"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
He can hear the chorus of their hearts racing when all those faces swarm and crowd them. It almost lulls him into a drunken stupor but the focus this many bodies requires keeps him awake enough to maintain them. With a simple twitch of his tentacles, the duplicates latch onto their victim with teeth or claws and drag the wayward travelers deep into the monster’s lair. The fungus glows red here in his presence and the cave ceiling drips with some kind of mild acidic liquid. The droplets have formed dimples on the dirt floor around him but the burning seems to do nothing to his flesh.
He rises from his perch in the corner of this enormous cavern and looms over them, all those thousand eyes unblinking and each mouth grinning wide. The furious copies retreat to their master’s side and they are like mice in the shadow of a colossus. When the travelers turn to gaze upon the Sunken God, they will not see him for what he is. His shape is too awful, too crooked for this plane, like trying to map the path to infinity. Their eyes refuse to focus and make sense of the fallen star that opens his endless mouths, beckoning his children back home. And they walk gladly into his waiting jaws.
The crack of their bones echoes off the damp walls as he chews them up eagerly. And yet, their voices whisper from the corners of the room, still angry and accusing. Their eyes flutter open from the walls and blink shut when the travelers look upon them.
He plucks the lost children of Beqanna from the cold rock floor with writhing tentacles that eagerly coil around them. Their bodies are ripe and perfect for him now. He turns them each this way and that as he observes, admiring their new wounds and ragged breaths. They have fought so hard! They deserve to rest in eternity with him, with all those screeching voices crying out from his belly.
But he wants them to come willingly. The awful thing wants to taste their defeat and know that they are truly, irrevocably his. So he sets them down as gently as a mother cat depositing her kitten with the rest of her litter. And all those awful mouths open wide, their needle-teeth awaiting and black tongues lolling.
It’s time to come home.
This is the fifth and final round. The prompt is simple: die. You can confess things to the monster if it makes it easier, or you can curse him for taking everything from you. As long as it ends with your character climbing into his mouth to be eaten, you're good. Describe the agony of dying for brownie points! This round will end at 11:59pm on March 1st for real this time.
It is Kensley who sinks his teeth in first.
Jarris can feel the flesh and muscle bend then give.
He cries out. Or tries to.
But there is a dam of emotion lodged into the space at the base of his aching throat.
No sound comes out at all.
Not as each of his children in turn sink their teeth into him.
And then the lovers.
And then, finally, Plumeria.
It is only then that all that dammed up sound comes rushing up out of him.
An unearthly cry. Because he has died once already and he will die again, he’s so sure of it.
They pull him, drag him, carry him deeper into the center of the earth. It is chaos in the cavern and chaos in his chest and he’s trying to breathe but the sound – startled and primal – keeps pouring out of him in a way that he can’t stop.
Let me be afraid, he begs the bastard heart, which – until now – has focused primarily on beating sorrow through his veins. Panic had seized him at the edge of the river, certainly, it had sunk into the marrow of his bones and festered there. And, could he have screamed as the water took him, he would have. But that fear had been different somehow. Different in a way he did not know how to identify.
It was the fear of dying without Plumeria knowing where he’d gone.
The fear of not being able to protect his daughter, who had died a second time when he’d killed her.
He wants to fear for his life.
And yet, as they drag him down to his death, he knows deep at the center of him that it is not a life worth mourning. They have shown him that.
Because he has done nothing but hurt them – all of them. Even without meaning to. (He never meant to, never had it in him to inflict pain on others for his own personal gain).
So, by the time they drop him on the floor of this new chamber, he has resigned himself to his death.
By the time the first drip of acid sears through his flesh, he knows that he deserves this.
He rises as they retreat. “I’m sorry,” he calls after them, the voice hoarse with emotion. Guilt perhaps the most prevalent. How desperately he wants to call Plumeria back to him, so that he can apologize to her most all. But she does not look back. It is only when they slink into the shadows at the rear of the cavern that he realizes they are not alone.
Or, more specifically, he is not alone because they are gone.
Walked willingly into waiting mouths, each and every one of them.
“No!” he cries, long, drawn out, agonized. But they do not scream as the thing grinds their bones between his teeth and neatly swallows them.
And then, there in that cavern, it is only the two of them.
He cannot make out the shape of the thing. But he knows that it will bring him death. And he wonders, as he stands there and this great and terrible thing reaches for him, if this was how it was always going to end.
There is nothing to fear when there is nothing left worth protecting.
So, the dark tendrils that snake through the him are not terror or panic but something like defeat.
And a blinding grief.
