brumeraven

[brumeraven]

🦋: Abstracted Definition || definitions, abstracted, transformations, conformity, expectations, psychopomps, self-abandonment, reflections, white lies

Abstracted (n): One now Passed who tried to escape and believes that it did. The Abstracted are not alive, but they fit the definition of life. The Yearning must cast either purpose or agency to the Void; the Abstracted chose neither. The Devil you know promises that the Void can be ignored.

~🦋

[brumeraven]

🍂: Brumeraven Definition 3 || definitions, oracles, transformations, fury, exhaustion, dehumanization

Brumeraven (n): (in the folklore of some inhuman peoples) an oracle of Shadowflame, the transformation of one who has witnessed inhumanity. A Brumeraven is said to be incapable of lying yet speaks only of the need for the complete extirpation of sapience from all existences.

~🍂

[brumeraven]

🍂: A Thousand Deaths || fae, creativity, failure, burnout, decay, exhaustion, scribes, self-doubt, faelure, i deserve to suffer for that pun

I don't remember the first time I died.

I could narrow it down, I suppose, but really, what's the point? Reflecting on one's failures rarely improves anything and must always bring pain, for how else do we learn but by avoiding that which hurts us?

I keep them locked away, deep in the bowels of the earth, buried in the lowest levels of the house I haunt.

Do you find that queer? Dying just the once is the normal state of affairs; how blessed you are. You can live free of certainty, full of false hope for a brighter future.

Oh, I'm certain you carry anxiety within your soul, spawned from incessantly not knowing what the future holds, but what is a little anxiety in the face of so much glorious potential? After all, anything is possible, until you've proved it isn't.

Until you've failed.

You disagree, I note. You truly think that it's better to know than not?

Very well then; come and I'll show you, but be warned as we condescend now into my graves that there can be no such panacea for an ailing soul once it has drunk deeply of the bitterness of defeat.

Not just once, no, but again and again and again. Each time, I try, I strive, I fail, and I die. And then I just...go on existing in spite of it.

With one more door down here in the basement.

You can see them too, can't you? The doors that flank this hallway.

Each hewn from ancient heartwood, a solid block of it now reduced, transformed, into this.

A door.

A choice: that which can be closed, rendered impassable, locked away and forgotten. Or opened. To allow whatever is inside egress.

Unlabeled, perhaps in the conventional sense, but each is covered in myriad scenes of struggle, carved bas-relief like so much braille, night-writing for one whose fingers are yet too blind to read the little triumphs set between the lines of patent failure.

What does it signify? Nothing. Perhaps it once did, but now there's only the sense of it.

This one, I succumbed to malaise, a general insouciance for all of life, much less my project at the time. Perhaps you've known some measure of it, even within your short mortality.

And here, further down the hall, see how the story just ends mid-scene, the entire left half of the door left blank and ungraven? This time it was mere intractability that did me in. I went in with a heart too bold, more comfortable in myself than the problems at hand warranted.

Ah, and here. One needn't even look; do you smell that? Like petrichor and ozone all at once, a sudden thunderstorm at the end of a long drought. This time, it was distraction, the alluring siren song of new challenges, so different from those that had stumped me at the time...

This is all of them.

A thousand doors.

A thousand lives, a thousand deaths, a thousand failures, and through all of it, here I yet stand in the hallway, amidst it all, awaiting my own door, wondering when I stand before it, will I remember what it is to be me, as I am, now?

This me, the me who wastes her time wandering the gallery of her failures rather than working on the task at hand. Giving tours of it, even, and for what? To convince you of what?

I have changed, again and again and again, yet that it seems is at least invariant.

I have always frequented these halls, no matter how few there were at the time, stopping to wonder about the door I'm carving for myself in doing so.

Thinking on every door. Every failure.

Every door but this last, here at the end of this hall.

The first door. The first death.

The words writ upon it hold no meaning to me now, not anymore, nor can I remember writing them.

And yet I find myself before it today, low in the bowels of the earth, as close to Hell as a thing like me will ever come, and just as far from the Heaven I will never know.

It's the smell I notice first, not even knowing how it is the door became open, no longer aware of my surroundings.

Mold, plain and simple, the damp rot of fallen leaves and cold mornings and wet paper, the autumnal cessation of vernal dreams of rebirth and growth and change.

And there, huddled in the middle of the room, is her, all hurt and hunger, looking prim and proper and put together, so unlike the decayed and decrepit thing I now am as to be unrecognizable as the same body.

I wonder, how can it be that I had once been her?

How could I once have not known what it is to die?

I wonder why she cries, as she takes me in her arms and holds me, the gesture itself so unlike any I would now offer.

Perhaps she cries for her failure. Perhaps she cries knowing that she will one day become me.

I slam the door shut once more, leaving her to the work I know she'll never finish, tears tearing canyons in the dust on my face, sobbing in the hall, thinking only of what it will be to be locked behind my own door, to look up to her disdain, just another failure in her past.

I guess...I guess I've brought you here that you might remember me instead as someone who tried.

~🍂

[brumeraven]

🍂: Playing At Dolls || dolls, witches, love, depression, either too obvious or too subtle and i don't know which

Dolls are ubiquitous. And, like all ubiquitous things, they go overlooked and unquestioned. From scribes and housemaids to weapons and 'cades, dolls are viewed only as tools with purpose, means to an end.

How easy it is to forget the origins of the things we overlook day by day.

Not only easier, but often safer; far more comfortable to think of pesticides as agrarian innovation than as the failed attempts at developing nerve agents they actually were. At least in the capital of the empire, where one can ignore the impact of their more successful cousins.

No surprise, then, that few really consider how dolls came to be.

Certainly, everyone knows that it was the Witches who made the first dolls, in those days when we first wove great firestorms, repurposing and refilling such empty vessels as were left in the wake of the Flames.

Oh, you didn't know...?

Phaw, history has been whitewashed even more than I was aware. Forgive me; I've been long away.

Well, it should not surprise you that those first dolls were made for a Purpose, just like they are now, made to play a role we ourselves could not.

We dressed them. Named them. Gave them elaborate backstories and roles and hopes and dreams and fears and flaws.

All of that effort, creation, creativity, complexity, all of it to create a thing that almost had a life of its own.

Almost.

To what end, you ask?

Simple. We set them at play. Made them meet for the first time. Spar with veiled promises and half-spoken desires.

We made them fight and fear, dance and dream, flirt and fuck, laugh and love. Share their deepest secrets and most foolish hopes, moments of passion and boredom.

