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

[Carnage]

lord, I fashion dark gods too;

They make it. Well, most of them. The fog does all manner of things – causes confusion, madness, makes beasts from nothing. He hears their cries and shouts and curses, and through their eyes he sees the beasts, feels the lapping tongues of madness. And that awful, insectile buzzing. He thinks that, in time, such a noise would work its way into your bones, tear you apart atom by atom.
(Maybe that is the only way to destroy a god.)
One does not emerge. The lightning mare with the spear in her chest is gone. He looks for her, for a moment, and finds nothing. She is simply gone. This is strange, almost unsettling – he had not felt her slip from his grasp – but he doesn’t ponder on it long. He knew he would lose some.

Through their eyes, he takes in the sight of it. The ledge of a cliff, nothingness beyond, and he wonders for a second if he was mistaken, if there’s nothing there, after all. He tries not to focus on the noise, on how it seems to reverberate in the very ground beneath their feet. Is it shaking?
And then –
He sees it, finally. A place beyond the cliff, down. It shimmers, just slightly, like a misplaced heat mirage. He keeps his – their – gaze on it now, thinking if he looks away he won’t find it again, it’s small, and he isn’t sure how to proceed, but – oh! – he blinks and thinks it might be larger now.
They know we’re here, he thinks to himself, which is a strange thought to have. Who are They?
It’s wider now. A circular, shimmering spot in the nothingness. A door, or a mouth.
The ground is definitely shaking, now.
There, he says, as if they had not all watched the spot below the cliff change, widen. Through there. And hurry. It’s hungry.
The final words aren’t his, but they come through him. Not quite his voice. Twisted, just slightly.
The door mouth is wide now. He thinks that if they don’t go to it, it will simply take them, instead. He wonders which is worse.
Go, he thinks again, jump. I don’t think you have much time.

NOTES:
- Sabra has withdrawn. She was consumed by the fog, and will wake up on the beach knowing she died, and came back, but not what happened in the afterlife. All those memories are white, like fog.
- At the edge of the cliff you made it to, there’s a rapidly expanding shimmery spot. Jump off the cliff into it! (Or just wait, the cliff is starting to crumble, and it might just pull you in.)
- But, like Carnage said, it’s hungry, and it will take something from you as you pass through. This can be a trait, a body part, something less tangible (a child, one of your senses, etc.). Can be more abstract too, just message me if you have an idea! 
- You’ll pass through the door, or into the mouth, where it will feed upon you. There’s a prolonged period of falling and darkness.
- The next world you fall into is…strange. The buzzing noise is gone, but it’s almost like you can still feel it in your bones. The world itself is warped and gives a sense of wrongness (think Salvador Dali paintings). There’s movement in the distance, but you don’t know what it is that’s moving.
- Your traits are still nonfunctioning.
- Replies are due at or before 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 23rd. If you need to withdraw, message me. Failure to reply without officially withdrawing will result in elimination or a defect.
- The next round is (probably) the last, but keep in mind I’m making all this up as I go along, and y’all are SUCH DAMN GOOD writers and inspiring so if there’s actually two more rounds don’t blame me.

c a r n a g e

[Beyza]

