Topic: Anticked

Val

Date: 2013-07-09 04:57 EST
( This is a continuation of the Giants at the Feet of Children SL logged under Dragon Tails. Lemme' say thanks to the Mods of SC, especially Mizz Minoko, fer' lettin' me post here 'n junk. ENJOY O___O )



Nazareth glides her scarf along the curvature of her blade again. She looks into her reflection and smiles. "Now we just need to get in." Her eyes rise, lock onto Val's and her smile spreads and infects her chin and cheeks. "With your talents," she begins sweetly, "I don't see it as a challenge."

Val's eyes roll away. He is stoic, is calm, is uncomfortable. He eyes the tall, thick wall. "Just tell me what to do."

"Tell you what to do?" Nazareth hoists an eyebrow and sheaths her blade. She lifts a bare foot and softly rests it on the young, dead boy's armored torso and leans onto her knee. "I just told you what to do. I told you to use your talents to get us through the village wall."

"What does that mean!" Nazareth leaps over the body and reaches for Val's collar. Attached, she stares up at the boy with large and marvelous copper eyes. "Quiet, damn you," she whispers loudly. Nazareth looks over her shoulder and up the wall. "There's still men in the watchtower. C"mon, your little sandstorm has passed, let's get to the wall so they can't see." Nazareth winks at Val, the cheek below her winking eye sharply pitched as a sidelong smirk drove into it. "And grab this guy and pull him towards the wall. The men in the tower won't be able to see if we drag them towards it."

Val did not express much. His eyes were narrow, his limbs were still. Nazareth jogs over to the older man with the hole in his throat. The man's neck was black and glistening, the sand below was black and matte and chunky. Val eyes her a moment, then looks down to the boy. His lips move and something small and quiet leaves them. Nazareth sees. Val steps over the corpse, leans over and begins dragging him towards the wall by his ankles. His armor carves into the sand, the trail black and matte and smooth. Val grunts, tugs, grunts, stops and wipes his forehead.

Nazareth lifts the old man up easily, lifts him right off the ground by his iron collar. Her strength anomalous, unnatural. She whips her arm around the shoulder and throws the heavy, armored man right at the wall where he collides with a hollow, metal echo. Val snaps to the sound, then squints at Nazareth. She quietly says, "Hurry," and nods. Val trugs backwards, hands around the boy's ankles, makes it to the wall, sighs and releases. The dead boy's ankles dig into the sand. Val leans his thin little red blade eyes in over the boy, smoothing his sight over the crooked knicks of his armor, down in to play in the dark hollows where Nazareth's blade had run through. Nazareth pinches Val's belly.

"What is your problem," she says. "Surely this innocence is for show." She looks up Val and fetters her eyes with his. Val fetters back blankly with an obvious obtuseness to him.

"What?"

Nazareth sighs and pushes him away with her knuckles. She shakes her head and whippets of watery platinum spray around charmingly. Nazareth says, "You're impossible," through a frown and moves ahead with her back to Val. Sliding her palm along the shantilly constructed village wall, Nazareth orbits until the barrier door is found. The door is impossibly large and is nuzzled by the aforementioned watch posts that pecker up shabbily on the left and right. Nazareth smiles and presses into the cold and massive door. Naturally, it does not rattle, budge or sound.

"Here," Nazareth says. She turns her happy reds over to Val. "Right here. Give us an opening. Be subtle."

Downcast, Val approaches on deaf, embarrassed feet. His hand joins Nazareth's on the tall door of wood. Val closes his eyes and Nazareth steps away to admire him. His fingers meld with the wood and the wood begins to run away like sand, fragmented chips running, drooling away like grains, spooling to the sand like sand as sand. He creates an entrance as ordered, six-by-three, larger than ordered, but soft and soundless. Eating, running, drooling sand falls away, six-by-three, draining and pooling and Nazareth admires; unplumbed, scratching her brother's face with her sharp, scalpel like gaze. Val opens his eyes when he feels nothing against his hand. He had carved straight through the wooden door, had made a six-by-three archway by turning the wood into sand. Nazareth slides her index finger across Val's lower back mysteriously.

