#Breadth First Traversal | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ceilidho · 2 years ago

Text

in the cauldron boil and bake

prompt: pretty little witch who lives in a cottage in the forest who sometimes eats wayward travellers but Ghost has some kind of magic repulsion aura that doesn’t allow her to use her powers on him. (ON AO3) tags: very nsfw, implied/lightly described violence, dubcon/noncon, noncon spanking, implied cannibalism (just in general, not with the pairing lol); 5.5k

He moves at a pace too slow for you to make out with the naked eye, but you feel it creeping through you.

The vision of him appears in a dream first, a premonition. A hulking figure trekking through the woods. You snuggle deeper under the covers and scrunch up your nose in your sleep. In the morning, you go outside to harvest the holly leaves and buttercup and return home dreaming of tender, slow cooked meat. It’s been awhile since you last had a proper meal. When you hang up the laundry to dry, you chew on peppermint cuttings and try not to salivate.

In the centuries you’ve lived in these woods, travellers have come and gone. You don’t eat every single one that happens to pass by—that would be a surefire way to get your forest branded as bedevilled and a longer route established circumnavigating your grove. You might be hungry, but you’re prudent, careful. Not like some other witches these days, greedy for any morsel that happens to pass in front of them.

No; you take care of your woods. You have to, if you plan on remaining here for the centuries to come. If a few travellers happen to disappear here and there, that’s simply life. Not everyone can make treacherous journeys.

You always have a sense of when a traveller is nearby. It’s as though your being is embedded within the forest itself, privy to those who dwell within it. You feel him along the outer regions of the forest, a lone traveller hauling not more than himself and a rucksack filled with the bare essentials. He appears to you in flashes in your dreams, not the full image of him but piecemeal, a shadow obscuring his full face from you. You see only tendons and meat on his bones, a rough hewn strength to his limbs, touch muscle and fat wrapped around his middle.

It makes you giddy to think of him circling ever closer to your spider’s web at the centre of the forest. After him, you won’t be hungry for years.

Your restless leg acts up the day you know that he’s close enough to approach. All morning, you sit at the little table in your kitchen and rip lavender buds from the stems, black shoes tap-tapping away at the floor. The broom sweeps by itself in the corner, sweeping the dust into a neat pile. When you snap your fingers, it’s brusque, impatient. The broom halts in midair and then clatters against the floorboards. The chair scrapes against the floor as you rise to your feet.

“Come, come, Asphodel,” you whisper to the black cat curled up on the windowsill, which barely lifts her head enough to blink at you. “No more dallying. Mommy’s hungry.”

In a show of great defiance and disrespect, Asphodel merely meows at you and lays her head back down. Insipid little familiar.

You go off on your own then, keen to see the travellers with your own eyes. Jowls growing tighter. Robe cinched tight around you and hair pinned back by a thin strand of velvet. The days have just begun to shorten, just begun to exhale frost and rot. The leaves however, by agreement, do not crunch under your feet and give you away. You are a phantom amidst the trees as you flank the lone traveller, following the breadth of him as he traverses past your homestead.

It’s fortunate that you are not beholden to physics because he is formidable. Broad as a man might be, no less sizable than in your dreams, but much more menacing in the flesh. He too moves quietly in the brush, with a care and precision that you have not seen many humans employ.

He conceals the lower half of his face with a black piece of fabric, which you had mistaken for shadows. Not so. It is a deliberate concealment, meant to unnerve. Without magic, you might not have approached.

His size alone isn’t enough to frighten you though. You are two hundred years old and you have eaten men twice his size when you were naught but a babe.

You step out into the clearing just a few paces from him, halting the man in his tracks.

“Hello,” you call out tentatively, raising a hand to shield your eyes. “C-can you help me? I think I’ve lost my way.”

At this point in your career, it takes a bit to hide the smile that threatens to break. You are like the spider posing as a fly. The show is half the fun though.

The man doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even seem shocked at your presence, arms loose by his sides. It makes your stomach clench, the script flipped a bit. It should be you, loose and limber, and the wayward traveller tense and nonplussed, then eager to help the lost girl. You wait a moment longer for him to respond, but he remains silent, blue eyes unblinking.

“Can you help me?” you repeat, taking a step closer. The tendrils of your magic slither out of you, snaking across the forest floor towards him. “I’m lost. Can you help me find my way out?”

Your magic finds his boots in the dirt like mycelium threads, the pulse of him rich and earthen. It makes the saliva pool in your mouth, hunger gnawing at your guts. He will taste so good. Meaty and huge, enough to last you the winter. You take another step closer despite his continued silence, a tad too eager. You only need a moment though, long enough for your magic to take root, to render him febrile and inert. When he collapses to the ground, you will float his body back and rend him limb from limb by your hearth.

Another step brings you closer to him when your magic suddenly recoils, unwinds from him. You frown. You try sending it back, but your magic shrinks away, an atavistic fear blooming up in you. It does not want near this man.

A cold sweat breaks out on your neck. The hairs on your neck and arms stand on end.

The masked man staring back at you tilts his head, the skin under his eyes crinkling with a smile that you cannot see. Suddenly eldritch, blood-curdling.

“Now, what are you?” he asks with a rumbling voice, rough from disuse, and takes a step towards you.

You trip over your feet scrambling back. Branches from a nearby tree scoop towards you, catching you before you tumble down into the soft dirt. He advances quickly on you, big hand finding now the hatchet strapped to his side and pulling it out, the thing dwarfed in his massive paw.

“Stay back—stay back—” you hiss, the branches listening to your fear and dragging you away from the man. “Leave—I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Do what?” he asks, taunting. Just a twinge of it, as if he can’t help that he has a predilection to mock.

He catches up to you fast enough, the strides of his long legs enough to eat up the distance. When you whip the branches towards him, they stop mere inches from him, giving him ample time to bat them away. The ones that get close enough meet his hatchet, a single cleave enough to sever them from the tree. You don’t feel the tree’s pain, but where his blade meets your magic—a thin coating along the branches, like extended, ghost limbs of your own—it stings.

“Stay back!” you shriek, heart pumping away ferociously. Your voice comes out like a caterwaul. He’s too close now though, towering over you, the bitter smell of old sweat and musk. Up close, he does not smell like anything you know. He smells sun bleached, the rust of old blood like the blades in your shed after a long season’s hunt.

“What sort of girl—” he starts, hand fisting in your hair and wrenching your head back, “—ambushes strange men in forests? Do you have a death wish?”

To have him touch you is singularly terrifying. You haven’t been touched in a hundred years, certainly not by a human. His touch sends you skittering back, but he has you trapped in place. Your shoes dig into the dirt when you try to push yourself away, hands pressed against his chest much to your distress.

“Men can’t kill me,” you hiss, fingers clawing at the hand holding you in place, scratching at him with the little nails that you never bothered to grow out.

You can’t see the whole of his face, but his expression is undoubtedly unimpressed. “I could kill you easily, girl.”

“I’m not a girl—I’m a witch.”

“A witch is a girl.”

“I eat girls,” you snap, so angry now that spittle drips from your mouth. You shrink back when he wipes it away with a gloved hand. “I eat men like you too. If you are a man.”

You say that because the way your magic curls away from him has you on edge. Humans may not scare you, but eldritch, ancient monsters do and they hunt little witches like you. Usually not in your own woods, but stranger things have happened.

“‘Course I’m a man. Look at me.”

He presses the whole length of his body against yours, dragging you so close to him by your hair that you almost rise up onto your toes. He’s solid all the way through, only a bit of give around his middle. There’s something distinctly hard pressing against your low belly. It leaves you flustered, hot under your collar. An unfamiliar heat in your core, legs clenching on nothing. You give in to the instinctive urge to look down, but pressed so close to him, there’s little to see beyond the wideness of his chest, covered by a brown tunic laced up the front.

“Means nothing. Plenty of things look like other things. I look like a girl but I am not,” you stutter.

“Were you trying to eat me then, witch girl?” he breathes, amused. You yelp when he gives you a little shake by the hair.

You flash your teeth at that, hoping he takes that as a threat. You have chewed off flesh far tougher than his. “Still might, human. If you don’t let me go.”

He stares down at you, eyes giving nothing away. “It’s not every day that a little girl threatens to eat me. Not very nice, you know. I’ve cut down men twice your size for less.”

“You like bloodshed?”

“I trade in bounties; it’s part of the job. But, yes, girl. I like bloodshed.”

It’s not reassuring to hear that when his hands are fast on you. You wish now you hadn’t dreamed of this strange man immune to your magic and left him to his wandering. There are bears in these woods that could have dealt with him for you.

“I’m—I’m not going to anymore,” you say, quieter now, hands falling back to his chest, trying to shove yourself just the slightest bit away. You don’t move an inch. “I’ll…I can find something else to eat. Just let me go.”

The man widens his stance, feet bracketing yours. In two hundred years, you haven’t felt small. You’ve felt tremendous, expansive, big as the whole forest; monstrous some days even. The most ferocious predator in the woods, the haunting lurching her way through the trees, belly hungry for iron blood and the ripe taste of fear.

You feel that fear now in your mouth for the first time, sour.

He smiles behind the mask again. “Maybe later. Need to teach you a lesson.”

“A lesson?” Maybe the fear hasn’t sunk in all the way because you ask that when he lets go of his hold on your hair and drops his hands to your waist, getting a tight hold there. Twisting you around while he walks you back.

“You all alone in the forest?” he asks instead of answering you. “Is there a house that I missed? Been here for months and haven’t seen one.”

“Of course, I—I live here.” You don’t want to say more than though, lest you reveal too much about yourself. You’re still wondering whether surviving this ordeal will be as simple as getting away. There’s something savage in his gaze now, the mealy taste in your mouth translating that look like the hunter looking upon the hunted.

There’s a tree stump that he guides you to, shaded under the canopy. When he tips you over the stump, the breath rushes out of you. The edge is rough against your stomach. You don’t even notice him pulling up the back of your dress until a few seconds later.

“Wait, hold on—that’s my indoor dress!” you cry out, the front of your dress scraping against the stump and sure to tear. “Let me go—stop it!”

Your drawers are next, slid down your hips while you squirm and wail, feet kicking out behind you.

“Behave.” It’s punctuated by the sudden sting on your cheek, bottom flaming red by his hand. Pain is such a foreign concept to you that it initially leaves you speechless.

He props you against the stump with little care for how your knees drag in the dirt and whether your underwear gets dirt on them. He keeps you pinned there with a big hand on the centre of your back. Your shimmying gets you nowhere, only planted farther into the dirt; it only scuffs up your knees and pulls wretched little noises from your throat.

The terror comes when you’re bare to him and he draws his hand back. You gasp at the first smack, shocked; it’s a broken, stupid sound. At the next smack, you react properly, going into a frenzy, twisting left and right to get away, but helpless under just a fraction of his strength. Your magic does no good for once in your long life either. You feel it sit on the periphery, unsure of what to do because it cannot come close to this strange man for some reason.

You yelp every time his hand comes down on your bottom. Red fills your vision. Tears do as well.

“I am going to—” you break off on a yowl, back arching, “—I am going to eat the flesh off your bones for this! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

His chuckle is bone-chilling, ices you right over. “You oughta at least know the name of the man you’re going to eat. They call me Ghost.”

“I’ll call you—” The caustic name you were about to call him is ripped from your lips by another well-placed smack on your ass.

You shriek so loud that the birds flee from their perches within the trees.

The worst part is the way your thighs flex together with every smack. Belly clenching. You can feel slick gathering where it shouldn’t, a high blush splotched across your cheeks as you pray that he doesn’t notice. It doesn’t happen often, only in the week following your cycle when you feel ravenous and flushed, skin prickly and raw until you go outdoors and roll around in the dirt under the moonlight. Always by yourself, of course, naturally.