The voice tells them to jump and Beyza instinctively takes a step closer to the edge - so that her white hoof is balanced perfectly on the edge. Despite not being able to reach her magic or ask for wings to help her soar on, she is still not gripped with fear. There is apprehension but it is so easy to override with  anticipation. She is so full of certainty that she is untouchable, despite having just bargained for her soul in the fog. That deal feels hazy now, though the weight of it settles in her stomach. There’s too much going in her mind, amplified by that horrid buzzing and the drive to jump. She only hesitates for a moment, and it is enough for her to consider Jamie. Although she’s no longer sure what they are to each other - no longer sure what he is - right now he is a familiar face and there is some comfort in that she does not want to ignore. She turns to him - examining his face - and though the buzzing drowns everything out she speaks anyway. “Together?” And though she wants nothing more to jump and to see what’s next she waits for him, waits until their bodies leave the cliff at the same time - light and dark into the unknown. White eyes are wide as she passes into the shimmering spot, wide because she wants to take it all in. She doesn’t even want to blink in case she misses something. There is nothing to miss, she realizes, as her jump turns into a fall and then she is plunged into darkness. Every moment she expects to meet solid ground, and every moment she does not. Further and further but she can see nothing to judge how far she has fallen. If she had a heartbeat now, it would surely be bursting from her chest. Beyza starts to scream at one point, half in the thrill of this fall, half in terror of it. And still she falls. When she lands, she is quiet - she cannot remember when the screaming had stopped. Her legs tremble slightly as she takes a few shaky steps - reorienting herself to the feeling of standing on something instead of falling through dark space. It takes her a moment to realize the buzzing sound has gone, and she wonders if she has gone deaf but then hears the shuffle of her hooves against the ground as she takes those steps and feels no relief. She can tell something has been taken - but perhaps it is just the absence of her magic? There are so many questions - and as she looks around at the warped landscape around her - she is flooded with more. Everything looks slippery as though it has melted under the heat of some great sun and become liquid even when it shouldn’t. It’s wonderful and fascinating and Beyza turns to find Jamie, to say something to him, but she discovers he is not there. She looks up - as if she could see the rest of them falling from the not-sky - but there are no other figures. So Beyza tries to speak, to call out to the one familiar thing in this strange world, and finds no words come to her. Panic bubbles in her as she tries desperately to reach her magic even though she knows it was lost somewhere in the fog. Jamie she thinks, tries to push it out from her body, but it is just a thought. It goes nowhere else. There is no trace of magic, no trace of the shadow-boy, and she is alone without even her voice to fill the silence. And now, fear begins to override the curiosity and Beyza tastes the bitterness of it as it consumes her. In death, there’s no quickening of her heart in panic or rough inhales of breath. Instead the fear settles inside her bones, rattling there with the echoes of the buzzing, and courses through her veins where blood had once been until it is all she can feel. All that she is. She tries to package this feeling away like she has done so many others, but this place is too strange - this world is too alien - she cannot ground herself enough. When she inhales there is no calming relief because there is no air for her to take in with her lungs that aren’t functioning after death. Unable to bring herself to explore as she had wanted to just moments ago, Beyza just stays where she is - rooted to the strange ground with fear - and can only hope that something will have a voice and give her direction when she has lost her own. beyza

artwork by kharthian


edit: Beyza had her voice snatched by the door

[Blasphemare]

blasphemare

She stood at the cliff long before the others had arrived, long enough to survey her surroundings in peace, before Carnage invaded their heads once more. There seems to be nothing. Just a chasm of emptiness that mimics the world of the dead, well, other than that god awful buzzing. She wishes that buzzing would go away, but it remains, reverberating throughout her body and mind. Blasphemare does her best to ignore it, since her magic seemed unwilling to do anything for her here, but that’s difficult, as the sound shakes the very core of her existence.

As she surveys the nothingness over the cliff, a slight shimmer catches her eye. She stares at it for a time, wondering about it, but since she has been tasked to wait, she soon grows bored and begins scouring the nothingness for anything else, perhaps something like it. But there is nothing.

Finally, the others begin to arrive. They arrive in droves, having struggled through the fog. She couldn’t blame them. The fog had nearly swallowed her own sanity whole, and she wonders if any of them (including herself) would ever be entirely whole again. Probably not, but this was a Carnage quest, after all. What more could they expect?

After everyone’s arrival, she felt him. He felt out of place in her head, like a thorn digging into the deepest recesses of her mind. For a moment, Blasphemare closes her eyes, not wanting to give him what he wants. However, this was his quest, so she carefully peels her eyes open once more to look at the slight shimmer in the nothingness. She could feel his thoughts in her head, and the sensation nearly causes her to wretch, but she stands sturdy and stares carefully at the shimmering patch–no, mouth. It is a mouth that wants to swallow her whole.

Suddenly, she feels a sense of fear growing within her. This was unusual, as fear was not something she commonly experienced. It actually forces her to take a step back, breaking her line of sight with the shimmering “mouth”. Recognizing this, she forces herself to move forward again, just as his words slide through her veins like icy poison. She would have to jump into the “mouth”.

