"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
They do not take to space as he did.
Nihlus is the first to figure it out, swimming through space, to the warmth. To him, the dark god gives diamond armor – a hardening of the skin, a change to sharp reflective diamonds that will not last forever, but will help protect the boy for what is coming. He also speeds up the boy’s reflexes, quickens his reactions.
Ramiel is next through, on the backs of alien creatures he has no name for. To him he gives metal armor, less resilient than diamonds but harder than their delicate skin.
Third is his daughter, propelled by the help of others. To her he gives leather armor across her skin (ah, she does so look like her mother). Less protection than mineral or metal, but far together than skin – and besides, what girl doesn’t love leather?
The others trickle through. He notes Wrynn’s quest, the strange purity she possesses that allows the monsters to see her through. Others work together, using their abilities to come forward. Nymeria and Kellyn step through, and he feels the wormhole sinking shut, collapsing in on itself, a dying star. He cannot stay with them and hold it open.
In the end, he leaves two behind.
With a gasp from him, the wormhole closes like a fist. It leaves Joscelin and Myrina behind, there in space.
Joscelin shatters, frozen without his protections and too far away from him to take her back in time, but he sends the pieces back to earth, back to him, where he repairs her haphazardly. She will look like a shattered piece of pottery for a while, but it will heal in time, he thinks.
He pulled Myrina back quick enough so she did not shatter, but he sees her mane and tail have turned to ice. Again, he supposes it shall fix itself with time.
With that, he forgets them, and turns to the ones who have made it through, made it to Gail.
******
He miscalculated.
The wormhole does not take his acolytes to the beach; instead, it takes them to a different point in time.
They are in the future, but not far enough. Instead, they are in the middle of a cataclysm. The sky is a murky gray, filled with ash. Something is burning in the distance. The air stinks like rotting meat.
And here there be monsters.
They are the Great Old Ones; they are the things that have slept – deep in the seas where light fails to reach, deep underground in places untouched. They are the ones who once ruled. They have awakened (the skeleton king wonders briefly, sweetly, if he is the one who woke them – and if so, where he stands now. Does he walk among them? Does he rule them?).
These are the devourers, the monsters, the things that cannot be looked at without going mad.
And they are burning the earth.
The ground cracks beneath his acolytes, and something roars in the distance. Something else replies, a babble of incoherent language so thick with consonants that might be a curse or a prayer, it’s impossible to tell. The next wormhole is… he pauses a moment, feeling for it through them, for the energy, it’s by the sea. About a mile off.
He does not tell them that the sea is boiling. Or that the Great Old Ones have caught their scent by now, and will be here soon.
NOTES:
Nihlus, for being the first to respond, you will have diamond armor and enhanced speed for this round.
Ramiel, for being second through, you will have metal armor for this round.
Lageratha, for being third, you’ll have leather armor for this round.
Joscelin, you were too slow and shattered in space. Carnage brought you back and glued you back together (think a broken vase). For 1 BQ year (1 month), you will have a ‘glued together’ appearance. You can choose to make this permanent, or have it fade after the time is up.
Myrina, you were too slow and got pulled back when the wormhole closed, but not before your mane and tail turned to ice. This will last for 1 BQ year (1 month). You can choose to make this permanent, or have it fade after the time is up.
RULES:
It’s the apocalypse! AKA some distant future point where monsters have risen up from everywhere and are scorching and salting the earth and basically fucking shit up.
To get to the next wormhole, you have to encounter and fight/trick/run from at least one monster. If you have traits, they may be used within reason.
Once again, you have 24 hours to reply. No reply at all will result in automatic elimination and a defect.
This round is quality over speed. Posts will be judged on creativity, ‘realism’ (as real as a fake horse fighting a Lovecraftian god can be, anyway), and overall style. Think of it as a battle post, except instead of another horse, you’re interacting with a monster.
You must act alone. Assume you’re scattered around.
Use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos_deities as a guide for the kinds of monsters/gods/Great Old Ones you might encounter.
If you have any questions, you may email me at acmrshll@gmail.com.
05-13-2015, 05:54 PM (This post was last modified: 05-13-2015, 05:59 PM by Wrynn.
Edit Reason: Formatting
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Oh look, oh my star is fading
She doesn't like it, this world of fire and brimstone, and the moment she hits the ground, she wrinkles her nose. But she will push through, she is of Scorch and Hestoni, of stronger stock than to give up now. She may be sweet and innocent, but she is a lollipop with a core of iron.
gail gail gail, by the sea, a mile off, gail gail gail
She has landed by a stream, and although the stream boils, it's lucky for her: she's lived all her short life within a jungle, she knows how to walk within one, and she knows that all jungle streams, inevitably, must lead to a larger body of water. by the sea, a mile off. Follow the stream, and she should find it.
Following the stream is no easy task, but she has the advantage of youth on her side, and when the ground cracks beneath her she can scramble away. The air is hot like sulfur and death, and it is unpleasant to walk. But it is not the conditions themselves that bother her the most: she can feel something in the air around her, a thickness and heaviness that she's never felt before. She's too young to know it, but it is the thickness of death.
Without warning, a tentacle erupts from the jungle to her left. She is on edge from dodging the erupting ground, enough that she's able to avoid the worst of it, but her dodge still sends her reeling. She slides towards a crack in the earth, feeling the heat of it start to singe her hind end – and in the nick of time her feet find purchase and she scrambles away from the fissure.
She did not notice how the tentacle grabbed at the open air, like a hand snatching out and coming up empty.
So she does not expect it to come again, a grabbing tentacle as thick as her foreleg. It is swift and it grabs her quickly, wrapping around her small barrel like an ersatz girth. Her reaction is pure instinct: she reaches around (much like an angry horse nipping at a rider who tightens that ersatz girth) and bites, twisting her body as much as she can in the meantime, making herself as slippery as she can.
Her teeth find purchase on the tentacle, and it drops her abruptly. Where it grabbed her, the flesh is burnt, as though she'd been touched by a light acid (not burned through to the muscle, just blistered and uncomfortable) but blessedly her teeth are fine. Smarter this time, knowing it will come back, she scrambles urgently across the broken ground, dodging and weaving, desperate to avoid another swipe.
Little does she know she's running right towards it.
She doesn't realize, not until the ground opens into a deep chasm beneath her, and she comes skidding to a stop, barely avoiding the edge. She throws herself to the side just in time to avoid the punch-grab of the tentacle arm. Falling back on her instincts, the genetics of horses so many thousand years made prey, she manages to catch glimpses of the creature that attacks her as she continues to dodge.
It is huge, large enough to occupy the entirety of the meadow back in Beqanna, far larger even than the monster (the friend?) she'd made back in space. And it seems to be attacking many different horses, or at least doing many different things, because tentacles of various sizes are erupting from it constantly. Not only that, the tentacles sometimes detach themselves, as though to continue the chase freed from the large body.
That body is a black carapace made of nothing that she recognizes. It could be nothing but fog, or it could be some kind of exoskeleton – the tentacles seem to be armored and jointed like the exoskeleton of a pill bug, with interlocking rings of hard armor. Hard, but brittle, she thinks, remembering how her teeth were able to pierce the shell, and how once they did, the tentacle had retracted.
There is one saving grace: it has only one eye. The eye moves freely around its body, able to appear on any part of the black surface, but seeming to roll aimlessly until right before it is ready to strike. Then it pauses, entirely still, and launches out a tentacle in one direction only. It is capable of striking quite quickly, of pausing its gaze and launching faster than she can see, but it doesn't seem to be capable of launching while it is looking.
And perhaps, if it needs to be looking, it needs to see in order to attack.
She decides to test her theory by hiding. This inhospitable world has kindly obliged with a particularly handy spot where the ruined ground has tossed itself against a larger boulder topped with a long-dead tree, the effect something like sea spray upon the rocks, but with a sheet of earth rather than a sheet of water. She waits until the eye is on the other side of the large body and then leaps behind it with a child's alacrity, hoping her movement remained unseen.
