04-10-2019, 01:08 AM
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Allura' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> <style type="text/css"> .wonderstatic_container { position: relative; z-index: 1; height: auto; background: #959273; width: 600px; padding: 0 0 0 0; border: solid 2px #3f342b; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_container p { margin: 0; } .wonderstatic_image { position: relative; z-index: 8; width: 600px; } .wonderstatic_gradient { position: absolute; z-index: 8; top: 150px; width: 600px; height: 200px; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); filter: progid
XImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#00959273', endColorstr='#959273', GradientType=0); } .wonderstatic_text { position: relative; z-index: 9; width: 560px; margin-top: -10px; } .wonderstatic_message { position: relative; font: 12px 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify; color: #000; padding: 30px; background-color: #a39772; border: solid 1px #635b47; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_quote { position: relative; text-align: center; color: #3f342b; font: 20px 'Allura', cursive; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 20px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } .wonderstatic_name { position: absolute; z-index: 11; color: #635b47; text-align: center; font: 90px 'Allura', cursive; margin-top: 250px; margin-left: 30px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } </style> <center> <div class="wonderstatic_container"> <div class="wonderstatic_name">Wonder</div> <img class="wonderstatic_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/X7F37P8w/wonder.png"> <div class="wonderstatic_gradient"></div> <div class="wonderstatic_text"> <p class="wonderstatic_message">She knows this weight in her chest the moment it wakes her, knows the way it grips so desperately at the silk of the soul so unraveled inside her. Her breath is a sharp exhale as her muscles contract suddenly, as shivers race across her skin and along her beautiful spine. <i>I can’t,</i> she wants to whisper, wants to curl into herself more tightly, <i>please don’t ask that of me.</i> But the feeling doesn’t leave her. It settles with the weight of a dozen stones into the pit of her small belly. So she rises as she fights back a sob, blinking and then regretting it immediately as the memories of a small girl dead and crumpled in the grass brand themselves against the insides of her dark eyelids. <i>That’s what happened last time you asked this of me,</i> she reminds the weight in her chest, the mission gifted to her like a dream remembered.
A child left for dead by a girl who thought she made the right choice.
By the time she reaches the mountain, following a path that makes her hurt inside from its familiarity, the wretched bone plates thrust through her skin have left new lines of angry pink welts all damp and beaded with blood. It spills in tears over the dull chestnut of her skin, leaving tracks that match the near-dried ones beneath those faded teal eyes. She is struck almost immediately by the strange fog, though it isn’t until she’s close enough to step inside that she can feel something is amiss. Weather isn’t like this, it doesn’t think and it doesn’t feel, it isn’t something she’s ever been afraid of. But this is different, it is wrong and ugly and she can feel the wicked intent the moment she disappears inside it to where the items lay. She touches each one warily, those gentle eyes flashing at shadows and the movement of air churning the fog nearby, and as she does the items stir as if woken by something inside her, her intent to help, to do good.
They drift along behind her, an icicle, a flower, a pebble, and a shell, and she watches them only for as long as it takes to be certain they won’t fall suddenly inanimate again and be lost to her. She treks slowly up a mountain that blinds her with fog, tripping over stones and roots and finding her path suddenly blocked by sheer walls of rock that force her to double back. The air is so thin up here, so cold and damp that it doesn’t take long for her lungs to start burning with coughs that seem too stubborn to stop. She wheezes, takes a break, starts and coughs again, wiping something hot and wet on her foreleg without looking to see that brilliant shade of red she leaves behind. She thinks it’s only sweat.
It isn’t until the sweating starts in earnest that she wonders if something might be amiss - and maybe it isn’t sense at all but rather the manifestation of the inexplicable dark dread clutching with sharp fingers at her heart. She stops again, drops her head with another wet cough to check that the items are still behind her, and notices for the first time the blood smeared brightly across her foreleg where she’d been wiping at her nose. She tries to gasp, but the effort is too much for lungs now strangled by the plague, and instead she trips to her knees, coughing and wheezing and blinking back confused tears.
She looks around again, and there is a new hint of something desperate in her eyes as she lurches back to her feet again, braced until the coughing subsides and the tears stop gathering in the wells of such ocean eyes. It is in that moment that she realizes what she thought were shadows and updrafts of air swirling in the thick glaze of fog are actually shapes she just barely recognizes. Mostly equine, but ruined by rot and blood and bone that juts out with shreds of flesh waving at her like flags. Horses that clamor towards her as if suddenly woken by the act of her recognizing what they are. As if they required her fear to animate them.
She cries out and bolts past them, falling and stumbling until her knees are full of blood and bruises and she is certain there will be scars that never heal. But they don’t seem able to follow her. They lack the intensity of life, have earned a slowness in death, in flayed skin and rotted muscle, in bones broken. They just amble past and try to touch her as she hurries past, covering them in the hot flecks of blood that fall from her wheezing lips.
