you're only as sick as your secrets

[Narcisus]

There’s a darkness inside of me writhing, always squirming. When I was younger, I pictured it a worm: small and burrowing deep where it didn’t belong, hollowing out the insides like rotten wood. I thought I was different somehow special, but the truth was less exciting and evident the older I grew. The truth that I was fallible and yet untouchable, crafting falsehoods when all I ever wanted was the real thing. I thought what I had wanted was so clear and so precise, but the worm wriggled its way up through my stomach and into my brain, rearranged my perception of this world and those who lived in it until they became the worms themselves. Eating and dying and fucking, carving holes into the landscape of time like mindless, sightless organisms.

I didn’t want to be one of them.
I refused to be like them, even if they approached me with half-smiles and promises of strange magicks.

What I wanted was exactly what I got. The sucking of air between the golden girl’s teeth; so sweet, like music to my ears. It made the smile around my mouth more genuine. I shivered gently, and probed into the places I wasn’t invited.

To her credit, the mostly-silent mare was as strong an opponent as I’d ever met. There was iron in her, forged and cast strong, and I met the resistance nearly everywhere my little invisible tendrils touched. There it was in her heart - so strong! So proud! There it was in her mind - I couldn’t breach the sheer barrier of mental doggedness she possessed. Even in her gaze; my skin felt the phantom burn, but I laughed and laughed a moment more. Stupid, silly mare.

“You’ve got spunk, haven’t you?” I snickered. “Where’s that pretty smile? Gone so soon?” I tsked sarcastically. That wouldn’t do. She’d been much more appealing with a come hither expression.

I resolved to fix her attitude. No; better yet I decide I’ll gift her. I’ll exchange a feeling, thick and sticky sweet - nearly substantial - and see how she takes to it. There are ways of conjuring bliss without touch, and though I relent the use of underhand tactics when it felt so simple just to clench the fist of my domination over her willpower, I’m more inclined now than ever to see how she takes to the drug I’m offering. It was easier when they fought less. Easier when they felt the strange fog slowly creeping through their head, bringing undesired but heavy-handed ecstasy with it. It almost seemed a bit unfair that I could make other creatures feel happy about walking into their own deaths.

Did she need a visual to complete the feeling, though? A little nightcap to take the edge off? I could manage.

The worm crawls in, the worm crawls out.
My skin writhes, tingling over my muscles like thousands of tiny ant bites, and I try my best to cast illusionment but even my powers aren’t infinite. They were draining steadily, and I only had a moment or two before one or all of them broke.

Narcisus

@[Aela]