Profession: Dracone Heir (Dracones are obscenely wealthy treasure hoarders), Doctor for a variety of medical fields, Smuggler/trader, Dark Ranger (retired), Curator of fine luxury goods
Interests/Skills: Science, Hunting, Blacksmithing, Husbandry, Medical Research, Playing his violin, Reading, all types of Vice
Writing bits:
August 2025 DWC Summary
Lillandyr's Magic Dracone Rings
Heathcliff and Aronsen watercolor by @lillandyrshadowglade:
House Motto: "Our Roots Will Not Burn"
(left design by this writer/designer, right castle painting by Ruth Sanderson)
Dr. Heathcliff Dracone and Lady Lillandyr Shadowglade, from my sketchbook:
Above graphite sketches by this writer/artist
Heathcliff is a statue of dark elegance, the definition of clarity. His motions are one of personal command and hard-lived wisdom. There is a dark perversion in his stare, some unspoken plotting in his eyes.
His appearance resembles a juxtaposition of dusty aristocracy and roguish piracy. He wears a wool and silver coat styled for agility and warmth. An obvious noble with a killer style.
Heathcliff spends most of his time in his laboratory or traveling, his research journals piling up in one town to the next.
He speaks in a manner in which he looks. Questions are always crafted in his advantage.
The Dracone family name has a strange, fabled history and carries even wilder rumors. Old, old money. So old that many of their coins aren't even accepted into circulation anymore. Their coffers were overflowing, their armories feared and their sons and daughters coveted. The Dracone Castle remains a huge menace of foreboding danger in the southern mountains of the Ghostlands. Some say the castle itself is sentient (@draconecastle), haunted by something dark and evil. Travelers beware!
Heathcliff grew up to fall in love and marry very early in his life. His education flourished and he was a gentleman of great expectations. Fate would not have it so and plucked from him all his happiness during a violent storm. Her neck snapped falling from the carriage, and his dreams were over.
Many years later the violent home invasion by the scourge destroyed most of the family— all slaughtered. All but two.
Heathcliff survived, the one that slept in the crypt that night, on her stone covered with roses.
And his eldest brother Aronsen (@wraaronsen), a brute that now haunts the Ghostlands to feed his unnatural appetite.
A fortune of money and misery left to two brothers.
TW: death, massacre, gore, consumption of a dragon, infidelity
When Tristan grieved he did it with the entirety of his foul existence. Like every strong emotion that seized him through the numbing haze of immortality, he became the unwavering priest of this new religion inside himself, his devotion terrible in its intensity.
The humans burned her body. He watched from atop the hill overlooking the village. The mortals celebrated her death and all the sheep she'd no longer feast on. They danced around the conflagration of her great body as the flames dulled her bright scales to ash. They feasted on her flesh because it was a way for them to reclaim their dead she had previously devoured.
The wind, merciless and uncaring as the sea, stirred Tristan’s long, black hair and brought the scent of his fallen mate’s cooking flesh to him, coated his body in it.
For a mortal there is no misery, no sorrow or suffering that is absolute. It is always fleeting and finite because it will end. Death was the great mercy and mortal feelings died a little every day before the lights went out. For Tristan, there was no madness to escape into.
As he watched the horror, feeling he should bear witness for HER sake, he drew a dagger from his belt and sawed into his chest. The pain made him scream as his fallen blood grew black and red variegated roses. He pushed past the pain, past the crunching bone as he cracked open his own sternum, lips drawn back from pale teeth wearing a thin veneer of his own blood.
He cut his own heart out of his chest and woke near dawn, said heart new and remade, dutifully beating out forever as he lay in the roses of his own vitae.
Tristan found himself walking amongst the sleeping revelers who were still drunk on wine and full of his mate. He knelt at the great fire pit they’d made to do this violence to every part of her and he smeared her ashes on his hair, face and clothes and remained on his knees, frozen.
He couldn’t be roused to speech or actions by the villagers when they woke to bury the ash and bones of his beloved. Only the occasional tear would cut a clean path down his cheek. It softened these mortals who had no idea it was the architect of their doom that silently wept.
After a full day and night had passed, a woman came to him with gentle, insistent hands and took him to her small hut where she undressed him, burning his blood caked robes in a fire outside. She washed him and dressed him in homely tunic and trousers. Then she sat before him with a lovely face soft with pity.
Like she understood.
The woman stroked his face, moved beyond logic and reason by the well of anguish she saw in his fathomless black eyes. His pain, unknown to her in the specific, still moved her to tears. He was beautiful to her this way, the other brought low enough to love.
This is surely what drove her to kiss him with heat and passion. This beautiful fallen angel who made no sound and only wept had to be a gift from uncaring gods. It felt like blasphemy not to touch him.
Her surprise at his voracious return of her sweet affection melted into delight when he dragged her into the bed and pressed her into the straw filled mattress, snarling at her, teeth at her throat. This is when Tristan came back to himself. The self loathing tore into him, sharper than any dagger. If only he could break the surly bonds of this mortal guise, be the beast they’d just burned to ash and devour this woman whole.
His blunt teeth couldn’t tear out her throat. His bites only made her cry out in pleasure that began to suck him down into confusion. Her kisses defeated him. Her soft touch so wanted it didn’t matter what hands delivered it.
Tristan learned her name and that she liked foxgloves. He learned that her hazel eyes were different colors depending on the time of day. Or if she’d been crying. He learned that she was a terrible cook and that he’d never tell her this. It was easy to lie to her and tell her every meal was his favorite.