She thinks she must be dying.
That this is why they chose <i>her</i>.
She thinks she must be there, must be so close to the top, can almost see sky through a thin gap in the fog ahead of her before it thickens again and steals the world from her eyes. She steps forward, sweating at her neck and her shoulders and her hips, shivering at the impossible cold of being so high up, at the fear that knots and coils in the pit of her belly. She just wants to be home. <i>But it’s close, and it’s so important,</i> she reminds herself with a whisper thought, unable to say the words aloud lest her lungs shred like tissue in her chest, <i>it’s okay.</i> To die for this, for those she loves and those she’s never had the chance to.
She takes another step forward, and then something dead steps out into her path, something so wrong it makes her cry out in surprised horror. It is the child from the last quest, the brittle little baby girl she had left dying in the grass with the promise of, <i>i’ll be back, i’ll save you</i>, a promise she had been unable to keep. <i>“I’m so sorry,”</i> she wheezes, and there are tears mixed with the blood falling freely down her cheeks, <i>“oh god, i’m so sorry.”</i> And she can’t stop crying, can’t catch her breath, can’t look away from this thing rattling closer and gnashing a mouth full of broken, missing teeth. It’s the eyes that catch her gaze though, they aren’t what she remembers. These are black and flat, void like a night without stars.
This thing isn’t the girl, not anymore. Whatever ruinous thing that had filled Wonder with fear now filled, quite literally, the body of a memory more lethal than any blade. She lowers her head in warning, the sharp points of her antlers bared to the child-beast as it launched at her suddenly, throwing itself down the path. Every instinct in her screams not to hurt her, to find a way to protect this baby when she hadn’t been able to protect her before. But there is nothing to protect anymore. So she thrusts hard with her antlers, remember the lesson of the fairies that some things are worth fighting for, but she still cries out at the internal agony that rips through her heart as the child-corpse connects and is impaled, sliding off the tines of her antlers and into a heap on the ground.
She is as Wonder remembers now. Soft and sad and very real, very still and unbreathing at her feet. Almost peaceful in this second death, if not for the way the plague had eaten away at her. She reaches down to brush her nose over the girls neck and there are tears in her eyes, ragged sobs muted by wheezing. Then she steps carefully over the body with the items in tow behind her, and steps through the fog to the peak of the mountain with her head hung low and teal eyes so flat and broken.
</p> <p class="wonderstatic_quote">i am brambles but i am tangled in your love</p> </div> </div> </center>
XImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#00959273', endColorstr='#959273', GradientType=0); } .wonderstatic_text { position: relative; z-index: 9; width: 560px; margin-top: -10px; } .wonderstatic_message { position: relative; font: 12px 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify; color: #000; padding: 30px; background-color: #a39772; border: solid 1px #635b47; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_quote { position: relative; text-align: center; color: #3f342b; font: 20px 'Allura', cursive; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 20px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } .wonderstatic_name { position: absolute; z-index: 11; color: #635b47; text-align: center; font: 90px 'Allura', cursive; margin-top: 250px; margin-left: 30px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } </style> <center> <div class="wonderstatic_container"> <div class="wonderstatic_name">Wonder</div> <img class="wonderstatic_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/X7F37P8w/wonder.png"> <div class="wonderstatic_gradient"></div> <div class="wonderstatic_text"> <p class="wonderstatic_message">She knows this weight in her chest the moment it wakes her, knows the way it grips so desperately at the silk of the soul so unraveled inside her. Her breath is a sharp exhale as her muscles contract suddenly, as shivers race across her skin and along her beautiful spine. <i>I can’t,</i> she wants to whisper, wants to curl into herself more tightly, <i>please don’t ask that of me.</i> But the feeling doesn’t leave her. It settles with the weight of a dozen stones into the pit of her small belly. So she rises as she fights back a sob, blinking and then regretting it immediately as the memories of a small girl dead and crumpled in the grass brand themselves against the insides of her dark eyelids. <i>That’s what happened last time you asked this of me,</i> she reminds the weight in her chest, the mission gifted to her like a dream remembered.A child left for dead by a girl who thought she made the right choice.
By the time she reaches the mountain, following a path that makes her hurt inside from its familiarity, the wretched bone plates thrust through her skin have left new lines of angry pink welts all damp and beaded with blood. It spills in tears over the dull chestnut of her skin, leaving tracks that match the near-dried ones beneath those faded teal eyes. She is struck almost immediately by the strange fog, though it isn’t until she’s close enough to step inside that she can feel something is amiss. Weather isn’t like this, it doesn’t think and it doesn’t feel, it isn’t something she’s ever been afraid of. But this is different, it is wrong and ugly and she can feel the wicked intent the moment she disappears inside it to where the items lay. She touches each one warily, those gentle eyes flashing at shadows and the movement of air churning the fog nearby, and as she does the items stir as if woken by something inside her, her intent to help, to do good.
