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

[Manikin]

She surges forward, like waves rolling up the shore. Boneless, she is Manikin-the-squid, and the squid travels more swiftly than one might expect. Her teeth are clenched together and her lips peel away from them in a childish snarl. The land is strange, it’s half-melted, like her, and seemingly empty but for whatever teems on the horizon and the strange trees that grab at her with their prickly branches, that try to absorb her into their too-soft trunks. A branch plucks at the black curls of her mane and Manny growls at it, bites, and hates these stupid, flat, useless teeth that click together dully. She wants her beak, she wants her lion’s claws, but the fog stripped her of those things so neatly. The debt paid to the belly of the Beast to be reborn in this madness is a lesser concern, she is learning how to use this fluid body. Like tentacles, her legs pull her across the livid landscape, and instinctively she keeps to the bone-dry earth, avoiding the still and glassy water. Sometimes, when she peers into it, her reflection does things it ought not to do, and so she has stopped going near the mirror pools at all.

The Thing on the horizon never seems nearer, but she is tireless, even here, and she outpaces the few other adventurers that she bothers to notice. They stay, and they wait, as if the mortal-made-god has a plan, as if they have any reason to care for it if he does. Manikin has her own plan, it is to find one of those little brown birds that burst from her poppy-flower blood and to feel it crushed between her teeth, to squeeze it in her tentacle-leg until it breaks beneath the pressure like a toy. She wonders if there is anything within them to crunch, any fragile hollow bones or if, like her, like the trees, it is a fluid-filled sac that will burst and ooze. She wonders if it will bleed black oil or bright flowers. She wonders and dreams, and does not see the creatures that gather ‘round, that seem to surround her no matter how deep into their world she ventures. The light of the sun slants suddenly, a sudden drop and bounce as if it dangles from a string, and then it falls still, but the changed shadows bring a welcome sight. Ahead of her, the distant shimmering has stopped racing away, the ground glows purple-pink and bright lights drift upwards like dandelion puffs made of stars. The octopus girl slows her tumultuous roll forward, slows to a stop, and twists her long neck fora better view. Glimmering, gleaming, the lights seem to birth themselves from the magenta earth, they make no sound and have no scent, and when she touches one with a sinuous leg, it burns.

Where she touches it, the starlight turns black and the burn leaves an orange scar on her skin that crackles and sears like acid and Manny cries out sharply in pain, tears leaping to her bright yellow eyes which roll, blinded by the pain of the poison. With a sobbing whimper, the girl sucks the limb back, it recedes into her body while she snivels and scowls through her tears. Her vision is slow to return, and when it does, the field of rising lights has turned black and dreadful, dripping down, thick like strands of dark mucus. She snorts her disgust at the change - not her fault, this - and cautious, but undeterred, she loops her uninjured leg around a rock and pitches it clumsily into the field of poisoned thistle-stars. It thuds against the oozing tar. It explodes. Shards of rock are flung back at her and a tiny creature tumbles out.

It’s not the bird.

No, it is assuredly not the bird from before. She cannot name the creature that tumbles out, it has long arms and legs like a monkey, yet it lacks a tail. Its face is a raven skull and its arms end in nimble fingers that flex and curl into the still-bright earth. If it has eyes, she cannot see them. It chirps, and she almost understands what it says, her head tilts to one side. She chirps back. It smiles somehow, but Manikin does not smile back, and she does not question how she knows it is smiling, despite the immovable bone of its mouth. Instead, she curls her leg around it and feels the way its small body snaps, squeezing until the strain of her wicked curiousity bubbles blood from the hollows of its empty eyes, and the blood is red and normal and mundane. She throws the thing aside, shattered and boring, and turns away from the ruined starfield.

Is this what they have all come for? Pink dirt and tiny, fragile monsters? She can break her toys at home just as easily.

