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.
08-14-2017, 09:50 PM (This post was last modified: 08-14-2017, 09:53 PM by Alerie.)
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.
He heard them gather. He did not know why they had come, but he suspected it had something to do with curiosity—it was a powerful thing, and damning. He paused for a moment, a small bonelight clutched in his shifting mouth, held by his soft lips and not his sharp teeth, and watched them as they gathered on the bank. White foam rose around his shadowy fetlocks. Curiosity, indeed, and resentment, for a young colt saw fit to uproot a bonelight before Otem stopped him. Kisamoa heaved a sigh. Good thing foals did not have teeth.
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.
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 first wave of chaos was manageable for the god of the same namesake. it was wild, it shook the earth, it blinded with shockingly bright light along the drenched riverbank.
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.
It ended in noise and confusion and chaos.
Then there was silence.
A silence that persevered for an impossible amount of time; impossible to tell the time, but it did stop. Just now, when all the noise and the confusion and the Kaos came rushing back in. It swirled around her, lifted her up and carried her back out, like the tide. It was unceremonious, it was rough, and it was wet.
She lifted, glistening, from the stream of souls, tears impossible to discern from the ectoplasm droplets that dripped off every fold.
Ampere the Mother of Companions was reborn.
Her body, previously cleaved into dust and teal, was reorganized and restructured with almost tender care. Like a glass vase that had shattered though, whatever fragments were rendered together once more, were always visible; fissures raced like lightning streaks across the forever imperfect surface. Her gaps, her splinters, her holes were actually held together with electricity, a testament to her nature as much as her disrepair. It rolled across the darkness of her hide, snarled out in erratic arcs from the depths of her being, and hissed at the edges of her stern features. What once had been a blue light that matched her coat, however, was tinged an all too familiar teal, and that seemed to rankle with wrongness more than it normally would have, given different circumstances.
Gently her remade form was placed from the water's depths onto the shore with the onlookers. It was there, as her hooves finally made contact with soil, with the Rift, that she seemed to notice them. Stormhewn mane tousled against her nape as her head lifted, electric gaze rising from the wildness of her mismatched face to cut down the crowd with a disconcerting heaviness. The blue of her eyes seemed to remain, windows to the soul; though a glint of teal would streak past at just the right angle.
She did not blink. Her flanks, if they heaved with breath, did so unnoticeably. Her heart did not flutter, even as she tilted her attention to a familiar figure(s).
A slow smile began to creep along the edges of her lips, just enough to show teeth, before her tongue parted her maw and a raspy, yet very Ampere-voice slid forth with, "Zeroooo."
Around her lightning snapped at the air and curled like steam against her form. Her smile didn't stop growing, and the further her lips bunched up and pulled taut against one another, the more her teeth exposed themselves, shiny with saliva and damnation. A short, low laugh rolled crookedly from her chest.
Ampere had died with fear in her breast and anger in her blood - much the way she had lived. It seemed to roil inside of her now, a rancor that never quite dissipated from the core of her being, returned now just as she was. Though, something about all of this seemed to suggest that even if Ampere had rested in peace, this raw fury would have still settled in her stomach. It curdled like old milk and sloshed against her innards, coating everything with a spiteful froth.
Noise.
Confusion.
KAOS.
Her feathers flared around her, wreathing her head like a dark halo lit up with unnaturally colored electricity, right before she charged at Zekle.
,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) .
A sound, not unlike the groaning of ice, rumbles softly from the bank of the Scint. A stone, unnoticed and unremarkable begins to lightly shake, as if its very atoms have begun to vibrate a great deal more than they are meant to. And indeed they are, for something metaphysically impossible is occurring within the rock; something forbidden by physics. But the natural laws have not been around forever, and as Kaos well knows, there are forces far older than them which still linger near the folds of the universe.
The sound comes again and light begins to pour through the stone. It begins strong and glows with a warm light that is reminiscent of candles on a fur tree. But quickly the light begins to warp and fade. Instead of shining through as light tends to do, it begins to fall as if made of water (or in this case, something far thicker and more viscous). Now it is like a mucus, pungent and horrible. It sludges down the rock, cracking it apart and then splashing into the river soundlessly. A noise comes from inside the rock now, like the stifling of a (scream) yawn. And, just as her father had so many times before, the daughter of the earth seemed to birth herself from inside of the granite sphere. There stands Isopia, carved out of the earth. Her hooves are still melded into the ground as if her maker has set her down without quite finishing. Her long russet tail too dissolves not into individual strands, but into ferns and grasses and other plant-life that lines the river Scint.
