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triskhellion · 11 months

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15 Shades of Red

Rated: Explicit (3.5k | WIP 1/18)

Relationships: Derek/Stiles, Stiles & Isaac, Derek & Malia, Derek & Isaac, The Family, background Boyd/Erica, Lydia/Jackson/Danny, Heather/Kira

Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale, Isaac Lahey, Lydia Martin, Malia Tate, Talia Hale, Peter Hale, Erica Reyes, Vernon Boyd, Kira Yukimura, Heather, Cora Hale, Laura Hale, Matt Daehler, Braeden, etc.

Tags: POV Stiles, POV Derek, Graphic Violence, Mob AU, Spark Stiles, Omega Derek, Mob Boss Stiles, Mob Boss/Pack Alpha Talia, Creeper Stiles, Power Imbalance, Sharing a Bed, Touch-Starved Derek, Getting Together, Angst & Fluff & Smut, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Blood, Kidnapping, Torture, Past Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Minor Character Deaths, Explicit Sexual Content, (Mostly) Bottom Derek/Top Stiles, Virgin Derek, Light BDSM, Praise Kink, Dirty Talk, Knotting, First Time Bottoming, Murder Husbands, Mpreg (in epilogue,) Happy Ending.

Summary: Derek is the 23 year old omega son of Alpha Boss Talia Hale, the only non-alpha born to the Hales in at least four generations. Restricted by his overprotective mother after a past kidnapping and misunderstood by the alphas and betas of the Pack, he longs for more than the boring life he's been consigned to and the suitors only interested in him for his name or body.

Stiles became the head of the Stilinski branch of the Gajoš Family at 19 after both of his parents were gunned down six years apart. With the help of a talented group of friends, the secret Spark with a newly powerful and disturbing Gift took down a slew of rivals to keep control of his territory in Beacon City. Now 21, the infamous Boss with a love for the color red is suddenly given an opportunity to bring the object of his affection, a completely oblivious Derek, into his Family as restitution for an unintended, but significant offense by the Hale Pack. He takes it.

Equiknots: Harvest & Hunter's Moon prompts: 18, Between, Corn Equal, Hunter, Knot, Sanguine, Spice, Super & Travel

Stiles

His cool, calm, and collected demeanor was at odds with the anxiety and anticipation roiling inside. Stiles learned years ago to school his facial expressions, to quiet the fingers that itched to drum on any surface, the feet to tap, or a leg to bounce. At least in public. There were the odd lapses, yes, but he couldn’t afford that today. He had to be the Boss, play the unbothered Blade of infamy.

Of course, the facade alone wouldn’t be worth a damn while in the company of werewolves, but he had other tricks up his sleeve. Or more accurately, hanging from a simple black cord around his neck; the thin, metallic, rune-marked disc the size of an old silver dollar resting flush against his sternum and tucked beneath layers of clothing. A white sleeveless v-neck under a long-sleeved red dress shirt, the shade of which he often used to signal his mood or the tone of the day’s business. (But not always, it wouldn’t do to be completely predictable, not to mention that circumstances often turned on a dime.)

Today he wore a vibrant scarlet, including a matching tie, with his signature charcoal gray 3-piece suit. Bold and triumphant for this was a momentous occasion. Stiles doubted he could’ve engineered a better opportunity himself than the one poised to fall into his lap. Hopefully literally in the not-too-distant future if he played his cards right.

And to think this had all been set into motion by sheer happenstance after more time than he cared to admit spent daydreaming trying to scheme up some kind of proper introduction over the past few years. But there was always some reason why it wasn’t a good time or likely to backfire if not cause a capital I Incident. There was also the part of him that would rather be able to keep his fantasy alive than risk the possibility of being shot down (and not only figuratively.)

But then eleven days ago his childhood best friend, Scott McCall, had been Bitten by Peter Hale.

The werewolf had been out of his mind at the time, drugged by a pretty face working for a rogue Calavera with some specialized strain of wolfsbane and made to go temporarily feral. An excuse for Hunters to “justifiably” attack the powerful Pack no doubt. Without his human side in charge to temper his ambitions — he was strong enough to become a Pack Alpha himself if he’d wanted to — the Left Hand of the Hales went looking for someone to Bite. His first Beta.

For some baffling reason he’d ended up going for Scott when he came across the veterinary student, who was entirely unsuitable for “the life,” walking with a date in the park. The terrified 21 year old managed to call Stiles just before he was actually attacked and when he was found by Isaac in some bushes soon after, bloody but healing, the Boss and Enforcer both knew exactly what was happening.

Isaac had been turned without consent himself several months before, but that Alpha had meant it as punishment for some slight, thinking either Stiles would turn on the new wolf or be killed by him. Instead he restrained Isaac with his power, threw him in a basement room, and slapped a silence rune on it. Then he made a concealment token to keep the change in status under wraps. They quietly figured it out with help from Alpha Satomi Ito, an old friend of Stiles’ mother, and once the blue-eyed wolf had learned enough control they took care of that asshole themselves.

It didn’t escape his notice that despite all of Scott’s issues with him following in his parents footsteps that it had been Stiles that he had called when his life was on the line. So it goes. They’d started growing apart after his mother was killed and the rift between them widened as they continued going through very different experiences. No matter how many times he tried to explain the concept of a power vacuum — that even if he, or previously his father, had wanted to run away from it all that more people would actually be hurt if they did so — Scott just couldn’t understand.

And so Stiles never even considered trying to bring him into to fold or tell him about Isaac being a wolf too. That he could find a pack here or that there were even ways to stick around without one. He called up Satomi and she had him on the way to some sleepy college town in Virginia within a handful of days.

Honestly, the whole situation was for the best for both of them. Scott could go be uncomplicated and enjoy his new lack of asthma with a laid back pack on the other side of the country and Stiles wouldn’t have to worry about him not being part of the Family, but possibly being targeted as an associate. There’d be no more sending anyone to babysit him from afar as he ambled about sketchy parts of Beacon City blissfully unaware of not being mugged either.

And so here he was. The Hales had contacted him apologetically once they realized what had happened and to whom and he’d let them stew for a few days before responding.

The barest smirk tugged at his lips as he observed the Alpha Heir, Laura Hale, attempt to discreetly scent his emotions, her nostrils flaring slightly as she feigned engrossment with the large painting taking up much of the wall behind his side of the table. The imagery of the Crooked Forest in Nowe Czarnowo on a misty morning was both deeply meaningful for him and an interesting conversation piece for the relatively few guests allowed within these walls. It would likely be quite some time before those gathered here returned again, if ever.

His amusement increased at the wrinkle deepening between her brows when she picked up nothing at all, huffing and turning to side-eye the short red-headed woman speaking with her younger sister, Cora, at the other end of the room. As far as those outside the Inner Circle of the Family knew (or Great Eight as Erica insisted,) Lydia Martin was the Stilinski emissary and responsible for any of their mage craft.

Dearest Lydia was indeed their emissary, his representative in matters both supernatural and mundane. She did also possess magic, though the exact nature of her abilities — that she was a banshee — was yet another closely guarded secret. But it was Stiles himself that created their magical implements, set their wards and, when need be, used his significant abilities to eliminate their threats.

The only people who’d witnessed him in action, enraged and eyes shining the rich burgundy of venous blood, were his most trusted Family and the soon to be dispatched recipients of said power. (The occasional innocent bystander didn’t count because their memories of the event would be wiped clean. He wasn’t entirely amonster.)

Aware of how requesting attendance by the entire Hale family, lowercase f, would seem an insultingly blatant trap he had sent a blood-spelled letter witnessed and effected by a Notary Mage. He, Isaac, and Lydia — the Head, the Hand, and the Voice of the Stilinski Family — had pricked their thumbs with the small ceremonial dagger and bled beside their signatures on the thick parchment, swearing that there'd be no violence against the Hales by them or those in their service, or with their foreknowledge, on pain of death.

For a span of 7 hours, equally before and after the meeting’s start time of noon, they could not strike. Unless the Hales attacked first, of course. They weren’t idiots.

Stiles still hadn’t been sure that they would come though, perhaps insisting on meeting in neutral territory instead. He would’ve agreed to that if he had to, but this made things so much simpler. More contained and less prone to erupt in violence or involve outside parties.

The Stilinskis and Hales weren’t formal allies, but they weren’t enemies either. Some minor altercations between underlings aside they had no quarrel with each other, even cooperating when their interests aligned from time to time or giving a heads up about some mutual rival.

The officiated blood-spell must’ve been enough for the Hale’s own emissary, Druid Alan Deaton to proclaim them safe enough even within another organization’s stronghold. The placid Black man in a forest green suit was currently observing everything from the sidelines and also keeping tabs on Lydia in particular. If he only knew.

In addition, they were allowed to bring a dozen soldiers with then; three were currently posted inside the room, two outside the door, and the other seven were split between the front and back entrances and on standby with their vehicles. He also knew, courtesy of his tech wizard, Danny, and head of security, Boyd, that the Steiner twins (jokingly referred to as Arts & Entertainment) were waiting with a small arsenal just beyond the property line about half a mile away in case things went south.

The heirloom oak and bronze grandfather clock chimed out the hour and the gathered werewolves turned to him expectingly, but he only looked toward the door and went back to reading the papers spread before him. With every minute after noon the tension grew and at 12:07pm Peter Hale finally broke the silence.

“Apologies,” he said, tone making clear that he wasn’t the one who should offer them. “But if we could start…”

Stiles raised an eyebrow. “Everyone hasn’t arrived yet.”

The four Hales looked at each other with surprise and discomfort. The druid’s gaze sharpened.

“You mean Derek and Malia? But wh—“ Peter began.

“Was the invitation not clear?”

“Yes, but they’re not really involved in this level of business,” said Laura, looking towards her mother as the Hale Alpha merely stared at him in silence.

Oh, I’m aware he thought disapprovingly, eyes intentionally flickering to the not-yet-18 year old Cora.

“Nevertheless, this matter affects them as well,” Stiles said, wearing what he hoped was a small, pleasant smile. “So if you could have them come per our agreement—”

“We would greatly appreciate it,” added Lydia, trying to soften the sharpness of his tone and keep things from devolving already.

The dark haired sisters shared an annoyed look as Peter sat tight-lipped in his seat. After several moments Talia broke eye contact and nodded to Laura. The Heir pulled out her phone and sent a few texts, snorting a minute later at the response.