When his maladaptive nature hurt her, he learned it was easy to earn her forgiveness with foxgloves he picked in a glade. Mortals needed death for everything. It was easy to lie then and tell her he loved her because it felt like love.
Tristan labored to build a better home for his wife. The years made his hands rough but didn’t put silver in his hair to match hers. It didn’t put lines around his dark eyes. The slow grinding pressure of time never stopped his back.
He found he didn’t mind the extra work when she became too frail to do it. The suspicion of his eternal youth was explained away by dragon magic. He had, forty years ago, bathed in the ashes of one of the last dragons. It wasn’t a gift he could give so he was not harmed for his otherness. At least…not directly.
He returned home one day after a disappointing trip to the city to sell wool. He found his wife in the arms of another man. This was no passionate affair. They were both in the winter of their lives and carried soft ease that told Tristan this had been going on for a very long time.
“Why did you lie to me?” Tristan asked, the numbed grief returning, strangling and screaming, demanding vengeance.
His wife wasn’t sorry. This confrontation only brought out defensive anger. “I never loved you. I felt sorry for you!” Was her only explanation.
He saw the warm familiarity of her fade into icy revulsion. She hated him, he understood this. She coveted his eternal youth and life. He was too strange to love. This little life had taken most of hers and yet had meant nothing to her. It had meant everything to him.
Tristan sighed. “I would have given it to you…if I could have. But perhaps you are right. I didn’t love you either,” he lied.
He killed his wife’s lover first and with the most efficacy. There was no need for him to suffer. He simply unmade his heart and the body died in seconds.
Systematically, he went from hut to hut, most never waking. Those that did and fought him discovered pain would not stop this monster. Nor would death. Every time Tristan was cut down, his body vanished and reappeared perfect and filled with patient rage.
When he’d finished, he dragged the bodies to the place they’d burned his mate. He made a pyre and watched the bodies burn. Twice, his wife stabbed him in the back with a kitchen knife, screaming and sobbing. Demanding he kill her too as he’d killed everyone she’d ever loved.
When the bodies were ash, he coated his skin, hair and clothes in them. Tristan stood and touched his wife’s hair, now white. She was just as beautiful as the day she had given him that first lie of kindness.
“May you live many years more,” he whispered. “I would kill you for what you’ve done…but alas. Love confounds me.”
He left her weeping in the ashes of the village as he made his way to the city to see his grim business finished.
Daily Writing Challenge @daily-writing-challenge Day 6th
Melody's Wicked End
Melody wasn't the type of girl to sleep well. As her body erupted into the phases of womanhood, so did her restlessness. She often woke up at strange angles in bed as if her flesh wanted to join her mind in all the starry hopeful dreams that pulled her through the night. Sharing with her sibling in their family's cramped cottage was also becoming a problem. Her long legs always accidentally kicked her small sister in slumber, causing wails and sleepy fighting.
The sheets suffocated in the still humid night air. Melody scowled angrily at the black shadow of morning glory blooms hanging their bonneted heads from the stars outside her open window. They were bowed and missed the sparkling promise of ancient starlight blessing and teasing mystery no mortal could know. She wondered about other worlds and yearned for perfect hearts waiting for her eager desire to give hers.
Her mind drifted to Freddy, her father's farmhand, who just started working for them. He had a strong jaw that made her cheeks blush but with the gentleness of youth fresh on his face. His young muscles were already easily competitive enough to a grown man's. She wished he smelled better though. He didn't seem to understand good hygiene after sheering their sheep the day before. When he shook her hand and let it linger too long, the lanolin musk wouldn't wash off easily from her own. Something about this frightened and excited her. She felt violated from the careless disrespect of his stink even though the touch of his fingers filled her with wild thoughts. The urge to punish him for it rose. Angry that she was still thinking about this stinky pretty farm boy, Melody snapped the sheet off and snuck out of the warm bed.
She tripped loudly on all her books in the dark, catching herself on the wall. Books on dragons happen to be the largest in her small collection. As if their lore had to be physically larger than life too. Her favorites were the ones with drawings of handsome elves next to their dragon form. They were meant to be educational so they were anatomically correct and nude for illustration purposes. Her finger would trace the parts of men she had never seen with her own eyes in fear and look longingly at the elegant beauty of women with heavy breasts and lower secrets modest by design, barely an artist's smudge. Fantasies about one of them coming to take her away from the farm and her own troublesome heart occupied all her longing. She would be special and a vicious creature would heel at her feet because fate would bind instant devotion. Her family would see never see her fly away on the back of her beloved to leave the boring small valley. She wouldn't miss the sweet songs of pond creatures and forest bugs. The smell of wet earth and apples fermenting. These beautiful constants only taught her prisons could be beautiful.
There were other books too, all borrowed from the library. Vampires and cryptids and creatures of many types. She wanted to know it all, to know there was more than her frustrating reality. Convinced the one she would give all her love to had to be one of these otherworldly beings and had not yet appeared. Mostly because the selection around her teenage desires was grossly dismal so far.
Melody used these as steps to quietly build to their window. She slipped out letting the shock of damp on her bare legs remind her she was now a wild thing like the night. Waking Freddy would be easy. The barn walls were thin and she knew he stayed up late reading boring books on husbandry and mechanics. Her disgust at his literary tastes repelled her the most. She wondered if his mind was boring. This would have to be tested.
