Autumn’s parky, tonic kiss brayed across the bifrost and all it immured, a sanctum for its drabness. Here, like many, it wasn’t the most picturesque; alloy soot ossified the terracotta loams, where dye’s of antique brass, arylide suns and rich, artichoke greens rouged every nook, crook and cranny. It was almost imperious, yet pales of bistre and bone bled into its ribald undertones. Lebraid wasn’t here to play recreations, nor divulge in the idiocies of foolhardy simpletons; if she were to rise, conquest, there was simply no room for blunders, burdens or ruinations alike. It was all garbed by moral codes, of course. There was no reason to think she couldn’t prevail, and a harrowing, brusque growl thrummed from the cacodemon’s gut, spuming at the surface like a hot-boiled pot, daring to brim its ferity without a lick of mercy. Nevertheless, achromic orbs ogled the grove of dragon’s blood trees -- some, even, bled a cardinal resin -- it sapped from ribboned bark, almost as if they’d been bleating tears of blood.

Fitting, was it not?

Opaque threads of spit oozed from stygian jowls, jacket jostling a demeanour so unholy, so raw, it could’ve been mistaken for a hellhound in the abode of the dahmed.

There was truly no telling what she may or may not do, and the revulsion for conversations fell no shorter; siam and lemongrass hairs went ablaze, congregating domination, gallantry and a concoction of unpredictable, virulent intentions. A purl of glassy, cold-worn clouds balled past Lebraid’s lips, pirouetting without rhythm or rhyme as she stormed the drab chaparral, muscles tautening, skin itching -- fires within lay dormant, for now. Rather, her soul ached for retribution.

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Redrum lingered at the grove’s edge, his golden eyes unblinking as they devoured the odd beauty of the blood trees. The crimson resin oozing from their bark gleamed, like fresh wounds left open to fester. The grove was steeped in an unnatural stillness, the brittle grass snapping softly under his paws. The air was heavy, suffocating. Discomfort clung to him like a second skin—intimate, familiar, and entirely ignorable.

His body twitched as a tremor rippled through his frame like a shuddering breath he couldn’t quite control. It wasn’t fear—it never was—but something far more unusual. As he crouched, his movements remained slow, his shallow breaths stirring the dust beneath him. His nares flared briefly at the sensation, but his focus was elsewhere. On her. A stranger on the horizon.

She moved through the grove with a ferality, every step steepled with barely restrained violence. The low growl vibrating from her chest made the fur along his spine prickle, but not with fear. Instead a dark, twisted thrill coursed through him, a predator acknowledging a predator.

His gaze locked onto the glistening strands of saliva hanging from her jaws, and the thought struck him—rabid. She could be rabid. But then again, so could he. Hadn’t others recoiled from his twitching, his halting movements, the unnerving pauses in his speech? He couldn’t fault her if she embodied what he so often projected himself.

His claws flexed into the hardened soil, planting him as his muscles tensed and quivered, ready to react. She wasn’t prey—far from it. She was something else, something angry, something different. And Redrum felt the familiar churn of conflicting urges within him: to approach, to retreat, to do something he could neither name nor resist.

He began to move, his form slinking in a slow, distant semi-circle around her. His steps were soundless, calculated, though the sparse cover made his eventual discovery inevitable. He didn’t care. The act of circling her, of studying her every movement—the ripple of her muscles beneath her coat, the sharp glint of her eyes—consumed him. His breath hitched, shallow and steady, as though he feared that even the rhythm of his lungs might give him away. Not yet. Not yet.

His gaze remained unbroken, a predator’s intensity tempered by his own innate awkwardness. The whites of his eyes visible as he stared, and there was hunger there, cold and calculating, along with strange fascination. Her visage burned into his mind—a pale, green fire flickering just beyond his grasp.

As he prowled closer, his tail dragged low against the soil, ears pinned tightly to his head. He wasn’t here to confront her, not yet. No, he was here to watch, to feel, to dissect. And if she turned her fire toward him, he would be ready—not to flee, but to meet it head-on.

"Murder"

 

 

As if this flaxen, meteorite and tiger-orange moor fret no almsgiving in the wake of its sparse, june-bud foliages, it was the reek encroachment of something else that pervaded the cacodemon’s solidarity.

Pungent, earthy aroma’s, befouled with hints of stannic blood.

A boy, a child, their actions breaching silence; the graveyard’s foggy, lichen and mossbed jacket adorned that of a wraithlike, presage beast, breathing helheim and absolute ruination. She’d turn, calculative and slow, perhaps bowed to ogle —— rosso corsa starched in a blunge of rubies and oxide, severed by baja-white undergarments —— a stark desert met with carmine shores, achromic eyes bid to lock with their candlelight, poison-mottled gaze, nonchalant and eerily capricious. She did not appreciate the circus act, and nor will it be met with light benignity; skin jerking, nerves hungering, a ripple plunged along the woman’s spine like billows battering beneath a wild tempest, daring him to make a move. Red-hot, pluming snarls, both raw and cataclysmic with every breath that rumbled from those sopping jowls. There was no telling what she may or may not do, metallurgic thrums bespeaking from the very pits of her gut -- she truly feared none, and a glacial, callous temptation glossed over those deadpan, neutral nebula’s.

What, pray tell, did they expect to procure from all of this?

Because she, for one, was more than willing to prove that she, a hellion, no less a psychopath born and bred in purgatory, would not be taken for a prat, “What?” The single word would bark past slavered lips, blighted in grit and a low, eldritch nuance, beguiling, provoking. She couldn’t care less for who or what they were, really; Lebraid’s demeanour would only bleed a phlegmatic, yet volatile tendency, faltering none in keeping them within her sights.

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