"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
His burning eyes serve as a beacon to guide them through the dead and the fog. He stares, unblinking, as they gather before him. Jack leans down with his spidery hands on his thin, crackling knees to stare into Anuya’s face. The jagged grin carves further up the sides of his face when she greets him, yet he says nothing for now.
Despoina is next and she breathes not a word when she limps closer to the towering holiday spirit. Llorona and Etojo, likewise, only stare up into his smoldering face. A sharp cackle blooms into a booming guffaw when Elliana asks if he is the one they’ve been searching for. Who else would they seek on this dark and eerie night? The Great Turkey? He wipes a tear of pumpkin juice from his eye.
Several more find him while others remain lost in the fog. Slowly and with a bit of grunting, the old spirit stands to his full height once more. He sweeps his spindly fingers and the fog suddenly clears in an instant, taking Saffron and Rare with it. They will awake safely in their beds with a few tricks for denying Jack his treat.
“The sun is nearly risen, the end is almost nigh.
Soon we’ll go our separate ways, we’ll tell each other bye.
You have conquered every challenge and braved every feat.
I ask you all one question now, tell me: trick or treat?”
He extends his claws to them then, presenting a candy in a bright orange wrapper in one palm and a small black box in the other.
Your traits and defects have been returned to you now that the fog has cleared.
End your post with your choice. The entry can be as long or as short as you want.
This round will end on November 7th at 8:00pm. Late replies will be eliminated and given a curse.
Saffron contracted a Cordycep Curse during his journey through the mountain. As a result, a white, branch or antler-like fungus has begun to grow from his shoulders, ears, mouth, and throat. The fungus causes a fever and he will feel deeply inclined to find plenty of water, sun, and other hosts for his tormentor. Someone with plant manipulation or healing may cleanse him.
Rare has come down with a serious case of Star Blindness. Some confused little stars have taken up residence in her eyes and now they shimmer with all the brilliance of the galaxies. For her, however, she can only see an empty white void. Anyone with star manipulation or healing may alleviate her illness.
Llorona honestly doesn’t sense or understand much of anything by now. Her sister the ghost, supports her and basically controls all her movement now, so she just stares, trying not to scream as loud as she is screaming inside her head.
There is a choice and she needs to grab something, but she sees double. Her pink-ish ghost moves as she stretches out her head to one of Jack’s sticky arms and grabs whatever he is giving away. It is not so much Llorona’s choice as it is the ghost’s.
Only when she clutches the thing and falls to the ground does she realize it is a black box.
Trick, Number Five confirms lovingly. It’s almost as if the voice is singing the word.
Anuya is tired and, now that the thought has been put into her head, extremely hungry. It’s a lot of work, running around as a human from a land where the money smells like maple and looks like it came out of a monopoly box.
And then being attacked by trees and rescued by a moose.
And then swimming across the river and climbing a mountain where there were snow monsters.
And then being chased by dried out corpses.
The point is, she’s worked up quite the appetite at this point so when presented with the option - her turquoise gaze is fixed on the candy and she answers with obvious longing in her voice.
Limping, bleeding, with dried bits of pumpkin still clinging to his hair, Sintra finds his way to Jack with his clothes in tatters, a boot left behind in the cave and the Jolly Roger hat left... somewhere. The parrot remains, hissing softly into the pirate's ear when they get too near Jack and keeping Sintra's frowning face between itself and the looming pumpkin man. Sintra tries to lift his hand to soothe the feathered beast (already forgetting how poorly that worked out in the amethyst cave,) and grunts, startled, when her foreleg only curls up beneath her, a grey hoof reaching out tentatively and hovering in the air. She lowers it again slowly while the iron tang of blood in her mouth fades back to the old, familiar, pomegranate. It's shocking how quickly she claimed the new body and now the lack of hands makes her feel strangely bereft. The parrot is not confused, merely shifting its perch and picking aggressively at the pumpkin-sticky mane and the seeds still in it.
The soap-bubble mare turns her head to focus on Jack with her single eye as he speaks his final couplets, recoiling visibly when he asks his question. Trick or treat? She is reminded viscerally of another time that question was asked of her and her dark ears pin back, that violet eye rolling. There had been a moment where she forgot all her anxieties and her doubts, but now another spirit stands before her in her memory, a shrouded guardian offering the same choice too a stupid child and the path it set her on.
I can't...
She can't decide, but the memory of Hera's anger freezes her feet in place even though she wants to run. Terror makes her stare at Jack as if this - this - is the step too far.
"I... I..."
"NO PREY NO PAY! SAVVY? *microwave beep*"
Sintra shakes her head, dislodging the shrill parrot from it's place between her ears and the bird flies a wild path to Jack's hand with an ear-piercing A-A-A-A-A-A-A, landing roughly in the claw with the candy and taking off again in a flash, winging its way back to the horrified, shivering, mare.
