[open quest] they all go into the dark, round III [MATURE]

[mae]

Where has it gone?

Mae keeps listening for it. Her ears keep straining, flicking forwards and back. All her other senses seem useless here. What is the point? The grating is stronger but it's shifted somehow. It came from all around before but now it seems to come from below. No, not below. From within. She is on her knees, shaking. Mae shakes and this world - the After - shakes with her. Almost as if it is grieving with her for this forgotten child. For the one she hadn't bothered to live for.

The child she had accused (and now wonders if she executed).

The Afterlife feels as if it could topple - as if it could all fray apart from the loose threads unraveling in her mind because her heart is still dim. The heart that Carnage had shattered seems to have done something else as well. They can't bleed the same way they might in the Land of the Living. Mae can't bleed out so she bleeds within. Those shards in her chest are dull but they continue to cut and carve, slowly draining away what little color there is in this world. The fog in front of her swirls and sways on an existential wind - a breeze bent by the whim of a God. Master strokes, really, revealing a glimpse of something below her. She'd pay it no heed because her immediate focus is the grinding in the air, the way that it rattles now instead of shrieks. The gray mare shakes her head once but it does nothing. It alleviates nothing and then He commands.

There, orders the voice. Carnage.

She obeys and looks down again, where the circle beneath her shimmers. Her dark eyes watch it because sometimes it comes into view and sometimes it doesn't. It comes in and out of focus and she wonders what There is. The thought doesn't remain alone because one that isn't her own follows behind it. Through there, the Dark God commands and Mae stiffens. There? The thought jars and she shakes her head, obscuring the last part. But she hears it. It's hungry. The mirage below her widens and grows, like it is feeding of every moment she delays. That for each second she doubts Carnage, it - There - grows.

Beqanna's history is littered with tales of Carnage. He had been Mortal once, the horses of Old had murmured (before the colors and magic mutated, when they had only had their horns and their wings). But what happened between those generations and this moment is unknown to Mae. What the Man might have been isn't worth recalling when the God commands her to jump. I don't think you have much time. Isn't that all they have in the Afterlife? Isn't it made up of all the minutes and moments that will never come?

It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't-

The world crumbles.
It runs out of time.
The world topples and Mae falls down with it. The ledge she had been tucked on gives way and the mare gives with the cliff.

There is nothing. There is nothing but the weight of the fall and she knows that is wrong. There can't be anything right with descension in the Afterlife.

And she's right. When she blinks, the World is all wrong. She struggles to stand here where she had been sure-footed before. She rises and looks wildly around. Her head jerks back and the whites of her eyes show, almost rolling in the back of her head. It's what those eyes see is all wrong. There is no color to the images that shift and swirl before her. Some things haze in and out in the distance, like the fog. There is something, she thinks, that shimmers on the horizon but everything she sees is gray. The sky is a variety of silvers. The colors that have made up the living world are gone, stripped clean from her sight. All she sees is the bare bones of this Everafter; the bleaching and blanching of shifting perspective.

A certainty gnaws in her bones. The only thing she can do is wait.

[Manikin]

In spite of the way the buzzing makes her bones weep, Manikin is leaning casually against the slumped body of the rat, relishing how his bristling fur pokes and prods the velvet flesh of her muzzle when she presses here and there against him. She chews at the gory fur and the blood stains her mouth black like too much licorice candy. Carnage's voice hums in her head, urging her to the edge of the cliff, but she is comfortably curled against the spirit-flesh mound of her rat and so she lays her ears back at Carnage-the-Voice and snorts petulantly at the air.

"You go," her girlish voice echoes softly, sounds thin and hollow in the great expanse of the Dead, "I'm tired."

The filly yawns, a soft sigh not unlike the whispered voices of the thins ghosts writhing themselves into a fog. More lies - if gentler ones - because she can no longer tire, but the others are gathering ahead, looking down into the ravine, whispering secrets to each other, and it makes her curious, spurs jealousy in her bloodless heart.

What do they see? Something interesting. They are rapt.

Hurry, Carnage says, It's hungry, something else declares.

That's all the convincing the filly needs. Her hooves trip-trap-trip upon the hard, dry, rock of the cliff as she comes to its crumbling edge, leaning forward to peer into that glittering, shifting, clearing depth. A chasm opens in her soul in answer to the mouth grinning wide up at her. Manikin has no hesitation, she does not need Carnage in her head or the thrumming beckoning of whatever lies below. It is in her blood to throw herself into the Beast's mouth, every nerve in her body sings in response, she is a willing sacrifice. The child leaps not up or over, but down with a giddy laugh, and falls for an eternity.

