05-01-2019, 12:24 AM
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Allura' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> <style type="text/css"> .wonderstatic_container { position: relative; z-index: 1; height: auto; background: #959273; width: 600px; padding: 0 0 0 0; border: solid 2px #3f342b; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_container p { margin: 0; } .wonderstatic_image { position: relative; z-index: 8; width: 600px; } .wonderstatic_gradient { position: absolute; z-index: 8; top: 150px; width: 600px; height: 200px; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(149, 146, 115, 0) 0%, rgba(149, 146, 115, 1) 100%); filter: progid
XImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#00959273', endColorstr='#959273', GradientType=0); } .wonderstatic_text { position: relative; z-index: 9; width: 560px; margin-top: -10px; } .wonderstatic_message { position: relative; font: 12px 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify; color: #000; padding: 30px; background-color: #a39772; border: solid 1px #635b47; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_quote { position: relative; text-align: center; color: #3f342b; font: 20px 'Allura', cursive; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 20px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } .wonderstatic_name { position: absolute; z-index: 11; color: #635b47; text-align: center; font: 90px 'Allura', cursive; margin-top: 250px; margin-left: 30px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } </style> <center> <div class="wonderstatic_container"> <div class="wonderstatic_name">Wonder</div> <img class="wonderstatic_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/X7F37P8w/wonder.png"> <div class="wonderstatic_gradient"></div> <div class="wonderstatic_text"> <p class="wonderstatic_message">She is startled by this vision of herself, by the sad, sorry face that stares back at her from the surface of the shimmering fire. That girl wears worry in eyes the shade of warm, clear oceans. She wears antlers too big for her head, and so she sags wearily, letting the tines stained rust-red from blood fall so they seem to be pointed at the reflection itself. She has bone on her face, but it is not bright and it is not beautiful - it is stretched so far she can hardly see a hint of the chestnut beneath it. A hint of her identity, her face, beneath it. This girl looks already dead and lost, like she’s climbed from a grave only to find she wishes she hadn’t.
There will be nothing left in this world.
She knows because the vision switches from her own broken face to the faces of her family, her friends, those she has never met but would love all the same. It shows her the world she knows, but it doesn’t seem familiar anymore. It is dark and it is dying, and it is broken. The black cloud hangs like dense fog so thick that even the sun can’t hardly find its way through. The grass is dead and churned, mud and bone and carcass. She thinks even the trees are sick, if not from the plague itself, then from the way the sun can no longer touch their branches, breathe life into leaves that have since crumpled and caved and turned as rust as the blood on her brow.
It is a reality that makes her cry, but she doesn’t notice it until the tears have already mixed with the blood on her face to sting her eyes and leave strange tracks down her cheeks. Doesn’t noticed until her throat aches with the need to sob aloud and mourn the loss of something so beautiful.
The loss of everything she has ever known.
She wills it to show her their faces again - her mother and her father, her brother, her sisters - because she understands what it is they ask of her now. That there is a cure in the twinkling vial that hovers beside her, but that there is only enough for one. Her first thought is all reflex, all impulse, and she wants to give it to her brother, her beautiful twin. The heart she grew beside even before they came to exist in this world.
But -
A second passes, and another, until there is a whole strand of time gone and lost where impulse fades and her heart flares wary in her chest. Brigade would hate her for that choice, she is sure of it, just as she would resent him if he made that choice for her. There is nothing but pain in watching those you love most fade and die around you, nothing but fear when even the world you’ve always known is changing and dying too. To give it to him, this cure, his life, would mean to condemn him to a future no less bleak than the world is now. He could live, but he would be alone in the carcass of a world with nothing left to give him.
For the same reason, she recoils from the notion of giving it to her mother or her father who would surely prefer death over the pain of watching their children suffer and die while they remained untouched - or to one her sisters still so little, so young, too small for a world so big and bad without someone there to keep them safe. And what’s more is that the more she thinks of who might want this cure, the less certain she is that anyone would want this choice made for them. The less certain she is that she <i>should</i> make this choice for anyone.
