Each day brings with it a new adventure, a new speck of land to be explored and discovered. The gargoyle has taken on the task of exploration with gusto, but alas, she's not doing a particularly good job of it. She has kept herself strictly to the places she knows, but today is different. Today, there's quite a crowd gathered, and that can only mean one thing - Kaos.
Whenever Kaos is here, misery and death usually follows. Oizys is rather proud that she was vindicated in her knowledge that he was Bad News, but that won't bring her mother back and it certainly won't make her any happier to be in this godforsaken place. She'd give anything to be back home, where her bond with Ker isn't constantly fluctuating between loud and nonexistent, where her magic works properly and doesn't shock her sorry ass whenever she uses it. She hates it here, yet she knows deep down that she can never go back. This is it. This is where she needs to survive. She lurks at the back of the crowd, her leonine tail swinging nervously behind her as she waits to see what Bullshitamoa has in store for them this time. |
ALERIE
It shouldn't come as a surprise that she would want to spend every waking moment near her mother but there is no denying that her grandma's experience makes her more nurturing and attentive than Naerys. Staying with Alysanne wasn't so bad, not with Mika available to play with but it wasn't mother. So when mother left and allowed her to tag along, the filly joyously followed; prancing and kicking a majority of the way. Perhaps it was her silliness that slowed them down or perhaps it was her smaller stride, either way she'd never know the irritation flooding her mother's heart. Instead she is blissful in her ignorance, thrilled about this sudden outing. Where are they going? What will they see? Alerie sticks close to her mother, eyes of ocean and ice taking everything in only to forget most of the details moments later when something else caught her attention. So distracted is she by everything else that she hardly notices the sudden increase in voices or that her mother suddenly ceased to move. When her gaze shifts forward, she cringes at how close she is to her mother's rear legs. Gangly limbs flail as she attempts to backpedal, managing only to succeed in falling upon her bottom in an awkward sit. She snorts softly then peers around her mother's larger form in attempt to see what had caused this particular chain of events. What she discovers, though, is something rather intriguing; a vast number of new faces, only one so extraordinarily different that it pulls her in. Naive and innocent as she is, she lifts herself back onto her dainty hooves and soon the leggy filly slips quietly to her mother's side - but only long enough for her mother to notice her presence and then become distracted with other things. After a few moments pass, the chocolate and white filly quietly slips away - practically crawling underneath mother's belly just to find an open space to pick her way unnoticed between the bodies. She inches close to the river, near the unique face in the crowd; the ever-changing face of Kisamoa. Her lack of knowledge and fear allow her to peer innocently and curiously at the strange lights he places. Curious but silent, the filly merely watches; ignorant of the panic likely building in mother's chest. one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star |
Stands closer to the river and Kisamoa like a curious derp.
He drove the bonelight into the river, before moving towards the bank. Otem kept chewing the boy out. It was...touching, he decided. He felt his lips curve into his version of a smile—lopsided and disconcerting, as if his entire face was about to slide off his skull. "Thank you, Otem," he breathed as he loomed behind her and Varuna, ignoring the young boy for now. He had no desire to argue. He needed to keep his focus.
Slowly, he reached down, and righted the upturned bonelight. It was still whole, fortunately, and he placed it with care.
An audience wasn't necessary for this, and that was why he had not called them, but he had still counted on them to come. And one, one of those who had escaped to Helovia only to be returned to the fold, spoke up, but he seemed more curious than condescending. Kisamoa's teal eyes flickered to him, and he paused for a moment before answering. Perhaps, they would need the knowledge to navigate the Scint in the future. "The bonelights are tools," he simply said. "And the river, you can jump across in places. There used to be a tree, you could carve a warding sign from it, and the spirits would let you walk across once, and then the ward would crack. But I don't—I haven't seen them. Perhaps, they do not grow here anymore." He tried to not let the distress he felt at the thought leak into his voice. The Rift was changed enough as it was, just in the few years the Gods had been dead and he missing—it had been warped and twisted and full of dangers for decades, maybe even centuries, but this? This was a whole new level of wrong and he never knew what to make of it, and neither did the Gods, so for the most part, he just ignored it.
He was good at ignoring things. "No," he answered Kiada, his voice soft. Zèklè stood next to her, and.. and he felt something twist in his heart, just a little. He had come, and. Kisamoa swallowed. He had warned him, and the Rift was warning him, but.. No more games, no more death. He had to try. "Yes," he said, sadly, for there was nothing else to say.