Silently, she presses her body to the rock, making no noise and barely daring to breathe. She should know soon, it's only been a few moments between tentacle attacks previously. The wounds where the tentacle had grabbed her are beginning to sting now as her small body drips with the exertion of her dodges. She hopes that’s it – for all she knows, this creature is poisoning her, or worse.
The seconds tick by and the attack doesn't come. She listens closely and hears what sounds like tentacles grabbing in far-off locations, but none of them seem to come past here. She is hidden, it would seem. And hiding works, it would seem. Whether noise attracts the creature or not she can't say. But maybe she can find out.
She rears up, scraping her tiny hooves against the stone boulder in front of her. She's still entirely hidden, invisible to its eye, but making enough noise that she should be easily heard. She is still and quiet then, like a coiled spring, waiting to see if a tentacle strikes.
When none does, she breathes a comical sigh of relief, loud and audible even against the muted sounds of doom that occupy this ruined world. All she has to do, then, is make it the remaining distance without being seen. She estimates that the wormhole should be more or less on the other side of this gigantic chasm, so if she can travel around the edge of the hole, she should be set.
That is, until she hears the crunching of the leaves behind her, approaching from the other direction, away from the beach, but walking toward her.
She spots it immediately, a creature walking slowly. It walks on only two legs, but must be easily twice her height. It has no face that she can see, just a million mouths, covering its surface entirely. It drips saliva as it comes, a terrifyingly thin creature, tall and thin enough that it waves in the wind. It is unbothered by the tentacles, she notes, and she decides it must be in league with that other creature. She watches it for a moment, putting slightly more distance between herself and the rock (but remaining hidden) to see if this creature will react.
It changes trajectory as soon as she moves, but it does not change speed. It's a timer, a pace horse, and she knows in her bones that if it catches her, she's done.
No big deal, then – she just has to carefully jump between hiding places to get around this crater, while making sure she does it fast enough to avoid this slow-moving doom.
No big deal.
She identifies her first goal, an outcrop that should be just reachable if she leaps as long and low as she possibly can. She positions herself just at the edge of the rock, as close as she can get without revealing herself, and tries as best she can to see when the monster's eye rolls to the other side. And when it does, when she sees it crest over its head, she leaps, long and low.
She lands ungracefully, stumbling forward a bit and coming to her knees before quickly struggling to her feet. She is not terribly hurt, her knees are only slightly scratched with nothing broken, but she will have to be more careful next time. She checks the slow-moving creature – it continues to walk directly toward her, but its pace is still the same. She catches her breath for a moment, no tentacles – so far, so good.
She maintains this strategy, moving only when its eye is turned, hiding behind what cover she can find as she crosses this huge expanse. She moves as quickly as she can, keeping the slow-moving creature of a million mouths at bay.
Once she reaches the far edge, the jungle is thin, but the slow creature is catching up. She is dripping sweat, her breath coming in gasps, her wounds (both on her barrel and on her knees) burning. But she doesn't have time to think about that, not when she's so close.
She decides to make a run for it.
She bursts out from her hiding place, both creatures behind her now. She tears through the ruined jungle, heading for the beach that is so close she can almost taste it. It doesn't taste like sea air, but like steam, and as the trees break she can see that the ocean is boiling. She zigs and zags with a horse's dexterity, applying her tactical mind to avoid the tentacles that come reaching out. They are almost nonstop, as though desperate to stop her from reaching her destination.
gail gail gail, by the sea, a mile off, gail gail gail -- Her heart beats.
gail gail gail, by the sea, a mile off, gail gail gail -- In a flash, she sees that the slow walker too seems to feel the urgency – it is running now, tilted forward, its mouths sucking and grasping. She moves faster, it moves faster.
gail gail gail, by the sea, a mile off, gail gail gail -- But now the last wormhole is in sight, now it is almost over (a tentacle flashes past her, she barely dodging) –
And with a motion that is half leap and half fall, she is through the wormhole. Just her - no tentacles, no runners.
05-13-2015, 06:32 PM (This post was last modified: 05-13-2015, 06:48 PM by Nymeria.)
It was black. It harbored no substance, and then in an instant light came and her hooves landed. She stomped the ground, packing the dirt in and forming a small indentation. Her nostrils flared and a horrid scent engulfed her lungs causing her diaphragm to convulse. Her stomach lurched and out came a thick green substance. It sloshed to the ground; unintentionally this had drawn attention to the mare. Nymeria felt her chest churn. She hadn’t opened her eyes yet. Fear had become her.
Nymeria was a plain mare. She was lack luster in everyway. Brinley, her sister, had been the one who fought. She had been the clever one and leader. Nymeria followed. Brinley never led her astray, but at this moment Nymeria was beginning to regret her following ways.
Slowly she peaked out from under her eyelids. The smell was still wreaking havoc on her stomach, but that problem soon fell to the wayside when Nymeria realized where she was (not that she knew exactly where that was). The bay mare had landed between two cliffs. She was shakily holding steady in the crevice of two mountains, utterly alone. She felt her pulse rise. Her ears tweaked. She was hearing everything. Above her a creature flew with talons longer than her own head (or so it appeared). Nymeria was glued to her position unsure of what to do next. its by the sea, about a mile off What? Sea? Nymeria barely managed the words above her own encasing fear. Out of the corner of her eye Nymeria spotted a cave. It was carved deep into the mountain. Perhaps that would be a good place to recap.
The bay mare steadily moved her hoof, tracing the ground with each step and back step. She slowly managed her way to the cave. Diving into the darkness Nymeria swung her body to the right of the entrance and exhaled a great sigh. Safe.
It had been an ignorant move, and the mare would note that at a later date. Within the depths of the cave awaited a creature- A creature that had been sprung out of other monsters. She was a daughter, and she was hungry. Ayi’ig did not often leave her cave especially with such dark times among the Earth. Eventually intruders always came to her. The daughter looked much like an octopus with snake-like eyes. Her tentacles were the most wondrous things. They sprung from her side with brains and bodies of their own. The she-creature had heard something hit the ground. She had felt the vibrations of an approach, and without any more reassurance she sent one of her tentacles to find and carry her meal home.
Nymeria could barely see in the darkness. Light barely shown through the entrance, giving the mare a bit of comfort. Nymeria had managed a plan. She could smell the salt in the air. The plan was to leave the cave, pick a direction and….. The bay mare did not get a chance to recall the full plan to herself for out of the pits came a long and wiry thing- unimaginable and indescribable. Its slimy touch managed to wrap around the base of Nymeria’s back leg. At this point instinct kicked in and Nymeria lashed her hind leg out. Her front hooves clawed into the earth, but they were only able to get a shallow hold. Her body fell with the weight of the tentacle dragging her backward. Nymeria gasped for breath. She clawed, clawed, and frantically looked for something to aid her. The edge of the cave harbored rocks. The rocks were rooted in the ground, and as Nymeria’s body flew backward she managed to scrap herself forward and twist her body around the jagged edge of a rock. The tentacle kept pulling, but now with the weight of the rock Nymeria had leverage. She swung her hoof back again, this time striking it against the side of the cave. The tentacle took a bit of the force, as did her hock. Nymeria repeated this motion until the grip lightened and leg to.
With luck Nymeria was able to scramble to a stance and gallop (or rather hobble with her bum leg) to the outside of the cave. She chose to go left (the air smelt saltier in that direction- or so she quickly deciphered). Nymeria ran as fast as she could, upon exiting the crevice.
Not once did Nymeria believe that anything could be worse than the cave creature or the rancid smell, but like before she was proven wrong. Creatures roamed the ground with multitudes of the thing that had just attacked her. She froze again, imagining without movement that she wouldn’t be detected. She could turn and go backward or she could brave forward. Nymeria looked to her injured leg. Blood had begun to pool and coagulate around the base of her hoof. She sneered at the site, but amongst her irritation toward injury came courage. She had survived, and she could push forward.