Utterly bewildered, Blasphemare shakes her head–not unlike she is saying “no.” However, she would go through, as this was a quest, and there was no backing out now. She draws a deep breath into her shaking lungs and closes her eyes. She had stared long enough at the void to know exactly where it was.

And then she had jumped. It didn’t take long for the buzzing sound to disappear, though she could still hear it like a distant, mocking laughter in her bones. When she opens her eyes, she stares into a strange world. Nothing seems right here, and the distant horizon moves, almost like a mountain of bugs crawling on top of each other. She shakes her head, the buzzing still there, haunting her.

She swallows a lump in her throat and stares for a moment before she realizes that she should take stock of herself. That hole had been hungry. No doubt it had stolen something from her, stolen it and ate it. She first checks her physical form, and everything is all there. Then she scans her mind, carefully and methodically, for there is much there. And there is definitely something missing. She felt nothing. No sadness, no shame, no fear, no guilt, no happiness, no nothing. The shimmer had stolen her emotions.

Like a fine, aged wine

[Svedka]

let my shadows prove the sunshine

Were it not for the sheer momentous vibration that tremors beneath his hooves, Svedka would be right in assuming that nothingness lay beneath and above him and before him, stretched out thin and spread so wide that its reaches were unfathomable, unattainable. Yet he is still being asked (forced) to trod upon this neverending existence, to dive into this nothingness and to bring something out of it, as if it was even possible by mortal means. But he doesn’t understand this, not really, as he stares into nothing and the drone of the buzzing fills his mind so much so that, for a moment, he forgets that there was anything before this and that, perhaps, there’d be anything after.

His gaze has grown glassy, staring into this void of neverending, dull and out of focus as if lulled to a gentle sleep by the buzzing that grinds sharply against his bones. He can feel the lion protest, stretching inside him for control, but the switch of his ability is still broken, flickering on and off incessantly and unsuccessfully. Svedka notices nothing, on the precipice of the cliff and teetering close to its edge, feeling faint and oh so very tired.

There.

The sudden voice amongst the nothing brings a little bit of focus into those dull eyes, righting himself with a soft snort of confusion. He blinks blearily, smacking his lips as he attempts to bring into focus the shimmering opening that begins to mold before them, It’s hungry.

The stallion swallows, the familiar prick of fear nestling its way into his chest for the first time since his heart had stopped beating. Even the lion does not stir this time, hesitant and unreliant as the mouth widens before them, eagerly awaiting to swallow them up. He thinks for a moment, what would it be like to die a second death, and almost gracefully accepts the idea of the cliff crumbling beneath him and for this to all come to an end once again. But that slippery, twisted voice speaks haste into his mind (I don’t think you have much time) and Svedka spooks, suddenly clamoring forward with such urgency that he cannot even process the feeling of sharp, cold air against him as he plummets, engulfed in that nothingness that has become such a familiar sight to him.

There is nothing but black and sharp whistling past his ears, the feeling of falling making his stomach spin and spin and spin until he was begging for the ground, even if it meant meeting it with such a strong force. He sees nothing, just eternal darkness that, even in the spiraling downward, seems to wrap all around him, searching him and investigating. It is looking for something, casually and thoughtfully, as gravity pulls him further and further downward until finally, Svedka feels it find what it was searching for.

A layer is peeled away with such quickness that a gasp leaves his pale lips. The darkness wedges deep inside his soul, grappling at something that festers and spits and plucking it from him as if it were as delicate as a flower. Svedka can feel it attempting to hold onto him, not wanting to let go but the darkness is persistent, tugging, and manipulating it until suddenly, the turmoil and sadness in his heart alleviate.

The beast ripped from him by this emptiness and darkness, is gone.

When he lands, he is upright. He feels the nothingness seeping into his bones, reminding him that it is only him that occupies his soul for the moment and - despite being in the upside-down of the afterlife - Svedka breathes a sigh of relief for the first time in decades. A specter finally at peace.

The world around him is no longer anything. It is strange, as if it isn’t really a world at all but is trying to appear like one, all melted and swirled and wrong. He frowns, though he knows that he is somehow in the right place, because that same grinding sound from above still vibrates endlessly within him. 