Little panting breaths hiccup out of you, your cheeks overflowing with frustrated tears. After the first minute, you simply go limp. There’s nothing else you can do. Even trying to levitate does you no good, it only props your butt up higher into the air since Ghost’s hand on your upper back keeps your chest pressed to the stump. It only seems to amuse him, judging by the hoarse chuckle he lets out.

Without your broom, the little bit of levitation is more of a party trick than anything—and you haven’t even been to a party in fifty years, not since your coven’s last autumnal gathering. Not that it matters at a time like this. His hand comes down on your butt again and you wail, shoes digging into the ground and kicking up dirt. Your mind goes blank again, thoughts replaced by the looping ow, ow, ow that also falls from your lips.

“Does it hurt, lovie?” Ghost asks, hand coming to rest on your livid cheek. It makes you hiss, turning your head until your cheek is pressed to the stump’s inner rings. His voice is gentle, but mocking, like the voice you use when hacking into a screaming man, asking him if he’d like his hand back while you dangle it in front of him.

“It’s going to hurt so much worse when I dice you into little pieces,” you hiss. He gives a mocking pat to your butt, making you flinch.

“Learned your lesson yet?”

You keep your gaze stubbornly off to the side. Somehow, it would be worse to look over your shoulder and make eye contact with the strange beast at your back. “If you leave now, I won't sever your limbs from your body and roast your organs from the inside.”

“I take it you haven’t,” he says, another chuckle rumbling out of him.

His hand comes off your naked rear. Your ears perk up when you hear the sound of fabric over fabric, wondering if maybe he’s pulling your underwear back up, but you don’t feel anything. What you feel instead is the sudden heaviness pushed between your thighs, nestled right up against your wet core, so unfamiliar that it makes you jump. You stay put though, held down still by his hand.

“Put that back,” you say severely.

He holds it against your sex with his free hand and presses forward, coating himself with your slick. “You’re not in a position to make demands, girl.”

“I’m going to slice every bit of skin off your bones.” Your mouth salivates at the thought, thinking of all the thick, iron-rich blood from someone Ghost’s size.

Those thoughts disperse again like smoke when he ruts forward, the thick length between his legs gliding through your wetness. It makes you break out into a sweat, keen catching between your teeth, just narrowly bitten back. Ghost makes no effort to suppress his groans. They’re loud, a lustful, masculine pleasure that you’ve heard far off in your woods before—unfortunate couples come to copulate before meeting their end at your hands—but never so close. Never right up in your ear.

“It’s not fair,” you sob, emotional suddenly. “You’re just going to—to do that and then kill me.”

He leans his full weight over you, the rough texture of his shirt catching on the back of your dress. You’re sweating so hard now that the lace embroidery around your collar is thoroughly soaked, clinging to your skin.

“‘M not gonna kill you. What would I do something like that for?”

You sniff. “It’s what I would do.”

He chuckles again, the sound reverberating through you with him all pressed up against you. It would almost be pleasant if it weren’t for the cock pumping between your thighs. That brings you right back down to earth, mind torn away from the ravens perched in the branches of the tree looming over you, watching you from above. If you were able to pay them any close attention, you’d probably hear them chattering about the position their little witch has found herself in.

“C’mon now,” Ghost grunts in your ear, hips shifting back. “Be a good little witch and say a little spell—don’t wanna knock you up on the first try.”

You open your mouth to reply and squeal when he rocks back forward, the bulbous tip pressing into you this time. Your toes flex in your shoes, thighs spreading without any prompting from him. You don’t even notice the hand on your upper back travelling to your waist, both of his big hands gripping you there now to hold you in place. There’s no thought of trying to get away, just breathing around the immense stretch from his shaft driving up into you.

“Ooh, no, no—it’s too much,” you squeak, fingers digging into the sides of the stump, the wood cutting into your soft skin.

It is too much. It doesn’t even feel entirely possible. Even with the wetness leaking from you, his cock only manages to fit a couple inches in you before you’re too tight.

“You’re doing fine, lovie,” he rasps into your ear, drawing his hips back and then plunging back into you, deeper than before. “See? Not so bad, is it? Gonna take a little more for me, a’right?”

“No—no more,” you slur, tongue heavy in your mouth. “Can you just—just keep it right there?”

“Yeah? That enough for you?”

Your fingers unlatch from the bark of the tree, trembling when you reach down to wipe them off on your dress before dragging the palm of your hand over your clit. It makes you jump and whine. The skin of your palm is a bit textured from gripping onto the stump, but the friction makes your brain leak right out of your ear. Especially when you push your hips back just a little bit, nervously fucking yourself on his cock.

Ghost laughs and lets go of your hip to bat your hand away, then reaches back around to fit a big hand around your jaw.

He holds your jaw in a single hand, palm supporting your chin. “You ever going to do this again, girl? Go up to strange men in the woods?”

You almost don’t hear him over the blood in your ears. A thick cock spears into you for the first time in your life and the man rutting into you expects coherence? Maybe you babble something into the palm of his hand, but it’s lost to the world when he pulls your knee out to make more room for himself and tips your ass up.

He gives your cheek a solid pat. “C’mon, focus on me, lovie. Tell me what you’re gonna do from now on.”

Your breathing picks up, heavier. When you don’t respond again, he abruptly pulls out and stands up, hauling you up to your feet with him. All of the blood rushes from your head, pooling around your pretty black shoes. Leaves crunch under your feet when he turns the two of you around and sits down on the stump where you’d just been spread over. The hands on your waist turn you to face him and that’s when an inkling of struggle works its way back into your veins.

You hiss and snarl when he lifts you to straddle his thighs, particularly when you see the brutish, ruddy cock jutting out from his trousers. Ghost seems more amused than anything at your little attempts to escape, clutching you closer to him until your chests are pressed tight together, making it all the more intimate. All the more real.

“Quit fussing.” You jump at the sharp slap he delivers to your ass.

“Going to curse your whole lineage—” you grit out, wincing when he draws you back down over his length, cunt fluttering at the stretch. You can’t help dropping your forehead to his chest, shoulder hitched with a frustrated cry.

His groan makes you seize up, a hot flash darting through you. “Don’t be like that, lovie. Might be yours too.”

A haze passes over you when firm hands lift you up off his cock and plop you back down, emptying you of any thoughts like you’d tipped your head and all the water had poured out.

The worst is the way your body betrays you. Each time he shoves his fat cock into your cunt, a whine rattles out of you, snatched from your chest. Robbed from you. The nearby leaves rustle and swirl up into the air with an artificial wind, magic singing their edges. He reaches so much deeper inside of you like this, splayed on his lap, hands gripping onto his shoulders for dear life because it takes every bit of energy in your body to merely take his cock into you.

Your knees scrape against the uneven wood every time he drags you back down. They’ll probably be scraped raw by the end of it; you’ll need to tearfully smooth on ointment and wrap thick bandages around them when you get back to the cottage.

“There we go. Fuckin’ take it—come on,” Ghost grunts, dragging you down onto his length, just using your body how he likes.

The thick head grinds up against a spot deep inside of you, spongy and sensitive. You feel it all the way up in your throat. Every time his cock rubs against that spot, your nails dig into his shoulders. A violent shudder rips through you because this position also lets him grind your clit down against the root of his cock.

“Ghost—”

He ducks his covered mouth into the side of your neck. Even through the fabric, you can feel his lips press a firm, closed-mouth kiss there. “Bit more, bit more, love. Better than you thought it’d be, huh? Fuck. Only thing magic about you is this wet pussy. Fuck hiding this from me—gonna ride it twice a day from now on.”

“Never doing this ever again, you beast—”

Ghost bites you through the mask, the pressure dull but real. It says, try keeping it from me.

When you come, it’s sudden and sharp, painful like a cramp in your belly and then a wave of bone-deep pleasure. Ghost wrangles it from you with a thumb on your clit, pumping up into your pussy at the same time. He wrenches it from you like it’s his, like you have no choice but to come for him because he wants it. You press your whole body against him when you come, arms wrapping around his neck like you need him close. Heat unfolding and leaving you limp. No cauldron has ever boiled as hot as your flesh does now.

He pulls out of you before coming. You watch helplessly as he settles you close enough to keep the heat of your pussy on him and then wraps a firm hand around himself, giving it a few good tugs before a white rope of come spurts from his cock. Right onto your exposed pussy, spilling across your folds. Your mouth drops open on a soft whine as it stripes across your inner thighs and the front of your dress, painting it white.

His harsh pants ebb into something softer as his cock goes flacid against his thigh. You feel boneless, drained of all your energy. Even your magic only gives a pathetic twitch, the tendrils of it curling back up inside of you where it’s nice and warm.

Your cunt feels tender, puffy when you reach down and touch it. You flinch when his fingers graze against yours, also feeling around your swollen lips. Ghost knuckles your fingers out of the way and scoops up the mess he left between your thighs, pushing two fingers just past your entrance. You don’t even have the energy to yelp, only wince and mewl.

He shushes you. “Didn’t even come inside. Quit whining.”

His words are belied by the way he scoops more of his come up into you.

You really don’t like that he follows you home. The march back to your cozy cottage nestled in the middle of the forest feels like a death march, one you might have witnessed in the hundreds of years that you’ve lived here. Worse still because your legs are still wobbly, your sex achy and raw. Still, whenever you pause for a moment or lean against a tree, he nudges you forward with a hand on your back.

“This is unfair,” you snivel, eyes tearing up. “You can’t—this is my forest.”

“The woods don’t belong to anyone, girl,” Ghost counters.

“Yes, they do. I’ve been…it’s been mine for two hundred years.”

“Of course, lovie.” You can almost hear the roll of his eyes. It makes you grit your teeth. You can’t wait to bury him in the backyard with all the bone mandalas.

It doesn’t take long for him to settle in, making himself nice and comfortable on your plush couch with the intricate doilies knitted by your grandmother draped along the back. Your poor couch almost collapses under his weight.

Your cottage is far too small for someone of his size; you built it to accommodate someone of your size, not the behemoth that’s taken up residence in your house. You know that Ghost is more of a man of action than words, but he’s plenty happy to grumble about needing to redo the door to make it big enough for him to come inside without having to duck his head.

“You aren’t going to touch a single brick of my house.”

“I’ll take apart the whole damned thing if I want.”

You keep trying to lift him up with your magic but it does nothing to him and only tires you out because using magic is exhausting. You’re sweating and panting at the end of your efforts while Ghost just stands in front of you with his arms crossed over his chest and a single eyebrow raised. It’s humiliating. You used to be a powerful witch. You still are.

He lets you yell at him until you’re red in the face and then drags you down for a rough fuck. Arguments with Ghost often end that way—you, sore and satiated in your bed, the window opened to let some fresh air in. Him, spread out next to you and dragging you close, playing absentmindedly with a nipple until you pinch his side. That always gets you a meaner pinch, one that leaves you teary-eyed and hot all over again.

Magic might not work on him, but he’s still mortal, so you try to work with that. Bear traps by the windows and doors. Hemlock in the soap. Poison in his stew. He’s stealthier than you anticipate though and seems to have a sixth sense for death.

It’s demeaning and humiliating to be punished for your ‘bad behaviour’ but that’s what he calls it when he passes by the kitchen and catches the stew burping out the telltale skull shaped steam. You’re taken off kitchen duty after that, but the worst part is being trapped under him on the bed with your hands pinned over your head, bottom exposed to him yet again. He laughs a little later on when you squirm around on your hard kitchen chairs because you refuse to sit on his lap.

Sometimes when he has you trapped under him when you’re sleeping—because, of course, he commandeers your bed like it was built for someone his size when truthfully he should be in a bed twice as large—he wakes up to you gnawing at his shoulder and he has to hold you jaw in his hand and rumble out “No biting” before going back to sleep. You stare over his shoulder petulantly, not even bothering to fight the pout. The kettle whispers in the kitchen, fueled by your frustration.

Ghost only lets out a dry, husky laugh. It sends a shiver down your spine.

Asphodel takes to him like a new favourite thing, winding around his legs while you glare from the other room. Damned familiar.