She turns, and she sees them, then, suddenly. Not one, not ten, not thousands. There are too many even to count, the entire world is made of the little beasts, they link their arms and become a stone. They swallow one another and become a tree. They will swallow her too, perhaps. The ground breaks apart, hundreds of arms un-linked, hundreds of nimble fingers that grasp her bubbling flesh, that curl into it like clay until she bursts beneath the pressure of them. She has no bones to snap, it doesn't seem to matter. The land breaks apart into tumbling madness, the creatures play tug-of-war with her jaw and they crawl down her forced open mouth so that she must swallow them and choke, and yet she does not die, because she has already died and so no end comes, no darkness, only the ticklish pain of their fingers splitting her from inside out, of arms thrust out from her belly that wriggle like a thousand worms, of shredding like wet paper, but never falling apart enough to find peace.

Had this always been their plan, or is this revenge?

Behind her eyes, they tramp through her skull, and she sees them, and each is different. Bird skulls, yes, but some have no head at all. None have eyes, only rending fingers that pierce into the backs of her eyes and avert her gaze where she does not wish it to go. Back, back, those golden eyes roll, back a hundred years to pasts she cannot comprehend in this impossible place. Great beasts lumber over a world made of tiny bodies and their footsteps crush the bones that were stolen from her, and she feels every crack, and she screams.

Her scream gurgles from a throat that boils and bulges with the squirming creatures, no place on her skin is still, and the scream fades into a mournful wail that continues even as Carnage's magic finds her. It takes so long, perhaps because she has gone so far, but his magic catches her up sharply and she sheds the monsters as she is retrieved, trawled from the bottom of the sea like the carcass of a whale teeming with hagfish. They fall away, they dissolve, they spill from her mouth like a living river, and if her grandfather's magic is neither gentle nor compassionate, she is beyond noticing. The world is flashes, eggshells, and darkness, and fog, and without ceremony, she is deposited in her body again hard enough to beat her cold heart back into motion.

Around her, the others rouse, but Manikin does not seem to do so. The world is heavy and she has forgotten her bones. The girl remains prone at the grey stallion's feet, yellow eyes rolling in her soft head and a feeling of fullness in her belly. It makes sweat prickle across her lips, and then, impossibly - oh, but what does impossible even mean, now? - impossibly, she vomits a beast with long arms and legs and nimble fingers, but no head. Its red blood still stains her teeth.

Image by Shevy-Art

[Ashhal]

I tried to sell my soul last night
Funny, he wouldn't even take a bite

There is no satisfaction in learning his instincts were correct. Though he couldn’t remember, a deep seated instinct had warned him. A well-developed instinct.

But he has no time to wonder how he gained such an instinct.

As luck would have it though, the moment he turns to respond to that increasingly loud voice telling him to leave, the buzzing ceases abruptly. His skin crawls violently along his spine, but it’s easy to see the way he had come would provide no exit anyway. By the time the distorted chirping starts, every sense he possesses is on the highest alert even as (almost ironically) his mind quiets.

He quickly finds that there is a familiarity in defense. In waiting for something (anything) to happen. A familiarity he finds oddly soothing, even as the prospect of death looms (it begs the question, could one die twice? He may not remember his recent death, but the fact still remains).

In this place (so twisted and wrong in ways he cannot quite fathom), that familiarity is everything. So much so that it nearly transcends the visceral disgust and horror he feels when the creatures first separate from their surroundings. There are pieces of them he recognizes, but they are cobbled together in all the wrong places, twisting in a manner that is disturbingly unnatural.

He has forgotten there is someone out there who had sent him here, and so his fight is one of genuine self-preservation. One in which he reserves no hope of (an admittedly distant) compassion. He discovers in himself an innate lust for violence, a satisfaction in the exertion and striking of flesh. He also finds pain to be something like an old friend. As though he has experienced more than his share of bloodshed.

