#i feel like ink would suit him better like in the study sketch with dark tones...

[sanzosin]

Long legs, boi has such long legs..he tol boi!

sketch commission for @theevilscribbler

A softer moment...

gift Bonus:

sometimes i get carried away or need to reset my mind or just do character study, dis boi is fun to draw!

[chapitre7]

Waltz for the Moon

The Untamed [陈情令] | Mo Dao Zu Shi [魔道祖师] fanfiction

Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji/Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian (Wangxian)

Science-fiction/Merpeople AU

CW: Suicidal references

Read on AO3

And it's breaking over me A thousand miles down to the sea bed Found the place to rest my head (Never let me go)

– Florence and the Machine, Never Let Me Go (Ceremonials, 2011)

  Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love. It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.

– The Shape of Water, screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor (2017)

   He thinks nothing much of his routine, as he does it one last time. Listening to the records, writing his reports. He does everything with the same diligence he’s employed in the past five months, and tomorrow, nothing will be needed anymore. There will be no scheduled time for work out, no eating from his provisions made to last one more month. There will be no more necessary or light reading, and no more songs to play as he lets his body unravel, unfold from itself, an evening stretching out in the dark of the deep blue sea.  Only in this small station, with its dim lights and solitary hours, did he allow himself to simply be. Until he fell asleep, and began the day anew, in the same lights, the same routine. Time was meaningless, nothing at all. There was only a series of repetition, and the sounds of the ocean.

 Lan Wangji finishes typing his last report and leans away from the keyboard. Then he picks up his notebook, filled with so many of his scattered thoughts, his handwriting as neat as it had always been. Uncle had liked it that way, and so he had liked it, too. He wonders if he does like it, neatness, or if it’s just the only thing he’s ever learned to be. He shakes his head, takes his pen, and leans its fine tip against the paper. A second of hesitation later, he pulls it back, and stares at the blue dot on the paper, where the ink just started to tell his story.

 Where to begin? What to say? To summarize the beginning and the end, and how it could not lead anywhere but here?

 Dear brother, he begins. Do you remember that day on the beach?

 It’s not what he wants to say. It’s so far. The memory is only flashes, the feeling of sand against his palm, feeling sick with the salt in the air, a fluttering white dress in the long distance—

 Dear brother, he tries again, pausing to listen to all the background noise that he’s made his home in his expedition. The inevitable low humming of the computers; the low ping of the sonar screen; and when he closes his eyes, he can hear the singing, even without the headphones. Calling him, beckoning him, enveloping in a warmth that was simply neverwhere. Even if the station was perfectly acclimatized for him, specifically for him, it was always cold with indifference. Or did he only begin to think so after that one venture outside?

 Brother, he writes. I was sent here to find life. I didn’t think I’d find my own, or even that I was looking for it.

 But he had been, hadn’t he? When he set out to study the ocean, when he went deep into every lecture, raising his hand, asking his questions, all under the hard glare of their uncle. All this time he had been trying to see and understand, to find a place that made sense for him. To find a spark of genuine joy in the wonder of the unknown, in the sea that had always been close to him. That had been close to him, since that day.

 (The sun grew cold on his back. Mother had been gone for so long.)

 Brother, he whispers, at the top of a new page. When you see him, you’ll understand.

 He halts, the ink staining the page again. He puts the notebook away and pushes his chair back, standing and walking to one of the station windows. His fingers touch the tempered glass, just like he does when the other is outside. He’s not there now, but Wangji sees him everywhere, sees him with his eyes closed, sees him in his dreams. He never used to dream, too knocked out by pills prescribed just right to last all eight hours of the night. He had been afraid to dream, afraid of what he’d find there, inside himself. Now there are red eyes in a vastness of a black blue, and arms that encircle all of him.

 Lan Wangji had gone there for him. Well, he was sent there to try and relocate the sonars to catch sign of him again, as the last reports had been inconclusive. Brother had shown concern, had begged him to take someone else, but they both knew he worked better with no chatter, no lingering presence of anybody else, even though he had seen the light in certain eyes the moment he had volunteered for the expedition. Some thought he wanted all the glory of catching new footage of deepwater life. Others strongly believed he thought himself superior and constantly belittled their efforts.

 He needed the quiet of these expeditions, and the distance from everything that was... Everything that was.

 “If anything happens, anything at all, Wangji, even if it’s just your gut instinct, you call the base immediately.”

 He had promised his brother. He had promised his brother so many things. Had promised to make friends, to eat well, to sleep well, to live well. He did his absolute best at every single thing, if not for himself, then for his brother. To keep brother’s smile on his face, to keep him from worrying, when he had worried enough. Wangji had hugged his brother back then, long, taking in the scent of him, the minimal difference in their heights, the way he cradled the back of his head like he was still a little boy. They both knew he felt alive in the sea, in his research, interpreting data. They both believed he could do it, trusted he could do it.

 Lan Wangji wasn’t ready for it.

 He thought he saw glimpses, during the first month. As if whatever being that he was searching for was hiding, knowing exactly where the sonars could find it, and running away just in time. A shadow. Putting on his suit, armed with new equipment, he tried to go as far as safely possible to extend the reach of the sonar. Back at the station, he alternated between focusing on his monitors for any glimpse of life and closing his eyes to listen in to the headphones full of ocean sounds. All of the data would be sent back when his expedition was done, to be analyzed and interpret by a whole team, but he would do whatever he could. Liked to, in these dangerous waters.

 That night, he could pick nothing but the calming nothing, buzzing inside his ears. Before he went to bed, he let the music of his uncle’s favorite orchestra play from the station’s speakers, like a palate cleanser, just enough to ease his body until a proper rest, so he could begin the next day with fresh determination. And the following day; and the one after that.

 It took him days to hear the shy response. With a throbbing head and back, slouched over his workstation, Lan Wangji dimmed the lights to the semi-darkness in which he slept, but he didn’t get up, he didn’t remove the headphones. He sat there, eyes closed, breathing, thinking himself breathing underwater, living away from any concern or expectation. Free to wash upon a golden shore, to warm up against the blessed sunrise, and then go back home. To live without his mother’s choices or his father’s failures on his shoulders.

 He heard it then. Low at first, distant, then louder. Nothing like a whale, more like... Humming. Nonsensically, everything like singing.

 His eyes snapped to the monitors, and he saw the trail of it, of its limbs. It approached so quickly, Wangji watched as its arms wove around the station, as though it wanted to embrace it. From where it stood, Wangji could see it from the station windows, so he looked, his breath stuttering painfully in his chest.

 It looked like a man. Had the torso, head, arms of a man. But Wangji had seen from the monitors, and could see from the windows as well, that it had the limbs of a cephalopod, all deep red and sprawling around him, around Lan Wangji. From a distance, its eyes seemed black just like its long, human-like hair, but as he approached — moving more by instinct than conscious mind —, he saw the station lights reflect on its irises and they had a red glow to them. Its lips parted and its hands, impossibly human, touched the glass from the outside. Wangji, more human than researcher, reached up to touch his own from his side. The lifeform seemed to startle, just a bit, and pushed its hand back when Lan Wangji pressed his against the glass, before curiously touching back. In a detached kind of way, Lan Wangji noticed his own hands were bigger. The creature shook it place, its lips, slightly darker than the rest of its skin, forming a smile. Did it... laugh? Lan Wangji couldn’t wrap his head around any of this knowledge, but it had sung. Seemed to have, his equipment had caught it. Was he dreaming? Was he dead?

 He couldn’t breathe. He let himself fall against a seat by the window, hit head hitting the glass, just beside his hand, and he breathed in, out, his breath catching on the cold surface and fogging it up. He took his time, listening to his brother’s voice in his head all along. He inhaled and exhaled, until the glass grew warm, until he felt good enough to open his eyes again. The red pair on the outside stared back at him, unblinking and wide. Leaning his forehead gently against the glass, he focused and unfocused his eyes, taking in every detail he could see, until he could draw it all from memory, if he wanted. His sketches were nothing special, and nothing he could produce could ever compare to the real thing, but he could try, if he wanted. At that moment, all he could do was watch it, see how it responded to him, following his hand with its gaze, and swimming from one window to the next, when he moved.

 “I have to sleep,” he told it, almost regretfully. He felt both too wired and exhausted, hopeful and fearful, that if he closed his eyes, what prospects awaited him when he next woke up. But he couldn’t stay awake forever, so with one last gaze at the one outside, he let the strings of Gusu drift him away to sleep.

 Brother, I want you to know...

 That he woke up to nothing but the darkness outside, until he saw those long arms reaching for his station again, and those eyes peering through the windows again, eager and searching, and those lips smiled, truly, beautifully, upon seeing him.

 That he spent hours looking at it, speaking to it, while the other tilted its head and seemed to listen, until it opened its mouth and sang, all of it caught in his records and in Lan Wangji’s perfect memory.

 That one night, he dimmed the lights and played a waltz, his feet moving to the one-two-three, one-two-three inside, the other twirling over itself outside, shaking with bubbles of laughter, while Lan Wangji laughed, easy and loud like he had no memory of ever doing, stumbling over his own feet and falling, the other plastering itself to the glass as if it wanted to catch him. Touching his cheek against the glass, he thought of himself waltzing in the water, twirling in an embrace that hurt nothing but breathed life in his lungs.

 That, unable to classify it under any categorization, he took to call him A-Ying.

 And that one day, not counting all the time that had passed and how much he still had left, Lan Wangji geared up in his suit, uncaring for the limited oxygen that was supposed to be used only for necessary outside ventures, and he left his station to float up to A-Ying.

 At first, he just circled around him excitedly, tentatively. Then, he took Lan Wangji’s gloved hand in his human-like hand. With no justification but the voice of instinct, Lan Wangji felt safe when he was pulled closer to A-Ying. He didn’t feel like he was going to get eaten or hurt or even accidentally harmed. His arms and tentacles brushed against his suit curiously, barely touching, and his human arm circled his waist, the other tapping the visor of his helmet. More, he seemed to say, whine, the waves of his voice rippling in the ocean around them. Lan Wangji couldn’t help but huff a quiet laughter and hold A-Ying’s face between his hands. More, he thought. I want to touch you more, too.

 He thought of him as he fell asleep, he wrote about him in his official and his personal notes, and in all the time he could spare, he gazed at him, and he watched him live, and eat, and swim, and dance, all around him. Lan Wangji never missed any live reports with his base, and he never neglected his duty, but every day he fell farther from the surface and closer to the bottom of the sea.

 Brother, I’m not giving up. I’m giving in.

 The cluster of discarded messages only grows by his feet, paper ball after paper ball. Clad in the thin, white underclothes he wore under his suit, Lan Wangji sighs, walks around his station, his digits scraping against his equipment, against his monitors that never turned off. He touches the crumbs of his last dinner, minimal on his dining table. His boots echo on the metal of the station floor, taking him to his sleeping chambers, taking him, one last time, to his belongings, to the only two items he cherishes in everything that he’s ever owned. A picture, yellowed with time, of his family. Not just his brother and his uncle, but his mother and father, all five of them smiling in front of their summerhouse. He folds the picture and slips it under his skin-tight clothes, and picks up the other object. A ribbon that his mother used to wear in her hair. No one knew he had it, that she had given it to him on that fateful day, right before she turned around and walked into the sea, never to surface again. His takes his hair, long like hers, just like in that memory he still clings to, and he ties it into a half-ponytail, the ribbon falling long and white against the black strands.

 He’s ready now. Armored, made strong with everything that he is. He walks back to his working station, picks up his pen, and he writes.

 With the message finished, he walks to the dock, where his suit awaits. One last trip, to fulfill a promise. Not to A-Ying, not to mother or brother, but to himself. He steps into it, latches everything perfectly into place, firm and secure; he takes one last look at his station, and opens the door to the sea.

 Once outside, he can see A-Ying. He swims to him, all red limbs and perfect smile, and when he catches him, they spin in place. It’s like a song, like a dance long practiced. Lan Wangji bows his head, closes his eyes, and breathes in the suit’s oxygen. A-Ying just holds him, not pushing or pulling anywhere, patient, like a dutiful lover. Lan Wangji breathes and breathes, in the limited oxygen, the sound loud inside the suit.

 He thinks of A-Ying’s song in his headphones. Of uncle’s fear that he’d end up like his mother, or worse, perish like his father, of a broken heart. Uncle had tried to harden his heart, to teach him to not waste time on flimsy connections, but on family, on knowledge, and as Wangji had been so inclined, on the nature he seemed to love so much. But uncle didn’t know that his heart was his loudest voice, searching, desperate, for a love that felt real. And that a part of him always knew he’d find it, maybe just like his mother did, underneath the sea surface, deep under the waves, singing a song no one else could hear.

 His hands tremble as they move to the latches of his suit. This deep, there is little hope for him as he is, simple and flawed and human. His hands don’t stop. He opens his eyes, looks at A-Ying, at his smile, and he doesn’t stop. One by one, he undoes all of the safeties, strips himself bare. The gloves, the suit, the helmet, they all fall, fall to the ocean abyss.

 A-Ying holds on to him. His hands feel human on his face, on his arms, on his hands when their fingers interlace.  He lets himself look at him, vulnerable, dying, sees the awe in his eyes before he opens his mouth and lets the last of his oxygen leave him.

 I’m not giving up.

