Topic: Giants at the feet of children

Nazareth

Date: 2013-03-23 01:50 EST
( As all my wise friends shall surely see, this is an excerpt taken from Val and Nazareth's childhood. It's a collaboration of our play, though most of it is my work due to Val's "busy" schedule, and more will be added in time. Thanks, private messages welcome. I assure you I'm not as abrasive as I really am. )





"Enough, we've been on our feet for days."

"Cry about it, will you?"

"You know I'm lazy."

Ten-thousand acres of flame push on the horizon. An astonishingly flat sea of sand that asks an eon in every direction, burning sky, dissolving cloud, leaving but one tired and old nub of white fluff stretched like bottle cotton taken to flame. Upon this sand, a boy, a girl; matched, perhaps, at the birth of teenhood. Their attire reflects charges of the vagabond; loose, tan tunics pocked with black holes received from shattershots of dirt and rock, large and wind-rippled pants that skin at mid-shin to expose flesh too-fair for human expectation of desert folk. The boy wears belted sandals adorned with a strange variety of leather straps that crawl up his legs. The girl is barefoot and wears a silk-sheened head of airy platinum hair, perfection amidst the death their world asks of them. She lifts her hand to her neck and tugs on the thick, red scarf ensnared there.

"You are lazy," shooting her devilishly concave brows to the top floor of her head, accepting the shade awarded from her sharp and biting blonde bangs. At her side, a sheath, curved and ornate, its nose nearly dragging along the crusted earth.

"I don't see the rush," his voice doesn't betray the soft youth he wears, yet an anomalous wisdom lives in his monotonous way of speaking. "Always, always, Nazareth." He sits crosslegged upon the ground and lends his back to the twisted spine of a sharply-carved, orange boulder. A groan slips from his lips as he sprawls for comfort, a pair of thin and testy brows, similarly shaped to the girl's, bend at the meridian of his healthy, but seemingly starved and sharp face as he pays his attentions to the sky.

"The town isn't going anywhere, Nazareth."

"Val," she whispers with a smile, straying ahead several steps. Her palm acts as a brim to shield the sun. The shade was welcome. "Mother's words were urgent," mannerisms also beyond her years tether the words along. A little click sounds from the boy in distaste as he turns his head away from the girl.

"I don't really care, if I can be quite honest."

His legs rock rhythmically, enjoying this time off his feet, fully reclining against the stone, his head of medium-length black blades softly kneaded into palms drawn behind, elbows-out. This calls a curt reaction from the girl as her head snaps to him.

"Don't you dare, Val, don't you dare be this way." White morsels of fury wash the red from her knuckles as they clench the long tassels that circle her blade's hilt.

"I'll be how I want, Nazareth." He'd sat up to face her, but his relaxing pose hadn't let up. The pair meet eyes, eyes of aged, plated copper that had sat at the bottom of a well a day too long. Wind began to hiss, sand bating from stone to cloud the air, shaped in orange-brown scythes that crawl along the earth, they walk up the hills until thinning to nothing.

The girl rips the blade from its housing with a metallic ring.

"What will you do," asks the boy.

"I'll take a finger for each minute you waste."

Val

Date: 2013-04-15 18:37 EST
Val doesn't concede, but is wary of her threat. He remains reclined upon the burnt orange sheets of this desert pallet, but lifts his head slightly, assuming a diligent pose. His eyes thin to ask hers to authenticate the promise.

"Don't threaten me, Nazareth."

While he spoke, the playful blonde took a step forward. Her cadence is menacing as the nose of her blade scrapes and divides the sand, depressing a crease that traces her path from point she'd drawn. Her long hair cracks like like a banner of gold thread as she steps through the wind.

"You know so little about me, brother." Those words run into, then through, a malicious and very wide smile. Here, she displays teeth that don't necessarily separate her from women of shared image, but could provide persistent inquiry, seeing as how the they round, slightly.

Nazareth pauses, separates her legs to proclaim power through stance, and slowly draws on her swordhand, lifting it as-to created a horizon with her shoulders; steel, bone, a red-scarf and pristine flesh.

"Hah.....Oh. Oh, Val. Your cowardice is....cute" Or will you name it 'humanity', again? Is that it' The 'man' on your face telling you it's wrong."