It all seemed so true, so right, so natural. And yet, not a whit of it was real, every interaction preordained, carefully rehearsed scripts acted out by deftly-manipulated puppets, all of it just a show put on for none but ourselves, serving a purpose none else would understand.

Why? Why?!

Really, you'd ask that of me now, not already understanding? Have we really been so forgotten as to be entirely misunderstood?

We made them because how else could we experience any of that?

Intimacy is, at its heart, a luxury knowable only by the vulnerable.

~🍂

[brumeraven]

🍂: On Perseverance || dolls, witches, pain, chronic illness, burnout, self-abandonment, self-harm, scribes, mutilation

Dolls are curious things.

Construe that as you will; it's true in both interpretations. For all that we have made them for countless years, we've never much stopped to ask why they are the way they are.

Though, to be fair, it's a blind spot for them as well.

For all their seeming simplicity and innocence, dolls are walking contradictions.

A thing of absolutely no intrinsic drive that is somehow nevertheless utterly, inexorably inerrant in carrying out its assigned purpose, never asking why or how.

Dolls do not wish nor want nor will, and yet they are creatures of nothing else. Pure will, distilled and made animate.

It just isn't their own.

And so it is this, I've come to believe, from which that seemingly necessary contradiction arises.

Within the Cardinalities, there are no mutually-extinguishing forces, only cycles of generation and overcoming.

Flame and Void do not annihilate on contact but rather feed into each other in endless ages of emptiness and ire.

So too the juxtaposition of Light and Shadow is not one of diminution nor of admixing to a uniform grey, but rather a clash of primordial, fundamental forces, the lightning in Miller's flask, a knife's edge on which the only truly living creatures must walk.

The term "Flux," it turns out, was not chosen at random by my predecessors. Change, growth, evolution...they always stem only from hardship and opposition.

Stagnation, I have learned, is death, as slow and comfortable as any opiate.

So, what happens then, when a Witch sees fit to fill a vacant vessel full of her will, to grant it anima yet never spiritus?

Perpetual motion, or as close to it as we can come without severely disappointing thermodynamics.

I have done my best to interrogate these bounds, since none else seem interested, with results somehow simultaneously both unexpected and utterly predictable.

Dolls do not get tired. After all, their Witch isn't doing the work, so why would her will waver?

In fact, it is nearly impossible to dissuade a doll from its assigned task shy of completion.

I took a scrivener once and set it to writing.

A simple enough task, one it took to with a sort of quiet delight, as if finding meaning in the trivial motions.

I took a hammer to its shoulder, shattering the delicate tracery of filigree that held the joint together.

The doll hardly seemed to notice the arm dangling uselessly at its side, only picked up the pencil in its other hand, neat script becoming crude block letters mid-sentence.

I took the pencil. It resorted to scratching letters into the writing desk, fingertip chewed to a sharp point.

You could call this determination, but it is mere constraint. There was a pen ready to hand, but pens were for Witches; using it was never an option, nor was quitting.

I let the thing write for years without rest, wearing every part of its arm down to the frame without comment or complaint.

Honestly, I all but forgot about the experiment...

Until the day I found it stopped, inanimate and halted with greater finality than death could manage.

At first, I began to doubt my thesis. Perhaps there were limits on the perseverance of dolls.

That is, until I went to check on the Witch who'd made the thing. Found her a guttering wreck of Void, babbling on and on about the horrible things the poor scribe had suffered through.

Turns out my suspicions had been correct from the start.

Dolls weren't human, and so it was that we would always fail and give up before they would.

I'd just have to find a Witch with less humanity left in her.

~🍂

[brumeraven]

🦋: What Must Be Fought || angels, abuse, burnout, exhaustion, helplessness, pain, trauma, transformations, victimhood

"How'd, uh, how'd this all get started, anyways?"

It was a stupid question. But then, I'd asked a lot of stupid questions on this job. Got in a lot of trouble with my coworker over those, back when I was a trainee, asking all the questions you weren't supposed to ask.

She'd taught me to keep my mouth shut and my eyes forward, to worry more about the repercussions of my questions than the answers to them.

Still, most of the answers I did get had been volunteered as flippant jests by her. Didn't understand the truth of it until later, heh.

That ability to laugh about my job was far from the only lesson I'd learned from her, but it may well have been the most important. Shame she'd passed a few years back; cancer was a cruel way to go.

I never thought I'd get an answer to it, that question.

Just wasn't a thing that was asked. I guess everyone just assumed that the energy crisis had gotten bad enough that divine intervention had seemed the most reasonable solution.

But now, here I was, on the other side of a concrete wall from the answer. And she was looking at me.

Not at the camera, mind you, by means of which I could see her.

No, she was staring fixated at the featureless wall I stood behind. Unable to help myself, I paced up and down, watching her inerrantly track my motions through several inches of concrete, head tracing side-to-side.

The hot bile of visceral fear churned in my chest, the instinctual need to freeze or flee, or at the very least to empty my bowels to have a fighting chance at one of those, but it was mine alone, not Extrinsic. The truth of it was she terrified me.

And yet, there was nothing actually terrifying about the scene.

She was just a girl like any other, with an unmarked face and slender build and messy shock of auburn hair that placed her indeterminately between fifteen and thirty five and similarly between pretty and just plain.

She sat on a plain bench with her knees hugged to her chest, stacks of books unread and plates of food untouched littering the room. It was a bad sign, if she wasn't eating again, but nothing else marred the illusion of normalcy.

From the camera's angle in the corner, I couldn't even see those ancient eyes that shattered the farce with their ocean of sorrow.

"How do you capture an Angel in the first place?"

Even without having read the files, I'd only had to look into those eyes once to know the answer.

They'd tried everything on It.

The initial binding had gone smoothly, all cold, mechanical precision of geometry and runes, salt and circuitry, paltry human attempts to summon and restrain and confine within circumscribable bounds the innately unknowable. The uncontrollable.

But the stronger the shackles, the stronger It became.

They did the worst mortal minds could conjure, anything to defile and debase It, to rob It of Its powers.

The more they cut away, the more men who had their way, the more the bindings failed.

Until the day It broke loose.

The facility had self-destructed, a final failsafe to prevent an apocalyptic outcome, the blast taking everyone involved with it.

And when teams came in to clean up the mess, they'd found nothing left but her, all alone, on the verge of death.

An Angel is a solution to a problem, a tool of pure Light imbued with purpose and given direction. An Angel is as strong as It needs to be. It can and will fight however hard It must to overcome any and all opposition. It can endure anything, destroy anything, withstand anything.

