#v : 𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 ‚ arc ii .

[wickedslip]

continued from here / @luposcainus

❛ Are you actually afraid of me? ❜ she chortled, despite herself. Being afraid was a very real, very human, very natural thing. But feasible, perhaps not at first approach. Their height difference alone was at least of difference by way of a foot.

❛ Now, this is a first. ❜

She walked the forest depths often, and as long as you knew your way and you showed no form of disrespect to nature, it would respect the voyager enough to clear the path back to familiar civilization. Heavy, howling gusts from the north began to crescendo and billow about, ricocheting off the trees and causing a dramatic shift of temperature rather instantly. The increasing shadows cast a looming eeriness over the expanse, the overhang of trees forming a dark canopy above them.

❛ You aren’t what you seem. Perhaps I'm not the most frightening thing in here. ❜  Lifting the back of her burgundy sweater, she pulled her phone from the back pocket of dark lacquered jeans, signaling the flashlight app, directing it to his eyes. ❛ Are you lost? ❜

[wickedslip]

“ we’re not that different, you and i. ” aisha

❛ It turns out that we are like two immaculate threads woven from the same mystical fabric, ❜ Nausicaä ascertained, careening idly toward her. Aisha, ever the mischievous witch, at least held true to balance, even if that balance was teetering, fraying on the verge of absolute collapse, Nausicaa thought in waves of misanthropy. She often wondered if there were any lines that Aisha would not cross, because the lines were really beginning to blur to the point of irrelevancy for herself.

Sitting on her knees with grimoire poised on her lap, the book was almost too large and cumbersome. A ring of candles lit, and there was still work to be done in the center of the circle. Everything hanging on the outside of it, including Sadist and Masochist, was different than anything inside of it—the circle provided immediate protection in a forcefield brought up and around, and Nausicaa ensure that Aisha would be safe, entering the ring of protective candles. ❛ Don’t worry, I’m not summoning demons. ❜ She motioned her forward, allowing her to enter. ❛ Just close the gap behind you while I steady this damn grimoire. ❜

[wickedslip]

“ this is not fun! it’s just scary! ” — from henrik

❛ I suppose that’s entirely dependent on one’s point of view, ❜ Nausicaä considered, drumming her matte black stiletto-shaped fingernails atop the fine oak desk, the ages-old grimoire levitating above as she scrolled through each piece of parchment until she directed her energy to the elaborate spell that she needed.

She had never said a trip to The Old Burying Point Cemetery would be fun, well……… perhaps that exact statement had been erected, but she didn’t really have solidity in what she said at times, so long as her overall tactic lured her captive. She had only tried her hand at necromancy a handful of times, and it almost always required exponential effort and more than her fair share of ethereal energy. Being a witch of the Black bloodline did have its rewards, but equally held as many grievances.

❛ What if I said you were the bait? ❜ She supposed she could have said it a little differently, but being contrite was really not in her extensive vocabulary.

[wickedslip]

tag dump iv. -- please ignore.

━━𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐄 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐒━━

v       :       𝐛𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬       ‚       arc i.

v       :       𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧       ‚       arc ii .

v       :       𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐬       ‚       arc iii.

v       :       𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴       ‚       arc iv.

━━𝐃𝐘𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐈𝐂𝐒 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐒━━

dyn :: damien / he11follows : 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗼 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲. dyn :: ripgray / peter : 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁. dyn :: damon / damnatore : 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. dyn :: wednesday / miercolaes : 𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘀.ᐟ dyn :: abra / roznrot : 𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹 𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵.

[wickedslip]

"In the heat of the investigative pursuit, the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line."

❛ Reading between the lines helps, ❜ she concurred, while adding input of her own. She couldn’t tell Nancy just how many times she had fallen off the beaten path to figuring out the little oddities around the city, so much so that the intervals often brought her to the brink of courting insanity. Perhaps it was in her Scorpionic nature, but she had always been a bit of a detective, favoring that instead of hobbies like jump rope and sidewalk chalk.

She probably had been the strangest, most off-putting person in her class, but it didn’t mean she was without the enthusiasm of an overactive imagination and a lust for curious morbidity. She had been described as deceptively intelligent in the comments on her report cards. ❛ And once you unearth the truth, it’s not always what you’d expect. ❜  

[wickedslip]

plotted starter for my bb @havvkinsqueen !

It was a gloriously misty Saturday morning, and there was far too much she needed to get done to enjoy it. The week had been strange and eventful; her house bustling with countless members of her mother’s coven entering and exiting during all hours of the night, which left Nausicaä a little brain fogged. The original intention had been to pick Chrissy up, get their ritual morning coffee from Wolf Next Door, and go to the beach. While most would presume that the summer was the best time for a jaunt to the shore, she preferred autumn and winter. There were fewer tourists and townsfolk to be bothering them, which wouldn’t run the risk that someone could overhear their conversations.