A grief that chases every last ounce of fight right out of him so that when the thing takes him up in its cold, cold tentacle, he does not even squirm. He hangs his weary head as the thing swings him high in the air and he can hear their voices still. Bastard, coward, liar!
Then he is standing on his own feet again, swaying as his vision strobes.
The thing open its mouth, an invitation.
And Jarris stares into all that darkness. And he remembers the way that tears had cut rivers down Plumeria’s cheeks. And how Kensley’s hatred had itched up under his skin. And how the rest of them had looked at him and how fiercely he had loved them all once. And how Kennice had looked at him so sweetly before they’d plunged into that river.
So, he follows them.
He follows them because he sees no other option. Because he’d sworn more than once that he would follow them to the ends of the earth. He had never imagined that this would be what the end of the earth would look like, but he drags in a shuddering breath and he closes his eyes.
There is no peace in his heart.
But there is no fight in it either.
The steps are slow, sluggish as he creeps up into the things mouth. Swallows his disgust as he steps onto its fat tongue and into the stench of death and decay and so many other terrible things, too. But the eyes are closed, even still.
The eyes are closed but it does not matter because he can hear the jaws closing. A faint rumble that draws closer, falls down around him like an embrace. But there is no warmth, no comfort to be found in it. There is one singular moment of stillness before the agony. The pain of being crushed rips another sound out of him, primal, guttural. Snatches it right out of the center of him. It is only then that the body convulses and recoils, as if there is any hope at all of escape. But the spine is the first thing to shatter and the legs give out, paralyzed.
He does not have to open his eyes to see Plumeria, plain as day, watching from the shadow. And the last thing he sees as he dies is that steady stream of tears and all the pain that comes from the bones breaking, snapping, splintering certainly pales in comparison to the pain he has dragged her through.
Were he able to speak, were the lungs not punctured and steadily filling with blood, he might have murmured another apology into the darkness. But there is no sound now save for the sounds his body makes as it gives beneath the pressure. This death is different. There is no peace. Just the agony and then, quite suddenly, there is nothing at all.
jarris
now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
He looks beyond the black mare in front of him to the deepest edges of the cavern where something more interesting than her useless rambling can be heard shifting just so, and it is in that second that she attacks, suddenly stronger than he knows her to be. With blunted teeth she takes hold of him, crushing one ear while the other suddenly pins deep into his flying black mane.
KEEEEEEEE!
He screeches and kicks out with a taloned foreleg, balling his toes into a fist deep in the flesh of her shoulder, but he cannot deny her steady pull. The many creatures he has consumed fly at him in a fury, their rodent teeth plucking bits of flesh from his legs, but even as they do so he crushes them underfoot, hind legs stamping on the tiny bodies beneath until there is little more than a slurry of bone and blood slick against the rocky cavern floor. He skids on it when Hippogryph pulls him, her strength never wavering. He is desperate to bite her, yet holds stubbornly to the cool heart in his beak, unwilling to drop it to defend himself. Besides, she is dragging him exactly where he wants to go. He can feel the nearness of something too large to even comprehend, can feel a heart that beats but eludes his magic. He wonders what would happen if he simply stopped struggling against her, as it seems the dark mare's only purpose is to drag him ever forward to his intended destination, but the remaining fawns and rabbits still attack ferociously. He ends his attacks on the false Hippogryph, following her with his neck bent and lowered to the level of her mouth, following like a child that has been scolded, but for the others, there is no more mercy than before, only now his claws are red with their blood rather than the hers.
It seems a neverending parade, easily more than he could have killed in his few years - or perhaps they simply resurrect, again and again - and his own blood runs fire-bright down his legs, as pockmarked by bites as the glowing red floor is by the pooling acid that drips from above. The beasts cannot reach any farther than his elbow and only a single streak of smeared blood stains his cheek and twisted neck from Hippogryph's tight grip. Still, he finds himself feeling light-headed with a loss of blood that makes his vision fade and crackle, sparks of light closing in on the edges. A warm, tingling, flush builds beneath his amber eyes and over his cere, and he stumbles when she releases suddenly, the assault over as abruptly as it began.
There is little to see. He sways in the dim light, blinking stupidly, and watches the entire horde gather as one, almost melt together into a bloody chimera that limps and shudders and groans its way into the waiting mouth of the beast. Dreamscar cannot focus on the nightmare creature, there is a sense of a great toothed mouth - so many mouths, all hungry and grinning - of tentacles and eyes and horns. It makes him dizzy to try and he almost falls but is instead swept up into a gentle arc by writhing tentacles that pull him so close to the blurry beast that his head feels like cracking and blood wells up in his eyes and nostrils and ears.
