#calon nie: i see i want i take

[ashintheairlikesnow]

The First That Will Live: Killan

As always, Killan’s universe and the details of fae biology + meta belongs to @wildfaewhump​ - all hail the Vic!

CW: GORE (lots of blood and graphic description of bleeding wounds, cutting, scarring, stitching), death of character, somewhat callous treatment of a corpse, dehumanization, self-loathing, forced self-injury (through a magical compulsion)

Hurtling through the space between stars at speeds the boy could not comprehend, the world felt like a snowball flung by a giant. Lying on his back with his wings spread wide on either side, the uncomfortable pressure of them pressing slowly into the stone table beneath the cave’s open ceiling, he could feel the spin of the planet. 

His fingers pressed tightly into the stone in some desperate, terrified attempt to keep himself from being flung into the sky, beyond the blue and to the deeper black he knew lurked behind it. The sun had set, and above him he could see the twinkling stars.

He could hear them, a rushing whispering array of mysteries, growing louder with every drop of life that bled into him.

Talons smacked into the back of his right hand, gouged lightly across, and he jerked, letting out a cry of pain and fear, only to hear Calon Nie’s soft laughter. “Too tight gripping, you. Bleed much.”

The cave reeked of blood, and the boy could smell iron in it, a jarring rusty note in the salt-sweet copper, and had he ever been able to smell the layer of iron in blood before? Had he ever known that blood had layers of scent at all?

The whispers in his ears grew louder.

His right arm bled, and stomach, and ribs. On his left side, though, something entirely different. On his left side, blood did not pour from him, but in. There was a twitching, cool arm tied tightly to his own, both of them slit from below the palm to the join of their elbow and then wrapped with a rough thorny vine that sparked new pains every time Killan moved. The pale arm had talons, not fingers, that went tight around Killan’s hand and then loosened, again and again. 

Each time they tightened their grip, it was a little less firm than the time before.

The smear of pearlescent blood, pooling on the stone, over their skin, mixing with Killan’s own in a shimmer of colors that repelled each other, marked the connection between Killan and the newest life being given to the madness of Calon Nie’s desires.

“I w-was, was bleeding be-... before.” The boy spoke in a gasp, voice thin and strained. His throat still ached from the screaming he’d done when the cutting began, but by now he had no energy left for that kind of sound. All he could do was whimper. “Pl-please, it’s-... y-your, the other f-fae… they’re dying-”

“Know this, me. Dying, them, yes, yes.” Calon Nie waved one hand in dismissal of the fact. “Must die, to bring dream to life. But not dying, you.” Calon Nie’s voice was low and pleased. “Will survive this, too.”

Lying beside Killan on the large stone table beneath the starlight, the trapped fae brought here to be murdered sobbed weakly, low and soft, as their pearlescent blood fed endlessly into Killan’s veins.

They had tried to chew their own arm free, at one point, but the thorns on the vines that tied them together were dipped in some kind of poison and all it had done was make them weak. They had no color to them now, grayish skin, wide eyes that stared into Killan and far beyond him. 

They babbled, sometimes, in a language he didn’t totally know, only knew a few words of. He couldn’t… he couldn’t help them. He could barely keep himself awake, and the new blood in his veins burned when it met his own. He’d been crying, weeping tears nonstop, for so long he had forgotten how it felt to be doing anything else.

The fae whispered, lips moving. There was no strength left in them for sound - or if there was, the other sound he could hear but did not understand drowned them out.

“I’m sorry,” Killan whispered. “I’m so sorry, I don’t want this-”

Talons raked across his bare chest and Killan’s back arched as he screamed again, his eyes wide and white-rimmed as his scream traveled up to be given to the starlight, just like the rest of his pain.

Next to him, the dying fae hissed and hid their face against their arm. 

“No talking!” Calon Nie snapped the words and brought his talons down again, in another vicious swipe across Killan’s collarbone, leading to another hoarse desperate cry. “Must listen to starsong, them, so they ready to go. Buachaill del, silent!” 

Killan collapsed back against the stone slick with his blood and the fae’s, coughing and whimpering as each cough lit the bloodied new wounds with fresh fire. The pain in his body was overwhelming, but even stronger was the sense of a spinning earth that might not hold his body any longer.

Louder than his own screams and the dying sounds of the fae was the slowly growing roar of harmonies, a song made of stars, that his mind had never been made to comprehend. 

His wings shuddered and bristled, aching where they had been joined to his back, trying to stretch in some weak, worthless attempt to give him the strength to flee. To fly, farther up, closer to the-... to the-... to the mysteries.

The starsong roared deafening in human ears, wrapped itself around the folds of a human mind. He shook his head but it only grew louder, with every drop of blood he took unwillingly from the creature beside him. They were getting colder and colder by the minute - Killan felt feverish, blistering-hot. 

Pearly blood raced through his veins, and magic moved with it, fed through his veins. His heart stopped - one second, two seconds, three seconds, four, five, how long until I am dead, how long can a heart refuse to beat - and just as panic settled into relief and acceptance, it started again.

Killan understood that when his heart began to pound inside his chest again that the fae blood had made its way there, and it wasn’t the same heart it had been before. In the time span between the last human heartbeat and the first of… whatever he was now… the roar of the stars began to separate, like peeling back the surface to find the sound had layers and he could separate them, now. 

He could hear the song of the fae tied to him, the unique harmony they carried within them. He could hear them dying, their song winding down as the larger song grew stronger.

Killan’s body took their harmonies and forced them underneath his own, off-key and clashing, two lives forced together. 

I was never made to hear this. 

I was never made to know this. They are dying because of me. Just like the last one.

“I’m sorry,” He whispered once more. “I’m so sorry.”

The fae’s lips moved, but they said nothing. Those wide slit-pupiled eyes locked on his, gasping breaths coming shallowly, their sharp teeth on display as their mouth hung slack. Their red hair was clumped with their own blood and his where it had soaked it up from the pools beneath them on the stone.

Killan swallowed, felt the blade-sharp pain that came with all the screaming he had done, and with the world still spinning in a woozy terror around him, he forced himself to let go of the stone and swung his arm up and over, to rest his palm against their pale, bloodless cheek.

They were so, so cold to the touch.

“T-t… teigh-... o’réaltaí,” Killan whispered. He knew so little of their language, he had to hope this would be enough for a deathbed blessing. To the stars.

Calon Nie glanced up from his work down near Killan’s stomach, yellow eyes traveling back and forth, considering the dying fae and the strange new thing he had made of the human boy. “Not dead yet,” He said, finally.

“Soon, though,” Killan whispered. The fae whimpered and closed their eyes, and Killan watched a single crystalline tear, like starlight made liquid, travel over their cheekbone and drip to be lost with the blood already below them. 

“Will take to the mountains,” Calon Nie said quietly. “Honor, to give life to greater things.”

This isn’t greater. This is just death. 

He didn’t dare speak the words out loud. Killan stayed silent and instead listened to the slowly fading starsong of the fae bleeding their life into his. 

Calon Nie watched for another moment - Killan could feel his eyes on them, even though he didn’t look back - and then went back to his work. “Must finish before body stiffens,” He muttered, and Killan hissed as the same blade that had once opened his back for his wings to be connected now made precise, tiny notches in the skin over his stomach.

Calon Nie carved spirals in perfect curves, and the world spun harder, faster. 

The boy felt more tears - how did he have any left, by now? - collecting at the corners of his eyes and running warm and then cool down his cheekbones to pool in the shells of his ears. He let out a half-broken sob. He felt like he might throw up or be tossed up to be rejected by the sky and sent crashing back to earth.

Neither fae nor human, some terrible creation between the two.

His veins burned as living star-matter forced the iron-rich red to run from his stomach and let beryllium, ozone-bright, overrun it.

The fae lying next to him on the stone died. Killan felt the moment the last breath of their life passed into him, their final heartbeat that matched his own, and then only Killan’s heart kept on beating. 

He gasped in a lungful of air that wasn’t his own just as they made their last exhale.

The stars screamed at him, and Killan tried to scream back, to drown them out, but the keening shriek of the empty space between stars mourning the life lost was stronger than he could ever be. 

“Silence,” Calon Nie hissed again, and slapped the gashes in Killan’s chest he had made earlier. “Must work fast, me.”

Killan’s scream was choked off to nothing as the pain flooded his mind all over again. He was drowning in the deafening noise all around him. He was going to die, the noise would steal all the air he was desperate to breathe. All this blood was for nothing, he would die, too, he would die and there would be no burial and the stars would not welcome him either. He would be bones and emptiness.

Just like he was now.

“Please, h-help me, I’m… I’m going-...” His voice cracked and then died, replaced by a low keening wail. In his veins the blood ran paler with every passing moment, lost on one side and regained on the other only through death.

He began to sob in earnest. Calon Nie did not look up from his careful work this time, and Killan needed those yellow eyes, needed to see the fae looking at him to feel like he was real. “C-Calon Nie, please-... please help, please-”

“What help?” Calon Nie’s eyes flashed up to his, only briefly, and then back to the wash of blood that marked Killan’s stomach, every spiral he had carved so far weeping a paler and paler red. “What help need, you?”

“I’m going to fall off!”

“Off? Fall? What falling?” 

“E-Everything! I’m going to fall off the fucking earth!” The boy half-screamed the words, and he thought he might throw up, but he couldn’t move just the same. He’d been told with that voice to lay down and be still and still he was, even as he saw just how small and unwanted he was, in the movements of the stars. 

His life had been traded - the fae had died to give Killan something he did not want and would have rejected if he could. In their blood he could feel time stretching, expanding, the very make of his skin changing. 

He was small, and pointless, and imperfect. 

He was being perfected.

“Not fall, you. Body will live long, now.” Calon Nie hummed, making three more quick cuts, and there was so much pain that Killan didn’t feel anything beyond the simple well of new blood. “Will help live through next parts.”

Finally, his gaze rested on Killan’s - finally, Killan felt the spin of the earth slow, the pull of the space between the stars lessen. Those yellow eyes were all he had to center himself with, and the calm pride and certainty in them settled some of his panic. Calon Nie did not want him to die.

Calon Nie would not let him die.

Not yet.

“Pl-please, I need-... please.” He didn’t know what he was begging for any longer. He was dizzy with blood-loss and blood-gain, both at once. Magic laced his veins in a way it never had before, and he could sense the mysteries twining around himself, and Calon Nie, and fading from the dead body still tied to him, the fae’s eyes wide open and unseeing.

He could sense the song inherent in every living and unliving thing on the planet, all part of its spin and its melody. He could sense how the movement of this earth fit in the greater starsong. He could hear it all but his body and brain hadn’t been meant to take it all on at once like this. 

The weight of new understanding was heavy, and Killan had only just begun to carry it.

Calon Nie hissed thoughtfully through his sharp teeth, and then moved, staying in his crouch, shifting up the length of the stone table until he was just next to Killan’s head. His talons, blood-dipped at the tips, gently pushed through Killan’s hair, staining it and petting it in equal measures. 

“Please tell… tell me it’s almost over,” Killan said, and his voice held a pleading whine. 

“Is,” Calon Nie replied, voice gentle and deep. “Almost, pretty human. Nearly so.” He leaned over and pressed his lips to Killan’s forehead. Calon Nie’s occasional kisses - always given with a breezy careless affection, like one might kiss a dog - had burned him before, fae bodies ran hot and their affection felt like fire.

This, though… Calon Nie’s kiss felt… fine.

It felt good, actually.

Reassuring, and soothing, and Killan whimpered and tried to lift his head from the stone for more when the fae pulled back and way. The world spun worse when he did and he let himself fall back, shaking his head, hating himself for leaning into the touch, but there was so little, now, that didn’t hurt.

“I sew cuts to give last old blood to stars, then done. Promising you, me. Promise to buachaill del.”

“Thank you,” Killan whispered with numb, rough lips, and he was so grateful to know that there would soon be something like mercy.

Calon Nie gave him a smile that showed sharp-edged teeth and moved back down to Killan’s stomach. A pause, and the sharp twinge of a needle breaking skin couldn’t even begin to touch the pain that had come before. It was a relief, in a way, that this smaller agony was a sign that the larger pain was over.

Killan closed his eyes, laid there with one arm still tied to the cooling corpse that lay beside him, and tried to endure. He felt every stitch that took the spirals and made them permanent, sewing magic into his skin as thoroughly as the blood had forced magic beneath it. With every stitch, the world spun less crazily around him. 

Or… it still spun, but his body began to acclimate to the feeling. The starsong settled, filtered through the sigils, to a volume that couldn’t drown out everything else, not any longer. 

He couldn't keep back his whimpers.

He couldn’t stop his tears.

But he stayed still, and endured.

When Calon Nie finished, he took a wet cloth and wiped Killan clean of the old blood over the patterns, exposing his skin to the starlight, pale and sewn with dark blue threads in spirals, sigils, signs of fae magic.

Pain and blood, a gift to the stars. A long life, the bargain of what Calon Nie bought him in return. The chance that he would survive whatever came next, whatever might be worse. Calon Nie had murdered two fae and given their lives to Killan’s broken body, and there would be more.

Killan’s eyes were hot and dry, but he knew the tears would fall again any moment. 

There were going to be so many more dead fae, and he would have to watch the life leave each and every one so that it might be given to him, to turn him into… what?

What new thing would he be, when Calon Nie was done?

“Finished,” Calon Nie said with satisfaction, standing up. His knees popped and cracked from crouching for so long and Killan turned his head, watching dully as Calon Nie stretched his arms over his head, his wings out to their full span, pressed his hands to his spine and arched his back.

Killan, ordered so long ago to lay still, could not move.

“Must fly perthynas up mountain to sit with others,” Calon Nie said, moving with quick efficiency around the table, and he carefully cut through the vines that had tied Killan and the dead fae together with his blade. He gathered them into his arms, a limp dead weight, wings dragging the ground. “Thank, for life, buachaill del. Thank and good bye, them, for gift to you. Will have many years that should be aos sidhe years, instead yours.”

