Rockette

alkaline.

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Y U E

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Yue was one of the first Aeons discovered; their crater was found in the farthest reaches of Palmecia, sunk deep into the mountains of Lullin, where the land remains eternally rapt with snow and ice. It is an unforgiving landscape that gives sanctuary to an unforgiving creature. Forged of white flame and pure, unadulterated power, Yue is an Aeon thought to be a being of complete and unyielding order of life and, subsequently, rebirth. The Law of All its domain of influence, for everything that is as it should be and ever was, that ever could be under its sanction of righteous fury. The means and thought to perform rightful punishment as deemed fit by its perfect judgment upon all life and the souls therein. Law and order their reign with balance sown betwixt white and black. For Yue, there is no grey or diluted solution but a singular path that carves through the existence of every creature, never donned as simply good or evil, but as creatures of purity that burn as the hottest of flame known to man. Yue's demands are harsh, accurate, and unwavering, where no doubt is permitted to eclipse their power or host. They demand total and complete subjugation and worship and accept nothing less.

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^{「 01 」}

alkaline.

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E L O W E N S L O A N E

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The alliance that is of order and balance, the subject of perfected birthright, the burden to be as she should be rather than what she could be: family a smothering mold, the burden of legacy. Elowen has been sanctioned righteously as a holy blade blessed under the might of All Law and the demanding price of purgatory that rivals the foundations of forsaken heavens lost of their Aeons. To be a weapon of these would-be Gods, the vast well of might and pure ruin sired in these eyes of black that peer through the quivering binds of a soul to purge, annihilate, and set aflame with holy conflagrations. The conceptual alignments of rigid, unyielding prowess that glisten near white-hot with her calloused touch, a reputation forged through the military as the Holy Light, a simplistic moniker that guides the impression of a Soldier prepared to do all in the name of success and glory- to what she believes is right. Elowen is a creature that has given all to her govern, her very soul rapt with their cruelty, her spirit forged through the fire and honed as the weapon sent to eradicate their foes and those that would oppress the Agenda, that defy the Law she has upheld most of her life. By the grace of her heart, of what remains of it, she has not entirely lost her humanity, even if half of it is fused with a deathly god.

Elowen has garnered a reputation of severity with her alarming tactics; the forgone morality of bequeathed death and purging opponents has earned her a rather stoic revere, an assumed facade of unyielding emotion that remains even on the decimated battlefield with her at the center of unwavering violence. She does not yield or break, or bend; she merely is, the Mark of her Aeon an amalgamation of scarring that ascends her spine as a pillar of scorched flesh, reminiscent of a blade wreathed in fire. Though the govern chose Yue for her, their intertwined cells have produced such a bond that bellows Yue's voice of wrath through her mind; their influence glimpsed through the hidden white fire that shimmers yonder the black of her piercing gaze and severe brow that wears an eternal glare. Elowen has been with Solider for nearly ten years, taking rank among the infamous military in 2040 when she was seventeen, shortly after The Shin Massacre. She recently gained the rank of Lieutenant in 2048 when she brought down a phalanx of peculiar red-robed fanatics that invaded the Southern ghettos; she's been hunting them ever since.

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^{「 01 」}

alkaline.

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_{ａ ｌ ｋ ａ ｌ ｉ ｎ ｅ}
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^{「 01」-「 02 」-「 03 」}

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I knew you once, long ago, in the wrath of a supernova did I find you. You were born into a nebula, and I a star. In our union did a thousand and one worlds come alive. And though I no longer remember your face, nor you mine, I never stopped searching.

alkaline.

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_{ａ ｌ ｋ ａ ｌ ｉ ｎ ｅ}
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^{「 01」-「 02 」-「 03 」}

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I knew you once, long ago, in the wrath of a supernova did I find you. You were born into a nebula, and I a star. In our union did a thousand and one worlds come alive. And though I no longer remember your face, nor you mine, I never stopped searching.

alkaline.

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_{ａ ｌ ｋ ａ ｌ ｉ ｎ ｅ}
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^{「 01」-「 02 」-「 03 」}

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I knew you once, long ago, in the wrath of a supernova did I find you. You were born into a nebula, and I a star. In our union did a thousand and one worlds come alive. And though I no longer remember your face, nor you mine, I never stopped searching.

alkaline.

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〚 A C T I V I S T S O P P O S E T H E A E O N A G E N D A I N T H E Y E A R 2 0 5 0 〛

_{O V E R T U R E}

The Agenda was a blueprint for the 21st century. It was the plan to inventory and control all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, information, energy, and human beings in the world. The Agenda was implemented by the Council of International Relations (CIR) in the year 2001. It was the official response to synthetic climate change caused by planetary pollution. However, climate change was only the public lightning rod with which special interests could introduce the Agenda to the public. Governments from all around the world that were present at the executive summit legally agreed to the plan to control the way people live, eat, learn, move, and communicate. All of this was masked by the noble banner of saving the planet from destructive climate change, spurred on by the secretive discovery of Aeon Craters and the death of life that surrounded their impact and the shift in the conceptual law of nature that bent to their will. In reality, the Agenda outlined the justification for a centralized world government; it built itself off of the fear of the unknown and the possibility of life outside of the realm, solidified when the Aeons fell from their seat of the heavens and violently tore through the atmosphere of our planet and drastically influenced the climate. The Agenda was a comprehensive framework for extreme environmentalism, social engineering, global political control, and groundwork for the development of Artificial Aeon Intelligence, creating a new pantheon of worship for the ever-appealing mantle to be known as God in man's somewhat demented image. Aeons were studied to near obsession, their vast powers carefully extracted, manipulated, made to the government's needs and desires, and carefully woven into the everyday production of pharmaceuticals. The Agenda sailed under the pretense of ‘sustainable development for mankind.’ The phrase means little more than ‘population control.’ It was the systematic program for de-population, enslavement, habitational control, social distribution of commonwealth, and complete deconstruction of national integrity. The Agenda exalted the wealth and living standards of a select few within the upper echelons of society. Everyone else became the subject of technological and totalitarian control. Over the course of fifty years since the Agenda’s inception, people around the world have been relocated to designated urban regions where they are effectively prisoners unless they have the assets to choose their fate. Such subjects have been used for Aeon Experimentation purposes- known as Crown Apocolypse in the earlier stages when mentioned subjects died from a queer crystallization process that completely invaded and later killed their hosts.

