#the iron manacle of inevitability

[dobodleaday]

08.05.24 A Fragile Vessel 🥚

[llondonfog]

twst (horror) tober — day 6 (time)

➤ Day 6: Time | “How long has it been?” 

Silver once told him that ever since stepping into the role of caring for Lilia, the concept of time turned meaningless to him.

Silver told him that he can only categorize the days now on a continuum of good and bad.

There were days when his father would wake up with the hint of recognition in his eyes and an agreeable slant to his lips, and Silver needn't coax him out of bed to amuse him with the trinkets and gifts bestowed upon him by well-meaning classmates and a grieving liege. There were even better days when a glimmer of memory not yet lost would surface in the dark and mired deadlands of his father's deteriorating mind, when he'd pat the cushion beside him on the couch and regal Silver with a tale he'd heard at least several times before— each time, he listens just as patiently as if it were the first.

And then there were bad days when the fae that awaited him on the other side of the bedroom door screeched and howled in a long-lost tongue, days when Silver was forced to use the iron bolts that Malleus-sama had pleaded with him to install on the wooden frame if he wouldn't listen to reason and use manacles fixed to the bed instead ("My father isn't a monster, Malleus-sama, I won't humiliate him and strip his dignity away!") to stop those wild, ragged claws from tearing through the wood like paper to scratch out his eyes. Days when it is hard to separate the loving, smiling father from the feral creature caught in a losing battle as it succumbs to a fate inevitable to its kind.

Sebek listens to his friend, remains silent for once— it is unlike Silver to share his burdens, to even talk about the difficulties of caring for a fae so advanced in the decay as Lilia lest he fears that anyone find him complaining. They had all tried to talk him out of it when they had learned that Silver had already rescinded his studies at Night Raven College with the intent to care for his father to the bitter end. Malleus had nearly been beside himself, for safety could not be guaranteed, even for a human as strong and determined as Silver— "He'll overwhelm you," Sebek had watched his prince all but beg the boy to reconsider. "You know naught of what you are consigning yourself to, you have never seen our kind at our most frightful display. He would not wish this upon you, he would want his memory to remain pristine in your mind!"

But Silver had remained steadfast, loyal and devoted to his father beyond all rational persuasion. "I will not allow his last moments to be in suffering and all alone, Malleus-sama. He has sacrificed his life for the country, for you, and for me— I find it hardly equal what meager weeks I can give to him so that he may go in peace."

And so they had left to that cottage in the forest, the only home that both of them had ever known. Sebek had visited only once, the nature of being Malleus-sama's sole guard until Silver's return dictating that he shoulder a more hefty responsibility. They had both appeared rather worn and weary, bags deeper under Silver's eyes than he had ever known them to exist before, but together at least with wan smiles on their faces, as Silver had so desperately wished for them to be.

All the same, Sebek's gaze had keenly noted the presence of thin, crimson lines along Silver's forearms and neck— he found himself too much of a coward to glance at Lilia's hands.

Today, however, he's visiting for a much different reason than merely personal concern. Malleus-sama had bid him to venture out into those isolated, lonely woods, a frown deep and haggard on his perfect face; Sebek knows that if he were to look in a mirror, the same expression would be reflected back at him. For two weeks now, not a single letter delivered to the cottage had returned with correspondence, courtesy of Silver's little feathered friends usually so delighted to concede to his requests. Normally, a week's worth of silence would have jolted the both of them into worry, but with the whirlwind of a recent goodwill trip to the neighboring human countries, Sebek had merely assumed there would be a small pile of daily updates from Silver for them to look forward to reading upon their return. Imagine then, the foreboding that had settled in like an ominous pressure at the lack of any such notes.

That pressure only mounts and builds with a wicked weight upon his shoulders as he approaches the darkened cottage, silent among the stilled trees. A pressure that twists in his stomach like a corkscrew, and grips his throat in a vice, thinning the air he breathes as he stares with dread at the front door swinging off its hinges, and a faint, nauseating smell choking the scent of violets from beneath his feet.

Today, it seems, is not simply a good or bad day— it is an awful one.

[noxcorvorum]

Ulysses Dies at dawn, or atleast that's the word on the street. Those who saw it go down in the cabin in the middle of woods, they made their statement and faced their fear.

First, to understand how this all goes down, you gotta know a little bit about the cabin we're talking of. See, in this cabin there was an avatar, of the Unknown Face, perhaps, or the Laughing Lie, given the twisting paths and clamoring voices and the many sprawling forms of the being inside, or even of Terminus, given the fate of our doomed Ulysses. (Maybe there were two avatars, after all that went down. Maybe Ulysses themselves was a magnet for the inevitable end.)

Our erstwhile party of adventurers, Smitten, Cheated, Stubborn, Cold, and dragging Doomed behind them, enters the forest, walks the path, opens the door to the house. Stubborn takes the knife, or maybe Cheated does, or perhaps it is left to rust on the table. They all have their agendas for what lies inside the little building, all with their own ideas of what they can rip from its walls.

Cold picks the lock to the basement, finding a great puzzle, a font of knowledge, a map to the way to a treasure. Black tape seethes in the corners of the room. His focus is too great, his eyesight too weak to see the figure, chained, moving up behind him, striking his skull with a massive iron manacle, and the shadows click decisively.

Stubborn opens the door, and the leonine figure curled around the wooden chest snarls.

Black tape writhes.

Stubborn leaps forward, waving the knife he took, that he didn't take, grasping the great beast round the neck, sliding the knife between its ribs. It slumps to the floor, but so does he, clawed to ribbons by the beast. Cheated steps forward, around the blood, and opens the chest to find it empty, and a single satisfied click follows her from the room.

Smitten hears an echo in the walls, sweet and pleading, almost like the woman he loved. He claws at the stones, at the mortar, trying to find her, to save her, to lead her from the dark and into the light. The stones he drops behind him click on the cobble, black veins eager in the cracks. He reaches dirt, mud, red and sticky with the blood from his raw fingers, and the voice only grows stronger. He digs, calling, weeping for his true love, and by the time he looks up and back towards the cabin, the earth is treacherous, a yawning maw. The voice is laughing now, a heaving, wheezing, coughing laugh full of dirt that he wonders how he could have ever mistaken for the woman he loved, and as he reaches for the light, the jaws close upon him, the maw snaps shut, and his voice dies in his throat with the last of the stones falling to the ground, with the clicking of pebbles and tape.

Cheated drags Doomed further on, shoving open a door at random. She finds a curious hallway, and peers further in, discovering it looks curiously like the tunnels of the mangled city they came from. Always one for gathering information, she steps inside, taking doomed with her. She sees a massive, vaulted room, something that she knows should be impossible underground, and perhaps if Cold was still alive he could have told her how it worked, and she stays astonished, beginning to search the room for anything valuable. Doomed starts to sneak back towards the door, and starts running when they hear Cheated's scream behind them.

Cheated is frozen in fear as a great shape unfolds from the shadows. Red eyes blink open, and horns sprout from the massive head rising five, ten, fifteen feet off the ground. This is its home, and she has just woken it from its nap. The creature bellows, and Doomed runs, and Cheated tries to. The massive hand comes down from above, and her ribs drive into her heart as it squeezes her chest.

The dark tape clicks appreciatively.

And what of our Doomed Ulysses? They are running from the beast, of course. This is not how they will die. They do not hear thundering footsteps coming down the labyrinth at them, but they slam and bar the door all the same.

They continue walking, letting their heart guide them home. It has been so long, you see. So long since they have seen their wife, in this home of rock, taken over by trickery and falsities and paths.

The stone is where it has always been, in the end. Though, when they push it, the door that opens worsens the tentative deal the rock has had with itself ever since Smitten started digging. It falls, and they are struck, staggering into the room, the stone sealing itself behind them. The bones of their wife, their dear Penelope, lay at the far end of the room, her wrist locked to the wall by the heavy chain, flesh rotting off her skeleton. Ulysses smiles, tired, and places their own wrist inside the manacle, lying beside their wife, closing their eyes, content in the knowledge that the dawn brings their peace, and that their corpses will never be disturbed again.

[calenheniel]

Silence | an installment of In Pieces

Frozen | Hans, Elsa | G+

Elsa hears the tapping on the other side of the cell wall first, followed by a sigh. “Good morning, Your Majesty. And how are we today?”

Author’s Note: Based on the prompt “Murderer” from SamAnderson on FF.Net. Canon-divergent within the original film, following the “oh, Hans is the bad guy!” revelation.

Follow updates on #InPiecesFrozen. Read it on FF.Net/Wattpad/AO3 via links on my profile page.

»»————-　❈　————-««

Silence

Elsa hears the tapping on the other side of the cell wall first, followed by a sigh.

“Good morning, Your Majesty. And how are we today?”

She ignores the question, just as she did the morning before. Her eyes fix themselves on the book in her lap, struggling to keep it straight with her hands still locked into their restrictive manacles.

Another sigh. “We might be here for months, you know, before a trial is called. Years, even.”

Her stare intensifies, reading the same two sentences over and over again, and says nothing.

“Don’t worry, Elsa. I’ll be sure not to use anything you say against you in a court of law.”

She snaps the tome shut, her lips turning down in a scowl. “Would you shut up already?” she hisses, and then bites the inside of her cheek as the outside reddens.

He laughs just loudly enough so that she can hear it, and she knows he’s smirking to boot. “Ah, there you are. I was worried I might just be talking to myself.”

“I’m sure you’d do that anyway,” she retorts, trying to find her place in the book again.

“Quite right,” he agrees, making her snort to herself. “But now that I have you talking, I’m dying to know: how have they managed to keep you locked up in this cage? Surely, with your powers, you could have just burst through the wall and—”

“And what?” Elsa interrupts, glaring at the wall. “Run back to the mountains? And how would I survive there, with no food or water except what I could collect with my bare hands?”

A pause. “I didn’t realize you’d thought this through so carefully,” he admits.

She rolls her eyes, leaning back against the cell. “You have a habit of underestimating people, it seems. Especially me.”

“I guess so,” he concurs.

An uneasy silence settles over them, and Elsa’s eyes glaze over as she stares at the opposite wall. The grey, lifeless stone mirrors her mood, and suddenly the hard straw mattress under her feels more uncomfortable than ever.

“My father,” she murmurs, not knowing - or caring - if he hears her. “He had this cell constructed specially for me, to contain my powers. He knew the day might come, when I—”

She trails off, blinking back tears, and bows her head.

“I see,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She starts at the remark, staring at the wall behind her with bemusement. “What?”

“Well, it’s not as if it’s your fault that you were born with these… powers,” he says, his tone cautious. “And it doesn’t seem as if you were ever taught to control them, so an outcome like this was rather inevitable, wasn’t it?”

Elsa falls silent at the question, and her gaze is locked on the manacles again, examining them for the hundredth time. It’s as if her hands are bound in an iron maiden - without the spikes, thankfully - and the steel, though technically cool to touch, burns her constricted skin.

She notes, with a droll sort of irony, the intricate snowflake design carved into the cuffs.

“Maybe,” she says at length. “Or maybe I’m just a monster, like everyone says.” She glances behind her, glowering. “Just look at the company I keep.”

She expects a dry chuckle from him, but is met with a strange hush instead. “They only call you that when you lose,” he remarked, “or behind your back, after you win.”

Her gaze narrows. “So if Ambassador Moulin hadn’t witnessed your little speech to Anna, you’d have been crowned ‘King Hans of Arendelle’ and not sitting here, rotting in the cell next to mine?”

“Maybe,” he replies, setting her eyes ablaze with anger. “Or maybe not. Who knows? My plot failed, and now I’m here, and you’re here, and the Duke of Weselton or some other numskull is probably ruling over whatever is left of Arendelle.”

Elsa pauses, her shoulders suddenly shaking, and this time she can’t hold back her tears. They fall in messy, uneven lines down her cheeks and onto her dress, freezing upon contact, and it takes all of her strength not to choke on her own sobs.

“Elsa…”

“Don’t,” she warns, gasping at the effort it takes to speak. “Please, don’t. I can’t stand your pity.” Even with her hands chained, a swirl of snowflakes surrounds her shuddering frame, making the whole prison colder.

She hears his teeth chatter through his reply. “I don’t pity you. I just…”

The drift subsides a little as her curiosity overcomes her self-contempt. “What?”

He swallows audibly. “I know you didn’t intend to freeze her—it was an accident. What I did, by comparison, was… even if it didn’t kill her, she died thinking that she was unloved.”

He pauses, and her chest tightens to the point that she thinks her heart might burst, her tears coursing freely again down her cheeks.

“For that, I am sorry.”

The dam breaks, and she sobs against the steel covering her hands, bending over as every inch of her body is wracked with pain. “My fault,” she whispers to herself, rocking back and forth. “My fault, my fault.”

The snowdrifts and cold winds return, stronger than ever, encircling her crumpled form until she is invisible to the naked eye.

“Elsa!” he shouts from the other cell, “Elsa, please!”

She doesn’t hear his cries, numb from the cold, but his other words - she died thinking she was unloved - echo in her mind, trapping her in place, and making her scream until her voice is little more than an abstraction.

When the worst of her panic subsides, the prison is quiet but for the sound of her own, labored breathing, her skin dripping with cold sweat as she regains the barest of control over her senses.

“Hans,” she rasps, raising herself from the bed. She gets as close as she can to the bars of the cell, which are frozen solid after her latest attack. “Hans, say something.”

Elsa’s erstwhile companion makes no reply, nor can she even make out the sound of his breath. Her eyes widen in alarm. “Hans, don’t play games. Please, answer me.”

When she is met with silence again, her breathing grows rapid and shallow, and she trembles.

“Hans, please!”

But there is no answer from Hans - nor any sound at all, from anywhere else - save for the beating of her own heart.

