#i think ancients would give corpses little things to “help” them in another. ..life . i think that's neat

[pmpwbrrs]

–

I made another loser their/his/her name is Influence of Silence and they stink and they're meat

Hheh 😏 smacks ghem with cheese

[heliosthegriffin]

Domain Expansion; Nobody’s fool anymore.

In the Emerald Forest various students were fighting for their life, as a sudden surge of Anthro-Grimm have invaded Beacon forcing a unexpected conflict between the Hunters of Light and the Beasts of Darkness.

One student in particular who has been separated from his team struggles the hardest for his life, Jaune Arc.

A shield comes up and blocks a clawed fist, but pushes the boy back wielding it.

Again and again fist after fist slams into his shield, and forces him further and further back till he till his back is slammed against a emerald tree painfully.

Jaune grunts in pain and fatigue as he blocks another blow, the strength behind the blow sending tremors up his arms as he blocked two handedly.

‘Just got to hold on, just got to hold on till someone can save me, no way I can beat this guy on my own.’ Jaune thinks to himself as he can feel his reserves being chipped away further and further.

A roar of annoyance catches his ears, as the twelve foot tall Ursa Master charges again, it Bear like bone mask hardly showing any emotion though, merely raising it’s fists together before dropping them on Jaune.

He barely manages to block it’s hands, as he is sent to his knees in the process. A leg as long as Jaune was tall then struck out into his guts with a powerful clawed foot, Jaune gasping and spitting as he feels the shockwave spread throughout his body before he is flung through the emerald tree flying through five feet of dense wood without his momentum stopping as he flies nearly a mile across the forest destroying any thing in his past till he lands in a heap, in paralyzing pain.

“Aaagh, is this it?” He asks himself, raising his hand in front of himself, shakily, hardly able to keep it from falling down. “Did all my training really mean nothing?”

He is given no chance to answer as a black shadow forms across the .sky that gets bigger and bigger till it falls right on top of him. The Ursa Master dropkicking him into the ground, Jaune gasps in other pain as the worlds starts to go dark as the Ursa Master punchs him again and again with body-shattering hits after body-shattering hits.

His mind drifts away to the day before as his aura drops away to nothing, and the Ursa Master breaks his body into pulp.

*Day Before*

Jaune stares at his mentor nervously, the white-haired headmaster smiling happily. “C’mon Jaune, you need to move first.” Jaune nods and charges forward to tackle Ozpin with his shield, but the white-haired man sidesteps, so Jaune tries to stab at him only for it to be dodged with nonchalant ease, he pulls back and tries to slash at the man’s neck, but it is batted away with Ozpin’s cane.

Jaune jumps back and holds up his shield, and Ozpin unleash a series of devastating jabs with his cane. Jaune holds still enduring the blows and trying to wait out the onslaught. Ozpins smirks and changes the direction of the cane to hit Jaune’s knees.

Jaune twitches as the blow shakes him, his legs starting to give out on him, and then finds himself on the floor as Ozpin knocks him to the ground cane to Jaune’s throat.

Ozpin takes a sip of his coco. “Hmm, still terrible.”

Jaune’s face falls.

“You’re not meant to stay behind a shield, Jaune. This sit and wait will not work out for you.”

Jaune frowns. “I’m not a fighter, I’m a aura-buffer, a team player, Oz. I’m just trying to be as helpful as possible to everyone else.” Ozpin leans down and stares into Jaune’s eyes with his arcane green eyes. “And that is not what I let you into my school for Jaune, despite your severe undertraining.”

“But, my semblance and my aura are meant to lift up other, Oz. I’m meant to be a hero.”

Ozpin lifts the cane up and shakes his head. “Silly boy, who told you that?”

“Everybody.”

“Well, then they’re stupid.” Ozpin says sticking out his tongue. “And, I’m the headmaster so my opinion matters more.”

Jaune grabs his mouth as he starts to laugh, then sits up.

“So what am I then?”

“A huntsman like anyone else here, and remember Jaune, all Huntsmen must hunt alone eventually. There will be a day when you must fight for your, or someone else, life, and you will have to drop your shield and go hog-fucking wild.”

Jaune stares at Ozpin in shock.

“You’re potential is among the highest I’ve ever seen, up there with Ruby or Pyrrha, now lets get you up to par.” Ozpin says raising his cane again.

*Back to Present.*

The Ursa-Master stabs it’s clawed fist through Jaune’s abdomen straight into the ground beneath sending cracks in the earth everywhere, spraying blood through the air, blood flowing freely out of Jaune’s eyes and mouths.

Jaune gags as he comes back to consciousness hacking up a mouth full of blood.

He stares at his hands in the sunlight, he drops his shield. “I-I’mmm not a fucccking fffailure!” He puts his hand on the broken ground and pulls himself forward and headbutts the Ursa-Master so hard the mask shatters and sends it realing back, revealing a human looking face with bear features, shock across it’s face.

Jaune growls and flips off the grounds to face the Ursa, sword in hand, and guts hanging out from his gaping stomach wound. He smiles. “It’s time to go full fucking hog!” He plants his sword point down into the ground and closes his eyes, the Ursa-Master takes a unsteady step back. 

A explosion of aura comes off of the Jaune. “I won’t wait around more, I’m sorry Oz, I should have taken you’re lesson closer to heart, hehe, I won’t be anyone’s fool anymore. No one will need to save me now,” Jaune opens his eyes looking at the Ursa-Master with utter serenity, having turned a crystalline blue as light leaked out behind them. “Cause you taught me that-”

Jaune doesn't get to finish as bone spike goes through is head, the Ursa-Master having fired a spike from it’s hand.

Jaune’s head falls back, but snaps back, the spike pushed out, the gaping hole healing in microseconds. “What my semblance actually is.” He holds his hands in prayed above his sword. “Domain Expansion: New Testament - Heaven’s Light.”

Light, soft white light spread across Jaune, the Ursa Master, and then all of the Emerald Forest, cutting it off of real space to form a pseudo-dimension. 

The white light touched each Huntsman in the forest, refill their aura reserves and amplifying they’re power by an order of magnitude, everyone who was touched felt the message in their head. “This is Jaune speaking, fuck ‘em up for me.”

Cries of battle sounded off beginning a one-sided massacre. 

Four Hunters in particular responded back.

“You got it, Fearless Leader! Break their existences!” Nora said with lightning flying from her eyes, going down her hands and through her hammer, as she was about to fight a Lamia-Master.

Ren gave a proud smile. “I believe in you, Jaune. So, come back safe.” His body fading in and out of light, about to fight a Yeti-Master

Pyrrha stood atop a mountain of dead Grimm, staring down a Dragonis-Master, a myriad of weapons rotating around her. “Hmm,, so that’s what laid dormant in you,” She smiles fondly. “I could get used to it, so make sure to come back Jaune.”

Ruby’s eyes glowed with power, a cloak of petals behind her. “There it is, I knew there was something in you.” She faced a Ancient Beowulf-Master. “We’re going to have so much fun when you get back.”

Jaune’s wounds begin to knit back together with ease, he held his sword up with both hands. “Sorry about the light show, but I don’t know what I just did exactly, so I’m just going to hope it’s enough to beat, and if it’s not, well not like I’m afraid of dying anymore.”

With a step Jaune appeared in front of the Ursa-Master and swung his sword down connecting instantly, the Ursa-Master having only a fleeting moment to show horror before it was erased by a curtain of light that came down for miles behind it, scaring the land deeply by it’s holy power dispersing any Grimm that it touched.

Jaune looked at his work, and then down to his sword. “Woah, I’m a little scary, aren’t I?” The light then evaporated in a shower of rainbows, releasing the pseudo-space. “I’m a little sleepy, now.” He said before falling asleep.

His friends would later find him in crater statured with holy energy and evaporating Grimm corpses, a miles long scar in the earth in front of him.

[cm-top-10]

C.M. Top 10: Most Dark & Gore Scenes &/or Characters in Cartoon Series

Warning: The following top ten may contain possible spoilers for those who haven't seen newer series. This post may also contain forms of graphic violence & some gore scenes that maybe too much for you to witness. So for your safety & others do not look unless it's at your own risk.

You've been warned...

We all discover at some point in time that not everything you know is allover the rainbow. Most times we see things we can't unsee or learn dark secrets of someone you thought you knew your whole life. & sometimes we learn things the hard way. Or the messed up dark way...

So for this 1st dark Top 10 features the most characters with a dark histories, secrets or just straight up dark/gore scenes. Which character did you not expect to have a dark side? Sadly you be the judge...

1. Invincible - Omni Man beating his son to a pulp.

After learning the dark truth that was revealed to Mark about his father's true intentions. Nolan tells his son the truth about why he was sent to Earth & why he killed the Guardians.

Telling him the reasons why he's here was so he could eliminate any potential threat to the Viltrum Empire. & that he was raising his son not out of responsibility or heroics, but to have him as a bred soldier of the Empire to kill anyone who stood in their way.

& he wanted Mark to join their cause with him.

After Mark angrily refused to help him conquer the planet. Nolan nearly beats the life out of his own son & yells to the top of his lungs saying how pointless it is to protect his home world. While killing millions of innocent people in the process of their brutal fight.

However before he could finish him off, Nolan suddenly realized what he did to his own child & fled the Earth in machspeed, shedding a tear.

They say fatherhood is complicated, but not like this...

2. Castlevania Lords of Shadow - Gabriel's dark fate

While on his journey to slay all three of the Lords of Shadow. Gabriel slowly learned they were the founders of the Order & told him the truth of his order's true intention from each Shadow Lord who too were being used by the Brotherhood of Light. Then when he finally reached the final Lord of Shadow, he learned about his wife's death & fell into dark despair.

Over time his heart grew darkened. & knew nothing but bitterness & sorrow...

But after defeating the three Lords, Laura appears to tell Gabriel that he awakened another ancient evil known as the Forgotten One. Who had plans to destroy all creation & they had to venture to the Brotherhood's fortress to find the entrance to where he was imprisoned.

However only dark begins can enter the realm. & the only way he can bypass it's effects & to defeat this ancient evil, was to become one himself...

So Laura asked him to drink her blood & free her of her torment. Hesitant at first he did what was asked of her & dranked every last drop of her blood, until she died.

He then defeated the Forgotten One & saved mankind. But at a cost of his soul & happiness.

Thus becoming a vampire.

A vampire the world would soon know & fear as Dracul the Dragon.

But that is another story...

3. Baki the Grappler - Yujiro Hanma

As most know Yujiro is the world's most unstoppable & cruelest warrior in the history of fighters. Not even the U.S. Military dares to go near him. Yes Yujiro the Orge has struck fear into many people, even military personnel of different countries. & he did it with no weapons & has turned the U.S. into his personal playground for death & battles.

But the most cruelest thing he's done was ripping the face of one of China's most respected Kaioh masters while facing him in battle, testing his worthiness. The reason Yujiro did this challenge was not to prove his worth but to show all of China & their leaders that they are worthless to him. & showed them all that he doesn't care about their hatred towards Japan noir their worthiness.

& he struck that fear into all who witnessed Ryu Kaioh getting defaced & brutally defeated. Yes this is one man who's definitely going to hell & is going to smile about it.

Because Satan himself would be pissing his buttflap in his sights in fear. While Yujiro fucks his succubus wife in front of his face knowing how little fucks he gives about his "sins."

4. Primal - Sauropod Massacre

After being infected by the Zombie Virus. The infected sauropod becomes a mad rouge & slaughters it's own herd in a bloody rage & massacre.

It left no survivors, ripped them apart & destroyed many of the herds' eggs leaving nothing remaining...

Truly whatever zombie virus this was it drove this poor creature mad & didn't stop until everything wasn't breathing.

Luckily Spear & Fang were able to run it into a dormant volcano. Where the infected dinosaur burnt to ash.

Hopefully now the poor beast is at peace...

5. Star Wars Rebels - Master Luminara's remains

In the search for Luminara to replace Kanan to be Ezra's new master. They soon learned too late that her remains were being used to lure any surviving Jedi out of hiding. So that any Sith Hunters like the Grand Inquisitor would slay them on the spot.

Sadly no one knows whatever happened to her corpse after they escaped. Or if the Empire even still has her.

Rest in peace Luminara wherever you are...

6. Legend of Tarzan - Death of Clayton

While battling in the trees, Tarzan defeated Clayton by tangling him into the jungle vines. But during his blind rage he angrily swiped vine after vine, until one wrapped his neck. Tarzan tried his best to warn him, but in his rage Claton cuts the vine that he was holding on to.

Then after it broke they both plummet to the ground. Tarzan landed safely, Clayton however was hung from above by one of the vines wrapped around his neck after it snapped it straight out from the fall.

There truly are things worse than fate...

7. RWBY - the Death of Adam Taurus

After weeks of stalking Blake & her group. Blake had no choice but to confront Adam for the last time with the help of Yang. The battle was harsh, but in the end they managed to out-think him by stabbing him from different sides. One in his chest & one in the back.

He then fell to his death over a huge waterfall after hitting his head over a ledge before plummeting into the water. Hopefully they've finally seen the last of Adam Taurus.

But let's also hope he doesn't pull a Cinder...

8. TFP Beast Hunters - Predaking beats the scrap out of Ratchet

After using Ratchet to wipe out mankind. The Decepticons threw him into the frails of a vengeful Predaking. Predaking then beats & claws Ratchet, throwing him around like a rag-doll. Until he was ready to finish him off, luckily Ratchet convinced him to hear him out. & told Predaking the truth about what had happened to his Predacon army.

After he told Predaking that it was Megatron who ordered his race's extermination. He asks why he did so & Ratchet replys--

Ratchet: Being on the receiving end of your might. One theory springs to mind, Megatron fears you & any like you.

In his blind rage Predaking stormed his way to Megatron, wiping out anyone who stood in his way.

Which led to his own demise, but that is a story for another time...

9. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stealy Joe gets his ass beat by Jotaro

Now this slimy bastard got what he deserves. Not only did he try to humiliate & blackmail Jotaro into doing his bidding. This cocky motherfucker goes & threatens a random little girl out of the blue. If Jotaro didn't face him like a man & does what he says.

With him up to here with the man's assholeness, our boi Jotaro decided enough is enough & beats the ever loving shit out of this guy. & after punching him multiple times, he literally sends him flying into a wall & throws him his receipt.

Rest in Hell, Joe you worthless bastard!

10. The Falcon Captain America & The Winter Soldier - Captain America U.S. Agent gets his arm broken.

John Walker the former Captain America was given a mantle he wasn't worthy of. Don't get me wrong as much as I had my doubts of him, I was willing to give him a benefit of a doubt. That is until he soiled Steve's good name by using his shield to kill a man in cold blood.

During his blind rage of vengeance, he chased down one of the Flag Smashers & constantly beats him over-&-over with the shield. & then kills him with a fatal blow to the chest area in front of tons of people.

After he murdered one of the perps, Falcon & Bucky tried to ask him to hand over the shield peacefully...

You can take a wild guess what Walker's answer was. He then attacked them with rage & ego, losing his shit. However that ego died as soon as Falcon & Buck breaks his arm to get the shield back. He was then discharged by the U.S. government & was relieved of his duties as Captain America.

Not only that but he then found his way into a dark path he may not be able to uncross.

But that part is another story for another time.

Either way he got dealt some shitty karma.

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Finally finished this! Sorry I’m a bit late.

Made this song in pairing with a new Revalink soulmark fic: Paraphrase

Based on a prompt @motherhyrule (Happy Birthday and thanks!)

Read it on AO3 or, here...

Chapter 1: Holes

There were holes in the sky.

While the artificial blue glow of Vah Medoh was a constant reminder of abnormal circumstances of this view—looking out into the east, you could be fooled for a moment to believe in serenity.

The details of the great, inky abyss were blurred by the occasional grey cloud, crawling towards the light of a decaying moon. Its pale, crescent complexion gave a humble glow to the dancing seas of grass and the motionless hills of glistening lake water. Below, wooden huts embraced one another on the edges of an ancient spire. The winds had crafted a fine sculpture, the unique silhouette of Rito Village cast faint shadows on Lake Totori.

There was distant whistling from either the cutting breeze or a bored village guard, perhaps leaning against his spear, dreaming of slumber.

There's a fire, somewhere. A spiral of smoke rises with a delicious aroma fantastic enough to reach the heights of Medoh. Someone making a late-night stew, under the dotted, broken sky.

If you could tear your eyes away from the nature down below, the navy blue canvas would still be there to greet you—a perfect night that cloaked any traces of the sun, as if time was always meant to be this way. Unchanging, and ever an elegant, unrivaled mix of blue, black, and grey.

But of course, unchanging was not everlasting. The perfect canvas was pierced by the frozen heights of Hebra, and flaming stars. Whole armies of them were scattered across the sky, as if the goddess had flicked a handful of embers at the night, burning through the blue and into an unknown.

"I heard that stars are actually holes into the heavens." Link finally said. "Like...They break through the sky, and at night you can look through them and see the great beyond." He leaned back, shifting himself into a more comfortable position on the rocky cliff.

The ghost beside him raised an eyebrow, wings tucked behind his back.

"Oh? And where exactly did you hear that?"

Silence.

The boy looks out to the distant mountains, wreathed in grey clouds with filtered moonlight. When the wind blows his golden hair just the right way, you could catch a glimpse of a familiar expression.

"...I'm not too sure."

Revali nodded, looking back into the night. He stood beside the hero, and let a quiet sigh escape him, the turquoise flames that circled around the Rito seemed to rise and fall with his chest. "Well. I cannot confirm or deny such a thing, but I imagine it's a decent enough fairy tale to entertain the fledglings."

Link scoffs, a smile tugging at his lips. "Really? They don't give you a big ghost book on how all of life works? What's the point of being dead if you don't know the answer to all the fancy questions?"

"I appear to have missed Hylia's educational spirit lecture. Perhaps my schedule was busy at the time. I do apologize."

"Don't apologize to me! You're the one who missed a once-in-a-afterlife-time opportunity."

"..."

"...Too soon?"

"No, it was just a horrible joke."

"Pfft. Well OK, Mr. 'Well I'll be plucked'"

"I don't think I'm going to accept criticism from someone who's sense of humor isn't even a year old."

"Aha...Fair enough."

A chuckle. A nod. A smile that doesn't reach his eyes.

Silence.

The moon crawls further west. Winds start to die with conversation.

The ghost sighs again, but of course, no breath escapes him. Something itches in the back of his mind, and he looks up at Medoh.

Her phantom blue eyes pierce both mortal and incorporeal, yet there's a tenderness in the way her head tilts towards Revali—every so slightly so as not to wake the whole kingdom with the groan of gears. The gesture is wordlessly understood by her pilot, something about speaking the unspoken. He clicks his tongue.

I don't remember flipping a relationship advice switch in your control unit...

Medoh's lights glow brighter and dim, playfully.

The Rito shakes his head.

No, he thinks again. It's better this way.

The Champion looks out towards Hyrule Castle, Medoh's red laser aimed directly into the heart of the swirling malice. From this view, it’s almost beautiful. Like layered petals of a rose...

I cannot wait to burn it to the ground.

"Yeah..." Link replied. "Don't worry, Revali. It'll be different this time. I won't let you down, again."

The Rito blinked. "Ah. Did I...say that outloud?"

Link nodded, tilting his head to the side with a smile. "You always seem in such deep thought when looking at Medoh. Your face gets a lot more s—uh...I don't know... " He trailed off, making the wise decision to not finish the sentence. Afterall, he wanted to hang out for a little bit longer before Revali's glares punted him to the Akkalain Sea.

Nonetheless, Revali grimaced. Looking at him? Acknowledging him? Oh, there was nothing worse in the world than that...

Time really can change anything.

"Hmph. Well," Revali turned his head back towards Medoh, "With Windblight gone, it's nice to actually have conversations...As unconventional as they may be." He makes sure that his smile can only be seen by the sky.

"She's good company."

Link picks at loose pebbles, tossing them off the cliff and letting gravity take them to new destinations. His hands are already coated in a dusty beige dust.

"Well, if Medoh ever becomes a bore. My schedule's always open." He chuckles. "I'm certainly a different sort of company in comparison, so I should be able to spice up your d—!"

"No."

The iciness of his tone runs Link's spine cold. He dares to look up at the Champion.

It takes all of Revali's strength to continue staring at the stars.

"You should really stop coming here, Link. You have a job to do, and so do I. You gain nothing by returning here each night."

He pauses, his beak clenched just a bit too tightly.

"You did well, avenging me, but now...Your job here is done, and there is more work to do. The fact that you keep visiting each night while the world fades away is pathetic, honestly. You banter and quip as if you have all the time in the world, as if everything doesn't depend on your success. Quit acting childish."

Silence. It drowns out the whistling wind.

Revali looks at the holes in the sky.

"It'll be morning in a few, so get lost. I don't need you here."

The Rito can feel the hero's eyes tearing into him.

= = = = = = =

"Careful now! Can't have you return with half a head. Can I?" Revali loosed an arrow just above Link's head, striking true in a Bokoblin's right eye.

Link whips around just in time to see the monster drop dead, just a foot away from where the knight stood. He turns back and gives the Rito a thumbs up in gratitude.