The Agenda was fully realized in 2050. Everything is under mass surveillance. The state-sanctioned corporations control all aspects of production and consumerism. All information is relentlessly premeditated and censored. Privacy is a forgotten memory within the residential regions. Freedom of expression has since long been removed from legislative protection. Individualism and independence are actively countered and discouraged. A Central Operating System connects and controls all aspects of technological life, which is pervasive. Medical science is obsessed with throttling senescence. Technological science is obsessed with Augmentations. The military is obsessed with creating the ultimate and perfect Soldiers made from the infusion of Aeon and Man. A Social Credit System segregates the masses. The presence of this oppressive system has inspired some citizens to vigilantism. Its activity has been sporadic over the past twenty years but has lately surged into the public view again. The actions are conducted by brave men and women who take measures into their own hands by breaking and manipulating the system in favor of the people. They spread the truth about government, the truth about the Aeons and the tale of other forms of intelligence and life forms, the experimentations of the Crown and the people that herald the might of the Aeons in exchange for a short life, and corporate corruption through digital intrusions and physical activism. They help the poor and exposed by commandeering supplies, storage, and housing. They free the wrongfully persecuted and imprisoned. Some rumors are that free and rouge Aeons influence their actions; other rumors are of defected Soldiers from the military attempting to take life back into their own hands and strike back against their former masters. Alas, immorality runs much more profound. Evidence of a cabalistic elite in hidden organizations and councils occasionally surfaces through various means. Their roots appear to reach further than what anyone would ever have suspected. Rumors of sacrificial rituals, pedophilia, medical experiments, and other vile practices circle hidden communications of the Darknet and a long-forgotten means of conversation undertaken by various couriers. Many of these implications are too much for some to stomach, so they eventually vanish.

Commencement: A Farewell to P.R.C.U. [COMPLETE]

_{Location: Ünterland.}

Human #5.073: the daughters.

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_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: in deliverance.

I see her in you.

Mother, maker, keeper. A remarkable thing that all children clung to– that all children were cast from, all of their mothers sown deep into this timeline as woeful beings struggling to contain hope for their wayward spawn.

Betrayer. She thinks and gazes towards the hearth.

Better yet she be born into a house aflame, to know the world as an eternal conflagration and her lungs filled with smoke. Better yet that she be given to the fire, to know only pain, for when was her life ever not set ablaze; to simmer as embers, coals, to bide time and patience until it was struck anew to rise as a beast of magmatic wrath?

And this woman, who claimed kinship to her, beheld those trembling gestures that dug nails into the damp wood and bled, nails splintered with the force of her disbelief: the convenience, the timing, the place. To be brought here, in this realm of unknown hell that tormented her dreams and warped them into the nightmarish reflections of other-selves and could-be’s that left her barren in all manners of heart and soul. Had she her powers, Amma would’ve tasted the ashen sorrows of hidden lies and truths, the viperish maw that would sluice through her pores and fixate on the lingering emotes of the world that subjugated to her vengeance, the pooling of hate on her wicked tongue stricken with the need to lash out and tear everything asunder. Water-spiked lashes drift closed on a withering sigh; the silence stretches on into a drone of flame and stuttering breath.

She thinks of the only other families she knew of to compare this revelation to, the name of Roth so well known on the island and deeply ingrained into the foundations of the school, even interwoven upon the seas of the Atlantic with their renown spoken into the waves. She cannot help but equate the disparity of her ancestral claims to the near royalty of such a lineage. The prince, she inwardly shudders, so blessedly charmed with life and home, whereas the name Cahors is a specter, a remnant of time fleeting and sorrows eternal. It is a shroud, an eclipse, a lament of death, destiny, and fate as she knows it to be. The name Baxter so delicately aligned with their downfall, the whispers once uttered by Sierra and the sister she both loved and hated and needed all the same. She sees Harper's pleading face in her mind and those eyes that saw everything they could not. Her Grandmother stands there so readily and maternally, a glimpse that fractures through her porcelain reserves to be faced with her kin and knowing such to be true. It does something to Amma as she remains there, still and silent, and dares this woman, dares herself, to deny such convenient dominations. To be brought here to this world so violently, accosted, thrown into the chasm of the dark that surfaced her latent fear of it, to be brought here, rested, and healed. It remains like some grandiose tale of fortune, a written prophecy of the forsaken child placated with familial contingencies; little did this woman know that she harbored a monster in her home. If her Grandmother knew of her sins, would she carelessly absolve them and bless her whole?

Amma had to speculate if she actually wore her mother’s face– if she was easily deciphered through Charlotte’s likeness. Her memory often remained shadowed in a veil of white, difficult to discern, clothed as if a maiden that wept over her misdeeds for the life she had given away. Even her dreams were haphazardly assembled to present that woman of pale skin and blue eyes, midnight hair likened to her own and donned in the mother's warmth yet so dissociated from what Amma thought she knew of the grace of god. She could not help but reflect on when another had looked at her as if a ghost, as an embodiment of someone else, and now she wondered, what had he seen? Who? Was her visage such a haunting shadow of the woman she thought she knew?

A mirror of mirrors reveals the truths of this world but conveniently conceals the lies of life in its embedded reflections, which bear all manner of self and other in this world and the next.

In the shadows of her mind's eyes lies a vacant spot on a hospital wall, ceramic remains, and the lingering confession of weakness to never face oneself again. Not for a while. Perhaps not ever. The bitter fear and self-hatred that lingered as stale and still coffee would in a perpetual ring of spiraling madness. Would she, too, be cursed, unable to face herself ever again and not see what they all saw? To witness the face of the one who had betrayed her more than anyone ever had? The raven-haired transfer written as an enigma, the paradox of who and what she was.

The water has now gone lukewarm and clouded with blackened swirls of detritus, and Amma finally wills herself to look up and lock eyes with her– her grandmother. Her pale hands wring together, and when she steps forward, taking that gaze as acceptance, something inside her swells and snaps and pierces through the rungs of bone that cage a grieving heart.

“Don’t.” She bites, teeth snapped against her tongue, lips paling in violet bruises, a split of flesh that peels against the constraints of a wound that begins to weep, blood washes against her hated mouth anointed as the kiss of death. “Don’t touch me.”

Kylmie looks almost perplexed, a shade of hurt crossing over her features, and Amma immediately loathes how the scrunch of her brows and the purse of her lips remind her of a shadowed face in the darkest corners of her mind. A dark, depraved voice slithers against her lobe and breathes aloud: how much would she look like Mother Dearest if she plucked those blue eyes from her head? She almost trembles from her cruelty envisioned, but would it entirely be out of character from what she knew of herself? What she could remember from sins gone past.

Since when did she care?

“I only want to look at your wounds.”

