lightsource visible in the sky.

Work wasn't terribly hard to come by out here in the Commonwealth so long as you weren't too picky. And Lucio had very little room nowadays to be picky anymore. So long as the work took his mind off of the constant turmoil in his skull, he did damn near any odd job he could find during the day. After all, his nights were booked. Dates with amber colored bottles filled his schedule.

What caught his attention recently was an ad that'd recently been becoming more and more prominent in his mind. It wasn't the fact that the ad was everywhere, quite the contrary. It was how it was worded. It seemed lucrative, yet he got a strange feeling from reading it. An itch in his stiffened palms.

Something that wasn't farm work at least was worth giving a look.

And so he made the small trek out to the coordinates advertised. Kinda far, but he didn't mind the travel towards the salty ocean air.

Arriving, he recognizes it as the Castle. The most recently set up headquarters for the newly revived Minutemen. Usually any authority would put Lucio on edge, but they were so new. No one would notice or question him he was sure. They could probably use all the help they could get if they're pulling out fliers and shit.

Drifters weren't exactly uncommon in these parts, but certainly the small group of Minutemen were causing a bit of a stir. Or so her ears, a large ghoul by the name of Knox, had told her.

Minutemen he says, though not warily. The Minutemen have never been anything but kind to the citizens of the Commonwealth as far as she was concerned. Perhaps a bit trigger happy with the mutants, but you couldn't win them all. Asking around for supplies. Apparently the local fare either wasn't enough or wasn't what they were looking for.

Kira's hand steadily begins to scribble at the paper before her on the desk. None too concerned with a small band of Minutemen in Goodneighbor. Surely they would end up being taken care of by Hancock. Should he be in a state of mind to take care of anything.

"Expect company," The voice tells her quietly from his place looking out the window. Keeping watch as he notices a few of the people they talk to point into the direction of their building. 'The Good Doctor', their lips ghost.

The announcement only pulls a sigh from her lips, her hands straightening out the papers on her desk and the frayed ends of her hair.

Knox wasn't worried. Likely just came looking for a surplus of supplies they couldn't find anywhere else. Wouldn't be the first time.

Of all the places he could have had chosen...

He wondered what had happened here... Claustrophobic city walls and winding alleys of rugged stone architecture. Narrow, shadowy streets paved the webbed layout of the small, forgotten town. Pumped full with an overwhelming smell of decay due to poor sanitation, the presence of disease-spreading vermin was unavoidable. The few intact buildings that stood close together, their looming dark stone walls tall and crooked, glistening from a substance he knew had been rain pouring down only half an hour ago. Casting most surfaces that were not damp earth and gloom in a glistening shen cast from a bloated silver moon. Flickering lanterns cast dancing, ghostly shadows smelling of burned wood more than they did spread their miserable light. A town so neglected, Alexander was not surprised travelers gave it a wide berth.

The graveyard he had passed on his way to the city gate had been much like the chapel — in ruins. The graves were marked by horizontal slabs of stone with a wall surrounding the area, though a rather large portion of the wall had collapsed along with the ground and fallen off the adjacent cliff and into the nearby sea, looking as though something had reached up from the watery depths and had claimed (torn) a piece of its land to reside with it now.

The noise of people come together got louder the nearer he got to the building with the most light and life inside. Voices of people merged together, incomprehensible in what it was they said. The only safe haven were folk flocked to for the night to escape the dark and foreboding blackness of the other streets, something told the witch that within was not any safer than the outside. The soil acidic, the whole place felt rotten.

Abandoned by the gods. Righteous ones, that was.

The man recalled before his inner eye the sight of the missing chapel wall and the stone statue — or what had been left of it. Nothing but robed legs and bare feet, the stone clean cut in the middle, with torso and arms and head out of sight. The black bird sitting perched on top of the wooden pole, to which the tavern sign measly hung attached to by only one chain anymore, cawed and pulled the man from his thoughts.

So he let go of the restraints barely tethering him back. Both of his hands firmly closed around Alexander’s back pockets, pressing, toying and, most of all, staining the spot with clear handprints. (And what better way to let everyone know, and for everyone to be warned, that his dearest angel was taken? That he would eviscerate anyone foolish enough to try their luck...)