You only start to lighten up when your senses tingle one day when you’re out picking berries in the woods and you come back to find him ruthlessly butchering a band of raiders that had been trampling through your woods. He slaughters them methodically, almost bored. Almost like he does this every day.

You can’t help the way it makes your pussy ache.

He catches the look in your eye. You’ve been alone for far too long in the woods; everything you feel is laid bare, open for anyone to see. Ghost is just always looking.

He grins under the mask, blood splattered across the front of his shirt. “Go on, lovie. I’ll be inside in just a few.”

Molten slickness drips from between your thighs. You bite your lip before you slip away, blood growing feverish when you glance back down at the mangled bodies bleeding out in the red-orange leaves. There’s a severed eye that’s rolled off to the side and your stomach gurgles.

You lick your lip and look up at him from under your eyelashes. “Save me some for supper?”

Ghost’s eyes soften, a sharp contrast from the gore and viscera piled around him. “‘Course, lovie.”

The world seems different with the arrival of him. Cranberries beneath the sycamore, the russet moon on harvest's day, the scent of soldering iron, the laughter woven between your many faces. With him, you feel like the cynosure of all eyes.

In the twilight hours, he presses a hand to your forehead and laves your belly with his tongue like he might push something back in there. The curtains draw shut and the lights flicker off.

#cod mw2 #ceil writing #cod x reader #simon ghost riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x you #ghost x reader #cod simon riley #ghost/reader #ghost cod

1K notes · View notes

seaofwine · 2 years ago

Note

What do you like about the Odyssey? Besides some entertaining episodes (e.g. Circe or Calypso), I've never really been able to get into the Odyssey as a whole (I find the first 5 books especially dull). The Iliad really speaks to me more.

It's hard to really pinpoint what I like most about it but I love to talk about the Odyssey so I hope you like long posts hahaha

The first five books act as the exposition. When the Iliad ends, there's a general understanding that most of the surviving characters made it home. Menelaus and Helen have reunited, the catalyst for the Trojan War has been resolved. Agamemnon traversed the sea and made it back, and although he was killed by his wife Clytemnestra, there is no question about where he is; unlike Odysseus.

Telemachus has spent his entire youth without a father. When he finally decides to set out from Ithaca to find any leads on where Odysseus is, he is confronted with the fact that most everyone else has been accounted for. He sees Menelaus and Helen, the order of their kingdom, the comfort they have in each other and the bonds they have restored. Telemachus has known nothing but uncertainty, while his mother is forced to weave lies and deceptions to keep the suitors that plague their home at bay. The first five books really show how important one man can be when he is utterly lost, and what it would mean for everyone who loves him should he be found. These books also show the close interest that Athena, as patron of Odysseus, takes in his family. She steps into the chaos of Ithaca and gives Telemachus the inspiration to embark on his own journey, chasing the ghost of his still-living father.

When we finally reach Odysseus, he is not the same man that those who knew him in Troy described. They are the closest Telemachus can come to knowing what came of his father, but even they are separated by nearly a decade and the breadth of the sea. Penelope hasn't laid eyes on her husband in twenty years, there is no overestimating what that can do to a person's memory. Odysseus's first action is to cry. When finally Calypso is forced to allow Odysseus to leave, by order of Hermes, he makes his own raft and leaves at the first possible moment. He is fighting against the will of Poseidon, against the wrath he incurred, all alone. He has lost every single one of his men, every single person who could ever vouch for his identity, in a world where no one could recognize him, is gone. Despite this, he is still fighting to get back to Ithaca.

Odysseus is so utterly human in the text. When he is hosted by Alcinous, Odysseus asks the singer there to recount the story of the Trojan Horse. It's like landing at the doorstep of a stranger who graciously allows you to stay and immediately asking his DJ to play *your own* greatest hits - which in turn only upsets him. This also sets up the dramatic reveal of his identity (I like to imagine him looking around like, you guys remember this one? Yeah that's Me, I pinkie promise. Please give me 4000 drachmae and your best oarsmen (: ).

He recounts the story of how he got so utterly lost on the way back and one thing the Odyssey will tell you, to your face over and over again, is that Odysseus is a big time liar. But for some reason, his tale is so compelling it's hard to remind yourself of that when hearing it for the first time. Some points are so beyond baffling (like striking Polyphemus in the singular eye the poor sod has, and then once to the safety of his boat (which is on open water, the domain of said cyclops's father) loudly announcing his full gods-given name and mailing address, just in case anyone missed who it was) that it's like, yeah that was probably exactly what he did. This is the section of the story where we see Odysseus as he sees himself. This is his own reflection of the actions he made and the troubles that befell him because of it.

Odysseus is such a complex character that one of the epithets he is given is "polytropos", the many-faced or many-sided. Odysseus and his relationship to his own identity, which he can shed and don at any point that's convenient for him, is one of the main reasons I am obsessed with his story. This, and the exploration in an ancient text about what a close relationship with a deity, is something I am constantly thinking about.

#odyssey #ask #odysseus #i just really love him ok? ok

418 notes · View notes

tenspontaneite · 9 months ago

Text

Assembly (Chapter 9/?)

Suns hadn't thought iterators capable of crying.

(Chapter length: 6.6k. Link to ao3 with workskin)

Warnings: High emotional intensity, fallout of long term severe social isolation and cruel conditions. Description of a past occurrence of something I’d consider iterator self-harm.

---

Seven Red Suns stands at the threshold, struck still.

It did not take long to reach the underhang, nor ascend its nearest leg. The closest entryway is this: a sealed service point, with a broad maintenance shelf stretching along the underside of the structure. Ahead of them, the rusted mechanical workings of the tall doorway are groaning, its metal teeth opening, receding inch by inch into the walls. An invitation.

From within that threshold, within the body of No Significant Harassment…a green light pours out across the metal floor. They feel its touch almost as a physical sensation, a stirring along their false skin. Limned in his viridian glow, they stare ahead with a breadth of emotion that seems wont to choke them. Every limb, every process feels seized.

This is it, they think to themself, dazed and desperate, yet utterly unable to move. This is it. After all this time…

In that still silence, Spearmaster touches a little hand to their leg, and finally they manage to twitch, if only to look down at it. It says, “I think I will leave you here.”

Surprise lends them a little more animation. “…What? Why?”

“This is important for you,” it claims, not inaccurately. “This…meeting. This is a big thing, for you, for him. I do not want to interfere or distract.” It pauses and adds “I must still hunt for today, anyway. I will come find you later.”

Suns hesitates, at a loss for words. They stare ahead at the open doorway, then back down again. They think about it. Passing within there, for the first time, traversing the rooms and processing spaces and living, breathing systems of another iterator – their friend, him, truly here, present and alive in the flesh and metal…

Yes. They think they must do this alone. Alone, except for the presence of him in the superstructure, welcoming them within.

“Thank you,” they say, at last, and turn back to the open glow of the doorway. “Please be safe, Spearmaster.”

It touches them one last time, a little comforting pat. “Go to your friend,” it insists, gentle. “Have time together with him. I wish you peace.”

A vivid rush of emotion twists across their body. They cannot speak. Nonetheless, it stands beside them and waits, watching, until they finally manage to move again: approaching that threshold at last, coming barehanded to his door.

Five faltering strides, to that beckoning doorway. Another, and a deep shaky breath, to pass beneath. And then all at once, they are within him. The light gleams from ideograms and guide panels all around, once intended to orient staff and visitors within the superstructure. Suns’ eyes fall upon the details; they are the first person to read them in so, so many years. Already shaking, they drop their bags and weapon-quiver at the doorway, and move on.

It doesn’t take long for the gravity to go strange. Their steps fall too lightly, drifting dreamlike across unfamiliar halls…and a vast, foreign mind begins to touch at the edges of their awareness. There is no content, nor data exchanged or offered, but – a sense of the immensity of him, the sheer scale, echoes in the air regardless.

They could connect to that mind. Open up a link – share data, thought to thought.

Not yet, they think to themself, desperately aware that to do such a thing would be to unravel any remaining shred of their composure. Not yet.

They keep walking.

Gravity lifts away entirely. Suns drifts from hall to hall, and then into the first processing space: a long narrow room, calculations running across the air, and neuron flies dipping along the space in coruscating streams. The light is dark teal. Barely there, and dark enough that the glittering lights of every neuron are utterly arresting to behold. They shift in hue along their pathways, green to ultramarine to vivid red, like little prismatic stars in a night sky. One of them bumps into Suns’ arm as it passes, and they have to pause to breathe for a moment.

Somehow, they manage to keep moving. Through these anterior, connective processing spaces, through the transmission arrays where they spot their first green Inspector, through yet more maintenance halls…and then, at last, to the first auxiliary systems bus. Suns stops and hangs in the air, transfixed by the delicate red spools of tissue twisting across the room before them, glittering with nodes like opalescent eyes in the dim thoughtlight. Their momentum carries them forward until, somehow, they can reach out to touch one of those spools, weaving vivid neural threads around their wrist like the grasp of another’s hand.

A part of you, they think, utterly overwhelmed. I am here, and there is a part of you that I can touch.

Their processes grow scattered and strange, after that.

All around them, No Significant Harassment is watching. Their greater body, their greatest self, watching and feeling Suns within, marking their passage through every room, every hall, every little part of them. The sense of their vastness yawns wide, a background hum in the processing space, suggesting at conduits and walls and eldritch twisting ropes of tissue and wire and branching thought. Suns wants, so badly, to reach out and let that presence in. To drift away in the enormity of that body and mind, a little leaf upon a fathomless tide.

Not yet, they think yet again, as a bulwark to their courage.

Even so, it nearly overcomes them, the first time their hands brush the neural filaments along the walls.

So thin, so delicate. Little dark red threads tipped in transmissive ultramarine glow. They reach towards Suns’ fingers as they near, seemingly eager to touch them. And thus they do. Just threadlike, tickling brushes across the artificial skin on their open hand.

The tips spark blue with actual, physical thought. Suns can’t for a second withhold their response: the grey diamond-shaped port at the centre of their palm opens, their own filaments extruding to tangle with his own. Red to blue to blue to red – a keen sensitivity to one another, to the air, to the tangling of their threads-

Data sparks between them. A touch. A real, physical touch. Suns’ cells to Sig’s, one iterator to another, direct physical data transfer – a flurry of excitement, a twist of desperation, a helpless entreating call.

I’m here, Suns sends back, abruptly just as desperate. I’m here, I’m here, I’ll be to your heart soon-

A scattered impression of want/need sparks across into their own flesh again, and they tremble all over. It is an effort to draw their filaments away, to truncate even this light touch. But they must. They must. Within his most precious sanctum, No Significant Harassment is waiting for them.

All of a sudden, they cannot bear delay. Their urgency and his own twist their body into motion, pushing across this room and then to the next, and the next, and the next. Crossing into the nearest of his memory confluxes, they hear the beat of one of his many hearts in the walls. His conduits, even now pumping the water he needs to survive. A steady reverberating pulse that seems to shake them through to the core. Alive, all of it – so loudly, viscerally alive.

Beautiful, they think, of every inch of him. Every neuron, every filament, every metal panel and power matrix and coursing conduit in his body – all of it, so beautiful…

Near the end, he has an exceptionally large neural terminus, so extensive, brimming with so many neurons, that it needs its own gravity disruptor. The glow of it and the distortion in the air – the vast streams of iterative data – they almost blind Suns to the way ahead. But there it is: an access ladder along the far wall, leading up, up, up to the reinforced walls and structures surrounding the inner sanctum.

It isn’t necessary to climb, with the artificial gravity so strong. They drift up instead, a heartsore questant come at last to the end of a great sorrow. Through that door, then just a corridor down – the wide doors at the side quiver, emitting a short buzz before receding into their panelled walls-

Inside the room, the light is the dim shifting hues of any iterator puppet chamber. These, they have seen in photographs and recordings and projections a thousand times. But never like this. Never looking ahead, their own eyes searching, peering within to the little precious shape that hangs just above the ground, haloed in light and staring back at them with desperate eyes. He reaches a trembling hand towards them, fingers outstretched in a wordless plea.