"Eye think that solves that problem." Link groans and rolls his eyes, but Revali smirks at the grin he attempts to hide. "Ah...One of the best things about these occasions is that you're in no position to quip back at me with your hands full like that." Revali shoots him a wink. "Perhaps I'll interpret your silence as overwhelming awe for my verbal abilities."

The Rito bows left and right, playfully. "Thank you, thank you. It takes a great deal of practice, but perhaps you'll grace my level of skill one day."

Link signs as best he can with the Master Sword in his left grip.

"You're an asshole."

"Perhaps. But it's your fault for sticking around!"

"On your left..." He suddenly says.

There's no hesitation as Revali moves his head out of the way, letting Link swing his sword over his shoulder. A brilliant beam of blue light escapes the edge of his sword, the disc of energy making contact with a Bokoblin's neck, slicing it asunder mid-roar.

"Hmm. Now that's just breath taki—"

"Shut UP!" Link says, knocking an elbow into his ribs. He starts to sign again. "Let's keep heading east. We need to close this pincer quickly. I'd like to finish before lunch..."

The Rito scans the snow covered path, littered with monster guts and blood. Deep reds and purple stain the pristine, crisp morning. The sky is a deep green, pine trees covering the day, dressed in coats of white. The breeze blows the smell of rotting corpses and hickory his way.

"Alright. Let's get a move on. Don't need the Princesses yelling at us again."

"A bit late for that, don't you think?"

The boys both look up in time to see a large burst of water erupt from a nearby cliff. It cascades into a shimmering slide, that freezes as it flows. A bright red Zora flips through the air and descends on it, landing delicately in front of the two. She gives a warm smile that could melt the winter.

"Shall I assume you ran into some chuchu troubles, again?"

Revali scoffed. "That was one time!"

"Hehehe...chuchu go 'sluuurrrp...'"

"Plus, that incident was entirely a certain knight's fault. I've been nothing but incredibly efficient and productive, since then."

"And your tail feathers are all the better for it!"

Revali thwacked Link with his bow to shut him up. The knight rubbed the back of his head with an "Ow..." and shot a rude glare, but the Rito continued. "So where is the Princess?"

Mipha gestured uphill to where she had come from, her magical waterfall already beginning to melt away. "We finished cleaning up the other end of the Tabantha path. She's met up with Urbosa and Daruk by one of the bridges."

The Zora smiles as she looks between Revali and Link. "I volunteered to check on you two while the others headed back. Neither of you need help cleaning chuchu slime out of your hair, yes? I do have the pliers, this time."

Revali's rageful squawk was drowned out by Link's laughter.

Before the trio's banter could truly serenade with the sounds of the forest, Mipha was off to regroup with the others, and Link was soaring in the sky.

The sky was open and clear, not a speck of grey clouded the air. The sun was perched comfortably on the heights of Tabantha ridge, painting the horizon with strokes of orange, the distance blushing in the morning's presence.

The wind flipped Link's hair back and forth, so he finished tying the braid behind his neck, woven tightly with a single, Prussian blue feather. Its tip looked like someone had dipped it in the moon's pale glow.

Braid or no, the heights above Lake Totori were quite cold, and Link nuzzled himself further into Revali's soft feathers. If he were any softer, it wouldn't be out of the question to drown in him.

"You're distracting me." Revali craned his neck back, raising an eyebrow at his passenger. "Keep it together, back there."

The hero shrugged his shoulders. "It's cold."

"I told you to drink another elixir before I took off."

"I wasn't cold then! Besides," He flopped back into the Rito's soft down. "This is adequate protection." Link's words were slightly muffled as he spoke.

Revali sighed. "You're insufferable..."

Eying the destination down below, the Rito rolled his shoulders to get Link's attention. "Keep steady. We're almost there." He started to dip forward.

"And try not to go flying, I imagine it won't work out well for you."

Before Link could even process his words, his stomach started to drop. Falling fast, Revali arched nearly perpendicular to the ground, his bright blue scarf flapping behind him. The Hylian on his back could do nothing but grip onto his armour for dear life, clothes flapping wildly. His loose sleeves caught the wind, pushing them back to reveal pale gold letters, etched in the underside of his right forearm.

Leaving so soon?

The wind rushed by Link's ears, and the sky quickly faded from the cerulean glow of morning, to the snow laced air of the Hebra. What was once broad strokes of indistinct colors soon morphed into the intricate faults, flaws, and edges of towering grey mountain peaks. With the heavens stolen from them, and the frozen earth quickly coming to greet them, Revali quickly opened his wings to catch the air, swooping just above the ground and shooting forward towards the Flight Range.

Rows of cool safflina and wildberries whizzed by, the scent of smoked boar drawing closer and closer. Revali could practically feel Link's appetite from aura alone. Although, the fact that his grip on his back was starting to tighten didn't exactly keep it subtle, either.

"I left the stew going before we headed out for the mission. It should be perfect by now..." He tucked his wings into himself with a quick twirl as he shot through a narrow pass.

The cold updrafts of the Flight Range now biting into his face; the Rito let his wings expand with a few more great flaps, before landing gracefully on the railing of the wooden platform.

Link practically soared off Revali's back and bounded straight for the simmering pot.

"'Thank you, Revali, for giving me a ride across all of Tabantha without asking for so much as a rupee in return!' Oh, you're so welcome, my dear hero. It's always a pleasure to aid a flightless Hylian in need." He shook his head as he made his way into the hut.

"'Oh, but really Revali! The speed at which you travel, and the strength required to take on my loathsome person as you fly is truly something to admire. It's a miracle you took me with you at all.' Why, you are much too generous with your compliments, Link. I have half a mind to write this all down for—MmMph?!"

In a brilliant move of both telling Revali to shut the fuck up, while also sharing their meal, Link shoved a ladleful of delicious stew in the Rito's beak.

Warm, savoury stew trickled down his throat, banishing the cold from his body in mere moments. His tastebuds were nestled with flavours of nutmeg, tender meat, and the delicate heat of a perhaps a single, spicy pepper.

Link's expression was equal parts, "Will you shut up now?" and "So how's it taste?"

"Not too bad...The prime meat I procured is obviously the main event. But your seasoning skills are certainly something of note..." Revali made his way to one of the cabinets, as Link rolled his eyes.

The Rito set his bow beside the Master Sword, leaning it against the painted wood. His eyes lingered on it for a bit too long, before he scoffed and continued on his routine.

Quiver on the counter; bomb arrows wrapped properly; armour loosened and set aside; scarf—

The feathers on Revali's neck suddenly floofed up at Link's touch. But he didn't dare turn around and risk losing the sensation.

He carefully unfolded the fabric around Revali's neck, and drew it off his shoulder. He wrapped it around himself, and signed at the Rito, "Mine, now."

The Rito chuckled, before turning back around to look at the hero, now adorned with far too much blue. Blue tunic, blue scarf, and sapphire eyes—it wouldn't be out of the question to mistake him for the sky.

Link stretched out his hand, and traced the edges of Revali's face, eventually falling down his neck, and towards his shoulders. His fingers eventually hovered over some familiar words that wrapped down the left side of his neck and down his shoulder.

You should give yourself more credit.

They both did nothing but smile at each for a moment, leaning closer and succumbing to the moment. Revali could already feel Link's breath, and see the bits of snow still sticking to his (horribly) braided hair.

The Hylian saw something curious in the Rito's expression as he planted a kiss on the tip of his beak. Looking back up at his jade eyes, he couldn't help but smile wide. Revali cocked an eyebrow.

"Something to say?"

Quiet. The fire chuckled in the background.

Link finally leaned in and whispered to him.

"You smell like shit."

Revali scoffed loudly before shoving Link to the carpet, where he burst out laughing, the wind carrying it to the spirits above.

"Gods, you're insufferable. Why do I settle for you..."

Link unsuccessfully attempted to toss a pillow in his face in revenge—Revali catching it with ease.

"Beats me! Now come here, you stinky bird." He patted the space in front of the fire. No doubt he wanted to sit between his wings again

"Stew or no, I need you to keep me toasty."

In no time, Revali had sat down and wrapped himself around Link, resting his beak on his head.

A hole in the ceiling let sunlight trickle on them as they warmed up.

= = = = = = = 

Link finally sighed, the sound falling off into the void below.

"You-I can't-It was never..." He trails off, before chucking another pebble off the cliff, shaking his head.

"...I'm sorry. I know that you...That we're not really...friends or whatever...I don't mean to force you into anything uncomfortable. I owe you that much..." He looked up at the spirit, a determined look on his face.

"But, don't worry. Whatever mess I was before, whatever person you hated 100 years ago. They're gone, now. I promise I'm different. I promise I won't repeat whatever mistakes I made with you."

Revali just wants to die all over again.

"Well. That's good to hear. Perhaps there's hope for you yet, hero..." He walks forward, so he can't see his face, pointing a translucent feather far out east.

"I'd say your next objection should be Rudania. It's the closest. You can backtrack through whatever roads you've already trailed through getting here." The Rito then waved towards some glistening summits just a bit south. "Although, you said you've been to Kakariko and Hateno, yes? You could probably trek to Zora's Domain from there. The Zora will no doubt be a great asset to your further adventures—"

"Who was I closest to?"

Revali knew it was impossible to feel cold at this point, but he felt something shiver nonetheless.

"What do you mean?"

"Like...the pilots I mean. Was I...particularly close with any of them?"

"Well how should I know!" Revali snapped. He immediately regretted it seeing the look in Link's eyes. "I mean...sorry..."

Silence.

"...Mipha would be overjoyed to see you, I'm sure." He pointed again towards the cliffs surrounding Zora's Domain. "She had quite the heart...She'll make better company than I, I'm sure."

"Mhm...Alright." Link nodded to himself.

"But whatever you choose, don't try taking on Naboris, yet. Urbosa was one of the strongest warriors that even I've ever met. So I imagine that what awaits there is...deserving of more preparation."

The moon escaped from the clutches of a grey cloud, and the two of them were bathed in moonlight.

The knight's sword on his back glistens.

"I'll start making preparations tomorrow, and I'll finally be out of your hair." Link scratched the back of his head. "Although...I hope you don't mind if I come back every now and then to get pointers on using your Gale. I really only used it that one time when you gave it to me, and I've been a bit scared ever since, aha..."

Revali nodded. "That would be a more productive use of your time, yes."

Link finally stood, adjusting the strap of his sword around his shoulder.

"S-So...with Mipha. I actually heard from Kass that...uh he's—well you see, I figured you could confirm if she actually—"

"Stop." His response was as sudden as thunder. Link started sputtering again.

"S-Sorry. I know you just s—"

"Stop doing that. Stop trying to learn about the past, there's nothing for you there." Revali poked a feather at Link's head, which surprisingly made physical contact as he flinched away. "You've been given a gift, you understand? You have the luxury of being unburdened by the pains and memories of 100 years ago, while the rest of us have been stuck wallowing in what we once knew for over a century. Things that we can never attain now that we are dead." He glared, eyes sharp enough to stab into Link's flesh.

"It'd be an insult to the rest of us to throw away such a gift. So stop being ungrateful, and move on."

Silence.

Revali sighed, turning back towards Medoh. "Now get los—"

"You have no right to speak to me like that!"

The Rito whipped around. "Excuse me?"

"You don't know what it's like!" Link stomped a foot down. "You don't know what it's like, to have no attachments, no nothing to grasp onto!"

The Hylian shook his head, looking at his hands. "You're dead because of my failures, and for that, I'm truly sorry. I really am. But..." He looked the Rito, dead in the eyes. "But now I have nothing of value. Nothing to tell me what I'm worth, besides being a fighter. Besides defeating the Calamity. I don't know what kind of person I need to be," He waves a hand at Revali, "Or even what person I should try not to be. I can't...I don't want to just be nothing. Nothing but a sword and useless snippets of a dead past.

"So don't try and tell me there's nothing for me in the past. I need to know what I was, what I lost, and what I did wrong. N-Not just for me, but for everyone's sake! I want to truly know what this is all for, even if it hurts me..."

Link looked down, caressing his right wrist. "I want to know...what it was like to be complete...at the very least..."

Revali looked him up and down, something clawing up the inside of his chest, threatening to escape as dangerous words.

"...Let me see your arm."

"What—?"

"Hurry up, and just come."

Link cautiously stepped closer to Revali, extending his right arm towards him, like a handshake. But he roughly tugged him closer and folded the sleeve of his Rito garb away, exposing the skin to the crisp night air.

Pale gold letters adorned Link's inner arm, running from his wrist to his inner elbow.

Why did you think it was impossible?

The Rito nodded to himself. He had noted the first word being different when he had first reunited with Link, but it put him at ease—and completely shattered something—to have his suspicions confirmed.

"Do you know what this is, hero?"

"Yeah, it's a soulmark. This is probably what my soulmate 100 years ago said when they—"

"No." Revali let his arm fall, turning away. "It's a soulmark alright, but your soulmate is very much alive."

"Wh-What?!" Link started to walk up to Revali. "T-That's impossible! I-It's been over a hundred—"

"That's not the soulmark you had when I met you." Revali said simply. "You died. You were revived. You are adorned with a new mark, and are destined for someone new. Or someones. Or, maybe your soulmate is just yourself, it really depends..." He turned his head back.

Link was just staring at his arm. He bore no smile, but Revali could see the new fire in his eyes.

"It's like I said. It'd be an insult to go digging up the past. But I suppose I can't stop you..." Revali continued to make his way to Medoh. "You want something to fight for? Fight for that..."

The moon disappeared behind another cloud, and the glow of Medoh was all that bathed them. Link finally looked up, calling after the ghost in the mist.

"I...Thank you, Revali. But just so you know..." The Rito Champion turned, staring directly at the hero's determined expression.

"This doesn't change what I want. I still intend to know who I was."

There was quiet as they each looked at their ghosts.

Revali sighed, giving a sad nod.

"I know."

He disappeared in glowing blue flames, the embers falling towards the stars.

[bunnys-beetlejuice-blog]

come on in, folks, i got some kind of goof ass Beetlejuice/Evil Dead crossover for you to enjoy.

He’s eighteen, and it’s Saturday, which means that he and Lydia are wandering around Manhattan, looking for trouble to get into. Lydia, eleven and ever his little shadow, is standing next to him, as they take a moment, on the busy New York street corner, to sip their boba and think about their next move. They were meant to be watching some horror movie that had looked alright from the previews, but ended up being so stupid, it wasn’t even fun, and the Deetz siblings had found themselves walking out, one hour poorer but a bucket of overly butter saturated movie popcorn richer. “I still can’t believe how bad that was,” Lydia says, again, huffing, because they’d actually paid money to see that stinker, instead of sneaking in, which is their usual habit. “Ya get one big name attached an’ everyone apparently stops givin’ a shit. Musta figured th’ droolin’ masses would eat it up,” he agrees, and he slurps up the last of his tapioca balls, and then proceeds to eat the plastic straw. “Is it too much to ask that characters actually be interesting, and, I don’t know, behave like normal human people?” Lyds bitches, as BJ takes a bite out of his cup, too. She glances up at him, dryly. “I mean, I guess maybe my standards for normality are low, but still.”

He grins at her. “Whatever could you possibly mean, sister dearest?” he puts on a posh, almost transatlantic accent, and she rolls her eyes, and sucks boba up in her straw, then shoots the pearls at him like a pea shooter. He snorts and laughs.

It’s a good day, despite the letdown at the movies. It’s nearly that time of year, just about the start of his seasonal depression, as the sun becomes shy and things go cold and gray. Still, there’s some time left with the sunshine, so he’s drinking it up, savoring it, and it feels good, to stand here with Lyds, and talk about nothing. “Alright, come on, let’s second act it,” he grins, and she perks up. “I think Wicked’s playing!” “Wicked’s always playin’.” “Well, I’m not sitting through Hamilton, it’s a Saturday. I’m not learning if I don’t have to.” “Totally fuckin’ fair. Music Man, maybe?” “Hugh Jackman’s weirdly brick shaped head freaks me out.” “There’s gotta be a show we can sneak into,” BJ frowns, scratching at the scruff of his chin, and then he catches a scent he’s never smelled before, as Lydia puzzles through their remaining options. It’s like death, sort of, but not. Like death warmed over, or death, refried. He takes his sister’s hand, and leads her away from the street corner, following the smell, nose in the air, pupils blown wide, and Lydia laughs. “Great, time to go poke a dead thing. That’s more fun than The Last Four Years, at least.” She’s seen him go like this before, and thinks she knows what to expect.

Neither of them know how to react when they follow the scent down an alleyway and see the violent fight happening in front of them.

Parked at the far end of the alleyway is a car, some 70’s make that he doesn’t know enough about such things to name, and between it, and the Deetz siblings, is an one handed man absolutely going feral on a group of three refried dead smelling zombie… things. “Deadly-vu,” he hears Lydia whisper, as they watch the man perform a scissor kick that sends a zombie head flying. It bounces like a basketball against the brick wall that makes the alleyway, rolls, and lands at the Deetz sibling’s feet. There’s a beat, as they stare at it, and it stares back, before the head on the ground opens its mouth and speaks. “DEMON!” it shrieks, and then it makes the life ending choice to roll at Lydia, teeth bared, and his boot is going through it, crushing through the skull like an overly juicy bug under his heel. He takes a second to wipe the gore from his sole onto the pavement. “Maybe Wicked could be good,” he turns and says to Lydia, who responds by ducking behind him, because the body the head formerly belonged to seems to be stumbling at them, clutching something in it’s boiled and infected and puss covered arms, and it thrusts the thing at BJ, before falling down and collapsing into dust. It’s a book. Some kind of creepy old demon book, from the look of it. He wrinkles his nose in vague disgust, and then takes a sniff. If the zombie things are refried death, this thing is a whole fucking Mexican food buffet of it, and it makes his head spin in a way he’s never felt before. He kind of likes it. He’s about to give the cursed reading material a tentative lick before a boom rings out from in front of them- the one handed man has pulled a sawed off shotgun off his back, and dispatched another corpse thing. There’s one left, and it’s circling the man, who by this point is so blood covered, he looks like he was tricked into being prom queen, or something.

“Is it just me, or do you freaks just keep gettin’ uglier?” the man quips, and the corpse lunges, a stumbling move which earns it the butt of the shotgun to the jaw, which goes flying. The zombie is shot through the gut, and drops, but is a twitching, squirming mess. BJ’s seen enough horror movies to know that thing is getting back up. The stranger has apparently, too. He takes a moment to reload the shotgun, then double taps, blowing clean through the thing’s skull. He blows at the slightly smoking barrels of his sawed off, twirls it, and holsters it, re-slipping it onto his back. It’s a pretty cool move, actually, and the siblings watch in rapt attention. It takes the three remaining people (well, two people, one demon,) in the alley a moment to actually focus on each other, and there’s silence, before the stranger speaks. “Uh,” says the man, covered in blood, and Lydia peaks out from behind BJ, and stares at him, with big eyes. “Kids,” he hears the man mutter. “Great, just what I need, a coupla kids, gettin’ in my way.. Hey, kiddies,” he says, louder, with a smile, which might be really charming when he’s not soaked in rot and blood, but the effect at the moment is not as sincere and friendly as he clearly thinks it is. “Looks like you two little heroes managed to wrangle my book away from those deadites. You wanna do your pal Ash a favor, and hand it over?” He makes a “come here” motion with his stump arm, and then seems to realize that’s not so appealing, because he tucks that appendage behind his back, worried, suddenly, about scaring them. As if a man with a missing hand is the weirdest thing they've seen in the last five minutes.

“What the fuck,” Lydia says, and BJ can’t help but agree with that sentiment. Also, he feels a vague sense of sudden responsibility for this weird old tome. It doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of thing a human should have. Maybe those zombies… deadites? Maybe they were trying to get back what was stolen from them. Though he’s not charitable enough to assume that they’re the good guys in this feud. The stranger, Ash, takes a careful step forward. “It’s alright,” he says, like he’s talking to a wild animal he’s trying to tame, and not a teen and preteen, respectively. “I’m not gonna hurtcha. Just need to get my book back.”

A sudden screeching wind roars down the alleyway, and both living humans react, ducking, as it bellows and swirls around them, kicking up dust and trash and chunks of leftover deadite. “Demon! Aid us!” BJ feels a presence in front of his face, something he can’t see, but a great, ancient something, reaching out to him, demanding, begging, pleading, for him to assist in whatever macabre goal it wants to meet. He responds by sticking his unglamoured tongue out at it. “Ewww, gross. No.”

The thing shrieks again, and makes a beeline for Lydia, which is just about the stupidest thing it could have done, because he drops his glamour fully and snarls, gives the ancient being a psychic push back, and he sends the thing that cannot be seen flying, out of the shady darkness of this alleyway, past what he assumes to be Ash’s car, and out onto the city street, into the sun. It shrieks and moans and curses him. He flips it off, as it dissipates. The vibe in the air, however, tells him it’s not “dead,” just gone.

Ash straightens up and looks at him. BJ’s already slipped his human disguise back on, so the effect is that Ash has just seen what seems to be a slightly too pale and definitely overweight human teen somehow push back an ancient evil, totally unaffected. Now it’s his turn to let out a confused, “What the fuck?”

“Come on, BJ!” Lydia grabs her big brother’s arm and pulls him away, running from the gore and the confused zombie slayer. “Wait, kids-!” Ash rounds the corner, after them, but the Deetz siblings are already gone, disappeared into thin air, flash stepping the span of blocks in the blink of an eye, and they don’t stop until Lydia, sick from the teleportation, gives his hand a squeeze. They appear on a rooftop, confusing and traumatizing some pigeons that had been roosting.

