11-02-2019, 05:06 AM
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Pinyon+Script|Source+Sans+Pro' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> <style type="text/css"> .ryatah_container { position: relative; z-index: 1; background: url('https://i.postimg.cc/YS7QJVgs/ryatah-bg.png'); width: 600px; min-height: 600px; border: solid 1px #92a09b; box-shadow: 0px 0px 15px 1px #000; } .ryatah_container p { margin: 0; } .ryatah_image { position: relative; z-index: 5; width: 600px; } .ryatah_text { position: relative; z-index: 8; width: 530px; margin-top: 35px; margin-bottom: -300px; border: solid 1px #000; border-bottom: none; background: url('https://i.postimg.cc/gkTKxNhM/lace-bg3.png'); } .ryatah_message { z-index: 8; position: relative; font: 12px 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify; color: #21200d; padding: 30px; } .ryatah_name { position: absolute; z-index: 10; font: 80px 'Pinyon Script', sans-serif; color: #6f8a8a; bottom: 10px; right: 40px; opacity: 0.6; } .ryatah_quote { position: absolute; z-index: 10; text-align: center; font: 10px 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; color: #000; letter-spacing: 1px; opacity: 0.7; bottom: 27px; right: 45px; } </style> <center> <div class="ryatah_container"> <div class="ryatah_text"> <p class="ryatah_message">Rhy’s voice is distant but it still manages to echo inside of her. She flinches when she hears it, because she had been dreading it. She knows she is being called back, and it is all at once a relief and a disappointment. Her head had turned towards the direction of the faint call, but now she looks back to Dhumin with a soft, muted kind of anguish evident in her nearly black eyes. There is so much more that she could say; so many things to try and convince him to see how he had destroyed her, whether he meant to or not.
But then, how could she ever place the blame on him – or anyone – when she had always done everything so willingly?
<i> “I refuse to believe that coming here was a mistake,”</i> she doesn’t know if he will fully fathom the earnesty in her voice, but she offers it to him anyway. She was vacillating between keeping her guard up, the way she always had when he was alive, and finally letting all of her walls come crumbling down. She could tell him that she loved him, she could tell him how he is the only one that has ever ignited even a small spark of jealousy in her. She could tell him how she would have done <i>anything</i> for him, how even though she had finally found a true, unquestionable love in Skellig that she still couldn’t be loyal – that she was still so easily led astray.<i> “I refuse to believe it, but it feels like it was.”</i>
She was close to touching him now, and there is a fleeting moment where she thinks she sees him flinch, like he thought about touching her, too. And in that moment, she thinks her heart might have stopped, but just like countless times before she is left waiting for a kindness that never comes.
And so she recoils, and though tears glitter along her eyelids she blinks them away and they never touch her skin. She does not say goodbye when she turns, and she does not retrieve the shimmering seaglass that still lies on the jungle floor. She leaves him, the token, and the phantom-like forest behind, and she fights every urge to look back.
She walks back along the path from which she had come, but when the jungle fails to give way to the dismal beach from before she can feel her pulse begin to quicken in fear. She hadn’t anticipated getting lost in the afterlife, and she doesn’t want to wonder what happens if you become trapped here as a living thing.
The trees begin to thin and fade, and in its place there is a vast field cloaked in fog. There is a melancholy that hangs thick in the air, and it is with trepidation that she continues forward. She is overcome with such an overwhelming sense of sorrow that it feels like lead in her lungs; like all her heartache that she has so artfully buried is suddenly being forced upon her. She wonders, then, if a heart can truly shatter to pieces in the afterlife, and she is afraid that she is about to find out.
There is a haunting melody, one that is at first so faint that she fears she is imagining it; that this is where she will finally go mad. But the further she walks, the louder it becomes, and the stronger that feeling of crushing sorrow grows. Ahead the mist begins to twist and swirl, parting to reveal a figure. She stops, and the figure stops too, and though she tries to focus, the creature never seems to fully form into anything clear. The song slowly ends, and she lets a silence hang between them for a few heartbeats, before she finally asks in her soft, uncertain way,<i> “Who are you? And where am I?”</i>
“Orpheus,” comes the almost disembodied voice, “And I think you already know. There is a place in the afterlife carved out for souls just like yours – souls that break their own hearts, that live a life full of injured love.”