“They said they could get here in about 25 minutes, but only by coming straight from the gym.”

Isaac looked over to him and chuckled.

“We promise not to take offense,” Stiles said, quickly banishing the thought of a flexing, sweat drenched Derek before it could fully form. “Refreshments will be served shortly in the meantime.”

He stood and nodded to Liam who’d been waiting near the entrance for any requests and the young soldier hurried to the kitchen.

“Excuse me while I attend to a few things in my office. Feel free to explore the library in the drawing room,” he said, gesturing to go through the archway on the right side and across the hall.

He walked over to Isaac on his way out. “Come get me when they arrive.”

Derek

He was at the power rack about to attempt a new single max low back squat when his and Malia’s phones chimed simultaneously. Always a good sign, Derek thought sarcastically as he let out a long sigh. What now?

His cousin, who had been racing on an elliptical nearby like an angry T1000 with John Connor in its sights, hopped off and grabbed her phone and water bottle as he continued to fume about the interruption, sure that his workout would be cut short.

Coming to the gym, like running beta shifted or blasting his music, was how he took the edge off the unmet needs and burned through the negative emotions that he lived with as a matter of course. The regular focus, control, and clearing of his mind also made it that much easier to mute the “outgoing” of his bonds and hide his interior world from the Pack’s scrutiny. Their well meaning, but frequently misapplied concern, especially his mother’s.

“They need us at the Stilinski meeting as soon as possible,” she said after reading the message.

Derek groaned and made a point of completing his lift, though his form was shaky in his annoyance. He’d heard of the letter “requesting” they all attend, but last night when he asked what time he should be ready to go he’d been assured that their presence wasn’t necessary. His presence, really. If she weren’t his usual bodyguard he bet they’d have taken Malia along. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to go, but he resented being summarily excluded. Again.

Growing up, Derek had never felt like a stereotypical alpha and being months past his 16th birthday he’d been worried about presenting as a beta, who tended to take longer to reveal their secondary sex than alphas did. Not because he thought there was anything was wrong with betas, but because he knew what it would mean in his family. He didn’t want to be different. Othered.

Not once though did he imagine that he could be an omega. Between Hale genetics being what they were and the rarity of omegas in general (and male ones in particular) it was so beyond the realm of possibility that that particular fear hadn’t even crossed his mind. Then came that first humiliating heat.

Derek had been playing video games in the den downstairs when it started, not recognizing the first symptoms. Feeling just a bit off he’d taken a nap on the couch only to wake up a few hours later confused and burning up. Simultaneously very uncomfortable and extremely horny, not to mention damp where he’d never been before. It was frightening.

Ten year old Cora had wandered in to play with her action figures and been alarmed to see him sweaty and groaning and yelled that he looked really sick. Peter had been the first to investigate and after several moments of shock had started laughing and offered to find him a “knotty boy” in front of his now present and scandalized mother.

He’d ended up locked inside an interrogation room with an inflatable mattress and some sheets and a blanket. Laura ran out to hastily purchase some random toys for him and then put them inside with snacks and water, but no one came around to make sure he ate or drank for longer than was healthy. They hadn’t known better.

Every wolf born in the past four generations of the main Hale family, all 30 of the 37 descendants of his great-grandfather Desmond Hale who had presented before him, had been alphas. (So had the three since.) The only non-alphas in their bloodline had been the mates of those born Hales, mostly betas and a handful of alpha-alpha pairs. There were just two omegas over that time frame: the wife of one of his second cousins and a deceased great uncle-in-law.

His beta father, Aaron, had been “blamed” for the anomaly having had an omega grandfather as well as a baby brother and two female cousins in his family. He’d died from smoke inhalation saving a handful of strangers from a house fire several years before Derek presented and had been cut off from his family when he mated the infamous Talia Hale, so they’d had no close and trusted source of advice and firsthand information. Oh, they’d read articles and browsed web forums and asked Deaton (who was not at all well versed in the subject) about it, but his family simply hadn’t really known what to do with any omega, much less a male one.

They’d muddled through, but not without plenty of scars to show for it, mostly on Derek’s end. All of the times when they treated him differently and shouldn’t have, especially after he was kidnapped at 17 by a gang led by a supernatural-hating fanatic.

His mother had been overprotective before then, but when they got him back — bruised and traumatized, but before the worst had happened — he could barely take a piss without someone hovering nearby.

Derek was steered away from or outright denied any position that might put him “at special risk” as an omega, which was practicality everything of rank or actually interesting. He would not be trained to be Laura’s Second as was customary for the next born nor sent on missions or even errands. If he were more technologically inclined he could’ve worked his way up in Intelligence, but torrenting foreign tv shows and troubleshooting the wifi were about the extent of his abilities. Anything related to their less-than-legal operations were off-limits as well. Unsafe.

No, Derek’s contribution to the Pack was in “Procurement and Supply Management,” i.e. making sure that the Manor and their other private or commercial properties never ran out of pasta or printer ink or toilet paper and that the lights stayed on. He also sometimes floated around filling in for members in Document Control or Internal Mail or did grunt work for the accountants. Sterile and boring.

Conversely, the one area where they should’ve taken his omega status into account they regularly failed to do so. Acted as if the same level of physical bonding and affection they normally engaged in would be enough for him. At least some of the pack had learned that omegas required more, knew that intellectually, but habits being as they were it generally hadn’t been the case in practice.

After getting met with annoyed glances or told that someone would come by later and have them never show he simply stopped asking after a while. Cuddling with his sisters once or twice a week while watching movies or tv shows and the occasional touches from his mother had kept him going, but he’d been low to mid-level touch starved much of the time and occasionally worse.

Since presenting Derek always felt at least somewhat apart from the pack as whole. He’d been teased by Peter and the beta soldiers, Aidan and Ethan, who often accompanied him before Malia was of age. He’d overheard certain comments from several others and withdrew even further inside himself, becoming more and more skilled at locking himself away.

What was the point of letting on exactly how dissatisfied and disconnected he felt? Things wouldn’t actually change, there’d just be some grumbling and there-theres and attempts to fix him instead of the situation.

Things had definitely improved when Malia arrived and had been amenable to random cuddling, but he still held himself back from doing it as often as he wanted to in fear of being a burden.

No one had been more surprised that Peter had a child than the playboy wolf himself, an alpha coyote-wolf hybrid that had long since been abandoned by her mother. She’d been a hellion of a street kid, causing all sorts of mischief and lashing out while trying to survive, until one day she’d ended up hauled in before the crew leader in charge of protection.

There was something about her, perhaps certain notes in her scent or something vaguely familiar in her appearance or manner, that gave Finstock pause before delivering the standard beating — non-life threatening or severely damaging — for a shifter her age. The wild-haired Bitten wolf was eccentric and prone to randomly bringing up his lost testicle, but had an uncanny sense about things and kept order in the streets, neither too soft nor overly cruel. Inquires were made, fingerprints and DNA ran, and surprise, congratulations, it was a bouncing baby snarling 16 year old Hale!

It didn’t take long for her and the then 19 year old Derek to gravitate towards each other, coming from two very different upbringings, but both outsiders in their own way. Malia was trained up and when she turned 18 became his primary bodyguard and the rest was history.

“C’mon, lets’s bounce,” she said, poking him in the shoulder. “ASAP means ASAP.”

“ASAP also means no shower or change of clothes,” Derek growled, lamenting that Hale Manor was in the opposite direction. He could’ve been there as presentable and on time as everyone else, but nooo. The most he could do was towel off some and slather on the deodorant he had in his bag.

“They’ll just have to deal,” she replied, shrugging. Her lack of concern for propriety was one of the many things he loved about her, but the rules were different for him. Oh well, the only wolves there would be family so perhaps he wouldn’t get that kind of shit for it. Hopefully the Stilinskis had been informed in advance and wouldn’t take their appearance as a slight.

“I guess so,” he muttered, wiping the barbell down quickly before tossing the towel in the used bin. They headed outside and he unlocked the black Camaro in the spot upfront reserved for him. Sliding behind the wheel, he strapped in and started it up as Malia pulled up the directions on her phone. Here we go.

#sterek #sterek fanfic #equiknots #trisk #equiknots trisk

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brokehorrorfan · 1 year

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Infinity Pool’s original motion picture soundtrack is available on vinyl via Death Waltz in association with Milan Records. Shipping in July, the score is composed by Tim Hecker (The North Water).

The 2xLP album is pressed on 140-gram vinyl with two editions: Mondo exclusive picture discs with artwork by Greg Ruth ($45; limited to 500) and clear red color vinyl ($40; limited to 2,500). They're housed in a red plastic gatefold sleeve within a spot varnish jacket.

#infinity pool #brandon cronenberg #alexander skarsgard #alexander skarsgård #mia goth #cleopatra coleman #jalil lespert #amanda brugel #death waltz #milan records #vinyl #gift #soundtrack #greg ruth #tim hecker

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walaw717 · 11 months

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The Egtved Girl

(c. 1390–1370 BC) was a Nordic Bronze Age girl whose well-preserved remains were discovered outside Egtved, Denmark in 1921. Aged 16–18 at death, she was slim, 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in) tall, had short, blond hair and well-trimmed nails. Her burial has been dated by dendrochronology to 1370 BC.

In the coffin, the girl was wrapped in an ox hide. She wore a loose, short tunic with sleeves reaching the elbow. She had a bare waist and wore a short string skirt. She had bronze bracelets, and a woollen belt with a large disc decorated with spirals and a spike. At her feet were the cremated remains of a child aged 5 to 6. By her head there was a small birch bark box that contained an awl, bronze pins, and a hair net.

Before the coffin was closed she was covered with a blanket and an ox hide. Flowering yarrow (indicating a summer burial) and a bucket of beer made of wheat, honey, bog-myrtle and cowberries were placed atop. Her distinctive outfit, which caused a sensation when it was unearthed in the 1920s, is the best preserved example of a style now known to be common in northern Europe during the Bronze Age. The good preservation of the Egtved Girl's outfit is due to the acidic bog conditions of the soil, which is a common condition of this locale.

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herestrish · 1 year

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the king of cups

takeru danma x reader (gn)

synopsis; after you safely returned from one of the games, it seemed only fair to erase the memory with the two things you knew how to do best: dancing and drinking.

contents; protective takeru, always the charming bastard, jealousy, homoeroticism, angst, implied murder, nightclubs, pool parties, heavy drinking, dubious morality.

notes; this happens to be my first contribution to the aib fandom & more importantly first take on him so i'm equally terrified & curious to know how it lands <3

You were always the type to stop when you knew you were having too much. But tonight had you pushing your limits with one gulp more, one at a time, light bouncing off pool water and the gin in your glass.