Slowly and with more confidence Nymeria edged forward along the borders of the arena like ground. She watched the creatures and calculated each move to motion with them. The salt air grew heavier. It began to win out over the flesh smell, and out of the corner of her eye Nymeria spotted water. Her patience had worn thin and with a small limp she turned her whole body and tilted forward.
All of a sudden Nymeria couldn’t move. Her whole body had been immersed in water. Only a foot in front of her and the ground was dry yet she was completely encased, enveloped in an unknown monster. The dark water god, Cthaat, had snuck up to the mare. It had followed her hoof steps until the mare had managed herself into its grasp. Cthaat felt the horses body become one with its globular form. Once taken Cthaat would smother its prey, and then carry it to the sea to be thrown amongst the dead, adding to its countless numbers of victims.
Nymeria panicked within the ball of water. She was floating mid-air, moving toward her destination (unknowingly), but she could not breath. Her lungs were burning, and her hooves were clawing at the weightless water. With each claw she simply swung her body round and round. Her body shifted, but the globe did not stop its movements nor did it flinch at her escape attempts. If Nymeria had not undergone her previous interaction she may have given up and allowed eternal peace to rest her. Instead Nymeria closed her eyes once more (like she had done in space) and centered herself. She felt her body convulse, wanting, begging for oxygen. Nymeria calmed. Her body relaxed then it went limp. Nymeria concentrated on her heartbeat. She focused on nothing but each thump, thump, thump. Cthaat felt its victim go lifeless. The monster had arrived to the sea soon after it captured the horse, but it was waiting for its death. Once lifeless Cthaat leg go, and then left the scene in search of its next victim.
The bay mare felt her body release from the hold of the encasement. She fell to the sea, causing a small splash when she broke the surface. Nymeria allowed her body to sink, but she soon hit the bottom. The water was boiling hot, though thankfully the monster had dropped her on the beach. Nymeria’s stomach never went beneath the water so she was able to lift both her head and her body all at once. She gasped for air as she leapt out of the sea, breathing in heavily the thick, warm air. Her body was now left scorched (though not nearly as bad as it could be) along with wounded. Nymeria looked before her and there was the wormhole. It was both a comforting site and a fearful site- where would it bring her next time. Regardless Nymeria fell forward into its embrace, duly unprepared for the next stage.
Although the sight of the dark god (their magician, their protector, their leader) is lost to his eyes, he can still feel the god’s presence brimming behind his forehead. The name of his lost lover echoes in the winged stallion’s mind like an insistent drum, as constant and thriving as a beating heart. Gail, Gail, Gail. Her, her, her. He knows what it is like – to feel each breath sucked in and pushed out to whisper her name, to hear the shattering of one’s own heart when they are not close, to taste the saltiness of her skin under his lips in his dreams – and it makes him even more determined to find her.
He breathes in the endlessly cold world of space, and then his next breath is taken within the ashy depression of catastrophe. Blinking against the harshness of another new world (another foreign place, another whirlwind of beginnings and endings, another sharp change of scenery, another brutal reality to adapt to), suicidal brown eyes gaze around. He can already tell he doesn’t like this new world (or the same world, but in a different time – he doesn’t know, yet); it is too close to those old memories. This new world, filled with ruin and disaster and morbid thoughts turned into realities, is something that suddenly twists his old depressed thoughts into something real – too real for him to bear.
He waits with a feverish impatience for the magician’s voice to direct him toward their next destination. It’s a shocking thing, he thinks, that the god whom horror stories are told about is suddenly someone he relies on and trusts to protect him and get him to the next stage. He could, for all any of them know, be leading them to a path which will only end in complete ruin and death for all his little rescuers.
By the sea, he says, and the chestnut tobiano sniffs the air hesitantly. It’s easy to pick out the scent of salt and water on a breeze suffocated with burning things and ash and chaos. The smell stings his nose – sharp against the dull crackle of fire – and the stallion finds himself easily turning toward the scent. After living on his own for so long, instincts are habits deeply rooted in the stallion’s being – especially when his instincts was the only thing that kept him alive for a good number of years.
Finding it easier to take to the skies rather than pick his way across the scorched, barren earth, the hopeless lover spreads his wings in flight. It is much easier to fly over the destroyed earth compared to clumsily waving them up in space, and the memory causes his eyes to turn toward the clouds in hopes of spotting a star or two. But there is nothing other than a seamless canvas of gray and it reminds the winged stallion of his true mission. Her, her, her.
It is while he’s in the sky that he feels the power of water. It’s much stronger than any raincloud or thunderstorm or even a body of water. The presence is immense and powerful and entirely its own being, although the scent of water doesn’t cease to overcome his sense of smell. Suddenly confused by the change in scent (his trail is roughly thrown off guard, instinctual GPS struggling to recalculate), the stallion twists his head and scans the horizon for any hazardous rainclouds.
Instead of clouds, however, he spots a levitating body of water. It is as if a large lake had forced itself away from the cocoon of its nest and instead floats in the air, held together by the atoms of air and space and emptiness. Curious (and now confused as to which way he should travel), the stallion flies closer to the water, brown eyes inspecting it with mingled hesitancy and surprise and curiosity.
Just as he gets close enough, the water moves. It doesn’t just shift slightly as if an imaginary tide had swept it away; it directly lunges at the flying stallion, droplets of liquid moving together in a motion so coordinated and realistically alive it catches him off guard (as much things are, recently). Letting out a rough-sounding growl of surprise, the chestnut tobiano tries not to get his wings wet – for certainly wet feathers equals a lack of flight and from this height the results could be disastrous – and instead the lunging water ends up soaking his chest and neck. Pawing roughly, he attempts to strike at the body of water with an angry snort. The water morphs (something both tantalizingly magical but equally as dangerous) into a replica of himself, only in the manipulated form of water.
If he must fight this thing, the stallion suddenly realizes, it would be better not to fall from soaked wings at this height. So he dives toward the ground, sensing the dive of the water-horse behind him. And when he lands, the shape-shifting water lands just behind him, about fifteen feet off. Pivoting with wings held tightly to his sides, the stallion lunges toward the water horse with poisonous fangs bared. And the fangs land on their mark, but when the injection is released, the dark-colored poison melts into the water and disappears into nothing.
Fear and panic begins to creep into his mind, but the ringing sound of ‘her, her, her’ in his mind encourages him to defeat the creature. So, tuning out the powerful smell of water nearby, the stallion searches for the faraway scent of salty ocean water. And when he finds it, he immediately moves into a pulsating gallop, muscles stretching and wings spread to encourage his fast speed. Already exhausted from the space trip, the gait isn’t nearly as quick as he would have liked, but the water-horse seems more intrigued to what the living version is doing rather than actually killing him (much like a lion might play with its mouse before the kill) and doesn’t overtake his speed.
The roar of the ocean reaches the stallion’s ears just before he nearly falls over from exhaustion and the familiar warmth like the warmth from space heats up his skin. Turning abruptly toward the water-horse (who now is manipulating into a tiger twenty feet tall), the winged stallion takes a step away, lulling the shape-shifting water closer to the wormhole. The heat, however, from the wormhole, begins to evaporate the water-tiger until it grows smaller and smaller and smaller.
And just as the chestnut tobiano is overcome with the ripping sensation of transporting through time and space and memory again, he sees the water-tiger go from something powerful and whimsical into something invisible and ordinary.
Diving into the black, she expected darkness. Instead, an entire universe of stars wrapped around her, enveloping her in their loving embrace. She felt her mother, her brother, the entire family she had lost in her youth. Four whole tribes whose existence had ended one fateful morning with a dive into the cold, bitter sea – all of her ancestors, all of her people who watched her from high above, twinkling stars guiding and guarding her, all of them held her close at once. And her most recent losses, the new family she had started just a few short years ago – and lost just a few short months ago – they were there too. Her Benny, and their two little ones. Brave Ragnar, and dancing Aya. She could feel them again, as real as the day before the world had ended. They held her, and they guided her through what should by all rights have been darkness.
