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twitchesandstitches · 4 years ago

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Birth of a New City

(Commission for @alt-hammer of an AU we’ve worked on together, of a fantasy-themed Homestuck AU where the main characters are the descendants of noble families following a long and perpetual conflict. This comm concerns the establishing of a city by the Megidos as Kankri journeys to be with his lady-love Damara, prior to her accidentally getting ahold of an artifact that stuffs her with ghosts that make her super pregnant and her boobs absolutely massive!)

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Into the furthest lands of the north, at the limits of the lands the trolls called home, there came a line of caravans bringing people. There wasn’t exactly a road for them to follow; they had to settle for a slightly deeper trail flattened beneath them, rolling onwards by the first arrivals, who had engineered a special tool to the rears of their own caravans, digging out the ground behind them so that in their wake, they left a trail to follow for the second wave of caravans.

These caravans were massive freight carriers, and designed for the environmental peculiarities of their destination. It was always cold in the north, and they had taken considerations for the weather. Up here, it was usually some variety of wet, and at best it made for a gloomy atmosphere. In the spring, it rained. In the summer, it rained more. Autumn and winter would come, and then it would snow. Now, it was snowing, despite it being summer, but unpredictable weather was unfortunately a consequence of heavy magical activity, and this land was drenched in it.

Snow spilled off the scalloped, upwards curved of the caravan’s tops, leaving little piles by the side of their road as they traveled onwards. And inside, the people who had come (mostly from the lakeside lands of the newborn Vantas dynasty, Inside, they were lined with thick blankets and massive furs donated from the hunting guilds of the Leijons to the eastern lands, so they were quite warm even as the threatening chill of this place made people very nervous.

It was a basic rule of exploring new lands; you got the hell where you were going before winter happened. That it should be snowing, even in summer, was making the experienced caravaneers edgy. Fortunately, they were simply following the steps that had been laid before them, bringing badly needed supplies to finish the job.

And at the front, in a caravan the same as any other, there was an opening to look out through. And peeking out of it was a troll. He was short for a troll, nearly human-sized (though not as much as his younger brother), swaddled in the pale greys that had once hidden their blood from prying eyes. Thick furs, pale white and spotted in random patterns, adorned most of his visible body beneath it: furs for the cold, and a cloak for the wind. It was how they would likely remain dressed here, for the foreseeable future.

And he had enough time to reflect. He thought that he looked very much like his father, wearing old grey robes and swaddled in the furs harvested by Leijon claws. It troubled him.

His name was Kankri Vantas. And as it turned out, he was not exactly small. He was not as large as an ordinary troll, who tended to be among the biggest of the known thinking species. He was… compressed, as if someone had taken a troll and squeezed him up, but maintained the usual proportions into a package that seemed to emanate a frenetic energy bottled up with great difficulty. His horns were short and nubby like the closed claws of the great crab guardians that protected the lakes of his homeland, and to trolls, this combined with his body shape to suggest someone who spent a lot of time in libraries. Really old libraries. Something of the dusty, academic dryness seemed to have settled in him.

Now he marked his spot on his book, put it down, and looked out onto the road. He gazed upon a landscape that would be someone’s home soon enough.

From here, as they crested a high hill crowned by a last outcropping of forests, Kankri could see the north spread out beyond them. Frosty mires bubbled faintly, kept warm by the mysterious organic processes of a bygone era still operating on automatic to make a somewhat unconventional hot spring, and there were about four or so of them visible from here. They made a warm mist, rising into the snowfall to make the snow melt just enough to fall as a strange rain into the snow.

As a consequence of that, they had been trudging through a kind of slush for the last few nights. Their caravan was designed for this sort of thing, and the weather had been anticipated even if things this far north were totally unknown to trollkind. Even humans, who had their reasons to try to live anywhere that didn’t instantly kill them, had avoided this landscape.

It was a place of death, old superstitions said. There were such places known to scholars of magical lore; Kankri had read their works well in preparation for his apparent task to observe the world and determine a way to repair the damage made by their forebears. He knew that any strong emotion or action could leave a mark in the world, influencing the flow of magic by shifting its aspect.

If a place saw a happy family, for many generations, that place would become kinder and happier; just look at the Hoard Keep of the Pyropes, that ancient fortress in the mountains. Their predecessors had always been brutal and vicious, but dragons were loyal to one another, and they cherished duty to their own above anything else. Serene feelings of safety and joy lived in the stone, and had a tendency to leak out everywhere else.

Kankri thought of the wars that had torn the land apart. Ages and ages of almost ceaseless conflict, and his fangs bared at the thought of such… stupid wastefulness. He amended the thought to ‘careless’ wastefulness. People dying, human and troll and other beings, over and over, and for what? The same ridiculous rhetoric; some purplebloods declaring themselves superior or declaring bloody war in the name of their capricious, serpentine gods. Or humans fighting back and becoming consumed with pride, hatred; declaring that this war of total destruction was justified by atrocities almost as bad as what they were going to do…

Blood had soaked the ground more thoroughly than the rain up here could possibly try to do. Troll, human, or something else: it didn’t matter. Blood was life energy, blood represented ties to other beings both positive and malicious, and blood shaped the world, as it shaped the bonds between others. Blood in every color of the troll rainbow and human red drenched the world, with its hate and sorrow and loss, and now, the land was scarred.

He wondered if this territory was one of those places. It didn’t feel like it had seen so much death and horror that it had become some sort of inverse holy place, sanctified to the worst in sapient life. He’d been to those places, and he didn’t like thinking about the things he’d seen even when he shut his eyes, his magical senses treacherously open to the horrors replaying themselves in the astral realms forever and ever.

Here, it just rained. The air was thick with magic, and it tasted of something… distinctive. It didn’t feel bad. It did not have any associations with the true cruelties that made their work so very difficult elsewhere, and it didn’t make him remember horrible memories that weren’t his own. (Being in tune with magic, and the living memories that shaped it, could really suck sometimes.)

It felt like death. That was the bit that Kankri was having some trouble figuring out, and apparently so were his companions.

“Figures Ara and her family decided to settle out there.” The voice had a curious buzzing quality, as if a multitude of voices were backing up the speaker’s words. Kankri turned aside and acknowledged the speaker.

“I hope you are not impugning the Megido family, Sollux,” Kankri said, rather stiffly.

The speaker snorted, hanging off a supporting rafter like some kind of morose spider; his limbs were long and gangly, and his claws were surprisingly suited to hanging onto things, given that they had apparently been carefully filed down to serve as pseudo-pens. Given that he did a lot of time inscribing things, that made some sense. The rest of his body was on the lean side, perhaps the powerful magic coursing in his body running him so hot that any excess mass just burned away into the aether.

This other troll replied, “The Megidos have never been pugned a day in their lives and you goddamn know it.”

The speaker was Sollux Captor, scion of an ancient house of mages who had endured the long ages in their hives to the west, and Kankri had read that the power of the goldbloods ran particularly vibrant in his family. He didn’t doubt it; Sollux had a nervous energy like his body was stuffed with lightning, constantly itching to find an avenue loose, and even his horns (two pairs of them; not uncommon in golds, but their length and size certainly was) radiated a faint glow.

Troll horns acted as a… release, as Kankri understood it. There were some machines that needed to continually vent off heat or magical energies to prevent breaking down or structural problems, and trolls were much the same. They generated magical energy in ways that humans or the other magical beings did not, and it fueled many of the instinctive abilities that came to them; the psionic powers of the hot-blooded lines, the immense physical power of the cooler-blooded, and the many variants thereof. Horns, Kankri supposed, bled off some of that excess energy.

Without him realizing it, Kankri self-consciously put a hand to his own stubby horns. He scratched at a velvety peel his last trip to the manicurist hadn't gotten. A faint crackle of magic moved, and though he honestly wasn't sure if the old power moved in him, he felt the presence of something familiar.

He looked out towards the trail again. His expression grew solemn. "We are almost there."

"Make it sound more ominous," Sollux grumbled. "You sound like a spooky assistant to a creepy necromancer dragging up victims to the master."

Kankri sniffed. “Pardon me, then. We are absolutely not any such thing.”

“It’s a joke, Kanker-sore.”

Kankri ignored the… insult? Nickname? Who even knew, with Sollux; he was notoriously abrasive, even by the standards of a species that regarded biting and clawing down to the bone as polite discourse. He simply continued speaking (which was just what Kankri always did, if you believed the people who disliked him personally). “We are spooky assistants who perform ethical tasks for our cinnamon-blood masterminds.”

There was a long pause as the caravans rattled across the land. Gradually, something new came into view upon the horizon; an irregularity, breaking apart from the distant view of mountains and ancient forests that dotted the land like the tombstones of randomized cemeteries. This new sight looked… made, though ancient all the same. It was too far for them to make it out clearly, but there was no doubt that the trail they followed was winding through the landscape directly to it.

Sollux recovered his faculties and said, partly disbelieving and partly in grudging admiration, “Did you just make a joke?”

“The important point,” Kankri said, with as much grave pomp and gravitas as he could manage, which was quite a lot, “Is that no matter who you tell, no one will ever believe you.”

“You total bastard,” Sollux said softly, the admiration a lot less grudging now. “Didn’t think you had a talent for… trolling.”

“Father may have passed on a few things.” Kankri shifted awkwardly. He didn’t actually talk much about his father. Their relationship was good, all things considered, but it was a terrible thing to live in the shadow of the Signless Sufferer, the paradox troll; a mutant with the powers of the color-line he originated from, a messiah of peace who had started the most bloody war in modern history, a kind man who had done terrible things to end coldblood supremacism, who had set the humans free by tearing his own people down.

Kankri was a pacifist. His father was not. There was more to their fundamental disagreements and conflicts than that, but the fact of it was that Kankri looked and acted so much like him, that it was like looking in a mirror at times. It bothered him, even as he readied himself to take his father’s position, should it prove necessary in future times, and when Kankri was bothered by something, the low-grade hostility radiated off him like heat from a rock someone left in a desert at high noon.

Sollux could take a hint. He could take a lot of hints, all of them couched in varying degrees of passive-aggressive sniping that served pretty much the same function as a friendly duel; swords were crossed, without any real intent to do injury. Kankri, on the other hand, was very honest. He said what he meant, when he understood how to say it properly, and where Sollux was from, this was something very hard to understand.

To the west of these lands, a relative stone’s throw if you didn’t account for the mountainous terrain, were the lands of the Captor Orders. The bitter cold of these death lands evened out towards the coast, growing… if not warmer, at least more hospitable, and in the past, many trolls and humans and other things had taken up residence there for the ample hunting, lumber; the massive animals living in the sea could feed many people for a long time, wood was useful for building homes and fueling the artistic interests of those inclined, and the magical bees native to the area proved amenable to being bred for being living engines to refine magic and calculate complex spell patterns or problems.

The ages had come and gone. The Captors had come early, and they had stayed ever since. They’d built their wizard’s towers and college-fortresses high, and left the other lands to their own devices; never conquering, not waging war, but ignoring it entirely. When coldblood supremacism had waged war across the land, the Captors stayed out of it; when slavers came searching for goldbloods to put to the yoke,the Captors usually sent them back to their employers as little more than a pile of ash.

Sometimes people came to learn, and the Captors taught them, and those people went home with power and influence. ‘Come to the lands of the Captors’, they said, ‘they will teach you the secret lore’.

The Captors did not recover or keep ancient lore; they made their own discoveries, over the ages. They made new things; new wonders, new understanding of the hidden rules of magic. This made them possibly unique on the continent, where the creations and knowledge of bygone civilizations were the foundation of entire regimes. Their lore was their own, and this same indifference to the past also applied to politics; they were barely aware of the influence and power they gathered, with magic so essential towards modern society, and the orders of mages the Captors had gathered all showing fealty to their teachers and colleges above all else.

As they came closer to their destination, Sollux reflected that his father would go down in history for sheer controversy; convincing the heads of the mystical orders and all the leaders of the colleges to engage in continental politics, and aiding the Pyropes in the war, wasn’t just a risky move. It was completely contrary to their established tradition of neutrality. Sollux supposed he’d either go down in history as an unconventional hero… or a heretic who kicked their traditions in the nook. One of those two. Hell, people were already calling him that, not that his dad seemed to care.

The moment of good humor had already passed. The caravan wagons moved upon the trail, and as it advanced them closer to what appeared to be a vast and ancient city (with many tents pitched around the front, and the distant impressions of what might have been scaffolding, cradling the old walls), Sollux and Kankri both reflected, in their own fashions, that they didn’t actually know each other.

Kankri glanced at Sollux. Sollux did the same in turn. They looked awkwardly away. The thought that they didn’t really have anything in common stuck with them, hanging there like a persistent thorn that hadn’t quite pierced the skin; it didn’t hurt, but it stuck there, so needling that the mind couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

It was, Kankri supposed, the sort of thing to be expected when building a better world than the one their parents had known. Dealing with people you normally would not. Making compromises, and so on.

‘This is weird,’ Sollux thought. ‘I’m friends with his brother. He’s friends with mine… I think. Are they lovers? Rivals? Got a mutual pining thing going on with Latula from when they were kids? No idea what happened there before she got hitched and he moved on. How the hell is it that we’ve never even really talked before today?’

Both of them tried to focus on the road. And it dawned on them that the only thing they really had in common was their mutual connection to the women of the Megido family.

The women they were… in all honesty, probably going to marry, in defiance of cultural norms but for different reasons. The only trolls who would actually like this cold land, soaked in death and forgotten memory.

That made them both feel better, funny enough. Thinking about the Megidos, that is.

Love, even for the terminally proper and persistently grouchy respectively, had a way of lightening moods. This lay on their minds, the tension beginning to evaporate as they drew closer.

Especially for Kankri. He visibly relaxed; not stiffening or trying to look impressive, but the tension that normally forced him into the uncomfortable posturing that he thought a lowblood mutant, raised to his position, had to look like, all drained away from him.

He felt her. Kankri had powers of his own, perhaps linked to his own magical studies, and there was a presence nearby, now, as they drew closer to their destination.

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Their destination was, in fact, a city. It was rather more than that, based on the ancient documents, translated journal entries, and map fragments they had pieced together from archives and collections from all over the kingdoms. It was a city of the dead, from an era before internment of the dead had become an alien notion for trollkind.

Jack Noir, a carapacian who had served as Karkat’s guardian for the complicated and dangerous years of their childhood, had suggested it held a major necropolis. Odd, Kankri considered, that the stab-happy bureaucrat should know a thing like that, but everyone knew weird things.

And of course, that said ‘Megido interests’ all over.

The walls were very tall, rising very high into the sky, and beyond the first one they saw was another set, even higher than that. The city was built on a steep incline, so the walls outlined the shape of the city beyond it. As they rode closer, Kankri could see pathways and high windows in regular intervals, and while the form was unfamiliar, the basic principles were similar to geomantic construction techniques common in the old troll empire, many ages ago.

The walls had not otherwise fared well through the ages. There were large gaps missing towards the tops, perhaps sheared off by siege weaponry; there were fewer signs of that near the bottom, which explained how they had remained stable enough to survive the ages. Nevertheless, there was still damage everywhere else. Ancient murals, enormously complex and surely the subject of much worthwhile study, were tragically heavily damaged; burned, half-melted, and worse. Perhaps the result of some ancient conflict that had seen this place becoming uninhabited to begin with.

Kankri approached them, as their group waited to be properly received. He was hardly an expert in the visual arts of a bygone era, but he did spend a lot of time reading. He was an expert in few fields, but reasonably knowledgeable in many of them. A deep fascination with history (or at least that which was recorded, and that which was worked out later, and he viewed both with polite suspicion) gave him a useful toolbox for this sort of thing.

Now he studied what could be seen of the murals, on this side of the outer wall. It was difficult to make any firm guesses on what they were meant to convey; the artistic style was consistent with the era prior to the collapse of the last known pan-continental troll civilization. Perhaps due to local preferences and cultures particular to this part of the continent (for the old empire was cosmopolitan, if only for trollkind), that style had shifted into something unique. It was chiseled into the stone, if the material was stone, but the style was something different.

Kankri ran a hand against the material, just to see what it was. His short claws, cut and dulled to minimize any possibility of injury to another, ran against something improbably smooth and cool. Even exposed to the elements for untold generations, left without any kind of maintenance in these winds and piercing snows, beneath deluge and mud, it was largely untouched.

It did not feel much like stone. It was cool; not as cold as one would assume, given the weather. Somehow, it was warming itself, and pulsed gently beneath his hands. It felt… wholesome, but it felt like something that made him nervous.

Magic has a resonance, in many different forms, from both the nature of it, the impact it had made, and from events going on around it. A sword might taste of craftsmanship and deliberation, but it was also soaked deep in the violence that defined a sword. And this, distantly, felt like endings.

Kankri kept his hand there, letting his magical senses journey far, and it felt colder still. There was an echo of many things ending, with a patient and steady pace, their memory marching backwards to him.

The murals beneath his claws, clear etching of a time so long removed that it had no real bearing on his sense of ancestry or country, were abstract. Squarish figures, all right angles and stylized depictions of that seemed to be trying to convey the very essence of a troll; each figure showed both horns but a face in profile, all limbs displayed at geometric angles. He didn’t know why, but it seemed relevant.

Other figures arrived, and they had no faces, and they had no horns. The firner was setting; the latter was horrifying. He rubbed his own horns, wincing at the idea of losing them. To many trolls, they were symbolic of identity, and most artistic work used them as such. Had the people of this land done something as cruel as removing the horns of criminals?!

He frowned, studying the mural longer. He supposed that if the faceless, shorn of horns, were supposed to be viewed negatively, they would look more gruesome. But they were chiseled the same as the others, but identified by their lack of horns and faces. And, as he followed the path of the mural onwards, he realized that the mural seemed focused around their progression.

First, they approached a city; it looked much like what he had seen in the distance, so perhaps it was this city, seen from afar in days when it had been in better condition. And then, they were laying down, in lines. This was a lot more complexly drawn, he had to admit, and it took him sometime to suggest that was what was meant.

He had to keep going, on and on, around one vast opening in the walls big enough for a group to have passed through, until he came to a particularly large mural. It was massive, nearly twice as tall as he was, and so wide that it could have formed a wall in some looter’s museum, if someone had simply torn it from the walls and stolen it. It displayed the faceless, the hornless, lying in many rows, lovingly chiseled in intricate detail.

The damage of ancient days lay strongly here; scorch marks had melted the stone in key areas, so it was hard to tell what it was supposed to show. He thought it showed many of the hornless laying down, and an unusual effect in the air above them, the stone apparently chipped away in very gradual sections and then glazed with some process he did not know, so that it shone in a way quite unlike the rest of the mural. The surface there shimmered, like the pulsing of particularly powerful magic.

Behind him, he heard footfalls against snow. Tarps were laid heavily over the walls in an attempt to keep it out, but they were not as efficient as whatever roofing had once crossed the sloping rise of the walls. He turned around, and standing behind him were several hooded figures, their cloaks of fine fur and bearing the marks of their homelands. The nearest of them drew near; behind them, one of the two taller figures behind them, exceedingly voluptuous even in form-obscuring cloak, tried to march ahead of them but were frantically waved off by one of the two in the front.

“No, no!” said one of the two at the front, and this speaker was taller than the other one. Both of them wore the gold-colored robes of the Captor Orders (though a bit frayed, now), and they had the distinctive multiplied horns of goldbloods. One of them, the speaker, crackled with even more raw magical energy than normal. “We gotta do this by the book! The book!”

A much taller woman, whom the goldblood spoke to, stamped a foot and crossed arms across what must have been a spectacular bustline, to press so outrageously against a fur cloak as thick as that. The horns extending out from her hood curled like a ram’s, smaller spikes rising along the curve, signifying her as one of the Megido family of necromancers. “I don’t see why!” She said archly. “We all know each other. We can be formal and boring when we actually have a settlement going!”

This speaker wore a cloak trimmed in dark red; the colors of a cinnamonblood. The eyes beneath the hood glowed a faint dark red; what had been called rust, by the purplebloods a few generations ago. Her cloak was buckled by a distinctive symbol, of a ram’s head with its horns locking the cloak together (and under some serious pressure, given the speaker’s apparent curves trying their best to force the cloak apart), a symbol marked on tombs all across the continent, on necropolises and places where the magic of death was studied, away from the sun in accordance to the magical principles surrounding such powers.

The necromancers of the Time Ram were infamous. None of them had as much authority, or as much magical power, as the Megido family.

Kankri stirred, paying more attention now, and less attention to a brief argument between the two. He looked about, for someone in particular. They liked to move together…

“Miss, we gotta have you introduced properly!” pleaded the cloaked goldblood.

“I mean, we don’t have to,” said his companion. She was shorter than him, and a lot wider. In some very select, specific places at least, in a fashion similar to the Megido who apparently didn’t want a formal introduction. Her cloak had a definite look, even with the thick fur making up most of it, of fabric stressed by the pushing of breasts nearly two and a half feet around, pushing out so much that her cloak hung off them in a big canopy downwards. Her buttocks were just as massive, so big she’d require at least two chairs per cheek to sit down normally, with a simply draping effect behind her. It was like she had a miniature tent around her body. “I mean, she’s the boss here. Right? So if she says no, that means we can’t do it.”

“But we have to!” he retorted, with an air of aghast horror. It was probably what you’d get with someone who had spent most of his short life idolizing the nobility and was outraged on principle that they didn’t want to be super fancy all the time.

“We really don’t,” said the other Megido, slightly taller than what had to be her sister. She had an attitude of stoicism that contrasted with the manic energy of the other, and she had the distinctive body shape; not exactly chubby, but certainly thickset, belly prominent, and breasts so big they had the same draping effect on her clothing as the short goldblood. Perhaps it was that she was tall, but her assets looked even more outrageously massive; each breast was over three feet across, their lower slopes dipping nearly to their waist, and slung nearly four feet out.

Her backside had a similar dramatic effect; perhaps as thick across as two of her standing back to back, taking up a sizable amount of her thighs and pushing out against the confines of her cloak.

Now, Kankri focused on her.

He knew her voice; heavily accented with the distinctive accent of someone who struggled with Purpleglot (the common language in most of the continent, for several hundred years now), thick with world-weary cynicism, ready to shift into a more hostile persona if required. Kankri began to approach, as the argument continued.

“We are NOT getting out the trumpets, or red carpet, or purple carpets!” The first Megido, whom Kankri determined was probably Aradia, said firmly. She had the same, hyper-curvaceous build as her sister, but since she was moving around so much, her sheer heft felt much more prominent. People tended to stand back from her, as if instinctively afraid she might ram them with her curves if they weren’t careful. “We don’t even have any of those!”

