it was night out again, the dark waters lit by the moonlight kissed the shaded beaches in slow languid strokes leaving behind damp sand like the fresh strokes of a paintbrush - it was almost idyllic and it certainly soothed the nerves of a troubled mind.

Said troubled mind was currently resting along a large outcropping of rock set by the edge of the jungle's dark corners - overlooking and jutting into the sandy beach, thankfully it was large enough to host the dark God.

Lucifer sighed, a small plume of smoke spiralling from his nostrils at the act - eyes or rather eye closing briefly in thought, for the scarred eye never did close much like the scarred jaw never recovered from its snarling etch - the great beast was waiting but for what he knew not, something had been building lately, nothing urgent or life threatening perhaps but he felt it - a slight knowing that a dynamic would shift perhaps.

Claws clicked on the rock as he shifted, plates mving against one another as his great head laid down to rest across his long fore legs, staring out into the dark night and the moons grinning slicked mouth reflecting upon those dark waters.

[member=218]ARGUS[/member] /sorry it's a bit eh, I tried ;-;

Argus was brutally aware. Something different to her and the rest. She did not try and deny who she was, who she had been before. She accepted them- all three of her others. The small and broken, the morning and rageing, the desperate- and set to destroy the world with her. She accepted her past and much better she moved to better herself She had made plans t fix the wrongs she had made, the settle the unease of each.

Obscuro had so many failures, too many to count - pushing aside her issues and the people she hurt as she ruthlessly grasped and gripped and kept taking from others in an attempt to fix herself.  In the end the blame had all came back, the guilt in the startling moment, clouded with rage and despair. She could not move an inch, she could do nothing but shake and quake as both sides of herself raged and neither of them won.

In the end, Argus was forced to shuffle on the burden. The memories of each families failure taken as a warning passed down from some unseen family. Hecate, their kids. There was no lesson. Only guilt. In the end, Obscuro had felt guilty for it, and even now, Argus felt that lingering guilt. The pooling of dread at facing the stepfather that she had promised- promised she would protect hecate, protect their family. The legacy. What had they done? nothing.

But Argus was not who she used to be, this name was a memento of that. And the memories were lessons to learn from. Argus would not sit still and idle. She had already made steps to sooth the ire of whatever lingering feelings she had for the killer- the start of the decline for her first family. It was now time to confront the other. The person she left to grieve while she too lost herself.

Stepping out of the sea, the air was fresh with salt. Dark red eyes narrowing on the dark beast settled on the edge of the jungle. It was good that she had decided to swim back. Otherwise, another clan's scent would've lingered on her fur. Now only a lingering taste of salt in the back of her throat. Well, now was a good time as any.

"Lucifer." She honestly had no idea how to start this, rising from the sea, and sticking to her fur as she came to walk to him. Trying to curl within the grass to keep more sand from latching on to her. Joining him in his vigil. "It was my fault Hecate disappeared. I understand if you hate me for it. Just... I'm trying to be different. I think I'm finally coming to realize that who i used to be- was not fit to carry the names as much as she was to cast them aside. " She spoke in a rush, and finally she was taking a breath of air. Dull eyes saturated with deep-rooted regret. With the loss that she allowed herself to see but never feel before. Not like this at least.

maybe once he would have raged, maybe once he would have smote and despaired at the unfairness of it all - and he could not deny that some part of him still wished to burn and destroy, to cleave and rend until all the world was tattered at his claws for all the despair brought before his form,

But he would not be his father in this, never, never again.

So when it came to Argus - Obscuro, whisper, but then he'd reinvented himself many times over and reclaimed a namesake, he could not fault her - as he watched her approach and pour out her own guilt, lucifer was not angry

He was tired

Tired of losing those he cared about, tired of the betrayals that littered his past, tired of his many children since lost - dead or gone, he did not know their fate - it was a small comfort that his eldest four still lived wherever they might be, for only Fenris he knew the location of - but then those four had championed godhood, where his many many others had not,

Thus it was a bitter pill to watch them vanish, die and wither while he remained unmoving in time.

So it was the greater dragon was silent, scrutinising Argus with an unreadable gaze as the wind whistled through the trees and the soft waves kissed the shore - the silence, it stretched for an age as both watched the other.

Then lucifer moved

The dragon curled half a wing around the other as he drew closer and a long tired sigh left obsidian and red scarred teeth as the very act seemed to weary the greater drake when such regrets made one remember the pain.

"I do not hate you Argus"

"not anymore"

There was a pause as he seemed to think over what to say next and those silver and red eyes seemed far away "I remember hating you with a fury that burned bright and all consuming - I remember blaming you in the confusion, my precious daughter gone and I had no answers" he sighed "and perhaps whether I knew it or not, an old paranoia saw you as an easy target convinced you were the reason".