The boy struggles to find his footing while battling the suction of hot sand. Felling the terrain, Val sprints to face the girl and lunges for her scarf. Nazareth's frame loosens, defaulting herself to a malleable rag to be wound in her brother's hands. He lifts the blonde onto her toes.

"Stop calling me a coward, Nazareth. It isn't funny anymore."

She interjects with laughter, naturally. It's spindly and contrived through a lecherous divide of long, flat lips. Val shoves her away and turns.

Lowering his eyes to the sand, "I just don't see the logic in it. Whatever's in this town....it can't be worth the lives of everyone in it."

Nazareth's sword recedes to the iron-laden scabbard with a click, this being the squared-off hiltguard smacking against the face of the sheath. Beneath the drapery, the girl slips her hands into a little pouch that is tied her stomach; a simple handwarmer.

Nazareth sagely begins, "That's irrelevant, Val. We were charged with this. Nothing else matters. Nothing." It's strange for the boy to identify the soft, pleading expo-say that cousins her words; outlandish, surely, while aside the girl's 'now-or-else' normalcy. Val fails to evade the ruse and turns to inquire the girl's experimental front.

"Mother matters over all else," she continues. A step towards him, "The world would see us cast into the void without a thought, and would smile and cheer to bare witness. They. Don't. Matter. Mother matters, and this is what she wants."

Val is unfixed at the eyes and becomes downtrodden. Every assembled piece of him limply secedes to the sand at his feet, as if tethered by a dead realization analogized by this baron sea of bone-dust and wind scars.

"You could do this alone."

"I could not!" To slip inside his viewpoint, Nazareth bends to reach under his downcast face and smiles up, supportively.



"We need you. It's all you. Everything. Everything is for you."

Val

Date: 2013-04-28 04:31 EST
An hour of travel brings the pair to a precipice of jutting rock that hangs over a sand-fault feeding into a windy bay. From atop this cliff, Nazareth and Val can see the town and a humdrum of travelers and merchants whose footfalls had built a tiny black road that winds and prods at the city's entrance. Several guardsmen pace while they round this gate and atop the raised wall, a single watchpost. At this height, the siblings are able to see an angled viewpoint of the village. A main dirt thoroughfare guts the seam of the town as-if its spine and centripetal support. Here, hundreds spend, barter and howl. Flyers of sand-wash parchment are rewarded from the pedestal boxes that give their adolescent criers and edge over the crowds' uniform, their arms whiffing as their necks arc and they pierce the peoples' murmurs like beams of light through fog.

Nazareth pinches the flesh of Val's shoulder then lowers herself to the cliff's point and crosses her legs, they shape a bowl in collaboration. She reclines by angling her spine and drawing back her hands, then sighs and her smile dissipates with a graduality that likens the airy expulsion.

"I don't think we should wait too long."

It was clear that Val had abandoned his restiveness, and as he joins his sister in small-eyed admiration of high-altitude cloud threads, he nods. And as shore skies reflect their oceans' wishful blues and jealous greens, Desert skies can rely on naught-but the blistered browns, oranges and what life a stroke of red can offer. It's a high sky, a bold sky, a wise and cynical sky whose clouds move singularly and orderly, whose clouds are awarded only the simplest of roles in its enigmatic plot, whose clouds are of a higher pedigree and unselfisly trek with no purpose other than to glorify their dusky heaven.

"Come on, Val." Nazareth had long-since retired from cloud counting, for she was a girl of business, a girl who felt her every step to be purposeful and in some way achieving an end. Women of achievement don't count clouds. She steps forward before taking notice of Val's once-again hesitation. Val was a cloud counter. Heaven speaks to him in an unaffirmative way. He liked starstrings and dust storms and queer insects. Admired the anomalous for being anomalous. He stands tall and his back arcs concavely and doesn't blink as a big stubborn cloud lumbers over and shadows the desert morosely. It won't rain on the sand because the desert sky is stubborn and proud and commands its loyal clouds to be tough on the earth that had flattened and burned. And the sky blames the earth, for the earth had flattened and burned the sky.

Val takes a long breath and steps into Nazareth's shadow. He doesn't look towards her, but he follows. But he follows. But he follows.