She is swallowed like the tiny thing that she is, her long, thin, legs trailing behind and the last thing she sees before blackness consumes her is a gray, clouded, sky over an ancient cliff dusted with powdered bones. The thin ghosts weep in her ears and she grins a wild grin that is so like her mother's. And then, the dark. It is so dark she cannot see she is falling, so silent she cannot hear, no breath of wind around her body tells her what direction is up or down or sideways. There is nothing, she is nothing, just the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing alone keeps her company and makes her numb. It grinds her bones to dust and she imagines them leaking out from her hooves in twisting trails like driven snow. Like the static in the back of her brain when Avo kicked her good and she stumbled half-blind and clumsy for the rest of the day. 

Boneless, she tucks her willowy legs against her body, curls her long neck, but does not bother to close her eyes, only floats in the void like a fetus tucked safely again in her mother's womb until - like a day not so long ago that she no longer recalls - there is building pressure against her sides. The darkness is too small for her. She presses against the hard, smooth, walls of her prison and she feels the whole world rock and tumble. There is a concussion and then a crack like thunder, and filmy light seeps in making her squeal wordlessly at the shock of brightness, but she presses at the weak light until at last her body slithers slick and slimy from the thick-shelled egg that she has been entombed within. It is hard to stand without bones and it takes her an Age to find her feet again, strange beneath her, fluid as the tentacles of an octopus. 

The world around her is as liquid as she, half-melted and sinister, its edges warped and wavering, quivering, and her billowing legs betray her. She falls against a tree for support and melts into it, becomes part tree, part squid, part horse, and the branches twine down to pluck bubbling hairs from her mane. 

"No!" Her teeth tear into the tree's soft flesh, but it is her flesh, too, white and wet and bloated like something drowned. Poppy flowers spill out of her haunch like blood, pooling under her feet as she tugs and rips herself away from the tree. It is like tearing her own leg from her body, but she does it, and she cries a cry that trebles across the sick land as her thin skin shreds and melts together again, sprouting black feather scars from the places the poppy blossoms flowed. With a snarl, Manikin snaps at one of the blood-flowers, shakes it, and when she throws it to the ground it is a white-speckled bird that dives into the earth and tunnels away. Her yellow eyes narrow but she turns away from the burrow to peer into the hazy horizon that seems to turn in on itself and makes her belly twist and flip. 

Something there moves. Manikin bares her teeth and swells forward after it like waves lapping at the shore.

Image by Shevy-Art

ooc: Manny lost her bones which is fine in the afterlife, but in retrospect may have been a poor choice. She is is currently moving the way an octopus does on land.

[frenzy]

If one of them disappears during the journey, Frenzy doesn’t notice. She’s fighting too hard with the buzzing all around her - in her head, in her mouth, in her bones - to notice anything else, especially not the fog dissipating to show them strung along the edge of a cliff. Her eyes are squeezed too tightly to see them, even as she murmurs expletives under her breath and tries to drown out the buzzing by alternating between humming and weeping.

Nothing makes it fade away.
Even when Carnage’s voice echoes deep within her head, the dreadful buzzing nearly devours the words whole. There, he tells her, and she cracks her eyes open, trembling as she realizes how close she had come to tumbling over the edge of the precipice. Through there, he continues, and Frenzy’s honeyed eyes fall on the growing spot below her. It shimmers slightly, and has begun growing rapidly. She can feel the ground beneath her crumpled body beginning to shake, but maybe that’s just her fear, causing her to convulse.

She forces herself to her hooves as the buzzing and the shaking overwhelm her senses, eyes rolling back to show the whites as she backs away from the edge of the cliff. “No!” she cries, tears flooding her cheeks as the ground beneath her feet begins to give way. Thinking that maybe she can outrun the collapsing earth, she spins around and begins to flee, only to suddenly find herself falling.

Some of them had undoubtedly been fearless, throwing themselves off of the cliff without a second thought. Frenzy… Frenzy is too full of fear, too overwhelmed, and so the mirage takes her instead, and what it takes from her she may not survive.