 A-Ying’s mouth closes over his. He breathes not air, or not just air, but something else, something more, that science has no name for. A-Ying’s fingers trace a pattern against both sides of Lan Wangji’s neck, and he keeps his mouth closed over his. Although overwhelmed, experiencing what maybe no one has ever experienced, Lan Wangji can still move his arms around A-Ying, move his mouth against his, tilting to a different angle. It’s an undocumented phenomenon; it’s a first kiss.

 When A-Ying moves back, still cradling Lan Wangji’s face, the researcher breathes.

 Only then, A-Ying allows himself to take his hands and swim with him. Away from the station, back and forth and swirling, one-two-three, one-two-three, bubbles coming out of their mouths in soundless laughter, foreheads touching as they dance and dance and dance, away from the surface, not quite at the bottom, but in the middle of the sea, where they exist together.

 At the station, Lan Wangji’s waltzes keep playing, all the way to the end of his playlist.

 ***

 Lan Xichen sits in the labs of a department that is not his own, incapable of looking away from the many screens. His tears have long dried, after hours of holding onto his little brother’s belongings. Clothes he would never wear again, notebooks filled with the pristine handwriting that Xichen could never emulate, no matter how alike they were. That’s how his brother always was, a paragon, never content with anything else. If he fell short of his own expectations, he’d work beyond it; in work, in interrelationships, in regards to himself. He longed to be whole.

 He has folded Lan Wangji’s message and kept it safe in his pocket, next to his heart. He’s reread it to the point of memorization, every word repeating itself in his mind, in his little brother’s voice. He sounds younger in Xichen’s head, as though he never really grew up to the age he was in his last mission, in the last hug they shared.

 Brother, you used to tell me mother loved to dance. I don’t remember. These days, I don’t remember her voice or her face anymore. It’s difficult, not remembering. I like to think I remember everything you ever did for me, even though there are things you did even before that. When I was born, you must have held me. I think about it when I’m alone, so I’m never truly lonely.

 That’s how I want you to think of me and remember me. Not with the sadness we think of mother’s last day, and everything that they told us, when we were too young to understand. Think of me as I’ve always been. Think of me, not at peace, but peaceful, at last.

 I don’t remember much about mother, but I remember this: her holding my hand as we walked the wet sand together, just the two of us. Her kissing my forehead, her hands in my hair. And words I heard in my dreams, before my dreams were taken from me.

 “A-Zhan, I’ll be going home now.”

 In the endless monitors of Lan Wangji’s department, Lan Xichen watches his little brother, striking white against the dark of the ocean, swim hand in hand with a creature he’s never seen before, or that no one has ever been allowed to see before. It moves and accommodates and molds against his brother as if they’ve known each other for years, forever. Together, they seem to dance. Lan Wangji’s — mother’s — white ribbon trails behind him, like it’s always been a part of his body.

 I’m not giving up, brother. I’m not going away. If you stay where you are, working just as you’ve always done, taking care of yourself as you’ve always done for me and for every life on this planet, we’ll see each other again.

 I’m going home. I’ll be waiting for you here. And when we see each other again, I’ll show you everything.

  The headphones against Lan Xichen’s ears speak with the language of the ocean. And given how long he’s been listening to it, he, too, can clearly make out its voice. Singing, humming a waltz, speaking the syllables of his brother's name, seeming to laugh with boundless joy.

[the-gunslock]

Amanda 3 - Hammer

Third canon-deviant fic about Amanda Holliday and her journey to being greater, from a mini-series of four.

"This one would be pret-tyyy cool…"

The burnt-blonde Shipwright scrolls through the 'Collections' of Exotics Guardians found in their journeys, analyzing their perks as she patiently waits to be called inside the most envied library in the City.

For some seconds, her emerald eyes fall on a pair of knightly silver Gauntlets that could be what she looks for. She ‘hmm’s to herself for a second, trying on some shaders, and nods in approval.

"Amanda, let's go."

Her head moves to pay attention to the Warlock that has just arrived at her usual spot at the Bazaar, greeting her with a nod as she stows her tablet away and is transmatted into the library. She makes a mental note of the name ‘Stronghold’. Shaxx would probably appreciate her dedication to swordplay.

Other pieces like Fr0st-EE5 and Transversive Steps, which do not require Light usage, would also benefit her while she fought. Good to know, good to know. So many loopholes to be exploited.

Ikora Rey had devoted the day to silent studying and rewriting of her books, still not completely updated after the Traveler’s awakening in recent times. In order to focus better, she does most of it quietly and alone in the library, save for the Hidden that appear to report to her on occasion. Today was an exception, for she allowed the Tower’s Shipwright to keep her company under the pretension that she wanted to learn, and there was no better teacher for that than Ikora.

Ikora’s library has dim, yellow lighting and a rustic aesthetic, with bookshelves and flooring made of dark wood covered with blue and white tapestry. The overall layout of the place was circular, the center having her desk and simple chairs and couches disposed about.

"So, Amanda." Ikora begins, making herself comfortable at the table and suggesting Amanda to do the same, across from her. "What do you seek?"

Amanda quietly taps her fingertips at the table, fidgeting as she tries to formulate a good reason.

"I wanna learn how to… to fight. Like y'all Guardians do."

Ikora doesn’t turn her head, but smiles.

“Is that so?”

“Uh… yeah?”

Ikora gives a chuckle as she finishes rewriting a page.

“I think not.”

“...Why not?”

Not faltering, Ikora turns her head to face her friend as she hovers her hand above the book. “Because if you wanted to learn how to fight, you would have asked Zavala. And, if the words I received are true... you already did.”

Amanda doesn’t have an answer to that, only looking at the desk and pressing her lips together, the inquietude only building up. She observes Ikora using an emanation of Solar heat to dry the ink on the pages.

“Ikora, I… want to be a Guardian. I thought I could ask you to teach me how to think like one.”

As the Warlock turns to the book again, she turns a page and looks at a previous version of the book, also spread open on another part of the table, for reference. “Okay. And why aren’t you?”

She is caught off-guard by this question. She struggles to let out her answer, and the next sentence comes out a bit more condescending than she’d hoped.

“Because I’m not a Lightbearer?” Amanda replies as if it was something obvious.

“During the Red War, we weren’t either.” Ikora says as she starts writing once more. “And I went through the same dilemma. I was lost. I looked to the ashes emanating from the City, and vowed… never again. And since I had nowhere left to go, I found myself on Io, in search for answers. As time passes me by, I realized I was left without answers, without Light, without my team... without anything to hold on to.”

“And then?”

“A Guardian found me. One of those who had made the pilgrimage to the Shard of the Traveler and recovered their Light. They could have refused, but they didn’t. They could have quit the fight, but even if they knew they were going to die, they didn’t. And their very presence reminded me that, while the terms are, indeed, very associable to the outside observer, they are not the same.”

The Shipwright listens intently as Ikora recounts her tale. There were many angles to this. Most, she didn’t consider. Multiple viewpoints are a virtue Guardians must possess.

“It took me some introspection and some... unprecedented incidents, for me to believe that I am more than just my Light, and in being greater than the Light, protecting it and the people who live through its influence is what made me who I am. So, as long as you strive to perfect yourself, you’ll always be one."

Ikora eyes her friend without turning her head this time. Her eyes are amiable, as fierce as they looked.

"A Guardian, Lightbearer or not... is always a Guardian.”

The Warlock delivered each part of that sentence in a very light, but thorough manner, a way that Amanda didn’t even think was possible. It was a nail she still had to hammer, that Guardians are more than just their Light.

During the Red War, Amanda had argued with Zavala after the Traveler was imprisoned and the Light lost. “There are thousands of people like me stranded down there in the City", she had said; “We're all the same now, Holliday. The Light is gone.” She was too angry to realize at the time, but looking back, she realizes she had taken the Guardianship for granted.

While she still didn’t like having to obey Zavala and leave citizens to die, it was paying off, in a way. Everything they did, they did for mankind. And it was beginning to thrive again, the best they could. She could feel it, even if her mission was far from over and new threats were still bound to come.

With a deep breath, she promises to face them gladly.

"Thank you, Ikora." The Shipwright says, eliciting a smile and a deep nod from the Vanguard that was still focused on writing the page.

Amanda pulls out her sketchbook and starts drawing over a sketch of herself. But before she continues, she has an idea for the final part of the 'secret-unnamed-project'.

"Can I, ah, look around for a book?”

“Do you need help with anything?”

“Yeah, actually. Wanna know where the name ‘Leviathan’ comes from.”

Ikora pulls up her own tablet, doing a query search for the word on the archive. It narrows down to multiple editions of a religious book from the old world, called ‘Bible’. Taking a break from writing, she hovers over to a particular section of the library, taking an intricate, gold-foil crafted book, meticulously turning its pages to where the query told her. “Job 41:1–34”, it said. She floats back to Amanda, laying the open book in front of her, before going back to her own seat.

She devours the verses, at first barely making heads or tails of what was on the pages. 'Why'd people back in the day write so weird?' She thought to herself. But eventually she managed to understand what it was about, and suddenly the name of Calus' ship made much more sense.

"Did you gather something new, my friend?"

Amanda recaps in her mind, making sure to try not to miss anything.

"Right, so- uh...” Amanda begins to explain her thoughts, trying not to let anything pass her by. “There was this man named Job, whose faith in this god couldn't be waived. In this part, the god is tryna teach Job how questioning a powerful being is futile by presenting him beasts so powerful that only he can control, one a them being a sea monster called, you guessed it, the Leviathan."

"How awfully appropriate."

"Yep. Apparently there were two beasts, a sea one, and a... land one."

Realization came into Amanda's mind as a name for her project finally snuck through her hands and into the paper.

"Reminds me of the World Serpent..." She adds nonchalantly, having doing some reading on the Edda in her free time back at Hiver’s place.

Ikora finally perks up from her book, stretching her writing hand. "You've been doing some homework."

"Hard not to, when you date a Warlock."

"And you are going to tell them about this… when?"

The one question Amanda dreaded, and it shows. Her 'Lightless Guardian' idea was nothing short of life-threatening, it's amazing she's got this far without being stopped.

Amanda had survived her whole life on the road, fighting off Fallen and hiding with hers and other families, but she would never, ever get rid of the pain of losing them. She survived and is happier than she's ever been, even if it's not a perfect life. Now, she was Hiver's family, and cannot bear the image of her lover having to go through the same — because of her own incompetence, nonetheless.

There was no telling how Hiver would react, the woman is already being a pile of anxieties, but of one thing she was sure.

It wouldn't be pretty.

“I don’t... know.“

"I can help if you'd like. But remember that this is your responsibility — and your burden."

She nods with a nervous face and gives a deep sigh.

“I’ll think of something. Can you take me back to the Tower?”

“Yes. And Amanda?”

“Yes?”

“Congratulations on finding love. Hold on to it. It is powerful.”

As nervous as she is, she nods smiling.

“Ophiuchus?” Ikora says to no one. Her Ghost, white and red and with spiking protrusions on the back of his shell, appears in the air next to her shoulder.

“One second.” He replies, spinning.

With a flash, Amanda is back at the Tower’s bazaar. Eyeing the drawing she has just finished, she runs to the Courtyard, in search of a person who could help her make it look much better.

Trying to ignore the built-up tension, she runs.

The Awoken woman stationed at the Tower Courtyard is, as usual, cleaning up dust and reorganizing her inventory, because it’s not home yet, but it would be. Then she hears a familiar voice calling to her.

“Tess!”

“Oh! Hello, Amanda. What can I do for you today?” Tess greets the Shipwright, assuming her usual hands-behind-back posture and giving her usual, welcoming smile.

“See, I got a lil’ project o’ my own, and wanted an expert’s opinion on how ta make it look the sharpest it can.”

Amanda presents the sketchbook with her sketch to Tess, who analyzes it meticulously.

It’s a suit of armor. Titan armor, to be more precise.

“Gothic knight inspiration… baroque decor… exquisite. Practical, but carries a lot of elegance. This looks incredible. Also, you draw extraordinarily well.”

“Thank you,” The Shipwright says, blushing. “But it lacks color. What would ya say works?”

“Excuse me.“

Tess takes the notebook into what appears to be a scanner, converting Amanda’s drawing into a digital projection that can easily be colored, and bringing it to the desk where they both could see it.

“Right, in my opinion the ornaments and trim should definitely be gold.” She says, quickly selecting the decorative parts of the plates and changing their colors to a light golden color. “The style reminds me of Gjallarhorn and the old Iron Lords’ armor. Maybe we can make it a bit more orange…”

“Would black fit with it, maybe?”

She changes the main plate colors to black. Tess and Amanda look at each other in disapproval.

“How about…” Tess changes the color to a deep blue.

“Can you try dark gray?” Amanda asks, and Tess obeys. However, it still seems to not fit, and they experiment with a midpoint between blue and gray.

“What do you think?”

“I like it.”

“Me too.”

Amanda scratches her nose, taking some time to think. The girls mix and match palettes for a while until finding one that fits the armor well.

Dark gray plates with crimson details, gold ornaments, and a white, gold-trimmed mark.

“Whew… Thank you, Tess. Anything I can do to repay ya?”

“The pleasure is mine. Although if you have some Silver on you…” Tess says, smiling smugly. “Just kidding.”

“My girlfriend does. She’ll probably come by again, she wants that duster you’re selling. Says she wants to look like a cowgirl.”