"See," she says on a warm smile. "A special boy indeed."

Val reacts by tangling his eyes up with Nazareth's face anxiously. The boy's jaw falls down a moment. He corrects, clears with a cough and steps away from the entrance he had created. He says, "What now?" And Nazareth was on a knee, untying her red scarf.

"First," she says, intonation occupied and hands-off while untying the scarf. Nazareth flicks back her head and all her hair goes scudding back luxuriously and she builds space for it by pulling the back of her collar open and pushes all her hair into her shirt. Next she twists the scarf around her head and it crowns her like a flat and amateur turban. The scarftails whip around and cut down her shoulders and the wiry little refuse threads on the ends finger and jolt out like cotton-electric frizz. She smiles up to Val and poses cutely.

"Hm' Yeah?"

"You look ridiculous."

"But I don't look Dominion—-do I?"

Val nods knowingly, but smiles. "I see. The hair." again he nods. "Too bad the color of that scarf makes your eyes jump out."

Nazareth tears a two feet of steel out of her sheath rabidly and admires her eyes with a crooked, indecisive mouth.

Val says, "It's fine," with a mellow and understanding smile and Nazareth beams and hops towards the six-by-three. She sticks her red-toweled head through the cutting and squints into the town.

She whispers, "Clear," over her shoulder. "Could not have been more opportune. The Brides are renewing their vows to the dust." Her laughter comes with genuine hissing and the egoist cobramouth steps completely into the hole in the wall. Val crouched and watched her path through the burrow. She exits the burrow and immediately turns right and escapes Val's view. So, Val rushes through the six-by-three, his limby body tucked in on itself to negotiate the three, but the six was affordable. Val takes a long arcing step out of the burrow and sinks his belted sandal into the town sand. Large eyes reflectively scan the villagemouth, split between awe and fear and fear the favorable lean. The square was smaller and he squints. From atop the cliff and looking down, it appeared a grand strip of barterers and tented kiosks and criers and the carelessness and deafness of spending. But on its toes, the square was but three tents and crumby, boarded stands that were naked in the evening. Val cringes at pain on his ankle. Because Nazareth had kicked it.

"Hey," she whispered angrily. "get out of yourself, please. For once in your life: don't be Valcroix. Be something of use to me. So hurry yourself, and you may get your wish of haste and perhaps no combat."

These words appear to wind the boy pervasively and his little red scythe eyes bolden in mighty and shocked gleefulness. "Okay,? he whispers orderly, on board with Nazareth's attrition because she had defanged it favorably for him. And because of her clever translation Val's eyes coruscate brilliantly and slyly, sleuthing through corridors and up eaten banisters of wood as he stays low on Nazareth's heels as she creeps through the town's outskirts, keeping low and against the tall interior wall, navigating the nucleus like a repulsed proton with her gelding in toe.

Val

Date: 2014-02-01 03:37 EST
There was a gathering in the towns square. This little trading town on the rim housed no fewer than two-hundred souls: crafters mostly, the stately old artisans whom instruct them and the deaf-headed guard coalition charged with leering over the sand. Nazareth snuck her eyes around the wall of the tiny shack they'd taken refuge behind and examined the roar. Braying with heaven-wanting arms skying high over his head stood a bearded man risen on a platform. Nazareth understood his words for their items sake, but their arrangement further convinced Nazareth of mortal fascinations regarding ethereal existences and imaginary plights and oh-so thoughtless and hearty tributes—Dominion respect the turning wheel and the burning fire, they do not elect astral representatives to thank for them. .

Easing out for a peek was Val, his red eyes wide and absorbent. "What. ." Neth snaps back. "Hush, fool!" She whisper-shouts. When he takes a cautious step in reverse, she assists with a shove and Val stumbles onto a knee. Zooming over, the girl crashes down on her knees and snatches the boy's collar. "What did I say!—-I said, "Val: do not be Val"—-does anything I say ring in that stupid head of yours, Valcroix?"