There’s movement in the near distance and the stallion freezes - the beast may be gone, but it did not mean it (or another) did not exist.

svedka

ooc: svedka's lion mountain shifting was taken

[echis]

echis

“ I will love you until we run out of mornings. Then I will love you in the dark. ”

She knows very little beyond the buzzing that shakes her vision and disrupts her balance, causing her to sway on the cliff’s edge. But her gaze follows where it is commanded, as the needle leads the thread. The shimmering thing grows right before her eyes. Echis has hardly noticed the way the ground quakes but her attention is drawn to it only by the grace of Carnage’s thoughts. Their thoughts - his and whatever lies beyond.

The serpent girl stumbles back the few steps she can manage and then she takes a running leap toward the shimmering maw that awaits her. Somewhere in the buzzing, she worries she hasn’t jumped far enough, but then she is too dizzy to keep her thoughts together.

There too many voices, too many sounds in her head to remain fully present for the fall. It grows dark at some point. Finally, the buzzing softens and leaves room for her to think again. The noise continues in the background for a while longer but she is consumed by something new entirely. She has begun to unravel, much like a ball of yarn tossed down a flight of stairs. Every fiber of her prickles and then falls away in the dark, but somehow she watches it all float from her - her gems, her skin, her scales. Echis tries to furrow her brows in confusion and finds the muscles no longer there.

Then, bit by bit, this Other Place puts her back together again. Her bones find cartilage, which in turns finds the muscle fibers. But the mouth keeps her skin to chew a while longer. She realizes this when the cold air finds her raw body, bleeding and burning like nothing she has known. She cries out in pain and stumbles to her knees only to find that this draws more agony across her every nerve. Unable to blink, her tears flow freely down her face as she forces herself to rise.

Her body still vibrates as though the buzzing never left her. Echis trembles as she rises back up onto her small hooves. Normally, focusing on the horizon would steady her, but it looks crooked somehow and far too close. Above, the sky fluctuates like ocean waves yet the ground beneath her drifts slowly by. She weakly searches every corner of her mind with an exhausted sense of urgency for Carnage. Was he still with her?

“Can you hear me?” she whispers, afraid of the way her lips sting when they move to speak. “If I can’t come back, tell Mother I’m so sorry.”

Because even now, her greatest fear is failure in her endeavor.

ooc: echis lost all her skin! yay!!

[Astra Daggenhardt]

Astra Daggenhardt

I never meant to cause no harm,

She hadn't waited long before the voice returned, and she shakily brought herself back to her feet, turning her small frame to face the edge once more and look down at the gaping maw of the unknown. The stallion's voice was somehow clear despite the buzzing that was resonating through her very core, and though his orders frightened her, she would do anything to get away from the buzzing, to get away from this place at all.

Astra took a few steps backwards before running towards the edge, shutting her eyes tightly as she plunged herself into the hungry mouth. The young mare fell for what felt like forever, and she eventually risked opening her eyes; however, curiosity was quickly replaced by horror as something began to swim around her. This thing had no shape, it confused her to watch it, every few seconds it seemed to change in appearance, making her unsure of what it truly was. The strange beast swirled closer to her now, before plunging its form into her own through her chest, causing Astra to desperately gasp for air. Her body felt so cold now, colder somehow than even when she had been met with death at the start of this hellish journey. A strange sense of numbness stole her, feeling drained at first before feeling absolutely nothing at all. Blue eyes gazed in front of her as she watched the beast flee from her body, taking away not only the cold but also something she was unsure of. Something felt like it was missing, but she could not fully comprehend what, and after a few seconds, she forgot entirely.

Finally reaching the end of the glowing maw, Astra felt her delicate body hit the ground with enough force to knock the air from her lungs. Choked gasps were all she could manage for a few minutes, laying on what felt like more sand as she slowly steadied her breathing once again. She shook the sand free from her pale coat as she stood, before raising her head to look at where she was; and it was quite a strange sight when she did so. If the abstract thoughts of an individual could become a tangible habitat, this place was it. Everything within the vicinity seemed more like an idea than a solid form, trees moved in strange ways and everything seemed to be made of liquid. It was as if someone had painted them into this land, and was now washing them away; but why?