They guided her through…to the darkness on the other side.
The smell of death and decay choked her, cloying and clinging and strangling. Flesh rotting, and the world burning. Soft tickling touches on her skin felt like snowfall, but without the cold. Dom drew in another breath, parsing out the scents of dead things and fire so she could identify ash. Not snow, but ashes, falling from the sky. Maybe she really had reached the end of the world.
Blackness surrounded her, black and the sounds of screaming. She could feel the stars pressing against her, felt them pushing her forward. Heard their cries of agony, and heard them going out one by one. Saw flashes of faces, strangers with familiar shapes and patterns, bodies built like the last of her people, mouths screaming RUN! So she ran. She ran through the darkness, spurred on by the ever-decreasing pressure of the stars as the souls that made them up were devoured. She ran on even as the flashes of faces grew more familiar, faces of people she recognized from her childhood. When those faces became family, she tried to stop. She planted her hooves in ash and dirt, digging in to face down whatever was devouring the souls of her grandparents, her cousins, her aunts and uncles.
The star that barreled into her and almost knocked her to the ground came with the face-flash of a tiny warrior struggling to survive even as he starved to death. Her baby brother, her son’s namesake, but he hit her with the force of a mountain. ”You fought for me. Now it’s my turn. Run. We're already gone, sis. You make it out, make it home. And death shall have no Dominion.” He shoved her again, pushing her forward even as the devourer claimed him.
One by one they fell away, face after face of those she had loved and lost fading as they fed the Devourer of Stars. And in the end, as she burst through the darkness to fall upon the shore of a sea that should have been cold and bitter, all that remained of a universe of stars were three. Her most recent losses. Her Benny and their babies were the only stars left as she stared at a sea that boiled, in a world that really was ending. And there, just by the shore, was the next portal into hell. Fighting not to think about the cost, about what had been lost all over again and what was yet to come, fighting not to give into the grief that threatened to drown her again, she ran, and dove once more into the darkness.
((To clarify: Dom, because she is a fucking masochist apparently, opted to encounter Ammutseba, Devourer of Stars. Since in her people’s stories, the souls of the dead become stars and watch over their loved ones from above. Because losing them once wasn’t enough. :| ))
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
I wish I could feel it all for you, I wish I could do it all for you
The strange feeling of falling through, but yet not down, ends with a landing that is hard. Not hard enough to seriously injure her, but she is dazed by the transition. Still, the strawberry girl scrambles to her feet, blinking in the heat, and it is good that she has regained her footing because the ground splinters beneath her hooves and she has to skip forward, leaping nimbly over a chasm that threatens to yawn open beneath her. The air is thick and hard to breathe, and she looks around for the others. They are within sight of her, yes, but it seems the wormhole has scattered them across the broken landscape. The next wormhole is by the sea, comes the instruction, and she steps forward, inhaling the ash-filled air to find traces of salt water. Its – oh, there – and when she looks hard she can see the shimmer of water on the horizon. Gail, the tug on her soul says. Find Gail. It’s irresistible at this point, and so she steps off in the direction of the water.
The rumble and the voices, perhaps, should have warned her. They should have said, this place is no good. Even if the cracked, burning earth and the ash-filled air had not been problem enough, the girl should have taken heed of the voices and the grumbles of clearly discontent beings. Somehow, it is still a surprise as she takes long strides towards the ocean: where a moment ago the path was clear (well, other than the ground breaking up beneath her hooves), there is suddenly a swirling black vortex. The sound of beating wings fills her ears (not the comforting sound she associates with her grandfather’s flying arrival, but more as if a murder of crows has descended to smother her), the sky around her darkens, and her eyes sting from more than the ash on the air.
A more vocal creature might have yelped or cried out, but Kellyn has spent so many years voluntarily nearly silent that it is not her instinct to do so. No, when she scrambles backwards, she is silent but wide-eyed. Her eyes water: burning, stinging; and she closes them against the irritation. The sound of the wings grows louder and louder; the darkness threatening to engulf her is so deep that even with her eyes closed it presses against her. It’s hard to breathe, and the roan girl strikes out hard with forelimbs and hind, contorting her body in the air, but to no avail. With a thread of panic, she realizes that nothing she can physically do will send this thing away. Reaching for the last vestige of hope, the girl grasps hard at the lines of shifting time around her and pushes them away, moving backwards through the emergence of the swirling, shifting thing. With a snap she knows only she will feel, Kellyn releases time and this time as it moves forward she is prepared, throwing herself sideways and darting forward, scrambling and leaping up and over as a new chasm opens under her feet.
Still her eyes are burning, itching, watering; but the strawberry girl forces them open in time to land, stumbling a bit because of her momentum but recovering quickly, only to stumble again as a huge jaw snaps closed a hairs-breadth from her face, close enough that she can make out a forked tongue surrounded by a double row of jagged teeth. On her knees, she looks up (and up, and up) to see the head the mouth belongs to at the end of an impossibly long neck, casting a dark shadow over her. Kellyn has a moment of blankness, no thoughts at all, but then reality falls back into place when she realizes that the head is descending again from its great height, and she is motionless waiting to be snatched up. Pushing off from the ground, she gains her feet and lunges forward, but she’s not quite quick enough and she knows the sudden, tearing pain of teeth cutting through her hide as the creature tries to close its mouth on her hindquarters. It is pure luck that Kellyn is past its real range, and the teeth cut their devastating path through her skin before snapping closed on a good portion of her tail.
With an inaudible growl, Kellyn jerks what’s left of her tail out from between the creature’s teeth, losing quite a bit of the long red hair in the process. She fits neatly beneath the belly of the creature, though it becomes a tighter fit as she darts towards its hind end, where sensitive underbelly meets reptilian tail. Desperate, the girl strikes out at the flesh in front of her: again and again and again. She guesses she isn’t fast enough to run back the way she came unless its head is distracted doing something else. Though she isn’t causing major damage, the strawberry girl is annoying enough that the monster lowers its head, using its long neck to reach towards her. But it can’t quite reach, and she continues her rampage, darting back and forth just beyond snapping teeth. It screeches its unholy fury and reaches too far, overbalancing itself, and tumbles sideways off of its feet. She dodges the thrashing tail and runs again, sight of the sea making her brave despite the blood running down her hind legs. The dark red of the blood nearly blends into the red-pink of her hide.
Her breath catches in her throat as the dirt turns to sand beneath her hooves, wavering air over the gray-blue water her target. The shifting sands are hard to run on, but they are still a welcome change from the cracking, gaping earth she has left behind. A few more strides, stilted now because it hurts to move, and she hits the water. It hits back, the wave of water knocking her off of her feet. It’s hot – too hot, nearly scalding her – closing over her head, clogging her nostrils and her ears. Somehow, it feels good on her eyes, washing away the ash and the remaining irritation from the swirling black vortex. But she inhales on accident and the salt water burns in her lungs, her nostrils, threatening to choke her. Thankfully every wave has an end, and she scrambles upright, coughing and gasping for real air. Another wave rolls towards her but this time she is braced, splay-legged, and it breaks around her instead of throwing her down.
A splash inconsistent with the rhythm of the waves makes her turn her head, and in this new monster she can pick out familiar aspects. It has the tentacles of one of the squids that occasionally wash up in the Tundra – but magnified, each round sucker the size of her own head. And heads… it’s got several: the heads of fish and whales that she has often seen leap from the waves at home. Each part alone is familiar, almost comforting: together, they are horrifying. It creeps forward – it might have been stealthy, if it weren’t for the splash of each tentacle clearing and entering the water as it moves. It is big enough to move against the push of the water – but when Kellyn tries to flee it is a constant struggle, the water pushing her back almost as hard as she moves forward. A sense of despair sweeps through her – will she die like this, so close to her goal? It is followed by a sense of rage, and an eerie calm. Yes, the waves batter her towards the monster on the surface but something else tugs against her legs; tugs towards the shimmer of the wormhole.