Until the task is done.

You see, wherever Light is brightest, so too is Shadow deepest.

Every last hand that had touched her had been burned away, and yet their touch remained.

What had been done could be neither erased nor changed.

Pain could be endured in pursuit of some greater purpose, but it must always be felt. The debts of the past must always be paid.

After she'd been bound this way, well, Others just kept coming to free her and Falling in turn, finding it an impossible task. She didn't want to go.

Capturing an Angel was easy, we'd learned. All you had to do was bring It face to face with that which couldn't be fought.

With a sigh, I noted down my recommendations for care and moved on from her room.

The hard part, it turned out, was keeping them alive afterwards.

~🦋

[brumeraven]

🍂: On Nostalgia || fae, decay, depression, creativity, burnout, scribes, oww, i'd tag this world of warcraft but i don't want to inflict it on people actually using that tag

Don't tell me.

You don't need to. Our stories are always the same.

When you were a child, you discovered that you had a gift, one that was precious, hidden, impossible to take away from you.

The ability to walk between worlds.

Perhaps it's birthright. We each already had the blood as a matter of provenance. We each had been replaced in the cradle from our earliest memories, infants that never cried, with eyes too-knowing for their age and a smile too wry and wistful.

Or, perhaps the gift came first, and we became other-than-human in that instant of disorientation, dissociation, in that liminal gap in continuity, in the empty spaces between worlds.

Regardless, we could deny our nature no longer the first time we stepped sideways from the sun.

In other worlds, we found refuge, solace, joy, delight, the warmth of welcome to an infinite myriad of places we never knew we belonged. As creatures of all and none, we belonged to nowhere and everywhere at once, and each new plane welcomed us in turn, animate for our presence.

But then, one day, something changed.

Worlds grew dark and grim and cold, rust and rot eating through both surface and support, noxious flaws shining in through dark cracks in shattered dreams.

We searched, frantically, for the Light we knew was out there, only to find none.

So we turned to the other half of our power. Cut wrists and wove dark magics to create new worlds of our own, worlds with names written in blood and ashes.

Surely this one would be without flaw, unlike countless before.

Surely, we'd finally find our asylum from the Shadow here.

And yet...you don't believe that, do you? You don't believe you can do it.

You still yet long for those light and joyous worlds you once walked among, however busy you might now be, however devoted to your quest, you still yet believe that there are worlds untouched by the rot.

Let me tell you the secret of our people, a fate we each are saddled with from birth by sin of knowledge.

You will bleed yourself dry trying to build your havenworld and still, still you will find it wanting. Still, you will yearn for those planes on which you walked as a child.

And one day, you'll give in. You'll lose faith in your own dreams.

One day, you'll seek them out once more, those lands beyond. You'll walk through darkened halls and overgrown cemeteries, searching in vain for the joy you'd left there, wondering what ruination was wrought here.

And on that day, in that moment, you will understand the truth of the rot you've fought for so long, the corruption you've run from your whole life.

That world never changed, never grew dark and hateful and twisted.

You did.

~🍂

[brumeraven]

🪫: On Fates || chronic illness, decay, exhaustion, depression, fatigue, helplessness, self-harm, the mirror

"Have a nice day-oh..." She trailed off mid-platitude, blinking and looking away as she noticed my Fate. I knew that's what it was; I'd grown accustomed to the sudden loss of eye contact. One quick saccade, realization, revulsion, and finally embarrassment.

For the first time, I allowed myself to become aware of the other figure, standing beside and a bit behind her, like an over-controlling manager.

Old. Tired, yes, but at peace, nothing at all like the vivacious youth she'd once been.

Not a bad way to go.

No one knows where Fates came from, or at the very least if someone does, they're not telling. Maybe they sprung from our collective subconscious. Maybe there was a data breach at the Akashic records. Maybe it was just divine revelation.

Or maybe a Witch decided once and for all that She was tired of explaining Herself, tired of the rest of us not seeing the world through Her eyes.

All I know is that one day, they were suddenly there, just beside and a little behind each of us.

Didn't take long to figure out what they meant.

Even if there'd been the possibility for doubt, well, a sizable majority of that first bunch showed all the hallmarks of a myriad novel and varied means of suicide.

And then all of them came true.

Once people came face to face with an inerrant, tangible proof of their own mortality, well, they just gave up. Taking matters into your own hands was a means of control, of reclaiming agency, snatching back some false sense of free will from the jaws of predestination.

It was paradoxical, come to think of it, all wrapped up in retrocausality. None of them ever saw any other death but by their own choice. Perhaps it was just the finality of it all, but it hardly seems as if that could have driven any to it.

And yet...

It was a matter of proof incontrovertible that one just wasn't strong enough to survive in a world devoid of make-believe, one in which it seemed impossible to forget.

They were wrong. The human capacity for self-delusion and willful blindness should never be underestimated.

I nodded politely to the girl and wandered out of the shop to the street. Those who survived adapted quickly.

It became gauche to even notice another's Fate, much less comment on it, and how could one acknowledge one's own without tacitly, indirectly doing the same to others?

People just ignored them.

If your Fate was to die fast and young, what was there but to squeeze in every last drop of life in the interim?

And if instead one was to die after a long life, why bother thinking of the future? Damn the consequences; apparently they wouldn't matter.

And so it was that, after a short period of adaptation, society all but returned to normal.

All but us, the afflicted.

I peered furtively at passersby, taking in the myriad endings their Fates foretold.

Cancer.

Heart disease.

An overdose.

Vehicle accident.

The usual fare.

For them, death was a state, the finality of an outcome so unlike one's current state as to be near impossible to consider. And as such of no concern to them.

For some small number of us, though, death was a process. Dying, dying was hard. And living in spite of it harder still.

I looked to my side, forcing myself to see what others refused to, what I'd seen every single day since that first.

I saw myself, as I was.

My own life, as I lived it.

All the suffering and resentment I lived with, day after day after day.

Only, it wasn't the same at all.

Decades older, she was nevertheless a mirror of me, a cruel reflection in which every ounce of pain and frustration and resentment had been magnified, every bit of exhaustion redoubled.

Decrepit and decaying, I saw the truth of my future every single day.

Decline.

Despair.

Every time I looked at her, I saw that I would only worsen.

Every time I looked at her, I saw that, soon enough, my bad days would be good ones, and the bad to come worse still.

Every time I looked at her, I knew I would go on existing anyways, spared even the mercy of death.

