#fantasy verse: scxrytxles

[justatouchjaded]

[Image description: An illustration of Diamond in an incarnation with light brown skin and wavy black hair. In one portrait he is middle-aged, with long graying hair and a beard. In the other portrait he is a young child. End ID.]

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A new illustration of the fantasy verse incarnation (as in threads with @scxrytxles )! 

I like it much better than my original attempt. Finally finding a good reference/face claim (plus this year’s realization that scruffier is generally better) made a big difference, hah.

[justatouchjaded]

(Continued from here with @scxrytxles )

scxrytxles:

Alice listens. And she watches. And she tries, again, to imagine what the many lives the child has lived might have looked like. How they might have tasted to pucker his mouth and curdle his soft, sweet little face. Her expression mirrors his, only a bit and only for a moment before her cheer returns. A viciously bright sort of optimism that swings like a heavy pendulum. “That’s perfect!” She points at him, so hard and fierce and quick that the penz flies from her fingers and whizzes past his head. Whoops! She can’t stop, now, though, this is important. Alice springs to her feet, notebook loosely clutched between her fingers as she trots across the floor. Her shadow creeps across Diamond’s little form as she peers over him, searching for the purple sheen of her pen. Ooh, there it is. She drops to her knees, reaches past him and pats the ground until her fingers close around the cool metal and she brings it back to herself. Alice glances over her shoulder, considers going back to her place, but decides No. She’d rather sit here. Alice plops onto the floor, scoots close so that she can feel the warmth of a Person beside her, and Diamond can see her paper. Well. Almost. Her hair is… it’s kind of in the way. Alice quickly brushes it to the side, fingers raking through it to force it to stop, sit, STAY- “I, Alice Riddle-Tongue,” She begins, curled and looping letters blooming from the nib in a smooth line of glittery ink. It takes a moment for her letters to catch up with her mouth, of course, because it is important that it be legible. The recipe won’t do Diamond much good if he can’t read it, hm? “Daughter Life who was born of Mother Death, Sister to the Cicadas and Keeper of Creations great and small charge Diamond thus-” A pause. She gathers her words like river stones, looking for the smoothest and shiniest and prettiest - “Every seven days, he will follow his mother and father to my temple with an offering, be it drawn or written or cooked in the hearth, and he will leave it-” She pauses, flow interrupted. A soft, conspiratorial whisper. “Diamond? Can you describe the temple for me?”

Diamond hesitates as Alice settles beside him. She’s a god. But he’s tired, and she picked him up earlier with none of the wariness his parents fail to hide from him, and…

His fragile will cracks when Alice brushes her hair out of the way, and he cautiously leans against her side, head resting on her upper arm. Her skin is cool. It soothes the edges of the headache that’s been starting to build as he tries to answer her questions. 

He stays there, if Alice lets him; watches her write, skilled dark hands crafting glittering lines, and listens to the smooth, poetic rhythm of her voice. 

A rhythm that falters, coaxing out a fond smile and a silent breath of a laugh. Alice’s whisper has the air of a hushed conversation in a theater—a furtive attempt to avoid interrupting her own performance. It feels almost like an invitation behind the curtain, intentional or not.

“Sure. Ah…” Diamond straightens, fluffy brows furrowing with soft concentration as he calls the layout to mind.

“The temple looks like a cottage, with a garden in front. Inside, the middle part is this big room for, ah… groups. Meetings. Mostly the chairs are set up in lines, but sometimes there are tables or pillows. People hang things on the walls — quilts, and art, and news, and feathers and things they’ve found. It changes. There are some shelves where kids can put things they find or make, too.”

He lifts his hands to frame the air, describing a central building with two offshoots. “The chapel’s its own… wing? On one side. It has a — hm.” Atrium. He knows this, but only as a ghost-word; the wrong language. Diamond grimaces and flaps that hand. “An open part, in the roof, and a pool below.” Diamond’s expression softens as he looks around Alice’s room. “Kind of like here… less stuff, but with a fountain, and altar, and plants. It’s peaceful.”

He points to the other imaginary wing on the opposite side of the temple. “The other part is the ob—ob-serv-atory, and greenhouse. I haven’t been in it, but I’ve seen bugs in the greenhouse through the glass. And then… behind the temple, between the wings, there’s another garden. It has—”

Diamond blinks as he realizes he’s droning on, and rubs at his forehead with a small sound of discomfort. He’d… been thinking about the memories of making journals, and from there the rhythm of how he would record the temple’s layout and function had taken over. He looks sheepishly up at Alice. “Mm. Sorry… is any of that what you need?”