The dampness of your lips as you sloshed the drink around your mouth.

Let it collapse from your grasp, it beat a tattoo into concrete, and it felt no louder than the blood thumping in your ears.

So it goes.

You weren’t making too much sense of the music they were playing either, not that you cared too much to try. The crowds at the Beach were especially animated during the night, and after two-something in the morning they began to gradually stream back outside. Lighters clicking, laughter booming, bodies swaying luridly with the tune. You stared across the pool at a volleyball plunging into a beer puddle, two slender girls lurching backwards when it did, their voices taking to a high-pitched sound.

More laughter. Flip-flops dodging shards of misplaced glass. But you were aware that, in the end, they were all taking momento with a knot in their throats. In a reality where a week is traded for suitcases and files and unrolled sleeves, Fridays leave room for everyone to store their mistakes. Entering this one reality was freefall. As if time contracted itself to the same day, droning, trudging, like a broken disc. You closed your eyes, chose to ignore the lingering smell of citrus in your nostrils.

Someone had died today.

Because that’s simply how things worked here. Death was a persisting thought for everyone wretched enough to land in this place; even for the ones who had it between their teeth. The Beach came as a band-aid for purgatory, a cheap thrill, yet here you found yourself, flat-eyed and confused, spilling the rest of your drink on the ground and hoping whoever would take it was resting in peace. Heavy breathing, the world distancing from you in waves, your heart tamped between your lungs. Ice-cold chlorine fondling your feet, you started to sort memories from moments ago. You’d renewed your visa. Showered. The night you’d spent in the prismatic flash of the dance floor, knocking back a few shots and losing control of your body to after-hours beats. Sweaty forehead, glitter on your chest.

As chance encounters go—you spotted him when you last needed to. Elbows propped on the bar with neon running a pink cast across his hair and a woman stitched to his face, he was a homemade majesty for a world that didn’t ask for it. Hatter, with his shoplifted sunglasses and iced whiskey and dubious hospitality. He bit the girl by the bottom lip and watched you from the corner of his eye as he did, his mouth slightly coiling into obscenity. And just like any other object starring your personal history of oversights, it happened that you'd seen this smirk before. You knew it well enough to have the temperature of your blood rise to hellfire.

She was a pretty thing. A pretty thing with a pretty face, at that, shoulder bone stabbing through skin and hair lining the chin in a symmetrical cut. Her swimsuit was two-piece with a loose string that slid down her shoulder when she wrapped her arm around him. You didn’t remember ever being coupled with her for a game, and for a moment there you envied Hatter’s ability to register even the less conspicuous of names. Dark hair was brushed around his ear in a tantalising way that revealed distant parts of his jaw and neck. The fingers that rested on her chin were long and slender and glimmered when the light shot into a chichi display of rings methodically lined just under the knuckles; over his shoulders he wore the usual robe that made him look like a sunscreen commercial running on loop. Polished and overripe.

If you were brought to say out loud, there was nothing more going on between you than some chardonnay-prompted chats and an insignificant number of nights spent on the balcony of his suite. For a clinical tongue-wagger like himself he had turned out a decent listener and you were surprised at how much you were ready to reveal about yourself. You watched him lay out his cards in dim-lit solitude and explain the unequivocal importance of consolidated communities. This morning when the executives called you in to head for a game, he made sure to slide a firearm under your car seat. You returned with a splitting headache and metal on the roof of your mouth; Eight of Hearts tossed on the coffee table, red-smudged, his eyes begging for detail, you stepped out into the hallway and promised yourself not to look back.

Music spread about the crowds like oxygen, someone elbowed you in the arm, and you flinched, blinked, looked over your shoulder. In different circumstances maybe you wouldn’t have even considered it. But you were angry and drunk and all you really needed to brush your pride at this point was to have a sweet someone flutter their eyelashes at you. Flashing lights, collarbones pulsing, lips half-opened, all dulling your thoughts into decision.

Two could play at this game, after all.

So you kissed them. Deeply, slowly, as the floor felt like being dragged from your feet. It became harder for you to remember the right order of later events. You saw a hip there, a vomiting head somewhere else. Danced more, touched more, then the next thing you knew you were edged into a secluded place where you didn’t need to shout over the music anymore and whatever you did with the person you brought there would remain up to the world’s imagination. Everything was a whirling blend of faces and colours and suddenly you felt thankful for all these people making you forget about what you experienced during the daytime. You also remembered the nausea, the tiles of the bathroom floor, you floundering outside with a glass of gin and tonic you didn’t know where the fuck came from.

You needed to take some air.

A sigh left you, hot and heavy. The water hugged your calves in small folds of movement, a slight gush of sobriety climbing in your exploding temples. You turned your head towards the red and blue sitting next to you, a bittersweet smile hanging in anticipation of your voice.

“So?” you managed, your throat surprisingly soar.

A moment passed.

A small chuckle fragranced the air. He smelled like amber and citrus and those fucking cherry superslims he used to smoke. “This is when you tell me to fuck off, I take.”

“Is that what you expect of my manners?” you said. “No, stay, let’s see how long you can feel sorry for yourself.”

“You think I’m pulling an act?” Takeru rested an ankle upon his knee; the movement was soundless, deliberate, a jaded Dionysus brought to divine trial.

You avoided meeting his stare. A corner of your lips hitched an inch higher at his response, like extracting the solving of a riddle. “Are you not?”

Then the laughter came out again, hearty this time, with his head thrown back and chest moving in an offensive staccato. You watched him as he regarded you with his tell-tale amusement and remembered the foul ways this world renders a man, edging between sanity and rehearsed conduct. But you knew Takeru well enough to tell he wasn’t a product of the games.

Unlike the rest of you, he was made for this. Viper sliding out of old skin.

Swiping the tears from his eyes, he said, “In my defense, I wasn’t expecting you’d know how to use it.”

You shot him a look. “That makes you an asshole and an idiot.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “You were, I–” a tap into concrete, once, twice, rephrasing the thought. “I should’ve come with you.”

You dragged your feet out of the water. “You simply don’t get it, don’t you now?” your frown was a wretched junction of jeer and accusation.

“Not really, no,” he said. “But I’m sure hoping you'll break it to me soon.”

“Ok, sure. I’ll tell you what you shoulda done,”

Takeru crossed his hands, his eyes fixing now an imaginary spot across the pool.

Silence.

You took in a deep breath.

“Nothing,” came out slow, painful. “Absolutely fucking nothing. I shouldn’t have been here, ok? What happened today confirmed it for me if anything. My chance at living is granted by someone deciding to fool around bending the rules, I didn’t do anything to deserve it.”

“That’s simply not true.” Takeru hummed, taking yet another moment to himself, his profile shimmered graciously with a grin forming at the corners of his mouth. It made you think of satin sheets and Lotus Eaters, staining your lips with the fullness of a pomegranate. “You are more deserving than you give yourself credit for, sweetheart. It wounds me actually that you think I’d go out of my way for someone who isn’t.”

But you’d come out of your way for yourself. Something close to laughter vibrated inside your throat, your stare grew blank. “And if I tell you I find it selfish either way?”

“Selfishness carves lovers,” he said, heaving a dramatic sigh. “Besides, it saved your life, did it not?” Words took to a whisper as he let his head fall on your shoulder. His breath smelled of cherries and alcohol. “I’m glad you chose to stay with us lesser things.” Me.

Across from you kindled water painted itself in irregular strokes upon the walls of the resort. Sound of glass shattering inside, a group of three lumbered into one another on the way to the bar. With a veer of what felt like losing consciousness, you experienced life in particles and molecules, microscopic worlds overlaying each other so fast and so slowly at the same time. Big-Bang. You wrapped your arm around Takeru, thumb digging into the texture of his clothes. His mouth moved to tell you something more, selfish, and you closed your eyes, pushing a tear off your eyelashes. Apocalypse.

“You didn’t mean that,” you said, forced playfullness, rested your temple against his.

“Who knows,” a long murmur of secrecy was wrapping you both in a distant space between movement and sleep. His fingers stroked your eyes to spare you from another tear. “I’ve earned myself a couple more days with your pretty. Better start making every minute worthwhile, for once, for both.”

Behind your eyelids lingered an unspoken ache for a reality where you didn’t kill anybody, and you weren’t versed to look for sympathy in the arms of someone who had done worse, and where you wouldn't worry that this peacefulness could be taken from you in the blink of an eye. His hair was velvet against your jawline and his touch warm enough to make you stay.

“I’m still hell mad at you,” you said against him, a faint sound.

You felt a small shrug pushing into your ribcage. “Very well,” he said. “Won’t fault you for feeling that. Sort of saw it coming.”

There was nothing going on between you, you’d convince yourself every morning after. Somewhere you imagined him doing the same. Takeru liked to market himself as a creature of instinct; but there was something serpentine about him, too, still, poised, always calculated. Someone who’d store the right word for the right person and snatch their trust when less expected. Isn’t this what false prophets do after all, sweetheart? your eyelashes brushed the thought against the tip of his thumb.

It’s always the fear of rejection that would get the worst out of these ones.

“Perhaps I’m not in the right place to ask,” he said again, and even with your eyes closed, you could see the grin climbing upon his lips as he did. “But have I ever told you how hot you are when you're pissed off? You were electric in there.”

This time you let the chuckle escape you, a little unconvincing under the trails of tears that had rolled down your cheeks, a little wrecked.

"That right?"

"Mhm."

“Does your friend know that, too?" you said. "Next time tell her I make my own cocktails or something.”

“I'll make sure the message's heeded,” Takeru’s voice was sultry by your ear, he rolled his head to catch bits of your best angles. “However I’m wondering if this is the best magic you’ve got, darling.”

“It sure worked with you,” The ease it took to say this was enough to lift your spirits. Neither could you deny the thrill hitching up your throat as you found his eye, first time tonight, dark waves reflecting a flicker of intrigue that for a fleeting second you allowed yourself to indulge. “And I wasn’t even trying.”

It was a strange thing, this feeling that you had, something bitter you couldn't quite place but were clever enough not to associate with love.

Takeru's sigh came out long and dreamy in the starless night. You smirked.