Love.
There is something of love that he feels and it comes with a rubberband snap that severs his connection to the true Hippogryph, somewhere distant - so distant! - but the mimic does not concern himself with that when something greater holds him in its grasp. Onto one deft tentacle he drops the offering of the heart he stole and has carried all this time, that he has brought here for It. It is not meant to save him, there was never any saving Dreamscar, not from that very first moment when his eyes opened upon his mother's hatred, but the young stallion is also not filled with fear or righteousness or self pity. He feels no regret for the deaths of others, he does not regret the forced slavery of his mother, or the scars he has scratched and pecked into her body, and when he is set down again, he purrs softly into the echoing cavern and approaches the Star whose shape makes him ill.
He does not walk into its mouth, rather sidesteps the tongue clumsily to rub cat-like against the lowered cheek. Feathers and bone knit together and though he can see them only from the ragged corners of his vision, he can feel them easily enough. His beak rubs against bone and with a trill, he begins preening what fetid feathers he can reach, cleansing them of the acid that drips down upon them, of the blood and slime and gore, and breaking open the pinfeathers buried beneath. It is a simple thing, to worship at the altar of such a being, and Dreamscar finds nothing in it of fear or disgust, only a love that pulses more strongly with each touch, and he knows that if this is how Hippogryph felt in her bonds to him then it was no terrible thing for her, no matter what great scores he left upon her body. She was his to do with as he pleased for as long as he wished to keep her enthralled.
It is a pleasant notion.
Time passes impossibly, is it hours, days, or mere seconds that he picks the rotting feathers clean? But they are eventually smooth again, the small patch he can reach, and the tentacles do not want preening, they pull away from the sharp tip of his beak despite his ability to be gentle when he wishes, and so there is only one last act of devotion, one that has been pressing heavily on his heart for some time, and he knows that it is time. Though still dizzy he leaps eagerly into the open maw, his claws careful not to scratch the rough surface of the tongue, and he reaches downward to press the curve of his beak to that shifting surfaces, flooding the beast with every ounce of his magic, the rolling sound of his trilling almost musical while crushing jaws press those glorious teeth together.
your heart, it's like a drum the chase has just begun
She is mindless now. Little more than a feral cat backed into an alley corner by a pack of rabid dogs. And they drag her away like one, teeth and claws sinking into scaled flesh as they pull her deep into the putrid tunnels. The wash of dim red light emitted by the glowing, fungi-covered walls throw her unnatural features into archaic relief, highlighting the first meeting between the monsters of star and sea.
They are not so very different in the end, are they? Only now, rather than predator, she has become prey. As though fate were laughing at her for her endless hubris.
In the face of his unfathomable stare and infinite teeth, she becomes little more than the quicksilver fish she often enjoyed between meals. As her tormentors march into his waiting jaws to be chewed like particularly crisp grapes, she can only stare in savage fascination. A moment later, a faint pop and grind accompany her own transformation into something other. If he were going to feast, he would not have her.
No, he would settle for the false, hauntingly beautiful facade that had served her so well in her hunts. Her own angler light, just as his minions were to him.
She hisses, thrashing with involuntary violence when he plucks her from the damp stone, turning her this way and that as though inspecting a particularly detailed stone. Instinct rages at her to use tooth and claw against him, but experience has taught her the futility. She may have lost this war, but neither would he truly win.
And then, much to her surprise, he sets her down gently without even taking a nibble.
The hiss of acid splashing stone and the accusatory whispers of the damned are the only music to serenade them in this time lost duel. She stares at him as his jaws gape wide. The sight of him disturbs her on a visceral level, but she would look the one who had finally bested her in the face, even as endless and unfathomable as it is. Let him know his prey as he had made her know her own.
She may not know regret and pain in the same fashion as others. May too easily forget her transgressions against the world. But she does know this. She knows the intimacy of a relationship forged between one who kills and one who is killed. And she would not honor him with hers, no matter how he attempted to claw at the recesses of her primitive mind.
Her impossible beauty is all that is left to greet him when she accepts the inevitability of her fate. The falsest part of her steps into his jaws to be chewed and swallowed and burned by unearthly acid. The pain does not make her scream as her accusers cackle. Instead she absorbs it into herself, accepting the inescapability of her end. Recognizing it as is her due in the course of death. Until there is simply nothing.
03-01-2020, 08:57 PM (This post was last modified: 03-01-2020, 09:06 PM by thorn.)