[justatouchjaded]

[ OH MY GOD ]for a hug in response to one muse learning that the other’s still alive. - alice :3 maybe if you wanna

For a long moment, as the last of his uncertainty is uprooted, as details and realizations slide into place, Diamond can’t do much more than stare.

This child... really is Alice. Alive. Somehow.

Then -- before he can think better of it or wonder if it’s a good idea -- he’s leaning forward and pulling her into a tight hug, nose buried into her curls. She’s cool to the touch. Even knowing that it’s normal for her, his first instinct is to bundle her up; hold her close. “Fickle ash-blasted stars, Alice, what happened?”

She’s so small.

[justatouchjaded]

💬 - Diamond about Alice, [ Child or Adult or both ;3 it's up to u ]

(Muse opinions + speed run)

(Adult Alice, late teen / young adult Diamond:)

"I appreciate her restraint -- which might sound strange to other folk, considering how energetic and spontaneous she seems, but truly.

"I had quite a lot to fear when my parents brought me to her as a child. If she had been even slightly less interested in listening to me, it could have been a disaster.

"But she did take that time, where many people wouldn't have. She knows she can steamroll people, and I appreciate how hard it must sometimes be for her to avoid that, and I appreciate that she can recognize when it's most important.

"Other than that... honestly, Alice is a delight. It's -- perhaps a bit concerning, to have somehow stayed so much within a god's attention, but... I like her. I like her for herself, and I like having someone else around who is also somewhat alien to some of the day-to-day normalities of this world."

[justatouchjaded]

(Transferred from here for @scxrytxles !)

Scxrytxles:

"So. I know what your parents want." Alice says to the child. She sets a bowl of fruit in front of him, plucking one up for herself before she takes a seat across from him. She strokes the purple skin with her thumb, as if she might feel out the Best and Most Ideal place to start eating in this way. "But, I don't really know what you want, you know."

Oh, she can guess! But that isn't fair, not really. She has the power to fix anything he likes. Anything at all. She could change it with a snapping of her fingers or a whispered word, a thought, but she won't, not until she's sure she's doing exactly what He-Himself wants, because powers like this require respectful consideration of the person being magicked.

( The first change is easy, the second and third and fourth can be... tricky. And she isn't a doctor, no, not a bit, so specificity is important if she doesn't want to bother poor Chester. )

"So, what I want is for you to tell me. Tell me what You want me to fix. Not what your parents think needs fixing, but you." A pause. "Oh! Also-" Alice holds up the offering the family had brought her, beautiful and expensive and very clearly too important to be left here with her. It feels like a family treasure, and she won't keep it from the family that treasures it.

"I'd like you to take this back with you. I don't need it, not really. I'll take one of the buttons from your shirt, if you'd feel better making a trade, though!"

He reaches out and takes the returned offering, tracing his fingers along the carefully carved details of its surface.

“I want…” He wants to feel less like shit, but there’s… something. He thinks that if he tries to think about it too hard he’ll get lost again, though, or else wind up with a blinding headache.

Still. If he can’t admit how out of place he is to a god then he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to be honest with anyone at all, and the idea of that makes him want to take a knife and find out if all of the too-clear memories of other worlds that fill his head are true after all—because even if they aren’t, that option still sounds better. So.

“…the headaches. I want the headaches to stop. And the fits, too. But I don’t want to be unmade.” Die, maybe, yes, but not get unraveled at the root and made into someone else, not in the way this would be. Selfishly hypocritical as that is.

…Oh. Oh, that thought that fixing anything could unravel him, that’s part of the something.

“I want to stay me,” he clarifies. A weak laugh bubbles in his throat, and he shakes his head. “I know it isn’t fair, I know… I think my parents are more right than they know, I think I killed their kid. But… still.”

He frowns and sets down his parents’ offering, their intertwined plea for both his health and his destruction, and turns to picking absently at a shirt button to try to loosen it. His hands are a young child’s hands, too clumsy for the task, but he tries regardless. He knows that the only way to get better is to practice. “I just… I feel like it might all be—tangled together. But I can’t…”

[justatouchjaded]

The stranger is finally moving, rustling around in the little nest of sheets (Okay, one is a tablecloth, so sue her! She has Limited Resources) and pillows she's scraped together. Heavy boots clomp down onto the ground as Nameless climbs up and over the table.