Usually her mind would be full of confusion, excitement, and in this case, fear. Yet, right now she could not seem to feel anything at all, and she did not care that she could not feel anything. Soon, she realized that's what the beast had taken. She no longer desired to move towards anything, not tired or bored nor even afraid, yet also not excited nor relieved in any sense. She no longer felt any particular emotions no matter what was happening or what she laid her eyes upon. As she looked around her, nothing really seemed boring, but yet nothing was interesting, nothing scared her nor did anything bring her comfort, there was no particular feeling towards anything at all, she simply did not care for anything that was happening around her. Something deep down did feel wrong, especially this place, something felt very wrong about it; but this point, Astra did not care whether or not she made it out of here alive, she did not care what the goal of this was. That's all there was to it now, not caring.

Something far off began to move, and she craned her neck forward while squinting, trying to make out what it was. It seemed so unidentifiable to her now, and though the horrid buzzing was gone, she could still feel it deep in her bones, making her hesitant to move at all. She decided that maybe that was best, though. It was best to stay here for now, and wait for orders, it didn't feel like it mattered anyways what the strange thing was, all of this was strange and nothing really felt important anymore.

Just wanna take this chance to fly

Brutess

Edit: The door took away all of Astra's emotions

[Ashhal]

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

The incessant buzzing grinds in his bones and rattles his teeth, making dwelling on his recent hell impossible. Even Carnage’s voice echoing once more in his mind fails to draw ire as it had before. Though he would be damned if he’d be a fucking puppet, jumping into the maw that grows and glimmers beneath the crumbling cliff is beginning to sound better and better with each passing moment (if for no other reason that to end this misery).

Death had never frightened him. And after seeing the endless existence he had most feared (a fear he had tried to bury deep), even the unknown hell waiting inside that portal could not inspire a matching fear.

And so, with gritted teeth, he jumps. Though his wings spread wide by force of habit, they do nothing to blunt the fall (as though they simply could not catch air here where the afterlife is every kind of wrong). The mouth gobbles him eagerly, plunging him into an endless, decaying pitch.

He can feel the way it tears at him, as much a physical sensation as it is a mental one. It delves through every fiber of his existence with greedy hunger, seeking, plundering. And it sure as hell finds plenty to plunder. Over a century of memories (a hellish existence, when replayed through this grotesque lens). It sees everything, the things that matter and the things he would rid himself of if given the chance.

But that is not what it wants. As he falls for what seems like eternity, he knows (he fucking knows) it doesn’t want the things he rejects. It wants the things he clings to, even if he hates the way he clings.

In the end, he is so goddamn helpless against it. It Devours. Like a bowl of ramen, it unravels the twisted, tangled bits and slurps at them greedily, ripping them from his skull. Until even the oldest and most faded pieces of his memory reach the surface. Briefly. Before they too are taken.

Until the bones are sucked clean and he is spit out the other side, hollowed out and emptied of all that which once defined him. His memories, both good and bad, ripped clean away.

For a moment he lay crumpled, the ringing in his head as unbearable as the soundless vibration in his bones. When he picks himself up and shakes himself, the ringing dissipates, leaving only the humming clarity of his newly undefined existence. And as he looks around, he can tell this world is a strange one, though he’s not certain why. The warping of the land around him, the disturbing undulation of lines that shouldn’t move, stir an unease deep within but no understanding of why he doesn’t like it.

He knows only that he needs out. As quickly as possible.

If it even is possible.