Water reaches above her shoulder as she backs up, staring at the marine monster, knowing she is not able to fight it. She is no warrior – she has no magic armor, no wings, no super strength. But she is smart, and the tug near her feet is insistent. So with a smile, and a laugh so out of place, (these are the things she has inherited from her quite mad mother) the girl lets herself collapse into the water and for a moment she fears she has miscalculated – a wave sweeps her towards the hazy outline of tentacles beneath the water’s surface – and then the wave has passed and the other force takes her. The undercurrent sweeps her backwards, more powerful than the wave on the surface, and just when she thinks she cannot hold her breath a moment longer there is the now-familiar wrongness of the wormhole and she is falling again, gasping for breath. Out of range of the monsters. ’If we all die,’ she snarls the words in her head, uncertain whether He is listening, ‘If we all die, no-one will find her. Nobody will be left to find your Gail’.
The cold of space is behind him, and he is warm and nestled within the wormhole. Not hiswormhole, because his sister lingers just behind, having answered his plea for help (how can she refuse that which flows through her very veins? Helping him is helping her any way you cut it). It squeezes him, but not uncomfortably so, more like the casing before his birth. And in a way, this was an entirely new kind of birth, really. A blossoming of his mind, an inescapable circumstance that will leave him forever changed.
He’s warm and happy until he’s not.
The wormhole closes with an almost audible pop. The pressure change gives his ears an uncomfortable reminder that he is here, landed in a newfound hell he is probably ill-equipped for. That’s alright, he thinks, shaking the space from his skin, at least I won’t go it alone. He smiles gratefully back at the nothingness that should be Joscelin. Would be Joscelin if she hadn’t been snatched from their thread of time-space. She’s gone, though, and looking about his new surroundings, he’s almost glad for her. It’s infinitely darker; the sky aches to breathe through all the grey soot kaleidoscoping the air. He can hear things he wish he couldn’t, smell things he never hoped to smell. Ramiel frowns, and the first inkling of fear creeps across his skin, threatening to overwhelm him.
He may have called for the end there (of this adventure or more, even he’s not sure in that moment) but for the sheet that suddenly covers him. It’s solid, metal, eerily similar to his mother’s skin and just as achingly familiar. How often has he sidled up to her cold side? How much more at home is he to metal than flesh? The black colt doesn’t know why it happens, but gaining the shield-skin protects his mind as much as his body, if not more so. The Dale feels more immediate than the millions of light-years (and actual years) it surely is away. In his metal, he is home among even aliens.
The voice comes back to him then, the cool powerhouse that lingers in the back of his mind even when it doesn’t speak. He is their captor as much as he is their guide. The yearling does not forget that his life is a small flame to the god, a piteous spark that can be easily snuffed out. So when the voice tells him that he will need to find a beach, he knows that is exactly what he must do. That is what he must do to find Gail and to live. Failure and refusal are not an option.
Ramiel moves out across ground that seems desperate to escape gravity. It flies up around his hooves, a bluish dust that clumps and reminds him of dry red clay back in Beqanna. The residue that comes off of his hooves is sticky, though. It’s a curiosity, but what isn’t in this strange world? The groans and moans of the injured and dying sound out around him, a morbid soundtrack to his mission. He becomes invested in some of them – almost leaves his course once, when he hears a distressed equine-sound in the distance – but ultimately, he doesn’t stray from the path he has set for himself. The footing becomes more treacherous, however, and a quarter of the mile to his destination, Ramiel finds himself deeply entrenched in the blue ground.
He is stuck fast in the alien quicksand, and his struggles only solidify his tragic demise on (far) distant shores. He tries, anyway, wiggling his body which is already weighed down by his metal armor. The boy calls out once before he realizes it might not be the best course of action. Shadows stretch longer here; the trees seem almost alive with their evil intent. Who knows what will hear his plaintive cry? He’s still figuring out how, exactly, one frees himself from a tarry death-pit when the situation deteriorates into dire. An enormous shell (perhaps a conch, though he’s certainly no expert on the matter and wouldn't dare claim to be) rises from the blue depths beside him. It’s nearly twice his height, a living, breathing transplant from the beach he is supposed to find. As if I need the reminder, he thinks, oddly calm in the face of death.
And what a face Oorn turns out to have. It’s shockingly blank, the kind of blank a writer faces just before a deadline. The kind of blank that the dead wear on their faces, a void where something should exist but doesn’t. It regards Ramiel as indifferently a wall would, but he knows he is prey. A primal fear stirs in his gut. This thing will disembowel him. This shell will pull his stomach through his nostrils; will take his heart down with it like a sinking ship below the surface. He’ll become an out-of-place-and-time fossil, a puzzling discovery if the universe makes it through this latest apocalypse. That is, if there is anything left of him. Oorn has tentacles, too. Devastating limbs that curl in serpentine motion; arms that seem open and welcoming to his death. The monster chooses instead to go in with its mouth first. Ramiel flinches as the shell creature draws in close (the end isn’t near, it’s now and what do I have to show for it?) He closes his eyes at the last second, unwilling to watch the degrading finale. But its mouth closes around the armor he’s almost forgotten. It bites down on the metal, lifting him from his once-tomb with a loud sucking sound into the ashy air. Ramiel is almost too shocked at his current state of aliveness to move, but he does once the tentacles begin to thrash at him. He bucks, a wild movement that manages to dislodge him from the alien’s mouth. The yearling lands, hard but alive, onto firmer dirt just beyond the trap.
Oorn isn’t finished with him yet. The shell-creature reaches out with its tentacles, but even it seems to know it is a rather desperate move. One catches his left hind leg, but he kicks out with his right, hitting the thicker part of the tentacle and causing it to release its hold. He hears the monster chatter its pain and anger; he is grateful to still hear such sounds. Where it held him is raw and imprinted with sucker marks, a painful reminder to watch where he’s stepping the next time. Once he’s well and away, he smiles at the thrill of it all. Of having narrowly escaped death to possibly fall into the same pattern again, once he’s reached the beach. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Life. Death. Repeat. For the love of a god, he risks everything. And secretly, it thrills him.
The beach is there stretching in front of the dark colt. It smells of death and rot, of salt and brimstone. He is so close that he can taste all of it, as well as the tepid promise of more adventure, on his tongue. A large herd of strange deer-like creatures graze on the briny, sparse plants along the shoreline. It’s an odd sight for its normalcy, and Ramiel moves in for a closer look in spite of himself, knowing they probably wouldn’t be much help (knowing that this close to the end of the world, they couldn’t be much help for very longer, anyway). As soon as he takes a step in their direction, the furthest one sputters and coughs and drops dead. Hastalyk moves through the herd, a silent but effective killer. From one alien-deer to the next, it spreads through their saliva in the tiny particulates they pass in their wheezing, brief coughs. Immediate respiratory system collapse. Ramiel recognizes that his armor is no match for this beast. He flees into the surf long before the last deer drops. It scalds his ankles, reaches up to singe his legs, but there is the wormhole! It comes with the next wave, glimmering and accepting. The boy dives for it. Hastalyk misses his chance to spread that final plague by a single black hair of a lucky colt.
05-14-2015, 09:25 AM (This post was last modified: 05-14-2015, 01:17 PM by Lagertha.