“Wait, why did we run?’ BJ asks, and Lydia looks at him like he’s a moron. “Because that guy was clearly a monster hunter! And kind of really good at it!” she says. He mulls that over, and smiles. “Worried for your big bro?” he bats his eyelashes at her, and she responds by slugging him in the gut, which he reacts the barest amount to. “Last thing I want is to explain to mom and dad how you ended up with a shotgun blast through your skull,” she says, and crosses her arms, before leaning forward, to study the book he’s still holding. “So. What is that?” He grins. “Wanna open it an’ find out?” Read the rest of the first chapter here!

[trashmenofmarvel]

Branded - Chapter 32

Pairing: Demon!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: Broken from the time-loop, you and Bucky discuss next steps.

(This is a fan AU of Falling’s Just Another Way to Fly by araniaart​ . Please check out this incredible series for all of your demon Bucky needs.)

Chapter Warnings: Mild anxiety attacks and dissociation 

AO3

“You…”

If you were sweating like a marathon runner, then Bucky was panting like a winded horse that had been galloping too long for too fast.

“What… did you see?” He was perched on the edge of the bed, tail thumping against the covers in agitation.

You sat further upright, trying to catch your breath. You confirmed that, yes, you were back in your own room, in your own body. It was nighttime, cold, and the house was quiet because everyone else had gone to bed. The solid softness under your hands grounded you, confirmed that this was real and you were back where you were supposed to be.

You could barely process his question.

“I… I don’t know—“

Bucky gripped you by the shoulders and leaned over you, expression a mixture of fear and panic.

“What did you see? Tell me!”

“Everything!”

You winced and lowered your voice, not wanting to wake anyone, trembling violently in his hands.

“I saw everything.”

Bucky deflated, releasing you with horrific guilt written all over his face as he backed away from the bed.

“And…” You looked up at him, dazed, gripping the bedspread like a lifeline. “And I… didn’t just see. I was… with you…”

“No…”

“…in that place. The demon realm—“

“No, no, no, no.” Bucky stumbled back, his tail whipping around as he gripped the sides of his head. “That wasn’t you. That wasn’t you. It can’t be.”

“Bucky, please, look at me,” you quietly begged. But he wouldn’t. He shook his head, paced your room like a caged animal, but he wouldn’t look at you.

“It’s my fault. My fault. This wasn’t supposed to happen, something went wrong. Oh, God, what did I do? What did I do to you?”

He was spiraling and there was nothing you could do to stop it. As soon as you stood from the bed, Bucky flinched away, staring at you in naked terror.

“I can’t…”

He choked out the words, turned to your windowsill, and flung it open. The same windowsill he’d fled from twenty years ago. Wings ripped from his shoulder blades, shredding the back of his shirt, and he leapt through, disappearing into the darkness with a rush of air washing over you.

You stared at the open window for a long time. Long enough that the room had gotten cold enough to see your breath. And still you stood there, frozen, your mind a blank space as your body felt strange and far away.

Something warm and alive rubbed against your leg, a concerned meow bringing you back to the present. You shook off your daze and quickly shut the window, drawing the curtains back over the dark glass.

Picking up Monster, you returned to the bed and crawled under the covers, holding him tight as you shivered violently.

You waited for Bucky to return, watching the digital read-out of the old clock as it crept past midnight. The exhaustion of parsing through all the memories, of feeling as if you’d lived several lives over the span of just a few minutes, and then for Bucky to just take off… You were torn between fatigue and depression that felt more akin to grief.

As the clock ticked past two in the morning, you wondered if Bucky would be coming back. Maybe this was the thing that broke him. You couldn’t even blame him.

Burying your face in Monster’s fur, which may have grown damp against your cheeks, you let the exhaustion overtake you, pulling you into merciful darkness.

Except it wasn’t merciful. Confusing images swirled past you. Freezing bunkers, a red, dead world, a pretty rooftop garden with a kind, bald woman. She reached out to you, and you tried to grab her hand but you slipped backwards, out of reach.

Down, down you fell, through the freezing air, until you crashed into the snow, left broken and bleeding red against the white.

You awoke with a start, heart leaping in your throat. The room was cold again, and your back ached from the aftereffects of the horrifically realistic dream.

The noise that woke you repeated itself: Monster was hissing into the dark.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” a low voice responded. “Don’t have to tell me. Move over.”

Monster spit his annoyance, but he wiggled out of your arms and jumped off the bed, vanishing out of sight in that way he had of doing.

“Bucky?” Your whisper had barely any strength to it.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m… I’m here. Can I… come to bed with you?”

You pulled back the covers without hesitation, shifting back to give him room. The room was dark but you could still see him slip under the blankets as the mattress jostled from the additional weight.

Your fingers brushed against his arm and you almost drew back.

“You’re freezing.”

Bucky released a snort, settling down into the bed as he rested his head on the pillow next to yours.

“I’ll live. My own damn fault, anyway. I shouldn’t have left.” He found your hands under the covers and squeezed them gently. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Despite how cold he was all over, you pressed right up to him, tucking your head under his chin as you hugged his arms against your chest, seeking comfort while simultaneously trying to warm him up. That was something you couldn’t forget from the memories. Bucky hated the cold.

“I forgive you.” You rested your chin on your favorite spot, his collarbone. “So long as you forgive me for what happened tonight. It wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”

“What? Why would you even say that? Of course it was my fault!”

Your shoulders hunched inward. How much could you tell him? You didn’t want Bucky to take the blame, but you weren’t sure if what the Ancient One had told you had been just for you and Strange.

Plus, Bucky had a complicated relationship with the sorcerers, and he already got weirded out by magic… Perhaps it would be better to wait to tell him the full truth when you actually knew what that was.

“Well…” You scooted a little closer. Even now you were craving contact, wanting to touch him even if it was selfish. After not having a body for so long, it was nearly a physical need. “Weird stuff keeps happening to me, right? The portal. The demons coming after me. Having a hobgoblin for a pet. That’s… that’s probably got something to do with me, at the very least.”

Bucky was quiet for a long moment. You waited, barely breathing, having no idea which way he would go. Continue to blame himself for everything, or allow someone else to shoulder the burden for once?

“I think we should talk to Strange,” he finally said.

You nearly melted with relief. This was good. Maybe you could talk to Strange and not involve Bucky at all with the weird time-loop, memory, magic stuff. At least Bucky could stop blaming himself for things he wasn’t responsible for.

Maybe Strange had been wrong about you being the magic equivalent of a dead battery. As much as you tried not to think about it, you knew something wasn’t normal if you were attracting demons left and right. What happened tonight just confirmed that something more was going on.

You just wished the Ancient One had been more clear about what she meant by training, not to mention that ominous bit of advice at the end. You were supposed to make a choice that would affect both of your lives? What the fuck? You were really beginning to understand Bucky’s frustration the wizards.

Hopefully, you could go to Strange for help without him finding out about the bond. It was a complicated balancing act you would somehow have to manage.

“I agree,” you said. “Your wizards are equipped to deal with this stuff, aren’t they?”

Bucky chuckled. He’d only been gone a few hours and you’d already missed that sound.

“They’re not my wizards, but yes.”

He made a low, comforting sound, almost like a purr, as he pulled you against his chest and petted your hair. Your eyelids drifted shut of their own accord, and you would have purred yourself if you could.

“Either way, I won’t run away again. I promise.”

Listening to his heartbeat, slow and steady against your ear pressed to his chest, you prayed it was a promise Bucky could keep. After the confusing but undeniable lifetime you’d spent together, you couldn’t imagine a life without him. You wanted to talk to him about everything you’d experienced in that place, but you were too tired, and Bucky’s breathing had already slowed to a steady rhythm. Tonight had taken a lot out of him, out of you both. The least you could do was get some rest.

But rest didn’t find you so easily. No matter how much you tried to push it out, the image of the dried-up corpse plagued your thoughts, and you eventually drifted into a restless sleep, dreaming it had your face. Long dead with a pentagram stretched across your shoulder.

Next Chapter

[snickiebear]

If this inspires anything in you, and if you have the time to write it, I hope we can see how you respond to the following prompt:

Kakashi is the god Sakura has to eat and kill.

Lordt help us!

HAHAHAHA MITTENS!! this is literally one of the best prompts ever. thank you SO MUCH!!

i literally had to sit down and outline this so make sure i gave it justice LMAO also, did a little research on japanese kami! which is so interesting btw :))

side note! this is also on ao3 bc i really, really loved it

xiv.

It begins with a girl (doesn’t it always?). A girl made woman who is nothing but smiles and laughter, unfiltered sunshine and the smell of flowers on the warm breeze.

She is good, she is brave, she is kind.

And she grows, that girl made woman, she grows and her eyes open to the world around her. To the hatred of the mortal, to the disease of the gods.

She holds her mother close as she dies in her arms, her father off to war.

They never find his body.

She is the only survivor of her village, war and wreckage in her wake.

This woman made once of sweet sighs and feather light touches learns to survive, learns to harden herself against the world, to bare her teeth and not her throat, to love the scars and hard muscle of her once too soft body.

She meets a woman with too ancient eyes for a face so young and the woman smiles at her, it is a horrible, wretched look. It is a beautiful, timeless look. “Oh, you.” She murmurs, voice old and young, standing slowly. “You’ll do just fine.”

And the girl made woman bares her teeth in a smile, a warning, tilting her head to the side, “Oh? And what shall I do just fine?”

The woman assesses her, amber eyes shining with something cruel, “You will be my avenger, girl.”

And the girl made woman, well, she rather likes the sound of that.

xxiii.

She sees him for the first time at the market, it’s a cloudy day, the streets full of people and the carts slowly selling out of the limited goods available.

The very land has been dying for years now. The mortals do not know it, but Sakura does. Less and less crops, dying plants, brain soil.

The thought itself brings a slight smile of fondness to her face.

But Sakura sees him for the first time at the market, and she knows who he is, what he is. She was under Tsunade’s tutelage for years. Sakura knows a god, a kami, when she sees one, feels one.

So, she walks, shoulders back, spine straight, loose and fluidly until her boot purposely catches on a crack in the cobblestoned road and she’s airborne with a sharp gasp—

Until two strong hands wrap around her forearms, steadying her gently. Sakura looks up, face flushed and eyes wide as she makes eye contact with the Shinigami, who looks at her in concern.

The god takes the form of a tall, broadly shouldered man with a mess of gray hair. Onyx eyes stare at her and they are so black she can see her reflection. Sakura fights the full body shudder that threatens to overtake her.

She has stared into the eyes of a dying god before. Staring into a living one’s should be no different.

“Are you okay?” He asks and his voice rumbles through her, her heart pounding without her consent.

“Yes,” She breathes and offers a shy but sweet smile, slowly taking a step back. He lets his hands drop, fingers grazing her bare skin. She ignores the goosebumps that erupt in his wake. “Thank you very much…”

“Hatake Kakashi,” The liar says, eyes crinkling from over his mask. “And you are?”

“Haruno Sakura,” She replies easily, tucking her hair behind her ear. The Shinigami holds out her basket of goods and she takes it, brushing her fingers against his deliberately, calculatingly.

The wretched kami gives her another eye crinkle, taking a step back himself, “Aa, a pleasure then, Haruno-san.”

Forcing a blush, Sakura waves off the honorific, “Please, just Sakura.”

“Then I am simply Kakashi,” And with a duck of his head, the fraud turns and ambles away.

Sakura turns also, disappearing into the crowd of much too skinny humans, too poor, too stupid. She allows herself to grin, wide and unfiltered, and with teeth. And that scaled, clawed, fanged thing inside her peeks its eye open and purrs.

xvi.

Tsunade— or at least that is what she wants Sakura to call her — takes a long swig from her jug and cackles to herself. “I was right when I picked you, you know.”

Sakura glances up from her scroll of poisons, “You still have yet to tell me why it took only one look to think I can do whatever avenging you want done.”

Swirling the liquid in the jug once more, Tsunade chuckles, “Call it intuition, yeah?”

She huffs, snapping the scroll shut and stealing the jug from her master, taking a long drink herself. It is horribly bitter and disgustingly tart, and Tsunade laughs herself hoarse at the look on Sakura’s face.

“You’re going to do great, mighty, quiet things.” Tsunade says after a long silence. Sakura looks at her curiously. “You will bring war upon earth, disrupt the very heavens. Sweet child, you only know a taste of the power you could hold.”

And Sakura, well, she’s been alone since she was eight years old and surrounded by disease ridden corpses, she’s stolen and cheated and bartered her way through survival. She knows her way around a knife, a piece of glass, a sharp rock.

She has spilt blood just to eat for the night.

“You’ll teach me,” It is not a question.

That cruel, beautiful smile unfurls on her master’s face, “Of course, Avenger. Tell me what you want to know.”

“Everything.” Sakura breathes, demands, pleads.

A soft, aching laugh. “Very well, come here and listen closely.”

And Sakura is a clever girl made woman, she listens to everything Tsunade says, and everything she does not.

So, when Tsunade leaves her alone for the night, Sakura stares at the ceiling of the cheap Inn they are staying in and allows herself to smirk.

xxiii.

She sees him every time she goes to the market after that. He crinkles his eyes at her with a, “Good morning, Sakura-san.”

And in response Sakura blushes and murmurs a sweet, “Hello Kakashi-san.”

It goes like this for weeks until he changes their routine, leaning against one of the carts, tossing an apple into the air. There is only one farmer who can now produce apples, and even then the fruit is weak, no longer crispy and juicy.

The very land, the very life of this village is being drained away. Just as the other villages Sakura has traveled through. There will always be consequences to her actions, she supposes.

Kakashi tosses her the apple and Sakura makes sure to fumble with it before clutching it close to her chest, a teasing smile on her lips, “Kakashi-san, this is new.”

“Mah,” He hums, shrugging, “Just didn’t want you to miss out on your usual, is all.”

Sakura smiles, tucking the apple into her basket, the usual contents dwindled down to a simple jar of jam, a measly loaf of bread, and now the apple. She would need to make this quick and move towns soon.

“Say, would you like to come to lunch with me?” It’s a shot in the dark but she’s hoping that Tsunade was right when she said Sakura was infuriatingly charming. “I understand if you would not like—"

Kakashi cuts her off with a wave of his hand and a friendly look in his eye. Sakura wonders, idly, what he would taste like freshly baked and seasoned. “I am not one to turn down free food, of course.”

She laughs, a light and tittering thing and bares her throat the slightest bit before looping arms with him, “I shall lead the way then.”

Luckily, she has some dried meat and left over vegetables to make something decent and she smiles as him as she sits.

“You’re a healer.” Is what he says, eyeing the herbs and the bandages she had left out.

Sakura shrugs, “I try to lessen pain,” It is one of the many things Tsunade had left her.

He looks at her as if she is something new and so very interesting and she knows what he sees. A thing of life, a thing of preservation, has invited a creature of death, a creature of destruction into its domain, and allows that dark creature to live there.

It is what she wants him to see. Sakura smiles with teeth and she knows he does not see the wolf that sits in front of him.

xvi.

“Dodge!” Tsunade barks harshly and Sakura just barely avoids a direct hit, her skin still burning from the way the air sizzles from her master’s blow.

Sakura twists and flips backwards to gain some space between them, thighs quaking and sweat pouring as she pants, chest heaving. “I fucking am!” She bites back.

“Do it faster.” And then Tsunade is in her space, uppercutting and a blow to her stomach, sending Sakura flying into the corpse of trees behind them.

But Sakura is used being beaten down and she snarls loudly, landing on all fours, fingers digging deep into the ground before she lunges upwards, narrowing avoiding Tsunade’s next hit before spinning horizontally and lashing out with her foot.

And for the first time, Sakura lands a hit on Tsunade; sending her stumbling back, golden blood bleeding down her face.

She lands, gasping for breath, knees collapsing out from under her as she stares wide eyed as her master wipes blood and sweat from her face with the back of her hand. Her amber eyes sharpen to knife points as she grins, feral and oh so wild, “Very good, Sakura. Now we’re making progress.”

Despite her exhaustion, Sakura smirks, tasting blood and salt and victory. “Think you can handle more, old lady?”

“Don’t push your luck, brat.” Tsunade smirks, stalking towards Sakura to pull her up, “Now let me see that jaw of yours. And the stomach, the hell did I tell you about the sto-“

“I know,” She snaps, rolling her eyes as her body throbs something fierce. She allows herself the weakness of leaning into Tsunade’s as they trudge back to their small cottage. “I’ll do better.”

“Good.” They leave it at that. Then, “That was a good hit, my pupil.”

And Sakura, well, she’s feeling indulgent, so she smiles, a slight twitch of the lips as she murmurs, “Thank you, shishou.”

xxiv.

She finds him at the usual spot, draped over a branch like a limp curtain, book in hand. Sakura is still not quite over the fact that the death god reads awfully written porn, but at this point in her life, nothing can truly shock her.

Sakura is well past expectations.

Hiking up her pants, she climbs up the tree and to the branch he’s lounging on, straddling it so her back is to the trunk. Kakashi makes a curious noise when she pulls out her book from the waistline of her pants, “I never took you as an Icha Icha reader, Sakura-chan.”

Peering over the top of her book, Sakura quirks a brow, “If you can read porn, so can I.” A pause as she turns the page, “Plus you’re reading Paradise, I’m reading Violence. Two very different pieces of literature.”

What she will not tell him is that Tsunade taught her how to read with these books, she’s memorized every page, paragraph, and line written.

“You wound me so,” He sighs, going back to his book.

Comfortable silence descends upon them and the only sounds are of nature and the rustle of paper. Time passes and she cannot help the slight twitch of her lips whenever Kakashi giggles at a certain part. It is nice, this quiet.

But she knows it will not last. She will not allow it.

And like an omen, low rumbling of thunder rolls through their quiet, small droplets landing on her hand before the rain steadily picks up. Sakura snaps the book shut and shimmies down the tree, Kakashi landing soundly next to her.

“My place?” She asks, though she knows the answer.

Kakashi intertwines their hands, gently and slowly, his hand encompassing her own as he looks at her, dark eyes reflecting the sky as lightning strikes. Something hot pools deep in her belly when she makes eye contact with him.

And she knows. She knows that she has him.

They stand in her small cottage, dripping and studying each other before they move as one, ripping at each other’s clothes, all lips, teeth, and tongue.

She claws at his back when he thrusts into her, rough and unyielding. The rain pounds outside as her back arches and he groans deep and rasping.

He falls asleep, his face pressed into the crook of her neck and Sakura allows herself to smirk, the taste of glory on her tongue once more.

xiv.

Sakura glowers and bares her teeth at the woman, “You still haven’t fuckin’ told me what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Truly, the only reason why Sakura is even here is because of the free food and shelter. She is well aware that nothing is free in this world, Sakura has learned that the hard way.

The woman tilts her head, studying keenly and Sakura rears her head in a snarl. But the woman’s lips pick up at the corner, “What’s your name girl?”

“Sakura.” She bites out, fingers curling into fists. Glancing around the tavern, she notes the exits, the windows, the people who could be an issue. Then again, she’s sitting across the biggest threat in the room. “And yours?”

The woman hums, “Call me Tsunade.”

“And what am I supposed to be doing here?” She grounds out. Sakura nearly bites the woman when two strong hands clamp down on her shoulders, the woman’s face inches from her own.

“You are the catalyst, girl. The commination that will teach the world the very meaning of power.” Sakura’s eyes sharpen at the last word and Tsunade nods. “You like that, hm? I will teach you then, Sakura. And you will enact my vengeance on the heavens itself.”

Sakura stares, tension slowly melting from her body as she stares at this woman, at this savior. And she thinks, she remembers how cold her mother’s body was, the look of grief her father wore when he left.

She remembers tripping over the bodies of friends, of neighbors, half coherent and sickly.

Looking at Tsunade, Sakura licks her lips, “And what will you teach me?”

“How to turn that rage into a dagger and slit gods’ throats with it.” The woman purrs and Sakura smiles.

xxiv.

She wakes to a freezing cold chest to her back and puffs of air on her neck, just as she has since that night.

It is exactly as Tsunade said it would be; fishing. Lure, hook, and reel.

Sakura lets herself smile with teeth, a smug and sharp thing before she slowly extracts herself from the tangle of limbs they had become. The Shinigami slumbers in her bed, wrapped in her blankets.

Leaning against the doorframe with crossed arms, she looks at the god who she has fallen in love with. He loves her with just as much ferocity, she knows. And despite it all, she finds herself not quite hesitating when she goes to dig through her cabinets, finding the small nine pedaled flower. It once had ten and after this morning it will only have eight.

It is as if sinking into a familiar skin as she picks one of the petals, tucking the flower back where it was. Humming under her breath, Sakura grounds the petal in a small bowl before brewing some tea, sprinkling the powder into it.

The Shinigami’s arms snake around her waist, kissing her temple as he rumbles, “Good morning.”

Sakura turns her head to smile at him, offering the tea.

The scaled, clawed, fanged thing within her has its ugly maw open, head throw back as it cackles and howls.

xviii.

“Listen brat,” Tsunade says, snapping open a scroll.

“I’ve already read that,” Sakura interjects, her brows raising. “You know that.”