She whimpers, and bangs her forehead once - then twice, three, four times more - against the frozen bars, her broken shackles on the floor going unnoticed.

“My fault,” she whispers, her jaw slack. “My fault.”

[goodqueenaly]

Volantis Is Doomed

If there is one fact you need to take away from ADWD (besides about ten thousand other things), it’s this: Volantis is doomed.

I used that word - “doomed” - specifically, because Volantis is determined to present itself as the Second Valyria. This is a city whose preferred epithet is “First Daughter of Valyria”, which takes enormous pride in being the first colony to be founded by the Freehold “in the first flush of its youthful expansion”, which considered itself “the heirs of the Freehold and rightful rulers of the world” after Valyria’s downfall. The heart of Volantis is the city-within-a-city inside the Black Walls where only “the Old Blood who could trace their ancestry back to Valyria itself” can live (and where they continue to worship Valyria’s gods). The governance of Volantis is specifically Valyrian: Volantis is ruled as a freehold, as Valyria was, and the only people eligible to be triarchs are those from “noble families who can prove unbroken descent from old Valyria”. Even the more minor traditions of the city are steeped in Valyrian heritage: triarchs are not forbidden to have their feet touch the ground during their term in office just to mark them as elevated (though that’s certainly part of it); the practice also recalls the draconic dominance of Valyria’s ruling families, when dragonlords would not need to touch the ground (generally speaking) because they could go where they would on their dragons. (Note that in a world (until recently) without dragons, Volantis has compensated by giving its triarchs the next-biggest riding animals around.)

There is, of course, one other, very major way in which Volantis mirrors Valyria, and that is its thorough dependence on slavery. Slavery is so omnipresent in Volantis that there are five slaves for every free man, iron manacles are sold on the street beside fresh-caught oysters and new cyvasse pieces, and the heads of rebellious slaves are displayed at the center of the shopping district on the Long Bridge. Slavery is so normalized in Volantis that Volantenes scorn those who walk (that is, like a slave), instead of being carried on a palanquin or hathay (slave-borne and slave-driven, respectively, of course). Slavery is so fundamentally a part of the culture of Volantis that the city’s slaves are tattooed according to a unique, highly detailed system - not only permanently marking them as members of the lowest class, but assigning them to specific labor positions within Volantene society. Slavery is literally built into the architecture of Volantis: the very reason the Long Bridge exists is because the triarchs needed an easier, more direct way of sending their slave soldiers to put down the “lawless city” founded by freedmen (among others) on the far side of the Rhoyne from the Black Walls.

That steeped, obsessive dependence on slavery has rotted Volantis, and as with the Ghiscari cities of Slaver’s Bay moral rottenness has gone hand in hand with physical decay. Volantis is slowly sinking into its own mud: the longer the city continues, the more it will become part of the filth on which it was built. Volantis may describe itself as a “city of fountains and flowers”, but as Tyrion correctly notes, “half the fountains were dry, half the pools cracked and stagnant”, and “[f]lowering vines sent up creepers from every crack in the wall or pavement, and young trees had taken root in the walls of abandoned shops and roofless temples”. Tyrion remarks that the city smells of “[s]omething sweet and something earthy and something dead and rotten” (comparing the smell to “some sagging slattern who has drenched her privy parts in perfume to drown the stench between her legs”), while Quentyn thinks of a favorite dish of Volantis, served at every meal - a cold soup of sweet beets, “as thick and rich as purple honey” - a dish that would, in other words, inevitably rot the teeth of anyone who consumed it regularly. Volantis is an economy that, as @racefortheironthrone correctly notes, produces no specialized exports; it has made its wealth as a central hub on a slavery-steeped trade route - and as that is destroyed, so Volantis will be.

Volantis is a society that, simply put, can’t go on. In embracing the role of heir to Valyria - and, importantly, heir to Valyria’s extensive trafficking in human misery - Volantis has consigned itself to the same fate as Valyria. Volantis has for so long, and so thoroughly, steeped itself in the evils of slavery that its reckoning is not an if but a when - and that when is likely very, very soon. Just as the kindly man hints that the oppressed slaves of Valyria who became the first Faceless Men were the ones who helped cause the Doom, so it will be the overwhelming slave population of Volantis which will, as the widow on the waterfront predicts, welcome Daenerys with open arms when she comes. As the dragons were for the dragonlords of Valyria the tools of expanding their slave empire, so I think they will be in Volantis, First Daughter of Valyria, the means of expiating the great wrong of slavery.

[sableflynn]

Out unseen - ch. 6

first | previous | next

Volkan takes something from Felicia.

contents: immediate aftermath of noncon, noncon touch, knife stuff, victim blaming. Ao3 link here.

---

The cement floor was cold and unyielding against Felicia’s body.

She lay on her side, body curled inwards, and the hard press of her shoulder against the ground sapped the warmth from her skin. Her wrists were bloody where the metal cuffs dug into them, and her back was chafed raw from—she shuddered and blinked, and a tear rolled down her cheek.

Her breathing was the only sound in the room, and the echo of it overtook her senses. In and out. Her chest rose and fell, the burn along her collarbone pulsing with heat with each inhale and exhale. She could smell sweat and blood and something else, the faintest trace in the air, and she took in the sensation and refused to do anything with it, refused to allow her mind to follow the path it led to his body over hers, crushing her, and the pain lancing between her legs—

She blinked again, and her gaze fell on her pants still lying discarded next to her, and something within her mind slipped into place.

I'm going to die down here. Then: He said he wouldn't kill me. Then: I can't trust a single thing he says.

She grabbed at the pants and dragged them towards her with a shaking hand. Her breath caught in her chest as she pulled the pants over her sore legs, and all at once it was his hands, running down her thighs, slipping the last of her clothing off her, digging fingers into her hips as he slammed into her—

She took a deep breath and forced herself to sit up.

The movement rocked her body with a fresh wave of pain, stomach churning with nausea. Her nails scraped against the cement as she clenched her fists and her chest heaved with half-formed sobs, gasps and cries locked up tight within her.

Then she moved again, and a sharp stab pierced deep in her abdomen, and everything crashed down on her. She was chained up in a basement with a man who wanted nothing more than to watch her shatter, and she had no clue where she was and no one knew where she was and there was no way they could find her and what the fuck could she do? What could she do? How long could she outlast him, when she had no clue what he wanted from her beyond her pain and anguish? How could she hold firm and wait for rescue, knowing it might never come? How could she free herself, when he was always ten steps ahead of her and every attempt she made just delighted him further?

She couldn’t stay here, and she had no way out, and any minute he was going to come down those stairs and hurt her again and god, she didn’t want him to ever touch her again but she couldn’t do a thing to stop him—

Her gaze fell on the wall across from her, and the row of knives that hung gleaming on the rack.

She rose to stand on unsteady legs, her body trembling with exhaustion. The chains connected to her shackled wrists ran to an anchor on the ceiling, but were slackened enough to give her some range of movement. She took a tentative step, and another. Each step brought her closer to the wall of knives, and her heart was in her throat and his body was crushing hers against the wall and his cigarette was hot against her skin and the sharp blades were slicing away every last defense she had, and with her next step the chain stopped her short.

She was close. She was so close, the knives were right there and she strained against the chains, shoulders protesting and wrists chafing anew as she twisted and contorted herself, desperate for some angle that would bring her that much closer, because she was going to die if she couldn’t get one of those knives.

The clang of the basement door opening shot through her like a blade to the heart.

Volkan’s footsteps were heavy behind her as he walked across the room. She tried to ignore him, tried to focus and stretch and grab the knife right in front of her, but she could feel his eyes on her and all she wanted was to curl up and crawl out of her own skin.

“What are you going to do if you get that knife?” Volkan’s voice was light, tinged with sardonic amusement. “Are you going to kill me?”

Felicia’s face burned. The knife was so close. Then Volkan stepped closer and plucked the knife from the wall, his gaze never leaving her. Mingled rage and terror swelled up inside of her as he stood there, eyes tracing down her half-naked body, the ghost of a threat in the knife in his hand. He smiled, and a tug of magic jerked her chains back, sending her sprawling on the ground.

She scrambled back with clumsy movements, heart hammering, and he advanced on her with an air of utter unconcern. He crouched before her, and for the first time she noticed the bottle clutched in his other hand. The thick liquid within swirled as he held it out to her. “Drink.”

She didn’t move. “Why would I trust anything you give me?” Dread pooled in her stomach. If he wanted her to drink it, it would happen; she was powerless to stop him.

He rolled his eyes and uncapped the bottle, taking several large gulps. “I told you I wasn’t going to kill you. It’s just nutrients and liquid, Felicia.” He held the bottle out to her once again. “You must be dehydrated from all that crying. Drink.”

Indecision warred within her, mistrust and desperation and the creeping knowledge that any move she made was only delaying the inevitable. She took the bottle and drank. The liquid was cool and refreshing with the barest taste of fruit.

As she finished the drink, Volkan shifted closer to her and laid a large hand on her thigh. “Not sure why you bothered to put these back on,” he murmured, his thumb rubbing the seam of her pants along her inner thigh.

His touch, deceptively gentle, sent a fresh wave of revulsion through her. She jerked back, the empty bottle slipping from her hands as she struggled to cover herself and get away from his hands. “Dont—” Don’t fucking touch me. It sounded so stupid, so pointless. But there was nothing else left to her.

He let her recoil, watching her with a thoughtful tilt to his head as she wrapped arms around her bare chest. Then he spoke. “Why do you think I brought you here?”

Because you’re cruel and controlling and calculated, and you can’t stand that I dared to fight against you. Because the only way you know to get what you want is to snuff out anyone who opposes you. Because making people feel small and hopeless gets you off. She swallowed. “Because you’re bored?”

He laughed at that. “I’m bored? So, what, I go grab some fucktoy off the street to keep me occupied?” She flinched at his blunt words. “No, that’s just a bonus. But here, let’s get you out of those heavy shackles.”

Caught off-guard by the sudden shift, she didn’t resist as he detached one of her wrists from the chain and brought it close to him. The manacle around her wrist fell away with a brush of his magic, and in its place he slid a new cuff. Thin, delicate, it was more like a bracelet than a tool of imprisonment. She shuddered as he fastened it around her wrist, and felt the slightest shift, something almost imperceptible that stirred within her and was smothered.

Her breath was thin and shaky and his hands on her skin sent tension thrumming through her. “What are you—”

“Shh.” He barely acknowledged her as he pulled down her other wrist, discarding the manacle and replacing it with an identical bracelet. As it closed around her wrist, she definitely felt something; it was as if some part of her was quieted, as if each breath she drew couldn’t quite reach her lungs. She couldn’t place what it was, but something had changed.

Volkan was watching her, saying nothing, idly twisting a ring onto his finger. She looked at her own wrists, the raw skin now partially revealed beneath the thinner bracelets she had on—and with a jolt, she realized she wasn’t chained to anything. She couldn’t help but glance back at the rack of knives behind her, and when she turned back to face Volkan, he was smiling.

The knife was in his hand again, the glint of sharp steel drawing her eye. Her muscles tensed, every inch of her body on high alert, ready to fight or flee, and then he lifted the knife and sliced his own palm.

She blinked, her mind sluggish to process the red blood welling up from the wound he had given himself. Her gaze lifted from his palm to his face, and his expression showed no hint of pain. His other hand shot out to grab her by the wrist, dragging her close and pressing her palm into his own bloody hand.

“Heal it.”

The blood was warm beneath her touch, the scent of it overwhelming. “If you needed a healer, why wouldn’t you just hire someone—”

“I didn’t tell you to ask questions.” His voice was steel as he pressed her hand more firmly into his own. “Heal it.”

Rage flared up in her at that, sudden and hot, because how dare he drag her down here to assault and torture and then demand she perform magic tricks for him? She wrenched her hand free of his grasp. “Fuck you, why would I heal you after you—”

“Heal it, or I’ll break every single bone in your hand.” He grabbed her once again, and she was acutely aware of how tiny her hand was in his, how fragile the bones of her fingers were in his iron grip. The anger in her was extinguished as quickly as it had flared up, replaced with a stomach-churning dread. What game was he playing now? What was he getting out of this? What would it cost her to play along?

She took a deep breath, let her eyes drift shut, and reached for the magic channeling through her—

And found nothing.

The vibrant hum of magic always present in her chest was silent, absent. She reached again, but it was like grasping at thin air. The blood welling from Volkan’s hand beneath hers was blood, nothing more, no sensation of skin or muscle or bone or life.

She opened her eyes to find him watching her, expectant. He raised an eyebrow. “What are you waiting for?”

“I—” Her breath caught in her throat. Now that she was aware of it, the absence of magic within her felt like a gaping hole in her chest. She took another breath, shakier this time, and deepened her focus. “Just hang on—”

“I am going to hurt you if you can’t heal this.” Volkan’s hand shifted under hers until he was gripping her, his palm pressing her wrist back further, further.

Panic bubbled in her. “I’m trying! I am!” Her other hand grabbed his, feeling around the wound. She may well have been feeling her way around a pitch-black room.

Volkan’s eyes were hard, and his hand pushed her wrist further back. “If you can’t even do this one simple thing,” he said, “I’ll kill you right here and now and find someone else.”

“Please!” She hated the way her voice squeaked on the word. Fighting back a sob, she tried to jerk her hand free from his, but his grip was crushing. “I don’t know what’s happening!” She tried again to heal him, and it was as if she was trying to breathe in a room that was rapidly running out of air.

Then his grip on her loosened and his eyes crinkled in a smile. Before she could comprehend, he pressed her fingers gently into his palm, and then—

Magic coursed through her, but she couldn’t control it or direct it, she couldn’t dam up the flood pouring through her, she was being swept along the current, flowing from her body to his—

A bright stripe of pain across her palm, and muscles and tendons and skin knitting back together, and then the flow was stoppered again.

