#i mean like craters? shadows and light? gravity? that's moon shit

[coquelicoq]

it's not that i think paul simon was on drugs when he wrote his songs. i wouldn't be surprised either way. but i do think that i would suddenly understand all his lyrics if i did even one teeny tiny little psychedelic.

[phagechildon]

Never

Been going through a lot at home/work and it almost feels crippling and I’m trying my best not to complain anymore so decided to write a bit to help release. Also I had to write angst using Jack’s curse because I’ve literally been dying to and now I can since it’s been a while since the book’s been out~ such an angsty curse I love it ;//////; This is probably just gonna be a one shot, wrote it in an hour and just quickly edited it. Might not be the best but oh well! 

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Slick sweat and pooling blood made the chains twist around the freckled neck as they pulled him along, practically dragging him up the steep jagged mountain trail. The merciless sun beat against his filthy bruised skin that had long forgotten what a gentle touch was like, but no longer cared. His forest green eyes were dull, that remarkable spark hardly visible even to a trained eye. No one could blame him for giving up, not when someone he trusted more than himself lead him and his people to hell and let the immortal flames feast on their souls.

He’s the only survivor, the chief of Berk.

But not for long.

A sweltering hot wind rushed at them as they turned a corner, sand and debris blinding them all. They heard someone scream, though the sound faded from distance after a few seconds.

No one turned, and no one grieved, they kept walking, yanking on the chain in anger, nearly making the prisoner fall flat on his face.

It won’t be long now,

Yes, it won’t be long now…

They marched even after the sun fell, losing a few more men along the way. His own foot slipped at some point, but the chain violently cut into his skin and nearly snapped his neck as they pulled him back to hell.

Of course it wouldn’t be that easy or satisfying. Nothing ever was for him.

They marched until both the soldiers and the moon reached their peaks, the scene at the top coming straight out of living nightmare.

Dozens of shadow people lined up on both sides of a dark crater at the center, creating a pathway the soldiers dragged the dying chief down. His skin tore and bled against the rocky surface, but he welcomed the pain.

“Finally,” a voice chuckled, seeming to come from everywhere. “Why, don’t you look pathetic?” The soldiers dropped the body to the ground, the hopeless human not even caring enough to stop his fall.  “If I didn’t know you were the Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, I wouldn’t believe my own Nightmares.” When Hiccup didn’t respond, the voice merely smirked even deeper, cold and clammy fingers gently running along his bloodied cheek, making him want to scowl.

“Get it over with, you sick bastard,” the auburn somehow chocked out, not wanting to put up with this bull shit anymore.

Of course he knew what he looked like, this piece of shit did this to him.

“And there’s the signature bark,” the man mocked, moving a few strands of hair from his face. “I’d punish you if this wasn’t the end you know, you should thank me.”

“Die bitch.”

“Oh good one, Pitch, Bitch, sounds the same,” the Nightmare leader sighed, enjoying this far too much. “As fun as this has been, it’s time for this to end.” Those ‘soothing’ fingers moved down and gripped his neck, pulling him up to dangle slightly off the ground. The auburn’s arms stayed at his sides, not even trying to get air back in his lungs out of instinct.

He just wanted this all to end.

“Think of it this way, when you’re sacrificed, your soul won’t even go to the afterlife, it’ll become part of me, part of the new age, the age where the world itself becomes a living hell for everyone. And you have your best friend Toothless and your lover boy Jack to thank for it.” Those names made Hiccup flinch, stirring emotions that nearly flared out of control. Pitch merely smirked as he brought him over to the pitch black fissure. “Tonight, you become a god, and your vengeance assured.”

Weightless-

Gravity’s greedy arms latched onto his chest and pulled him down, the moon getting further and further away as darkness enveloped him. Flashes of him and Toothless soaring the skies made him choke as they were quickly replaced with flames and ash. Those acid green eyes no longer saw him, those acid green eyes became poisonous gold that laid waste to everything he was, and everything he thought he’d ever be.  

And it was all Jack’s fault. The one he fell in love with, the one he shared his whole being with.

He forgot who he was, but more importantly, forgot who his enemies were, and the curse.

He forgot Pitch can hear his thoughts, feel his emotions, and sometimes even see what he sees. He was destined to live alone at the bottom of a lake he threw himself into to prevent anyone he loved from dying, and in the process, literally forgot everything, even himself.

If only he and Toothless hadn’t passed by that lake.

If only they didn’t try to give him a proper burial…

The ice spirit didn’t even come for him, not even as darkness slowly plunges into his body, the bitter loneliness crippling as all his thoughts from the past year come back at once:

Did you forget about me? Did you… find someone else that’s better? Was I never good enough in the first place…? Did your popularity as a guardian mean more to you than me? Did you get bored of me?

I was never good enough

I will never be good enough, not for anyone…

Or maybe… you aren’t. You left me, you left all of us. Everything came crumbling down in a blaze, and you were nowhere to be found as my skin burned and I cried out at the top of my lungs for you. After all those years together, I’ve become nothing, and I’ve become numb to the pain.

Will you even notice when I die...?