Tsunade slaps the back of her head, “When I say listen, I mean it.” She shoves the scroll into Sakura’s lap before striding towards a chest that had not been there before. “Come here.”

Slowly, Sakura makes her way towards the opened chest and peeks inside. She drops the scroll, “Is-is that-”

“Weapons to kill the divine,” Tsunade finishes for her, nodding. “Find one you like.”

Sakura swallows harshly as she kneels down and digs through the weapons, careful of every sharp point, as she palms a knife, a curved dagger with a golden blade. “This one.” She whispers, looking up to her master.

Tsunade nods in approval. “There are few ways to kill a kami.” She holds out one finger, “One, with an ichor dipped weapon.” A second finger. “Two, a very particular poison.”

Picking up the scroll, Sakura glances down the list before landing on one flower, “Kami koroshi.”

“That’s right.” Tsunade nods, “And do you know what to do with it?”

Sakura stands, flipping the dagger in her hand. It feels like coming home, having a blade at her side, bathing in the intimately dangerous knowledge of how to bring about the destruction of the heavens.

“Crush it for indigestion.”

xxiii.

Her stomach aches with laughter, clutching at her sides as she cramps and chokes on her tears. “An-and then wha-what happened?” She manages to get out as Kakashi laughs himself, leaning against the wall, a jug of liquor in hand.

He passes it to her and Sakura takes a long drink, reminiscing of a time similar to this.

“Then I told him, fuck off you little shit—" Kakashi wheezes and Sakura shouts with laughter, curling over as she gasps for breath. “And go blow som-someone else!”

They both dissolve into giggles and howls, Kakashi joining her on the floor. Sakura’s panting by the time she catches her breath, wiping tears from her face, and when she looks over Kakashi is not much better.

Brushing hair from his face, she points skyward, the stars winking down at him. “Hey Kakashi,” She asks, drunk off her ass and still giggly. “Where do you think we go when we die?”

Silence meets her question, and she sluggishly looks to the side to find him watching her, eyes soft and so full of— of—

“You’ll go somewhere safe,” He says softly. “Somewhere beautiful.”

“Yeah?” She mumbles, eyes dropping closed.

“I’ll make sure of it.” Is the last thing she hears before the dark overtakes her.

xix.

Tsunade sits across from her, laughing as she takes another long drink from her jug and sets it down heavily.

Sakura simply watches, leaning back in her chair, eyes cold and head tilted as her master coughs once, twice, three times.

Her arms begin to lose its color, being paler and paler and Tsunade watches with detached interest before laughing. She looks to Sakura, “Took you long enough, you fuckin’ brat.”

Snorting, Sakura stands, dagger in hand as Tsunade’s body begins to writhe, her breathes coming quick and uneven.

She yanks her master’s hair back, exposing her throat and slitting it in a single slide, so deep that she knicks bone, golden blood spraying.

The body drops forward, ichor pooling on the table and dripping onto the floor. Sakura sighs, rubbing the back of her neck as she kneels down to look into Tsunade’s lifeless eyes, “I will take it from here, Shishou.”

The promise rings out into the silence and Sakura revels in it.

xxiv.

Kakashi takes a sip of the tea as they both sit down, Sakura across from him. She takes a bite from the rest of their bread, watching him keenly.

He jerks suddenly, choking and hacking as he looks to her in horror and alarm. “You—"

“Me.” She confirms easily, getting up, dagger in hand.

The Shinigami roars and pushes the table away from himself and into the wall, Sakura ducks, the wood barely grazing her head before she lunges.

His already pale skin grays some more as he attempts to fight her off. She laughs at him, holding him down with one hand, knees on either side of his hips. And in the morning light, her dagger glints like a heaven sent prayer.

She plunges the blade into his head and drags it down his breast, carving him open as the kami screams and screams and screams.

Sakura feels his life bleed out from him under her hand. It is quiet once more.

And the girl made woman smiles, all bloodied teeth and gold stained hands. "And here we are." she whispers, caressing the corpse's cheek, reveling in her quiet victory. "Divinity dies at my wretched hands once again."

xvii.

“Shishou,” She begins, treading carefully. Her teacher looks at her in question, quirking up a brow. “Why were you outcasted from the other Kami?”

Tsunade— or more commonly known as Inari, Goddess of Everything Important, of the very Life— laughs and it is a hollow sound. “Oh, darling girl,” She says, a bland smile on her face. “Even gods hunger for power."

xiv.

Sakura sits, a feast laid out in front of her, a goblet of wine in her hand as she smiles, eyes flashing with something predatory.

Picking up her fork, Sakura spears into the first bit of meat, taking a bite and moaning at the way it melts in her mouth, the way the spices and flavors all blend.

She sips at her wine, running her tongue over her teeth before she laughs, throwing her head back and cackles at it all, with it all. Oh, she is a god killer, she is god taught and god fucked and she will be the one to rule them all.

Sakura sits, a feast laid in front of her, and eats the Shinigami’s flesh, one bite at a time until she can feel the power in her roar.

xix.

The corpse still sits at the table as Sakura rummages through the shit Tsunade had left behind, finding a thick envelope sealed in wax. Prying it open, Sakura laughs.

If you’ve found this, it means you’ve finally grown a pair and done what you were supposed to do. Well done, my pupil. You know your mission. I have trained you well. Do not disappoint me.

And behind the scrawled letter is a recipe.

She looks to the corpse and back down to the paper before she stands, going to gather the ingredients needed.

Sakura stands, flipping through the rest of the contents of the envelope until she pauses at another paper; a list of names and common dwellings.

The Shinigami’s is underlined three times in red.

xxv.

It ends with a girl (doesn't it always?), a girl made of nothing but destruction and anger, all slit throats and bleeding teeth.

She is horrid, she is wretched, she is powerful.

And she has grown, that girl made woman, she has grown and her eyes are wide open and she is intimately aware of the hated and evil of the world, of the weaknesses of the divine.

She finds them laying under a tree, peacefully existing and smiling at each other. The blonde one laughs, clutching his stomach while the raven simply watches on in adoration.

Sakura takes out the list, and under the Shinigami’s name crosses off two more, Raijin and Fujin.

Smiling, she makes her way towards them making sure to look a little lost and a bit scared.

And that thing inside her, the scaled, clawed, fanged thing, it smiles wide and hungry.

[invaderlynx]

Booker and La Campagne de Russie

I just watched The Old Guard and honestly, it was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a VERY long time. Of course, now I’m having all sorts of thoughts about the whole thing and particularly about Booker because his backstory intersects perfectly with my historical interests. I know that all the immortals in The Old Guard have experienced all sorts of terrible trauma, but because I am a history major with an affinity for the Napoleonic period, especially the Russian Campaign (and because Booker is my favorite character), I’d like to give you guys an idea of just what sort of torture he faced even before the pain of losing his family (also for fair warning, I have not read the comics):

Please place yourself in Booker’s shoes. You are one of over 600,000 men mustered to march into Russia. You’re serving in an army you never wanted to join, taking up arms for the glory of an empire that’s never done anything for you. You’ve been separated from your three beloved sons and your wife whom you love more than life itself, and have been sent off to fight in a foreign land that’s nothing like the home you’ve left behind. That much becomes evident immediately. 

The invasion starts in the summer of 1812 and it is hot, unseasonably hot. You feel it, laboring as you are under the thick heavy materials of your sweat-soaked uniform. Each step is its own torture in the heat as you struggle through mud left behind by hard summer rains. More than a few men kill themselves at this point and although this is just the beginning, you can hardly blame them. Some of your comrades get the bright idea to start discarding some of their extra layers of clothing—underthings and the like. Perhaps you join them, anything to lighten the load. You can’t be expected to carry all this over the long miles ahead. You’ll live to regret that decision.

The fighting itself is worse than the conditions. You never quite get used to the violence. No matter how many times you’re thrust into battle, your mouth still goes dry, your heart still thunders as loud as the military drums’ tattoo, you still choke on that thick gunpowder smoke. You nearly threw up the first time you killed with a bayonet. You remember sticking the man in between the ribs, a swift stab and he is bleeding out. It is only then that you see his face and realize just how young he is. He is a boy, maybe a few precious years older than your eldest. He cries as he falls. You didn’t speak Russian at the time but you didn’t need to to recognize the word “Мама”.

The only thing that makes it possible to keep putting one foot in front of the other (besides your family, of course) is your comrades-in-arms. Against all odds, you’ve found friendship here, men with whom you can share stories and jokes and drinks. You find a few men of around your own age with families, wives and children that they lovingly speak of, but many of these soldiers are young, young enough to be your sons, far too young to be out here slaughtering and being slaughtered. Over your meager meals you tell stories of home and it is enough to hold off the impending horror, at least for a moment. When that doesn’t work, you turn to drink. You drink an awful lot.

The conditions of this foreign land are mercurial at best and your woes are only compounded by your lack of proper supplies. The Russians have been scorching nearly everything in the wake of their retreat, making it difficult for you to forage for food. Your search parties turn up very little by way of provisions and your food supply continues to fall in tandem with the temperature.

Borodino is hell. You see the man to the right of you receive a cannonball to the chest and fall in a spray of red, you see the man to the left crumple as a shot rips through his handsome, hard-lined face. One of your friends, one of those boys that you’d come to regard as a surrogate son who was barely old enough to grow hair on his chin, catches a bullet in the leg. He dies in agony four days later, one of the thousands of casualties of that damned battle. In your lowest moments, you wish you would have joined him.

You were never a particularly happy man, even before the war. Prone to fits of melancholia, they would have said back then. Your darling wife and your three sons certainly helped to alleviate that heavy, aching emptiness that resided in your chest, but it never went away, not fully. It resurfaces with a vengeance now. Sitting with your gun in your hands and far too much liquor in your belly, you think about ending it all. How easy it would be to put a bullet in your brain and finally die. In the end, it’s your family that saves you again. You may not want to live for yourself, but for them- for them you can keep fighting. Besides, Moscow is only 70 miles away and once you take the ancient capital, Russia will have no choice but to surrender. That’s what everyone is saying and you force yourself to believe that it’s true.

Moscow was a lie. You took the capital but there was no peace. There was no food either. The Russians took it all when they abandoned the place, leaving almost nothing for your starving army. Nothing but liquor, which you are very grateful for at least. Your superiors probably aren’t, you think wryly as you raise the bottle to your lips and drink, drink, drink.

Moscow passes in a drunken haze for you. You drown yourself in Russian booze, drinking yourself absolutely insensate. There are entire days you spend propped up against the wall of some ramshackle Russian establishment, surrounded by empty bottles, too drunk to even stand. You remember bits and pieces, shattered memories drifting in and out of the fog. The looting and the things you took (a fine scarf, a silver flask, maybe more), a ladies’ fur shawl wrapped about your shoulders to keep out the chill, the burning heat of a terrible fire and the screams in French and Russian, the acrid taste of bile in your mouth as you splutter sick all over yourself only to raise the bottle to your lips again for another drink. In the end, you’re forced to leave Moscow as the position becomes untenable, the abandoned city burned to a shell of its former self. You never do learn who first started the fire, even years after the fact. 

The retreat is hell on Earth, worse than anything else that came before. La Grande Armée is hardly an army any longer, you’ve lost practically all discipline. By now, you’re just a bunch of exhausted, cold, starving men who want nothing more than to just make it home alive. Most of them won’t. The temperatures have dropped to below freezing at this point and you are wishing more than anything that you still had those infernal layers that caused you so much pain in the summer months. The clothing you and your comrades drunkenly plundered in Moscow—silken scarves stolen from abandoned trunks, heavy furs pilfered from store inventories, ladies’ shoes that hurt your feet but do a better job of keeping out the slush than your tattered boots—help, but not enough. Your fingers stiffen to near icicles in the cold as you try your damnedest to massage even a little warmth back into them, your face is wind-chapped and scabbed. You feel as though your very marrow has frozen, and you are one of the lucky ones. Men freeze to death in their sleep in less than an hour. Fifty men will sit down at a fire and only the twenty or so closest will ever get back up again. You all begin to loot the bodies of the dead and—as you grow more desperate—the dying as well. Corpses are stripped naked and left in the snow as the survivors squabble over their threadbare uniform pieces. Sometimes the corpses still twitch and moan but you try to ignore that.

There’s no food either. In addition to freezing, you’re starving too. The lot of you fight and quarrel over moldy crusts of bread, and in some cases even kill each other for them. The more clever turn to other sources to fill their writhing, empty stomachs. Some eat their boots, but there isn’t much leather left in any case. Some carve their meals off the horses as they walk, tearing bits of bleeding flesh off of the warm, moving flanks in a short-sighted attempt to get even a few morsels of meat in their bellies. Others, in mad desperation as the march (if you can even call it that any longer) wears on, turn to each other.

Perhaps you take part in this, perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you sidle a man out of the way to get closer to the fire, perhaps you take a coat off a corpse that you don’t know for sure is dead yet, perhaps you accept a piece of meat that you do not quite know the origin of. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

In the end it doesn’t matter. You die anyway. You don’t really remember how it happened the first time. Maybe you were finally picked off by the advancing Russians, maybe it was exposure, exhaustion, starvation, sickness, any of the hundred ways that you could die in this frozen wasteland. All you know is that one moment you were on your feet, shambling mutely forward, the next you were lying on the icy ground, gasping air back into lungs that had fallen completely still. Four faces are burned into your memory and from one you can still hear the gurgling, watery screams.

That’s when the dreams start, after that first death. Though, you wouldn’t classify them as dreams, they’re far more alike to nightmares. You see that screaming, drowning woman often. You feel her fear as she slams her body against her metal coffin. Even awake you can’t get the sound of her choking out of your head. Sometimes there are soft moments interspersed with the horror. You see a woman with short hair (it reminds you of a coiffure à la victime) laughing, you see two men resting in each others’ arms, foreheads pressed together gently, blissfully happy. To be quite honest, these ones hurt worst of all because they make you regret ever waking up.

You die a few more times before you finally decide to desert. You can’t take it anymore. That tyrant Bonaparte has abandoned this army, why can’t you? You take flight under the cold cover of night, trying to get to the Russian border. You don’t make it very far. You are dragged back—aching, tired, and hungry—and are hanged by the road as a deserter. Perhaps there still is a little discipline left in these ranks, at least enough to allow these soldiers to kill their comrades in the name of orders. You have to wait three days for the road to clear before you can finally run. In that time your body is almost entirely picked clean by looters. You continue your desperate trek back home in spite of it all and die many more times in the weeks (or was it months?) that follow. It never gets any easier.

 It’s near the border into Prussia that you finally meet one of the figures from your dreams. Perhaps it is the woman with the short hair who offers you a drink and a coat to put around your shoulders, and tells you bluntly but not unkindly that you’re immortal. Perhaps it is the curly-haired man who helps hold you upright when you stumble and is careful and caring with his words as he gently explains the situation. Perhaps it is his lighter-haired lover who catches you when you fold in on yourself from the weight of his words and offers you affirmations and condolences in a voice reminiscent of a priest. Whoever it is, they ask you to come with them and explain that there are others like them- like you out there.

“What about my family?” you stutter out, almost unconscious of the words as the tumble from your mouth “My wife? What about them?”

They favor you with a sad smile and try to explain, but you will hear none of it. They do not stop you when you tell them that you are going home, and you are glad for it.

With the supplies they give to you, you manage to hobble your way back home. You’ve been taken for a dead man, you realize, everyone you pass seems to think you’re a ghost. You don’t care. You only have one person on your mind.

Your wife answers the door dressed in black. She starts to cry when she sees you and throws her arms around your neck. You nearly crumple, weak as you are. “Bastien, Bastien,” she sobs against your shoulder “What happened?”

That question fills you with icy dread. Your stomach drops as you realize you cannot explain to her what you’ve been through, not in a way that she’ll understand. Even if you explain the immortality and she believes you, she won’t understand the horrors you’ve seen. No one will. A soldier’s burden.

You stay silent and instead cradle her closer as your boys appear in the doorway. You have them and, for now, that is enough. You won’t forget, you will never forget, but for now at least you have this.

[feralphoenix]

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY

if you’re following my blog or if you read my fanfiction, you may have seen me talking in tags or comments about how the radiance hollowknight was a pacifist. “feral, wtf?” you may have thought. “she’s the freaking final boss and tries really, really hard to kill you and all her attacks do 2 entire masks damage. where on earth do you get pacifism out of that???”

to you specifically i say, that’s an understandable reaction! the short version of how i got here was that i started thinking about the story implications of radi not inflicting contact damage and took a deep dive into game mechanics and lore. when i came up for air i had made myself Very Sad.

if this intrigues you and you would like to know more, come along with me, i am happy to point out the things i noticed and share the Big Sad around.

this essay is also available on dreamwidth for accessibility purposes, since my layout’s text may be too small for folks on pc with high-res screens.

CONTENT WARNING: This essay discusses pseudo-zombie plagues and associated body horror, colonialism and genocide, horrible things that happened in real life Australian history... you know, the usual topics that come up when I’m talking about Hollow Knight.

ADDITIONAL NOTICE: TPK fans of the “TPK meant well/was working for the greater good”/“TPK and Radi are equally bad”/“TPK is bad but Radi is worse” variety please give this one a pass, it ain’t for you.

finally if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO TRY: The Radiance Doesn’t Deal Contact Damage And That’s Kind Of Fucked Up And Sad

The vast majority of hostile creatures in Hollow Knight deal contact damage: This is to say, if the Wandering Knight (who I’ll probably spend most of this essay calling by their affectionate fan name Ghost) touches a hostile creature, this harms them.

There are exceptions to this rule. The most notable and most oft-memed example is the game’s literal actual true final boss, the Radiance. Not only will Ghost not be harmed by running into any part of her body, but during her stagger animation, where she drops to the boss arena floor on her front with her whole body splayed out, Ghost still isn’t harmed if she lands on top of them! What’s more, this holds true for her full-power form Absolute Radiance, the secret final boss of the Godmaster quest/endings.

A lot of people find this amusing, because it’s a little absurd that a game’s final boss is an exception to such a consistent element of gameplay! Hence all the “haha moth too soft and fluffy for contact damage” jokes. It is objective facts that Radi is very soft and very fluffy, so it’s very easy to understand why people don’t overthink this too much.

Thinking about things I like in gross detail is unfortunately my hobby. When it comes to Hollow Knight this usually leads to me making myself really sad. I’d like to share the fruits of my theorizing with the class, so other people can be sad with me.

Now, from a game design perspective I can think of a lot of reasons why Team Cherry chose for Radiance not to inflict contact damage. Her hitbox only covers the central part of her body. Her limbs are large, so because of the way she floats, if she did contact damage she would be protected from nail strikes from below and to either side. This would give a player who prefers nail combat a punishingly small margin through which they could inflict damage without also taking a hit, potentially forcing them to adapt to a new and unfamiliar play style at the very end of the game. That’s not fun for anybody and tends to make players feel very frustrated.

In addition to this, Radiance’s attacks are all bullet hell-style spells. All of them except the floor hazards inflict two masks of damage, meaning if you want to stay alive and identify points where it’s possible to heal, you need to learn the spell patterns and dodge a lot. Radi is a large boss. If running into her hurt you this would make the bullet hell elements of her fight extra punishing.

So, I think the purely game mechanics reason for Moth Too Soft And Fluffy is in interest of keeping her boss fight fair, and helping players feel like they have a chance of actually defeating her.

Part of why we all love Hollow Knight, though, is that there’s not much in the game that only exists for purely mechanical reasons. There’s always some form of story or lore integration.

So what on earth is the story reason behind why Radiance doesn’t deal contact damage?

OTHER ENEMIES THAT DON’T DEAL CONTACT DAMAGE

Radi isn’t the only enemy (here defined as fightable/killable creature) in Hollow Knight who doesn't inflict contact damage, so let’s take a look at her fellow exceptions to the rule to see what we can learn.

Broadly speaking there are two categories of Enemies That Don’t Deal Contact Damage. The first is enemies or bosses who used to be hostile, but have become friendly to the player. For instance, when characters like Ogrim and Hornet are not being fought in boss battles, touching them won’t cause damage to Ghost. These story characters who Ghost has more or less reconciled with can’t be damaged by the player out of combat either.

In terms of generic enemies who used to be hostile but have become friendly to the player, we have the mantises of the Fungal Wastes and the Siblings/Ghost’s Shade. We learn from the game’s lore that the mantises Did Not Like The Pale King and were hostile to Hallownest, but that they established a ceasefire conditional on their keeping the people of Deepnest (who were also hostile to Hallownest) from leaving through the area’s main entrance/exit in the Fungal Wastes - essentially the two native kingdoms were pitted against one another by the Pale King.

Now, just because there was a ceasefire, that doesn’t mean the mantises take kindly to Hallownest bugs brazenly trespassing into their dang house; they will get in your face and try to kill you unless you have permission to be there. But once you’ve defeated the Mantis Lords in combat and proven yourself worthy of the mantises’ respect, they’ll let you pass through their turf unmolested. They are no longer actively hostile and don't deal contact damage.

(You're still able to attack them, though - maybe because you’d be locked out of receiving the Hunter’s Mark if you complete the Respect quest/achievement before you’ve successfully killed enough mantises? - and if you attack them, or if your pet charm familiars attack them, any mantises you aggroed will fight back and deal contact damage again.)

