#world end gluttony

[enderianmalfoy]

(SPOILERS)

I need to show this cause im so proud of it

[magic2810]

Bro has his name written on his face and was surprised that ildio remembered it

[joydoesathing]

contract

as far as chapter 131 shown, il has indeed (probably) bitten nico in the neck when they made a contract, so.......yes

here's a more accurate version of the picture below:

[servampsideblog]

I could put a billion more hours into this and I'm convinced there's still stuff I'd want to mess with/fix. Unfortunately, I'm not that kind of perfectionist so this is the version you get. :P

[shiirotas]

one MUST consider world end big naturals

[favficbirthdays]

Happy Birthday

Ildio (4th May)

Servamp of Gluttony

[kiwi-the-servamp-addict]

Drew this because I was listening to Too Sweet by Hozier and had this idea that would not let me rest until I drew it.

I'm pretty damn proud of myself because I can't draw backgrounds for shit

[weatherholds]

Gave him a nice pillow before Mahiru caught me -^-

And i finally came back! \(^-^)/

[alizacoleenselibio-blog]

i made my own next gen servamp au

Servamp: Sleepy Ash of Sloth

New Name: Kuro-chan (is the same name mahiru name him)

Eve: sonoku hana

Eve’s Weapon: guitar to ax

Servamp: Old Child of Pride

New Name: Hugh The Dark Algernon iii (same name)

Eve: haru sendgaya

Eve’s Weapon: soccer

Servamp: Doubt Doubt of Envy

New Name: Daku

Eve: yuri alicein

Eve’s Weapon: My Fair Lady name yuu (same lead mikuni)

Servamp: The Mother of Wrath

New Name: Makoto

Eve: Takashi Roki

Eve’s Weapon: motorbike

Servamp: The One and Only Lawless of Greed

New Name: Tokusa

Eve: azami jeklland todoroki

Eve’s Weapon: violin

Servamp: World End of Gluttony

New Name: Michinaga

Eve: Kezeno Kage

Eve’s Weapon: hacking

Servamp: All of Love of Lust

New Name: Yuki

Eve: shinobu alicein

Eve’s Weapon: fan

[inbabylontheywept]

Kartchner Caverns

The first time I traveled to Tucson I was in a car full of zooted children. I would've preferred being one of those children, but alas, any medication that makes me sleep also makes me sleepwalk. And after an incident where I tried to climb out of the car while it was still going sixty (thank God for seatbelts), I was condemned to a childhood of car trip sobriety: No more poor-man's time travel. No more ambien. One less morally ambiguawesome parenting decision from my crazy-ass dad.

I was talking with him when it happened.

I can't remember exactly what we were talking about - something to do with our final destination in Mexico. But at some point, we woke up my little brother. 

(Nothing good happens from waking the dreamer. Best case scenario, the dream ends. Worst case, it doesn't.)

I remember starting when I felt one of his small cold hands reach up to grab my shoulder. Our dad did the same, and it jerked the car a little bit - startling someone whose hands are on the steering wheel has its risks. Dad and I both turned to look at him, but he wasn't even looking at us. He was leaning over the console, staring into the red and purple sunset ahead, watching the rolling skyline of Tucson like it was drowning in dreams. Like he was drowning in dreams. 

We waited for him to speak. It took a while. Normal social conventions don't apply to people when they're unconscious. The fact that he could talk was just some broken line code in the fabric of the world. 

"Wow," he said at long last. 

"Beautiful, isn't it?" my dad replied. And my little brother shook his head like he just heard the silliest thing in the world. 

"It's terrible," he said. "Awful. Is Mexico always like this?" 

"We're still in America," my dad said back. 

My little brother squinted into the sunset, doubt and derision etched into his face. After a few seconds, both emotions softened, and he nodded in wonder. 

"Eagle feathers," he said, chuckling softly. Like he'd just solved some clever little riddle. Then he fell like an angel into something deeper than sleep. 

𓆙𓆙𓆙

(There is a word for angels that fall.)

𓆙𓆙𓆙

The second time I went to Tucson, I hid from the sun. 