"I'm sorry," he said. His eyes flee. "I've never seen them before."

"Who?" Nazareth asked. "—Brides" To the void with them, you've not missed anything. When the sun comes up, they rise up and thank it. When it burns their idiot heads they weep thankfully, and when it sets they cry thankfully. They do nothing but thank and cry and breed, they're worse than the beasts they drive and slaughter, Valcroix. Your curiosity only furthers their purpose."

"Purpose?"

"Brides spend their lives in search of something to search for. They chart the sky and the stars, write down which way the wind blows and invent metrics to cleverly disguise their fear of what they cannot change. This is why Dominion are superior: we do not define the world, we live beside it and allow it to carry us to our fate."

Val stands, sweeps dusty sand from his knees and says, "I don't understand." Zeroing in on his sister's eyes, he asks, "Why is what they do so bad?"

Neth, glowering, leaps for Val with her left hand armed forward, cringed like a claw. The flummoxed boy's feet stutter in reverse, his eyes wild and fear saturated. Digging her fingers into her brother's flesh, she guides him to the wall of an old, sandbrick home and slams his body against it. Val clawed at her wrist but had not her power, had not the rancorous will to usurp her desire to afflict him. She whips Val back and his rangy body wallops the sand and rolls with the force, five yards, throwing up skinny tufts of sand and gravel as he divides through the dusty earth.

Searching the thick grains for support, Val's hands sift through the earth, find hold and push. "What. ." Pawing around his throat in-search of indentations while scouring the unbalanced earth with watery eyes, Val stumbles forward, towards his sister, and the fear in him was a mystic marriage of the inexplicable and dark knowing.

"Hush!" Nazareth cries, tempering her tone no longer. Weighing him down with a thick gaze, Neth began playing her fingers on the long hilt of her blade, tapping and strolling. A smile appears, long and sleek. "You and I are not the same, Valcroix. You cannot see what my eyes have seen, and for this reason I forgive your idiocy.?

Val

Date: 2014-02-01 03:46 EST
"Nazareth," Val's rusty voice cracks, an obvious combat roaring between the heavy air and his constricted throat. Val croaks again, "Nazareth—-I don't—-"

"How many times!" His sister howls. "How many -times-, Valcroix" How many times will you force my hands to strike you?"

"Force nothing," the furious boy hissed. "You do it because it pleases you. I'll never share your hatred for everything, and I won't stay quiet anymore."

During the course of her brother's proclamation, Nazareth's cadence had shifted from angered reply to wild puzzlement. Cruising ribbons of sand, curled-out by kicks of wind, whip by Val, whip by Neth, veiling their view of one another. When the curtain falls, Val squints as Nazareth was unsheathing her blade.

"What're you going to do, Nazareth?"

Smiling sweetly, her free hand unwinding the scarf from her head, Nazareth leans her head towards the crowd. "Do you hear them, dear brother" Do you wish to understand that which they pray for?" When the red band falls around her neck and her hair is unleashed, Nazareth drives the blade into the sand and takes both tails of the scarf in her hand. "I can tell you, dear brother, for they pray for the sunlight that will come regardless of their chants, they pray for a chill in the afternoon and a heat in the cold, dead night. Do you not hear them, Valcroix" What it is you wish to understand baffles me, fool. These beasts are not worthy of Gailey, it is only due to their incessant breeding and our ancestors penchant for roaming and ignorant trustworthiness that has allowed them rights to this world.

"Mother has never made a motion to oppose them, Val. Why' Are you aware that she was awarded representation in Gailey' With the Brides, Val—-she sits on their council."

"She—-?"

