Private Feed my Chaos

[Eriobea]

L O C A T I O N | Temple of the Silmä
T A G | Baen Zavaleta
​

Someone was in the foyer.

Bea set her misshapen jaw, sliding the lower mandible across the upper into another maloccluded alignment. It wasn't just nerves, but then again maybe it was. Bea hadn't actually had blood on her tongue since Nimue had changed her into them. One of the Silmä. That had been some time ago. She had been fasting since, but right now, right here, the moment she wandered past that ionic façade, it felt like she had been force fed, like the air in the cavity that was her mouth had suddenly condensated into molten iron to coat the crowns of her teeth as well as every taste bud. It seared into the skin, sinking down layer by layer slowly to the lethargic beat of a heart. The vampiric insanity must be setting in, she thought.

A heart.

Bea was already forgetting what it was like to have one of those. Maybe because she still looked like the broken-bodied human she had been she was even more curious as to how a living being had found its way into the Temple.

Quite unfortunate indeed.

She drew to the foyer's great doors, both left open and propped by unseen magics. Orange red firelight flickered among the shadows coming from within. But who was there?

 

[Baen Zavaleta]

Eriobea

Baen believes that the time will soon come to move on.

This is not idle faith. It is simple existence. You could not stay in the same spot for too long, because otherwise your existence will atrophy into nothingness. This is how Baen has survived all this time. Centuries pass over. Baen continued on. It was a measure of staying busy, of doing their best to stay curious... and to never stick around for too long.

From the scroll his and her and their eyes slide off towards the entrance to the foyer.

He breathes in.

Heart goes thump.

And then minutes of nothing as slow hot blood runs through veins. More magma than lava. The circulation takes time as it heats up every extremity as a by-product of his long lineage.

A quarter Maelibus.

Isn't that scary?

"A predator does not slinks in the shadows past the element of surprise." They say with colored amusement, before returning eyes backward to the scroll in question. This is a feint. There is nothing else that has Baen's attention more than Eriobea. He but also she can sense her. So close that they feel they can taste her.

Cold and that means this is not food.

Disappointment follows, but Baen does not let it linger too long.

He was never one to stay with disappointment long.

"Will you enter and join Baen at the fire? You can hunt us, if you wish. But we will hunt in return." A simple warning. This will suffice.

 

[Eriobea]

L O C A T I O N | Temple of the Silmä
T A G | Baen Zavaleta
​

A scoff was the first reply Baen got.

Then:

"I'm not huntin' nuthin'."

Bea stepped into the foyer's threshold.

"Least of all you." Those words in a vacuum might have been understood as a biting insult, but this one said them with no such intonation. Instead, the implication was a submissive statement--she couldn't hope to hunt one such as them.

Still, the fledgling vampirika shuffled her way into the room, pulling nervously on her left-hand sleeve made shorter by the diagonal of her shoulders.

 

[Baen Zavaleta]

Eriobea

Baen did not register it as an insult.

Simple.

He does not consider it likely that anyone can miss their glory. Baen thinks she is beautiful, and brilliant, and sharp, and... you get the drift. The very possibility that someone might look down on them did not compute at all. Instead Baen takes it as a simple stated fact. She is not hunting nuthin' and the least of which was them.

A strange sentence, but context assists.

"And what is-" Amber eyes cast back and brows quirk up. The sight followed next is unexpected. She is broken. Clear as day. But the pity is packed up tight and hidden deep within, because this will not help Bea to become stronger.

"-the little fledgling doing here then? Does she want to warm herself in the presence of Baen? Does she want see her glory?" And when Baen says 'her' they indicate their own self to remove any confusion in the word choice. Yes, he refers to himself in third person and yes he, but also she, and also they, refer to one another in every shade possible.

This was true liberty.

 

[Eriobea]

L O C A T I O N | Temple of the Silmä
T A G | Baen Zavaleta
​

"She was taking a walk," replied Bea, stopping a few meters shy of Baen and still wringing the hem of her sleeve. "And then she heard a...a beat, so she followed the sound." She finally glanced up at them. The shade of her violet eyes seemed almost pastel, shy and soft. She didn't belong here, but she didn't belong at the Nirnroot Collective on Saleucami picking jester root either.

Fledgling or not, what a waste of space.

Her next words illuminated her answers to both of Baen's last questions:

". . . Does she want to warm herself in the presence of Baen? Does she want see her glory?"

Yes and yes.

"How did you get to keep your heart?"

There was a quiet sort of hunger in those words too. Not for blood, no, but for a semblance of humanity lost.

Then Bea grasped over her chest as she realized something. Technically, she had kept hers too. She just could no longer feel it. "Keep it working, I-I mean?"

 

[Baen Zavaleta]

Eriobea

A beat?

What beat could that be?

Baen wonders this for a brief moment, before their heart starts up again. Another heavy thunk that pulses through their chest. It immediately gets a response from Eriobea as well. A flicker of her lilic eyes to his chest and then back to her face. Baen smiles at this. Few people expect a beating heart when they know what she is.

A little trick.

Of genetics and birth.

"We were born like this." Baen declares with clear pride and pleasure. "A strong heart pulses in Baen's chest. Tick tonk, tick tonk. He is unique and she knows it."

Almost purring it like a prayer, because it is. Baen prays to their own altar. Daily, hourly, minutely. Every moment of existence. If a body can be a temple then to Baen theirs is a grand cathedral. He stretches. A show, showing off his lines. But also to relax languidly and relaxed. This place does not scare them at all.

Even as a guest.

They belong.

"You are new, aren't you? A fledgling. When were you turned, little one?"

 

[Eriobea]

L O C A T I O N | Temple of the Silmä
T A G | Baen Zavaleta​

"Yes. ... A year or so."

That would have been some time for a human, but now, as one of them, it was none at all. She hadn't gotten used to the coolness of her own skin, the quiet of her veins, the loosening of her canines for another round of teething.

"I haven't gone through a transformation like some of the others," she mused, smoothing down her jet black bob with one hand. The transformation, if Nimue was to be considered the template, would give long, white hair and blood red eyes.

Bea sighed to herself. She didn't particularly want that. It would make her look ever more like a hag way before her time.