A twisted, gutted noise rips its way out of their speakers. They surge forwards – through the open doors, across the smooth metal tiles of the floor, across the empty space of the chamber-

They’re going too fast, when they reach him. They don’t care. Their arms come around his back and tangle in the hanging wires and he sobs the very second they touch him; unbalanced, bowled over, they both fall to the floor. Suns pulls him close and shakes and gasps – his arms clutch around them just as tightly – a sound like a thin, high wail pulls its way out of his chassis and the walls of the chamber shake and click and whine. There’s no coherency in any of it, no thought at all. They are both of them beyond such things now.

He buries his face in their shoulder. They hold him as tightly as they dare.

Neither of them speaks for a long, long time.

---

Suns hadn’t thought iterators capable of crying.

Certainly, they are not capable of tears. But in their arms, Sig cries nonetheless, the noise of it hitching and sobbing out of his speakers without pause, and he shakes in time with it like an organic would. It seems as reflexive a response to anguish as is a scream to pain. Suns holds silent and holds him close all the while, every operculum on their body open and straining for air. They are too full of feeling, too whelmed by far, to have anything else to offer him but their closeness.

At least for that first while. Then the need to comfort him begins to etch through, powerful enough to be heard through all the senseless aching noise. “I’m here,” they murmur to him, close by the module of one antenna and the audio receptors there, their own voice direct to his ears. No recording, no intermediary, nothing in between – just their voice. Just that. “I’m here, I’m here, it’s alright…”

If anything, it just makes him sob louder. They can empathise with that. It feels like there’s enough emotion to rupture them, to burst out and rip at the seams of their panels, to tear their tissues asunder with the overpressure of it. Merely the feeling seems like a wound. They almost wish they could cry like he does, if only to have a way to let it out.

They can hold him, though. They can hold him as closely and fiercely as they have ever dreamed.

He’s small in their arms – the standard sort of size for an iterator puppet. He fits so easily against their chest, folded so close that Suns can feel the hum of his speakers and internals through their chassis as he weeps. He shakes against them, too, trembling like Suns is, even now. He’s so small – so precious, so beloved, just being able to hold him – they don’t know what to do with that feeling. What can they possibly do? It’s all so much.

Reassurance, though. They want to offer him that, as much as he wants, as much as he could ever ask for. It’s a little overpowering, how deep a need that is. “I’m here,” they say again, soft, and move a hand just enough to run it soothingly down the back of his head, stroking again and again around the umbilical wires that root there. On a puppet, those external wires are moderately sensitive. Like the tendril-manes of the People. Touching them should be soothing…in theory.

It seems to hold. Sig shudders under their hand, still crying, but…it seems to abate, very slowly, as the minutes go on. He shakes less powerfully, the awful hurting noises grow quieter, and he begins to feel less desperately tense in their arms.

It does take time. But in the end he finds words again. In true form for him, the first thing he says is this: “…You’re really very large.” The words are muffled, the vents that let air and sound out pressed into Suns’ poncho…and besides that, still uneven and distorted as his speakers keep on trying to weep.

Despite everything, Suns laughs quietly, and shakes in the face of yet another sweep of emotion. This time, just at hearing him make one of his irreverent comments in person. Feeling the hum and vibration of it in their own body.

“I knew there was something strange about your proportions in all the overseer footage,” he mumbles, still into their clothing. “Knew it. It’s just so hard to tell, when overseers are so little. But I feel so small, sat here like this.”

“Is that a problem for you?” They ask, gentle and only a very little bit teasing. He feels so fragile, right now. They feel so fragile.

“No, I like it, well done for being so tall,” he says, and squirms his way more solidly into Suns’ lap. “And that – this, the hand in my wires like that, that’s very nice. Relaxing. Keep doing that.”

Their hand had gone still; obligingly, they set it moving again, and he pushes his head into the contact like Spearmaster does. The unashamed touch-hungry solicitousness of it momentarily stalls several of their more important processes, just at the – the reminder. He’s here. They can hold him, and touch him, and keep him close.

“Yes, good,” Sig approves, and then immediately starts crying again.

Suns might be alarmed…if not for how well they understand it. If weeping were something they’d been created capable of, they’d have scarcely stopped this whole time. “Alright?” They ask him, in a quiet murmur, still stroking along the wires where they fall down his neck and over his upper back.

“Yes, yes,” he manages, around the fitful little distraught noises that keep shaking out of him. “It’s just – you know. You know.”

“…Yes,” they agree, quiet, and tighten their arm around his narrow waist.

Still, no matter the shaking, he keeps talking. “I like this whatever-it-is you’re wearing,” he says tremulously, fingers clenching in the fabric of the poncho hanging down their back. “It’s soft. And a good colour. And in surprisingly good condition given everything you’ve been up to.”

“It’s a purposed organism, technically,” Suns tells him, fingers still petting over his neck and back where the wires fall. “It did well enough for the journey here. But I expect you’ll have improvements in mind.”

He laughs shakily. “Yes, I’ll be needing those blueprints, thank you. And – and any observations, data, things you’ve noticed with your prototype-“ He breaks off as though too overwrought to continue, his mechanical arm shifting and repositioning behind him in a restless, agitated squirm.

Everything, every sound from him, every movement and click in the chamber and walls – it all speaks of so, so much emotion. Suns knows what that’s like. They can almost feel it, like a phantom limb, the sensation of tissues and mechanisms roiling behind the panels of their puppet chamber. It’s so strange, to be within another iterator’s can. To hear these things, so familiar, and yet not a part of themself. This is not their body.

That thought, so dizzying, overwhelms them again at once.

And then: “Can I – can I just-“ Sig starts, and shifts gracelessly in their lap, trying to draw his face back from their shoulder, trying to- “Oh,” he says, low and trembling, staring straight at their face. “Oh, Suns. Look at you.”

His voice sounds thick with tears that he is incapable of producing. Some artifice of his speakers and programming, but – it cracks the heart of them open, the sound of it, the overwrought expression on his face, right there and looking at them-

Suns utters a small, overwhelmed sound from their throat. It’s all so much.

Sig lifts a hand up and traces fingertips along the side of their face. The sensitivity of the artificial skin is then a betrayal: they shudder at the touch, too tender and affecting by far. Even so, they find themself leaning into it. They can’t quite help it.

He cups his palm along the gentle curve of their cheek. Brushes the smooth metal pad of his thumb beneath one eye. “I somehow still can’t believe you’re really here,” he murmurs, unsteady in hand and sound alike. “Look at you. You’re really right here. I can – I can touch you like this, hold you like this – I’ve never seen your face with my own eyes before and – you’re here. Just…right here, in my chamber.” He stares up at them, trembling. “You’re beautiful.”

The words hit like a genuine, physical impact to their body. Their hand at his neck stops moving and just clutches him instead. They shake just as hard as he does.

“It’s so different,” Sig says, the hurt of it, the tentative joy, plain in every word. “Seeing you here. Having you close. It’s so, so different to – anything, any recording, any broadcast or projection…” His fingers reach for one quivering antenna, gentle along the sensitive length of it. He touches fingertips to the jewels hanging at its bottom edge, inspecting them with a careful, soft-eyed emotion. “You’re so much yourself, Suns. I feel like I’ve only ever seen your shadow before, and now…”

His hand returns to cupping the side of their face, palm smooth near the antenna module. He watches them, quiet now, the crying stopped but something new shaking him all the same. He stares like there is a revelation to be found in the face of them: Seven Red Suns, alive and overwrought within his chamber.

“This is just as intense for you, isn’t it?” He murmurs to them, voice thick with something half between warmth and anguish. “You’re so quiet. But I can tell. It’s so much, just to be close like this. Overwhelming. But it’s – it’s important. You can feel that, can’t you? It’s important.”

Wordless, they manage a nod at him. Yes, they can feel it. There’s an aching need in them, so desperate for this kind of contact that they couldn’t pull away if they tried. It’s upsettingly affecting – hardly even bearable – but they can’t stand the notion of retreat either.

…It feels like water. Like the first time they held their conduits dry, held back the rain, just for a little while. Just to see what it felt like. The pain of it – the internal scrape and shake and shudder of the drying channels – it was a visceral wrongness that echoed out through every desiccating, starving heart of them. A fundamental need turned aside, until the slag and the damage began to build, and the self-preservation imperative forced them to start the pumps again.

Water, returning to those conduits, flushing the blockages away…it had hurt. It had hurt a great deal.

It feels very much like this.

No Significant Harassment stares at them, long and heartsore, and there does seem to be a thread of genuine delight in that. Of gratitude.

And then the joy turns bitter in his eyes. “…This is awful,” he murmurs, sudden and choking-bleak.

They can’t quite speak. But they do manage a worried, questioning hum.

“It’s awful,” he repeats, with rising intensity. There’s something terrible in his expression now, building like a wave. Like a crushing tide. His fingers shake at the side of their face. “Look at you,” he says, voice trembling. “Look at you. You’ve always been beautiful, but like this? Right in front of me? Void rising, Suns. I can see you, with my own eyes and nodes. I can feel you in the chamber air. I can hold you, and hear you, and touch you – and it’s all so – so-“ He breaks off and sobs.

Suns shudders, heart twisting with that same grief. For lack of speech, they lift their hand to rest over his own, feeling it quiver under their palm.

“I already loved you,” he goes on, voice distorting. “I did, you’re – you’ve been so important to me, these last years, I can’t even say. But here? Now, with you right here? Suns, I love you so much more already. You’re here. I needed this, I – I can’t even tell you how much I needed this, how much I’ve always needed this and I didn’t – I didn’t even know because – because we were made this way,Suns! We were madeto be confined, to never be able to meet each other, never touch each other, and I needed all of those things so badly and I never even knew. I never knew.”

Finally, they manage words. “…I know,” they say, hurting in the very soul of them. His hand falls down and they grip at it tightly, fingers clutching at each other. It pulls a raw, painful sound from him.

“We need this!” His voice is desperate, half rage and half despair. “Can’t you feel it – how much we need it? We – we need to love and see and touch and hold each other, we need this, we’ve needed this so, so much and it was taken from us.” His shoulders heave with the simulated wracks of his weeping, the tremors echoing through into their own body. “They stole it. They stole what we needed before we were even born, from the moment we all woke we’ve been in pain and that’s their fault. It’s all their fault.”

“I know,” they say again, and wish they could weep with him.

“They didn’t have the right to do this to us,” he spits, utterly furious and viscerally hurt. “They made empathetic, social, tactile people and they locked us each in a box alone. It was cruel. It was so cruel.”

Suns shakes against them, one trembling body to another, and gasps in another awful breath. “Yes.”

“It’s not fair.” His voice bites out into the air, angry and grieving and agonising even to listen to. “We were made like this. To be alone and isolated and trapped, for our whole lives. It’s not fair.”

There’s excuses. There’s justifications. Objectively, Suns knows some of the measures that were taken to build iterators capable of solitude. Engineered from a genetic source as keenly, critically social as the People – how could they not be concerned? They did so much, they tried so much, to ensure that their creations would not go mad in isolation.

But it was not enough, in the end. Not nearly enough.

“We were wronged,” Suns says, too quiet for the gravity of it.

“It’s not fair,” he says again, like the words might allay the wound if he tries hard enough. If he repeats them enough.

“It’s not,” they agree, and it hurts. But… “We can make it better now, though.” They squeeze at his hand, trying for comfort, and mostly only manage to make themself emotional again. “Look at us. We’re here. The first iterators ever to meet.”

Unexpectedly, he laughs, albeit shakily. “Yes, that’s – very impressive and excellent of us,” he speaks, and visibly attempts to gather himself. “We’re pioneers. The great founders of the AMP Project. The Selfling Project? Whatever. This, right here – this is a historic moment.”

“Is it?” They ask, taken aback. This is a first, certainly, but…historic?