"Yes," Nazareth said. "Long before our births, The Brides finally chose to choke-down their fear of us and send their legions into the sand to slaughter us. "The War of Two Turns?" You've heard this term, surely—-Mother arose and actually fought then, unified our people. I heard that she slaughtered hundreds of them on the cliffs of Roan, heard she burned her captives, single-file, on stakes all under the eyes of their comrades. And when only ten were left, she let them free to the capitol to tell their tale." Nazareth, squinting into the sky, the arms of her scarf crooning wildly between the fingers of wind, smiled. She turns to her brother and her smile inverts. "Where has this woman gone, Val" What is she now, brother" Why are we in this bedamned town on the rim to reclaim the festered body of our dead sister?"

"You're kidding!" Val shrieks. "We're here for Pilot!?"

Nazareth was storming over; Val shields his mouth as an apology. "Yes," she hissed. "—-sometimes I wonder just what you are, can you not smell her" I was not keen to our objective until we crossed into the wall, but now I'm convinced: Mother sent us all the way out here to recover the corpse of her beloved Pilot, Valcroix." The young girl's hard face softened then, gained the precious curves of plaintiveness and the certain doom of an illogical endeavor. She rises and turns towards the tiny corridor between the old, stone homes that showed the sliver of society braying at the sky in the square. "I'm going; I'm going to get this done."

"Nazareth," Val said softly, his face enlarged with the dire qualms and multitude of puzzlements Nazareth's tongue had slashed into him. He watched his sister slowly retreat. "Nazareth!——Nazareth. . what will you do?"

Siding her head just-so as to show the point of her nose jutting from the sly banisters of flailing gold spun from her scalp, Nazareth says, "I'm going to kill them."

Val

Date: 2014-02-06 00:22 EST
"You won't," Val said. "You can't, Nazareth, please—-this isn't worth it, it can't be."

His sister reverts her eyes to the alley. The wind circled, shrieked and threw a tantrum in the sand. "No more arguments," Nazareth said. "If you do not agree with my resolution, then stop me. I'm taking a step now, Valcroix, and after I do nothing will stop me besides you. Do what you wish, but I promise you that I will not hesitate to yank every limb from your body. I promise you." She takes that single step then waits. The girl did not have to turn and read her brother's sullen face, for his defeatist habitude had long-since been diagnosed. There would be no engagement, so Nazareth, sheathing her blade, leaned ahead and darted through the alley way.

Val, his eyes wide as his mind dabbled in presage, as it painted the smooth dome of his skull with the blood of Nazareth's targets, crumbled to the ground, folded his legs and watched the squirming and praiseful crowd.

Leaping with fantastic celerity and power, her looseform clothing and hair cracking as she ascends through the air, Nazareth took an entire house with but a single jump and landed on the shoddy, slanted roof. Her grace was unrivaled as barefeet cascade down and land precisely on the old clay tiles. The crowd dumbly roared without notice as the girl strolled upon the rooftops above without slyness or crouch. Scarf flailing, Nazareth paused only when she stood above the nucleus of the crowd, above the risen priest on his pedestal with his flowing robe of white, beard and eyes of gray. With arms jouncing from the socket, with martyrdom off his lips and onto and over the crowd like a great inferno, swallowing them all up, she listened to the good applicant of faith a moment.

"—-And I'm aware of your doubts, my kin," the priest said sadly. "Oh yes, I am, for I once had them too, you understand" These doubts are daggers of the void, tongues of the goliath underground who aims to ruin our souls, my kin, and of this I am finally certain, for I—-"

Nazareth slid her eyes to a small band of armored soldiers that were approaching the pedestal from the west. Four of them fused together and carried a fifteen-foot pole or trunk that was completely veiled by a large brown cloth tarp that was stretched over and tightly bound at the base by a long yard of thick wire. And although the foot of the trunk was slender and cylindrical, the crest was shaped strangely as a bulging anomaly was very apparent through the tight-wrap. The priest did not yield his tongue as the soldiers" untapered march bludgeoned through the crowd, the mast looming high above and its shadow ran around the crowd like a colossal serpent of black. And the eyes of the crowd were captivated by the mysterious titan.

