#: 𝙫𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙖𝙙 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙪𝙗𝙞 𝙫𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙨

[nightmarefuele]

renhara is actually a sitcom @petitsdieu

[nightmarefuele]

He lets go.

It might be more than she deserves. The Ren would hang his head on the bleakest swathes of Purgatuum if they were so abled, if they could speak the same way as he has done. For now, they'll bay at his choice to give her what she does not want. They'll say she doesn't deserve this pain. They'll say he should have her cling.

Till it kills her.

Ren's arm falls back into form. He steps off her livewire quiet, reminding her to remember the defiled mount on which they stand with the cast of his gaze. She will feel him looking if he wants it so. This is but one price she'll begin to pay.

Ren says, once last, I will not deny you forever. He's already halfway elsewhere, between planetary parameters; his shadow lapses into liminal space.

Peran is out there, in the milky between. Waiting.

Forever is an unsacred plane.

This hold is Alode.

Is power in her wherewithal? Or the lack of it.

Hara doesn’t need to see his face now. She feels all she needs to. If body talks, his hand tells nothing. He is as Pulseless as they come. If she'd only look with the eye behind her eye, see the squid ink of him staining her palm already.

Too busied looking at his.

She slips on new language. Right through frontal to occipital bone. Voice fills. This is a conversation unlike she's known. Never speaking through force. No one's accessed her like this; she's never accessed anyone like this either. This is as intimate as they can be. Or allowed. She could have giggled again.

Show me?

The Princess is a hothouse flower. Her lungs breathe warmth. In the end of Earth chill, Her palm reacts in a harsh, noticeable flinch, from his. Too distracted to listen to her inner — this coalition would have her wilt.

To let go?

[nightmarefuele]

@huntershowl //starter from the Ren.

||

The thing represents their blindness. It’s a transport shuttle with all its parts ungreased, all dead. They’re stunted to an old age by the remnant vistas of their power as though it still is what only was, at one prior time, advancement.

The shuttle’s present dwellers—like limbs of a breathing weapon—know steeper powers.

They don’t fear us.

That one, crawling into the recondite film of the Shadow, is Vermis; passerby, or patron, fingering into such ant-bitten places as to turn out the innermost of wounds. There are several corners here in the belly of the shuttle, which now glides over a wall like a colosseum’s cracked ring around an outfit of unlit craters—the preferential truth beneath any great rule. She keeps to one whilst bleeding over all the others, scrawling her vapors over the porthole whereon her neuranium exoskull hooks.

They don’t know us.

This muck their ship courts, well, it’s no wonder. Before long, however, the droid valet—whose likeness is man enough that he gives his unimportance away, overstrung in the spine where he pilots at deck’s fore, perhaps a serf or experiment but altogether useless to the Ren—takes them down from the murk of the stratos. The shuttle folds like an insect into a wet handhold. Into sight, they sink.

A shadow unspools from its crouch and becomes a monolith across two strides. It hangs over the half-droid’s back, and gazes out into the Dusk’s bleak quick.

A child’s eyes might see nothing. The night might have scooped out the world from beneath them, replaced it with something breathing and sick. But the monolith—Kylo, the body, the one they have already begun to call, simply, Ren—has witnessed such nothings as to lay the black beneath them naked.

“What is it?” Vermis wonders, materializing there, her voice like a hangnail throbbing.

And Ren, like the low, skulking crackle of dry bone, “An ocean.”

Within the void clutch, a mount, whose age could be any or none. Ren holds there, the city and life already forgotten as solidity drags underway, with his formless, glistening eye like a mouth roused to open.

Then, as their course shifts, “And this?”

Inorganic death, sprawling for miles across a shipyard. Those of oblique, hostile fingers slouched along a sandbed, perhaps the fortuitous shrine of some humanoid ship; or white, milky ovoids like shapeless spiders’ eggs, clusters under clusters of energy staring out from the side of a hill; and here—approaching—the formless dance of light from sources unseeable, steepling toward the great house like a thousand airborne coelenterate.