Unlike Ampere or Tae's spirits, Isopia appears to be more or less as she was when alive. Her golden eyes are calm and observant, her expression neutral. Though there were many to whom she owed a look, a smile, a word, for now Isopia turns her death-marked skull towards Kaos. "You should not have done this." She advises simply, her tone matching perfectly the academic (and often condescending) lilt it had possessed when she was alive. "I am past your control now." She breaks eye contact for a moment to look at Ampere, galloping towards Zero, with an expression that one might be tempted to label as 'sad', or 'disappointed'. And then to Tae, screaming for her lost twin. "We are beyound your control." Isopia concludes, looking back with decisive patience.
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...
Right or wrong, I can hardly tell
I'm on the wrong side of heaven and the righteous side of hell
08-15-2017, 05:37 PM (This post was last modified: 08-15-2017, 05:39 PM by Zèklè.)
Well kid-
Ya done goofed.
You know it the minute he looks at you, those teal eyes the only constant in a shifting face. There is something terrible within them, something that makes your heart stop and your head spin as your throat goes dry, ash filling up your mouth, blood running chill and fast in your veins. It isn't the terrible of his murders, the terrible of the blood he wears upon his hooves, the terrible of the rage and hatred he inspires with his mere existence.
It's a far more terrible than any of that.
It is the terrible sadness, the terrible mournfulness, the terrible guilt and regret in the amorphous god's eyes and his simple, quiet "Yes" that tells you, in an instant, just how badly you've fucked up.
You barely notice Sparky come up beside you, his voice a low murmur under the rush of dark water. For the first time in your life, though, you wish he wasn't here, that he hadn't come and found you, that he was far, far, far away, tucked somewhere safe and sound. Your ear flicks toward him anxiously, trying to take in his words - he's a smart kid, and that's good, because he's going to need his brains and his heart in the shit storm to come. Because it's gonna be a shit storm - of this you're more certain by the minute, that flicker of hope steadily drowning under the sheer volume of the river's screams
You nod absently, agreeing, frowning, silent, gaze still locked on the beast who winds through the water. Your anxiety is rising; you shift, uneasy, wings rustling and body tense. More children appear, flocking to you like a collection of frail birds you cannot possibly hope to save, delicate and beautiful and so blissfully unaware. You hear little of their talk, their quiet calls for rebellion - the voice of Kaos is too loud in your head, ringing and terrible, ("I'll do what I can, but death.. It's... I don't—I can't recommend coming back from it."), far more significant than you'd realized at the time, a memory that drowns out the rising sound of screams. The voice of Kaos is too loud -
- until another voice is louder.
"No-" you whisper, choke, as your son appears- your sweet son, your cheerful son, your perfect son who does not deserve the hell that you have wrought. You move, your eyes finally leaving the demon to train upon your child, your body following, defensive and offensive, spreading and stepping as though to encompass him, to shield him from the world and all its cruel intent. "Mauna-" and your gaze holds that same terrible sadness, the same apology, the same guilt. Whatever happens next, whatever horrible thing it is, if it touches and hurts your precious boy -
- it will be your fault.
You don't look back at the river, at the God. You can't. You're a coward. You look at your son, touch him and smell him and soak him in, sunbeam eyes glancing over his spotted body, his tender wings, his budding horn, his grin, his mirth, his joy. He is the important thing - the only important thing - and for a moment you think that maybe maybe if you keep the world just him and you nothing else will enter, that the brightness of your love for him will be enough to keep any darkness from penetrating and scarring your child.
"Be brave, Little Mountain," you whisper, and turn.
Nothing could have prepared you for what happens next.
Because, if we're being honest, you had a certain set of expectations. Sure, you feared the worst - but in your mind the worst was this:
Isopia, a hideous, deformed, stupid thing, a collection of bone and sinew and hunger, gnashing crooked teeth and glaring through empty sockets. Isopia, a husk, an empty container of the mind you knew and loved, a tuneless echo, a ghost.
You turned around expecting you dead best friend's zombie.
