[ kalon 1500 try-out ]

[iBrevity]

[ name ] kynolkos
[ nickname ] kyn
[ pronunciation ] kin-nol-coas
[ gender ] female
[ age ] ageless; looks 16
[ theme song ] medusa - gems

There's something in their past that they are running from.
What is it, and why are they afraid to face the consequences?
Is it something they would change if given the chance to go
back? How would they change it, and how would that affect
the future?

[ tryout for kalon 1500 ]


[ art credit ]
[ pixel tree F2U by Plush-Bean ]
[ circle pixels F2U by oculusness ]

[iBrevity]

Kynolkos is born in the sands of Mikena Bay long before the beaches bear a name. She is the second of two children--like her elder brother she is crowned with their father’s vibrant red hair and their mother’s coin-gold eyes. Unlike her brother she is small; she does not grow as he does, trips in the footprints he leaves behind in his marathon sprints across the dunes. She is scarcely to his chest when she should be nearer to his shoulder, and their parents fret but keep such worries to themselves. Surely she will grow soon; surely she is only a precariously small child, and will become a relievingly normal adult.

As is the wont of civilization, people follow Kynolkos’ family onto the beach once the fishing proves itself fruitful. A small village grows teeteringly at the edge of the sea; Kyn and her elder brother Idouma have agemates finally, though Kyn is relegated to the company of her younger peers and Idouma flees his friends often to see his sister. They remain close as the years wear on, even as Idouma grows tall and handsome and Kyn stays stubbornly small. She is as fine-boned as a child five years her junior, thin-fingered and delicately pretty. She wears her scarlet hair in a complicated mass of braids and knots, and threads beads through the ends. She gains a reputation for being soft spoken and charmingly shy, kind to people and animals alike and affectionate with her friends. It is here the troubles start, when Kyn is little more than fifteen--here where Boanerges catches sight of her, and begins to scheme.

Boanerges is one of Idouma’s newest friends, the only son of a widowed fisherman who has just recently joined their community. He’s lauded as being his father’s pride and joy; he’s cheerful and cunning and makes Kyn uncomfortable because he is always staring. She dislikes him the moment she is introduced to him, when he takes her hand in a firm grip and holds it for three breaths too long. She ducks away from her brother’s friendly shadow, feeling terrible about it but unwilling to put up with Boanerges even for the sake of Idouma. She figures Idouma will tire of him soon enough, or see through Boanerges’ poorly imagined amiability. No one can look him in the eye and believe he is genuine, Kyn is sure of it.

So she settles in for the long haul, hones the unflexed skill of avoiding her brother and tries never to catch Boanerges’ eye. She figures Idouma will shed himself of the other boy within a few months; but Boanerges persists, and though Idouma tries to corner Kyn to ask her what’s wrong she squirrels herself away. She spends long afternoons in the spindly trees that grow at the edges of the sand, combs patiently through the underbrush for rare herbs for if she’s been driven out of town she may as well make herself useful.

She is there one day in the middle of the summer, when the sun slides thin fingers of trickling warmth through the branches overhead and prompts her to stop and messily pin her hair up off her neck. She has a basket tucked into the crook of one arm, and it’s half-filled already, sprigs of emerald plants neatly laid in rows along the bottom. The copse of acacia trees that shields her from the brunt of the sun’s wrath has grown little over the last spring, and she tends to the strange scraggly trees with an affection that’s almost endearing.

She hears Boanerges only when he steps purposefully on a stick, the sharp crack of wood drawing her attention like a startled hare. Their eyes meet in the loamy light--Boanerges grins, and Kyn feels a thrill of fear shiver up her spine.

“Kynolkos,” he says, putting such emphasis on her full name that Kyn wants fiercely to never hear it again. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Idouma isn’t here,” she says weakly. “It’s just me.”

Boanerges’ grin widens. “I know,” he says lightly, stepping closer to her, the sunlight striping his face in alternating shadow and gold. “Now come here, Kyn.”