“Oh,” Amma deflates, a weariness threaded through every pulsating vein. She merely lifts her hand, fingers bruised and marred, and ignores the silvery line of scars that flicker in the hazed light of the fire; how many has she gained anew over the last few months? Did it matter anymore? Would she be fated to walk eternally donned in these laces of hate? Water splashes over the basin as she stands, wet strands of her hair sobbed and wed to her figure, like tentacles of darkness warped against the black lines raised against her skin. She gestures down to her thigh, the bandage now a shade darker.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Are you always this…”

“Defensive.” Dain lists, curiously tacking down his raised fingers. “Abrasive.”

“Difficult.”

Amma could entertain the banter; a quip danced along the edges of carmine-washed teeth, copper wetted against the fullness of her mouth as she merely glared through the casted shadow of her lashes and willed her stare to answer for her.

“Dain.” Kylmie snaps and hands Amma a thick wrap of grey cotton to conceal herself, which she lazily pulls from her familiar hands; she stares at those sapphire jewels adorned on her fingers and remembers a curious red jewel her mother possessed once. She deliberately wraps the material around her body with a feigned slowness and snaps the wet whips of her hair down her back before stepping out from the basin and settling back onto the blanket of furs. Dain growls but looks away, muscles and scars thick and taut, bunched under tan skin that gleams golden under the bathing of firelight before he snarls. It rips through the space that strikes at her bravado. She shivered from the fury she felt.

“You certainly have her eyes,” Kylmie muses offhandedly while kneeling beside her, and something in Amma crumbles beneath those words.

“Don’t do that. Don’t compare me to her.” She drags heavy pieces of her hair over her shoulder. “The woman you’re talking about…”

“I don’t know her.”

Silence resumes, and Amma pulls her fingers through her hair, knots snagging against every tug as she merely yanks through them, wetted pieces of black coming away through her fists, sharp pricks against her scalp that detonate the ringing betwixt her ears, the pain at least cements her to the now with the lingering fog of her nightmare gradually fading away. Though Kylmie doesn’t say anything, she can feel every flinch at the quiet brutality she displays and silently moves to unwrap Amma’s thigh, exposing blackened lines and finely pin-holed wounds of jagged teeth, but also the peculiar scarring that lay beneath and the thick lines of ink beside them. Beautiful, strange, and macabre.

“What happened to you?”

Had anyone ever asked her so blatantly before? There had been rumors and traded stories of things The Foundation had done to her over the years. Ghosts that bore an unknown face and name until they came for her once again. Speculated whispers tossed out over the sea carelessly abandoned, all confirmed during the trials when the simulation had cruelly displayed bits and pieces of truth and lies and spoken her name into the wavering spirit of her dread.

I know that what they did to you - the ghastly, abyssal things they must have done to you, to bring forth what you are now.

It’s a delicate inquiry, spoken carefully, almost in a whisper. Still, she hears it all the same as if a shout into the void of her past, every annunciation ricocheted off the rungs of her bones that splinter with every breath she takes. Amma goes entirely too still. And with her stillness comes the eerily silent reaper of her pain, the ache in her muscles, the fissures in the flesh of her scarred palms and battered feet, the weight of everything endured and lost and forgotten that manifests as more than just the paled crown that bleeds over her brow. She could have meant the markings on her skin, the tattoos she wore as a shield against the hated fragments of her past, to gain ownership of her body once more that had been plied apart over and over again, the violation of her sanctity of heart and the touches of chaos she bore through her trembling hands. She had said yes. The scars she had gritted her teeth against every time needles had graced the silver membrane of her malcontent, the burden she had to bear, the decimation of self. She had said yes.

Kylmie could have meant her time spent within this Limbo they spoke of; she could have meant anything really as she delicately worked and redressed her wounded leg with a cooling salve, a gentleness that she had never known, or perhaps forgotten, mesmerizing as she looked down and then back towards the hearth that swelled and burned.

“Crushed chrysanthemums,” she said, merely to fill the silence. “It’ll help fight back the lingering toxins. You’ll be just fine in a manner of days.”

“Days. Weeks.” It was slowly settling in, like a stone plunked into the recesses of her heart. “I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” It was a simple whisper, dragged over shards of glass, her throat convulsing with thirst and weariness.

“There are… ways to cross realms. But we no longer possess them. She was the last ever to cross over.”

“My mother.” Amma clarified and pulled through her hair again and again.

“Yes. The council forbade us from using that power, but not before she crawled through a conjunction to seek out Midyeden. She always claimed to see things, feel them, and whatever was happening in your world was fated to spill into our own.”

“But…”

“She never came back, and we never heard from her again. The dragon woke up right before she left, and she claimed she’d find a way to send it back wherever it came from. It came, fed, gorged, and slaughtered before it went back to sleep on the neighboring island. She sought answers, answers we would be constantly denied here. Some still remember what happened long ago, and some still whisper our old name.”

Kylmie raised her hand, almost as if she intended to touch Amma’s shoulder, but she quickly lowered it and asked instead: “Do you know what happened to her? Did she ever talk about her home? Did she- is she…?”

“I don’t know,” Amma confessed in a whisper, flinching instinctively at the mention of home. The rapid-fire questions that rang hollow with her Grandmother’s concerns, the sort of affections she envied at that moment, because when had anyone ever thought the same about her? “Bits and pieces come and go; it’s all jagged shards and a ringing that won’t stop.”

Dain stalked closer along the edges of the wall, hearing her uttered whispers and the lulling draw of her voice, the accent that fell off the edge of her words as she spoke.

“I can’t remember many things; I can’t even remember her face. But I hear her voice sometimes, in the dark, and it speaks about a red moon and a Tree of Life. Sometimes, I hear another voice, a roar, a screech, a wail. Something that taunts me constantly, reminding me of what I’ve done. What she did.”

“What-”

“She gave me away.” Amma stares into the fire, the flames that she can feel burrowing deep into her pores, lancing away through her veins and marrow, boiling within and without; hidden within the depths of this contained malice lies the maw of her personal hell that roars, so loudly, so keenly, it vibrates against the heaving cage of her ribs, threatened to rend her asunder as her powers would, and she welcomed the distraction of the panic and pain as she said:

“She keeps telling me to run away. She keeps telling me she’s sorry. She keeps crying, and she won’t stop. She looks out over the sea and says his name, but I can never hear her. She weeps and screams and begs for something, but I can’t remember what it was, what it is. She tells me she’s sorry. She still gave me away to them.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorrysorrysorrysorry.” Her heart beats faster and faster; her heart pounds louder, over and over; it hammers at her ribs ruthlessly as she breathes unsteadily.

Forgive me, dove. They said you had to go; they said they could help you!

“But they didn’t help me– ”

“- They hurt me.”