Lately those conversations had increased in intensity. Not friction that caused discord between them, but an intensity that provoked a course of action. Her mother wouldn’t be happy with what they were doing, and too often she would ask Nausicaä why it mattered so much if Chrissy wasn’t an actual coven member. Why did it matter? It mattered to her, that’s why it mattered. Her mother wasn’t one to inhabit strays off the road, and that was probably how she felt about the majority of her friends. Everyone was expendable. Everyone that wasn’t a Black, a Sibley, an Alden or a member of her covenant. Sleep deprived from the glare of candles through her bay window late at night. It hadn’t been her imagination that something had been calling her name, waking her from a fitful sleep. Something was hissing from the waves, from the moon above that was just the color of old gold, casting an ethereal reflection on the coast, the waves lapping at the shoreline. Every s sounding like the slithering of a portentous serpent. It had been coming from the objects, and no. It didn’t make any sense at all. Waves didn’t hiss, and neither did the moon.

Black witchcraft ran in the Black familial line. They were truly doing the devil’s work, and Nausicaä wouldn’t have a thing to do with it. What they were planning was not bound by nature. It’s not what witches stood for as servants of nature. And they had begged her to be a part of them, that it was in her birthright to not just be of the coven, but to guide it. To lead it. And she would take no part. Her mother often reminded her that if she didn’t do this for her, for them, that she would be doing the family a disservice. And any disservice to Demetria and Deucalion Black was inexcusable.

Snapping her head out of her reverie, the drive to her friend’s house at the westernmost part of the bluff, closer to the mainland, had always enveloped her thoughts. She mechanically went through each light, and finally pulled the violet Porsche 911 Turbo up to the brick establishment, waiting for the strawberry blonde to come out with her overnight bag. It was at least every other weekend occurrence. She would stay with Chrissy and vice versa. Her mother had enforced over the next month that there would be no going out overnight, at least until the autumn equinox celebrations had wrapped up. She didn’t know what she was on about, but she didn’t have the energy to expend to her anymore.

Her friend had been going through a lot over the last year, and she was only privy to it because of how close they were. They had been good friends since Chrissy’s family had moved in for the rest of their senior year. With Nausicaä just a year under her but in advanced classes, she took the same classes that Chrissy was taking. But it wasn’t their classes that bonded them. It was whatever she was going on beneath the surface. This residual energy that emanated from the girl, and Nausicaä could naturally hone in on it. An unnatural malady that caused her system to have broken synapse. It clung to her like a second skin, although evasive to anyone that didn’t know what they were looking for. But witches could sense it through the aura. Detecting it immediately, she had grown concerned.

❛ I’ll only help you if that’s what you want, ❜ she had spoken candidly about it, not wanting to overstep. She remembered back to the haunted surface of her friend, of the way that she had grasped onto her hand as it held the gear shift—just as she had now. The knock on her since frosted door indicated she had been sitting for a minute. Unlocking the door with a quick brush of a button, she smiled gingerly at Chrissy, planting herself in the passenger seat. Putting the car in gear, they sped off to the beloved coffee shop for provisions.  

[wickedslip]

“ sometimes you just need someone to tell you you're not as terrible as you think you are. ”

There were those that were touch starved, and others were so empathic to their very core that bits of their souls fissured and split; their multi-faceted auras beaded, swelled with a sigh of heaviness and seeped like rivulets of precipitation on a rainy windshield amidst a stormy day. The empathic ones, the ones that yearned for those words of affirmation, would pull themselves apart at the seams until the librettos rushed in to save them.  Then there were people like her, that would hide every part of themselves to not damage anyone in their direct vicinity. Which was what she had been doing now.

She sometimes stumbled upon her own thoughts, and reaching out to another person would never be her strongest suit ⸻ it never had been. But she had to try, especially when the need was voiced so despondently in her earlobes. Jessie’s big doe eyes and soft heart were weeping torrents in her aura, even if her lovely visage remained neutral. She could sense it in her, and it broke her to her core to witness the ache. That, too, would be words she would never say.

[ . . . ] ❛ You aren’t terrible. I’ve seen it, and this isn’t it, Jess. If you were, I’d sense it. And all I sense . . . all I feel . . . is anything but that. ❜

[wickedslip]

“ grief is not a feeling, but a neighbourhood. this is where i come from. everyone i love still lives there. ”

He was so right ━━━ their sorrows were housed within the deep confines of the witch, humanity seeping through the almost infallible exterior. It’s how empathy was able to shine, even in the darkest parts of them. Often hidden like a penumbral shadow, and if history was a factor in the decision making, they were the best at what they had to do. They had to be. Feelings were only one component, one of the many streets of the neatly compressed neighborhoods he so spoke of. But there were inlets and cul-de-sacs, parks and valleys, and all the houses and buildings that made up the inner communities of their zone-imbued composition.  

But what if that neighborhood became permeated with rot, withering them from the inside out? What if the toxin that they ingested began to consume them whole, until the only thing left was the stain of what they had become? The rebelliousness of the route that her mind took, and gingerly she turned on one pert foot, winding one leg behind the other. She knew those ballerina moves would pay off. But not before she had traded in the much-loved satin pointe shoes for acrylic brushes to paint out the newest, most disturbing of her nightmares, come to roost before her very lilac-instilled optics.