It would be different if there were more vials, more cure, more of a chance to rebuild in a dying, broken world. But all she sees when she peers at the fire-glass shimmer is a world that feels like some kind of nightmarish hellscape - and she knows, deep in her aching, wounded heart, that the only one she can give the cure to is herself.
There is no irony lost on her as she thinks of the girl that will forever haunt her days and dreams. A girl sick and dying, left behind on a quest because Wonder thought it was the right decision. It hadn’t been, though. The girl had died before Wonder could come back to help her, to find a way to heal her. But it had felt so right in the moment when she made the choice. Would this decision be like that one? Right, until she made it, and then so, so wrong?
But in her heart she feels there is no good choice to make here, no easy choice. There is no part of her that wants to take a cure if it could help someone else, no part of her that wants to watch everyone she loves suffer and die if there is something she could have done for one of them. Just one, though. She closes her eyes and bows her head, cries until her throat aches with it and her eyes burn, because when they are gone she will have to live with this choice, just like she has to live with the ghost of last one she made. It will be the only company she has in a world where trees stand like bare skeletons and the only voices are the ones in her memories until the day she grows old and dies.
But she will give all of herself to them. To helping them and loving them and finding ways to heal whatever brokenness she can - and she will never breathe a word of this choice to any of them for fear that this is not the decision she should have made, for fear that they will look at her with wounded eyes and wonder how she could ever be so selfish. How she could have this cure and not give it to one of them.
But in her heart, in a place so marked with the dark, so mutilated with scars, she knows this is the only choice to make. So she drinks until it is gone, until there are no tears left in her eyes, until that soft teal color is raw and wet and ruined.
And then -
In one final effort, she turns to the heart of the world she loves, the world they all so desperately need. A world so abused that it is in its death throes and not even the fairies can hold the inevitable at bay - and with a whisper she closes her eyes again, bows that strange, antlered brow, and whispers, <i>“Take my heart.”</i> Because she has been made whole again, because she can feel the cure like liquid sunshine in her veins. Because if it will help, she would give it gladly.
</p> <p class="wonderstatic_quote">i am brambles but i am tangled in your love</p> </div> </div> </center>
XImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#00959273', endColorstr='#959273', GradientType=0); } .wonderstatic_text { position: relative; z-index: 9; width: 560px; margin-top: -10px; } .wonderstatic_message { position: relative; font: 12px 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify; color: #000; padding: 30px; background-color: #a39772; border: solid 1px #635b47; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px 1px #000; } .wonderstatic_quote { position: relative; text-align: center; color: #3f342b; font: 20px 'Allura', cursive; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 20px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } .wonderstatic_name { position: absolute; z-index: 11; color: #635b47; text-align: center; font: 90px 'Allura', cursive; margin-top: 250px; margin-left: 30px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #635b47; } </style> <center> <div class="wonderstatic_container"> <div class="wonderstatic_name">Wonder</div> <img class="wonderstatic_image" src="https://i.postimg.cc/X7F37P8w/wonder.png"> <div class="wonderstatic_gradient"></div> <div class="wonderstatic_text"> <p class="wonderstatic_message">She is startled by this vision of herself, by the sad, sorry face that stares back at her from the surface of the shimmering fire. That girl wears worry in eyes the shade of warm, clear oceans. She wears antlers too big for her head, and so she sags wearily, letting the tines stained rust-red from blood fall so they seem to be pointed at the reflection itself. She has bone on her face, but it is not bright and it is not beautiful - it is stretched so far she can hardly see a hint of the chestnut beneath it. A hint of her identity, her face, beneath it. This girl looks already dead and lost, like she’s climbed from a grave only to find she wishes she hadn’t.There will be nothing left in this world.