[iBrevity]

When Kyn stumbles out of the trees two hours later, her wrists tingle with the force of Boanerges’ grip and the pain at the back of her neck goads her faster. He’d carved his initials into her skin there, laughed while she’d squirmed and screamed.

“We have years now,” he’d told her conversationally, as one hand had steadied her chin and the other had wielded the blade. “And I’ve been waiting such a long time for this.”

He had not hurt her past that, though he had looked at her with a hunger that promised a limited patience. When he’d released her she’d jerked away from him, abandoning the half-full basket and sprinting unsteadily towards the roar of the sea. The back of her shirt is wet with blood, the fabric sticky with it; the air off the ocean wafts salt into the wound, and draws fresh tears to her eyes. She bites her lip and refuses to cry, hunches her shoulder as if to protect herself from her own meandering thoughts.

She will tell Idouma when she gets home, she thinks, and he will… He will what? Kyn has been avoiding him for months now, and he loves Boanerges with a fierceness she’d rarely seen for his friends. He will not believe her, if she tries now. She should have told him her suspicions from the beginning.

She has to seize her lip more fiercely in the grip of her teeth now to keep the tears back, and she slows her ungainly walking when she hits the sweeping plane of the beach. Boanerges will not follow her here; he has an unusual distaste for the sea, and always kept well back to the village’s farthermost buildings.

It is empty this time of day, the horizon speckled with the smudges of a few distant boats, so Kyn sinks to her knees in the sand and lets herself cry. She wishes briefly that she had not been born so small; that she had not been born human at all, but rather as something bigger, something scarier. She wishes she had the strength to intimidate Boanerges, to hurt him like he has hurt her.

“What are you thinking about, dear?”

Kyn jolts, whirls to face the unfamiliar voice and stays kneeling in her bewilderment. It is a lizard, perhaps, or maybe some similar beasty; bigger than any animals she has seen on the island, and coated with yellow scales that are nearly the same shade as her eyes. As she watches him he exhales, and a long, reptilian tongue comes flicking out.

“Who are you?” She whispers, her words choked in her throat. The lizard grins, and Kyn barely resists the useless urge to get up and run. She will not escape this monster; she has seen crocodiles of similar girth run before, hiking up the heft of their body and moving with more swiftness than she could have ever imagined. If he is built anything like they are, she will not outrun him.

“Do your parents speak of the old religions still?” He asks, his tone friendlier than the conversation warrants, his dark, glitzing eyes impossible to read.

Kyn swallows and nods, once. Idouma has always been more interested in the stories than her, but she is familiar enough with the tales. They are called the Old Gods, though her parents have never provided a satisfying answer to why they are called such--only that people have long suspected the gods retreated to a more mystical place, and left the mortal plane to folks like her. The Old Gods could not become convincingly human, and so maintained the form of other animals, birds being particularly favored. But she has never heard of a massive lizard.

“I can help you,” he says, tilting his broad head in obvious consideration. “I have heard what you’ve been wishing.”

Kyn startles and blushes. Everyone has always teased her for her size and frailty, a good-natured joke but a joke all the same. Kyn has been sore about it for years, but never angry, not until Boanerges. She rolls the idea of power around in her mouth and asks tentatively, “What would I need to do for you?”

He looks amused she’s asked, sweeps his bulbous tail to one side and affects something that might be a shrug. “Promise me a favor,” he suggests.

Kyn knows better than this. She has heard the stories the same as Idouma, and Old Gods are not to be trusted. They do not do things for free, out of goodwill or some other moral calling; they do things for mortals so mortals may do something for them. She dawdles, tries to work up the willpower to say no, and the Old God considers her and says softly, “I will help you kill Boanerges.”

“I promise you a favor,” she blurts, thrusting out her hand before she has even finished speaking. “I’ll do anything.”

