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emmg · 1 month ago

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wip whenever

i was tagged by my baes @heylittleriotact @aldisobey @ollypopwrites so im tagging yall three back in turn and adding @thepalehorsevictoria @excited-hiss @jainydoe @rooks-leather-jumpsuit @caffeinatedmunchkin @xxnashiraxx @lavenderprose and everyone else

euh this is from that Hadestown Emmrook AU I drunkenly posted about yesterday. The brain rot is real. I'm putting Emmrich & Rook as Hades/Persephone and Bellara & Neve as Orpheus/Eurydice.

anyway lol

Excerpt from Emmrich’s Research Notes (Unfiled Addendum)

"The Veil is deteriorating at several key fault lines. Surface-level efforts remain inconsistent. Solas and I are in agreement: stabilization must occur from both sides. He holds the Fade. I hold the world. He tends the dreaming. I manage the dead. The Grand Necropolis must serve as a stabilizing anchor, its necromantic field designed to resist volatile Fade incursions at structurally compromised points. The city is not merely a sanctuary for the dead, but a mechanism of containment. Lichdom is not corruption, but crystallization. Ritual intention remains pure. Undeath becomes the framework through which purpose endures. Mortality introduces entropy; emotion distorts the weave. I am—by nature—too human. The living cannot bear this burden forever. The dead do not fray under repetition. She will not understand. Rook fears what does not grow. She believes stillness is stagnation. But stillness is the only reason the walls still hold."

The train to the Grand Necropolis has no windows. It unsettles her every time. She always hesitates, Rook notices. Always. One foot extended, the other still grounded, she teeters at the threshold, suspended between the platform, the train, and the void that lies between.

But inevitably, as always, she boards. Time snaps back into motion. The whistle shrills, the wheels begin to turn. She almost loses her balance, lurches forward, arms flailing, takes three quick steps to steady herself. Behind her, the doors slide shut.

It’s always the same: hesitate, glance down, step in, stumble, recover.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. She hears the great machine; or maybe she feels it. It travels through her bones as much as through her ears, a pulse in the metal spine of the train as she walks the corridor toward her private cabin.

The one that needs a key.

The key she wears on a chain around her neck. The key that rests cold between her breasts, always cold, no matter how long it lies pressed to her skin—and that is always. It never warms. It only leeches.

She stops. Fumbles at the chain, trying to free it. It snags, scratches her collarbone. She tugs. Harder. The chain catches on the top button of her blouse and, with one sharp pull, it snaps. The key flies.

“Motherfucker,” she mutters, dropping to one knee just as the train jolts beneath her. The key skitters away.

A foot steps out from one of the cabins—a pointed boot catches it before it vanishes. Then the other foot follows, this one curved, elegant, and false: a gilded, dwarven-forged prosthetic that ends just below the knee. Its owner leans down, humming as she picks up the key, rolling it along her knuckles like a two-penny magician with a coin. A cheap trick. Still, impressive.

“Thank you,” Rook says, brushing off her knees as the woman holds it out to her.

“Think nothing of it,” the woman replies.

Her smile is small. Kind. A touch reserved.

As soon as Rook takes the key, the woman tilts her head and says, “It must be very important to you.”

"Why do you say that?"

“For starters, you wear it tucked beneath your clothes, not over. You check for it with your fingers without even realizing it. Twice since you stepped on board. You flinched when it hit the ground. You swore when the chain broke, not because of the chain itself, but because the key was loose. You didn’t run after it; you dropped. Dropped fast. Knees first.”

She spins the snapped bit of chain once around her finger before handing it over as well. “Also… you didn’t say ‘thank you’ right away. You looked at it first. Made sure it was intact. Still yours. Still there.”

“Ah,” Rook says, folding the key into her palm. She closes her fingers around it, then covers it with her other hand. It probably looks ridiculous. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to lose it again. “Well, then.”

“Take care, now.”

The woman offers a small nod, then turns and walks back into her cabin, the one she shares with three others. None of them acknowledge her return. Each stares at something else entirely: the wall, the floor, the ceiling. Anywhere but her.

She picks up a bound stack of papers, set aside, apparently, to catch her flying key. She licks her fingers, tugs the ribbon loose, and resumes reading. As her head dips, a loose strand of hair slips forward, veiling her face.

“Just as important as those are to you,” Rook says, nodding toward the papers.

She doesn’t know why she says it. The woman had clearly meant to end their encounter then and there. Rook should let it go. She doesn’t know why her mouth keeps moving.

A pause.