"but I know better and when I named you kinslayer then for perceived fault I was mistaken - I've seen true kinslayers Argus and you are nothing like them, no matter the faults in your own past" he knew whisper, he knew Obscuro they had their own faults and their own blames - he would not fault Argus for seeing that there was reason in becoming better.

It was something he wished for himself with his newly restored mind - he would ever strive to never be his sire, never again let that kind of monster grow from a misplaced grudge or perceived slight.

But he could not fault his prior selves for an old paranoia unknown to them preying upon a perceived slight - he remembered Corvus these days, it still sickened him to be reminded of just what his younger brother had done and the dark reminders of dead corpses in his dreams did not help it.

"I'm old and tired Argus, I will not carry a grudge that can be forgiven - perhaps I will never know why Hecate disappeared and she will join all the others I have lost" his wings drooped And the moonlight highlighted small dark tracks against the scales near his eyes briefly but the dark beast was ever stoic even in his weary countenance.

"you need not run from my presence again Argus" he remembered her leaving riverside when he was no longer that small confused child, reborn in fire along the edges of the territory and taken in by a kind healer, he missed Lessa still, but he would mourn for all he lost and could no longer reach later, his silent vigils were a part of such true.

He sighed again, settling against the sand "I would like to start over - for even all that has passed, good or ill, you are still family in the end"

Argus was not a creature that could be considered elegant or graceful. She was always two steps away from a rageing beast. One breath shy of savage. A monster carfeully wrappted in feathers and fur. Argus had been realized with this power under her fur, curling under her skin. For now it was dormant, but for the logest time it was blazing inferno, ichor poisioning mortal frame- spending her mornings filled with shakes and hideing nose-bleeds under carefully black fur.

She has memories of letting that think under her skin fester. Letting it rise and change her. Fur and feathers morphing to ivory and scales, to skin and cartilage. She has memories of her bones aching and the blood dripping down her entire frame. Of letting out a beyond wild howl in joy as she festered and feasted. Indulging until she was heaving for breaths, choking on the cries of her prey and gasping through lungfuls of gorging.

Argus was not made of anything nice. She was made of memories of monsters and stitched- glued together out of broken fragile things. She felt a hairs away from breaking at least twice a day, and even now. Along this beach, she felt herself tremble- fear to call it home. Felt herself seethe in anger when something mildly annoying comes to pester her. She is dangerous, all claws and bites and venom. She is made of things that are not gentle and expects fully to become something similar. She counts on it, it's why she keeps herself distant, keeps her ties small and heartfelt. Keeps those few connections possessively and with the same fragility, she is made of.

To admit a fraction of her sins is like pushing a paw willingly into harm. But nothing as physical, as deservingp as it should be- because she deserves to hold it close. To bottle it up until they all explode and she is left with the pieces again- because it is how it ends- how it always ends. So when she utters to the truth, the relief is minuscule in the imagery of the beast- the night pinning her until she is gasping for breath. Until the very thing, she fears growls at her to remind her that she is a not a monster but something made of filth and watches as she squirms into the sandy beach. Maybe even leave her body as an example.

When Lucifer moves she does not flinch. She breathes deeply- quickly and quietly. And his wing settles around her form she does not realize she is shaking until she presses up against his support. She does not think she is crying until she can spot the blurring edges of where his serrated teeth turn into a red line down his jaw as he breathes a response.

I do not hate you Argus.

Not anymore

She has never been able to meet his eyes. Now here she lowers her head, not in shame but to blink away the sea that's dripping from her eyes. "I have done so much in the name of a family. I am undeserving of one. I abandoned my own, I destroyed yours. Lucifer, I am sorry." Her voice is quivering. Breath stuttering between a skittering tongue and she tries to breathe deep again and it comes out choked. A gasp as she tries to breathe between the pain. "I have run to the clan that killed my son and saw fit to join them. I forgot his sacrifice as I found a daughter and i watched it all get ripped away. Lucifer- it hurts."

She was unstable, she was breakable and shakeable and ash. It clotted her tongue with the memory of regret and she tries to push it down. Tries to fix what broken hole there is inside her soul but she can't. SHe is broken and he wants to acknolege her? Forgive her? Can he not see what she's done?

"I wish it would end. I wish i could forget. But they scream. They won't leave me be and i hear them and they won't stop. They're s c r e a m i n g. They won't let me rest. They won't let me do anything." It was breaking again as she hushed her faults to the only parental role she had ever seen in her life. The only one that has stayed long enough to glimpse what is in her eyes and not run away in fear. Here he is telling her she is family and she is terrified. Terrified that he'll leave her too now that she has him.

She cannot handle being left alone again.

SHe [b]won't she'll b r e a k.