Tess laughs at this, eliciting a grin from Amanda, who picks her sketchbook and transfers the colored illustration file from the Awoken vendor to her own tablet, almost walking off and ready to send it to Crux/Lomar for forging.

“Oh, Amanda.”

“Yeah?” She turns back to face Tess.

“Does it have a name?” She asks in genuine curiosity.

Amanda smiles contagiously in pride, remembering what she read from the Bible in Ikora’s library. She had the perfect name for her project, given what was going down on the System — and how she’d fight it, if need be.

“The Behemoth.”

[iwroteinapastlife]

Family

I have been working on finishing this nearly every day since Chlonath Week, but the chapter just KEPT GETTING LONGER. But it’s finally ready! Finally, here’s @chlonathweek day 6, Family! Enjoy~

***

On day one of the art project, Nathaniel learned that Chloé’s favorite color was gold and that she didn’t have a favorite song. She wrote with pen because she, quote, ‘never makes mistakes,’ and her pens were a range of fiery colors—reds, oranges, yellows. Black ink only when absolutely necessary. She would only eat fruit flavors of ice cream and sprinkles were only permitted on strawberry, because, ‘they only look right on pink.’ On hot summer days, she drank mango iced tea, but the rest of the time, she liked hot coffee for waking up in the morning and hot tea for relaxing at night. And if her hot drinks didn’t have steam rising from them, they weren’t hot enough.

He also learned to never ever suggest that pineapple is a valid pizza topping.

On day two, he learned that nothing drove Chloé insane more than someone repeatedly clicking their pen. Pencil tapping was also maddening. He unfortunately learned this the hard way.

But that day, he also learned that she loved the sound of rain on the roof of a quiet room and the scent of asphalt as the first drops begin to fall. Nothing ever scared or excited her quite as much as the first strike of lightning in a storm and by observation alone, he realized that she had a very particular hum she emitted in reaction to the resonance of thunder in her chest.

On day two, she had told him that she rarely wore headphones while walking around, but on day three, she admitted that she wears them every time she goes out in public on her own. Because by the age of 15, she had realized that she would never learn not to listen when she overheard people talking about her.

Day three was also the first time he ever witnessed her 100% complete genuine laugh. He had never thought her so beautiful.

On day four, he realized there was something they would always fight about.

“But Brotherhood sticks to the story of the original manga!”

“That doesn’t mean it’s automatically better! It just means it’s different!”

“Yeah!” Chloé tossed her arms up in the air. “Different better! The original was a clusterfuck with filler that didn’t know what it was doing! Brotherhood was way more organized and well-paced and complete!”

“The original wasn’t bad though!” He argued. “It’s like its own thing separate from Brotherhood! I’m not saying it’s better, I’m just saying it has its own individual value!”

She crossed her arms. “I think you’re just blinded by the nostalgia factor.”

“And I think you’re blinded by newer, shinier animation.”

They never really reached a conclusion there. They went back and forth for a while until eventually they got distracted talking about the story itself. It was somewhere in the middle of Chloé’s rant on why she liked Mustang and Hawkeye more as a platonic ship that it actually occurred to him: his soulmate was a closeted weeb. Watching her go on, eyes spirited and a baseline smile fixed to her lips as she spoke, he was beginning to see why they were soulmates. And when he heard her laugh again, he realized that that sound was quickly becoming his new favorite song.

Day five was the first time he ever found the lines of his pencil coming to resemble her face as he mindlessly sketched in class.

They didn’t really need to meet that day. Their project was done. There were some spots that they could still throw in some extra detailing if they really wanted to, but it wasn’t necessary. The project was finished by the time Nathaniel had gone home on day four. And yet, neither of them said anything about it. Nathaniel still came over to her hotel suite after school and she still welcomed him.

So they did that extra detailing. And they asked each other more questions. And he got to listen to his favorite song again and again and again.

It wasn’t until he lay down at the end of the night that he realized he didn’t have an excuse to spend time with her anymore. He supposed they were still soulmates and that was probably an excuse in itself, but would she be okay with that? And if they were to hang out without an academic excuse under the reasoning that they were soulmates, would it be a date? Were they ready for that yet? Was he ready for that yet?

Nathaniel pulled out his phone with the intent to text her even though he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

She beat him to it.

CB: Want to come over on Saturday to watch the FMA movie? I never actually watched it.

A slow smile spread across his lips as he typed his response.

NK: I can’t believe you had the audacity to pick that fight when you never even saw the movie

CB: I stand by my actions.

CB: So?

NK: Definitely.

Spending time with her wasn’t the most natural thing in the world. They were awkward, both of them. But with time came comfort, and with comfort came ease.

Week two was when Chloé started talking to him at school, in sight of other people. Not a ton, of course—it wasn’t like she was eating lunch with him or walking around with him—but when they crossed paths in the halls, there were actual words exchanged. Pleasant ones.

It was somewhere in week four that he began anticipating and even looking forward to those brief interactions. And it was on Monday of week five—after a family trip to the coast had made him go a whole weekend without talking to her—that those interactions started making his stomach flutter.

That next Saturday, as they enjoyed the sunny afternoon out in the park, Nathaniel stumbled across his first opportunity to talk about weres.

“So you two broke up because of a bad kiss?”

The day was warm, with that perfect hint of a breeze that brushed the stray strands of hair about her face just right. The trees above had dappled her skin in an array of shadows, but they left an open window of sunlight just for her eyes. They absolutely glowed as they stared at him like he was an idiot.  

“Well when you say it like that it sounds shallow,” he laughed. “It wasn’t just a bad kiss, it was…nothing. The complete absence of any feeling or passion or desire…” He trailed off as he caught himself looking back and forth between her eyes. Was she wondering the same thing he was? “We both knew that a kiss shouldn’t feel that way. Not with our soulmate.”

Chloé seemed to consider that a moment. In that single breath of silence, his eyes did the unspeakable and stole a glance at her lips—her pink, glossy lips. “Do you think all kisses with the wrong person feel that way?” she asked a second later. As he met her eyes again, he hoped beyond hope she hadn’t noticed where his had traveled.

“I-I don’t know,” he said, scratching the back of his head with a nervous smile. “My only other kiss was Alix and she was dared to do that.” The corners of her lips turned up in an amused smile. Nathaniel cleared his throat and forced himself to look away before his mind could travel further down the track of wondering what flavor her lip gloss was. “What about you? Have you ever kissed anyone?”

She shook her head with a tiny laugh. “Not unless you count kissing my best friend when we were five.”

“You kissed Sabrina? What was that like?”

“No, not Sabrina—,” Chloé cut herself off mid-sentence.

When she didn’t continue, Nathaniel turned to look at her again—and was confronted with a heart breaking sight.

Her eyes almost seemed to dull over and he watched as the tiny smile she had worn all afternoon slowly faded from her lips. “Never mind,” she said, tone suddenly somber. She vacantly watched the children playing across the park, but it was clear that her mind was somewhere else.

He found himself scrutinizing her profile for answers. She looked so melancholy all of a sudden when up until then, they had been having a good day talking and laughing. Where did that come from? And if it wasn’t Sabrina, who did she kiss? Who else did she ever call her best friend? And why did the thought of them make her so—

Oh shit.

You knew him right? Did you know? Weren’t you friends? What did he look like as a cat?

The younger voices of his classmates began echoing off the walls of his head as he recalled that day. The only day Chloé came to school and didn’t talk. The only day everyone wanted her to talk.

Did your dad know? Did he have anything to do with the fire?

He remembered sitting in the back of the class and watching with shamefully vested interest as the other kids surrounded her desk and berated her with a never ending onslaught of questions. Watching with shamefully vested interest as she said absolutely nothing. As she stood up and left without a word. As she didn’t come back to school for a week.

Her gaze had grown hard, as if her mind was retreating further and further into a dark place.

“Was it Adrien Agreste?” he asked quietly.

Chloé winced at the name, but her expression remained unchanged. He wondered how many times circumstances had forced her to practice that absolutely unyielding look.

“Yeah,” she answered curtly, voice just above a whisper.

This was his chance—albeit a less than ideal one. Throughout all of their interactions, he had always kept the topic in the back of his mind, always kept looking for any signs and signals of what she might think. But if ever he was going to have a chance to talk about it—really talk about it—it was with the topic of Adrien Agreste.

He felt like every nerve in his body was shaking. He tried not to let it show as he welled up the courage to ask her something—anything—about it. Finally, in a strained and quiet voice, he pushed out the words, “Did you—?”

“Nathaniel.” If the sharpness of her tone didn’t cut him off, those hard, almost pleading eyes as she turned to look at him surely would have. She softened the harshness in her voice but spoke her next statement slowly, stressing the importance of her words. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

He watched those eyes, studied them, trying with every bit of detail oriented observation power he had to discern any meaning behind them. That was the clear look of someone who really didn’t want to reveal their feelings—someone who didn’t want to open up, didn’t want anyone to know. But he needed to know. If nothing else, he needed to know why she didn’t want him to know.

In the wake of the Agreste fire, Chloé would have thought just like everyone else that there were no survivors. That Gabriel, Emilie, and Adrien Agreste all were dead.

Before they were outed as weres, the Agreste’s were known family friends of the Bourgeois’s. Audrey Bourgeois and Gabriel Agreste old friends and icons in the fashion industry and their children, born the same year, raised as friends from birth. Adrien Agreste—Paris’s collective crush—was famously known to have exactly one friend, and that was Chloé. Chloé Bourgeois—Paris’s heiress. Pictures of them could still be found floating around social media, ranging from when they had just begun to walk, leading all the way up to the very same month of the fire. The very same month the Agreste name was cursed in the angry chanting of mobs and the Agreste mansion went up in flames.

A hint of betrayal could be discerned in her eyes, that much he gleaned. But was it betrayal because her best friend turned out to be the enemy? Or was it betrayal because her best friend didn’t trust her with the truth?

Had she known the truth? Was she aware that whole time growing up that her best friend had the blood of a cat? Did he tell her? Did she find out?

Did she out him?

He needed to know if that was the hurt of shame, anger, and betrayal begging him to drop the subject in that moment, or if that was the hurt of mourning. If he were to tell her that Adrien was alive—that he escaped and had been safe all these years in hiding—would she cry tears of relief or would she speak words of fury? If she were to see him—to confront him in the flesh—would she wrap him in the embrace of an old friend? Or in the embrace of death? Would she speak a word of it to anyone? To her father? To the akumas? To a hunter? Or would she keep the secret held tightly in her grasp, safe and sound, where no one could ever harm him again?

He didn’t know. He needed to know. But looking in those eyes right then, right there, the only thing he knew was that she wasn’t ready to tell him. Not yet.

“Will you?” he asked. “Someday?”

She watched him, and in her then, he could see his own analytical gaze mirrored. Assessing. Gauging. Trying to decipher if he could be trusted or not.

Her expression softened with a slow exhale. “I’m sure I will,” she whispered, and the way she said it almost sounded like a resignation to herself. An admittance. “Someday.”

Someday wouldn’t come for a long while, but hints started to trickle in after that. He couldn’t be sure if it was because she was trusting him more or because she was filtering around him less, but either way he found himself feeling safer and safer around her with each passing week. It was the occasional grunt of disgust when akuma propaganda popped up on her facebook feed or the subtle eye roll when a rally could be overheard nearby. None of the hints were concrete; all of them could be attributed to baseline annoyance or contextual displeasure. But they were there. They were there and each and every one was adding to his growing hope.

It was a warm night in month three, leaning over the bridge railing to watch boats float along the River Seine, when she confessed the words in a hushed whisper.

“I miss him.”

The lapping of the water down below. The music of a street performer down the street. The giggles of children running along the bridge. Those were the sounds that faded away as Nathaniel’s entire world seemed to zoom into focus on her and her alone.

Chloé kept her gaze on the reflection of city lights rippling along the surface of the river. Her eyes weren’t as hardened as he might have expected them to be. Not as guarded.

“I couldn’t save him,” she continued, voice low, her words for him and him alone. “When news broke out about the fire, I ran straight to his house. By the time I got there, the entire building was in flames, the exits blocked. Sabrina’s father caught me trying to claw my way through the police barricade. He held me back, hid me from view. He thought he was doing me a favor. Wouldn’t want word getting out that the mayor’s daughter fought for the life of a were.” She paused, narrowing her eyes in such a way that he knew she was staring at the police chief’s face in her mind. “Such bullshit,” she muttered under her breath.

He waited until he was sure she was done speaking. Softly, gently, he asked, “Did you know?”

Just when he thought those eyes couldn’t get sadder. “No. He never told me.” She let out a long sigh, dropping her head below her shoulders. “I can’t blame him. Even if he trusted me, there’s no telling what could have happened. Look at what happened without him speaking a word. I just wish…”

She never finished that thought.

With a deep breath, Chloé picked her head back up, stood up straight, and turned to fully face him. She leveled him a look built on courage and riddled with fear.

“So that’s who your soulmate is, Nathaniel,” she said. Her voice was still quiet, but strong, and suddenly he realized why she chose to bring it up. “Someone who nearly put their life on the line for a were and would do it again in a heartbeat. We’ve danced around the subject long enough. I need to know if the same is true for you.”

Steadfast blue eyes reflecting every light in a dark city. Determination and fear inextricably wrapped up in one another—wrapped up in a dance of hesitation and necessity. A lonely soul held in the arms of a confrontational spirit.