Following the edge of the foxglove garden, Melody tip-toed like a fae in bare feet with her long nightgown bottom bunched in her hand over her knees so the dew would not soak it.
Settling near the large oak to shadow her ghostly figure, she watched the barn door from a distance and began to trill and sing like a bird. She did not know their songs by heart but this did not matter. He should think this was odd. If she saw his confusion and frown looking outside the barn, it would be worth getting her feet wet. She grinned and suppressed audible giggles as she waited for his investigation.
To her delight, Freddy appeared almost instantly. Her mouth opened seeing him shirtless with a weapon in-hand, tense with threat. The metal on the long spear flashed in oil lamplight as she drew in a little gasp. Instantly she started running, determined to make him chase. She trailed her retreat with a few more obviously poor bird sounds.
The hedge of forest on the edge of the field hid her but blocked the moment Freddy alerted a passing Scarlet company of three other men on the nearby road. His face was serious as he conveyed his concerns of livestock thieves.
She ran breathless straight into the dark expanse of a barley field, the tickle up her leg from the plant whipping by as she brought distance between Freddy's pursuit. He would see her in the field dancing under the stars and fall in love. Her plan was working perfectly.
When she paused to wait her brow furrowed at a strange hole in the sky. It was as if a shadow blinked them out in vast swaths. Slowly this defined clearer until with terror she realized this was a huge creature descending upon her. Her mouth dropped open and a small sound escaped her watching the vague outline of a black dragon circle her lazily in curiosity. Huge red eyes narrowed as the magnificent expanse of it nearly landed. Trembling, she began to whimper with awe, unable to move. The first roar it shrieked made her scream and crumple to the ground.
Men's shouts followed and ghastly sounds of ripping flesh filled the humid dark. Melody cried while trying to make herself small. Despair had settled her to quiet when she knew the silence meant they were all dead.
The crunch was sickening. Sounds of the dragon eating had her shaking so hard she could no longer think. Looking was impossible, her eyes still squeezed shut tight. Thoughts of her own death consumed her. She screamed when she opened them and a naked elf was squatting down with her, wicked eyes observing with irritation.
He was covered in remnants of gore, with a horrible handsomeness that curled her expression into confusion. This made him look scarier and more cruel. He didn't feel alone, either. Shadows like imploring snakes curled around her body in indifferent observation. Her breath hitched into hiccups, sniveling in misery.
"Please don't hurt me!" she begged.
The elven man huffed with pissy disgust, looking at her very strangely. He spoke in common with a thick elven accent, words hissed like he still had a serpent's tongue.
"You lured me like bait. Did they see me overhead and decide to use you to lure the beast?" he accused with his teeth bared. She did not answer, grief and shock silencing. "But I am only hunting for wicked men tonight. Not little girls."
He stood slowly, hovering above her, thinking of his mate and their own seed of a child. "This is not mercy. My child will not feed on innocence. She will learn what your kind cannot." Leonardo backed away slowly to ready himself for transformation and flight but her defiance stopped him.
"No." Melody shouted after him with a sob. She knew Freddy was one of the dead. Knew that this guilt would slowly destroy her. Seeing the beautiful wicked man of her dreams look at her that way spurred her to fury. He turned, eyes flaring with narrowed waiting.
"No." she repeated, clearer despite her shaking. She stood and addressed the being with a heaving chest, unable to do anything but fight. "Dragons are all wicked. Your child will be too!" she added like a curse. It made her feel powerful, like she could lose her mind and be full of magic by wishing it so.
The red glow increased in intensity at her words. Leonardo made swift connection to her with a mean snatch and sunk his teeth into her tiny neck with efficiency. Her life drained in a rush and tasted unpleasantly unripe. She was fruit that should have grown longer and Leonardo felt only sour dissatisfaction from her kill. Nothing in his stomach settled right anymore.
He dropped her in the dew and transformed into a dragon, scanning over body parts leaking into the barley grass filling the air with sweet trampled leaf and rancid blood. His clawed weight sunk into the field as he snatched the body of the young man that threw the first spear through his leathered wing. He hung like a limp doll as he flew off back to Tristan's tower.
When Leonardo arrived and dumped him on the terrace, no one was around. His mate's proximity to Roval bothered him easily in his already ruined mood. The shower was a pout of denial. Normally he would present the blood of his hunt on his body for his mate but he didn't want her to have any of the girl's blood. It bothered him, the entire encounter. He regretted her kill in a way that unsettled him deeply.
She did not appear interested in what he brought home and he could hear laughter from Roval's room. He bared his teeth openly to no one as he walked back out to the terrace. With effort he removed the heart of the human and put it on a tray he grabbed from Tristan's wine and burst back into Roval's room again without care. His shadows conjured a tight rendering of elegant elven wear, hair curls separated still by the steam of the shower.
He sat down on an nearby lounge uninvited in a languid slouch, feasting and picking on the heart like it was a roasted chicken in a pub.
Roval was propped up in his recovery bed, sharing sandwiches Ahnariel made as a snack. Both paused with surprise at his return.
Roval grinned with amusement at his uncle. His bad moods were entertaining now. Ahnariel had warned him about the purpose of this hunt. "Is that a wicked heart?" he asked.
Leonardo glanced at Ahnariel while he licked his fingers messily. He brooded for a bit with drama before answering.