She slides forward, until her shadow stretches across the sleeping Unknown. Dark, calloused hands grip his face and pinch, squish, and stretch his skin. Get the blood moving, wake his brains-

"Hey, hey! You're awake now, yes-yeah? Not asleep, maybe? Why are you here? Didn't you read the sign?" She can tell by the smell of him, by the temperature of him, by the rhythm under his skin that he isn't going to die yet which is REALLY GREAT. Make no mistake, she is Very Happy to see him crawling out of unconsciousness! But! While he's here, she's not out there and people could still be wandering into her home and all it's many dangers. Things like the warm embrace of the leaves and the hazy perfume of poisonous flowers, the throb of cicada song and the smoky jaws of big black cats- It's all very alluring, she understands. But she can't be everywhere at once, and she can't help everyone, especially if she's not out there because he's in here and-

She peels one of his eyes open. "Hey, did you see a sign when you came in and ignore it or was it too hard to read or was it missing or-" Her mouth moves miles per minute, words buzzing this way and that like beating wings.

The eyelid quivers under her touch; the man gives a quiet whine and twitches his head slightly, not really enough to succeed in pulling away. 

Diamond’s head hurts, a slow pulse that digs all the way down into his teeth and echoes distantly in a queasy stomach. Whoever is babbling at him is. Not. Helping. And they’re talking too fast for him to figure out what they’re saying.  “Fucking… s-stop that. The… the talking, stop talking,” he slurs irritably. He reaches up with a clumsy motion and manages to grab one of their wrists, pulls it down to his chest and holds the hand there where it can’t poke at him anymore. “Shush.”

He opens his eye just enough to glare; blinks as his eye slowly focuses. It’s hard to make out details. Her body casts him in shadow, and the light behind her haloes in the edges of curly black hair. Why… is this girl hovering over him? 

“What’re you doing here?” he mutters. He gives her hand an absentminded pat, trying to take the sting out of his earlier words—barely remembers what those words even were, but has the vague feeling that he was snappish. “Sorry. Should… y’should go back t’bed. S’fine.”

Diamond swallows. Something isn’t right here. 

He releases her hand and presses both palms to his face, one to empty socket and one to closed eye; takes a deep, shuddering breath. When he lowers his hands to rest folded limply on his chest, his gaze is a bit more lucid. His brow furrows as he takes in his surroundings. “Ah. What… should I know you?”

[justatouchjaded]

“Maybe you should sit down” ask reply for @scxrytxles, version 2! (v.1 here)

“I—ahah. That. Maybe. Yes.” Diamond sways, blinks, and wipes at the blood on his face. He isn’t sure when he cut his forehead, and he knows that it’s the least of his problems right now, but it’s still incredibly annoying. The blood keeps trickling down towards his eye and obscuring his vision. (Couldn’t he at least have cut the left side of his face?)

“So, ah—about, about the thing, the thing you warned me about…” Words aren’t working very well at the moment. Diamond swallows and sinks carefully to the ground.

He knows, he knows that thanks to Alice his seizures are incredibly well managed in this body, that he’s just a bit shaken and has probably hit his head. But enough stress or magic use has triggered a breakthrough once or twice, as has the wrong drug on one memorable occasion, and Diamond really hasn’t been sleeping enough recently. The distant possibility is always there: lurking. 

“…hm. That’s. Not helpful, is it? You worry about a lot of things.”

[justatouchjaded]

Diamond watches Alice’s imperious gesture with faint confusion, but his worry fades and his soft smile returns as she looks down at him with a sheepish expression to rival his own. His eye crinkles at her confession.

“I think that’s — better, actually. For you, at least? Omni- anything seems like it would be… mm. Too much.”

He wants to ask ‘so what about in the bog,’ but the cicada arrives and distracts him. He tilts his head, brow furrowing as Alice insists they’ll be done soon.

He hasn’t been paying any attention to the time, and other than worrying about having a fit here, he doesn’t mind if this takes a while. He doesn’t think he’s seemed impatient…

So is she talking to him, or the cicada? It’s a strange thought — to part of Diamond, at least, while a different part (gentle and old) just perks up with interest — but… it seems like it might be the cicada.

He hopes he isn’t keeping her from her real job. That seems… bad. Rude at the very least, and surely most of her other work is more important than Diamond’s comfort and appeasing his parents, which would be worse still.

Her direct question pulls him from his burgeoning guilt.

“The chapel,” Diamond says, without hesitation. It has nothing to do with piety and everything to do with the place itself; outdoors-but-not, sheltered and safe and scented of stone. He remembers the last time his parents brought him there while it rained, the sound of water falling through the opening in the roof merging with the sound of the fountain into a soothing white noise.