Nathaniel had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

“Well?” she asked, her eyes darting about his face in every effort to find her answer.

The next breath he took was one of the easiest in his life. Somehow, he had never felt so safe outside of his own home. He didn’t have the voice to respond—nor did he know what words to use if he did—so the best he could give her was a soft smile and a silent nod. She thankfully accepted that.

On June 26th, Nathaniel learned that Chloé wore strawberry lip gloss.

It was the last day of classes and instead of the summer sun that everyone anticipated, they got rain.

Their intermittent laughter and the splashing of their footsteps as they ran through puddles was the music that followed them down the street on their way to the cafe. He could feel water droplets on the back of his neck and dampness soaking through his shoes, but with Chloé’s hand in his and his favorite song on repeat, those things couldn’t be further from his mind.

“You’re getting a bill from my hairdresser,” she laughed as they took refuge under a nearby awning. For the first time in his life, he watched as Chloé pulled the hair tie out of her hair, letting the long, tangled strands fall loose about her head. It was damp and frizzy, and her efforts to comb her fingers through it were hopeless from the start.

As he spoke, he found his hand reaching out, fingers taking delicate hold of a strand that was blocking his view of those beautiful eyes. “I don’t know; I think you look pretty great like this.”

“Oh really?” she scoffed, flat and sarcastic. She gave him a look to match, gaze rising to meet his—a glowing summer sky amidst spring rain.

An easy smile spread across his lips as he tucked the hair away behind her ear. He didn’t drop his hand, fingers threading delicately through tangled strands. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Really.”

The very air around them stilled and the world faded away and suddenly it was just them—two soulmates a breath apart tucked away from the rain. He didn’t try to stop the urge to glance at her lips this time, nor did she. The pull to Chloé was more familiar than the pull of gravity, more natural than the ocean’s currents. Her forehead was warm against his and her breath was cool on his cheek. The moment their lips touched was the thunder after the lightning, the day after the night—the undeniable fate of nature taking its course. Her kiss was more than inevitable, it was right. Like breathing itself, the touch of her lips against his was easy, simple—and something he couldn’t imagine living without.

And it was just one kiss. Their lips parted like the tide’s retreat back into the ocean, leaving the faint taste of strawberry lingering on his lips, but neither of them moved. Her breath still tickled his cheek. His forehead still rested against hers.

“So that’s how that’s supposed to feel,” he whispered.

He opened his eyes just enough to see the delicate curl of perfect lips. Chloé reached up and took hold of the edges of his jacket. His palms likewise found the perfect curvature of her cheeks, fingers threading through the hair at the base of her neck. And they came together again.

By the next week, Nathaniel had learned that Chloé rotated lip gloss flavors. Strawberry that first day in the rain, cherry behind the theater that weekend, lemon in her room two days after that. And forever after that next Thursday, Nathaniel would always remember the distinct taste of raspberry as the flavor of the truth.

His arm was numb, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not when it was tucked so perfectly under the crook of Chloé’s neck.

The queen had deigned to grant this lowly peasant the sight of her with her hair down once again and though he suspected she may make him pay for it later, he was taking full advantage of it. His fingers tangled through the soft golden strands at the base of her neck, no doubt making a storm of knots that he would hear about later. For now, however, she didn’t seem to mind. Not with her hand on his waist, thumb dancing along the skin just under the hem of his shirt as she pulled him close.

Their lips moved in perfect tandem, a rhythm born in instinct and refined in practice, and his body molded to hers with such an ease he hadn’t thought possible between two people. Kissing Chloé was so much more than he ever could have predicted it would be. Time was lost when they came together, all semblance of thought gone and reality limited to her skin under his fingers and her tongue against his. The kiss of a soulmate. The taste of raspberry.

“Ey dude, you in here?”

A sharp intake of breath and the kiss was broken as the lights in the room flicked on. Both he and Chloé immediately sat up on the couch, totally inconspicuous. Pins and needles prickled his fingertips as feeling slowly returned.

An amused grin spread across Nino’s cheeks. “Watcha doin in the dark, kids?”

Nathaniel cleared his throat as he clenched and unclenched his hand to get blood circulating. “Watching a movie.” It wasn’t technically a lie; that was what they were doing before Chloé had—

“Oh yeah,” Nino said sarcastically, looking past him, “that menu screen looks absolutely enthralling.”

Chloé snorted behind him. He turned to look and sure enough, Spirited Away sat on the main menu.

He leaned in toward Chloé and lowered his voice—not that it made Nino any less likely to hear him, what with him coming close and leaning on his elbows on the back of the couch. “When did it end?”

She hummed in thought, fingers beginning their endeavor to undo the knots he’d made. “Somewhere around the time you started messing up my hair.” She closed the statement with a tiny glare and he just grinned. He rather liked the way she looked with less-than-pristine hair.

“Dude you owe me one for intercepting Aunt Abigail on her way in here.”

He turned his attention back to his cousin. “Mom would have been fine.” Nino raised an eyebrow at him. “...I think. Anyway, what’s up?”

“Family trip to the coast tomorrow,” he reported, drumming his hands on the couch. “Leaving early in the morning, so Chloé has to go home in a couple hours.”

“Your family takes a lot of trips to the coast.”

Ice water down his back. Nathaniel felt the color drain from his face as he shared an apprehensive look with Nino. He was glad Chloé was behind him at that moment and couldn’t see him panicking.

“Yeah,” Nino replied, giving him a look. “We do.”

“Why?”

He raised his brows at him and Nathaniel could practically hear the ‘Dude, you gotta tell her,’ echo in his mind. Nino knew that Nathaniel had already gotten clearance from the rest of the family and that Chloé had told him in explicit terms that she supported weres. He’d been pestering him for weeks to tell her and the only reason Nathaniel had been able to give him as to why he hadn’t yet was just ‘I haven’t had a good opportunity.’

It was bullshit and they both knew it. The reason was just that he was scared.

Retrospectively loving a friend thought dead who she hadn’t known to be a were prior to his alleged death was very different from being in a current relationship with a were who was very much alive. He’d be lying if he tried to claim that there wasn’t still a part of him—albeit increasingly small—that worried she would reject him upon learning that he had scales when completely submerged. That worried she would be disgusted by him.

“Dunno,” Nino finally said. His voice kept casual so as not to alert Chloé, but the look he was giving him was anything but. As he stood up straight to leave, the message rang loud and clear. Tell her.

Nathaniel swallowed nervously as the door shut, leaving him and Chloé alone once again. “I mean the coast is nice and all,” she continued, “but you go like, two or three times a month. I don’t even know the last time I went.” He turned to face her once again and found her with approximately half of her hair somewhat tamed while the rest was still frizzy. “Do you think I could come actually? It’s been way too long.”

Blue eyes found him as she continued combing her fingers through the mess, absolutely oblivious to the anxiety welling within him. Clear summer skies parting a raging storm.

Nathaniel interrupted her progress by threading his fingers through her hair once more and pulling her into a kiss. A single slow, perfect, calming, centering, breathtaking, mind clearing, soul completing kiss. A soulmate’s kiss.

Nino was right. If she really was his soulmate—which was beyond a shadow of a doubt with a kiss like that—then he should be safe with her. Whether he had kissed her to strengthen his resolve or to savor what could be his last though, he couldn’t say.

“Nathaniel?”

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

[gabrielsstrangecorner]

Slenderverse #5 - more Proxies

Hi! Today we’re gonna take a look at more Slenderman’s Proxies OC’s (Original Characters)

-Domino-

not much that I know about him. Here’s his story: https://www.wattpad.com/296506937-creepypasta-origins-stories-domino

although I’m not sure if this is his official story 

here’s a ref by GhostfaceNikol.

 Again I don’t know if she’s the creator of this character but I think so. 

-Loup Noir-

Now, it’s time to tell you that sadly, not every Proxy OC has a story. Most of them are just characters with short backstories. But I like them nontheless.

Loup Noir is a Proxy created by AK-47x ( https://www.deviantart.com/ak-47x ).

Loup Noir’s real name is Ray Lilian and she was born in British Columbia. She speaks both English and French Canadian. She was once a proxy of another Slender being called Lady Melody, but now is a proxy of Slenderman. She lives in a forest and thinks of herself as an animal. As a weapon she uses: double bladed staff, hunting knife and daggers. 

How she bacame a Slenderman’s Proxy: 

Ray who came from a mission that her former master Lady Melody had assigned her to accomplish, was captured by the police and was brought to the police car, until they had a very devastating car accident. The driver died on the spot, while a handful of people had saved her from her very close death and was brought to the hospital. She had a comma for a long period of time. Lady who cannot feel her presence as a Slenderbeing thought she had died and never gave a thought on returning to her, being of course the self-centered, callous and evil creature she is. She disposes her proxies when she thinks their dead. After the comma, she wakes up fully after a month and had forgotten some memories about her relationships with her former fellow proxies; however she never had forgotten her master still. Disliking the hospital and medical equipment there (since she isn't used to “human related stuff”), she barely grasped her deer staff weapon and a few of her remaining things left and tried to escape as she can. Being skilled in stealth she successfully but barely escaped. She had also noticed that her proxy mark on her neck had faded, thus proves that she lost her connection with her former master. While walking through the woods pondering what to do next on her next chapter of life, she met a clown figure who happens to be one of Slenderman's proxies and also had recently had a deep connection with (while she was Lady's proxy). It was Hoaxton, who even nearly mistaken her for someone almost killing her. She was brought to the quarters of his fellow proxies for a rest/stay and was told that she is already free from her job of being Lady's Proxy and she can finally roam around and do what she likes to do. However, being gotten used to being a loyal proxy she is and who doesn’t know how to live a normal human life). Ray articulated how she feels more “free” in the forest with living her life accomplishing tasks for a Slenderbeing than living free like a full normal human, because she doesn’t know how to. After her health state barely and slowly got back to normal, Slender Man who had observed and noticed her that she was a former proxy of his relative, tested her worth if she was a valuable proxy. Before he took her in, she was given a great number of challenges to accomplish and one of them had lead her to killing a wolf (she’s a good huntress after all ever since) which she had made and preserved as a mask. This is a prize for her, symbolizing her accomplishments of being proved worthy as a proxy to the tall faceless man.

                                              Ref by AK-47x       

here you can read her full bio: https://www.deviantart.com/ak-47x/art/Proxy-OC-Loup-Noir-new-update-595937364

-Hoaxton-

Hoaxton is a Slenderman’s Proxy created by Dav-Ink ( https://www.deviantart.com/dav-ink ) 

His real name is  Kiefer Louise Raymundo and he’s 26 years old. He was born in Bagulo, Philippines. For a weapon he uses saw, mace, spiked glove and stryk pistol. 

Backstory: 

Childhood/Elementary: Kiefer Raymundo is the son of a civil engineer (Juan Raymundo) and a skilled shooter yet an ex-convict, (Casey Wilson). He was born in the Philippines' summer capital, Baguio City. One of the places in the country with the coldest (however snow doesn't really happen since Philippines is a tropical country) temperatures and yet an eco zone full of large clusters of pine tree forests, where originally people tend to make stories about the unwanted spirits, urban legends and creatures mostly. Kiefer was born a stubborn, mischievous and yet a naughty child. Although he is smart and creative. His entire childhood was mostly him being a bully to his classmates and even his friends. He enjoys pranking and embarassing people a lot. And yet he uses his intelligence and talents for the bad. His studies downgraded because of this. Until the first event that will change him came, as he was going home down the street. He "met" a tall suited faceless being. The boy just practically stared at him and didn't even got "hurt". The being amazed of his ability of not being "sick" (supposedly) from him, and had observed him fully and found out all about himself with his unknown abilities, oddly spared his life. Instead he began planning something for him. He spoke through his mind that his school will be engulfed by a large devastation of fire. Overwhelmed, the boy ran his way home. The next day, he began feeling unconscious of himself and started setting off the fire alarms running in the school. He yelled fire is going to go off. He was actually serious but a little unconcious at the same time as if someone is controlling him. This made the entire school panic and evacuated the buildings. Long moments after, nothing actually happened. There was no fire nor something that will start a tiny bit of flame. This resulted into a fire hoax. Kiefer was brought to the principal's office together with his dad. He began telling them about the creature and what he said about the fire that will ablazed the school. This made himself worse and unbelievable for his hoax. The principal laughed and nicknamed him "hoax-boy". Of course he has been known for his reported pranks around the school and would never ever believe him of course. Especially now, this fire prank. This resulted him to reflecting his own life and what he has been doing wrong. Adolescence/High School: Kiefer thought the unknown being he met was just an odd hallucination which lead to changing his life, that his tricks, pranking and bullying should stop. With this, he used his talents, intelligence and improved for he better. He stopped his negative behavior and attitudes and started developing them for the good. Until he became a certified school paper cartoonist and a varsity football player, making him actually multi-talented. Until his mother being proud even secretly taught him about her skilled shooting in a safe house. She even secretly gave her favorite pystol to her son as a gift. Kiefer in this stage had a lot of interests, like gaming, doodling, etc. College/Adulthood: He finally went to a prestigious college in Baguio and moved by himself to an apartment without his parents leaving him for his independence. He took his favorite course, Mechanical Engineering. Overtime, he developed himself really good with his studies, friends, skills, other talents, school paper work and even the football team. Until finally, one night while he was working overtime in the school paper office, his laptop began to static and make ear-bleeding sounds. He turned to the window in a cluster of pine trees and was startled to see the being back again after all these years since his childhood. The tall faceless figure watching him from afar. He shrug this off hoping it was just a hallucination. But it wasn't, he was still there.  After seeing the being once again, the next days, were unusual hardships for him as he developed a sense of unusual behavior of going back to his bullying and negative self. Until the final proof came for his awaited football game. He became unconscious of himself and started violently fighting and punching his teammates. He even nearly killed one of his teammates when he tried smashing their head on a hard metal post, shoving it. He was indeed acting oddly histerical, until he was kicked out of the team as a punishment, and this lead him to a big disappointment for himself. Until all he had left was his job as a school paper cartoonist. The adviser had assigned him to draw the editorial cartoon for his school paper. Later, he finished it and placed the finished paper onto the adviser's desk. The adviser soon saw it and was surprised to see an eerie drawn sketch of the tall faceless figure on it instead of the drawing she assigned him to draw. Kiefer explained that this sinister being exists and needs to be seen in the school paper. The adviser was angered and of course didn't believe his "hoax" about the "silly" creature, she crumpled the paper and told him to redo it by tomorrow. But for a long week, unusually, he never came back to school. Until another paper arrived on the adviser's desk. She saw it and she was greatly disappointed about it seeing the same sketch, it was more eerie and dark with Kiefer's signature on it. Because of this, she finally went to his apartment with a taxi and knocked by the door looking for him. With no one answering, she tried opening the door seeing it was unlocked. Going inside, she was shocked to see dead bodies on the floor. She tried exiting going to ask for help, but the door had suddenly locked. Until an eerie and clowny figure emerged from the shadows, wearing a similar football varsity jacket and with a weapon on hand. He laughed histerically and this frightened her. Then the tall faceless man appeared in front of her, she stared at him paralyzed. "You think this is just a hoax huh? Now you see him with your own eyes!" This was the last words she had ever heard. News spread later that Kiefer, the adviser and a few people from the apartment were nowhere to be found. Until today no one knew what really happened on why they disappeared.

