#healing nailbeds are the worst

[lunarflare64]

I just broke a nail in the worst way you could break a nail and I saw my life flash before my eyes IM SO LUCKY ITS NOT BLEEDING HHHHH

[lanymme]

Pure Land of Deliberate Overwhelming Delight, Event Horizon

--

Ritsuka’s dreams are never her own.

Sometimes they give her a glimpse into a Servant’s internal world: sometimes they transport her spirit, without warning, to terrifying places far from home.

Sometimes they do both.

CW: brief description of graphic violence.

--

She is surrounded by horrible human creatures.

They are faceless, heads with only mouths, hairless with limbs that twist and bend. But that is not what causes her skin to shiver: it is their rawness, their familiar body language and that behavior.

They crawl, and grasp, and rut against each other, but their crotches are smooth like dolls. One minute engrossed in touching and caressing each other, and the next beating and tearing at each others’ skin, and then they walk away, one loping and dragging itself, rampaging through the masses, the other walking like anyone down the street, or the corridors of Chaldea. They make moans, grunts, little half sounds, all around her, and she is frozen still.

At any moment, they could notice, they could converge, and on her hand there are no command spells.

And they are everywhere, like she's in some horrible mockery of Shibuya station. She thinks for a moment that she might actually be—but the landscape is featureless, blank, void, but for the yawning black disc that hangs in the sky, emanating a low, almost inaudible hum that makes it hard to think.

She hears a voice from behind her, joyous and wild and pure. And familiar. She has some idea where she might be.

“Ah, Master! This is such a terribly shameful thing for you to see. But of course, I welcome you nonetheless. I would never think to turn you away.”

“It’s not the worst dream I’ve been in,” she says as she turns around, “but it definitely���“

Kiara is reclining, naked and luxurious on her side, supported at Ritsuka’s head level by a hundred trembling palms, a thousand writhing fingers, as a swarm of creatures bite and claw to lay hands on her. Something about crowdsurfing briefly flickers through Ritsuka’s mind. Massive horns sprout from her head, elegantly tapered and dreadful, and the one that descends into the mass of flesh is clutched and stroked by many fingers.

The hands are not gentle with Kiara’s body. Some of them clutch her skin or claw at it, leaving red trails in her flesh. Some curl themselves blissfully in her long shining hair, and others tear at it, pulling out chunks that quickly dissolve—and yet somehow, her silky sheets of hair, flowing and spiraling, never diminish. Ritsuka watches one grip firmly at one of her toes and pull until the toenail slowly lifts and Kiara shudders as it tears from the nailbed, blood leaking down her toes and away. Ritsuka lurches forward without thought, a cry in her throat, as three of the faceless creatures yank the perpetrator away and throw it to the ground, pounding away at it like enraged chimpanzees before she can take a step. She pushes through the mass of limbs to come closer, and they drag and pull at her as she forces her legs through, slaps at them as they reach out to her. She breaks the throng, stumbling out to stand before the impenetrable mass that hold the woman up, and raises her hand by instinct to heal. The blood flow has stopped. There is a perfectly-manicured nail there. Her eyes snap back to Kiara, who smiles down at her, radiant and composed, suffused with inner joy, and then to the creatures. One lies beaten and broken on the floor, and the others, seemingly forgetting it existed, fight to caress the site of injury.

She feels… deeply uneasy, and almost ill.

She watches them, slapping each others’ hands away, making loping, insensate bays of sorrow, grasping hands reaching to touch flesh and trace bone.

Did she look like that, too, in her moment of instinct?

Kiara smiles down at them all, eyes bright and soft.

--

“I am so delighted to see you here, inside me,” Kiara says, eyes glittering.

She sighs. “But you have come by accident, in your sleep, so I shall continue to abstain.” She blinks slowly, and looks Ritsuka directly in the eyes. “You really do make it so difficult for me to behave, Master.”

Ritsuka swallows.

She looks around at the bleak landscape. “I guess I was expecting something more…

“Dramatic? Enticing? Yes, I admit, I took some… precautions. To preserve you, in case something like this might happen. Though,” she says, smiling, “if you’re not satisfied, Master… I can still show you everything.”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Aha. Such a shame. If you can resist, though, then so can I.” She reaches down, pensively, and takes the hand of one of those supplicant creatures in her own, holding it up, demure and soothing, as its owner trembles in stricken awe.

She smiles at it, gently, radiantly, before bringing her gaze back up to Ritsuka’s. Idly, she strokes that hand gently with her thumb. “I suppose I’ll content myself with the chance to share a moment of privacy with you, away from all those prying eyes.”

Ritsuka… smiles back, actually. Even knowing it’s possible nobody knows where she is, that nobody can come help, and that she stands on the brink of a hell where her very self is in question, she finds herself feeling strangely… safe. Not relaxed, not in the slightest, but compared to the singularity she fell asleep in… yes. She feels secure.

Perhaps that’s trust.

Kiara’s eyes pick through her expression, glowing with enthusiasm. She laughs, delicate and pleased, behind her free hand.

For a moment, they regard each other.