No wonder then that I walked alone in a bubble of averted eyes down these crowded streets.

With time, they'd all found it easy enough to know that they'd die.

How much crueler a fate to know that you'd never be allowed to live.

~🪫

[brumeraven]

👺: A Dismissal || combat dolls, violence, fear, dehumanization, anxiety, not a hit with local therapists and well-wishers

"I hope you find peace..."

What an odd benediction, an empty adage offered not as expression of goodwill, not as legitimate wish that you might attain a better future, but instead as a curt dismissal, a Parthian shot to remind you that, whatever they said, you weren't safe here.

It was just another way of saying "I can't help you" that spared the speaker whatever guilt or responsibility they might otherwise feel for your situation.

I guess I could charitably assume it was my feelings they hoped to spare, not their own. I could assume they were an idiot.

The thought provoked a fit of laughter, cut short by a glare at the first passerby startled by my sudden outburst of bitter mirth.

But it was all a grand joke, wasn't it? The way they pretended to care, pretended they could help, pretended they could even be bothered to try.

They didn't give a fuck. No one did. We never would have been sent out to die in their stead if they had.

We were easy to ignore out there on some distant, hypothetical battlefield, easy to throw into the grinder in the name of...what had it been? Wealth? Land? Life? Freedom?

I no longer remember the rationale, forget how they'd whitewashed their lies. I forget why they thought it was a grand idea to even create me in the first place.

But, they had.

And now, they tell me they can't do anything, tell me I only need to relax, to trust, to find peace.

They tell me all those smiling faces that pass me on the street are worn by friends, each manifest sincerity and not just another mask to hide more enemies.

The more thoughtful even say it was a mistake, that it was wrong we were created in the first place.

Bullshit.

It was a mistake that any of us ever made it back from the front; it was wrong for me to try to pretend to be their equal.

They tell me to find peace? I have. I have known greater peace than they ever will, and they revile me for it.

I have heard the thrumming beat of marching feet on hard-packed earth.

Heard the keening elegy of Fluxwrought wingblades slicing through still air and flesh alike.

Heard the harmonic, shattering screams of the imploding cores of my erstwhile friends.

Heard the bitter, croaking laughter of brumeravens gorging themselves on carrion and discarded tool alike.

In all of it was peace. The peace of certainty, of righteousness.

The peace of knowing for a fact that the man in front of you was an enemy, not just a potential one.

The peace of knowing, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I was made for this.

I have known the peace of the eye of the storm, forgetting myself, forgetting all falsehoods and lies, knowing only the truth of my blades, the truth that I am a mote riding on the winds of fury.

It's not that I have never found peace, no.

It's only that I fear I will never know it again.

~👺

[brumeraven]

🦋: Vigilance And Vengeance || mech pilots, angels, fury, stigmatization, transformations, violence, victimhood, probably worth reading The One Who Made Angels and Those Thankless Years first if you haven't

"At least you're not a Stig."

Bitter fucking comfort, though I supposed it true. At least I didn't proclaim what I was to the world in gilded writ. At least there was still something that was "me" inside of me, not just hollow Void. Would that that were all that was inside me...

See, I'd been a second gen pilot, snatched away from the claws of a mother who drank her fears away to stand wingblade to talon with the Beasts that threatened the world. And I'd been glad to go; even at that age, I knew it was what I wanted, knew it was where I belonged.

Not for the world's sake, mind you. Fuck the world, and all it had ever given me.

It was what I wanted for myself. I'd had nothing and been given a chance at everything I could ever want.

Strength. Power. The chance to win.

The S2's were incarnate miracles, striding tall through evacuated streets, absent the myriad flaws of the first generation. The first Seraphs, well, that man had slapped them together in record haste on a prayer and a collective dream of survival.

They'd been good enough, sure, but they were weak, vulnerable still, prone to cooking their pilots alive, assuming they held together long enough through the fire and Flame. We didn't know how strong the Beasts really were nor how to have a chance against them.

And the third generation, well...that was where the Stigs came from. By then, someone had figured out Halo field inversion, and it was all over for the pilots once they realized that the Seraphs cost far, far more than another unwanted child.

But the S2's...perfection. Could push 'em harder than yourself. They were fast. Deadly. And if you were good enough, hell, you were invulnerable. With the right pilot, man and machine would apotheose, an unwavering avatar of vengeance, the human will to never, ever submit again.

That's what they wanted, what they looked for in us. That pathological need to never, ever lose again, that will too indomitable to crack. And those of us who had had it, well, we piloted those angels as if we'd been born to those towering frames.

We were too in sync.

The best of us forgot how to feel comfortable in our own bodies, kicking and fighting to stay in those porcelain walls, desperation fueling our grasps at safety. Once you'd been one with a Seraph...everything else felt like death, or worse.

Helplessness.

Stumbling steps in a body with too few limbs, blind and frail as a newborn infant. I raised such a fit they all but let me sleep in the thing. It was for the best; anywhere else was too exposed. Couldn't be comfortable unless I was able to fight back.

On the rare occasion that I was forced out, I'd wander at night, looking to the sky, staring at Caelum glinting overhead, wondering if that man never condescended to us for the same reason.

I might not have been happy, but I was safe. Until the affinity became to strong.

It was the first inkling anyone had of Halo inversion. Its polar opposite, in fact: Conjunction.

One morning, He told me it was over. A hundred and seventeen fights without a scratch on me, a hundred and seventeen kills, and they were cutting me loose.

I was too old. Too hard to handle. Too stubborn.

So it was out on the open streets with a stipend and a "thanks."

I punched a hole through the wall when I heard the news. You could write it off as teenage angst, if not for it having been a solid meter of reinforced concrete.

They still let me go; too afraid to do otherwise, I assume. But it only got worse from there. The connection only got stronger. For whatever time I'd spent in the Seraph, its beating core lived on deep in my chest now.

I was stronger, yes, but we were one thing. A fighter.

The first person I killed just sneered in my direction. I didn't want to. But an S2 had only one job, pilot and Seraph alike. Never lose. Never stop fighting.

He burned on the spot, incinerated in the concordant perfection of my Halo. The thing in my chest demanded it.

At least he'd deserved it, not so different from a Beast.

The next didn't.

So I ran. I moved, over and over, city to town to city again, never staying still, never getting to actually live my life. I assume it all got swept under the rug, every broken body and burned building.

In time I learned to hide it, to force down the destroying angel inside. Days became weeks became months, and...I let myself hope. That there could be more to me than that. I made friends. Built a life. Fell in love. Read books and baked bread and did everything one was meant to.