You are met instead by your dead Ma's soul.
There are no apt words to describe your thoughts, so we shall not attempt to find them. Instead we will say this - as you look at Ampere, a teal-and-black wraith of the mother you adore, every emotion you have ever felt hits you with the weight of a thousand stones. You are a newborn, fresh and damp on the desert sand, and her blue eyes are the sky, the world; you are a child, thrown from the sky by a great tiger beast, and her warm embrace is safety and life; you are a young man, alone on that same sand, and her absence is the tear in your heart; you are a son, angry and adoring and needy and independent, and she is your Ma.
"Ma..."
There are other ghosts, so many others, too many others, each one a slice of your skin, a hot poker plunged into your chest. Tae rises from the water behind your mother, her wolves at her heels (wolves, always wolves - you remember another wolf, a silver one with a broken jaw - is he here to judge you, too?), her lovely eyes like marbles, spinning and rolling in a ghostly head. She is furious(so much like your mother, so strong, so vibrant), your baby sister (and you are watching her hatch, her and her twin, so beautiful and perfect on the beach, and you know you will do anything for them, except then you don't-).
Tae screams for Grusha, and it is a kick in your throat, another failure. "I don't know," you confess to the water, failure and sorrow heavy in your voice. "I couldn't save her- I couldn't save you- little Ghost, please, come back home to us, we miss you-"
And behind her another rises, tall and perfect and just as measured, just as intelligent and collected as you remember, your anchor, your rock, your mountain, the mother of your child.
For a moment there is stillness and hope, hope that this will be a happy reunion, that your family will embrace you and you will find the closure you so desperately crave. "Iso!" you cry, your voice blooming, a lilt of half-laughter and exhaled prayer. Because though your mother and sister are raging storms, Isopia is a deep sea, an untouchable calm, a constant in your tumultuous- you want to see her, to run to her, to hide behind her and laugh because, see, spirits are real, all those years ago you were right, and now you can go together and find more secrets, learn more about the world - you can be together and raise your child, and her other children because fuck it, if they came out of her you're prepared to love them with all you have. Maybe the gift Kaos gave is a good one, maybe he is sorry after all-
Or maybe your loved ones are just dead, and they've come back for the rest of the world.
Your sunbeam eyes turn back to Kaos, rife with horror, with a new understanding and grief and rage. He did this- and even though you asked for it, you wanted it, he should have known better-
Because clearly, this plan? It was not good.
Ampere is vibrant, a halo of teal on a background of black. "Ma," your voice cracks and breaks; you step forward, your silver hoof touching the dark water (turn away, Zero, look away, go back); you hope. Your pleas are heavy with heartache and longing - a part of you, a stupid and silly part, thinks that maybe your mother will forgive you, that this is all a bad dream and her specter is here to hold you through the night, to wrap you in her wings and send you away to safety. You wonder if maybe, maybe, you can assuage the rage that clouds her heart, be the bulwark to her storm. "Ma, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, ma, please, I love you, I need you-"
But Ampere will not be assuaged, and as she begins her charge you glance at Iskra and Mauna, trying to see them, trying to save them, your wings spreading like shields with far more bravado than you actually feel - and you remember that night, that other night, when you tried to protect Sparky and left everything fucked"Sparky, protect Mauna," you beg of your brother - and then, because this is your fault, and if he loses you on top of everything else that, too, will be your fault, "I'm sorry."
You step toward the oncoming figure, wings still spread, hooves damp in the water, love and misery a painting on your face. As you look at your Ma, a specter on the water, your name a curse on her raspy tongue, you are all the things you said, all the things you ever said, all the cruel words and curses that final night, the way you left it, the anger, the blame. She died believing you saw her unfit, that you had judged her wanting. She died angry, hateful, with all your grievances unresolved.
But she is also all the stories, all the warmth, all the laughter and adventure and tales of whales and stars. She is everything, your everything, even if you could never be everything to her.
She died, you think, in your overly dramatic and self-deprecating mind, believing you didn't love her - when in fact you loved her so much that you will die for her, right now, today - if only it will heal you from how much your love hurts.
Zèklè
What if I'm far from home?
Oh, brother, I will hear you call
08-16-2017, 04:12 PM (This post was last modified: 08-16-2017, 04:13 PM by Otem.)
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.
Scint River
