#anyway. heavily inspired by dunmeshi bc good god. the ahamkara could learn from that.

[night-dark-woods]

Ikora Week Day 3 - Undefeated

Shed thy self.

When I battled Madhir, he tried the same trick as Azirim. But I simply became someone else. I do not mean that I pretended to be someone else. I mean that I allowed Madhir to change me into someone who Madhir could not tempt.

I laugh much less since that day. But I am more content.

-First Calling of the Hidden, Annotated.

[on AO3] - cw for body horror & language reminiscent of sexual violence

...

The Ahamkara coils down the side of the mountain and through the orange-yellow-blue potholes of the hot springs until it can settle before her. It's in the form of something like a lion, something like a lizard, and yet nothing very much at all like either of those things. Its scales and fur are the same baked alkaline orange as the dirt around the springs; its throat and frills and rows of eyes glow Cherenkov-blue. Aposematism. And yet here she is anyway. She's never been good at listening to warnings.

Her head still hurts from Wei Ning's punch, and the pressure of the Ahamkara's voice only makes it worse. He's borrowed it from Osiris—he must be able to taste the bitter tang of her disappointment in herself for that misstep with Azirim—and he makes it known that his name is Madhir. He asks her what she wants.

Ikora traps the sides of her tongue between her teeth, bites down. Carefully, carefully, she thinks her way around the desire she knows he senses, thoughts averted like she’s looking away from a too-bright light. She knows the shape of it now, after Azirim—can feel the sticky guilt and sorrow in her throat and sidestep it before Madhir can sink his teeth in. Instead she says,

"I wish to be immune."

Madhir recoils, and a shiver passes through him. Not a shiver like a horse twitching its skin to shed a fly; a shiver like a ripple through a pond, his physical form going transiently wrong and revealing it as the lie it is, before he stabilizes.

He coils around her and above her, mouth stretching wider to show more teeth, to make room for more teeth than he had a moment prior. The Ahamkara have been learning from humanity throughout this genocide, reshaping themselves to fit ever more neatly into the grasp of human desires. Flint that knaps itself; intentional evolution happening before her very eyes. A smile is a useful tool for an apex predator that needs consent to feed—convincing, comforting. But this one hasn't learned the trick of it yet. And if she has her way, he never will.

"Do you know what you are asking?"

Osiris's voice, pitched like he's about to share some new discovery, glee like a banked fire.

"Do you understand what you are offering?"

Madhir coils tighter around her. The bioluminescent blue fans along his back are growing longer and fluttering in excitement, kicking a light wind into her face. His fur brushes the back of her neck and head, seeps out the rank hot carnivore smell of him. The claws on all his feet are extending and retracting, cutting deep grooves in the silty mud.

Ikora tilts her head back to stare at him. Her pulse is a rapid thrum, adrenaline tempered by practiced control, the steady anticipation of knowing exactly what corner your opponent is about to round in the Crucible.

Does she understand? She understands well enough. It's her only option. She's played out the scenarios, run the calculations last night while she was meditating beside the field of hot white ash that short hours prior had been Azirim. Azirim who defeated her, Azirim who waltzed right past all the precisely bound and catalogued selfish impulses she had accounted for, Azirim who rummaged through the back corners of her brain and returned with something sick and shining that for all her preparations she had missed. Azirim who proved she didn't, maybe couldn't, truly know herself.

She can't afford to have that happen again. The Vanguard, the City, Humanity itself can't afford to have that happen again.

If she cannot map her weaknesses, cannot suss out the desires lurking in her blind spots, well. A predator designed for the task will serve well enough as dowsing rod and cautery both.

"I understand."

Madhir strikes.

She had expected it to hurt, perhaps, but it just feels strange. His snout sinks into the hollow below her sternum, a tight knot like she's swallowed something too large too fast. She watches with interest— Ahamkara change their shape at will, but presumably some rules of physics must still apply? Her flesh is still there, taking up space, and yet his muzzle overlaps it, and is pushing deeper into her chest as she watches. And earlier too, the way his form had shivered like a reflection distorted by a thrown stone— maybe their shapes are all illusion? Lies made real, or real enough to fool. But then how would their bones-

Madhir starts to chew.

Her breath leaves her with a ragged cut-off cry, wind knocked out of her and replaced with hot red pain. When Ikora can open her eyes against the feeling, she expects gore, a warm soak of blood down her robes, but what she sees is worse.

Madhir's head is buried in her up to his first row of eyes now, which are slitted in pleasure. Her own body is distorting wrong and warped like his had, stretching like her ribs are as malleable as clay, flesh piling up in bloodless ripples to make room for the jaws that gnash and tear at something deep inside her, burrowing deeper still.

The sheer wrongness of it makes her panic. She struggles involuntarily, pure animal impulse of something caught in a trap, but his claws cut grooves into her arms as easily as they had in the clay, and hold her still as he feeds. Sharp carve of fangs through whatever part of her desires shares space with her lungs; hot lap of tongue against what hides between the anterior processes of her vertebrae. A deep, tugging pull that comes with a sensation oddly like walking from one room to another and forgetting what you came there for.

Madhir grows as he feeds, bending her backward in his grip as he shoves his head deeper into her ribcage, nosing around like a scavenger for the choicest scraps of organ meat. He grows enough that her feet come off the ground and her whole weight hangs from the blades of his claws. There is a hot wash of liquid down her front by now, but it isn't blood—Madhir is a messy eater, and he slavers at the feast she is giving him.

Ikora can glimpse the edges of what he's tearing out of her, a flicker-fast parade of weaknesses.

The guilty hum of the wish near-fulfilled by Azirim.

A cavalcade of wants that all sparkle bitter with the metallic scent of radiolaria and the sweet burn of incense.

Resentment at the duties she's been saddled with, that he left her with; The Last City at night, a weary need to be strong enough to bear the weight of all those lives.

The skittish, selfish want to not bear it at all: gunpowder clash of the Crucible, scent of pine trees from her first fumbling runs at scholarly suicide, long before she'd even heard the term thanatonaut.

The warm press of Chalco's arm around her shoulder; the flash of Eris's smile at a campfire.

A hundred, a thousand other wants, torn out at the root and devoured one by one, leaving raw hollows in their wake.

Once he's sated, once he has gorged himself on the rich meat of everything she's ever wanted and licked her clean of the crumbs of her smaller, simpler impulses, he drops her unceremoniously to the ground.

She crumples.

The slices from his claws bleed sluggishly as Ikora slowly drags herself back up to standing. A strange sensation, to stand without wanting it; stranger still to look at Madhir and feel nothing. Ikora can remember the riot of everything she wanted earlier: the desperate desire to not fail in her hunt, the hope her ploy would work, the wish to never again be understood without her consent like she had been by Azirim, but it's all gone. She looks at him now, licking his lips and basking like a lion after a kill, and feels nothing but a slight distaste.

A chill whisper of voidlight spins up between her fingers. She doesn't need to want his execution to know it needs to happen.

...

She stacks his bones and burns them to charcoal, and then to ash that mixes with the clear water of the hot springs until they're choked with fine gray paste.

She doesn't hear a single whisper.