                                               Ref by Dav-Ink 

His full bio: https://www.deviantart.com/dav-ink/art/-Slenderverse-Horror-FINAL-REF-Hoaxton-599408799

This is all for this post. Bye!

[myselfinserts]

“While you were busy being heterosexual, I studied the blade.”

Étienne really didn’t want to be here today. He didn’t want to be at a place with needless and ink. He wanted to go home.

But he’d made a promise, so he let Reginald drag him to the little haunted house looking establishment halfway between Elspie proper and Elswood, a good thirty minutes away from civilization.

Whoever it was that they were going to had a strange taste in location.

“I’m not sure if this is a good idea,” Étienne sighed, reading the ‘closed’ sign in the window. “Perhaps we should go.”

“Chill, Étienne,” Regi assured. “Kel’s legit, I swear.”

Étienne rolled his eyes. “I know you say that, and I’ve got no reason to doubt you, but…” he looked at around, trying to resist the urge to run. “You cannot deny this isn’t…exactly the kind of place that instills confidence that we won’t fall victim to a slasher movie villain.”

Regi laughed nervously, tugging on the sleeves of his sweat jacket. “I know. But believe me. Teacake wouldn’t let anyone past the front room.”

“Teacake is the dog, right?”

“That’s right. He’s a good boy.” Regi opened the door, smiling as a loud bark greeted them. “Hey there, Mr. Cake!”

Étienne followed Regi into the house, raising an eyebrow as he saw the dark colored corgi sitting at the front desk in a blue bowtie. He had to admit, it was rather cute. Though he’d have opted for a more periwinkle shade himself.

“Can you take us to the waiting room?” Regi asked. “We have an appointment.”

Teacake jumped from his spot at the counter, pulling a basket from a nearby shelf and bringing it over to them. Étienne took a peek, noticing a few familiar lines that resembled a contract.

He didn’t remember this.

“What are these?”

Regi took the  papers from the basket, smiling fondly. “It’s the paperwork. You know, like how we have our clients fill out papers before we do the work? Same concept.”

Étienne swiped the papers from him, adjusting his glasses to get a better look. “You just sign this without reading it over?”

“I’ve been here enough to have memorized it. I’ll go over it with you if you want.”

“I’ll look over it myself.”

“Suit yourself.” Regi turned back to Teacake, taking another copy of the contract for himself. “Teacake? Can you take us to today’s best waiting room?”

Teacake barked pleasantly and scurried toward one of the nearest doors. The two designers hurried after him, one more enthused about the situation. That was fine. Étienne wasn’t the one getting the tattoo anyway.

Though he supposed if he ever did, this might be an okay place given how clean it was. And how thorough the contract was too. Choices of permanent or temporary, what kind of design, if the design was meant to be a personalized commission and not to be shared. There was even an option to be hired on to model your tattoo in the store’s advertising. 

He wasn’t going to say it, but he was highly impressed at how strong everything was on a business standpoint.

The two were lead to the back by Teacake, and after about three minutes of walking they arrived in a very nice game room. On the table were stacks of books labeled ‘designs’, and there were choices between board, card, and video games. Along with pool and air hockey against a gentle cafe jazz soundtrack on the radio. And of course, a couple of vending machines and a couple of tea and coffee makers at their own station. 

It had everything.

“So today’s best is an arcade,” Regi hummed. “Very nice.”

Étienne took a seat on the nearby sofa, picking up one of the notebooks and noticing it was brand new. And as he flipped through the pages, he saw it was empty. 

“Is this for us to design things?” he asked.

“Yeah, she lets people do designs if they want,” Regi explained. “Kel especially lets kids do it, because she has this thing for parents that want tattoos of their children’s art. Make it look like something really special.”

“I see…Wait one minute.” Étienne got a devilsh smirk as he hurried over to the coffee station. “What the hell is this poster?”

Regi’s face went red. “Th-that’s-”

“Is that you?” Étienne laughed. What is that pixel design on your face?! You look ridiculous!”

“It was my first modelling job!” Regi pouted. “Kel asked if I could model the design last minute since the last guy bailed. It wasn’t designed for my face!”

“He’s right.”

Étienne looked up, nearly jumping back when he saw a horned young lady staring at him, book open and filled with sketches. She seemed rather…unperturbed. 

Where the hell did she come from?!

“I designed it for a more rounded, stout looking face. Not a long heart like Renegade’s. My fault for not taking the possibility of my model bailing on me like a little bitch for some flaky trend start up down the road.” She shrugged. “That shop was shut down a month later after reports of infections from bad needles, so tomato tomato I guess.”

“Hey Kel,” Regi said excitedly. “Étienne, this is Kelly Hornblower, but prefers to go by Kel. She’s my friend.”

“We’re not friends,” Kel said. 

“Best friends?”

“Not even close.”

“Come on!” he groaned. “We’ve known each other for years!”

“Yeah, and while you were busy being heterosexual with Skald, I studied the blade. I can out fence you now.” She smirked. “Relax, Glady. We’re friends.” She looked at Étienne, face back to blank. “If you’re considering being friends with him, run while you can. Once he’s got you, he doesn’t let go.”

“I’m well aware of what friendship with Gladstone entails.” Étienne held out his hand. “Étienne Allard. Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Hornblower.”

“Ms. Hornblower’s my mum,” she snickered, accepting his handshake. “You can call me Kel.”

“Kel. Right.” 

She glanced at her hands as they let go. “Strong grip. Very steady. Perfect for intricate detailed work.” She smiled. “Ever thought of going into ink?”

“I found my passion, thank you.”

“Well, if you ever change your mind.” She looked to Regi, brow raised. “So, what will it be this time?”

“Cats on my ankle. Meatloaf had kittens and I want something for them.”

Kel nodded. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you today.”

Regi’s eyes went wide. “How come?”

“Art block.” She handed him the sketchbook. “I need to get this design right for a client. They want me to put ‘not afraid of the dark’ in fancy letters on this lighthouse but the bastard doesn’t like any of the fonts. I know what he’s looking for but I can’t seem to replicate it.”

Regi and Étienne looked at each other and nodded, each of them taking a turn and writing the sentence on a blank page of the book before handing it back. 

“Would one of these work?” they asked in unison.

Kel took a look, eyes seeming to shine with excitement. “This is just what I need. Thanks.” She closed the book. “I think I can fit you both in today now.”

“Just him,” Étienne said. “I don’t do needles.”

“I think I have just the thing for you though.” She escorted them to the next room over. “You know how people use stencils? I think I have something you’ll enjoy. And as a thank you for helping me, this is on the house.”

“I highly doubt it’ll be something I’ll enjoy.”

“Trust me. With your perfect tone and smooth skin, everyone with a brain with be fawning over you until it washes away.”

“...Very well, I’ll hear you out. What do you have in mind?”

Ceri felt his throat tighten as he did a double take. He couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible. Étienne would never-

But he did. Ceri could see it. The gentle golden feather design on his wrists poking out from beneath the lavender button up’s sleeves. The perfect shade to compliment his skin tone. And he could have sworn he saw some more designs barely poking out near the unbuttoned collar. Was it a full body? Or just a few specific places?

“It’s rude to stare,” Étienne said without looking up from his book.

“Sorry,” Ceri mumbled. “I just, uh...did you...did you get a tattoo?”

Étienne smirked and set his book down. “If you want to find out, I suggest you finish your cocoa.” He got up and started making his way out of the livingroom, making sure to whisper in Ceri’s ear when he stopped to give him a peck on the cheek. “And by the way. Purple really does suit you.” 

With a quick nibble on the ear, he left the room. 

Ceri sat there for a moment completely stunned. He could feel his ears burning. His face hotter than his drink. He knew exactly what Étienne had done. He guzzled down his drink and hurried after him.

If that man is trying to kill me, I will gladly embrace death.

[lasersheith]

for prompts: mutually pining Keith and Shiro with matching tattoos (something that’s meaningful to them specifically)... that they got separately, without realizing they were getting matching tattoos 🙌🏼

I love this prompt SO much! Thank you for sending it! It got pretty long, so I’m gonna make a part two later. It’ll probably eventually end up on AO3 at some point. 

A lot of people asked Allura why she became a tattoo artist of all things. Her mother and father, with their high ranking offices and political connections had always expected her to follow in their footsteps, but loved her and supported her decision even if they didn’t understand it. When she first became interested in art and design, her uncle, with his veritable fashion empire had been especially keen to take her under his wing, but still offered her his critiques and praises for her beautiful work. Her friends from the ivy league school at which she’d gotten a full ride for a business degree pretended they didn’t turn up their noses at her chosen career, but it didn’t bother her in the slightest. Especially not when a familiar handsome face walked into her quiet little shop.

“Keith! Back again, are we?” She greeted him with a smile. “You’ve turned me into an addict, Ally. Can’t stay away long.” He replied, returning her smile and dropping a sheet of notebook paper in front of her on the desk. The page was filled with pencil sketches. There was a large, black panther in the middle with an inscrutable expression, poised to pounce. Along the edges there were more sketches of large cats; a few leopards, a cheetah, another panther. The one that caught her eye the most, however, was the lion. It stood serenely, facing just slightly left of center, windswept mane appearing to billow in an unseen breeze. It exuded a certain dangerous quality that Allura couldn’t quite name. As though it were standing there just to observe, but it absolutely wasn’t to be trifled with.

It was perfect for Keith.

“I think this one.” She said, pointing at it. Keith hummed in approval. “Not the panther?” He asked tentatively. “Well it’s your body, so we can do the panther if that’s what you’d like.” She started tactfully. “But I think the lion suits you better.” He nodded, deep in thought. “I do think you’ve just about run out of room on your arms and chest, though.” She added with a teasing smile. “Where is this one going?” He turned around and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I was thinking in between my shoulder blades, pretty big. Dinner plate sized, maybe?” Allura narrowed her eyes and looked between the spot where he was pointing and the paper. She held the drawing up, first looking at the panther and then the lion. “That should work.” She finally said after a brief pause, twisting the paper a few ways to gauge where each drawing would look best.

“Let’s do it then,” He said decisively, “The lion.” Allura nodded with a smile. “Alright then, let’s get started.”

2 hours later, all of the outlining was finished and looked absolutely perfect to Allura’s eyes. She held up a mirror in front of Keith as he studied the fresh tattoo from the larger wall mirror’s reflection with a wide smile. “I think this is my favorite one yet.” He said, looking up at her. She grinned back. “Excellent!” She replied triumphantly. “I think we should wait 10 days, maybe 2 weeks for the rest. Let you heal up and rest, this piece is pretty big.” He nodded. “Same time, Saturday after next?” She pulled out her phone and put his next appointment in her calendar. “You’re booked. Let’s get you covered up and checked out, then.”

..

Some days Allura regretted her walk-in policy; there was always the danger of people coming in to get something on the spur of the moment and being angry when they regret it, inebriated college boys who don’t understand how bleeding works and why she won’t tattoo them when they’re nearly black out drunk, and kids who come in pretending they “forgot” their ID at home. Other days, ridiculously tall and muscular, handsome, one-armed strangers waltz in wearing leather jackets, tight jeans, and boots that make her mouth drop open and she didn’t regret it at all. He smiled shyly at her as he approached the counter. “Hi there, how can I help you?” She asked with her best charming smile. The man returned it politely and pulled an unevenly folded sheet of notebook paper from his pocket, slightly poking his tongue out between his pursed lips as he struggled to unfold it with one hand. Allura waited patiently, sensing that he would be put off by an offer of assistance. “I was hoping to do a consultation to maybe get one of these done on my chest.” He said, having finally opened the page flat on the counter.