Not that it does him a great deal of good here - a place that is every kind of wrong. In the end, he is at their mercy. He cannot seem to predict how they will move. Their shifting, unnatural motion defies every expectation he has. He cannot even seem to focus his gaze on them for more than a moment without his vision trying to cross, the battered neurons of his brain firing so chaotically there is no way to make sense of it.

Ultimately, he succumbs. His blood flows freely even as his own bones bend and snap, easily piercing the too-thin cage of his flesh.

By the time Carnage reaches in to yank him from this unnatural hell, he isn’t entirely certain whether he is alive or not. He is shoved back onto the beach into a body made mostly whole. There is weakness. A bone-deep illness that he can’t quite put a name to. But it hardly matters when the mind that now resides in it is only a fraction of what it once was.

He doesn’t try to rise from the beach where he lay crumpled. Doesn't even have the energy to pick at the anger that seems to bubble deep in his chest as he blinks blearily at whoever the hell had pulled them from that pit.

The irony of the situation might have been humorous if the man who had returned to Ashhal’s body were not so deeply pitiful. His worst nightmare had been realized, and he hasn’t even the wits to know it.

[mae]

There is eternity and then nothing.
There is the gnawing and then nothing.
There is the horizon that swarms - that lengthens and loosens, that swirls and tangles - and then nothing.

It feels unkind, the way all the sensations leave her hanging. Leaves her waiting.

It is like the bated breath of a predator, something that lingers on the back of the neck and raises all the hackles. It is one heartbeat and then two. It is that moment of knowing she is prey, a time beneath tremoring heartbeats that is infinite, before the beast strikes. It had originally been a child - her child - but the sound of the singing (chirping?) tells her there is more than one, now. They chime in a chorus and while this sound isn't grating like the one before, while this reality doesn't gnaw the way the one before did, there is more than one. Her ears flicker nervously and Mae shifts her weight, trading her worries from one silver hip to another. (Does it matter? It - they - are like her; gray, dull, without color).

They sing. Like the sound of summer nights, like the hum of hummingbird wings. An ear twitches again because there is something to sound, the way that it rings in her ears. The trilling and calling suddenly stops. The eerie silence is the only thing that fills this realm. It is deafening and something in her says run. It warns her to flee. She will. She will turn tail and-


Mae blinks. That is all it takes. In an instant, they are on her. She thinks she might have been bloodied before, from the fall. From the void. If she had looked down, maybe there would have been pools of black blood streaming down from her shoulders. Maybe she had been cut along her back and the blood wept like tears from the small shallows of her ribs. Maybe she was already marked on her legs, on her knees, on her neck. Maybe there were scars she never saw and she won't now because the shape of a thousand things borrows a few.

They continue to chirp as they lunge. They tear and shred. Mae cries out and starts to plead: Stop! comes the first cry. No! I have- already died, she would have said. I have already died.

She can't cry because one finds her throat. It tugs and with it takes her ability to try and survive. The chirping starts to take on a sound, she thinks. There had no rhyme or rhythm to the sound it made before. But as the false-blood runs and she bleeds out in a place that doesn't exist (and what happens to those who die in a place where death might not exist? Another realm?), the chirp becomes more of a chant. Her dark mouth opens again but no sound comes, nothing rises to greet the creatures that have started to devour her. False. She hears it. The word hums, it bleeds, as she does, into two. False. They delightfully trill again, growing excited by the banquet laid before them. One tears and Mae raises her head from where she has fallen, a faltering attempt and brief glimmer of life left in the blood-splattered carcass.

It animates them and as if they know, the trilling becomes louder. False, false, false. It seems to delight them, this anguish that spreads within her and gives them something to savor. Falseheart. One breaks, a solo that rings against the choir. They - the monsters, the demons, the devils - brighten with this. Falseheart, falseheart, falseheart. They all echo.

They repeat the word over and over; they chant it with a fervor that would make even the most religious of souls jealous. It knells in this realm and tolls so many memories. (Abandoning her children. Being abandoned by Pawn. Trying to love Coca-Cola and dying instead because that had seemed easier kinder than living a lie.)