The lizard grins. He moseys closer, noses at her palm when her fingers tremble. After a moment he presses the length of his face against her hand, and he breathes against her bare skin with a heat that races uncomfortably up her arm. There’s brief pinpricks of pain under the knotted mess of her hair, flares of biting heat all along the span of her arms and legs. She nearly pulls back, grits her teeth and squats lower in the sand to steady her wavering knees. When he finally steps away from her she is aware of tingling pain all around her, and the uncomfortable fullness of her mouth. She goes to speak and trips on the undulating tongue that presses along her teeth, an unusual vastness of it, the forked tip striking at the roof of her mouth.

“It happens,” he says, watching her struggle to form words with this abrupt addition. He has a similar tongue, though his is a different shade.

“What did you do to me?” She manages finally, the words squeezed past the mass of her tongue. When she stands she sways once, corrects herself with an outflung hand and nearly pushes herself back the other way. She is not used to the strength of her arms, the flexing of new muscle in her limbs. She looks down at her bare feet and sees they are both speckled with scales, erupted from her skin in flashes of teal. She scratches uncomfortably at the back of her neck and rather than meeting the wound Boanerges left her fingertips encounter feathers. She startles, and the Old God grins.

“Interesting,” he says, waddling closer. “Though sharing godhood with a mortal usually is.”

“Sharing godhood?” Kyn echoes. She unconsciously flexes her fingers and the ripple of power up into her shoulder makes her joints hurt.

The lizard performs another would-be shrug. “It is the easiest way to share our abilities.”

Kyn swallows. There’s a grin threatening at one corner of her mouth, and she tamps down on the ecstasy that’s making her stomach jump. She’s never felt like this before, so in-control, so big.

“Boanerges is home now,” the Old God says, drawing Kyn’s wandering attention. “You will have to wait.”

The grin pushes through then, shows teeth sharper than they’d been a moment ago. “I won’t have to do anything ever again,” she says delightfully, and she pats the Old God on the broad pan of his head without thought. She takes off into the acacia trees, her entrance now so startlingly different than her dejected exit less than an hour ago, and the Old God settles the bulk of his weight into the sand. He has not been so fortunate in such a time, and he contents himself with a rumbling laugh while he waits for her return.


[ old god design credited to discodips on DA ]

[iBrevity]

For as long as she can remember, Kynolkos has been good at one thing. She waits in the shadows that cling to the exterior of Boanerges’ house, rolls her ridiculous tongue along her teeth and pitches her voice low until it sits frog-like above her diaphragm.

She breathes out, half-closes her luminous eyes, and says in a perfect imitation of Boanerges’ dad’s voice, “Son? Can you come give me a hand?”

There’s a grumbled compliant from inside, and the hasty scraping of furniture. Boanerges appears in the doorway, scratching at his mussed hair. The sight of his hands draws the fresh scar at the back of her neck to tingling, and she creeps closer as he squints into the dark and yawns.

“Dad?” He asks aloud. “What’d you need?”

“Don’t worry,” she says as she grabs him, her voice her own again and her gold eyes sparking in the candlelight framing Boanerges in the open door. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

[iBrevity]

It’s Boanerges’ actual father who finds his body, and the same man who raises the alarm among the other villagers. He tells a compelling story of a monster who has ripped his son asunder, and everyone tuts and brings him fresh food and confides in among their spouses and children that the loss of his son has rattled something loose. There’s nothing that big on their island, nothing dangerous at all; Boanerges was no doubt killed by doing something foolish, and his body ravaged by the resident coyotes. No one looks to Kynolkos, of course. She is so small and fragile, her enormous eyes haunted by the wet shine of tears. She would never do something like this, never even dream it.

Kyn, for her part, gets used to the satisfaction of death. She wears her hair long, to cover the feathers that grow at the edge of her scalp and down the back of her neck, and if she smiles less it is only because she’s terribly sad over Boanerges, and not because she has the same wolfish teeth that destroyed his spine. She wears long pants and dresses religiously, to hide the smattering of scales on her calves and feet, and she meets the Old God at the beach every night and tells him of how it felt. How it feels, to be confident, to not be scared.

