thing for vale --

Consider! A deal gone sour
When the clock strikes the hour,
Teeth gleam sharp and devour.

Ninazu hummed at his words, unable to put thoughts into words. Their imprisonment remained a dark spot in her memory, no matter how many times she meditated. The psychedelics came closest to removing the gunk in her mind from such trauma, but the lioness never liked remembering that time. To remember was to drown in powerlessness.

She threw more gold in her satchel, until Stryker’s comment draws her eye. Eyebrow curling up, she glanced over her shoulder before turning her head. Her golden eyes widened.

“One would look equally good on you, my lightning bug.” She hooked one on a claw, raising her paw until she held it at Stryker’s ear level. Smiling softly, she hummed again, this time in satisfaction. “Quite handsome, indeed. The iridescent metal matches your eyes.”

Her flames licked her cheeks, the mane contracting in size but flickering wildly. Ninazu’s eyes narrowed, before her expression returned to a relaxed grin. “Things did change. Before… that… we were both too wrapped up in our own desires. I we hadn’t gone through that mess together, I doubt either of us could trust the other completely. Ironically, all of that bullshit means you’re the only one I could trust completely.”

She inhaled sharply, the flames expanding, and exhaled a puff of steam through her nostrils. The flame’s edges tinged green. She glanced away from his face, staring at the earring in her paw for a long moment.

“Perhaps it’s time we… show off our bond. And using stolen jewelry to do it is about as us as we can get.”

Lazily, a lopsided grin grew on Ximen’s muzzle. “There’s a lot of magic in this world, kid. Arrow and Els have the flashy kind, but Ximen? He has his tricks.” To prove his point, he flicked his paw, sending a small cup of black paint to levitate toward Lucinder and Arrow.

His attention shifted to Vinegere, recognizing the wildcat hybrid as one of those noisy ass motherfuckers waking him up all the time. Ximen didn’t hold a grudge about that—insomniacs like him couldn’t be pissed the rest of the world didn’t suffer from his affliction. “This one—” he tapped a paw to his chest. “—is Ximen Xiu.”

“Oh, these?” He raised a brow as he took a chomp of the levitating heart.

“Not for painting, this time. But, when Ximen uses blood for paint, it’s more efficient to bleed a living thing than wring blood out of a corpse; let the dying heart perform its function, filling the bowl between five minutes—” He paused long enough to swallow. “—and seven seconds. Depends on which artery was severed.”

He broke eye contact to look at his bandanas, frowning at the flashiness of patterns and colors. Squinting, he selected a black and white pattern. One wave of his paw and! The bandana looped around his neck.

BURN
BRIGHT

// takes place 8 hours after the conclusion to this thread

Cold, not the painful cold of freezing temperatures, not the chill of a harsh breeze, but a numb cold, a pervasive shiver hooked into the skin. The numb traversed down to the bone, the heart, the brain. If she even had any of those; her senses had died in a haze of bloodloss, and they remained dark. No, not dark, for dark implied light, color, vision.

In the void, there was no darkness, no grey, no color. The bleak monotone slipped over everything, from the tastelessness to the toneless not-sound. A soupy concoction one part void, three parts directionless, and a dash of disorientation mixed in as your soul spins aimlessly down the spiral to oblivion. The lack of sensory input canceled the hallucination known as “time.”

Thoughts drifted in and out of focus. These gradually lost their shape and color as the eternity and not-eternity wore on Ninazu’s psyche. Ninazu? She grabbed the name. Held it tight. Repeated the word in her mind over and over and over, until the word lost its meaning and she relearned its significance over and over and over.

Abruptly, the cold ended and she dissolved, like boiling water thrown on a nightmare. She breathed hot air, body convulsing, and thrashed. But the thrashing translated to twitchy toes and blinking eyelids to her lioness body, as her mind screamed and writhed. The comfort of the numb, where was her cold, how could she be she?

Ninazu gasped and wheezed, sitting up all too suddenly and yet slow as molasses, her jaw working around an object until copper taste drowned out the staleness of her gums. Her tongue, she chewed on her tongue. Her golden eyes opened, blinking rapidly, until she remembered how to see and the world focused.

Home. Her soul managed to navigate home, in the hut she shared with Stryker. How? Her memories blanked after Roxanne killed her serval body. Even the memories in the void faded and blurred to an uncomfortable grey. She chewed on her tongue and shivered, golden eyes closing, swaying on her paws.

Her fire licked down her neck with its comforting warmth. Green and yellow reflected in her golden eyes, and she stared, uncomprehending, at her pawpads beyond the flaming haze.

The fire’s warmth cradled her body. But the cold nestled in her chest and refused to thaw.

© MADI

[w]isker