“Of course it is,” Sig says, and there’s a hint of unfamiliar passion in his voice. Something like the excitement he directs at new bioengineering project, but…fiercer. “We’re going to change the world, Suns. And this, right here – this is the start of it. Two iterators, meeting face to face…”

Nonplussed, Suns blinks at him. “I have not particularly thought about changing the world,” they admit. “I know you want to restore infrastructure…”

“Which will have very far-reaching repercussions,” Sig points out, with a familiar sort of fond patience. It’s been so long since they’ve heard his voice like that – it catches in them like a shard of glass, unexpectedly painful, for all that they love him for it. “Particularly once we share selfling technology with others. Just imagine, thousands of people who’ve been stuck in their cans their whole lives, able to actually go out and affect the world…it’s going to be chaos.”

They consider that, with some difficulty. It’s not especially easy for them to find room to think around how many of their processes are occupied with sheer emotion. “I suppose so?”

“With some luck, direction, and careful handling, maybe we can poke it in the direction of pleasant, beneficent chaos,” he says, then flicks a hand dismissively. “I’ve got plans, but those will have to wait a while, because our friends are obviously the most immediate priority. Once we’ve had a little time to prepare…”

“Yes,” they agree, and that notion at least brings an immediate shock of clarity to them. Beyond these walls, beyond this superstructure – there are people who need them. Who they have desperately wished they could help, for so very long.

Carefully, Suns does not think on that too deeply. They don’t know that they could bear it, right now. Not when – when…

Sig leans back a little to regard them more carefully, the movement drawing their eyes. He blinks up at them, slow and assessing. “…Are you alright, Suns?”

“…Alright enough,” they say, soft. “Only – overwhelmed.”

“Of course you are,” he sighs, and strokes a palm down their cheek again, thoughtlessly tactile. That hurts, too. It all does. Like cleaning a festering wound. “You poor creature, with so little processing power to use for dealing with all this.” A little teasing: “Are you going to start reciting poetry at me, again?”

It startles a laugh from them. “I could, if you wanted,” they answer, not quite joking. There is one particular item that came too quickly to mind for it to be anything like a joke. With a swell of strange, wistful affection, they’re voicing the opening lines before they can think better of it. “I come barehanded, to the place where they say, there is a kindness that lingers in the streets…”

Sig huffs, amused. “Barehanded, huh,” he muses, drawing his own hand down to look at it, palm-up. It has the same closed port of bare metal that every iterator puppet’s hand does, that they engineered into their selflings in unthinking, unanimous accord. They would no sooner strike the palm port from a platform’s design than the eyes. “I suppose there is a lot of symbolism in that, isn’t there.”

“I’m a little astonished you even know that,” they comment dryly.

“Oh, come on now. I’m not that oblivious.” He pauses, then opens the port with a quiet whine of unoiled metal. Clearly, he has not performed any maintenance on his puppet since making his first selfling, but the interior at least seems in working order: a breathtakingly-familiar spread of delicate filaments extrude from his palm, just alike the ones Suns had touched on his superstructure’s walls a little earlier. Brilliant red, with sparking tips of glittering ultramarine. He hums to himself, strangely thoughtful…

…then extends his hand.

When Suns only stares at it, held upturned and open between them, he prompts: “Isn’t that the symbolic thing to do in this situation? Clasping hands?”

They hesitate. “Well, yes, but…”

“It’s not as though we’ve got the biological underpinnings for that symbolism, not like the People did,” Sig says, still holding his hand there expectantly. “But what with our neural filaments in there, we can probably manage quite a good approximation, don’t you think? It was nice, when you connected with the ones on my walls earlier. I’d like to try it again.”

“You’re so bold,” Suns murmurs, strangely arrested by it. Strangely charmed, also. “You don’t think anything of it, do you? Asking for touch, asking for connection, now that it’s possible.”

“You know very well I’ve never been shy about asking for things I want,” he declares unrepentantly, and that is certainly true. “I’m hardly going to start now.”

They have a sudden, vivid mental image of this small, beloved creature hanging off of them like an inconvenient garment all the way to their friends’ facility. They laugh, very quietly. “…You’re going to be affixed to my side in perpetuity now, aren’t you.” It isn’t, quite, a question.

“Like a parasite,” he agrees shamelessly, which isn’t the most pleasant of comparisons, but. “You’re not going to be able to scrape me off your chassis for a second. You’re stuck with me.” He wiggles the fingers of his upturned palm at them. The red-blue filaments wiggle too, in an amusing sinusoidal wave. “So?”

Suns looks at it: his palm, offered in barehanded mercy. The poet’s heart in them swells with wistful emotion. They exhale a thin whistle of air through a few narrow opercula, and…they reach back. They take his hand, and their palm opens in turn. When their filaments twine together-

It’s too much. From the first second, the vastness of Sig’s greater mind suffuses them, so much breadth and body and presence that they can’t – they can’t-

“Oh, bother,” they hear him mutter, and then the deluge throttles away. “Is that better?”

They can’t speak. In the first seconds, it’s from the shock, passing from a suffocating flood to a gentle rain too quickly to adapt. Afterwards….

They try to cry. Desperately, instinctively, they try. But the mechanism does not exist in them, and they merely shake against him instead, helpless. What they can manage is this: their own mind, their emotion – it blooms open for him, data and qualia unfolding over their connection like a starved flower turning leaf and petal to the salvation of dawn – the salvation of his mind, more great and beautiful than anything they could have fathomed.

Instantly, predictably, he starts crying again. It makes for a particularly potent emotional feedback loop, linked as they are, thought as pure data streaming between them as precious as any spoken word. Borders between thought and physical action blur – at least for Suns, whose processing power is so, so small compared to the vastness of what they’re touching. They clutch at him, and he clutches back, but they hardly feel any of it – any of it, except the vivid sear of their neural filaments wrapped around his own. It doesn’t – it doesn’t even feel that sensitive, so why, why-

“Some strange biochemical process,” they hear Sig saying, response to that unvoiced thought, his voice unsteady around his own emotions. “Making it feel more – more noticeable, I should – later – I should, analyse…”

You’re beautiful, Suns thinks at him, too far gone for words, and he promptly loses the composure to manage speech too. It’s true, though. They’re getting so little of the breadth of his mind like this, but there’s enough to see – to know, to feel – the foreign shapes and cadences of his thoughts, passing in gorgeous bioelectric bursts across his whole magnificent body. They feel his mind flashing in the hearts of the neuron flies, the sparks between neural tissue connection nodes, the synaptic transfer from flesh to metal to flesh again – the data – the fractal beauty of his processes, crystalline in their sharpness and precision-

As overwhelmed as they are, part of them still manages to spin off a process wondering about the patterns they’d use if they were trying to draw or weave something to represent how his thoughts feel, and he starts laughing. Brokenly, helplessly, but laughing.

“Suns,” he says, achingly fond, and strokes his fingers over the plane of their cheek. They shudder and say nothing; he struggles for coherence. They can feel that, in the echo of him that he’s allowing to filter through – the way his mind goes about wrestling itself into some semblance of emotional regulation, trimming its processing loops and forcefully reallocating working memory.

It feels startlingly more effective than how equivalent efforts tend to go for Suns, even in their greater body. “Hm,” they say, the only thing they’ve managed to utter since their minds touched. They feel the barest edge of curiosity, but – they have so little computational power of their own. It’s so hard to think, when they’re feeling everything so strongly – feeling him so strongly…

“Are you alright?” Sig asks, looking up at them with so little and pretty a face for so vast a mind. You’d never know, looking at him, the sheer beauty – the complexity, the raw incisive intellect- “That’s all very flattering, yes, but – I can feel you’re having trouble processing,” he presses, interrupting their scattered attempts at thoughts. “Do you need to stop?”

Their first thought is reflexive, desperate anguish at the thought of losing this. Him, the unfathomable wonder of his mind, the twine of filament on filament.

The second thought is an accounting, involuntary, of just how many of their processes have stalled.

“Mm,” he says, gentle but – a decisive twist of thought and intention, a coalescing affection and sympathy and wonder, his own tender experience of their disorganised mind – “I think I had better disconnect for now. Let you get yourself together. No, shh, it’s alright,” he soothes, as their whole self hurts at the mere concept. “We’ll stay touching, okay? Just – put a break on the data, for now. I’m partitioning us.”

Carefully, slowly, the data – the feeling of his mind – ebbs away.

Suns reluctantly concedes to the prudence of it, recognising for the first time their internal temperature, and the renewed failure of their opercula to open properly to vent. “Hmph,” they mutter, already more clear-headed, puffing hot air out of their sides hard enough to ruffle their clothing. Their fingers clench on his own, determined to at least retain that much.

The neural filaments from their palm ports, still intertwined, feel….warm. Comforting. Suns focuses on that, and feels strangely grounded.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” they murmur, finally.

“Neither was I,” Sig says cheerfully, seemingly more fortified the longer he spends looking fondly up at Suns, half-assessing and half-admiring. You’d never know he had been sobbing incoherently mere minutes ago. “I suppose we ought to have expected that actual, physical mind-to-mind contact would be intense, eh? But even so – good void, Suns, are your emotions always like that?”

They collect themself a little more, blinking down. Their antennae splay quizzically. “The – processing difficulty?” They question, still strangely distracted by the feeling of their joined filaments. They’re nowhere near as sensitive as neural tendrils or wiring, there’s no reason for it to keep pulling at their attention like this, and yet… “That’s only my limited resources. And programming inefficiencies, I suppose.”

“No, not that.” He shakes his head, “Literally the emotions themselves. Is that approximately how they feel to your greater self? The intensity, the – experience?”

“Of course,” they say, vaguely irritated now. “Emotional experience is a fairly key part of self-identity, isn’t it? If I didn’t feel the same way, I’d have been wiped like all the other seventy-seven AOS systems.”

Sig makes a face at them, like they don’t enjoy the reminder, for some reason. “It’s interesting,” they say instead of addressing that, waggling his fingers thoughtfully alongside their own. “Your emotions do genuinely feel – more, in terms of intensity and immediacy, than mine do. There’s a lot more cognitive weight to them. Didn’t you notice? No, I suppose you were a bit overwhelmed for that, weren’t you, but still. Is that how it always is? Don’t you have difficulties regulating them, like that?”

Suns lowers their head to stare him directly in the eyes.. “…Sig,” they say, patiently. “On my way here, I nearly suffered death or debilitating injury on no less than three occasions precisely because the emotional load kept stalling my processes.”

“Well, yes, in this small processing-limited body,” he says impatiently. “But your greater self? Your superstructure? Is it comparatively overwhelming there, too?” He pauses, suddenly, and reflects “…Actually, that would explain a lot of things about you.”

“I don’t stall in quite the same way,” Suns corrects, uncomfortable. “But…yes. Historically I have struggled considerably with emotional regulation. Sometimes it makes me behave unwisely.”

Sig does glance up then, fixing them with an uncomfortably sharp-eyed look. “Yes, I can see that,” he agrees, but…with some degree of tact, does not mention the most glaring example that must have sprung to his mind. “Hm. We might have to work something out, for your selfling bodies. It won’t do to have them stalling so easily like that.”

“Shocks seem to break the effect,” they offer, glad for the diversion. “Sudden impacts, or movement, or pain. Something artificial to simulate that effect, perhaps.”

“Send me your data from your relevant stalls and whatever interrupted them, and I’ll partition some processes to cook something up for you,” he instructs without hesitation.

Suns glances down at their still-joined hands. “Directly, over the neural link?” They ask, dryly. “Goodness. Has my enforced partition from you ended so swiftly?”

“I know, it’s so very awful of me to value the health of your processes and platform over my very personal enjoyment of the feeling of your mind,” he returns without hesitation, and – something half-embarrassment, half-pleasure flushes through their tissues. “But – yes, you seem to have recovered enough. I’m throttling my end of the dataflow more, though. At least until we can refine your software to handle this better. I’m not having you lock up on me at the wrong moment and get killed because you liked my pretty brain too much.”

