this isn't mischief
His bruised eyes blink (it’s a slow blink, just as heavy as the weight of blood in his stomach) and when they open, he is at the beginning. The room is startling familiar (and what an amusing word ‘familiar’ is, for so far nothing aside from this room has been familiar). His gaze take in the high ceiling with cobwebs cramping the corners, plaster walls slathered with a bare color of ash gray, and a floor coated in the dust of years of lack of care. The shuffling footprints of his own feet (had it been days or weeks or months or years since he’d stepped through the inky door?) are the only indication that anything had stepped across the floor in years (aside from perhaps a rat or two and the peaceful steps of spiders).
Her voice again reaches into the corners of his mind. He smirks at the thought of the creatures feeding off of angst. Angst is such a raw, caring emotion that he rarely allows it to affect him. Angst might be a sense a caring soul might ache after killing someone like he just did. But rather, he revels in the memory of his teeth sinking into her ivory and mud patched neck (in the thickness of her life saturating his throat, in the way her mouth opened in a last gasp for life, in those golden orbs fading into nothing, in the way her skin yielded to his mouth like a knife to butter). He feels hope, sure – but there is no fear.
Not yet, anyway.
The two doors that once stood before him have disappeared. In their stead, the trickster only sees a gray wall (ashy and pale and indecisive and simple). However, before the two doors (one bright red and leaking something liquid and dripping between its frame, the other deep black and holding the mysteriousness of a thousand thoughts) had been the only way in or out of the empty room. Now, with a closer look around, the trickster notices a double door. It is immensely better kept than anything else in the room, with intricate curves and circles and swirls carved into its creamy face. The faint sound of lilting music (sultry and dangerous and dark and calling) comes from the other side.
The music sends a chill down the trickster’s spine. So he places one long-fingered hand on the right door’s gold handle and pulls it toward him. Compared to the chilling temperature and creeping shadows of the previous room, this one is a desert to a tundra (there is warmth from a crackling fire, dimly lit chandeliers, and glowing candles). The music grows louder as he steps fully into the room and hears the door softly click shut behind him. He doesn’t risk a glance behind him (at this point, he knows that the double doors will either still be there or have disappeared by some magic), but his bruised eyes take in the sight before him.
Thirteen (yes, he counted them all) women fill the room with their sultry frames. He doesn’t know them all by their names, but they are familiar to him. Each woman he’d spent a night with are found in this room (although their bodies are just as his are – human and two-legged rather than four), each with their own personalities and looks and clothing choices. His eyes latch onto each category (the shy ones, hugging their knees and pretending they don’t exist; the bold ones, dancing in the middle of the room with vibrant passion; the angry ones, moving with stiff paces; the gentle ones, comforting the shy ones and sipping delicately from golden chalices). It isn’t until he clears his throat that every single pair of eyes turns to find him.
Almost as if they are all made up of one creature (of one monster, of one mind, of one body) they surge toward him. Curvy bodies, slender bodies, skinny bodies, muscular bodies – they press against him on all sides and he nearly purrs from physical delight. They crawl around him, each one vying for his attention, each one singing his name like it is their poison.
All except one of them.
She lingers near the fire, fierce golden eyes staring him down. Twelve half-naked bodies tug on anything they can reach to pull him to bed with them. But the golden-eyed warrior (he knew she would be here, as soon as he recognized each woman) doesn’t approach him – only glares at him. It jabs at his heart in a way he knows shouldn’t. Her black hair trails down her back (falling in wavy, tangled tresses that complement the pale of her cheeks), something that startles him. He should’ve been expecting her brutal yet beautiful appearance in this world, but he couldn’t have prepared himself for this.
“Myrina,” he says, and the sound of his voice causes every single woman in the room to shut her mouth. He shoves one girl away (one of her arms is creepily shorter than all the other and the hair atop her head is patchy and uncomfortably shedding) in order to wade through the ocean of women to reach the only one he might have ever cared about. “Myrina,” he says again and he can see her fierce eyes flash with intensity. She always tried (she always tries, he corrects himself) to resist him, but it has rarely ever truly worked.
He reaches her relatively quickly (all the other women stand in a confusing bunch, each head tipped to the side and each mouth quirked in a thoughtful expression) but stops himself before he touches her. He knows she isn’t truly here (he knows she is only one of those monsters, that she isn’t truly staring him down), but his mind wants to make it so. The trickster’s mouth opens to say her name once more, but she suddenly silences him. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Her voice is so true to his reality that he almost says something. “You look…” her eyes travel across his face, his body, then back to his bruised eyes “…actually good, for once. Except for the stain of blood on your mouth.” He doesn’t move to wipe it away.