The Siblings, as well as Ghost’s Shade, are initially indiscriminately hostile. Our window into Shade psychology is limited, but we know that the Shade died violently and the Siblings probably did too; they may be lashing out. They’re also Void creatures, and Ghost looks a lot like the Pale King, whom we can guess from context clues pissed the Void off significantly by using it as his personal play-doh to make tools and toys with and also using its house as his personal garbage dump for baby corpses.

However, once Ghost recalls their past and breaks the mask of the Kingsoul charm to reveal the Void Heart at its core, the Void recognizes them as a part of it, and Ghost becomes able to direct/lead the Void to some extent. As an extension of this, the Siblings and Ghost’s shade become docile and can now be killed by any weapon in one hit instead of just the Dream Nail (which is made of Radiance’s Light and is the Void’s natural weakness). They don’t deal contact damage anymore either.

That’s it for “enemies that inflict contact damage at one point, but stop inflicting it after becoming friendly or neutral to Ghost”.

The generic enemies which don't inflict contact damage include shrumelings, maggots, maskflies, and lightseeds/lifeseeds. These enemies are incapable of inflicting any damage on Ghost whatsoever, because by themselves they are completely helpless entities with no natural defenses.

Shrumelings are infant members of the mushroom clan who are usually protected by adult fungi like shrumal warriors and ogres. Lightseeds and lifeseeds are harmless single-celled organisms. Maskflies are similarly harmless. Maggots, we glean from the Hunter’s Journal and dialogue from False Knight/Failed Champion, are the bottom rung of Hallownest’s society because they are weak and helpless, and are forced into menial and slave labor by other Hallownest bugs because they cannot defend themselves. The maggots’ plight is the whole reason why False Knight/Failed Champion stole Hegemol's armor in the first place, as he wanted to protect his people.

All of these enemies flee when Ghost approaches them. (Some maskfly groups’ flight triggers are set to specific areas on a map and won’t flee if you can avoid stepping on/passing through those areas, but this is clearly due to a programming oversight because their whole Thing is running away.)

But, there’s something interesting to be observed in the case of lightseeds and maggots: They can fight back against and harm Ghost if they use tools. The little flock of lightseeds you chase around the Ancient Basin eventually get sick of Ghost’s shit and take over Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s corpse, which they puppet around to try to murder you. By doing so they gain access to Broken Vessel/Lost Kin’s considerable combat prowess and become very dangerous, contact damage included in the bargain. (The lightseeds’ doing this seems to evoke the vessel’s spirit, since they reach for Ghost when defeated. That’s not a gesture the lightseeds have any reason to make. The Lost Kin fight, by which the spirit seems to gain some form of closure, becomes available here too.)

False Knight/Failed Champion’s fights work on the same general principle. Now that he has a weapon he can attack Ghost, and his armor deals contact damage. The maggot inside the armor does not inflict contact damage; essentially both his boss fights consist of your whacking the armor until he’s stunned and pops out of the armor for a moment so you can hit his vulnerable real body, which is the only part of him that yields Soul when you smack him. In fact, his boss fights will last forever if you let him recover from being stunned on his own.

Between these two groups, Radiance very obviously doesn’t fit in the first, as she’s the final boss and is very vigorously trying to kill Ghost with various magic spells. You can tell from her Dream Nail dialogue that she’s furious about what the Pale King did to her and her people, and is afraid for her life. She is willing to use everything at her disposal to try to destroy Ghost so she can survive, go free, and get revenge for the Pale King’s crimes. If she could do contact damage to Ghost she would.

So, the only logical conclusion to make is that Radi falls into the second group of enemies that don’t inflict contact damage. She is physically incapable of causing any harm to anyone with only her body. Her magic is deadly as all get out and the 2 masks damage explosion noise probably haunts the nightmares of anyone who’s struggled fighting her, but without it she is helpless.

WHY CAN’T RADIANCE DO CONTACT DAMAGE?

It might be pretty hard to reconcile the fact that a character with Audre Lorde energy as potent as Radi Hollowknight’s is has a whopping 0 ATK. The biggest clues we get in terms of story context for her inability to inflict physical harm of any kind can be found within the culture of the moth tribe, who were her people.

Thistlewind, the backer-designed moth ghost who can be found in the Resting Grounds, tells you that the majority of moths were pacifists, and that individuals like them and like Markoth who learned to wield a nail were in the minority. Thistlewind appears to have learned to fight as a means of self-defense while they explored the crater area, and describes Markoth as having done so in order to “[brave] the edges of this world, hoping to uncover a truth long forgotten”. It sounds to me like Markoth was trying to recover parts of moth culture that were lost when their tribe was assimilated into Hallownest, or maybe even searching for Radiance or trying to learn what happened to her. (Judging that his corpse is hidden behind one of the Pale King’s shade gates it seems this didn’t go well. Thanks TPK.)

As far as fighting moths go there’s Marmu too, but she seems to be a special case, possibly raised in Hallownest's culture instead of with her tribe. We don’t actually get any sort of canon explanation for how a baby moth wound up as a child soldier who died defending the Queen’s Gardens, but given the overall tone of Hollow Knight as a game and all the colonization/Australian history parallel subtext, some horrifying possibilities come to mind.

So, if Thistlewind, Markoth, and Marmu are Outliers Lepidoptera and should not be counted, how did the majority of moths spend their time? According to Seer, who knows more about the tribe’s history than most (and to Quirrel, who points you to her if you defeat Uumuu before picking up the Dream Nail), the moths’ main prerogative was cultivating and developing dream magic. From the way the Seer describes dreams as a living history as you collect Essence, dream magic seems to be a parallel to the Dreaming (or Dreamtime), a spiritual concept in Indigenous Australian religion related to both history and myth.

To translate this into simple terms, the moths were by and large pacifists whose culture celebrated art, history, and spirituality.

Team Cherry tends to adapt at least some aspects of real-life bug behavior and biology into their sad cartoon bugs, so moths-as-pacifists tracks: Real moths do not really have any way to fight. They defend themselves from predators via their mobility and their markings, which tend towards either camouflage that helps them hide or bright markings intended to scare predators off by indicating they’re poisonous (therefore not good to eat) or look like the face of something much bigger and more dangerous than they are.

There's not that much we can glean about the moths in pre-Hallownest society aside from Seer’s dialogue, because Hallownest destroyed their civilization so thoroughly: Except in the Dream Realm (which is filled with Essence spirographs and the wisteria charms that decorate Seer’s room), their architecture can only be found anymore in hidden parts of the Resting Grounds and at the very top of the Crystal Peak where Radi’s statue and a fuckton of lore tablets Ghost doesn’t know how to read are located.

But, we know that the crater pre-Hallownest was home to a ton of diverse bug nations - the mosskin, the mushroom tribe, the mantises, Deepnest, the Hive, the flukes - and every SINGLE one of those had some kind of warrior tradition, as well as their own unique cultures. In the midst of all that it was only the moths who were pacifists, so from there we can tentatively assume that they were on good enough terms with their neighbors for there not to be any fighting. The mosskin in particular also had and still have a Higher Being on their side, though in the modern day Unn seems to be rather conflict avoidant to say the least.

And we know from Hallownest’s past dealings with the mantises and Deepnest that even having Two (2) Higher Beings isn’t enough to keep rival civilizations off your nuts if they hate you, so it’s improbable that Radiance just did all the moths’ fighting for them.

The only hint that the moths ever had beef with anyone at all is one of Radiance’s Dream Nail lines, “ancient enemy” - this is popularly theorized to refer to the Void and might be corroborated by the Void’s willingness to follow Ghost into Radi’s boss fights and fight alongside them. As the Void seems to be some sort of Higher Being/god of darkness and nothingness, and the Dream Nail’s only offensive ability is to kill Void creatures, the Void and creatures of Light appear to be in a position of mutual vulnerability. Some of the Pale King’s writings in his workshop, which identify the Void as a power in direct opposition to his, support this too.

It’s unclear whether the Void civilization and Radiance ever directly came to blows or whether they were just giving each other the stink eye over being natural enemies - personally I think the latter is more likely because the two civilizations existed on opposite sides of the crater*, and again, the moths were pacifists; plus when Ghost brings the Void along to Radi’s boss fight she is quickly and gruesomely overwhelmed by it.

What I am saying here is that if pacifism was such an integral aspect of moth culture, and Radiance epitomized her people’s culture, and she is 100% incapable of inflicting physical harm, she was probably a pacifist too.

DEEP DOWN YOU KNOW YOU WEREN'T BUILT FOR FIGHTING

Hallownest flourished for a long, long time between the Pale King and White Lady first establishing it and the initial outbreak of the Infection.

There’s no conclusive information in-game as to why this is. We can only guess: Maybe Radiance was so badly hurt or weakened by the moths’ assimilation that it simply took her That Long to become capable of the mass dream broadcast to Literally Everyone In Hallownest that would eventually become the Infection when Hallownest’s people tried to suppress it. Or, maybe it just took a long time for her to come up with a way to fight back. It’s possible that it took her a while to find the resolve to actually fight back, too, with her principles of pacifism in conflict with the necessity of defending herself and taking her people back. Maybe there was a change in the moths’ situation in Hallownest somewhere down the line that compelled her to step in - all the moths are super extremely dead at the time Hollow Knight starts, after all. Even Seer is eventually revealed to be a revenant like Ze’mer the Grey Mourner, only lingering in the world to pass on the Dream Nail and tell Radiance’s story. Maybe it was a combination of all those factors. Barring Team Cherry dropping in to explain this bit of Sekret Deep Lore, we are never going to know.

All we DO know for sure is that when we mosey into Hollow’s brain (and/or Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny our way to the top of Hallownest’s Pantheon) and challenge the literal actual sun to a fight, Radi takes the challenge with extreme prejudice and comes in swinging.

Something interesting I noticed while comparing the Radiance boss fights with the Pure Vessel fight is that some of their attacks are vaguely similar. Where warrior-mage characters like Xero and Markoth have physical weapons that they summon and manipulate with magic, Radiance and Pure Vessel both create nails and daggers out of Essence and Soul respectively. Both characters’ magical weapon attacks are similar in nature too: Some are used to create hazards that must be dodged or avoided, and some are fired directly at Ghost in radial patterns.

This begs a very sad chicken-and-egg question. Did Radi and Hollow develop these battle techniques independently of each other, has Hollow in their prime form somehow absorbed similar techniques to Radi through osmosis since they’re currently chained together by the brain... or is Radi mimicking and innovating on these attacks she knows Hollow can do?

All her other attacks seem very obvious for a light-themed character, after all: Beam attacks and blobs of light. A flash of bright light is also how she shakes off the Void the first time it tries to grab her, too, making for a strong argument that that’s the original natural defense she possessed, and that’s what she based most of her attack magic off of.

Making sword’s and knive’s from Essence when most of her people didn’t even handle these sorts of tools even at the height of her power and influence, though... that seems less like something that would come naturally to her. i don’t really know i don’t have a definitive answer or theory for this one it just Seems Possible and it’s fucking me up guys

Even the Infection - which began life as Radiance’s attempt to communicate, let’s remember, before it progressed to “The End Of Eva Disease Will Continue Until Someone Actually Listens To Me” and then finally Radi screaming “FUCK U LET ME OUT, GET THAT NEW SUNNY D BOTTLE THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, HALLOWNEST EAT SHIT” during canon - does not appear to be fatal to living bugs until the tumorous growths grow so large they impede bodily functions, like real cancer. We can observe this phenomenon via a number of NPCs and enemies that are rediscovered as tumorous corpses after the whole Crossroads area becomes infected.

At least to me, all of this points to Radiance being a character to whom violence and causing harm doesn't come naturally, and who has resorted to these methods in desperation.

It actually reminds me a lot of False Knight/Failed Champion. It’s a very common theory among fans that when he stole Hegemol’s armor he killed Hegemol - this is a reasonable thing to believe, since Hegemol is the only one of the Five Great Knights of Hallownest who never appears at all in-game, not even as a corpse like Dryya and Isma. Like Radi, False Knight/Failed Champion is a character who rose up and turned to violence in order to protect his people, despite the maggots not being a belligerent species.

False Knight is one of the game’s first major bosses, sometimes the first boss that players encounter at all. And so Hollow Knight’s story bookends with two separate victims of a predatory system, one who lived within and was cannibalized by it, one outside of it who was deliberately targeted by the Pale King. Neither of them started out as a fighter, but both of them still adopted violence as a tool to protect themselves and their people. Radiance is as doomed as False Knight by the Pale King’s genocide, but just like False Knight, she has no intention of going quietly, and will rage against the dying of the light as only the literal actual sun can.

Cue Deedee Magno Hall voice clip. You all know the one.

*A footnote: There’s no conclusive evidence to tell us whether the Void civilization was contemporaneous with the other pre-Hallownest indigenous bug nations or whether it predated them. Mask Maker has a line suggesting that the Void civilization tried to expand throughout the crater in its heyday and that maybe this was linked to its collapse, but in general the Void lore is just too darn thin to draw firm conclusions - it’s like trying to speculate on the ancient stone age cultures of the Americas that came before pre-settler Indigenous countries when the only sources you can easily access are elementary school level US history textbooks. (To non-Americans: We mostly teach kids propaganda until they hit college-level courses and it sucks so much ass.) This is very realistic worldbuilding, but also please Team Cherry I want to know more about these ancient bugs who apparently got lost in the sauce

[translations-by-aiimee]

Dig a Grave to Dig Out a Ghost - Chapter 13

Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 13 - Doubt

In the archaeological internship Lin Yan participated in, the Ming Tomb was undoubtedly a very peculiar place. The excavation work lasted three months. Before the excavation started, Lin Yan didn't even get any relevant background information. He asked his professor several times but never got a response. When he was told that would be staying at the tomb for only a week, he thought he was coming to be the team's water boy. Instead, he was unexpectedly sent to the site as soon as the plane touched down and was given one of the most important jobs of cleaning the body found in the main room of the tomb.

It was a medium-sized underground mysterious tomb. Bluestone blocks were built into arches. The apse in the room was about forty meters long. A large black lacquered coffin left slightly ajar rested peacefully on the stone platform. Lin Yan and the rest of the crew held their breath together. When the golden nanmu wood coffin lid was slowly lifted, and the gold, silver, jade and rosy brocade around the corpse were exposed, a soft cheer erupted from the tomb. Everyone couldn't help but celebrate that they found such an magnificent mausoleum that had been left completely untouched by tomb robbers. After a long while, all nonessential personnel evacuated one by one. Lin Yan remembered that the professor was the last one to leave the scene. When he left, he rested his hand heavily on his shoulders, as if he wanted to say something but never ended up getting anything out. In the empty and dark main room of the tomb, only Lin Yan and a few lights, both bright and dim, were left. Sometimes, the miner's lamp was often extinguished inexplicably. He later recalled that the owner of the tomb might have been watching him ever since then.

The corpse in the coffin had rotted into a skeleton, but the hair that remained was soft and shiny. However, when Lin Yan sat alone by the coffin and skimmed through some history books, doubts arose. The identity of the owner of the tomb was like the bronze of this mysterious palace, unrecognizable under the green rust. There was no record, no genealogy, nothing even mentioned in town and county chronologies. The tomb's eternal light placed in front of the coffin had long been dried up, and a two-foot-long black name card behind it was coated with thick old blood. The place where the name should be written was empty, and it turned out to be a non-character memorial tablet.

When the last artifact in the coffin was successfully taken out, Lin Yan was told he could return. It only took them seven days and no one had ever told him about the origin of the tomb that whole time.

The sun was shining on Friday morning, and the roses in the flower bed were rushing to bloom. There was a soft fragrance of something oily like burning opium in the air. Lin Yan parked his car at the school gate and hurried through the small square in front of the building to get to the professor's office. He was in such a rush that he went through the ground fountain in the square. After he took a few steps, bells and drums started playing and spurts of water shot from the jets, the surrounding area immediately turning into a forest of water columns shooting up.

"Shit. . ." He couldn't dodge them and got completely soaked. Lin Yan internally cursed as he rushed forward, wringing out the hem of his shirt. A few school girls had just come out of the main entrance of the building and giggled at the embarrassing scene.

Lin Yan blushed a little.

Shiny drops of water splashed off his hair and a droplet fell into his eye. When he raised his hand to wipe it away, his wrist was caught by someone. The cold fingertips wiped the drop off one of his eyelashes. Lin Yan blinked and stood there silently.

When he walked up the steps, he saw a new large poster on the left side of the automatic door. A gentle-looking middle-aged man with glasses was holding a pen, and his demeanour resembled an unopened folder in a stationery store. There was a large line next to him: Chen XX, a well-known Chinese history professor, is coming to our school to give a lecture. All students are welcome to participate. This will be a great chance to interact with the professor.

The tune played was one typically used by the Propaganda Department, the following rows of small letters are written with the specific time and content of the event. Lin Yan struggled to twist the hem of the wet T-shirt and walked towards the hall, muttering that this was probably the reason that the fountain suddenly turned on. Turning back, he frowned and stood in front of the poster for a minute. He always felt that the man on the poster was a bit familiar, but he couldn't remember who it was. After thinking about it for a while, Lin Yan shook his head and stepped through the hall.

The professor's office was on the fourth floor.

"Professor, are you kidding me? From the preliminary preparations to the end of the tomb excavation, so many people participated in it. How could it be possible that nothing about the tomb owner's origins could be found until now?"

"That tomb was already considered to be average to wealthy for the time period. Even if the owner of the tomb was not of official origin, there is always a record in historical records for wealthy businessmen."

University institutions were never busy on Fridays. Everyone was waiting for the weekend. Lin Yan’s professor was no exception. He was sitting in the office with his legs crossed when the drenched student burst into his office. Behind the table, he held a heavy purple sand teacup in his hand. Because he often went to the West in his early years, his skin was wrinkled by the wind and frost. His midsection was blessed by some middle-aged fat, and the bags under the eyes were hanging loosely behind the glasses.

The professor grew impatient with Lin Yan's aggressive tone, and patted a stack of books on the table: "Isn't that so? You see, I'm more worried about writing a report on the excavation. I've been busy for more than a month and I haven't made any progress."

Lin Yan leaned forward impatiently with his hands on the glass plate of the tabletop: "The mausoleum was left untouched. The body and burial items were intact. Isn't it possible to determine the identity of the tomb owner?"

This student had always been known for his politeness and patience. It was rare for him to be this anxious.

"That's the problem. Comparing the data compiled based on the unearthed cultural relics with the records at the time, I can only say that he's completely unknown." The professor put down the cup and tapped his finger on the cover of the book a few times: "Ming Dynasty history is not my specialty. Tell me, why don't you do some research yourself? The students in our school must be able to research independently. You should make good use of the school library resources."

Lin Yan shook his head disappointedly. Just like the professor said, there was a lot of historical data to go through. He wouldn't make any progress in the next three months. Even three years might not be enough time to go through all the information. By then, he would have run out of ten lives. What's more, he has searched through the relevant history books of the library for the past week and even asked Yin Zhou to search through the database in less legal ways, but the strange thing is that no matter what keywords they use - the age, name, location - he couldn't find any information. It was common sense that, in ancient times, even a talented person would be written about somewhere in the county annals, but this Xiao Yu was like a person from another world. The records passed over him like he had never existed.

The faint scent of book pages and wood was floating in the air, and the light blue shutters broke up the rays of sun leaking in. Lin Yan subconsciously glanced back, as if there should be a companion waiting to respond to his doubts. But Xiao Yu does exist, he thought.

Trying his best to stay calm, Lin Yan lowered his head and lowered his voice: "Teacher, this is really important to me, can you help. . ." While speaking, his gaze was fixed on the table. Under the glass plate were many old photos of the professor when he was young. There was a row of people wearing work clothes and hard hats in the black-and-white pictures. Compared to the middle-aged man with swollen eyes in front of him, there was a strange sense of contradiction in the gray-headed but happy-looking man in the pictures.

Time really did wonders.

The instructor tapped two fingers on the table. He didn't look at Lin Yan when he spoke. His eyes were a little dodged: "Why do you need to know the owner of the tomb? Do you need to write a paper?"

Lin Yan took a deep breath. He had always had a keen insight into people's emotions. When he had been sorting through clues last night, the situation that occurred in the tomb flashed in his mind. He had already had his doubts at the time, but he was so nervous and excited that he didn't think too much of it. For example, ever since he joined the team, everyone had been keeping secrets, and the professor also looked at him with that dodgy look when the excavators all left the tomb. The whole thing seemed to have been arranged long ago, so Lin Yan hadn't cared about interrupting the teacher's off-time and grabbed the phone to set up a meeting time.

"Professor, you should know why; this is a matter of life and death." After hesitating for a moment, Lin Yan frowned and said this sentence with emphasis. He pressed his hands on the table hard and turned away.

When I walked to the door of the office. He paused, one, two. . . Lin Yan counted silently in his heart.

Three.

"Wait." The professor's voice sounded from behind.

"Lin Yan, this project isn't under my control. I just heard that a lot of strange things happened when the tomb was opened. Someone came to me and asked you to go. I didn't agree with it. . . If you really want to know more, you can go ask the coordinator of the excavation yourself." The finger tapped twice on the desk. "His name is Chen, he'll be at our school next Monday for a lecture. There are posters downstairs." After speaking, he took a few volumes from the neatly arranged books and put them back on the table, gesturing that he could leave. "You can get more out of him than me"

"Last question." Lin Yan held the door frame and poked his face in: "Teacher, do you know Xiao Yu?"