How many of them had he suffered? The isolation of sleepless nights, in which Alexander had cultivated illusions and constructed effigies from figments of longing. He had kissed their spectre mouths, had stroked their phantom limbs. Yet he had found no solace in these unreal unions. Lying as feverish and as lonely as before, his heart remained an aching hollow in his chest, its supervisor pulsing in search through the darkness for some tangible thing to vest this passion in.

Alexander breathed. Out, first, closing his glacial eyes to leave himself solely sensing the closing in of Duke, then in again. Brought back into life through a kiss alone. Though an impossible feat just a couple months ago proved not to be by Deucalión. Not first of his name, yet he just may be. The man that stood before him was more than a Thessalonian king. More than a survivor of a flood created by a god.

Before, Alexander had pondered about the name. While the Greek flood tradition first appeared in Plato, it closely mirrored the Biblical tale he knew of Noah’s Ark. One story ended with man; one began with him. In one, God named and blessed; In the other, man named but God cursed. In the monotheistic Genesis version, there was no council of gods. Yahweh alone had decided to send the flood and it is also Yahweh that warned Noah. God vowed never again to send such a flood but displayed no remorse, the flood ultimately served no purpose since human evil had not been eliminated.

Which was more like the other and was it the very reason why Deucalión had begun to hate humanity so much? Why he thought them all undeserving of forgiveness, undeserving of life? All but him. All but him. He, whose parents had named Alexander, when all he had done was to grow tall, not be great.

Deucalión looked at him with different eyes. Touched him with a different purpose. Caring and tender and yet not hiding his want. Large hands landing on his behind, warm and strong, with a firm grip that sent that pleasant tingling sensation up the lower part of his spine and made his slimmer body respond to with a shudder. Not out of fear but blessed, pure excitement. Sighing through relief which was bestowed upon him, unable to hide the softening of his features into a smile, growing into a grin. Knowing, comprehending, reciprocating the feeling. The need and the thought, even if it means there is chalk now painting the black fabric of his jeans into a white, where Duke's fingers and palm held and kneaded him. Alexander chuckled softly, then welcomed the treatment with a low hum. Instead of leaning closer, Alexander leaned a little back instead, to better fill the hands of his lover.

               „Did you know that chalk can be used to raise the pH in acidic soil?“

In time, only the fire would remember. Here it was now, sparked to life, the silent tale-teller of time, the mewling mother of memory, two half-black logs jutting out of the smutty pit, piercing through the cosmos, coaled and seething, while the flames danced, as each crackle and snap whispered a secret pledge to the man, promising the same warm, eternal embrace, as long as his patience endured.

Voron watched in silence, how the witch sat still, head perched in his hand and gaze fixated onto the roaring blaze before him. He traced an index finger along the ridge of his jaw, the pads of his fingers gliding over his smooth chin, before they traveled back up the right side of his face, as he was right-handed and had a habit of cupping his face with his palm whenever he was so deeply in thought. Above them hung the stars, bearing their witness, their own fires burning immemorially. Not for eons, though, would they taste tonight’s wood and Voron felt the human take pleasure in that—in knowing that the earth’s own ancient furnace would be cold long before the stars would ever come to dim.

Nearby, there was a tilting of the grass and the rustling of some leaves being bushed past, and the tall man dressed in night-dark plumage turned his head to look in the direction, sensing the stooped creak of nature’s censure. It did not take long for his eyes to adjust to the blackness and see within it form and from it emerge, a mass. Strutting towards him with the usual feline gait.

His head cocked to the side as a reaction. Looking down at the dead mouse laid as offering before him, tried making sense of the gesture he was not accustomed to. A gift. For him? The bird-man glanced to the other in search of guidance yet was only giving a slow blink of eyes that had caught the color of the fire, before the witch stared straight ahead into the flames again. He was left to his own devices.

