#can you tell my love for the vvitch is coming through with this wip lmao

[socially-awkward-skeleton]

tagged by: @direwombat @inafieldofdaisies @theresaruggedroad @thesingularityseries and @madparadoxum (this week) and @nightbloodbix @ivymarquis @g0dspeeed @kyber-infinitygems (last week, tagging you all back this week) thank you all so much!

I've been struggling to do much writing at all lately, but I have a bit from Kit's Herald/Role swap AU I've started messing around with. This fic leans really heavily into the supernatural side of the FC5 lore and of course twists the origin of Kit's arrival in Hope County:

A foggy haze of smoke filled the red, infernal sky as the sun beat down upon the desert and heat rose from the golden dunes in blurry striations. Kit was in a daze, her thousand yard stare focused on the mirage in the distance while her mind was addled by pain. The twisting of metal shrapnel sheared away at meat and bone, slicing through veins and tendons as flames devoured through fat and flesh in equal measure. Fever clouded her vision and her limbs became numb as the clothes on her body charred like a Fourth of July barbecue. The fire in her belly was fading, her very life slipping away from her like sand through her fingers. Her mouth became as hot and dry as the world around her, the tongue that hung from the corner of it now thick and heavy. The steady thumping in her skull started to slow along with the beating of her heart as the lights in her eyes collapsed into tiny pinpricks, tunneling the view she had of the wreckage around her. Screaming faded into the periphery, the terrified moans and groans of her unit members desperately clinging to life became a hellish, cacophonous choir and from out of the desert, something crawled towards her – a dark mass. 

It stole the breath from her lungs, nearly ripped the heart right out of her rib cage that begged to distend and snap apart. Whatever it was – and despite the adrenaline that coursed through her removing all clarity of thought and mind, preparing her for the great beyond – only one thought came to mind: it was ancient. Older than the mountains and the sands that caged her, something that came long before the stars and the sky they called home. Primordial. The Alpha and the Omega. 

The burning sun and the scorching heat of the fires that nipped and gnawed away at her stung at her eyes, tears spilled down her cheeks as the form and figure grew closer. Then silence fell. Impossible silence. That same crushing nothing that came while in the eye of a storm, and she was facing down a tempest. Giant paws stomped down, leaving prints in the sand that turned to glass. Golden eyes stared out at her, but there was nothing feline behind the glare affixed upon her (despite the gaping maw filled with sharpened teeth like knives) instead they were slits with a light behind them that was far more human than they should have been. This was no earthly creature. There were no lions in Afghanistan. And yet here it was, mane and all, bowing in her company, and licking up the blood that poured from her wounds with its rough pink tongue. 

The breath hitched in her throat as she tried to croak out a scream, but she was rendered speechless. A waking nightmare and she was unable to make a sound, all she could do was lay there and blink and pray. Pray that she’d be deemed inedible, pray that she’d be saved, pray that someone would come and spare her life. Pray that she was deemed worthy in the eyes of something holy. 

It’s massive head rose, eyes looking into her own as if it could read the very thoughts that rushed through her mind. Sinking into its gaze, she fell deeper into the black, empty pit at the back of her mind where the darkness sat dormant and entombed, waiting to be released onto the world. She just had to let go of what little control she’d been allowed in life and open that lid to Pandora’s box. 

And then a voice – not quite male, not quite female, something that was a convergence of the two – arose from out of the dark and infested her mind. “You know pain. You know suffering. Would you like to be free?”

It asked the question and yet her vocal chords were already burned to the point she could no longer speak, her lungs having filled with acrid smoke would not allow for even choked words to spill forward from her lips, but somehow she was able to answer. “Not if it means dying.”

A laugh, cold and mirthless, sent a shiver down her spine. The rattling of a tail screaming through the very weave of time itself. It coiled in the back of her skull, and whatever amount of human evolution and countless generations it had taken to get her here was stripped back until she was nothing more than an ape who’d discovered fire as a means to hold back the dark. She was a sniveling being in the presence of something it’s simple mind could not comprehend without being driven mad. 

“You wish to live?”

“Yes.”

“What would you give?”

“Anything.”

It was a simple trade, a barter that worked in her favor. What she might have had to give up was a small price to pay for what she’d receive in return – a second chance. For what, she wasn’t quite sure yet: redemption, revenge, reclaiming her birthright? She supposed she’d find out in due time. She’d sacrificed enough in her life, it was time for all that effort to be recouped and repaid in full. 

As the fire extinguished, and the bright glow of headlights fell upon her, she was more alive than ever. Skin had regrown, her hair no longer melted, blackened and burned, the milky cataracts of her eyes scraped back to the icy blue gleam they had once been.  She was reborn, made anew in God’s image. Chosen. Saved. A miracle that should never have been. The lone witness to the hand of God still willing to burn bushes for those most fervent in their belief of him.

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