“I didn’t-... I didn’t want them,” Killan whispered. No, he whimpered, and hated himself for how weak and whining he sounded. As if the dead fae cared whether or not Killan had wanted them murdered for him. “I don’t want years, I don’t want to be like this, I don’t… I don’t want-”

“No care, me, what Killan wants.”

Killan’s mouth closed with a snap, and he shuddered, felt the fearful thudding of his pulse.

“No care. No matters. Killan has years now. Killan has life, will live through new pieces. My… ah, say you kin. My kin die for you. Be grateful.” Calon Nie’s eyes narrowed, flashed fire with irritation. His lip curled back from his teeth in an inhuman snarl. “Thank for gift.”

“N-no, I don’t want it…” Killan groaned as he rolled onto his side, pulling his hands close to himself, feeling the pull of his skin along the newly-stitched sigils over his stomach, pelvis, and hips, all the way down to his thighs. “I don’t want their life, I don’t want th-their death, I don’t want the songs, I don’t want the m-mysteries, I want to give it back!”

“Killan, take knife from me.”

His hand moved without his consent, following the order from the fae’s twisting, thralling voice. With new senses, Killan could feel the starsong as it moved him, but he was not fae enough yet to resist it.

He took the hilt of the blade in his hand, felt its cool weight in his grip, slick with a mix of pearl and red blood. “C-Calon Nie, please-”

“Force blade through own shoulder.”

“No,” he whispered, eyes wide and panicked, but his hand still moved. He gulped in air, sobbed helplessly, and then closed his eyes as he felt the first press of the blade through his skin. His grip never loosened as he pushed the serrated blade straight through himself, even as his body went tense and he screamed again.

Screamed, and it pitched higher and higher into a shrieking wail.

He gave his pain and his attempt to reject the dead fae’s gift of life to the stars, and they sang louder in return.

The blood that welled up around the blade ran a pale, shimmering, pearly red. 

Choking in his own saliva and on the agony, Killan twisted but could not make himself pull the blade back out. He could only suffer as Calon Nie stared flatly down. The dead fae’s eyes were still open, looking right at Killan, ungrateful recipient of their final gift.

“Thank,” Calon Nie repeated.

“Th-... th-th-thank you,” Killan sobbed, voice cracking, full of thick tears, writhing beneath his own hand’s actions, hot blood running to join the cooled, congealed, drying blood already beneath him on the table. “Thank y-y-you for, for dying for m-me, thank you, please, please let me stop, please-”

“Now good-bye, say.”

Killan forced his eyes back open, to meet the unseeing dead thing in Calon Nie’s arms. They still dripped pearly blood from the slice in their arm, dripping with a soft tap, tap, tap onto the floor. Their song was gone, and lived now in Killan, no matter how badly he did not want it.

“Good… g-g-goodbye,” Killan said to them. Then, haltingly, he added, “Tabron… Tabron… orm.”

I’m sorry.

Calon Nie snorted, gathered the corpse up closer, like a bride in his arms. “Good. Let go knife. Leave in until I return. Stay still on rock.”

“W-wait, no, please, let me take it out, please, gods, please, C-Calon Nie, please please please!”

Calon Nie was already turning away, and Killan was left to listen to the scrape of the dead fae’s wings along the cave floor and stare with tear-filled eyes up at the unmoved but always-moving stars.

He could hear them, now. 

He could hear them, but he was not their child, not like the fae whose blood and life he had been forced to steal. He stood outside the mysteries, even if he could hear them. Sense them. His veins burned and his skin warmed, his wings shivered and Killan stared at the long, deep slice down his arm and to his abject horror realized he knew what to do to fix it.

Thoughts coalesced into a murmur of words and the wound closed, simply knitted itself back together like it had never been there, but for a very pale, faint scar left behind. He looked at the gouges left on the back of his other hand by Calon Nie’s talons and did the same to them.

Then the deeper wounds across his chest. It all closed up, piece by piece, as he wove threads of mystery and song together and made it happen. The wounds underneath his new stitching closed, but the stitching remained, a permanent marking. Magic that would not decay.

He couldn’t touch the blade in his shoulder, not yet, but once he was allowed to, he would be able to… heal it.

This was fae magic, starsong, and he was terrified of how easy it was to use it. He was repulsed by it, but he couldn’t stop himself.

He waited for Calon Nie to come back. 

What am I, now? 

The answer was simple, once he thought of it.

Easy, and certain.

I am the first of his new things that will live.

But I don’t deserve to.

---

Tagging Killan’s crew:  @astrobly​​​​​​ @burtlederp​​​​​​ ​, @finder-of-rings​​​​​​ ���, @slaintetowhump​​​​​ ​, @quirkykayleetam​​​​​ ​, @whumpallday​​​​​ , @whumppsychology​​​​​, @doveotions​​​​​, @broken-horn​​​​, @moose-teeth​​​​, @whumpfigure​​​​, @spiffythespook​​​​, @oceanthesarcasamfox​​​​,  @whump-only​​​, @just-strawberry-jam​(if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Does your character have siblings or family members in their age group? Which one are they closest with?What is/was your character’s relationship with their mother like?What is/was your character’s relationship with their father like?Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know? For Calon Nie. Who I am curious about.

*rubs hands together* so, for this bastard fae:

Calon Nie:

He does have multiple younger siblings. His parents are older and have raised many fledglings to adulthood by fae standards. In his clutch, he was the only one who survived.

He is close with none of his siblings. He has always been distant, had eyes on some wider portrait no one else could discern.

He and his mother were very close when he was a fledgeling. After the... incident that led to him choosing to leave his kin, they became estranged. When he returns with Killan newly-made, she vows never to speak to him again. This wounds him, as he always thought his mother of all fae would appreciate his genius.

He had a strong, pleasant relationship with his father, but his father also disowns him after seeing Killan. Unlike with his mother, Calon Nie was not surprised.

For a fundamental change... What planted the seed in his mind was coming across a heavily wounded human being at the side of a battlefield, two days after the battle itself had ended. The human was still alive, and calling weakly for his mother or for water. Calon Nie gave him water, not sure why, and he sang fae songs to the man until he died. he spent a few hours, most of the day really, sitting there next to the dead body of the man thinking about how pointlessly, brutally short human lives were.

He began to wonder if, perhaps, this inherent flaw in their design could be changed. And if so... what else could be fixed, in these stubby, short-lived barbarians?

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Petition for people to appreciate Calon Nie's genius more, like how he deserves. Thank you very much.

You are Calon Nie's favorite now. Look, what would the pretty boy be, if not for Calon Nie's attention? Nothing, that's what! Just another pointless human who dies in a few years and means nothing to anyone. This way he is special.

It's not Calon Nie's fault no one appreciates this.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Can we have random Calon Nie facts? Or will they spoil some stuff?

More facts on this guy?

1. Calon Nie was banished by his court and family for reasons unknown but claims he left of his own free will

2. He believes mankind to be a lesser species and thinks that fae could simply solve the problem of ongoing conflict if they simply banded together to take humans down

3. Killan is not his first attempt. Killan is his first successful attempt.

4. He doesn't like Killan's name, so he only uses it when he's going to inflict pain on him, until the boy associates the use of his name with pain and entirely stops answering to it or ever saying it out loud.

5. He likes to make flower chains to turn into necklaces and little crowns to put on Killan's hair and around his neck

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Totally not connected to your actual story, but Calon in Welsh means heart!

Ooooh it’s connected. Calon = heart Nie = no, in two different languages. No heart.

Heartless.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Do you have a face claim for Calon Nie?

Yes! This guy, Takahiro Yaguchi! Largely because of these photos of him:

BIG Calon Nie energy

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Creepy would do just fine! I just want to be near his gorgeous form.

This one?

[ashintheairlikesnow]

I mean, I haven’t met any geologists who aren’t some degree of feral

Facts about Calon Nie: he is largely a recluse and he will swear up and down he left his court by his own personal choice (he didn't), he finds humans incredibly fascinating, he's always wanted one for his own, his favorite food is eggs from the nests of birds who only live in the mountains, he controls Killan through both speaking and singing, and he's a feral geologist

[ashintheairlikesnow]

can we have random facts about Killan please im sad

Hi, Anon! Sorry this is only getting answered now, illness has found my household and I went to bed early last night.

1. Killan goes so long without speaking that most people believe his voice is permanently hoarse, because he rarely speaks to anyone long enough to warm it up to normal again

2. His scars, where Calon Nie sewed him together, sometimes itch so terribly it's all he can do to not go mad from it

3. For only having talons on one hand, he is a surprisingly good hunter. It comes from him being patient and willing to wait for the perfect moment.

4. He dreams about going back south to see his mother, but he would never want her to see him like this. He just wants to see if she is still alive.

5. He is currently known as a ghost haunting a set of woods in which bandits and other cutthroats have begun to disappear. Local folk tell a tale that he is a bandit himself cursed to be look like a fae and take revenge on those who would harm them.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

What are your characters’ biggest flaws?

Ryan: Taking the easy way out or not wanting to do difficult things, because everything has always been easy for him.

Nate: Passivity in the face of danger. It's a learned survival skill but Nate considers it his biggest flaw.

Danny: It used to be his temper. Now I would argue it is how well he no longer has one, even when he needs it. He has no self-protection that isn't entirely internal left.

Ora: Apathy. Nothing matters any longer. Why try? They are getting... somewhat better about this.

Abraham: Bram's biggest flaw is probably his assumption that he can break anyone he wants, no matter who or what they are

Ashley: *maniacal cackling*

---

Jake: His anger and temper. While it comes in handy on occasion, it also makes things harder for him

Chris: He would say his unwillingness/inability to risk himself to help others

Antoni: He keeps so many secrets, even those he does not have to

Nat: She is an eternal slave to the "I'll just do it myself" mentality and ends up overwhelmed

Laken: They tend to drop people easily but take a long time to make long-lasting connections, which sometimes means making real friends is difficult

Krista: She is very susceptible to peer pressure

Kauri: Lack of a sense of self-worth, cripplingly low self-esteem

Leila: A self-protective sharpness that often makes her seem cruel or unkind

Allyn: No sense of individual identity, they struggle to see themself as worthwhile unless they are on someone else's arm

Jameson: Rage with no target or purpose still burning inside him

Nova: Obsessive fascination with anyone or anything that interests her

Sarita: lack of impulse control when her temper flares

Eli: He is so good at waiting that he is nearly incapable of taking action on his own

Nine: He keeps to himself so well basically no one knows him at all

Keira: Keira performs to custom specifications of Kauri Grant. Keira is adequate. Concern broken front wheel.

---

Kima: Naiveté

Bahram: Passivity. After his breakdown, he lost his ambitions to push and push and push and is largely content to simply exist. This is difficult when the situation calls for heroics

Miah: Impulse control and temper

Dr. Rachel Lachlan: The ability to compartmentalize and maintain cognitive dissonance at any cost

Anders Kirsse: He got so good at making money off of conspiracy theorists about cryptids that he became one

---

Killan: Lack of self-worth

Calon Nie: WAY TOO MUCH SELF-WORTH

---

Savvie: It's all flaws all the way down. But let's pick one and say that really, she loves @comfy-whumpee's Jax too deeply, that's all...

Izzy: Total lack of self-esteem and inability to stand up for herself the way she can for Jax or her little brother

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Whumptober Day 26: Blindness

CW: Blinded whumpee - references to eye gore, dehumanization, creepy and sadistic whumper, noncon touching (nonsexual)

Set after The First That Will Live

Killan’s world and its details as always belong to @wildfaewhump. It’s Vic’s sandbox - they just let me build some fucked-up castles there.

“Been thinking, me,” Calon Nie said, tapping talons lightly on the stone ground. 

He watched the blindfolded human boy clumsily pawing with his pinkish pointless prodding little fingers at the feathers of one reddish-brown wing. 

It had come within a day or so - the boy had started, in this sad little human way, to try and groom himself, combing through his feathers with those blunt-tipped skin-covered fingers, straightening them obsessively. Even after he stopped being able to see them, Calon Nie would watch him spend hours trying to carefully straighten them back to the right placement.

Instinct, pure and simple - and Calon Nie enjoyed the sight of it, the proof that his theory on the sharing of blood and the connection of bone to back had been correct. Each piece of the boy he took away and replaced with something else seemed to impress more and more deeply into him a set of fae-born impulses he didn’t have on his own.

It wouldn’t be long before they would move on to the voice, and then the organs, and then… who knew? At some point, Calon Nie had begun to wonder how many parts of a weak, ineffectual little thing could be replaced before what he created was no longer the original human at all. 

Could you take out a brain and give a new one? These were the questions Calon Nie asked himself before he slept. 

It wasn’t clear at first if the boy heard him speaking - he kept combing at feathers, and Calon Nie let the silence draw out to listen to their soft rustling. The wing was majestic - the hand hardly worth having. He would fix that, when the boy’s body was ready.

He could fix everything in the boy that was not to his liking. He understood that, now, in a way he hadn’t before the wings connected, the magic settled and took root in him. Starsong wrapped itself around the human like a blanket, a pillow pressed over mouth and nose to smother the human in the boy and draw out the fae.

He would kill the humanity of the boy, burn it away, and beneath its ashes he would find the new thing underneath.

“Buachaill del.” The boy did not look up - not that he could, exactly, look at all. Bandages wrapped over his head from eyebrow to cheekbone, covering up the evidence of his failures. It was the pain of his useless failed eyes that led the boy to spend the hours grooming his wings, soothing himself, as blood soaked through the cloth.

He wept blood, now, and that was the most fascinating part of the eyes to Calon Nie.

 “Killan.” The boy flinched at the use of his human name, the name Calon Nie did not like. He bit the syllables, drew out the ah sound, made his disgust perfectly clear. “Listening? Listen to Calon Nie, you?”

The boy’s shoulders hunched up near his chin, head turning in Calon Nie’ direction, hitching in a breath in sudden fear. Calon Nie’s sharp teeth flashed in a smile the boy could not see in response. “I’m listening.” His voice was whispery-thin, nervous, uncertain. 