"I don't know. I'm the wicked one. And I eat whatever the fuck I want." he replied with a nasty rebuke, not offering a bite.
Some of my writing from a different character... and a new POV for this story. You don't have to know our existing lore to enjoy this one. Thanks for reading!
Tw: Tristan gets really weird about his dad’s @draconecastle magic, poison, death, captivity
After spending a timeless age beneath the waves, deep in the ocean, he let his vanity return, draping his lean body in jewel toned silks. A blood thistle cigarette dangled from Tristan’s bottom lip as he dabbed perfumed oil on his wrists. He could not change his face, but disguises were easy enough by drastically changing his mode of dress and the way he comported himself. He removed a smoldering piece of cypress from a brazier in his tent and crushed the blackened end in a bowl which he then mixed with sweet almond oil with mortar and pestle.
“You can’t do this,” came a melodic voice with a strange accent, tight with rage and threaded sweetly with fear. Their shackles and chains rattled against the iron of their cage.
Using a small brush, Tristan lined his eyes with the black paste he’d made. “Can’t I?” He wondered lightly.
“I’m not an animal to be put on display and pawed at! I’m a person and-“
With a sharp ‘tch’, Tristan silenced his prisoner. “You’re right. You’re not an animal…you’re…bait,” he said with dry amusement.
The lights outside his tent came on, the calliope music trilling merrily. Tristan felt the light effervescence of a novel experience. He’d never owned a circus before. He closed his eyes, listening to the arriving crowd, the barking of carnival workers all mingling with the scent of cheap, fried street food, sugary treats and the yeasty stink of spilled beer in the summer heat.
“Yeah. So that’s it? I just rot in this cage to line your pockets?” His prisoner snarled at him, lips drawn over pointed teeth, golden eyes full of venom and hate.
Tristan ignored this and set a satin top hat on top of his head. He adjusted it in the mirror until it tilted jauntily and he didn’t look like himself. “I’ve no need for coin,” he said, satisfied with his guise, he turned back to the creature in the cage. “I’m merely interested in who comes to gawp at you. Just a test of an old folk tale.”
“Mister Black, if I’m going to be your pet, I’d be better out of the cage,” the creature suggested, his tone velvet, the snarl attractive instead of intimidating.
Tristan swept his flinty gaze over the creature’s pale gray skin, his silver hair, wildly curly and long. The big, golden eyes, slitted pupils like a cat’s. A pretty thing from a dream. A living breather trinket of his father’s magic.
He laughed edged in incredulity. It would be intimacy with his father’s dream? No. The thought was foul even if the creature was beguiling.
“If someone offers their bed, *creature*, as bargain instead of hunger for me, I’m not particularly interested,” he lied. He had no issue exchanging coin and circumstance favorable to him for sex. Wanting him was always ulterior motive and any advantageous, enterprising mortal would be a fool not to take advantage of.
Tristan wasn’t sure why this figment of the imagination’s desire or lack there of was any concern or why his pride stung. Perhaps it was that it was the only piece of his father that was touchable. Evidence that even in his prison and exile, he could still reach the physical world. It gave a bitter, sour false hope that he could speak to the father that abandoned him.
“You’re fair enough,” the creature snapped as if he had his pride stung too. “It’s not like I’d have to talk myself into it or be zozzled.”
Tristan felt charmed despite himself. He sighed, brow raised. “I’ll consider it. After tonight. I want to see who’s interested in you. If there are others like you. What happens when a dream is made flesh and seen by mortal eyes in the waking world.”
There were tales in every land across any shore about carnivals and fairs and circuses displaying the bizarre and rare for coin. Tristan had always searched for anomalies like himself but only found mortals with birth conditions and various mutations. Just normal people under the iron grip of fear of the other.
Mortals had it right to fear the other among them. But he looked just like them, the best of them. Ignorance and fear ruled them and they would never suspect him at all.
#
Tristan didn’t usually keep his promises. The world made a devil of him thousands of years ago but he was no adversary. He was no demon bound to oath or spell. He let the mortals bargain because it settled their violent natures with focus. And because it was funny how indignant they got when he refused to honor his end.
But he was plagued with curiosity and had the creature Brudirach freed from his cage (though not his chains) and brought to his tent long after all the patrons had gone home. He didn’t desire him as he thought he might earlier. At least not in his bed no matter how…interesting he looked chained and at his mercy. No, he wanted his company. He had little interest in self delusion and could admit he wanted to speak to a creature made of his father’s dream.
Tristan gestured for Brudirach to make himself comfortable on the silk cushions. “Are you thinking of strangling me with your chains? Is that why you tremble? With desire for my death and your freedom?”
Brudirach scoffed and sank his long, lanky frame into the cushions. “Maybe I was,” he said, a little cheeky, a little snide.
“Wise to think better of it,” Tristan said. “It would have gone poorly.” He poured them both a glass of wine. Watched the creature drink and marveled at creation he wasn’t capable of. Entropy could not manifest. Only erode.
He smiled at Brudirach who violently sneezed. Perhaps the incense agitated him. He simply sat and enjoyed the creature’s presence for a time. He blamed a strange, heavy sleepiness on the wine.
“Do you pray to a god, Brudirach?” He asked, amused at his own question, feeling far too drunk from one glass of wine.
“No. I talk to the stars. That’s where we come from,” he said with darling certainty. The wine hadn’t seemed to affect him as much as it had Tristan.