The lions littering the page were Keith’s work. There was no doubt in her mind. Allura had tattooed enough of his drawings on his own skin that she’d be able to pick them out in the dark if the lines were drawn hard enough. “Where did you get this?” She asked, trying not to sound hostile. Art theft was rampant in the tattooing community and she wouldn’t let it happen to one of her best customers, especially since she also considered him a close friend. The man’s cheeks went pink and he stuttered a bit. “My friend is an artist.” He started, clearing his throat before continuing. “We went to the zoo and he was sketching, so I asked him to draw some of the lions for me.” Allura eyed him suspiciously for a moment. “Does this friend have a name?” She asked. The man looked immediately affronted. “Keith.” He said plainly. “Look, I can go somewhere else if you want.” His voice took on a hardened edge.

Everything clicked into place for her with that. The leather jacket and jawline that could cut glass should have clenched it immediately, but she was an artist not a detective. The new “friend” Keith had mentioned spending time with, the one he’d been going on and on about how sweet and kind and strong he was. He’d mentioned their date to the zoo to Allura during his last tattooing session, having absolutely denied it was a date, because “there’s no way someone like him is into someone like me, Allura, come on.” She held up her hands, “No, no, I’m sorry. Keith comes here a lot is all, I recognized his work and wanted to make sure you hadn’t stolen it.” His eyes and his posture softened at her words. “Oh, ok. Well that’s really cool of you, actually.” He said with a faraway smile. “His work is pretty one of a kind, isn’t it?” Allura tried hard not to giggle. He was absolutely done for and it was painfully obviously written clear across his face.

“It is absolutely unique and gorgeous.” She agreed. “And I think any of these would look great on you, which one’s your favorite?” She asked, the vibe of the conversation having eased back into a much more friendly one. “I was thinking this one.” She smiled as he pointed at a drawing that was very reminiscent of the one she’d just done on Keith. The lion was sitting in this one, not standing, facing slightly to the right this time. His mane was fluffed and blowing in the breeze, and he had that same hint of dangerous, predatory energy while still appearing aloof and regal.

“Great choice.” She replied sincerely. “I’ve done a lot of Keith’s work, I’m more than comfortable freehanding it, but I’m happy to use a stencil if that’s what you’d prefer.” She pulled a binder out of the desk drawer and laid it on the table, hundreds of small photos of her previous work was lovingly arranged in the plastic sleeves. The middle had a divider. “Up here is stenciled work, and the back is freehand. Feel free to take your time looking.”

She observed him as he poured through the book, comparing several pictures from the front and back in turns. Keith had described him as breathtaking, and he certainly wasn’t wrong. The scar across the bridge of his nose only made him more handsome, somehow sharpening his features even further than nature already had. She had to stifle a laugh as she noticed him clack the barbell in his tongue against the roof of his mouth while deep in thought. Keith had never stood a chance. He looked up at her with another polite smile. “I think freehand is fine. Your work is really incredible.” Praises for her art were the quickest path to excellent service. She’d gladly bend over backwards for a polite customer who claimed to be a fan.

“I’m so glad you think so.” She answered with a bright smile. “When were you thinking?” He pulled out his phone and opened his calendar. “When’s your next available appointment?” She pulled open her own shop calendar and hummed in thought. “Well, I have a Tuesday at 4:30. Or if you’ve not had any aspirin or alcohol in about 12 hours, we could do it now. I don’t have anyone else scheduled for 3 hours. That should be plenty of time provided it’s going in this area.” She made a circle with her hands in the air around one of his pecs. His eyes widened a little. “Or if you need more time to think about it. No rush.” He smiled wide.

“No, now is perfect. Keith’s away for work, so I’ll be able to show it off all healed up by the time he gets back.” Allura returned his grin and had him sign all the usual paperwork. He finally introduced himself as Shiro. She couldn’t wait for the frantic messages from Keith when he finally saw Shiro’s tattoo of his drawing. Allura led him back to the sterile tattooing room trying not to snicker about Keith’s reaction, it was sure to be priceless.

“Oh uh…” Shiro started, clearly nervous. He shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the hook next to the door. “Before we get started. There’s um. There’s kind of a lot…” Allura waited patiently again as he tried to find the right words. “There’s a lot of scarring. The spot I want the ink doesn’t have much, but it might be hard to look at.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes as he spoke. “Don’t worry about that at all. I promise there’s nothing you can show me that I would run from.” She meant it sincerely, and he appeared to not mistake it for a platitude, offering her a kind smile in return. “And, if I may be so bold.” She added quietly. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.” Shiro knew, of course, who she meant. A dark blush spread its way across his cheeks. “Here’s to hoping.” He replied with a slight chuckle.

He pulled the white shirt up over his head and with a practiced motion. She took in the scars around his missing arm first, they looked faded and pink- clearly an old injury. There were several other scars across his chest and stomach, some deep and still an angry purplish color, others not as severe and closer to the tone of his skin. “Not even close to the worst thing I’ve seen.” She said as she pulled on her gloves and set about opening all of the fresh packages. “Let me tell you about the ridiculous frat boy that came in a few years back.” She started her story as she set about preparing his skin for the ink. “You’ll NEVER believe what he wanted.” She pulled back and made a disgusted face. “Or where.” Shiro visibly relaxed and laughed a bit, coaxing her for the rest of the story as she started.

TO BE CONTINUED

[lighthouseroleplay]

ISABELLE ‘IZ’ PARK

                          ( 21 ,  cis woman , she/her )

♪♫ currently listening  ⧸⧸  stupid girl by garage

the bitterness of black tea, worn-in leather boots that stomp on the floor, killing every plant she owns but buying more just to try again. old t-shirts, the crunch of a popsicle on a warm day, neat, handwritten notes. the rattle of a windowpane as rain pours from dark clouds, a silver necklace with matching bracelet. evenings spent buried in history documentaries, stubborn frowns, flickering neon.

    •  moon started off as a lab partner your junior year; never much of a thought in your mind unless you were working on anatomy homework. you don’t mean to stumble upon your mother’s past, the future your father took on while forgetting all about you. he’s happy with his real family, his seemingly perfect daughter that you somehow happened to be paired up with in class. you can’t help but turn a cold shoulder to the girl you’ve paid only a little attention to for most of your life. as much as you want to let go of the bitterness, it hurts to think that she’s the one your father chose to care for.

    •  ackerman has been your closest friend for as long as you can remember. of course you heard the whispers about her family, the rumors about her that swirled through your small town, and yet you couldn’t bring yourself to care. she’s been by your side through everything, from first crushes to revelations about your family you never really expected. she softens your rough edges, brings caution when you’d rather throw it to the wind. even with her miles and miles away, she is a constant comforting presence in your life. 

taken by v/sloth  ⧸⧸  tiana tolstoi

tw: depression, cancer mention, attempted suicide

Y’know, you came out swinging, her mom said quietly, holding in a laugh. She dabbed a cotton swab soaked with iodine onto her daughter’s scraped knee and smiled at some far-off thought. Grandma had been the stern one. She’d seen the teacher’s note about “behavioral misconduct” and her wrinkled, fleshy face had gone hard. You’re too old for this, Isabelle Park. Brawling on the playground like I didn’t raise you better. Izzie had felt her eyes burning, but she’d been unable to find the words to explain what had happened: how some boys from her class had circled her like a pack of dogs and jeered, Where’s your dad? Where’s your dad? until she had felt that terrible shame bringing heat to her face, blood rushing behind her eyes, turning her sight dark. She had decked the biggest of them with a closed fist and left him crying in the dirt. Now, her mother applied the bandaids and smoothed the flyways at her temple. She kissed the cheek where tears were still drying. You weren’t a screamer, but I remember those tiny, tiny fists, swinging at anyone in reach. Izzie could see the memory that wasn’t even her’s: the tiny infant lifted up against the bright lights of the delivery room, batting the air as if to clear everyone away— the doctors, the nurses, even her own exhausted mother, watching in awe.

She isn’t sure when she realized that her mom wasn’t like other moms. She knew, as early as childhood awareness would allow, that her family wasn’t like other families. There was an absence in photographs and on parent signature forms where a father should have been, but that didn’t bother her; it wasn’t an ache she would feel until much later. Instead, Izzie grew up knowing mostly warmth and happiness in that run-down Victorian where the shingles slid off the roof every rainy season, and the gutters were constantly clogged with putrified leaves. She lived with her mother and her grandmother and the old, bristly fox terrier that her grandfather— long-dead before she was born— had left behind. Her grandmother was a fearsome pillar of a woman: stocky and broad-shouldered, her dark hair shot through with streaks of iron and pleated down her back. Nothing feeble about her; she seemed to grow more solid with each passing year, like an ancient oak. Often, she took Isabelle by the chin and turned her this way and that, saying, God broke the mold with you. But Izzie secretly liked to think God had re-used one of his favorite molds, the same one that he’d made her grandmother with. There was no one in the world she more reverently admired, no one she more fiercely wanted to become.

It was her mother who was the anomaly. She was different in a way that defied easy explanation; for many years, Grandma would not answer questions whenever Izzie ventured to ask them, instead ordering her to peel some more carrots in that clipped tone of voice that left no room for argument. But Izzie was an astute child. Nothing escaped her notice. She saw that her mother had a tendency to feel things in extremes; a soapy glass would slip from her grasp and pop into shards, and Izzie would watch her mother’s face crumple like cardboard left out in the rain, as if she’d just broken something irreplaceable. There were weeks of vegetative sadness, and dinners that Izzie and her grandmother ate alone because her mother refused to leave the darkened bedroom. Other times, she became sensitive and wild, highly reactive to the world around her. She’d throw fits at the blinking cashier who’d given her the wrong change, and snap unkindly at her daughter or her mother over minor grievances, making mountains out of molehills. Some days, though, she was transformed. The heavy clouds would shift; a burst of sunlight would bathe them all in warmth. Her mother would float into the kitchen and dole out kisses on the cheek, her face radiant with a pure, concentrated happiness— those were the times Izzie loved her the most. She loved her mother so hard in those episodes that later, she’d look back on them with a certain guilt, recognizing them for the mania that they were: her mom taking her out of school early, face flushed as if she’d been infused with someone else’s blood, taking her to the park to feed the ducks or to the aquarium three towns away. Always, she promised better adventures. Vacations to the redwood forests of California. Trips to see the mirrored skyscrapers of New York.

All throughout her childhood, Izzie was merely a spectator to the unpredictable moods her mother cycled through. She never paid much attention to how her grandmother handled them, the way she’d take her grown daughter into her arms like a child and coax her back from the brink with soft words meant only for her. Her grandmother was a good caretaker. She was the mast they could all lash themselves to in a storm. Because of her, they weathered each gale and came out on the other side, shuddering, shivering, but still whole. Izzie, meanwhile, had sprung up two inches above her classmates and stopped dealing black eyes to anyone who incurred her wrath. Instead, her anger had refined itself into a sharpened point; there was a condensed, dark kernel in the very center of her, and from it she began to cast a sort of furious solitude around herself, a shield that very few could penetrate. By late middle school, she wore only black. She found a pair of men’s Doc Martens at the thrift store and was thrilled by their thick-soled meanness, even if she had to double up her socks to compensate for the size. And she no longer went by Isabelle, or Izzie— it was Iz now, her elegant name shorn to a single brute syllable. It suited her. With that keen elfin face always watchful beneath eyebrows thin and arced like scythes, you could tell that she was a sharp one. She had edges to watch out for.

You might have an artist’s temperament, her grandmother noted one day, raising her eyebrows at the smudged ink sketches that Iz had scattered throughout her math notebook, which had been sent home with another exasperated note from her teacher. But not the talent. Her grandmother’s truths never concerned themselves with what they happened to destroy. Still, she was right; Iz was not an artist. She’d quit piano after a month, too impatient with her clumsy fingers, and her drawings, though painstakingly done, were flat and lifeless on the page. But while she didn’t have the ability to make art, Iz felt that she could still appreciate it. That had to count for something— she was desperate to distinguish herself from the small-town folk of Tennebrin Port in some way, convinced that their dull inner lives were nothing like her own bone-deep hunger for more. Movies in particular captivated her. When she had money, she spent it on DVD rentals or movie tickets. When she didn’t have money, she pestered the concession boys until one of them let her sneak in through the theater’s back door. Then she would creep from one back row to the next, watching movie after movie until all the enormous screens flickered to black, and only stopped doing this once the manager threatened to ban her. She consumed books and articles and Wikipedia pages with a voracious appetite, determined to know every little fact, to understand every intricacy of the film-making process. She began to worship her favorite directors; the walls of her bedroom became plastered with posters for Carpenter and Kubrick, Wong Kar-Wai, Fincher, Kurosawa. Once she started taking French classes in high school, she framed the poster for Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless above her bed.