But he heard them, their voices twining with the whispers, curling around his heart like poison and doubt; the glances thrown at the bonelights, the odds calculated, did not escape him. Off-hand comments about eating mothers and killing friends, reminders of every perceived wrong he had committed to save his world. His heart picked up.
They wanted to be angry, to howl out their disdain and hatred, to let it spill like black-and-teal death from his mouth, a tide to smother them—an eye for an eye until they had built themselves new bodies from them, and once more walked their fucking lands.
But they were dead. He wished he could just drop them in the river, but they weren't the kind of dead things that stayed properly dead.
So they stayed in the half-existence, bits of a whole, filled with rage.
He strode back into the river, into the storm of power; the wind howled around his ears, tugged at his tangled, matted hair, a halo of black thorns crowning him for a moment. In the distance, he heard the thunder roar. He felt the ground beneath him quiver and shake; massive waves crashed onto the shore far away, and the specters in the Labyrinth were frenzied. The entire Rift tensed, and Kisamoa stood in the center death's power, nostrils flaring, breathing in the charged air. This was it.
It was now or never.
Kisamoa buried his doubts, and spoke the words aloud.
"להעלות את המתים."
And the world erupted into chaos. The ground quaked, deep rents opening, and white, blinding light blazed out of them—and with the light, the spirits crawled out of their graves, called by the patterns he had laid.
kaos in light
There isn't exactly any posting order, so just post as much as you like. :]
There will be a few posts from the spirits shortly, but you may post whenever you like!
The second, however, was not.
It was wild chaos; of a power so great and alien that the young god—for Kisamoa was young, even if those four he came from were not—had no hope of harnessing. A single form leapt from the patterns created by the bonelights. This one was eager—was it even a soul Kis had summoned? Not yet shedding the anonymity of death, the soul that had no place in this realm lunged towards the the foal whose mouth was marked by unearthly glowing that shrouded all the bonelights.
An unearthly scream split through the air, heard as much with the mind as with the ears. It rang and rang…and then it stopped. But it was not alone; oh no, more appeared from beyond the veil.
For touching the bonelights when Kis asked not to, Varuna's mouth and jaws now appear to be a glowing and skeletal.
darya87.deviantart.com |
tae
,eivom kcochctiH a fo dne eht m'I
gnivieced tol a dna krad elttil A Although the mandible-marked mare would never quite possess her mother's intimidating presence, Tae had become in death what she had always bordered on in life: a ghost. Now however it did not take adrenaline or emotion to make her skin melt away into whispy vapour, nor was this in any way an illusion as it had been in life. This was not passive magic as the Helovian's had taken to calling it. This was fucking death, and the look of tortured and prolonged pain evident in Tae's ghostly-white gaze was also very real. "NNNRRRGGGAHH!!!" The phantom screeched. Tae's bones seem to hang somewhere in between being attached by muscle and sinew, and being held together by bits of ethereal plasma. Unlike her mother, Tae's flanks did heave noticeably back and forth, and with each laboured breath maggots seemed to be expelled between the places where her ribs should have been, but where a wall of cloud-like white was instead. Eyes that appeared to be able to see rolled in the mare's mandible-marked skull as she too rounded on Zero. "WHERE IS SHE." Tae roared, wings flying from her flanks as the sound of rabid barking canines erupted from somewhere behind her, as if her wolves were still somehow tethered to her. White eyes, glazed over with malice and outright rage swerved briefly to Volterra (he was really the only one other than her brother and her mother that she recognized, before fixating back on her smallish sibling) . "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH GRUSHA." |
Isopia
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
|
She had sworn she would appear wherever Kaos did, and though it wasn't the easiest promise to keep, Erthë thought she was doing fairly well in keeping it. From what she knew she had not yet failed to find him. There was nothing she could do to make him go away again, of course, not yet, but she told herself that if she just kept watching him and remained vigilant, a witness to all his crimes, she would one day be able to find a way to vanquish him from this world and every other.
Speaking of crimes, here he was; at it again, as if he had learned nothing from the past. Horror clutched at her senses with poisoned claws where she circled above the gathered crowd, her face a pale mask of dread and disbelief at what the fool of a god was doing. She could see the pattern he had drawn with the foul markers, or rather the lack of pattern, and she felt the foul taint of the powers he set in motion even as his ritual brought the dead back to life.