No, this wasn't love, you concluded further, but rather the unexpected realisation of feeling anything at all, the weight of existence pressing down your shoulders. A drowsy appetite for life with its worths and misfortunes readying to flash at you all at once.

˖ ࣪⭑roll credits

#hatter x reader #takeru danma x reader #hatter #takeru danma #alice in borderland #今際の国のアリス #trish writing

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magic-is-something-we-create · 2 years

Text

Whispers Snippet - (7/?)

happy not-MS monday!!! this ones Special :) Word count: 760 Content warnings: Graphic violence POV: Marika In which Marika witnesses the Whispers at play on their home turf. IMPORTANT CONTEXT: she is in the shape of an Uryak right now.

[The guards] wave for us to stop when I’m still a dozen paces away. Without a word, the smaller one goes to close the distance, freeing their rifle of its holster as they approach.

“Who you working for?” they shout, the wind ruffling the fur of their coat burying half of their voice, the scarf around their face burying most of the rest.

The sound of Ivan rolling up his sleeve seems louder than it should be, louder than his own shout. “The Shadow.”

The guard scoffs, tugging down their scarf to spit at their feet. “Empty your pockets.”

Ivan sighs, but a moment later, his wallet flies through the air to land in the drift next to them.

“Of everything,” they insist, gesturing with the gun, though apparently careful to not point it at us directly.

As Ivan reluctantly nudges Dakarsa and the two start shedding the myriad bits of clutter on their persons--including a holstered revolver that comes from Ivan’s general area and what looks like a bag of ball bearings from Dakarsa’s--I let my inconspicuous eyes wander, taking in the steel towers on either side of the massive gate and picking out the subtle movements of the figures at their tops.

There’s only two on the watchtowers, and the two down here on the ground.

At least, I think there is, until I spot another figure behind the one atop the western tower. And a faint flicker against the black of the gate, too high up to be another person the rest have noticed.

Both of which I would have missed, if not for the way an Uryak’s eyes are made to seek motion over detail.

The unpacking has finished, and now the guard toes at the scattered objects in the snow, the barrel of their gun trained on my shape with the kind of lazy sway my father would have taken a switch to them for. I am the only one to notice when behind them, atop the looming ice, the speckled band of the western scout disappears with a strangled cry that barely carries on the wind, mixing just enough with the air to be lost.

The gunshot that follows doesn’t hide so easily.

Time seems to slow, as the body tumbles from the tower and their eastern counterpart jerks back, hood chased from their head by a thick spray of red, the smoking barrel of a silver revolver glinting from where the western scout once stood. In tandem, the near-invisible motion partway up the gate drops like a leopard, landing solidly on the shoulders of the taller guard before they have a chance to turn around, the snap of their bones joining the violent choir building over the glacier as a knife sinks into the back of their neck.

And as the one in front of us turns, gun at the ready, the cloaked shape atop their partner rises, flicking something from their hand that whips like an arc of lightning across the space between them.

The small one’s death is quiet, a shining bladed disc ripping through their hood and splitting their head from their body without so much as a stutter on its path through the air.

Before the echoes have had time to bounce twice, the massacre is over.

The two figures stand in silence at the gates, not a single flinch between them when the western scout finally hits the ice with a crack and the disc circles back around to be caught in the similarly-shining gauntlet of its wielder.

Ivan wastes no time dismounting, unhooking the snake-fanged wolf mask at his hip and holding it up to his face with his bared forearm, the other hand thrown up in surrender. Dakarsa follows his lead, choking back a yelp when his heels hit the ice, even though I crouch as much as I’m able before he does.

In response, the gauntleted figure on the ground steps into the light, illuminating their own mask with the face of a bat-eared doe.

“’Lo, Greyheart,” the Doe calls, the high lilt of their feminine voice carrying a wide, foreign accent clear over the wind. “You’re here early.”

Ivan curses under his breath, donning his mask in full before going to Dakarsa and throwing the boy’s arm over his shoulder. “Come on. It’s safe.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Dakarsa stammers, panic leaking into everything from his breath to his movement as Ivan marches him past the body whose head stares up at us in blank terror from several feet away. “The fucking--fucks who appeared out of nowhere with an animated rotary saw are the safe ones.”

Ivan doesn’t bother to reply.

#writeblr #writblr #writers on tumblr #original fiction #original writing #dark fantasy #writing excerpt #snip #q #whispers #millennium saga monday

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savage-kult-of-gorthaur · 1 year

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RX PRESCRIPTION BY "DR. NUT" -- TAKE 2x DAILY UNTIL ADDICTION OR DEATH.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on cropped + original artwork of "Dr. Nut," back cover sleeve art to the "Alive" album on Compact Disc, recorded live in Boston 2005 by American sludge/DOOM metal band GRIEF, and released under the Southern Lord label in 2006. Limited to 2000 numbered CD copies [my own personal copy is #1242].

Artwork from the "unquiet mind" of former GRIEF bass player, Eric C. Harrison.

"Life can be Confusing And not very Amusing A fucked Circus Full of freaks and psychotic Attractions Trying to make sense Forget it..."

-- "Life Can Be..." (1998) by GRIEF

Source: www.discogs.com/release/941544.

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achtung-attitude · 1 year

Text

Jerome steps into All-Kill's driveway and exhales heavily. He jostles his friend. “Haha, we made it! Come on Kilo, let's get in there! Get this shit done!”

As he turns his head, the load on his back falls away. Kilo slips off his shoulder and collapses in the gravel. He doesn’t move, and Jerome knows at once that this is real. He does nothing, because he can do nothing. He simply stands and stares at the remains of his departed friend.

A mechanical wiring sound turns Kilo’s head. A shiny silver disc dislodges from his skull and rolls a short distance away. Now, truly, there is nothing left of him.

Kilo Staples: Deceased.

Jerome watches the disc stop rolling and fall to its side. His legs feel like they may give way at any moment. Finally he looks away from Kilo’s body, raising his face skyward as he attempts to hold himself together.

Rustling. Something limps out of the shadows of the half-burnt greenery around the mansion. Jerome looks and is greeted by the sight of Yeon-in, bloodied and wheezing. It hobbles over to him. “What… What the…?”

The wolf pauses a couple meters from him. Right over Kilo’s Stand disc. He sniffs at the disc, then maneuvers it with his snout to pick it up in his mouth.

“Hey!! What are you doing?!!” the rapper shouts, marching at the animal without thinking. He actually reaches into his pocket, feeling the gun. Yeon-in’s head jerks up. Its remaining eye flashes crimson and Jerome halts. At the last moment, he covers his face and the sleeve of his jacket bursts into flame. “AAAAH!!” he yells, feverishly batting the fire to put it.

As he does so, Yeon-in turns to the house and limps to the front door, taking Kilo’s disc with him.

Jerome finally pulls the whole hoodie off and stamps the fire out on the ground. Once finished, he shakes in abject terror. Even he can sense it now: the foreboding aura emitted from within All-Kill’s house. Entering this place means death. “Fuck this…” he mutters… “Fuuuuuuck this!!” The rapper pulls out his phone and dials quickly. Raising it to his ear, he declares, “I need to talk to the police…”

***

All-Kill takes a step towards Shizuka. Despite losing no blood from his missing hand, he still seems to be in shock. His steps are slow and clumsy. Shizuka stares him down, stepping in front of T’onga to face him herself.

“You’ve taken everything… Everything from me…!” All-Kill declares. “Now you… You’ll know what it's like-”

The door to the living room suddenly swings inward, taking all three of them by surprise. “That… That’s impossible…” T’onga whispers as Yeon-in enters the kitchen with the Stand disc in his mouth.

All-Kill gapes, his eyes shimmering with hope. “Y-Yeon-in…” he says, his little hope dashed as the wolf hobbles towards, whining incessantly. Blood stains his gray coat. Finally reaching his master’s feet, he drops the disc to the floor and collapses.

“What…?” Shizuka gasps, “That… that disc… where did you…?”

Yeon-in has little time left. All-Kill crouches next to him, petting his head. The wolf continues whimpering, gazing at his master through one bloody eye. All-Kill’s eyes go sullen. “It’s OK… You don’t have to suffer anymore…” Yeon-in keeps his eye open as his master turns BLACK KEYS on him, entering his neck. After a second passes, it turns and Yeon-in’s whimpering ceases.

Shizuka and T’onga stare. Although their enemy is vulnerable before them, they don’t dare to approach. All-Kill pets his wolf a final time, then reaches for the Stand disc on the floor. “Shizuka Joestar…” he says, examining the disc. “Do you know what this is?”

She swallows.

“This belonged to Kilo Staples. Looks like he’s dead.”

The girl’s body goes stiff. Even the fear in her eyes freezes, the shock seizing all of her being. But she soon recovers as rage fills her. Shizuka takes a step forward, but to her, she seems to move in slow motion. T’onga reaches to pull her back.

“What even are these things? Where did Dust get his hands on them? You know… There’s still much I don’t understand about Stands… Even though I was born with mine… I wonder what would happen… If a natural Stand user like me… took one of these for himself…?”

Shizuka's mouth opens to release a roar.

“Let’s see, shall we?” Without hesitation, as All-Kill presses the Stand disc to his own forehead. It slides in at once.

A burst of air explodes from All-Kill's body. Shizuka covers her face from the incoming air burst, as T'onga grabs her, pulling her daughter close.

#jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #jojo no kimyou na bouken #achtung attitude #kilo staples #c-king #ch77

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musiconanironingboard · 1 year

Text

18 March 2023: Frank Zappa Plays the Music of Frank Zappa: A Memorial Tribute, Frank Zappa. (Barfko-Swill, 1996)

I own dozens upon dozens of Frank Zappa albums, but my interest in listening to him happens only intermittently and, generally, for short periods of time. Earlier in the winter I spent time with a couple of posthumous Zappa releases that I’d picked up two years prior. (I’m in a long stretch of time when, because I listen to most of my used acquisitions in order of purchase, I don’t hear my used-CD purchases until two years later.) Of those two 2021 purchases, I most enjoyed the 1996 audio-verite compilation The Lost Episodes, one of seemingly countless albums that Zappa produced and assembled for release before his untimely death from cancer in 1993. I liked it well enough that I got on a very short-lived Zappa kick, and kicks often result in me making additional purchases. Visiting Reckless Records on Belmont Avenue here in Chicago, I flipped through the Zappa bin and found this pristine item, originally available by mail-order only. It’s an album I never quite understood until I examined the liner notes, but more importantly it’s an album I would never have considered buying were it not immaculate, because the front cover has an actual furry moustache on it. I tend to avoid packages with fake fur or anything of the sort, and especially a 27-year-old album with fake hair on it, but this Zappa item was so immaculate that it looked like it had come straight out of shrinkwrap and put on the shelf. I will admit that I even brushed it when I got it home, and now it’s safely in a protective plastic sleeve. Reckless often puts descriptive labels on their stock, and on this one they wrote “THIS BAD BOY HAS AN OFFICIAL LAB GROWN ZAPPA STACHE ON THE FRONT.” That cracked me up.