The first speaker gasped in horror. Kankri realized that this had to be one of the people that had come from Sollux’s land. He hadn’t familiarized himself with all of them, and so he’d overlooked the matter entirely. After a moment of thought, he recalled a brief encounter on the way up here, with a pair of wanderers on Sollux’s land that Sollux had taken a liking to on a whim, and had gotten to come along with them.

Kuprem; a powerful goldblood mage, though totally untutored, and his friend Folykl, the shortstacked goldblood whose tremendous figure was partially genetic but mostly the consequence of her unusual power to siphon away magical energies and absorb it into her own body (and store it as bigger curves). Kankri had noticed them get uncomfortably excited over being in the presence of genuine nobility, or at least Kuprum did, but he tended to put people into little folders marked ‘NOT OF INTEREST’ until they did something to get his attention, and he’d completely forgotten about them.

Even so, they were of very little interest now that he’d spotted the girl he had come across half a continent for.

Kankri strode onwards, towards the Megidos. “At least let me scream like a trumpet!” Kuprum begged, almost on his knees, teary-eyed.

“Okay, uh, wow!” Aradia said, giggling with a strange enthusiasm. “That sounds kind of fun. I don’t want any formality here, but maybe we could do a screaming contest!”

Folykl groaned, bowing her head. Four crooked horns, bending out forwards, jutted from her cloak like the jaws of some fierce beast, and thick hair spilled out onto her front. Her eyes, though, were the dead black of the outermost void, a reflection of her singular power; the air felt strange around her, energy slowly draining into her, feeding her own abilities or perhaps nourishing her. If one looked close, they would see her cloak slowly straining, filling out as her breasts very visibly grew at a slow, steady rate. Magic ebbed into her, and took physical form as a curvier form. “Please, don’t. Tired of screaming already!”

Kuprum, conversely, was a lot taller, so much so that Kankri had seen her riding on him like a scowling backpack. He was a pretty athletic guy, or so Kankri would assume; he was currently carrying a massive load of construction equipment on his back without any strain, despite the fact that when Sollux had picked him out, he and Folykl had apparently been living out in the wild, abandoned by any caretakers, half-starved and oblivious to current events. His horns, double-rowed and hooked upwards, were startlingly similar to the Captor horn style. Perhaps, Kankri had mused before, this was why Sollux had taken an interest besides the potent magical abilities the caravans had spotted at a distance. He might have been a scion of a lost branch of the Captors.

Now, though, Kankri didn’t have much interest in him, and he was an impediment. He walked past him, pushing him aside. Or he tried to. His hand pushed against Kuprum with some force, but his load made him far too heavy. Kankri just rebounded and plopped onto some stony stairs. “Ow.”

“Hey, don’t go pushing in line!” Kuprum said. “I’m supposed to announce them and stuff first!”

“Hey, none of that!” Aradia said firmly, putting her hands on her exceptionally bountiful hips, her arms making crooked shapes inside her cloak. If Folykl looked curvaceous, Aradia made her look slim; the front and back of her robes both stuck out a startling amount, given the slackness of the material, and it was a testament to just how ample she really was. She radiated a sort of maniacal, happy wildness, like a clock freewheeling it’s hands all over the place so hard the gears might bust loose at any second, and even turning about to face him, Aradia did it with so much energy that she did not step, but sprang from one foot to the other, flailing around so that she didn’t unbalance herself. There was a lot of bouncing. Kuprum averted his gaze and wailed that he did not deserve to witness the wiggle of the nobility. Folykl just went ‘ooh wow that’s a lot’.

The face peering at Kankri was smiling extremely widely, lips thick and dark red, and her hood framed that face in such a way that her expression was disconcertingly concentrated. Kankri felt the urge to shuffle back awkwardly, just having her look at him. She was… intense, to put it mildly. “Hello, Aradia,” he said meekly.

“Kankri!” Aradia came forward, and with a twist of her hand, generated a swell of force that pushed the snow back, in a great burst of magic that felt like a faint wind moving by, and could have smashed him to a pulp if she was so inclined. The power she held radiated from her, and Folykl hopped up and down excitedly, drinking down the magic that came her way. Aradia regarded this with deep interest, grinning and showing all her broad, heavy fangs. But she returned to Kankri again, as the other Megido started to impatiently stride forwards. “Where have you guys been!? Oh, Dam’s been waiting on knives and daggers for you!”

(Which was like ‘pins and needles, but adjusted for the subject’s decidedly morbid interests.)

“Have not,” said the other Megido, taller than Aradia. She was possibly not quite as overwhelmingly voluptuous as Aradia, but perhaps her cloak was just too big to really emphasize her figure; it draped over her like an ominous cloak of the sort that the really dedicated necromancers liked to wear.

“Have so.”

“Did not,” Damara Megido said, with an unspoken air of ‘keep this up and zombies will use your head as a kickball’. The scowling face under the hood tilted up slightly, with an expression that suggested that a smile would be in completely unfamiliar territory there. Dark red eyes, obscured very slightly by a few stray hairs falling from an obsessively prim hairstyle, flickered from the obstruction to Kankri.

For a moment, the stern expression softened. Thick lips, several shades notably darker than Kankri’s own mutant blood, shifted like breaking stone into something that would have been a smile if she hadn’t suddenly remembered she had a reputation to uphold.

Kankri sat up. Damara stepped forward. She stood nearly a head taller than her sister, her shoulders around roughly the same level as Aradia’s distinctive curling horns, just like a ram’s. Damara’s were much the same, but polished to a shine, and capped with bone and rings curling around it, all etched with symbols Kankri assumed were magical. Damara walked with a wide, swinging strut, her hips so massive that it was the easiest way for her enormous thighs to move. And yes, her thighs were huge, easily as wide across as Kankri’s body, and her cloak swayed magnificently as she advanced towards him. Soon, a bustline advanced over his personal horizon, so that he couldn’t see her face. It was a shame; anything obscuring Damara’s face was, in his opinion, a travesty.

(He’d told her that, once. Her face had gone very burgundy and she had to cover her face in a pillow and she’d wailed a little bit. It took about five minutes of his frantic apologizing for upsetting her before someone had to come along and tactfully inform him that she was blushing.)

Now, Damara gestured, as if to summon him to come to her side, and Kankri felt a gentle and very firm grip around his entire body. The air shimmered with a faint darkness, and that same power pulsed around Damara, her native powers calling upon the death energies in the region and focusing through her. Up Kankri went, lifted into the air by the telekinetic spell, and then he was gently let down. The pressure of Damara’s mind did not abate until he was firmly standing on his own two feet again.

It was no easy feet to pick up a full grown troll, nor to apply the strength required to do so evenly across his entire body, and certainly not to pick him up and then down at a respectable speed, and definitely not to do all that as casually as someone picking up a letter.

Kolykl was practically drooling. “Oh, wow, she is really strong… your magical energies are delicious.”

Damara tilted her head. “Thank you. I suppose? Never heard that before.”

Folykl only grinned ghoulishly. Kuprum gasped, in horror, and rushed over to her. “Please!” He cried. “Do not smite my beloved for her impudence, my lady!”

“I… wasn’t?” She said, looking bemused. “And we don’t use that term of address here.”

Kuprum looked vaguely disappointed that he wasn’t going to have to genuflect himself into the dirt for the sake of Folykl. He tried again. “Your highness?”

“No. No monarchy here.”

Once again, he tried, “Your most doomy slaughter-monster?”

“Like that. But no. Try again.”

He slumped over, his extremely vague archive of noble address exhausted. “What do I call you!?”

Damara shrugged, an interesting motion that affixed Kankri’s attention. He moved by her side, which was a natural place for him to be in most circumstances. “Whatever you like.”

Kuprem scowled. “That is a terrible precedent for royalty!”

“We’re not royal.”

“We’re the nobility of necromancers!” Aradia said cheerfully. “There’s a difference! We do spooky stuff! That our ancestors did not necessarily do.”

Folkyl raised a hand. “Um. Miss spooky lady? What DO necromancers do?”

Sensing that Damara and Kankri probably would have liked a moment alone, Aradia seized the moment, and swooped ahead, telekinetically picking up both of the goldbloods. “I’m SO glad you asked! Let’s go find Sollux and we can tell you ALL the little details about the spooky, icky things necromancers do! First warning, it involves ghosts! And dead things! Sometimes ghosts IN dead things! Or ghosts in BREAD things!”

“I’m sorry, what?” Kuprum said as Aradia bounced away, taking the goldbloods with her.

“Pastry minions are a thing!” Aradia said cheerfully. “Flatbread constructs straight from the Pyrope lands!” She continued on, turning a corner and going out the walls, into the complex of tents that was marginally warmer and certainly where Sollux would be orchestrating his fellow mages to working on the walls and making long term habitation a bit more sustainable.

Damara and Kankri watched her go.

They looked at each other, and they did what many young lovers, who were still somewhat unaccustomed to such powerful feelings and keenly aware that their respective training to continue their own family’s work into the future did not cover this particular topic, were wont to do:

They froze up and looked at the ground awkwardly.

Tension sang out between them. Not a harsh tension. Not something uncomfortable; it was the tension of a string plucked and about to sing, or of a wheel rolling steadily down a hillside. They saw the inevitable conclusion, had been building up to it for some time, and these were the first hesitant steps towards something… real, and lasting.

It scared them. Kankri dealt with fear by pretending it wasn’t a problem, and Damara dealt with it by snarling at it, but for both of them, the usual way they handled fear was not an option.

So, Damara tried not to look directly at him, or his handsome face, or the vibrant, unique scarlet of his eyes. No, instead she studied the same walls she had, pretending they held an unbearable fascination for her. Her gaze now slid across them as Kankri’s presence grew more accustomed to being with her again, and then it moved upwards. Towards the tarp-laced borders between the walls, and the remnants of the glass-like material that had once bordered the inner and outer walls. Snow fell from the gaps between them, and she stared at that spot there for a while, as if distracted by something. A shy glance her way from Kankri caught her eyes staring upwards.

“Is there something up there?” He asked, mostly to fill the silence.

And then, he regretted asking it. Because there might have actually been something there.

Kankri saw only empty space.

Damara did not.

She stared there for a while, her head tilted very slightly beneath her cloak. She began to speak, and perhaps it was going to be a comforting lie, and then she thought better of it. Instead, she said, “Are you certain you want that answered?”

He saw the look on her face and shuddered. “Perhaps not.” he muttered, giving the area above them a brief look. He could sense many things, but there were things that he could not sense.

The dead were not his domain. But it was Damara’s.

She patted his hand. “Come here,” she said, holding her own hand out, palm up, offering it. Kankri calmly took her hand, and their fingers laced warmly together. She began to walk, and Kankri came with her.

They began to walk aimlessly. Damara didn’t have a destination in mind, and her feet carried her to a completely random direction, and Kankri allowed her to carry him with her. Her hand was warm, no, it was hot, a pulsing heat nearly as warm as his own blood, and he half-thought that it was a wonder that her heat did not make the snow drifting on down instantly become steam upon her cloak.

There was a wind, curling down from the sky overhead, and it rustled her cloak. For a moment, both their furs smacked together. They adjusted their stance on pure automatic, awkwardly shuffling together so that their cloaks laid over one another, and their arms lay flat against the other. Their hands met near their hips, and swayed gently as they walked.

And as they walked, Kankri could feel the massive sway of Damara’s… endowments, wobbling up and down as she pressed onwards, moving against her cloak. That made a distinctive noise, and he couldn’t help but feel his heart beat faster at the awareness of her. Damara, in all her amplitude, here and now.

Goodness. It had been months since he’d held her hand like this, for the first time.

He swallowed, thinking of a few scattered moments in his homelands before the Megidos had journeyed north, to found their own homeland up here; a reward from the ruling council of the nobles of the unified kingdoms, and personally administered by his father and Redglare herself.

It had all been so sudden. They hadn’t even announced their intentions to court, to their families.

Kankri swallowed again. He tried to think of something besides the heart-wrenching goodbyes for even a few weeks, and his dread that the Megido’s journey to end their diaspora and reclaim what had been their old homelands would end with nothing. Just dead silence, and them vanishing forever into the north, lost and gone as so many others who had journeyed there.

But then, the Megidos walked with the dead. Perhaps the whispers and advice of those long gone had given them some help.

He blinked back tears. Damara stopped in front of the wall, the same one he had studied earlier, and moved slightly. A hand came up to his face, and gently wiped away the hot wetness on his cheek. “Is something wrong?” She asked, quietly.

“No,” Kankri said, wiping his face with his cloak. The cold stung his face, but it seemed less so with her there. And also, that it was warmer here than it ought to have been. Uncomfortable, yes, but as if in a warm home with the door open during winter. “I was… worried. All this time. For you and Aradia and those that came with you.”

She regarded him with the stoic detachment he was used to from her, and then her face softened. “You didn’t have to worry,” she said, calmly. “We knew what we were getting into.”

“I know. But I worry anyway.”

“I suppose someone must.” Damara shrugged. Now she turned to the wall. “I see you were looking at this earlier too?”

He rolled his thumb against her hand in an unthinking, instinctive way. “Yes.” something she said struck him. “‘Too’? You were studying this as well?”

“Yes.” With her free hand, she gestured at the murals, and she began to speak at length; not in Purpleglot, but in the language of her own people, and though Kankri was not the most fluent in it, he was versed enough to follow what she said. And he was pleased to see that his own assumptions were on broadly the right track, though Damara went into further detail then him, which was only fitting. The study of the cultures of the past, and the things they left behind, was something of an abiding interest for her.

(Damara did not tell Kankri of the whispers in the wind. Of words spoken in ancient tongues so old and its speakers so abruptly torn away from their earthly vessels that there were few connections to modern language.)

“You see here?” Damara said, gesturing at the wall and the large hole there, with the few remaining fragments suggesting a large crowd of the hornless laying down, attended by other trolls. “I believe this suggests burial rites.”

“You think so?” Kankri said.

Damara glanced up, just for a moment, before she replied.

(She would not tell Kankri what was roiling about them. She didn’t want to keep looking at the roiling masses of limbs and blurred horns and yowling, serpentine forms totally unfamiliar to her, and she didn’t want to admit to Kankri they were there. Some secrets ought to remain quiet.

But she could relay what few things she understood from them.)

“Yes,” Damara said, politely declining to remark that it was the best she had gleaned from the… entities around her.

She didn’t see a sky, or even a ceiling. They clustered too thickly to see such a thing.

She indicated, instead, the mural once more. “I believe the people of this town used geomantic magic. Architecture that shapes local magic, rearranges the flow of it for a specific purpose, yes?” Kankri nodded slowly. “And things that happen in a place can shape that magic, too. I think this wall is a big part of that magic, and the carvings aren’t decoration.”

“Oh?”

“I think they were… encoding? Runes that direct it? They’re part of the magical working.”

“Ah!” Kankri brightened. “So the depictions here are not merely artistic effects! And much of this damage looks like the wall was being targeted, despite there being no signs of there having been a gateway; this place was not meant to be defended, I would think. So whatever happened to make this city fall started with this wall?”

“Perhaps to disrupt whatever magic the city was producing. Though I don’t think it is a city, as such. I believe it was a place where dead were laid to rest, interred, and cared for as they neared the ends of their lives. A necropolis, yes.”

“What makes you say that?”

Damara did not look upwards at what she supposed had to be a mass of ghosts, so many of them and in such intensity that they were a silent cloud. “Observation.”

She gestured at the wall. “In the era this mural appears to have been made in, horns and faces often had a very specific meaning. Horns equated to identity, in the sense of being people, in the artwork of the time.”

Kankri’s face grew dark. “I have heard troubling things about the way humans and other such beings were treated. It was very akin to the way lowbloods and mutants were treated until the Pyropes attacked.”

Damara waved off the knowledge of injustice as though it were rain falling down on them; important, yes, but not strictly relevant to her point. “Yes, I know, but hornlessness in artwork was often used to indicate death.” She pointed at one part of the mural. “Look at these figures. They have horns and distinctive faces. Look at them continue onwards, until they lie down.” There, at a point where the mural’s unnatural shininess was on full display, and even pulsed faintly, new shapes appeared: wispy figures rose from the things who were now hornless and faceless, but the figures rising from them had those same horns and faces.

“I think this symbolizes those dying, and their souls departing, or perhaps stamping their identity onto magic to create death spirits,” Damara said. Again, she definitely made an effort to not look at the very obvious evidence of this, presently wheeling overhead.

Those spirits, from what she, Aradia and the other necromancers that had come with them had worked out, had been here for a very, very long time. So long that they had no real means to communicate with them. The best they could do was listen to their frantic whispers, begging to be understood, and try to find something that was just close enough to a language family still spoken in the modern day. They had learned a few things, but so terribly little.

“The horns, and the faces,” Kankri said. “If those symbolize identity, then these might mean the identity moving onwards? That DOES sound like the way another culture might have viewed death. Are you certain enough to call it a theory?”

“Yes; I suppose it will be disputed, but if anyone has alternatives, I will be happy to tell them they are objectively fools and are obviously wrong.”

Now she pointed at the center of the mural; overlooking it all, as if a beneficent giver of goods, there was something coiled far overhead. She wanted to say that it was a serpent, with a head very superficially similar to a skull. The shimmering quality of the mural, which she supposed was meant to convey magical energy, did not extend around it, and perhaps that meant that it was not strictly related to the workings of the mural.

The serpent, though, was important. She just didn’t know why it was given a position right at the top.

“I am still trying to work out what that implies there,” she said.

Kankri pointed to something above it. “And what of that?”

Damara gave it a long look. It looked something like a large gemstone, suspending like a crown above the serpent. The mural had been shaped around it, so that something like bright rays were descending from it, pointing right at what she had theorized to be spirits, who were rising towards it.

“It looks like a beacon,” Kankri said thoughtfully. “I don’t know what it could actually mean, though that is what it looks like to me. Have you any ideas?”

“Actually, I have thought the same.” Damara stared up at it, and she glanced back at a stairway leading further into the city, for some reason.

Her hand squeezed him tighter. Any obvious indication of emotion from Damara was extremely startling, and so Kankri glanced up, looking alarmed. He turned to her, and her expression was strange; a grimace of sorts, caught between delight and… some kind of worry.

“Are you… hungry or tired?” She asked. “We could go find one of the makeshift homes and rest for a while…?”

The question surprised him; she didn’t seem certain, and Damara always felt so adamantly, indignantly certain about everything, even the things she knew she was objectively wrong about. Kankri felt unsettled, as though the ground beneath him was about to give way, with the distinctive panic that implied. “Is something wrong? You don’t sound like yourself!”

Damara shook her head, stray lengths of hair flashing over her eyes. “Listen! Some time ago, I found… something. In a chamber, not far from here. Blocked off by rubble, and I think it’s very important, but…” She tensed. “You came at an opportune time. I’d hoped that you would be the first to study it with me. And there’s no one else I trust to be responsible with it.”

She took both his hands, propriety (never exactly a priority with Damara to begin with) forgotten in favor of the wonders of study and exploration. “Please, let me show you!”

Kankri took her hands, but he felt he had to make at least one reasonable objection. “You haven’t shown Aradia?”

Damara’s expression flickered, and she hesitated before she spoke. “I would not say anything about my sister, but she is… perhaps not the most cautious when it comes to research and investigation. And believe me, this requires delicacy.”

“And Aradia likes to do digging by throwing big rocks at things.” Kankri grimaced. “I see your point.” Then, he smiled. “And I’d much rather examine the wonders of bygone ages as soon as possible. I am with you, Damara!”

She smiled again and, tugging on one of his hands, walked them both up the stairway. Kankri observed that not only was it abnormally wide, but in the middle of it was a ramp, smooth and worn.

They traveled further into the city, past several additional walls also covered in murals (alas, most apparently too damaged to read legibly at this point) and this reinforced the theory that the walls were not meant as defense, but as part of a larger magical working. There were large gateways in them, without doors or a sign that there had ever been doorways. These were here to dictate the flow of power throughout the land, not bar entry, and Kankri (again, quite able to sense the flow of magical power around him) felt a heavy pressure as he moved through them.

It was not unpleasant. But it did taste of death, and old death at that. The weight of centuries was heavy here, and it was certainly unsettling.

The moment passed as they advanced further into the city, moving upwards: the stairway sloped upwards, and he thought for a moment that it felt like they were climbing into an old volcano caldera: they had walked up the outside of it, the considerable distance of the walls from one another outlining first the base of it and than a midpoint to it, and now they were approaching the top. And beyond, would be the inner part of the caldera.

He mentioned this theory to Damara, who nodded approvingly. “It’s not a caldera or a volcano of any kind,” she said, and went on to name a number of geographic curiosities that would be particular to such a place, and were not present here in any form. “The people who dwelled here were originally diggers, I think. They simply dug down into a hill and kept going as they needed more space.”

“A traditional thing for our people to do,” Kankri noted. “Though not so common in recent ages.”

Damara’s expression went strange, then. “I don’t think the people who built this city were trolls.”

Kankri frowned. “Really? Why not?”

Damara thought of old ghosts, their winged shapes so totally unlike any troll… or human. “Some of the things I’ve seen are inconsistent with the builders being trolls.” And he accepted that, at least.

By then, they reached the top of the staircase; it did not open out into another wall. As Damara had surmised, the walls were not fortifications, and further ones wouldn’t serve the purposes of the original city-builders. They stepped upwards onto a broad flatness, of quarried stone cut into shape, leading directly into the broad ramp at the very center of the stairs. It continued onwards, forming a ring around the entire lip of the hillside (broken and smashed in a few places, but reasonably intact), looking inwards towards the city itself below them.

Damara and Kankri admired it for a moment, their gaze following down the trail; below the stars and ramp going down, and there the sight of the stairs was lost, as buildings rose up in a complex weave below them. All the horizon in front of them was the city itself, all the way to the distant other sides of the ring far from them. Winding towers rose up beyond them, triangular points sticking up far, and even from here it was plain that the construction was much more varied than the stony construction elsewhere seen here. Wooden structures, treated to endure the climate, still endured, though in terrible disrepair, and as they began to descend, Kankri saw that there was further variety; stone, metal-shod walls, even the remnants of what must have been the quasi-organic substances some trolls literally grew into being, though the bodies of those homes had long since decayed so that only their skeletons remained.