Breathless, Felicia wrenched her hand back. Volkan was studying his palm, the skin smooth as if it had never been sliced at all. “Interesting,” he murmured. “Did that hurt you at all?”

“What did you do?” Her shoulders were heaving, head spinning with magical exhaustion. “What did you do to me?”

“Doesn’t that sort of healing usually hurt both parties?” He flexed his hand. “I didn’t feel a thing. How about you?”

Her own palm still burned with the last pangs of healing, the familiar sensation heightened by bitter absence of magic otherwise pulsing through her. “What did you do?”

He met her eyes at last, and he was smiling. “I took something from you.”

A chill came over her at his words, his eyes, the persistent lack that ached her body, and then she was struck all at once with a sharp awareness of the cuffs he had slipped onto her wrists. She tugged at them with frantic hands, refusing to look away from Volkan. “You—”

Her words cut off with a yelp as he grabbed her wrist and jerked her forward, sending her sprawling against him. Conscious of her bare chest dragging against the fabric of his shirt, she tried to pull back, but he held her in place as if she were nothing. His face was inches from hers as he spoke. “Can a healer heal themself?”

She froze. “What?”

“You’re a healer.” He pressed the knife against the palm of her hand, crushing her wrist in an iron grip. “Can you heal yourself?”

It was such an absurd question, she would almost laugh if she weren’t terrified. It was one of the first things anyone who studied magic learned about. No, she couldn’t heal herself, no more than she could feed herself from nothing, or rest her body without sleep. The energy for healing had to come from somewhere other than the person being healed.

And he knew that. He studied magic, he owned a hospital, he knew that wasn’t how it worked. And he was asking her this question with a blade to her skin sharper than anything she’d ever known in her life, and he’d taken something from her that left her gasping and fumbling and empty and unable to feel a core part of herself, and she couldn’t pull herself away from him. “You know I can’t,” she managed to say.

He jerked his hand, and she saw the red of blood welling up from her palm before she felt the pain. Her hammering heart pulsed the blood from her hand, and he studied it a moment, a harsh thumb pressing into the wound.

Then her skin prickled, and that same sensation coursed through her of something being drawn from her, almost as if her blood itself was flowing to his will. The pain in her hand burned hotter, hotter, crescendoing into a bright flash of agony, and then nothing.

The wound on her hand was gone, the skin as smooth as if it’d never been cut in the first place.

“Looks like you can,” Volkan said, tracing a finger over the unmarked skin.

She jerked her hand back and clutched it to her chest, heart racing. Her palm ached dully, and her head was fogged with a post-magic haze, and through the exhaustion all she could think was he’s doing something to me. “What did you do?”

“I already answered that.” Volkan’s expression was less a smirk and more a smile of genuine delight. “I can’t believe it actually worked.”

Panicked, unwilling to sit there and let him rip her magic from her like it was nothing, she threw herself back from him and scrambled to her feet for the wall behind her, and the row of sharp knives in their stand.

She made it two steps before a strong hand wrapped around her ankle and jerked her down, sending her slamming into the cold concrete floor. Her skin scraped against the ground as she fought the pull of him dragging her back—and then her leg exploded with a pain so acute her vision blackened a moment.

“How about this?” Volkan growled in her ear. Blinking spots from her vision, Felicia struggled to make sense of what she was feeling. Her mind slowly filtered in the sensations—the weight of Volkan crushing her, grinding the knife into the back of her knee until it hit bone. Her chest heaved, and he ripped the knife from her leg in an arc of blood. “Can you heal something like this?”

She shook her head, not at his question but at the entire situation. It wasn’t real, it was too much—but he was wrenching her head back with one hand as the other prodded the wound, drawing magic from her again until the skin reknit itself in a twist of pain.

Lightheaded from the inexorable drag of magic through her, she focused on breathing. Her mind couldn’t process an injury of that magnitude, muscle and tendons split down to the bone and then healed faster than her nerves could fire. It shouldn’t be possible, and yet it was happening, and she was helpless to stop it.

She didn’t—couldn’t—fight back as Volkan attached chains to her new cuffs, manipulating the metal until she was hauled to her feet and balanced on tiptoes before him. His eyes swept up her body once and he grinned, raising a blood-streaked hand to cup her cheek and smear the red across her skin.

She flinched from his touch, dancing back on her toes in a desperate bid to escape his hands. “Why?” she bit out.

“It’s just a little something I’ve been working on,” he mused, his hand sliding down from her cheek to trace along her waist, the curve of her hip. “I thought, if it were possible to harness a healer’s energy and channel it through someone else…but I needed a healer to run some tests with.” The knife flashed in the harsh light before he stabbed it into her side up to the hilt and dragged it down.

She screamed, the sound choked and hoarse, and barely had time to think that’s too much, I can’t heal that, he’s killing me before he was forcing the wound to heal in a blaze of bright pain. Harnessing her energy, as he’d put it. The force of it left her feeling hollow, spent.

“That’s the only reason you’re alive right now, you know.” One finger traced a line where the wound had been a heartbeat before, a delicate touch that made Felicia shiver. “If you’d shown up that night at the docks and hadn’t been just the thing I needed, I would’ve just killed you.” His hand moved to cup her breast and her chest heaved with a pent-up sob. “That boy I was buying was a healing student, and he would’ve served well enough. But you, with all your talents, throwing yourself into my arms like that even after our encounter at the masquerade...you were just made to be used like this.”

His words bolted through her with an almost physical force, and she jerked herself back. “Fuck that,” she snarled, and lashed out with a knee. Teetering as she was on the tips of her toes, there was no force behind the blow, but she had to try.

A smile ghosted his lips as he watched her struggle, and then he wound his hand through her hair, gripping her head in place as his face lingered inches from hers. “How long did you study healing?” he asked, his breath hot on her skin.

She turned her head away as best she could, the fight already leaving her. Maybe I can just make myself uninteresting to him. His hands were in her hair, on her body, and the sensation sent a tremor of fear through her, an echo of the horror of what he had already done to her. She swallowed. If I become uninteresting, he’ll just kill me.

At her silence, Volkan released her hair and slid his hands down to the waistband of her pants. “That program is usually...six years, isn’t it?” She was frozen in place as he worked open the fastenings and began to slide the pants down her legs. “Pretty grueling. Covers a lot of material.” His breath tickled her legs as he worked the pants down, and she knew she should kick out at him but she couldn’t even breathe.

He pulled the pants the rest of the way off and stood to face her again. She shivered as the cold basement air hit her naked body. Pulling her close to him once again, he smiled. “Seems like a lot of work for you to end up ruined by me.”

Naked before him, paralyzed by his touch, her mind was unwillingly awakening to just what this truly meant for her. He was going to keep her and use her like this, again and again. Through her dawning horror, she forced herself to hold his gaze. “I’m not—”

“You are.” One arm wrapped around her in a mockery of an embrace, his lips at her throat like a lover’s kiss. His free hand brought the knife to her collarbone, resting the blade just above the bright burn, not cutting. “And I’m looking forward to exploring everything you can do for me.” He pressed the knife in until her skin split under the blade, and she screamed.

[wri0thesley]

sparring practise - sorbet x reader x gelato

you realise how helpless you are after an attempted burglary, and sorbet and gelato attempt to help you defend yourself. things do not go as planned. 

warnings: not sfw. reader is gender neutral and neutral of body. mentions of fighting, guns, knives, blood, home invasion, choking, cannibalism, serial killing, violence, general sorbet and gelato type warnings. 

yes this is self indulgent no i do not care

The home you share with Sorbet and Gelato is cloaked in civility. It’s in a nice neighbourhood that has a low rate for crime, and Sorbet dutifully tends to the flower beds – Gelato paints your front door in a shade of yellow that makes the neighbours whisper under their breaths even more than the nature of the relationship the three of you share, but nobody comes out and says it because as a whole, you seem like three perfectly well-adjusted and functional members of society who keep to yourselves.

They figure that Sorbet and Gelato work nights, perhaps as a security guards or some kind of manual labour – in the dark, bloodstains can look like all kinds of different things. They greet you when you go to the supermarket and gather your shopping, not blinking when you buy another new sharpening steel with the laugh that all three of you are foodies, and you seem to have an unfortunate habit of breaking them--

The house is your domain. The careful windows, the flower boxes, the neatly vacuumed carpets and the sigh as you stare at Gelato’s muddy boot prints in the entrance hall. They do their best – but sometimes, it is half past one in the morning, and they are weary and simply want to come to bed and embrace you.

The basement, though . . .

That is Sorbet and Gelato’s domain, and you are very rarely in it.

Not because you disapprove of what they do �� but because they worry about you, you think. You are smaller than they are, not as scarred, not quite hardened by the years of their past.

“It’s better if you don’t get involved in Passione shit,” Gelato has said, a hundred times. “We need you here, amore! Who fuckin’ knows what we’d do without you?”

“He’s right,” Sorbet has intoned, wrapping his arms around both of your waists. “Bad enough we’re involved.”

“You love it!” Gelato accuses, leaning into Sorbet’s shoulder despite it. Sorbet’s mouth tilts at the corners, a small smile on his face. You know that a hundred men or perhaps more have had that smile be the last thing they see, Sorbet’s eyes dark, his face streaked with blood. It should strike fear into your heart – but all it ever does is make you want to poke his cheek, kiss him until you can feel the curve of his lips echoing all over you.

“Yes,” he says simply. “I do.”

Sorbet and Gelato keep their weapons down here, mounted on the wall. There’s an iron-topped table like the kind one would find in a butcher’s shop beneath the knives, shining brightly despite how often you’ve poked your head down there to tell them dinner is ready and seen it practically bathed in blood. The training mats to one side of the room, a table and chairs and fridge on the other side. Opposite the side of the room with the table and chairs are four iron manacles set into the brickwork, for times when hits have to be taken home and interrogated before being brought to an end – and for some of Sorbet and Gelato’s other outside of work activities, though they don’t talk to you much about those.

And tonight, you are here too.

“You leave me a gun in the bureau,” you’d said to Gelato, a night after a would-be attacker had attempted to burgle you, seeing that your house was neat and pretty and hearing on the grapevine that one homeowner was often alone. “But if someone overpowers me, I’m useless--”

(Sorbet and Gelato had not treated the man kindly. The basement is soundproofed, but you had still heard rhythmic thumping, and the next morning Sorbet had come into the kitchen with several unusual cuts of meat.

“They won’t fit in the fridge down there,” he’d said. Sorbet does most of the cooking. His meals are always delicious.)

It had been Sorbet’s idea to try sparring with you.

“We could leave you some knives too,” Gelato had suggested. “Maybe some other guns? A chainsaw?” and Sorbet had had to point out that none of those things would actually assuage your fears – in fact, if the perpetrator managed to wrangle them off you, you were left much worse off facing a chainsaw than you would be if you had never had one in the first place.

Gelato is closer to your height, so Sorbet makes him wrap his fists and take off his shirt. You do your best not to stare at his torso too much, though he is all lean, wiry muscle dotted with scars and starbursts that you have kissed a thousand times over. He sees you looking and gives you one of his most manic grins, his teeth all sharp – you repress the shiver that runs through you at that, trying to remind yourself you are here to learn and not merely to ogle your boyfriend. Though he does look very good, with his gold hair all tousled and a rush in his eyes that you always see when he feels like he has the dominant position.

Sorbet had taken a seat at first and told you to approach Gelato as if he were hostile, to see if you could get a punch in and so they could work on that – you had made a valiant attempt, despite every bit of common sense you had immediately whispering that Gelato was a predator and you were a prey animal.

You had not been surprised when he had flipped you easily, and you had landed on your back on the training mats with a great thump of air, all of the breath knocked out of you. One of Gelato’s heavy military grade boots had landed, gently, on your abdomen, as he’d bent over you with his eyes glinting in the fluorescent lighting of the basement.

“You look cute like that!” He’d laughed. “Come on! You can do better than this, tesoro!”

He’d been delighted as you’d dragged yourself back up, and as you had made attempt after attempt to get ahead of him. All of them had inevitably ended with you on your knees, or on your back – or once against a wall with a knife far too close to your back for comfort, Gelato’s hand easily around your throat.

That one had almost pushed you to the brink, your breath coming in little pants, a hot jolt of arousal coursing through you at just how Gelato was looking down on you. Gelato had obviously felt it too, because his grin had widened just a little, pressing closer to you so you’d felt the stiff, hot heat of something in his fatigues pressing heavily against your thigh--

“Come here,” Sorbet says. He’s stood up from the chair now, his hands coming to unbutton his own shirt. He is not quite as covered in scars as Gelato is – the blond is more reckless, and you have gathered his previous military experience was more dangerous than . . . whatever Sorbet did, after leaving his church school. That does not make any difference to the fact he is broad and muscled, sculpted from training and years of violence. “You’re not starting right. Your stance is all wrong.”

“I started that last one sittin’ on the floor to give ‘em a chance,” Gelato says, breathlessly, as he peels himself away from you and your hand flies to your throat, recalling the echo of Gelato’s calloused fingers. It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve had one of their hands about their necks, but . . . well. It never gets old, does it? “’N I’m doing fine.”

“You have experience behind you, caro,” Sorbet’s tone is patient. “Of course you do.”

Gelato grins as he gets back into position opposite you, clenching his fist.

“Sorbetto,” his tone is sing-song, wheedling. “You’re not gonna tell me what a good job I’m doin’? C’mooooon--”

Sorbet chuckles, crossing the room to wrap an arm around Gelato’s smaller form, using one hand to tip up his face and place a chaste kiss on the tilt of his crooked nose. Gelato’s had two broken noses in the past six months.

“You know you’re doing wonderfully,” he coos at his boyfriend, who dutifully reddens despite asking for the praise. “But that’s not what we’re here for, is it?”