<i> “But I’m not dead,”</i> and she tries to keep the panic from rising in her throat, she tries to fight the tremble that threatens to shake against the syllables that leave her tongue.<i> “I’m not supposed to be here.”</i> Yet she cannot help but to think that maybe she is. Maybe she is meant to be lost here in this heartbreaking land, without all the toxic ways she finds to soothe her wounds in the living. Maybe she is meant for this punishment, instead of an eternity being alive and at least standing a chance at intermittent moments of happiness.
“You came here to find a lost love, though. I saw you. You’re not going to try and bring him back?” He asks her, and she can feel heat rush to her cheeks, and she again has to swallow the tears away.<i> “I suppose you could say that. Some things are better left lost.”</i> She looks away even though she cannot see his face, willing the hurt from her eyes and smoothing her mask of composure before looking back and whispering,<i> “I just want to go back.”</i>
“Well...I could help you get out, I think,” he says, and she pretends to not notice his uncertainty, because as of now, he is the only hope that she has. She is used to clinging to tenuous threads of hope, at least. And she is used to placing her trust in those that are sure to let her down. There is a subconscious part of her that has accepted that she is meant to be trapped in this mourning field forever. "You won't make it past Cerberus on your own, I can promise you that."
She follows him, this shadowy, obscure figure, clear to the edge of the vale. Through the veil of fog she can hardly make out an entrance to a cave, and just outside of it a strange beast unlike she has ever seen stands sentinel. Like some demonic canine, she feels her apprehension take root when she notices the multiple heads that look in every direction. She can feel her faith begin to fade, and she looks to her guide with doubt clouding her eyes.
Orpheus drifts to the side, and again that low, sweet, sorrowful melody begins to play. “When you get into the cave just run, and remember, don’t look back.” She would never understand how important that was, because she does not know his story, but she has always done as she was told. Sometimes a flaw, and sometimes a strength.
She waits with her heart hammering in her chest and her breath caught in her lungs as the creature is lured from the entrance by the enchanting song, and then seemingly locked in a sleep-like trance.
And she runs.
Her footsteps echo across the stone floor and bounce off the walls, and she does not listen to hear if she is being followed, and she does not dare to glance over her shoulder. She runs through the endless black of the cave, and it is only by some adrenaline-fueled instinct that she remembers to call upon her infrared vision to decipher where the walls are to keep them from hindering her pace.
She doesn’t even know when she finally breaks from the afterlife. There is no great shattering of the veil that she can feel, she just knows hard stone suddenly gives into shifty sand, and the sounds of the waves crashing against the shore are the loudest that she has ever heard. She does not stop until the smell of the salt of the sea and the rotting of corpses reaches her nose, she does not stop until she hears the distant cry of a lone gull.
And when she does stop, with her lungs burning and her legs trembling, and she finally dares to look back, there is no cave to be found. Just a long stretch of beach, riddled with bleached bones.</div> <div class="ryatah_name">Ryatah</div> <div class="ryatah_quote">even angels have their wicked schemes</div> <img class="ryatah_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/9FSpNJJ6/ryatah.png"> </div> </center>
I took some liberties on the greek mythology to make it work lmao hopefully that's okay.
But then, how could she ever place the blame on him – or anyone – when she had always done everything so willingly?
<i> “I refuse to believe that coming here was a mistake,”</i> she doesn’t know if he will fully fathom the earnesty in her voice, but she offers it to him anyway. She was vacillating between keeping her guard up, the way she always had when he was alive, and finally letting all of her walls come crumbling down. She could tell him that she loved him, she could tell him how he is the only one that has ever ignited even a small spark of jealousy in her. She could tell him how she would have done <i>anything</i> for him, how even though she had finally found a true, unquestionable love in Skellig that she still couldn’t be loyal – that she was still so easily led astray.<i> “I refuse to believe it, but it feels like it was.”</i>
She was close to touching him now, and there is a fleeting moment where she thinks she sees him flinch, like he thought about touching her, too. And in that moment, she thinks her heart might have stopped, but just like countless times before she is left waiting for a kindness that never comes.
And so she recoils, and though tears glitter along her eyelids she blinks them away and they never touch her skin. She does not say goodbye when she turns, and she does not retrieve the shimmering seaglass that still lies on the jungle floor. She leaves him, the token, and the phantom-like forest behind, and she fights every urge to look back.
She walks back along the path from which she had come, but when the jungle fails to give way to the dismal beach from before she can feel her pulse begin to quicken in fear. She hadn’t anticipated getting lost in the afterlife, and she doesn’t want to wonder what happens if you become trapped here as a living thing.