Undead walked here; zombies carefully treated to hold off decay, skeletons held together with leather straps and metal bolts, and they were wandering mechanically from one building to another, patching up gaps in the buildings or towing bedding here and there. The Megidos, and those who shared their teachings, were well known for their use of undead servants, and Kankri supposed these had been brought with them.

It was a long way to go, past the bulk of zombie minions. The stairs descended downwards, and from here Kankri saw the inward curve of the city. Yes; he saw well-organized districts, incredibly complex and adhering to principles of architecture that seemed very alien to him, tilting slightly down as their foundations followed the curve of the hillside.

He and Damara followed them, and as they did, his view of it became clearer. He also saw that, where there had been totally destroyed buildings or empty spaces, Damara’s group had begun to build new buildings, doing their best to match the geomancy of the area and not disrupt it. They were far from complete, ragged foundations covered with high-mounted fabrics to shield themselves from the wind, but they were sufficient as temporary shelter, and at least this was not destructive and harmful to the old city.

As they passed a few other people, tending to their work or simply minding their own business, Kankri saw the very base of the city. He couldn’t make it out very clearly; it was quite distant from them, and it would be a long time to walk there on foot. He suspected the original inhabitants had not; he could see the long, narrow pathways of what could have been ancient trains, rigged to slide down by the pull of gravity and pulled up by powerful counterweights, to convey passengers straight to the center.

He made out some vaguely triangular shapes, or perhaps pyramids. Old homes and what might have been businesses, all the buildings strangely crooked and tending towards curving shapes quite unusual to his eyes, the product of architectural sensibilities totally foriegn to him, bore so much damage they were hollowed out husks. Whatever had damaged the city had made a beeline to the center of the city from here. “Are we headed there?” He asked.

“Yes,” Damara said solemnly. “To the center of the city; the necropolis proper. The thing I found is there.”

He tried not to look terribly enthusiastic about going to an ancient ritual graveyard. “It is a bit of a walk,” he said vaguely.

She squeezed his hand. “I can carry us both there.”

He tried not to flush at the notion of being lifted aloft by her. “Oh, if you must.”

“I must, indeed.” Her fingers wrapped firmly on his palm, blunt claws tapped on his wrist, and then she suddenly swung him up, catching him in a carry with her other arm, his legs fitting snugly into the crook of her elbow and forearm, sliding him against her monstrously huge breasts so suddenly that he let out a cry that was meant to be a protest but just came out as a mortified squeak, compounded by the rush of heat of being pressed so firmly against her incredibly heated body, and the cold suddenly seemed very distant.

Damara floated upwards, carrying Kanki with her. She flew high, over the highest of the buildings around them, so that the city stretched away beneath them. Kankri’s nerve gave out and he clutched into Damara’s front, face buried in hot softness. The sheer inappropriateness of it didn’t matter as much as his stomach dropping out into a pit and his head swimming at so much distance beneath them, and he thought with a sudden certainty that he absolutely could not look down. Not at all.

His stomach felt that it was plummeting again as they descended downwards. Damara judged them in the right spot, and their cloaks flapping together, she came down right in the center.

Eventually, they dropped down. For Kankri, it was an interminable time, suspended between Damara’s astonishingly big bustline (and the temptation to snuggle; oh, that was a cruel thing indeed), her strong arms, and nothing between falling hundreds of feet except more Damara.

There was a sound as Damara’s feet touched down, eventually. She remained holding him in a bridal carry, though, a faint smirk on her lips.

“Please let me go,” Kankri said, still clinging to her.

She let him down, and he honestly expected her to say something just a little sardonic. She didn’t need to; she radiated smugness at seeing him so vulnerable.

Kankri needed a long moment to recover, and when he did, he was again overwhelmed; not by fear of falling far and fast, but wonder. He had thought he had seen pyramids from afar, and so there were.

High and angled surfaces rose far, pocked and burned with the injuries of ancient years, but they still gleamed, in the same way as the walls outside did. Power coursed through them: weakened, faint, but it was magical power all the same, an ancient circuit of magical energy still moving. It took him a moment to realize that they were indeed pyramids after all, and he stood in the center of a podium between them. Four of them, a narrow crossroads between them just wide enough for perhaps four average-sized trolls to walk, side by side, rolling their mysterious burdens along.

“I’ll thank you for being less needlessly terrifying in the future,” Kankri said. “But what are these wonders? Burial grounds?”

“No, those would be below us,” Damara said. “These are not pyramids in the sense of being sites for beings that are buried. That is, we did find beings interred within them, but the pyramids were not built for them. There were many rooms, filled with tools; scalpels, old funerary kits, containers that were probably filled with fluids used to speed decomposition of bodies after burial, alters for religious rites… I think these pyramids were most likely used to prepare bodies for burial, and a lot of them at once.”

“So perhaps a site where many people were interred? Or a city built specifically for that purpose?” Kankri halted, and he realized that Damara was avoiding talking about something. “You said ‘beings’. Not trolls?”

“No,” Damara said, and despite her fascination, she still sounded troubled. “They were… strange. I don’t know what they were. No one had ever seen anything like them before.”

Kankri frowned. “Can you describe them for me?”

“They were skeletons; still preserved, so I suspect that was important somehow. Not trolls, or humans. Humanoid from the waist up, much larger than trolls. Skulls.. I would say they resemble a snake’s, but with broader jaws, larger eyes. Wings, I think, extending from the back. And below the waist, they don’t seem to have legs, but a large flexible trunk. Like a snake’s body, some of my people thought.”

Kankri racked his mind, and found nothing that sounded familiar. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Nor has anyone else.”

Kankri stared up at the pyramid. “I would like to study them later, if that is permitted,” he said. Damara glanced at the roiling storm of ghosts, always a present sight even this far down. They were thicker around here, as if something around the pyramids made them stronger, gave them greater substance than they would have otherwise. And four strange ghosts, so totally unlike anything she’d ever seen, were studying him with interest.

They gave a sense of, if not exactly approval, at least a lack of antagonism. “I think that would be acceptable,” she said carefully.

Kankr peerd outwards into the darkness; it was quite dim down here, as Damara’s people were unwilling to keep it too brightly lit. “Do we go down there?” He asked, pointing at a stairwell. He sounded uncomfortable.

“No,” she said, and he visibly brightened. “That leads downwards into the necropolis proper, I think; we found many catacombs down there.”

“How far down do they go?”

Damara recalled a staircase that had just… kept going, on and on, its design suited for both bipeds and someone that might slither, and in her mind the image had formed of a spike’s outline, made by the staircase. “We sent people down there. They followed it for days. It just kept going.”

Kankri’s eyebrows rose. “Ah.”

“Suppose the people who built this necropolis just kept digging downwards and building more catacombs as they needed,” Damara said. “They just keep going on… like spider webs, or canals.” She moved to the very center of the area between the four pyramids. The ground was absolutely torn up by damage, very little of the original stonework still intact at all. She went to a large pile of rubble and made a gesture; the whole pile moved up and floated away, piled up to disguise a large hole right at the center. “What we’re going to look at is down there.”

Kankri felt something pulse up from there. “At the very center of the entire city?”

“Going up, and down,” Damara said, with something distressingly close to cheerful. She offered her hand to Kankri’s again. He took it, and they floated into the air, and down into the hole.

They descended down into a chamber that was not, relatively, all that big. It was not brightly lit, but it didn’t need to be; trolls had very good nocturnal vision, though not to the degree of being able to see in the dark like many humans believed, but there was sufficient light to see clearly enough. It was not long before they stepped down, and for some reason that seemed vaguely disappointing. He expected a longer fall; perhaps some kind of interminably long drop, as fit Damara’s description of how far down the necropolis went.

He looked around into a chamber that was, surprisingly, reasonably well lit. Illumination radiated from… lines of a sort, set into the walls, though they were so badly damaged that he initially thought they were dots and circles. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw the walls, rising up to meet the floor above them in a gradually widening circle, and those walls were in ruins.

Scorch marks did not dot the walls, but engulfed it. The marks of devastation, a terrible impact blow and hints of some massive blast had rendered the walls all but unrecognizable. Perhaps something had smashed the entire chamber open, flooding it with the destructive output of some ancient weapon, or a dragon had descended down here.

There had been murals on the walls. Tragically, there was very little left of them. Some part of him cursed the moment he recognized the damage; it was hard to tell that there even was decoration on the walls, with so much of it having been smashing away, or lying in pieces on the floor. So densely covered was the floor, that there was hardly a space to stand upon. He felt a great sense of loss, and tragedy; what had been here? What ancient secrets had been ruined, in some ancient conflict?

The lines he had seen were clearly magical in nature, still powered by some ambient force just barely present. He thought perhaps they were magical conduction lines; a geomantic pattern of conducting energies from one place to another, or from a power source. They were still operational, if perhaps not to fuel whatever spell they had once managed, but enough to give them light.

They connected to a podium, in the center of the chamber. The very heart of it; perhaps the heart of the entire city. Once, it must have been a grand thing; a marvel of magical engineering, every inch honed to precise mathematical precision, and here and there he saw the fragments of curving shapes that once would have cradled the podium like the petals of a large flower. The conduits connected to it in a spiraling shape, like a spirograph, flickering steadily even in front of his eyes.

However, his gaze was ultimately drawn not to the podium, intriguing as it was, beautiful as it might have been. Rather, pulled in much the same manner as iron was tugged by a magnet, his attention came to something laying behind the rubble, near the podium. From the rubble and its position, it might have been once set atop that podium before being knocked away.

It was a crystal; a little taller than he was, nearly three times wider than it was tall. It shimmered a dull red, brighter shades periodically flashing as the magical forces it embodied moved within. It didn’t appear shaped; large bulbous swellings defined its shape into something that looked surprisingly like a humanoid figure sitting down in a calm position, but these were so smooth and rounded that Kankri rather suspected that it had been grown, not carved into shape.

It was not just a crystal, though.

It radiated age, even more than the city above and below them. It felt old, and Kankri felt a sudden and terrible awareness of how many generations of trolls could have lived and died before this object. And it radiated power, so fiercely that it was nearly a physical pressure weighing against him.

He’d felt power like this; in the halls of the mighty, in the presence of weapons whose mere existence threatened the world, in places where artifacts had been shaped into entire structures. He’d felt it shaped into forms radiating such magical might that their substances alone were transmuted into something otherworldly, their very touch dangerous to many.

Kankri’s breath caught in his throat. His senses, so tuned to the magical and the invisible ties of emotion and feeling, blazed at the sight of this, and the immense power dormant within it. It did not blaze with power, as such. Blaze implied activity, and this felt quiet, passive; asleep.

But to look directly at it with magical senses alone might have wounded him. It shone like a quiet star, with so much power that he was honestly shaken. How had it stayed here without anyone even noticing? How could anyone not feel it; how had he not felt it as they approached?

“I know the feeling,” Damara said, reading his mood, sympathetically. “It’s a bit.. Intense, isn’t it?”

Kankri breathed in. “Damara. Is that what I think it is?”

She stared at it for a long time, her expression distant, and then she swallowed loudly. She played well at being calm, but Kankri read the excitement, and the fear, in her voice when she spoke. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know exactly what it might be but…” he hesitated to say it. It sounded foolish. “It’s old. And powerful. It’s something like… I don’t know if I want to really say this.”

“Then you thought the same thing as me, I suppose.”

“It’s like the castle of the Pyropes. Or the ships of the Amporas. This is something from the old era, isn’t it? That’s an artifact of power; one of those relics that entire kingdoms fought and died over.”

Damara looked nervous, even as she nodded. “Now the city’s layout makes even more sense, doesn’t it? An entire city, built around this artifact, conveying its power.”

“Power to do… what, exactly?” Kankri bent low. He felt extremely nervous in its presence, but also excited. This wasn’t just something for the history books, this would define the Megido sorcerers! They’d found an artifact, an actual artifact of the ancient world!

“I’m not sure.” Damara leaned down, not quite daring to touch it. “It reminds me of the magical power batteries people make by condensing magic into something that can be stored and tapped, but this is far stronger than any of that.” She reflected, once more, upon the vast storm of ghosts lurking around here. Still here, even after so long, with nothing tying them to the world. And perhaps, sustained by something. “It could be naturally occuring, but I think it’s more likely that this artifact once powered this city.”

“Perhaps this was made after eons of this city’s spells discharging excess into something?”

“Or it predates even the city, and they designed those spells after harnessing its power,” Damara countered. “To be honest, I was hoping you might have some insight.”

Kankri crouched down as well. Being in the presence of so much power made him feel intensely uncomfortable, and he would have liked nothing better than to be away from it, but the excitement of the moment was more potent by far. He winced in the fast of so much spiritual power pulsing from it, and he recalled something. “Do you remember the mural?”

“Yes! The crystal it showed; do you think it is the same thing?”

“Well, it would be a strange coincidence, yes?”

Damara, impulsively, clasped his hand. He clasped back, smiling widely, his eyes shining with wonder.

Without thinking, Kankri’s iron self control slackened. It was her influence on him; just as he made Damara feel gentler, let her guard down for once, she made him calm, and so the magical power he possessed, with its ties to emotion and feeling, came loose.

Normally, it wouldn’t have meant much. Perhaps people sensing his feelings and thoughts, or spells materializing to suit his feelings.

But this was not a normal situation.

(For so long, the spirits had called, and cried out for form again. And it could not answer.

The city lay dead and forgotten, and it could not fuel it.

It’s people were gone. The last priest of death and endings had died long ago, the sacred rites lost and with them, the knowledge to maintain it.

It’s power pulsed out, the need of the restless dead and enduring memories pulling at it. The two lives around it pulled it to greater function, and here, HERE was an ideal priestess.

From the other came a pulse of magic, colored in love and affection, and it was a gateway. A road, to giving the spirits peace once more.

It flowed to its new container.)

The crystal pulsed, so brightly that both Kankri and Damara had to shield their eyes, and power radiated from it so furiously at the magical conduits around them ignited in actintic brilliance.

Kankri shouted aloud, and power jumped to him, and his mind ached beneath the strain as unimaginable forces coursed through him, and into Damara, using himself as a living conduit. It only lasted a moment, but it burned so furiously he nearly passed out on the spot. He heard her shout, and he forced himself to stay conscious. He took hold of himself and demanded, No! Stay awake!’

“What?” Damara said, voice steady even with a faint waver.

The light faded, just enough for Kankri to see. “What is it!?” KAnkri yelled. “What’s it doing?”

“I, I don’t know…” Damara’s voice was faint, uncertain. “Yes? Hello?”

“Damara! Who are you talking to!?”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and it was too long; power coursed out, twisting and churning around them, and it felt so alive, and moving with the moment, time itself flowing into its depths and somehow melded with it. It was terrible to behold, it was awful. And this was meant in the old definitions of those words; it was full of awe. It was terrifying, but also somehow a good thing.

And she felt a question directed towards her.

Somehow, she understood what it actually meant.

The weight of ages, of countless generations piling up long before her ancestors had ever walked the continent, loomed before her. She felt as though she were paddling before a tidal wave ready to crash down on her, and the wave had noticed her. And asked something.

She felt sorrow, all the countless and soul-rending sorrows of thousands of souls, trapped in torment for so terribly long. The need to alleviate their pain, to give them form and to find a way to move on, and regain what had been lost, and here, the last remnant of the city that had once tended to their needs lay before her.

“Yes,” she said softly to it.

The crystal flashed, even more brightly than before… and then, it faded. And then it was Damara who glowed with radiant light.

-----

And above, the churning mass of spirits paused.

And then, they slowly descended downwards to the very center of the city, with something like wild relief.

-----

In the chamber below the city, power flashed out, like a fist blindly striking around.

Kankri tumbled as Damara shone so brightly she became impossible to look at directly, flashing a brighter red than his own blood, and so much magic made a physical force that knocked him away. He saw her begin to float upwards, suspended by the power that was funneling into her, merging with her and infusing her living body with its limitless energies.

“Damara!” he wailed. “Let me… hold on!” He tried to crawl, and the pressure shoved him face first against the ground. Even so, he kept crawling, claws against the dirt and pulling him onwards.

And he looked up as the ghosts appeared.

It was the first time he had seen them properly, and he realized what Damara had been coyly hinting at all that time; that this was a place of the unquiet dead, and it was from them she had learned so much of it. HE had little time to dwell on this, though, as the first of them descended upon her.

He stopped, horror halting him completely still, as Damara tilted her head upwards with enough presence of self that his fears faded a little. She flung her arms open wide, as if a mother greeting long lost children, and it was not entirely Damara there, for a moment; there was another presence meshed into her, staring out through her eyes. Not overriding her, but channeled through her.

The ghost, a troll so old that its features were almost totally nothing but faint memory, flew into Damara. And then it was gone, flashing red and sucked up into her. Her belly grew slightly larger, as if it had entered her womb in some strange inversion of sacred birth.

And then another ghost came down, shyly fluttering down. This one landed right across her heart, and vanished into her two. Another did the same, and another, and then another; and with each one, her belly began to swell more than before. Her cloak fluttered, and the robes she wore beneath them swelled outwards, as her body began to take on a more excessively curvaceous shape: magic flowed through her, and her body responded to it by converting it into size and attractive mass.

Four serpentine shapes descended downwards. Kankri stared in awe and a little bit of horror as they hovered downwards, a tornado of spiritual force pulling like a vacuum around Damara’s willing body. The four creatures looking nothing like anything he had ever seen; there were long trailing tails like the bodies of serpents, muscular and powerful forms even more massive than that of the most mighty troll, body-dwarfing bustlines equal to the most magically powerful of mages, and enshrouding Damara now were spectral wings, feathered and gently cradling her.

There were few other details. They were old. They were so old. So many countless ages must have scrubbed away their memories of themselves, perhaps their very identities, until nothing was left but this vague suggestion of what they had once looked like, and an overriding imperative. He felt it, as keenly as he felt any other emotion and mind, and though the minds he touched were so profoundly alien that it scared him, the desperation and hope from them felt familiar indeed.

One of them leaned forward. As far as he could tell, it was presumably a woman, and the only hint of color left was spiral-shaped eyes shining a lime green. The same color as his own blood would be, were he not a mutant. It stared into Damara’s face, making its own mysterious judgements, and then nodded it’s fearsome face once at her.

All four vanished, into her. Damara’s belly billowed out, writhing beneath the surface and flickering with magical force. Kankri stared at this, shocked and bewildered, and then he turned his face away in embarrassment as her top swelled out; her breasts expanded nearly as much as her belly, and even her backside seemed to swell outwards. She radiated an image of fertility, and it was a little mortifying to watch.

He looked back, compelled to do so. It felt wrong to look away. He felt, suddenly, that he was witnessing something sacred; holy.

Damara’s belly expanded outwards even more, the shimmering ghosts stabilizing, becoming part of her and growing docile within her. Her body sustained them, endowed them with serene energies that soothed the torment of their condition, and they fed her back, infusing her with magical energies that made her keep growing even bigger than she already was.

And, above them, the air changed, and the magic from Damara gave shaped to the storm of ghosts descending pleadingly towards her.

There were thousands of them. More. So many of them that he couldn’t possibly keep count, flying with such ferocity that they packed together, spectral forms blending into each other; Damara’s magic gave them greater substance, and he saw their faceless features resolve into more identifiable features, and he felt their minds suddenly bloom again, resolving into being after eons of unraveling and suffering. Complexity flowed from her, giving them not life… but perhaps a form of peace.

How many had died here? How many had been here, all this time, trapped and in such awful torment?

They were all here. All the ghosts of this place, drawn to Damara.

She opened her arms and embraced them, drawing them into herself as they filled her up, and he could not look directly at her as the necromancer’s light shone forth.

(Her power flowed into the ancient conduits, the veins running across the city; into ancient buildings of law and good order. Into the places where food had once been stored, the foundries where the sacred tools had been fashioned, and into the homes where it must be warm and comfortable; for those who lived there, and for those who came there to pass away.

This was largely a moot point, now. But the new residents, the people who had come with Damara, saw portions of the wall suddenly turn on, and the dark city was suddenly illuminated.

Machines turned on, and then off again as they were not needed, scaring the hell out of several humans who’d been investigating the area.

Glyphs, once serving as person-to-person communications, lit up, forming a physical shape; there was no one to speak through them now, so they simply turned off. And unfortunately, Aradia had been sitting there, mistaking it for a chair, and its activation had toppled her right off onto her face. Or onto Kuprum, who had wailed that he was not fit for nobility to boob-slam him. Folykl simply observed that he didn’t seem to be bothered when she did it to him, and realized that ‘bothered’ was not the feeling there.

The walls were damaged, broken. But there was still enough of them to maintain the most basic of the spells, and warmth swelled up, sizzling away the snow. Blessed heat pulsed through the city, filling its streets with a pleasant warmth. Those now looking to give this place life again felt a great sense of relief, before they felt bewildered; what was going on?

And those who used magic, or could at least perceive it, felt the massive surge of magic shooting straight up and drawing restless spirits to it, and they felt the old power of it, enough to make them alarmed. This was the power of ancient workings, lost to modern wonder-workers, and they dreaded to know what it might mean.)

And below the city, in the chamber that had once housed the heart of the city, the roar of such immense power slowly petered away, the weight of it fading so that Kankri was able to get up, and he heard a sound as something very heavy landed on the ground.

He looked up; all the ghosts were gone. He looked to his side, and there was the crystal artifact. It was still there, reasonably intact, though it had been severely drained. It’s surface was translucent, apparently hollowed out, the vast bulk of the power it carried now somewhere else. Or in someone else.

He looked up. His ability to sense magical energies almost quailed before the sheer quantity of it in front of him, nearly as much as the crystal had done before, and there was Damara.

Well. Certainly, it was Damara. A lot more of Damara than he’d imagined ever seeing.

Damara rocked back and forth on her feet, groaning faintly, with a faint hint of satisfaction. She was bigger, her cloak not destroyed but pushed back by the expanding force of her enlarged body, hanging back like a too-small cape. Her body was broader; her hips more than four and a half feet across, her arms wider across than before, and her thighs noticeably bigger than they had been, and that was saying quite a lot.

But her stomach had grown impossibly huge, even by the generous standards that magically-fueled expansion could change for a body. Damara leaned upon it; an enormous mass slung out in front of her, so big that it was longer across than she was tall, and rose up nearly as high as she was taller. Some part of him thought that it was even bigger still than he was, or at least looked that way; there was just so much mass, so much gray-red flesh swelling out. The sheer volume of it was a physical weight, drawing both magical focus towards it, and the eye.