The pilot catches himself between answers. He, unlike the Ren, has never witnessed anything.

But he does now—Vermis leans around the controls, small, boneless thing that she appears to be, and settles her pin eyes deep.

“Enough.”

The eyes leap to Ren like floating red germs.

“They will show us.”

|||

The attendant ogles them as though they are the lucky ones.

To see inside the invisible, then, is even among their own such a privilege–and the deeper their small company wades, a dark blur encroaching on the periphery of a monument, a dome, the further the cipher appears to coil. The smell, too, emits a facade; a feat of nature, a sweet place for the sun, to enshroud what dust and depth crawl underneath.

Vermis thinks the attendant should feel lucky to keep his eyes hereafter.

Instead, once upon the iris’ vault, he halts; he holds to his silence like a celibate; he puts his back to his master’s vaulting door, and waits.

[nightmarefuele]

@protectmypeople *

It lets him go the very same way it took him: clemently. Cruelly.

Bellamy's throat is its own weapon. He has not realized this. He hasn't aged, yet, though he will, beyond their viscera-pink folds, where they are not just minds— bound in plastic, evolving perpetuity— but bodies. One body, of the Ren.

He thought he was alone? He should beg, then. Beg that they excise him from their organs before he grows, before he rots.

Bellamy, still with his boy name, has not walked their bodied plane, but they have his. No other violation will cherish him so intimately so long as he lives. Nor after.

Ren had unspooled himself like a grave marker across the storage egress. Shadow could've bled this little space dry, what trifle it's been reduced to by the guilt of the meek; another day, and he would have. Instead, he'd hung himself over Bellamy's sorrow. For its taste.

Now he but waits.

“It will.” Simple. Like a physical law, although the others would sooner pluck out Bellamy's eyes than let his conscience rest. Than let him wear one upon his face.

Ren, however, is perhaps curious. His vocoders crawl a resonance like wonder from a taciturn stock.

“Your guilt runs as thick as your blood; it doesn't sprout from nowhere. It has a seed.”

The Corellians did not die softly. These were runners of the same cloth within which traitors are born. The farther Rims wilt and deliquesce on death's prow, devolving at the behest of First Order flagships. But these trade mutts, disposed, always, to cling to an age forever unforgiven in the eyes of the Ren, will not even be allowed the peace of a black sea, or of ghosts.

“You degrade yourself with your shame. Do you believe it spares you?”

[nightmarefuele]

@petitsdieu asked,

“ oh well  —  i hope it’s a quick death ” ( one dead brother pls. ) ( can also be pass tense to “it was” if needed, ) PART II.

She should be well used to disappointment.

“It wasn't.”

The Stygian menhir drops a body in the round at her sandaled feet. By design of whatever shelled Belarilian genus, the floor undulates forever against the head that smacks there. Without objection. There's a wet hole the size of a pointed finger opened in the seat of the boy's larynx. Like it was coerced there, pried out— on a glaring glimpse of hard, which is bone— against a thumb. As indelicate as not. Generous.

Its socket seeps plums, perfect round globules as overripe as the fruit. As stiff-solid. It makes somewhere between a pop and a gurgle for sound. Like the tongue's trying to fill the space. Or the pus-white nose. The chewed cheek sutured out like mealworms.

“He isn't dead.”

Heir brother, no more now than a boy, will rupture his throat for a valley if he tries to speak. And this is not the worst of it. This is only his throat, what she can see.

Ren has prowled backward, soaked in the liquid grim of shadows. There's a moon tugging around the glass doors that ring their circle, private but not pristine. High and low. He makes of the south wing a purgatory like so many other realms.

What he is stays where he is. His breadth crawls no further. His vocoders have unlearned the language of explanations; so has his epinephrine machine-pulse. Nothing unasked is worth offering.

[nightmarefuele]

He had come alone. Had he plucked forth his weapons—any one of them, numerous and resplendent in their glory as well as their pain—from ventricles of their one body—depthless, dismal meadow become form—they would have come. He needed only say; or gesture, tilt the sheath of his undying gaze. Tip the crest of his fist. Silence would be enough.