“No,” Gelato admits, with a sigh – he looks at you, and he gives you a nod. “You’re not doing too badly! Look, Sorbet could knock me down without blinking, if you’re gonna learn from him, some low-life fuckin’ thief is gonna be a piece of cake.”

Sorbet kisses him on the sweaty mass of his pale curls and comes to you.

“Here,” Sorbet murmurs, getting in very close to you. “Your feet are too far apart.” One of his feet kicks gently at your own, forcing you to widen your hips. He grabs a hold of those next, rearranging the tilt, his body so close that you can feel the heat radiating from his chest. Your breath catches as he takes your wrist, helping you curl your fingers into a fist. “Not too tight, don’t put your thumb inside or you’ll break it--”

He’s bent over you, his dark gaze on your hand – and you feel the puff of air he dispels in a breath, warming your neck and shoulder. You can barely breathe. Your heart is beating ten to the dozen.

You know Gelato is turned on – you’d felt that when you were pinned against the wall. You hadn’t realised until Sorbet had come up behind you that watching you was doing the exact same thing to him.

“Alright,” Sorbet says. “When you throw the punch, aim to get it through him, you’ll need the follow through.” You nod, but your throat is dry and your head is spinning.

“Yeah,” you say, “I will.”

Sorbet gives you a pat on the shoulder, before pausing and leaning in to whisper against your ear;

“Aim for his ribs. He’s got a weak spot, left side. You should be able to kick him and sweep him off-balance too.” A hand on your hip drags down, squeezing your ass. “If you manage it, he’ll fuck you into next week.”

“Don’t give ‘em too much of an advantage,” Gelato says. “Can I rush on them now?”

Sorbet gives a small smile again.

“Be my guest,” he says, but he does not go back to his chair – instead, he steps to one side so he can observe. Gelato bounces on the balls of his feet, all buzzing and unrestrained energy. You keep your fists as Sorbet told you to, re-running everything you’ve been told about punching today--

And Gelato moves like a wild animal, chaotic and quick. You dodge one of his blows by inches, sliding your foot forward towards him to alter your balance slightly, your dominant hand coming out with as much force as you can muster, everything you can remember about how to hold your fists running through your mind as it connects hard with Gelato’s left rib and the blond sputters.

Kick. Sweep. Under the ankle, despite his heavy boots--

Gelato stumbles to one side, balance lost, coughing – and then Sorbet is in the fray too, pushing you down in between the two of them so that you’re trapped between two of his legs and topple onto Gelato. The blond snarls hungrily, grabbing a handful of Sorbet’s hair and dragging him into a hungry kiss.

Sorbet’s stiff erection digs into the meat of your ass whilst Gelato’s digs into your front, stuck between the two of them, your glory at getting Gelato off of his feet seeming much less important than the frantic beating of your heart.

“You told them about my ribs,” Gelato grumbles. “Asshole.”

“Your asshole,” Sorbet reminds him, and kisses him again, before pulling away to wrap his arms about your middle instead. “Besides.” Sorbet’s voice turns low and smug. “You can’t tell me you didn’t notice . . .?”

Gelato snickers. He lets go of Sorbet’s hair to cup your face roughly.

“Cucciolo mia,” he says. “How long have you wanted to be fucked?”

Your face grows hot, but that just makes him grin harder, sparks fly from his dark eyes. He grinds his crotch into your thigh and you swallow the thickness that rises in there.

“M’sorry,” you say, after a moment, as Sorbet joins in with the bullying, grinding his hips against your ass. “I--”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Gelato says, with a laugh like a rusty iron grate. That’s one of those laughs that his victims hear – one you should be scared of, but that makes nothing rise in you except want. “As you can probably feel--” Sorbet’s lips brush your ear, teeth worrying at the earlobe so you moan aloud. “We’ve got the same kinda problem ourselves. Y’know.” His teeth flash, sharp, bright, and you imagine them coated in blood. “If y’wanna help out some.”

You don’t respond to him in words. Instead, you press your lips against his hard, and when he bites hard enough to draw forth blood you moan.

---

When everything is over and done with, you lay sweaty and panting in between both of your boyfriends – Sorbet’s front pressed protectively against your back, Gelato clinging to your waist as he tucks his head beneath your chin.

“Next time,” Gelato breathes, already looking ahead, as if you three did not just spend several hours tangled hot and heavy within each other, biting and moaning and groaning and making the entire basement smell like sex. “We should teach ‘em to fire a rifle. I think they’ve got potential.”

“Mm,” Sorbet says, very low, making his chest reverberate against your spine in a way that has you shivering. “I think you’re right.”

[kettlequills]

black emporium exchange fill: anything, anything

now all the gifts have been revealed, i can finally post this! done for little_abyss. pretty proud of this one! TW: grief/mourning, implied/referenced self harm, blood magic, implied sexual content, violence. Audacity/Merrill.

What would you risk, to save it all? // In the aftermath of Tamlen's disappearance, Merrill meets a spirit that calls itself Audacity.

Merrill met Audacity in a nightmare.

It was the same one it always was. Every night, back there, like she’d never left, heaving-sick in the belly of a boat, emerging coughing into the dampness of the Marches, the least free she’d ever been. The City of Chains had grinned at the elves it swallowed into its docks, and the mages had escaped only by hiding their staffs. Merrill remembered the smell of the lyrium-lingering Templars, the dense crush and press of human bodies and sweat. She had never seen so many people before in her life. In the nightmare, though, she was alone.

The mirror was dark and taunting in the hollow embrace of the crumbling ruins of the Brecilian Forest, where no wise Dalish went. In it, the fleeing edge of Tamlen’s back through the mirror, imagined, for Merrill hadn’t been there, wondered, sometimes, if it would have taken her instead. Wondered, sometimes, if that’s what Marethari would have wanted. Wondered if that was what Merrill wanted.

Merrill saw the hunter’s mouth, spilling black taint. Merrill had been there for that like she hadn’t been for Tamlen, there for the way he’d coughed and gasped, bubbling on the fluid in his lungs, as Merrill cast spell after spell to save him. Even blood only delayed the inevitable. For nothing, in the end. The clan never looked at Merrill quite right after that. Like she’d walked away and come back ghoulish from the ruins, like they’d kissed her, smeared her with a stain that was all the clan saw when they looked at Merrill’s face marked with the same gods they wore. Like the Creators hadn’t made blood with magic in it to be used.

Death when it came for him had darkened the hunter’s eyes to smudges and the hollows of his cheeks like he was gaunt, an old creature in a young hunter’s body. Like the ancients, wrathful wraiths that waited, cursing Fen’harel the Trickster for taking their gods away and shattering their curse-mirrors to the realm of dreams and demons that whispered, help me.

Through the mirror, she could see them – their ancestors, their people, their suffering faces and their tear-grave eyes, screaming as they clutched to them Tamlen, who had always been kind to Merrill. Tamlen’s gaze was spawn-dark, his smile was gone, gone, and he had no kindness left for Merrill, none at all. Was he with the Creators now?

Like clockwork, the mirror shattered, and Merrill was left, looking into in her own eyes. Green as grey-leaves, lost, and confused, alone against the darkness. Or almost alone. Around her feet, the bodies of her clan, spawn-bloated, blood-drained, Marethari’s staring eyes accusing, accusing. The blood between her toes that soaked and squirmed like her skin soaked it up, to replace the blood she’d lost on the hunter. The blood she’d given with a knife jagged as the mirror-shard and hope cutting each breath and each poisoned promise she begged from the hunter’s blight-licked lips.

Help me, the demon whispered. Help me.

Merrill closed her eyes and prayed to wake up. Every time, she feared it was real, felt immeasurable relief when she saw the rippling fabric of the aravel and knew herself among her clan and alone, except for her dead – Tamlen’s face, the hunters they’d lost along the way. This time, she opened her eyes in the dream, and knew she was not.

The demon was there, and it saw her.

On the green slopes of the Fade beneath Sundermount, Merrill felt the hole in the world. The Fade here was rippled and pinched, like a scar. Kirkwall was a burning blister in the distance, the howling grief of the city swelling like a canker, night after night. The sea-wind was foul and carried the screams of darkspawn-fodder, left behind on the docks of Ferelden but for the price of passage.

(Ferelden, where Tamlen’s body didn’t rest, uneaten by the worms that had crawled through the eyesockets of Brecilian Forest elves for decades of generations. The mirror shard pressed like a dagger into her skin through her pocket. It was heavier here, in the Fade, and warm like a breathing creature. Merrill always felt it. Always just on the edge of cutting her. Disagreements with Marethari had grown more and more pointed, and the shard sharper and sharper.)

Sunken into the darkness, the hole in the Fade where the demon cried was in the shape of chains. They sloshed when Merrill tugged them, curious, and her hands came away sticky and red. Help me, the chains whispered in elvhen voices, remember me.

“I remember you,” said Merrill, moved, and she saw in her eye a white-haired man, an elf, old, old as the mountain, close his eyes in bitter suffering. His face had no Dalish tattoos at all, but he carried around his shoulders a wolf-pelt. His throat smiled in a wet gash, and the chains pushed their way out like the grasping hands of an infant, out of his blood, out of his body. In his closed eyelids were mirrors.

The ancient ones slept on Sundermount, but they did not rest.

“Do you, brave elfling?” asked a voice, strained, indistinct, and Merrill looked for it – found-

The demon was bound, like the old elf, and it was beautiful. It was like something that had never been a wolf, with more eyes than legs, and the spiralling horns and scales of a dragon. The fur pushed its way out between the scales like vines, like the pitch between the boards of a ship. It smelled of shem-wine and the gull-cries of the new shore, of dusty books and magic. It was vaguely purple like forget-me-nots, each coloured scale smooth as an old statue, washed clear by the ages. Sparks cracked and snapped in its nostrils when it breathed laboriously, and its eyes, seven, maybe eight of them, looked at Merrill like a challenge.

Like they saw her, beneath her dead.

“What are you?” Merrill asked the demon because it paid to be polite. She had never seen Pride like this before, proud enough to ask for help, proud enough to demand it. Maybe desperation had made itself bedfellow in its purpose. The things that Merrill had done for desperate love of her clan – she knew that it could make any feeling stretch liquid to fill the containment of necessity.

The chamber it lay in was as red as the secret inside chamber of a peeled heart. Elfsblood was dark, dark and still warm where it rose around Merrill’s calves. When she opened her mouth to speak, the air tasted of iron and the adrenaline just before a bone-snapping fall. It was dizzying. Merrill had never been so conscious of her aliveness.

“Anything,” said the demon. “Anything I want to be. I am the pride of every one of us who has gone before. I am the boldness of the sun swallowing the night. I am Audacity.”

“Where are you?” Merrill asked. “Did you kill these people?”

“Hurting,” said Audacity. “Do you dare to help me?”

Now – Merrill wasn’t born yesterday, contrary to what Marethari thought. But after that night, she didn’t have that nightmare any longer. Instead, she had Audacity.

“What can you teach me?” Merrill asked the demon.

They were in the Fade again. Merrill sat and felt the warm blood ebb and flow around her knees. She gazed into her eyes in the shard of the mirror and Audacity’s fingers – humanlike, since Merrill had met Hawke, but still clawed, like Fenris’ gauntlets – curved over Merrill’s shoulder. Their body was feminine, crowned with feathers over the shoulders like Anders’ coat, dragonlike, wolflike, piratelike, since Merrill had met Isabela. Audacity’s breasts against Merrill’s back felt like the hand between the shoulderblades that pushed Merrill tumbling over the cliffs into the tossing waves of new experience, of the melting pot that was Kirkwall – comforting, warm, sure, since Merrill had met Varric. Audacity’s face was approximately elvhen ever since Merrill had met her own eyes in the cracked washbasin in the Alienage and known herself, but the band of crowning horns around the delicate, scaled features gleamed Aveline-sure and Aveline-strong.

Merrill’s dark hair was a raven’s wing against Audacity’s shock-storm cheek. Audacity’s chin was the pointed fork of a tree struck by lightning against a black wreathing sky, defiant til the end, against Merrill’s shoulder. Promise hung about it like perfume. Audacity held Merrill close, like no one could for Tamlen, like no one had for the dead hunter. Except Merrill.

There was Tamlen’s absence in the sanguine wetness that stained Merrill’s feet and Merrill’s hands and Merrill’s magic, and that left footprints when she walked in the Fade. The Blight sung its discordance through the bones of Merrill’s dream where she held the mirror shard. Where Audacity held Merrill and Merrill held the mirror shard.

It was warm and hard in Merrill’s hands, but her flesh was soft and chilled from the blood, the dream, the shadow of the nightmare Audacity ate, and it dimpled against Audacity’s searching grip. The chains clanked and shifted, heavy as snake-coil, all muscle. Merrill felt the echo of them, when Audacity was this close, in their corner of the Fade. In the warmth they made together, in that secret little hollow between Audacity’s spiritstuff ribs and Merrill’s thundering heart.

Audacity’s nose found its resting place in the shadow behind Merrill’s pointed ear, and it said, in its voice of the People whose blood wrapped manacles around Audacity’s spirit and Audacity’s body it had made for holding Merrill, “Anything.”

“Anything?” Merrill echoed, and Audacity’s pointed teeth grazed Merrill’s neck when its lips measured her pulse. Its clawed hand spanned Merrill’s stomach like the pinpricks of knives, like the rusty spikes that stabbed through Kirkwall’s walls and its listless summer heat.

“What will you dare to learn? What will you risk to know?” It was probably lonely, prideful creature, all alone in its pit of blood, Merrill thought. Kept apart from the world, soaked in death. When Audacity’s new-made fingers curled in the fabric of Merrill’s tattered and torn-again shirt, Merrill thought she felt desperation there. Hunger, there.

Or maybe that was Merrill’s own. It hadn’t asked her to free it. But Merrill dreamed of it in the daylight, its pointed tongue, its enamel-bone horns.