Calon Nie hummed to himself, tapping talons on the floor, watching the boy sit so still, as though stillness could protect him from the dangers of the world. “Good. Failed, you, to keep new eyes. Costs a life, to give something new. Killan Josta, human boy, he fail Calon Nie. He fail the life given, when eyes don’t work. Did not respect sacrifice.”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” The boy said hoarsely, curling in on himself even more, his wings instinctively curling protectively around him. “I… I don’t want anyone to d-die for me. I didn’t mean to-... I didn’t mean to fail. I, I tried to p-pray for them, to stars, to-”

“Paugh! Mysteries do not hear you.” Calon Nie tilted his head to the side as he watched the boy’s wings bristle, feathers slightly fluffing out with nervousness and maybe even a little defensive anger. From the moment the connection had been made, the wings had been a part of him, mind and body, more rapidly than Calon Nie had ever dreamed.

A clear sign, for those who knew how to look for it. Favored by the stars, this boy, the starsong already slip-sliding around him even though he couldn’t use it. 

Not yet.

They would need a fae voice for that. Calon Nie already had someone in mind, someone who had dismissed his ideas. Someone who would live to see their progress before he allowed them to die and be part of his grand ambitions. 

“Anyway, no matter what mean. What intend. Already have died, for Killan. My kin and yours.” The mention of the humans that the boy had slaughtered brought fresh bright red blood to soak through the new bandages, and Calon Nie watched with fascination as the spots spread, as though he could see with his blood. Beautiful. “Too late for sorry. Have already killed your own, yes? Slit throat after throat, for Calon Nie? Your hand holds knife, yes?”

The boy choked back a sob. “Yes.”

Calon Nie knew the cruelty was unnecessary, but it was fascinating to watch how red blood rushed to pale cheeks, visible even in the dimness to Calon’s sharp fae eyes. Even more fascinating to see how his pretty human’s new wings already reflected his moods, built as deeply into the basic movements of his body now as the beat of his sad, tiny little heart, the movement of air in and out of his stupid nearly-pointless weak lungs.

Beautiful, wasn’t it? The way the spaces left behind by failure wanted to cry? The way that red wetness still soaked the cloth that Calon Nie had tied around his head to hide his failure from view? It was beautiful, to watch the damp spread slightly shining in the cave’s soft light to the boy’s jaw. The trails of red that ran and dripped to feed the earth.

There were still eyes under the blindfold, failed fae eyes that bled constantly and could not see, holding place until he could find another one of his own people to lead here. Another life given to the stars in the name of something new.

It was worth everything - every mistake, every death, every step closer. It was worth any cost, for Calon Nie to be something better than any other fae had ever been.

They would fly with the stars, but Calon Nie would direct the mystery of them himself. No one else could do that. No one else had ever tried.

But he would do it, no matter how many he must kill. Humans, paugh, they weren’t anything. But fae lives… that he took seriously, but still. It would be worth everything, in the end, and failures were to be expected. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t play with the boy’s fear, now and then for his own amusement. It didn’t mean he wasn’t confused, and troubled, and worried that this perfect subject was… perhaps not perfect enough. 

He wasn’t sure how the eyes had failed when the wings worked. It was a mystery, and Calon Nie loved mysteries but he did not like them when they meant that his failure cost fae lives with no gain in return. He’d flown the body back up to the mountains to place next to the one who had given her wings. They would rest together, he could give them that much, but Calon Nie did not like that this second had died for nothing.

Were they honored, still, to die for no reason?

Or was he simply murdering, then?

For the boy’s body to fail when it most needed not to, forcing Calon Nie to waste a gift of sight. It was… irritating. 

It made Calon Nie doubt himself.

Really, it was not the boy’s fault human bodies were so frail and weak, that they had to make sharp things to hurt with because they had no sharpness themselves. It wasn’t the boy’s fault that he was an imperfect recipient of Calon Nie’s discoveries.

The strongest, so far - but still not perfect.

“Hmph. I say no sorries.” Calon Nie waved his talons dismissively, ignoring that the boy could not see him do it. “Is Calon Nie’s fault, not my del, really, that eyes did not work. Missed something, me. Miss step, miss thought. Something… something missed.”

The boy was silent beyond the harsh loud sound of his breathing. He claimed the failed eyes hurt, a constant throbbing pain in his face, and Calon Nie allowed him to drink some teas that soothed it, but that was all. 

He needed to be pure, to ensure the eyes worked next time. To make sure that the next of his people he gave to the stars in search of his greatest dreams would not be a pointless murder, but something that a fae could be honored by.

Even if they did not know to be honored, until they were dead.

Calon Nie moved over to the boy, watching the way his chin lifted and his head tilted as he tried to hear Calon Nie’s careful quiet footsteps across the cave floor. Maybe he could be given new ears, too, somehow, someday. Rather than his silly half-deaf human hearing.

The brush of the backs of his talons made the boy flinch backwards, but Calon Nie tsked, clicking narrow tongue against sharp teeth, and the boy went still, trembling under his touch as he gently pushed the blindfold up to look underneath.

Pale, cloudy fae eyes looked sightlessly beyond him. They had bonded well enough, but something severed the connection that magic should have made, and they looked like they had been scratched and scarred over from the inside out. Pale yellow, with only the tiniest sliver of slit black pupil. 

Blood ran wet from the corners of the boy’s eyes, trickling down his face. 

He held still, though, without the force of a thralling, without the mysteries to hold him. 

“Pretty human,” Calon Nie whispered. He wrapped his hand carefully around the boy’s throat, staring into his blind eyes. The eyes that had been taken from a fae, the eyes that had been sacrificed, only to need sacrificed again. “Pretty, pretty. My pretty new thing. Mo ragnaithe. We will try again.”

“P-Please,” The boy whispered, sniffing, his little human nose scrunching up. “Please, I-I don’t want to be blind.”

“If try again, me - if give another life to making you better - and this next one dies and still, you fail… will die, you.” He leaned in, lips moving against the boy’s ear. “Will kill Killan myself, me. Understand this, you? That Killan dies?”

The boy nodded, frantically, sightless wide eyes filling with red tears.

He let go of the blindfold and it dropped to the ground. Calon Nie pulled back and away, watching the boy scramble to cover his pointless useless eyes again, whimpering and choking back sobs as he tied the cloth back on, knowing how Calon Nie hated to hear weak whimpering human sadness when he was being built to something of such glory.

The boy curled into the tiniest little ball he could make of himself, and Calon Nie watched as his shaking fingers went back to his wings, to straighten the feathers, to comb through them, to soothe himself with grooming. Obsessively straightening, running fingers through, soothing.

Bit by bit.

Moment by moment.

Piece by piece.

The next set of eyes would work, Calon Nie was sure of it.

They would work, or he would declare this one a failure, just like the rest, and dispose of him in the woods to rot alongside his other failed experiments. 

Then he would start again.

---

@quirkykayleetam ​​​ , @whumpallday ​​​ , @whumppsychology ​​​, @doveotions ​​​, @broken-horn , @moose-teeth ​​​, @whumpfigure    @whump-only ​​​, @just-strawberry-jam ​​​, @loopylunacy ​​​ @raigash @whump-tr0pes @slaintetowhump @astrobly​​​​​​ @burtlederp​​​​​​ ​, @finder-of-rings​​​​​​ ​

[ashintheairlikesnow]

The God of New Things

The universe of Killan’s story belongs to @wildfaewhump​. If you haven’t read their Iesin and Talvos or Pathverse stories, go! Go read! Read them or face my wrath.

CW: GORE (wing whump, breaking bones, stitches, tons of blood and bone descriptors), murder/character death, mutilation of a dead person described, nonconsensual surgery (oof), noncon touching and kissing (nonsexual), creepy whumper, god complex

“Time for beginning, Killan.”

The fae’s voice was low and loving, murmured as he gripped the long, wickedly sharp knife. 

The boy’s breath hitched, trembled and caught, was released in a whimper, and Calon Nie’s pearly blood thrilled in his veins that finally he could begin again.

It was going to work this time. He had learned from his past mistakes. For instance - for this, his talons would not do. This would take precision, and perfection. The knife had been dipped in boiling water five times, and heated on the fire five times, and then dipped in boiling water again. It had been held up to the stars, through the large hole in the cave’s roof, until starsong and starshine had bathed it as surely as the water that had bubbled along the edges of the pot hanging low over the fire.

Was the cave used for something else, once upon a time? The rough-wrought opening that lets the stars shine down directly onto the center of this cave seemed too perfectly formed to be accidental. The cave was set low in the mountains, still hours of flying from the colder, sharper places where the fae’s family still lived, where his court made their home. But a series of caves along the edges of this mountain made him think that perhaps a court had been near here, once chased up past the trees by the humans.

He would fix that, one day.

He would make the humans so terrified they would give the fae all the space they wanted, and then more than that besides. He would give to the fae weapons of fear and pain and blood, and then… then they would understand him.

It could have been an accidental, the plain gray rock slab so perfectly placed under the hole in the cave’s ceiling. But still… perhaps another has had ideas like this, before him. 

Perhaps another fae had once made offerings to the night sky, given a human scream in exchange for making something no one had ever seen before.

Perhaps he was left this altar, led here. Perhaps that is what it is, this space, designed for the creation of new things. Calon Nie will be a father the way that the humans call certain of their strange little deities fathers. He will be the creator. 

His name will be whispered at human campfires, one day, in terror. He will make his new thing, his offering to the stars, to his court, to his family to see if one day it will be enough. 

I will make you something new. You must call me powerful, then. I have always been stronger than all of you, I feel things you don’t feel, I know secrets you don’t know.

But I can show you, through my chosen, my pretty human boy.

You will understand what we can do to them, to keep them from overrunning us. You’ll see. I can show you.

I will show you.

The first cut dug deep beneath the thin layers of human skin, blood welling a beautifully dark red that was nearly burgundy in the dim cave light. The magic breathed out along with the empty human life, a life that was pointless suffering and strife before Calon Nie raised it up, gave its suffering a higher calling, a purpose, a place that all this pain might be leading to.

You will bleed and break on my shore, mo ragnaithe, but then you will be all the stronger. I can show you what strength is. I can give to you the starsong.

I can show you.

I will show you.

Calon Nie’s head cocked to the side, birdlike, as blood beaded up on pale skin, a little more and a little more and a little more, before finally some tension broke and the droplet turned from a perfect half-sphere to a running river trailing over the beautifully wrought ribcage.

Too many ribs and too many organs, but that could be fixed, too. He trailed a talon, ever so gently, along to break the line of red, and then soothed the whimpering human boy restrained against the long, low stone slab he was laid on with low soft trills.

“Pl-please, please stop, please… please stop.” The boy’s pleading was pleasing to the ear, or at least to Calon Nie’s. His voice was not yet cracked from screaming but soon it would be. A simple human voice, hardly worth hearing. Calon lifted a talon to trail the back of the boy’s neck, leading to a new shudder wracking across him as he saw the raw, red skin around his wrists where the rough ropes had rubbed skin clear away.

“Still, Killan,” Calon Nie said, pointing with his talon at the blood soaking into the woven braid that kept his wrist firmly pressed down against the stone. Red was already smeared there. Just a little, but there would be so much blood on this rock by morning… 

The boy sobbed at the sound of his own name, as always now. “No, please, I don’t-... I don’t know why y-y-you’re, you’re doing this but please stop-”

“Sssshhhh. Cannot stop, me. Will understand later, you. Will explain.”

“At, at least… at least put me to sleep,” The boy whimpered, and Calon Nie paused with the knife just above the other shoulder blade, looking back at the boy’s tear-stained face with a calm curiosity. 

“Why?”

“B-because I wouldn’t… have to f-f-feel… this���”

Calon Nie laughed, then, patting him lightly along the already-cut space on his back, pulling another strangled cry of pain. “Cannot. Need to hear.”

It was the boy’s turn to ask, in a broken voice, “Why?”

“To make gift of buachaill del. Give screams to stars. Now no more talking.”

The starsong wrapped around the boy’s mouth, slipped over his tongue and down his throat, and the words fled him as quickly as Calon Nie could speak the compulsion into being. The boy could not be convinced, he had seen that during other times he’d caused him pain. Silence was preferable to arguments while trying to do something as delicate as this. 

No, the boy’s screams were essential, not his words. His pain was important, as was the other thing, the reason that he had been chosen at all. In the boy, he had seen resilience twisted to another’s purpose, and a boy who did not fight being simply an instrument of someone else’s will.

Calon Nie had known it, that this was the one, the chosen human boy who would be better than the last three. This one would live.

When the boy had made a wish not for himself but to serve the purpose of the rabbit, Calon Nie had known, then, that this boy’s particular weakness had been tailored for him as well as if he had been born only for this. Had known this is my chosen human. 

This one will break for me.

And so he would. The cracks were already there. Calon Nie had only to shatter him, and rebuild him into something better, something more, than he had been.

He slid the knife from the boy’s rounded shoulder blade, pointless now, and cut a slow curve along its line, his head nearly perpendicular to his body with the intensity of his focus. For his pretty human boy, the darkness must have been nearly total in here, the pain seemingly pointless, but Calon Nie’s eyes cut through the dark as easily as they did the day. He could see the beauty of the world in ways that the boy’s bleary night-blind eyes could not.

That would be fixed, too. Today, though, was not for the eyes or ribs or hands or ears or any of the other plans that Calon Nie had. Even Calon Nie, after countless failures had taught him the importance of moving quickly, could not fix so many things at once.

Today was for his wings.

The human’s hands pulled helplessly against the ropes - it had been the simplest turn of starsong to have the boy lay himself down on the slab and hold his own wrists out to be tied, but Calon Nie couldn’t have simply forced him to hold himself still the whole time. He needed to save the mysteries for the hardest part, the part that had not worked on prior chosen humans. He needed it to work, this time.