Lucifer had never been an wholly elegant creature - he wasn't a blunt instrument either, no he had been moulded to be a precise thing, a tool for his father, a weapon wielded by the mad entity, where his mother would have wished him a choice in all things and yet he was not given that as his chance in life with the mad void deities schemes snatching him away from a more free life.

the lurid red scarring was enough to testify to what end they - his brother and he - had been taken, it marked who their sire was without question and it marked the bane and curse of his line well enough,

it was a small thankfulness that none of his children born in skyclan or bloodclan had ever inherited the line of leviathan's curse, nothing good came of it.

if one asked Lucifer what he was or what he was made of in a matter of context, he would say three things

he would say darkness,

he would say violence,

he would say tragedy.

for his story, his past was nothing but made of tragedies - too many lives with too many taken, he'd lost everything more than once in all his long living and he'd been blamed for a thousand fold crimes in his father's name he never committed - chained and sealed away in retribution to pain he hadn't caused and then freed to wreak a revenge so terrible it had cost him his sanity and his truth for awhile.

until he remembered himself again and knew regret like an old friend drawn back in.

it is this why he watches her now, watches his daughter in law bare her soul to him as she would never consider to otherwise and he knows - oh void does he know what it feels like to bear a neverending agony.

he's watched his family slaughtered by his brother - he's killed his sister in the grips of insanity and watched on as thousands and millions drowned to the drumbeat of his terrible wrath.

he knows the ghosts hound him - and he knows he will never be free of them.

and this is why he reaches towards her to pull her against his cool scales - he is always cold, so so cold, cold as the void, he can never feel warmth again - and doesn't speak again for what feels an age and when he finally does it is a final blow - a final acknowledgement - he accepts her words and her worst fears projected and he lets  them  g o.

he sees this creature and sees himself,

Hurting and screaming on the inside, unable to stop, unable to do anything - red, red, red, his sister's blood on his claws and he cannot think past the screaming in his mind and the laughter in his ears, no, no, no, what have I done? - he knows this pain,

and for all she has done, for all he sees reflected back,

he accepts it,

and he does not turn her way,

"I know Argus"

"I know"

I GOT A BONE TO PICK

---

[div style="background-color:#BG COLOR;width:90%; overflow: stretch;text-align: justify; font-size: 8pt;"] Argus has little idea of Jasper's intentions when she was conceived. An aimless mistake that turned to love half the way into falling. Argus has never truly dwelled on their mother. Too caught up in feeling and seeing and - watching. Watching the world through innocent baby blue eyes that jolted with a unseen power. She was born without a power, a small little fleck of ash within a den of milk and love. Kryll was similar. The pair of them tiny squirming little things, living breathing animals. Maybe once they were a family. Maybe Argus knew the semblance of one once upon a dawn.

But looking back into the mindset of a different name. All she sees is a deep rooted sorrow and a flicker of desperate hope. That family, the very first one she never got a taste of- abandoned her to fend for herself in the sands. Leaving for a literal greener pasture of windclan's open fields. Leaving argus- whisper with the choice to give up and die, or live on. That was to say that she did still have family. A grumpy old tiger with a knack for pixie sticks and a tender heart.

What she remembers most, she remembers being alone.

After a while, it was a choice. To live on the edges of society, to live on the cusps of clans and walk the barren borders as a shadow without it's light. She choose isolation. Too desperate for someone to come find her and too stubborn to ask for it. She asked to be alone- self imposed isolation based on some faulty reason that she was undeserving of something as simple as comfort. Tough starved. But she never chose the loneliness. Now it is the only lingering memory, the feeling of her oldest other is only the deep sorrow. The pathetic whimpering of her choice. The first and biggest mistake of her life.

The last one she ever made being truly alive: To chose not to live, but die by her own paw.

12 moons old. Whisperpup died of a slit throat to a dagger melted within the sands of time. Too young to understand the feeling of a comforted embrace of a home or family. Too young to understand that love was not the feeling of watching your mother's back as she left one final time. Too quiet too somber- too loud- and clever enough to hide it but too stubborn to seek help before she reached that ultimatum that death would bring her peace.

And so- so ignorant to think that the gods would grant her a peace that she did not deserve.

Now, with a beating heart in her chest and a hollow hole above her throat, she feels the same loneliness. Feels it fester beyond her control and spiral out through her mouth- her eyes her throat her ears. Feels tears never ceasing. Feels one painful sob after another as she laid out this broken soul marked to wonder the earth forever. and wonders what it is like to truly die. Wonders how it feels to be peaceful. How to love and try and ignite that spark of hope that she had snuffed out when she was young and mortal and alive.

If asked what she were, she could only say the word definition mortals saw fit to title one such as her. Shinigami. She was not a god born but created by her own merit. A powerless whisper a tiny puny little soul that tried to snuff itself out. Now she is left to wonder the earth and clean up the messes of mortals. Find the broken little cusps of failures and shattered animals like herself and mend them into something fixable. To fall in love with her own younger reflections and let them live in a love she never had the courage to ask for but now to give freely- and she watches them die in death, to cling to their each last breath in the night or day and their soul to cry out it was worth living.