Val

Date: 2013-05-03 02:18 EST
The only way down the rocky spire is around, where the sand slopes less sharply. Val and Nazareth trek through an angled precipitation of sand, running down quickly, etching the exposed rock teeth that frame their path, and the grains hiss over the stone. Nazareth leads, she follows the path through the dust storm, agreeably, while Val shields his retracted and cringed face with his brimmed hand. They round the base and Nazareth pauses to look back at the cliffs above. She smiles triumphantly and playfully winks to Val before shoving her lovely head towards the direction she believed the town to be, for the desert now lay enshrouded. Nazareth climbs the slope of a little hill and grins wickedly; she had found the village. Val struggles in the sand but recovers, lifts those knees high, and climbs to join his sister. Less than a mile away and now level with the foundation, the city walls loom high and throw great angular shadows on the already dusk darkened sand.

Val's eyes thinly observe the walled encampment, as the dust storm had loosened its grip on the late evening. Val crouches on his hamstrings and gathers some sand between his fingers, lifts the hand, and the grains stream out of the sides of his palm. Val glances to Nazareth and flatly asks, "So, what now" Shall we gut the guards 'n paint our faces with their blood?" The sarcasm burbles from him and it tickles Nazareth. "That could be fun," Nazareth amusingly says. She lifts her bare foot and flicks away several pebbles that had sunk into the pad. Nazareth pulls the scabbard around the face of her hip and withdraws several inches of the blade from it, the steel cool and reflective. Hypnotized with the glimmering weapon, "We should have been faster." She looks dissatisfied and whacks the hilt back into the sheath, shortly. "That sandstorm would have been perfect. I'd have those men buried, were the storm still kicking." Val continues to stare over her, for she was a puzzlement. They'd grown up together, but apart, and when he'd arrive home, she would leave. And this mad cycle was routine, and this routine was the definition of their bond; apart, but always resewn by blood.

Val ashamedly admits, "I could design a distraction." Nazareth turns her sharp face to the final half of the juicy red and fat, dying sun, and a smile grows, but Val can't see. She sweetly chops at pale gold hair, turns up the fingertips and ties the hair behind her ear. "You could," asks Nazareth before she turns and lowers her brother a small faced and concerned look.

"I don't think mother would want you to exert yourself-so."

"I'll be fine." "I don't think it's wise."

"It's fine."

Nazareth, knowing she'd won, continues to play to her station; older sister, culpable sister. She cants her head and whitegold strips fly up when a cylinder of wind strikes off the stone and blasts her face. Concernedly, she eyes Val over, and her eyes appear to falter before she steps forward. She says, "Fine. Your decision." And Val rises despondently to face her. "Don't be so damn fake, Nazareth." The girl taps his chest with the back of her hand and moves ahead. Val is left staring at the space she had left. Nazareth confidently trots down the face of the hill and sharply coos over her shoulder, "Well, if you have it in you—-then do it. Show me what makes you so special, Valcroix."

Val

Date: 2013-05-05 02:01 EST
Val turns away and his face is embarrassed. He kicks through a lump of sand and walks along the ridge of the hill, horizontally. The big fat star had sunk so that only a little, bald and red head nosily waits on the orange horizon. It sinks slowly and with interest, and after it disappeared a fiery halo stilled the desert. And it mixed with the dry blue sky and created violet, and the dust below was swarmed and overpowered by it. Val's gaze turns over the purple land. He crouches and his knees knife out, and defensively he turns to Nazareth. "I never said I was special." Nazareth stopped coldly and turned to reply, jagged threads of hair flagging away and masking her face. "Well everyone says otherwise, Val. And I think I've heard just about enough about it. Earlier, with your toes in the sand and your eyes in heaven, you told me to go-it alone. So to hell with you, you coward." She'd spit the final two words and her face was expressive and hard. Her eye brows sunk in and the flesh around them deepened and wrinkled curtly. "You're baiting me again," Val says dryly, an arid smile starving his sharp face. He looks between his feet and grabs the dead tinder and bonerock resting there. Val hoists his tired body up and washes the ash from his hands by smacking them together. The siblings exhausted a long silence. Nazareth retained her brother's image in her eyes, and her brother was stubbornly passe. Casually he slipped down the hill and then hopped the final leg and dust clouded around his ankles when he sunk-in beside his sister. He smiled confidently, and confidently said, "Well, it worked. I'll show you. And we can kill-up the whole damned town to satisfy you." The girl smiled cutely and giggled. "Then? I've been itching to see what you've become, Val. Don't disappoint me," she issued matter-of-factly by lowering her nose and twinkling her eyes at him.