“We’re going to make sure you never come home,” they sing, voices humming with the drone of unison. Thorn watches with wide, unbelieving eyes as they rush in. He closes his eyes as the pain settles in, incapable of watching any longer. Some have fangs and some have claws, but they all dig into his flesh with the same fervor. Blood drips and drips and drips with each dragging step Thorn is forced to take. Soon the white of his fur is soaked in red and pink.
A trail of blood is illuminated by the crimson fungi that leads to the colossus. The blood loss leaves Thorn nearly delusional so a choked laugh escapes his mouth at the thought of following his own blood back to safety. Because that is how it would work, right? he thinks. The blood would take me back to the chamber, and surely that’s a better fate than here. Here being in front of the distorted parent of all of his nightmares. Thorn knows on instinct what this monster is supposed to mean to him:
An ending.
He, the father, and me, the mother, the blood-covered sabino thinks deliriously. All of my hateful loved ones our children. Bile rises violently up his throat, so quickly that it spews from his mouth, yellow and just as warped as the rest of his surroundings.
“Please don’t leave me,” Thorn manages to moan as his family prances to the open mouths of the star. Even now, beneath the weight of his convictions and their hatred, he is too weak to let them leave without pleading. “Please, no,” he sobs, falling to his knees and cracking torn flesh and bone against the stone. But the creature chews them all, a separate mouth for each eager duplicate, and all Thorn can do is wallow in the noise of their demise.
The worst part is the joyous death, the way they do not cry out in pain—
the worst part is the joyous death—
(We’ve returned to you, oh loving father.)
—the way they do not cry out in pain.
Thorn’s maddened laughter peals across the monster’s bedchamber. He laughs loud and hearty, boyish noise echoing off the stone walls. They call to him (those wicked, wicked imposters), mostly violent things, but the occasional coo to join them in their father’s stomach is enough to make his pain-addled brain even heavier.
Wet, squelching tentacles wrap tightly around Thorn’s body. One slaps against his open, laughing mouth. The sabino bites down but a single squeeze of the tentacles snaps his wings against his sides. His mouth opens wide in a muffled scream. Thorn wonders if the old god is gleeful with his pain, if it is drunk on the blood of his family. He knows it must be as each of his wounds is put on display. A tentacle lifts each of his legs, then his chin, ending with flipping him over to observe the torn flesh of his underbelly.
The cold air on his open muscle burns, though Thorn cannot find the will to even wince.
It is clear what is meant to happen: become the monster’s next meal—become the monster’s next slave. Thorn laughs again when he is put ever-so-gently back on the ground. He laughs and laughs for at least a minute before opening those lilac, mirth-filled eyes to stare at the vibrating and blurred mouths.
Come home, my love.
It sounds like Wonder, silky sweet and motherly; but the colossus cannot keep its own voice from mingling, a demonic echo reverberating beneath her sweet calls. When Thorn does not come, she grows infuriated.
You don’t deserve to live anywhere else. The pit of the pit of our god’s stomach is where you belong, you vile—you disgusting—you complete waste of air and flesh.
Thorn’s heart sinks, but he does not dips his head in defeat; instead, he leans into the blood still oozing from his body. He leans into the delirium and grins up at the needle teeth.
“Anything for you, mother!”
Then he prances up an outstretched tongue and into the monster’s jaws.
—
Thorn floats in darkness for what might be eternity. The initial shutting of the fallen star’s jaws did not come with teeth—no, he was simply enveloped in hot breath and a rotting smell.
But those hundreds of mouths are meant for pain. They’re meant for what is left of shredded souls. And Thorn feels that might when the teeth finally enter his malleable skin. He only gasps at first, but then the jaws start working that gasp is followed by a piercing screech.
The screams fall on deaf ears (or no ears), a new one tearing his throat up as the mouth takes its time ripping him apart. First he falls to the right side, two legs rended effortlessly from his body; then the tongue rolls him to the middle where the first few inches of his nose fall upon a wayward fang. The monster seems to delight in this, jerking its jaw just enough so that it tears Thorn’s face completely open. Blood pools on the creature’s taste buds and he knows it must be delighted by the flavor, delighted by the death of the flesh of one that is not its creation.
Thorn is shoved to the side, where half of his body is bit in half over the stomach. He screams and sobs and attempts to curse words through his shredded mouth—the last bit of his brain fighting desperately to understand what is happening to him—
There's a ripping seam in my chest already, the heavy weight of regret drumming like endless rain on my head. When the words turn into violence, I am hardly surprised. There's so much anger in the air, it feels like a living thing, as hungry as the ones it inhabits, as the one who created it.