The boy began to weep, again, sobs that shook him bodily, and Calon Nie smiled at the sound as his blade began to dig a little deeper. His talons pressed into the space where the wound had opened. Weeping turned to screaming as talons dug deep, but the mysteries did not feel pity for a human’s scream.

What the mysteries heard was Calon Nie’s call, and the starsong answered him in force.

Humans were dead iron-things, with blood that pumped dead stars instead of life and bones that did not know the magic of air, of flight. But the mysteries still poured in through the bleeding wound in the boy’s skin, and all his thrashing could not free him of Calon Nie’s grip. 

“Almost, almost, almost,” Calon Nie sang, swaying slowly back and forth, feeling the mysteries in the trees outside and woven into the very rock of the cave, even in the boy himself. He could feel nothing with his dead senses but with the first step taken he would feel a little more. 

Against the wall, soft breathing, deep and even. The occasional scrape of sleeping movement. Calon Nie chanced only the barest glance away before he had to look back to his human, whose screams were rising again as talons and blade worked together to ensure that his skin was peeled back and shoulder blades exposed. 

This was a dark kind of magic, Calon Nie knew that. Something he was not supposed to do. But the boy’s scream became a screeching, keening shriek as his very bones began to shift and change in the pool of blood and skin and spine.

The final shriek of his consciousness echoed off the cave, up through the opening, being given as a great gift to the stars themselves.

Then the boy’s eyes rolled up, and all his fighting and pulling on ropes meant nothing, as it was never going to mean anything, and he was sleeping, too, in a way.

“Good boy,” Calon Nie murmured. 

The movement along the wall increased, and Calon Nie’s sharp fanged teeth snapped harshly at the air in a sudden irritation. He needed more time to ready the boy’s bones for flight, for the attachment. He had no time to fight, now.

Besides, what he asked for was not so much. To give the boy fae wings, he had needed fae wings to give. It was a tragedy, to take another fae life, but what were a few lives in the service of Calon Nie showing his court and the world itself that humans could be perfected?

The other fae would never have to know anything had happened, if only they would stay sleeping - there and then gone, returned to the stars where she belonged. It was an honor to give your life in service of greater things, wasn’t it? And Calon Nie would honor her by giving her death a higher purpose, just like he honored the dull, pointless human boy’s suffering by sharpening it to a point to be a weapon that could be wielded.

“You’ll see,” He murmured, petting his free hand through the boy’s hair, feeling his shuddering, shaking attempts to breathe around the agony he must be feeling even in his unconscious state. “You’ll understand why, later, won’t you, buachaill del?”

They would all understand, later.

It took precious minutes ticking by, listening to the cracking and shifting sound of a boy’s bones hollowing and changing, feeling the press of shoulder blades as they pushed back and up, moved along his back to be more properly placed to carry the weight of feathers. 

The first one had died before he’d ever even made it this far. The second had died three days after the wings. The third had survived two weeks.

This one, though.

This one wouldn’t die.

He was sure of it.

The fae he had drugged and restrained against the wall died under his blade, a single harsh movement had slit her throat and bled pearly blood onto the cave floor. A piece of the great mystery of the stars died, with her death, and Calon Nie felt tears prick his eyes. How terrible, that his purpose must mean the deaths of his own people.

But all the wars ever fought have had a body count, and you make no progress without damage.

Her death was quick, but taking her wings was harder. While the boy laid still and silent on the slab, blood pouring from him in sheets across his back from the open wounds and discolored uneven knobs of bone sticking out, Calon Nie had to cut into her as well, the already-reddened blade now smeared with pearlescent fae blood. The two mixed poorly, but the look of it caught Calon Nie’s eye and made him go still, thoughtful.

Could the boy’s blood be replaced, too? He’d never thought of that before.

Once he had cut deeply, he had to break the bones beneath the skin and then wrench the wing off, a horrible cracking sound like a tree trunk breaking beneath a punishing wind. Finally, he pulled her left wing free, reddish-brown feathers bursting into the air around him and settling on the ground. The right followed soon after, and the massive things were heavy in his arms. He moved them over to the stone slab, settling them next to the boy, who still had not awoken.

The starsong kept the boy in thrall, lost in a wash of it, mysteries wrapped tightly around him. Calon Nie knew that the mysteries did not have a mind, but he liked to think if they did, they would have looked at what h was doing with the same curiosity and certainty that h did. 

Humans were dead things walking th earth, but they did not have to be.

He returned to the dead fae lying on the ground, crouching beside her, brushing a bit of hair from her closed eyes. Never to open again, because of him. He let the gravity of that fact settle in. He had killed seven fae in his life, now. Three, for each of his failed subjects. This one, today. And the three… before.

Before he left his court and came to the human lands to build his new things in peace. He had never once taken a fae life for granted. It was only… it was only that his own purpose was so much more important than theirs. 

He smiled down at her. Forever sleeping, he would fly her into the high places tomorrow and place her where she could face the dawn and stay frozen, to watch the sunrise again and again, forever. “Mo bhuí-ocha, chwaeri, as do rodd,” He whispered, and pressed a kiss to the top of her white hair. “Eitilt i measc réaltaí anois.”

Then he returned to the boy bathed in the mysteries, to the pair of wings that lay in pearly-red mixed blood of fae and human alike. He let the knife fall to the ground, he had no need of it for this. 

The boy groaned, muffled with his face pressed flat to the stone now, and Calon Nie ignored him. There was no room for error, the starsong was fading by the second from the fae wings he had stolen. If he waited too long, the loss would poison them and the boy would die with the wings, just like the first two.

“Is feidir liome,” Calon Nie whispered, when he felt his talons shake for the first time. The first two humans had died thrashing and screaming, their bodies rejecting the wings that he had worked so hard to give them. The first two had haunted his dreams, as he planned and thought and worked towards what he must do to solve it for the next one.

They had died in pain, but it was glorious pain, in service to a higher calling.

To Calon Nie’s calling.

He had been their killer, their thief, their murdering monster in the dark.

He would be this boy’s god.

“Is feidir liome,” He whispered again. I can. He could. 

“Beidh mé.” His voice was stronger this time. I will. He took up the fae’s left wing, maneuvering it so its feathers were splayed, the joins raised and curved, as though the boy on the slab might take flight at any moment. 

His talons clicked against the exposed hollow bone. Fear beat his pulse rapidly in the hollow of his throat. He slowly, carefully lowered the wing until the fae bones just touched the mutilated, reformed left shoulder blade of the boy.

Then he called to the mysteries that swirled above the two of them and raised his eyes to the stars he could see through the open space in the cave’s ceiling.

“Beidh sé ag eitilt!” His voice rang through the cave, more melody than shout, and the rush of power through him was the same heady ecstasy it had been the first time, and the second, the third.

This one would not die screaming as feathers molted in droves. This one would not lay with glazed-over eyes. This one would not fail.

This one would fly.

A breath, and then a rush of wind through the cave blew the boy’s hair in every direction, ruffled the light brown with hints of honey-blond than had so caught Calon Nie’s eye the first time he’d seen him. Another low groan, and the blunt human fingers, so useless, curled back into fists. Calon Nie held still, breathing faster, hardly daring to hope.

He always dared hope.

Then, he looked down, as the boy’s eyes blinked back open, insensible, before he threw his head back, every muscle tense, and screamed again.

Calon Nie felt his smile crack so wide it nearly broke his face as the place where the boy’s reformed bones met the fae’s wing began to blend. The bone rebuilt itself in a flash of time that would have taken weeks or months without the mysteries, the hollowed spaces finding each other and melding. Pearly blood ran into red and consumed it rather than falling to its death-knell iron.

Calon Nie trilled in delight as the feathers of the wing shuddered, and the wing suddenly expanded to its full height, the boy’s scream trapped in an everlasting moment of Calon Nie’s perfect triumph. The connection was made, and the boy’s mind and muscle would control the wings now, just as he’d hoped.

He moved to the other wing - the right wing would always be a little weaker, for the extra seconds elapsed before it could be attached, too. It shouldn’t be enough to affect much, or even notice, if this worked.

It was going to work.

It was already working.

“Wh-what-... wha’s happ-... h-hurts, please, please-please-please, it hurts, what’s happening-” The boy’s desperate pleading cries were a babble, noise, they were nothing against the rush of Calon Nie’s blood as he carefully placed the second wing, and then the screams began again. 

The boy screamed through the connection. He wept through the stitches that sewed his thick human skin back into place, although it would always be heavily scarred. That was fine. That was fine, if it worked.

It was going to work.

Once the stitches were done, with the thread clipped off by talon and teeth and coated with still-bubbling blood that his fae eyes could see was paler than it had once been, he knew. He could feel the sense of the mysteries beginning, for the first time, to run in the veins of the shaking human tied down before him. 

He would fly, soon. He would sing to the stars, one day. He would be… he would be perfect. Calon Nie would make him perfect.

And then his court - and all the fae - would understand that he was stronger than them. That he could make new things. 

They would understand that Calon Nie was a new thing, too.

“Will fly, you,” Calon Nie whispered, his eyes so wide the whites showed around his slit-pupil irises, his lips drawn back from his fangs in a rictus of delight he could not seem to control. “My pretty boy. Will fly!”

The boy couldn’t hear him over his own screams. It didn’t matter, because the shudder ran through the right wing, too, and then Calon Nie moved, dropping down from the slab back onto the cave floor, to watch as the boy’s fear controlled their movements. The wings closed and then opened again, bristled, feathers puffing in fear unconsciously.

They were both breathing harshly, Calon Nie with his delighted ecstasy, his pride - the boy with terrified confusion. It didn’t matter.

The boy raised his head and turned it, meeting Calon Nie’s eyes with his own human ones weeping tears to darken the rock beneath him. “Wh-what happened to me? Wha… what did you d-d-do?”

Calon Nie dropped into a crouch next to the boy’s head, petted bloody talons into his hair, and leaned over to lick the tears from his face, delighting in the saltwater taste, the boy’s shuddering disgust, the way his wings reacted already. 

None of the others had controlled them so soon. This was working better than he had thought, had imagined, it could. He had given the boy’s pain a purpose and the boy’s body had soaked it up with gratitude his mind might not feel… but it would, one day.

“What did you d-do to me?” The boy whispered.

Calon Nie leaned in so closely that their eyes were mere inches apart. He kissed the boy’s forehead, soft as a mother with a feverish fledgling. 

“Make better, you. My buachaill del, better than all others. Mo ragnaithe, you I choose. I give wings. I give flying. I give starsong.”

“I didn’t want it,” The boy whimpered. “It h-hurts…”

Calon Nie kissed his forehead again, and then stood. In the corner, a dead fae, a sacrifice to a higher cause. On the slab, a human boy with working wings.

Standing between them, Calon Nie, who would do things that no one else had ever done, things no one else could do. He could make something new.

“Wanting not matter,” Calon Nie whispered, raising his eyes to the stars, his teeth flashing, raising his hands slowly to bathe in the mysteries that settled heavy in the cave around him. “More than pretty boy, now. More than that, you.”

It felt like standing in the space between the stars itself. 

Starlight like a kiss fell across his cheekbones.

His hands were bathed in iron blood and would itch for days, but it was worth it. Everything worth doing, after all, came with discomfort. You could not bring new life into the world without pain.

“Not Calon Nie, aos sidhe, now,” He murmured. “Calon Nie, god. Dia ruda’ai nuah.”

As the boy wept and his new feathers rustled in the darkness, Calon Nie smiled up at the stars. This one would live. This one would fly. This one would be perfect.

I will make you an offering, a thing no one has ever seen.

I will make you.

You are mine.

----------

Tagging Killan’s crew:  @astrobly​​​​ @burtlederp​​​​ ​, @finder-of-rings​​​​ ​, @slaintetowhump​​​ ​, @quirkykayleetam​​​ ​, @whumpallday​​​ , @whumppsychology​​​, @doveotions​​​, @broken-horn​​, @moose-teeth​​, @whumpfigure​​, @spiffythespook​​, @oceanthesarcasamfox​​,  @whump-only​ (if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

[ashintheairlikesnow]

All That Is Or Was Or Will Be

CW: Character death (no main characters), murder, so much murder, just like a lot of murder, no animals harmed in the writing of this piece, emeto (brief), referenced physical abuse, blood, drugging, knives, mind control, noncon touching (nonsexual), a kind of pet whump, trauma response, creepy whumper, suicidal ideation (brief, of the “wish I had a way out of this” variety)

Killan Josta belongs to @wildfaewhump​‘s Iesin and Talvos universe, which Vic is graciously letting me use with their permission to just absolutely ruin Killan in every possible way.

Tagging Killan’s crew:  @astrobly​ @burtlederp​ ​, @finder-of-rings​ ​, @slaintetowhump​ ​, @quirkykayleetam​ ​, @whumpallday​ , @whumppsychology​, @doveotions​ (if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

With every step, Killan tried to stop walking. 

He told himself to stand still, to drop the small bag he held in one hand, to cry out and warn them he was coming. The woods were dark around him, but he never tripped on anything. He never placed his feet wrong. He never stumbled, or struggled. He walked with a perfect, inhumanly smooth stride even as his heart pounded, lurching sickly inside his chest with dread.

He couldn’t stop.

He didn’t want to stop. Or he did, but the want was buried underneath a deeper push, the twining starsong that wrapped him up in Calon Nie's voice. 

Take this, you, in secret steps and quietness. Walk til you see, but do not wake. I show you what starsong can do.

Pl-please, no, don't make me do this-

His feet had already been moving.

Calon's teeth flashed in the dark with his smile. You want to see what starsong can do, my pretty human.

He didn’t want to know what starsong could do - and yet he was desperate for the knowledge, wasn’t he? If only to know what he was in for, how terrible it was going to be, what kinds of monster-magic the fae could really do. 

He didn’t want to know what would happen to Ren, to Tinch and Vanya and Pyllko… definitely did not want to see what Calon Nie would do to Beron, who had sometimes helped him pack up the camp in the mornings or patted him on the back, ruffled his hair and said, you worked hard today with a hint of pride in his voice as though Killan were his own son and not just a debt-slave…

He had liked Beron sometimes, as much as you could like a man who kicked you in the stomach for eating a second helping of porridge until you threw the first one up or took your food and threw it to dogs to make himself laugh. Killan had been kind of fond of him, worked hard for his approval, been glad that Beron always asked for Killan to sit watch with him at night.