You'd be surprised how easy it is to do down there. Society accommodates it in ways you just won't find anywhere else. When it's 109 outside with single digit humidity, of course you stay indoors. Of course the outdoor markets open at 6 pm, and of course they don't close until 11. Of course. You make the sun mean enough, and everyone becomes a vampire. 

So I roamed the streets at night, kicking up red gravel, watching coyotes wander in between the sea of strip malls. Strip malls are such an Arizonan atrocity. Nobody bothers to build up because there’s nothing to be gained from density. The city will never be walkable, because the problem isn’t infrastructure. It's the sun. And you can't solve the sun, so you might as well lean into driving. Mash the whole city flat and crawl through the dust like rattlers. 

(I met a man once, by the canals, that said the strip malls were some sort of American curse upon the inheritors of Johnny Appleseed. There's one God in this world, he said, and it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone. So this is our hell.)

Still. It made the days long down there. Lurking at night and hiding all day gives you something like cabin fever. I needed something to do outside. Something that was outside, but also, somehow, inside. What's inside and outside at the same time? What kind of klein-flask ouroboros nonsense fits that bill?

Kartchner caverns. 

𓆙𓆙𓆙

I wouldn't say the caves were like walking into Dante's hell - more like finishing the journey. At some point in my life, I'd blown past limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, and anger. I'd spent two decades plus change living in the fires of heresy. Every layer past would only get colder. 

And each step into that cave did. 

My tour guide and psychopomp was a friendly old man. Familiar in the way that all old people feel familiar to me. I view the world more as a pile of metaphors. He viewed it primarily as water-soluble minerals. 

It was a good work dynamic. 

"These here," he said, gesturing to a long, slender series of impossibly frail stalactites, "are called soda straws."

They were beautiful. I can wax poetic at the keyboard, but in real life, my exclamation of wonder is primarily Hot Damn.

"Hot damn," I said, and he nodded good naturedly. 

"They're pretty fun aren't they? Took a few eons to make 'em but I think it was worth the wait."

I was charmed by the way he talked. I knew it was just a fluke of tenses, but there was something funny about the way he described them - as if he personally oversaw each of the dainty little spires. We went further, and he pointed out more formations as we came across them. 

"Behold!" he said just a few feet further. "Fried eggs!" 

And I had to admit: There were fried eggs. 

"Behold!" he said further still. "A shield!"

And lo, there was a shield. It didn't look terribly shieldlike, but who knows - maybe he made the shields first and got better as he went along. The eggs were beautiful.

We kept walking, deeper, and deeper into the cave. At the surface, it had been hot enough for my sweat to dry into a stinging white powder. Down there it was cold enough to see my breath. The feeling of descending into hell was replaced with the feeling of being swallowed by some ancient, fossilized snake. 

"We call this serpent-stone," he said, gesturing to an expanse of wall. 

And then all I could see was the snake that was swallowing me. 

Now, I want to bring something up right about now. At this point, you might be tempted to write off the unease that I was feeling as claustrophobia. Which would make sense - caves unsettle a lot of people. But not me. I'm borderline claustrophilic. When I was a child, I didn't feel comfortable reading until I was wedged somewhere. Behind a shelf, or in a cabinet, or even underneath the beanbag my parents had intended for sitting. Those were my happy places. I liked being crammed into tight spaces. 

I did not like that cave. 

The section of serpent-stone narrowed the further we went. The room started off maybe six feet wide, but eventually it narrowed down. First to five, then four, then three. Two. And it didn’t stop at one. 

The old man put me in front at that point. Said that if I got stuck, he could just push me forward. Didn't occur to me until I'd gone another hundred feet forward, sideways, that maybe getting dragged out would be better. But I was strangely reluctant to bring it up. I’d already let myself get cornered. There was nothing to be gained from letting him know my thoughts. 

But the only way to keep them secret was by going forward. So I poured myself through the crack, slick as slip.  

There's a grain to the scales of serpent-stone, both in the shape of the formations and in the texture of the individual pieces. They're metamorphic, but there's enough sediment left to ‘em that they have a grain. They bite when you go one way, and slide when you go the other. It felt like I was ratcheting myself in. Even if I could slip forward more, I didn't think I could go back. Not without wearing myself down into something skinless and screaming. 