"Fool!" she screamed at Kisamoa, voice trembling and nearly breaking as she saw them emerge from the river. She knew them, some of them, and it felt as though her heart would break all over again when she heard Isopia's familiar drawl address the demon. "Have you not done enough harm already? Is it not enough that you killed them, must you disturb them in death as well!?"
The little mare tugged her wings sharply towards the sides and dove madly towards the ever-changing god, too incensed by the atrocity he committed upon the souls of those he had slain to care about her own fate. Like a vicious seagull the little mare swooped down upon him, then angled herself up and around so that she might do it again. There was no plan behind it, no reasoning or hope of success, just a feral desire to hurt him for this.
That she in turn would probably get hurt was of no consequence. It would be a small price to pay for disrupting this ritual of his. Oh, if only her bow still worked...
I'm on the wrong side of heaven and the righteous side of hell
this is a shit show.
otem
You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley You can tell the sun in his jealous sky when we walked in fields of gold Kaos thanks her, and for a moment the oak-marked filly thinks that perhaps the metaphorical swelling heart of the Grinch is not a metaphor, for she is fairly confident that within her own chest, her own tiny grinch-like heart is also swelling. Pride and recognition surged like a wave inside of the girl, and Otem's mind also hastily supplied a great deal of optimism into the mix as well. But Otem didn't have time to baste in Kaos' brief acknowledgement of her before everything went straight and utterly to hell. Or rather it all came from hell, presumably. Otem watched horror-struck as Ampere (a mare she really hadn't known well at all back in the Throat), appeared in a wicked fury of sparks and undead rage. The blue ghost's anger was directed towards Zero (her pseudo step-father, she supposed), and Otem took a hasty step backwards from the river and Varuna to try and distance herself from the scene unfolding. The filly was glad that she did, for Ampere was soon joined by her daughter, also seemingly intent upon Zero. Before Otem could think about any further reactions (should she sent her earth spirits to help? was Kaos going to intervene? could the ghosts even hurt him?), her mother appeared. Her mother appeared. Her mother appeared. Her mother appeared. Her mother appeared. She couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. Words left her. Thoughts left her. Time slowed. Or maybe it sped up. Did the air grow colder? Was the world spinning? Was this real? Would- But Isopia hadn't even turned towards her, nor to Vulkán or Mauna, or Volterra or Zero. She turned to Kaos. Otem wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to faint, and run away, and run towards Isopia and hit her and hug her and tell her to leave and ask her to stay. But all she could do was watch and listen. It was Erthe actually who broke Otem out of her reverie. Clearly it was something that Kaos had done to bring her mother here, Isopia's scolding had confirmed that, and now Erthe (a mare who had seemed so calm and kind when Otem had first met her), was now attacking him. Isopia might not have looked at her yet, but she would. She had to. Even though Otem had no illusions about her mother's almost sterile emotional nature, she would say something when she could. If she could. With the sort of scream that only a child can manage, Otem shrieked at Erthe and hastily bound forward. "STOP IT". The words flew from her lips in such a high frequency she might have broken glass. Each word was punctuated by spittle which was ejected by the urgency of the air leaving her lungs. Two earth sprites appeared, belching thick black smoke from their silent mouths as they flew towards Erthe, their bodies defensively spread to protect Kaos if they could. "DON'T. YOU'LL MAKE THEM GO-" The last word died as it left her lips, for her tiny body was so exhausted from the emotional uproar and magical energy that for a moment stars filled her vision and she felt very light headed. Staggering slightly, Otem turned moiste eyes towards her mother, as if her stare could somehow fix the demi-goddess in place. "Mom please", she sobbed, mucus dripping from her nose slightly as tears rushed down her cheeks. Her voice was broken with emotion and longing and need. Her body ached to be held, her ears screamed to hear a word or two from Isopia directed their way, and her heart broke at the implications of Isopia's words. We are beyound your control. That could only mean they weren't staying. They weren't staying. She wasn't staying. Otem would have to watch her mother leave again. "Mom.." The word was a pitiful sigh of her heart to be looked at, held, loved. |
WAY TO GO CHARKS. CLEARLY NO ONE WANTED TO FOLLOW THAT.
Otem tries to protect Kaos from