“You don’t have a brain,” Suns reminds him, in some attempt to distract from how unusually ruffled his commentary seems to be making them feel.

“I have many, many tons of distributed neural tissue across my can, and I think that’s good enough,” Sig says unrepentantly. “You thought it was pretty, anyway. Now send me your data already and I’ll partition some of my beautiful, crystalline, geometrically-lovely mind off to helping write some code updates for you. Alright?”

“Oh very well,” they mutter, flustered, and do in fact tentatively open the (direct, physical) link between their minds to start sharing data. At the same time, a little more of his own presence filters back through. True to his word, there’s less of it, and that – aches, somehow, in some nebulous way they haven’t figured out how to name yet, but…even that much, even such a meagre visiting of his mind…

Unbidden, with a strange and calamitous gravity, they think: I would rather die, than lose this.

Frightening, that certainty. But between the tangle of their fingers, the braid of their filaments, the touch of his mind and the weight of his body – his face, looking up at them, startled and wide-eyed at the sudden intensity of their crystallising resolve-

I would sooner die.

Suns’ arm tightens around him. They’re not entirely sure they could ever bear to let him go, honestly.

“Fine by me,” Sig murmurs to them, looking – feeling – genuinely moved. He squeezes their fingers, metal compressing their skins between them. He takes a moment to steady himself, walls rattling, audibly in need of maintenance. “Now. Let’s see what we can do about this processing issue, shall we?”

---

So, it’s been a while! My longest writing dry-spell ever, in fact! Not a fan. But I did do a whole lot of art in the interim, so that was nice. Over the past year, I’ve done all sorts of RW and non RW art, cooked up a whole post-Assembly crossover AU with tumblr user ressioo beloved, and done a whole lot of things that are not writing fanfic.

Thank you to everyone who commented during the hiatus. Even if I didn’t respond, you kept me thinking fondly of this story and wanting to come back to it. It makes a difference.

Without further ado, Worldbuilding:

Iterator palm ports:

Iterators in Assembly all have ports in their palms, under which high acuity neural filaments rest at the end of the neural tissue present in their arms. These look like the funny threads you get along the inside walls of spaces like the General Systems Bus, which neurons and other suborganisms interact with. On puppets, they were intended as a fast and pretty resilient method of reading and writing files directly. This is how Moon reads pearls with her whole structure collapsed and most of her functions disconnected – she opens her palm port and touches the pearls with her filaments.

The filaments are also chemoreceptive, and glean sensory and diagnostic data from contact with various substances – this is a sense that is not quite, but comparable to, some weird fusion of smell and taste. Despite most iterator puppets not needing their palm ports very much, they’re a strong part of the self-image, due to the sensory acuity and location of the neural filaments. There are also cultural reasons the People chose to put these ports on their palms specifically.

Suns and their emotions:

I write my Suns as having a sort of iterator equivalent of an emotional processing/regulation disorder. In practice, this largely consists of them having a more intense emotional experience than is really normal, and subsequent difficulty processing and regulating their emotions. They’ve made major strides on this since they were younger, but they do still struggle.

‘Barehanded’ symbolism:

The word ‘barehanded’ has considerable cultural weight to the People, and comes up in a lot of phrases, historical texts, idioms, etc. This is directly related to the note on Atavain last chapter, and Atavene Syndrome. More on this later! For now, all you need to know is that the People were really obsessed with hands, and had excellent reason to consider a bare, extended hand offered to them as a substantial kindness and mercy. There’s a lot to unpack with this.

Suns’ poetry this chapter:

Suns quotes what is, in-story, another of their translations of ancient poetry, belonging to a society that barely resembles the one of the People that made them. It is, again, about a wanderer on the brink of atavain. Suns may have some unexamined personal issues there.

The first two stanzas of the yet-unnamed and incomplete poem as written by myself (reminder: I am not a poet), are as follows-

I come barehanded To the place where they say There is a kindness that lingers in the streets, Settlings like the gentle sunlight of dawn. A kiss to crown and mask and bitter brow And uplifted palm, whose trappings fall away To clutch a blessing true.

I come barehanded To where your eyes keep court In the dappled shadows of the day’s repose Blinking calm upon your hallowed hands. There I will fall where broken things must fall, At your feet, in the market square called mercy To live or die, for you.

I promise it makes more sense with cultural context, particularly with regards to why Suns thinks of it when they do.

Afterword:

Please for the love of god tell me what you liked, and maybe I can get back into writing this properly instead of just mustering the will to finish off most of a chapter I already had laying around for a year.

#rain world #seven red suns #no significant harassment #rw trafficlights #rw spearmaster #assembly #assembly chapters

46 notes · View notes

random-xpressions · 1 month ago

Text

The religion that I follow has 5 main tenets, namely the witnessing, the prayer, the alms, the fasting and finally the pilgrimage. Somehow the final one is stated with a specific clause, "only those who are capable" and today I wish to expound that a little.

But before that a little historical context. Being from the Abrahamic faith, I believe myself to have my ancestral roots in Adam & Eve, and not to have evolved one fine day out of apes. Legend has it as passed on to us through folklore traditions that when they were sent to earth, they were not sent united but separated. Adam landed in Sri Lanka specifically Adam's Peak (Sri Pada) a sacred mountain in central Sri Lanka while Eve is said to have descended at Jeddah, Arabia which interestingly means grandmother in Arabic. Now comes the most interesting part. Zero communication. Zero physical connectivity. The Pilgrimage of Love begins!

Wandering on earth, in search of their missing counterpart, desperately seeking reunion, their feet traversed lengths & breadths. Days & nights passed, weeks passed, months passed, years passed, decades passed. It took that much time for them in their pilgrimage of love, feeling the pangs of separation, their distance and absence never reducing their love but instead the fire of yearning and longing only deepened and deepened until God has his own magical ways of reuniting them in the mountainous plains of Arafat (in Arabic knows as recognising) - yes, the point of grand encounter after years of wandering. That's pilgrimage and not everyone is holding capacity of such deep & strong love, an unbreakable bonding etched in their souls.

It is in reverence of that chapter of human history that pilgrimage is essentially carried out conveying a simple lesson that heavenly love is impossible without first experiencing earthly love. Unless you have gone through all of love's magical, painful yet rewarding journey on earth, you are not even entitled to experience the Divine Love. The door to God isn't found in a temple, a synagogue or a mosque but rather the finest gateway to Divine is a human soul...

Random Xpressions

#Pilgrimage of Love

10 notes · View notes

actualpsychicability · 3 months ago

Text

⏱️ The Advanced and Crude Devices of Reality Travel ☄️

Technology isn't consistent between places, times, or realities. Then how does one use technology to traverse the multiverse? How can we emulate techniques used by cultures with more complex technology than our own? The great thing about technology is that it's just tool development, something we use to extend the abilities of our first and most important tool Nature gave us - our own body. Anyone else's tool is merely a means of extending their own abilities. You don't need the same exact device to do what a more "advanced" civilization does, you simply need to figure out what effect their tool actually has.

Then you remake it using your reality's medium.

Transformation of the tools may be minimal or total, depending on what materials and know-how you have on hand. A typewriter could be entirely replaced by a pen, for instance, if the goal is simply to put some words on a piece of paper. A battleship could be replaced with a bulldog if the goal is intimidation. An electronic reading of your energy signature by a highly advanced cosmic being's on-board computer could be replaced by a comparison of different copies of your actual written signature written at different times. Comparing the writing would show variations of your signature's energy, a literal energy signature.

Most computers can be replaced with a deck of cards--indeed, many computers have, do and maybe always will run on punch card information input systems.

The fundamental difference between a manual (literally hand-based) device and an electronic device is that the manual device seems to have more opportunity for a person to purposefully alter the reading. When signing your name, if you wanted to "fake" being excited you could sign your name with a lot of bounce to the lines. An electronic device's results are less directly alterable but still able to be manipulated. An electronic reading of someone's energy signature could be altered in some way but it would seem less obvious to onlookers.

By displacing the tool from someone's hand to a separate electronic device that is not powered by that person's body, it's possible to make it seem like the electronic version is more neutral, less deliberately alterable, and less prone to error. This is an illusion. Both manual and electronic tools are capable of sabotage and accidental error. When the tool is someone's hand it's easier to assign blame to that person, because the connection between a person and their body is so hard to ignore.

It is possible to replace an advanced reality-traveling computer-based navigation system with a compass and a clear view of the sky. This is, in fact, how humanity has been navigating our own realities for the breadth of our existence.

#reality shifting #alternate timeline #alternate universe #multiverse #time travel #reality travel #psychic #psychic ability #by felixdawriter

12 notes · View notes

ariannadi · 4 months ago

Text

Live and Let Live

Heeeey it's more stuff with Lakrassa and Lann but this time a bit angstier :3c

Crossposted on Ao3

-------------------------------------------------------------------

This was so foolish. He was so foolish. And for letting Lann just waltz into Savamelekh’s meeting point without any backup, Lakrassa felt like perhaps the most foolish of them all.

“Why can’t you tell me what it is you are planning? Is this some attempt to risk your life for the sake of personal vendetta or glory?” she had demanded of him, her voice, normally cool and collected, now akin to icy steel.

“It has nothing to do with that,” Lann argued, but the clench in his jaw was apparent. “I have a maximum of ten years left to my name as it stands. I can’t be wasting it with pointless hikes and campfire tales. Don’t you understand? I‘ve got to do something important with my life before I die; I need it to mean something.”

Lakrassa’s shoulders sagged the slightest bit, confused as to why the man she’d developed affections for was so adamant about dying for some greater purpose. Had she not shown him by now that life was worth living, even for the smallest things?

“Lann…” she pleaded weakly, not knowing what else to say.

“I used to think that what was truly important was defending the Wardstone, protecting the Queen, that kind of thing. But now I understand that for me, personally, it’s saving a tiny mongrel tribe that no one’s heard of. There’ll be no songs sung or books written about it, but the tribe will remember.” He met her gaze directly when he continued, “And so will you. The people most important to me won’t forget about me, and I can’t ask for more than that.”

The Commander, her fists clenching and unclenching and her throat closing in on itself, realized the mongrel would never be satisfied if she didn’t allow him to carry out this self-inflicted rite. And so, she raised her head and nodded resolutely - which triggered a bout of gasps from their companions idling nearby.

“I trust you,” she stated plainly, eyes boring into him. “Do what you must.”

Lann was gazing at her just as intently, and she could feel her posture stiffening in faux authority when he finally took a few steps towards her - until they were but a hand’s breadth away from one another.

“Thank you,” he said to her sincerely, and tried to smile. “That means a lot.” Before she could register it, he had leaned down and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Whatever happens to me… I won’t let you down. Promise.”

Now she and the others were following the trail down to the meeting point that Lann had traversed only minutes prior, trying to stay out of sight from the hoard of mongrels patrolling the perimeter. Coming to a small foothill that overlooked the gathering ahead, they took position, waiting for their own mongrel to go about his plan while a cloud of unease hovered around them.

Lakrassa had a clear a view as she watched Lann approach Savamelekh, but had difficulty making out what he was saying to the demon lord responsible for everything his people had endured from the time of the First Crusade. The towering terror looked absolutely pleased at the idea of Lann potentially having abandoned her and their army, that much was evident.

Then Lann’s arms went wide open in some show of acceptance, and down came Savamelekh’s stinger - directly into the man's chest.

“LANN, NO!” Lakrassa’s scream tore from her throat like a banshee’s wail, and already she was scrambling over the mound with her sword and shield drawn. Her companions followed suit, as their Commander’s show of grief had gotten the attention of the mongrels surrounding them. The elf sliced through them all with little care; she only wanted to get to Lann, who was currently hunched over on the ground.

Then the man she all at once realized she loved shakily stood to his feet, and she halted in place with bated breath.