From one step to the next, her opossum body falls away with a clatter of candy still tucked away in her pouch.
Ah dangit.
The yearling flicks her ears in dismay, picking at the candies with her lips, but the feeling is short-lived because the other partygoers are gathering 'round the Great Pumpkin with his bag of toys, and she's quick to join them, her large hooves thudding dully against Pangea's sandy earth. The girl wearing the ears is gone. Several others are gone and suddenly it occurs to Beechbone that maybe there had been legitimate danger out there. The thought makes her nervous. She had laughed her way through it all without ever realizing that she could be badly injured or killed. The bruises around her neck from the snow-ape's gnarled hands make her throat feel thick, but she snorts harshly, chasing the feelings away.
There's no sense dwelling on it. The weight of her black wings brings her comfort and she stretches them carefully, shaking out the feathers and resettling the limbs so the long shining flight feathers cross against her golden-brown back. There was something to be said for that other shape, there was a freedom in not needing to be so mindful of her strength, but it's like coming home to be herself once again, she offers Jack a droll smile.
"Trick," she says, with a shrug and a laugh, leaving a second brightly-wrapped candy in Jack's claw as she takes the black box. Perhaps she has not learned her lesson after all.
yes, eyes, eyes has replaced the chant of not yet, not yet, not yet, inside her heart. Elliana follows, gripping her red cloak tighter around her for a moment, before she no longer is holding the cloak against her body, but it is strewn across her shoulders and her back as she returns to her own shape and form. The hood of the cloak drops onto her shoulders to join the rest of the shimmering, red fabric.
He laughs (she tries to remember where she has heard such a laugh and who laughed it.) She thinks she can almost smell pumpkin. But he laughs and those glacial blue eyes drop to his claws as they extend before her. There are words echoing inside of her, Jack’s own. Morning has almost come, and thus ending this wicked night, and then with the sun it will break them free from whatever hold Jack seems to have on them (a hold Elliana walked into when she could have turned away). It would seem there was one final challenge, a choice none-the-less, and for a girl who has made too many decisions she now questions she feels pinpricks at the back of her skull.
Maybe it is some deeper choice, or maybe it is purely instinct, or reflexive, or a well thought out plan.
Or maybe it is simply after such a journey, nothing sounds better than something sweet on her tongue.
Etojo felt drawn to the wicked eyes and grinning mouth. Those smouldering eyes burning yet another unpleasant memory deep in his mind, one he’d likely be unable to shake any time soon. Without blinking, he stared up and into them, unable to break his gaze away even if he’d wished it. There was an aura of finality about it all. And at the edges of his numb consciousness, he somehow began to sense he was not the only presence before those eyes. A soft heat from unseen bodies radiating outwards. It should’ve caused some comfort, it did not.
The thing grew even taller before him. The fog vanishing, revealing a clear night sky which promised to break soon enough with dawn. And in that same instant he was himself. The cuts, blood and bruises suddenly hidden away below shrivelled up leaves. The numbness replaced by that lonely, heartless chill Etojo had grown far too familiar with over countless years. It had been too easy to be converted back, not like before, when the costume had been bound to him through pain. A deep and never satisfied hunger grumbled in his belly once again. He was too exhausted to feel angry, but it would come.
Trick or treat? It spoke. It’s claws uncurling to reveal two items, one per hand. Too easy a choice after a night such as this, he’d had enough tricks. “Treat.” Etojo grumbled, and he reached towards the claw cradling the orange wrapper, and what he supposed was the treat.
She is tired. She can feel it down in her bones—the kind of fatigue that she is not certain even a full night of slumber will be able to chase from her bones. It is the kind of exhaustion that will haunt her steps for days, for months, for years. The kind that will be a constant reminder of that which she faced tonight.
A mother who would fight for her but not look at her.
A scar that ran deeper than she realized, even now.
Despoina’s head lowers and she exhales slowly, not seeing the others arrive or seeing Jack rise up. She just stands there, tail tucked, until she feels her body return to her. She grows taller and her limbs lengthen. She becomes the iridescent blue of her mother instead of that shaggy brown of the puppy.
But the exhaustion remains.
She slowly lifts her eyes up again, searching the monster before her who was nothing when compared to the monster that she knew rumbled in her—desperate and greedy. Another deep breath and she rolls her shoulders, nearly ready to ask for the trick that she is certain she deserves until she remembers that which waits for her back at home. Her children curled up asleep. Torryn surely keeping watch.
A faint smile breaks through the bitter exhaustion and she nods toward the orange wrapper.
“Treat,” her voice is dry and she coughs, “please.”
Hopefully she could at least bring them home that.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