Amma’s eyes flicker to where the flower remains, glittering with red shards, tiny fragments of who she was, of what she lost.

“I wanted to find her. I said yes. I wanted to find him. I said yes. I only wanted to go home. And here I am, in her home, trapped. Just when I thought maybe I could belong with them. I wanted to try.”

I said yes.

“I wanted the name they took away from me. The name she gave me. I just wanted to mean something to someone, and he promised me…”

Dain moves closer, and Kylmie only stares, unable to speak as Amma begins to shake. It starts as small tremors in her hands, her arms, her shoulders hunched inward, and her head bowed, pieces of her hair shaded over a quivering mouth as she grits her teeth and hisses with the weight of the life of lies that smother her in a choked shadow of dismay and anger. Her rage is a felt and thriving thing that pulsates with her broken heart, her soul shredded into ribbons of wasted remains brutally picked clean and left for naught, the only thing in life that she knew to be her own, something she chose in the darkest pits of gleaming needles and ringing voids, the only thing she could claim as her only means of purpose. She begins to whisper, lost to the toils of her sorrows:

“My name is–”

An exploding wail is there to answer her, a screech that shatters through Ünterland with the powerful thunder of wings that pierce through the shaded clouds of black and red as the dragon begins its attack on the blackwood coven.

Commencement: A Farewell to P.R.C.U. [COMPLETE]

_{Location: Ünterland.}

Human #5.065: in deliverance.

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_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: never there.

She was dreaming again. Or was this truth, a premonition, a retelling, or a taunting perspective to perceive such circumstances from the outside looking in? She was a spectator to her own misconstrued reality and was helpless to wake, forced then to endure the prophecy.

It's all carefully defined and sharpened, the clarity flawless and simultaneously damning as Amma experiences the dance anew, scarlet drapery accentuated in gold, blood ran through in rivulets on patterned floors of black and white, ichor glimmering in its splendor liken to cruel paint. Decorative resplendence of death and a smattering of corpses thrown askew and bedeviled in crimson convergences of her wrath, it’s all frozen in time, facades now agape in eternal screams and nevermore. In this, the gargoyle lays slain, and it is she that has risen above it, a crown of silver bone impaled over her brow, a queen of the ashes heralded and risen on wings of leathery malice that churn lazily through the fires of a forged netherworld. She is as she was made to be: rage, pain, death, destruction. A weapon. Less than human. Chaos sown betwixt heart, body, and soul– a void of omnipotence, the final answer to all things unknown, the foundations of all lain in her blood.

The key is in your blood.

Tiamat, perhaps, or the other that rises as the harbinger of this immediate ruin and despair. A name that lists through on gargled whispers and pleading cries of those fallen under her might. A name that was given through the convergence of amber-yellow and crimson sparks of passion and heated desires, burdened by shared pain and sorrows, amplified tendrils of fear that wove even still through her malformed gestures as she stepped over the stone beast that now lay at her feet in pieces. In the sphere of dread, she is Made and sullen, eyes of blue forlorn and decrepit with smudged tears of black and gold, and in her manacled grip lies a pale throat torn asunder by wicked fingers stained rusted-dark. Her bones crack, fingers splayed, torrents of carmine bidden through the crumbling barriers of this world suspended on her emotional throes as she completes her mission (one of many, but it was this one that had begun her descent) and postures under the moonlight with a terrifying wail of anguish plied from her bloodied lips.

Ummu-Hubur.
Mother of monsters.

None of it matters anyhow, for everyone is dead.

Rory’s inadequacies, Haven's cries, Harper's pleading voice, and her sister’s lament. Banjo's inability to act. Lorcán and Aurora were gone, simply vanished, never there. Katja, too, is missing, perhaps locked and lost in a prison of ice.

Even the lullaby one had pulled from the depths of her mind. All for naught and hummed prettily from her quivering mouth, ribbons of flesh webbed betwixt her teeth.

And there… Gil’s body.
His death. His murder.

His blood warm and wet and heavy on her hands, arms, pores sopped and engorged with the death of his wavering strength and defiance in the face of the reaper to bring her home. Dare she weep over his mangled form when it was she who brought this hell upon them? As she cradled a severed limb, a hand that once sought her own in the dark, a simplistic gesture that had invaded deep to the rungs of her heart and plucked at the sorrow she bore.

A quiet, pained voice whispers through the mayhem, her true name a pleading token as she lay there mangled and wingless, feathers clumped and drowned in reds, stuck to her beautiful face plump with youth and drawn in immense pain. Sickening displays of bone and sinew and twitching muscle, tears of anguish melded into the bronze and golds Amma had drawn onto Haven’s eyes earlier that evening as she reached for her, called to her. She left Gil’s broken body to answer her, poised over to gaze unto those eyes of green and melded browns, glistening and brightened by her miseries, her anguish so profoundly felt as Amma kneels, skin stained and wet, crackling energy formed into her palm and she reaches for her and stops as Haven asks:

What name did you choose?

She opens her mouth to speak.

What have you done?

The prince now stands aloft over ice and blood, arrived too late, the floundering hero with his princess at his side, horror-stricken over her mouth and features, twisted with sadness; heated vengeance alighted in the eyes of the prophetic heir bathed in righteous flame at the carnage witnessed and the beast left to languish over it. Amma trills and laughs, a chittering call heaved from a shattered cavity that plunges with a growling timbre, a beast steadfast in the eyes of a would-be savior, rage and hate quickly replacing kindness and acceptance, a once-seen beauty exchanged for the ugliness of what was rooted in her body. Poised over Haven’s battered self, her beautiful wings torn ruthlessly from her back, tawny feathers decorating Amma’s lap as she cradles in her scarred hand a twisting, pulsating wreath of scarlet power that snaps and drags over her arms, coils descending to meld over Haven’s chest that rises and falls unsteadily.

Ammaranthe, she begs, and it falls upon deaf ears.

Lorcán shouts the name that is not her name, descending to appeal to her wavering humanity, hands stilled and trembling as the field of ice begins to melt, the air sweltering with his churning powers that rise, prepared to meet her ascending plumes of red that boil and froth, they lance through the air ripe with death and meet as tangible waves of vermillion and darkened scarlet, near black now, melding as one as they had before. He pushes against her might, and plasma blooms and churns through his hands as blades poised to strike, but they tremble as he calls to her humanity and roars once more.

Why?

She laughs, she cries, body and bones trembling with the loss of her heart. Unable to stop it.
For the role I have to play.