Ren did nothing. The color of his power was that of sombre escarpments in abyssal skies. Edifices made of the same sand that brushes cheeks, and topples cities. He had no soul to speak of.

The tatters of what may have been, once, many deaths past, were gone with their ghosts. Perhaps what Ren now put forth—something dogged, an achromic body hewn to its most vicious and, thus, primordial armaments—was the husk, blood, and bone. Perhaps he lay with his shell.

But his presence was no answer. It was only the question. She pried, teeth, tongue, and claw, and all her valorous devices besides, he suspected. He perched, cross-legged, beneath the spattered soul of the world laid out across the sky; like retinal capularies, blooming. Endless.

“Will you sing the songs of this annihilation?” Ren but angled his helm. “You are of the Valkyrie. The women reapers. I've heard the stories; I know of songs woven by blades.” He'd come to see if there were such things as holiness, falling. “What would you sing to the wake of a ruin?”

Ren's arms hung over his knees, the edifices of his shoulders concealing the mountain of his form. The blade she spoke of lay, small and unignited, upon soot-blackened sand.

“I give you no pity, Valkyrie. I have none to give. Still. I wonder at what such a place must once have been; this failed relic of a realm.”

“I will gouge out the throats of the holier than thou.” (Ren.)

@nightmarefuele

Disparate. Ungoverned. Godless. Lawless. Standing in the ashes of a planet that had once lived and breathed but now existed only as a husk. As a shell. As a monument to the folly of a one-eyed god whose realm had been snuffed out and replaced with the teeth and hide of wolves.

Ragnarok. No mouth uttered the word, but it reverberated through each mind. Over and over; a howl, a growl, a promise. Asgard was gone, Valhalla was empty, and the souls of a thousand by a thousand warriors coloured the sky as a bloody aurora.

The echo of the battle would have rippled through the realms. A sonic boom that declared death. Few remained; listless, aimless, unshackled. Wandering the universe. Her sisters were gone; scattered to the stars. Dismissed to their own devices.

He had spoken to her there; as she stood in the skeleton of a home perched on a cliff. Blonde hair soot stained. Elegant hands coated in blood. Wings still armoured, still unfurled. Humming with power for those who knew how to sense their silence.

Fingers closed around a spear, made of a metal not yet known to man. Her gaze climbed the black of him. Her eyes sought to see past his armour and find the colour of his power. Of his soul.

"You will need a bigger blade."

[nightmarefuele]

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muse directory. last updated 11/21/24

if you follow first, reach out first.

or shoot over a prompt, your meme lists or mine (.nightmare.fuel tag).

[nightmarefuele]

@etoilebleu

Mists cling to mesosphere, thin as morning draperies. Clouds are like flotsam, floating in wind, while jellies of various genera suckle the edges of an Upsilon-class command shuttle’s posterior windows. When Inuja surfaces beneath its occupants’ roving eyes, each of indeterminate origin, her garden of marble Eden is no more a disc than a first shadow is the night. She blooms with frost-hued suns, and offers up for her unheralded visitors her sequins of architectural fantasy. There are gods who have not spoken so elegantly.

Ren gives himself over to looking as if rousing himself from a dream: he once saw such a place through youth’s eyes.

Now, that place has died with the youth and his memory. Hanging mists and flotsam clouds disperse as darkness descends; white temples, still steepled in the old ways of easy, nurturing faith, have gone to gray, and stand instead upon the shoulders of time-eaten mountains. The only dawn here is the First Order’s awakening age. The deep, predatory rumble of Inuja’s anchoring visitor.

“Something to look at,” the one they call Machaera—“weapon,” simple and crude, cruel in that way only ignorants can be—murmurs from his window, the shuttle’s belly. He is not the murmuring kind, his is a violent presence, his brawn instates this clearly. But he is surfacing on the edges of an evolution, exquisite detail of melee and musculature that he is; so he murmurs all the same.