The fall itself is painless, but that is not what she’s afraid of now. She doesn’t know if there’s a way to die once you are already dead, but it appears she’s going to soon find out. The shimmer swallows her whole as if it is a mouth and the world is plunged into blackness - but the buzzing is gone. She wonders how long she will fall for; is eternity too cliche of a word here?

The galaxy-marked filly can feel something - everything - being stripped away from her as she falls, but it is too soon to take stock of herself. It is only when she finds her hooves once more on some semblance of solid ground that she realizes that the shimmer stole her hearing, or perhaps it is just ironically silent here. Too terrified to make a peep herself she scans the horizon, noticing the movement in the distance but not quite willing to explore just yet. This world that she has fallen into is strangely distorted somehow, though she can’t quite put her finger on it; it’s just wrong.

It appears the shimmer took something else from her, as well - a sudden pain rips through the girl and she falls to her knees, letting out a cry that she cannot hear. Blood drips down her hind legs and her body feels so, so shredded, as if a beast had reached up inside of her and clawed out her womb. Trying hard to stifle her sobs - this is an alien world, after all, and who knows what monsters are listening - she forces herself to stand again, knowing that whatever happens, this place has permanently ruined her.


ooc // the door took her womb and tore up that part of her inner abdomen while doing so

[sybella]

She imagines she can feel Him there inside her mind, sharing her eyes so that they are seeing this together. It is the loneliness inside her chest, leftovers from a life already lived in entirety but with no time lost, that makes her want to share more than just this view. She wants to know His thoughts, too. If He has ever felt the kind of fear she feels now, or the sense of wonder as this shared view settles on something she absolutely cannot fathom. She is just a roach, after all, she is not like Him.
There. He says, and she clings to that single word as the world around her seems to absorb every decibel of sound until it is shaking with it, aching to come undone. Through there. And hurry. It’s hungry.

She does not even notice that his voice is all wrong.

A new tremor of fear runs through her as she watches that disk shiver and grow, undulating like a shimmering puddle as the shape warps and swallows more of the dark space around it. I can’t. She thinks, and there is a sad kind of desperation burning in her chest as she tries to reach Him with that frightened thought, tries to make Him someone safe to hold onto in this torrent of constant impossibilities. But He only exists to urge her on again, and she feels almost like a child with the way she wants to cling to Him.

She takes a single step backwards, and then another, inching away from the cliff as though there is any way to escape all of this - to escape the sound and the sight and the it that is hungry. Her body shivers again, and it feels as though there are eyes crawling all over every inch of her, learning every single thing she would have otherwise kept secret, kept safe within the cage of her delicate chest. I don’t want this. She decides, taking another step back - she even goes so far as to tear her gaze from the circular shimmering irregularity, refusing it.

It is, of course, in that moment that the cliff crumbles beneath her feet and the choice to jump is stolen from her, just as everything else has been taken.

Sybella had never imagined what it would be like to fall into perpetuity, to exist only in the dark of the in-between with nothing to see or touch, nothing but fear and nausea making her dizzy as an eternal black slips past her. But she wonders now, feeling so small and so changed, feeling like this is a nightmare that might never end, even despite the way it seems to keep beginning again. Death, the fog, this strange new damnation. If she had ever doubted that she were nothing to this world, to any world, she surely believes it now. She is a cockroach, a speck. She is disposable.

And then she is not alone anymore, and again she wonders why she ever thought alone was a bad thing. Just as she wonders why she ever thought sound was any kind of beautiful. There is another presence in her mind now, it wears her thoughts like a mask, pretends to be Sybella, and she only just barely doesn’t believe it. There is no voice she can discern - it is not like when He fills her, it is something more insidious, something that fills the brokenness inside her with itself.

She is a disguise.

Hungry. The thought finds her again, a reminder, and she ignores it, balks because she has nothing to give. Hungry. A command now, but she feels lost inside herself as she falls.

Suddenly there is silence again - a thing so deep and vast that it steals her breath away as she cries out. It is only her echo that comes to find her again, but this sound is strange, disembodied, so very much like it did not come from her after all. She flinches.

You gave nothing, not even a story, something so simple. Easy. She feels mocked by her thoughts, not her thoughts, mocked for her cowardice. Now you lose what you wanted most. You will suffer the discomfort of carrying a child, the pain of birth, but you will never know what it is to be a mother. Every child you bear, and even those you do not, will feel a compulsion not to know you. You will never be seen by them, never heard. You are a ghost to them, just as your mother is to you now.