One becomes two and two become three. There had been shapes before - hazy things - but the protestations, like her, are dying and the Monsters are instead taking shapes from her flesh. They never leave her tongue but they know. They borrow Pawn's shape first. One bites her legs, another tears at her haunch. The third just smiles, a shape that stands alone. It had been the instigator. Falseheart. Falseheart. It tells her even as the beats in hers have started to fade.  The monster does not and because she thinks of Pawn, she thinks of Penninah. And so there stands the former Dalean queen beside him. The dark mare shreds into her, claiming a piece of Mae.

Her vision swarms and suddenly there are so many more. She can't tell all of them but her mind recalls a few: Craft. Coke. Shiprah. Kuriosake. Texas. Allana. Asylum. Arabelle. Jacob. Milky Way.

This is it. She thinks. This is the End. Everything deepens before it grows dark. This is the price to pay for loving a black heart. She thinks. (Because what had Pawn ever done besides create devastation? He had wanted to prove himself a worthy heir to Desecration and tried to live up to that namesake.)

And then amidst this desecration, there is a tug that is not the creatures. There is a pull that doesn't come from Kings or Queens, from Dogmatists or Opposition-members. It doesn't come from children, grandchildren, from great-grandchildren who might have learned better from this sorrow-filled tale. (And to this day, the Magic in Beqanna still weeps through the descendants of Mae.) No, she weakly thinks. No, let me go. I will pay it. I will pay the price.

Isn't that what love is? She thinks in delirium. Isn't all-consuming? Somewhere along the line of hallucination and this alternate reality, she is ready to welcome it. Isn't it everything?

It's a pull that comes from the back of mind first, that stirs in the place where only dark thoughts and Gods could dwell. It pulls - rips - shreds her away from the hungry mouths that had been so eagerly feasting before. If there is anger or fury at being stripped of a meal, she doesn't know it. She is stripped of this realm (and the ones in-between) until she comes to the world that she had known before. Carnage brings them back to Beqanna and suddenly, she is there.

All in the blink of an eye.
All in the workings and machinations of a God.
They are back at the beginning.

This world doesn't swirl. Nothing stirs. Mae blinks and nothing changes. This world - this Living one - remains gray, devoid of all color.

OOC: Mae is now color-blind from the Carnage-palooza quest :|

[sybella]

There is something about the new quiet that lulls her - or perhaps it is just an exhaustion that goes deeper than flesh and bone, deeper than even the furthest chasms of her mind. There is fear, because there is always fears now, but it does not feel as jagged as it had at the beginning of all this. Decades of fear, time imagined or otherwise, have, for the moment, dulled the edge that presses itself like a knife against the inside of her chest. It is still ready to split her open, this quiet, dull fear, but she cannot feel the edge of the blade pressed to her.

She blinks, and in the silence her eyes wander over things her mind cannot make sense of. Shapes in a dimension that is not her own, colors that force her eyes to constantly refocus as they search for something familiar - though she cannot pick out a single shade she knows. It makes her eyes hood tiredly, nearly closed against the pounding ache writhing beneath her brow now. It takes up the rhythm that the buzzing had, threatening to unmake her at her weary seams.

Is this her life now? She glances around again, gaze narrowed and squinting, finding nothing that feels remotely like home. It is a gauzy kind of reality, like viewing everything - color and shape alike - through the smear of a sludgy oil slick. There is no one here with her either, and she is surprised to find how unnerving it is to hear the fear-pattern of her own heart thudding in her chest. It gets louder the longer the silence goes on, like it is filling this emptiness the only way it knows how. She wonders idly if hearts can bruise, if they can beat themselves to a soft, frightened pulp like an overripe fruit.

She isn’t sure, but she thinks if the quiet doesn’t leave she is likely to find out.