She rocked forwards, standing on her tip-toes into her stomach. Two enormous swells, barely contained by a robe top that had generously grown to keep them within a minimum of modesty, wobbled on the steady shifting of her belly’s firm surface. It took Kankri a moment to realize those were her breasts, grown by the same process that had made her stomach so big. They were huge; as big as a massive chunk of her own body, at least five feet out and easily over ten feet across each, sprawling over the top and sides of her stomach in much the same way that Damara herself liked to lounge on couches.

For that matter, her stomach was increasingly beginning to resemble a couch, at least in terms of size.

Kankri began to draw close, so worried that he couldn’t stay back. Damara groaned, her eyes fluttered. There was a red glow there, which faded; whatever alien presence had spoken to her, or merged with her, faded away. The crystal on the ground pulsed more brightly, almost like a living thing.

She was changed, even so. Even apart from having breasts so massive Kankri could have slept comfortably on them, or a stomach as big as she was. He glanced nervously from the firm and distinctive shape that suggested pregnancy to him, and he almost jumped at the movement from within, of serpentine shapes and many horned shapes brushing against it, briefly.

Damara blinked again, and now she looked directly at him.

“Oh,” she said, voice soft and low. “That feels… nice.”

She gave him another look. Instincts more central to her character took hold. She smirked. “What’s with that look?”

Kankri became vaguely aware that he was blushing horrendously.

“I think you need to cover up,” he said, looking away and covering his eyes.

Damara looked at herself, and took stock of the situation. As in so many other things, she took refuge in audaciousness and teasing him:

“Perhaps you could spraw upon me, and warm me up that way?”

“Damara, we are in the north, romantic cuddling will not help and anyway I don’t think you’re appreciating the gravity of the situation!”

“Firstly, it’s… surprisingly warm, now. Secondly, don’t you mean… gravid-ity?”

“Puns don’t count as helping!

-------

Less than a week went by, after that momentous day.

This was not much time, from an objective view of things. It was little enough time for life to be established or for the memory of it to fade from the world. Certainly it wasn’t enough time for the trolls, humans and carapacians who had traveled across from their lands to do more than simply settle into the city, and make it a little more comfortable for them.

It definitely was not long enough for Damara to really adjust to her new body. Or for that matter, for everyone else to adjust to her.

“You’re looking more like your mother every day,” Sollux observed, sitting on a table they’d set up in a fairly large building close to the entrance of the city as a whole. From the outside, Damara had seen as they’d struggled to get her in there, it loomed over the neighborhood around it, topped by a fancy dome; an upper level had been converted into a bedroom for herself via the addition of many plush bag-seats that piled together to form a makeshift mattress suitable for her body.

Kankri had his own apartments in another improvised dwelling not far from there, but in practice he stayed at her place every night, pouring over plans with her: devising new schemes for infrastructure, working out the logistics of supply caravans due to be called for within a few months, working out nearby eras to start establishing crops (rice, for example, making use of the swampy region to make paddies), and on and on, until the nights grew long and they both grew weary, and they fell into each other’s arms.

Well. Rather, he fell between her breasts and on top of her stomach, the spirits within her writhing invisibly as he came down. Her arms weren’t quite enough to hold him for a proper embrace, but the rest of her body could manage it fine.

The doors of this building were exceptionally wide, and high; it threw off the sociological assumptions many of them had come with, given that it was far too wide to make sense for a normal troll sensibility, and perhaps suitable for industrial-grade carts to be rolled in. The ramped stairway and a smooth floor, suitable for slithering, suggested it had been made for an entirely different kind of body, far larger than a troll.

It also meant that Damara was able to get into this home without too much difficulty, which had been a major consideration in choosing it as her temporary residence until the city was restored enough to find more permanent lodgings. ‘Too much’ was not the same as saying ‘none at all’ though; Sollux had said this while glancing wryly at the doorway, which was presently a massive lump of belly flesh squeezing out around the doorframe, from the ceiling to about halfway up it, softness pushing out so thickly against the doorframe that it made a faint noise as she tried to force her way through.

“I promise you, Captor,” Damara said through gritted fangs, clicking them in a grimace with each word, “I will get in here and I will find a way to hit you!”

“Just don’t drop your big-ass belly on me,” he said, tonelessly. “That’s what’ll ruin my day.”

Damara’s belly inched slightly through Roughly over a hundred pounds of solid cinnamonblood gut was pushing through and the dark grey tinting into genuine shades of dark red where she was exerting herself, or even pulsing with the thick essence of raw magic currently fused into her physical body.

Aradia was floating in the air, for reasons she had declined to volunteer to anyone. She was watching Damara’s progress with great interest, and a lot of envy. “How’s it feel having all those ghosts inside you like that?” She asked, grinning a little too wide to be entirely approachable.

Damara grunted. She pushed forward with one leg, shoving herself with telekinetic might, so much that she managed to get a few feet of stomach through the wall. She shivered as her stomach now touched the cool floor, but the outslung mass of her apparently pregnant belly had a lot more to go. “You’ve asked me this before, Aradia! Kankri, I need you to push hard - now!”

“As you ask!” Kankri shoved against her back, pushing with all his surprisingly considerable might. They moved together as a single unit, sliding her at a reasonably consistent, but insufferably just steady pace.

Aradia watched them slide in. “Oh, hey, your boobs made it in now.”

“I noticed!” Damara retorted. Now that her stomach was about halfway through, her massive mammary mounds wobbled at a slight incline, the rise of her firm belly pushing between them. Combined with her disinterest in supportive undergarments and her fondness for loose fabric, her breasts sloped gently downwards.

And that, in turn, combined with her stomach being very bouncy and rippling at the slightest touch. The ground slapped up from below her, the doorframe pinched so hard her stomach wobbled even more fiercely from the force redirected throughout the whole thing, and it rose into her breasts, and they were almost constantly wobbling and shifting.

And very sensitive, as it transpired. Damara was having a hard time pretending to be stoic and contain the erogenous pleasure of so much movement, so she channeled it into sounding angry all the time.

“Push, now!” Damara ordered.

Kankri did so, wearing a cloak low over his head to cover his face and his extremely intense blush. There was just so much… Damara now, and everywhere his unrefined hands fell, it just sank in. He was having to be very careful where his hands went; her butt was so massive now that just putting his arm on her waist could risk an inappropriate patting, if he wasn’t careful.

(Granted, she didn’t actually seem to care, but he thought he ought to. It was gentlemanly.)

“Somewhere besides the small of my back,” Damara said tensely. Kankri was pushing, but it wasn’t going with the rest of her attempts to keep moving, and now she was being pushed upwards onto her own gut, her boobs rising up and pinched by the door overhead, and now they hung directly above her as her powers misfired, and lifted them upwards. “Move with me!”

Kankri obliged by ramming into her with his shoulder, making alarming noises when his hip slid between her robed butt.

“Close enough,” Damara said, both of them sliding through the door.

Over the noise of something that sounded distinctly like enough sloshing to contain a couple troll-sized communal pools, Damara and Kankri’s struggles to get her through continued. There was a crude kitchen set up in the room beyond; a table that was probably meant for many people but in practice worked fine for Sollux, Aradia, Kankri, a couple attendants, and Damara in all her vast scope. At the other side of the room, there were several makeshift stoves, attended by the frenetic figure of Kuprum and the more reserved movement of Folykl.

To be specific, Kuprum was doing all the work. Folykl sat back, periodically running like a quadruped (her massive butt stuck in the air like the tail of a beat, wobbling so much that it was amazing it didn’t affect her movement) to steal some food when Kuprum wasn’t looking, and sometimes when he was, and otherwise she sat back to do whatever errands her superiors demanded of her. Or dared her to do, as Aradia had spent the week discovering to her delight.

“Eat that bug, I dare you!” Aradia said, growing briefly bored with the sight of Damara’s growth hampering her daily life.

“Okay,” Folykl said. She pounced, and there was the distinctive noise of a very large bustline smacking into the ground. A small bug was caught between her cleavage, that Folykl swiftly extracted and promptly gulped down.

Aradia clapped. “What did I ever do without you!?”

Folykl tilted her head. “Be super bored, I guess.”

Sollux made a face. “That’s disgusting. ...Do it again.”

Folykl went to chase more bugs, pausing to glance adoringly at Damara’s… bigness, slowly making its way through the doorway. There was a look in her black eyes, light playing against the pitch-dark coloration from corner to corner, that suggested she dearly wanted something like that to herself. Or to lay in those boobs. Or both.

In the meantime, Sollux went to Kuprum. “So, some good news, bud.”

Kuprum saluted with one hand, and continued flipping a monstrously huge collection of pancakes, each with its own pan, all at the same time. “You’ve made a motion to fuse me and Folykl into a horrible monster to serve as a minion?”

Sollux paused. “You want that?”

“No sir! It sounds existentially terrifying, sir!”

“No, we absolutely are not doing that. Why are you so excited about it?”

“I’m just happy to be of service, sir!”

“We have GOT to get you a backbone.”

“Understood! Where do you want me to have it installed?”

Sollux groaned. “I’ve got the paperwork finished, so you and your little buddy there,” he indicated Folykl, currently scratching her hair with her hindfoot, as Aradia mimicked her in mid-air. “Are now officially employed as Damara’s attendants, given her…” he sought for proper words. “Condition.” He showed the paperwork to Kuprum, who being barely literate, stared at the legal fine print and complex wording with polite terror. “...That’s a good thing. Means you get paid and crap. And given that service for a noble gets attention from the magical orders, that’s practical a shoo-in for being accepted into the Captor universities of your choice.”

Kuprum nodded gratefully. “Thank you, sir! So very much, sir! What’s a university?”

Sollux paused. “What’s your level of schooling, again?”

“Is that something you eat? Is it poisoned? Should i be a food taster?”

“No, no. Guess we should, uh, find some schooling for you before we set all that up, too.”

“That’s good! I think?”

Sollux cuffed him on the back of the head, in a friendly way. “It is, yeah.”

Kuprum shrieked in delight. “My head has felt the impact of a noble! I may never wash it again!”

Aradia shouted, from above, “Wash your head as soon as you can, mister! That’s just nasty!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Kuprum said loyally, though with obvious disappointment.

“And go help Damara and Kankri!”

Folykl and Kuprum both saluted. Or at least, Kuprum did. Folykl, being rather newer at the whole concept, just smacked herself in the face. But at least it was respectful. They hurried over to Damara’s emerging body, like cleaner birds flocking around a whale trying to beach itself. (And hopefully grow legs or something, because you didn’t want whales actually beaching themselves.)

“Hey, what’s that there!?” Damara said sharply as she felt a telekinetic power grip the sides of her stomach and the bottom.

“Ha ha, wow, this is really heavy!” Kuprum said cheerfully from the other side, his magical power manifesting as telekinesis, and Damara’s stomach began to float under his power, and inch through as he pulled.

“Who’s there!?”

Folykl began to climb up the front of Damara’s stomach. “Oh my shit this is so damn squishy I love it.” Beneath her, Damara’s newfound power gave shape and substance to the spirits housed within her, and several of them moved against her, so that her skin surged with horns and handprints at Folykl’s passing. “That looks DISGUSTING, your booby-ness. I dig it.”

“What’s climbing on me!?” Damara said, genuinely alarmed.

“Just push please, your booby-ness!” Kuprum shouted from the outside, readying for a massive pull.

“Fine, whatever!” Damara said. “And stop calling me that! Kankri, push! On the count of one… two…”

She counted to three, and she, and Kankri, pushed with their respective capacity for might.

Kankri was very strong now. Kuprum pulled her, and Folykl jumped up and down with so much enthusiasm that it squashed her belly up and down, the rippling motion making her stomach slide through easier.

But Damara’s power echoed out, as a wave of force that blasted clear to the skies above; in its wake, ghosts and spirits that had been drawn to the reawakened power of the city took on a physical form for an alarming few seconds, and then more alien shapes appeared above: her power called to thoughts and memories, to stray ideas, to even the basic resonance left in the old stone and that growing anew as people accumulated new memories and life in the city, and she was so strong that even this little exertion of power gave all that form, for a few miraculous moments.

The sky above twisted with eldritch forms, which faded.

The exertion also shoved Damara and Kankri into the house, right on top of Kuprum and Folykl, which did not fade.

After the shaking stopped, Damara groaned. “Is anyone dead?” She said grumpily.

Kuprum and Folykl made noises beneath her, indicating they were okay.

“Fine. Good.” Damara leaned up, her stomach firmly propping her into the air by a good eight feet, at the very least. Her breasts flopped down, barely robed, nearly to the ground. This kind of dress might have been a very bad idea, given the weather, but the magical awakening of the city she had caused had also made the climate within the city significantly warmer, so she felt free to dress as she pleased.

She leaned up, squinting. It was far too early in the morning for all this, and she was sorely regretting ever leaving for a bit of managing the construction outside the city. “Kankri! Where are you!?”

“I promise you I did not mean to do this, I am not doing any inappropriate touching!” Kankri said desperately from behind her, and also atop her, his arms firmly plastered to his sides, but the rest of him sinking into her backside. His face was pressed firmly against the small of his back.

“Actually, that’s quite pleasant,” Damara replied, a sly tone in her words. “You may stay.”

“Damara, that’s indecent!”

Her breasts wiggled. Eventually, Folykl’s horns and then her face poked up between them, her compact body brimming with energies as she leeched off the ambient magical energies gushing off Damara. “Can I stay!?”

“...Sure. Why not.”

“You are gracious and crap, your booby-ness.”

“But not if you keep calling me that.”

Sollux watched the whole thing with a faint frown. “Will you move already!? You might have crushed your new attendant!”

Damara tilted her head. “My what now?”

Kuprum wiggled out, head eventually appearing from under her belly. “I have been crushed by the firm iron belly of authority!” He said, obscenely delighted. “It’s everything I ever wanted out of life! I LOVE this job!”

Damara blinked. “Oh.” She glanced back again. “Why do I need attendants?”

“You did just spend fifteen minutes wiggling your way through a door until they helped,” Aradia said delicately. “I’d say that’s why.”

“Ah.”

Damara rocked up, so Kuprum could extricate himself, and she allowed her new attendants to get down and push her belly, so she rocked back up to a standing position. And everywhere, she felt herself bouncing, and Kankri sliding (absolutely mortified, which was a plus) onto his own feet again.

She felt a keen sense of her own body, and how massive it was. The spirits within herself as well, feeding her power as she fed them back with a sort of mystical complexity that made them more active, more aware, thinking and feeling more. Perhaps soon, they would be able to move onto whatever awaited them, or for the ones that were just memories imprinted, to fade away or express a desire to be shaped into useful objects.

The idea of it, and feeling them inside her, making her so big (inconvenient as it might sometimes be) genuinely felt very good.

The power coursing through her, making her an equal to any country-killing weapon hoarded from the old days, though, was something she was actively trying not to think about.

But that would be a matter for another day.

#my writing #fics #commissions #twitchy!homestuck #twitchy!kankri #twitchy!damara #twitchy!aradia #twitchy!sollux #twitchy kinks: breeding

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dzamie-oc · 4 years ago

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Smaugust 06 - Magma

A human wants to accompany his dragon girlfriends on their magma-diving outings, but they don't think he's ready. Yet.

Lily glanced at the clock. "Oh, Verrea," the blue dragoness said, pointing at the hanging timepiece, "it's past two. We'd best get going if we want to return before sundown."

With mumbles of affirmation, her friend in green scales rose and stretched her wings. "C'mon, L, I usually get my trips in three hours."

"I suspect you wouldn't if I stopped letting you eat my rubies." She looked to their other partner, a human named Ben, and gave a sheepish smile full of sharp teeth. "Sorry, forgot to tell you. We should be back for dinner, though."

Ben looked up from his game of virtual alchemy to give the dragons a thumbs-up. "Sure thing, you two. Where are you girls headed?"

"Volcano," Verrea replied casually, "looking for gems. They grow fastest at the bottom."

The blue dragon rolled her golden eyes and huffed, a wisp of smoke trailing from her nostrils. Ben watched it rise and dissipate, hoping that it wouldn't set off the smoke alarm - fortunately, it didn't. "It's not a volcano!" she admonished, "Mount Ternen is a mountain with a volcanic flow inside it."

"Magma stream."

"Lava," Lily corrected.

"It's magma if you go down far enough," Verrea shot back with a grin and a playful flick of her bladed tail. This earned her a forked tongue being poked out at her, to which she retaliated by tapping her muzzle against Lily's.

"Oh, that sounds cool," Ben remarked ("more like hot," said Verrea), "can I come with?"

The dragonesses both shook their heads. "Sorry, Ben, far too dangerous. More a dragon thing, anyway."

"Eh, alright. Have fun you two." He waved at them, letting his gaze linger as the green dragon teased him with a flick of her tail, then tried to get back to his game. But no matter what, he kept thinking about his friends swimming through molten rock. So he gave in and searched for information on Mount Ternan, looking at maps and photos. Sure enough, the maps he found all had a section labeled something along the lines of "closed to tourists," "staff/experienced cave delvers only," or, frankly enough, "lava past here." He printed out one of the more detailed maps of the area and checked for any tours of the caverns... so that, of course, he could avoid them.

Phase one complete.

---

The next day, he was looking at the map over breakfast when Verrea walked up behind him and laid her chin over his shoulder. "Whatcha got there, Ben?" she asked, her breath smelling of bacon and... well, mostly more bacon.

He reached his arm up to pat her head. "Oh, you girls got me thinking about that mountain. I don't think I've been there, and it's only half an hour drive or so, so I figure I would go and walk around. Look at the stalactites, stalagmites, and stuff."

"Hey, that's cool. It's pretty pretty in there, at least for dragons. Dunno what it's like with human vision, of course." The dragoness grinned, Ben catching the glint of her fangs in the corner of his eye, and continued, "hey, if you want something extra to do there, see if you can figure out which stalagmite I use to get off when I visit?"

"Wh-what?"

"She's messing with you," Lily chimed in from across the table. She sent the last of the sausages on her plate to their demise before carefully picking up the plate in her mouth and carrying it to the sink. "And even if she wasn't, she's hopefully not stupid enough to do it anywhere a tour could see her."

Verrea departed from Ben's shoulder to brush her wing against Lily. "So far as you know. The imminent danger of being found out is part of the fun!" she purred, before winking at them, "but no, I didn't. Dirty rocks where who knows how many other dragons and humans could further mess with it? I treat my body well; give me a nice tongue or dick any day of the week. Well, maybe not today, since you're doing stuff. Though, Lily..."

"I JUST ate," the blue dragoness replied. Ben excused himself from the table to get ready and not let on how much Verrea's casual teasing had affected him. A few minutes later, the scaly pair waved goodbye to him as Lily settled down in front of the television, controller in paw, and Verrea sprawled over the couch.

---

"...and as we come down here, you'll see a really cool formation. Us tour guides, we call it the snowman, on account of, well, it looks like a snowman. There it is. See the body, and the head?..." The tour guide's voice faded out as the last of the group walked out of sight around a column. Ben looked around him. Nobody in sight. Moving quickly, he stepped over the chain rope marking the path, and strode swiftly into the dark tunnel beyond. He kept careful track of how many steps he was taking, marking them down on a makeshift map of the... less than publicly available section of the caverns. A wide flashlight beam kept him from stumbling over rough parts of the floor or falling into parts where the floor simply stopped existing as much.

As he pressed on, further into the dark cave, he realized the temperature was rather quickly climbing. What began as rather cool, somewhat stale air had soon become midsummer temperatures, with no sign of stopping. Before long, he was forced to turn back before he dehydrated from sweating. His map proved quite excellent for his purposes, and he was soon able to see the lit part of the caverns. He shut off his flashlight, and waited until he was sure no other tour groups or wayward tourists were around before scurrying back to safety. As he made his way back to the mouth of the tunnel, two conflicting emotions dominated: he could probably do it with some help, and how could he be so dumb as to forget that magma was over 500 degrees Celsius. Well, either way...

Phase two located.

---

Ben lay amidst a tangle of limbs and scales. Lily was purring hardest, Verrea having elected to simply pass out. "Alright, I'll give you that," the blue dragoness said, "that crystal you got is more than a little overkill, but powers excellent heat resistance potions. Good luck convincing Verrea to lay with you without expressing herself in fire again." She nuzzled the human. "Not that I'll be all that much easier, of course."

The human stroked her neck, pressing his fingers in just the right way to get her to coo and nuzzle in against him. "I'm just glad it worked so well. You'd think she'd try the effect out on my hand or something, first, not my dick. And you're not so innocent there, either, miss 'oh good you can handle my deep internal temperature.'"

Lily flopped her head over and gave him the most innocent stare she could muster. "What? You knew I like my throat played with. Just because she's more open about it doesn't mean I can't be a weird dragon with weird dragon kinks."

"Still. My entire arm? I was half-worried you were going to see if you could deepthroat the rest of me, too." He booped her snout; she poked out her forked tongue.

"Aww, you think I'd be able to do that?"

"Yes."

She nuzzled her snout into his neck and flicked her tongue at the sensitive spots. "Good boy~"

They lay in silence for a few minutes before Lily tapped her paw on him. "By the way, magma is roughly twice as dense as honey, and therefore much, much slower to move in than water, so we have to manage our air well when we dive. Or use magic."

Ben felt his heart rate jump. "Uh... why do you mention that, Lily?"

She gently nipped at his neck, teasing him with sharp fangs that never broke skin. "Call it draconic intuition. And, I'm not sure if you picked up on this, but I do like having you alive rather than paying for the mistakes of a lack of research."

"Well... thanks, then. I'll take those into account."

Lily resumed purring, her legs and Verrea's holding him securely between and under them. "Very good boy."

---

A few days later, Ben was watching some speedruns on their TV screen with a blue, scaly pillow and a green, scaly blanket. He could feel Lily's muscles tense under his head as the race they were spectating entered the last level with barely two seconds difference between first and last place. And while he wasn't looking at their girlfriend, he figured she was more watching the two of them rather than the screen.

"Oh, wow, all of them got first try on that wallclip," he remarked. A quick glance to Verrea confirmed that Lily had started tapping her tail rapidly against the green dragon.

"I think upper-right got the best of that speed rule. Gap's closing," Lily said as the goal drew into sight.

Scant seconds later, the results were in. Ben's head sank into Lily's side as she relaxed and exhaled.

"Hey, speaking of time," Verrea spoke up, "isn't two the time you were shooting for, L?" And just like that, a bit of tension was there again. Ben and Verrea got up to let the blue dragoness out, and the green soon joined her.

"Mount Ternen again?" Ben asked, getting nods in response, "Can I come along this time? I finally got all the stuff needed to join you two."