"No, I don't." The answer was quick this time: "Who's that?"

Lin Yan sighed and held the railing as he quickly walked downstairs.

[boxoftheskyking]

Something Good, Part Fifteen

Here’s the second of the Very Difficult Chapters. a great relief

Look, I don’t know shit about mythical ancient China, but I feel some kind of way about any society with a noble class, and you know what so does Wei Ying

In which we hear The Tale of Wei Ying

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen

—- Once there was a family, like many families. Mother, father, son, daughter, and somebody else. Don’t sigh like that, Lan Zhan, I’m telling the story. The children could either do nothing wrong or nothing right, depending on who you asked. One year they spent a summer on top of a mountain to learn from the wisest and most beautiful scholars in the world. I’m talking about you and your brother, not your uncle. Are you blushing, Lan Zhan? 

Fine, fine, I’ll skip what you already know. We heard there was an attack, and we left. Did you notice we’d gone? Of course you’d say that now. Fine, fine. 

Uncle was dead when we got there. Madam Yu nearly dead. Jiang Cheng ran out— We tried to stop him, but he’s always so reckless. He’s all heart, Jiang Cheng. People don’t realize that, but he is. 

It was Wen Zhuliu, and some others—I didn’t recognize them. Everything was burning, and Wen Zhuliu came out of the dark … Have you seen him? Have you ever seen what Core Melting Hand can do? It’s like he drained the life out of him. I never thought Jiang Cheng was some glowing, ethereal beauty, ha! But the light was gone. He was a corpse, a breathing corpse. Skin like paper. And Yanli and I stayed out of sight, and they left him for dead and Lotus Pier in flames. So we ran. 

You know Wen Ruohan was behind it, right? All of these attacks on smaller sects, these rogue agents—I’d bet anything I used to own that the Lan Sect ambush was them as well. Oh, your father was there, wasn’t he? I’m sorry, Lan Zhan.

Right.

It took a month, I think. Jiang Cheng kept trying to die. Yanli was barely holding on. Every time he’d try something, she’d break down. It was just me, trying to keep us hidden, trying to keep them alive. They’re so— They feel everything, you know? They feel it so strongly. They can’t help it.

So I wrote to Wen Qing. In code, of course, but she’s clever. She got Yanli safe somewhere with some old aunt or another. I don’t know where. I suppose if I asked—

Ah, I’m stalling. You can tell, can’t you? 

Lan Zhan, have you ever heard of a core transfer? 

Just legends, right? That poem about Yao Ling and Yao Xiulan that romantics like to recite.

You can hold my hand, but not so tight, okay? Don’t be upset. Everyone is fine.

We told Jiang Cheng to meet the mysterious Baoshan Sanren on a mountain and then knocked him out. Wen Qing loves her needles. That’s something you should know about her. 

And so … Ah, it’s hard to say. Why is it so hard to say? So Wen Qing did surgery and gave my golden core to Jiang Cheng. Hey, not so tight. I’m just a poor common man after all. No, I didn’t mean let go!

I don’t know where she learned it. I think she made some of it up, because she’s a genius. I don’t think anyone else could have done it. No one appreciates Wen Qing the way they should. No one but us, now, Lan Zhan.

So we recovered, and I ran. I couldn’t let him find out. It would destroy him. You know—well, you don’t know him very well, do you? Trust me. Maybe someday, far in the future when he’s been a mighty sect leader for years and nothing like this could threaten his position, who he thinks he is. Maybe then I’ll find a way back to Lotus Pier. See Shijie again.

Because I can’t lie to her. And she can’t lie to Jiang Cheng. I couldn’t— can’t risk her seeing me. She’d look me in the eyes for a moment and she’d know. She’s kind of like you in that way, the way she can look into your soul. 

Lan Zhan, you’re shaking. Are you cold? Look, it’s almost dawn.

You know the rest, anyway. I didn’t know how to be mediocre, and the resentful spirits in the Burial Mounds felt it, knew it, filled me up. 

What? Yes, I’m all healed. I can show you the scar if you don’t think it’s too shameless.

It— Two days, I think. I—

I’m not going to tell you about that, Lan Zhan.

–

The sky is a glowing grey, turning everything monochromatic. Here in the dirt Wei Wuxian can’t see much difference between the white and grey of their clothing. Lan Wangji is leaning a bit towards him, still holding his hand. His eyes are distant, aimed somewhere at the ground but not focused on anything. For his part, Wei Wuxian feels like laundry. Boiled and scrubbed and rung out, now swinging in the early morning breeze. He’s as light as a bed sheet, and just as pale.

“You gave your golden core voluntarily,” Lan Wangji says quietly, frowning. “Because of Jiang Wanyin.”

“For Jiang Cheng. Not because of him. It wasn’t his fault.”

“You gave it to him. All of it.”

“You would too, for Zewu Jun.”

“You couldn’t keep any? You had to give it all to him.”

Wei Wuxian blinks at him. “I— You know what, Lan Zhan? I didn’t actually think of that. Wen Qing probably did. I don’t know how she’d split a core, anyway. Huh. I really never even thought to ask. I wish you’d been there!”

Lan Wangji looks up at him, his face twisting painfully

“You didn’t ask. You just gave it—”

“Yes, yes, don’t keep saying that. Now I feel silly.”

“That’s not—” he glares at their joined hands. “Who knows? Who else knows?”

“You. Wen Qing. Zewu Jun now, I suppose. That’s it. You can never tell him, you can never tell Jiang Cheng. You promised.”

Lan Wangji’s glare grows stronger, and Wei Wuxian imagines he can see it drilling into the dirt.

“The transfer. Transplant. How did Wen Qing know—”

Wei Wuxian waves his free hand. “I don’t know. I already told you; I don’t know how she figured it out. It worked though. Aiyah, that’s the worst part of this whole thing! She’s done something no one in the world has dared to try, and it worked! And no one knows.”

Lan Wangji’s head snaps over to him.

“Lan Zhan, she’s so talented. You have no idea, she’s the most— It’s really the worst part of it, not being able to tell anyone. I’d yell it from the top of the mountain if I could! She deserves far greater praise than mine. She’s incredible, your wife.”

“She’s not my wife.”

Wei Wuxian rolls his eyes and gets stiffly to his feet, brushing off his trousers. “Come on, Lan Zhan. If I’m staying then I need to get breakfast for the children.”

“That is the worst part?” Lan Wangji asks, suddenly. He rises in one smooth movement, not a wrinkle in his robes.

“What?”

“Not being able to praise Wen Qing publicly. That is the worst part for you?”

Wei Wuxian shrugs. “Yeah. It’s not fair.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Are you just going to repeat—” he cuts off with a squeak as Lan Wangji grabs onto his collar and doesn’t let go. “Lan Zhan—”

He’s silenced by Lan Wangji’s mouth, firm and unmoving on his and so incredibly warm. He chokes, with dignity, stumbles closer. Lan Wangji is as still and solid as a statue, until Wei Wuxian shifts and lets a hysterical giggle slip out between their lips. It’s like sunlight melting ice, and his hands come up to hold Wei Wuxian’s neck, his head tilts, and his lips soften into a true and sincere, heart-wrenching kiss. 

Wei Wuxian wonders, for a moment, if he is the statute and life is breathing into him, animating his body and calling his spirit back from the dark, cold place it’s been hiding. He’s kissed people before, but it’s never been like this. It’s always felt like a give and take, but this is giving and giving and falling and rising at the same time.

When Lan Wangji pulls back, Wei Wuxian realizes his eyes are closed and his hands are pressed to the broad chest in front of him, which feels startlingly intimate

“Wei Wuxian,” Lan Wangji says seriously, and he freezes at the sudden formality. Oh no. No, no, no— “You have been wronged.”

Ah. He melts back to a watery smile and meets Lan Wangji’s eyes.

“Not by you, Lan Zhan.”

“Yes, by me. By all of us, the whole cultivation world. It was wrong. What can—” he cuts off, frustrated, eyes darting to the side and back. “What do you need?”

“What?”

“It has to be made right. What do you need me to do?”

Bow. Weep. Marry me. Fight Wen Ruohan in single combat. Give me land and a donkey and make everyone leave me alone. Give me your core.

“Just—” he looks down at his hands against the white fabric. They’re rougher than they used to be, callused, scarred, nails dirty and a little ragged. He turns them, runs his thumb over his fingertips. They don’t hurt. They haven’t hurt for weeks. “Let me stay.”

“You were the one leaving. I was going to ask you to stay. To try and make you stay.”

“Good.” 

He back looks up at Lan Wangji, who doesn’t look satisfied. He sighs.

“Look, Lan Zhan, I’ve spent a long time thinking about what could happen if people knew the truth. That’s why it— well, it broke me a little when I thought you did. But nothing I imagined ever felt right. And I think I figured it out today. Nothing can go back to the way it was. Not for any of us. There’s going to be a war, whether Qishan or Lanling starts it, and even if I’m pardoned that doesn’t give me my core back. I still did bad things. Whatever my reasons, I did reckless things that hurt people. When I was cultivating the dark path, I used people, hurt people, ruined graves to wake corpse puppets without even a thought that they had families, that they mattered. I deserve punishment for that. But it’s made me think. How many cultivators would you say there are in each province compared to common people?”

Lan Zhan furrows his brow. “I would need to research.”

“Sure. But who makes the laws for all of these people? Who negotiates trade routes and tariffs? Who starts wars?”

“Hmm.”

“Do any of the people setting a price for grain know how to harvest it? How to tell by touch if the soil is fertile? How to prevent pests, or rot, or any other disaster? What does a bad year mean to the men negotiating the trade of that grain to a province with none? And compared to the common men who pack it, haul it, grind it? When war breaks out, who gives the command to burn the field?”

“I understand.”

“You don’t, but I don’t think I do either. Not exactly. I just— I have questions that I’ve never had before. I think I’ve been telling myself my whole life that there are two options. You can be a cultivator or you can be nothing. That’s how we were raised. But that’s not true. That’s just arrogance. My own pride brought me down, but the problem wasn’t that I was proud, arrogant, entitled. I was just the wrong kind of arrogant.”

Lan Wangji takes both of his hands. “What do you need me to do?”

Wei Wuxian laughs, and the sound startles a tree full of birds into song. “Dear Lan Zhan, we’re not going to solve the world this morning. Come help me get breakfast for the kids.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Well, kiss me again first. Then—”

Lan Wangji huffs. “Wei Ying, you don’t need to work in Cloud Recesses. I don’t believe the sentence was just, and Brother won’t either. You can live here, and we can find someone—”

“No. I’m staying, and I’m taking care of the kids. Not someone else, and not Wen Qing. Me. Deal?”

“If that’s truly what you want.”

“It is. For now. What I really want right now, more than anything else, is to go home with you and get breakfast for the kids.”

Lan Wangji nods solemnly, a final judgement. “Then that is what we will do.”

Part Sixteen

[firerose]

Angstpril day 28- The day her love died

also on ao3   

This is my last fic before I have to take a long writing break ( I have exams), So feedback would be very great :)

Hazel loved winning the war games. The Cohorts allies and enemies alike stood around her cheering and congratulating each other.

It made her happy to see them like this, so joyful after the giant war.

Dakota her Centurian colleague patted her back appreciatively.

“Good fighting out there Levesque.“, He complimented with pride in his voice.

Hazel could not suppress her smile.

Dakota was one of the Romans who took wargames a bit too seriously.

“ Thanks, you weren‘t bad either!“, She told him with a very stern tone.

Thomas rosewood, the Centurian of the first cohort walked up to them with a mocking grin.“You know you will never lose the wargames as long as Frank‘s Praetor right?“, He asked looking at Hazel with playful anger.

She felt her cheeks heating up.

She knew about the theories that the first and second cohort had made up to justify the many victories the fifth cohort won since they had started war games again. One of the popular ones was that they just lost because they did not want to hurt the Praetors girlfriend.“ My relationship with Frank has absolutely nothing to do with your fighting skills. Maybe Fortuna just isn‘t at your side for once.“, She explained reasonably.

Thoma‘s opened his mouths speechless at her words. He hadn‘t expected that she would use his godly mother against him.

Hazel felt satisfied and turned to look for her boyfriend.

Frank eyes wandered the crowd in search of Hazel. Reyna and Jason were busy with yet another talk about old times. Jason had come to Camp two days ago to talk about temple designs but he had most of the time just talked to his old friends especially Reyna.

He spotted Hazel walking towards him through the masses and quickened his steps.

He got slowed down a bit by all the people that wanted to talk to him but he did not mind.

Frank enjoyed giving them compliments or just having small talks with them.

That gave him the feeling that he was just another one of them and not one of their rulers. He suddenly felt a grasp on his arm.

When he turned his head he saw Alice a twelve-year-old shy member of the fifth cohort, smiling at him gratefully.“Thanks for training Praetor Zhang. It was a great help.“ She said softly and Frank felt moved.

“No problem and I already told you that you can call me Frank.“, He responded hoping that all of the younger demigods would learn that someday.

Alice wrapped one arm around him and leaned onto his chest but Frank did not complain. He had a soft spot for new Campers especially the ones who came with little confidence, like Alice.

“I‘m sorry it‘s just that you did so many impressing things! You are a great Praetor!“.Alice whispered and Frank felt thankfulness washing over him.“Sadly your Praetorship ends here.“, She told him with the same sweet voice.

Frank had barely time to process her words when he felt a sharp pain stabbing right into his chest.

He gasped in pain, his hand grasping the shaft of the dagger that had been pushed into his heart. Alice still held it with her small hand. He tried to back away, tried to breathe but all his body allowed was pain. He already felt his world fading and so his eyes met Hazels one last time. He did not want to leave her so soon. He had imagined a long happy life with her but as always fate was cruel.

The last thing he registered before darkness overtook him was Alice ripping out the dagger and Hazel screaming.

Hazel saw Frank fall, she saw the bloodred dagger in Alice's hand and yet she still did not want to believe it.

Alice had been her friend, almost like a little sister. She had come to Hazel with her doubts and Hazel had always cheered her up.

This girl could not have killed Frank, she could never hurt a fly.

There were shocked gasps around her as her friends had noticed what had happened.

“Nooo!“, Reyna yelled in fury and stormed towards Alice her weapon raised and Jason close behind her his blue eyes as hard as hers. Dozens of others followed their example and a terrible suspicion hit Hazel. What if this girl hadn‘t been who she claimed she was. What if this all had been a trick and the others had figured it out?

She looked at Frank‘s motionless body on the ground and the pain in her heart quickly turned to anger.

Whoever this girl was she was going to pay.

Hazel yelled out her despair and started running, ready to impale her boyfriends killer with her sword. Alice simply smiled at her attackers and with a wave of her hand they were all thrown back, crashing down on the hard ground.

The demigods who hadn‘t attacked stepped back in horror as they started to realize that the monster maybe was more than they could handle.

Hazel‘s whole body ached from the impact and when she tried to face her enemy again, a blinding white light forced her to close her eyes.

When she opened them again her mouth opened in horror. A woman had replaced Alice, a woman that Hazel knew and that she had hoped to never see again.

She had golden hair that was braided in an ancient Greek style, her black robes mirrored her dark eyes that were full of hate.

No, she could not be here, was trapped in her maze, she could not be here.

“Pasiphae?“, Hazel asked her voice trembling in fear as she, rose to her feet. Jason who got up next to her gave her a shocked glance.

“ Of course my dear you. Did you think I would stay in that hole you threw me in?“, The sorceress mocked amused.

Hazel felt tears forming in her eyes.

Yes, she had thought that had trapped Pasiphae forever, that she had kept her from harming anyone. She had wanted a peaceful life so much that she had not focussed on potential threats.

Now Frank had paid the price for her weakness, for her naivety.“You should have stayed there. I will send you back to the fields of punishment for what you did! Frank was a good, kind person and you murdered him like a coward!“, Reyna spat but Hazel stood close enough to see the girls shimmering eyes.

She had loved Frank too, not like a partner but like a brother.

Her words were meant for Pasiphae but Hazel felt them burning into her heart.

Frank had been a good person, that was why she had fallen in love with him and now he was gone. He would never kiss her again, would never smile at her again.

Her gaze wandered to him. His face was turned away from her and she felt the urge to turn him just to see his soft brown eyes.

Pasiphae gave Reyna a pitiful look.“ Don‘t be foolish. I‘m the most powerful with who walked this earth and you are just a pathetic child of a minor goddess.“, She tuned to Hazel the sadism in her eyes making Hazel‘s gut fill with dread,

“But murdering your sweet boyfriend was not that satisfying to me my dear. I have many cruel spells mind if I try them on your friend?“, She asked and her hand went up in flames.

Some of the Campers screamed, the younger ones clinging onto the older ones.

Hazel felt guilt as she saw them. Pasiphae was only here because of her, if any of them got hurt it was her fault.

“You will not hurt any of them !“, Hazel demanded as loud as she could. Pasiphae did not seem intimidated by her.“Well then have a good night daughter of Pluto. I will enjoy watching you suffer.“, Pasiphae mused and then disappeared in a blast of hot white flames.

The Campers were in too much shock to move but Hazel took her chance. She ran to Franks side and kneeled next to him. Her hands were shaking as she gently touched him. He was still warm, maybe just maybe there was still a chance.

“ Frank?“, She asked softly a part of her told her that it was pointless, that he was dead but the denial was a strong emotion.

She gripped his shoulders and turned him around so she could see his face. She was hoping for closed eyes, for a sign of his shallow breath.

Instead, she was greeted with two cold eyes whose light had died already.

Hazel flinched as if someone had hit her and that was how she felt.

“No…..No please…no.“ She muttered over and over again her throat filling with sobs.

She couldn‘t lose him. She had only known him for six months, they deserved more time.

„Come back to me Frank please come back.“, She pleaded and tears fell onto his face as she leaned over him. He did not react, of course, he only stared at her and the eyes that she had loved so much already haunted her.

“You can‘t die like this! After everything we went through…please you can‘t…….“ Hazel begged her sobs finally breaking out of her. She collapsed over Frank‘s body, corpse and buried her face into his chest like that would close the bloodied stab wound.

She suddenly felt arms wrapping around her and even though they were gentle she felt panic rising in her.

“NO, LET ME GO!“ She yelled as she was gently pulled away.

She pressed her lips on Frank‘s, a last desperate attempt to feel his warmth again but again there was nothing only darkness and she felt the dark rising inside her as well.

“It‘s okay Hazel I‘m here … it‘s okay.“, Jason told her softly while he slowly leaned her onto his chest for comfort. Reyna and Dakota joined him sitting down to tell Hazel soft words that they knew were not working.

Hazel did not resist anymore, she was too weak. She let herself sink against Jason closing her eyes to block out the cruel reality that she now lived in. Her heart was broken and in between all her grief, the sweetness that so many people loved was washed away by a deep hatred.

No one noticed that change until Hazel opened her eyes opened again hours later.

They looked empty, dead just like Frank‘s like he had taken Hazel‘s light to the underworld.

Dakota searched them for the sarcastic girl had joked with only hours ago but the longer he searched the more he realized that she was dead.

Hazel Levesque and Frank Zhang both had lost their lives that night and when Hazel finally spoke again her tone was hard and her words were a desire for revenge.