Across Machaera, the Axis’ helm glistens. Her’s is an uninterrupted glaze of indeterminate black material, wrapping down around her skull. Perhaps it seeps down between her ultrachrome collar and flesh—whatever flesh hers is—and braids with her skeleton.

“You should’ve called on Surri,” she says. Ren tastes the brine of her disgust wherever it rains: Down on this nest of vipers—politicians—she perceives. And, perhaps, on him.

He affords her no true answer. They both know the Ren has called Surri-diae to meet other ends. Instead, Ren lifts his helm to the shuttle’s frontal cortex as he comes to. As gravity skips along the vessel’s chromium-plated plumonodes like Salix fronds. As the command shuttle raises its Upsilon wings, and finds its rhythm in the pressurized air fields—indiscernible, lulling teeth of the Inujan Royal aerodrome—below.

The helm’s apparatuses click. Some darker, deeper rhythm, an otherly pressure sliding into place. His timbre is of kinds bred for heralding nightfall. Displace dawn with decay. Within it now holds at once flat derision, and discomfiting tenderness.

“Diae is not the sole deceiver among us,” Ren responds. “Take her place.”

***

To the outer witness, the command shuttle’s landing may well look like a claiming of grounds. The way black laminasteel kisses marble floors is no kiss between lovers: it’s violent, domineering. It dispenses all pretense of greeting as effusively as it throws up dirt and grass off the landing aisle’s cliff-borne sides. When the dust settles, the thing tosses a final breath to uneasy winds before retracting. All what remains is pregnant silence.

This is no precursor. There is no message in the Upsilon’s sheathed winds. This is nothing out of an Order officer’s repertoire. This smells more like death, extending its digits. Feel out the textures writ before it like brail.

Mechanical voice coughs from ship’s hatch. A slender mount descends, black and unspooling, a tongue stamped in soot and lead. Steam, layering the mist.

The Ren sift free, like inverted fireflies.

They emerge as one, two do not linger behind the first. A singular sort of matrimony outlines their gradations of movement. But he who stands central, and tallest between them—whose powerful gait is limned with prowling deliberation—could not be more palpably the head of whatever body he thus commands, than in his present silence.

Unmoving, Ren probes each of them; this reception come to greet his augural company on their precious, ancient prow. The two others wait at his sides, unwavering as their purpose. They’ll be doing the same.

When he does draw forth, he speaks more to the dusk mist than to its people: “Who among you serves as Inuja’s noble crown?”

[nightmarefuele]

@protectmypeople *

Contradicting God.

Ren's laughter is an aphotic, rolling thing. It doesn't give itself freely; indeed, when humor overrides the tipping of his lattice'd brow, or the incline of a monolithic shoulder, or any trace hint he'd otherwise impel his vessel toward besides, it's as unsympathetic as is Jakku, and all its suns' blisters.

Contradicting God. His isn't the only laughter. Surri-Diae somewhere giggles, solar systems away.

God? echoes Ren, across their bodiless plane, a voice without a voice. The Shadow, then, is its own deity. Or it is that overturned, abandoned underbelly of a god's power. It makes no difference to us.

Machaera, nearby Bellamy— not as tall as their master, but larger for his musculature, the vibro mace across his back— asks what to do with the women by shifting his footing. Not before his visor glints, as though to scoff: Don't be so sure it's the First Order we serve, Praeses.

[nightmarefuele]

Would she envisage him thus? In her unlucid eyes? Would she try to?

Mmm.

More acknowledgement than most are likely to receive. He's more with her than he is with many, even as a real thing.

Interesting punishment, Ren doesn't voice (here, there, wherever) — sensible. With his own hands he has been made to chain down a knight, and he called this servitude. He's pained them with substitutes for pain.

With his own hands, he has clutched himself awake across a tremoring world of skin, which was his, long ago. Every now and then, the piece of the dark he calls Master buries him back, back, into that boy skin. 'To remember, and learn.'

Why wait?

The rumble of him sticks there, contemplating. To give answer would be as worthwhile as his silence. But . . . she asked. And he, too, wonders things. ( He wonders about what he recognizes, even a liminal space away. )

I know because I wished to. And others were looking; you aren't discreet.