Tristan arched a brow, eyelids heavy. “I know the name of your god,” he said with a cruel laugh, head lolling back on the cushions. His fingertips tingled unpleasantly. His chest began to ache. “But I won’t tell you, you little shit,” he hissed. “You’ve poisoned me,” he choked out.
Brudirach stood, looking down as Tristan writhed in agony, frothy saliva ringing his open mouth. “Not me,” he said with a crooked grin. “But a consolation; your little test worked. Good people found me. Freaks like me. Freaks like you. Too bad…”
Tristan felt his body fail him, limbs like burning lead. His breath wheezed wetly out of lungs filling with blood. He knew this poison. He’d had it before. Podostroma cornu-damae. Poison coral mushroom. Usually, it took days to die from absorbing it through the skin…but he had only moments, fading eyes watching Brudirach flee.
Tristan Black loved the stars before he knew they could die. He would lay back in the cool grass on summer evenings and gaze up at them, feeling small and insignificant. This humility was relief. They are like me, he thought, shining in the dark, all alone. Perhaps he had brothers and sisters worlds away, looking at the same stars and wondering about him. This was a different kind of lonely ache. It held hope along with longing, dangerous things for him to feel.
In his five thousandth year, laying in the grass, listening to the night wind hiss through the trees, he discovered the sky was wrong. A bright star called Adhara was gone from the sky. In her bright place was a hazy smear.
He sat up, heart racing with a cold, sick sinking feeling in his guts. So this was the legacy of all things, even the stars, to die? Would he witness the very last one blink out of existence leaving him in the cold, vast forever?
Tristan had convinced himself that after all these ages, he had mastered his emotions. He hadn’t shed a tear in a thousand years and now, he found himself hunched over on his knees, sobbing, snot and spittle on his face, his chest on fire with tight horror and grief.
Adhara, his beautiful star, the star that had been shining since his lonely birth, abandoned him at last. Immortality was a long road of grief and if one waited long enough, unmoving, the road changed until it was unrecognizable…but the direction never changed. Forward. Forever leaving loves and enemies behind. Forward with no destination.
He felt the air warm, night blooming flowers a thick perfume that drove away the salt scent of his tears. Light filled the glade, soft and silvery, making him raise his face from his hands.
There, standing before him, was a unicorn, slender as any cervine, coat white and shimmering. In all his long existence, he had never seen one. They only appeared to the innocent and pure of heart. He’d been monstrous since birth. He didn’t belong here and this wasn’t for him.
His ego could not stand in the face of divine beauty born of the magic of the world he so loved. He stayed on his knees, weeping because he couldn’t avert his gaze though he felt he should.
“Get away from me,” he begged. “Please…I am foul and I ruin everything I touch. I’m no innocent.”
But the unicorn only lowered her proud head and nudged him with her muzzle. You are innocent for what you are, came her soft voice inside his head.
His brow twisted in desperation and confusion. “What am I? Please…tell me there are others like me.”
The unicorn chuffed and began to graze in the glade as the moonlight broke through the canopy of trees. There is nothing like you because you carry the power of nothing. You don’t belong in the world.
Tristan felt the black tide of rage sweep over him, drown and suffocate him and the thread of reason in his mind. He stood, fists clenched. “No! You lie, creature!” He snarled like a fox with its leg in a trap.
I cannot lie. You do not belong but that does not mean you are unimportant. You will give me a name. The unicorn paused her grazing to look at him with dark, mysterious eyes.
Trembling, the anger drained out of him at such an honor. Perhaps she felt kinship with him, another immortal. She felt ancient in his mind, her magic wild and of the earth. She was the Old Magic that had been fading from the world.
“I will name you,” he said softly. A little, sad smile curled his lips. “Adhara.” He reached out to touch the unicorn’s neck.
The light of her was snuffed the moment he spoke the name. Without word or explanation, just relieved sigh as she crumpled to the ground and began to dissolve like mist hit by sunlight. He screamed in horror, on his knees again, begging.
“I’m sorry! Please! I didn’t know…please don’t…please,” he ended his pleading with a thin whimper.
He kept the unicorn’s horn. It became his secret treasure, never to be used in spells, with him wherever he ended up. It was subtle, his love of the mythical creature he had only seen once, when he was still innocent…for what he was. Little porcelain figurines hid between thick tiles on shelves. A fountain on a balcony with a marble unicorn resting through the spray of water. Brass statues in his library. Carved into his headboard, looking down at Nesnora’s sleeping face.
He felt strongly then, gazing at the two, beautiful countenances that had pierced his heart, that he didn’t belong. But how could he stay away when everything in him needed these lights. Ached and bled for them. More than death, he wanted them.
Wanted her.
He’d promised Nesnora he would never apologize to her. There could be no forgiveness for all he had done. For the first time he wished he could go back and do it differently.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her as she drifted in dreams, not hearing him.
To her he gave the only material treasure that had ever meant anything to him. On the pillow beside her beautiful, sleeping head he laid Adhara’s spiral, golden horn. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I hope this is goodbye. And if it is…don’t mourn me.”
He left in the dead of night, his magic taking him to the Shadowglade estate crawling with undead. He made his way unmolested to the dying iron tree.
Tristan kneeled in the poisoned soil and gazed up at her black branches. “I do not belong, mother. No good deed made you answer and so no evil deed has either.” He paused. He didn’t expect to hear her voice. But he still hoped. Still gave her the silence in between beats of his broken heart.