He waits nearly two months after Boanerges’ death before he suggests another. He has been patient and played it well; Kyn is midway through the story of another neighbouring boy who looks at her too long, who follows her into the acacia trees sometimes as though he expects to find her defenseless.

“Kill him,” the Old God says coolly, examining his nails as though her response matters little. Her voice peters out as she frowns and twists the idea in her head, and he glances up at her and says, “There are other girls here, Kyn. Does he look at them?”

It takes little more to goad her. Kynolkos kills this boy the same way she killed Boanerges, and the Old God need only ask for a bit of the body to himself for Kyn to agree to a meal. She doesn’t consider it that she’s feeding the God; she thinks instead of the other little girls who may not need to grow up afraid now, who will never know the heavy weight of unwanted stares.

[iBrevity]

Life goes on. Kyn provides a few more bodies to the Old God, but their village is small and the population of boys deserving a gruesome death smaller yet. When she’s run out of boys she’s willing to feed him, she tells the Old God no.

“There’s no more,” she says one evening, her scaled feet buried in the fading warmth of the sand. “You’ll have to hunt like everyone else.”

The Old God rolls his eye to see her. “You are my hunting dog, Kynolkos,” he says reasonably, and when she starts and stares at him he grins. “You hadn’t figured that out, dear?”

Kyn realizes quickly that she can’t actually say no to him. Going against what the Old God says, even if it is delivered in that same honey-soft tone, hurts her. It’s a pain like disagreeing with a sibling, like saying something unforgivable to someone you love. She can’t tell him no and mean it, and he sends her out to hunt people who don’t deserve it, people who have never looked at her with anything beyond compassion.

It makes her sick now, waking up to the scratch of her scaled legs, the hissing whisper of the feathers in her hair. She trails around the house like a ghost, roused to conversation only barely by Idouma. If he knew what she was doing at night, when no one thought to suspect her… She spends more time down at the beaches, for it starts to hurt her just being apart from the Old God. The ache of him is a constant agony in her bones, in the fine joints of her fingers and toes. She is owned by him just the same as she might have been by Boanerges, and the realization frightens her.

As the weeks wear on, Kyn waits for the Old God to feed and then asks him politely curious questions. She mediates her voice so she sounds merely bored and the God, lulled into a stupor by a big meal, answers without preamble. She learns of the plane where the Gods live, how this one can move between these places, how he gave her some of his own godhood when he gave her power.

“We belong to one another,” he mutters sleepily one night, and the idea rankles her but also sets her to thinking. If she has a part of a god in her, does she have power over him?

It takes her some time to work up the courage to try. She dreads upsetting the Old God, even at the cost of her continued murders. It is only the night he sends her out for a little girl that she musters up the strength to face him and say through gritted teeth, “No.”

“No?” He echoes, genuinely confused by the refusal. “I’m hungry, Kynolkos.”

“We all are, Stamatios,” she says, and he flinches from her, the sound of his true name enough to put an edge to his fear. She should not know that; a God’s true name is power, and she knows that as well as he does.

She reaches for him and he moves to scuttle back, but her providing for him has made the God fat and content, and he moves slowly even now. She closes her hand around his jaw, cinches her fingers so he can’t speak, and says in a low voice, “Give me the rest of it, Stamatios.”

He shakes his head, a ripple of fear finally in the pits of his eyes, and she squeezes harder. She chants the words he murmured to her one night, the prayer to transfer all of a God’s power into a mortal, the willing sacrifice of a God for a fleeting life. She thinks of nothing beyond being free of him; she holds tight and speaks the words with a clarity that sets her bones to shaking, and when she finishes with a dark, “Begone, Stamatios,” the Old God vanishes in a vacuum of freezing cold air.