Edit Reason: clarifications, typos
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this will never end, ‘cause i want more, more, give me more
It must be some miracle, Lagertha thinks, that she does not break a single bone upon landing. Any fall from even a decent height should shatter her forelegs, her hind legs, even her relatively floppy neck - but for some reason, whatever they fell through brought them here, to what must be some circle of hell. The land is dotted with hills that are have nothing but burnt, blackened tree trunks on them. Nothing walks or talks or moves. There is no life here, only the silence that remains when everything else has been devoured. The air itself (not clouds - there are no clouds) is gray, grayer than the aftermath of the Jungle’s blizzard, grayer than the dreariest, cloud-covered horizon. And that smell! It’s worse than a vulture’s carcass that’s been left in a stagnant pool full of panther shit and urine.
She coughs (almost retches, vomiting a bit of bile in her mouth) suddenly aware that it is difficult to breath. She is hot - too hot - and looks down to realize that a thick layer of leather now covers her body. That is all nice and dandy, but her first thought goes to her powers. Would they still work?
The General does a quick test drive, trying to summon a thin layer of metal beneath the leather. She pauses and takes a step, noting that her legs do indeed feel heavier than before, despite the fact that she cannot see them. Then the metal is gone, and though she wants to try her favorite method of defense (thorns), she doesn’t want to leave holes in the leather quite yet. So instead, the gray woman summons some puffy white clouds to the outside of the armor, making herself look like either an overgrown sheep or a giant cotton ball. Absurd… but necessary. Lagertha shakes it off and looks in all directions, trying to find some trace of salt and this sea that the Dark God told them about.
She hopes Rhy is alright. The gold and white woman has twice the power Lagertha does, but though she is fierce and well-protected, the Ambassador is no warrior. She must have faith that she will see her sole friend on the other side - perhaps then they will compare battle scars like true comrades.
She turns her nose to the still air and after a minute or two of definitive deciphering, she finds something: it’s very faint, almost overpowered by the pervasive stench of the air, but like a Glade spritzer by a dumpster, it stands out as a beacon of fresh air. Ok. That way, to her left. For a good couple of minutes she proceeds at a cautious trot, eyes peeled and nostrils flared, every nerve standing on edge - just as they would be if she were entering enemy territory (she is). All is well until the ground beneath her starts to shake and tremble, sending her skittering sideways with a squeal of surprise. Fucking hell! The ground cracks where she was just standing, sending a boiling geyser of steam into the air. A powerful roar echoes in the distance, and Lagertha knows it would be foolish to linger.
Even she is afraid of this place.
Her first lesson was to know the difference between fight and flight, and this situation begged for flight. A good warrior knows when to retreat, when to raise the white flag; this alien land was nothing like she’d ever encountered, and Lagertha didn’t want to wait around for something to come and find her.
Her trot becomes a canter, and she tries to imagine that the heat of this place is like the sweltering blanket of the Jungle on a summer’s day, but that water is always just a few minutes away. You can stand anything for a couple of minutes. She crests her second hill, only to screech to a halt at the sight below, hooves sliding to find some traction before she moves too quickly down into the small valley and towards the massive, pulsing red blob with several searching tubes and a gaping, slimy hole at its base just dangling in mid-air. What. The. Actual. Fuck. She is completely and utterly repulsed, frantically searching for a way around the monstrosity. However, as fate is wont to do (and often does), the immediate areas around the slimeball are taken up by a bubbling pool of something very acrid to its left and a minefield of active, scalding geysers to its right.
Can’t go over it, can’t go around it… must go under it.
As if the (what would be the aorta) tubes at the top could sense vibrations in the heavy, blanketing air, they begin to wave in a searching manner when Lagertha moves forward. They are, however, short and stubby and can't reach her, so she automatically marks them down as less threatening than the gaping hole at the base of the things. Foolish General - you’re in an alien land, everything is a threat! So while the gray mare’s attention is directed towards what she perceives to be the greater problem, the… monster (it hardly seems sentient) waits until she is closer to rain acid down on her. She can almost see the inside of the hole when she first hears the sizzling of corrosion. It’s faint, and comes in irregular intervals. Lagertha turns her head to see what is going on behind her, and that’s when she sees a blackish-purple, oily looking substance falling around her. As she cranes her neck even further, she sees the edges of the top tubes pulsing and quivering and shooting the very same liquid into the sky.
Luckilyy for her, she has leather armor, but that’s not going to keep her safe for long.
Her eyes dart towards her hindquarters, which are already pock-marked with tiny little divots as the light acid eats towards her flesh. FUCK. It doesn’t hurt yet, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before it does, so she adds a thin layer of platinum to her skin to buy herself time. Must move forward, must get to the sea. Lagertha turns her head back around and is about to surge forward and go underneath the blob when another horrifying site stops her in her tracks.
Crawling out of that gaping hole - in fact, almost completely out of it - is a large, pale, reptilian creature with a trunk for a nose. That trunk has a mouth at it’s end, and that mouth is gnashing it’s very, very sharp and pointy teeth. Their eyes connect. The mouth grins, and the disconnect between eyes and lips make it seem that much more sinister. Lagertha bolts forward, and the creature drops, landing on her back. The upside of this is that it is blocking her from being rained on by acid, the bad part is that there is a large, hungry, half-elephant/half-lizard creature on her back that presumably wants to make her its supper.
Lagertha crow hops, trying to throw the beast from her back, but those little reptilian claws (feet? pads?) have dug themselves into her armor and are holding on tight. She crow hops again, this time throwing her hind legs into the air and adding a buck at the end - but still, the beast hangs on. The only thing her writhing and bucking and hopping around seem to be doing is keeping the mouth from finding a good place to latch on to. It’s mouth… lamprey like in its placement and number of teeth, does not seek to eat her, only suck her dry. Perhaps the lizard-child feeds the mother heart with the blood of its victims, and it is the blood of the slain that is turned into acid to weaken others. It would be a fitting cycle for this dimension of hell.
Lagertha knows she must keep moving, must keep that long and wobbly trunk unsteady and flailing. Unless… unless she can kill it. The General pauses in her hopping and bucking long enough to focus on that thin sheet of platinum that already lines her back. She adds more to it, pulling it into a spike and forcing it - there is a stabbing pain in her belly. The pause was long enough for the vampiric creature to find a softer piece of flesh and bored through the leather to attach itself. It clenches its circular jaws and begins to draw the blood from her body.
She screams her rage and frustration- loud and powerful and dramatic (as we all know Lagertha often is). How dare it try to take her blood! How dare it try to keep her from her mission?! If anything, its successful attack has made her even more determined, giving her a renewed sort of battle rage that only comes from drawing first blood. She shoots several platinum spikes out of her back, hoping to impale her ill-begotten rider, and it not impale it, at least injure it enough to realize that she wasn’t going to be an easy meal. She knows she hits something on the beast, because the mouth suddenly lets go of her belly, hissing in anger. The creature’s reaction is enough to encourage her, and she shoots several more out - enough to painfully poke and prod the beast, so that it leaves her alone.
She would kill it. She wants to kill it, but Lagertha doesn’t know if killing it will bring more, or if it even could be killed. What parts were vulnerable? Regardless of what she wants to do, the pale lizardoid leaps from her back and scuttles across the land to return to the warm womb of the heart, it’s mouth bloody and hissing all the while. Lagertha’s wound is dripping, stinging and aching all at once. But the sea, the sea! And the next wormhole. If she reaches it, she’ll be safe. Maybe.
To top it all off, the acid has reached her skin, and its stinging is worse than any god forsaken plant she’s ever encountered in the Jungle. It compels her to move forward, demands that she disregard the wound to her belly and march on like a good soldier does. The sea cannot be far. If she hurries, she might not attract anything else, despite being a walking advertisement for a horse burger. Lagertha grits her teeth and hurries on, alternating between a trot and a canter again. She crests a fourth hill, and then a fifth, and finally spots the sea. Her heart sinks. Of course it isn’t the welcome relief she sought… just another vast expanse of boiling water - but there! There, right on the edge of its shore is a black hole!
And so, like the champion that she is, Lagertha powers through till the end, running head-long, as fast as she can into the portal to whatever came next, leaving a smattering of bloody breadcrumbs in her wake. That thing better fucking close before any other abominations get through, otherwise Lagertha is going to be in some serious trouble. Anything could be following her.