A soft, half-exasperated, half-fond huff. Then, “Yes... though it’d be better if someone hadn’t filled the margins with half-baked schematics.” She lifts a page and gives it a little shake—lines and diagrams scrawled at odd angles, layered between blocks of cramped handwriting. “They’re everywhere,” the woman mutters, more to herself now. “As if her thoughts were leaking sideways.”

She never looks up. Never looks back.

No one goes to the Grand Necropolis for fun.

Rook stands in the hallway, fully aware she’s staring but unable to stop. She wonders who she forgot. Or what.

The Veil has been faltering for a year now. Sizzling at the edges, breaking apart, only to re-knit itself moments later, as if nothing ever happened. Nothing, then everything. Collapse and recovery, over and over.

Some whisper it’s better to be almost-dead, half-dead, very-nearly-dead—anything but truly dead. So they board the train. They go underground. They enter the Grand Necropolis.

No one is truly alive there, Rook thinks.

Not even Emmrich.

Eventually, she moves. Drifts. Leaves the hallway behind and slips into her cabin.

The key turns in the lock without resistance, smooth as butter, as always.

Inside, she presses her back to the door and inhales deeply.

It never changes. Not really. The same every time. Familiar to the point of wrongness. So strange. So perfect.

Rivaini spices from the box of loose teas on the table. The warm musk of amber clinging to the upholstery. A new bracelet—gold, always gold. Never silver, never steel. Only gold. The eternal metal. The one that still shines beneath the earth, even without the sun.

For Gold and Glory, she thinks, or half-remembers. The words come hazy, distant. She’s fairly certain she once shouted them, leaping into a cave to plunder its depths.

She wonders which meaning they were meant to hold. The glory or the sun?

Both belong to the past.

One is hers. The other… isn’t.

It is a ritual.

She sits. Gives the small kettle two taps and waits, silent and patient, for the magic to do its work. Boiling water with no flame, no sound but the faint hiss as heat blooms. Cinnamon, ginger, clove; all ground fine and mixed. Good for headaches. For steadying the nerves. For softening the edges of thought.

She pours a cup, then reaches for the letter that brought her here. Again.

Written in her own hand.

A sigh escapes. A smile follows. And then the impulse, half-dramatic, half-genuine, to cover her face with her hands. As if the gesture might shield her from the absurd sweetness of it all. Something theatrical. Something borrowed. Something Emmrich, certainly.

Not his voice, but hers, written out in a looping, slanted script. A ghost version of herself, leaving messages in the dark: come home, come home, come back down—look what you’ve made me do. I’ve written it in the mirror for you, the words seem to say, so you’ll catch it next time you look at your reflection.

Yes. That is the trick. Not a summons, this letter—a call, soft and strange. That is how Emmrich writes to her.

He constructs a tableau, precise in its staging, uncanny in its intimacy. He does not sign his name. He does not need to. The handwriting is hers—flawlessly imitated, down to the curl of the descenders, the pressure points in each curlicue—but the voice beneath it is unmistakably his.

It reads as if she is speaking to herself.

Or rather, as if he is speaking through her.

Or perhaps—as it once was—as if they are speaking together, inside the same sentence.

All she ever has to do is arrive.

You once said you would return when the world cracked open. It is cracking, Rook. The Grand Necropolis hums still, but the rhythm falters. They say it moves souls like clockwork. I believe it only winds them tighter. They do not understand, of course. They were not here when it was soft, when it bloomed. I have missed you. In all the ways you expect, and in those you would not. In silences that shape themselves like your name. If you can come—come now.

And then, a ring.

It arrives precisely as she finishes reading the letter for the umpteenth time, as if summoned by the final line. It does not fall so much as appear, condensing from the air. Another gift. Another gesture. Emmrich’s handwriting in mineral form.

Because beneath the earth, it is always cold. And in the cold, there is pressure. There is rock. There are veins that glitter. Jewels curled like thoughts in the dark. There is gold.

She catches it mid-air, instinctively.

An emerald. Deep, green, and quiet.

It matches the bracelet.

It fits as though it had always been hers.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk.

****

Bellara’s Workshop Log—Personal Tinkering Notes (Filed: Messily, Unsorted)

"Prototype #227b failed. Resonance sync fractured mid-loop. Neve would say it’s because I didn’t test it long enough. I’d say she’s probably right. Again. She said I don’t finish anything. That I leap to the next idea before the first one even settles. I told her I can’t sit still, that I don’t want to. She didn’t laugh. The truth is, I was building something for her. I just never got to the part where it worked. She left before I could name it. Maybe that’s fair. Maybe I would have left me, too."

#the brain rot is brain rotting #anyway lol #wip whenever #im gonna go take a bath im tired now #emmrook #emmrich x rook #emmrich volkarin #dragon age the veilguard #datv

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