@justatouchjaded

Diamond hesitates as Alice settles beside him. She’s a god. But he’s tired, and she picked him up earlier with none of the wariness his parents fail to hide from him, and…

His fragile will cracks when Alice brushes her hair out of the way, and he cautiously leans against her side, head resting on her upper arm. Her skin is cool. It soothes the edges of the headache that’s been starting to build as he tries to answer her questions. 

He stays there, if Alice lets him; watches her write, skilled dark hands crafting glittering lines, and listens to the smooth, poetic rhythm of her voice. 

A rhythm that falters, coaxing out a fond smile and a silent breath of a laugh. Alice’s whisper has the air of a hushed conversation in a theater—a furtive attempt to avoid interrupting her own performance. It feels almost like an invitation behind the curtain, intentional or not.

“Sure. Ah…” Diamond straightens, fluffy brows furrowing with soft concentration as he calls the layout to mind.

“The temple looks like a cottage, with a garden in front. Inside, the middle part is this big room for, ah… groups. Meetings. Mostly the chairs are set up in lines, but sometimes there are tables or pillows. People hang things on the walls — quilts, and art, and news, and feathers and things they’ve found. It changes. There are some shelves where kids can put things they find or make, too.”

He lifts his hands to frame the air, describing a central building with two offshoots. “The chapel’s its own… wing? On one side. It has a — hm.” Atrium. He knows this, but only as a ghost-word; the wrong language. Diamond grimaces and flaps that hand. “An open part, in the roof, and a pool below.” Diamond’s expression softens as he looks around Alice’s room. “Kind of like here… less stuff, but with a fountain, and altar, and plants. It’s peaceful.”

He points to the other imaginary wing on the opposite side of the temple. “The other part is the ob—ob-serv-atory, and greenhouse. I haven’t been in it, but I’ve seen bugs in the greenhouse through the glass. And then… behind the temple, between the wings, there’s another garden. It has—”

Diamond blinks as he realizes he’s droning on, and rubs at his forehead with a small sound of discomfort. He’d… been thinking about the memories of making journals, and from there the rhythm of how he would record the temple’s layout and function had taken over. He looks sheepishly up at Alice. “Mm. Sorry… is any of that what you need?”

She had at some point gone glassy eyed and quiet, tracing her pen in the air and conjuring a small, shifting map of glittering spores and scales to mirror what Diamond describes to her. It rearranges itself like a puzzle, snapping and scaling itself to fit each new detail unearthed.

It takes her a minute or two to realize he's stopped talking, blinking in surprise when the map refuses to continue self populating. She waves her pen again, a bit more firmly, head tilting as she tries to fill in this other garden. As if in reproach, the sparkly powder blinkers several different colors, all shades of puce and red and maroon.

Finally, it occurs to her what the problem is, and she looks back to Diamond, almost mirroring his expression. Sheepish and wide and embarrassed by her focus. She brushes it aside, nodding encouragingly at him.

He's doing just fine, even if she is doing a poor job at imitating her esteemed Mother.

"It all is! Yes, absolutely. I've never been to Stradid and, did you know-?" Again, that beckoning, conspiratorial note to her voice as she peels away the heavy velvet curtain fabricated by mortal and human shaped creatures to obscure the plain and perhaps disappointing truth about the things they've dubbed Gods. "I'm not omnipotent. Omniscient? Omni... present? Really, honest! I have to go into town and pick up the paper if I want to know what's happening outside of my bog."

She twiddles the pen, prodding the sharp tip with her less melanated thumb pad. "But I suppose-" And this is difficult for her, because her curiosity is itchy, twitchy and hungry to know what the rest of it looks like even if it is a diversion from his true reason for visiting. "What really matters is where you feel most comfortable. Or, at least, the room you like the most. Hate the least?"

She taps the pen against her knee, nibbling on her lower lip with knife point teeth. A cicada has crawled up onto her shoulder and begun pulsing in her ear.

She glances at Diamond, and the slight anxiety of a time crunch appears in her eyes.

"We won't be too much longer--" The insect crawls up her neck and across her lips, drinking in the essence of her voice, an echo of her words. "Just need a little more time to cross our t's and dot our i's." It departs in a sharp buzz, kicking off her face hard enough to flick her hair around.

"Rude." She mutters, one eye closing before she turns her focus back onto Diamond.

"So! Favorite room and or garden, Go."