Edit: Ashhal lost his memories to the door/mouth

[Anomaly]

a n o m a l y. For a moment the sensation of the ground moving beneath her feet is more disconcerting than the unrelenting buzzing in her head.  She knows that she is already dead. Knows that she cannot die again in the afterlife. But that doesn’t stop the sickening sense of déjà vu from seeping beneath her skin.  It doesn’t stop the panic – the same panic she’d felt the first time she’d died – from screaming through her bloodstream until it rivaled the sound of the infernal, unrelenting buzzing.  The shimmering is all that exists beyond the cliff. Beyond is just…nothing. An abyss of black.  She can feel the urgency in the instruction she’d been given. ”Go,” he’d said.  The familiarity of the sensation holds her to the cliff’s edge for a moment longer than she’d have liked.  The memory of the panic and the trauma still thrums through her bloodstream with every heartbeat. This time when the ground gives way beneath her feet, she does not simply fall as she had before. She’d met her end buried beneath the rubble once before – and taken an innocent with her.  She can still feel the warmth of the girl draped over her broken body in the moments before the pain had consumed her and death had come to take them both.  Beyza had pulled them both back from the brink that day. There would be no need for salvation today.   No, this time death itself has imbued her with courage she did not have in life.  So as the ground grows unstable, she pushes off with all the strength she can muster – throwing herself into the abyss.  There isn’t time to second guess her decision, but she knows that the alternative is being buried beneath the rocks somewhere beyond her sight far below. Or so she assumes. The sensation of falling is sickeningly familiar.  She remembers this so vividly.  The flip-flopping of her insides. The strange sensation of weightlessness that follows.  But this time there is no searing pain that immediately follows.  No.  This time she falls for what feels like an eternity.  It is peaceful, almost.  Peaceful until she hears something. A voice. She isn’t sure if the voice is coming from outside her head or within – but the words ring in her mind nonetheless. It is not her own voice. It is not her father’s.  Is it whoever is responsible for the shimmering? ”You may be protected from your own radiation, but children born of your womb will not be so lucky. Those that survive will suffer from mutations or defects that cannot be healed. The price you pay for your presence here is your progeny. No healthy offspring will come from your womb.”  While her face remains outwardly impassive, there’s a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Because in the span of only a few sentences, the only opportunity that Anomaly had for any sort of normalcy in her life had been torn away.  Not only was she cursed but now her children would have to bear her burden. It was a heavy price, indeed, for one who had already lost so much. When the voice ceases, there is a searing light that leads her to slam her eyes shut after the prolonged darkness.  Her feet find the ground more gently than she would have imagined after such a fall.   Slowly her eyes flicker open. She grits her teeth and turns her attention to where she had landed. This place was…strange.  Off. It was disconcerting in the sense that things were certainly recognizable but just not…right.  Things bent where they should have broken, shapes warped unnaturally, and the laws of gravity seemed to be less firm than they were in the living world. It was curious, and she was sure she could have spent hours investigating this strange place, but her attention was demanded elsewhere. Movement. She catches it out of the corner of her still-glowing eyes and whirls to face it – ready to face the unknown. i'm breathing in the chemicals.

 

EDIT: the door took Anomaly's ability to have healthy children. She can only have stillborn or highly defected children.

[jamie]

from the destruction, out of the flame

How strange it is that he can still feel himself inching toward madness.
He can still feel the agony in his bones, in the fiber of his muscles, in the brittle lining of his lungs.

And the god awful buzzing.
It chatters his teeth and makes his jaw ache.

It feels like some small miracle that he can even hear himself think, though the thoughts are not his. He creeps slow to the edge, to peer over the cliff’s lip into the darkness below. But he sees it, just as the rest of them do, the ripple of something. A glimmer of fantastical, alien light.

The shadow thing knows fear better than his counterpart, the sun stood beside him. She feels none of it while it compounds in the pit of his gut. He has been plagued by fear his whole life, hasn’t he? And hasn’t it always been a bone-deep fear of the unknown? Hadn’t he told her that what he feared most was what he might be capable of? He had never tested his own boundaries and he feels no overwhelming urge to test these boundaries either.

But she looks to him and says, ‘together?’ and he nods numbly. Because the buzzing is unbearable and there is some sharp spike of paranoia lodged in his chest, gets him thinking that the fog is going to creep up on them, douse them in all that pain again.

Together, they edge a little closer to the precipice. And he stares out into the flat expanse of darkness, up and over the pulsing tear in the fabric. There is only a fraction of a second that separates them -- a beat of hesitation after she jumps before he jumps, too.