Water began to pool up in sections. It was cold enough to avoid the stink that still waters normally carry, but things stranger than algae festered in the waters beneath my feet. The puddles felt thick, almost slimy. A dozen steps later I saw little ropes of the stuff trickling down my feet. 

Eventually, it got so narrow I couldn't turn my head. I could still hear the old man behind me, but only through little things - the occasional sharp inhale, or steps just an eighth of a beat off from my own. But never words. I remember stopping at one point, just to get pushed, just to know he was there. And he refused. All I heard for fifteen minutes was his breathing behind me. 

He'd called my bluff. There was nowhere to go but forward. 

𓆙𓆙𓆙

I don't know why it took so long to get dark down there. I wasn't carrying a flashlight, and if the old man had been carrying one, I'd have seen it bob with his steps. There was a sort of soft glow to everything but that had faded hour by hour. Eventually it didn't matter that I couldn't turn my head sideways - I wouldn't have been able to see the man if he'd been two inches in front of me. I walked, and I walked, and I walked, and just when I was about to get stuck for real - stuck in a way where I wouldn't be able to step forward, where I'd have to be pushed (or dragged back along the sharpness of the scales) - I popped out of the serpent stone crevasse like a cork from a bottle. 

Plunk. 

I can't tell you the relief that I felt at that moment. It didn't matter that I didn't know where I was, or how I got there. I'd never been claustrophobic in my life, but at that moment, I couldn't stand even the proximity of the crevice. I scrambled forward, stumbling over the rough cave floor, desperate and eager to find the next wall. To get some sense of where I was. 

I never did. Even as I calmed down, even as the relief of being free of that infernal vice sat upon me like a crown, I never found another wall. Anywhere. I walked until fear made me crawl, as low and blind as any worm. I crawled until my pants tore and my knees bled and my spine ached. 

And I found nothing. 

When the vastness of the space truly sank in, when I realized that leaving that first wall had been a mistake, I turned back. But some choices can't be unmade. There were no walls. Not anymore. No matter how far I crawled, how hard I tried, there was no end. There was nothing but perfect darkness, broken stone, and endless snaking trickles of cold cavern water. 

I dipped a finger in one of the rivulets. Just to feel it. Just to ground myself in something. I felt the waters slither past, and I found something like sight in their motion. 

Water always goes down. Whatever else I lacked down here in the stone, in that moment, I knew up and down. And for the first time in hours, I had a choice. A real choice. No instinct or panic or too late realizations: Up or down. 

I went down. 

𓆙𓆙𓆙

I’d visited a rope factory once. Watched the threads dance and spin and weave into something mighty. I got a blind man’s sense of that from my trickle. I felt it meet more of its kind, braiding into them like thread. I liked pretending it was still my rivulet, but eventually, I had to admit it was lost in the mess. Picking out one thread from a rope would be easy, compared to picking out one trickle from a river. 

Funny how water can drown in itself. 

The first contaminant to the water was iron. I could smell it in the air -  strong as blood. It should have unsettled me, but I’d smelled water like that before. My grandpas well-water stained everything it touched rusty red. His sinks, his showers, his fields. Even his teeth. He was wealthy enough that he could've wiped the stains off decades back, but he told me once that he liked the way it made other people uncomfortable. The way it reminded everyone who saw him smile that by sacrament or soil, they too drank of god. 

The next contaminant was the thick water from before. Apparently, the stagnant pools weren’t as still as I’d thought. Somehow, over strange eons, they too could seep through the stone and make their way into this deep river. It was scentless, but I could feel it catch around my ankles on some steps. It seemed like a memory from a different life. I just didn’t feel like the same person that crawled through the serpent-stone crack. I was just some stranger wearing his shed skin. 

Then at long last came a smell of deep sulphur 🜏. It was an odd contrast with the sharply cold air, and the strangely warm waters. It was the least pleasant of the bunch, but I endured it well. I followed until the tears streaming down my cheeks felt as normal as breathing. Until the rush of the river was replaced by the pounding of waves. 

I’d arrived on a beach. I couldn’t see the ocean in front of me, but I could hear how vast it had to be. There was a terrible stench, worse than the sulphur - the smell of some vast death. Godly carrion. A wound in the world long left to fester. 