Valcroix took a long step ahead of Nazareth and pocketed his hands in his loose and sand punished trousers; a light wind sunk into the excess fabric and rippled them with the little noises of movement. He took a hard look across the purple desert and at the town and the encampment that rested in its overgrown shadow. The little guards paraded with pomp, encased in beaten and blacked iron with long rudimentary spears slung over their shoulders. They'd built a fire and the light flickered and jumped off their armor dully. "What are—", Nazareth began before Val interrupted, "Quiet." And then he was sullen and pensive when his eyes closed. He relaxed his body and exhaled and the whining of a great energy buzzed in Nazareth's ear and she was suddenly uncomfortable as the balloon of static enveloped her. The girl looked in anger as her brother's power streamed across the shape of her body, then through like a piercing light. Her feet trudged into the sand and she awaited her brother's storm with apprehension.

The sand at Val's feet boiled like a tar pit. Little bubbles at first, innocent and embarrassed bubbles that popped and toiled with an adolescence. And Nazareth sighed regretfully, and she crossed her arms and looked away from him. But Val stood proudly and his hands were still casually stuffed in his pockets. The desert boils spread and strengthened, then multiplied and soon fifty yards of purple sand had been a stewing quagmire of boiling. Nazareth nosed into the rupturing air that shielded her brother and opened her mouth questionably and whispered to herself, "So this is—" Val's perception of the immediate had dwindled and he was a specter, astral and ethereal, bound in tight, lean-muscled flesh. At once, the bubbles refused to pop and now great craters dug into the purple desert, eighty of them. The craters became holes and a large sound of running grain spilled into the ears of Nazareth. Her face gasped and she plodded each hole with quick eyes, and before she he had a thought vested, great geysers of dust appeared from those holes. They billow into the sky quickly and cloud the air quickly and the image of the town was lost behind the bursting cloud of dust.

Nazareth lowered her face furiously and leaped forward to shove that very face into Val's calm one. "What are you doing," Nazareth shrieked. Val, with a closed and contemplative amusement, slowly repealed his eye lids and his eyes flickered arrogantly. "Showing you."

Val

Date: 2013-05-31 04:52 EST
Nazareth studied Val's face. Her lips were sloped crookedly and she expressed frustrated confusion. "This is all very cute," Nazareth says. "but you're flexing your muscles for nothing." Val closes his eyes, his face blanks and he inhales deeply. The little potholes no longer shoot cones of dust, but ahead of the siblings the massive cloud hid the encampment. Val steps slowly and his body eases into the dustcloud. Val says, "I gave you the distraction you asked for. The dust'll move over the town, and you can slip in undetected."

Nazareth stays behind and eyes the boy as he moves away.

"You know what I'm going to do when I get there," Nazareth says carefully.

The boy stops, his shoulders deflate and he turns back to his sister.

"Then just go and do it," he says with eyes low and somber, mouth long and flat and anxious. "I won't help you; both you and Mother are being cute with me, and I won't be apart of it."

Nazareth runs towards Val and delivers a vicious hook to his chin. Her brother grunts when the knuckles pummel his lower-jaw and stumbles backwards, unbalanced arms flailing. He leans over and handles his mouth and his lips were red with blood. His copper eyes were wide and looked to his sister in horror because she was running at him again. Val pulled back his arm, readying a punch, but the quick-handed Nazareth ripped her blade half-way out of its scabbard and thrusted the butt of the hilt into Val's belly. Val cringes and he gasps and shrinks onto his left knee and his arms cross around his bruised stomach.

The slick sound of running metal rings in the air sharply. Val looks up to see Nazareth, her blade raised high for a beheading. The boy's eyes quake, Nazareth's narrow hatefully. And Val looks up pitifully, and the statuesque Nazareth remains ready to divide him, the blade lifted high, the curvature arcing above her head. The wind whistles along the sharp rocks and brushes the grains of sand and they hiss and physicalize the wind as they're sucked inside the gusts. Nazareth's gold hair swings in front of her face and Val's curved bangs wiggle on his forehead.

Nazareth loosens her arm and the nose of the blade is dropped into the soft sand. She moves forward and the sword cuts into the ground and leaves a crease in the desert as she moves. Val didn't bother to watch her go. Instead he peers up and the whitehot sky appeared flat and cracked.