Anders called her a fool. But Merrill looked at him and saw Justice engraved in the lines of his flesh, and thought – Audacity would hate that.

“Tell me,” Merrill tipped her head back against Audacity’s cheek, felt its not-breath against her skin, its razor-crack singe of electric-tail looped around her thigh. It made her nerves prickle like they did when Merrill tried sips of the foul alcohol Varric pushed on her, chuckling with warm whiskey eyes when she coughed and spluttered. Never sweet, shem-ale and shem-wine. Not like Dalish Red. Not like Audacity. “Tell me of the pride of the Elvhen.”

Audacity’s words were rhythmic and soft, and they wove into her thoughts like glue for the mirror she made with blood and guile, each piece painstaking, weeks of work.

“Where are you, kitten?” Isabela needled once, halfway through a game of Wicked Grace with Merrill’s wrist limp and her mind sore with mental equations of metallic magic. Merrill looked at her and thought of Isabela’s lips, so soft, so inviting, so warm when she laughingly kissed Merrill on dares she made up, spewing darkspawn bile like the hunter’s had, at the end.

What was behind the mirror? Was Tamlen there, waiting, like Audacity was with brighter eyes like coals fanned with the sighs lovers made each time when Merrill rested her head against the thin pillow in her damp little house in the Alienage? Merrill wanted to know. Wanted to save her People. They had known once. The knowledge was there, locked away under the dusty sheafs of history. There was a way to fix the mirror, Merrill just had to be –

“Brave,” Audacity called her, when Merrill gripped its face between her hands and felt its scales cut her palms. Her blood mixed with the seething sea of everyone who had come before her that surged around Merrill’s hips, bracketing Audacity’s grapevine thighs. Its voice was the storm of Sundermount, deep as the sleep of the ancients that waited in the heart of its peak.

“What do you want from me?” Merrill asked Audacity, all of her breath left inside of Audacity’s chest, its mouth that tasted of sparks and stepping in front of charging carriages.

“Anything,” said Audacity, “What are you bold enough to give me?”

Anything, thought Merrill, for the taste of the strength to keep going with the thankless task of repairing the mirror, of banishing the Taint a cut at a time. She felt always faint, these days. The blood in Audacity’s prison was richer than ever. And Tamlen was still gone, the dead still distant, and the clan ran away from her when Merrill wandered the hunting paths.

Merrill answered by biting Audacity’s lip until it burned in her mouth and she saw herself reflected in the ivory mirror of Audacity’s scales. Her own eyes seared into Merrill’s soul, her face in the blood, in the scale, in the chain and the old man whose neck smiled redly. In Audacity, who moaned and met her touch for touch, kiss for kiss.

All spirits are dangerous, she said to Anders, I understood that. I’m sorry you didn’t.

Audacity traced the edge of the mirror shard that was as heavy as Merrill’s dead with a claw white as bone. Their reflection together was beautiful in the mirror’s Blighted face, Audacity’s horns spiralling over Merrill’s head while its lips kiss her hair. The ivory tips were beaded with red, red, from where Audacity had laid in the blood underneath Merrill and twisted and gasped, like it felt pleasure in the body it had made to hold Merrill. The horns crowned Merrill like thorns, like the spirals of vallaslin that marked her face.

“What will you risk to find out what your People have lost?” Audacity asked, its clawed palm upraised where it wrapped its arm around Merrill’s waist like a chain, an offering, a promise. Its skin was scale-soft when Merrill kissed the pad of its thumb, and its fingers twitched, as if it fought not to hold her cheek.

And Merrill said, “Everything.”

[chiseler]

Ophelia By the Yard

Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood.

Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, leapt from the gothic toy box now joined by a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette that journeyman Italian cinematographers could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else. 

When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn't underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman's Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane; it seems that filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were attempting the very same trick on their audiences.

The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre, and when you get to something like Kill, Baby...Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.

Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century -- a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-faced detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism, set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up, dot the film like musical numbers or action sequences might appear in a different genre. 

Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider 1964’s Danza Macabra, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women? 

The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned the elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterisation to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.

When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace's leaden "shockers." These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more��inky shadows. A certain amount of fun, but different from the coming bloodbath because Wallace, despite somewhat fascistic tendencies, is anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, a sadism sublimated in story, a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace's more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer both thrilled and appalled. 

The Giallo fetishizes murder. But then, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring — each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. And yet, for the directors who rode most dexterously the Giallo wave, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to find other, more violent outlets for their misogyny. Please enter into evidence the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are inconsequential. Argento’s defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).

Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually apply to their interior design. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.

Like a river of blood, homophobia, in the literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister and gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.

The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity, so they need fictional avatars to cloak their own feverish woman-hating. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce eye from mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).

The Giallo is founded on an unstated assumption: the modern world brings forth monsters. Jack the Ripper was an aberration in his day, but now there's a Jack around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, "propitious rooms." There's the glorious line in Withnail and I: "That's the sort of window faces appear at." But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One needn’t enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare, or perhaps better to say: the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.

Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only assigns misogyny to a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but plays the killer himself in A Cat in the Brain. Though, in another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli are bullshit, always. Criminology and clinical psychology are largely ignored, and Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signaling psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?

A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might just be a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos, but it’s of some interest, perhaps mitigating the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, like this?

Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.

Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and swellegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever admitting it, with the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.

If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), and it is only the women who are mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us. But the sex and the suffering that captivates most sadists is never what registers; no, it is the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face that resonates. Once again, physical interiors become a negative form of emotional interiority, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under trivial headings, either “the visuals” or “color palette” – neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.

Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine, if not psychotic, decor. Before he tortures and stabs her to death, “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic rules The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs – all gulped, swallowed.

About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness – a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to fill the eye somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity.

Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects are supposed to mean. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.

Function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto.  Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as color becomes an instrument of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye and then some.  

As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (which the Giallo is a sub-genre of, only the psychology has to be deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation.

In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings are interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and somehow makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner, and there are also grotesque incidents with no relation to story whatever: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a solution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, is all but abandoned, replaced by the search for the next sensational set-piece.

Argento’s villains are now witches, but, abandoning centuries of tradition, these witches show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than with worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they’re meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities he dreams of. And inhabit places built for his aesthetic pleasure rather than their own. Following Bava’s cue, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, no naturalistic explanation offered for the lurid tinted hues. Just as no explanation is offered for the presence of a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.

Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations; that Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller – departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” – had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”

Daria Nicolodi

Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization – indeed, the characters barely speak – and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.

by The Chiselers

Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns, Tom Sutpen, and Richard Chetwynd

[sasorikigai]

"You have graciously accepted me, Sub-Zero. For that, I am grateful. I begin to understand, if only by a little, what my older self meant to you. I... cannot make up for his loss, but I will stand by you, regardless. That is my oath."

Random Inbox Shenanigans || @bastardsunlight || always accepting! 

❄️ || Implosion of faith, for Sub-Zero doesn’t have to believe in an old or a new religion to build his amalgamation of purified hope even amidst the rapture of violence. It had always come in the form of war and retribution. Still, their reconfigured allegiance is much more than the magnetized union of stars spilling out into the living night, where feeders of dark crawl and threaten to plunge him into the onslaught intrusion of tenebrous darkness. In the throes of his monstrous affliction and despair still dwelling in the depths of his heart, for Kuai Liang’s un-manacled spasm of all that is weakened in human flaws as brevity of severe emotions he frequents threaten to unravel from its coiled state. His glacier icicles will melt, leaving a penetrative ring of moisture, as Kuai Liang blinks away the cold emptiness; of all that is left behind. 

How his gaze towers over even in the face of his inevitable finality of death. Kuai Liang never fears being surrounded in total blackness, for transferred flame of his beloved’s dwell within him now. What once suffocated his heart with fumed smoke and asphyxiating constriction now paints his zealous passion. Wasn’t it ironic that how the most broken are the ones that are desperate to heal all the brokenness around them? How Kuai Liang would recognize and pick up pieces of everyone’s shattered shards, but failed too long to recover his own. In his re-connection with Scorpion, he had found semblance of peace, some consolation, in healing another heart when Kuai Liang knows that he cannot fully heal his own. 

“He was my liberation,” Sub-Zero begins, his back still turned away from Scorpion; how it still pains so, to plunge into the intense pool of scorched orbs, lest Kuai Liang could still see the magnanimity of hearth embers embedded in the specter’s gaze. “Hanzo granted me miracles, blessings, wealth, dreams, respect, fulfillment, and most importantly, how unbidden and limitless love could be.” He would always brazenly admit the essence of their relationship, for it was akin to his rebirth. How it had been like falling into a bottomless ocean of feeling no one has ever dare explained to him, because it is overwhelmingly heavy in his bones and his body still cannot fathom to embody its complete meaning. 

“And he was the only one who has possessed me and my heart would know no name other than his, but Scorpion, I may have been throttled with a quiet, searing agony, but your solid presence will always mean as much if Hanzo was standing right beside me. Thanks to you, my ceaseless ache will stop eventually, and the insistent cloud over my brain will break through the inexorable storms of darkness as once again, we conquer the threat of evil’s bereavement together.” ❄️ || 

[lynne-monstr]

strange partnership

Written for Tentacletober Day 2: Under the Sea

ao3 link

“Walk the plank, Lightwood.” The tip of Hodge’s blade prods Alec between the shoulders.

Alec squints against the sun, his rage burning hotter than the unrelenting heat of midday. He could beat Hodge with his hands tied behind his back. Unfortunately, he can’t say the same for all the rest of his traitorous crew.

“You’re all dead men,” Alec says. It’s bluster but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When Isabelle and Jace hear what happened to him, there’s nowhere far enough this group of scoundrels will be able to hide from their wrath.

With that, he jumps.

There’s time for one last desperate drag of air before the water closes over his head.

“So long, Captain Lightwood.” The mocking words of his first mate echo in his ears. Alec hopes Hodge chokes on them.

In the shadow of his own ship, he sinks like a stone, weighed down by the heavy chains around his wrists and ankles. It isn’t the way he wants to die– in the back of his mind, he always assumed he’d be hung by the Crown, punishment for breaking from his parents’ cruel legacy to become a pirate—but there’s something appropriate about finding his final resting place in the ocean he loves so much.

Plunging deep into the sea’s embrace is surprisingly peaceful. Or it would be, except for how Alec’s chest begins to burn. Still, he clings to his last shred of comfort. At least Isabelle and Jace aren’t here to share his fate.

It’s pure chance he sent them away on a scouting mission over a week ago. Their absence may have helped Hodge stage his mutiny, but it also ensured that Alec can bear this last agony alone without regret. It’s them he thinks of as the fire in his chest blooms into an all-encompassing inferno.

At first, he thinks the prodding against his lips is a hallucination, a fever dream brought on by his own impending demise. He ignores it, too consumed with the agony spreading through his limbs, the need for relief that will never come.

The gentle prodding is back, and something soft and pliable slips past his lips and into his mouth.

Instinct takes over, and he thrashes against the intrusion. Even if Alec wins, he’s a dead man, but at least he’ll die fighting and there’s comfort in that. His hands clench into fists where they’re bound and useless at his back, his legs kicking out at whatever sea creature wants a piece of him. Black spots devour his vision even as the last of his breath escapes him in a stream of bubbles.

He gasps, bracing against the inevitable rush of water.

“Breathe, pretty boy.”

The astonishment of hearing another human voice, warm and faintly amused, is nearly as shocking as the sweet relief of breathing fresh air this far below the sea. Alec is too consumed with filling his chest to wonder. He takes a long, greedy breath from the object in his mouth, and then another.

When his heart is no longer in danger of pounding its way out of his chest, he cautiously studies his surroundings. At this depth the water is a rich blue, with enough light to see that the object in his mouth is connected to something else.

Someone else.

Alec lets out a muffled gasp. A kraken, is his first, terrible thought.

But it’s no mythical monster whose tentacles have both ensnared and saved him. It’s a man. Well, half a man. Half a very muscular man. Despite his dire situation, Alec can’t help but stare. He’s laid with his share of men over the years but no one as beautiful as this. His eyes rake over broad shoulders, shapely arms, and a defined abdomen. Where there should be legs, the man’s tanned skin gives way to a mass of writhing, golden tentacles.

One of which is currently in Alec’s mouth.

It feels odd on his tongue, slippery and textured. It brings to mind a different activity entirely, and Alec has to wonder if that’s what this half-man-half-creature expects from Alec in return. Or if there’s a different reason he saved his life. He hasn’t felt this wrong-footed since the day he left home after learning of the atrocities his parents committed in the name of the Crown.

He can’t speak his endless questions aloud and so he tries to convey his thanks with his eyes. It must work, because the creature’s face softens and he swims forward until he’s nearly close enough to touch. Or would be, if Alec’s arms weren’t still bound. He pulls against the chains, hoping his rescuer will get the hint and free him.

“Eager to leave already?” The creature asks, a glint in his eyes.

Alec raises his head towards the surface, a silent affirmative.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to keep you here, but I can’t take you back either.” A sense of dread settles over Alec. If this man takes him captive, there’s not much he can do. Hodge had taken Alec’s cutlass and his pistol before pushing him overboard. He doesn’t even have the set of thin metal rods that have gotten him out locked rooms before.

He swallows around the tentacle in his mouth, his throat suddenly dry.

The man must sense his fear, because he rushes to explain. “No, no, not like that.” Another tentacle comes up to brush against Alec’s shoulder and Alec flinches away. He shouldn’t care about the flash of hurt that flickers across the strange creature’s face but he does. Alec's mouth is half open in apology before he remembers himself and clamps back down on the only source of air he has.

The man’s face settles into a cool mask as he asks, “If I take you back up, am I to assume that whoever tossed your down here into my home will still be there?”