The album evolved out of a conversation Zappa had with his son Dweezil near the end of his life, about what songs the elder Zappa considered to be his signature tunes. This album compiles them—all instrumentals—in their original album versions, and then an accompanying live version of each; there is also one track that appears only here, “Merely a Blues in A.” Zappa’s guitar instrumentals aren’t my favorite pieces in his catalog, but I knew I’d never find a nicer copy of this so I was happy to add it to my stacks.

Above we see the front and back covers. The package is a sort of faux-leather folio that is hard to photograph.

When you open the folio once, you see this; the pocket on the left contains the booklet.

Here is the front of the booklet by itself. The back is solid black and I didn’t photograph it. It’s glossy, so you see the ironing-board cover’s reflection in it.

Open the folio all the way and you see this. I photographed it at a crazy angle because if taken head-on you could barely see the print.

Last, here is a view of the disc, unavoidably reflective like all the other shots.

My used copy is missing an insert that discusses the moustache front, but here is a copy of it taken from Discogs:

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honey-climb · 1 year

Text

The Vivisection

Characters: Philip Wittebane, The Collector, Previous Grimwalker

Rating: Explicit

Graphic Depictions of Violence

Major Character Death

Tags: Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Dismemberment, Amputation, Torture, Dehumanization, Surgery, Descriptions of Guts, Explicit rating is for the gore - nothing sexual happens, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat

Word count: 8k

Description:

Philip has questions about his new Grimwalker that he intends to answer.

Viv·i·sec·tion (noun) -

The practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research.

Read on AO3!

From the loosely packed, humid earth clawed ghostly hands, one after the other. Frantically they cleared the soil, making way for the matted, blond head that followed. Deathly skinny shoulders came next, the discs and vertebrae visible through practically translucent skin.

The creature—the first Grimwalker born by Philip’s hand—was the size of a ten-year-old child. It moved without hindrance and with precise coordination as it freed itself from its grave. Aside from how skinny it was, so far it seemed to be an excellent first attempt.

Pride swelled in a dark corner of Philip’s heart, muted against all the other emotions flooding him. He had succeeded in an ugly and impossible task; he had raised life from death. There was little now that stood between him and God.

That thought made him smile slightly.

Philip then welcomed his Grimwalker to the world with the heavy swing of a shovel delivered to the back of its head.

A sickening crack rang out through the small cave-turned-workshop. Philip’s hands were slick with sweat against the handle of the shovel; when it made contact, he almost lost his grip as the force wracked through him. The Grimwalker jolted forward, then fell in a heap, face-down on the upturned dirt from which it crawled.

The Collector on the wall behind Philip shrieked with laughter. “Holy crap!” They shouted. “Didja kill it?”

Philip wet his lips to chase away his horrid smile. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. Even still, he kept the shovel raised, his shoulders tense and hunched, as he prepared a second strike if necessary.

The Collector laughed harder. The sound pierced Philip’s mind and mixed painfully with the pounding of his heart in his ears.

“I think you did! You killed it!”

That worked to rid him of his smile. A familiar feeling of dread and uneasiness welled up in Philip’s stomach. Combined with the Collector screaming, he found it almost impossible to focus then. Part of Philip wanted to retreat into his own mind and avoid the reality he had created, but still he forced his attention on the creature.

The Grimwalker showed no signs of moving; its arms lay out, partially pinned under its body from its collapse. Its shoulder-length hair was thick and, toward the base of its skull, came a slow trickle of blood. Everything about it, so far, was eerily similar to that of a human. Or a witch, Philip supposed, as he observed the tips of its pointed ears poking out shyly from its hair.

Another beat passed. Its body lay completely still, with no sign of breath.

Philip allowed himself a slow exhale; it did little to quell the adrenaline rushing through him. He lowered his shovel and stabbed the spade securely into the soil at his feet.

The Collector slid across the walls to the side adjacent to Philip. They hung overtop his cluttered work bench, their shadowy legs swinging against Philip’s collection of open books, various tools, and assorted knickknacks. The Collector gawked; their mouth turned up in absolute delight.

“Whaddya think it looks like?”

“We’re about to find out.” Philip replied. He rolled up his shirt sleeves to his elbow, uncomfortably eyeing the Grimwalker all the while.

“What if it’s all gross looking?” The Collector commented. “Or— or what if it has three eyes and two noses? And a b-iig mouth full of shark teeth? And—”

“I suspect that it will be entirely average-looking.” Philip cut in. With his sleeves secure, he reached behind his head to tighten his ponytail. “If the book of forbidden knowledge is good to its word, it should look almost identical to its… Source material. And I’m sure that I followed the recipe exactly.”

The Collector pouted. “That’s lame. Maybe you should mess up the next one, to see how freaky they can come out.”

Philip pursed his lips and shot the Collector a look. Then, after a brief pause, he eased slightly. “…Actually, that isn’t a bad idea. However misguided you may be, that is the mindset of a scholar. We ought to push boundaries and expand our knowledge through trial and error… Excellent thinking.”

The Collector smiled wider. They puffed out their chest proudly. “Heh, well, sometimes I do have pretty good ideas.”

It was a fine line that Philip treaded often, keeping the Collector sated with praise and humouring them. After all, if Philip was going to continue wringing them for knowledge, he needed every advantage he could take.

That aside, Philip gazed once more upon his fallen creature. An uncontrollable shiver shot down his spine. At a quick glance, he could have almost convinced himself that it was a younger Caleb laying there, face-down in the soil.

But it wasn’t, Philip reminded himself.

He had spent weeks mentally preparing himself for this moment, and he couldn’t get in his own way now. Though the book of forbidden knowledge that he possessed was extremely detailed on the ingredients and synthesis of a Grimwalker, it lacked further information. There was nothing written on the creature’s temperament, or its anatomy, just a brief description and the recipe.

It was because of this, and Philip’s innate thirst for knowledge, that he made an important decision upon undertaking the creation of his Grimwalker:

Regardless of how it looked, how it acted, what it said or did, Philip would treat this first Grimwalker for what it was—a cadaver. An experiment.

The Collector’s eyes bore into Philip as he crouched over the Grimwalker. He laid his hand upon the creature’s shoulder, and immediately recoiled. Its skin was hot and damp to the touch. Disgusted initially, Philip wiped his palm against the leg of his pants.

He felt then that there were a hundred sets of eyes upon him. A quick glance up confirmed that the Collector had multiplied themself across the cave walls and ceiling, every set of their eyes spectating Philip and the Grimwalker. When they noticed him look, each mouth grinned wider. Anticipating the face on the Grimwalker, just as Philip was.

Philip drew a steadying breath. Better prepared now, Philip once again took the Grimwalker’s shoulder. Its pale skin was slick with sweat, making purchase difficult as Philip rolled it over.

The reveal of its face was… Underwhelming. A sigh of relief—disappointment?—trailed past Philip’s lips.

The Collector, more vocal about their disappointment, moaned, “Aww, man. It’s not weird at all. That sucks.”

The book of forbidden knowledge spoke of how the Grimwalkers took on the face of the corpse they were built from. Philip prepared himself to be faced with an exact copy of Caleb. What he saw instead was more akin to a distant cousin, or a distorted memory.

The nose was wrong, first of all. The Grimwalker lacked Caleb’s broad, prominent nose, instead its thin bridge sloped crookedly to one side. Its eyes were too far apart, its mouth too big. A hooked finger into its cheek revealed perfectly straight rows of white teeth. Observing down further, Philip noted its jutting collarbone and thin, frail emancipated body. If the creature were sentient and not a soulless husk, Philip would consider it a male. Above that anatomy, also, was smooth skin across its stomach, with no sign of a belly button. But that made sense—after all, it hadn’t grown in a womb, thus had no umbilical cord.

Other pieces worth noting, which Philip would later record in his journal, was that the longer the Grimwalker sat out, the more it seemed to pink up. Practically before his eyes, he watched the creature’s cheeks turn round and rosy, and its fingers, toes, and joints flush.

Overall, the Grimwalker was basically a stranger. That would make the following easier.

“It’s awful skinny,” Philip commented, mostly to himself. He pressed his hand against the diaphragm of the Grimwalker and was met by surprising resistance. He expected to feel the bite of ribs, and instead felt the shift of liquid, as though he were handling a leather canteen. A shudder went through him. “Yet it feels solid. Are they always this skinny?”

“I dunno,” the Collector offered in a symphony from the walls.

Philip wanted to roll his eyes but resisted. “Was it the soil content, I wonder? You know how crops grow stronger in rich, composted soil… Are the Grimwalkers similar to plants that way?”

The Collector shrugged in a wave across their clones. They watched with interest as Philip proceeded to poke and prod at the Grimwalker.

“We’ll need to investigate further.” Philip said. As he went to draw his hand back, he felt a thump against his palm. Then another, in a slow rhythm.

Philip’s skin crawled. The Grimwalker was still alive.

But it was too late to turn back now.

Philip reminded himself that the Grimwalker was a corpse, a cadaver, less than an animal. It was nothing; he had created it, and he could destroy it however he saw fit.

The audience, which was the Collector, observed with interest as Philip gathered up the Grimwalker in his arms. They followed him across the room, to the stone table Philip had built with glyphs beforehand. At each corner were short pieces of rope tied and anchored down. The Grimwalker’s body flopped, listless, as Philip loaded it up on the table. Grey smudges of bruises were left in Philip’s wake across its skin.

The Collector shrunk themself back down to one shadow. They perched high on the wall, giving themself a bird’s eye view.

Philip tied the ropes around the Grimwalker’s ankles and wrists, securing it to the table, arms above its head and its legs spread-eagle. Its skin only became oilier the longer it was left out. Along with this, Philip became aware of another problem; the Grimwalker was much smaller than he had been anticipating. Had the creature been a full-sized man, as Philip accounted for when building his workstation, he would have had more than enough rope. However, the rope stretched tight to reach the Grimwalker’s short limbs and Philip was only able to knot it once.