Abruptly unsupported, Kyn falls forward into the sand and then the true pain begins. It sets her on fire, urges her skin to crawling; she is only distantly aware of the weight of her hair falling around her shoulders, the mass of the red locks drifting lightly to the sand. Red-orange feathers sprout over her bare head, frill up to frame her face and spill down the length of her neck. There’s a pain in her eyes that draws tears down her cheeks, and she will only realize later that it’s her eye whites bleeding scarlet. She is now too consumed with the agony of her legs to think on it, of the jerking of the bones and muscles there as her legs reshape themselves. Scales press out from under her flesh, leaving slivers of teal that glitter against her dark skin. Her body in its entirety pulses with the pain of this transformation, with forcing godhood into a mortal body.

Her addled thoughts remind her of a story her mother told her once--of a young woman who became a god, and how her body had to change to bear it. Kyn’s mother had said, “The God’s power split open her mortality,” and Kyn had never understood that line, not until she alone lay writhing in the sand.

[iBrevity]

It seems hours later that the pain becomes bearable enough for her to crawl onto her hands and knees. The distant horizon is now pink with dawn and she can hear the scuttling of people in the village climbing out of bed, making breakfast. Her senses are so enlightened that the noise of it is nearly unbearable, and a headache beats at the backs of her eyes.

It takes over an hour for her to get home. For once she is grateful that her family lives on the outermost edge of the village; there is no one to see her now, not at this hour, not when the majority of the people here no longer go anywhere alone and travel en masse down to the docks.

She expects her house to be empty, for her parents and brother to be on their boat already, but as she nudges open the front door with an inexplicably sore shoulder she sees Idouma at the table. She has not spent much time with him lately--Kyn is afraid that should he take a good long look at her he will see what she has done, what she has become, and now that she comes limping into their home with her hair replaced by feathers and her eyes startlingly reptilian she knows she has no choice.

She stops in the doorway, sags against the frame as Idouma stares. He has become thinner over these past few months, she realizes suddenly, grief from Boanerges maybe, grief from everyone else she has killed and the Old God has consumed.

“...Kyn?” He says tentatively, like he expects her to be someone else, and the pain of it, the hesitation in his voice, drives her halfway to tears. She rubs at her agonized eyes and fights back any noise, shakes her head once when Idouma carefully stands.

“What happened to you?” He asks faintly, and she remembers when she asked the same to the God, when he’d first given her a bit of his power. It has been over a year now, that she’s been doing this; four months of willing murders and another six of ones ordered.

“I’m not myself,” she says finally, looking up solely to see Idouma startle at the edge in her eyes. “Where’s Ma and Pa?”

“Out,” he says vaguely, and he takes a few steps closer to her, creeping as though he’s approaching a skittish animal.

Kyn doesn’t move. She’s tired of running, tired of hiding, tired. “They can’t see me like this.”

Idouma nods, and then holds out his hand. Kyn blinks at it, takes his hand as gently as she can in the grip of her nails and lets him lead her to the back room.

“We’ll fix this,” he says, and there’s a confidence there that Kyn has sorely missed. He squeezes her hand a little, guides her to sit on the edge of her bed and then takes a critical eye to her feathers. “If we can figure out something for you to wear…”

He disappears into his own room, presumably to pillage his wardrobe, and Kyn takes the silent second to look at her feet. They are unmistakably inhuman now--her toes have been condensed to three, though they splay wide in a way that hasn’t negatively affected her balance. Each digit is tipped with a dark claw reminiscent of the ones on her hands but bigger yet; tiny switchblades that she will never be able to hide in shoes.

She can’t fathom how her brother will conceal any of this, and she is not particularly surprised when he returns empty-handed. She does blink when he sits down beside her though, and seizes one of her dangerous hands.

“Ma and Pa got a new hire,” he says, scarcely stopping to breathe, the words coming out in one wheezing rush. “He’s young, younger than you, and he likes the boat so much more than I ever could. He’ll make a good heir for them.”