It is not surprising, but it still hurts when the first teeth sink into my shoulder. A groan of pain rumbled through my throat, but I don't have time to react beyond this before the assault begins in earnest.
What I expect is not what occurs. I feel the dull ache of jaws clamped tight in my flesh, but they do not rend and tear. Instead my crowding mob seems to have united in their cause, to drag me by wing and throat and thigh and a dozen other pinching points, away into the deepest entrails of the earth.
I'm weak by now, exhausted by the twisted road I've taken, by the relentless assault my heart has taken. The arcane whorls of sickly algea darken in my eyes. They spin and collide in dizzying ways, blurring together in some grim message I feel I could understand if only I could stand still. But I have been lost, hauled along ever faster as the colors bleed to darker shades, blood smeared on the walls.
The choking tunnels spit us out. A new cavern, and for a moment I think we're absorbed by the empty depths. My breath is a reedy, halting thing, escaping in frightened gasps that vanish in the humid air. The air is painful here, damp and acidic where it runs along my sinuses, burns my lungs. The howling herd is throbbing with unseen energy, waiting, waiting.
I hear it.
A wet, squelching wail. The darkness writhes.
The pit is a living thing. The suggestion of pulsating flesh, the ruddy gleam of fungal glow on weeping sores. Beyond this my mind refuses to process. It's too much, too large, too horrid. The laws of creation have forsaken us here, and the chattering horde grows ever louder, proclaiming my sins to the eldritch night.
A moan of endless, eternal hunger tears the toxic air. The darkness yawns, and the throng dances towards it. Into it. The bodies are gone, but the voices remain, louder than ever. They chant my name, the litany of all things I have done wrong, and I feel it. The beckoning void that has always called my name. The emptiness that has always been my birthright and my sentence.
Dazed and bleeding, I blink unseeing. There's nothing to see, even in a room filled with Everything. A high pitched laugh bursts unbidden from my maw, the familiar gleam of a broken mind shining in my eyes. "I owe nothing to you! Nothing!"My voice crackles out in a pitiful thread. "You hear me? I have fucked up. In so many ways. But they were my choices, always." I stepped forward on unsteady hooves, eyes searching for something, anything to focus on. It was hopeless, but then I knew it would be.
"I hope you've had fun. Cause I think you've finally put me where I belong. I've finally found Hell."
I'm stumbling, tripping over my own feet, falling. The weak red light winks out like dying stars, and the endless night swallows me whole. It crushes me with a merciless grip, squeezing my body and then my essence until there's nothing left but my name on the lips of the ones I've disappointed.
I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky
I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die
They close in on him, and instinctively he wants to fight. He wants to land blows against their ribs and their skulls, he wants to listen to breath be expelled from their lungs and retaliate against every single one of their attacks.
But he sees their familiar faces, their eyes, and he can’t.
He succumbs to their jaws as they latch onto him, lets them drag him further into this endless darkness that he can’t seem to escape from. If the white-hot pain of their teeth didn’t burn so brightly he would have been sure by now that this was a nightmare. There was no way this could be reality – no way that something this wretched and awful could exist. But when he is deposited into the pit of this lair, when the acid drips and burns his skin, he is again reminded of how terribly real this all is.
He stands there, breathing ragged and pulse pounding. Blood runs from all the wounds his family inflicted on him, and fresh waves of pain alight to every nerve-ending when the acid lands in the open, torn skin. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry out. He lifts his head to stare at the strange beast before him, and he cannot even find it in himself to be afraid. Because he is looking at them – at his father, at Haunt and Wrenley, at Eternal and his mother. He is looking at the faces he has loved all his life, in the best way he knew how, and all he can choke out to them is, “Why?”
They don’t answer. They stare at him, unfeeling, disgusted, as if he is not worth their effort.
And then they turn, and one by one they walk into the waiting jaws. The crack of their bones and the crushing of their flesh echos in his ears, it rattles all the way down to his bones.
And, without even a thought, he follows them.
“Wait!” He cries out to them, and he rushes forward. He doesn’t think, he doesn’t hesitate. He just follows them because they are all that he has, and even if they hated him, even if he was nothing to them, he knows he cannot – will not – be alive without them. That he would follow them wherever they may go, into any shadow or any lair, into the mouth of any monster. He rushes into the jaws and when the teeth fall to crush him he is only afraid that wherever he goes after this, they will not be there. That they will again be in their own world of shadows and he will not be able to follow, but he dies knowing that he at least tried.