Slowly, Alec nods. Idiot, he’s an idiot. It might seem as if he’s been drowning for ages but barely a few sparse minutes have passed. The moment Alec shows his face above water, Hodge will kill him, with a gun instead of a watery grave this time. And if Hodge doesn’t, the rest of Alec’s traitorous crew certainly will. Alec’s heart sinks into his feet.

He has nowhere to go.

“You can come with me, I have a home on the surface.” the man says, and Alec imagines he sees the faint stirrings of hope behind his heavily lined eyes. Perhaps he’s lonely and wants the company. “I’ll even share my collection of human tools. I’ve amassed quite a large number over the centuries, you know. We can find a way to get you free of those pesky things.”

A tentacle pokes at the manacles and leg irons Alec is still wearing, and he’s more than a little relieved at the confirmation that he’s not going to be some kind of prisoner. He takes a last glance up towards the surface. The shadow of his ship looms large, a massive cloud across the blue of the ocean and sky.

He’ll get it back, but not today.

The man must see the despair on Alec’s face because his voice is soft when he adds, “Don’t worry, no one will find you if you don’t want to be found. You have my word.”

Alec nods, and this time doesn’t pull away when a tentacle winds itself snug around his waist. The man begins to swim, the mass of tentacles around his waist propelling them quickly through the water. At first Alec is terrified that it’s going to dislodge the tentacle allowing him to breathe, but after several minutes without catastrophe, he begins to relax.

His morning began with a betrayal by a man he considered family. It should be too soon to trust another, yet that’s exactly what he’s doing. Perhaps Isabelle is right after all. His heart is too soft for his own good.

The further they travel, the more the excitement of adventure stirs in Alec’s blood. He lost his ship but he still has his life. Looking over at the impossible man holding him pressed to his side, he considers that perhaps he’s gained a new ally as well.

A new ally whose name he doesn’t know. Alec still can’t use his hands, and so be bumps his shoulder into his rescuer. Who stills immediately, halting their progress through the water. “Are you okay, pretty boy?”

There’s that name again. Alec’s grateful for the chill of the water hiding the flush that would normally rush into his cheeks. He’s been called far more lewd things in his life, but none of them with such honesty. Alec’s usual response to those kinds of words is as quick as it is brutal. He doesn’t tolerate disrespect, not to himself and not to his crew. He knows how to react to insults, but this kind of open appreciation is new. A beautiful man who saved his life is calling him pretty. Alec don’t want him to stop.

But first he has a more pressing matter to deal with. How can he convey that he wants to know—?

He bumps his shoulder into the man’s chest again, willing him to understand. He looks down at himself before flicking his eyes back towards the man. All he gets in return is a blank look. Rolling his eyes, Alec does it again, this time making sure to point his chin directly at him.

“Oh!” The man says, a grin lighting up his face that Alec can’t help but echo even with his mouth occupied. “If you’re asking for my name, it’s Magnus.”

Alec grins as much as he can around the tentacle between his lips. Magnus. It suits him.

Magnus keeps up a steady stream of conversation the entire way towards his hideaway on the surface. It helps keep Alec’s mind off the indignity of his situation.

Then again, it’s hardly the worst predicament he’s found himself in since making a name as a notorious pirate captain. He once had to sneak out a window of the governor’s son’s room at dawn when the local militia caught wind of his location. There wasn’t even time for him to dress, or he'd risk a hanging. Jace has never let him forget that particular folly.

The moment Magnus hauls them both onto land, his tentacles fade into long, muscled legs, including the one feeding Alec air while underwater. With his mouth freed, the first thing Alec does is offer his name. Tit-for-tat was his first lesson all those long years ago after leaving his parents' home. He still needs to find a way to repay this man his kindness but at the very least he can offer his name. And try not to stare at the hard, unclothed lines of Magnus’ very human-looking body.

Later, once Alec is released from his bindings, the rush of relief he expects never actually comes. It takes him a moment to understand it’s because he never doubted Magnus’ word or his intentions. He tries not to dwell on what that means and instead works the ache of out his shoulders, his mind occupied with plans of revenge.

A set of heavy footsteps comes up beside him. Magnus has changed into a set of black pants and a loose linen shirt with a deep neckline. In his hands is a sheathed sword attached to a thick belt.

He looks like a pirate captain and Alec can’t help but stare.

“I used to be one, almost a century ago,” Magnus admits, “but I tired of it and I missed the sea, so I returned to my old home.” Instead of buckling the sword around his waist, Magnus holds it out. Alec blinks, not understanding. “If you’re going to take your ship back, you’re going to need a captain’s weapon.”

“What about you?” Alec asks, and winces at his boldness. He can hardly expect Magnus to keep helping him. He’d already done far more than his share.

Magnus blinks, something like wonder in his eyes. “Me?”

“You saved my life. I could use an ally in this.” Alec pauses, remembers the fleeting glimpses of hope on his face when Alec first accepted his offer of sanctuary. He takes a chance. “I could use a friend.”

“I suppose I have nothing else to do.” Magnus’ strong shoulders sway as he closes the distance between them.

The sword hangs between them, and this time Alec takes it, his grip firm and sure.

“As long as you don’t mind…” Magnus trails off, and when Alec blinks he can see the translucent outline of tentacles around Magnus’ hips.

He reaches out with the hand not holding the sword, surprised when the tentacle feels solid in his hand. His thumb traces a line around one of the raised ridges and for a split second, Magnus’ mouth falls open, his breath hitching. He recovers so fast Alec almost thinks he imagined it.

Almost.

“I don’t mind at all,” Alec says, and means it. He doesn’t bring the tentacle to his lips but he hopes one day he’ll have that right.

Their strange partnership is just beginning and Alec doesn’t know what it will entail, but he’s looking forward to finding out.

[littleperilstories]

TPOT: Your Story Will End in Ruin

As part of the TPOT revival, I'll be updating existing chapters. This one is almost 500 words longer, has been further edited, and is generally better (at least imho).

Warnings: 1800s-esque police/prison/arrest scenario, restraints (chains/shackles, suspended), blindfold (bag/hood), physical violence (hitting/beating), mention of death

Also on Ao3!

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Word count: 2364 ||| Approx reading time: 9 mins

Your Story Will End in Ruin

Teaser: The air in here is cool, but I’m sweating. Hanging by the wrists, feet unable to find the floor, will do that to a person. At least, I think bitterly, there’s no iron ring around my throat like there was in the prison wagon. My situation is hardly pleasant, though: the heavy black hood is still over my head, heavy manacles bite into my skin, and terror burns through me that every sound outside my world of blackness is one of the constables coming for the inevitable interrogation…

Will Wardrew

They’ll be in here soon. I’m not sure how much time has passed, but I know I've been alone for a while. An eternity’s worth of slippery, painful seconds have passed without another voice, another face. Hell, there hasn’t even been a fist or a lash or anything else horrible they could come up with. None of that is comforting. It simply means that I am only drawing closer to my doom with every breath.

Jamie is going to lose his mind when he realizes what happened.

You idiot, I imagine him saying. The word is unkind, yes, but in his voice would be an undercurrent of affection. It’s a voice I know well, the one that older brothers reserve for their younger—not wiser—siblings. How did you manage to get caught?

We've been so careful. Years, it’s been, without being found out. An inner circle, the only ones privy to our plans, routes, safehouses, and allies. False names, changing hideouts, a revolving selection of runners. Runners who were supposed to be trustworthy.

Now I can’t help but wonder if it was one of them who betrayed me, or if the supposed ally I met in the tavern sold me out on his own.

My arms are going to break, I think. That fear…I guess it’s part of the strategy. If I’m in enough pain, if I’m terrified that the slightest movement will dislocate my shoulders… I bet they think I’ll give in easy.

Wrong.

The air in here is cool, but I’m sweating. Hanging by the wrists, feet only just able to find the floor, will do that to a person. At least, I think bitterly, there’s no iron ring around my throat like there was in the prison wagon. My situation is hardly pleasant, though: the heavy black hood is still over my head, heavy manacles bite into my skin, and terror burns through me that every sound outside my world of blackness is one of the constables coming for the inevitable interrogation…

My muscles begin to shake.

Outside the hood, a door rattles open. There’s the jangle of keys, the clanging of a heavy door, clicking footsteps. The constables wear these metal-studded boots, truly the stuff of nightmares, and not only because a kick from one of those infernal things could easily break someone’s jaw.

The clicking against the floor is also goddamn fucking annoying.

I don’t want to acknowledge their presence, I really don’t, but I start at the sound, and almost automatically, I shift position slightly, trying to relieve some of the pain in my limbs. It doesn’t stop the tremors, though, and what little I relief I grasp for my shrieking wrists is brief.

The person says nothing, does nothing. More sweat beads on my skin, cooling quickly in the chill of the air.

I wonder what they want, what they’re looking at. Me? I guess that must be it. Gauging my reaction, checking for any visible strain or weakness. Fuck you, I think. If I weren’t shackled, I could take them. Whoever it is.

Yet still they don’t speak.

What do you want?

Years of agony have passed before the person finally says something. A chill runs down my spine as I recognize the voice. It’s the constable himself, not one of the juniors.

I flatter myself that this must mean that I am a very important prisoner.

“Do you want me to let you down?”

I only know Baden Hatchett from afar—or, at least, I knew him only from afar until the moment he and his men cornered me. I know he is smooth-voiced and cold-eyed. I know he respects law and order. I know he hates criminals.

This means, of course, that he hates me.

I have not had a drink in what feels like hours. I am not sure I can give an answer. I suspect, also, that there is a trap laid within these words, ready to spring and swallow me whole. So I stay silent.

He draws closer. “It must hurt by now.” He can see my arms shaking, how I can’t control it, can’t stop it.  He isn’t just fucking guessing. He knows it hurts. “Do you wish for me to let you down?”

I bite into my papery tongue.

The air seems to shift, a current of anger flowing now, charging through the room. My skin prickles.

And then the chains begin to lower.

I gasp when my feet stand solidly against the floor. It’s involuntary, guttural. Relief through my arms and torso so sharp it hurts.

Salt burns my cheeks. Perhaps I’m grateful for this black bag after all, for hiding my tears from Constable Hatchett.

And then the chains pull up again.

“Fuck!” I don’t mean to scream. But as my feet scrabble fruitlessly for the disappearing ground beneath me, as the pressure returns to my shoulders, the pain doubles. Triples.

“I asked you a question,” Hatchett says quietly. “Didn’t you hear me?”

The chains were pulled higher this time—my feet are dangling. The drag of my own bones trying to get back to the ground is excruciating.

"Do you want me to let you down?"

"Yes!" Weakness wins. I will do anything, almost, to not be hanging from the ceiling for another instant.

A long silence, and in chasm of it, I wonder if his offer was nothing but a trick.

Then the scrape of chains and gears fills the room, and my feet touch the ground again.

Hatchett pulls away the black hood and studies me as I blink the world back into focus. He takes in my still-shaking arms, the bruises I won as I tried desperately to fight myself out of my capture. I take in the cold grey eyes, the crispness of his blue uniform. The slight, sneering curl to his lips.

"Do you know why you've been arrested?" He's keeping his voice slick, almost coy. We've begun a game, and he knows it. We both do. He will question, I will lie and deny. He will pursue, and I will block. He will hurt, and I will break.

No, I vow. I have already decided, long known, in fact, that I will not betray the others. Baden Hatchett will never hear the names James Wardrew, Colette Haris, or Geoffrey Marks. I will take their names and the location to whatever unmarked grave they dig for me. I will take my own name into death with me if it means it will protect the others.

Even with such bold thoughts roaring in my ears, my breath comes in gasps. Pain still shoots through my shoulders, and the prospect of more is already unbearable.

It’s for Jamie, I think. For Jamie. For Jamie. He has done nothing but take care of me for his entire life. I failed him by getting caught. I won't fail him again.

The back of Hatchett's hand knocks my head to one side, smarting pain now radiating through my cheek and jaw. "Did you not hear me? Do I have to ask every question twice?"

My vision is swimming, and my mind is whirring. Is this an act, I wonder, or does he really find the silence more infuriating than the inevitable lies I'm going to spout?

I smirk at him.

Up, up, off the floor. Hanging again. I cry out.

"Do you know why you've been arrested?"

"No."

A flash of wicked joy across his face. "Would you like me to tell you?"

My chest hurts. Even yes or no feels like too much effort.

"I could make this much worse," Hatchett says. "I have so many instruments to help me loosen your tongue."

I stare at him, trying to banish the tears from my eyes. Failing.

"But it's perhaps just enough to leave you like that, isn't it?"

A noise escapes my throat. A whimper, a bleat. Humiliating evidence of how soundly I am beaten at this game.

For now.

I will not break, I remind myself. For Jamie. For all of them.

"Would you like me to tell you why you're here?"

"I don't fucking care what you do." Every word rips a new whole in my chest. I force them out anyway.

A grin. "I know that is not true."

I try to get a grasp on the chains, try to pull myself up, but my fingers and wrists are weak, probably purple from hanging like this for so long.

He lets me down. This time, I bite back a scream as he lets even more slack into the chains, and my knees have the opportunity to bend, to give out beneath me.

“We know you’re in that cursed thieving ring,” Hatchett says softly. He brushes the tattoo on my arm, traces the I.A. It burns.“What do you call yourselves? Thieves of Honour?” It’s a piss-poor translation of Iustitia Aecum, but who am I to judge? It wasn’t me who came up with it. Colette was the one who suggested using Latin in our name, and Jamie liked the sound of it so much, we had to go with it. Not even sure it’s correct, but again, how would I know? It isn’t worth correcting the good constable, anyway. He laughs, then spits. “There’s no such thing.”