The trees begin to thin and fade, and in its place there is a vast field cloaked in fog. There is a melancholy that hangs thick in the air, and it is with trepidation that she continues forward. She is overcome with such an overwhelming sense of sorrow that it feels like lead in her lungs; like all her heartache that she has so artfully buried is suddenly being forced upon her. She wonders, then, if a heart can truly shatter to pieces in the afterlife, and she is afraid that she is about to find out.
There is a haunting melody, one that is at first so faint that she fears she is imagining it; that this is where she will finally go mad. But the further she walks, the louder it becomes, and the stronger that feeling of crushing sorrow grows. Ahead the mist begins to twist and swirl, parting to reveal a figure. She stops, and the figure stops too, and though she tries to focus, the creature never seems to fully form into anything clear. The song slowly ends, and she lets a silence hang between them for a few heartbeats, before she finally asks in her soft, uncertain way,<i> “Who are you? And where am I?”</i>
“Orpheus,” comes the almost disembodied voice, “And I think you already know. There is a place in the afterlife carved out for souls just like yours – souls that break their own hearts, that live a life full of injured love.”
<i> “But I’m not dead,”</i> and she tries to keep the panic from rising in her throat, she tries to fight the tremble that threatens to shake against the syllables that leave her tongue.<i> “I’m not supposed to be here.”</i> Yet she cannot help but to think that maybe she is. Maybe she is meant to be lost here in this heartbreaking land, without all the toxic ways she finds to soothe her wounds in the living. Maybe she is meant for this punishment, instead of an eternity being alive and at least standing a chance at intermittent moments of happiness.
“You came here to find a lost love, though. I saw you. You’re not going to try and bring him back?” He asks her, and she can feel heat rush to her cheeks, and she again has to swallow the tears away.<i> “I suppose you could say that. Some things are better left lost.”</i> She looks away even though she cannot see his face, willing the hurt from her eyes and smoothing her mask of composure before looking back and whispering,<i> “I just want to go back.”</i>
“Well...I could help you get out, I think,” he says, and she pretends to not notice his uncertainty, because as of now, he is the only hope that she has. She is used to clinging to tenuous threads of hope, at least. And she is used to placing her trust in those that are sure to let her down. There is a subconscious part of her that has accepted that she is meant to be trapped in this mourning field forever. "You won't make it past Cerberus on your own, I can promise you that."
She follows him, this shadowy, obscure figure, clear to the edge of the vale. Through the veil of fog she can hardly make out an entrance to a cave, and just outside of it a strange beast unlike she has ever seen stands sentinel. Like some demonic canine, she feels her apprehension take root when she notices the multiple heads that look in every direction. She can feel her faith begin to fade, and she looks to her guide with doubt clouding her eyes.
Orpheus drifts to the side, and again that low, sweet, sorrowful melody begins to play. “When you get into the cave just run, and remember, don’t look back.” She would never understand how important that was, because she does not know his story, but she has always done as she was told. Sometimes a flaw, and sometimes a strength.
She waits with her heart hammering in her chest and her breath caught in her lungs as the creature is lured from the entrance by the enchanting song, and then seemingly locked in a sleep-like trance.
And she runs.
Her footsteps echo across the stone floor and bounce off the walls, and she does not listen to hear if she is being followed, and she does not dare to glance over her shoulder. She runs through the endless black of the cave, and it is only by some adrenaline-fueled instinct that she remembers to call upon her infrared vision to decipher where the walls are to keep them from hindering her pace.
She doesn’t even know when she finally breaks from the afterlife. There is no great shattering of the veil that she can feel, she just knows hard stone suddenly gives into shifty sand, and the sounds of the waves crashing against the shore are the loudest that she has ever heard. She does not stop until the smell of the salt of the sea and the rotting of corpses reaches her nose, she does not stop until she hears the distant cry of a lone gull.
And when she does stop, with her lungs burning and her legs trembling, and she finally dares to look back, there is no cave to be found. Just a long stretch of beach, riddled with bleached bones.</div> <div class="ryatah_name">Ryatah</div> <div class="ryatah_quote">even angels have their wicked schemes</div> <img class="ryatah_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/9FSpNJJ6/ryatah.png"> </div> </center>
I took some liberties on the greek mythology to make it work lmao hopefully that's okay.