Lily shook her head. "Sorry, Ben. We'd love to take you along, but still not yet."

Ben quirked an eyebrow at her. "Still? What am I missing?"

"It's... hard to say, really," Verrea chipped in, "it's like a thing about dragon stuff. Physical and mental, and you don't have it. But hey, you're doing better. And if nothing else, you got us some fun toys for the bedroom."

A blue muzzle tapped a green one. "I love you, Verrea, but do you ever think about anything else?"

"Of course I do! You think I'm that one-track-mind?" she scoffed, "there's so many other places I can fuck you two. Kitchen, living room, a few thousand feet up..."

"I... may have to take you up on that last one, if we can figure out a harness..." Ben said, successfully distracted.

"Mm. Keep it in mind, cutie! Back for dinner!" Verrea waved goodbye with her tail as the two dragonesses left.

---

"Hey, Verrea. It's been a couple weeks. Wanna head out?"

"Sure, I'm running low on smoky quartzes."

Ben got up and grabbed the magical tools he'd acquired about three weeks prior, before they'd previously refused him. Lily watched him.

"Ben-"

"I'm coming." he stated. The two dragons looked at each other for a second, then smiled.

"You sure are. Riding or driving?" Lily asked, ignoring a "phrasing" from Verrea.

"Driving." Ben looked at them. "Was that really all?"

Verrea grinned. "Dragon thing needs dragon mind. Welcome aboard, honorary dragon."

#dragon #smaugust #smaugust 2020 #writing #writers on tumblr #text

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pink-wisp · 5 years ago

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Featuring Penny being an innocent robot and observing people, trying to understand what emotions and relationships are. For those that just want the rarepair Penny/Winter I’ll put it under the cut.

Can be read standalone. Summery of last chapter: Penny snuck out to met her faux teammates. ‘Aro’ Glade is one of them and the only friendly one. Hard of hearing, goat faunus, has prosthetic horns. She’s lil quirky like Entrapta.

Successful interpersonal action: Three people.

They spent half the day drilling her backstory. Penny was adopted from one of Dr. Pietro’s clients who lived in Atlas. They were board members of the Schnee Dust Company who… disappeared on a business trip to Vacuo. Dr. Pietro adopted Penny and changed her last name to hide her from White Fang extremist.

The young women didn’t like it. It was… common and therefor believable. But it was sad. It placed blame on the innocent- but they weren’t really innocent and-

“Darling? Something is bothering you again.” Dr. Pietro gently prodded. Penny was reluctant at first. It wasn't a problem that could be solved. The cover story solved many issues but…

The more she thought about it the more her aura stirred and amplified her power unit to overwhelming capacity. "It's about lying," Penny blurted out. She squeezed her hands, almost tight enough to damage the artificial skin. She didn't know if admitting it stressed her out more or relieved the internal conflict. "It doesn't feel right."

"That's because you’re a good person." Dr. Pietro said with a smile. His hands covered her and squeezed. The pressure reaffirmed his presence and was comforting. "How about you go for a walk, outside."

"… Outside?” Penny repeated. She wouldn’t consider her trip to Aro’s apartment outside. She went from inside the facility to inside a transport, then inside a building. "Around Atlas?"

"We're still setting up your official documents but now probably the best time to explore as… as a normal girl, not a huntress-in-training or savior of the world," Dr. Pietro said. He was smiling, but like Aro last night it wasn't a real smile. His tone was soft, possibly sad? "The air might do you good."

"But I am not impacted by air quality."

Dr. Pietro chuckled, a hand cupped her cheek for a moment. "My dear girl, it's not just about taking care of your body. But also here," He tapped Penny's nose. She gasped and giggled. Her nose was various types of silicone and sensors, very sensitive ones apparently. "Go on, you're also supposed to learn, and you can only do that outside." Penny still squeezed her hands. And her father hummed in thought. "Oh I know, this would be the perfect time for you to meet Ms. Glade!"

"Oh! Um…" Penny froze a little, panic written over her face. Luckily her father turned around, chair walking to another workbench. Xanthic had to sneak her out, so it is highly probable meeting her soon to be teammates was supposed to be a secret. That would explain the private communications network, or maybe Xanthic was just trouble. So many thoughts fired through her processers jumped a little when she found a box containing a pair golden horns in her hands.

"These are Ms. Glade's new horns! I've made some modifications after all that testing we did with your artificial skin. She lost most of her hearing years ago and uses those horns to detect wavelengths as well as aura." Penny remembered the photo Xanthic altered. The Faunus ears on the sides of Aro's head must be the original traits she was born with, hopefully still flesh and blood. "Ms. Glade should be at Atlas Academy, helping with the weapons department."

"Understood," Penny said with a smile. She closed the package and left for the Academy.

Despite Dr. Pietro's encouraging words it was still difficult to actually leave the facility. The process involved using her scroll to open the door and moving her legs but they suddenly felt heavy. That instinct that caused her to throw herself into cover during her last trial suddenly pulling at the wires in her chest.

“I’ll be fine…” Penny whispered to herself. She was in a room with a hacker and a mechanic, two people that could directly manipulate her software and hardware and turned out fine.

The first few steps were terrifying. She made a note to research this strange feeling of being to protective of herself when logically there was no reason to be. She felt exposed, as if the artificial skin was peeled back and her metal chassis was open.

Penny yelped, holding the box to her chest when a Faunus on skates zipped by, a rainbow trail following her. Then she looked over her shoulder again, turn around and did one ring around Penny. In turn Penny notice the Atlas Academy uniform. The Faunus grinned and gave a thumbs up as she skated away, "Brothers! You are adorable! Cute dress too."

"Thank… Thank you! Your compliment is much appreciated!" Penny yelled back, hoping the pink Faunus could hear her.

After that Penny was able to relax. She may not had faith in herself because of her lack of experience, so instead she trusted her father and Ironwood's judgement. They put her through those trials for a reason and it was to make sure she could pass in public.

With some confidence restored she continued to the Academy. She allowed herself to wander from the most efficient path. Unlike Mantle, Atlas was a polished city. Buildings over twice as big as those on the ground, and hard-light displays everywhere. All sorts of amazing technologies walked the streets, from pets with prosthetic limbs to robots trimmed with gold and bright lights like Xanthic’s butler.

As she got closer to the school the number of weaponshops, Schnee Dust Company distributors, and restaurants increased. Nearly everyone around her wore an Atlas student or military uniform. A few gave her a glance but never lingered long enough to make Penny feel uncomfortable.

That changed once she entered the Academy.

The cool and steady tone of Special Operative Winter Schnee called out to her. “Ma’am, all non-personal are required to state their business at the guest office and receive a pass.” She said. Unlike the recordings Penny saw her in she was dressed in a civilian suit, almost business but just high Atleasian fashion. “And unmarked packages are to be inspected. This is partially a military facility after all.”

“Oh um…” Penny held the box to her chest. These were sensitive instruments. The horns connect directly to Aro’s brain and if the inspectors were to pry it open and damage it, it could cause neurological harm. “This is a delivery from Dr. Piertro to Aro.”

Flicker of instant recognition passed over Winter's face. Then consideration. Xanthic did say Aro's reputation preceded her, but would Ironwood's second in command really make an exception for the Faunus?

“Aro… You’re friends with Ms. Glade?” Winter asked leveled tone somehow flattening even more. She seemed resigned. An aggressive huff escaped her lips, “Of course she’d… Ugh. I will accompany you. State your name, civilian.”

“Penny, ma’am!” She answered clicking her heels to attention. Winter didn’t seem satisfied, instead waiting a moment then just walking into the Academy. Penny half jogged to catch up.

“Are you and Ms. Glade close?”

“Oh, perhaps? I do not know how to gauge relationship depth.”

“An accurate statement with that women,” Winter said. Then was silent for a few minutes. Penny didn’t encourage a conversation, she was too busy looking at the Academy. The hallways were so tall the new Paladins could fit but it wasn't wide enough for the mech to walk through. Winter noticed, “Would you like a tour?”

“That would be lovely!” Penny said with a large smile. She would be attending this school soon and experiencing it would provide better information than just maps and recordings. “I would like to examine the hard-light technology in detail, the sustainability is quite efficient!”

“It better be, for something so minuscule and unnecessary.” Winter said with a scoff. “Such dust is better in practical applications.”

“Hmm… I don’t think that’s true.” Penny gently argued. Winter looked over her shoulder. Penny winced, expecting a glare like Xanthic but Winter merely raised a brow. The specialist stayed silent so Penny continued. “These everyday applications helps further our understanding of hard-light dust. Only those very skilled with aura can use create something that last more than a few hits.” Penny noted Aro's hard-light blades didn't break or flicker once.

“That is a fair point.”

“Though installing 20 hard-light lamps within a single hallway is excessive.” Penny finished. At that Winter gave a hum of approval. Penny couldn’t see it and Winter’s tone was still rather flat but some part of her detected a smile.

Conversation lulled into hard-light application and the use of it in Argus. They both agreed that the barrier was brilliant but implementation needed much work. Winter thought sturdy walls like the one around Mantel with hard-light gates was the solution, though she conceded the opinion when Penny brought up ecological damage.

Eventually the hallway began to change. They widened so even a Spider Droid could walk down the halls. Classrooms were no longer around but instead numbered and heavily armored doors lined the walls.

“This is the combat section of the Academy,” Winter said, “We are approaching the workshop. It is open during training hours for student use, smiths such as Ms. Glade volunteer from time to time.” Winter pressed her scroll to a lock and the thick doors opened.

The workshop was huge, nearly as big as a single floor of Aro’s apartment. There were several rows of benches, some taken by students and three being used by Aro and her companion. Weapons in various states were scattered around them, dust ammunition and crystals on another workbench. Aro and her friend seemed to be using the third as a conversation prop, the former leaning against it while the latter sat on it.

Aro looked like a proper mechanic, jumpsuit in oil and grime. There was a little on her face until her friend pointed it out. Then it became a lot as Aro swiped at it with dirty hands. Penny quietly giggled. It reminded her of her father and brought a sense of comfort and familiarity. Apparently they pair was too focused on their own conversation to detect Penny and Winter, even as they advanced closer.

Aro rolled her glowing blue eyes. “Marigold. My answer is no.” Her words were stern even if her smile was playful.

“Me and Fiona will step in if anything goes wrong!” Marigold said. Blue hair, gold eyes. She looked familiar but immediate facial scans didn't recognize her. It brought up a Huntress Marigold several times but it didn’t match. Penny overwrote the current scan as ??? 'Aro's friend' Marigold. “I’m telling you, you have a knack for this kind of stuff.” She continued, picking up a rag and grabbing Aro, "Stop you're making it worse. Don’t move."

Aro made a displeased noise. A growl or perhaps a whine? She did comply and stayed still while Marigold cleaned her face. “It’s called Focus-“

“It’s called illegal and reckless.” Winter barked, voice nearly echoing the room. Aro let out a small scream, jumping almost a foot into the air while her friend flinched and slid off the workbench. They both slowly turned to the new pair. "Marigold."

The Huntress answered back in a tone just as cold, "Schnee-"

"Penny!" Aro yelled. She vaulted over the table and crouched. The purple glow in her prosthetic legs changed to a fiery orange. Combustion dust cartridge locked in.

"W-Wait!" Penny gasped holding the box above her, "These are sensitive equipment!" Just as the words left her mouth an explosion of purple and orange pushed Aro towards Penny. Winter had just enough time to take the box as the dense metal woman was lifted off the ground.

Penny squeezed Aro's shoulders, trying not to follow her programming. Processors immediately list several maneuvers to escape, everything was saying this was an attack. But it couldn't have been because Aro was laughing. Aro wasn't dangerous, she was a kind civilian but that information wasn't registering to herself defense protocols. Something else was off- her gyrostabilizer couldn't detect the ground.

"I am unequipped for zero gravity! Down please!" Penny squeaked. Aro sneered the slow levitating twirl slowly changed back to a stable vertical. Before Aro turned off the gravity dust, she hoisted Penny onto her shoulder. Her sensors couldn't process what was happening, visual data conflicted with her sense of gravity, logically Aro shouldn't be able to lift Penny with ease. "Wai- Wait!"

"Trust exercise!" Aro said with a grin and hearty laugh. Penny was tense, waiting for her density to pull them both to the ground. After several solid steps on metal tiles, it didn't happen. "See! Ease the grip, Penn."

"Oh! Of… of course. I'm sorry." She said quickly letting go. She was thankful for the durable muscle there. If it was a normal civilian like Ciel there would be a bruise. Penny yelped as the walk turned into a light jog, hand holding down her dress with a tight grip. It was impossible for her to feel sick but her sensors was still scrambled after her first zero-gravity experience. It was a highly unpleasant sensation Penny did not want to experience again.

"Penny! This May Marigold, my favorite Huntress and friend."

May chuckled a little and patted Aro's head. Her father did it too, earlier. Penny noted it down as an affectionate gesture. "Sorry about this one. Aro gets a little too hyper at times. A pleasure to meet you." She finished ruffling Aro's hair to hold a hand out to the young women.

"It's a pleasure to meet you too, May Marigold," Penny said shaking her hand, quickly updating the information in her recognition software. She was a little surprised at how hard May squeezed and also updated her pressure output for next time.

"We have come with a delivery from Dr. Polendina," Winter announced set the box on the table.

Aro set Penny to sit on the workbench but while she was up there she noticed glowing purple circuits on the horns, as well as a few cracks and other signs of wear. If these horns were the basis for Penny's artifical skin it would explain all the complications. It was made for neurological input, human input… Penny willed her processors to focus on the conversation around her. Instead of opening the box Aro looked at May who couldn't hold in a snort and brief laughter.

"You came because you, and you," May glared at Aro who rolled her eyes. "Don't understand what a day off mean."

"I understand it quite well. What I don't understand is why I need it."

"I agree with the Schnee," Aro said with a shrug. "I'm still good! I don't need a break."

"You've been working for nearly ten hours straight! When was the last time you ate?" May asked. Aro grinned. The mechanic pulled a candy bar from her pocket and slowly unwrapped it. Her smile grew, glowing blue eyes never leaving May's glaring gold ones even as May's expression grew frustrated.

Penny tilted her head and watched them. From her experience with Xanthic and Ciel a few nights ago, frustration was a negative emotion, something to avoid. Between May and Aro it felt… teasing? Penny looked at Winter to confirm her suspicions. The women looked… indifferent. Humans express themselves quite differently and she hasn't been exposed to Winter's behavior to decipher it. Still Penny was confident that the lack of urgency was amusement. In Winter-language.

At the last second May snatched the candy away. "Alright you assholes, we're going to dinner." She declared, ordering the General's second-in-command. Winter gave a tired roll of her eyes while Aro shrugged.

"Nothing Minstral, I'm still working through the leftovers from a few nights ago. May if you would kindly…" Aro pulled her hair into a ponytail and turned the back of her head to the huntress. Penny leaned back to watch May's fingers trail over circuit on the back of Aro's skull before pushing a button. The gold horns shut down, color fading to a black glossy material and the glowing purple disappearing. Setting the fashionable aids aside, Penny saw a glimpse of complex wiring. The Faunus ears had no sign of cybernetics but they looked damaged.

"I will have to decline," Winter quickly said as Aro opened the box and inspected her new horns. Aids, Penny reminded herself. Her father said she lost most of her hearing in the accident that took her legs but Penny did not know the extent of the damage. "I already have prior arrangements to show Penny around Atlas Academy."

"You just can't stay away from work can you?" May sighed.

Apparently the damage was enough that Aro could not understand a conversation in close proximity at average volume. Penny looked at the two huntresses a little confused. Was it not considered rude to have a conversation that left one party unable to communicate? Why would they not want Aro's input?

"Do you really want me to interrupt your date?" Winter asked. Her tone was flat, mostly flat. The smile was hard to detect if without understanding micro expressions.

May scoffed, a blush feint on her cheeks. Her voice was noticeably softer than Winter's. Soft tones were personal but this situation was different. The word secret popped into Penny's head but why wouldn't they want Aro to know? "We aren't… I hadn't-" A loud click interrupted them and they all looked at Aro who winced, a new aid plugged into her neural input.

It signaled an end to the interesting conversation, much to Penny's disappointment. They displayed so many emotions and behaviors she never saw from her father or the General. May and Winter's body language quickly shifted back to normal, or as Penny saw it as, lightly guarded. She couldn't define the conversation as anything but teasing. Intimate was close but too personal. Friendly? Were they friends?

"Argh, ouch," Aro held the second horn to the port and twisted it in. Another click and almost a whine. The pain was brief and she turned back to the group. "Sorry about that. What were you saying Schnee?"

"Penny agreed to a small tour of the Academy but please have a lovely… " Winter said. There was definitely a small change in inflection, very subtle. The specialist paused looking at May who tried not to finch under those blue eyes. What did that mean? Penny hungrily observed all these small interactions. It was a puzzle she was slowly solving and still finding pieces too. Winter's eyes then cut back to Aro with a hard look, "Uneventful dinner."

May scowled, crossing her arms. She was about to say something but Aro literally jumped between them, "Then how about we do something eventful?" She asked with a grin. The ears on her side of her head poked out of her hair, wiggling up and down as she nearly bounced in spot. Penny wanted to touch it. "The Military Robotics Event."

"Aren't you banned?" May quickly asked.

"From viewing unattended! But I'll have two of Atlas' best huntresses accompanying me! And honestly if you two can't keep me out of trouble, Goddess save the Brothers."

May and Winter looked at each other both displeased and unyielding to Aro's pout until Penny spoke up. Aro was her soon to teammate, Penny could inspect the Faunus ears later, but this event sounded temporary, "I think attending the Military Show with friends would make for a most wonderful and eventful evening!"

"Yeah!" Aro slid by Penny's side, ears wiggling up and down in excitement. This time Penny found her hands trying to touch them but Winter calmly pushed her hands down. In her excitement, Aro was oblivious to the attempt. This must be what May meant when she said too hyper. "Please May! I won't touch the bots this time!"

May practically growled under her breath. Her face was a little red again. Penny knew blood rushes to the head when frustrated or flustered, but she did not understand enough about relationships to know which it was. Overall they seemed to be on positive terms so she hoped May was flustered- May suddenly grabbed onto Aro's ears and pulled them a little, making the Faunus squirm. It confirmed that they were still flesh and blood, but also resulted in an inconclusive assessment of May's emotion. Perhaps the flush was due to frustration? Both?

"You better. Or I'll sick Fiona on you."

"Yes, ma'am!" Aro said. As soon as May let go of her ears, Aro tried running but May quickly grabbed the back of her neck and picked her up. "Why- Seriously how are you all so strong?!"

"It’s almost as if you have gravity dust all over you," May drawled with a new tone Penny hadn’t heard before. Her systems registered it as sarcasm, emphasized by May rolling her eyes. "I'll help Aro clean up. Meet you at the front, Schnee?"

"An acceptable plan." Winter said, hands in their default position behind her back. She looked at Aro, the arms of her jumpsuit tied around her waist, sweat, grime and oil smeared across well-defined muscle or fat. Winter gave the first true expression Penny saw, a very tiny and sly smirk. "Good luck," She mouthed so Aro wouldn't hear.

This time May did blush- due to being flustered, Penny finally decided- and she only acknowledged Winter's teasing with a middle finger behind her back. Out of sight from Aro, Penny observed but why? At the entrance to the workshop the group split into their respective pair. Penny could hear Aro’s playful struggle and banter a few halls down. She wasn’t sure how sensitive those new horns are so Penny waited a few minutes more until talking.

"Schnee, ma'am-"

"I suppose since I am off duty," The Specialist said the last words with dread and more emotion than Penny had seen yet. "Winter will suffice."

"Winter…" Penny said slowly. She smiled and followed the huntress out of the Academy, "Are you and Marigold close?"

Winter's long strides seemed to falter, slow even. "In a way, perhaps. The Schnees and Marigolds are on good social terms and it's not often one from Atlas’ Elite families peruse a hazardous lifestyle."

Penny frowned. "I don't understand. Your similarities are enough to be friends?" If it was that easy wouldn't Ciel and Xanthic like each other? They were both serious.

"If only," Winter sighed. She finally slowed down and matched Penny's strides to look at the young women she was conversing with. Penny smiled up at her, showing appreciation for the gesture. She noted the Huntress' silence stretch on a little too long, eyes a little studious. Did Penny do something wrong? "The situation with me and Marigold is similar to you and Aro. Not many people understand us, so we cherish the ones that do. Even if there are differences."

"Interesting…"

Successful interpersonal action: Five people.

#penny polendina #winter schnee #May Marigold #rwby #penny x winter #winter x penny #pfenning #toy soldiers #wispywrites #cutting strings

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fascinatedhelix · 6 years ago

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A shitload of Deltarune headcanons below the cut:

Hometown

Kris

Has selective mutism, but can really talk if you get them going.

Is skilled in many musical pursuits, including singing, but doesn’t like having to face the audience in order to perform, so they prefer the piano.

Might have something along the lines of bipolar disorder, but where that starts and the frequent possessions by foreign entities ends is a mystery. Adverse reactions to medicine prevent them from going the medical route of treatment.

Obtained the birdcage from the attic where either the previous homeowner or Toriel left it after having a pet bird.

Was adopted as a baby.

Highschool age but probably not a Senior or Freshman.

More of a battle strategist and puzzle solver than a leader, but still a valued member of the team regardless.

Susie

Has been an outcast from a young age.

Wore that funny ponytail from the concept art as a kid, as well as a bow. Probably dressed much more feminine back then.

Probably either poor or subject to subpar parenting, either neglect or hovering. Maybe something like Lancer’s situation where her family isn’t at rock bottom, but they don’t care enough to provide for her as much as they can.

Has some degree of pica, but has a stomach strong enough to not die from it.

Doesn’t like quiet people because one of her neglectful parents is like that.

Would probably eat cigarettes instead of smoke them.

If she had been introduced to Kris while they were pranking someone, they might have sparked a friendship as the school troublemakers.

The Town

Monster religion isn’t Christianity. There’s no cross, and there’s a pointed emphasis on worshipping an Angel as opposed to the son of God, so Jesus either isn’t in their mythos at all or is not considered as important a figure. One part of their religion is the reduced or nonexistent consumption of alcohol.

There was no full-scale war between humans and monsters, but there was enough conflict to designate territories where one is the vast majority over the other. Gerson’s writings may have been based on the tensions of this time period.

The school used to be a religious boarding school but was secularized sometime before the events of the game.