In the darkness, as she falls, there's time think about what happened. About the creature, so like her sister, that she killed without a second thought. It hadn’t been the shape of her sister (hadn’t had her hooves or face or voice). This is the only consolation Rhy has, that she didn't kill her real sister. It was just a creature of the cold. Similar, but not the same. But still, she had killed it. Still, she hadn't batted an eye at doing so.
But in the darkness, it’s Kora’s chest that Rhy digs into. Kora’s blood, red and warm, that coats her skin. Kora’s dying breath that touches her face. Rhy's breathing is rapid now, her heart racing, as the image plays over and over. Kora. Her own sister. Although there's something freeing in the image too, something both terrible and wonderful about killing the remaining tether to her childhood.
She shakes her head, trying to get rid of that thought. This isn’t you, she thinks to herself. But maybe it is. Maybe this is the part of her that Kratos felt, that Rhy buried, that Kora feared. Maybe this is the real Rhy. But it’s not; she knows it’s not. At heart, she’s good. At heart, she loves her sister. But there’s a monster in that heart, a black piece that is deep and dark and deadly like the space they tumble through.
Finally (has it been seconds or hours?), she lands on her feet, legs bending to absorb the shock. Mercifully her train of thought is cut off. But no, not mercifully at all. The world is crumbling around them, the sky ashen and she chokes as she breaths in. The world around her is barren, a ravaged expanse of nothing. There are no trees, no shelter, just endless scorched earth and gray sky. She can smell smoke, and something beneath it too, a lingering, rotting stench.
What died?
But that is a stupid question. Everything died. Everything but her, and she hopes, her friends. Though she cannot see them anymore. Are they close? Perhaps. She peers through the smoke, but cannot see more than a few feet in any direction. Something is burning. The world. The entire world is burning. Is this how it ends then?
Did their Dark God cause this? Or was it something else?
The questions reel through her head, but then so do his words. It’s by the sea. About a mile off.” Get to the sea. Just a mile. She can make it a mile.
Can she?
No, don’t think like that. She can, and she has to. There’s no other choice. Don’t think about the cause of the destruction. Just move. She takes a step, still in her lioness form, feral and predatory. Despite the electric in her veins, she feels safer as a lioness. Who knows if electric or claws will harm the creatures that lurk here. But at least she has options. Some of the horses on this trip likely had only blunt teeth and hooves to work with.
First she has to find the sea. It’s impossible to see, with the world so achromatic in every direction. She cannot smell water either, not over the smell of smoke and burning flesh. But she’s played with lightning enough to know the electrical current radiates across the surface of water. And she can feel the way electric charges move around her. So she begins with one bolt off to the right, the lightning finding nothing but ground. To the left then, a mile away, because at least she knows the distance she needs to search. Again, nothing. In front of her, and she can feel the lightning bolt almost as if it shatters across the water. Forward it is.
Then the ground splits open, the world rumbling with the sound of some creature. Not small creatures, it seems. She starts to run, scrambling sideways to avoid the chasm that has opened to her left. Her paws slap against the parched earth. The ground is warm. Not quite burning hot yet, but too warm to be natural. Something is burning and she hopes she isn’t running straight for it.
Vines snake out from her left as she runs, swiping her off her feet before she has time to react. The vines tangle around her legs, pinning her against the ground on her side. Rhy cranes her head to see that the vines drop down into the chasm. She has no idea if there’s a body connected to these vines. Maybe they are just vines, mutated into something vile and vicious at the end of the world. Her claws shoot from between the toes, slicing into the vines. Something like a shriek rumbles from the crack in the earth as the veins flail and snake away.
She jumps to her feet and keeps running. But then she feels an icy blast of cold to her right. Peering around, she sees grey, cold flames licking at the anemic sky. They know. They must know. Are they gods too, or did her own Dark God give away her secrets before she ever arrived? First vines, so like the ones that climb up the trees of the Jungle. And now ice and cold. Again, her sister’s face swims into her mind but there’s no time for regrets. The flames leap toward her, aiming at her face, her back. It doesn’t matter where. The cold fires try to engulf her, and she cannot fight fire with sharp teeth and electric. Not even a cold fire. At least, she doesn’t think.
Instead, she darts to the left, hoping she’s faster than this creature of flame. The fire catches her right flank anyway, searing her gold and white hide. Pain roars through her in a way she assumes must be akin to the way electric feels to everyone else. A horrid radiating pain that howls through her veins. The electric inside her recoils at the savage cold.
Oh Kora, was this your life in the womb? No wonder her sister fears her. No wonder so many keep their distance.
But her momentary thought leads to another slap from the fires and she screams now. The creature is fast, the flames thrashing their way across the ground. There’s something sentient about the way it moves though, like it can see her. If it is sentient, than it must have a heart. Or at least something that makes it move. And she can stop a heart, so maybe she can stop this creature. Lightning surges off her skin, erupting in a mountain of white fire as it crashes into the creature. The creature stops, at least for now. Likely, she has not killed this thing, but she’s stopped it. She doesn't hesitate this time, doesn't think. She runs.
It’s boiling hot now. Hotter than the Jungle, and sweat begins to soak her skin, her breath coming in gasps. But she can see it; she can see the sea now. It’s roiling, and as she draws closer, she can see that it’s boiling. But there’s the wormhole, just above the sea. Just close enough she thinks she can leap over the boiling water and make it. She picks up speed, her muscles screaming, her frozen skin tearing. But the adrenaline and the electric in her veins sing with the excitement as well.
And then she sees it. No, not it. Kora. Here, in the middle of the desolation, a silhouette against the boiling sea. No. No. That’s not Kora. That can’t be Kora. It’s another creature. A shadow creature with the right shape with the right eyes and the right demeanor. Blocking her path. There’s no way around without fighting.
Her heart pounds against her chest, crying the name of the mare she has to find. Gail gail, gail gail. Is this love then? Do you destroy everything in your path to get to it, to try and keep it? But if you destroy everything, don’t you destroy everything you love too?
She slams her feet into the ground, halting before the shadow creature. She can’t bring herself to slice her sister open or stop her sister’s heart. Even if it’s not her real sister. Even if it kills Rhy instead.
Rhy has always known that she is deadly. There’s nothing pretty about the way she fights, but her traits aid her well. But she is not a warrior. She is not the monster, not the black piece of her heart. She is Rhy, the electric lioness who loves her sister very much. Despite everything.
The world around her goes cold and everything stills. She cannot hear the roars of the monsters, the incomprehensible babble of replies. She cannot hear anymore screams, or the rumbling of the earth, or the boiling sea. Her vision blurs, and the creature before her shifts again and again. Still, it's Kora that she sees.
The monster doesn’t move, and she knows that she cannot fight it and should not try. If it wanted her dead, she’d already be gone. “Please.” The only sound in a world devoid of everything but the one force that brought them here.
And the creature disappears. She heaves a sigh of relief as the heat rushes back into the world and her vision clears. She leaps, stretching her front paws out to touch the wormhole and it sucks her in. Down she goes, through the rabbit hole.
Noctosa was the first to feel the suckling at her shell when the earthly demigod severed their nebulous chains and set the sisters loose. Their galaxies are undefinable, unfathomable. The Great Old Ones liked to believe they wrought the knowledge to fully manipulate its infiniteness, that their corporeal souls could actually wield its final and omniscient power. They knew nothing and the petty magic that bound Nctolhu & Noctosa to be battered in the forever-storms of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter was voided when the faceless summoner broke the seal in the continuum of their spacely prison.