Beron had been mean, could be mean - but he was the only one of them where Killan could mostly predict that violence, and so it was as close to safe as he had been since the day he'd been attacked in town and nearly drowned. He was the only one who’d put together a bit of hot broth or tea when Killan was sick.

Beron took care of him, in between hurting, and no one else did.

 What would starsong do to Beron?

He didn’t want to do this, but his feet would not stop moving.

The more he fought against the silvery web of compulsion wrapped around him, the louder the fae’s voice sang in the back of his mind. Eerie twin notes, harmonized with itself in a single voice, soaking into the deepest parts of him. Above him, Calon Nie moved through the branches in nearly-perfect silence, even his wings hidden in the dark canopy of trees.

Buachaill del… pretty boy, you are mo ragnaith, my chosen one. My human. I am all, all was or is or will be, for you. 

He did not want to be Calon Nie’s human, but he had no choice.

His mam used to tell a story about a wicked fae who sang away all the children in a village who had not listened to their mothers when it was time for bed, using her hands to make shadowed wings on the wall, while a tiny Killan had watched and listened, wide-eyed and rapt. The fae led the disobedient children right off a cliff just to hover in the air with its awful wings and watch their bodies dash to the rocks below.

You see, then, Killy, why it’s what you must do, to listen to your mam when she sends you to sleep? Otherwise the fae monsters will take you and tear out your throat.

It was just a story to scare children - until it wasn’t.

He would have been less terrified if Calon Nie had simply wanted to kill him and drink his blood and make things out of his bones, like his mam had said fae would. What was happening to him instead was much, much worse, because he was starting to understand that it wouldn’t end, that Calon Nie had some plan for him he wasn’t explaining. Some idea that had led him to want a human boy for his very own. There was some hidden reason he kept measuring Killan’s arms and fingers and legs, pressing on his sides to feel at the ribs beneath, not counting - just saying too much bones, and Killan was both desperate to know what that meant and praying to some dim concept of a forest god that he never, ever would learn.

He couldn’t stop walking, but one hand raised to feel over his neck as he went, the bandage wrapped around it felt too tight, constricting. Calon Nie was not gentle. It covered the sliced-up skin down one side, where Calon Nie had let blood drip down to dry and stain brownish on his collarbone, but it didn’t feel like a bandage.

It felt worse than that. 

Killan felt like a collared dog.

He felt like a pet that walked on its hind legs for the amusement of its keepers. Like the little dogs at the harvest festival who could balance balls on the tips of their noses as they ‘danced’, hind-legged, while the people clapped and cheered.

The bandages crinkled, the barest hint of noise in the dark woods. Above him, there was a soft hiss, and Killan’s hand fell back to his side. 

Quietness, buachaill del. He didn’t have to hear the words spoken to hear the order. Not any longer.

He could see the camp ahead of him, the fire banked low to embers, the men stretched out in their bedrolls to sleep under the stars. The horses breathing in soft snorts, ears back, heads turned in his direction. They saw him, but they knew Killan - he fed them, sliding the heavy bags up over their noses so they could munch where they stood, even deep in the woods with no real grass to graze on. They weren’t scared of him like they would have been of Calon Nie, and so they made no sound at his approach beyond the softest whicker. 

Beron and Tinch were on watch, sitting up with their backs to him for the moment, and Killan opened his mouth to warn them, to say, please, he’s going to kill you-

“Sleep,” The fae in the branches above him commanded. Killan’s knees buckled and he crashed to the ground as the world spun to sudden exhausted wooziness around him. 

The last thing he heard was the sound of Beron and Tinch falling forward, too, the soft thuds of their bodies falling into the dirt.

Then, darkness.

He woke to the whisper of Calon Nie’s talons across his back, ghosting over shoulder blades long-scarred by Ren’s punishments for past transgressions. He tensed at the touch of those clawed fingertips, but they didn’t quite cut his skin. Instead, it felt more like Calon Nie played his spine as an instrument. “Wake, only you.” Calon Nie spoke almost gently, almost lovingly. “But be still. Time for the first.”

“The… the first what?” Killan asked, blinking, pushing slowly up onto his elbows with his hips and legs still splayed on the ground. The little bag he had been forced to carry all the way here lay on its side, still tied tightly closed.

He looked around to see the bandits he had lived with were now all asleep - three in their bedrolls, and Beron and Tinch simply slumped on the ground, too deeply unconscious for dignity. Everyone’s breath came deep and even, low snores settling in the air around them. “I thought-...” His own voice was slurred, struggling to come all the way awake even with the command. “I thought you were going to kill-... to kill them.”

“No kill, me,” Calon said easily. “Now. Hold still. Silence, Killan.” 

He only said Killan’s real name when whatever he was about to do was going to hurt. Sure enough, when Killan had frozen on the ground like a boy made of stone, Calon’s taloned fingers slipped, for the first time, into his skin.

Killan had begun to hate his name. At least buachaill del, mo ragnaith, pretty boy, my human - at least those names didn’t come with the promise of pain.

He tried to cry out with the sudden burning pain, but no sound came. Compelled to silence, Killan could do nothing but dig his fingers into the loose earth, mouth open in a scream he could not voice, his vocal chords locked tight with starsong wrapped around them. He felt the talon trail through like his mam heating a knife and slicing butter, his skin falling away almost eagerly to either side, leaping to do the fae’s will.

Only when he could feel the blood running did Calon Nie pull back his hand, his head cocking to the side as he held the talons up in front of his own face, slit-pupiled yellow eyes locked on the deep red, colored nearly black in the dark night, running warm and then cool down the palm of his monstrous hand.

“Pretty,” He whispered. “So red, with iron. Dead star, you. But I can give life.”

Killan breathed in gasps against the pain, tears running hot down his face, dripping saltwater to a forest floor that maybe had never seen water and salt mixed before. He couldn’t speak to ask what the fae meant, and he didn’t wan to. He didn’t want to know what life meant to a fae that thought Killan, with his beating heart and red blood, was dead.

“Is time, now,” Calon Nie said after contemplating Killan’s blood a moment longer. “Stand, you. Keep silent.”

Killan’s arms moved, palms pressed to earth, shifting onto his hands and knees even as his back screamed and he wept silent tears into the earth beneath him, blood trickling in a garish tickle down his sides and then soaking into the waistband of his pants, until he stood, swaying. He could be forced to silence but the rictus-scream was stuck on his face, the only expression of his pain he was allowed beyond his labored breathing.

“Good. Now, is time, is time, is time for celebration.” Calon Nie sing-song sang the words more than spoke them in his hissing, sibilant accent. He reached his own hand behind his back and then pulled from the waistband of his own pans an intricately carved dagger made of no metal that Killan had ever known. He was used to Ren’s weapons, all good solid strong iron, poison to the fae and a good defense when you hunted as close to the mountains as Ren did.

This, though, shimmered in the darkness like silver, was carved with the peaks of mountains clear along each side of the blade. Crafted with a sharply angled serration, it looked like something you couldn’t possibly need for hunting.

Calon Nie held the knife out to Killan. “Take,” He commanded, and Killan’s hand moved without him even as his heart dropped, went cold, turned to a block of ice in his stomach. The pain in his back was forgotten, simply overrun by the horrified understanding.

He tried to move his mouth, but the compulsion to silence still held, and he couldn’t do anything more than that.

Calon raised his eyebrows slowly, curious and amused. The moonlight caught his eyes as his chin raised to look Killan in the eyes, turning yellow eyes briefly to a cloudy opalescence, and he seemed somehow more a product of a story meant to scare children than ever. “No questions, you. Time for questions gone.” He drew his hand through the air, a quick sharp dismissal, and Killan felt his stomach twist as some of his own blood flew off Calon’s taloned fingertips and landed on Ren’s face where he lay in his bedroll.

Wake up, Killan begged him, mouth moving, silent. Wake up. Fight him with iron. Wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up-

Ren shifted, mumbling to himself in a slurred voice, and wiped at the blood on his cheek.

Then he settled back to unconsciousness again.

Calon Nie swayed lightly back and forth, as if to a rhythm only he could hear, eyes half-closed as his head tilted back and forth with his movements, long black hair that turned nearly white by the ends moving, his wings slightly - deeply auburn reddish-brown on the outside and a layered, striped black-and-white on the inside - spread in the small clearing for balance. He smiled, head tilted up to the moon, to the stars, visible in the perfectly clear night sky.

Without looking away from a constellation just next to the moon - Killan had always known it, three stars in a line and two more above, as the Rider - Calon Nie pointed to Ren, and said, “Slit his throat, Killan. Stop only when no living.”

Killan’s body moved without him to obey the starsong command.

His hands moved steady and sure, one to grip Ren by the hair and yank until his head was forced back, the other to draw the serrated blade across the man’s throat, digging in deep, blood bursting as though a dam had broken, a waterfall of a man’s life soaking into his bedroll, snuffled half-breaths that could no longer be drawn.

Killan’s hand didn’t loosen the grip on Ren’s hair - on the man who had saved him when the robbers threw him in the river, who had owned his life and hurt him and written all the scars on him that weren’t Calon Nie’s - until the man was dead.

Right to death, the fae’s magic held Ren in a deep slumber. 

He never woke, before he was gone.

Killan wept for him, his heart burning, and waited for what he knew came next when he let Ren’s head drop onto his bedroll, never to wake again.

“Good,” Calon Nie praised, eyes fluttering half-closed. “Now.” He pointed at Pyllko. “Slit his throat.”

Killan moved to the next bedroll, grabbed Pyllko by his curly hair - he was vain of it, Pyllko, found new women in every town they stopped in, had babies scattered through the land, or so he said - and killed him, too. His hand was dripping red with blood. Pyllko liked to say awful things about the women he saw, but he was like a spoiled selfish boy, younger even than Killan in mind if not in body. 

A nobleman’s son, so he swore, who had been banished for something to do with a higher noble’s eldest daughter. 

Ren saved me, too, Pyllko had said to him once. I could have died. You should be grateful that he’s got such a big heart for you.

Then Vanya.

Killan forced Calon Nie to give the command for each one, refused to move of his own volition. His eyes were too blurry to see with the tears and he knew his hand was struggling, he was getting Pyllko’s blood in Vanya’s hair, his grip on the blade now slick with red, struggling to hold it tightly enough for the killing stroke.

Vanya, who was cruel and cruel and cruel again, for his own amusement.

Killan still had never wanted him to die. 

He killed him anyway.

Now, Tinch.

Tinch, who had ignored him mostly as a child but had started to stare at him as an adult, get too close, look too long. Who joked about sneaking to the river to see what it was about bathing naked there that Killan loved so much. 

Tinch, who had a habit of grabbing at Killan’s arms or chin or hair whenever he wanted. This throat, Killan slit with hardly a lick of grief at all. I know what you would have done to me, soon enough, Killan thought, as the man bled to death on his side, his hand lying outstretched. If they were ever found, it might even look like Tinch had reached for his weapon.

He hadn’t.

He would look like he’d had a chance to be brave, when he wasn’t, and he hadn’t had any such thing. But there was a comfort in the idea that someone might find their bones, one day, and think that someone had tried to fight the fae.

Finally… Beron.

Killan stalled, now, fought the starsong as hard as he could, its tendrils wrapping so tightly around him that they felt like new fire licking blue across his skin. He turned to look at Calon Nie, still swaying to the song only he could hear. No, he whispered, still unable to speak. 

Calon seemed to hear it, anyway. He opened his eyes and looked at Killan, smiling to show his sharp teeth. “Say no, you?”

Not Beron.

For the first time since the fae had taken him, something dark and ugly passed across his features. Killan had never seen it before, not in relation to him, anyway, but he could read it easily nonetheless.

Calon Nie was jealous.

“Slit. Throat. Now.”

The command was spat instead of sung, but Killan’s hands began to move, and he hitched in a breath, a half-whispered, half-silent sob, his tears falling right onto Beron’s peaceful sleeping face. 

Beron would toss his food just to watch him cry over is loss, would smack him around when he took too long at a chore, but he would also tell Killan stories like his mam used to, and volunteer to take him into the shops when they visited towns. 

Killan grabbed the hair of the only one of them that had ever offered him an ounce of kindness and he murdered him, too, crying over him as he watched Beron, peaceful to the bitter end, take his very last breath. Then he slumped down to his knees and leaned over him, gripping fingers into the fabric of his shirt like a child clinging to its mother after a nightmare, and cried at the loss of what he hadn’t even known was a better life than what he was now living.

Somehow, Calon Nie did not stop him from grieving. He cried, holding Beron with one hand and the blood-slicked blade with the other, into the man’s slowly cooling body.

He wept for them, and for himself.

Then he straightened his back - singing pain up the tiny cuts Calon Nie had made, but he didn’t care any longer, none of it meant anything and maybe if he was lucky Calon Nie would let him bleed to death here with the closest thing he had left to a family - and threw the silver-colored knife as far as he could into the dark woods.

He heard it land, a rustle in underbrush, and that was all. Whoever found the bodies - maybe they’d find the murder weapon, too.

I killed them. I killed them. I killed them. The word rang round and round inside Killan’s mind, and this time when his stomach twisted he let it lead him, curling himself over on the ground and losing the contents of his stomach across the beaten-down grass and earth. He retched and heaved until his stomach and his back hurt in equal measures, until nothing was left but sour spit and bile on his tongue, until… until nothing was left but his guilt.

Thrall, murderer, fae-led slave boy, you did this you did this you did this you did this-

Ren’s flask dropped to the ground next to his knees and he slowly looked up to see Calon Nie staring down at him, head tilted so far to the side it seemed an impossible angle, evidence of the fluidity, the flexibility of fae bones. “You drink,” Calon Nie said, pointing with his talon. It wasn’t a command, but Killan grabbed the flask up anyway, sucking down the burning liquor inside, letting it wash the taste from his mouth.