She knows because the vision switches from her own broken face to the faces of her family, her friends, those she has never met but would love all the same. It shows her the world she knows, but it doesn’t seem familiar anymore. It is dark and it is dying, and it is broken. The black cloud hangs like dense fog so thick that even the sun can’t hardly find its way through. The grass is dead and churned, mud and bone and carcass. She thinks even the trees are sick, if not from the plague itself, then from the way the sun can no longer touch their branches, breathe life into leaves that have since crumpled and caved and turned as rust as the blood on her brow.
It is a reality that makes her cry, but she doesn’t notice it until the tears have already mixed with the blood on her face to sting her eyes and leave strange tracks down her cheeks. Doesn’t noticed until her throat aches with the need to sob aloud and mourn the loss of something so beautiful.
The loss of everything she has ever known.
She wills it to show her their faces again - her mother and her father, her brother, her sisters - because she understands what it is they ask of her now. That there is a cure in the twinkling vial that hovers beside her, but that there is only enough for one. Her first thought is all reflex, all impulse, and she wants to give it to her brother, her beautiful twin. The heart she grew beside even before they came to exist in this world.
But -
A second passes, and another, until there is a whole strand of time gone and lost where impulse fades and her heart flares wary in her chest. Brigade would hate her for that choice, she is sure of it, just as she would resent him if he made that choice for her. There is nothing but pain in watching those you love most fade and die around you, nothing but fear when even the world you’ve always known is changing and dying too. To give it to him, this cure, his life, would mean to condemn him to a future no less bleak than the world is now. He could live, but he would be alone in the carcass of a world with nothing left to give him.
For the same reason, she recoils from the notion of giving it to her mother or her father who would surely prefer death over the pain of watching their children suffer and die while they remained untouched - or to one her sisters still so little, so young, too small for a world so big and bad without someone there to keep them safe. And what’s more is that the more she thinks of who might want this cure, the less certain she is that anyone would want this choice made for them. The less certain she is that she <i>should</i> make this choice for anyone.
It would be different if there were more vials, more cure, more of a chance to rebuild in a dying, broken world. But all she sees when she peers at the fire-glass shimmer is a world that feels like some kind of nightmarish hellscape - and she knows, deep in her aching, wounded heart, that the only one she can give the cure to is herself.
There is no irony lost on her as she thinks of the girl that will forever haunt her days and dreams. A girl sick and dying, left behind on a quest because Wonder thought it was the right decision. It hadn’t been, though. The girl had died before Wonder could come back to help her, to find a way to heal her. But it had felt so right in the moment when she made the choice. Would this decision be like that one? Right, until she made it, and then so, so wrong?
But in her heart she feels there is no good choice to make here, no easy choice. There is no part of her that wants to take a cure if it could help someone else, no part of her that wants to watch everyone she loves suffer and die if there is something she could have done for one of them. Just one, though. She closes her eyes and bows her head, cries until her throat aches with it and her eyes burn, because when they are gone she will have to live with this choice, just like she has to live with the ghost of last one she made. It will be the only company she has in a world where trees stand like bare skeletons and the only voices are the ones in her memories until the day she grows old and dies.
But she will give all of herself to them. To helping them and loving them and finding ways to heal whatever brokenness she can - and she will never breathe a word of this choice to any of them for fear that this is not the decision she should have made, for fear that they will look at her with wounded eyes and wonder how she could ever be so selfish. How she could have this cure and not give it to one of them.
But in her heart, in a place so marked with the dark, so mutilated with scars, she knows this is the only choice to make. So she drinks until it is gone, until there are no tears left in her eyes, until that soft teal color is raw and wet and ruined.
And then -
In one final effort, she turns to the heart of the world she loves, the world they all so desperately need. A world so abused that it is in its death throes and not even the fairies can hold the inevitable at bay - and with a whisper she closes her eyes again, bows that strange, antlered brow, and whispers, <i>“Take my heart.”</i> Because she has been made whole again, because she can feel the cure like liquid sunshine in her veins. Because if it will help, she would give it gladly.
</p> <p class="wonderstatic_quote">i am brambles but i am tangled in your love</p> </div> </div> </center>