"I will find Pasiphae and I will kill her.“

@chaos-company @qperseusjackson-jasongrace @emilydaughterofapollo @fictionalnormalcy

[itonje]

like all woods, this one has a legend. you won’t hear it outside of whispers at the campfire, told by college students driving on the winding roads, midnight stops at gas stations just like this one. tuck your knees under your head, keep your eyes open. 

the why for it varies. a while back, before the highway was built, there were two run of the mill hikers, hunters, what have you. some say they were friends, others say they were brothers. if you’re the romantic type, they could be lovers. they say the first hated the second so much it would have made cain blush, but i don’t tell it like that. no, they walked into those fateful woods laughing and preening as all the youth do, hand clenched tight in hand. 

the thing about these woods is that though they’re not as deep as some others, not one landmark stands to set your place. no special rocks, no ancient trees, and for each notable river or pond there’s four that look just like it. one can go in circles for days and they would never know it. don’t give me that look, it’s not too bad! just keep your head and you’ll be fine. my father made our way around the same two tree groves for an hour before we made it back to the marked trail and all that made me was thirsty. 

our two hikers had been having the time of their lives out there, splashing through the cleanest and coolest streams you’ll ever see, laughing as loud as they could with nothing but the birds to listen, chasing the deer that grazed in the glades. 

but something went wrong. one misstep maybe, took down a path closed long ago, heard a bird call they didn’t recognize and wanted to see. and they found themselves stranded. when you see them again and again, the streams become icy and damp. the human silence is deafening. the deer are bothersome, bug-eyed and filthy. i told you it wasn’t so bad if you didn’t lose your head. but it’s very easy to lose your head out there, and that’s just what those two did. 

oh, they got along the first couple of hours, and the second too, but when the chill set into their bones and the loneliness struck them, god did they fight! no action was blameless. they made up imaginary arguments at the other-if you tell it like they’re friends, the slights made years ago had been torn open fresh. if siblings, they accused the other of being their parent’s darling eye. lovers? why, they feared the other gallivanting off with a new, younger paramour. 

they say there’s a spot where this all came to a head, high up one of our stone hills, where one could see the all the forest down below them. but for the life of me, no one can say where this mount is exactly. the sparring had reached its peak, both parties angry and starving, lost and scared but would never speak it. and then, a hand was raised, and struck. lord above, that did it! they tussled and fought and bit, butting heads and howling. fighting on a mountain isn’t really smart, is it? one little move and the two slipped down, down, down, still locked about each other...

no one survives that sort of fall, and by the time they reached the very bottom their corpses were already cooling. but they were in the woods, and in the woods, nothing’s dead for very long. 

sometimes, the hunters’ll bring in a special sort of prize, when the stags start rutting and go after each other like nothing you’ve ever seen. well, maybe you’ve seen it. god, isn’t nature strange? the antlers will be locked together so long they’ll start to grow together, twisting into bony knots. if the bucks cooperate, they’ll learn to live with it, drink and walk and eat together up till they’re shot down during open season. sometimes they’ll keep on going at one another, until one dies and the corpse eventually rots off, leaving but nothing but a skull sitting on the antlers. sometimes they both die, starved to death or exhausted beyond belief. 

there’s a legend in these woods, that if you walk off the beaten trail, or hunt out of season, that if you go into the forest with hate in your heart and a lemon on your tongue you’ll see a specter. or is it specters? they move as one. they’re covered in mud and blood and filth, and rot from the inside out, maggots squirming in their ribs. they run at you fast, faster than they should, shambling together on four feet. two cadavers, twisted together at the heads by a set of awful antlers, bloody and dripping half-shed velvet. 

they say that if they manage to catch you, they’ll tear you to bits on those antlers, but i think different. they’ll fall at your feet, and if you listen to their shrieks and beastly bays for too long you’ll begin to hear words form, hear them beseeching and pleading, i’m sorry, please help me. i’m sorry, please. please. make it stop. make it stop. shoot me down, put me to rest. but they never will, cause when they say their sorries and repent they don’t turn to each other once. the antlers still clash. 

it’s getting late, and you should get on. we’re closing up soon. just remember to keep your eyes out when going by the deep dark woods, and if you ever find yourself lost, you’d do better to be kind to your company. 

[thehouseofvs]

Echoes Of Another Life - A Hellish Introduction

Flicker. The sound of many footsteps resonated through a dense forest, filled with towering trees of golden bark that seemed to almost sparkle when the sunlight caught them in a particular manner, their fiery leaves of red, orange, and brown waving and occasionally cascading downward to the mossy floor below. The wind was gentle today, rustling the canopies overhead just enough to ensure that these woods were never silent. Not that they needed to, as the delighted cries of adventurous children bounced back and forth through the forest. About a half-dozen children from the nearby village scurried and ran after one another, all seemingly eager to reach whatever destination it was that they were heading towards. Humans all, they had not a care in the world, for in this distant corner of the realm, they knew only peace. Only the daily life of a peasantry undisturbed. Here, in the Autumn Vale, named so for its eternally-colorful foliage, there was no sign of the greater turmoil that afflicted the rest of the world. And it was during another such blissful day that a raven-haired girl found herself lagging behind the rest of her friends, her sandal-covered feet lightly pattering away at the mossy earth beneath her as she tried to catch up to the others. They were headed towards a small stream that made its way towards their village, brought to them by the mountain springs over yonder. Even if she couldn’t reach them, she knew where they were going - the same place they always did, a wide, flower-strewn clearing within the forest that gave them ample room to run and play. Just as she reaches the stream, the blue-eyed child catches sight of the backs of her fellow village children, who had already crossed over via the stone walkways they had laid out in months past. “Heeeey…! Scipio! Marus! Guys, wait for me!” The girl called out, but her cries went unheeded as her friends continued deeper into the woods. Pouting, she begins to grumble to herself, too preoccupied to take notice of one sizable stone blocking her path. As soon as her toes struck the stone, the girl let out a yelp and tumbled down to the gravelly earth right next to the stream, landing onto her hands and knees. Wincing, and with the occasional whimper escaping her, she could feel that her knees had been cut up a bit from the fall. But before she could stand up to inspect her lightly-wounded limbs, her eyes caught sight of something else - something...unusual. Further upstream, the corpse of a local buck lay near the edge of the water. Seeing dead beasts was not exactly uncommon, even for a young child such as herself, but something about the creature seemed odd to her. For one thing, while it looked as if it had been mauled by another beast - likely a roaming predator - the wounds on it appeared to not be fresh. But, surely, the kill had to be fresh, as a faint amount of dark, sickly blood dribbled from its open wounds and into the stream. Before the raven-haired girl could dwell on the curious sight too much, she once again heard the shrill cries and laughter of her friends further on in the woods. With a grunt, she climbs back up onto her feet, gingerly wiping away the pebbles from her knees and hands before she too crosses the stream via the makeshift stone “bridge” they had made. Following the distant voices, the child raced towards their usual playground, though she would occasionally glance upward to see that some dark-looking clouds had begun to roll in, and rather rapidly at that. Strange, the village’s skywatcher had not predicted any poor weather today - she made sure to ask before leaving the village, as she always did! And the closer she drew towards the forest clearing, the darker the sky became. When she finally arrives, the sky appears as if it were about to pour down a deluge upon the unsuspecting children, the other five all running around and attempting to tag one another in whatever game it was they had chosen to start. Panting from her dash to reach them, the raven-haired girl stops just at the edge of the clearing, leaning against a nearby golden-barked tree and calling out to her friends. “...G-Guys! It’s about to rain! Come over…here?” Her voice trailed off as she looked to the sky overhead of them. The dark clouds that had so rapidly formed had grown denser, and bright, orange-red lights flickered within their depths. That wasn’t lightning, and the girl heard no thunder. What was happening? And as if to answer her confusion, the first of many fiery streams descend from the heavens, illuminating the sky in their radiance before slowly fading away well before they struck the earth. Dozens - no, hundreds of the falling lights fell from the rumbling sky, a cacophony of lights. Feeling a mixture of fear and awe, the girl could not help but stare at the display within the sky for a couple of moments before she looked at her still-playing friends, who all seemed oddly oblivious to what was happening. Concerned for her fellow villagers, she rushes forward and reaches out to grab one passing girl, lightly tugging on her sleeve as she points to the sky overhead. “Look! It’s a starshower! We need to go home!” She tried to inform her friend, her fear evident in her voice. However, the other girl - a plump, brown-haired and mousy child - gives her raven-haired friend a confused stare before also looking at the sky. “...What are you talking about? There’s nothing there!” It was the blue-eyed girl’s turn to be confused, as she once more shot her gaze up towards the sky and...nothing. No more falling stars, no more dark clouds, just an endless expense of blue sky with the occasional, white puff to dot the horizon. “I...wh-what?” The dark-haired girl stammers, slowly releasing her friend’s sleeve as she stares dumbfoundedly at the sky. With a sigh, the plump girl took her younger friend by the hand before calling out to the others. “Hey, I’ll be back! I’m taking her home!” A brief chorus of responses come their way, before the older girl begins to gently tug her dark-haired friend behind her, back towards the way they came. “C’mon, are you not feeling well? Your mother will kill us if you get sick again, you know…” The mousy child chides, as the other girl allows herself to be pulled along, her thoughts seemingly elsewhere. After a few attempts to get the younger girl to talk, the brown-haired girl finally gives up, leaving her friend to her thoughts as she leads the way back to their village. Meanwhile, all the raven-haired child could think about was the falling stars. Was it all just her imagination playing tricks on her? Why did it seem so vivid, so real to her? And did her friends really not see it, either? The sight had instilled in her such a sense of dread, something she had never felt before...what could it possibly mean? “...O-Octavia, I’m so-” _________________________________________________________ Flicker. A week had passed since that fateful day. One long, horrific week. Just the day after the raven-haired girl had witnessed the star shower, the first person in her village had gotten sick. An elderly man known for sharing countless stories and myths, Septimius, had fallen ill with a mysterious ailment. He had grown haggard rapidly, eyes and flesh losing their color, and virulent purple buboes forming on his body. Not long after, he began to secrete blood and viscous ooze from his mouth and ears. Before the sun had set, Septimius was dead, taken as swiftly as the disease had appeared. But that was just the first day. On the second day, like wildfire, the sickness began to spread through the village. The same symptoms began to show on the eldest first, plunging their ancient flesh into horrific agony and draining them of their life. The raven-haired girl’s mother, the local healer, did her best to try and ease the pain of the afflicted...but there was nothing she could truly do to stop their demise. Almost immediately after the second patient perished, the healer sent forth a letter via carrier pigeon - praying that it would reach her contact in time. With the arrival of the third day, the village’s adults came next. Mothers and fathers, working-aged men and women who were responsible for maintaining the village’s day-to-day functions, now rapidly fell ill themselves. Much like their elders, the adults seemed to show the same symptoms...however, they also seemed to become more aggressive, with a tendency to lash out at those near them as they came closer to death. By the time the moon reached its zenith, all that remained were the village’s mourning children, the raven-haired girl, and her mother...but not for long. The raven-haired girl knelt by her mother’s bedside, as the dutiful healer struggled with every breath she made. At this point, the woman knew what had struck her village. The violent behavior of the adults nearing their demise was the final clue...and now, all she could do was fear for the life of her own daughter. Turning her own once-blue, now whitening, gaze on the tear-stained face of her daughter, the healer lifted up a dagger from the bed, and held it handle-out towards her child. At the look of horror on her child’s face, the healer did her best to offer as soothing of a smile as she could...but given her current state, she doubted that it would do much. “...Songbird...I n-need you to do this. Please…” The dying healer rasped out, her exhausted eyes wavering in their vision already. The raven-haired girl violently shook her head, in denial of what was happening. “No…! No, Mama, I can’t...I c-can’t! You can’t...please don’t leave me alone…!” The blue-eyed girl sobs, begging her mother. But even the child knew that such pleas were futile. She had seen with her own eyes that no one, not even her own mother, could escape the disease’s reaping grasp once the symptoms had set in. Knowing that there was little time left, the healer used her other, ghostly-pale hand to take her daughter’s and guide it to the dagger’s handle, gently wrapping the girl’s fingers around the coarse leather grip. By the time the moon had reached its peak, the horrific curse unleashed upon their village would finally awake...and there would be nothing but screams. Red-tinged tears fall down the healer’s face, her lips quivering as it came time for her to beg. “...You...you have to listen. I...don’t w-want to hurt you, Songbird...but I fear I will. W-Which is why...you have to do this.” She whispers, slowly pulling the dagger’s blade towards her chest, right over her heart, even as her daughter’s breathing quickens between sobs. “T-This will...keep me from coming back…” Her eyes moved over to the door that served as the entrance to their home. “...When I’m gone...you need to block the door. P-Put whatever you can in front of it. And whatever you d-do...do not go outside…stay quiet…” While her mother’s words confused the raven-haired girl, she knew that there was some sort of reasoning behind them. After all, mother always knew best...but that did not make this any less hard. Any less painful. “...M-Mama, I...I don’t want to be alone...wh-what will I…?” She tried to speak, but her sobs kept drowning whatever else could come out, her eyes now centered directly on the sinister edge of the dagger her hand now held. With her daughter’s fingers now wrapped around the dagger, the healer moves her hand to gently cup her child’s cheek, tips softly stroking against the alabaster skin. “...You won’t be. Someone v-very important is coming...he’ll help you. H-He’ll take you far away from here...somewhere better, I promise…” The tears now spill freely from the healer’s face, even as she reaffirms her resolve and returns her hand to join her daughter’s upon the dagger. “...Now. Now, my dear…” The dying woman swallows, and attempts to offer one more smile. “...sing, like I taught you. I love you...b-be strong, and live...” With that, the raven-haired girl grits her teeth, hanging her head and unable to meet her mother’s eyes as she obeys...as she always had. To fulfill her mother’s one final request. And thus, with a quiet voice but laden with grief, the young girl begins to sing for her mother… “Shut your eyes and listen close, As I sing under the moon, newly arose, So that your dream will take you far from here, To the home we keep, so far yet so near. A land of flowers, carried upon a gentle breeze, A place where one's heart knows, but never sees. Rest well my heart, forget all your fear, For the Light blesses us, even here, Forever loved are we, the children of the Mother, Cradled are we, long after our last whisper. Listen close, for on the distant gale, Are the prayers of our Mother, who has heard of our tale, When you have lost all hope, and have only despair, Know that you are not alone, our bonds kept safe in the air. Some day, one day, we all find our way home, To the place where fields of flowers endlessly roam. Rest well my beloved, forget all your fear, For the Stars watch over us, even here, Forever loved are we, the children of the Light, Cradled are we, for long into the night. So wipe away your tears, stifle your cries, Brush away the hurt, and all of the lies, When you have buried the pain, not to let it show, Know that home is near, by the Mother's eternal glow, For She guides the Stars, upon which our rest is made, And guides us back home, so that our scars may at last fade. Rest well my dear, forget all your fear, For the Heavens wait for us, even here, Forever loved are we, the flock of our Shepherd, Cradled are we, long after we are severed. One day, some day, I pray you'll be saved and left be, To make your way home, and finally see, That the world is not so cold, nor as cruel as it seems, And embrace the Light's warmth, borne upon gentle beams. Just listen to Her Song, to the promise it brings, To remove your burdens, as the hymn of Freedom rings. Such is my prayer, my own dream for you, Mother, may She listen, and make my wish true, May She keep you, guide you back to the blossoming trees, Where your pain will be gone, carried on a far away breeze… Yes, I sing, for a far away breeze…” By the time the hymn had reached its conclusion, the raven-haired girl could tell that her mother had ceased breathing. Choking back her sobs, she looks up once more, to take in the pale sight of the healer’s visage. A gentle smile remained upon her lips, a sense of peace resting over her. It was too much to bear. Averting her eyes once again, the girl whispers a prayer of her own...feeling the magic invoked by the song flow into the dagger’s blade, as she drives it home into her mother’s still heart. The child knelt there at the bedside, for what seemed like ages, before she finally stood back up onto her feet and turned away from the corpse resting upon the bed. There was still one thing she had to do, to fulfill her mother’s last words. Struggling to move whatever heavy furniture she could reasonably position in front of the cabin’s front door, she worked through a haze of tears as she steadily barricaded herself inside. Now, left by herself, she extinguishes the lights in the cabin, plunging her into absolute darkness. With nothing else to do, she sits herself down on the floor by the bed, pulling her knees up to her chest and burying her head into her arms...and waits. The raven-haired girl did not have to wait for long, before the panicked screams of the village’s children began to be sounded outside the cabin - along with the guttural, inhuman screams of the risen dead. Such screams would echo within the girl’s head for years to come, and continued to pound inside her skull...long after they had abruptly ceased. By the fifth day, the raven-haired girl was all that remained of the once-prosperous, peaceful village. The risen dead continued to shamble about outside, unaware as to her presence. On the sixth day, those very same walking corpses began to crumble apart and fall to the earth, plunging the ruined refuge into absolute silence. It was not until the seventh day that the village’s last child finally mustered the courage to step outside, both in search of food and to finally see what was left of her home. The sights would scar her till the end of her days...and perhaps long after. But before the girl could bring herself to leave, she had once last obligation to fulfill towards her fellow villagers. And so she grabbed Forgemaster Brutus’ shovel, and set to work… ________________________________________________________ Flicker. It was near high noon, on the eighth day, that the raven-haired girl would be disturbed in the midst of her grim task. Ever since her emergence from the cabin that had once been her home, she had labored away in an effort to dig graves, drag corpses, and bury what remained of the villagers. Her hands had long-since become cracked and bleeding from the work, and her general demeanor had fallen into something more akin to a zombie than that of a living girl. The shock of recent events had forced her to repress what emotions she had felt since the dreaded fourth night. However, even in her current state, there seemed to be some semblance of cognisance still active, as the distant sound of hoofbeats could be heard from the distant forest word that led towards the village. Pausing in the middle of digging the last of a whole, fresh graveyard - the grave meant for what remained of her mother - the raven-haired girl could not be certain whether the source of the noise would be a threat or not, and thus hastily dropped her shovel and ran to the cabin, shutting the door behind her and hiding herself underneath the dining table. Not long after she curled up beneath the table, she heard the hoofbeats draw even closer, until the sound of men calling out to one another could also be gleaned. Their voices sounded firm, authoritative...harsh, as they barked their orders. “...You know the drill! Scour the village, search for survivors! The Chantry does as it must - and ready the torches!” Within the cabin, the girl could hear as the men dismounted and began to spread themselves outside, kicking in what doors remained closed as they occasionally made shouts to the others to verify their status. “Clear!” “Clean here!” Until, finally, her own cabin door was kicked open and off its hinges, the door cracking and hanging off to the side as the sound of heavy, plated footsteps slowly entered the room. The girl flinched, holding her breath as she curled up even more, remaining perfectly still in the hope of not being seen. The first indication she received as to the identity of the person who had arrived, was their retching due to the heavy scent of death and decay in the cabin room. A woman, from the sounds of it. As the armored woman delved further into the cabin, she would spot the corpse still remaining on the bed, a grunt escaping her from the stench...and a weary sigh. “...Poor woman...I wonder if she died alone...” The mysterious warrior muttered to herself, still unaware as to the young girl’s presence. After another moment, the woman has herself another sigh, grumbling. “...Curses. This one died of the plague after all.” “Tessarius Tutor! What did you find?” The voice of a man - the same one that had been issuing orders outside - called out to the armored woman from the cabin’s doorway, as a similarly-attired man strode inside. The raven-haired girl tried her best to remain still, but the need to breathe was beginning to supersede her fear. At the man’s inquiry, the mysterious warrior-woman turns on her heel to face him, replying as any soldier would to a superior. “A body, Centurion. I believe she died of the plague that was reported.” There is a sound of disapproval from this ‘Centurion’, along with a heavy sigh of his own. “Yes, I see the pustules. A mass grave site was reported, so we believe that there may be a survivor or several here. We will have to-” The man is cut off when the raven-haired child attempts to take a breath, and in doing so, moves just enough to cause the floorboard beneath her to creak. Both of the mysterious intruders fell silent, before advancing towards the table. The man raises his greave-protected right foot and uses it to kick the table back and out of the way, exposing the girl underneath as she flinches and quivers where she is, like a frightened mouse. With the table gone, she could at last see the faces of the two warriors, even partially-obscured by their helmets as they were. The woman bore a pale visage, blue eyes, and traces of golden hair could be seen at the edges of her helm, while the man was of darker complexion, with dark brown eyes and a stern expression - one growing ever more dour as he glares down at the raven-haired child. “A survivor indeed…” After a couple of uneasy moments pass by, the woman bends her knees and slowly lowers herself, her eyes focused on the frightened child in front of them. Adopting a smile in an attempt to ease the girl’s fears, she tries to talk to her. “Do not fear, we are not here to hurt you, child...are you alone? Is there anyone else here?” The girl does not answer, opting to instead remain silent. The Centurion reaches to his waist, his hand seizing hold of the hilt of his gladius, and begins to withdraw it from its scabbard - but he is stopped by the hand of the woman standing next to him, who is looking at him with an expression of horror. “Stop! What are you doing?!” The woman asked, glancing between the frightened girl and her superior. Keeping his eyes locked onto the shaking child, in case she were to try and run, he answers his subordinate with a cold, harsh tone. “You know the protocol, Tessarius. Any and all survivors within these villages are to be executed, lest they spread the disease elsewhere. Now, unhand me.” The Centurion’s voice takes on a threatening edge to it towards the end, as if daring the woman to continue to hold him back. “She is but a child! Ask the Lord-Chanter to-” “Ask me to, what, Tessarius?” Another voice joined the fray, once more coming from the cabin’s doorway. This time, from a man wearing an odd combination of priestly robes and light, leather armor, adorned in the divine symbols of the Mother’s Chant and her holy Chantry. His hair, cut short in military fashion, was as pale as snow, his face featuring the wear that came with middle age. But it was his eyes, the piercing, all-knowing blues, that defined his visage. The Centurion raises his own voice to answer, violently shrugging off the woman’s grip as he did so. “Nothing, my Lord-Chanter. We will handle this situation promptly.” The man reassured the priest, his eyes fixating once more on the shaking child. But he does not get the chance to do as he promises, as the Lord-Chanter’s own response came immediately after. “Stay your blade, Centurion...the girl does not harbor the plague.” The reply came calmly, yet firm, as to dissuade any attempts to disagree or contest his assertion. The Centurion stays silent, staring hard at the raven-haired girl, before he briskly nods and removes his hand from the pommel of his gladius. “As you command, Lord-Chanter.” Waiting for a dismissive nod of the priest’s head, the Centurion then walks past him and back out into the village proper, barking more orders to his men with perhaps a hint of added heat to his words. The Lord-Chanter waits for his Centurion to pass him by, before he fully enters the cabin and looks down at the raven-haired child. His expression doesn’t shift, remaining as calm and stone-faced, but there is a glint of recognition in his blue stare. He then shifts his attention to the corpse laid out upon the nearby bed, and walks over to stand before it. For an uncomfortable period of time, the Lord-Chanter stares at the body, before he finally speaks once again. “Tessarius Tutor, was it?” The armored woman, nervous as she was, had waited to be addressed and directly dismissed, until the Lord-Chanter spoke to her. Swallowing, the woman places a fist against her chest and confirms. “Yes, Lord-Chanter. What do you require of me?” The Lord-Chanter does not turn to look at them, his eyes only for the body before him. But he continues, as authoritative as always. “You physically obstructed your superior from conducting his duty, before receiving orders to do so from someone of higher rank. Such behavior is unacceptable, and you will be chastised for it.” The Lord-Chanter informs, but before the trepidation grows too much, he proceeds. “For the time-being, as part of your punishment, you will be responsible for the child’s safekeeping. I trust you will fulfill this obligation to the fullest of your abilities.” The order came as a small surprise to the Tessarius, but she does not hesitate to respond in confirmation. “Yes, my Lord. I understand.” When the Lord-Chanter offers a single-worded dismissal, the woman turns back around to the child, still curled up on the floor and fearful. Crouching down, she kneels in front of the girl. “It is alright...you are in good hands.” She accentuates her words by extending both of her hands towards the girl for her to take, smiling. “Do you have a name…?” The raven-haired girl stares at the armored woman in front of her, blue eyes wide as they took in all of her features. Despite the intimidating attire the soldier in front of her wore, the face she bore was nothing but gentle. A welcoming, nurturing smile meant to instill some sense of ease in the traumatized child. Which, perhaps to both of their surprise, succeeded to some small degree as the girl shakily reached out to take both of the Tessarius’ hands. “...Valeria…” The child answered in a whisper. If the name came as a shock to the Lord-Chanter, he did not seem to show it, though the woman certainly seemed to find it a rather curious circumstance. “Valeria…? A lovely name. I am Justinia.” She introduces herself, gently squeezing the girl’s hands with her own, before she steadily works at bringing them both up onto their feet. “Now, come along...it is time we left.” The raven-haired girl hesitates, looking over to where the Lord-Chanter stood over the corpse of her mother. “...B-But…” “It is alright...Lord Camena will take care of her.” Justinia promises to the young Valeria, maintaining her hold on the girl’s hands before slowly beginning to lead them both out of the cabin, and onto the streets. Already, the Chantry’s soldiery had begun to set the village ablaze, the homes of dozens alight and billowing smoke upward to the sky. Justinia did not allow Valeria to linger, instead guiding her to the mount she owned, helping the child up onto the saddle, and then joining her soon after to trot away from the village. With the Tessarius’ arms wrapped around her, and the rocking of the beast’s movements, for the first time in days the young girl felt safe enough to finally shut her eyes. And within moments, she was out, lost to the blissful relief that was slumber… ...But that simply set the stage, did it not? Your life started as a unique Hell of its own. And it continued to be such, did it not? Until the very end. And even then, She did not let you find the rest you craved. No, She seems content to let you suffer. But perhaps that is alright. After all...we will be able to see each other again, very soon...