He feels weightless. Adrift. He does not plunge as the rest of them plunge, he merely drifts. A feather in the wind. There is hardly anything to him, the shadow thing. He is only an idea, a wonder, a dream even. And he falls so long that he begins to wonder if he’s even died at all or if he has simply been transported from one world to another. Not even death is enough to convince him that he’d ever been truly alive.

He feels something else, too. Something like a thousand teeth raking hungry against his sides. Licking greedy down the length of his throat. They feel ravenous. He feels ravaged.

And when his feet touch solid ground again, he comes to rest so gingerly that he begins to wonder if he’d really been falling at all. Or if he had simply blinked and there he was.

He turns in a slow circle but does not see Beyza. He is alone here.
And it is quiet. But he can feel the buzzing like it’s trapped in his chest. Like it has replaced his heartbeat.

Still, he calls out. “Beyza?”
And the atmosphere here shimmers with the sound of his voice.
He can see it ripple outward from his mouth. It stirs the strange leaves on the strange trees. It expands forever outward.

Everything here slouches toward the horizon. Somehow technicolor and monochrome all at once. He blinks those freakish eyes but doing so does not pull anything into sharper focus.

There, in the distance, something else stirs. It draws his attention way from the trees with their question mark spines and the ground, which seems alive, and the ever-expanding ripple of his voice.

And he does not hesitate before he begins to move toward it. He remembers how Beyza had looked to him on the ledge and said, ‘together?’ and he had arrived here alone. There is some cavernous void where his hesitation should be. He feels nothing, not even a flicker of guilt, when he moves on without her. The thing had taken his conscience.

you need a villain, give me a name

Jamie

ooc: just to reiterate, the door took his conscience!

[Celest]

Celest stands looking over the edge, and her fear cools into something strange. She knows where this is going. There is only one way it can go -- one way they can go. Blood runs down her one white leg, blossoming out on the earth around her hoof, and turning the top layer of dust to black mud, but she feels little pain. Her mind only capable of focusing on what she assumes will be the Carnage's next logical step. He didn't bring them this far to give up now, and she wasn't sure she wanted him to. The idea of standing on the border of another world, of going somewhere even the dark god had never been, it was tempting.

And anyway, she had nothing to lose. She was already dead.

Detached in this way, his next words are easier to obey. But her body still flinches from such blatant self-destruction, causing her to take one false-step before she leaps.

The fall is sickening, but once her instinctual flash of panic passes, there is something glorious about it. Her body is vibrating with the roar of the buzzing as she nears the mouth. The wash of adrenaline has her skin tingling and her head floating, or maybe that's the loss of blood. Regardless, she passes through the shimmering eye with her ears pinned and her face a hardened mask teal stone.

The darkness swallows her, and her dive is no longer elegant. She beings to spiral as she falls, and falls, and falls, all the while feeling as if layer by layer something is pealing her apart.

Silence. 

She isn't falling anymore, but she isn't exactly standing either. The buzzing has stopped but her body still trembles, harboring echoes of that terrible noise. She turns her head and the world distorts, not quite keeping track with her movements. There are others, the same others from before, but there is an eerie stillness as they all seem to hold their breath. Celest tries to swallow the dust and acidity that have settled in her mouth, but her tongue is thick as a pumice stone. She looks down, only to see a body that is not her own. Her fine, beautiful legs are now rickety and pale, her whole body has changed to the color of ash. With a startled snort, her tail whips against her haunches, but it is a thin, pitiful thing now. She turns to look back over her shoulder, startled as she realizes she could count her ribs below her sallow, white-grey pelt. Her beautiful pelt and luscious curves are gone, her full, violet tail and mane have been replaced by a few bleached and yellowing threads of knotted hair.

Panic is becoming a familiar feeling. There is a change in the air, and with some difficulty, the pale mare returns her attention to the horizon line. Her eyes slowly scan the wasteland. Too-tall trees and melting landmarks add to the sense of wrongness lodged in her gut, and she realizes she was not wrong.

Something moves. Celest grits her teeth, preparing herself for the next challenge.

I'm not a girl, I'm a storm with skin

celest lost "her beauty" her coat is now a pale white/yellow/grey along with her eyes. she is rickety and her ribs and hip bones are protruding and her back/neck seem hollow