Except the quiet isn’t the worst thing, she realizes a while later, when an odd sound shatters the space around her with change her mind stumbles to fathom. It is funny how long it had taken her to accept the quiet, to settle the pounding in her chest - funny, because now that the quiet is gone everything feels wrong again instead of better. But sound is still new to her, so when the shrill note explodes into every dark corner and rebounds back to her, she winces, but she does not feel dread. Nor do the clicking of too many legs against stone, or the wet snarls of ravenous beasts raise warning flags.

She doesn’t like it, but she does not know to run from it.

So she is like a fawn fallen before wolves when the creatures find her, waiting with uncertain doe-eyes for the strange, oily dark to show her something. She should have known that it would never show her something good. Sybella falls quickly beneath the bodies of beasts the size of bears. They resemble spiders the most, if she had to pick something from home to compare them to. They have long barbed legs that click and scuttle, but the bodies are stiff and armored, the feet speared at the bottoms. She knows this because there are many buried in her belly now. They search her with a hunger she cannot fathom, tearing at her skin like she is made of flower petals.

Roses, maybe. She pretends that is the red she sees spilling in her periphery, pretends the pain is someone else's. That she cannot feel the way her skin is sawed open, or the way her insides spill. These creatures eat someone else - though she isn’t sure how since they have no discernible head as far as she can tell, no anatomy she can make sense of. She cannot cry out because one of them has split her throat and her vocal cords within. Cannot move because another has cracked her spine and there is no sensation in any of her legs. They leave her with only complacency, quiet and obedient as they push her towards death, working with the frenzied efficiency of a hive mind. The only thing left to her is the tears that trail like sleepy beads of dew down the dark mahogany of her cheek. But then one of them plucks her eyes out, and she succumbs at last to the freedom of nonexistence.

In death she dreams that she can feel Him there, that when he reaches for her, her untethered soul reaches back for him.

Still, she is surprised when she opens her eyes again - surprised to have any eyes to open at all, and surprised a second time to find that Carnage is the one whose gaze had settled on her for just an instant. “Thank you.” She whispers, maybe not even aloud because sound has gone from her again. But the strange gratitude in her delicate bay and violet face is odd and unmistakable as she lays still in the sand and watches him. She wonders a hundred wild thoughts, each one like a separate leaf loosed in an autumn gale from the moorings of it’s branch. Is she alive? Or had he come to collect their souls from the never-place, the in-between. Would she be allowed to stay here, alive, would she be allowed to leave this place behind but never the memory of what had happened?

She tries to move so she can lift her head and find Him again, but her spine has only just begun healing and this body is little more than that of a doll with a conscious mind. Instead she sighs, closing her eyes so that the whole world disappears too. But then her eyes fly open again and her heart beats fast, because the dark behind her eyes is different now. There are memories buried like seeds and already growing monsters.

[Celest]

There is no name for what they are: they are terrible, and they are hungry. Her eyes refuse to truly focus on them, whatever they are, or maybe they are just moving too fast. She can feel that she was not made for this world; she can feel it in the new ineptitude of her limbs as she turns to flee. But in this dry, open plane there would be nowhere to go, even if she still had the usual command of her body.

Tick, click, tick.

The dark shadows are so close. They move in a mass that hums and vibrates with reverberated energy. They cover the distance with unnatural speed, and as they near, the blur of them divides to encircle her. Collectively, the draw a breath, or say a prayer, and then they fall into the feast.

Her world is suddenly dark, and her ears ring with the insect-like sounds the creatures make. Lithe and bony, they scurry around her, filling in every space until she disappears from view. There is nothing she can do, her meager bucks do not dislodge them. When her teeth rip one off her shoulder, another fills its place. They burrow and sing, and gorge themselves, reveling in their good luck.

The bone-white mare tries to rear, lifting her weight and theirs onto her haunches, but it only serves to unbalance her. She falls, crushing several below her, but the rest seem to cackle with delight. 