@nightmarefuele said:

"Did they lock you in here?" (from yk who.) protective starters. ACCEPTING

❝ THEY MAY AS WELL HAVE. ❞ THE WORDS contain no bitterness directed at her employer. only exhaustion — at the circumstance, and at herself for being stupid enough to get caught in her most vulnerable state. ❝ they can get me out any time they want. this is as much a punishment as a direct hand. ❞ somewhere, fletch waits for what they deem an adequate moment to make the call, the blackmail, the infiltration. usually a few days. sometimes weeks.

despite the hound's complete inability to fight back, the imperial military soldiers sent in lieu of bluecoats still clapped full-block shackles over the creature's ankles and hands. this time, they didn't make the mistake of processing her; they simply used the immortal emperor's warrant to bypass fair trial and threw her in solitary.

it was a smart move, they have to admit. the last time they tried to lock her down, she killed fifteen inmates because their de facto leader tried to lay a hand on her. sometimes she wonders if fletch keeps her here just to see what she will do.

the voice reverberates through persephone's skull, fingerlike, as disconcerting and familiar as the singing rush of blood through muscle & vein. they cannot see him in the pitch-dark, but there is no need to. he is not here — he cannot be. the prison would have sounded the alarm if he were.

if persephone were any less exhausted she would have reacted defensively. aggressively. but the kill they committed today, and the world-eater tide of rage that fueled it, leaves her shaking and spent. in truth, they aren't even positive this interaction is real — it would not be the first time they hallucinated after a kill.

❝ what do you care? how did you know? ❞

[nightmarefuele]

@valkxrie *

“It has you now.” The palm she has been closed inside, like pus to welt, profers no name besides. What is Ragnarok, but the going? What is Asgard, but the ash? Death is wherefrom she learns her somber.

“Death sews pointless seeds, and takes from all life the same. You have not been spared, Valkyrie.” Ren says this as a teacher. As once the Ren said it to him, tasting of questions more than answers, and bade he follow his longing by its tail. Until he could not.

—Or wanted only to go on as aimless, answerless longing would have it. These paths are the same.

“And so you carry it with you. Within.” And so to extricate is to exhaust.

A tomb for corpses; a womb for flesh. She knows, now, something of what he is, and what has made him.

[nightmarefuele]

@rensect *

Outside, the margins of a styx. Callous, curtailed, they await.

It does not flow. It is wound around a fingerboned steeple in the shape of the once-Supreme's dead flesh. That steeple is not hers. Zela, Zela . . . you cannot collect every affliction.

Inside, Ren—opened. He is the cathedral wherein Zela wades. He is the aboriginal tree, split, now, from the bole, arrested by his biles, the animus over which his shoulders hang. The consummate body so calls to him; it weeps and wails and calls. And it will crawl, when it can do no more, to his fleshless feet, and ring the basin stretch of his skull for bodies anew.

What is he, if not he who surpassed Kylo, the one with heart.

“Silence.”

A judder leafs through the paper rungs serving, winged, from Ren's sternum. This might be command, or commandment.

And again, as his emergent face temporizes from within—halved somewhere along its metal bones, either by his own grace or his burgeons'—Zela's—and the mechanized rumble expires, deflating, without ceremony, halfway,

. . . silence.

The menhir, mounted on the exalted plaque set forth by his burgeons.

[nightmarefuele]

“ Fools who rule over this fake world. “

“Fake? Ahh...” Sound of a silver tongue, tutting. Whether its silver is of metals or of esoteric substance, wrought into human shape, only his mask knows, and it sees fit only to recast Hara in umbras of the Shadow's own sombre tread. “Fools, innocent princess, speak so plainly. Does father know you hold his fief in such high regard?”

High indeed: Privilege is the bed in which she lies, sentiments of servitude notwithstanding. Hara hasn't known a day of true imprisonment in her life. As such Ren's timbre is sharpened to a scythe, ready for the cut as any weapon in his repository. His words are simple; his language is not. He makes ferocity sound a gentle word.