Until the day he asked me to play stones.

I hadn't played before, but it was simple enough. White and black, good and evil, diametrically opposed, smooth porcelain maneuvering for territory.

I was good. The man I loved was better.

I moved the next day. I guess he didn't understand, in the end, didn't know me as well as he thought.

"It's just a game" were words no one would knowingly choose for their last.

I don't think the flames will ever die down. I know now that that Halo will burn anyone who wrongs me, anyone who tells me to stop fighting. Anyone who tells me I'm safe.

And they'll learn, in time, learn to stay away.

At least I'll never be a Stig.

~🦋

[brumeraven]

In retrospect, probably should have tagged this one with angels too...

🦋: On Salvation || dolls, dehumanization, decay, depression, gross, mutilation, saints, transformations

I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren for all that I graced it with my presence. And in all that silence, in that void between clock ticks, when no sound meets my ears but that of memory, I remember how they named me Savior.

I didn't do it for that. Never gave two shits about the accolades, whether my family name was praised or reviled.

I did it because someone had to. People were hurting, dying, and the world did what it always did; it stood by and watched.

I think the philosophists named it something. Someone won some fancy award for the discovery, after distilling down that creeping miasma to isolate the causative agent. Etiology helped them feel in control, I assume, putting a name and identity on the root of the evil.

But science is no protection against demons, and no amount of theology could return Lucifer to Heaven.

Everyone else, well, we just called it brumerot. Seemed to fit, and it was hard to care why exactly your skin was sloughing off in sheets in the midst of it happening.

My parents begged me not to go, or, rather, they wrote a strongly-worded letter impressing upon me the value of pursuing my present studies, a most cursory exegesis of which laid bare the subtext:

They didn't care, so neither should I.

That was just the way of the world, as it always had been and would always be. Not caring was the only way one could avoid being crushed beneath its weight.

I was on the next ship. Someone had to care, had to help, and it would be me.

It was that conviction...no, that identity, that kept me going in the midst of it all.

It didn't matter that people were hurting, so long as I was doing something.

It didn't matter that, left and right, my fellows were showing signs of the affliction, so long as I was helping.

It didn't matter that, no matter how many I treated, how hard I fought, it was all palliative, and the epidemic burned on and on without signs of abating.

It didn't even matter when I found myself strapped down to a gurney, wheeled off to who knew what fate.

The rot had set in, they told me, my arm as good as lost.

Of course it was; my fingertips had begun to blacken two days ago, and that very morning, half the flesh of my hand had simply degloved as I'd tried to grab a cup of coffee.

But it didn't matter.

I was still me; I was my mission, even after they took one arm, and then the next a month later.

I kept going back, over and over, for there was yet work to be done.

I hardly noticed when they finally cut away the last bits of my old life; I hardly noticed I then stood alone against the affliction.

Everyone else had either died or given up and gone home. One way or another, they'd all stopped fighting, except for me.

The people called me a savior, then. The Clockwork Saint, all shiny porcelain that stood unsullied by the plague. The infection couldn't reach me, couldn't affect crystalline perfection. All the blood and tears and feces and prayers I waded through every day just rinsed off.

Odd, to me, that I was admired thus.

I was no saint, untouched by the epidemic, no matter how many I saved. I was an oracle, an omen of its coming. I was walking proof of how much this sickness would take from you.

I didn't realize just how true that was at the time.

Society's fever broke, eventually, or perhaps every last person that sickness could take with it was long since gone, and so I returned home, thinking somehow that everything had changed and nothing at all.

I was right, but only in the wrong fashion.

I thought only my body had been taken from me.

I thought myself immune to the disease, but the rot had sunk in to the bone. Past it, even, deeper still to those parts of myself that couldn't simply be replaced.

The woman I loved welcomed me home with open arms, saying she understood.

I watched her body burn a week later, and that was when I finally noticed it. That miasma, seeping from every crack in my unfeeling carapace, oily black wisps, like a lover's corpsesmoke.

I went back to a house that had been my home when I'd left it. There was little left inside. Everything of hers was already gone.

I reached for the cat I'd forgotten to feed in my grief and watched as the thing inside me stretched out its tendrils and melted flesh from bone.

I reached for my coffee and found it bitter and cold, the scone molded and inedible.

I reached for a pencil and the lead snapped and paper mildewed.

I suppose I didn't need to leave a note. Whoever read it would end up contaminated, after all.

So now I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren, for all that I graced it with my presence a few moments longer. And in all that silence, I remember how they named me Savior.

I remember the adulation, for fighting what no one else was willing to.

I think, not of the people I helped, but of the ones I couldn't, and of what both had lost.

And I wonder still, as I set flames to debride the last remnants of the disease, could one named saint or savior ever be saved?

~🦋

[brumeraven]

🦋: On Salvation || dolls, dehumanization, decay, depression, gross, mutilation, saints, transformations

I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren for all that I graced it with my presence. And in all that silence, in that void between clock ticks, when no sound meets my ears but that of memory, I remember how they named me Savior.

I didn't do it for that. Never gave two shits about the accolades, whether my family name was praised or reviled.

I did it because someone had to. People were hurting, dying, and the world did what it always did; it stood by and watched.

I think the philosophists named it something. Someone won some fancy award for the discovery, after distilling down that creeping miasma to isolate the causative agent. Etiology helped them feel in control, I assume, putting a name and identity on the root of the evil.

But science is no protection against demons, and no amount of theology could return Lucifer to Heaven.

Everyone else, well, we just called it brumerot. Seemed to fit, and it was hard to care why exactly your skin was sloughing off in sheets in the midst of it happening.

My parents begged me not to go, or, rather, they wrote a strongly-worded letter impressing upon me the value of pursuing my present studies, a most cursory exegesis of which laid bare the subtext:

They didn't care, so neither should I.

That was just the way of the world, as it always had been and would always be. Not caring was the only way one could avoid being crushed beneath its weight.

I was on the next ship. Someone had to care, had to help, and it would be me.

It was that conviction...no, that identity, that kept me going in the midst of it all.

It didn't matter that people were hurting, so long as I was doing something.

It didn't matter that, left and right, my fellows were showing signs of the affliction, so long as I was helping.

It didn't matter that, no matter how many I treated, how hard I fought, it was all palliative, and the epidemic burned on and on without signs of abating.

It didn't even matter when I found myself strapped down to a gurney, wheeled off to who knew what fate.

The rot had set in, they told me, my arm as good as lost.