They drift along behind her, an icicle, a flower, a pebble, and a shell, and she watches them only for as long as it takes to be certain they won’t fall suddenly inanimate again and be lost to her. She treks slowly up a mountain that blinds her with fog, tripping over stones and roots and finding her path suddenly blocked by sheer walls of rock that force her to double back. The air is so thin up here, so cold and damp that it doesn’t take long for her lungs to start burning with coughs that seem too stubborn to stop. She wheezes, takes a break, starts and coughs again, wiping something hot and wet on her foreleg without looking to see that brilliant shade of red she leaves behind. She thinks it’s only sweat.
It isn’t until the sweating starts in earnest that she wonders if something might be amiss - and maybe it isn’t sense at all but rather the manifestation of the inexplicable dark dread clutching with sharp fingers at her heart. She stops again, drops her head with another wet cough to check that the items are still behind her, and notices for the first time the blood smeared brightly across her foreleg where she’d been wiping at her nose. She tries to gasp, but the effort is too much for lungs now strangled by the plague, and instead she trips to her knees, coughing and wheezing and blinking back confused tears.
She looks around again, and there is a new hint of something desperate in her eyes as she lurches back to her feet again, braced until the coughing subsides and the tears stop gathering in the wells of such ocean eyes. It is in that moment that she realizes what she thought were shadows and updrafts of air swirling in the thick glaze of fog are actually shapes she just barely recognizes. Mostly equine, but ruined by rot and blood and bone that juts out with shreds of flesh waving at her like flags. Horses that clamor towards her as if suddenly woken by the act of her recognizing what they are. As if they required her fear to animate them.
She cries out and bolts past them, falling and stumbling until her knees are full of blood and bruises and she is certain there will be scars that never heal. But they don’t seem able to follow her. They lack the intensity of life, have earned a slowness in death, in flayed skin and rotted muscle, in bones broken. They just amble past and try to touch her as she hurries past, covering them in the hot flecks of blood that fall from her wheezing lips.
She thinks she must be dying.
That this is why they chose <i>her</i>.
She thinks she must be there, must be so close to the top, can almost see sky through a thin gap in the fog ahead of her before it thickens again and steals the world from her eyes. She steps forward, sweating at her neck and her shoulders and her hips, shivering at the impossible cold of being so high up, at the fear that knots and coils in the pit of her belly. She just wants to be home. <i>But it’s close, and it’s so important,</i> she reminds herself with a whisper thought, unable to say the words aloud lest her lungs shred like tissue in her chest, <i>it’s okay.</i> To die for this, for those she loves and those she’s never had the chance to.
She takes another step forward, and then something dead steps out into her path, something so wrong it makes her cry out in surprised horror. It is the child from the last quest, the brittle little baby girl she had left dying in the grass with the promise of, <i>i’ll be back, i’ll save you</i>, a promise she had been unable to keep. <i>“I’m so sorry,”</i> she wheezes, and there are tears mixed with the blood falling freely down her cheeks, <i>“oh god, i’m so sorry.”</i> And she can’t stop crying, can’t catch her breath, can’t look away from this thing rattling closer and gnashing a mouth full of broken, missing teeth. It’s the eyes that catch her gaze though, they aren’t what she remembers. These are black and flat, void like a night without stars.
This thing isn’t the girl, not anymore. Whatever ruinous thing that had filled Wonder with fear now filled, quite literally, the body of a memory more lethal than any blade. She lowers her head in warning, the sharp points of her antlers bared to the child-beast as it launched at her suddenly, throwing itself down the path. Every instinct in her screams not to hurt her, to find a way to protect this baby when she hadn’t been able to protect her before. But there is nothing to protect anymore. So she thrusts hard with her antlers, remember the lesson of the fairies that some things are worth fighting for, but she still cries out at the internal agony that rips through her heart as the child-corpse connects and is impaled, sliding off the tines of her antlers and into a heap on the ground.
She is as Wonder remembers now. Soft and sad and very real, very still and unbreathing at her feet. Almost peaceful in this second death, if not for the way the plague had eaten away at her. She reaches down to brush her nose over the girls neck and there are tears in her eyes, ragged sobs muted by wheezing. Then she steps carefully over the body with the items in tow behind her, and steps through the fog to the peak of the mountain with her head hung low and teal eyes so flat and broken.
</p> <p class="wonderstatic_quote">i am brambles but i am tangled in your love</p> </div> </div> </center>