Her gold eyes (and suddenly, he notices the fact that her eyes are an exact replica of the blonde’s gold eyes) blink once and then they are all upon him like hungry scavengers. Although the hoard had been on the other side of the room, they are suddenly shoving him to the ground. He bites his lip in the process of his head hitting the floor (a floor covered by a rug the color of a blue sky) and blood gushes into his mouth. It tastes salty and bitter, but still threaded with that gentle call for more. The women’s hands are grasping at anything they can (his clothes, which are soon ripped from him save his pants; his arms, his legs, his neck, his bare chest) and they make intense noises of mingled pleasure and danger.
Scratches begin to appear on his skin, stinging with the sensation of the women’s fingers. Even the shy ones have eyes like fire (eyes he doesn’t know if he will be able to get out of his nightmares) and his throat suddenly ceases with terror. He is at the bottom of a dogpile and he cannot find a way out. They are suddenly playing the game of “Queen of the Mountain” except he is the mountain and they are more than queens. They are raging, fiery, intense, dangerous, bloody beasts. And he is the quivering prize they all desire.
The one who wins, however, is the one he least expected. It is the one with the short arm and the shedding hair. Her eyes burn the color of dried mud, but there is something different about them (something almost comforting). She grabs his arm and drags him away from the mass of crawling monsters. He sees a flicker (like a hologram, like a prerecorded video, like a mirage of his nightmares) and suddenly their glamour falls into the true sight. They are wispy and the color orange of a bleeding sun. He can see through their shapeless bodies, but something tells him if he were to hit them they would be very much a solid form.
Although they wriggle across each other, he knows it is only moments before they notice his disappearance. Bruised eyes turn toward his savior and she looks steadily the same. “Follow me,” she whispers, tugging him behind a forest green tapestry that shields a foggy window and half a stone wall. Watching her, the trickster notices her full lips press against a singular stone. With a shimmer and soft groaning noise, the wall behind the tapestry opens to reveal a dark corridor. “This way.”
He trusts her, because he doesn’t have much choice left.
As soon as they are within the corridor, the wall imprisons them in darkness. It is short-lived, though, as the woman suddenly brings forth light from her palms (and it is the same bleeding-sun orange as the monster-woman) and then scurries down the corridor. They pass doors (although he supposes they open into the middle of a wall) and each plays some sort of noise behind it. The screech of metal on metal, the harsh caw of a crow, the low bellow of something his human mind cannot even identify.
Finally, they come to a door with only silence behind it. The woman turns to face the trickster and he searches her muddy brown eyes for any reason behind her kindness. As if she could hear his thoughts, she says, “I don’t want to be like them, Lokii. Remember me.” She presses a cool kiss to his cheek and then watches as she scampers back the way she came. Turning back to the door, he grabs the handle and boldly pushes himself through.
The hallway he steps into is empty, but the trickster gets the feeling it won’t be that way for very long. The kiss from the woman burns into his cheek until, suddenly, he realized it actually was. Although there is no fire, his skin feels as if there is. The ivory of his cheek is beginning to eat away, starting with the spot where her kiss touched. His lip sneers. The vile little temptress saved him, but for a cost. He senses that if he wants the burn to stop (especially before it disintegrates his entire body) he must escape from the mansion swiftly.
So he begins to run down the hallway, steps taken in jaunty, ragged steps. The burn persists and he almost sheds a tear from the fierceness of the pain. His lungs gasp for air (an incredibly loud sound among the eerie silence of the hallway) and it is almost like the noise awakes the dead. A gasp identical to his own echoes down the hallway, causing the trickster to stop in his tracks. The kiss that eats at his skin has crawled up to the corner of his right eye (his good eye, the one swirled with blue and black) and into the flesh of his mouth until his tongue and teeth and gums are exposed to the chilly air of the hallway. Through the hole in his mouth, he can feel the breeze of something moving and his head turns to the right.
It’s a replica of himself (only the picture of perfection, the sight of him before he opened the door, the image of him when he stood in the ash-gray room). The mirror image halts and looks at his counterpart. “Only one can survive,” he says. His voice would have caused the trickster to laugh if he didn’t have a painful hole in his mouth and his eye screaming as it is devoured. It is rocky and patchwork and flickering (it is the sound of his voice when he first practiced putting his voice into other’s minds). And he knows. He knows as clearly as he knows it is day when the sun rises.
This mirror image – it is only an illusion. It is an illusion of his creation.
So he turns. He begins loping back down the hallway, feeling the chase the illusion gives as it trails after him, screaming about survival. The trickster knows that he will not survive if his good eye is eaten away by the kiss. He spots a door (the outline of the frame is emblazed with white hot light) and his memory recounts the beginning of his quest in the mansion, of the room with the bright light in the basement. So he bolts for it, just as his mirror image’s hand snakes across his bare back.
His vision blurs and then fades (replaced by the startling darkness of sightlessness) as his hand fumbles over the door handle. His illusion speaks again, but he cannot see him any longer. Its voice is different now, darker and harsher and growling. “You cannot leave me.”
Then the trickster shoves his body through the doorway and slams the door behind him, but he can barely see the hot, pure light of the room.
lokii
this is mayhem