Later is would make her angry: the way she lay there. Later, she would punish herself for the way she had given up. But now, as she lies in her blood, with the clicking and the licking, she knows that it is finished.

But, it isn't.

The one thing she never expected happens. She doesn't comprehend the gamble he takes, that it is an almost selfless act that brings her back. But she feels herself being pulled away, and it doesn't feel like death.

The pain changes, a dull bone-weary ache instead of the blinding agony, and the air; it smells like home. Her mouth and eyes open, and she draws the ocean-breeze into her burning lungs.

He is over her, breathing life into her, and she is glad to see his face.

There is no time to thank him, to curse him, or ask for explanations. Once she shows signs of life he is gone, leaning over someone else. Shaken and flayed, she lies there, her senses cautiously returning. She is numb. But as she rolls onto her side, her eyes involuntarily find him, and she can no put a name to the emotion burning below her broken ribs.

I'm not a girl, I'm a storm with skin

[Dacian]

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

There is a sound, a trilling call that he would compare to that of a bird if he had to, but he knows it is not a bird. There is nothing about this twisted world that leads him to believe something as ordinary as a bird would be here. Not in a place where the sky is the wrong color, with both a moon and a sun suspended in tandem. The shape of the trees is nonsensical, and even the color of light and shadows are all wrong.

Here, where he was swallowed by a void and vomited onto a different ground – innocent things like birds didn’t exist here.

He grits his teeth, his eyes closing briefly before he dares to turn his head to see what kind of demon this twisted hell is about to spit at him.

One at first begins to emerge from the shadows, and when all he can see is a silhouette, he thinks it is a large wolf. It is not until it fully peels itself from the dark, and he sees its face – oddly shaped and plant-like, similar to a tightly closed rosebud – that he realizes they are nothing like wolves at all.

There are a few at first, and then more than a dozen. The creatures close in on the stallion with his flatly pinned ears and a snarl on his lips, trading in their bird-like calls for completely foreign sounding chittering. They go back and forth amongst each other, seemingly debating something in their own language. Their flesh is dark, but he cannot tell if it is scaled, or only impossibly thick, like armor.

He does not have time to wonder about it any longer when the first creature’s petal-like mouth blossoms open, revealing too many sharp teeth to count and a black-void center.

Taking their cue from the first, the rest of the pack follows suit, lunging at him with petal-mouths flared open. Dacian opens his mouth, too, trying one last time to exhale the fire he had grown so accustomed to having — he reaches for it, and there is nothing. Not even smoke.

The first one goes for his throat, wasting no time. Then there is another ripping into his hind legs, and another at his chest. They consume him so quickly he can hardly register the pain, and yet somehow his throat still goes raw from the strength at which he tries to cry out — all his rage tearing him apart from the inside out and no voice to carry it.

He had not thought it possible to die twice, but he thinks this indeed must be hell. Levels and levels of hell, where you die over and over, always moving on, yet never getting anywhere. He wonders if once he is picked clean if he will emerge whole and new and ready to be destroyed, again, and in the fleeting yet stretching moments of dying (is it called that, when you are already dead?), he could almost laugh.

Of course Carnage would bring them to the afterlife, only to send them through endless oblivions of torture. He almost misses the infinite doldrums of what it had been like to be dead the first time; anything besides being someone’s entertainment, watching them all burn like ants beneath the magnifying glass.

That is his last thread of thought when he is suddenly slammed back into his own body on the beach, and he sucks in the decay and the salt air like it is the sweetest he has ever tasted. His heart beats hard and sure in his chest, and the jolt of adrenaline brings him to his feet. He is weak, though, weaker than he had been after leaving the afterlife the first time; his legs threaten to tremble, and all of his bones feel like lead. He does not dare to move, knowing that if he tried, he would likely collapse again.

His dark gaze follows the gray magician, and he would thank him, maybe, if he only he had the voice to do so.

Dacian

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

I miss Stranger Things