The general public isn’t 100% sure what is up with Kris. Though they’re a bit of a local celebrity, nobody’s really sure why Kris acts the way they do. Media doesn’t depict humans as being so taciturn or erratic, so they honestly don’t know what to make of them.

Darkworld

Darkeners

In nature, darkeners are not monsters, but rather another classification of magical being that is a little more physical in makeup. If a monster dies, they turn into dust, but if a darkener dies, they might leave a shriveled corpse or a pile of sludge.

Darkeners tend to be changeable based on the amount of light in the environment; too much light makes them antsy and irritable, while little to no light makes them relaxed and confident. Light and dark levels affect their power, so of course, it’d affect their moods too.

The Board used to be its own sovereign nation, but it was either conquered by the Card Kingdom or merged by way of royal marriage.

Darkeners can reduce themselves into cards or toys if too badly damaged, or to play dead if threatened.

Lancer

Middle school age. Probably knows where babies come from but he isn’t at the point where he finds it anything but gross (prepubescent).

More educated than he looks, but not in anything especially important, just stuff that looks good on a king.

Will eventually grow to be as big as his father, but he probably won’t develop his temperament.

He inherits his goofy personality from his mom, even though she died/disappeared when he was very little.

He’s got some dog-like traits, but not nearly as much as the dog monsters from Snowdin. It’s a contributor to his hole-digging habit.

He’ll probably have some initial trouble speaking when he grows his big boy teeth (fangs like his dad’s).

His goofy demeanor will cool down when he gets older so he might come to resemble Asgore in terms of personality when he gets to that point, though perhaps less oblivious to others.

The Kings

The King of Spades’ given name is Pike. He doesn’t like it because it sounds dog-like and makes him sound simple-minded, so it's using is only reserved for those extremely close to him (that is, his wife, at least before she left the picture, and maybe the other kings).

The other kings are either Spades’ cousins, his brothers, or members of three other royal houses. Either way, the lot of them have known each other for a very long time.

Clover is the Princess/Jack of Clubs, though she isn’t in the habit of acting like it, hence why she’s still running free despite being in competition for the throne, technically. Too busy arguing with herself.

The kings all had different reactions when the princess and later prince were born. Clubs was experiencing a lot of emotions when Clover was born, with pride and protectiveness lording over all the others. Diamonds thought the kids were cute as babies but he didn’t want them to puke on him so he kept his distance. Hearts loved the babies to the point he acted kind of like a second mom.

The King of Diamonds is a rather apathetic guy who just wants to do his job and get paid at the end of the day. He, like the Rudinns, has something of a weird dragon-like instinct to hoard shiny stuff, so he likes to have his things bejeweled to hell and back.

The King of Hearts is a lot like the Hathys in that he’s kind of a lovebug. He’s a sappy guy who probably reads romance novels, good and bad, out the wazoo and is probably the biggest consumer of romcoms this side of the Darkworld. Finds the art of courtship to be the purest of art forms, even though he’s single.

The King of Clubs has as many personalities as he has heads, and they all have their own names, but the consensuses he comes to are usually really sound and thought through, so he makes for an effective though slow king. He was perhaps the closest to Spades out of the lot of them, being black suits and all, but ultimately this helped none during Spades’ takeover. He’s kind of like a weird lion hydra.

The King of Spades was, at one point, a rather quiet guy himself. He preferred to work in the shadows and keep to himself, and to his credit, this worked well for him, though he tended to feel forgotten and useless at times. The Knight came after him because he was a relatively insecure soul and more prone to holding grudges, which gave the Knight something to latch onto and blow out of proportion.

Rouxls Kaard

He’s made of silly putty. Though most headcanons of him make it so he melts when stressed, I think he only gets all liquidy when he’s relaxed. He probably sleeps in a bathtub.

He consciously has to keep up that eloquent facade, because he thought it was cool at one point, but he’s done it so much it’s become a force of habit and now he can’t not do it.

I like to imagine he’s bisexual, though he’s probably too preoccupied with trying to keep himself alive than pursuing love. If he did return anyone’s affections, he’d probably be very hush-hush about it at first because of his concerns with Spades.

He probably has slurped worms from a soup bowl like he was slurping up ramen before.

He literally can’t stop smiling. Has anyone else seriously not noticed how his smile never wanes when he gets mad or scared? It actually gets wider, you can only see how he feels through his eyes and tone. Not sure if this is how his face is structured or what.

I like the idea of him having some degree of reality-warping powers as the rules card, but that’d require his opponent to be playing his game. So, the only instance in which he could do that is if someone accepted a proper challenge from him. Puzzles are not his forte at all, and it’s implied he’s incompetent at battle too, so what is his game, then?

#deltarune #headcanons #dr kris #dr susie #dr lancer #the spades king #the king of spades #rouxls kaard

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persephonelovesbts · 6 years ago

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The Line of Kim Chapter 33

Warnings: LOOOOONG, emotional roller coaster, SMUT! (not giving specifics because i dont want to ruin the fun), mild violence?, blood,

Master List

A03 Link

Blood Moon

You all went back home together. A month passes and it’s hard to explain how happy you were in that month. Your family was back together. You didn’t think that the mere presence of Tae would make everything so much better, but it did. Everyone was so much happier with their alpha being home and happy. It must be a shifter thing, they need their alpha to feel whole and you had been with them long enough that you experienced the same thing.

Jimin and Jungkook were sent to a meeting with some buyers. Tae stayed home with you. You had been on edge lately, so you decided to go to the tree. It was strange to be on edge when everything was better. Something was going to happen, and you knew that. You didn’t know what was going to happen, but you were hoping it wasn’t anything bad. The trees showed you blood, pain, heartache, and sadness. Something bad was going to happen soon.

The sound of your phone ringing broke you out of your meditation. Jimin was calling. “Hello, my love.” You say cheerily.

“Hello, yeo-bo.” You can hear the smile in his voice but can feel his worry. He called you because he felt you. “How are you tonight?”

“I’m good.” That wasn’t very true, and he knew that. “I’ve been at the tree.”

“Any revelations?” He sounds hesitant, he knows how you were feeling.

You swallow, “Just a lot of blood and sadness.” You frown. Jimin sighs, “On the bright side, the moon is beautiful tonight.”

“Really?” You can hear the smile in his voice.

“Yeah, it’s a blood moon tonight.” Jimin is quiet for an extended amount of time, “Jimin?”

“YN, go inside and stay away from Taehyung.” He panics.

“What? Why?” You start toward the house.

“Because it’s a blood moon. Shit, how could we forget? Idiots.” He sounds like he’s running.

“Jimin what’s going on?”

“The Kim’s lose their shit on blood moons!” He shouts.

You hear leaves rustling, you turn, and freeze when you see Tae with glowing red eyes. “Hello, babygirl.”

“Shit,” Jimin mutters. “Get away from him, YN.”

“Is that Jimin?” Tae asks all you can do is nod. He reaches out his hand to take the phone, “Don’t worry Jimin, I won’t hurt her…” He smirks suggestively, “At least not in a way she doesn’t like.” He says into the phone then hangs it up. He stares at you for a moment.

“You okay, Tae?” You try to hide the fear in your voice. You know you could probably get away, but you were too scared to move. His eyes were terrifying, and he was radiating alpha dominance. You’ve never seen his eyes this color, it has to be from the blood moon.

He smirks, “I’m just fine, babygirl.” You knew what that pet name insinuated.

“Jimin is worried about you. He said you lose their shit during blood moons.” You inform cautiously.

“I can control myself.” He states calmly, then reaches out his hand to you. “Come.” You stay where you are. “Come.” His voice deepens, and you’re compelled to listen. You take his hand and follow him. It was his alpha voice. Just like with Jimin, you’re forced into submission and you have to listen to him.

He takes you into the house and up to his room. “Please sit.” He smiles warmly when you enter his room. He closes the door.

You stand near the bed but don’t sit, “I feel like standing.”

“I said sit.” He says, again, in is alpha tone. You immediately sit on the bed. “Good girl.” He smirks as he walks over to you. “Do you know why you listen to me?” You shake your head no because you assumed that the only Alpha you would obey was Jimin. “Because you carry my child. My child who is my subordinate.” He kneels in front of you and presses his ear to your stomach, “One day, he will be able to resist me, but for now he cannot. Since he resides in you,” He looks up into your eyes, “You must also obey.”

“Why are you doing this?” You whisper.

“You are mine.” He growls.

“I belong to no one.” You state firmly.

He snarls and grabs your throat, but he does not choke you he merely means to scare you. “You were mine before you turned. I marked you.”

“But I turned… and I chose Jimin.” You only said the last part to hurt him. That probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do since he could very well kill you right now.

He snarls, “You were mine before Jimin before you even knew what we were, you were mine!”

“Then you shared me.” You counter. He only shared you to make you and Jimin happy, you knew that, but if he was going to be an alpha asshole, you were going to be a bratty bitch.

His face twitched, “If I hadn’t would you still be with me?” His voice is softer. He’s breaking through.

“I don’t know.” You say quietly. “But you love Jimin too…”

His hand relaxes. His face twitches. He looks conflicted. “You need to go.” He growls. “Before it’s too late.” He forces himself away from you.

You were at the door when a wave of hunger flows through you. You feel the blood rushing to your gums. Something is different. You slowly turn back towards him. His eyes go wide when he sees your hungry, black eyes. You want him, need him, need his blood. Your body shakes as you see the blood pumping through his veins.

Tae growls. “He wants me. He is my blood and he needs it.”

Your control is wearing thin. You feel Jimin, he’s rushing, getting closer, he’s coming to you. I’m sorry. You think to him, then shut him out. He knows where you are, he’ll find you, he’ll come. You look up at Tae and you know your eyes are black and lips are red and swollen. You feel your canines elongate. “I need you.” The rational part of your brain loses to the hunger you feel for Tae.

He rushes towards you. He picks you up and slams you on the bed. He practically rips your clothes off of you and then rips off his own. There is no time for foreplay. You both need each other too much. He slams his cock into you and you both groan. “Fuck, babygirl, you’re just as tight as I remember.”

“Shut up and fuck me.” You pant.

His hand finds your throat, “It seems you have forgotten how this works.” He pulls back and slams into you once then leans into your face, “I am your Master. You do as I say.” His voice changed again to that deep commanding tone. He hums as he looks you over, “You look so beautiful with my pup inside of you.” He thrusts again. “I’ve wanted to breed you for so long, I didn’t expect it to be this way.” He looks into your eyes and his grip on your throat tightens, “You are mine.”

“Let me taste you.” You whisper. Tae hums and releases your throat. Almost immediately, you sit up and latch your fangs to his shoulder. You suck down the sweet liquid in large gulps.

Tae manages to slam into you as you do so. “Fuck.” He groans.

“Stop!” Jimin growls. He ripped Taehyung away from you and throws him across the room. The growl Jimin releases is nothing you would have expected from him.

When you see Jimin, fear fills you. It was the kind of fear you got from Tae. You’ve never seen Jimin like this. He was partially turned. His eyes were bright green, his teeth sharp, and his fingernails elongated into claws. Not many shifters can achieve a partial shift, it’s very rare. For Jimin, this is his most powerful form. As a cat shifter, he’s too small in his cat form for fights and in his human form, he is too weak.

You can feel how angry he is. “Jimin don’t hurt him.”

“I told you!” Jimin screams, “I told you I didn’t want you to taste anyone else! Why do you keep lying to me!” He faces you now. He steps toward you, “You are mine.” He growls. “Now I’m going to have to kill him.”

Your eyes go wide, “No!” Jimin pushes you back then turns with a claw raised ready to strike. “Daddy!” He freezes. “Don’t hurt him. You don’t want to.”

Tae growls now, “She’s mine.” He puffs his chest out at Jimin and steps toward him.

You flash to stand between them, “Stop.” You hold your hands up between them. “Why do you always have to fight. I’m tired of you fighting over me.” Their chests heave as they continue to glare each other down. “You love each other. I know you do.” Their eyes flicker towards you momentarily, “We had an arrangement once.” Now their eyes stay on you, “Why can't we all just be happy together. You had each other before me,” You look between them, “Maybe the problem before was you were trying to share me separately. Remember when we were all together that one time.” They both seem to have relaxed. You feel arousal in Jimin. “It was complicated because Tae marked me and then he ran away because I realized I loved Jimin.” Tae’s shoulders slump, “But I never stopped loving you.” You say as you cup his cheeks. “And I know you’ve never stopped loving him.” His eyes look softer even though they are still that terrifying shade of red. You turn to Jimin now, “And you I know you love Tae too. That’s why you took care of him, even when I chose you.”

Jimin’s is now fully human, “What are you saying?”

You take his hand, then turn to Tae and take his, “I want all of us to be happy… together.”

Tae growls and his eyes are locked on Jimin. “The blood moon has me in a rut.” His voice is strained.

Jimin looks him over, “Do you want Daddy to take care of you?”

Tae is vibrating with need, “I want Daddy and my babygirl.”

They hold each other’s gaze for a moment. Jimin reaches his hand out for Tae’s, “You want us both little alpha?”

Tae growls but takes his hand, “I can't hold back, Daddy.”

Jimin steps towards him, releasing your hand, “Yes, you can.” Jimin grabs his throbbing erection and Tae grans. “Do you want Daddy to suck your dick?”

Tae licks his lips and pants, “I wanna fuck Daddy’s mouth.”

Jimin stroke’s Tae’s member slowly, “No.”

“I can’t-”

“You can and you will,” Jimin growls, his eyes glow green again. “I don’t care if you’re in a rut or if it’s a blood moon, you will obey.” Tae is shaking and his jaw is clenched tight from trying to restrain himself. “Submit.”

Tae takes a few deep, shaky breaths then bows his head in submission, “Please.”

Jimin smirks then drops to his knees. You never thought you’d see this day. Jimin licks Tae’s throbbing cock from base to tip, “Now little alpha, when you’re ready to cum, I want you to call your babygirl over here and she’s going bite you.” He looks back at you, “And you’re going to bite her too.” He looks up at Tae, “Do you understand.”

He clenches his jaw and nods, “Yes, sir.”

“Good boy.” He takes all of Tae into his mouth.

Tae groans in pleasure. “Fuck. Thank you, Daddy.” Tae strains. His hands are balled into fists and his whole body is flexed as he tries not to fuck into Jimin’s mouth.

You can't take your eyes off of them. Fuck Jimin’s mouth was made to suck dick… and eat pussy… and talk dirty… fuck Jimin just has an amazing mouth. He clearly has no gag reflex, that is obvious by how he takes Tae’s dick down his throat hard and fast. Tae doesn’t even need to fuck Jimin’s mouth, Jimin’s mouth is fucking him.

“Fuck, babygirl, YN, please. I-I need you. NOW!” He shouts.

You flash over to him. You stand next to Jimin and take Tae’s arm quickly and offer him yours. Jimin sneaks a hand up your thigh then slips two fingers into your dripping heat. You bite into Tae and he bites into you. Almost immediately after you suck his blood into your mouth, he cums down Jimin’s throat. He releases his bite on your arm and moans loudly.

Tae? You think to him. He released so suddenly that you weren’t sure if the connection was made.

“I hear you babygirl.” He moans out loud.

Jimin pulls off his dick with a pop and slips his fingers out of you. “Now it’s your turn, kitten.” Jimin purrs.

They both look at you in a predatory way. “Do you think we could leave a mating mark on her?” Tae hums.

Jimin stands next to Tae and strokes his finger under his chin, “My little alpha is so smart.” He praises. “Would you like to mate with us, kitten?” He looks at you now.

A mating mark? That means they both have to cum inside of you and bite into your neck with their shifter teeth. The thought sends a shiver through you. Poly mating was rare for shifters, and poly mating bites are practically nonexistent. “You’ll have to mate each other first.” The words fall out of your mouth. It must have been one of those things you just knew.

Jimin raises an eyebrow, “Really now?” The corner of his mouth twitches into a smirk. He turns to Tae, “Would you like that, little alpha?” He steps closer to Tae and noses his neck, “Would you like for me to bite you?” He nips Tae’s neck.

Tae shivers, “Yes, please.”

“I want you to bite me too.” Jimin hums.

Tae looks down at Jimin with shock on his face, “What?”

Jimin smiles sweetly, “I want to be yours too.” He reaches up to stroke Tae’s cheek. He looks at me, “I want us all to belong to each other. By taking your blood we belong to you. When we mate with you, you will belong to us.” He looks back up at Tae, “When I bite you, you will be mine, but I want to belong to you too.” In the shifter culture, both mates never both have mating marks, only the more dominant mate bites the other.

Tae leans down and touches their foreheads together, they both close their eyes. “I love you.” He whispers gently.

Jimin pulls back slightly and looks at Tae with wide eyes. “You’ve never said that to me before.”

Tae looks down at him with all seriousness, “I love you.” He cups Jimin’s face in his hands and kisses him. The kiss turns rough fast as Tae’s rut takes over him. “You’ll have to take me first or I won't let you-” Tae’s voice is strained.

Jimin pushes him onto the bed, “I love you too.” He pecks Tae on the lips. “Hands and knees, little alpha.” He growls. He looks at me, “I want you in front of him.” His eyes are green again. You and Tae both do as we’re told. “Be a good Master and eat your babygirl out, little alpha.” Jimin purrs.

Tae kisses, licks, and bites up your thighs until his tongue meets your dripping heat. Your head falls back as you moan. Tae moans loud into your pussy, the vibrations have your legs shaking. You look up to see Jimin, shirtless now, behind Tae. You can tell by his movements that he’s prepping Tae, your eyes roll back at the sight. “Fuck, Daddy, another.” Tae groans and pushes himself back onto Jimin’s fingers.

“Master, please, I-” I start, but Tae knows what I need, and he thrusts two fingers into you. “Yes, thank you! Ah!” You whine.

Tae’s moans mix with yours. “Fuck, Daddy, please. I’m ready, I’m- UGH!”

Jimin thrusts into Tae and the vibrations of his grunt sends you over the edge. Jimin chuckles, “Good boy. Look you made her cum with your voice, that’s hot.” His voice is strained. “Fuck, I’ve missed your ass.” He spanks Tae hard and thrusts into him harder.

“Fuck, b-baby- I’m sorry. I-I c-can’t-AH!” Tae stutters as Jimin pounds into him. He can't focus on you when Jimin is pounding into him making him feel so good.

“Mmm, my little alpha can't take me and do his babygirl at the same time. You can't cum until she does again.” Jimin fucks him harder. “I’m close, so it looks like you can't cum yet.” Jimin grunts. A few more thrusts and Jimin has his teeth bared as he groans. Then he falls forward and bites into the space between Tae’s neck and shoulder as he cums in Tae’s ass.

Tae yells and his back arches as Jimin’s teeth sink into him. His whole body shakes, his mouth hangs open, his eyes wide as he stares at the ceiling, then he goes limp and falls on top of me. Jimin remains upright on his knees with blood dripping down his chin, dick slick with lube and cum, eyes wide, breath heavy. You look at Tae and watch as the wound on his shoulder heal before your eyes, leaving behind only small teeth shaped scars.

Tae’s breath stutters as he pushes himself up. His eyes meet yours, his pupils are dilated so wide they almost consume his red irises. He looks back at Jimin, “I can feel you.” He whispers as his hand lifts to his new mark.

Jimin wipes the blood off his chin before he leans forward and pulls Tae’s lips to his own. It’s a quick sloppy kiss. “I love you so much, Tae.” Jimin says as he pulls away. You can feel the love between them, and you can't help but smile softly. Jimin moves so that’s he’s between you and Tae. “You me to fuck you, while Tae fucks me?” He asks me. All you can do is nod. He smirks and looks back at Tae, “Your turn, little alpha.” Jimin presents his ass to Tae and shakes it.

Tae licks his lips and grabs the bottle of lube that’s on the bed. Where did that come from? Before you could question it, Jimin flips you over to your hands and knees and thrusts into you. “Fuck.” You moan.

Jimin breathes a moan of his own soon after.

“You like that, Daddy?” Tae hums.

“Don’t tease, little alpha,” Jimin growls. He pushes your face down in the pillows and covers your back with his front. You assume this position gives Tae better access to his hole. He begins to move inside of you. “You know, kitten,” he hums, as he runs a hand between your bodies, “We haven’t explored this hole yet.” His thumb pokes at your asshole. He sits up when you whimper, “Would you like that, kitten?” His hand leaves your ass.

“Y-yes, daddy.” You manage to whimper out.

Suddenly, Jimin groans and falls on top of you.

Tae is thrusting into Jimin so hard that Jimin’s hips slap against your ass. “Am I not making you feel good Daddy?” Jimin’s weight is pulled off of you. You look over your shoulder to see Tae with his hand in Jimin’s hair.

“Fuck.” Jimin groans. He thrusts into you hard.

“Pull out,” Tae growls. Jimin groans but doesn’t pull out. “I know, you’re close, pull out!”

Jimin pushes you forward off his dick with a loud, irritated groan. You quickly move to face them and sit up on your knees. You look at Jimin who has his head leaned back against Tae’s shoulder. You grab his dick and start to jerk him off. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Cum for me, Daddy.” Tae hums. Jimin whines and cums in your hand and on your stomach. A few more thrusts and Tae is growling. He bares his teeth and bites into Jimin’s neck. Jimin squeezes his eyes shut as his body shudders. When Tae pulls off, Jimin slumps back against his shoulder. Tae wraps his arms lovingly around Jimin’s waist and kisses his shoulder as the bite heals into a scar. “You okay?”

Jimin’s breath stutters, “Yeah. I’m amazing.” He looks at you with lust filled eyes, “I think we’ve been neglecting our girl.”

How the hell is he still horny? He’s cum twice already. You look behind him at Tae and he’s giving you the same look. “I think we should fix that.” Tae hums. “Both of us. Together.”

They crawl towards you predatorily. “How do you want us, kitten?” He kisses one side of your neck.

“Do you want both of us in your tight little pussy?” Tae hums as he grazes a finger up your thigh.

“Or…” Jimin runs his hand down your back and grabs your ass, “One of us in here while the other is in your tight little pussy?”

You shudder. The thought of either is terrifyingly thrilling. “I-I-”

“Don’t be scared,” Jimin says gently.

“We will go slow and try not to hurt you.” Tae whispers.

You chew your bottom lip. You wanted to make them happy. You wanted to serve them. You wanted them to destroy you. “I’ll do whatever you want, Master,” You look at Jimin, “Daddy.”

Mischievous grins spread across their faces, “Well, little alpha, as a reward for being so good, I’ll let you choose.” Jimin reaches out and caresses Tae’s cheek.