But it couldn’t wipe the blood, thick in the air, thick on his hands, thick on his soul.

“Now is me only,” Calon Nie said, firmly. “Only me, you for. I am start and finish and all things. All that was or is or will be. These, gone. Paugh. No need. You may speak.”

“You said-... before, you said you would only make me put the sleeping drug in their water!”

Yellow eyes met his above Calon Nie’s patient, loving smile. “Calon Nie lies.”

“But, you... you have cl-claws, y-... you... y-you could have k-k-killed them y-y-yourself-” He started crying again, now that he could cry openly he let his voice wail, bouncing off the trees and back at him like a physical blow. He let sobs turn to wails and wails becomes screams and he prayed and prayed and prayed someone, somewhere, could hear him.

“I not kill these.” Calon Nie shook his head, and when he held out his hand, Killan could do nothing but take it and let the fae help him, shaking legs and all, to his feet. “Yours to kill. Kill pretty human’s family, I am family now. Done. Those, though…” Calon Nie’s eyes went to the horses, who were pulling on the ties that bound them near trees, ears back, herd animals wanting to run from the smell of blood and the teeth of the predator that stood openly before them. “Those I kill-”

“No. Please.” Killan put a hand on Calon Nie’s arm, smearing it with blood. “Please, Calon Nie, please, n-not the horses, please.”

Why did it matter if he killed them? Killan couldn’t have said. But in that moment, where he felt a mix of guilt and grief shredding him apart, it mattered more than anything that Calon might give him just one hint of mercy.

Calon Nie looked back at him, surprised, and then to the horses again. He sighed, smiling - affectionate and indulgent, as though Killan were a child who had asked for an extra sweet at market. “Más mian leat, buachaill del. Find other food, me.”

Killan nodded, whispering his sincere thanks, hating himself for the depraved gratitude he felt. He grabbed Beron’s sword from his bedroll - it had been all ready for his watch to end but he had never had a chance to use it - and moved to the horses, cutting them free from the tree they’d been tied to, watching them as they fled.

Wishing he could flee, too.

His eyes drifted down to the leather-wrapped hilt of the iron sword in his hand just in time to hear Calon Nie to say, sharply, “Drop sword, you.”

Iron thumped to the earth, useless. 

Just like Killan, to everyone but the fae who held him in thrall.

When he turned, Calon Nie was right there, had moved with perfect silence and speed to stand just behind him, and Killan didn’t have to be commanded to hold still under the look in those yellow eyes. The camp smells - fire and smoke and the horses, whatever they’d had for dinner maybe - were overlaid with the thick copper-salt-sweet scent of blood.

Killan would never stop smelling that blood, he thought, no matter how long Calon Nie allowed him to live.

“Mine now,” Calon Nie whispered. “Truly mine, you.” He lifted his hand and Killan shuddered, shivering like a spooked animal as a blood-tipped talon drew lightly over his bandaged throat, not quite cutting the cloth strips, not cutting his skin. The fae moved around him, chin tilted up slightly to look, focused with unsettling intensity as he moved in a slow circle around Killan, tracing a perfect circle around his throat.

The message was clear.

Killan was a collared dog - to be fussed over to set to kill, whichever his master commanded. To the fae, humans were nothing but livestock that could speak, weren’t they? Killan was nothing but a bit of skin with a puzzling habit of having opinions.

“Don’t-” His voice caught, and Calon Nie’s talon came to a stop, just beneath his ear, pressed lightly against his pulse. A trickle of blood ran down to soak into the bandages. “Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t make me kill anyone else.”

“Not worry,” Calon Nie whispered, opening his hand to rest the palm of it against the back of Killan’s neck, bloody taloned twisting and playing with his hair until he thought he might throw up all over again, even though he had nothing left. “Not you, next time.”

Killan’s eyes closed, trying to hide the tears that escaped anyway, the new wash of fear. “N-next ti-... ti-time?” He managed, his voice shaking so badly he could barely get out the words.

Calon Nie went up on his toes, his breath hot against Killan’s ear. “Next time, I kill, for you.”

“I-I don’t n-n-need anyone to, to die for me,” Killan protested, in a hitching half-sobbed whimper. How did he have so many tears in him? It felt like he would never stop crying. 

He tried to open his eyes, only to see the men he had murdered with his own hands, and had to close them again. When he broke out in sobs this time, Calon Nie bundled him close, held him in a tight grip with those heavily muscled arms, and petted through his hair with his bloody talons.

Where a bit of Killan’s blood touched his skin, Calon Nie hissed against a faint burn.

“Calm, calm, calm,” Calon Nie sing-songed, soothing and soft. “Calm, calm, my pretty. Did well for your Calon Nie, yes? Did well for me?”

He was a murderer. He had blood on his hands. He had taken men’s lives while they slept, like a coward, like a monster, like a thrall.

“Pretty boy, answer me,” Calon Nie said.

I am the children the fae threw off the cliff, but you won’t let me go far enough to escape you, not even if I died.

Killan hitched in breath, tried to find his voice where it had fled this time, deep within his chest where he knew their lives would stay wrapped up in him, wreckage and ruin, his own fault for being alone in the woods near the mountains. “Yes,” He said, miserable. “Yes. I d-did what you-... what you, gods, what you s-s-said-”

“Good. Good human.” Calon Nie hummed, nuzzling his nose against the side of Killan’s face, sharp teeth entirely too close to the veins in his neck. Killan kept his eyes closed, ground his teeth together, and hoped - for one long drawn-out moment - that Calon Nie would kill him, too, so he wouldn’t have to live like this.

After a long silence, Calon Nie pulled away from him, taking his scent of something metallic and wild with him, and Killan felt the pain in his back all at once, as though the adrenaline and guilt had dampened what he could feel. 

Calon Nie smiled at the way Killan whined at the pain.

“Get used to,” He advised. “Back must hurt, for now, all time.”

“What? Wh-why?” Killan looked at the fae, whose eyes had gone back to the stars above their heads, basking in the faint silvery light, in the song he swore he could hear but Killan heard nothing but the beat of his own heart.

Even the birds were silent in the trees.

Even the forest knew when monsters walked.

Calon Nie did not open his eyes when he said, in a voice of perfect bliss, “To ready you for wings, mo ragnaith.”

[ashintheairlikesnow]

WIP Wednesday: Whumptober Previews, Take 2

I still have a few more to go, but I am in the final stretch for writing my @whumptober2020​ pieces! I already posted one preview of what I have so far (you can see Days 1-12 here), so here are previews for the rest of what I have written - and sneak peeks at what’s planned out but not written yet! 

Whumptober starts tomorrow - we’ll see how you feel about my work this go-round! Last year, Whumptober Day 1 introduced Daniel Michaelson. This year... it starts with Danny, too.

Day 13:

“Vanni, they thought he was you.”

“I know, Ridley!” Rossi never snapped at Ridley, but here it was, and Connor forced in a hitching, shaky inhale around the tremendous, inescapable weight pressing down on him, determined to keep breathing long enough to understand. “I know they did.”

“And they fucking poisoned him and then dumped him to fucking die-”

“I know!” The two men went silent for a second, Ridley staring with shock at Rossi and Rossi glaring furious towards the window without looking back. Connor’s breath, rattling in his struggling lungs, was the only sound in the room.

Day 14:

Peter glanced over his shoulder, back towards the house. The thermometer had climbed a little more, reading 98.5 degrees Farenheit now, and Peter blinked as he shivered again, swallowing without any saliva. His mouth felt dry, and strange. Why was he shivering - how did he have goosebumps - if it was almost one hundred degrees?

As if he’d heard Peter’s thoughts, the side door opened and Micheal came out, wearing his weekend outfit of slim black slacks and a pale heathered gray t-shirt, what Madam allowed him to wear. He was carrying a glass of water with ice and a little striped straw stuck in the top. The black shock collar he was never allowed to remove - not yet, Madam said, not until Micheal learned how to be silent without needing encouragement, to her satisfaction - cut a wide band across his neck, the black box small and nearly perfectly blended in at the back. 

“Peter,” He said in a low voice - not quite a whisper, but just as quiet. “I brought you a drink, I-” He looked up, squinting towards the sky. “It’s hot. Should you be out here?”

Day 15:

He drops back to the ground, groaning, eyes fluttering open and shut, before he reaches out to grip onto Ora’s arm again. He turns to look at them, and his eyes are glowing so brightly he can see the reflected light on Ora’s face, the flicker of yellow against their irises. There are things that move beneath the light in Ryan Michaelson’s eyes, and he no longer feels them pushed back under the surface of his skin. 

“I’m so fucking hungry,” He whispers, and his fingernails dig into Ora’s arm until they begin to bleed and whimper, but they don’t - can’t - pull away. Not until he lets them.

They will be lost in his eyes until he decides to let them go.

Day 16:

Count to ten, Tris! One… two...

Her voice is so loud he jumps, but when he looks to the left, nothing’s there. Just the white walls, plain and featureless, white tiles that were smooth under his fingertips back when he was allowed to touch them. 

Everything is cold, and the boy has been shivering for so long that his muscles ache from the constant tense-and-release, tense-and-release, struggling to keep him warm.

Day 17:

She giggles a little, then glances over her shoulder, mouths something at the cameraman. Oliver can guess what. Edit that out.

Kelly Donahue doesn’t want the episode to be aired with her giggling like a schoolgirl at a bit of idle flattery. Well. Everyone has their things they like to hide, don’t they?

She has her giggle. Oliver has a teenage boy locked in his bedroom.

Day 18:

“Your mother,” Patrick interrupted, with gentle violence, “believes that you are squandering an opportunity.”

“An-... a what-”

“We respect your decision - and your brother’s - to refuse interviews, especially at his early date.” Patrick sounded like he’d rehearsed this answer, delivered with the same smooth cadence he had during his speeches before the Board of Directors. “But, considering the effort it took us to find you-”

“The effort it took Nate to find us,” Ryan corrected, ice growing along his veins at the same time it took over his voice. “Nate. It was Nate who watched the videos, it was Nate who talked Abraham into showing him the yard, it was Nate who spent fucking night after fucking night trolling fucking satellite photos to try and find us. Don’t act like the effort came from you. It came from my brother’s goddamn fiance.”

Day 19:

“If this is a trap, I’m going to owe Gavin fifty bucks.” Vera checked and rechecked her handgun, as though it would suddenly be less loaded than it was just a few minutes before. Her jaw was set in a grim line, eyes flashing a kind of damped-down fire, embers ready to spark. Her thick black hair, showing growing hints of gray, was pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and she wore a pair of black pants and a tucked-in t-shirt, ready for the fight she was definitely expecting. “I don’t want to owe Gavin money, Isaac.”

“It’s not a trap,” Isaac replied, making his own nervous check and recheck of the table and chairs. “I don’t think it is, anyway. My instincts are saying it isn’t.”

“Your instincts-”

“My instincts have been spot-on for a decade, Vera. Just trust me on this. She let us pick the day, the time, the location… she let us give her the location with less than four hours’ notice, even. If this is a trap, she’s piss-poor at setting it.”

Day 20:

He’d been flying, and the fall had been worse than the arrow, at first.

The sudden burst of white-hot pain had stunned him, caught him mid-spin enjoying an early-morning chill, and sent him tumbling to the ground below.

He’d heard his own frantic keens of panic and fear as if from a distance, and then they’d been drowned out when he slammed into the trees, feathers flying all around him as they were ripped free by the branches he smacked into one after another on the way down.

Day 21:

"Mmhmmm. Christopher. Stanton." Nat listens for a long time, then says quietly, "No known health problems. Autistic."

Jake looks up, and Nat calmly looks back at him, while speaking into the phone. "Yes. Yes, I'm confident. He is sensitive to fluorescent lights, scared of needles, and terrified of sedation. Yeah, I realize that I just described the exact environment we’re sending him into.” Chris whimpered, and Nat’s voice went ragged, her eyes closed tightly against the sight of his face pale, sweaty, twisted with pain. “Listen. Just-... just put on the fucking papers that Christopher Stanton is fucking autistic, because that's what my goddamn rescue is - I'll sell someone else's firstborn to fucking Satan if he isn't, mark my fucking words - and we're wasting time while he gets worse!"

Day 22:

Rossi picks the glass up and just as he tilts it up to his lips, Connor rears back and up on his knees and swings one of his hands, the black leather ‘paw’ smacking into the rim of the glass and spilling it in an arc across Rossi’s suit, onto the table, soaking his cards and hitting the next person at the table right in the eyes.

“Connor, what the fuck?!” Rossi’s voice isn’t furious, not yet - he’s too shocked to get beyond the simple surprise.

Day 23:

The drugs in his system weigh him down, he is too exhausted to understand what’s happening or how to begin to fight it. His eyes keep trying to close and stay closed, and he whimpers, forcing them back open.

“Pozhaluysta…” He groans, collapsing forward against the heavy solidity of the man, the soft tailored fabric of his expensive suitjacket, the scent of clove cigarettes that clings to him like a woman’s fingers clutching tightly. “Pozhaluysta, otpusti menya…”

Day 24:

“My name is Melody,” The girl said, nearly extending her hand, but then she realized the creature’s right hand was nothing but wickedly sharp talons, and it was bound in front of him to his left. “Oh, I’m sorry. What’s your name?”

The creature blinked once, twice. Watched her, tense and maybe suspicious, and then shook his head. “No… no name.” He spoke slowly, as though words came only with difficulty but a soft little trill sounded under one voice, layered it with another. “Pet.”

Day 25:

“Wh, where, where, where-where, where am, am I-”

“Sssshhhh.” The person in the dark blue uniform presses a plastic-gloved hand to his shoulder as he tries to sit up, pushing him back down. “Hey no, you gotta stay steady, there. Don’t move.”

“Please-... please, sir, h-hurts-”

“Not sir,” The person says, gently, a bit of auburn hair falling over their forehead. “Can you see?”