I sat there on the beach of that ocean. Afraid to let those dark waters touch me. Thinking and waiting and worrying about what would happen next. 

A voice spoke just twenty feet behind me. I recognized it. I never would’ve recognized it before, but there was a knack to the way this place wore me thin. Like a razor getting sharpened instead of a shirt going ratty. 

“You’re very close,” the old man said, and I remembered him from all those years ago - sitting cross-legged in the moonlight by the bank of the canal. Looking up at me, eyes dark, and calling me over to tell me a secret. 

There's one God in this world, he said then. One God. And it's the god of don't-eat-apples. But then we invented apple pie and gave it to everyone. 

So this is our hell.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

I turned around. I don’t know why. I shouldn’t have been able to see him. I shouldn’t have been able to see anything. But I could see the outline of where he was on that shoreline. Not as a  bright thing, but as a darker shade of absence. A little hole in the dark. 

I could have run. But that would’ve required taking my eyes off him, and at that moment I couldn’t bear the thought. He was the only thing to see down there. The only reason I had eyes. But somehow, more important than the joy of seeing was the feeling that as long as I kept my eyes on him, he was trapped. Pinned to this world like a butterfly on cork. 

There was a half second pause. The voice was a memory, but seeing through the gaps was new to me. The thing in front of me wasn’t an old man. It wasn’t even good at pretending. I was oddly embarrassed that I’d ever been fooled by it. What I was looking at was something older than this cave. Something trapped down here so long it could not bear the thought of light. The dream of something dead. The sloughed skin of a snake. 

The first apple eater. 

I could see shades of absence. More than the hole in the dark. I could look at the thing and feel the place where its wings should have been. Its first ones, at least. 

It lunged for me. 

I’d forgotten it could do that. 

It slammed into me like the water from the bottom of a dam. The power was nothing compared to the cold. I couldn’t see a thing, but what I could feel made bile climb up my throat. 

It was melting. Running down itself in little streams, like snow melting in the sun. Like the river I followed all the way down here. A hand ran over my face and I could feel it pouring into me, and in my fury I did the only thing I could think of: I reached up, and I wrapped my hands around its neck, and I clenched so hard that I could feel the tendons in my wrist sawing up through my skin, taut as piano wire. 

It was like squeezing wet clay. It deformed under my touch, stretching longer and thinner and smoother even as the muscular length of his impossibly long body wrapped around me. At some point the fists beating on my chest turned into wings. Stolen wings, to replace the ones that were stolen from it, and there was a scream in the cave it was so awful that I prayed it wasn’t mine. 

It was a terrible race. We were killing each other the same way. There was no question about someone dying here in front of the empty throne of god. I just didn’t want it to be me. 

Eventually, it could stretch no more, and my hands could crush more than just nightmare and shadow. The wings beat on me weaker, and weaker, until eventually some cartilage in its great neck snapped under the pressure of my thumbs.

It was like cracking a glow stick. There was a flash of light, brief as thunder, and I could see the waves in front of me. An ocean of rotting meat and bones. The outline of some great, dead serpent, fifty feet tall. And a tower of dead bodies, stretching back to ages that I could not recognize. The only corpses I could recognize were those at the top, with their strange helmets and iconic breastplates. 

Conquistadors. 

When the light went out, the body went with it. Most dreams don’t leave anything behind. Even when they’re made by gods. 

𓆙𓆙𓆙

I don’t know how I left the cave. 

I followed the river up. At some point, it stopped being the river I followed down. The tributaries feeding into it spread out like a fan, and fool that I am, I kept picking left. It shouldn’t have worked. Part of me wonders if I somehow bent the river to my will. Filled in for the dead thing bobbing in the lake, or the echo that I strangled on that starless shore. 

Or maybe I just got lucky. 

I can remember finally breaching the incline and seeing an exit into the desert. Not the one I stepped in through, but good enough. I can remember getting closer and closer, before stepping out into the burning sun. I thought it was finally over.

I thought wrong.  

I can remember looking into the bright blue sky and seeing exactly what my little brother saw on that drive all those years back. 

I don’t know what I killed down in the cave. Some dead thing in the dark, dreaming it was alive. An altar of blood and bone, designed to hold a fragment. 