Tae looks like a kid at Christmas for a moment before the naughty gears in his head start turning. “Let’s take her ass.”

You blush a deep shade of red.

“Don’t worry, kitten, we’ll take care of you,” Jimin says. He and Tae share a look. “Face down, ass up, kitten.”

You swallow and do as he says. They were so excited, it made you drip. You felt a tongue against your clit. You looked under you to find Jimin on his back, licking at your folds. His hands reached up to grab your thighs and pull you closer to his face. You whined when you felt the blunt head of Tae’s cock at your entrance, “W-wait I-I thought-” You cut yourself off when you felt wetness around your other hole.

“Shh, babygirl, we’ll take care of you.” Tae hums as he pushes inside your pussy. His thumb continues to tease the ring of muscle.

Jimin swirls his tongue around your clit, “This will help you relax into it.” He does something with his tongue that makes you moan, just as Tae begins to slowly thrust into you. Jimin reaches a hand up and pinches one of your nipples, as Tae slips the tip of a finger into your hole.

A whimper escapes your lips. It burns slightly, but Tae doesn’t move it. Jimin sucks at your clit and you moan. Eventually, Tae has the entire length of his long finger in your ass. It’s not as bad as you expected. When you’re about to cum, you say, “M-more. A-anoth-” Tae pushes a second long finer in, just as you cum. It burns but the pleasure of your orgasm overshadows the slight pain. Tae scissors his fingers but keeps his hips still. Jimin continues to attack your clit with his tongue. Your thighs tremble as you become overstimulated.

“Ji-Daddy- it’s too much.” You whimper.

He pulls his mouth from your swollen clit, “Tae, pull out. She’s almost ready for you.”

Tae pulls his dick out of your dripping heat and inserts a third finger into your ass. Jimin slides up your body so that his body is under yours. He leans up to kiss your lips eagerly. Jimin and Tae adjust themselves so Jimin can push his cock inside your pussy.

“Are you ready for me, babygirl?” Tae hums against your neck.

Your breath stutters, “Y-yes, p-p-please.”

Tae gently pulls his fingers out, slicks up his member, and slowly pushes inside. You feel fuller and fuller with every inch. When he bottoms out, you’re panting with your face in Jimin’s neck. “Does it feel good, babygirl?”

“Fuck, so good. M-move, p-please.” You stutter out.

They slowly begin to move in tandem. You let out guttural moans. “Fuck. I can feel you, little alpha. She’s so tight with both of us inside her slutty holes. Fuck. Kitten, you feel so good. Do you like having us both inside you?”

“Yes, Daddy!” You groan. “I love you. I love you both so much.” Your orgasm comes out of nowhere and you scream into Jimin’s neck.

“Fuck!” They both groan as you squeeze around them.

“Daddy-” Tae starts but he’s interrupted.

“I’m ready,” Jimin responds.

You’re lifted slightly off Jimin. Both boys are on your neck, Jimin on the right, Tae on the left. They groan loudly, then you feel sharp teeth bite into your neck. Pain and please once again mix in your body. Your body trembles as they mark you.

When they release you, you flop down on Jimin. You’re barely conscious as they begin to clean up. You don’t manage to open your eyes again until you’re placed in hot water. Tae sits in front of you and Jimin behind you. You can feel how tired they both are from the night’s activities, but they are also filled with pure joy and love. Tae doesn’t feel like he’s possessed by the moon anymore. His eyes are soft chocolate brown again.

“You smell so good, my loves,” Jimin says. His nose glides along your shoulder, “You smell like me now.”

“We all smell like each other.” Tae leans forward and kisses Jimin behind you, then pecks your cheek.

“What do we smell like?” You ask quietly.

“Well, your scent has always been roses, even when you turned,” Jimin explained.

“Jimin’s scent is sandalwood,” Tae informs.

“And Tae’s is Pine. So now it is all blended in all of us. Our personal scents are slightly stronger but it’s all mixed together perfectly.” Jimin kisses your neck.

You can feel their satisfaction. “I wish I could smell it.” You murmur with a small smile.

A slight sadness flows from them. “Let’s get some sleep. The sun will be up soon, so Tae is back to normal.”

You are lifted out of the tub by Jimin. Tae grabs a towel and dries you off, then Jimin, then himself. Jimin carries you to the bed. You all curl up together. Jimin in front of you, Tae behind you. You can't help but smile as their warmth seeps into your skin. You’ve never felt so happy before.

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www-suzannerichardsonwrites · 7 years ago

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On Connection, Disconnection, Memento Mori, and “In The Pines”

In my creative writing classes I use a text by Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing. In this text there’s an entire section about fiction, and plot, but specifically stories being told through the concepts of connections and disconnection. Though I’ve taught this portion of the text many times, I’ve often confessed to my students that I was never fully convinced by the idea that connections and disconnections make for good stories or plots--or at least not in the way Burroway describes. She claims each moment in a story is a moment of connection or disconnection building towards a climax. She charts out Cinderella with certainty and quotes Claudia Johnson, “The conflict and surface events are like waves, but underneath is an emotional tide--the ebb and flow of human connection” (Burroway). Each time I’ve taught this section I have re-read it and tried to more deeply understand how periods of connection and disconnection make good stories and it hasn’t really made sense, until now.

It is safe to say I have been disconnected. I find myself single again at thirty-four and while it feels somewhat hopeful, it also feels like an overwhelming task. Each break-up I go through takes me back to the original break-up of my twenties, the place where all that pain lives pressed like dead flowers on display. I struggle with feeling like a failure. Feeling like a lonely failure. Feeling like I fought tooth and nail for something that I should have let go years ago. It feels a bit like being underwater while people breathe deeply and splash around on the surface. It feels a bit like being the party guest who wants to go home within five minutes of entering the party. It also feels like being a newborn--all this focus on me, my needs, my wants, what matters to me, is almost like I’ve grown a new set of eyes and I am seeing the world anew. I take long walks, I stop whenever I want. I get up in the middle of the night and eat citrus fruit or drink down gulps of grapefruit juice over the sink (some of my old single girl behavior). I shower in the dark sometimes--a fun game. Entering a gas station is like landing on a new planet--the thrum of the neon lights, the low growl of the refrigerators; rows and rows of cold beverages and I can drink any, or all of them. I have lots of choices; which is both freeing and scary. I wake up with answers to some of my own questions that I ask myself at night; it’s like my life is now one long, deep conversation with myself that I occasionally invite people to. I started dreaming again--something I was too stressed out and depressed to do for almost two years. I dream first about myself, looking in a mirror and I’m so interested in what I see, I take my shirt off and examine my naked breasts (like I’ve never seen them before). Next the women come rushing back; I dream about girlfriends I’ve been disconnected from. Stress dreams of one who just had a baby, two others who are both pregnant appear in a dream inviting me to sit down in the kitchen of our old apartment we shared in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I dream about circles and wonder what the universe is trying to tell me. Turn? Keep going? Roll? This is a cycle? I try to pay attention.

I find inspiration everywhere--tree bark, jewelry I haven’t worn for many years, parts of books I love that I revisit when I can’t sleep. I’m reminded of the fiction about vampires, how they grow fangs and begin to know a hunger they’ve never experienced before--I too am hungry. I think many emerge from heartbreak a little undead, a little closer to the coffin, a little more evil, a little more interested in feeding themselves than those around them.

But it isn’t just me. For months others are telling me their own stories of disconnection. This semester almost every person in an office left of me has disconnected, struggled, tried desperately to stay connected to the people they love, made sacrifices they never thought they’d have to make. I love them all, the way they have bent, twisting, contorting, drooping, so as not to break--the ones who break (like me) I love them even more. I love them for risking everything--risking all connection-- to burst into pieces alone. The ones who are about to break--I can see it in them, their eyes pooling. Is it a kind of insanity to want to break? During snowstorms in March, Rosie would wake me at 3,4,5 am to go out--so quiet then. Snow flakes the size of quarters traveled to the ground. The tulip tree in the front yard was doubled over. I kept waiting for it to break, every day, more, wet heavy snow, more pressure, the boughs and branches brought all the way to the ground. I walked around it looking for a breaking point. A shame to lose this much of a tree; I kept thinking. The nubs of its fuzzy buds glowed gray-green in the dark. The winter wouldn’t let up--unforgiving and snowing until the first week of May. But slowly spring came. First, I noticed the perfect circle of a bird’s nest; then I realized it was nestled in the part of the tree that had spent months on the ground and was now in the air; elastic; resilient; it gave; it gives. I want to learn more from this tree. It is teaching me. I am now drowning and drunk off the perfume of its blossoms. Passing the tree makes my circuits jump; the pink soft folds of the blooms; a deeply sensuous reward for such a bitter broken disconnected winter. I want to show my colleagues this tree-- proof of connection and disconnection making a good story so that in moments of pure doubt, when they ask themselves why they are bending, and breaking, they’ll know there’s an end to the suffering.

* * *

In April, on a trip to Rhode Island with students, I was lucky enough to view a pilgrim’s compass on display in a glass case. The tour guide had leaned over and casually pointed out the menento mori etched into the top of the compass.

“Sickos” he’d chuckled.

“Maybe it’s a comfort,” I’d retorted, standing up straight to meet his gaze.

“Ah, so you’re a sicko too,” he winked.

I thought about fear, all the fear I had inside me about being alone again. I thought about fear, all the fear a pilgrim might have in the woods not knowing if they should go north, or south, or east, or west, and how no matter what, death in every direction; always. How it makes the choice easier.

* * *

In Rhode Island we visit houses Edgar Allan Poe wrote in, lived in, loved in. In some of my darkest moments I always turn back to him. Later in life he was interested in philosophical dialogues between fictitious characters about the process of death and dying. In his piece, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” he describes the end of bodily attachment and the deep sensual state of death where all who are dead gain a 6th sense, and all touch, and pleasure is enhanced ten-fold with no dull, dirty, body to process it. Both Monos and Una describe to one another the story of the end of the world (disconnection) and their deaths one by one (disconnection) then Una’s coffin is lowered onto Monos’ and the space around his body becomes the body--the idea of “being” is replaced with location, “perpetual place and time” --things with no form (disconnection). “For that which was not--for that which had no form--for that which was soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion--for all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates” (Poe). Ah, nothingness, still somehow a trap according to Poe (disconnection). I start to realize I have a habit of staying in relationships longer than I should for bodily comforts even though I start to spiritually suffer. Only when I reach a spiritual breaking point do I leave--

Back in school I lecture to my students about the haunting American folk song “In The Pines,” or “Black Girl,” or “The Longest Train,” or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” We are reading Rob Sheffield’s book Love is a Mixtape and he is lamenting that the only artist who is writing about and singing about marriage and its strange cultural link with death is Kurt Cobain. Sheffield talks about the strange and scary vows, how marriage is a death pact. He unpacks Cobain’s version of “In The Pines,” a wailing and warbling version that builds into a sorrowful howl. Before he plays, Kurt attributes his version as inspired by Leadbelly’s recording. All covers of this song seem to stem from two early recordings though the song has been dated back to the 1870′s. Either Leadbelly’s or Bill Monroe’s versions are inspiration for newer ones. It should be no surprise the country covers follow Bill, and the more emotionally charged blues versions follow Leadbelly. The song’s lyrics change slightly in every version I’ve heard--each singer adding to the narrative, or trying to make sense of what has remained true and real about the song. Sheffield is convinced it’s about a married couple; their married troubles. I don’t buy his interpretation--it feels very clouded by his own worldview. There’s something else that bothers me about interpretations of this song: it’s the fact there’s clearly a call and response, or a female voice that gets crunched into the main narrative--her story, her words are not separate from the man who is angry, wounded, and accusatory in both versions. My college boyfriend used to play Nirvana’s version for me. We would talk about the lyrics together.

If your lover isn’t sleeping with you, where are they? A chilling question for the ages. Is she dead? do “the pines” become a metaphor for a burial place? Is sleep death? Does she know she might as well be dead if she didn’t come home to her husband last night? Is her lover about to kill her? When did the song become one voice telling the story? This becomes the ghostly part for me--her answers become squelched into the story her lover is telling about her betrayal. Why can’t she tell it? What happened to her? She “would” shiver, as in, she can’t? In Leadbelly’s version a murder does take place, but it seems it’s possibly the man who is asking where his girl went. Someone is decapitated, their body never found...but how can that be if he’s telling the story?

This song is a story of disconnection; death, anger, questions unanswered.

Even in the country version it’s sad, though it opens with descriptions of trains from Georgia. By the end of the country version the singer is heartbroken, wants to know why a woman treated him so badly.

After a while, all the versions start to blend together; Nirvana, Leadbelly, Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, The Carter Sisters--whose version haunts Youtube. They sit, still as dolls with long crazy dresses adorned in bows and curls like they’re trapped in a cult reporting about it live on a country TV variety show. Their harmonies so sad it breaks you.

Both versions are love gone bad. One murderously bad. One just plain old ass out on the street, bad.

My recent ex climbs his anger like stairs, I want you to feel pain. Feel the pain you’ve made me feel. I want you to hurt. I rearrange these words: I want to hurt you. You want I to hurt. I think about a dream I had once where I was shaking a friend hard by the shoulders, but then halfway through, realized I was choking her and couldn’t stop. I. Hurt. You.

He rages at me. I almost want to laugh in his face--this idea that I’m not suffering at all. That I will never suffer like he does. Like his suffering should eclipse mine, show up and beat the shit out of me. That because he’s certain I’m not in pain, or not in enough pain it’s now his responsibility to make me feel it, a kind of justice in his mind to see me suffering. Is someone with you? Is someone there? Are you seeing someone else? (Where did you sleep last night?)

I don’t answer.

(Disconnection).

youtube

#Disconnection #Connection #In The Pines #Nirvana #Leadbelly #Carter Family #Bill Monroe #Memento Mori

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the-foxwolf · 7 years ago

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Places to Go and Stories to Tell: The Wild West, Oceania, Feudal Japan, and Vikings

The Foxwolf is back! As an avid Vorthos and a natural storyteller, I’m excited to once again share my talents with you all.

This article lists four places I think the Magic Story could go and the type of story I’d like to see in each of those worlds. This exercise would be a little dry if I just listed things out. I figured it would be more fun, and expressive, to give you all a short glimpse of what a story there might look like. This article is a little different than the kind I normally do. But I’m fairly confident that if you sit down to read it, you’ll find you enjoy it. Let me know what you think! And enjoy!

It’s good to be back. Writing. Sharing my love for story telling again.

Gather `Round Everyone! It’s Story Telling Time!

(Omniscience: Magic 2013) (Art by Jason Chan)

Format

As you read through you’ll see the header for a section with a setting and some defining characteristics of that setting. I’ll then move into describing what that world might look like, the characters it might have, the environment and conflicts within the world, and the potential storyline I could easily see happening in said environment. It’s an easy, fun read, that provides you my thoughts on what I see coming in Magic’s future.

Wild West: Spellslingers and Railroads

Sheriff Chandra steps out of the saloon, appreciating how the rising sun paints the sky into a canvassed pastel orange. Chandra breathes in the dry desert air of this dusty Frontier town. She lets it out slowly, eyes closed, hands on her hips, the warmth of the sun caressing her face, and takes in the world around her with all her senses. The Frontier air is charged with sensations and emotions. She can taste the unbridled hope and opportunity the Frontier has to offer; her skin shivers at the feeling of the electric static of the thrill of discovery all around her; the lizards scuttle across the floorboards beneath her boots and the jackalopes scurry into the brush at the sound of her clinking spurs; the sweat of the hard working people doing their best every day to thrive in this harsh world; all these things flood her senses and for a brief moment, she is lost in the romanticism of it all. But that moment quickly fades. She knows that the Frontier isn’t the romantic dream the East makes it out to be. The rolling tumbleweeds who witnessed the bloody fate of the evicted natives whose promises of peace were betrayed by greed, protest by clumsily beating around the town- uselessly silent. Eagles and vultures circling above the town screech, echoing the pain the land itself feels with each new drill the Aether Barons order constructed. The Rail Monger’s train tracks are greased with the sweat of the imported indentured goblins and the tears of the settlers who are extorted into poverty by the extreme shipping costs. Chandra takes off her hat and presses it gently against her chest in a moment of respectful silence. She puts it back and taps the badge, the sigil of the Gatewatch, on her cowhide jacket twice, reminding herself of the oath she made just a few years ago:

“Every world has its tyrants, following their own desires with no concern for the people they step on. They’re no different from the Eldrazi....If it means that people can live in freedom, yeah, I’ll keep watch...”

(Oath of Chandra: Oath of the Gatewatch) (Art by Wesley Burt)

She whistles for Ashaya, the Sun Stallion and watches as a beam of sunlight materializes into the majestic, noble, horse Nissa had taught her to summon. Chandra mounts Ashaya and checks her Spell-Slinger Gauntlets. With a flex of her hand, a small mote of concentrated Red Mana puffs into existence at her fingertips and proceeds to start circling her extended index finger. This tiny mote of energy could burn through bone like a hot knife cuts through butter. With another flex of her hand, she extinguishes the mote. Satisfied her equipment is in order, she taps on Ashaya’s neck, motioning him towards the plateau to the West, near where the Sun Foot Tribe was last seen. “My mom always believed that I could be a leader. I’m starting to believe she’s right. Let’s go make my mother proud, Ashaya.”

Oceania: Islands and Atlantis

The salty sting of the sea air carried upon the cool breeze tickles Nissa’s nose as she sits quietly just within reach of the lapping ocean waves. In the distance she can hear the rhythmic drums and the upbeat flutes of the islanders as they celebrate their annual Fire God festival. The scent of roasted swine rises from the thin grey cooking fires at the center of the nearby village. Above, a sea gull screeches and below, the ocean once again rolls in around Nissa, playfully embracing her as she meditates. Searching the soul of the world, she senses the snuffing out of another island-searing lava scorching it down to the sands, leaving only obsidian behind. The second island, this week. The fifth this month. Jace finalizes his inspection of the ship the islanders so happily helped him build. Though they have never built anything quite like it, Jace was able to telepathically share the shipbuilding skills and knowledge he learned on Ixalan. They have enough supplies to last them well over a month. He glances at Nissa and decides not to disturb her. Instead, he heads into his cabin and once again presses his palms against the table, already starting to wear in those places by the constant pressure and practice, and gazes upon the chart before him. Though it had required a lot of sailing in ships he was far less familiar piloting, he and Nissa had managed to visit enough islands for Jace to glean a fairly accurate map from the collected thoughts of the most experienced sailors of each village. But now they were ready. At every stop, Nissa spent most of her time meditating, searching the sea floor, communing with the world’s soul, seeking for the sunken city of Atlantis. Between all her hard work and all of Jace’s research, they are close to finding its exact position.

(Island: Magic 2010) (Art by Fred Fields)

But their time is running short. Volcanoes, both underwater and those above, that have been silent and slumbering for millennia are awakening with a tremendous violence. Entire islands have been washed away. Others have been buried beneath molten rock. If the stories sung in the songs of the Slumbering Fire God are true, then the only way to stop these devastating disasters is to find Atlantis and search the secrets therein for a way to calm the unruly world. Of all the worlds Jace had ever learned about, of all the worlds Nissa had ever touched, this one was the most innocent. Yes, every village has its quarrels and grudges and power struggles. And on the rare occasion neighboring islands might even go to war against one another. But compared to many of the worlds the Gatewatch had operated in... well...saving this one had a personal stake for them. Jace looks up toward the far end of the island and sees a boat, similar to his own, approaching. Finjamin! The merfolk biomancer who had gone to Ravnica to implore the Gatewatch for their help had gathered the bravest souls from the archipelago. Not one of them could possibly have been older than two dozen years. Yet they dared to brave the seas in search of the sunken city, from whence no explorer had ever returned from whence they had sought to find. Nissa smiles, sensing the ship approaching before she sees it. She stands and dusts the sand from her skirt, saying, “See what we are here for, Jace. For the life of every plane, and every life it nurtures.” The telepath nods and takes a moment to look beyond the mission, to see the world they were here to help save. He smiles. “For the people.” He says to himself, leaning on the rails. “Let‘s go find Atlantis, Nissa. Let’s save the world.”

Feudal Japan: Ninjas and Samurais

Liliana walks upon the wooden floor of her courtyard, along the coy ponds, and amidst the blooming Cherry Blossoms. The running water between the several ponds babbles a soft melody in the background. She reaches up and plucks a flower from a branch. The necromancer smells it and allows herself to smile for just a moment...before slowly proceeding to tear it apart, one petal at a time until at last she crumbles the remains in her black, silken, gloved hands, and scatters the remains in the gentle breeze. A soft, warm, orange from the setting sun colors the sky and graces her face as she heads back into her palace. The smell of incense greets her as she slides open the doors and walks in. Running her hand along the wooden walls, her mauve silken kimono’s skirts brushing gently against the floor, she heads to the shogun’s war room. She slides open the door and sees Gideon raptly paying attention to a demon masked messenger proclaiming nonsense about ‘the glory of Shogun Lix’ and ‘total surrender or total destruction’. Nothing important. Liliana watches Gideon miraculously keep a stoic face of seriousness throughout the entire speech. Gideon looks good with his long hair in a pony tail. But the hunk of meat is still the same man he’s always been. Stoic. Righteous. Selfless. Unyieldingly boring. But at the very least, pretty to look at. When the messenger concludes, Gideon politely dismisses him with the promise of a safe passage out of his realm. Gideon turns to face her once they’re alone and says, “Have your ninjas found the Blade of Kings?”

