#: 𝙫𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙖𝙙 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙪𝙗𝙞 𝙫𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙨

[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]

▪︎ key ▪︎

muse directory. last updated 8/24/24; HotD section added.

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shoot over a prompt (yours or mine) if you'd rather break ice that way.

[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]

@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

[nightmarefuele]

"Please don't look at me." zela feeling 😞 @ ren { @rensect }

She affords them that which they will not preserve, and meaninglessly. Although they sought the wound of her eyes, throb of her heart, they won't recognize it, either.

“You praise them with your tears,” he says, drifting from his helm the rhythm of unearthed sound. What he affords, he does so willingly. “You heighten them, and they're already so deluded.”

Ren is a body, today. His musculature changes, and he moves; the shadow ebs, and his legs flow. This is a new, unnatural grace, warped by the distance of years and derealized by all the names that lived, and died, in their going. But when he permits Zela yet another tolerance, lifting his gaze to explore what she sees in so hiding — a place outside of death, moored by life — he does so as she might. As she will, until she cannot.

When he stoops before her, he finds there is yet more to be seen under the hanging flora. That which decays with its arms around her.

Zela. Speak to me. “Tell me how it haunts you.”

There may be warmth. Would she pronounce it living? Only she among them may know the real difference.

[nightmarefuele]

@rensect x

“And are you not a sum of parts?” In a channel wherein worn things, spent things, come to die. And flourish, dead. What sprout vesicular growing pains are seeds of once-things and becoming-things. What is left, then, but perdition. So go. So be.

They've hacked wet the chamber throb wherefrom he once held pity—- where now holes a rhythm anew, evolved, like a daughter. He folds his hands over what's been opened raw, and the polymer bleeds warm.

Ren will retain no petulent, unwanted thing. The Ren agrees.

For now. For here. For what the object will be when its birth introduces a new orbit. The Ren agrees.

And so the throat purges itself. Touching on insides, where there is too much and so they choke on the scabs of themselves, the used-to-death.

And so, and so. You've overstayed your names on the neck of this new one.

Enough.

The two usurp their one. The tilth writhes with that overgrowth, and a scythe somewhere stirs. In the central filaments of the malnourished badland, Ren rouses from his nucleolus seat, unfurling out a crepitus casket. His blood warms and it, too, moves, so that the shell mold butters its clay lissom, and fluid.

He rounds, body and helm, with the concaved lattice for a broken face. Red roils a killing shape from his fist, peeling back the mist.

“You are your blades. Use them.”

[nightmarefuele]

❛ What you want is very wrong. ❜

He has sieved the desecrated sands of mors for its derelicts, picked through the rot, the bleached skins of its bones, for its dead. He has trudged through timeless sloughs, that blistered escarpment dubbed Pergatuum — the infinite purgatory — to pluck its yearning captives from their hollow pain.

He has seen such dismal fjords as to run worlds and gods into ruin; he has seen wildfire monoliths raging blue, vivisecting plains into mazes, unto their ends.

He has not, however, seen an abyssal styx, dense with nocturnal silence. He has not seen a land of demons, whose sand-encrusted oceans rise, like ilium folds, on dread and ruin.

“Perhaps.” His body is an ink-vine claw: high and lean, but his limbs, his cloaked edges, are ripe with teething shadow, curled up against the backdrop horizon of pitted, aphotic azure. Flexing. “But I've no misfortune of human morality.” The helm is turned askance from his visitor. It chooses instead the desolation, the mires which surround them, which are built upon souls and their muck. Which are arid and starved and infertile as the voice's memory.

It forges sounds from similar straits; low, hewn, and mirthless. “What I want? I've not acted out of want for some time.”

The place, though he knows it not — hasn't lain with its secrets and virtues, its misfortunes and pain-edged sinew — is, natheless, familiar. Sibling to that place wherein the Ren was born — and killed, and born again.

Ren has seen Wights. Gutted creatures, more vesicle than whole, more shrapnel than form. He has looked on their fathomless faces and returned. Far from intact, no; there are pieces aplenty of who once occupied his face, his flesh, strewn among the passages of those forever dead. But he remains, reformed.

“What is it that I want?” Ren asks, as if requesting the sound of a song. “Are you so sure you can say so, from where you stand?”

@cxcasiris

[nightmarefuele]

Pernix squats, tasting the soil with her fingertips. Her hands are small and strange. Nocturnal mammals with cross-hatched bellies. She squats low and dips her fingers into the earth while Syrax paces and Kylo Ren looms, paying no mind to either master or sire, though she has suspicions about what becomes of Syrax after the next resurrection, and she lets them hang on the air. They’re following the river. Her voice does the same, intermural among the Ren, cold and quick. On foot, and they’re hungry. Death will have them soon. You can still make them see when it’s done. Pernix rises and watches Syrax pace. She addresses him, albeit with her visor inclined toward their master, wiping the muck from her hands and pulling her speeder gloves over the smears, her paw-pink digits. Her helm warps her words, but they are clear. “Syrax is getting slow.” And when in motion again, she spreads rapidly, like an oil slick.