But the real thing sat there in the sky. Curled up so tight and so smooth, you could mistake it for a ball. Waiting, and watching, and hating. Alive but dreaming death. The mould that stamped out the form of what lay in the cave. 

Quetzalcoatl, I learned later. The feathered serpent. 

I moved the month after that. Went somewhere north, somewhere cold, somewhere that a snake wouldn’t follow. Most days now, I look up, and I just see the sun. A flaming ball of gas. A little, red, star. 

But only most.

𓆙𓆙𓆙

𓆙𓆙𓆙

𓆙𓆙𓆙

𓆙𓆙𓆙

𓆙𓆙𓆙 𓇳

Thanks to @qsatisfaction and @foldingfittedsheets for being my editors on this piece. And thanks to @dr-robert-chase-apologist for providing the prompt.

[undeadentropy]

Major spoilers for dungeon meshi ahead, but I really wanna talk about it.

I really love how the demon is handled. It's not just simply evil. Like every other character in the series, it's motives make perfect sense in context. What happened is one of my favorite ideas to play with in fiction. We all know about cosmic horror, and the madness that comes from perceiving their reality. And the demon, being an infinite being from another dimension, certainly is that. And it does spread chaos in its wake. Infinite mana destroys those who wield it in the end. They become foie gras.

But the truth is that it went both ways. The demon was corrupted by a finite world, where once you eat, once your desires are fulfilled, that's it. Things end. The demon is driven mad by consuming desire, by coming to understand this eldritch place it found itself in. It wished for a paradise where desires are forever fulfilled and it could feast forever. It's infinite mind couldn't accept the limitations of mortal existence. It was never equipped to understand hunger, nor could it ever be filled.

Just like a lone traveler who feasts with the fey, it couldn't go back to the way things were before. It needed more, and the only way to do that was to consume everything, forever.

It might hate Laios for what he did, but he saved it from an eternity of unsated gluttony. Bringing everyone to its realm was doomed to fail. For an infinite being, even all life won't be enough to satisfy. That how infinity works. And that's not getting into the fact that this was the only way to defeat the demon without stripping magic away from the world forever. The demon might just figure out just what a favor Laios did for it, though it might be centuries later. Recovery from addiction is never easy.

Anyway, I just think the way they handled it was neat. Alien is purely subjective. The demon was no more prepared for the mortal world than the mortal world was for it.

[taelophone]

Teeth n Tongue

⟡ — Thinking about reader with an oral fixation…

At first, he notices your habit of biting and chewing on the tips of your pens or the wood of your pencil. Your teeth would gnash and grind against the material— a sound he found to be rather unpleasant at times.

Then it’s lollipops and long-lasting candies like jawbreakers and ring pops. The rainbow confectioneries would gloss your lips with pops and shimmers of color, drawing his attention right towards your lips every time you spoke to him.

And when candy wasn’t enough, he started tossing chewelry your way, held around your neck by a black or white elastic tie and a pretty pink clasp. Originally he got it for you as a joke— giggling like a child as he handed you the silicone bone like it was a sword forged from the fires of Vulcan himself.

“I thought this was funny…I’m sure you’ll enjoy it though,” he’d say, tossing you the silicone-skeletal necklace and not expecting you to use it.

But his world turned upside down when he saw you perched on the couch with your lips wrapped around the northern end of your murky white necklace and a little red handkerchief tied around your neck to save your cotton shirt from the oncoming drool that came from your jaw‘s constant work.

He’d be incredibly rude if he didn’t provide his darling girlfriend with the stimulation she clearly so desperately needed.

Pants and heavy moans filled the living room; the sticky, sloppy, slippery sounds of sexual frustration and overstimulation echoed off the walls as Luigi bullied his fat dick through your plush walls.

“Lu—! Luigi..” you panted, his hand pushing your legs as close to your chest as your anatomy would allow while his thumb began to force entry into your mouth.

“Fuck…Shh, let me hear her,” he grunted, trying not to cum on the spot as your tongue attacked the pad of his thumb.

Soon his thumb departed from your lips, a string of silvery and shiny saliva left behind before he pushed his pointer, middle, and ring finger right back into your hot and humid maw. Greedy with gluttony, you eagerly accepted the oral stimulation as his fingers pressured against your pink tongue.