Nctolhu felt it too and placid, leaking smiles slid across the seven elongated, leech mouths that swung independently from her face like nightmarish trunks. The thunder and acidic rain clouds were the first to be sucked through the wormhole that formed above their storm-brewed cells, spiraling up into the cavernous black sky hole like smoke through a straw. Nctolhu kept her lidless eyes locked on her twin as she felt herself begin to lift from the planet’s surface, with a sloppy ‘pop’ she was plucked through – clawed arms dangling like a crab being lifted to the pot for boiling. Gail, Gail, Gail, Gail - the sisters would remember the name.
Kratos comes crashing into the swollen, dry ground when he’s spit from the wormhole with a left flank (external abdominal oblique muscle) that both oozed blood and a gelatinous, black substance that smelled like sulfur and hydrocarbons. Not too deep, but enough to make him uncomfortable and probably in need of a trip to the Falls. With a grunt he rolls onto his feet, shaking the loose soil away. The sky was a dead grey that cried ash onto his flesh, the combination of the burning in the distance and the putrid scent of flesh in the air had him tentatively curious as to what type of skewed hell he had been sent into this time.
Neither Rhy nor Lagertha are within eyes-reach as he did a once over of his immediate surroundings, he sees a bay girl not far away and in the distance – something behind her approached walking up-right on two legs in front of him. When he swings his heavy white head to the left he sees another bay girl and a painted chestnut that takes to the sky. With neither Rhy nor Lagertha in sight he heads for the sea when he hears their summoner’s voice in his ears, the dull roar of bubbling water in the distance. But his attention is raked away when a cacophony of sounds clattered through his nerves, instinctually his muscles clenched in response to the twisted, deviant cries that forced him to turn away from the sea and back at what came for him. He didn’t need to see them to know that it, them, they came for him – came for all of them.
The ground beneath his hooves began to break and crumble away, fissuring deep red wounds in the distended earth and temporarily drawing his attention away from whatever was coming – he had to deal with what was here now. He leaps away easily enough, although not gracefully, until the breaking of the earth stops for the time being. Kratos takes a final long-legged step from a crumbling now precipice, feeling a minor stab of pain in his injured flank as his body twisted. When he rights himself again he nearly collides with the two, viscous bodied monstrosities that were plopped down from the sky like twin rotten egg-yolks.
They couldn’t know how long those jealous sacs of nothingness had kept them prisoner in that forever tumbling, forever raining, and forever raging clusterfuck of a planet. Time was unimportant and insignificant to the Twins, all that mattered now was eventual retribution and for now – to soothe their barren, dusty stomachs (they each had three and they were neither herbivorous nor carnivorous, their bellies sought the atoms of all things tangible). The sisters were eaters of the flesh, land and sky and today they have stumbled upon Kratos.
"Oh, look at him Tol-tol, isn’t he positively glorious? Let’s keep this one, please!" Noctosa beseeches, although the words wouldn’t be logical to Kratos, just a series of mushy plops and wet groans from leech-like mouths that swiveled and intertwined with each other like snakes.
"Stop calling me that and no he’s not, He’s fodder for my stomach, now stop fucking around." Nctolhu was in no mood for her twin’s peculiarities, her infuriating curiosity. She was hungry and the beast before them had begun to drip something bright and hot from his mouth as the sisters idled. "Hurry, grab him."
Although the twins are lumbering, they are not clumsy – they each wielded six long arms that allowed them to crab-walk quickly, albeit quite fucking terrifyingly. Nctolhu lunges forward while her twin stays behind, reaching with a sickeningly long claw Although the twins are lumbering, they are not clumsy – they each wielded six long arms that allowed them to crab-walk quickly, albeit quite fucking terrifyingly. Nctolhu lunges forward while her twin stays behind, reaching with her heaviest claw (much like lobsters or crabs the Twins had two main pincher claws and the rest were for motion) to clench around the back of the fleshy beasts neck.
"I want to keep that one, I said!" The stationary twin warbled, her many mouths squealing and vibrating malevolently like angry eels. Nctolhu never indulged her, always belittling her idiosyncrasies like she was so much better than her. Their father Cthulhu had left them BOTH on that fucking boring planet, left them there to rot. She was no better than her and she wanted this beast, she would have him! She could see it already, she would cut off the arms of some other wretched creature and sew them onto his sides, which would make him better, yes – she could see it already. A couple of more arms and maybe she’d even eat the mouth he had now and give him one like her uncle Hnarqu. Yes, she could see it already, she had plans and her sister was fucking it up. Noctosa, in a fit of childish temper, reaches with her own claw to wrench her sister’s arm away from her would be-pet.
Kratos didn’t have time to ponder on the impossibility of these creature’s existence – they were a living meld of all things that frightened foals and left the old to hope that when their end came, they wouldn’t be sent for the bellies of these wretches. While his muscles instinctually screamed for flight, he acknowledged that such a luxury was not an option here – he was too close to reel away from its grasp. They stand directly before him, so near that their the fishy, infected scent of their flesh nearly chokes him and he isn’t imagining the smell of burnt flesh that was rife in his nostrils – he just doesn’t recognize it’s his own nostrils that are burning. The Twins breath (as well as the rest of their bodily gases) were made up of sulfur dichloride and ethylene – essentially mustard gas.
As the first one moves to clench the back of his neck, much like a wolf to her cub, he doesn’t pull away. The flesh in his nostrils were flaking away and filling with blood, which was never good considering horses can’t breathe out of their mouths. The ground around him is splintered and he risked breaking a leg if he made the mistake of stepping into one of the many clefts that surrounded him, not to mention the exertion wouldn’t help his rising respiratory distress. He could have reared up but offering his soft underbelly to the shear-like claws seemed the most unwise of the options before him. Coupled with the fact that his hooves probably wouldn’t do much amid a myriad of leech mouths. His ears are flailing wildly as the second nightmare begin to wail, her mouths gnashing angrily towards her sister.
When the claw clamps around the back of his neck, the vice-grip tightened and pinched the trapezius muscle there. It’s sharp edges slicing into the sides of his neck – albeit not deep enough to slice through the splenius’ muscles on either side, but certainly enough to cause him immediate discomfort and trouble moving his neck. Her claw lingers only long enough for the other sister to clamp her own around it and begin to wrench away, digging the cuts deeper into his neck before he lets the lightning explode from his skin. It’s a powerful strike, adrenaline and cold instinct pumping the power unchecked through his body and into the Twins. The claw immediately drops from his neck amid a cacophony of garbled, wet shrieks as the two sister’s reel back. In Noctosa’s tantrum she had latched herself to her sister so when Kratos sent his lightning through one, both felt his fury. He could see his lightning ricocheting through their gelatinous blobs of torsos before coming up and out through their cracked shells.
When Nctholu turns to her sister, who now lies in a sloppy puddle of what could best be described as chum, she lets out a torrent of howls that reverberate through his eardrums, threatening to puncture them as he angles past the grief-stricken twin who is slobbering and mewling in her own pile of pain. Kratos doesn’t hesitate any longer, perhaps the second sister would also succumb to her injuries, perhaps not. Perhaps she would rally to her father for the sake of a greater vengeance, or perhaps she would plead to the Outer Gods to gather Kratos’ soul for her to eat – but it would be hers to be had. She’d rip the dimensions asunder to feel his final breath in her mouth.
Kratos can still hear the monster’s ominous sloshing screams as he makes it to the edge of the boiling sea, a wormhole collapsing and spinning in on itself like whirlpool just a few feet off the shore. Whatever was in the wormhole beat the fuck out of what was here, boiling water included. He’s tired and although the blood from his nose has mostly cleared, his chest heaves with the exertion to breathe. His neck is stiff and bleeding, as well as his flank and yet he still chooses to fling himself into the churning waters after encasing himself in a husk of lightning that he hoped would at least somewhat save his skin from the scalding waters. Just as he’s being sucked into the vortex he hears the creature’s nightmarish, garbled voice shrieking after him and he swears it sounds like, Gail, Gail, Gail….
ooc - I saw some websites refer to her as "Nctosa" and others as "Noctosa" so I just picked one