And then she plunges her blackened fingers into Haven’s chest with the droning manifest of her power drowning out their screams.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Her eyes suddenly flash open and flicker with a sheen of tears, but Amma refused to allow them to fall as her body begins to tremble, the lingering visions of her nightmare weighed so heavily in her chest that she cannot breathe around the finality of what could have happened.

Could it have been done so? Had she not been dragged here or taken, would she have lost the war against herself and been reborn as what she feared most?

Beneath her cheek, she feels the bristled fur of an animal with her fingers purchased through the rough pelt of a blackened hide; she smells smoke tinged with something else, an herb perhaps, that billows in her direction as she slowly becomes aware of her surroundings and lifts glassy eyes from her clenched fingers and beholds the roaring flame of a hearth. She rears back almost instantly, the flickering light too familiar, and too soon, she feels worn rock and stone beneath her. She kicks aside the mass of pelts thrown over her and drags herself back on the heels of her palms. Old training and habit have her immediately surveying the space, a small structure of smoothed stone, quaint and ancient, with an entire wall gouged and blackened by flame, creating a warmth that beads sweat on her brow. Amma glances down, her legs askew and bare and tangled in various furs of black and brown, but what she notices then distracts her entirely from her surroundings. She immediately sits up and studies the dressing knotted carefully over her thigh, gone were the makeshift wrappings of her tattered dress to conceal the wound, even her hands and bloodied feet were bare, though still smudged in black muck and dried remains. Pieces flake away from her skin as she twists her body, studying the curious patches of fabric wrapped and fixed to her injuries, her ballroom gown presumably discarded, leaving her nude.

But where was the flower?

Amma’s eyes round out, widened as she struggles to stand and fails, her body weakened and slight as she searches, had they taken it too? Thrown it away? Perhaps into the fire, unaware of its importance? She doesn’t understand the haste in her movements as she searches every inch of her body, even peers through the blanket of pelts tangled around her until a spark of red in the shadows of the fire draws her attention. There’s a small shelf set aside next to various clay pots that she inspects and finds warmed water inside each of them, but what she reaches for on quivering hands and knees is the replicated flower that remains, a soft, hazy shimmer surrounding it with the faintest touches of amber and red melded through every delicate petal. A faint energy pulsated around it, a quieted hum as if hastily beating wings to answer her caressing fingers as she touched it and felt the subtle vibrations. Amma cradles it to her chest, a soft flutter along the ridge of her scar.

“You’re awake.”

She slants her glare over her shoulder; her back turned to an assumed door as he stands there, with tanned skin, and golden eyes, dark brown hair turned umber in the glow of the fire.

“Where am I?”

He ignored her question with a flickering pass over her figure, a slow perusal she could feel flitting down her body and scars, lingering over the intense tattoos on her skin. Amma does not hide, for it's not in her nature, but she does her best to conceal her modesty. She reaches for a discarded hide and pulls it over her shoulders; the flower still clutched against her heart. A sigh answers her finally before he steps away from the entrance, a massive basin suddenly carried in, constructed of wood and stone. A woman accompanies it, aged and silent, her impression a curious strength with ebony hair braided over her shoulder and streaked with silver. Blue eyes pause and look at Amma curiously before she turns to the man and says,

“Thank you, Dain.”

Dain, now appropriately named, merely nods and takes guard against the wall, arms crossed, and the intensity of his eyes flashes yellow as he continues to stare Amma down. She meets such a gaze with her own, brow furrowed and plummeted low over her eyes. Before she can even challenge him, the woman approaches Amma carefully and studies her intently. Familiarity is found there, along with hesitation, before she reaches past and takes hold of one of the clay pots, the basin brought close to the fire now. She notices the others that carry it, eyes of gold and yellow and blue before they depart on a softened growl from Dain still leaned against the wall, his eyes still refuse to leave her and Amma scoffs with the brazen action.

“I apologize for him. He’s wary of you. We all are.” The woman confesses and dumps the water from the pot into what she recognizes now as a bath, an archaic method, but steam coils, and Amma cannot deny its temptation. She is accustomed to distrust and says nothing to convince them otherwise, whether in this realm or another; she is eternally destined to be suspected. The remaining pots are dumped into the basin, and a cloying perfume wafted by curious hands adorned in sapphires. “Bathe, cleanse. Then we can resume healing your wounds.”

“Who are you?” Amma says instead, pulling the furs tighter around her shoulders. “And where am I?”

“I’m Kylmie. You’re with my coven in the blackwood.”

“I told him I’m not a witch,” she snaps with gritted teeth; Dain merely growls in response with a roll of his eyes that Amma makes a face at.

“Not entirely, but you are… something. Someone” The latter is muttered almost as an afterthought, Kylmie’s eyes unable to meet her peering gaze. She was avoiding her. Why?

“What is your name?” Dain speaks up, glaring at her through the bath’s steam. It is her turn to look away, the inquiry finding its mark, too close in phrase, reminding her of the winged girl who asked similar things. Just as she could not answer in her nightmares, Amma could not find the truth here either: too many names, too many faces, too much to sift through in hazed-out images and epitaphs scored against the obsidian walls of her heart. She merely breathes, and the silence stretches thin in the crackling of flames before she drops the pelt from her shoulders and sets the flower carefully on the shelf where she had found it, her back given to them.

Dain immediately looks away, and Kylmie holds out her hands, palms up, to guide her into the waters, which Amma ignores. She submerges herself into the scented bath graciously. She was glad for the lack of a mirror in this instance as the taint of (what did he call it, Limbo?) began to fall away from her in rolling clouds of black. As a creature of vanity, it was instinctual to graze her scarred palms over her body, ridding her skin of dried blood and filth; her mass of hair was a different challenge as she worked through the knots with her fingers. Kylmie stood beside her, silent in a queer vigil before she spoke.

“You’ve been asleep for about three days.” Amma stills, a quiet shock rolling through her. “We treated the Wendigo bite. Any longer, and eventually, it would’ve killed you. Dain thankfully found us when he did.”

Did she say thank you in this instance?

“You were in Limbo for a while, judging by the healing rate in your other wounds. I’d wager a few weeks, almost some months if I had to guess.”

“What?”
“Time… is different here. Different there. Any longer and you would’ve aged and died. Fallen away to dust.”
“You’re telling me that I’ve been here for weeks?”
“Just a few, yes.”

Amma laughed at the lunacy of it all; so much time had passed that it hardly made any sense. What of (dare she think it) home? What happened after the attack? Gil was dead- her breath caught, hitched, and she shuddered in her grief and sank deep into the waters. Did the rest of Blackjack perish, too? Was her nightmare really just a nightmare? Her hands begin their trembling as she completely submerges herself in the bath, her hair wreathed around her figure in a cloud of midnight black, it did seem longer now…

With a gasp, she came for air and found Kylmie leaning over her, those blue eyes peering into her own, a smattering glitter of silver in her intense stare that Amma recognized. Who was she really?