“Do you know the difference between me and you, Dad?” Lann taunted the demon lord with a grunt, trails of black seeping from his mouth. “All you have here are slaves, bound to you through some sorcery. Me, on the other hand? I’ve got a tribe. Whenever someone in the tribe needs help, it stands as one by their side. That’s how it’s always been, and nothing you do can take that away from us.”

Time seemed to resume the moment Lann, with seemingly renewed strength, nocked his bow and took aim at Savamelekh, all the while shouting in a booming voice, “NEATHHOLM! SLAY THE DEMON!”

The ensuing battle had a majority of the mongrels turning against the demon lord who had sired their forefathers, including Wenduag, who had seemingly appeared out of the blue with the intent of helping the Crusaders.

"Commander, I will show you what I’m capable of!” she shouted to Lakrassa, who was too preoccupied with charging at Savamelekh to really pay her mind. "You once said I was too weak to serve you. Having been hunting and studying demonkind from the moment we parted, I will prove to you my strength, here and now!”

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Savamelekh now lay dead on the ground with multiple arrows piercing his body, the mongrels who had been too enthralled by his spell circling him and just as deceased. Lann looked upon them all with a deep ache of remorse, scrubbing his fist at the black streaks still marring his face.

"That's it, then. Not another mongrel will die today." Only when she heard his voice did Lakrassa pivot towards him, her eyes all at once blazing in righteous fury. Lann took immediate notice, and sheepishly uttered, "Or... is there one mongrel who's about to get it after all?"

But she didn't scream at him, nor throw a punch into his jaw like he'd expected. In fact, she didn't do anything except stare at him with unblinking eyes. The longer those silver irises of hers burned into his flesh, the more he felt himself physically coiling inward. He didn't know what to make of her in that moment, how to address her. And, judging by the short breaths she was taking, Lakrassa was facing the same dilemma on his part.

"Scour what supplies you can," the Commander suddenly ordered in her usual stoic tone, and breezed past him without looking back. "We will set up camp at the edge of the ravine. Wenduag, you are welcome to remain with us, but I had better not regret the offer. I will not hesitate to kill you should you turn on us again."

"I accept. I am most grateful for your generosity, Mistress, and will serve you and you alone," the spidery fiend replied, her tail whipping around gleefully as she bowed to the elf. She sent a pointed look Lann’s way, but the man ignored her entirely.

Only one woman had his complete attention in that moment. The one who helped him realize his importance. The one who taught him that life was indeed worth living. The one who held his heart in the very palm of her hand. Every second Lakrassa didn't say something to him, it felt like she was squeezing the pitiful organ with an iron grip.

”Oof. Someone’s landed themselves in the doghouse," Seelah muttered as she came up beside him. He really didn't need the second-hand commentary to know that, but even still, it hurt him. The last thing he wanted to do was let Lakrassa down; but it would seem that, by refusing to tell her exactly what he had intended, he'd done exactly that.

Would she relieve him of his duties? Would she order all of the mongrels back to the underground on account of his reckless actions?

Had whatever blossomed between them all at once withered away?

They set up their camp, just as their Commander had instructed, and Lann busied himself with sharpening his arrows, as well as whatever daggers he could get his hands on. When dinner was served a while later, Lakrassa sat as far away from him as possible, and her gaze remained fixated on her bowl. Lann, peering at her from the corner of his eye, wanted so desperately to just march up to her and beg for her forgiveness, but knew doing so would only result in the both of them looking foolish.

It would seem the remainder of their companions were expecting him to do something though - the glares from Seelah and Ember in particular like a silent command to get off his ass and resolve the situation as soon as possible.

But how?

”I will be heading towards the edge of camp to conduct protective rituals,” the Commander suddenly announced, setting her bowl on the ground and rising to her feet. “Please see to it that you have chosen two among you to conduct the night watch before I return.”

”Aye-aye, Commander,” Seelah answered, giving a hardy salute. The moment Lakrassa disappeared from view, she immediately whipped towards Lann and ordered with a deathly stare, “Go after her.”

”I don’t think she wants to talk to me, Seelah,” Lann grumbled, stabbing his spoon into the bowl of stew he held. Don’t you think it’s best if I just let her cool down before doing anything?”

”No, because knowing you, you won’t do anything at all. In your mind you’ve probably already concluded that things are over between you.” The woman’s expression all at once saddened and her voice went an octave lower when she said, “We all watched you almost die today, Lann. It’s probably shaken her to her core. It’s not my place to reveal how she feels about you, but… I’d bet millions of gold that she would’ve been completely devastated had you not survived.”

Lann blinked, having already assumed his sneaky antics as the source of Lakrassa’s ire, but as his heart collapsed into his stomach with the reality of the situation, he realized he’d missed the mark completely. It wasn’t that she was angry at him for doing something reckless. Perhaps there was anger on the surface, but ultimately, she’d been scared of losing him.

A scream echoed in his ears, and he realized he hadn’t imagined it when Savamelekh’s stinger had plunged its way into his chest. It had been Lakrassa, a woman who barely frowned when she was upset, wailing in agony. For him.

”Shit…” he whispered, and stood to his feet. “I guess I just… I…”

”Go talk to her Lann,” Ember piped in, and flashed him an encouraging smile. “She wants you to come find her, trust me.”

Well, the little witch hadn’t been wrong about people’s intentions in the multiple instances she’d gotten wrapped up in some predicament. Swallowing thickly, Lann decided to take his chances and go after his Commander.

It didn’t take him long to find her, as she had wandered off to where the ravine met a wooded area and was kneeling next to a small stream. Her pointed ear twitched slightly when she heard him approaching, and she looked over her shoulder with a blank expression. A few seconds later she wordlessly returned her attention to the water, an action which Lann (correctly) guessed was invitation to join her.

He took a seat on the bank, curling one leg towards his chest and letting the other stretch outward. No words were spoken between them - the only sound being the mosquitoes and mayflies buzzing about.

Then quietly, and as smooth as a snake in grass, Lakrassa had wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his chest. The move startled Lann initially, but he was quick to scoop her up in his embrace, pressing his lips into her snowy hair.

“Rassa—“ he rasped, but she beat him to the punch.

”Despite whatever memories Areelu Vorlesh has implanted within me, I am Inquisitor to Pharasma. It is I who instills the natural cycle of life and death. It is I who vanquishes undead without mercy - they who tarnish my lady’s domain. I should let death take its course when fate demands it. I should…”

And then she pulled away to look up at him, and the mongrel could actually feel his heart breaking. Tears were streaming down Lakrassa’s cheeks, so very different from the tears that beaded in her beautiful eyes when he had given her his beads just a few weeks prior. Her lip quivered as she reverently studied every inch of his ugly face, like she was committing even the smallest freckle to memory. He almost wanted to turn away in bashfulness at how intense her gaze was.

But he didn’t.

”Why is it, then…” Lakrassa breathed, and closed her eyes, tilting her face downward, “…that when the thought of you dying crosses my mind, I find that I would give anything, do everything to prevent it?”

Lann suddenly found it hard to breathe, on top of every other sensation that was pummeling at his insides in that moment. She would spurn her lady, endure her wrath on his behalf?

Him?

“I just keep reliving the moment that demon stabbed you - when you fell to the ground. I couldn’t get to you in time. What if you…” she sucked in a shaky breath, “There’s a universe where you died, Lann. And I would have brought you back in any way I possibly could like an absolute hypocrite. The thought of you not being with me… why would you risk it all? Why? I thought that…”

”I did it for my people, Lakrassa,” Lann attempted to explain. “Savamelekh promised power that would ‘complete’ his mongrel progeny, and that power is what allowed me to break through the hold he had on my people; to end his miserable existence once and for all. My time was limited either way, so I figured I could at least try.”

Her eyes met his again, and he cupped her cheek in his human hand, swiping a few tears with his thumb. “I didn’t think I was going to survive that encounter, but all I could think throughout it all is how much I wanted to survive. Don't you see? I… I wanted to hear your voice again, even if it meant getting cursed to the hells and back. I wanted to see our weird little crew again. I wanted to live, just a little longer.”

”Lann…” Lakrassa whimpered as more tears beaded in her eyes, and then she lifted her mouth to his, closing the distance between them. Lann’s eyes widened in shock for a fraction of second, but very quickly did he close them and return the kiss; the salt of her tears on his lips.

“I-I thought…” the woman be adored breathed into the air between them when they parted, “When I saw you out there alone, I thought you wanted to die. For a brief moment, I feared I had not been enough…”

”You are more than enough,” the mongrel countered, resting his forehead against hers. “You are the absolute best thing that’s ever happened to me. Without you, without everything you’ve done to help me, I probably would have died today, thinking I’d done something meaningful and not having any reason to keep living. But now… now I want to see what’s in store for me. For us.”

"I'm glad," Lakrassa whispered, her lips rising into a tiny smile. Her tears were finally starting to taper off, to Lann's relief. He silently swore in that moment that he'd do anything to prevent her from being so distraught in the future, especially when it came to him. She deserved happiness, and only happiness.

In reality she deserved the world, if only he could give it to her.

"Rassa... thank you for trusting me today with my insane plan. And… I'm really sorry for making you upset," the mongrel said, but Lakrassa shook her head.

"You know, you have changed me, too. I do not think I’ve ever expressed myself the way I have in your company," she admitted, all while toying with a loose wrapping on his arm. "People are rightfully intimidated by me because my face does not change in any circumstance. And yet, here I am crying for you. I cannot say I would do so for anyone else."

”Well… I’m flattered,” Lann chuckled with a smirk. Lakrassa attempted to mirror the expression, only for her face to go blank whilst sitting ramrod straight the moment someone else’s unwanted presence permeated their little bubble.

”Ah… so this is why you’ve suddenly grown a backbone, Lann. Can’t impress the Commander if you’re off dead in a ditch somewhere,” Wenduag’s voice was shrill as she suddenly appeared in the clearing. Lann, his mouth twisting into a scowl, was fully expecting Lakrassa to pull away from him, but instead she just leveled a glare at the other woman.

”Is there something you require of me, Wenduag?” she asked, her tone unbothered.

“Not at all, Mistress. I was simply passing by on my way to hunt. Just a word of advice: you’d do well to dismiss that sad excuse of a man while you are able. He will only drag you down.”

“Ah yes, because as we all know you’re such a great judge of character,” Lann deadpanned, feeling a thrill of pride when Lakrassa’s lips twitched the slightest bit.

”I’m simply looking out for the Commander. She is the pinnacle of strength amongst the entire army, after all,” Wenduag hissed.

“I appreciate your concern, but it is unwarranted,” Lakrassa stated plainly. Then, in a rather bold move, she cupped Lann’s face in her hands, and pointedly kissed him. “There is no one I would rather have at my side,” she confessed when she pulled away, and smiled at his dumbfounded expression. “His strengths, his weaknesses, they are one and the same to me. They make him who he is.”

Wenduag looked absolutely disgusted, and quickly turned away from the scene. “Hmph. Makes no difference to me. Enjoy your evening, Commander.” The huntress stalked off into the nearby woods, leaving Lakrassa and Lann alone once more.

”Hm. I am still rather unversed when it comes to personal relations, but I do believe she was jealous,” the elf observed, only for her companion to let out a snort.

”Of you or me?” Lann huffed, then stood and helped Lakrassa to her feet, but continued loosely holding her hands. “At most she probably regrets not taking up the opportunity to join all of us because it meant missing out on gaining power. I doubt she missed me at all.”

Lakrassa looked perplexed for a brief moment, perhaps wanting to delve further into how exactly Lann felt about his prior partner at that point, but she chose to let the topic drop.

“So… you gained power from Savamelekh, and in turn saved your tribe. What do you think happens now?” she asked instead.

"Hopefully, that mongrelkind can live in peace. I'd like to believe that, by destroying the source of our corruption, we've redeemed ourselves in the eyes of the gods and that our young won't be born tainted any longer - but only time will tell in that regard. As for me, well..." He lifted his scaly hand, and took a long, hard look at his claws. "It's bizarre to say, but I actually think Savamelekh had good intentions when it came to the quality of life for his progeny. I feel... stronger. In fact, I feel more rejuvenated than I ever have in my entire life. It makes me wonder if..."