❛ You’ll save them all, or you’ll die trying. [ . . . ] You carry grief like a soldier carries a sword, Zeev. It might feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, but you aren’t alone in that. ❜ One slender hand placed on his shoulder; eyes filled with empathy for his plight. She knew grief like she knew the metaphoric serrated edge in her chest. It devoured anything in its clinging wake.

[wickedslip]

❛ Forests have secrets. ❜

❛ ━━━ But not as many secrets as those that walk its winding paths, ❜ walking alongside Gen, their conversation was easy as it always had, flowing like the breeze through the nearby canopy of red maples with a few stray pitch pines closer to the headland. The trees became scarcer the closer they got to the bluff, but if they wound the opposite way, getting deeper into the depths of thickets, the overhang became as black as a starless night, even in the early light as it was now.

She remembered the need to clear her head after a long day, and with classes commencing, soon to be brimming with the autumn semester’s horde of students, she would be lucky to get any time alone. ❛ What made you want to come with me out here? Not that I’m complaining, you know I don’t particularly like company [ . . . ] but you’re different. You’re almost family. ❜ Although she had only known her for a short expanse, in that time she found to likeness to the girl, really something she couldn’t explain. But she always enjoyed the time spent in her endearing presence.

[wickedslip]

❛ You are going to break your promise. ❜

She felt the words as they poured into the apertures of her earlobes, quaking the drums. Had she heard this before? Long ago perhaps, from a different time. Perhaps a time when the deceased was still alive, waiting for someone to save them. And that someone should have been her, could have been her, if she hadn't been so wrapped up in her own bullshit. Her own conscience coming to roost from the residue of her own grief over events long past and out of her control. But it wasn't her own conscience speaking, a person had spoken. Turning fully to Max, giving her her full, undivided attention, amethyst optics bordering a hint of a wisteria hue, wistful and full of regret she would never rectify or have absolution for.

❛ Don't you think I don't know that? You're marching me to the same song and dance I've already heard so many times now. ❜ but she stopped, softening her abrupt tone; she would never be angry at Max, who reminded her in ways of Nikolai. Perhaps she was around the same age as Nik would have been, and it made her long for him to be on this earth once more. If there were no consequences to actions, she would be a qualified necromancer at this point. Black magic ran in the Black familial line ───── irony rang in the depths of the namesake.

[wickedslip]

❛ Don’t look but … I think something is following us. ❜ @soulmateprinciple / Gillian noted.

Growing up in the heart of New Salem, Nausi didn’t like the outskirts of the forest; the path was too close to the roads that led to the mainland, and they were sure to be found out by whoever had been following them. She had the daunting suspicion that it had been witch hunters ---- they always had a keen sense of when there were witches nearby. They had gotten craftier in their years of the hunt and the chase, when before they couldn’t sniff one out to save their lives. Had they really gotten the upper hand on them?

❛ We need to get further in, ❜ her breath hitched. Although autumn was practically knocking on their door, the summer held them by the throat, not wanting the change of the seasons to prevail. Demeter must be in a fist fight with the Lord of the Underworld, she mused. They both had their claim to the daughter of spring and bride of the chthonic realm. The dual goddess didn’t know how to play favorites and waited until the very last minute to descend. Or at least, that’s how the stories went.  

If they kept travelling on foot, they would eventually cross through, and end up at the back end of Rosethorns Estates. She didn’t like the change of pace, and she had a sneaking suspicion there were goings-on at her house. Demetria and Deucalion had been spending an excessive amount of time away from the house, leaving her to her own devices after the passing of Nikolai. It hadn’t been that long, and this little jaunt was the first time that she had gone out of the house willingly. She was sick about not having him there with her, she should have protected him from whatever had happened. She still hadn’t wrapped her mind around it. Something unnatural, but her entire world hadn’t been natural. The days now just rang bleak and unchanging. The only reason she was out and about was Gillian wanted to gather herbs that they didn’t have at the house.

Two sets of gaunt-legged silhouettes traveled, and the shadows grew longer as they day became later. Thick canopies of trees reigned in the distance, and they were headed to the middle of it, moving towards the winding path and the bridge over the moving river that followed. They still had a way to go, but they were making good time.

❛ Come on, it’s not that much further. If they decided to follow us, I could always make them scurry up one of the trees by setting their shoes on fire. ❜

[wickedslip]

“ what’s it saying? ”

Body tilted at an unnatural angle, she came onto the forefront like a witch possessed; raven locks tumbled forward and gleamed in the waxing firelight from the flickering candle. Nausicaa could only sit on the base of her gaunt shins, the upper half of her torso pitched forward, her hands clasped in her lap. Her hyacinth oculars maneuvering the thick slab of board with widened, skeptical eyes. In the light of the flickering flame, they took on the hue of amethyst, with an unnatural illumination.

Taking in letter after letter as the planchette roamed the board, displaying a range of figure eights, she tilted her head up and locked eyes with Christina. ❛ Sometimes these ouija board can have a real smart-assed nature about them, ❜ she mused, slumping slightly as it was nothing pertinent.