“I can’t exist. There is no place for me. I can’t…even love properly,” he said with shame, tears sliding down his cheeks. “But you can fix it. You can wipe the world clean of me.”
He took in a breath, afraid but resolute. “Name me?”he asked in the pleading voice of a child.
He returned before Nesnora and his….guests woke. Tristan never spoke of how even now, his mother refused to name him.
This writing is so beautiful. You don't even need to know the whole story, just read this. Stunning, brava, brava, Ottimo lavoro, donna brillante, brava...
I'm working on a larger writing project with @lillandyrshadowglade so I won't be participating myself in the daily writing challenge but as we write I am in awe of what she has created that only my eyes have seen (so far). Lily is an incredible writer and she truly understands the characters in ways that feel like magic. Or maybe she's the magic. Either way, I'm sharing a snippet of something she just wrote because it's sentences like these that really keep me hooked. This is describing a scene with Aronsen and Seralah:
"When he slid his teeth from her throat without tasting, she cradled his face, mesmerized by the crimson and gold in his eyes. The moonlight glowed on his pale skin made him look as if he was a creature this place had made, sacred, gentle death who wept for the blossoms he plucked."
TW: graphic description of remains, desecration of remains, murder, emasculation, violence, blood, implied self gratification, mind control
Tristan stood at the mouth of the cave under anemic moonlight, eyes flat like smooth, black river stones. He had not come here to stop an evil man, though it would be easy and inevitable as breathing to do so. Vividly, he fantasized about pulling this man apart by all the invisible particles that comprised him. He would erase him from the golden spiral lattice of existence until not a soul remembered him. Until he never, ever was.
But future prophecy compelled Tristan to endure the disgraceful company of this haunted meat.
The rotten, syrup sweet stench of decay fouled the spring evening breeze. He heard Rhuen’s gasping and grunting, animalistic in the dark mouth of the cave made humid by the off gasping of corpses. The flutter of something dark snagged his gaze and attention. It was a clump of long, dark hair, frayed by wind and exposure. Unbidden, he tormented himself with the memory of Nesnora’s inky strands flowing through his fingers.
Disgust and fury propelled him farther into the cave, to stand before the shrine of an evil man’s depravity. Tristan removed the sound of his steps from the air so the kick would be more of a surprise.
When his boot connected with Rhuen’s ribs, it was as lovely and gratifying as he’d imagined it would be. The reddened face, dissolving from aberrant pleasure into agony. The strangled, cowardly yelp and whine. The woosh and hiss of breath. The dry twig snap of bone. His lips curled into a slow, self indulgent smile.
“You’re getting sloppy again. Shitting where you eat. I could smell your little…din nearly a mile away.” Tristan canted his head, looking at Rhuen’s shiver and cry, rolling on the floor of the cave struggling to pull up his trousers. Amusing of him to think he had any dignity to preserve.
“Ooh,” he said flatly, “I understand. A moment of clarity and in rolls the guilt you’ve no right to.” He slid his gaze to the side to rest on the body of a woman, skin now a sickly green, delicate features warped and bloated from decomposition. Most of her dark hair had been shed but one of her eyes was less closed than the other and a brilliant blue.
To destroy beauty without purpose was so intolerable that he viciously kicked Rhuen over and over, spittle on his chin, black hair wild. Until the man squeaked like a dying pig.
Tristan’s chest heaved as he smoothed back his mussed hair. “You will clean this mess properly,” he commanded.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rhuen wheezed. “I don’t have anything left.”
“No. You don’t. The Dracones took all the things you coveted. Do you know why?” He smiled. “They are better men than you. Stronger. More clever…better looking.” He reached down and snatched up Rhuen’s discarded shirt and cleaned the bloodied tip of his boot as though he’d stepped in something unpleasant. “Of course beautiful Arinsen Dracone stole your young wife away.” He hmm’d. “She fucked him on your wedding night…in your house. And what is it you do? Destroy these women. Does it make you feel like the big man? Or is it the only thing that makes your pathetic cock hard these days?”
He tch’d at him sharply when Rhuen tried to blubber excuses, scolded him like a dog that had messed on the carpet.
“Speak to me again and I’ll remove your tongue.” He heaved a sigh. “When I kill you, and I will, in the same way you tortured them,” Tristan said, making a sweepy gesture, encompassing the all the snuffed lives in the cave, “it will be my parting gift to the world. Existence with you removed from it.” His smile was thin.
“You will give the bodies of these women to the sea. Tonight.”
He gave the dead woman a lingering look before he left and tried not to think of her.
Her light touches became barely felt with the sting of her teeth. The sharp pain, the deep burn of punctured muscle was supposed to be the warning. Completely enthralled, all he could do was whimper. Dimly, Tristan knew he shouldn’t love the creature doing this to him, but she’d done something to his mind, warped it, made him feel beautiful, horrible things. Even as she killed him, over and over. Let the lesser vampires feed on him.
As they did now that she had her fill. They descended on him like rats. Razor teeth sank with bestial roughness into his belly, throat, his thighs, and his arms. He felt no compelled worship of these creatures. Only boiling, black hate. He knew they would do this until dawn, until the sun’s merciful light brought on the torpor that stilled them in nightmare sleep.
Tristan could have ended the entire den of them easily…but that would have displeased Bejhor. These were her children, the mortals she had sired with sips of her wicked blood. And he could not, for reasons that eluded him, bear to displease her.