Of course it was; my fingertips had begun to blacken two days ago, and that very morning, half the flesh of my hand had simply degloved as I'd tried to grab a cup of coffee.

But it didn't matter.

I was still me; I was my mission, even after they took one arm, and then the next a month later.

I kept going back, over and over, for there was yet work to be done.

I hardly noticed when they finally cut away the last bits of my old life; I hardly noticed I then stood alone against the affliction.

Everyone else had either died or given up and gone home. One way or another, they'd all stopped fighting, except for me.

The people called me a savior, then. The Clockwork Saint, all shiny porcelain that stood unsullied by the plague. The infection couldn't reach me, couldn't affect crystalline perfection. All the blood and tears and feces and prayers I waded through every day just rinsed off.

Odd, to me, that I was admired thus.

I was no saint, untouched by the epidemic, no matter how many I saved. I was an oracle, an omen of its coming. I was walking proof of how much this sickness would take from you.

I didn't realize just how true that was at the time.

Society's fever broke, eventually, or perhaps every last person that sickness could take with it was long since gone, and so I returned home, thinking somehow that everything had changed and nothing at all.

I was right, but only in the wrong fashion.

I thought only my body had been taken from me.

I thought myself immune to the disease, but the rot had sunk in to the bone. Past it, even, deeper still to those parts of myself that couldn't simply be replaced.

The woman I loved welcomed me home with open arms, saying she understood.

I watched her body burn a week later, and that was when I finally noticed it. That miasma, seeping from every crack in my unfeeling carapace, oily black wisps, like a lover's corpsesmoke.

I went back to a house that had been my home when I'd left it. There was little left inside. Everything of hers was already gone.

I reached for the cat I'd forgotten to feed in my grief and watched as the thing inside me stretched out its tendrils and melted flesh from bone.

I reached for my coffee and found it bitter and cold, the scone molded and inedible.

I reached for a pencil and the lead snapped and paper mildewed.

I suppose I didn't need to leave a note. Whoever read it would end up contaminated, after all.

So now I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren, for all that I graced it with my presence a few moments longer. And in all that silence, I remember how they named me Savior.

I remember the adulation, for fighting what no one else was willing to.

I think, not of the people I helped, but of the ones I couldn't, and of what both had lost.

And I wonder still, as I set flames to debride the last remnants of the disease, could one named saint or savior ever be saved?

~🦋

[brumeraven]

Really need to find a better workflow that doesn't keep resulting in missing paragraphs... Fixed now.

🐺: They Call It Charity || dolls, combat dolls, dysmorphia, flashbacks, guilt, disability, abuse

They call it charity, what I do.

I feel more than hear it, as I step out into the blinding lights, the thrum of applause from the crowd. Thousands of pairs of hands clapping together, a warding gesture, keeping clean the consciences of their owners.

The pomp and circumstance of it mattered; it was far too gauche to simply pay for plenary indulgence, but call it an endowment, a prize, philanthropy, well... It wasn't them ostensibly being honored, no, but it was for their comfort alone that I was.

My ears rang, clamorous acclamation turning rancorous behind my eyes, memory an anchor that pulled me down, down, near to drowning.

I was back at the asylum. It was just me and the task at hand, the doll that sobbed and quaked and whimpered before me.

One arm was wrenched halfway out of the socket and dangling limply, worthlessly, at its side. It had tried to move too quickly, forgetting in a moment of panic that heavy ceramic armor no longer weighed it down.

It still moved with the inerrant purpose of a many-tonned thing.

Once it strode through cratered fields, forded rivers of blood, trampled thousands underfoot; now it was burdened only by those memories.

Learning to move without every motion tearing its frame apart was a slow, painful, and laborious process. But it was one I could help with.

They call it charity, what I do.

Rehabilitation.

Combat dolls were easier just to discard. To euthanize, though they'd call it "decommissioning" or some other word that would let them sleep soundly at night.

I stepped to the podium, the audience of benefactors falling silent.

I doubted any of them would lose sleep either way.

I doubted any knew the price. They hadn't seen what I had, hadn't ever walked a battlefield where dolls had been used. Hadn't ever smelled blood and brass and ozone. Hadn't ever heard the wails of wounded and weapon alike.

At least the wounded eventually fell silent.

This was an acceptance speech, supposedly, and yet my lips refused to say the words, refused even to part.

For all that I preached it, acceptance was something I struggled to find. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. But what more could I say?

What more could I do, when the doll stood before me, beating itself to pieces against the thinly-padded concrete walls of its room, screaming in anguish and demanding to know why it wasn't whole? What more could I do? It demanded to know what had been done to it.

Where was it? The sword was a part of it, gone, ripped away.

It begged me to return it. That blade was all it knew, all it was, all it had ever been.

It'd been made for one, singular reason, one task, purpose and drive honed keener than the edge of the inscrimed blade itself.

And now it was gone. All in a moment.

I held the jittering thing in my arms as it cried, wrapped it in a blanket, whispered to it and told it that it was okay, told it that it still had purpose, told it that it wasn't worthless, told it that people still cared, still wanted it.

I told it all it needed to do was to come to terms with these changes, to believe me, to trust that what I kept telling it was the truth.

I lied, and lied, and lied.

Some fucking acceptance speech.

In the crowd now there were whispers here and there. Quiet at first, then more and more bold, as the silence grew and slowly pressed against the bounds of the socially acceptable. People weren't meant to be seen and not heard, least of all the lauded and famous.

It wasn't right.

It wasn't normal.

Not as it was for a doll to spend countless hours in silence, staring, fixated on the wall, praying to its creator that that blank slate of an image would replace the ones that danced just behind its eyelids every time they closed.

Eyes unblinking, I stared out into the darkness of the auditorium, wondering not for the first time what it was they saw in me. In my peripheral vision, I could make out the man who'd ushered me onto the stage, gesticulating wildly, trying to get my attention, mouthing silence.

"Are you alright?"

The words from a concerned black silhouette in the front row snapped me out of my reverie. I blinked, clearing my eyes and my head, took a deep breath and swallowed, silencing the ringing in my ears to a dull, droning hum.

"They call it charity, what I do." The room fell silent at my words, a thousand faces contorted with perverse anticipation, an almost venereal desire for the absolution only I could give them.

I closed my eyes, seeing the faces of those dead and those still living in my care.

What I did wasn't charity, no more than it was for the murderer to walk the gallows. I was damned, yes, but they could burn with me.

"I wonder what history will call what I did."

The words echoed quietly through a silent auditorium as I turned and walked off the stage.