“K-Kind... kind of... hurts-”

“Sssshhhh. I know. I know it does. Just hang on. Tori’s going to help me get you some paperwork going. Don’t worry, kiddo.” The person pats him, lightly, and then looks up, brown eyes scanning the hallway outside. “You’re not the first we’ve pulled through this.”

Day 26:

Calon Nie hummed to himself, tapping talons on the floor, watching the boy sit so still, as though stillness could protect him from the dangers of the world. “Good. Failed, you, to keep new eyes. Costs a life, to give something new. Killan Josta, human boy, he fail Calon Nie. He fail the life given, when eyes don’t work. Did not respect sacrifice.”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” The boy said hoarsely, curling in on himself even more, his wings instinctively curling protectively around him. “I… I don’t want anyone to d-die for me. I didn’t mean to-... I didn’t mean to fail. I, I tried to p-pray for them, to stars, to-”

“Paugh! Mysteries do not hear you.”

Day 27:

Jake answers, and on the other side of the door, the old woman stands holding a large cardboard box in her arms, her grandson present, as nearly always, at her side. He holds a large box, too - so big, in fact, that only the top half of his face is visible.

“They’re sayin’ it could be a week before we get power back,” Ruth says, with a world-weary sigh. “A full-on week. We figured we’d bring you some supplies.” 

Day 28:

Ora Collins is hungry.

Day 29:

Jake is a tall man, but the emergency room always made him feel so small. Even now, part of him rehearses the scripted stories. I fell while climbing a tree. I crashed my bike. I tripped going down the stairs.

He has lies to tell today, just like he always has, but today the lies are for Chris, not himself.

He’s my brother. No, different dads, that’s all. His mom lives a few states away, I handle all his medical stuff. 

Day 30:

(AKA Possession, Part 2)

Ryan and Nate take down Abraham Denner.

Day 31:

Danny is left for dead.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Rise: Killan

The universe of Killan’s story belongs to @wildfaewhump​. If you haven’t read their Iesin and Talvos or Pathverse stories, go! Go read! Read them or face my wrath. I have so much wrath to share.

CW: Referenced past torture, scarring, referenced dehumanization and briefly referenced pet whump, but this is not a piece about any of those things

Killan stopped, just at the edge of the rock along the riverbank, taking in a deep breath. The air was thin here, where the trees became scraggly pines that clung to rocky soil, hints of snowfall still littering the earth even this late in spring. 

Leather boots covered his feet, he’d made them himself. It had taken forever to make the kill, tan the leather, cut it around his foot, sew it together. But he’d done it. Coated against the water, they kept his feet warm, but he wouldn’t have needed them, anyway.

He just never lost the habit of wanting to feign humanity, no matter how clear it was that he wasn’t human at all.

Not anymore.

Not a man.

Before, he couldn’t have stood here like this in just a shirt and pants without freezing. His fingertips should be blue, but when he looked down they were the same as always. Pale skin, roughened and scarred, but still skin - feeling only a faint chill. The dark talons on his right hand didn’t feel cold at all.

Killan lowered his eyes to look at them, clicking them together a little. The place where they’d been attached to the knuckles of his hands still held faint scarring where they’d been stitched on even as his bones blended, accepting with each addition parts that had been someone else’s body a little more easily.

Killan was so many people now, most of them fae. He was the only human left in his body but he could have told anyone who asked - cut his skin now and the blood ran pale, a pearlescent shimmer in what had once been a flat dark red when oxygen met wound. 

Break a bone and find it hollowed inside, lighter weight easier for his wings to carry. 

Make an incision along the wicked scar down his side and you’d find he lost a kidney and some ribs but gained other organs that weren’t there before. Killan would tell you - the wings were one life he stole, it took two for the eyes because the first set didn’t take, my hand was one along with some air sacs, the other air sacs and the lungs were another…

He was so many fae who should be alive, but instead there was only Killan Josta left to wear their parts, a child’s nightmare hiding under the bed, in the dark woods, a set of glowing eyes in the dark.

Not fae, either. 

Watch Killan Josta open his eyes and see the pale color was replaced by a saturated, overwhelming blue, a black slit-pupil, eyes that would never sit in true comfort in his skin. They weren’t meant to be there. He still bled instead of crying.

Monster.

Hurt the creature and make it cry out in pain and hear two voices, two sets of vocal chords operating simultaneously, a shrieking fae scream alongside the lower human voice. Calon Nie had loved to hear both screams at once. So had the humans who had chained him down for entertainment.

Everyone was a monster, when given power over something new.

Everyone but... everyone but the ones who had saved him.

Buachaill del. Pretty boy.

Calon Nie’s pretty human, left alone to wander and stumble and plead, to make the mistake of asking for help. Captured, bought and sold, beaten and bled and sold and bought again, until there hadn’t been anything in Killan’s life but survival. 

Until there had been no Killan left, that name held and hidden deep within himself. There had been only the creature, the monster, the pet the piece of fascinating conversation start the thing.

Not man or fae or boy or anything but organs and skin and wings to be bruised, broken, bloodied. Not even a favored animal.

Just a thing that knew how to keep living.

Raise your chin at the four-count whistle, hold up your hands at the three. Let them touch your talons, your wings, run their grubby fingers through the feathers you can never get clean. Feel the lash against the skin you were never meant to have for your own when you disobey. Fingers prodding and pressing at your scars. Chirp and trill for the men, the women, the children who call you the unnatural offspring of degeneracy when you were never that.

And it wouldn’t matter if you were, no one could deserve this. No one could earn this.

But this is life, this is all you’ll ever be, guard what’s left of you as deeply as you can and give them the mindless animal doing tricks for their coins, their hands, the promise that if you’re good it won’t last forever.

Feel the press of the muzzle keeping your jaw locked while you weep and beg to be seen as human again. See them lock up your voice and laugh when you try to speak and you can beg all you want, it won’t happen, they’ll never see you as a boy again.

It will never happen, and then one day… 

One day, stop begging.

Slide away, into your own mind. Live for the moments where you’re fed for being good, the soft velvet of a horse nosing a carrot right out of your hand, the warmth of their breath curling up in winter stables with them. Curl up on straw and hold the chain around your neck and learn to stop crying.

Until he gives the five-count whistle.

Then you cry on cue.

Live for nothing but the hope that this day will end, because it has to, and then begin the next day living for the end of that one, too. Pray for the night because you are never alone until then.

Pray that it will one day end, and know that you are not praying for salvation, only darkness.

Until someone looks you in the eyes and takes a risk and you end up saved anyway.

Next to him, the river rushed by, swollen with a winter’s melt. The roar of water was deafening, and he couldn’t even imagine how loud it would be at the bottom of the waterfall, hundreds of feet below. 

Somewhere further up there were fae courts hidden, deep inside the mountains. They didn’t want him either, but at least he wouldn’t be sold there. He wasn’t a curiosity to the fae, but an abomination, a warning, something to be feared. Something to be sent away as quickly as possible, but for all Calon Nie’s cruelty, it was only one fae that had held him captive and carved into his skin.

It had been a dozen of his fellow humans-

No. Not human anymore.

It had been a dozen or more humans who had bound his hands, forced muzzles on until he bled, sliced his skin to show the change in blood and marvel over his reddish tears, buried their hands in his feathers until he could not help but scream at the violation.

They loved to hear him scream.

Fae rejected him - but humans overwhelmed him.

Not fae either.

Killan looked down at his hands - fingers and talons, a madman’s puppet tossed aside, a piece of decoration in a human’s receiving hall, a pet kept hidden away until they tired of cutting him, a dirty slave for sale in the streets, keep him as a pet or the same way you keep a painting on the wall.

I promise you, messire, you’ve never seen anything like this! Show the man your hands, creature.

Even now, just remembering the whistle, Killan’s fingers twitched with unconscious need to obey.

The sun was rising, the sky a brilliant scattering of pink thrown up against the gathering clouds and a growing golden light finding its slow way along the world he could see below. The forest ran to the curve of the earth, and he could, with sharp fae eyes, see the smoke of chimneys in a village that would have taken him a day to climb down the mountain and walk to, but with wings…

Killan slowly flexed his wings out as wide as they would go, closing his eyes as his back straightened instinctively to balance the weight. The chill air ruffled along his reddish-brown feathers, a playful hint of breeze.

You know how to do this, the breeze whispered to him. You knew the moment he gave them to you. 

He wasn’t meant to have them, but he did. They were blended into his back in a mass of scarring and changed bones, shoulder blades shifted out. On fae, the transition was seamless. On Killan, every inch of his skin told the story of screaming agony.

But the fae who had owned them was dead, along with every other one sacrificed to Calon Nie’s game. If they were anyone’s wings now, they were Killan’s. 

I don’t have to be ashamed of what he did to me. I didn’t ask to be a monster.

The water burst from the confines of the earth next to him, tumbled and rolled into the air before it fell and fell and fell and crashed back down to earth below. Killan sighed softly, watching breath puff out before his face, and then turned away from the dawn.

He walked, step by silent step, back along the riverbank, watching the water running the other way, chasing the flight back down to ground. He stopped next to a thin pine tree, reaching out to touch the needles, crushing them between his fingers to release the scent, closing his eyes and breathing it in.

I didn’t ask to be this. It’s not my fault.

It’s not my fault I have new parts.

It’s not my fault I can fly.

Against his back, the breeze slipped around him again, dancing air that ran along the edges of feathers, beckoning. Beneath that, a faint shimmer of mystery. While fae and humans both looked away, Killan could call and have starsong reply, if only faintly, to his cries for help.

The mysteries recognized him as a mystery himself, not a monster. Not understood but not entirely turned away. 

And he wasn’t alone, either. There were others out there who had been broken and bent to someone else’s will, who could see beyond the way he had been stitched together and know there was still a whole person inside.

Eitilt.

The breeze called again, and Killan stopped to look over his shoulder at the dawn. Farther than the sun’s light could reach, stars still shone, visible in the blue as brightly as they’d been in the black the night before.

Fly.

Killan took off running, back towards the cliffside, racing with his wings curved against his back and his feet pounding on rock. The roar of the river alongside felt like it ran with him right to the edge, where instead of stopping Killan flung himself out into space, the spray of water beside him.

Wings curved, he fell.

The air flew past his ears as he plummeted towards the earth, mysteries a song that wound around hollowed bones and filled the places inside him with air. The bottom of the waterfall came closer and closer, a frothing white spray where the water was wearing the earth down beneath dirt, beneath stone, to bedrock underneath it all.

Instinct told him things that human experience never could, and he let his body - bent and broken and twisted and remade, rebuilt, created by a fae who named himself Killan’s god - tell him when to stop.

Down and down and down and-

Now.

His wings snapped out, catching the breeze and slowing his descent, sending him forward instead of down and he trilled, beating wings heavily to head back up again. His back ached a little but he caught a current that helped carry him up, air that rested under his feathers like hands slipping around a small child to lift them up onto a mother’s hip to be carried.

The sky was not his mother, but she would be here to lift him where his own mam could not.

He burst upwards, spinning, breathing thin air as though he’d always been able to do so, human and fae lungs filtering every ounce of oxygen he needed in tandem. The sun warmed his face, and he closed his eyes against its touch. Sun on his face, stars at his back, Killan let the currents carry him a little further.

And then he dove again. 

Fly.

He dropped like a stone, rushing downwards, spinning in the air before he snapped his wings out again and cut a hard left. Around him the air itself celebrated with him everything his broken body could still do, all the things he’d been given alongside what he had lost.

Sharp talons could tear apart a rabbit and defend him from attackers just as easily.

Rise.

Fae eyes saw far, farther than even the keenest human sight, and kept him safe. He could see in the dark, he could see them coming before they could see him. 

Rise.

Hollowed bones let him fly, kept him lighter, along with the places added to him to hold air, to bring him higher and higher, to help him-

Rise.

Fae blood carried oxygen more easily, let him climb higher into the air, the currents under his feathers like a friend lifting him up. As high as he could go, not quite so high as a full-blooded fae but he felt the air thinning and thinning and the stars were ever closer, their song welcoming him even if the fae did not.

Ardu th’uas. Rise above.

He slowed, spinning in the air, letting starshine and sun wash all his ruined skin clean.

Leanh na realtai. Child of stars, you, too.

His heart stilled, here where the air was thinnest, with the question he never voiced. Even ruined, I am?

And every time, the certainty returns.

Even ruined, you are.

Iron and earth may be blind, but the stars see you.

Killan dropped again.

He spun with his wings pressed tightly, speeding to earth so fast the air was a scream and he couldn't find the breath to laugh. The forest below him, the sky above him, the sun and stars. 

Killan Josta, as he was, should not exist. 

He did, though, and in this moment with his wings snapping out to slow his descent, catching an air current that pulled him back around towards the mountains, he feels them.

Something like friends.

They were calling him back to the waterfall and the cliff and the camp in the woods where they will be waiting for him, the ones who saw beneath his skin to the boy still hiding under a monster, the man half-buried by cruelty but still trying to break free of its legacy. 

They were waiting, with breakfast probably already ladled out for him. 

First, though…

First Killan Josta, who had a name again, wanted to fly. One more time he climbed the currents, found the pockets of air to push him higher and higher and higher, until there was a half-breath of pause as high as his broken, remade body could go.

He let that pause draw out, listening to the stars whisper in human ears.

Sing, Killan Josta.

He trilled, a cry as much of gratitude as it was of joy, and wrapped his wings around himself to plummet to earth again. 

Rise.

Killan fell, and fell and fell, and then just when he could fall no further without breaking on the earth, his feathers caught the air and he flew.

-----

Tagging Killan’s crew:  @astrobly​​​​ @burtlederp​​​​ ​, @finder-of-rings​​​​ ​, @slaintetowhump​​​ ​, @quirkykayleetam​​​ ​, @whumpallday​​​ , @whumppsychology​​​, @doveotions​​​, @broken-horn​​, @moose-teeth​​, @whumpfigure​​, @spiffythespook​​, @oceanthesarcasamfox​​,  @whump-only​(if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Not Quite: Killan

CW: Dehumanization, imprisonment, restraints, wing whump implied, blindfolding, muzzling

Timeline: Takes place after Killan is no longer with Calon Nie, but early on in his time being sold from person to person. 