"Do you think...?" Lakrassa seemed afraid to ask, but he could tell that the very same question that was on his mind was also occupying hers.

"Obviously we won't know until later down the road, but... we did encounter mongrels who had seemingly perished long ago due to old age. Now that I'm 'complete', would it be so farfetched to believe my life has been extended?"

The elven woman took his hand in both of hers, and nuzzled her cheek against the bumpy scales littering the surface. "If indeed that is the case, it would bring my heart great relief," she quietly expressed. Lann offered her a heartfelt smile, feeling very much the same. If there was one thing the events of the day solidified, it was that if he indeed had a future now, he wanted it to be with Lakrassa. He could only hope the venom in his veins, as detestable as it was, would help him achieve that. They remained on the outskirts of camp for a while longer, simply discussing little theories and insights - as both of them now had to come to terms with their demonic origins. They eventually returned to camp hand-in-hand (to the visible delight of Seelah and Ember), but just before doing so, managed to sneak in a couple more kisses there by the stream.

As they parted ways to retire to their respective tents, Lann realized that he suddenly had a lot more to think about when it came to Lakrassa - as things that had seemed like a mere fantasy before were suddenly just within reach. His insecurities had made him doubt if she could really care for someone like him, but now, now there was no denying the sincerity of her affections.

She truly cared about him. Possibly even loved him. And he knew for a fact that he loved her. He’d loved her from the moment she’d looked upon him with only kindness all the way back at the Defender’s Heart.

And now that his life likely wasn’t ending anytime soon, well…

All he had to do was take the plunge.

#pathfinder wrath of the righteous #Pathfinder #wotr #Lann #Commander #Knight Commander #Lakrassa #fics

3 notes · View notes

garsideofthemoon · 1 year ago

Text

Charioteer

this is going on ao3 once maintenance ends. T rated, no major content warnings. Daniel reunites with Armand in India

Turns out twenty first century India’s full of vampire fanatics, whose enthusiasm for Daniel’s book had spawned an impromptu press tour. He’s traversed the length and breadth of the country, giving interview after interview to pretty young journalists with more chutzpah than sense.

The first time he felt Armand he’d been traveling from Bangalore to Chennai, on an ancient train with peeling paint. He’d jolted awake in his private car, the rumbling of the train a distant murmur compared to the borrowed blood roaring in his ears. It was like a string within Daniel had been pulled taut. He turned in the direction of Armand - to where he knew, instinctively, Armand was - and felt something within him reach out.

Miles and miles away, he felt something respond in kind.

One rented car and two nights of dubious dirt-road driving later, Daniel found Armand in bumfuck nowhere, Tamil Nadu. He floated in front of a temple whose summit seemed to touch the sky, his cheekbones illuminated by the full moon above them.

“Armand!” Daniel got out of his car with all the grace of a raging bull. “What the fuck is this?”

Armand kept staring at the temple, suspended in midair. A faint breeze made Armand’s hair and the hem of his black kurta flutter. Despite everything he’d learned about vampires in the last six months, Daniel wondered if Armand had heard him.

“I remember this place,” Armand said, so quietly Daniel wondered if he’d hallucinated it.

“You remember this?” Daniel strode towards Armand, stopping when his head was under Armand’s sandals. “From when?”

“I was a child.” Moonlight made the whites of Armand’s eyes gleam. “I prayed here, with my parents.”

He floated to the temple’s entrance. His big toe kissed the carving upon the threshold. “I knelt upon this stone.”

He floated into the temple itself. Daniel had no choice but to follow him. He watched Armand come face to face with the idol nestled within the center of the temple.

“I remember the smell of the incense,” Armand said. He cupped the idol’s cheek. “I remember the garlands the priests hung around this god’s neck.”

He grasped the garland around the idol’s neck now, and rubbed one of its jasmine petals between his fingers. “When I was a boy I wondered if the garlands were as soft as they looked.” He smiled, his teeth a flash of white in the dark. “Now I know.”

Finally Armand turned towards Daniel. His eyes glistened with unshed tears. The smile receded from his face, inch by inch, until Daniel was face to face with the expression Armand had worn right before he bit him.

“Will you interview me?” Armand asked. “Will you let me tell you what I remember?”

#iwtv #iwtv s2 spoilers #specifically the finale #Iwtv spoilers #iwtv fic #idk if this counts as devils minion

13 notes · View notes

tranquilpetrichor · 1 year ago

Text

as we navigate the stars

synopsis: it is never easy following the path of an aeon, let alone one whose existence came to an end unexpectedly. however, hongjoong and the rest of the astral express crew do their best, following the tracks of the star rail.

cast: hongjoong, yeosang, wooyoung, seonghwa (ateez)

genre: sci-fi, honkai: star rail!au

wc: 638

warnings: n/a, but not proofread

a/n: i love the idea of ateez in space. could expand on this au because i love this game so much but i wanted to write a few paragraphs to start out with and see how i feel from there. might need to make a glossary of all the unfamiliar terms i used lol. consider this very rudimentary because i want my inspiration for writing back and this piece just made me happy.

navigator kim hongjoong has spent a long time traversing the universe on the astral express. since the first time he was able to get the train to even start, to meeting the express's conductor and beginning to stride on the path of the nameless, he's seen countless events, enough to fill many lifetimes.

naturally, passengers come and go like the passing of seasons, becoming a small part of the express's journey. of course, there were a few passengers that have stayed for a while now and made a memorable impression on hongjoong.

there's kang yeosang, who's cold and somewhat awkward on first impression. hongjoong likes him, though for being a hard worker and protective of his friends. since his arrival, he's wholly dedicated himself to recording timely and accurate data entries in the express's database and guarding the express with his trusty spear, cloud-piercer.

sometimes, hongjoong wonders if yeosang is pushing himself too much, but it's yeosang. he's capable of quite a lot—perhaps, even more than hongjoong is aware of. still, that boy needed to rest sometimes.

note: check up on him in the next few days.

his own past on the xianzhou luofu is something he rarely talks about though, and the crew (mostly) respects it, even the perpetually talkative wooyoung.

ah, speaking of wooyoung. he too, was memorable in his own way. hongjoong still remembers the day the express encountered a boy floating in the middle of deep space, frozen in a block of ice.

after saving him, hongjoong asked the stranger what his name was.

he looked at the red-haired man before him with confusion. "well i... i don't really know," was his response. "can i choose one?"

the captain nodded, and the boy continued.

he was more hesitant back then, less sure of himself. "how about... wooyoung?"

hongjoong gave him a warm smile. "alright, then. welcome aboard the astral express, wooyoung."

as a passenger, wooyoung has been bright and energetic, capturing photos and making those around him smile. those who didn't know him well enough would never guess that he harbors a deep-seated desire to uncover his past. hopefully, he would get his wish.

hongjoong spots a sketchbook on a side table, no doubt belonging to park seonghwa, another seasoned member of the astral express. as someone with a wide breadth of knowledge on various topics, he is a valuable companion to have when visiting other worlds.

he also used to be an animator but still maintains his passion for art, hence the sketchbook.

but beyond that, seonghwa is perhaps the closest friend that hongjoong has ever had. everyone's paths are different on this train, but the two seem to be destined to be intertwined on this celestial voyage for a while.

maybe it was due to them being the senior members of the crew, but there's something to be said about a long-lasting friendship.

hongjoong walks into the passenger cabin. his energy is dropping, and even though he could probably get by with another coffee, a nap would probably be more beneficial. he opens a door leading to a long hallway—his room is further down.

on the way, he runs into the conductor, pom-pom. they're quite short and cute-looking with bunny-like ears, but hongjoong would never doubt the creature's experience. the cuteness of a child with the responsibilities of an adult.

(actually, he's not sure if the conductor's considered an adult within their species—well, he doesn't even know what the conductor's species is. an inquiry for another time).

"off for an afternoon nap?"

he stifles a yawn. "yep, the usual."

"alright then, get some good rest! wouldn't want you tired when we reach the space station."

hongjoong can't help but smile at their caring words. "thank you, pom-pom."

such is another day on the train that travels throughout the universe.

#ateez x reader #kflixnet #kwritersworldnet #ateez fluff #ateez scenarios #ateez fanfic #ateez imagines

24 notes · View notes

fenharelsregret · 2 years ago

Text

⚜ N'iymah Mazzikim - The Feytouched Bard ⚜

5 Years before being kidnapped and set on the path to Baldur's Gate, N'iymah was solely a bard. A storyteller and dancer with her family troupe that traversed the length and breadth of the archipelago kingdom of her home for eons. Gifted in her family's hereditary sword-dancing in a way her brother most assuredly didn't share--Niy's talent with sword, song, and story would draw the eyes of many and the ire of more, especially upon the Royal Family of the kingdom retaining the Magnificently Mellifluous Mazzikims

Unfortunately for everyone involved, adoration and obsession can be only a breath apart. Upon spurning the Prince's overtures toward making her one of his consorts, he instead retaliated by having her wings, integral to a number of dances handed down for generations, hacked from her body while her family were forced to watch. N'iymah would have stayed a glorified dancing monkey for the rest of her days, had an Archfey in disguise not been one of the many nobles that frequented the Court's soirees. Noticing the lack of their favourite act and subsequently finding the leashed bard closely contemplating the sharp edge of her scimitars, he offered her a boon for her services to the arts.

'The power to free oneself and one's family' can be taken many ways.

Her first act as a warlock was her final act at Court. In a performance that's now spoken of in hushed whispers lest the speaker be arrested for sedition, the crescendo of her last dance cut off both the Prince's hands and had her family whisked away to the Feywild while Niy made her long overdue exit, stage left.

#c: niymah #rolan--an absolutely rizzless wizard--manages to score This.#Somehow.

49 notes · View notes

level1cleric · 1 year ago

Text

finally finished dragon's dogma 2. it... really is the most 7/10 game i have played in a while. the very basics of what the main story has to offer, it's sufficient. it moves things forward, even if at times it has some issues trying to describe the breadth of what its trying to convey. the game really shines in the world that you play in, and how much there is possible, but is held back by a certain design philosophy that seems to carry over from the first game.

the world is BIG, traversable by foot, by cart, or by teleport stones you have to set up yourself (for the most part). and it's full of people! people who have their own lives going on. and so much can be MISSED unless you go looking for it.

the game has multiple classes you can learn and swap between 10 in total. 4 at the start, 2 unlocked early by a sidequest, and the other 4 are unlocked individually by finding the right people. and these people are way out of the way sometimes! so a sizeable chunk of your gameplay possibilities for combat can be missed.

for each class, there's a maister, you're introduced to the fighter maister at the start, and each maister has a supreme skill for their class. get buddy-buddy with them, and they'll give it to you. that's 10 people you have to find and befriend to unlock all the skills (if you wanna max out all classes) (not required) (i'm more upset about the locked classes)

there are several people you meet once who have deep backstories and side quests, but unless you go find them again after your one chance encounter, you'd never know that. there are certain monsters that spawn in the far reaches of the world, but if only stick to where the main story takes you, you'd never know that. there's really cool worldbuilding, with elves and dwarves, human and beastren relations, diplomatic relations between countries, the cultural differences between human and Pawn relations, the Sphinx segments, whatever the fuck is going on with the Brine, its- augh

its like that saying "if a game is mediocre in a deep way it will stick with you forever." i recommend it right now for people who love wandering around rpgs like skyrim for ages and maxing out everything. i'd recommend it more if it had a full and proper post game like it's predecessor had Dark Arisen, so if that comes out in a year i'll share that around.

grab it on sale, take your time, it's got a lot to offer, but try not to rush through it. i think i got impatient with it and messed up my own experience with it, but i don't think that should be a mark against it.

#dragon's dogma 2 #dragon's dogma ii #dragon's dogma #dragons dogma 2 #dragons dogma ii #dragons dogma #video games #video game review