[Everyone in Pangea] When our bodies wash ashore;

[Yidhra]

out in the deep, I've seen something real
the mouth of the void that the waves conceal

Gaunt and barely alive, the Archon is a beast of shambling legs and rotting bones beneath the slick and grotesque flesh: porous and hairless with a mucus sheen atop the patchy grey and black… spatters of white as well. She, for all purposes of identification, is a being whose tendrils curl and flex on their own volition- whose barbed suckered reach and grasp… lift and tickle the grounds she moves across. Her maw opens, the split tendrils unveiling the great chitinous beak and the tapping it creates as it chitters and chatters in a mockery of laughter… radula on the near-white tongue visible as the Archon calls out across the whistling plateaus and desert: through the whole of Pangea.

“Come children, and any who crawl amidst my land. Name yourselves and let us be numbered here: for long have I slumbered since taking my crown’ but now, I am awakened once more.”

Those shoulders roll back and the squid-like Archon allows her barbell shaped irises to narrow into little more than slits amidst the teal speckled grey-green. Her half white face leering and a single tendril stretched from her shoulder, lengthy and long: grasping as she plucked a rock and allowed it to roll between the suction cups.

“The Archon, Yee tho rah (Yidhra)... calls you.”

Yidhra

[Eight]

no matter what they say, I am still the king

We are all monsters in a way - some of us more than others. There is the appearance of a monster - something that you would look at and feel a cold and slick wave through your body (a fear, a revolution, a horror) - something created from the minds of gods, from the gifts of the fairies. There is the mind of a monster - a gelatinous and pulsing thing, riddled with ideas that only seek to destroy (murder, maim, mutiny) - something learned, taught, nature and nurtured. There is the heart of a monster - this is something most deadly; something that beats with a reason that not even you are sure of, this is something that cannot be changed - something born from the soul, that cannot be undone.

Pangea perishes. The canyons are carcasses, empty and rotting -- the slow flowing river nourishing none (save for the bloated bodies that drift and bump gently by). There is not a soul to hear the crying call of the cephalopod woman, save for Him. There are none that traverse the terminal plains of Pangea to adhere to her hark, save for Him. Carnage’s crown jewel has been laid to waste; a vapid wasteland that has become home to none except that fetid Plague, the magician, and His quarry.

His voice appears amidst the stretch of silence that aches across Pangea. “There are none who crawl here. Only I.” He is not surprised at your unique personification; He had felt the rumination of a kraken creature when He first came here; the very faded scent of brackish and brine, the echoes of sound once uttered- clickclacktink. He knew a creature once stirred here - something more mythological than equine; and you have not disappointed Him in your appearance.
He approaches, “Pangea has been lifeless for the last half year, Yidhra. I will change that.” The truth was an aching stagger; an empty hole had been here in Pangea since His return to Beqanna at the end of autumn. “I am Eight.. I will stand beside you here in Pangea as Archon. We will rebuild the vastness of the dark god’s design together.” Some monsters take without asking - some offer solace and a promise of synergy. It is up to the receiver to decide which unfurls.

∞

and now the storm is coming, the storm is coming in

[Warlight]

Warlight

It calls to her, the land where she spilled his blood. Where she had grit her teeth and dove into the fray, taking his curse into herself as his body was broken and reduced to nothing more than steaming organic matter below them. It calls to her while she dreams not so far away, and she wakes to the familiar sensation of her body resembling itself in another location with a violent crack of her neck. 
 
She is wild, this untempered daughter of queens. She holds her antlered crown with more pride than should have been allowed her, despite the way you can count her ribs under her patchwork hide. 

But it is not a front, she does not posture. She had never been told to behave otherwise. Although, as her blue-black gaze cuts to the unfamiliar stallion, she has a feeling that he could break her if he wanted and a brow lifts as she looks him over once, twice.

Maybe this should tame her - it does not. 

A year in pain had grown an impulsive girl into a reckless woman, and while caution would have been wise, she is brazen and unapologetic. Warlight had little to lose, she thinks, although some may say otherwise.  

A cough threatens to overtake her after she prepares to speak, but she suppresses it. Forgetting even to lick away the trickle of blood which dribbles down her sunburnt lip as her eyes return to the kraken-mare. 

"Sorry to interrupt," she lies with a gritty laugh, "but who the fuck is this, Yidhra?"

— soul as sweet as blood red jam —