The slick slapping sounds that filled the room almost blocked out the sinful symphony of your lips greedily sucking on your boyfriend's fingers. The ivory bone sat neatly between your collarbones, a saccharine sign of just how much Luigi would always love your mouth and the things it could do.

[nataliesscatorccio]

there's a message in yellowjackets that really resonates, about what it looks like to "overcome" trauma. you live through something indescribable, you're "rescued" from that thing, and you have a grace period. how long? a week? a month? a year? how long before the world stops giving you grace, how long before the world expects you to give them a pretty little story with a happy little ending so they can stop feeling weird when they look at you, for the way what you've been through makes them feel? how long before you have to be a wife and mother to prove you're fine, or a successful politician, or a respectable nurse. or, how long before they want to see you in the psych ward or rehab so they can frown and ooh and ahh at your failure to assimilate back into a world you can no longer see in the same light? they don't want to help you. they want to watch you. they want to make a feel-good story out of you. a quippy headline. and if they can't, they'll make you their cautionary tale. if you can give them neither, you'd better hide yourself away. everybody asks "what really happened out there?" what was it like how did it feel what did you have to do to survive it? and the answer is there is no answer. it is still happening. it is happening every night in your dreams, it is happening every time you look in the mirror, it is happening over and over and over again forever. hitting the "recovery milestones"–the socially acceptable You Did It life markers such as a successful career, a successful family, a successful whatever the fuck–meeting those marks isn't for you. you don't see the merit in those things anymore. and why would you? you know a different way of living now. it's for the audience who wants to be placated by your okayness or entertained by your insanity, and will not rest until you've given them one or the other. the wilderness may have taken indiscriminately, cruelly, violently. but society is worse. that's the difference between hunger and gluttony. you ate your friends to survive. they are eating you to throw you up to eat you again to complain about how unpalatable you are now. and then they still ask for more.

[max1461]

I don't think it really "means" anything, but I think it's kind of interesting that a lot of human societies have been quite squeamish about sex—in particular viewing it as a worldly pleasure which is gross, sinful, or unvirtuous to engage in—while generally not feeling squeamish about eating in the same way.

I think this is interesting because, conceptually, sex is actually pretty tame. It is (or at least should be) pleasurable for both parties, it's connected with both romantic love and the creation of new life (things which people generally valorize), etc. Obviously I understand the practical reasons why cultures might frown on unrestrained expression of sexuality in a world without birth control, but on a purely conceptual level sex seems pretty wholesome all around.

On the other hand, eating is rather disturbing as an idea, isn't it? Eating necessarily involves killing—even eating plants. As heterotrophs we literally cannot eat anything without ending life in order to do it. And of course most people now and throughout history have eaten meat, which means that eating involves slaughter. It's a gruesome thing; the pleasure we take from food is intimately and inherently tied to death. Eating is an act of destruction which is necessary to nourish the physical body. Surely this should be regarded, by the sorts of people inclined to the idea, as the greatest symbol of the fallen nature of the material world as compared to the spiritual. Surely it is hunger and not lust that should be the archetype of sinful material desire.

While ascetics of various backgrounds do seem to have mentioned gluttony (it is after all one of the seven deadly sins), my impression is that usually lust is a much greater concern for them. Why? Because lust is more tempting, a greater threat? I don't think so. I think it's because food is more tempting. Because you can go a lifetime without sex if you actually decide to, but a few days without food and your brain will basically shut down your capacity for higher reasoning and make you eat. Even when desire for food is railed against, it is generally merely excessive desire (gluttony), and not, as with lust, desire-at-all (hunger). I think only the most hardcore Buddhist monks take umbrage with hunger. Because lust is small potatoes; hunger has us all in its thrall. No matter how pacifistic we think ourselves to be, hunger drives us to kill and kill and kill. Isn't there a little more inherent horror in that than in, uh, people having sex?

At least the Jains seem to have taken the inherent-horror-in-eating stuff seriously.

[favficbirthdays]

Happy Birthday

Ildio (4th May)

Servamp of Gluttony

[kiwi-the-servamp-addict]

I love Ildio.