“I want to see it.”

The voice was young, and female, and the boy - who was not yet only a creature or monster in his own mind, but was already nameless except for whatever words they chose to call him - looked up from where he had curled up in the corner, scratching his talons idly along the floor.

One scratch for every day. He had three weeks of scratches on the floor behind the pallet stuffed with hen feathers and straw that he slept on. Not that it mattered how long he had been here, but he tried to keep track. It gave him something to do, and he had nothing else to look forward to but meals and the times the man who owned him visited. 

The room was large, although he could only move around about a third of it. He had a pallet, a bucket, a shirt and a pair of pants, a bowl and cup. That was all he had here. They told him animals need nothing else.

A book might have been nice, though. Or a game. Or… something. Even Beron and Ren had given him stories to think over while he worked, time out in the light. Even Calon Nie had spoken to him, told him tales of his own life, given the boy’s mind anything, anything at all, anything to remind him that he had a mind at all.

The boy was kept in a large stone room in a large stone house in a large stone city he only saw in glimpses, tied down in a wagon, trussed up like so much cargo jostling around in the back. The buildings seemed so tall that the sky could barely make itself seen between them, but in the stone room in the stone house, he could see blue sky through the window that he could not reach.

He couldn’t reach the window because of the chains hooked into the rings pierced into the joins of his wings, chains that ran down to hooks in the floor next to his pallet. 

Iron didn’t hurt him but they still used it just in case. Iron chains bound between stone floor and brass rings punched through feathers and skin, keeping the boy just a few feet away from a window where he saw pink skies in the morning, blue at noon, and the barest hint of stars deep in the night.

He could hear the stars, faint as a whispered word three rooms away. He could hear them, but nothing could hear him in here.

If anything out there had ever heard his prayers, it had only ever been to answer them with laughter and to give him more tears instead of saving, anyway. The boy thought he’d cried tears enough, now, that he had none left.

But the day the girl came the first time, he learned otherwise.

After she spoke, he heard another voice, older. “Now, miss, your father wouldn’t find it appropriate-”

“I don’t much care what Father finds appropriate. He brought it here and I should get to see it.” The girl’s voice was petulant, ringing clear and high on the other side of the locked door. 

The boy looked over that direction from his corner, wrinkling his nose under the muzzle buckled tightly to his head, listening to the clink of the iron chains as his wings pulled a little closer in against his body.

“I absolutely should not let you be in there alone,” The older voice warned. “It has claws, you know.”

“It’s a fae thing, right? I think they’re called talons. Fae are like birds, aren’t they? I’m pretty sure they’re like birds.”

“It doesn’t matter. It could hurt you dearly, young lady.”

“I don’t care, and I’ll bet it doesn’t! I should get to see what my father keeps showing his friends, shouldn’t I?”

The boy cocked his head, unaware of the ways he’d picked up Calon Nie’s mannerisms and kept them. The more he was treated as something other than human, the easier it was to hold only to those things that seemed to reinforce the assumption. 

“You are too delicate to bear such a sight alone-”

“Then come in with me.”

A hesitation. Then a resigned sigh. “... fine. But if your father comes home unexpectedly-”

“I’ll swear up and down I threatened to have you dismissed if you wouldn’t do what I wanted. I promise. I’ll put on such a show of snobbish spoiled nonsense, they’d pay me in the theaters to come act for them. Come on, let me in there! Let me see it, please?” Her voice turned wheedling. “Please, Governess?”

There was a sigh, exasperated and affectionate, and the boy tensed as he listened to the clink of the key in the lock, the tumblers shifting and clicking, and then the door to the stone room swung open and a girl his own age stepped inside.

She turned to look at him, and for a moment the boy forgot the misery and endless pain of living, and saw only her face.

She was brilliant as a star, shimmering light-colored hair in an elaborate tumble of braids and shine down her back, wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, a flash of warm tanned skin. Her eyes sparkled blue in a beautifully rounded face, reflecting the sun the boy had never directly seen since he’d been brought here in the first place. 

He kept his gaze sidelong.

She was beautiful. 

He was hideous, and a monster, and she was beautiful.

“Is this it?” She asked, eyes widening as she looked at him in what he thought must be horror, only to realize it was… delight. “Why, it’s a boy! With wings!”

“Not quite,” the older woman, dressed more severely in a high-necked gray-blue dress and with her own brown hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck, said dryly. “It’s not a boy. It’s… damnation itself. Why your father wanted it-”

“I know why he wanted it.” The girl was still standing by the door, but the boy heard a shift, a scrape, and he turned to see her slippered feet, clad in pale satin to match her dress, moving towards him with a slow determination. “Because there’s nothing else like it in the world. That’s what he’s always looking for.” She stopped, just shy of how far the chains on his wings would let him go. “Isn’t that true, creature? Or… hm. Is there anyone else like you?”

He was already numb to the name.

Creature. Monster. Abomination. Should Not Be.

He shook his head in answer, feeling the shift of his hair, shaggy and badly in need of a cut, moving around the leather straps of the muzzle clamped over nose, mouth, and jaw. 

“So there you go, that’s why,” The girl said matter-of factly. “It’s unique.” She still stood with her feet just outside the marked circle around him, drawn in chalk across the floor, a warning line of how far he could reach.

Then, deliberately, she stepped over the line.

The governess by the door gave a start. “Leanisa, he’s dangerous-”

“No, he’s not. Will you hurt me, creature?”

He shook his head again, watching her come closer to him. His own breathing sped up, rapid and shallow, audible through the muzzle as she came within a foot of him and dropped down, her dress spreading out along the floor. The sight of the pale blue silk lying along cold, dirty stone made the boy want to push her back up, tell her not to stay here, near him, near what he was and is and would always be.

“What would you hurt me with, if you wanted to?” Her eyes were alight with interest, avid and curious, and when he slowly lifted his right hand she gasped out loud at the sight of his talons, wickedly curved keratin, thick and slightly heavier than his human fingers. She took the hand in hers, and he caught his breath.

“Leanisa, I must insist-”

“Hush. Let me touch him.” She pressed her finger against the blunt side of one talon, ran it along the curve, and the boy wished desperately that he could sense the touch as more than a simple pressure. “These are lovely, aren’t they?”

Were they? He stared blankly at her, then gave a one-shouldered shrug.

Her fingers ran up the dark, rough skin behind the talons, feeling over it, murmuring to herself, until she reached the scarring where they had been sewn on a human palm just at the knuckles. Shivers ran up his arm, electric and never felt before, and he had to swallow against a sense of tightness in his throat that made no sense. 

She clasped his hand, briefly, and he watched a bit of her braid fall over one shoulder. He would have done anything, in that moment, for her to move closer, or to be able to touch back. But he didn’t dare.

“You’re not dangerous for me, are you?” She asked, teasing, and he shivered as she let go of his hand and moved to lay her palm along the wrought-leather of the muzzle that covered the bottom half of his face, rubbing a thumb over the little holes edged in brass for him to breathe through. He let her raise his head until his eyes met hers.

She gave a little start, but her smile faded only a little. “Your eyes are blue… and bleeding,” She said, softly. He felt the trickle of reddish-pale saltwater, stinging when it reached the spaces where the muzzle fit tightly, rubbed and irritated until he bled. 

They do that. All he could do was shrug in response. 

She seemed to take the statement he meant with the gesture, because she laughed a little, pushing back some of his shaggy hair from his head. “That’s all right. Hold on.” She stood up and walked back away fromhim, and the boy found himself wanting to lean after her, whining in his throat when the chains in his wings kept him on the other side of the white chalk line in the floor. She stopped before her governess and held out her hand. “Natalia, your scarf.”

“I’m… I’m sorry?”

“I’d like your scarf, please. It needs something for its eyes.”

“You are not giving my scarf to that thing-”

“Yes, I am. Are you or aren’t you my governess? I’m doing it. Just try and stop me. Give me your scarf.” The girl paused, and in a beguiling, lovely, lilting voice, she added, “Please?”

After a pause, the older woman’s mouth pursed into a thin little curve of displeasure, but she unwound the scarf from her neck and the girl smiled brilliantly.

“Thank you, Natalia, you’re a love.” She leaned up to kiss the woman on the cheek before she turned and came back to him, stepping with casual carelessness over the line this time, dropping back into her crouch.

He looked at her, and she smiled kindly at him. “Hold on,” She said, softly, tenderly. “Be still.” She lifted the cloth up and for a moment he leaned forward, wondering if she would wipe away his tears.

Instead, she slid the cloth around and over his eyes, wrapping it over twice until the world was plunged into a pure and perfect darkness for the boy. Then she double-knotted it at the back of his head.

Her fingertips grazed against the skin just above where the muzzle cut in, curiously tapping nails along the side of the muzzle before he felt another touch, fingers deftly undoing the buckle of the muzzle itself. His head jerked up, and she shushed him playfully. For the first time when it wasn’t simply to eat a meal, the leather was pulled away from his face, and he heard it drop with a clatter to the ground beside him.

“There,” She said softly. “Isn’t that better?”

For a moment, he was so wracked with his gratitude that he forgot how to speak. “I… m-... much, yes,” He managed, his voice hoarse from disuse. “Yes, m… miss. Who are… who are you?”

“I am your master’s daughter, Leanisa.” Her fingers settled onto his jaw on either side of his face, lifting his chin, and he could feel the weight of her eyes along the scar on his throat. “I’ve heard you can thrall people. Will you enthrall me?”

Her voice darkened slightly, in something less like anger or suspicion and more like flirtation. 

“No, miss,” He said, fervently, feeling a flush he couldn’t explain heating his cheeks near her fingertips. He could feel her hands like fire, the best kind of fire, warming him from the inside out. A shivery nervous heat in his stomach seemed to be telling him to touch her, too, but he kept his hands carefully to himself. He heard the chains clink together as his wings rustled behind him. “I don’t-... I don’t want to. It’s a dirty trick and it’s only, when I’m scared, I can’t… stop it.”

“Then I suppose I shouldn’t scare you, should I?” She had laughter in her words, and her fingertips danced over clammy skin and dry alike, moved over him, feeling at the structure and form of his face, his jaw, his throat, down to his collarbone visible through the low neck of the shirt he wore. “Do I scare you, creature?”

“C… can you call me something else?” His voice was low. He hardly dared speak the words. “Please? Can you give… give me a name?”

She hesitated, and then he could hear the smile when she said, “What would you rather be called?”

“Del,” he said, low. His own name meant pain, he didn’t want to hear the syllables out loud ever again. But… “Can you call me Del?”

Boy, in the fae tongue. Still better than creature or monster.

“Fair enough, Del. I can do that. It’s nice to meet you, Del.”

“It’s… good to meet you as well, Miss. You’re the first who has… who has been so kind to me. The first since… I became what I am.”

“I can see why, it’s hard when you see something you’ve never seen before. But I’m more used to seeing new things than most people, with my father being all a-twitter over every rumor of a new animal’s discovery. Do you sing like the fae do?”

His cheeks colored, humiliated at the idea of performing on cue, but he cleared his throat, and then chirped a few times, gave a quiet little trill.

She laughed, the sound bouncing off the walls, shining and lovely. It felt like he was listening to the laughter of starlight or moonlight or the sun itself. He could see her, almost - picture her hands clapped over her mouth in surprised happiness. “Oh, you can! How lovely! How lovely, Del! I adore it. What beautiful sounds you make.”

He dared a slight smile, and felt her hands on him again. He leaned into the palm on the side of his face, closed his eyes behind the blindfold and felt tears prickling, hot and grateful. Someone who did not hurt him. Someone who was kind. 

Her thumb stroked over his cheekbone, her fingertips were just touching his jaw. He chirped, low in his throat, a fae sound of comfort and something like contentment.

“I’m glad you make those sounds to remind me, and have those wings,” Leanisa said softly. “Otherwise I might make a terrible mistake and not put this back on.”

There had been a curl of warmth inside him, slowly unfurling, remembering a life that had once held kindness. At her words, that warmth died, and the core of him went cold. “... Miss?”

He heard the movement of leather and brass scraping along the floor, and then felt the muzzle pressing back over his mouth. He made a soft sound of despair with both voices, and she laughed again, not unkindly. “Oh, hush. I won’t take chances, Del. You’re different, that’s for sure, but you’re still... what you are. I’ve never seen anything like you before.” 

She buckled the muzzle on, catching it in his hair so he flinched at the sudden pinch and pull. 

There was a pause, and she patted him on the head. Then he heard the nearly-silent sound of her silk slippers as she walked away. 

He heard her pause, just at the door. Her voice, high and sweet, rang through the room. “With that blindfold on, you look almost human.”

The door closed as she and her governess left. He listened to the click of the lock turning, and then he tore the blindfold off his head, shredded the scarf into nothing but broken threads, and curled up behind his wings next to his pallet, in the corner of the room.

He looked through the curtain of feathers at the bare rectangle of pale blue sky he could see through the window they’d ensured he could not reach, wondering if he’d ever see the great expanse of sky he knew was out there, ever again.

Almost human.

But not enough.

He found he had more tears to cry, after all.

----

Tagging Killan’s crew:  @astrobly​​​​ @burtlederp​​​​ ​, @finder-of-rings​​​​ ​, @slaintetowhump​​​ ​, @quirkykayleetam​​​ ​, @whumpallday​​​ , @whumppsychology​​​, @doveotions​​​, @broken-horn​​, @moose-teeth​​, @whumpfigure​​, @spiffythespook​​, @oceanthesarcasamfox​​,  @whump-only​(if you would like to be added to an OC’s tag list, please send your request via an ask! Those are easier for me to keep track of and I tend to lose requests in comments, reblogs, tags, or PMs!)

NOTE: Killan's universe and the details of fae, fae biology, etc all belong to @wildfaewhump!