“I know you must be exhausted. But… I have to ask. Does the name Cahors mean anything to you?” She could deny to answer, she could deny the truth of it all entirely, she owed nothing to this woman, but there was no ignoring the immediate knowing that wavered betwixt them, a clarification of self that Amma felt in the utterance of her last name.

“Yes.”

Kylmie lurches back, her pale hand rising to her throat where a sapphire jewel glimmers, capturing the flame in the hearth that swells and roars.

“You’re her daughter. I see her in you.”
Amma did not answer or confirm; she dared this woman to say her name, her hands clutched against the basin’s rim and her nails digging into the wood and stone. Dared her to claim what she felt was true in their shared eyes of blue.

“And that makes you my granddaughter.”

Commencement: A Farewell to P.R.C.U. [COMPLETE]

In the dark, though there was life sown, there also lingered an aphotic dread, the conceptual design of everlasting energy correlated into the fabric of reality that listed through the unwavering rule of time and all subjugated beneath its reign of inevitability. The void therein that churned and collided against unforeseen energies as wars raged above and below. Roots wove, and deep into the sphere of abyss did something stir and wake, prisoned since the beginning, where chaos was a malformed pit of unknown power; it was many things of an awakening disorder that slumbered still before the One took seed into the chasm of the deep, something that the world would never forget, but would refuse to acknowledge its truth lain far into the void of the in-between, where bedlam heralded through the eldrith roar of resonating malice and want of despair. The reaping desire of revenge for its imprisonment and the want of life and the Vis that fed its hate just as it breathed life through the creations of its once-upon-a-time keepers, now forsaken and cast aside for their greed and want of freedom now denied to it as time unwound through the mighty limbs of The Tree of Life and sowed deep into the roots impaled through the darkness of the endless void.

Until finally, it broke free.

Once as an undulating pit of appetence, it arose as a terrifying, winged wyrm with eyes of loathed blue that sheered through the world and fed upon the energies of life and vestiges of death, relics of eternity and rebirth, denying souls repentance and instead bequeathing punishment of damnation. A serpentine creature once before that fled through the gardens of serenity and gluttonized itself upon the intrigues of immortality before plummeting far below into the chasm of a shattered looking glass and lay waste to lands bathed in a hated red glow. Wrought with insatiable hunger, such a beast fell far from reasoning, listing through the wiles of the world in nightmarish visions of glimmering, crystalline blue eyes peering back from the darkness, its roar shattering through bones and blood, flesh and even stricken unto the souls of many and all as it cried for the netherworld of all life owed to it.

All the wrongs of the world done unto it.

For all the power in the world until naught remained but ash in its grasp.

_{Location: unknown.}

Human #5.064: ancestral trauma.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &.}

Previously: &

^{| Many Years Ago.}

Long ago, a red moon rose. Through the sanguine splendor, there bloomed a fissure through the fabrics of the worlds, from root to branch, to be as above and so below, the equivalent exchange for life and death as Charlotte Cahors dragged herself through a conjunction, wrought with the vile remains of Limbo and putrid creatures that sought to carry through her likeness to feast upon the souls of life astride through the energy particles that infected Midyeden by the might of an undying star. Through sand and surf, she crawled, tides of an ocean heralded under the mighty influence of lunar rays donned in crimson shadows, roaring with their whorl of froth and churning void that ebbed and flowed against her trembling form. Clutched against her palm glimmered the remaining ember of precious jewels, now drained conduits of power lost of their luster, and in her opposite, a soiled blade of black no longer than her forearm. She fought for massive gasps of air, a lingering taint of smog instantly coating her throat, the firmament here embedded with industrial claims of iron and smoke, even the waters here slick with oil and tinged black into their depths as she looked yonder to the realm she had studied through scrying silver-glass of mirrors. Charlotte leaned back onto her heels, the grit of sand harsh on her knees and scoured through her palms that she cleansed with water, the salt of the sea stinging her flesh but further cementing her intentions as the rift at her back wavered and swelled before finally sealing shut at the rush of molecules that flitted through this time and many others, lingering caresses of magic threaded into the leylines burrowed here into the surf that connected to the edges of this world and the next.

And there at her side, as had been for years and would be for many to come as always and meant-to-be, stood a towering beast of black and white, its coat tainted just as she was, laden heavily with the remnants of Limbo and the abysmal creatures that haunted it. Exhausted and spent, bound together in a tangibly felt fragment of a soul of souls, the wavering spools of magic struggled to contain their manifest in either body as this world was unknown for it and instead coiled with the vivacity of celestial endowment. Charlotte dug trembling fingers into its pelt and heaved herself up, burrowing into a heaving flank as the scarlet moon above began to pale and flicker, silver drowning them and painting the beach aglow with it, shimmering lamplight of starlight that reflected in her eyes of blue, burdened to see and witness all, the eyes of eternal sorrows that glistened with every drop of her lashes. A soft canine growl of concern purred through her bones, and Charlotte finally stepped back, carved hands through her midnight-black hair, and looked onto the shoreline, then back over rolling fields of deadened reeds and the cresting dunes of rock.

Are you sure about this?

“No,” she admitted quietly, soft hands whispering over perked ears. “But I saw something, felt something.” Charlotte amended, her Familiar for many years now so attuned with her voice and mannerisms, an intelligence that alighted in too-keen eyes that studied the landscape just as she did. “And whatever happens here could happen in Ünterland. Too many holes for things to crawl through, too many eyes wandering into the shadows, too few guardians to keep them at bay.”

But the dragon -

“Sleeps.” She muttered and quickly pointed away from them. “Now, scout.”

Her Familiar chuffed, almost with an imperceptible too-human eye roll, before powerful paws carved deep into the wet sand, heaving its massive body quickly over the dunes and into the dark at a galloping pace. With him disappearing finally from sight, Charlotte sighed, her shoulders stooped with effort, her limbs weighted and weary, and her heart plummeted to the depths of a sudden loneliness stranded on this plane. She was not sure, no, because getting here was one thing, but to get back was entirely another, a circumstance she had contemplated in their journey with the moniker of deserter chained to her spirit. Still, there was no turning back when they stepped over the threshold of knowing, to be seekers now that defied the order of here and there to search for an evil that quaked through a mirror of mirrors, for as above and so below, as she was taught and could not ignore that calling that inspired her to leave from Ünterland. Banishment some had uttered, isolation in her curious mind that could not leave this world be, for though a reflection of what she knew, there was fascination in the towering spires of metal and glass she could glean and the inspiring architecture that stood against the ages. Things here were fast, quick; they accelerated far more than any other place she had seen, man and the world in a constant fluctuation of movement and sparing little charm in their daily endeavors.

