#cc hunter | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

narenohate · 5 months ago

Text

the reckless, the wild youth (WIP)

(since eda and raine's backstory is so different in this AU, i'm pondering a comic about the two of them and just how and why it went so wrong) (infodump.... ramble?? ig down there + design notes on how my progress is going with this project)

Seb's design notes: anyways i've been dancing with the idea of making canis caninam's witches more animalistic. because yeah im just having fun at this point. bonus, sphynx / owl beast design. i'm not a big fan of her canon design, and it's not because i think she's scary.

my current inspo for the witch faces is a mix of good ol' na'vi 3d models, deerchip's s work (they're on twitter!!) and olya bossak's anthropomorphic portraits!! i didn't just want them to be elves who purr, tbh... though more and more as i post this i'm kind of hoping to get harrassed off the fandom for my weird ideas and "forced" to make this into an original story.

ramble on story derived from conversation with Bow (idea beta tester, victim of the circumstances of my hyperfixation, beautiful white hetero man who got here by accident). IT'S A ROUGH, UNEDITED DRAFT. PARTS OF IT ARE DIRECTLY FROM A CONVERSATION. IT'S ROUGH. Eda is born to the Clawthorne family - daughter of Gwendolyn, a healer, and Dell, a toy maker who married into her clan as to escape the hardships of living outside the barrier, amidst bestial demons... and probably something else, smart enough to scare him into hiding, though that usually goes unsaid. She is one of a pair of twins, and, for the first fourteen suns, eleven moons and twenty-nine sundowns of their lives they are inseparable.

It's their fifteenth birthday when Dell gives them an old grimmoire that has been in his family for centuries. Some of its words have been altered with the years, rewritten and repaired by generations, their meaning lost - symbols re-drawn from memory with each unfortunate accident.

Lilith partakes in that tradition - having to repair a page of a long-winded wild-spell meant to be cast by a powerful warlock, after she spills some tea on it.

that night, the two set out to camp with a group of their friends -hyacinth, a selk nobleman who, despite his young age, served under belos as his huntsmaid and personal cook, and his apprentice, darius, a prodigy who'd already been branded for a coven, and who'd been personally selected by belos to be a companion for the golden-haired boy who'd earned his favor.

and, of course, trailing slightly behind, raine whispers. their glasses are foggy and they already smell like the alcohol they brought to the party.

nobody leaves the outermost wall to camp these days, of course, so the bunch of them settle in an abandoned park, before doing as teenagers do when provided alcohol, and getting plastered.

at some point, eda, raine and hyacinth get into an argument of some kind - one that results in eda opening the grimmoire she brought along, and going along with the plan she'd nearly abandoned: using her rudimentary knowledge of the old tongue the tome was written in, she makes a circle out of salt around herself, and reads the spell.

its words are all wrong. whatever she summons she angers, and, at first, nothing happens.

then, as she and raine lay together on her hammock the afternoon after the party and the tiny backyard camping "trip", eda falls ill.

it was fever and it was vomiting. then the lining of her stomach, then her gums and her teeth and her tongue. her skin sagged and it was like she was all liquid inside it.

raine slept by her bedside, singing to calm her down whenever she awoke. lilith laid in the old manor's basement, endlessly brewing potion after potion to try and quell the pain that refused to ebb away.

darius and hyacinth did not go to belos - instead they were stopped at the door by the clawthorne patriarch, and with his help, took a griffin out of the city, found an old thing. it called itself queen of bats, and it was made of wood, and it knew dell very well.

the three give her the griffin, and spend four sunsets and three sunrises walking back with their prize - it's a living tether, a wooden owl dell had made as a toy for his daughter when she was very young. filled with the griffin's soul, it was given by its enchantress the mission of tethering its holder.

they arrive to a burning house. darius and dell don't speak of it, but the only time they both see the emperor is when they deliver his selk concubine's mutilated carcass at the throne room, laid at his feet like an offering.

dell lost one eye to his daughter, the other eye and both hands to the emperor.

raine was gone to everyone except the thing that eda had become, a sphynx that spared their life for the price of their song. they land atop a rocky cliffface, a few miles away from the outer border of the bonesborough wall - soon, something finds them.

the owl her father had carved for her followed eda, and raine became sure, at that moment, that she wasn't lost.