She enters the cloud, and Nazareth sheaths her blade. Once inside there is nothing but suffocating brown and orange and the sounds of raining pebbles as they patter off stone and whirl around inside the cloud. Nazareth turns her narrow red eyes over her shoulder every few paces. After five minutes of travel through Val's synthesized dust storm, Nazareth finds her brother. He followed, downcast and broken, his heels never leaving the ground and they slide along the sandy carpeting, magnetized to Nazareth.



"Do you know where it is," Val asks softly.

"If we walk straight we're bound to find it."

Two guards man the city entrance side-by side, their spears stuck into the ground casually. Their dirty, sheenless armor is dented and crudely designed and the man on the left shuffles uncomfortably and the iron chest piece rattles. The man on the left looks into the desert with small blue eyes, his counterpart looks on with small brown eyes.

Blue eyes points at the coming cloud. He asks in a young and high-pitched voice, "Another sandstorm?"

Brown shakes his head and his helmet rattles. "No," he replies in an experienced, calm voice. "Looks like one"a those fat ol" desert clouds just settlin" down for the evenin". They look like dust sometimes, probably just a fog. Move"n too slow to be a storm."

Blue lowers his hand, grips his spear and looks to Brown. "Yeah' Never seen a fog like that. You sure?"

"Can't say I "em," Brown replies.

"Then what could it be?"

"I just told you."

"You just said you weren't sure!"

Brown shakes his head and smiles, his wise face wrinkling. "I said what I had ta". You're in constant need of answers, so I feed ya" constant answers."

Blue groans and looks back at the cloud. It's dark swells approach and the hissing of the falling grains is heard by both men. Blue stirs nervously, Brown looks up at the behemoth cloud, still and proud. It envelops them and now they stand amidst a world of brown and orange.

Blue draws his old rusted gauntlet across his mouth. "Damn—this is thick." Sand scratches his eyes and he cringes and cusses.

Brown laughs and raises his voice to speak over the loud sounds of raining sand and pebble as it thrums off the walls of the encampment. "You'd better get use to this kinda" thing, Chester! This is good experience! Soon as the sand browns yer" skin, maybe the boys at the barracks won't tease ya" and that purdy-white, city-born skin ya" got!"

"This is just stupid," Chester yells back. He lowers his head to hide those blue eyes from the falling sand. "I can't stand out in this kind of thing, Hector; twice in one day!—I can't, this is insane! This isn't a cloud!"

"Naw, maybe not. A lil" sandstorm. Maybe you were right. Maybe—-"

Footprints in the sand are masked by the whizzing grains. Nazareth moves quickly, tears her weapon from its casing and leans forward as she sprints. Nazareth lept out of the plumage, drew back her arm with the blade held back-handedly and thrusted at Hector's throat and Hector's wise words are silenced by steel. And his small, wise brown eyes explode open as the razor slips through the flesh of his neck with the ease of flame through ice, and as Nazareth falls her inertia is lent to Hector and he falls onto his back with the sword threading his throat.

The air was thick, but not swarming, and Chester's young blue eyes moistened and quaked as he witnessed Hector's murder. The boy was frozen, and when Nazareth's red eyes pierce through the cloudy air like fire in the darkness, he stumbles backwards and gasps. Chester bumps into the spear he had lodged into the sand. He grunts as he pulls it out, and turns back to Hector's body. Nazareth was not there, and Chester turns with the spear jutted forward defensively. But Chester was overwhelmed by Nazareth's speed, and when the tip of her blade came running through his back and out his chest, he was stunned. Chester gasps and looks down his body and crosses his wide blue eyes upon the curved edge of steel piercing his abdomen. Shock blankets him and he does not feel pain. Chester crumbles to his knees, Nazareth plants her foot on his back, kicks and the blade is jarred from his chest. The boy's shaking hands clutch the wound. He curls up and shivers and bleeds and his wet blue eyes dry out and become cold and hard and ugly like opal.

Val appears in the fray slowly and arrives at the feet of the dead boy. Nazareth was driving the bloodied edge of her sword across her scarf to clear away the blood. Instead it smears and the delight on her face shows that she found this satisfactory. Her brother looms over the corpse. He had no expression to give them, but they award him apathy. He turns away, then stares up the large gated entrance.

"What now," Val asks.