In the distant gloom, she heard a howl, something soft and careful that pitched low into an echo off the sands and curled over the quieting waves.

Nothing, dawn is some hours away yet. There are houses, I think, farther in. I didn’t get too close; they have their own Familiars.

They’re more like pets, Keiran. They’d likely think you one as well.

I am not a pet.

He returned to her side quickly, paced eagerly, and almost irritable, the sand giving way underneath his considerable weight and size. She studied him carefully, contemplating his guard in silence.

What?

“You’re too big; you’ll attract unwanted attention in this form.”
That’s ridiculous.
“No, animals are far smaller here. Domesticated.”
…What do you suggest then?

Charlotte grinned and procured a small golden trinket, one beset with a polished, clear silver gem. She unspooled the chain from her delicate hand; her blade tucked curiously into the white veils draped over her form, adorned in curious armor and filigree. Keiran, as she called him, settled back onto powerful haunches. A chuff pumped away from a panting maw and growled. A sparkling convergence of magic intertwined between them, shimmering as a kaleidoscope of pale, white threads.

“Like a pet,” she uttered and intricately wove her hands, settling her palm against his furred brow and then pushed. His once immense size began to waver, quivering with their combined souls, pulsating as a heart, as one, as Keiran possessed of bones and fur and muscle bunched and fell, a form of once dominating prowess sundered to something far more mundane. A sharp, swift bark sounded immediately; a simple dog of black and white now sat on her heels, obedient in all manners of a loyal hound with longer, shaggy fur, even if the response was less than pleased and disgruntled.

“There, now you look like a normal dog.”

Great.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Far across the sea, where the tides of fate would later converge on an island, Jonas Lehrer stirred, near panicked, and fell into the fabrics of time unwillingly; suspended within the throes of life as he tried to decipher that sudden shift in the spun threads of reality he had so carefully advised for many years; a once secured future for his family, his adoptive grandchild to be exact, suddenly shifted into uncertainty by the unveiling of an intriguing, pale face. In his many years of living, seeing events unfold, and knowing, he was burdened with everything unraveling from his grasp and unable to intervene, simply being an adviser to those directly affected by the cruelty of life’s eternal clock. Time shifted once more, out of his grasp, and he was thrust forward, he could see the ashen spires of a church lit through with terrifying, crackling wreaths of crimson power and obsidian wraiths born unto death in plumes of darkness. He fell onto a beach and saw this woman he did not know, heard her name, and then was dragged once more by his powers fluctuating madly, and then he saw a man there, one he knew of, and witnessed their meeting bid by the eclipsing matters of fate. He was sent to discover the torn veil she stepped through, to study and inquire about a potential threat heralded by those eyes wreathed of starlight to see All. The birth of a child next and the terrible fate meant for her by the hopeless draw of love, her own destines intertwined through this particular timeline now christened by the power of evil, a madman rose upon a self-given name of all-knowing cruelty and ill intent. Children unborn and unknown and all their lives now changed because, across the seas, there would be a little girl who would come to bear the mantle of pure destruction, born of midnight hair and pale eyes, delicate palms cupped around a shattered heart and held aloft as a sacrifice.

Chaos is then given form and home in waxen skin donned in scars and ink.

He knew he could not interfere, but even so, he grabbed both pen and paper and set to write a letter that would play a part in ultimately deciding her fate many years from now. He had to try something, yes, if only to save the child who had not yet been born, the one who would become his heir. A curious stone sat beside his still and poised pen, glinting in the light, and with a careful glance, he then set to write.

Dear Ms. Cahors,

You don’t know me, but I know you, and I know of your daughter. I have seen what the world has done to her and I have seen the countless lives she will touch…

Commencement: A Farewell to P.R.C.U. [COMPLETE]

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.059: never there.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: awaken.

Amma hissed. Her reactions were instinctual swaths of anger that pooled against her tongue, warmed by blood, and a rush of more adrenaline hitched her breath in the limited space allowed. Her right hand snatched up to cinch around the muscled arm that bunched beneath her slick palm, tightening around her throat. She choked, lips parting around a gasp and a curse as she raked her bloodied nails and blackened fingers against his skin and jerked her body back, wrapped feet scraping through dirt even as ebony fog fled to the edges of her vision and clouded the expanse betwixt her ears.

“Let me go.” She demanded, lashes fluttering shut as the pressure increased; his hand was all-encompassing on her neck, a mortal frailty she refused to acknowledge, sundering all manner of breath as she struggled. A snarl surrounded her, followed by barks and whimpers, a cacophony that yipped and crowded from the shadows and nipped around her heels; she felt hot breath and tongues against her legs, thighs, more that scraped against her back and waist and yanked against the remains of silk wed to her heated body. Amma used his arm as an anchor and attempted to move out of their reach; leathery noses pressed heavily against her flesh and wet. Her weight pulled against him, but he barely budged. He merely held her there as an amalgamation of teeth, claw, and fur nearly swept her under, harsh eyes aglow in hazed-out yellows as ebony pupils narrowed and slivered. He hoisted her forward, fingers manacled beneath the line of her jaw as he inhaled, swift and deep, powerful as he took in her scent and glanced down the quivering lines of her body as she shook in his grasp- they were as fleeing quakes of rage, scorned by the hopeless endeavor of trying to remove herself from his grasp. Foolish. Brave.

Compared to him, she was merely an adolescent, minuscule, frail- but what he felt from her was entirely different, something that was other, unknown, and something else that he knew well from his aged life. Witches blood. An interwoven conjunction of it, a half-breed, he mused: Hexenbrüt and something else, something tainted with flickering kernels of loss and pain.

She smelled like… death. Destruction. Empty. A void, perhaps, as the abyss of life that once was and had ever been. Insatiable for whatever remained hidden and yet unbound in those blue eyes.

“What are you?”

Amma wheezed at the inquiry; wasn’t that entirely ironic? A question that stalked through her life, what, who, an interrogation of self that sown itself deep into the vestiges of her heart and soul of souls. No one, nothing, and everything, she thought. Never known and constantly desired– never chosen. So, she laughed with a husked and drawn-out breath, nails sinking deep into his skin as the wolves frenzied around her. One flanked to her side to tear away at the silk knotted over her thigh, blunted canines brushed against her flesh, and she welcomed the bite that never came; let them tear her to pieces, she envisioned, let the torment begin anew in the hell unsought.