[ninjakitty15]

Chapter 19: Good Impressions (Loki x OFC Pairing)

I looked in the mirror and couldn't help but grin widely, baring my teeth even as a sense of giddiness filled me. It was very rarely I ever actually dressed up or even really did much to prepare for an upcoming battle beyond gathering power, planning and making sure I had all my war ducks in a row, this was extra but it was the good kind in my opinion.

"You know...I read that the Spartans, the fiercest ancient warriors our world had at one point, would pretty themselves up before battle and spies from enemy lines that caught them doing that would overestimate them. Apparently real men don't wear makeup into a war," I told Loki who walked up behind me, watching me check myself out. "Funny thing is in this country and probably a lot of other countries today have this thing called war paint which might not make them look fabulous like a Spartan but it might as well be makeup as it's primarily worn on their face."

"I remember the Spartans, Odin was impressed by their tactics and way of life, especially their stand against the Persians, the odds weren't in their favor and yet somehow they gave them hell before defeat," Loki recalled.

"Quality over quantity," I added. "Those people were literally born to be warriors, only the strong babies survived the first of many tests they were forced into." I combed a hand through my hair, considered messing it but decided against it. "I used to be more of a silk or velvet kinda girl but I gotta tell ya, I'm really digging the leather. It's fashionable, it's sexy even, and it's pretty decent armor, I mean it's no breastplate or Kevlar vest but those are a bit too obvious and that's the last thing we want right now." I took a few swaggering steps, glancing at my backside curiously to see how it all fit together.

"You're enjoying this entirely too much," he mused.

"I know it hasn't been that long since we met, but are you really surprised at this point?"

"No, not really. How long are you gonna fawn over yourself in the mirror before we actually put this plan into motion?"

"Relax, I got this. I just gotta get a few things down pat before we jump head first into this oncoming shit storm." I grinned again. "What's the hurry?"

He watched me, a glint of amusement in his eyes as he shook his head at my antics. "You got the smile right and I'm not sure how you were able to copy my walk so quickly but the humor needs to change if you insist on chattering before things get started."

"But...humor is why I'm still kicking," I protested. "And it's a far cry from your own, which mind you I'm glad you have any at all, some other gods can't seem to grasp that concept despite being eons old. Still, it's a lot more...eloquent than I'm used to."

"Then perhaps don't say anything at all."

"And leave you to do all the talking, hell to the no, spank you very much."

"What's wrong with me doing the talking for once?" he crossed his arms in challenge and arched an eyebrow, daring me to answer.

I gave the god an unapologetic and unamused look. "I'm not the only one that's been muzzled here, maybe your brother was onto something when he did it to you."

"How dare you? You take that back right now!"

"Or what? Whatcha gonna do, huh? Take your shot, green boy, you got me deadbang."

The sound of someone clearing their throat loudly interrupted our usual bickering match and we both turned to see a half amused half arachnid smirking at us with his unnaturally muscular arms crossed as well. "You know this is technically playing with yourself, right? I mean if that's the case, could you get a room that isn't the only bathroom in the apartment, please?"

"How long since this plan was in motion did you wanna use that joke?" I teased the kid.

Peter shrugged and pretended to look bashful but now that he too was throwing in dirty jokes, the facade of him being an innocent kid was now out the window. "You sure I can't tag along?"

"Kid, you got your own enemies to fight and this might be a bit above your skillset which means if you tag along theres much less chance of you coming back."

"But you could just bring me back yourself, right?"

I scowled at his optimism. "Doesn't work that way, I only bring back the ones that can't pass on on their own and want another chance at tying up loose ends, and you better not be one of those people, you're a kid, which goes against my personal code of bringing back zombie kids, that's just fucking depressing having an army of rotting midgets."

Peter sighed in despair and slumped his shoulders. "I never get to do anything fun."

I rolled my eyes at his whining. "I'd also be held responsible for letting you come with and I kinda don't want to be hunted down by a team of go getters and fancyass technology, no spank you. I already have Hydra for the latter. So do me a favor, sit your five dollar ass down, before I make change."

Peter scoffed at my implied threat but stopped bugging me, it might have been his plan that could get the odds in our favor but it sure as hell wasn't his fight and I had no intention of dragging another cute super powered person into my personal vendetta. "Aunt May says you can come back anytime, just give one of us a heads up next time...and maybe something that gets black bloodstains off any surface just in case."

I would've blanched if I wasn't pale already. "Oh no, did I ruin something, I can pay for that."

"No no, just, I think she thinks you'd only come here if you're in trouble like you were this time and she's worried you might miss a spot next time if that's the case, normal blood you can just use hydrogen peroxide, but I'm not too sure it works on corpse blood."

"Noted and tell her thanks for everything, same goes for you of course since you were the one to let us in before she agreed to it. And also not informing the A team, that's important...you didn't tell them right?"

"Not like they take me all that seriously or even answer my calls if I did," Peter muttered. "You're all good there, promise."

"Excellent! You stay sharp and cute, the second either of that fails, you're fucked."

"Thanks, I think."

"Right then." I turned to Loki with another smirk. "How's this for a first impression?" I asked in smooth sorta British sorta something else accent.

He scowled at me but couldn't complain it seemed. "I'm getting the sense you've been working on that before this came to pass."

"Anyone can do an Avenger impression, hell anyone can wear their costumes, right Peter? But I'm not about the hero life, so why waste time on them when I've been giving it all to you?"

Loki was silent at this and it was Peter that actually responded to me. "That was actually really sweet."

"You say that like it's a surprise, physically dead here, not emotionally dead, thank you. My heart hadn't reached that stage where it becomes calcified like a fetus that won't leave its womb."

"You always have the oddest choice of metaphors," muttered Loki. "So you have the walk, the voice, the smile even though I'm not sure that's even necessary at this point."

"When are you going to prepare for the plan then?" I challenged. "Go on, see how well you know your part."

"Don't you worry about my side of the plan, I've been doing this sort of thing for the sheer fun of it long before you decided to do it out of sheer boredom."

I snorted and rolled my eyes at him. "Yes, we're all very aware of your old age, you don't have to remind us like we have to remind you, old man."

"Ye of little faith," he mocked, earning a bar of soap flying at his face he was lucky enough to duck. "Your aim needs improvement."

"I'm sorry, did you actually want to be hit in the head by something solid and hard and not a pillow, because I missed on purpose, you cotton headed ninny-muggins."

"Seriously, is all you two do bicker at each other?" asked Peter.

"Well I mean you wouldn't let us have any real adult fun while we crashed here so we gotta get that pent up energy out somehow, right?" I reasoned.

"She's not wrong," Loki agreed.

"Besides, no one's getting hurt from it, I'm convinced this is our own special way of showing we love each other without being a bunch of saps. I'm 99 things but a sap ain't one."

"What's wrong with being affectionate?" asked Peter, almost sounding offended.

"That implies I have more emotions than I'm willing to admit to anyone including myself, I'm generally not ok with having that much feels." I grinned, slicked back my hair again before doing a little dance for funsies.

"I'd refrain from doing that little jig when the plan's in full swing," warned Loki though he was still smiling in amusement.

"Oh but I like this," I purred with the accent again.

The smirk on his own face twisted, like I said something that somehow offended him and all his ancestors and pissed him off or deeply upset him. "Don't make me take it away from you till right before the fight starts."

"Oh come on, maybe you just need to hug it out and join the fun, bring it in, big guy." I opened my arms wide for emphasis. "There's no better love than self love."

He rolled his eyes at my stellar pun and green magic rolled over him as he changed into character. "I bet you were just dying to make that joke."

I stared at him and it was my turn to glare. "Was that your attempt at a dead joke? Oh hun, you gotta do better than that to fit the bill."

"Don't patronize me, woman, I wasn't even trying then."

I walked over and patted his cheek just to mess with him. "Sure you weren't. Do me a favor and work on that but also turn around for me."

"Why?"

"Just...do it."

He did begrudgingly and I frowned upon studying his form thoroughly before he faced me again. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, you got it right, it's just...I didn't realize it looked like that and now I'm suddenly an insecure teenager. Peter, is this how you feel all the time because, dude, this really sucks and I feel for ya."

"You say that like you were never one yourself," Peter noted.

"I know I was but like, I don't remember what it was like then, I couldn't tell you what I was like as a teen."

"Why not?"

"No memory of it, at all."

"You mean like it was so long ago that you can't remember that far back or lots of stuff happened during it so fast that it's all a blur."

"I mean it's not even accessible, it's gone from my mind completely."

Peter frowned, probably trying to understand what I was getting at. "Amnesia?"

"Mindwipe."

"Like Bucky Barnes?"

"No, that's brainwashed...wait, those do sound synonymous, damn, hadn't even thought about that. Brainwashed is basically having your mind overridden and reprogrammed, there's memories there but they're not real ones. Mindwiped is just nothing there to reprogram at all."

"Did Hydra do that too?"

"No, Hydra can't touch this, something they need to have programmed in their heads for all the times they tried and failed any of their aims when they had me. I can't tell you the who, but I can tell you it was painless and done willingly and without regret."

"You chose to have memories taken from you?"

I nodded simply, unable to elaborate as per the deal.

Loki, knowing there was some things I couldn't talk about for reasons he wouldn't know until hopefully later, chose to cut in then. "I think that's enough curiosity for now, we should get going and finish the plan you concocted for us."

I smiled thankfully at Loki and nodded in agreement. "Yes, of course.  Parker, if I don't make it back by tomorrow...just wait longer."

"Stop teasing the child, Nell, you could be really testing his patience with your antics and we wouldn't be welcomed back."

"You wouldn't, I would because I'm a delight to be around." I strutted after him anyway and he shook his head and beckoned me out of the bathroom and unfortunately out of the apartment.

"The Hydra agents and people that turned on you would say otherwise."

"The Hydra agents don't even know what joy is, the only time they're smiling is when they think they're about to take over the world and people are dying around them...the traitors are just pussies which means it doesn't take much to make em weep."

"Again with the metaphors."

"Maybe you should start taking some notes, eh? Give you a head start seeing as I'm all caught up on my end, unless you got something to add there?"

"Well you still haven't proven you can get the mannerisms right and mannerisms maketh men."

"But we are not men..."

"No, we're immortals."

[themuzzleofnemesis]

3–Memory of the Four Seasons; Scene 12

The Muzzle of Nemesis, pages 138-147

--It was still snowing.

I continued to watch it through the gaps in the cherry blossom tree’s branches, laying on my back on the ground.

“You’ll catch a cold sleeping in a place like that,” someone said to me, and I gradually sat up.

I had hoped that was Shakuson’s voice, but naturally it wouldn’t be.

It was a man wearing glasses…Someone I had never seen before.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked me.

I honestly replied, “…Shakuson. My boyfriend.”

His corpse was nowhere to be seen.

Maybe he survived—

But that fragile hope was immediately dashed by the man before me.

“If you mean his dead body, I put it back in his room. I couldn’t have someone finding it, after all. I’d just gotten back to carry you away too. And then you woke up.”

I didn’t cry again. I had cried so much that my tears had already dried up.

More than that, several questions were welling up inside my mind.

First—who was this man?

This man who was so calm despite knowing that I had killed Shakuson.

And another one…How was I alive?

I put a hand on my temple where I had shot myself.

“…Ow.”

There was definitely a wound there.

But it wasn’t bleeding.

…What in the world…

The man reached out a hand in response to my confusion.

“I’m sure you have questions for me…But first let’s get back to your room. There fortunately isn’t anyone else around, but—it’s very likely that someone heard the gunshots. It’s best we get away from here before the police run up.”

After saying that, he grabbed my arm and tugged me up to my feet.

.

It was only once we had returned to my room that I truly felt that I was in neither heaven nor hell, but the living world.

“Well then…Shall I now answer your questions, Nemesis?”

The man sat down and lounged on the sofa as though this were his room.

“If you know my real name, then…You must be from the organization after all.”

“Sadly, that is incorrect. I have nothing to do with Pere Noel, PN, or the Dark Star Bureau. However—I have been watching over you up to now.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“What an awful way to put it. Didn’t I just tell you I’m not related to the organization?”

“Then just who are you!?” I pressed the man.

“…Hm. Rather than explaining with words—Perhaps it would be faster to show you.”

Directly after he said that—

His body rapidly began to emit light.

“--!?”

I instinctively closed my eyes against its brilliance.

“…”

When I opened them again a short while later, the man was no longer there.

--Or rather, he had changed into a different creature.

“This is…it can’t be…”

It was a single blue octopus.

“…Are you Mr. Ziz?”

And then I heard a voice speak directly into my mind.

It wasn’t the “other me” I would usually hear. It belonged to the same man as before.

<This form has its share of difficulties. I can’t directly converse with you like I was doing just now. So that’s why I have to speak to you in your mind like this>

“Mr. Ziz…you survived.”

<Indeed. That old sorcerer got me good. A normal octopus would have undoubtedly frozen to death if made to suffer such nonsense as being frozen inside a lake. I managed to pull through, but it took a great deal of time for me to recover to how I had been before>

Mr. Ziz’ body once more began to glow.

And then he returned to his form of the bespectacled man.

“—Right. Yes, this one is better for talking.”

“Is that…your true form?”

So Mr. Ziz’ true identity hadn’t been an octopus, but a human—

But he shook his head. “No. My true form is neither an octopus nor is it a human being.”

And then he changed shape again.

This time—he was a small, golden key.

<This is my true form>

“A key…So you aren’t even a living thing?”

<The name of this key is “Grim the End”. In the ancient era two people called the “Twins of God” unleased into the world seven vessels with demons inside—this is one of them. From time to time Grim the End will change its shape into various forms. A knife, poison…sometimes even an octopus or a person. However, as it’s really an inorganic substance, it has no will of its own>

“…Then that means you talking to me right now are—”

<A demon dwelling inside one of those seven vessels—popularly called a “Vessel of Deadly Sin”. In other words, I am--> He once more changed from key to human. “—The ‘Demon of Wrath’ who resides in Grim the End. Demons have no physical bodies in the living world. And on the other hand, vessels have no will. When you join the two together—I can become a conscious person like this.”

--If I hadn’t had any talent in magic, and if I hadn’t heard the voice of the “will of the forest”, I wouldn’t have been able to believe what he was telling me at all.

But since “magic” and the “will of the forest” truly existed—then there was nothing unusual about there being “demons” in the world.

“Mr. Ziz—My mother was the one who gave you to me. …So then, was this all by her instigation?”

“No, she didn’t know my true identity. She had bought me at the marketplace thinking I was a simple octopus. –Though it is because I knew that she was looking to buy a pet octopus for her daughter that I infiltrated that market.”

“Why would you go to all that trouble to—”

“Let’s just say that I was ordered to by a certain someone—I’ll reiterate to be clear, but I have no connection to that organization. A demon can’t be ordered around by the likes of a normal human being, now can they?”

“…”

There are beings in this world that would try to protect me, that I cannot see—that was what the “will of the forest” had told me.

Mr. Ziz put a hand on my shoulder, and grinned at me.

“Well, I hope we can work well together from here on out. Though you may know my true identity now, there’s no need to go recklessly worshipping me or anything like that. You can treat me as you did before this point.”

“I’ve no intention of sinking so low that I start worshipping a demon.”

“Is that right? I’d still appreciate at least a little gratitude. It’s thanks to me—that you wound up not dying, after all.”

Yes—there was that.

How I was alive, despite having been shot in the head?

“You mean this is by the power of a demon?” I asked him, pointing to the wound on my temple.

“Not a power so much as—it might be better to call it a ‘Rule’ established by the gods. ‘Those who have contracted with a demon can only be killed by another contractor’…So it goes. By all rights you can’t commit suicide. Though well, it’s a different matter if your physical body were to be completely erased from this world.”

“I have no memory of contracting with a demon.”

“—That Christmas night when I first went to your house…Didn’t you have a dream?”

“A dream? …It was so long ago I’ve already forgotten.”

“That night, I spoke to you in your dream. I asked you to ‘become friends with me’. And you agreed.”

“…That’s a ‘contract’!? What nonsense!”

“Whatever you think, that night a contract was established.”

“A contract! But not a valid one!” I yelled.

Mr. Zis sighed regretfully. “If you really insist then I’ll respect your wishes. But—don’t you still need my power yet?”

“…I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Then let me ask you this. What do you intend to do now?”

“—I…wanted to die. Along with Shakuson. I would probably just try to do so again.”

“Are you really fine with that? Living while set adrift by the people around you only to helplessly give up and run away from this world—If you died now, that would be the sum total of your life. Isn’t that wretched? Don’t you have any regrets!”

Mr. Ziz raised his voice.

Were his words the whisperings of a demon?

Or—the advice of a friend?

“I don’t know…What I should…do…”

“Nemesis…The weak you is the one who died just now. From this moment on will be your true life.”

“…”

“You don’t have to come to a conclusion right away. What you do now is up to you.”

Mr. Ziz once more began to glow.

I closed my eyes, and when I had opened them again—

There was a single mask…and a single golden bullet.

“…What’s this?”

<This mask form is the closest to my proper self. Being an octopus or a human’s not too bad, but this is more comfortable. And that bullet—It’s a fragment of Grim the End that has been divided off>

“So you can do that…”

<Since you have skill in handling a gun, I’ll give you this bullet as a present. You are free to choose whether you shoot it at someone or not>

“A demon…bullet.”

<Shoot it at those who you think to be the most “evil” to you. You will always kill them, no matter what kind of person they are. –Even if this person is a “demon contractor”>

“…But if what you’re saying is true, then aren’t I already a ‘demon contractor’? And so I should be able to kill other contractors even without using this bullet, right?”

<Naturally. But in that case, you and your foe would be on equal footing. There’s a chance you would have the tables turned on you. This is a “power” that helps avert that. A power separate from the “Demon of Wrath”, one that exists inside Grim the End itself>

In other words, by obtaining both the power of the “demon” and the “vessel” together, I had an advantage over other contractors.

A bullet that could kill a demon contractor—

“If…I were to shoot this at myself, what would happen?”

<Your body would be destroyed. Earlier I said you couldn’t commit suicide, but in the event that you’re using Grim the End that’s an exception. It’s a vessel that specializes in killing demons, after all>

“…”

<Grim the End has no will. But it is “alive”. That’s why it’s able to take on the shape of living creatures. In that sense you could say that Grim the End is a unique type of “contractor”>

“And another ‘contractor’ would be able to kill me…I see.”

<I pray that you will not use it on yourself. I’m being earnest>

“I got it…Thank you. I’ll—think about it a little.”

I picked up the mask and the bullet, and set them down on the desk.

--Frankly there was so much to process that I couldn’t keep it straight in my mind.

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