(Tatsumasa, the Dragon’s Fang: Champions of Kamigawa) (Art by Martina Pilcerova) “They have. Shogun Fa has been hiding it this entire time. How much trouble we could have saved had we just gone and wiped them out earlier like I suggested.” “You know that was never an option. The only reason we’ve fought the other Shoguns is because-” Yeah, yeah. ‘It was an absolute necessity with no other possible solution‘.“ She quoted. “I’ve heard your speech. But you have yet to understand that when Ob Nixilis is the enemy, there are no neutral parties, soldier boy. In some form or other, everything that doesn’t directly stand against him is his pawn.“ Gideon furrows his brow but doesn’t disagree. Instead he turns around and leans on the table with his elbow. “This is the closest we’ve ever come to stopping him, Liliana. We’re so close. By all accounts, Ob Nixilis should have defeated us by now. He surpasses my tactical talents by miles. But with you reanimating every samurai that our forces lose or kill we’ve managed to keep the scales balanced. For now, at least..” “Don‘t feel bad, Gid-boy. He‘s called you his arch-nemesis. Surely that counts for something.” He scoffs but his mood lightens. “Has Narset discovered what the Blade of Kings is yet?” “She mentioned something about it being able to sever mana lines and eradiate magic and other weapon-of-ultimate-power type of things. So serious that one... I don’t like her.” “Narset is normally a very serious woman. And you know why she’s here. Jace can’t be everywhere at once and you chose to come here rather than to join him on Oceania. But that’s neither here nor there. Focus, Liliana. We can’t let a weapon so powerful fall into the wrong hands.“ “That happy little world was just a little too sunny for me... And personally, Gideon, I could care less if we, or anyone else really, get our hands on that weapon or not. I just want the satisfaction of having taken it from under Ob Nixilis’ pointy demonic nose.“

Nordic: Barbarians, Vikings, and the Norse Gods

Up in Valhalla the gods are faced with, for the first time, the fear of mortality. Ragnarok is coming. All the omens and portends prophesized by the oracles ages ago have begun to manifest. The Great Chill has lasted for nearly two years now. The Hell Hound raids have drastically increased in number and ferocity. The mountains rumble and groan and quake. Astrid of the Grey-Claw clan, daughter of the chieftain, humbled herself and came to Ravnica to plead for the Gatewatch’s help. Ajani sees in her what he saw in Elspeth. A warrior looking for a home to feel safe at. Young. Beautiful. But above all fierce and brave. He happily swore his service. Ajani, Astrid, and her Relentless Crew board their longboats, sailing to the North, into the ever colder waters of the Poles. Even though the Great Chill has buried much of this world in snow, Ajani can see that this world was once beautiful. Yet the gods offer no help to save it. Instead, they bicker amongst themselves as they decide whether to fight against destiny or stand out of the way and hope that Ragnarok, whatever it may be, spares them. The gods are always useless. In the few times they stop to rest, Ajani listens to The Relentless Crew sing songs of the world before it was covered in snow. They drink heavily, and they dance merrily, and they laugh heartily. Astrid enjoys the merry making as much as her loyal crew do. Seeing the vibrant life in their eyes, Ajani knows he can’t let this world down. He won’t watch another life as full and as rich as Astrid’s meet Elspeth’s fate. Ajani’s heart couldn’t take it. They sing of their homeland: Beloved tundras, irritating rams, babbling creeks, tranquil lakes, lush green lands, glory, and joy, and love. The world is cold, but the love the people have for it make it warm. Whatever Ragnarok is, it’ll face the best this world has to offer.

(Mountain: Khans of Tarkir Variant 2) (Art by Titus Lunter)

Stirring beneath the mountains of the North are horrors that worship and praise the coming of the apocalypse. Ragnarok, Phyrexia’s greatest Dragon Engine, is almost done repairing itself. It was created to destroy Urza Planeswalker-- and it nearly succeeded had the planeswalker named Serra not intervened. When repairs finish, Ragnarok will destroy this icy world on which it was trapped for so long and then it will go find whatever remains of Phyrexia. With its Planar Matrix, it will warp itself between through the Blind Eternities until it finds whatever remains of its masters. Once reunited, Ragnarok will deliver the Glory of Phyrexia across the multiverse, unimpeded! RISE RAGNAROK! RISE!

Conclusion

That’s all I‘ve got for today, folk! Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think about this type of article. Don’t worry. My informative articles, opinion pieces, and essays will remain as they are. I just want to get a feel for how much my audience has patience for this type of stuff.

For more from me, at Story Telling Time, hit that “Follow“ button. If you enjoyed what you read, spread the world and hit that “Reblog“ button. Once again, thanks for reading. See ya next time!

#story telling time #storytellingtime #speculation #mtg #magic story #worlds to come

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strainingfororiginality · 7 years ago

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Chapter 10.2 - Ouroboros

He needed to get to his brothers. He had to get to Gabriel before he did something he knew his brother would regret forever. But he needed to pick something up on the way. He could hear the commotion before he could even see the scene far below him. As he pulled his wings in tight to rocket down, he smirked.

"Cowards!" Sempronius’ voice thundered with menace as he stepped forward and the Bene Elohim crowd surrendered a step backwards to match his advance. “These are the great Bene Elohim!? Do you all lack the fortitude to challenge me?!”

Raphael landed hard between the two and the impact cratered the stone around him. Sempronius retreated a single step and stood up straight, the blade waning in his grip as he swallowed hard. Raphael loved that moment of sweet and bitter intimidation whenever he flexed his power. He locked eyes with the man, flashing his fangs with an wide and toothy smile.

"Cowards? I would say they are more pragmatic than cowardly." The angel explained, though he knew he didn’t need to. Sempronius was obviously bluffing; the angel could read his body language easily. “It is quite rare to be faced with utter destruction, after all.” Raphael’s eyes locked onto the blade and he reached an open palm out. “I’ll need that now, Sempronius. Please.”

"I …" Hesitation. The centurion looked down at the blade and deep thought spread across his face as he considered his options very carefully and Raphael waited patiently. “I can’t let you pass …” He said finally, his eyes meeting Raphael’s as his brow furrowed. “... Indigo Son.”

Hmmmm. Well … hmmmm. Clever, clever … clever boy … clever father. Raphael couldn’t help but smirk wider at the secret jab. He wondered just how many people knew his secret now.

"I’m afraid you’ll find … You simply can’t stop me ... not even with that trinket." Raphael began to walk, closing the distance between them with strides so confident they caused Sempronius to take a defensive stance. In any other situation, at any other time, he would have simply taken the blade from him, but the Bene Elohim were watching. He had to be careful. The need to play boths sides was still very important. It was unclear how much Sempronius might know, and he needed to control the flow of information.

The blade shook as the man’s arm trembled at the angel’s swift advancement. "I do apologize for this. I don’t normally get … physical." Raphael swatted the weapon to the side, knocking it out of the man’s hand as he grabbed a handful of Sempronius’ shirt and bowling him across the ground, to the feet of the Puriel. “Take him to the stockade … Let no one speak with him until I arrive.”

Puriel was nodding at the comment when Raphael heard the metal of the blade scrape across the ground as it was lifted behind him and he already knew who wielded it now. He fought the desire to chuckle with growing entertainment.

"Hello Honoria." He said before he turned to greet her with warmth as he locked his fingers calmly behind him.

"Hello Raphael." She smirked as her grip on the weapon’s handle tightened and he heard the muscles in her body tense with sweet anticipation of the impending scuffle.

Amused, he smiled back at her. "You will not win."

"Oh … Don’t be absurd. Of course not." She winked wickedly, shrugging innocently as she did. “But the point is not to win.”

"It is not? Then, pray tell, what is the point?" His hands dropped from their interlaced position as he began to circle the woman. He knew she was good. No. He knew she was the best … human, but even that hadn’t been fair to the men around her, had it? Crystal child. Child of Fire. When she was only sixteen years old, she’d fought and beaten a fallen hayyoth after all. Well … 1/7th of one. Still, an impressive feat regardless of who she really was. An impressive feat regardless of what she actually was.

"The point should never be to win." She explained to him as she circled. “The moment it is, is the moment you’ve already lost.” Was this a lesson? Yes. And he loved it. She couldn’t beat him, but he loved that she was going to give it her all.

She had always been one of his most cherished halfling Indigo Children. Child of fire. Child of the sun. Only daughter of Al-Mubhib, The Golden King, the Eternal Devourer of Snakes. Even from the first moment of her birth, when he had looked down upon her in his loving embrace, he knew she would be important. He had placed a hand upon the very top of her tiny head, hidden under the mass of her wild golden hair and obfuscated her. When Ozryel had uttered her name in that cell, everything made painful sense. Quintus was unique, because he wasn’t like the four who came before. Not even close ...

"Quite right." He nodded and stepped around her as she did the same to him. “But then tell me … what is the point?”

"The point is to say that I at least tried." She lunged forward with more speed than he had ever seen … from a human. As he stepped to the side and the celestial blade cut up, inches from his face, he smiled even wider, enjoying her words. “That when he needed me, I can assure myself I was there.”

"Very true." He agreed before she lunged at him again.

Hathų had experienced real fear only a handful of times during her short existence. Being able to speak to those who had passed, she was never afraid of death as she knew the afterlife existed and she knew it would be kind to her. Being descended from Two Rivers, she was always protected from physical harm by the greatest Thunder, Hinon. And being able to see the future, she always felt somewhat immune to anything fate might throw at her.

But in this agonizing moment, as she stared at the still water less than two feet away, she feared and her body shuddered in response to it. Every decision, every choice, flashed across her mind and she bit back her tears. Her soul might be eternal but those waters could take everything that made her who she is. Everything that made her … her.

Her angel captor paced as he grew more impatient, staring up the winding staircase as he walked back and forth. She watched carefully and quietly from her position on the ground and his face contorted with so many emotions, she couldn’t read what he was really thinking … at first.

"Gabriel--" She eventually tried to reason with him. The words were hard to utter, but she forced them out.

"Shut up." He spat back. “I want to hear nothing from you. You are all liars. ALL OF YOU.”

"Gabriel, please. I--" She tried again.

"You’re words are poison. You are as much of a hypocrite as he is!" He sneered with vicious intonation. “Keep it up. I don’t have a problem with gagging you … though probably not in the same way my brother does.”

Ew. EW. Gross and childish buffoon … She resisted the urge to bark back an insult at him. It wouldn’t help the situation to be as childish as he was. And though she did not like his tone or his words, she finally saw it, so very clear in his eyes. It wasn’t obedience or injustice that was driving him right now, but raw and unadulterated betrayal. He was hurting so much. Michael always assured her that Gabriel was kind at heart, but she never saw that in him. He was always a brute in her eyes … until now.

He hurt.

Hathų summoned all of her remaining courage and her palms pressed against the ground timidly as she began to push herself up, embracing her husband’s assessment of his brother and having faith in it, having faith in Michael’s love for him. She bottled her fear, rising to her feet and he pointed at the ominous water, his nostrils flaring wildly as he spoke. "Don’t tempt me, whore!" His tone was frantic, but she didn’t care, even as he grabbed her wrist to further his intimidation. “Don’t force my hand!”

"You said you saw her?" She smiled at him. "Her name is Dawn."

"Shut up and sit down." Gabriel took a deep breath. “She will be cleansed ...”

“She is your niece. Your … family.”

"I won’t ask again."

"Gabriel …" She shook her head. “You won’t do this.” She didn’t believe her own words until they were out and his brows furrowed, contorted with conflicted emotion. No, he really wouldn’t. “And he knows that. He won’t come for me. Michael is too smart for that. He is not so foolish to accept a challenge from you--”

It was a good play. It was working even, but the footfall behind the angel was loud as the figure rocketed down the center of the stairs and the butt of the staff knocked into Gabriel’s stomach and then swung up in an arch, hitting him squarely in the chin. Gabriel flew backwards onto the ground, skidding along on his back. Hathų’s heart fell as she looked upon her husband sneering down at his fallen brother.

"Don’t touch her, you fucking fuck!"

Oh no …

No.

Damn fool.

Broken Bones - Kaleo

I've busted bones, broken stones, looked the devil in the eye

I hope he's going to break these chains, oh yeah

The devil's going to make me a free man

The devil's going to set me free

He flipped back and forth between Earth and Hell while he drove. All in all, he was happy to be completely in control, but he grew bored of having to actually drive himself. How … quaint. He would often step back to his citadel and speak with Shaitan for a moment before shifting back to Earth. Time passed there much more quickly than here. What would be days there, would only be seconds here.

"Find me a pilot." He had commanded his Djinn underling.

"What kind of plane?"

Hmmm. Fuck. Good question. Dammit. And, if he didn’t like driving, did he really want to have to fly?

"Find me an airfield then."

"Umm …" The Djinn became nervous. “Wouldn’t it be much easier for you to find that information there?” Shaitan was right, unfortunately. The Djinn could, in theory, find some soul who might have been from that area, but even then, Lucifer would have had to paw through their minds himself. He hated that shit. None of the Fallen that benefited from his hospitality possess that particular ability.

"Fuck. Fine. I have to do everything myself then. I guess I’ll find a fucking phonebook or something then?" His frustration was obvious and Shaitan shrugged innocently. He regretted chucking the phone into the wilderness before trying to look one up. Regardless, it was a good move. He didn’t trust that sneaky Italian nor the overly resourceful Hacker.

"I guess so?"

Lucifer took a deep and calming breath. Fine. It was ok. This was good. Everything was good.

He had been waiting for this for so long, what was a few more hours or … he cringed … days. He needed to be patient. The hard part was already done and now he just had to work out how to get to Siberia.

He wished he could just spread his wings and actually fly. He wished he could manifest wings, but her body was still too new. He had been pumping it full of his own divinity for months, but it was slow and her shell still didn’t possess the ability to shape itself. It would get there though. Patience. It would get there very soon if he kept siphoning himself into it.

Retaking his seated position on floor, he closed his eyes to get back to the monotonous task of driving, but he looked back to his minion first. "How is she doing?"

"She is …" Shaitan remained entirely still. “Complacent.”

"Happy?" Lucifer pushed.

"Complacent." Shaitan said again.

Hmm. It wasn’t what he had hoped for, but it was good enough.

"Tell me if that changes." Shaitan nodded. “How is she enjoying … our gift.”

This had been both a gift to her as well as Shaitan. It worked in tandem to make them both more complacent. "It seems to please her."

"Does she remember anything?"

"No."

"Good. Make sure it stays that way, Satan." He loved to use that name to mock the Djinn, grinning every time he would say it.

"Lord?" Shaitan questioned the statement.

"Did I stutter?"

"Does it matter? You are in control now."

"Unlike you lesser beings …" Lucifer chortled, his words laced with insult. “I actually learn from my mistakes.”

"And what mistake is that … My Lord?"

"Not to underestimate the power of any Hayyoth, regardless of how weak they seem." And then, Lucifer shifted back to the Earthly plane, disintegrating in front of his minion as he did so. This was different, taking her body this way. He was no longer just visiting and his spirit would travel in its entirety along the pathway left between her soul and her shell.

Now he bounded down the country road towards the signs that pointed him to Syracuse … again.

He should have talked her into just offing herself in Siberian.

What a goddamn hassle …

Down Side of Me (Live) - CHVRCHES

You're not same, not the same, you're not the same

Not the same, you're not the same, not the same

You're not same, not the same

I believe, I believe

And tell myself to think forward

I will show I believe

And I hold you up and know that you're all I see in the light

And never do what I used to

He sat in the bed of that same truck as it bounded down the road … alone. The three braves had piled into the cab of the vehicle, under the explanation that it was cold, but he knew, after what they had just witnessed from him, none of them were keen on sitting alone in his company. The rejection had no affect on him as he preferred the solitude right now. He wanted to get his thoughts straight.

It was cold though and he appreciated the frigid air cutting through the cotton and cooling his hot skin. His body was coming back down to his normal temperature, but it was slow. At least he was no longer seeing everything through an indigo hue.

The last time he was in the bed of this very truck, he had been with Mr. Elizalde and … Dawn. It had been a cold night then as well and he remembered pulling her against his chest, sharing his warmth with her when she shivered. His mind drifted through groggy memories and he stared down at the phone in his grip, watching the bars in the corner. He was a patient man, but his heart beat furiously with bitter anticipation.

While he waited, he occasionally stared out into the darkness and feeling the power coursing through his body. He felt the same, but not. There was an electricity that danced within his muscles and his skin felt tight and new. Eventually, he reached up to wipe something from his cheek and his hands touched smooth skin.

Wait. What? His fingers explored his face curiously and he found nothing. His scars were gone. Pulling the shirt out, he looked down at his bare chest, searching for the marks left by the silver bullets the night of the factory and he found … none. He felt around on his upper back with timid finger tips. Nothing. His brand? Gone.

He exhaled heavily, unsure how he felt about it all. At the very least, he was free of their constant reminder. He was … reborn. Everything was full circle … again.

"Ouroboros." He said and chuckled.

Little Bear beat his fist against the back window and Quintus turned, looking up at the lights of the familiar camp less than a mile away. He stared down at the phone in his hand and his pupils dilated as the ‘X’ turned into one tiny bar, then two, then three.

He dialed immediately. The number was special. One that only Antonio knew. He was the only person he could think to contact right now. His heart jumped as he pressed the call button and held the speaker to his anxious ear, reminding himself not to crush the little device in his nervous preternatural grip.

One full ring. Two-- … The second was only half out when he heard the call connect and then … silence. If he had not heard breathing through the speaker, he might have assumed the call had dropped.

"Sir … ?" The voice was uncharacteristically desperate for the man that he knew so well, but it was definitely him.

"Antonio." Quinlan rarely called the man by his first name and he heard a rush of relief rich in the heavy sigh on the other end.

"Oh … Sir … where … where have you been?" Relief was replaced by mild annoyance and Quintus grinned. Had this man actually missed him? This was a reaction he was not anticipating in the least.

"You received my letter?" Quinlan ignored his prod for information. “Mrs. Velders contacted you on my behalf?”

"Yes, sir."

"Did you accommodate my …" wife … He found himself unable to voice the lie he had spun to Ferraro and Quinlan swallowed hard. “My wishes?”

"As you instructed, sir."

"Good." At least there was that. He had some concern the man would not do as he had asked. “Where is she now? I will require travel …” He looked down at the fatigues. “And the location of the closest intact safe house …”

"Sir …" Antonio hesitated. “There have been … complications.”

"Antonio …" Quinlan said firmly, repeating his question. “Where is she?”

"I will send you the current location for her phone, but she is no longer answering my calls." The human’s worry was impossible to ignore.

"Tell me everything ... Now."

The truck came to an abrupt stop and Little Bear stepped out to find Quinlan already standing in front of him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but the man stepped back in minor shock of the sudden and uncomfortable proximity.

"Jesus Christ … man …" He clutched his chest as his heart rate skyrocketed.

"I require a vehicle … now." Quinlan’s voice was firm and somewhat rushed. Something was … off. He still held the phone tightly in his right hand as he pointed to the truck. “I will take this one. I will see to it that you are compensated.”

Little Bear looked back at his truck and then furrowed his brow. "My truck? You want my truck?" He said the words, but as he spun back to face the dhampir, he knew there was no questioning it. But, he loved his truck. His dad had left it to him. “Wait, compensated how? You done with my phone?”

Quinlan stared at him for a moment and ignored the request for the return of the device. Plucking the keys from his grip, Quinlan reached for the door handle as he reassured him. "You will be compensated. I give my word."

Wait, what? No way he was gonna take his dad’s truck … "Hey, we can find you another car …"

"George!" A voice called from the direction of the camp. “We’ve got a problem! We’ve got a big problem!”

"GAH! What is it now?!" He turned to address the two older people approaching. As he looked at the shorter of the two, he worried. What was the hell was Deer Clan Mother doing here? She was staying with the ...

"The Great Fire has been … taken …" The older man’s voice trailed and he noticed the dhampir. “Wait … is that … ?”

"Ah … shit …" Barbara gasped, her mouth falling agape the moment she looked upon Quinlan. “I thought he was … dead?”

"Taken?" Little Bear laughed out loud. “Who would be strong enough to take the Great Fire?!” He intended his question to sound so utterly ridiculous that everyone would laugh, but when no one did, he turned back to Quinlan, who was already getting into the driver’s seat of his truck, starting the engine immediately.

Shit. He looked at Jacks and Two Paws, flicking his chin towards the truck before sliding across the hood and sitting down into the passenger seat. His two friends followed suit, jumping into the bed together.

Quintus regarded his new passenger with disdain. "I do not require your assistance. You should stay--"

"Like you said … it’s a war …" Little Bear shrugged, grinning madly as he did. “And wars need soldiers. ‘Sides … my truck doesn’t go anywhere without me.”

"Indeed."

It was a damn good strike, but Gabriel didn’t stay down for long. He lifted himself up and sneered at his older brother. "Fucking hypocrite!"

"Yeah …" Michael shrugged madly. “So what!? WHO CARES!?”

Gabriel screamed something incoherent, his voice full of fury as he charged his big brother, tackling Michael with viscous force, throwing the golden hayyoth back against the rock wall and everything shook around them.

"Selfish Heartless BASTARD!!!" The massive angel bellowed as he swung to strike, but Michael sidestepped and used the staff again, jabbing it into Gabriel’s shoulder, causing him to step back from its force. Michael always knew, should his discretion come to light, that his brothers would be disappointed in him, but Gabriel was incensed and there was something off about the rationality of his anger. “I looked UP to you!”

"I’m heartless?! You’re the one who’s acting like a chil--" Could he reason with him when he was in this state? He doubted it, but he still felt like he should try. He wasn’t allowed to finish his sentence as another blow landed and his brother tore him from the ground, picking him up completely and chucking him across the chamber. As he hit the wall head first, the staff slipped from his grip and Gabriel grappled with him. They rolled across the ground like fighting children, tearing and clawing at each other’s face and hair.

"You only care about yourself! YOU’VE ONLY EVER CARED--"

"Please stop!" Michael heard Hathų scream from behind. Why was she still here?! She needed to run. Didn’t she understand? Michael had afford her a chance to escape, at the cost of his own freedom. There was no way he could beat Gabriel. He had come to give her a chance to flee … to get to their safe place …

Gabriel fish hooked his mouth and Michael bit down on his finger. Both men sneered and spit at each other. Maybe if he could get him in a submission hold? They rolled and rolled on the ground.

Nope, his massive brother won the wrestling match and he was on top of Michael completely when the staff connected with Gabriel’s head. It was like a light thub against his temple, but the force was miniscule and he looked confused for a moment. His brows furrowed and both men stopped their fight and turned to look at the prophet, standing to the side, holding the staff in both hands, her eyes wide with shock. She had struck the angel with as much force as she could muster, but ...

"What the hell?" Gabriel released his hold on Michael’s wrists and grabbed the end of the staff, yanking it out of her hands and chastising her with a tone one might use with a child. “What’re you doing? Give me that!”

Michael lunged at the wrong time during the exchange and the staff swung up and around, mercilessly connecting with the side of her temple, sending her crumpling to the ground, unconscious.

"Oh shit …" Gabriel’s mouth flew open and he turned to look at Michael with absolute shock. “No no no. That wasn’t my fault. She--”

"YOU MOTHER FUCKER!" Michael surged with energy and he tackled his brother as a flurry of golden lightning danced across his spotted skin. “I’LL KILL YOU!”

#the strain fanfic #quinlan fanfic #mr. quinlan fanfic #quintus sertorius fanfic #quintus densus #an insatiable ache #chapter 10 #part 2

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