A quick pull on the restraints left Philip satisfied that they would hold regardless. Plus, he felt confident that the Grimwalker wouldn’t escape—it was barely alive as is and frail enough that a sharp breeze would knock it over. Surely it would be fine.

Anxious now to begin, Philip took a step back from the table. He went instead to his desk, where his journal and necessary tools had been laid out. He took up his quill and jotted down quick, short-hand notes. He couldn’t exclude anything, or forget his train of thought; Philip would need to reference these notes when he began building the next Grimwalkers and all their variations.

Behind Philip, the Collector gasped with delight.

“Hey, it’s still alive! I saw it twitch!” The Collector called out, laughing. “That’s so cool!”

Philip tensed slightly. With his shoulders hunched over his desk, he ground his jaw shut and forced himself to continue writing. His handwriting stuttered slightly across the page. He knew that the Grimwalker was still alive, but it was easier to comprehend it in his own mind if he pretended that it wasn’t. Having the Collector there to remind him that the creature he planned to dismember was, in fact, a living thing put a slight damper on things.

Philip finished scribbling his last thought, then exchanged his quill for a tool from the table. He was quite lucky to have scavenged it washed up on the beaches—a slightly rusted handsaw. The handle sported intricately carved designs; whoever had owned it before obviously took much pride in it. Philip hoped to honour it well once more.

It was the same saw that he used to dismember his decaying brother, what felt like a millennia ago. The shovel he used to subdue the Grimwalker was also the one that dug Caleb up. Perhaps Philip ought to use the same knife to carve up the Grimwalker, just so he’d have the completed set.

Though he wanted to laugh, the thought settled sour in Philip’s stomach.

“Whaddya gonna do next?” The Collector asked. They had slithered off the wall and now wrapped themself around the handle of Philip’s shovel like a snake.

“I’ve done my external observations,” Philip explained as he approached the Grimwalker once more. “Now I will proceed with the dissection.”

“Ooh,” replied the Collector. “What’s that mean?”

“I’m going to cut into it and observe how it works internally. I’ll start by gathering a sample of its bone.”

“While it’s alive?”

Philip glanced back at the Collector with a forced, patient smile. “I’d hardly call this thing living, wouldn’t you?”

(The Collector quietly contemplated that statement as Philip turned and moved in on the Grimwalker. They had a hard time viewing anything as a living object whereas their perception of time and space was so much different than other beings. Inside, they felt like Philip was doing something despicable, but he was so casual about it. Besides, Philip wouldn’t do something bad intentionally, he wasn’t like that. Maybe he was right—the Grimwalkers couldn’t be considered alive.)

Philip stood at the Grimwalker’s side now. The saw handle fit almost perfectly in his palm.

In the face, the Grimwalker appeared as though it were peacefully asleep. Its soft expression was relaxed and its wet lips slightly parted as it breathed. At first glance, Philip could almost convince himself that this was a real child strapped to his work table, instead of a creature synthesized from a corpse.

Philip blinked that thought away, and said decisively, “Let us begin.”

The Collector, from their perch on the shovel, watched on with wide-eyed wonder.

Philip laid his right hand on the Grimwalker’s shoulder to steady it. The Grimwalker stirred slightly, though it didn’t open its eyes or wake. Then Philip placed the jagged teeth of the saw against the creature’s skinny bicep. He drew in another deep breath, bore down, and forced the saw against the Grimwalker’s arm.

The young, pale flesh offered no resistance. With little effort on Philip’s part, the saw chewed through skin and muscle with a grisly tearing sound. Blood sprayed hard and fast from the wound, as though a pipe had been burst, staining the table and Philip’s hands red.

Before he could complete the first cut, the Grimwalker’s eyes shot open. Its chest leapt with a ragged gasp, which then fuelled the ear-piercing scream that left its mouth.

The Grimwalker twisted and writhed against the restraints as it screamed. Desperately it tried to escape from Philip’s saw, though Philip merely doubled down. He leaned his weight fully against the Grimwalker and drew the saw back, chewing away at the tender flesh. Skin and muscle flayed away from each other, appearing then that an animal had taken a bite of it, rather than a saw. The sight almost turned Philip’s stomach, as hot blood poured over his hands and strings of snapped muscles convulsed before him.

After two tearing strokes, the teeth of the saw sunk into bone, impeding his progress. The Grimwalker’s screams turned into sobs. Fat tears mixed with blood and snot rolled down its cheeks. It gasped breathlessly, a high-pitched whining emitting in-between, as its body twitched and tugged uselessly against the restraints.

“Strange that it isn’t begging for mercy,” Philip mused aloud, a little breathless himself. It was harder work than he imagined chewing through living bone and marrow; when he dismembered Caleb (then dead for the better half of six months), the rotten flesh offered nowhere near as much resistance.

“Maybe it can’t talk,” the Collector offered. They stuck their tongue out as the Grimwalker wretched and bled all over the place. They had never seen such a show before; though they were disgusted, they couldn’t look away.

Philip paused. He hummed. “I hadn’t considered that. Do you imagine it’s mute, or does it need to be taught language?”

The Collector shrugged. They slithered down the shovel handle to the sticky, bloody floor. “It sure is makin’ a lot of noise, though. Maybe it doesn’t know it can talk.”

“Interesting.”

This aside helped refocus Philip’s mind. As he wondered on the specifics of Grimwalker speech and learning, his mind blocked out the sobbing screams of the creature under his palm. Philip once more put his weight behind the saw; he grunted with effort as the Grimwalker’s panicked and pained screams rose to the ceiling.

Sweat beaded across Philip’s forehead from the effort it took to gnaw through the surprisingly sturdy bone.

“Bugger,” Philip mumbled. His hands, slick with blood, struggled to find purchase against the squirming Grimwalker and the slimy saw handle. “I should’ve gone through the elbow. I imagine it would’ve been a great deal easier.”

The Collector snorted a chuckle. At Philip’s feet, they changed their shadowy body into an interpretation of the suffering Grimwalker, missing the arm that Philip currently sawed away at, complete with a cartoonish bone stuck out at the nub. “Ohh, oww!” They wailed in a mocking tone. “Boo-hoo!”

Finally, with a last few powerful thrusts through the spongy marrow, the blade completed its journey. As Philip shoved his weight behind the saw, he almost toppled forward; he cleared the bone and severed the flimsy skin holding it together underneath. The Grimwalker shrieked louder as it stopped feeling the blinding pain from both ends of its arm.

Philip heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of a job well done. He tossed the saw aside. Blood, sharp bits of bone, and spongy dripping marrow splattered on the floor as the tool bounced away. He plucked at the rope loosely holding the limp arm and picked it up. Philip examined the appendage, briefly disgusted that it was still warm and now especially wet—both from the hot blood pouring out of the grisly wound and from sweat.

A childhood of torturing small animals along with a brief apprenticeship with Caleb at the local butcher meant that Philip was no stranger to blood and bone. Though his knowledge of internal human (no, witch; there was nothing human about the creature at his table) anatomy was limited, Philip was impressed. What little he did know based on an examination of his rotting brother and a few sparse anatomy books seemed accurate to what he observed in the Grimwalker.

Philip brought the arm closer for studying. The entire appendage was drenched with blood; he estimated that it weighed only a few pounds. As he waved it about, held by the elbow, rigor mortis had yet to set in. The pale wrist and fingers dangled and flopped with every movement. Philip noted previously that the Grimwalker was fully articulated as it escaped its grave; seeing its joints work in-real time up close was nothing short of astonishing. Philip bent the elbow twice, testing how smoothly he worked the joint, then moved to the amputated end.

The saw did a nasty job of the bone. Philip never bothered to sharpen it, and it showed. The entire nub was gored, the bone splintered and jagged. Dark pink marrow and fat black blood clots seeped out. Blood dripped from the frayed, torn shreds of skin and the stringy muscle.

Curious, Philip swiped his finger across the amputated wound, collecting a small sample of blood. He sniffed it, then decisively tasted it. Sure enough, the familiar warm coppery taste rested on his tongue.

“Eww!” The Collector shrieked.

Philip glanced down. The Collector laid between his feet, gazing upwards. Their expression twisted, quite literally, with disgust.

“Are you gonna eat it? Is that what humans do?”

“No!” Philip snapped, his cheeks flushing red. “I will not be eating it. For all the things I am willing to do in the name of science, that certainly is not one of them. Plus, that’s a disgusting notion.”

“I’ll say!”

Philip stepped around the Collector, huffing. He carried the severed arm over to his workbench on the other side of the room. He abandoned the arm there, on a spot he had specifically cleared for it, then returned to his Grimwalker. The screaming had stopped some time ago, Philip realized.

The Grimwalker now lay listless, its wine-red eyes almost glazed over as it stared up at the ceiling. Any colour that previously tinted its face vanished; somehow, it appeared even more ghostly than before.

Blood pooled on the table and cascaded to the floor in a slow, steady drip. Yet, despite the endless amount of blood that the Grimwalker lost, Philip still caught its chest rattling. From its wet, quivering lips and chin came quick, stuttering breaths.

“Resilient thing,” Philip mused aloud.

Though he held little respect for the Grimwalker’s life, Philip still produced a bandage that he’d set aside earlier, makeshift from an old, torn shirt. He pressed it tightly to the sawed-off wound. Hot blood soaked through it quickly, dampening the cloth and Philip’s hands once more.

The Grimwalker weakly turned its head. Its eyes seemed unfocused, but still Philip felt it observing him. There was no resistance or fight left in the creature.

“This is a weird game,” the Collector offered from across the room. They hung on the wall behind Philip’s work desk, taking their turn then to also examine the severed arm. They feigned poking at it with their shadowy finger. “Won’t it need this?”

Philip shook his head. He finished tying the bandage with a hard knot, then he patted the Grimwalker’s shivering shoulder.

“I don’t imagine it will, but beside that point. This isn’t a game—it’s science. It’s experimentation and research.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

“To each their own, my dear Collector.”

The Collector huffed and made a show of how bored they were getting with the whole ordeal. Philip put them out of his mind as he went to rinse the blood from his hands in a small water basin.

While Philip’s mind wandered to his questions and hypotheses about the Grimwalker, the Collector’s eyes roamed over to the creature itself. The Grimwalker’s creepy red eyes gazed back.