She feels the last words with such finality, like a weight in her stomach that makes her want to retch. Feels pain and confusion, even doubt. These are her thoughts, are they not? They sound like her and wear her voice, but even she cannot deny that they are wrong. In the next moment her feet touch the floor with such grace that for an instant she does not understand that it is, in fact, the ground beneath her. It feels too gentle for this unending nightmare. Even stranger is that she feels no different, feels completely unchanged except for the way her body vibrates with a sound she cannot hear any longer.

Thoughts scatter from her like spilled stones, and she stumbles forward a step as she confirms the ground beneath her feet is solid and real. It is, so she turns to look back up from where she fell, a suspicious frown on that violet face as she searches the dark for something that is not there. Nothing is there. But it feels so much like she left part of herself behind that it takes a long moment for her to stop looking for a distant reflection. Is that why it still feels this way, like her bones might shake apart? Is it because there is another version of herself still standing on the cliff, staring into the circular shimmering nothing while this copy takes shape in the dark between?

Of all the things she has encountered, this thought does not feel like an impossible one.

She turns again and forces the last thought out of her mind, the one that settles in her belly like acid, eating away at her inside. Could it really be true that she will never raise a child? She clings to a naive hope that maybe this, like her lifetime lost, is just another hallucination, just some kind of paranoid dream. But even as her eyes land dully on something writhing in the distance, she is well aware that she cannot remember anything about the woman who had raised her. There is no name, no face, not even a remembered feeling of warmth and love. But, she reasons, pausing where she stands to watch that distant tumult of movement, she hadn’t actually known her mother, right?



sybella lost her ability to be a mother. she can give birth, but children will feel a compulsion to not notice her. she also lost her memories of her own mother.

[Sabrael]

Sabrael

The fog curls at his heels (the fog that had jellied around him, suffocated and subdued him) but it is behind, at least.  He catches himself from falling down the cliff, but soon realizes there had been no real need to do so.  A small part of him wonders if perhaps he should have just continued falling down, down, down the precipice into the everdark below.  Maybe his head, his skin, and his bones will then be free of the incessant rattling.  Maybe the quiet will be worth the price of his own very warm blood he hopes will again surge through his veins after this.  But truth be told, that darkness scares him more than anything.  The unknown vacuum is not a tangible threat he can conquer.  The space beyond is full of questions he has no answers for.
No, he waits on that cliff – clings to that cliff – for as long as he can.

The wait, it turns out, is brief.

A low rumble starts at his feet.  Sabrael instinctively tries to begin the shift into his reptilian shape in preparation for flight, but catches his mistake almost immediately. Of course you’re not there when I need you, the thought is bitter and unspoken on his tongue.  But then his eyes are shifted instead, though only in the direction they are looking.  Unwittingly, he sees the wavering spot in the distance.  He sees it against the nothingness, sees it grow. 

No.  He thinks, when it is clear what the dark god intends for them to do.  No. All the scenarios of him making it down from the cliff had involved those familiar leathery wings sprouting from his back.  But jumping without them?  Jumping into a vat of emptiness with the likelihood of it being far worse than the fog he’s just somehow emerged from?  He agrees with that grey guy from the Afterlife beach; Carnage can fucking suck it.

Sabrael backs up a few steps even as the hole widens in anticipatory hunger.  His feet scramble against the rocking motion of the compromised cliff and the bone-rattling buzz.  Through there.  And hurry.  He shakes his greying, ghostly head in either defiance or absolute irritation or both.  It’s hungry.  His eyes widen at this, because it is obviously not Carnage alone giving the orders anymore.  He leans deeply into his haunches as the cliff starts to buck wildly, tipping him towards the open mouth waiting to devour him. Sabrael defies his marching order as long as he can. 

In the end, he too falls.

In the end, it takes him. 

The darkness envelopes him as the last of the rock comes out from under his feet.  It blots out every trace of light, disorienting the stallion as he spins madly down.  Then, it is as if he is not alone in his fall.  The sensation of touch spreads all across his body, searching, claiming.  He feels tendrils of darkness poke into his ears, his eyes, his nose, reaching up and wrapping around his brain.  Like the fog, it is suffocating in its intensity.  But the darkness is not done with him.  It finds what it wants in his memories, finds what it will satiate itself on. 