They killed him three times that night. Painfully. It humiliated him, to be dressed in silks, his eyes painted, laid on a bed of flowers and caressed like a lover and fucked when moments later he was simply cattle. The temple prostitutes had made the sharing of flesh sweet and holy. This was foul and profane.
Naked and chained, body fresh and filled with vitality like the day he was born, Tristan could only feel the sun rise. Deep underground, he couldn’t see it. He felt like life, part of the great golden lattice of creation. And life felt like death to him, unattainable. He had been set to the side of both. He was some thing of the middle path that was the road to nowhere.
“I am a long hallway without doors,” he whispered in the warm, humid dark of the cave. “I will never end.” Tears slid down his face. “And the gods cannot hear me.” Just like his mother.
And mother is god in the eyes of the child.
Was this the cost of love? All of his pride?
He lay and waited for his torment to resume as he had every night for three years. He had been brought to Bejhor from the temple in kindred friendship. Until they spoke of a great hunt. How they would run down the beautiful girls who had given themselves to the god of love.
It was then he’d give over himself to his new friends…a bargain to spare the temple prostitutes. He could suffer to save them. Because no god they prayed to would. He could be their savior in the dark and feel the pain for them. Because he was a monster. And they were sweet things.
When night fell, Bejhor came to him, pale and golden haired with eyes the color of the verdant hills where he was born. She stroked him until he was writhing and gasping, trembling.
“I will spare you tonight. You will rest and have only pleasure, my little lamb,” she whispered. “I will take my children to drink from the maidens at the temple.”
And he offered no protest because he…loved her. She had made him love her. And now she betrayed him because she was a vile, wicked thing. To love her was to know the truth of her. Not the porcelain skin and delicate beauty. That was the mask of the Beast.
To love her would be to end her because her existence was foul and in death she would find peace from the horror of what she was.
This was how he broke his chains and crept after them in the dark as they began their hunt.
He almost lost his way but evil always called to him, black pits in the golden lattice, he could see them, the rot of them. And so he felt along the cave walls ascending into air perfumed with incense, to music broken by screams.
The vampires had gathered the girls cruelly, taunting them. It was no hunt. It would only be a slaughter.
“Don’t weep or fear. Your god doesn’t answer, but I do. You showed me kindness and for that I bled for you. These fiends did not keep their bargain…but I’ll keep it for them.” He said this to the women, his voice soft as he took the vampires apart, dissolving them into red mist…and the mist into *nothing*.
The women were grateful and wept at his feet and offered their service and souls…to him. With a soft, strange smile, he lay his hands atop their heads. “I am no god. But you have prayed to me. The truth is that there are no gods to answer your prayers. So I will answer them.”
He let them lead him up the stairs of the temple to the great throne, a seat reserved for a good who wasn’t there.
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It was in his three thousandth year that Tristan simply wandered without purpose. When grief smothered into despondency and blood soaked vengeance gave no pleasure, he found he couldn’t bear to be alone but simultaneously did not want mortal company. The thought of having to speak to the same creatures that hunted and killed *her* was something beyond repugnance.
Tristan wanted something like him. Something eternal and weary. So, he went to the cities and their temples. Some were merely crude effigies of rough hewn stone, no walls to encircle their divinity. He sat under these statues, wide, black eyes unblinking. He would do this for days until thirst and exhaustion gave him visions.
“Please,” he breathed, watching the statue warp and change, placid stone face a terrifying grimace. “I want no riches. I don’t beg for love or power. Just your voice. Just speak to me and I’ll lay whatever tribute that pleases you at your feet.”
But the visions were only products of his fevered mind and could tell him nothing.
So, he went to gilded marble temples, clothed like a pilgrim. He watched all forms of worship. Desperate prayer and bloody sacrifice that turned his stomach. He watched mortals flail themselves until the flesh hung in strips off their backs.
He heard them raise their voices with such sublime beauty that he wept and this is when he knew. The moment their song made him weep in regret for ever taking a life, even in righteous fury, he knew.
There were no gods. Or worse, they did not care. The watchmaker had finished his great work and left it, abandoned it, not even bothering with the winding.
Tristan wept into trembling hands. There was no one. No being, no higher power. Maybe the gods answered mortals in their souls in a way they could feel. But they didn’t and wouldn’t answer him.
A soft hand, delicate and fleeting, touched his shoulder. He dropped his hands to look into the face of a soft, mortal woman, eyes soft with emotion he saw so infrequently.
Empathy.
“Why do you weep, pilgrim?” She asked him so sweetly.
He shook his head. “There’s nothing…no one…no gods.”
The woman, gentle and beautiful, cupped his wet cheek. “I can restore your faith, pilgrim,” she murmured. “The path to the god of love…I will show you and you will believe again ,” she whispered as she took his hand and took him away, behind silk curtains into a room carved out of the stone, thick with incense.
He told himself he should be revolted. This was a betrayal of his dead mate. But when she pushed him down onto the silk cushions and bared herself to him, his mind and body responded with ravenous hunger, hands sinking into soft, feminine flesh…and he trembled.
He didn’t find god between her legs, but it was close enough that he thought to try several times. When spent and she slept next to him, he studied her. The spilling her pale hair, the sweetness of her face. Would she rest calmly next to him if she knew what he was? Or would she go cold, scheming to make his curse her own? Or would she recoil in disgust….fear?