Val

Date: 2014-02-06 00:27 EST
"The beasts of the void have been dealt with," the priest said calmly as he too joined in revering the cloaked mast that was now being placed in the sand just a few feet from his altar. "You all know this, my kin, as we were all present for the rebellion, as we were all told of the horrors and death "The Dominion"," he said dirtily and through a scowl; above, Nazareth glowered; "needlessly brought upon our good and holy kin. And although our victory was certain, it was and still is not complete. It is hard, my kin! Hard to do what must be done to preserve and sanctify Gailey."

Beside the altar a hole had been dug to support the mast. The soldiers heaved and, adhering to the sharp orders of their commanding officer who had been ahead of the quartet bearing the mast, grunted in unison as they carefully aligned the base of their monument with the hole. It sunk in and smacked the base of the well and a tiny quake ruptured the feet of the gathered. Looking up their achievement, at the strange mound atop the tarped obelisk, the four soldiers are drawn away only when their officer reprimands. They find posts along the risen altar, stand at ease and preside over the crowd.

The priest smiles at the officer and bows his head. "We thank you, Captain Marcius," he says. The captain nods dutifully before turning his stern eyes around.

Knowing she had a much keener set of eyes opposing her in Marcius, Nazareth, as the men were setting the mast up in the sand, had slipped behind the crest of the roof so that her body would be concealed. There was the matter of her hair and scarf, but Nazareth was only postponing combat for her curiosity's sake, diminishing the fear of discovery to hardly a fear at all.

"Captain Marcius is from Ionosis, my kin. He and his troop were patrolling the rim only days ago when they came under assault—-assault by the supposedly disarmed and docile Dominion, my kin." The crowd crackled and gasped in unison. Nazareth squinted her scrutiny while sustaining reconnaissance.

When the murmurs died, the priest lifted his hands and nodded them to calm. He boasts, "Yes—-it's true. These courageous warriors, many of whom saw combat during the war, were ambushed by a rogue cell of Dominion that had been stalking their route."

The sun sets behind a jagged wall of cliff on the horizon and deepens the color of the land, of the sky, and of the flesh of the gathered. The single cloud that hung in the purple sky like a decrepit cotton ornament began to run away from the fiery horizon, choosing instead to scud towards the slick, oily blue night that was spreading quickly, that had swallowed-up all the lively cyan in the east.

Val

Date: 2014-02-06 00:28 EST
"Captain," the priest said softly. Marcius turned around and matched the arbiter at eyes. "Please, remove the veil from it."

The officer swung his arm towards the shielded mast and each man moved and took a spot around the base of the thick, wooden trunk. The soldier nearest the tail of the wire took it up while men at both sides knelt to uninspire the knot that bound the tarp. It did not take long and, with a long tug at the hands of the man who cradled the wire, the bunching at the foot of the tarp unkinked. Dabs of wind splayed over the slacked cotton tarp as it was no longer tied and taut. All four soldiers moved right of the swaying veil, took a bunch in their fists and tugged it off. Because of it's size, the covering fell over the men like a grand blanket. Quickly, they fought to wrangle and roll it up.

Nazareth stood straight up in a fury.

The people in the square held their hands over their mouths. Some turned to weep, several cheered.

The priest, being the pious pillar he was, lowered his head regretfully and folded his hands together.

A nail in her belly, a nail piercing both hands as they were wrapped around the back of the pole and fused by the spike. Twine held a greyfleshed neck in place, twine kept dirty feet from flailing, and there, a sickly degeneration of bloodied clothing and a face asleep with death, hung Pilot atop the pole.

The crowd roared up; the priest censored them by flattening his hands and pressing down on the air, on their unrest until order was restored. "Please," he said. "Please, my kin, I know it's grisly, I know it is not appetizing to the eye. Some of you see it as evil, as a "trophy' or prize, but it is not. You do not understand the power of these creatures, my kin, you do not understand their resiliency.?