(A strange feeling crept up inside the Collector again, although they didn’t have the words to describe it. They felt like the Grimwalker was trying to plead with them, attempting in futile to reach inside and touch them. But it shouldn’t be able to; like Philip said, it wasn’t alive. But it moved and looked at the Collector and screamed bloody murder like it was alive…)

Either way, the Grimwalker obviously had no idea that in this limited form, the Collector was practically as useless as it was. Just until Philip released them, anyway.

In response to its desperate pleading gaze, the Collector smiled, made a funny face, and waved.

Philip returned, wiping his hands on the front of his pants. Once dry, he stepped to his desk and took up his quill.

“I have to ask that you refrain from tormenting it,” he chided.

“I’m not!” The Collector argued, pointing at the Grimwalker. “It was lookin’ at me funny.”

“Somehow I doubt that. That thing certainly lacks any higher thinking power, especially now.”

The Collector frowned. Philip intentionally avoided looking at them as he scribbled in his journal. He caught a glimpse of their shadowy body cascading over the wall and out of his direct line of sight. More focused now, Philip finished his thought and began a quick sketch of the severed arm beside him. Blood pooled underneath it, though the outward bleeding from the wound had stopped. Philip made special note in his journal that the underside of the arm, where it rested on the table, had gone dark and bruised looking—where the blood inside now pooled, presumably.

The sketch when it was done wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be; Philip would do a more detailed diagram of the bone and the marrow once he was finished completely disassembling the Grimwalker. He would have to shave the skin and the meat from the bone as well, to get an accurate look at how it all came together.

Satisfied for now, Philip pushed his journal aside, away from the severed arm, and exchanged his quill once more for another tool; this time, a meticulously sharpened, several inch-long blade. The weight of it was similar to the one that had started the entire process, and it filled Philip with a disgusting sense of nostalgia.

When he turned back to the stone table, his expression fell. Philip pursed his lips.

The Collector grinned up at him. They draped their shadowy body over that of the shaking Grimwalker, and twisted about, making a show of it all.

“No-o-o-o, don’t cut me up!” The Collector wailed dramatically. “Ahh, I’m so scared right now!”

“Collector.” Philip said sternly. He waved his hand over the Grimwalker’s stomach to shoo the Collector away. “I told you that this isn’t the time for games. Move, please.”

The Collector frowned deeply. They pouted and crossed their arms over their chest.

“It’s never time for games anymore! All you care about is this stupid Grimwalker!”

“Collector—”

“You spent all this time makin’ it and now you’re just takin’ it apart! Where’s the fun in that? You aren’t even gonna play with it first!”

Philip opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Getting worked up and talking out of turns to the Collector would prove to be unhelpful, so he chewed over his words and cycled through what he needed to say. It was difficult to remember sometimes that the Collector was but a child, and needed to be treated as such. They needed gentle words to calm their fits, although Philip had been raised under the motto that if you spare the switch, you spoil the child. He supposed, however, you couldn’t switch a shadow nor a child-like God of all knowing knowledge.

Finally, Philip eased his expression. He allowed himself a small sigh, as he switched the knife from his left to his right. He stepped in closer, then placed his hand over the Collector’s—and by extension, the Grimwalker’s—shoulder. Under his palm, the Grimwalker shook.

The Collector’s expression twitched. They tried to stay pouting, though it became difficult then.

“Come now,” Philip urged gently. “Once I’ve finished with this Grimwalker, I must assemble the next one. What if we made a game of it?”

The Collector turned their head into a flat profile, glancing away from Philip. Underneath, they exposed the terrified, hazy left eye of the Grimwalker, otherwise forgotten.

“…How would that be a game?” The Collector asked. They failed at keeping the intrigue out of their voice; Philip knew by the note in their tone that he had won them over once again.

“How about you think on it. You’re an intelligent young man, or… Whatever you are. I’m sure you could come up with a way to make it all more fun, hm?”

Philip gave them a warm, doting smile. Almost immediately the tension and troublesome-ness fled the Collector. Moments later, a wide smile broke across their masked face.

“Yeah! Okay!” They grinned, their eyes turning up into elated crescent moons. They snorted and giggled. “I’ve got some great ideas already!”

“Excellent. I won’t be much longer. Run along and keep thinking.”

“Aye-aye!”

The Collector slid off the table, exposing the ruddy, jaunt cheeks and the hazy, distant eyes of the Grimwalker below. As the Collector relegated themself to the far upper corner of the cavern to scheme, Philip dropped his smile. He stared down impatiently at the Grimwalker.

Its hollow chest still moved with breath, miraculously, although at this point that notion had lost its intrigue. Philip no longer cared that it still breathed soft, whistling breaths from between drooling lips. The fact that it was still alive now was proving to be a nuisance more than anything. He hoped that this was a fluke, and that the other Grimwalkers weren’t going to be so hard to kill.

Philip wiped the Grimwalker’s sweat off his left hand on his pant leg, then switched the knife back.

“Alright,” he said, mostly to himself, though the Grimwalker’s eyes moved pathetically to him. “Let us continue.”

Philip pressed the tip of the blade to the skin just below the Grimwalker’s breast bone. With little effort, the blade pierced the skin and sunk inside; using great restraint, Philip dug the knife in less than half an inch. Blood swelled and spouted from the incision, and cut small streams of red down the Grimwalker’s ribs.

The Grimwalker jolted, a startled, “ghhk,” sound escaping it. A wave of fresh tears flowed from its puffy, crusted eyes, though it made no further sounds.

Philip proceeded with the first cut.

Once upon a time, very briefly, Caleb had worked an apprenticeship with the local butcher. Too young to work or be left alone, Philip had accompanied him most days. He learned second-hand how to cut and clean almost any animal—though Philip never had any interest in such a hands-on job. Neither did Caleb, who was incredibly squeamish and didn’t last long at the apprenticeship. However, they were there just long enough for Philip to absorb all the information he could, which he would later finesse on squirrels and mice and cats that he would capture, and now on his magnum opus.

Philip smiled at the memories, as the Grimwalker once again pitched into a sharp, short scream. The long cut, which Philip was careful to keep consistently deep, went straight down from the bottom of the ribs, across the Grimwalker’s belly, and ended just below where it ought to have a belly-button.

Blood flooded freely as Philip drew back his knife. The screaming Grimwalker’s quaking abdomen was painted entirely red, as the pulsating wound flushed out a comical amount of blood. There was no inch of the table left dry now, and a considerable puddle formed on the floor. Philip walked carefully through the tacky liquid, as to not slip, as he moved back up to the upper half of the Grimwalker.

In addition to the long vertical cut across its body, Philip traced two diagonal cuts from the top of the first. Each of the new incisions trailed over the Grimwalker’s shrieking, bumpy ridges of its ribs, and stopped below either nipple.

The incisions weren’t perfect due to the Grimwalker using the last of its fading willpower to struggle and flop like a dying fish, but none the less, Philip was impressed with himself. He set the knife down on the slippery table under the Grimwalker’s amputated armpit, then slid his fingers under the vertical incision. Gently, ever so gently, he peeled back the Grimwalker’s skin.

As the tender flesh separated from muscle and bone structure, the Grimwalker cried and screamed to the heavens. If Philip had thought he needed it, he would have gagged the Grimwalker. However, as he unveiled the beautiful, disgusting mess of the Grimwalker’s innards, everything else became ambient background noise.

Philip found his breath taken away as he gazed down at the Grimwalker’s dissected abdomen. He watched the Grimwalker’s diaphragm quiver and snap behind its ribs, shielded only by a thin layer of muscle and mucus that hadn’t been cut on the first incision. Its bulging digestive track stared back at Philip just below, shining in horrid hues of red, pink, purple, and grey. Exorbitant amounts of blood pooling from the skin and between the organs made it hard to discern at first glance what exactly was what, but it was wonderful. It was so wonderful. To see this all before his very eyes, the inner workings of a creature he had created with his own hand—the only way to describe it was overwhelming.

Philip was overwhelmed to the point of almost crying himself. Out of pride, or disgust, or anguish, or euphoria.

To cry because he had dismembered his beloved brother once again.

To cry because this pitiful creature wasn’t Caleb, and he hadn’t gotten to kill Caleb again.

For a moment, the feelings overtook him. In the back of his mind, Philip thought, damn science, damn the sake of learning. Acting purely on want alone, Philip shoved his left hand deep into the Grimwalker’s abdominal cavity.

Wet, hot heat enveloped him, slick and strange and unlike anything he had ever felt before. Philip didn’t need to know what the internal organs of his Grimwalker felt like, but he wanted to. And to have the Grimwalker’s guts and offal squirming about his hand, knowing that it belonged to creature that was both alive and dead at the same time… It scratched an itch inside Philip’s brain he never realized was there. It made him smile as much as it all disgusted him.

Philip pushed his arm in farther, the gore sliding up his forearm. The Grimwalker finally lost its ability to scream at full volume, its voice gone hoarse or perhaps even dead altogether. The low, whining noise that escaped it now may have well been a death rattle. Philip didn’t care.

All he wanted was to rip through the pericardium, so carefully cradling the Grimwalker’s stone sleeper heart, and feel it beat in his palm. He wanted to squeeze it until the organ exploded and then tear out the remains.

This urge, however, Philip resisted. All movement around him seemed to stop then. Finally, the creature must have died. Surely.

Mentally, Philip reigned himself back in. Indulging in these impulsive thoughts was good for the soul, but he needed to be more controlled than that for the future. If Philip were to complete his end goal successfully—and he would—he needed self restraint. He needed to be calm and collected.

He shoved down all the thoughts of Caleb and the hurt and the evil things he wished he could do to make something hurt as much as he did. He drew his hand back from the Grimwalker’s body slowly. Its organs made a sucking sound as he withdrew. His arm was coated in blood and mucus, to his sleeve rolled at the elbow. Briefly, Philip admired the sight of it, then he turned his attention back down to the Grimwalker’s gaping cavity.

In his mind, Philip compartmentalized everything; he secured his feelings away, and mentally brought his mission back to the forefront. Then he turned away from the Grimwalker, and went back to his desk.

There was a slight shake in his hand as Philip took up his quill once more. He wrote quickly to distract his mind, hoping to become fully absorbed in his work once more. He noted everything he could about the internal structures of the Grimwalker from a first glance.

The Collector made themself known again. They hung low on the wall by the desk, peering over Philip’s shoulder to the dead Grimwalker.