In the morning she told him he was beautiful and he wanted to confess he was monstrous but she was gentle with him and he fell into her arms and wept and moaned and had her again. She told him he was blessed and said he should be as she was, a sacred vessel for fertility and love and that this would open doors unseen. If he offered his flesh to the pilgrims, it would be a path to this god’s…heart and he would speak to him. He’d never be alone again.
She dressed him in fine silk and dyed his eyes and put flowers in his hair and for a little while, he could almost pretend he was one of them. In the hot, slick slide of flesh, the warm, humid breath and pleasure, he could just be a man.
And it was a man who wanted his blessing, to find the path to the divine through his flesh. Pale and beautiful, the man had skin like marble, cold and unyielding. His eyes were wrong but Tristan found he couldn’t stop looking into the red haze of them, how they glittered like spilled blood in the moonlight, how warm and inviting they seemed, how they made him limp and dizzy as if he’d smoked fine opium.
When teeth, sharp as daggers, slid into his throat, Tristan felt no pain or fear. “Yes…take it all,” he whispered to the beautiful monster bleeding him.
Tristan laughed like a drunkard, sinking his hands into the man’s dark hair, aroused by something like him, something that teased oblivion in a new way. For a moment, as he lay on silk cushions, vision dark at the corners, lips parted as the monster stroked his hair, his chest. He smiled as he died, hope bright and brief as the light left his eyes.
And when he gasped, returned again, as always, he looked up at the monster and grinned. “Again,” he whispered.
Lillandyr sprinkled the sadarac powder over the deep, purple ink. The scent of clove tickled her nose, but she found it warm and pleasant. It hid the ammonia the lichen had fermented in and prevented mold. Her lips curled into a little, girlish smile as she tied a black ribbon around the ink bottle. It was a clever gift.
Once the ink was dry, she swept a mink brush over it to free it of the powder and rolled up the parchment. This she tied with a black ribbon too. Lillandyr spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready.
Arriving at the Lucky Mermaid, she knew she’d be overdressed. It was the first time she’d asked Heathcliff to show up somewhere instead of their happenstance meetings. She’d lied and said there was a poker tournament and she needed a partner. Poker was a solo game so it wasn’t even a good lie, but he’d readily accepted.
Lillandyr had spent what little she had on renting the whole lounge for the night and for a band that was admittedly not very good, to play. She’d stayed after closing the night before to decorate. Purple streamers and balloons. She knew it was silly but she couldn’t keep from indulging her childhood, unfulfilled wish of having a birthday party.
The cake was small. Three layers, drenched in buttercream with purple rosebuds and Chantelle cream filling. Lillandyr completed all of this by nestling a ridiculous, metallic silver party hat in her pinned up hair. Her dress matched the decor, purple satin, short, tight, and showing plenty of cleavage.
The look on Heathcliff’s face was worth all the trouble. At first, he looked puzzled at the empty state of the popular lounge. Then he found her, sitting towards the back, grimacing with amusement at the party hat.
“Happy birthday,” she said airily. “Since you were a cunt and wouldn’t tell me when your birthday is, I decided it was today. Sit down and if you complain…I’ll cry,” she threatened nastily.
Any protest or complaint died immediately. His features softened into an expression she’d never seen, soft and vulnerable, pleased and a little sad.
“Presents, then cake,” she said over the din of poorly played jazz.
Lillandyr took the bottle of ink from her purse and slid it smugly over the table. “Ink made from Ochrolechia tartarea. That lichen you showed me on the rocks a couple months ago. I figured out how to make it.”
He looked genuinely delighted. “You rolled your eyes so much I didn’t think you were paying attention.”
She scoffed. “I’m always paying attention, you ass. It’s just…you are being so…nerdy.” The sting of her words was smothered by the affection and warmth in her eyes and her ornery little grin.
Before he could go on about it and embarrass her, she slid the rolled parchment over the table and watched as he read the poem.
You are a thousand things
It hurts to want
Things I’ll never know
Like how your eyes look
First thing in the morning
Which side of the bed
You’d claim if I was there
The little sounds you’d make
While deeply asleep
A more easy silence
Not tight with tension,
That can never be broken,
Would settle warmly
Over our morning coffee
I’ll never sleep on your couch
In a fit of petty anger
I’ll never hold when you cry
Or wear your slippers
Even though I know
You’d hate it if I did
In this way
I mourn a thousand tragedies
Of all the little things I want
But know I’ll never have
Watching his face…Lillandyr realized she’d fucked up. The ache in her heart was mirrored in his expression. And he looked as though he was gearing up to let her down easy but she’d already, clearly accepted and admitted defeat. The humiliation couldn’t stand.
“It’s one of my favorite poets,” she blurted. “Thought you would…enjoy her work.” The lie came too fast. It had loose ends. She scrambled to add legitimacy. “Private, unpublished piece so it’s rare. Part of my collection. Copied it in the ink so you can see how pretty it is.” Her face was hot.
There was this odd moment of disappointment, but then he had the twinkle of discovery in his eyes. “I enjoyed that. I’d love to see her other work. Who’s the poet?” He asked with real interest.
Fuck.
Her mind furiously tried out names in seconds as sweat gathered at her lower back. A…for Anya. Then S for Silverbough. She couldn’t resist putting part of herself in there. And at last Mira, after the woman she wished she was more like.
“Asmira,” she said with a smile filled with both relief and the sting of her own lie.