My hands had made weapons, but I'd done it because of men like them.

Let them choke, waiting for forgiveness.

I'm not the one who could give it.

~🐺

[brumeraven]

🐺: They Call It Charity || dolls, combat dolls, dysmorphia, flashbacks, guilt, disability, abuse

They call it charity, what I do.

I feel more than hear it, as I step out into the blinding lights, the thrum of applause from the crowd. Thousands of pairs of hands clapping together, a warding gesture, keeping clean the consciences of their owners.

The pomp and circumstance of it mattered; it was far too gauche to simply pay for plenary indulgence, but call it an endowment, a prize, philanthropy, well... It wasn't them ostensibly being honored, no, but it was for their comfort alone that I was.

My ears rang, clamorous acclamation turning rancorous behind my eyes, memory an anchor that pulled me down, down, near to drowning.

I was back at the asylum. It was just me and the task at hand, the doll that sobbed and quaked and whimpered before me.

One arm was wrenched halfway out of the socket and dangling limply, worthlessly, at its side. It had tried to move too quickly, forgetting in a moment of panic that heavy ceramic armor no longer weighed it down.

It still moved with the inerrant purpose of a many-tonned thing.

Once it strode through cratered fields, forded rivers of blood, trampled thousands underfoot; now it was burdened only by those memories.

Learning to move without every motion tearing its frame apart was a slow, painful, and laborious process. But it was one I could help with.

They call it charity, what I do.

Rehabilitation.

Combat dolls were easier just to discard. To euthanize, though they'd call it "decommissioning" or some other word that would let them sleep soundly at night.

I stepped to the podium, the audience of benefactors falling silent.

I doubted any of them would lose sleep either way.

I doubted any knew the price. They hadn't seen what I had, hadn't ever walked a battlefield where dolls had been used. Hadn't ever smelled blood and brass and ozone. Hadn't ever heard the wails of wounded and weapon alike.

At least the wounded eventually fell silent.

This was an acceptance speech, supposedly, and yet my lips refused to say the words, refused even to part.

For all that I preached it, acceptance was something I struggled to find. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. But what more could I say?

What more could I do, when the doll stood before me, beating itself to pieces against the thinly-padded concrete walls of its room, screaming in anguish and demanding to know why it wasn't whole? What more could I do? It demanded to know what had been done to it.

Where was it? The sword was a part of it, gone, ripped away.

It begged me to return it. That blade was all it knew, all it was, all it had ever been.

It'd been made for one, singular reason, one task, purpose and drive honed keener than the edge of the inscrimed blade itself.

And now it was gone. All in a moment.

I held the jittering thing in my arms as it cried, wrapped it in a blanket, whispered to it and told it that it was okay, told it that it still had purpose, told it that it wasn't worthless, told it that people still cared, still wanted it.

I told it all it needed to do was to come to terms with these changes, to believe me, to trust that what I kept telling it was the truth.

I lied, and lied, and lied.

Some fucking acceptance speech.

In the crowd now there were whispers here and there. Quiet at first, then more and more bold, as the silence grew and slowly pressed against the bounds of the socially acceptable. People weren't meant to be seen and not heard, least of all the lauded and famous.

It wasn't right.

It wasn't normal.

Not as it was for a doll to spend countless hours in silence, staring, fixated on the wall, praying to its creator that that blank slate of an image would replace the ones that danced just behind its eyelids every time they closed.

Eyes unblinking, I stared out into the darkness of the auditorium, wondering not for the first time what it was they saw in me. In my peripheral vision, I could make out the man who'd ushered me onto the stage, gesticulating wildly, trying to get my attention, mouthing silence.

"Are you alright?"

The words from a concerned black silhouette in the front row snapped me out of my reverie. I blinked, clearing my eyes and my head, took a deep breath and swallowed, silencing the ringing in my ears to a dull, droning hum.

"They call it charity, what I do." The room fell silent at my words, a thousand faces contorted with perverse anticipation, an almost venereal desire for the absolution only I could give them.

I closed my eyes, seeing the faces of those dead and those still living in my care.

What I did wasn't charity, no more than it was for the murderer to walk the gallows. I was damned, yes, but they could burn with me.

"I wonder what history will call what I did."

The words echoed quietly through a silent auditorium as I turned and walked off the stage.

My hands had made weapons, but I'd done it because of men like them.

Let them choke, waiting for forgiveness.

I'm not the one who could give it.

~🐺

[brumeraven]

🪫: Judgment Day || exhaustion, burnout, fatigue, existential despair, abandonment, gods, helplessness, dolls

Judgment Day came on a Sunday.

Absent the fire and flames everyone had expected.

No buttons were pressed, no bombs fell, for judgment came not from mortal hands, all had come to dread, but instead from that source once considered quaint superstition: the divine.

And yet, it was mundane. Profane. Uneventful, even.

That Sunday was just a day of rest that wasn't. A weekend that didn't. A day on.

Hell, most hadn't even noticed, at first. Most hadn't understood until it was too late to stop.

I wandered the city, ambling down empty roads that had once pulsed with the lifeblood of commerce, still wondering if maybe, just maybe, I'd find a living soul.

To both sides, hollow storefronts stared like sightless eyes, vacant and dead, unseeing gaze as futile as my search.

There was no damage. No broken windows, no looting. No corpses, no ash, no sign of death or destruction or decline. As if everyone had just packed up and left.

It hadn't been an ending. Things had just ended, like a novel you couldn't finish or a show canceled after one season.

Even now, I expected to see...something. Some sign of interruption.

An empty pair of shoes or pants, an open book, a crashed car. Anything to suggest that everyone had just been instantaneously vanished from existence.

But they hadn't.

It hadn't been a rapture.

I hadn't been left behind.

Believer and atheist and every fence-sitting agnostic had all met the same end.

There'd been no seven seals, no trumpets, no horsemen. No thousand years of messianic peace, whether before or after the second coming.

Charitably, it had been post-tribulational, but that was a stretch at best. No one had recognized the hardship until it was over.

And while a few angels had been present, I suppose, really on the whole it'd been an eschatological disappointment. A failure of prophetic foresight.

The only part they'd gotten right had been naming it Apocalypse.

Revelation.

People hadn't taken the news well. Not when the proof of its truth had been all around them for so long.

Most had just...given up on the whole ordeal.

Stopped caring. Stopped fighting. Stopped living.

Given up and gone off to die or to stare at the stars, to smell the flowers, to listen to the birds.

And then to just...halt. As their mainsprings ran down and their time ran out.