For the first time in months, tears trailed down his bruised cheeks, tears of regret, tears of loneliness – of abandonment. Tears of failure, tears of pure misery.

He couldn’t remember what it felt like to cry, but there wasn’t always a light, was there? A blinding light and soothing touch-

That wasn’t always there, was it? Crying was never this soothing, and yet, he didn’t want to open his eyes nor his mind to the possibility of what this light and soft caress that stopped his body from falling could be. His heart and mind couldn’t take it – he’d shatter under the weight of everything.

When unconsciousness suddenly took him, he was more than willing to go, no matter where it took him as long as it kept him far from reality.

He no longer had the strength to face it.

[idanwyn-et-al]

Gather close, beloveds. Do not mind the howling rattling the casement; such winds have always blown their whining load against the staunchest of barriers. They have levied their spume, moon-drawn, against the unyielding lighthouse walls forged from the very bedrock of the sea itself; immune to even the most misbegotten wave that carries the pallid, wriggling worms of the depths near its crest. My beloveds, you may know the tales of the Waxing Gibbous moon, glassy craters upon its sunward face that shield its surface from the very light it reflects. It is said that the best and worst among us wear this mask for rites unspeakable; their beginnings murky, much like the grey moon’s surface, but their purpose clear. The grey moon beholds the radiance of the sun, and, behind its obsidian mask, courts the brighter light. 

Some succeed; the bearer of light finds the words whispered in the gibbous moon’s glow to lift them up; to benefit the covenant of gravity, two bodies spinning harmoniously in the firmament. 

More fail; they whisper the words wrong, perhaps; mean for the light to never put long shadows behind their paltry offering. The moon lives in much isolation; it does not consider the gravity of other bodies that keeps it from being spun into darkness, lost amongst its lesser fellows, devoid of life and light and meaning. When I tell you, beloveds, of the glass-cratered moon, I bid you heed this tale. Heed, too, these words; sacrosanct, weighty with the eyes of thousands of suns, of lighthouses and their lanterns, that expose your wriggling worm in the darkness: “Unless your spume is sought by the shore itself, know that you are a small wave among many. Also, stop sending this shit to people, it’s disgusting and never works.”

Can I show you a cumshot?

Noooo thank you!

[saltineofswing]

Prime Fragment: DIVIDED

“Found it!” The Ghost’s shell is scorched and twisted by heat, but as the Hunter holds it up for the others in the retrieval squad to see crimson glints beneath the ash. Galatea jogs over and the Hunter bounces the ruined Ghost in his palm, tosses it underhand to her.

“Show some respect,” Galatea says. When she speaks it’s like being struck - like being punched in the morals, specifically, and the Hunter coughs self-consciously and turns away to keep combing the rubble.

Galatea, and 20 other Guardians, have been out sifting through the wreckage of the destroyed districts of the City for three days - since the Red Legion’s occupation broke. Mostly Hunters, of course; a couple of Titans around for heavy lifting, a Warlock around to disintegrate debris. Galatea volunteered for this district, specifically. There’s a specific Guardian she’s looking for.

The Ghost in her hand is only half of that equation.

“Sun’s going down!” The shift commander calls in from a block ahead. Galatea doesn’t look up from Constant’s twisted shell. “Last dig, then we go home!”

“The body. The Guardian’s body.” Galatea indicates Constant’s shell. “Did you find it?”

The Hunter hums a soft negatory, offering apologetic palms and shaking his head. They are standing in a crater, glassed smooth, filled like a basin with debris from the surrounding buildings. “Just the shell. Maybe it can be revived? It might be able to find the body.” He sighs and folds his hands behind his back, scanning the rubble for another of the strange phantom leads Hunters use to find what they seek. “Wouldn’t do the poor sod much good now, but at least we’d have him for the memorial.” If Galatea didn’t know any better she would’ve guessed the crater to be just the site of another orbital bombardment; but the crater is perfectly circular and the glass is too even.

That, and she saw the beginning of its creation.

“No,” Galatea murmurs, turning Constant over in her hand. “Were he here, they would’ve been together.”

He snorts quietly. “I mean, it’s not like he got up and walked away, right?”

The urge to reach out and backhand this impetuous runt is quelled by a melancholy, bitter amusement at the thought that she’d seen him do stranger things.

The Hunter finally realizes why she is so invested and his body language becomes stiff and awkward. “... You knew the Ghost?” He asks carefully, hands flexing self-consciously.

“And the Guardian,” Galatea murmurs. Beneath her helmet, her lips tighten. “Keep searching.” As the Hunter takes his leave, Galatea glances around and remembers the crater before it was a crater, and the solemn glance she’d exchanged with a Guardian she had purposely kept at arms distance. Now, she wants nothing more than to have the uneasy comfort of at least knowing what has become of him.

“Where are you, Euclid?” She whispers, and paces the perimeter of his last stand. She finds the trace remnants of the Cabal who had stood against him, but all she finds of her friend is the quiet acceptance he has left etched into the glass.  