“The next step will be to disassemble it completely,” Philip said aloud, partially to the Collector but mostly himself. “I’ll remove the organs to examine them, and then compare them with the witch’s book of anatomy.”

“Umm, Philip?”

“I’d like to know in particular if the thing has a bile-sack. Given its nature, could it perform magic?”

“I think you’ll wanna see this.”

Philip didn’t intentionally tune out the Collector, however he also didn’t register them speaking until they waved their shadowy hand across his journal. As Philip blinked, he also noted that he had smeared the page with the Grimwalker’s blood. He hoped that his notes weren’t too obscured to read later.

Philip pursed his lips and looked up at the Collector. They smiled back.

“What is it?” Philip asked.

The Collector clasped a hand over their grinning mouth, the corners poking out over the edge of their palm. They slid back up the wall more, giggling, and pointed over Philip’s shoulder.

“Look behind you!”

Exasperated, Philip straightened his back. He turned to the table with the dead Grimwalker.

Except the Grimwalker wasn’t dead.

Philip jolted with a gasp. He grabbed the edge of the desk as he almost lost his footing.

Somehow, somehow the Grimwalker had freed its hand, and then it had untied its ankles, too. Now it sat upright, wielding Philip’s bloody knife left discarded on the table. It stared at Philip, its eyes hazy and blurry. It swayed as it weakly kicked the restraints from its ankles.

The rope! The damn rope wasn’t secure!

Philip’s heart lodged hard in his throat. “What the hell?” He managed to whisper.

“What’s ‘hell’?” The Collector asked, ever helpful.

Philip ignored them. He kept his focus on the shivering Grimwalker. Likewise, the creature kept its drooping eyes steady on Philip in a tense stand-off. Philip was positive that he could easily overpower the Grimwalker, especially considering its condition, but if the damn thing had lived this long, who was to say it could be killed at all? Knowing Philip’s luck today, the creature would probably outlive him at this rate.

Philip gathered his courage—how stupid he felt then, being secretly afraid of a dismembered child—and shifted forward. He held his hands out, ready to either attack or defend himself.

The Grimwalker steadied itself likewise, its body quaking. Blood poured from its gaping cavity wound as it pulled itself fully upright and scooted towards the edge of the table.

The wet squelching sound that followed would live forever in Philip’s mind. Every one of the Grimwalker’s organs crushed together, all loosely packed in the abdomen. The sound echoed across the cavern, making Philip almost wretch. The Collector, meanwhile, laughed like it was the funniest thing they had ever heard.

“Why aren’t you dead?” Philip mused aloud again.

The Grimwalker failed to respond. It pointed the knife as steady as it could at Philip. Carefully, one at a time, it swung its legs to the floor.

Philip watched on in awe. Despite everything, and the yawning, grisly wound dominating its body, the Grimwalker lived. It still breathed. It still moved. And more than that, it was learning. It evidently had learned from Philip that the knife could be a weapon and how to wield it—or was this knowledge inherent to it? Horror suddenly washed over Philip like a wave of icy water; had the Grimwalker retained Caleb’s memories?

Philip locked eyes uncomfortably with the creature as it slid off the table. Holding this terrible thought in his mind, Philip was able to see more of Caleb then, reflected in those distant, hateful red eyes.

The Grimwalker drooled over its slack jaw. Keeping its body stiff and steady, perhaps keenly aware that the only thing holding it together then was its willpower alone, the Grimwalker took a shaking step forward.

Foolishly, Philip prepared himself; as if he expected it to lunge at him, knife and teeth gnashing.

Instead, a tearing sound occurred, like ripping wet cloth. The Grimwalker’s eyes shot open. Its breath came in a sharp gasp from its throat, as though someone had punched it.

The incision of its abdomen split open completely. The tear continued from where Philip had stopped cutting, around where the Grimwalker’s belly button should have been. That small strip of untouched flesh until now had held a majority of the Grimwalker’s organs together. Now, it tore open, succumbing to the weight and the pressure of being upright. The skin ripped, tearing hard and fast down its pubic bone, and cleaving through its penis and testes. In the same instant, its entrails were expelled outwards; fat ropes of intestines and a surge of bile and blood rolled out from the cavity and splattered on the floor in a heap.

Philip winced and stared. Disgust boiled inside his own cold stomach as the sight and smell both hit him at once. The Collector shrieked with laughter behind him.

The Grimwalker staggered at the force of its insides sliding out. It looked down upon its mound of innards strewn from its body. Some ropes of its guts hung against its legs, dripping wet and bulging. Finally, the last of the colour vacated from its face. The Grimwalker dropped the knife with stiff fingers, allowing the weapon to bound away. Instead, it reached down, eyes wide and pale expression unmoving, as it grabbed a handful of its own guts. It attempted, unsuccessfully, to shove the mess back into its cavity; each time it tried, its intestines quickly slithered back out, squishing and squelching against one another. Having only one hand now certainly made the task all that much harder.

Philip wondered briefly if the thing even felt pain anymore, though based on the dumb, shocked look on the Grimwalker’s face, he doubted it. Finally, its physical state must have caught up with it—the Grimwalker’s shaking became more violent as its actions got slower and slower.

Finally, perhaps in an act of mercy, on the third attempt at putting itself back together, the Grimwalker’s shaking turned into full convulsions. Its heel skidded on the sticky blood pooled at its feet, and it pitched over backwards. The Grimwalker’s feet shot out from under it, and its insides were briefly tossed into the air like party streamers as it went airborne. The Grimwalker made no sound as it crashed down, landing on its neck; only a sharp snap rang out.

Philip reeled back and winced. The Grimwalker’s head bounced on the hard ground and came to rest at an unnatural ninety-degree angle. After a second, the twitching ended. The Grimwalker now lay listless on the floor, covered by its own gore and tangled by its entrails.

Philip exhaled in a deep rush. When he breathed back in, he did so through his mouth, to both calm himself and to avoid the smell. He found that the sour taste of raw guts and offal lingered in the back of his mouth instead.

“Ho-ly crap,” the Collector said beside Philip.

A glance to the side showed that they were a flat profile on the wall, gazing out also at the Grimwalker.

“That was… SO NASTY!” They squealed with chortling laughter, falling over backwards with their arms clutched to their stomach. “It was so wet inside! And then— and then everything fell out and it was like—” The Collector turned their eyes into big dinner plates, their mouth open with faux horror. “A wuh-huh-huh—”

“Collector,” Philip said. Though visibly shaken by the entire ordeal, he tried to remain calm and stoic when speaking. “Your inside voice, please. I need to think for a moment.”

The Collector turned themself over in a somersault and clasped their hands over their mouth. They grinned and snorted. “Sorry. It was just so funny!”

Part of Philip admired the Collector then; so ignorant and innocent that they couldn’t see the horror in front of their face. He would do well to mimic them that way.

Philip approached the Grimwalker to crouched beside it. He knew better than to presume it dead by this point, though he didn’t think to arm himself with the shovel or another weapon. For good measure, he ought to put a stake through its heart or cut off its head.

Again, Philip would have laughed if the dread inside him didn’t weigh him down completely.

This time, Philip pressed two fingers against the broken neck of the Grimwalker. His fingers basically sunk into the pale skin, as the artery underneath seemed to flatten. No pulse. Finally.

Philip wanted to be relieved, but relieved about what? The fact that the Grimwalker no longer suffered? That he wouldn’t need to watch it struggle to live after he dismembered it?

(That he wouldn’t need to see Caleb’s look of betrayal in its eyes?)

He told himself that the creature was never alive to begin with. It was a cadaver. An experiment. Philip needed to believe that now more than ever.

“Perhaps these creatures are more akin to plants than I expected.” Philip said. He brushed the Grimwalker’s bangs away from its forehead and found them to be soaked through with sweat. Likewise, every part of its body, even the ones untouched by blood, seemed to glisten.

“Whaddya mean?” The Collector inquired. They were on the far wall and craning their neck for a better view.

“It seems that underfeeding and overwatering undoubtedly influences their growth. Take this one, for example. It’s far too skinny and... Wet.”

Philip drew back and wiped his hand on his pants. He scowled with disgust.

“The humours are all out of balance, no doubt. I’ll change the watering regime for the next Grimwalker, and if it comes out similar to this one, in that it’s too hot and wet, I may have to prescribe bloodletting…”

He couldn’t risk having another Grimwalker with too much blood and too much will to live. Not to mention how quickly it turned to self preservation. Was there something Philip could do to prevent that from happening? If the Grimwalkers could learn… Could he gain their trust?

With the gears turning in Philip’s head, he found he was able to bypass his previous thoughts and feelings on the dead creature laying at his feet. Much like before, he compartmentalized everything—he needed to focus now on his research and write down his findings for further experimentation.

Philip rose to his feet, turning his back on the corpse. He grabbed the desk chair he had pushed aside earlier and drew it in. There he hunkered down and began furiously writing in the blood-soaked pages of his journal.

The Collector crawled up Philip’s desk and shrunk themself down so that they were the same size as Philip’s journal. They pointed over at the Grimwalker with a tiny hand.

“Are you just gonna leave it there?”

“For now.” Philip replied. Then he huffed over the scratching of his quill, “Hopefully it won’t go anywhere this time.”

The Collector took that in with a nod. Then they grinned.

They cascaded off Philip’s desk, then between Philip’s and the chair’s legs. They skated over the pools of blood covering the floor, until they were at the Grimwalker’s side. Seeing it up close now with all its guts and organs hanging out was disgustingly interesting. The Collector circled it twice just to get the full image.

When they stopped again at its side, they grinned wider. They waved their shadowy hand over the ropes of intestines wrapped around the Grimwalker’s leg, pretending to grab at it. With their mouth, they quietly mimicked the squelching sound it made earlier. They wondered what the intestines felt like; they bet it felt gross and slimy like big fat slugs. They imagined that the organs would squish and squeak in their palm.

Maybe when Philip finally released them and allowed them to use their physical form, they could find out for themself? The Collector’s imagination soared at the possibility.

While Philip wrote and the Collector played, the Grimwalker stared up at the ceiling with residual tears leaking from its eyes.

It did not cry, for it was already dead, but as the internal pressure of its body gave out and relaxed, a small streak of tears escaped its eye and collected on the floor.

#the owl house #toh fic #toh #philip wittebane #tw: gore #tw: violence #dead dove do not eat #emperor belos

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