No! Sabrael feels the press of it at his haunches, pushing and holding him where it wants him.  He thinks of Wallace, then, as it grips him tightly.  It fills him and he fills it intimately, unwillingly.  He thinks of all the years – decades - he’s waited to share this experience with her and her alone (to tell her how much she means to him, to tell her he loves her and always will).  He remembers the way they’d found her in the woods after she’d been taken with force, remembers the way the dragon had fully ignited with rage for the first time seeing her the way he had.  He remembers the blood, even as he feels his own dead blood waking within him as the emptiness both fills him and finishes him simultaneously. 

It takes his first time from him (a treasure the dragon has been hoarding almost his entire life) and leaves him with something, too. 
The ghost continues falling through the dark even after the moving darkness slips from him.  He is glad.  He wouldn’t be able to stand on such shaking legs anyway.  As he falls, there are three blows he takes to the gut.  Three children after this first that will be born stillborn.  Three more heartaches to follow.  Eventually, he crumples to the ground.  Firm ground, at least.  It makes it easier to rise when he can bring himself to.  He feels raw though, exposed.  He is sore and violated and still realizes in an instant that the buzzing sound is gone.  That had been a constant, something to expect in a world that was spinning so exponentially towards entropy.  But no, it was there, just different.  In him like –

Sabrael realizes he is quaking despite the solid ground.

A movement in the distance catches his gaze, but he is slow like molasses to force his molten eyes to focus.  Even then, it is too far away.  He sees instead that it is an even stranger place he has now landed.  Trees rise (or at least some semblance of trees) but they rise at odd, jutting angles.  The grass waves nauseatingly quick in a field nearby; he has to look away just after noticing the movement.  The light shining from…somewhere makes everything look artificial and sallow and sick.  Sabrael feels sick himself just being here, just surviving what he has so far.  Thoughts of saving his father are long gone.  He only hopes now that he can save himself.

ooc: Sabrael's virginity was taken (that he'd been saving for a v. long time to share with Wallace).  It also took his next three children. After this child, the next three will be stillborn.

[Dacian]

you have forsaken all the love you've taken
sleeping on a razor there's nowhere left to fall

He stands on the edge of the cliff, staring down at the nothing. It is almost disconcerting to see how far it can stretch – nothing, for infinity. It would be worse than being dead, he thinks, to fall into that. He takes another step back from the ledge, his jaw set in a furious clench when the ground beneath him begins to quiver. He thinks, at first, it is just the buzzing, that it has finally rattled its way clean into the marrow of his bones, but then the earth shifts beneath his feet.

His dead heart plummets to the bottom of his chest, and he looks again over the ledge.

He sees it then, the strange void, the way it makes his eyes waver, like the horizon in a scorching desert. It is stretching wide, at a rapid enough pace that he does not doubt it will swallow him regardless of what he does.

He jumps, and he does not hesitate, because he would rather jump into this spiraling infinity than to fall into it; he wants to pretend he still has some semblance of control over his own fate.

The darkness envelopes him, and the feeling of falling through a sea of black is just as disorienting as he had feared it to be. He knows he is falling only because he can feel that something is rushing up to meet him; that feeling of being hurtled toward something even though he cannot see anything else around him.

It's then that he feels the darkness seep into his skin. Like fangs injecting poison, it storms his veins, but instead of spreading throughout his body, it concentrates on his throat. He can feel the way it prods at the fire that lay in waiting there, trying to coax it forth into its greedy hands. He can taste the burning, and the embers on his tongue as the flames crawl obediently towards the void that beckons it forward. He can feel as the darkness tries to excise his fire-breathing out of him like it is a cancer that could be removed.

And somehow, even during this freefall, in the middle of this crushing silence, Dacian manages to spit viciously into the void: “No.”

He hits the ground with a force that would have killed him had he been alive.

It takes a moment for him to gather himself, and when his bones ring and hum, he thinks it is from the fall. He stands, cautiously taking in this strange, warped world, and the buzzing continues to pulse inside of him. It has buried itself so deep he thinks that should he ever make it out of here that his heart just might buzz instead of beat.

There is something off to his left, a movement, a noise, but the shapes and colors are so distorted he is sure, now, that he must be dreaming.

He is all the more certain that he is dreaming when he opens his mouth to question the noise, to demand it make itself known, and there is no sound that comes out.

He had fought to keep his fire-breathing, useless in this nightmare that it may be, and he had lost his voice instead.

Dacian

your body's aching, every bone is breaking
nothing seems to shake it, it just keeps holding on

ooc: the void took his voice