But that love. The selfless consuming love she gave so freely broke her with each step she took. It tumbles now under her chest. rattles her heart in warning for each breath of it she consumes- feeding the dark tendrils of malice and rage inside of her. Now when asked she may admit to being something other than wolf. But to herself, to her true self she admits she is not a creature fit to walk this earth. Not a monster born surely- but a monster none the less.

Where each love she found she saw them break and take a part of that heart with them. Where she selfless- gave everything they only saw fit to take with them as they leave. Now she is desperate. Missing parts of her empathy where only a callous beating heart remain. Where only the desperate broken parts of herself remain- where she does not remember anything of love but only the hurt. The final crescendo of when that love fruits into more hurt.

She cannot fathom love ever being worth it- the joy the desperate, and the consumption the absolution of a power that would make all the shattered peaces of her being align into something not necessarily less broken but something greater than herself.  With each steady beat of this mortal framing around her soul. it is not a selfless, open love but a callous beast, armed to the teeth with malice and rage. Driven to desperation and doomed to watch. Watch as the world around her shifts to match her own soul. Watch with open eyes and recognize- too late that she was meant to save thoese broken souls so much like her mortal self. Save them instead of break them. Save instead of letting them fall into a legion of crying desperate immortals like herself.

Now they scream. When she thinks of love she thinks of this desperate broken openness of letting this eldritch being see her soul. She wonders if he has the benevolence to end it. And she selfishly hopes. There is a slefish, broken part of herself that wants to close it's eyes and not see the world fall. To see mortals turned into monsters and monsters turn back into mortals. Does not want to see this world shift to the worst. She wants to hope- but she does not know what it means to hope. Not anymore.

She breaks from her silence in a desperate keen. Wings cradling her frail hollow mortal frame and shudder in deep lungfuls as she breathes in and exhales whatever love is. Tries to remember what it's like to have a family. And fail. She sobs and breaks apart under the only night she has ever let herself break. The only immortal to ever remember that she was born a shadow. Not this mimicry of light her body now represents. Where her eyes- once red now blink open blue. Pale electric blue- she sobs into the world with different eyes, but the eyes she has hidden for so long.

"I didn't- n't mean to do it." She cuts off as a shudder breaks through her lungs. A lungful of air that smolders into memories of ash. "I was so terribly alone. I wanted peace and... it was foolish to think that the gods would give it to me in death." Breathe. Breathe. Remember the sand of sand under your paws. remember the feeling of blood in your fur. The scent of milk and honey and how you had fo r g o tt en. "Now the death cling to me. Now i have forgotten what it was like- to be alive." Forgotten love, forgotten hope. Forgot what it was like to breathe and need it. Forgot what it was like without this monster under her skin. This selfless love breaking her down until her brain shuts it out as a means of self preservation.

Now- here she looks up. Sees the glow of red that reflected unreadable runes of leviathans and void. She looks into the abyss of lucifer. She looks up and see's a broken god born into his own right. See's how every thing built for him, built around him and what he desperately tried to build for himself shattered. See's how the very different being has come to try, and desperately crawl its way out under the ruble of it all. She see's an almost perfect reflection of herself and tries to picture what kind of monster- what kind of power it would take to bring a beast such as the both of them to halt and flicker. Wonders what lets them forgive so easily. To allow them to bear their souls so openly and to find the desperate, broken parts of themselves in others and attempt to mend it.

She wonders about love. And she thinks it has something to do with it.

And the god spoke one final acknowledgement. Here pressed against a coldness that seeps into her fur. It reminds of her death, of that final giving embrace she felt when she was 12 before it spat her back out. She feels this terrible cold and the god of darkness - as Lucifer speaks. She feels a warmth she never thought was possible since she had died.

She is wordless, against this cold, this warmth. She is unable to explain the rattle of her heart and how the hunger- the desperate feeling she has felt since she woke up after killing herself that never left her- suddenly vanishes with her next breath. She is unable to find a word for this peace. So when she speaks again, it is with a sure breath. With a calm resolution that she speaks to the dark cold that embraces her now. " I never saw myself deserving of a family." She tries to inspire that same warmth. the same familiar flutter- a whisper of the same intangible feeling into the ice that covers his scales and tries to break it. Hopelessly with her works. "Family isn't something made with mistakes. But i think. If there is such a thing as family for me out there. I am glad that it's you. Lucifer." She cannot remember what it is like to hope. To love. But she is stranded. Stuck on this plane until the last mortal flees into the afterlife and this realm is reborn into one for immortals. So she has time. Time to repay this flicker of life- of warmth. Into the cold scales that has forgotten the feeling.