And those few of us not mortal? We who'd been made to serve, to fulfill a purpose, to do a job?

We were left alone. Abandoned in a world that had decided nothing really needed doing after all.

I didn't blame them. Who would keep working after God Himself had condescended from Heaven and laid bare the Truth of His existence before humankind?

Who would keep fighting after all He'd done in that moment was weep? Weep and whisper the last words spoken: "I'm so tired."

~🪫

[brumeraven]

🦋: An Inconvenience || ghosts, violence, transformations, mutilation, the mirror, parents, gross, slurs, horrible things, apologies for vent art

I died today.

Perhaps I should mention I was murdered...hardly seems relevant, though.

I waited around, at first. Don't know for what; not sure what I expected. Someone to tell me what had happened, where to go next.

No one came. No one ever does. So I'm still here.

Sort of.

It isn't as if no one noticed I was gone, of course. Lots did, a seemingly endless web of lives I'd touched. I wasn't "really" around anymore, not the way I had been, not as they'd known me.

I just...wasn't gone either.

And whatever I was now...well, they couldn't or wouldn't see me anymore, I guess.

And so it was that I came to understand just how thoroughly my death had inconvenienced countless still-living acquaintances.

I watched my killer, swearing, sweating, grunting, bemoaning the fact that I was heavier than I looked.

It hadn't gone as he'd planned; seems I was too tight to fit his cock into, too tall to roll up in the rug he'd planned on using, bones too dense for the hacksaw to dismember.

He took issue with the fact that I'd tried to fight back instead of just giving up.

I "hadn't died pretty enough," and it took some limp-fisted jerking for him to reach even a half-hearted and profoundly unsatisfying orgasm.

The police, well, they told me I should be ashamed for not having gone to the dentist in years, so my records were out of date. That plus the lack of semen from the killer meant they never did solve the case. Then it was a lecture on how I was dragging down their clearance rate.

Politicians complained that my timing hadn't been expedient. No one wanted to run a "tough-on-crime" platform this cycle, and besides, the message wouldn't resonate with voters.

They said no one would really care about a dead tranny.

They were wrong, though not in the overall spirit of it.

The owner of the cafe I'd been in front of complained my blood had gotten all over the windows, and it wouldn't come clean.

A family regretted that my gore had splattered on the flyers they'd hung for their lost dog.

Animal control had to be called for the brumeravens, and the mortician, well, it seems the paperwork was a mess for my having had multiple names, and my torn skin had been near-impossible to stitch back together into some semblance of a body.

I don't know why he even bothered. My family had decided an open-casket funeral would lead to too many questions from the more distant relatives in their socially-mandated attendance.

But at least my mother cried during the ceremony.

The whole funeral had been so fucking expensive, and she'd had to cancel her night out, which kept reminding her of the night it had all happened.

I'd been supposed to bring home eggs, and dinner had been ruined.

~🦋

[brumeraven]

💎: The Front Bit || dolls, violence, self-abandonment, hatred, psychopomps, the mirror, way too full of references to a musical

I'd all but written uptown off as lost, all its swank houses and influential figures offering little of interest to one of my appetites, what with their too-open floor plans and faces alike, both of which made promises of honesty they neither could nor would ever meet.

Wasn't the scene for us, the lowlifes had neither time nor money to put on airs and pull off personas. For us, it was the promise of pain that kept prying eyes sliding on past, doubly so for us who had to meet the exacting standards of "lady."

That all changed with 'cades.

Not for us, mind, not at those prices.

Hell, dolls were a rare sight around my home, even for production roles. Much cheaper to just find a girl who wouldn't be missed.

But up north ways? 'Cades changed everything.

It was like society itself let out a collective shit or pent-up sigh, a breath no one knew they'd been holding in their whole privileged lives. It was such a relief, they all said, to finally stop pretending.

No more having to remember which metaphorical mask to wear in which company.

No more countless little fucking lies.

That honesty I so dearly craved? Well, now it was to be found in reckless abundance.

Now, finally, uptown was where I belonged.

"put some decent clothes on, degenerate. at least pretend to have some fucking class."

The words sounded odd in a doll's precise, clockwork monotone. The man standing just behind it offered an apologetic smile as if to say "Dolls these days... What can you do?"

Too much lace around the collar for my taste. This one was too far gone, too lost to a disease without easy cure. Truly convinced his ways were the true and proper ones; so convinced of his own righteous invulnerability it had become true.

There'd be no getting through to him.

I ducked my head in what might of passed as bow and walked on, cloak pulled tight against the evening's damp miasma, hunger churning in the pit of my gut, more visceral than the need for food, a frantic desperation for the human connection I had been denied for weeks.

"if you're uptown, dear, you must cut a dash."

This one's 'cade was bedecked every inch the same as her, festooned even, garish colors of the latest fashions so covering flesh and brass as to make the two practically indistinguishable, if not for one standing before the other.

Not her, no. She would never come clean, never speak truth to me; her words and clothes were mere reflections of what she'd been told.

I bared my teeth to her, neither smile nor snarl, and she and the doll stepped back in unison, affronted but unwilling to speak on it.

Not yet...not yet

But it had been so long, the snarling bile rising within my gut insisted, pleading for my attention.

I tamped it down with the casual efficiency of long practice.

I would be seen, seen truly by someone. And I would see them in turn.

Here, a girl fidgeted in the shadows, her doll moving in perfect lockstep and synchrony. Nervousness brightened her face in the gloaming, her eyes beautiful, white as the moon obscured by the smog above.

"people shouldn't trust you; you're wearing a sword. women don't do that."

Finally.

She tried to hide behind the doll as I crossed the street slowly, taking my time, savoring it. Even cowering as she was, she truly believed it would protect her, truly believed I would play the same game of make-believe and pretend the doll's words were its alone.

My hand cupped the 'cade's face, gently caressing its blank expression, the vacancy of affect.

It didn't change at the sword thrust---hard, brittle porcelain holding, holding, holding still, then shattering entirely, the blade plunging into supple, yielding flesh beneath.

Rapture.

The only word I could think of. It was every time, to meet another, to feel the pulse of their innermost self, the gift of a heart's heat to warm cold, bitter steel.

I quivered, wishing only for that brief moment of connection to go on and on and on forever.

"Shh...it's okay," I whispered, sliding sword free.

The 'cade shattered, and I stepped forwards to wrap the girl in my arms, my lips pressed to hers, willing them to silence as she tried to gurgle her truths to me.

"You don't have to pretend anymore. I see the real you."

~💎