lilith and darius compensated for hyacinth's loss, sitting for years at the foot of the throne as the emperor's guards, until belos found it fit to entrust them both to make for him a new selkie servant - they took hyacinth's old heart, a blue stone that ebbed and flowed, and they took the lungs of a dragon, the innards of a maiden, and all the blood they could get from a seal-devil, along with a tiny fragment of bone that had been strapped to hyacinth's old heart.

they spend day and night putting him together - the rough face of clay mixed with blood, the organs gracefully gifted, the bone.

they bury the sculpture. a boy digs himself out of the dirt while they sleep in the temple, curled up together in a mess of ratty old sheets they'd found.

they name him hunter because he was more demon than boy, but had hyacinth's face, and, though something seemed very wrong, he had somehow killed and dragged in a rat to eat by their side during the time they'd spent asleep.

belos allows the name to stay, and grants them both titles and robes of white, and allows them to mary whomever they wish.

lilith secludes herself to a temple and studies every grimmoire she can, and darius takes on apprentice after apprentice, teaching them how to pull the throat strings of a bard out, and how to best slay a sphynx.

hunter looks just like hyacinth, and, despite how strongly he'd imprinted on his makers, they both hate him from just the look in his eyes.

lilith finds the portraits of every other selk concubine, every other golden guard.

it's always hyacinth's face. meanwhile, raine managed to unearth eda - partially.

they bind her to them, and she remembers very little, but she is undeniably herself, and despite the tragedy of her body, or maybe because of it, she seeks to cause chaos. she embraces the life of a wildling, and raine follows in her stead.

a year passes. then two. three, maybe. probably more, considering everything that comes after. what really matters is that, as raine grows more frantic in their search for something that can help her, occasionally coming in contact with the fragmented clawthorne family's matriarch (before finding her treatments too harsh), all in search for a way to stabilize eda's mind and body...

she accepts that fate she was given.

the system of castes and castings and divisions becomes pointless to her, and she eagerly, easily pushes raine to rebellion by her side. the wards around the walls have nothing against her - usually, griffins and dragons don't fly that high.

raine found gwen's attempts to heal her daughter too much - but at some point, more than a decade after the two set out together, a night after raine settles a chain with a golden ring around her massive paw's wrist, they catch wind, through that shared palisman of theirs, that raine's mother has passed.

they leave eda to sleep atop the church, tail around its tower, and enter it to pray.

they meet someone - a who who dances on the edge of being a what - and, in their grief, bear to her their heart, and are offered a deal in return.

all they want in life, for a price, their mind.

eda wakes up, a moon later, transformed, and with every memory made vague, erased except for vague outlines.

naked but for a wedding ring around her neck, in a dark, low chunk of the city, with the body of a beast, she's seen as exotic enough to work the night for a couple years, as she catches up on a life she lost, and takes the name of a harpy, not knowing she's a clawthorne.

… clawthorne health clinic seems so familiar of a name, though. she jots down their contacts. attends every speech given by darius deammonne, head of the carnomantis force, and often borrows from the library books on forbidden magic written or translated by one lilith clawthorne.

it's not familiar.

she feels like it should be, though. so she digs into it all - never takes the name of clawthorne, but as her social standing falls and she teeters ever closer to living outside the walls, the people around her take to calling her the owl-lady.

she eventually takes to stealing from old homes - the abandoned sort, full of hobs and rats and hexes she can easily bypass, with magic as strong (as well-trained, despite the lack of any memory of schooling) as hers.

there's a farm-house, though, mostly burnt, long ago vacated, that feels very familiar when she enters. she tears up despite not remembering her, when she recognizes her twin's face beside her own in a portrait. in the rubble of a bedroom, a large woven hammock still has an old violin sitting broken on top of its torn fabric.

inside its case, the thing she knows she gave up her memories - or maybe something more - for, sits waiting and patient.

... a key to the human realm. she knows a lot about it, and remembers an unbound fascination.

(her one visit goes very wrong, of course - but she can spy through her palisman's little eye, so it's worth it. it's all worth it.)

meanwhile, raine wakes up, married to a woman whose face is foggy to them, with three apprentices who don't know their name but promise they've been there under them for weeks.

whomever wiped their mind didn't bother to take the human-styled wedding ring off their finger.

181 notes · View notes