When she thinks back on that summer, the summer that ushered in the worst year of her life, she remembers only pale, bled skies and unbroken heat, black flies stewing in the air, the briney smell of the ocean stinging her nostrils more sharply than ever before. Memories can change depending on what meaning we assign to them; even before Andrea Clare drowned, Iz remembers how that summer felt wrong, like a stagnant pool of water brewing disease. She had never known the girl that well— besides Angela, her friendships were limited to those she exchanged a few words with at lunch or in study hall, or those she negotiated with during the terse diplomacy of group projects. Iz would not disrespect a dead girl by pretending they’d ever been friends. But the looping footage of her death— and all the sound and sensation she came to associate with it— shifted something inside of her. She’d come to think of herself as an impenetrable fortress; she’d felt protected by the aloofness that kept her apart from the world. But as the days of July and August crawled by, with Tennebrin Port stunned into a stupor of grief, she was beginning to understand what death was and what it did. All of them on the shore shared in this terrible knowledge together; she wondered often about the others and how they were able to find space for it inside themselves, but never did she have the nerve to ask.

If Andrea’s death didn’t feel like an omen at the time, it certainly became one in retrospect. Her grandmother coughed blood into the sink one morning, as the leaves outside the window rustled in shades of copper and gold. Then came the quick raging of her cancer, an illness like a wild animal tearing through her body, and then she was gone, leaving only Iz and her mother behind in the old house, listening to the wind moan despondently through the attic. Iz took the death hard. She sank so deeply into herself that she emitted no light, becoming a hermit within her own body. Her grief made her turn teeth on well-meaning neighbors and teachers and classmates. She told Angela to fuck off so many times that the poor girl— her only real friend, the only one who understood the totality of her loss— finally did, and Iz wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself after that. Through that long, brutal winter, she’d come home from school and find her mother in bed as she’d been for weeks, her face swollen with tears, the ashtray by her bedside overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. Iz would linger in the doorway and watch the blue light of the TV bouncing off her mother’s vacant gaze; then she’d close the door, and feel the gulf between them widening each time she crept upstairs, ashamed, in the dark. There was no way across it. Without her grandmother, the remaining Park women were as separate as two ice floes on the black Arctic sea. Each was now alone in a way that was permanent.

In the blue-and-red strobe of the ambulance, Iz wore a mask of calm just as her grandmother had, so many times before, and spent a week with her mother in the hospital watching monitors zig-zag like seismographs measuring aftershocks. Then she brought her back to the drafty, creaking Victorian under strict orders to never leave her unsupervised. Difficult to do, considering she was still in high school. Neighbors stepped in to help when she finally broke down enough to ask. Friends squirreled her study notes and cheatsheets for all the classes she missed, but still her grades— never better than average— began a slow descent towards rock-bottom. Her dreams of college felt laughable now; all the possible outcomes, all the imagined opportunities, all of them dwindled to nothing. She saw a long, dark patch of life waiting for her like a mile of black ice up ahead. This would be it: she’d be her mother’s sole caretaker, managing medications and hiding the alcohol, forcing her outside for some fresh air, cooking meals that she wouldn’t eat, steadily accumulating resentments like tallymarks on a prison wall. On and on, ad infinitum, until maybe she too succumbed to whatever sleeping gene had made her mother this way. Then they’d both be rattling around this old house, as crazy as two cuckoos. The future was almost as comical as it was bleak.

Somewhere around this time, her partnership with Moon began. The girl was a perfect example of how kind life could be to those protected from its worst blows: she was pretty and popular, never at a shortage of friends, never at a shortage of admirers. Things seemed to come easily to her as a virtue of her privilege. Once, this might’ve prompted nothing more than an eye-roll from Iz— and maybe some snide comments to Angela about the bourgeoisie— but now, Moon’s easy, effortless existence confronted her on a daily basis with just how shitty her own circumstances had become. The contrast was as plain as night and day when they sat next to each other in class: Moon lovely and immaculate in her expensive sweater sets and designer-brand jeans, Iz pale and fatigued in her ratty Goodwill finds which only came in mismatched shades of black, her stomach curdling with a childish bitterness that couldn’t be helped. But it turned out that Moon was also unexpectedly kind; whenever Iz didn’t show up for class, or didn’t have the energy to complete her portion of a lab report, Moon would cover without needing to be asked. It was this— the sparing of her sensitive pride— that she was most grateful for. As winter thawed into a more merciful spring, a tentative friendship took root, and began to grow.

They’d met at the Has Bean to cram for finals, and ended up lingering long after their study group disbanded, notes pushed to the side and dregs of coffee growing cold. Once the sole barista began sweeping the floors and shooting them looks of increasing urgency, Iz offered Moon a ride home in her rust-flecked Pontiac; the girl declined, saying that her father was already on his way. They waited outside. April was raw this year, blustery and cold. The wind rattled all the empty branches on this quiet street. Mr. Moon pulled up in his sleek car and rolled down the passenger side window to call to his daughter; when he put his eyes on Iz, she felt their weight and raised her own. The gaze she met was unsettlingly dark, just like hers. He stared. She stared back. They looked at each other like two startled animals caught under the same porchlight. She saw the pointed features and almond eyes, the parts of her which had never belonged to her mother’s side of the family, the strange, subdued fear waking in Mr. Moon’s expression. Instantly, she felt sick. She turned away, leaving Moon to blink after her in confusion, and walked quickly down the street with her head ducked and her hands balled into fists in her pockets. Then she sat in her car without moving until dusk became dark. Her knuckles were blanched on the wheel; each successive shudder made her feel like she might shake apart. She knew, she knew. She knew whose face she’d just seen.

It would be another month before she approached him. She couldn’t ask her mother for fear of the domino effect that it might trigger, but the certainty she felt after that first encounter didn’t need confirmation. Mr. Moon, for his part, agreed willingly to meet with her and didn’t ask why. They sat across from each other in the vinyl booths of some roadside diner, a safe distance away from town, and he ordered a plate of fries she didn’t touch, a soda that went watery with the ice that melted in it. Coolly, she sipped a glass of tap and watched the emotions darting openly across his face; the worry, anxiety, fear, shame, guilt. He didn’t want her to tell Moon, of course. He was a reputable man in Tenebrin, and he had a family to protect. Hearing the word family, Iz felt the surge of sour, tainted groundwater welling up inside of her, bringing all her toxins to the surface. The spite in her voice could’ve killed any growing thing. I don’t give a shit about your family. The immensity of her rage shocked her; she’d sustained all this anger towards a man she’d never even met. It had existed deep inside of her all these years, enduring, building layer upon layer in a process so slow that she had never noticed the added weight— until now. This was the heavy, compressed anger underlying everything else; she’d reserved especially for her father, and she wanted him to feel its impact like a blow from her own fist. I’m not going to say anything, and not because I don’t think you deserve to have your life ruined, because you do. It’s because I want nothing to do with you or your shitty family. And because my mother doesn’t need more shit being talked about her in town. Mr. Moon cleared his throat. They lapsed into silence as a waitress cleared their cold food, after which Iz wasted no time in getting to real reason she’d arranged this meeting: holding him accountable for what he’d done— or rather, failed to do.

This was the plan that would take her where she needed to go: she would go to a liberal arts college, one with a decent film program, somewhere inland where she wouldn’t constantly smell salt on the air or hear the distant, dull roar of the waves to remind her of this place. Tennebrin had become unbearable after all that had happened here; she wanted to rip herself out of the ground like a plant, roots snapping. The school would still be within state, close enough to home to prevent the guilt of abandoning her mother— she’d come back for breaks and vacations, and in the meantime, he would pay for a live-in nurse and whatever other types of care her mother might need. And though she wasn’t asking him to put her through college, a stipend towards tuition seemed appropriate, didn’t it? She laid out her demands with flinty eyes, making it clear what the repercussions would be if he didn’t comply. Iz had intended for this to be a scene of blackmail straight out of a Scorsese flick; in the month leading up to this moment, she had indulged vicious daydreams of how it would play out, how he’d stammer through apologies only for her to cut him off mid-sentence, denying him any forgiveness, any absolution of guilt. But life lacked the satisfaction of movies. With his quiet, calm manner, Mr. Moon only nodded as he watched cars leaving the darkened parking lot, throwing their headlights against the window. When he looked at her again, near the end, there was something in his tired face that his eyes were fighting to explain. I just need you to know, I tried. I would have tried for longer. But your grandmother… He stopped because of whatever change had come over her expression. Iz let him continue speaking, trying to keep down the thing that was rising swiftly in her stomach, displacing her heart into her throat. What should have come as a surprise to her, didn’t— it made sense, the role that her grandmother had played in his departure. The woman had always had a way of seeing straight into the marrow of people; if she’d sensed weakness in this man, so handsome and well-groomed in his dark business suit, then she must have been right to make the choice she did. As Mr. Moon told the story, Iz heard the explanation in her grandmother’s hoarse voice: he didn’t have the stomach for it. So she had forced him out, in the best interest of her daughter and then unborn granddaughter. She had released him. And the people of Tenebrin Port, with their eyes averted, had let a veil fall over this event, this shattering of what could’ve been a family, and the town had moved on in the way that small towns do, carefully preserving the secrets of those living inside it.

The day of Andrea’s death is imprinted in her memory for reasons she understands, and some that she doesn’t, but Iz forced that entire chapter of her life closed when she graduated from Cecil Morgan and moved away from Tenebrin Port. Four years at Whitman College afforded her the distance to blunt that memory and so many others; she retained her acerbic wit, her dark sense of humor, her sometimes turbulent moods, but her sharp edges became sanded down and she discovered that being around people was not such a terrible thing after all, which in turn made her a much more tolerable presence. She excelled in her film classes and did passably in others, still very much governed by her own interests. She partied, experimented with boys and girls alike, left dents in a couple hearts, collected a few scratches on the hard exterior of her own. College gave her exactly what she’d always been after. Freedom. It was a sensation that outweighed any sense of guilt towards her mother, but even her mother seemed better in these last few years, cooking all the meals whenever Iz came home for holidays, her nurse more like a companion, her smiles genuine as she listened to the sanitized stories Iz told of friends and eccentric professors and annoying roommates. All in all, Isabelle Park was doing just fine when the dreams started. Their onset didn’t seem to coincide with any anniversary she could pinpoint— not Andrea’s death, nor her grandmother’s. At first they were murky and shapeless, hybrids of imagination and memory that didn’t leave much of themselves behind, but slowly, they gained definition. There was the beach, the pale rind of sand and the dark, glossy ocean. There was Alderman’s Point where the old lighthouse stood, looming and sinister. In the dream just as in the memory, lightening ripped open the sky; in its sudden ghostlight, there was Andrea Clare, resurrected without logic or warning. Bobbing in the surf, her mouth open in a scream that the gulls echoed as they wheeled around her, the waves lapping over her, choking her, then erasing her entirely. Each dream replayed her death with startling clarity. After the first couple of doozies, Iz started to borrow her roommate’s prescription Ambien. That did the trick nicely— she coasted all the way through finals on heavy, dreamless sleep, and began to believe that the night terrors would simply resolve themselves like the strange fluke they were, weaning herself off the pills once it seemed like enough time had passed. But a few days before she was set to come home for the summer— newly graduated, completely unemployed, and staring down the barrel of her future— she had the worst dream to date. Everything was the same, except for Andrea’s scream; this time it was her own mother’s voice that was screaming, and she was screaming her daughter’s name, over and over, begging for help.

[childrenofhypnos]

Chapter 15: Mad Science

Past the castle’s portcullis was an long and empty courtyard, and the far side of it stood a yawning entrance. Weeds grew up through the courtyard flagstones. The entrance of the castle had once been covered by two great oak doors banded with iron; one now hung open on an iron hinge the length of Emery’s leg, and the other lay across the floor of the entrance hall, covered in a layer of dust. Emery and Wes had to step around it to enter.

Moonlight filtered through the high narrow windows behind them, illuminating dancing dust motes in the air. To their left and right was darkness, no walls in sight, and stretching out before them was a wide green carpet covering the smooth stone floor. The ceiling vaulted high over their heads, held aloft by two rows of columns that led from the ruined doors to a large stone staircase at the far end of the hall. The staircase, too, had been destroyed. It looked as if a great fist had punched sideways through its middle; the bottom half of the stairs was scattered to their left in chunks of stone bigger than Emery’s whole body, and the intact remains of the upper half hung over the gaping hole that remained. The green carpet climbed the stairs until it reached the rubble, then fell down into the hole.

The place had an eerie gaping silence; it gave Emery the feeling that something had been making noise just before they entered. Their footsteps made no sound against the carpet.

“Bets on Frankenstein monsters?” Emery said. Her voice echoed up to the ceiling.

Wes looked sick. “Please don’t talk. It’s creepy enough in here already.”

There were no other visible doors in the room, and the staircase, like the walls, disappeared into darkness. They approached the hole in the stairs. The carpet tripped down over the rubble left behind, then fell straight, hanging into what must have been a secret passage beneath the staircase, now revealed. A ten foot drop led the way to another staircase. This one curved downward, and around the bend was the faintest glow of firelight.

Wes made an unhappy noise.

“Yes, we have to go down,” Emery said. “Even if we don’t find anything, we have to play out the dream to get out of here.”

Her voice was higher than she liked. She pushed sweaty hair off her forehead, then looked at her hand, confused. She hadn’t been sweaty until just then. Her heart beat faster, too, and her throat tightened. Wes didn’t look like he was faring much better; though a chill settled through the castle, a sheen of sweat coated his forehead.

“This is just the fear the Dream wants us to feel,” Emery said. “It’s a nightmare, this was going to happen. The more fear we feel, the closer we are to something important.”