There’s just enough slack in the chains for me to wipe my face. It takes every nugget of self-control within me not to throw myself at him to smash his face in. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, oh honourable Constable Hatchett.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he snarls. He doesn’t like the smarminess. This is good to know. “We also know you’re not just in it, but one of the leaders. Running around, organizing your little band of would-be do-gooders. I want your name. Your real fucking name. I want the name of the others. I want the location of your headquarters."

You will have none of it.

"I don't know what you're talking about,” I repeat.

He shakes his head, tutting. "Are you sure you want to go down that road, boy? If you give me the information I want, you could avoid the noose."

"I didn't know thieves were sentenced to death," I say. Relaxed. Nonchalant. A vein pulses in his forehead. “How comforting. I thought you only hanged murderers and dangerous criminals.”

"For you and your little gang," Hatchett says, eyes sparking, "we reserve only the most special treatment."

A shiver runs down my back.

“And don’t worry,” he adds, “I’ll make sure to invite every noble family whose jewels the fools you’ve convinced to work for you absconded with.”

I fix him with a glare, pretending I know what absconded means, pretending I don’t give a shit what he says or does.

He rests his hand on the crank that will pull back toward the ceiling again. Lets it hover. Taunts me with its stillness.

"What is your name?"

I say nothing.

"What is your name?"

I say nothing.

"What is your name, boy?"

For Jamie. For Jamie. For Jamie.

A lazy half-turn. The chain tightens slightly.

"What is your name?"

Jamie wouldn't rat me out. I won't—

Another turn, drawing my hands up again, my trembling legs still on solid ground beneath me.

"Your name."

Nothing, nothing, I will say nothing.

This crank pulls my shaking body taut, feet only just grazing the floor.

"Let's try another question.” He shrugs. “We can play this game for as long as you like. So, I want the other names. Who do you work with?"

Their faces flash in my mind: Jamie. Colette. Geoff. No. No. No.

My feet lift off the ground.

When it's over, finally, finally, finally, Hatchett stares down at me. There's no pity in his face, but there is no anger, either. I know I will come to see his rage before I die, but today, there is something else carved into his features. I think there is, anyway. My thoughts are wild and loose, floundering in a sea of pain. I am not sure my arms will ever work again. I can’t believe I’m still breathing.

"Get up."

I can’t. There's no possible way. My limbs might as well be brittle twigs, scorched to death by summer’s heat.

"I told you to get up."

"I can't." What point is there in lying, in cursing at him now? He's done, and I am spent. I didn't give in. If he wants to beat me or kill me for being too weak to move after his own vile tactics, so be it.

That cold grey gaze bores into me.

And then he pulls me to my feet, hands hooked under my useless arms. There is nothing violent in the motion, but choking vines of apprehension creep through me.

"Walk."

I manage a few steps on shaking legs. Hatchett does not let me fall.

This is part of his game. Of course he isn't going to kill me—not now, not yet. Not until he has what he wants from me. Names and places. That stinging blow of betrayal, struck by my own hand.

"You will break," he tells me. The blunt knife-edge of his voice slashes at my throat. "I will have your name. And theirs. You will live out the rest of your miserable existence down here, and your story will end at the gallows."

"Maybe the last part is true." Perhaps it is the admission, the acceptance of my own looming execution, the inevitability of my fate, that makes me stumble. He catches me, and I hate every touch of his hands against my skin. "I won't tell you anything."

"You say that now," he says. He's smiling, and there is something sickening behind it. "I will be proven right in the end."

At my cell, I brace myself, waiting for him to throw me inside and watch my treacherous limbs crumple beneath me.

Instead, he sets me down with neither brutality not tenderness, but with a precision that is cutting in its own way.

"Rest," he says. "Today was just the beginning."

"Go fuck yourself."

Hatchett smiles. "And tomorrow will be much, much worse."

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~~~~

These were the prompts (Whumptober Day 17) used to write this chapter:

Whumptober 2022 Masterpost

Breaking Point | Stress Positions | Reluctant Caretaker

[lnfinitc]

@chaosbcrne speaks to you again, but nothing has changed // why does he waste his breath?

【 There was no redemption left to the treacherous; so far GONE was he, the empty husk of a jackal that was bred from the darkest fells of hatred and agony. Infinite had become a specter of his former self, long withered to the ANGER that ruled his every pitiful, waking moments. His voice, deep and venomous like the slithering snake he was, ventured his serpentine way closer to the hedgehog who spoke to him with such disdain.        “Is there no BEAUTY to      behold in DEVASTATION?” His words, distorted from under his mask still ran as thick as honey. Infinite’s golden eye regarded Shadow for a long moment, roving over him with piqued interest. He was always so calm, so confident. So protective over what darkness that clouded the inner-workings of his mind, marred by previous times and times that were inevitable to come. Was that true strength? To be able to COVER whatever weakness lie coiled underneath from stoic facades like filthy, fettering maggots waiting to be uprooted from their timber homes. Or was it cowardice? It didn’t matter. Not anymore. The jackal was so enraptured by vengeance, it consumed all rhyme and reason he once possessed. Now, he could only see RED and it bathed the hedgehog in a bloody display.  Infinite took another practiced step forward, and in shaky red blur, his form appeared beside Shadow in an instant. His snide laughter filled the air, mocking and malicious as he motioned out beyond them. Smokestacks billowing and filling the sky with the fire that savaged the world below. The stench of iron tainting air once pure. The hedgehog’s name rolled on his tongue, dancing on the edge of his words. Caged like a bird, never to be liberated from invisible manacles.      “Look around you, Shadow.       This PAINTING I have created      with my own two, TIRED hands.      Such painstaking work should      not go without PRIDE and praise.“ He circled around him, predatory as his seething anger flared in time with the revolving pattern inside of the Phantom Ruby. Red and purple tongues of hungry false fires licked around his lithe frame, brash pupils narrowed to devilish slits as he reaches out his hand to ghost gloved digits along Shadow’s shoulders and back. It took every fiber of restraint to not bury his gnarled talons into his FILTHY fur. The jackal wanted to carve the hedgehog up, to feel his lifeblood poor out from underneath his terrible claws. To REND his miserable flesh and scar up his body in PRETTY patterns to match the crimson streaks of his quills. But Shadow was still his PLAYTHING. He wasn’t done with him yet. The hero would know insignificance and he would realize weakness time and time again, before the former captain finally tired of this little game of theirs. Then Shadow would be nothing. Infinite’s voice hardens, moving closer.

    “Dont you DARE      look AWAY from ME.      A f t e r        a l l . . . ” Closer still, the jackal’s sickening murmur rumbles close to his ear.                                                              “you  are  M Y   next   c a n v a s . ” 】

[jaydcstories]

Read this and other stories on my blog: JOHN DEE COOPER'S ALL-MALE SLAVERY STORIES

PAULO by John Dee Cooper © 2020

Chapter 2

The truck had stopped. I could hear the ugly man and his mate chatting in the driver's cabin. I was still lying on my stomach under the canvas, shackled and gagged but I'd no idea how far we'd travelled. My head was smarting from whatever they'd used to knock me out and I was feeling sick from the lack of air and food.

What was happening to me? Was I a hostage? Who would want to pay to have me back? Were they going to be turn me over to the policía in exchange for a reward? I couldn't see how I'd have a price on my head. Maybe they were just thugs and they were going to rob me and leave me for dead. But why would they do that? I hadn't got any money or valuables. I was just a poor penniless teenager. Now that I was fully conscious, I tried to squeeze my wrists out of the iron shackles, but they were way too tight. There was a chain attached to them and I tried giving that a jerk but it was fixed to the floor of the truck and I couldn't get it loose. I even tried shaking myself free of the canvas sheet but that seemed to be tied down. It was hopeless.

The engine started up again and we drove very slowly for several metres over a bumpy road. I heard other voices and the clang of an iron gate. We drove a little further and stopped. The engine was turned off and I heard the driver and his companion get out. There were more voices and then the canvas sheet was suddenly whipped off me.

"Something we picked up on the road," said the ugly man as he loosened the chain and unshackled my feet. "It'll make up for yesterday's short fall."

He pulled me off the back of the truck. My hands were still shackled and my mouth gagged with tape. My legs were shaking and it took me a few moments to steady myself. I tried to take in my surroundings but there wasn't much to see, only the truck in front of me and the iron gate behind. It was getting dark, probably early evening, so we must have been on the road for quite a few hours.  

"What is it?" asked a small man with a clipboard.

"Young fit male," said the ugly man. "We can take him elsewhere if you don't want him. But we were short on our order yesterday so you'll probably want to hang on to him. Usual payment."

I couldn't make any sense of this. Were they talking about me?

"Put him over with the others," said the man with the clipboard. "We'll go inside and sort something out."

He and the ugly man disappeared while the ugly man's companion grabbed my shoulders and steered me round the side of the truck.

I'm not sure if I was horrified, or just plain dumbfounded by what met my eyes.

We were in a small dimly lit courtyard, and some twenty youngsters were huddled together against the far wall, all shackled and gagged like me. Most of them were boys but there were three young girls standing in a group apart. The boys seemed to be all ages, mostly teenagers but with a couple of  seven or eight-year-olds cowering in the shadows. They were  all very subdued and weary, and looked as if they'd been standing there all day. Some of them were glowering angrily and one or two looked as if they'd been beaten up.

I was made to stand next to one of the older teenagers.

After several minutes the ugly man came out of the building to the left of us, boarded the truck with his companion and drove off — abandoning us to our fate. I suppose in a way it was reassuring to know I wasn't alone in my misfortune, but there was something sinister about this gaggle of frightened kids. Who were they? They couldn't all be runaways like me. Some were so ragged and dirty they could have been dragged off the streets, but others were dressed quite smart as if  they'd come from well-to-do families. The boy next to me was wearing a football strip and looked as if he'd been dragged off the pitch in the middle of a game. Apart from the two armed guards in black combat uniforms taking it in turns to wander up and down threatening us with their guns, nothing happened for several hours. The silence was unbearable. Occasionally one of the boys would get beaten up for shuffling his feet, or attempting to sit down, but for most of the time we just stood gazing out into the courtyard, trying not to draw attention to ourselves — and trying not to pass out.

That became a real challenge for me because I was already quite faint with hunger and the iron shackles were weighing my arms down. The gag made it difficult to breath and I kept losing my balance. I couldn't understand why they wouldn't let us sit down. It was as if we were being kept ready to march off somewhere at any moment.

After a while I began to think the whole thing was absurd. It was just some stupid mixup. I had no business being there at all. I had to tell them that running away had been a mistake and that I was expected back at the orphanage. I had to work out who was in charge and try to get his attention.

But then the gates opened and a very smart black car with dark windows glided in. It pulled up directly in front of us and I was expecting someone important to step out. Instead the driver lowered his window and spoke to the little man with the clipboard. The back door swung open and the three girls were pushed inside.

It all happened so quickly, without hardly a word being spoken, that the rest of us just looked on in amazement. There wasn't even enough time for the girls to put up a struggle — although they were clearly terrified. The door slammed shut, the car turned round and we watched it coast out through the gates. Before we could fully absorb what had just happened we were back to staring at the ground. It was as if the girls had never existed.  

Another couple of hours drifted by and I began to wonder if what had happened to the girls wasn't a good omen after all. Maybe they were going to be sent home. Maybe someone had been in touch and the girls were being released. Which meant there was hope for me, if I could think of a way of communicating with the right person — get a message through to Senor Martinez at the orphanage, maybe. But somehow, the way they'd handled the girls didn't inspire much confidence. They'd been pretty rough with them. Maybe this was some kind of terrorist organisation and we were all being used as bargaining chips.

But just as I was trying to make sense of this latest theory, another vehicle drove into the yard. This time it was a truck, like a small horse box. Two men in black shirts, riding breeches and calf-length boots stepped down from the driver's cabin. One of them unlocked the rear doors, while the other spoke to the little man with the clipboard. It was in a language I didn't recognise, but I guessed it was German and these men were something to do with the Reich Marshalls. Suddenly there was a frenzy of activity. Two more guards came running out of the building and together with the original two, started waving their pistols at us. The little man shouted something about getting us into a straight line. We were poked and jostled and screamed at — which is very scary when you are completely defenceless with your hands manacled behind your back and your mouth smothered in sticky tape — until we were all lined up shoulder to shoulder against the wall.

"Vier muskulösen Arbeiter; vier muskulösen Arbeiter," the little man kept mumbling as he trotted down the line followed by the German. He was making some kind of selection. Each time he tapped a boy in the chest, that boy had to take two steps forward. He only seemed to be interested in the older, tougher looking ones, so I was relieved but not surprised when he walked straight past me.

"Nackt ausziehen!" the German shouted when there were six boys standing out front.

Nobody moved at first, mainly because they didn't understand what he was saying. Then the little man explained in Spanish that the six boys were to strip naked so that they could be examined by the Offizier.

This of course meant their shackles had to be removed, which the little man did, one boy at a time, while the guards kept their rifles pointing at the boys' heads.

It was a tense moment. These boys were angry and tired and were liable to cause trouble once their hands were free. But the close proximity of the rifles kept them quiet, and very slowly and begrudgingly they began to remove their clothes. It was a weird sight watching them denude themselves in front of us. It was a mild evening, but there was enough of a chill to make their flesh quiver — and I suppose having a loaded pistol pointing at your head must have been pretty unnerving.  

They had to stand with their legs spread and their fingers touching the back of their necks while the Offizier made a brief examination, back and front. He indicated the four boys he wanted by flicking their chests with the leather gloves he was holding. It was clear he was picking out the ones with the most muscle.

The selected boys were frog-marched over to the wagon. It took some doing. Their gags had been ripped off, and so they were shouting and swearing and putting up quite a fight. Canes had to be used on a couple of them to get them on board. It was extraordinary to see those strong young bodies overpowered by the men in black. It was a desperate situation and yet there was something strangely inevitable about it. I couldn't explain it at the time.  