•••  •  •••••••••

“Hate this shit.” Viggo stirs the fire with a stick as Moon-5 surveys the small camp they’ve set up, and Alathar tugs the pauldrons on his Titan armor to make sure they’re secure. “Vanguard sends us out on a wild goose chase, for what? The civvies at the Farm who refuse to move back to the City?” The Black Forest is an ungodly uncomfortable place to be at night, especially for a Hunter; his instincts scream over every shadow and there are too many stray impulses in this place. Everything feels like a tacit threat, not the least of which the Shard looming over their heads venting strange energy into the clouds overhead.

“Devrim has good eyes, Viggo.” Alathar turns his own eyes on the Hunter, and he squirms under the Awoken’s luminous green irises. “If he says there’s lights in the forest, there’s lights in the forest.”

“Maybe we shoulda told him to point his sniper at it,” Viggo shoots back sourly. “He seems to think that’s good enough for the Fallen in Trostland.”

“Don’t mind him,” Moon pipes up, examining one of the strange, gravity-deficient chunks of rock that hang in the air like omens. She pokes it and it drifts off into the dark; Viggo feels it strain his perception of their surroundings as if it were slowly tearing its way through spiderweb. “Viggo’s still a newb, hasn’t learned you gotta trust eyes.”

“Trust eyes?” Alathar questions. A strange gossamer energy flickers through the clearing. The fire tinges violet for a moment.

“Somebody says they saw something, you believe ‘em until you have proof,” Moon explains. She chuckles a bit and rejoins the others at the fire, sits cross-legged across from her young ward. “You don’t trust another Hunter’s eyes, nobody’ll trust yours.”

“Yeah, but Devrim’s not a hunter,” Viggo protests. Moon waves him down.

“Nah, but it’s just a saying. Goes the same for Warlocks, for Titans. For Civs. Falls under the Golden Rule-“

“Don’t be a dick,” Alathar and Viggo both parrot simultaneously. Moon chuckles again.

The night wears on, and Moon feeds the fire her Light every once in a while to keep it going. Viggo doesn’t let the tightness in his shoulders go for a second. It’s not that there’s nothing in the forest. It’s that there’s too much in the forest. Is that a Fallen, a Taken, a stray Psion, or just an empty shadow? Alathar spends his time meditating and Moon spends her time spinning her Hand Cannon on her finger without lighting it aflame, trying to master some obscure trick. Viggo keeps his eyes on the perimeter and tries to pretend he’s not being watched from all angles.

The Shard towers over their heads, making Viggo nauseous whenever he looks at it for too long. Eventually, though, the warmth of the fire and Alathar’s rhythmic breathing lulls his attention until he’s zoning out.

You must go back.

Viggo’s head perks up. “Did you guys hear that?” He whispers, rising to a crouch and unslinging his rifle.

“No,” Moon says, amused. “Jumping at shadows, Vigs? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“You’re not a Nightstalker,” Alathar points out, and lifts his shotgun off his knees.

A violet light flickers somewhere deeper in the forest behind the two of them, so Viggo points silently and frantically. When Alathar and Moon whip around, guns raised, the light vanishes.

“Shit!” Viggo whispers.

“Rookie!” Moon teases.

You can never be what you were.

“I heard it that time,” Alathar murmurs; Viggo isn’t great with Awoken body language but the steel prickling smell of fear reads the same on any organic. “What is that?”

The light is dim when it winks back into view, this time almost fifty feet closer than before, and this time both of his companions see it. Moon’s gloves grip her hand cannon so tightly that Viggo hears them creak. Alathar puts on his helmet.

There is something in the dark.

“There it is again!” Viggo hisses; his sidearm shakes in his hands. “What is that?! We’re not- that’s not- we’re not hearing that right?”

“No...” Alathar murmurs, head turning slightly. Surveying the forest for an ambush. But it’s all silent now, holding its breath, waiting. Far overhead, the Shard watches.

This is not right.

“Stop it!!” Viggo shouts into the dark, and Moon hisses for him to shut the hell up. The light whispers out, and when it goes, so does the campfire. The three of them are frozen in place, but the absence of the fire light makes Viggo’s heart thunder as if it were about to burst.

A violet light illuminates his companions’ faceplates from behind the trees at the edge of the clearing. Viggo’s breath sticks in his chest; despite himself it is beautiful. A single figure’s obsidian silhouette steps into the glow. For a moment Viggo fancies he sees teal mouthlights flicker.

“Just some nutbar Warlock,” Moon mutters with strained relief in her voice. The hand cannon lowers, just slightly, and she stands fully upright. “Hey, Guardian!”

A horrific tremor races down the figure’s body from horns to boots and the light vanishes; the guns fly up. Ghosts spin out of nothing and cast flashlights into a murky blackness beyond the clearing.

“Oh, what the fuck?” Viggo whines. “What the fuck?!”

There is a ghastly molecular squeal as Moon’s gun- and her arms up to her elbows- shred in spiral patterns, and at the same time Alathar howls and goes blind. They fly in opposite directions and Viggo wails.

“I AM!!” The corpse comes screaming out of the darkness in tattered saffron robes, fingers reaching for Viggo’s throat, curved horns bathed in unfathomable darkness. “I AM NOT!!”