Wes nodded. Emery lowered herself into the hole first, climbing carefully down the rubble that had partially filled the secret passageway. Wes followed. They kept their weapons out as they descended the curving staircase into the castle’s basement, and Emery prayed they didn’t run into anything else wearing a suit of armor.

At the bottom of the curving stair was yet another heavy door. A padlock the size of Emery’s head hung on a black chain looped several times around the door handle and an iron ring on the wall.

“I can try shooting this,” Emery said, “or you can dreamform it away. I’m not super eager to shoot anything else around here, so dreamforming is my choice.”

Wes shouldered up beside her in the narrow passage and took the padlock. He looked it over, frowning, and said, “This is a strong dream. I don’t know if I can get rid of the whole padlock, but I can probably just…” He grabbed the chain instead. The chain creaked in his fist as he squeezed tight around it, and with a loud crink, a link gave way. Wes unraveled the chain and let the padlock fall to the ground.

“You need to teach me how to do that,” Emery said. “Without getting a nosebleed, I mean. Obviously I can do it if I try, I just don’t want to kill myself in the process.”

“Oh, obviously.”

Emery ignored him and pushed open the door.

Inside was a laboratory out of an old black-and-white horror film. Torches along the walls burned with emerald fire, casting the room in sickly shades of green. Emery and Wes stood on above it all; a staircase to their left followed the wall down into the room. At the base of the stairs were sturdy wooden tables cluttered with test tubes, beakers, piles of reagents like hair and claws. Pages of scrawled notes spilled from a large leatherbound notebook. Against the left side of the room, cages of all sizes had been stacked up in a pyramid, and inside them huddled the unmoving forms of furred animals. Against the right side of the room, chains hanging from the ceiling held up body parts too large to belong to any human: arms and legs as big around as a horse’s body; hulking shoulders and torsos; slack-jawed heads without hair or eyes. Every body part was made of different shades of skin held together by black stitches as big as Emery’s pinkie. The back wall was empty, but the stone appeared to have been scored many times, over and over, from the floor to the ceiling.

Emery motioned to the body parts. “What’d I say? Frankenstein.”

Wes rolled his eyes.

They crept down the short staircase, toward the animal cages. Emery knew through the logic of the Dream that the animals had come from the woods, that the scientist who lived here had captured them and was using them for study. One little creature in a smaller cage on top peeked out at Emery from under a batlike wing; its eyes were sickly, poisonous green, and they glowed. In the cages below it were a lizard, a sort of porcupine with huge black quills, and in the biggest cage at the bottom, a doglike creature curled in a tight ball. The faint glow of their eyes showed through their eyelids. All of them were missing patches of fur, some had blood caked on their snouts or legs, and the porcupine had been stripped of half its quills.

Wes picked up the leatherbound notebook on the table and began rifling through the pages. “He’s researching something. Not all of this is in that dream-language from before—some is in English, and there are pictures. Diagrams. Dream windows. Gateways.” His frown deepened. “Dreamhunter weapons. Sleeping sand.” He turned a few pages and began to read. “‘The existence of dreamseekers predates dreamhunters by several decades…The shift to dreamhunter power in the Hypnos State began as early as the 1920s…’” He flipped a little farther. “Floating hair. Doppelgängers? ‘…a surge in numbers…new policies…’ more of it is nonsense now…” He turned another page and stopped. His face went ashen.

“What?” Emery said.

Wes’s lips pressed together in a thin line. He held the notebook out for her.

Inside was a drawing of a doppelgänger in ink. The long tendrils of her black hair floated around her head like she was underwater, and her body was only an outline, naked but undetailed. Everything except for her face. It was detailed enough, and she stared out at the viewer with eyes a piercing white against the black of her lashes and thick eyebrows.

Emery’s insides shifted sideways. The pressure of the Dream crushed in around her.

“It’s me,” she croaked. “This is me—my doppelgänger. But why—why would he draw this? He’s been following me. Does he—does he know something? He can’t like, send people’s doppelgängers after them, can he? I wouldn’t even have a doppelgänger yet, we’re too young, we’re way too young, and—”

“Emery.” Wes was shaking his head. “There’s no way you have a doppelgänger. No way. He’s insane, he’s got to be. We weren’t even supposed to go near him, and now we’re inside his head. This is just a drawing. It doesn’t mean anything.” He took the book back. “I’ll read through this and see if I can find something more concrete. You finish searching the room.”

Emery almost ripped the book out of his hands again. It was her doppelgänger—the Sandman had been following her. If anyone should get to look through his thoughts, it was her. But Wes was already turning away, looking at that sketch again, and Emery marched away from him so she didn’t have to look at it.

The body parts hanging from chains hadn’t come from the forest, like the animals. Emery got no information from the Dream at all about whose skin and innards had been stitched together to make them, but she knew the scientist was making something. Strings of tissue and gristle dangled from the open ends of the arms and legs and the big torsos. They should have smelled horrible, but the only scent in the air was something just past sweet, like decomposing flowers, that had also pervaded the woods. Emery spent only a moment looking up into an eyeless head that could have swallowed her without hardly opening its mouth before her stomach turned over and she had to walk away.

She went instead to the scores on the back wall, which appeared to have been carved into the stone with some kind of metal instrument. The grooves were shallow but many, harsh repeating jagged lines. Closer to the floor and ceiling they became deeper and more violent. Emery followed the intensity of the lines to the center of the wall, where they shrank and shrank and shrank until they began to take shape, until she realized the repetition was not the work of madness, but of writing. Five letters, over and over again.

In the very center of the wall, where the writing was small and calm, the word had been etched into the stone the very first time. Though they were the same letters and it was the same word, only the smallest one was legible; all the others blurred and distorted when Emery tried to read them. She had to lean close to the smallest one, at the center of all the chaos, and her nose almost touched the wall.

It wasn’t a word. It was a name.

“Klaus,” Emery read.

Like a stone tossed into a calm lake, the name rippled the fabric of the nightmare around them. The entire room flexed in, pressure squeezing Emery’s insides so tightly she almost vomited, then it flexed out, ballooning until she got lightheaded. When it snapped back into place, it rocked the room, throwing Wes into a stone pillar and Emery against the animal cages. One of the stitched heads came loose from its chains and hit the floor with a wet and heavy THUD. The animals sprang awake in their cages with screeches and barks. The tiny batlike creature that had peered out at Emery before struck at once, sinking its needlelike teeth into one of the fingers Emery had wrapped around its cage bars to keep herself upright.

The pain shot up her hand and wrist; she whipped out a Peacemaker, shoved the barrel through the cage bars, and fired. In a flash of purple light and a bang that echoed off the walls, the little bat because a spray of green blood on the wall. Emery pulled her hand back. Where the knuckle of her index finger had been there was now a torn and bloody mess. It throbbed in time with her heartbeat.

“Are you okay?” Wes grabbed her collar and tugged her gently away from the bottom cage, where the burly dog monster—complete with fangs like a sabertooth tiger—was attacking the bars near Emery’s shins.

“How hard do you think it is to dreamform a new finger?” she asked.

“You said something right before that happened. What was it?”

Emery started to repeat it, then thought better of it and nodded toward the wall. “Those marks. I think those are his name. I said his name, and the Dream reacted. But—look!”

The ripple had shaken a portion of the back wall loose. Stones had fallen from their careful placement, revealing a hole to yet another room. Stones portruded from the jagged edges of the hole like the teeth of a zipper. More green torchlight flickered in the room beyond.

Emery and Wes made their way carefully around the remains of the wall and looked inside. The new room was half the size of the first, lined with those green torches. Wicked metal instruments hung from a rack on the far wall. Chains swayed in the darkness of the ceiling, disturbed by the Dream’s fluctuation. The only furniture was a long metal table in the center of the floor, and on the table laid a young woman in a filthy dress. Leather cuffs around her wrists and ankles held her to the table. Pale hair fanned around her head.

“Is she dead?” Emery said over the continuing raucous of the animals in their cages.

As if in response, the young woman moaned.

Emery and Wes sprang through the hole in the wall and hurried to the table. The woman’s eyes were closed, her breathing shallow, her skin the color of wax.

Emery began undoing the restraints on the woman’s ankles, picking at the buckle with her nine good fingers. “Get her wrists, Wes.”

Wes stood at the end of the table, frowning at the woman. “You think this is a good idea?”

“Are you kidding me? She’s strapped down to an exam table in a mad scientist lab! Don’t you watch movies? We can’t leave her here.” Emery got one cuff off and started on the next.

Wes started on the wrist restraints. “I don’t like this.”

Emery wished the animals would shut up; their shrieks and barks were making her hair stand on end, and she couldn’t hear footsteps coming down the steps from the entry hall. Her heart pounded in her head and in her finger, which was now leaking a green pus from her wound. Sweat gathered at the nape of her neck, the small of her back, between her legs. It dripped into her eyes, and when she tried to blink it away, her vision split double, then came back together.

When the woman was free, Wes pulled her arms over his shoulders and hefted her onto his back. She looked like she didn’t weight much more than a feather pillow. The woman moaned again, pale hair falling around her gaunt face.

“Let’s…let’s get her back to the village.” Emery’s voice came out slurred. Wes gave her a strange look. “‘M fine. Just…go…”

Emery followed Wes back through the hole in the wall, though when she tried to climb out after him, her foot caught on the loose rubble and she tripped back into the laboratory, catching herself on her hands before she hit the ground. Green pus oozed from her finger and onto the floor; her whole hand gave a vicious throb that made her head spin. She stood again.

Their path back upstairs was slow, and when they reached the hidden entrance to the laboratory, Wes had to boost Emery up so she could grab the ledge and pull herself back into the entry hall, and then they had to slowly and painstakingly lift and pull the young woman up after. Emery’s head throbbed and her finger screamed, but they got the woman sprawled along the stone floor, and Emery reached back down to pull Wes up. He slung the young woman over his back again and frowned at Emery.

“Do you feel okay? You’re not walking straight.”

Emery pushed against his elbow. “Walk. Need to get out of here.”

They started toward the fallen front doors of the castle. The floor rocked back and forth under Emery’s feet. They’d left the screeching of the animals behind down below, but somehow the silence was worse. The silence left a ringing in Emery’s ears that wouldn’t go away.

Moonlight spilled into the couryard outside the castle’s front entrance. The walls around the courtyard were too high to see over, but when Emery turned to look behind them, the moon loomed over the castle, five times as large as it had been when they’d gone inside. She could see every crater and pockmark in its surface; it was so big she could only see its top half curving over the castle. It was so big, Emery craned back to see it over the tallest of the castle’s towers, and the ground lurched beneath her. She fell hard on her back in the dirt and the weeds.

“Emery!” Wes appeared over her. He got darker in the moonlight; the young woman got brighter, as if the light reflected off her pale skin and hair.

Emery started pushing herself up. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine”

“Shut up. I’m fine.”

“Emery…”

She pushed herself onto her elbows and glared up at him.

The young woman, still hanging over his shoulder, glared back.

Her eyes were open and locked on Emery, and they were the same bright glowing green as the animals in the lab. Her pale hair, strands shimmering silver, began to weave itself back along her head; her dirty shift had become a long white dress, and it lifted into the air behind Wes like sheets billowing in the wind. Then her body, too, began to lift away from him, and Wes’s eyes went wide.

Like the moon, the young woman grew. She towered over them, the layers of her dress flowing in a nonexistent breeze, her eyes like beacons. Her arms were long and pale, her fingers each tipped with a wicked white fingernail. In Emery’s head she heard the name, like the Dream was whispering it directly into her ear.

Witch of the Wood.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

High on the courtyard wall, above the portcullis, stood a figure all in black. His hair, too, had gone luminscent in the moonlight; his black goggles hid his eyes. Emery blinked and the Sandman disappeared from the wall and came charging at them across the courtyard.

Wes grabbed Emery’s arm and hauled her to her feet. Her knees had given out; she could no longer stand, much less run. Her hand felt like it was on fire. Wes grunted, slinging an arm around her waist and taking on her weight. The Dream shifted around them; the ground rose up around the witch and grabbed at her flowing skirts. Emery tried desperately to lift her feet and help Wes move them forward, but her toes and ankles had gone numb. The portcullis loomed before them and the witch screamed, horrible and piercing, behind them. The pressure of the Dream crawled in through Emery’s ears and squeezed her brain.

Edgar, she thought. Edgar and his sweaters. Grandpa Al and his tea. Mom’s weapon is a cannon. Dad’s is a claymore. Jacqueline makes order and Joel makes chaos. The student council room will be warm and cozy right now. XVIII. The quotes on the Fenhallow steps. I will be one of those quotes someday. I will not die here. Wes’s eyes. Wes’s eyes are black. Wes’s eyes are black because they are dreamforms.

“The dean!” Wes gasped.

Emery raised her head. They’d made it through the portcullis. There was the blurry span of the bridge in the moonlight, and the hard line of the forest past that, and the Dream groaned and rippled as a light pierced the nightmare. The trees bubbled outward and exploded. The bridge fell to pieces under their feet, but they didn’t fall with it. A man appeared before them. The light coalesced into a sword in his hand, as bright as the sun. His eyes burned with it, round and flat. Reflecting. Glasses.

“Dad?” she said.

“No, Em,” the man replied.

He turned, drew his sword through the air, and tore a hole in the world.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos —> Turns Out, Poison Isn’t Fun)