I had a good view of the truck from where I was standing and could see that once inside the boys' arms were forced up so that their wrists could be manacled to hooks in the roof. They hung there like meat in a butcher's shop, one in front of the other — except these carcasses were alive and kicking.

The truck door was slammed shut and bolted, papers were signed and the truck drove off into the night.

There was a long brooding silence. The stillness was terrifying. What fate could possibly await those boys? All my theories had been blown out of the window. I knew now we were up against something really dark. Something I didn't understand.

One of the guards gathered up the discarded clothes and stuffed them into a black sack. Some of the clothes belonged to the two boys who'd been left behind. They protested but were told to be quiet. The little man said it wasn't worth them getting dressed again. Instead their wrists were manacled, their mouths gagged and they were sent back to join the rest of us. They were both tough looking lads in their early twenties and even though they'd escaped the fate of the boys in the wagon, they were obviously humiliated and confused as they shuffled back towards us, unable to hide their nakedness.

A few minutes later, to my great relief, we were told we could sit down, although we had to wait while they attached our manacles to iron fixtures in the wall — so that we couldn't make a run for it when their backs were turned, I suppose.

I made myself as comfortable as I could with my back against the wall, but the manacles didn't make it easy. I only had a thin tee-shirt on and, as the temperature began to drop, I wished that I'd not taken my pullover off before jumping on board that truck. I'd left it in my backpack along with all my other stuff, and God knows where that was now. It was all my own fault. I should have gone back to the Orphanage when I had the chance and faced the music. Instead I had to get myself into this ridiculous mess. Time crept on and as it got darker and colder it became clear that we were going to have to spend the rest of the night sleeping, or trying to sleep, out here in the open. I felt sorry for the two naked boys. I couldn't see them because, they were further down the line, but they must have been shivering with the cold.

The boy on my left was quite young, I should say about  thirteen or fourteen. He looked absolutely miserable, as you would expect. I wondered what his story was and how long he had been there. Had he been captured, like me, by some ruffian on the road? Was he a runaway? Perhaps he had a family who missed him and would come to rescue him? No one was going to come and rescue me. Even if by a miracle I found my way back to the orphanage, they weren't going to welcome me with open arms. I was in deep trouble whichever way I looked.

I could see the boy was on the verge of tears. I gave him a nudge with my arm, and tried to smile — which sounds ridiculous with sticky tape covering half your face, but it seemed to work. He took a deep breath and I think he was trying to smile back. I moved in closer to him, and let him rest his head on my shoulder. It wasn't much but that little bit of human contact was enough to release all his pent up emotion. He curled up and cried himself to sleep on my chest.

I was a fool to have run away. I had no idea what kind of trouble I had walked into. But at least I had found someone I could help. He was just some nameless kid, but in this dark place he trusted me and, without having spoken a word, he had become my friend.  

[spell-cleaver]

Faithless

@sixofcrowsnet heist: mythology

Another demon. This one walked with soft feet like she'd drifted in from the next world and no one had the good sense to send her back.

The name Wraith wasn't given to her by the human Kaz Brekker as part of his mocking pretentiousness, or as an uncharacteristic urge to show off, or even as a characteristic fondness for drama. No. It was given to her because it was true.

On the night that a slaver's ship sailed from the coast of Ravka to Ketterdam, a thunderstorm shook the night. The kidnapped children in the hold were left to shiver and press up against each other amidst the vomit and the seawater and the sweat, even as the boat was tossed upon the seas.

You see, no one really knows what lightning is, or where it comes from. So it's entirely possible that the errant flashes of light are indeed tears in the fabric of reality, between worlds, and it's entirely possible that that night, someone slipped through them, and became trapped.

The world of the slavers and the children and the seas didn't have a name for her. She wasn't human - was more shadow than substance - but when a fourteen year old Suli girl died on the voyage, the shadow occupied her body.

The shadow called herself Inej, and she was more powerful than any human could ever be.

But she wasn't powerful here. She'd barely breathed warmth back into her new flesh by the time the slave ship docked in a harbour and the slavers came into the hold with the first in a pair of horrible coincidences that changed the course of Inej's life forever:

The manacles were made of iron.

Iron, which was the only thing that weakened shadows like her. Iron, which could bind her in this body indefinitely.

She was taken out of them shortly after, and she tried to fight back, but that was when the second horrible coincidence came into play:

The ink in the tattoo they forced on her arm, of a curled, delicate feather, contained traces of iron as well.

And it was stuck to her skin.

So Inej spent months in the Menagerie, several nights scratching her arm bloody in an attempt to purge the iron from her body. But there was always enough left by the next morning that Inej couldn't slip out of her own flesh to avoid the beating that came as a consequence of it.

Until Kaz Brekker came.

Until she drew on the last scraps of illusion she could hold, vanishing into smoke and silence for two moments, and whispered in his ear, "I can help you," in a voice of wind and rain.

When he whirled around, disguised shock evident on his features, she was standing behind him fully formed, the purple polka dots of her outfit painfully garish.

He narrowed his eyes, then left.

Inej knew she'd won.

He came back soon enough, and was smart enough to have her tattoo removed. The last dregs of iron were flushed from her system. When it happened, she was so excited at being free that she almost shifted there and then, almost let the girl's body drop dead where she sat and soar off.

Even when she didn't, she was half sure Kaz noticed the mirage of wings floating behind her back.

She could've left there and then, as well. But Inej wasn't a demon. She came from a realm of saints and deities, and if there was one thing she would do, it was stand by those who'd stood by her.

She stayed with the Dregs. She didn't know how long she would do it for - maybe until her human body was old and grey and could no longer crawl over rooftops or survive knife wounds and gunshots - but she simply knew that Kaz Brekker had saved her, so she would be around to save him, when the time came.

*

Kaz Brekker was faithless.

Inej was the opposite. While she couldn't in good conscience call it faith when she knew it was true - she'd spoken to Sankta Lizabeta face-to-face on a regular basis before she came to this world - she prayed to her saints and deities every day. She didn't fit in with the rest of the Dregs: she didn't swear, she didn't drink, she didn't gamble. But she was one of them anyway, if only because that was one thing they could have faith in: That she would always try her damned hardest to ensure everyone pulled through, alive and unharmed, no matter the cost to herself.

Kaz was a different story. Inej knew he didn't have faith in anything - not the gods, not other people, and not even himself. And whenever she wondered why, she inevitably remembered moments of a past life, of peering through a veil into another world and watching a little boy paddle back to shore using his brother's body as a raft.

"Men mock the gods until they need them, Kaz," she told him once.

He'd just scoffed. "What have the gods ever done for me?"

She'd just sighed.

"What makes you so sure your saints are listening?" he'd asked her another time.

"Because they always listen," she'd replied. "Whether I was talking to them face-to-face, or through prayers, they always reply."

He'd half-laughed, half-sneered. "You've met them?"

"I'm a wraith, Kaz. Of course I have."

He'd just laughed again. He hadn't believed her.

Despite relying on her as much as he did, Kaz was perhaps the only one in the Dregs who didn't have faith in her.

*

The incident with Oomen only comes about because he's using an iron knife. It weakens her, but because the iron is quickly removed from her body, that means it frees her in a way, as well.

She's not strong enough to hold herself in her human body for much longer. She's at risk of just. . . drifting away.

It scares Kaz, the way the smoke seems to seep out of her as he carries her to the ship, and it scares Nina as well, when her heart stops for several hours but she wakes up fine the next morning anyway. During the voyage she knows that Kaz thinks he feels Death hovering over the ship, ready to take her away, but it's not Death. It's her, at last, free of her cage of flesh and blood, and she can't honestly say that she wants to return.

But she loves these people. They need her.

And she doesn't regret coming back, not when Nina cries to see her alive, and Jesper cheers, and Kaz tries to disguise his worried fussing over her as planning for their next move. But things change after she does. Sometimes she catches Nina and Jesper giving her odd looks, like they've finally guessed what's been odd about her this whole time.

Kaz still doesn't see it. Still doesn't want to see it, even as he watched the shadows curl around her with his own eyes.

Kaz still doesn't believe.

*

No one can deny it once she's scaled the incinerator shaft. There was a moment when she nearly slipped and the wings that had been hovering at her back had evaporated with the heat, incorporeal, unable to catch her.

Then the rain hit them, and she soared.

She felt more like herself than she ever had.

So when they're confronted in the harbour, with every piece of might Fjerda had to offer stacked against them, it wasn't Nina who rained destruction on them. It was Inej.

She'd forgotten what it was like, having this power. This freedom. She'd kept herself reigned in for so long that she'd forgotten who she was.

She didn't deserve to be denied it any longer. By anyone - for anyone. She had a family waiting for her back home, and saints to talk to, and people remember.

"Stay in Ketterdam," Kaz whispered. "Stay with me."

I will have you without armour, Kaz Brekker, or I will have you not at all.

She whispered the words, hoping he'd give her a reason to stay. A reason to want to stay.

He stayed silent.

So she left. And all she could do was smile sadly as she left, and Kaz Brekker the faithless watched as the girl (he loved) dissipated into ashes and smoke.

After she was gone, he turned his gaze back to the distant horizon they were sailing towards.

Dawn was still a long way off.

[ask-valerian-40k]

The man who was going to kill him at dawn came to save his life in the middle of the night. Keys scraped at the locks of the old cell door. It took three keys to release the thick slab of battered metal. Usually, the unlocking routine was methodical and precise, but this sounded hasty and rushed. Mabbon waited patiently. He could do little else. The iron manacles on his wrists attached him to the floor by a heavy chain. He could stand and walk in a small circle in the tight confines of the filthy cell, or he could sit on the rockcrete block that served as a stool. They always ordered him to sit when they were coming in, and he preferred it that way. The heavy door opened, groaning on its metal hinges. Zamak looked in at him. Zamak was one of the six guards who watched Mabbon around the clock. He was Urdeshi, a thick-set man from the 17th Heavy Storm Troop cadre that provided all six members of the guard team. Zamak looked flustered, his face red, sweat on his forehead. His puzzle-pattern jacket was open as if he hadn’t had time to button it properly. He wasn’t wearing his body armour. He stepped into the cell, producing the set of keys that fit the manacles. No body search first. No thorough pat-down. None of the usual, painstaking protocols. ‘I don’t usually see you at this hour,’ said Mabbon. ‘I’ve got to move you,’ said Zamak. He was trying to find the correct key. His hands were shaking. ‘Is it dawn already?’ Mabbon asked. ‘Shut up,’ said Zamak. He breathed hard. ‘They’re through the yard already. They’re killing everybody.’ Mabbon had been aware of the gunfire for the past ten minutes. Las-fire, sporadic, its whip-crack sound muffled by the cellblock’s thick stone walls. ‘Who?’ asked Mabbon. ‘Your kind!’ Zamak spat. ‘Your filth!’ Mabbon nodded, understanding. It had been inevitable. He had been waiting for it. ‘Sons?’ he asked. ‘Sons of Sek?’ ‘I don’t know what they are!’ Mabbon shrugged, as much as the chains would allow. ‘A kill team, I should think,’ he said placidly. ‘Mortuak Nkah. An “extinction force”. I imagine that’s what they’d send.’ Zamak fumbled and released the heavy cuff around Mabbon’s right wrist. ‘I’ve got to move you,’ he said. ‘Get you clear. Get you to a safe location.’ ‘Why?’ asked Mabbon. Zamak stared at him. ‘They’re coming to kill you,’ he said. Mabbon nodded. ‘I know they are,’ he replied. ‘Zamak, you’re scheduled to shoot me at dawn.’ ‘Yeah,’ Zamak said, struggling to fit the key to the other cuff. Garic, the S-troop squad leader, had explained the timetable to Mabbon two days earlier. At dawn, the six man team guarding him would take him from the cell, escort him down to the yard, put him against the wall, and shoot him. Mabbon didn’t know which of them would actually end his life. It might be any of them. All six would fire their lasrifles at once. He would, he had been told, be offered a blindfold. ‘Well, I don’t understand,’ Mabbon said. ‘You want me dead. They want me dead. Stand aside and let them have me.’ ‘I can’t do that!’ Zamak exclaimed. He looked horrified at the suggestion. ‘I’ve got to get you clear–’ ‘Why?’ asked Mabbon. He was genuinely bemused. ‘The packsons are killing people to get to me. Killing anyone in their way, or so it sounds. If you try to protect me, you will become a target.’ ‘So?’ ‘Zamak, the logic isn’t hard. Let them have me. Save yourself.’ ‘I can’t do that. I’ve got to move you. That’s orders.’ ‘If you get me clear, are you still going to execute me at sunrise?’ asked Mabbon. ‘Of course.’ ‘Then what–’ Mabbon began. ‘Shut up!’ Zamak snapped. He couldn’t get the key to fit the left cuff. ‘I’m serious,’ said Mabbon. ‘You’re risking your life over a… what? A bureaucratic issue? By dawn, I’ll be dead. Does it matter who does it?’ ‘It doesn’t work like that!’ Zamak said. ‘Well, I think it should. There’s a strong chance you’ll die protecting me. If you don’t, you’ll only shoot me yourself. Go. Get out of here. By dawn, I’ll be dead. You don’t have to be dead too.’ ‘Shut the hell up!’ ‘I really don’t understand the Imperium sometimes,’ Mabbon said. ‘It’s so constrained by administrative nonsense and paradoxical–’ Zamak had become so flustered he dropped the keys. They landed on the floor between Mabbon’s feet. ‘Shit!’ said Zamak. He bent down to pick them up. Outside, close by, a lasgun ripped out three shots. They heard a man cry out in pain. The cry cut short. Zamak turned in fear. He drew his sidearm and stepped back to the cell door warily. He peered out. ‘Shit,’ he said again. He stepped out of the cell and disappeared from view.

Anarch, by Dan Abnett