“Why come to me, then? Unless your understanding of the First Order is equal to the control you hold over your father's realm.”

He prowls about their current habitat without striking, without raising his vowels to the baying winds beyond the open wing's skybound columns. Far out there, the day is glorious, almost safe. There is no safety in his presence.

[nightmarefuele]

@protectmypeople *

He looks, to Ren — the wraith, the Revenant — uncanny and young. He is, for a moment, swaddled there in his blankets and bedding, the boy that soaks his dreamworld.

Ren is there. At a distance, ephemeral as Time's indifferent gaze, but there all the same. Like fleshless, star-bodied hands. Silhouetted in the curve neath the man's jaw. Where his collarbones are cavitied, overcast and sweating. Ren is a death away from touching.

Memory makes of him the tower in the corner. The dream. He has his own pasts, sunken under tepid waters. All of them are bleary.

“You grieve.” It is, in Ren's own way, an answer, and these low, beggarly walls keep it dearly, whether or not Bellamy understands. “You yearn through your mourning, and confine both to sleep.”

[nightmarefuele]

@kylo-wrecked | xx

Good. Hunger is enough.

A place is more than a place. That water Pernix tastes is tepid, charged with copper and brine. If Syrax had not faltered, the river would be missing something, and yet would bleed metal still. It makes little difference. A place is more than a place. This one, static, but living, exacts the same toll as do all predators: sacrifice.

“Syrax doesn't need your words to speak for him.” Amorphous as the achrome winds, though his inflection is singularly vacant. Ren's silhouette sifts the dusk palette under cover of coniferous refuse. Rotten limbs clotting a muffled horizon.

See? “No. I won't.” 'Make them.'

Ren's helm cedes nothing when it moves—slower, slower than Pernix, if that oil were mutant and viscous. Syrax distends upon a bed of his own warfare. Little more than a body, beggarly and depraved. If the place is one for sacrifice, then the Ren will claim its own evolution. Hunger is enough.

“Syrax has plenty in his own eyes.” Unclear to whom it's for, but the second thing he offers is lashing, steeped in modulation decay, “Be still,” and his footfalls engrave his intent into the muck as cleanly as does his shadow across Syrax's bent skull. He extends no more than material imminence.

“You have something,” the helm murmurs. Might be prompting, might be taunting. Perhaps as tender as both. “In your eyes. Will that be enough, do you think?”

[nightmarefuele]

xxx

A suspiring, gusting prow, a cliff's rough-hewn extremity. It aches aloft porous bones. Depraved and ragged red, whittled to it, pruned by restive hands. It is a good place, insofar as what language it speaks. It wants for no recompense, it needs little guidance. Its reception is innate. Arid as the rusty shore.

Forgotten how to fear? wonders the Stygian menhir, inspiring rilles unto her stone, her chassis of the change. To fear, or to want?

“If I had one to give, it would be withered, and grey. It failed its function long ago. Worthless.” The thing is more than the wind. The thing is the sound of inferno, eaten. “It would be no gift. You would not recognize the hollow thing it is.”

He dips his fingers into her woven fabric. His is the cold she feels. Knees stooped, face a valley tipped low, he is the murk and brume. He is the spray of midnight seas. His leather'd digits, absolving her eventide magnanimity. How clement his stroke, how loving.

Inside, there is a ribcage, a fiberglass composite like an animal's hutch. Papyrus ribbons sighing to and fro, expiring with what becomes of his pulp, his tissue. When [Zela] touches him, when her dead fingers make a name within his chest, Ren does not exhale so much as his peritoneum flexes, and slackens around her want.

—what would a monolith do with a heart if it had one?

“I would make a new realm of a heart. So that its vital throb would serve as shield, and weapon; so that pretenders who might climb inside shall convulse, and bleed.”

[Zela] endears herself to the cold, by chance or by purpose. She picks at some unspooling nerve — (a softness) — from within their conjugation.

What I have forgotten... the penumbra seeps. You would have them to command: my dismembered dreams.

@kylo-wrecked