Then, Kiara lets the creature’s hand slide free until she holds only its fingers, and brings it up to meet her as she leans down to press it to her lips. Idly, softly, eyes flicking down under her long lashes and lingering for the barest hint of time: pure in perfection, immodestly chaste, and with such a loving intimacy, tender and private, that Ritsuka can feel the hollow ache of her own innermost loneliness bubble to the surface and burn starkly in her chest and hands. The recipient falls trembling to its knees as Kiara’s gaze returns to Ritsuka, bemused and conspiratorial, and she withdraws to her resting posture. Just as the creature’s rapture cools into bereaved, hungry anguish, the crowd around it begins to howl and rage, smashing and trampling it, tearing it apart, before turning on each other in a wild orgy of desperate violence, radiating outward as far as she can see, surrounding Ritsuka as she stands exposed.

A moment of terror strikes Ritsuka, but it passes when she realizes they all stay clear of her, laying no threat against her body.

In the center of the frenzy, Kiara’s dais thins as its members pull themselves into the conflict, and she steps one long leg down to the ground, gracefully dismounting. Dainty and unswayed, even as hands grasp and pull at her and teeth bite at her flesh before being smashed in by wrathful, jealous fists: a single lotus flower glowing amidst the muck and ugliness, ten-thousand colored radiance shining from behind her head, the red of her blood blooming into spider lillies in her wake.

Ritsuka can’t bring herself to look away.

The crowd slowly dissipates, its delirious rage burning low into vengeful, martyred fury as one by one, stilled and trampled figures dissolve and blow away.

Kiara lightly, considerately steps over the bodies that remain, crossing the emptied space between them.

Behind her, the last of the creatures reaches out for her in its final moments before falling still.

With a dark glint of fuchsia light, robes materialize across her body, dripping sumptuously from her form, trailing behind her, hiding only enough to entice. Beautiful golden jewelry hangs from her horns, clinking and glittering with each little motion.

Kiara offers her slender, long-fingered hand.

The heavy-hanging sleeves, the bottoms of her robes, are all patterned with the silhouettes of grasping, clutching hands.

Ritsuka shivers. Kiara smiles.

But there is something… something about this empty landscape, and the two of them standing alone in it, about Kiara reaching out her hand.

Ritsuka reaches out and, quietly, takes it in hers.

She smiles.

Kiara stares back at her, just for a moment, before she turns and begins to walk. Ritsuka follows.

[ms-demeanor]

@notthatmirandajuly asked if I have any tips for carving stamps and this is my first try so not really? But here are some things that I learned in carving my first stamp

#1 - I don’t know how archival ink pads work, I don’t know if the one I have is not working or if I’m not using it right, spending $13 on it because I figured “it’s an ink pad, how can I fuck this up” was a mistake, it smells weird as hell, and I hate it. Speedball all the way, babey.

#2 - Ouch. Carving hurts your hands. It’s difficult and it requires a fair amount of force combined with a significant amount of control. It’s easy to mess up and being more careful only makes it hurt more. So take your time, give yourself lots of breaks, use the most comfortable tool you can possibly find or make.

#3 - I don’t even know why I bothered with the scoop carver bits, the knife one was 10 times easier to work with and went much faster.

#4 - Keep it simple. I agonized over carving those thistles and they don’t translate at all and I wish I’d done something much cleaner and easier than a bunch of flowers and leaves that didn’t even show up.

#5 - Your carving doesn’t have to be smooth and pretty. I thought that having clean, even depressions would make it easier for me to parse the carving as I was making it but it turns out it didn’t make much of a difference in my ability to see what I was doing and it also made my hands hurt more from unnecessary work and therefore I hate it. You can see that I gave up on smooth pretty carving as soon as I got to any level of detail and that was an excellent choice.

#6 - Work in tiny segments for details. If I tried to carve up a bigger chunk I was much more likely to fuck up and rip a way a piece of rubber that I didn’t mean to.

#7 - I can’t emphasize enough how much your hands will get fucked up from this. I was very, very lucky and didn’t cut my hand on any of the carving blades but I did manage to get an extremely painful blister on my middle finger that made it difficult to hold a pen until it healed into callus. Maybe a bigger deal was that carving like this made the skin of my index finger pull away from the nailbed like the worst hangnail in the world and that actually still hasn’t healed.

#8 - Carve next to a trash can because you’re gonna need someplace to put all of those shavings and cut away bits. I don’t know why that wasn’t obvious to me at the start but it was not and it became a bigger issue than I expected about every twenty minutes.

#9 - Draw your design on the stamp before you start carving then go stand in front of a mirror and make sure it makes sense then take a picture of it and flip it horizontally and make sure it makes sense then get someone who isn’t dyslexic to check for you because I thought I was in good shape and was about to start carving but then I had my partner check and turns out I’d put the “B” backwards.

(screen prints *do not* have to be mirrored, stamps *do* have to be mirrored, and for some reason my brain can’t keep that straight and so I have to triple check each time I’m about to do something but it turns out that triple checking before you do something permanent is a pretty good idea overall)