So he looked at the mouse again and the many black feathers moved with a light tremble as he straightened his body into a proper sitting position, shaking off fatigue and the call of the night. Reaching out with a large, clawed hand that visibly tried its best to be careful, Voron tried scooping up the small mouse into his palm. A low, rumbling growl began to vibrate in the pits of his chest. Ominous bellowing, even as the towering man extended his other clawed hand towards Felix—

He was a high contrast image of black gliding against a pale gloomy sky. Flying high over the trees, he had seen nothing but a landscape punctuated by the skeletal outlines of bare trunks and twisted branches which the brutal wind sent flying, unfettered and out of control. Shapes, textures, and patterns usually lost under the finery of foliage, now engulfed in a settled dense fog. He descended through a small clearing, landing soundlessly on the edge of a burnt-out roof. Looking inside, he had found the human seeking shelter from the wet wall of damp air.

Keeping his safety distance, at first he had watched. Had moved his head and tilted and cocked it, cranded in between blinking of pitch black orbs, looking at the human, at the floor, at the walls. Searching for a shadow that looked like one but was none, belonging to the human that looked like one but was none either. The big black bird shuddered on its perch, shook itself which made a mess of its feathers momentarily. He did not like the presence of the blackened mass that moved even without the traveling of the human and without the wandering of the sun.

Voron did not know what to make of this human in particular. He only knew, from the bottom of is animal heart, that something was deeply wrong with him.

The human had bit him. Had sunk his teeth so deeply into his second skin that it had broken and bled. Voron remembered the trembling of the muscle suffering the pain burning through his nerves. Or... Thinks that he does. His wing did not hurt and his arm... There was none. Only two feet whose ends had grown into talons, which had dug deeply into the charred wood of the roof beam.

If he too was human he would have felt insulted, he was sure of it! Angered, perhaps. He does not quite know what that feels like. Humans felt things so differently to how he did them, he had learned and had experienced, first hand. Even though he understood the words, they were mostly hollow to his bird brain. He thinks of the boy who, perched daintily on a slanty rooftop, had befriended the nightly ravens, teaching them words in his language. The boy, whose father would call him in from play by crowing and who, to this day, when the raven spoke, listened.

For a brief moment, he glimpsed that boy. That man. Standing there reaching out and offering him in his hand something of worth. That man, who had the face capable of the same softness but withholding it, hidden away somewhere. That man, who had eyes filled with the same melancholic sadness...

He decided not to hold a grudge. He decided to give it a try and find out whether it was a trap.

With a hop-glide the black bird descended from the beam and landed on the ground, a few meters away from the revenant. Eyeing him from his new position expectantly with a few blinks and half-turns, he decided to waddle even closer than that with his extraordinate bird gait. Only to stop a few feet away from Felix and bow his head and for some reason more feathers seemed to grow from his back, like hackles, but did not stop at the rising of them and continued their amassing and swelling in mass. Swallowing the shape of the raven whole until there was nothing but a moving, hulking mass of fleecy, gossamer black. Which rose and straightened itself and popped the bones in its back, as the feathers took a new shape. Skin appeared and soon after hands and a face and before Felix stood the same hunky man from a few moons back.

🐈‍⬛

It was not so much him being made to trip but more him stumbling because of his own legs, awkwardly misstepping to the side, with no control or grace, the moment he felt there being a resistance closer than the hard floor was supposed to be. A soft and moving mass that followed and that, quickly casting down his gaze to see what it was, turned out to be a living thing. A heart-stopping second caused his breathing to hitch and for his muscles to involuntarily stiffen at the fright of possibly hurting (or already having hurt) the cat that had snuck between his long legs without so much as a sound.

Why did cats walk in between your legs while you walk? So they could feed on your body after you trip and break your neck, of course, evil tongues would argue.

It was a behavior that many interpreted differently. From the wise feline weaving between your legs because of them wanting attention, to them being playful, to them having separation anxiety to them attempting to herd you in a certain direction. To think that it would be an affectionate behavior, with them thinking you a friend, scenting you through their chin and cheeks, it could as well be a good sign when they were all up in your business. To be tripped by something that did unconditionally like you. Mayhaps that was where the term, 'falling in love' originated from.