“That thing has been asleep for years, and now it has suddenly woken up and come here, to this island. And here you are. Climbing up from the Wailing Cliffs at that. So I’ll ask again, what are you? Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” came her honest answer. All the names she bore through life fell into the fractured shadows, leaving a mere husk of a girl in a tattered gown. A swift bark followed, and Amma winced, gritting around the burning pain in her leg as another wolf whimpered shrilly; a growl heaved from a massive maw thereafter, as if speaking amongst each other. They blended as a solitary unit of sheer power with various pelts of grey, brown, and muddied white. Some were donned in black and coppery reds, a myriad of colors blended perfectly into the sanguine darkness. Amma counted at least eight of them that she could see, all many heads taller than her, some even crested at his shoulder that flexed under her searching gaze. Not just wolves, she thought; they presented too-human mannerisms in how they chuffed and shook, powerful muscles coiling beneath their pelts as they paced in tight circles around them, her wounded leg now exposed.

Nostrils flared, and those piercing eyes glanced down in response. There were more clamoring barks and whines, warnings trills as fresh blood wept and oozed, and Amma nearly screamed from the burning sensation that lanced through her veins, a familiar agony that she had felt once before in the eternal darkness.

“You were in Limbo. I can smell it on you. And the thing that attacked you.”

“Limbo? That means what to me?” She challenged in a rasp, her fingers clutching at the rough-hewn skin of his hands, feeling the raised purchase of scars. He still refused to release her, and a frustrated call slithered from her lips and teeth, bone against her pout as she twisted her body; she was not accustomed to feeling so helpless, so powerless. Within and without, Amma felt at a loss from the manifest that made her up in its entirety, to be so intertwined with the leagues of chaos and destruction, and then bitterly denied their droning resonation at her weakest moment. She couldn’t decipher what emotion brewed betwixt her ribs and stuck to the rungs that shuddered around her exhales, but the void of once frightening symphonies of nihilism was blissfully vacant.

“It means you don’t belong here, yet you have witch blood in you. Perhaps that is why the Wendigo’s bite hasn’t taken you.” He paused, a quizzical cant to his head, studying her in sincerity as he finally lowered her and relinquished his hold on her throat. “Yet something is missing, something taken. Witch and something… else.” Amma drew in her great gasps as she fought to breathe, a frigid glare slanted through her lashes as ice floes adrift in the sea, paling with her exhaustion as she heavily said:

“I’m not a witch.”

“Not entirely, no.” A wolf of muddied, pale fur fit its massive, wedge-shaped head beneath his free arm, a soft whine and a growl directed at her for the tiniest slivers of her nails had raked through. She is reminded of another and swiftly looks away. “But you will be dead.”

“What?” Amma snapped, teeth clacking together and her brow plummeting low over her glare. “I’m already dead; you can’t kill me.”

“You’re not dead. Though if I wanted, you already would be.” He responded, matter-of-fact, sounding almost bored as he stroked through the white pelt of the wolf still nestled against his side, a delicate tail swishing to and fro; it was surreal to witness him caress and dote on such a creature that she had to look up at. He towered over her even, causing her to crane her neck back to fully meet the golden ochre of his gaze that pierced right through her as a predator would.

“Is this not hell?”

“There is no such place. You’re in Ünterland.”

And it is at that very mention of a place that Amma stills; everything is leeched entirely away from her, replaced by acrid realization as rusted keys twist achingly slow and click with finality, locks once more falling away into the chasm of her despairing memory, the white veil of her mother poised delicately across a mirror of mirrors, lips moving soundlessly as her voice whispers through the darkness of her wavering thoughts:

There is a place
As if the roots of a great tree
A Tree of Life, if you will
And in such a place is where I was born

It is like this world, and yet not.
Twisted, maybe, fallen to some
Many things and creatures live there
For the monsters are very much real

And it is called Ünterland.

The weight of remembrance plummets low onto her heart, dragging with it an unforeseen wealth of damning evocation for many things forgotten and locked away. A whispering chant accompanies the trauma endured as she falls, her ashes fanned and peeled wide as she suddenly lists and faints, caught within golden arms twined in scars.

A warbling growl mutters against his side, and he carefully shifts, hoisting Amma’s weight with ease. He glances at the pale yellows amassed before him, eagerly awaiting the direction of their master.

The Jarl will want her.
Yes, he’s been searching for thralls and concubines.

But would he want a witch?
She’s not a witch.

Do we take her to the coven?
Would they even want her?

What is she?!

“Silence,” he barks, once mundane features shifting eerily to something more lupine and feral, a transitional phase as muscles quivered and bunched, a coiling need spiraling through as he glances down to the girl in his grasp. He needed answers, and what’s more, with the dragon having returned, the island was fated to suffer the storm of its wrath should it be provoked. This girl was connected; only he could not fathom how or why; with an unwavering hold, he glanced down to the bite festering on her pale thigh and turned to face the treeline where a trembling roar shook through the forest and great wings once more took to the red-hued sky, heralding a massive cloud of black imbued with crackling crimson light.

“We’re taking her to the witches.”

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

^{| A few weeks from now.}

She follows the chittering moths into the gloom, lured and seduced by demented yellows and shades of grey. Darkness wavers and undulates with every step she takes, as they told her it would, for they told her to keep going even if she could not see. Something pulls her forward, something connected to the void of self, and she searches in vain for fragments of power splintered and lost. The further she travels, a blackened blade in hand with its jeweled pommel nestled against her scars, the more her path slowly descends as gentle slopes into the shadows. Wailing howls sound at her back, warning drones that pitch and claw against her lobes, she had managed to get away, but at what cost as she ventured onto this plane unknown with no direction other than the strings of fate that wavered and spooled away from her chest?

She caresses white petals that have curiously remained, coiling tendrils bidden to and by her touch.

She hears her name, a desperate and pleading summons, a voice she recognizes but cannot believe. Not here in this cresting black, for nothing here could be trusted, for though it was not hell, it still twisted and malformed her desires and plagued her heart with the manifest of her dreams and shattering nightmares. Visions that she has suffered for weeks with more fiendish memories cantering through rusted hinges and bleeding chasms of hate.

In the distance, she can see them, hazed out in pools of ink. They reach for her with desperate hands, crying out her name—her true name. She reaches for them, fingers splayed and clawing through the dark. She is almost there and so close that she can finally see them as they say her name repeatedly as a mantra, a prayer falling and tumbling from their lips.

It was almost too good to be true.

And so it was as from the pitch of black came a viperish maw rent open, hollowed fangs aimed for her- for them- as from its bite came a sudden eddy of a swirling vortex of familiar scarlet power with faded edges of silver.