“A good heir?” She repeats dumbly. “But Idouma--”

“You’re my sister,” he says fiercely, “And I heard the rumors about Boanerges and I never thought twice about them.” She shrinks from the ferocity in his voice, and he grips her hand to gain her eyes. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

Kyn’s strange eyes fill with tears. Idouma loosens his hold and Kyn fears he will leave her; but he only drags her into a hug, buries his face into the surprising softness of her feathers.

“You killed all of them.”

It’s not a question this time. Kyn holds him tighter and nods, and he breathes out against her.

“Okay,” he says, sitting back after a minute and hurriedly wiping his eyes. “Get your things, Kyn. We’re going.”

“Going where?” She asks thinly, watching as he gets up and starts throwing her stuff onto the bed.

“Somewhere else,” he says, pushes a blanket into her arms. “Anywhere else. Get ready, sis.”

[iBrevity]

It takes them time to find a place to live. Idouma is charmingly sweet, and can find shelter for the night in a storm--but Kynolkos, even dressed head-to-toe in a cloak and pinching boots, is off-putting. It frustrates Idouma, though Kyn has her own theories for how people realize there’s something wrong without seeing hide nor hair of her.

She’s a lot of God wadded into a mortal body; she exudes power, still squeezes too hard sometimes, reacts too quickly. There’s something intensely beastly about her, and so she relegates herself without complaint to the woods and the wet. She does not begrudge her brother a bed for the night, though she misses him. She is afraid to be alone with herself almost to the extent she’d been afraid to be alone with the Old God, towards the end.

They make it to the mountains, where few people have yet to venture. Kyn sheds her cloaks and her ridiculous shoes; she moves barefoot through the woods, catches prey with no weapon but herself. There’s a village at the base of the mountain and they tell tales about her, folks who have caught sea-green glimpses of scales through the trees, people who have seen her run a careless hand through the feathers that ruffle from her head and neck. Idouma bears the gossip with good humor and Kyn waits for him to ask her to cover up again--but he never does, and when they’re alone in the small cabin they’ve built on the edges of the forest he reads with a book in one hand and preens her feathers with the other.

It’s a couple of years before they notice that she’s not aging. Kyn has always been small, /will/ always be small; she is perpetually sixteen now, and has the looks of half a maiden and a half a monster. Idouma gets taller yet, much to Kyn’s annoyance, and takes a blacksmithing job down in the village that he walks to every morning with a cheerful whistle. He was never meant for the wilds, like her, like their parents were destined for the sea; but he doesn’t mind the in-between state they maintain, half their lawn a cultivated garden and the other the wild tangled herbs of the woods.

It is seasons later, and Idouma is close to forty and has grey in his fine red hair. Kyn is still sixteen, still topped with feathers the color of the hair she lost, still with coin-gold eyes and red eye whites. She thinks frequently of her meeting with the Old God on the beach; she thinks of what might have been had she told him no, if she and Idouma still lived in the home where they’d been born, if she had the same freckles of silver hair that he has.

They still live in the woods, and Idouma still works in the smithy at the village. But sometimes Kyn will creep down into the town among the people, and sometimes a boy or two will go missing. They are never missed terribly--they are always boys with bad reputations, boys the other girls are scared of. They go in a flash of fever-bright eyes and black claws, and Idouma doesn’t ask her about it once, not even when the carrots grow spectacularly well one season.

Instead they sit together on the porch, Kyn with her gnarled feet propped on Idouma’s lap, a book’s spine resting against the curve of her strange toes. They sit and talk, and Idouma whittles wood and Kyn tries not to think on mortality, on the godhood she cannot share, on the long lonely years that she traded thoughtlessly for vengeance.

They don’t speak of the missing boys, but Idouma hugs her more than he had when they were both children, and Kyn marvels at the strength of her brother, who can look at a monster and still see a girl.

[iBrevity]

[ just in case <3 ]