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| Crisis; For Lilieth | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 25 2017, 07:16 PM (99 Views) | |
| Belkonas | Jul 25 2017, 07:16 PM Post #1 |
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ὁ θυμὸς ἀλγῶν ἀσφάλειαν οὐκ ἔχει.
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(TW: Explicit suicide, dismemberment, body horror... etc.) In the end it was little more than a boy who did it, which didn’t make him feel any better. He was weaving and ducking between swords and shields, whipping vines, the hooves of centaurs -- he’d been in a lot of fights, but he hadn’t been in one like this. When the boy slipped into his line of sight he did it quickly, ramming his gladius into Florens’ chest with perfect precision, sliding it between the pieces of his armor like it was a thing he’d been born to do. Florens got a good look at him just then. Underneath his helmet he had eyes that were very blue, and a scattering of freckles across his strong nose. He was crying out, saying, “Oh my gods,” probably because Florens wasn’t bleeding; he was wrenching out his sword and looking at it, and looking at the wound, from which a flurry of mushroom-like appendages was beginning to sprout, and then he started screaming in a way that made Florens’ head hurt. I’ll make this quick, son, thought Belkonas, maneuvering himself and then his blade around -- but then an unexpected thing happened. The young soldier managed to lop one of his arms off. Well, he thought, looking at it, and he was thoroughly confounded. A roaring sound had begun blasting through his ears. In the time it took him to understand that he was down a limb -- and, consequently, to watch as the severed arm flowered and became its own organism, stretching out long pale feet, its hand opening and spreading like the leaves of a bone-and-blood flower -- the young soldier had rammed him another few times. And another. And another. And soon he was stumbling back while the young pride of Auberon’s Destiny was butchering him in nearly every way, the look on his face so distraught that Belkonas might have felt a little pity, if he weren’t the object of the butchery. More and more strangenesses bloomed from Florens’ body, its limbs sprouting their own vine-like limbs; after a few moments, he was hardly recognizable. “Fuck! What are you?” the soldier muttered, then began shrieking: “Die! Die! Die!” You don’t have any way to react to that. The thing that thought it was Florens scrambled backwards, crabwalked on its freakish appendages; it had no concept of where each queer extension of it was whipping and whirling, entangling itself and others. In its agony it bruised itself against buildings crawling with the new vines of the forest’s insurrection, wheeling and slamming into further and further obstacles in its frantic flight. “Gods,” breathed the soldier, nearly dropping his blade. He regained his grip on it in no time, though, and the thing that had been Belkonas just a few seconds ago, the thing that was still grappling at the man’s memories like a ship during a storm, squealed: it saw the cold steel edge coming toward it, thought wildly, feverishly, can I survive this? Shit, shit -- and it was real and unholy and incredible. He was in squirming, crawling pieces! The killing blade had come to quarter him, and it had swept through his fibrous flesh like the chopping of so many mushrooms. † The hours flooded by and transformed into days. The alien was in too many pieces to think like a person, of course: it could only crawl, keeping track of its pieces and knitting them together where it could. It realized that the battle was over, and it assumed, by the hazy warmth-shapes of people that it sensed in the streets, that the Men had won. If the Men had won, then it was no longer welcome. It had to flee. It had to find a cool, dark place, and eventually it found one, dividing itself into so many pieces and slipping through various gratings; all of its pieces found one another, scuttling in the damp darkness. There it nested in a spacious place where the tiniest of pipes connected to one another, where Madrid’s blood-and-war-laced refuse met dry hollows that led to ancient catacombs. It began to knit its fragmented body together, drinking in the moisture and listening to the distant rush and drip of water, reveling in dimness broken only by flickering lights that slid in through gratings in the streets. † Who am I? Who am I? Florens remembered the first time he’d ever died and how easy it was, pushing the pugio through the tender flesh of his belly. In the moments between the dying and the waking, he remembered, it had been black like pitch, and there was that question in his mind of how long it would last -- when, as Phoebe might’ve put it, Thaenon would turn the light off. But that dark god hadn’t decided it was time for him to go. He’d woken like a revenant, unkillable, and had just kept going, always keeping his fist clenched around something, never giving himself time to think. Now he had plenty of time to think, and he didn’t like it very much. More relevantly, he didn’t like what he had to think about. On the one hand, his physical condition was at least as distressing as being dead. Most of the people he’d known and loved in life would’ve run him off with pitchforks, looking like this -- and worse, he didn’t know what any of his limbs were called, he couldn’t see in the traditional sense, couldn’t talk, and he was aware, even, that he wasn’t breathing, which was really a special experience. On the other, it had finally hit him that he really and truly wasn’t himself -- Florens, that is. He’d known he might be a ghost or a zombie or some sort of experiment, but he wasn’t prepared to come to the sudden realization, true from any angle, that he wasn’t the same lifeform that he had been in his memories. That his whole identity was something he’d stolen or borrowed, that Phoebe wasn’t his wife and Alcaeus wasn’t his son, that he’d never been a general, that the real memories were the just-plain-damned-weird images that rushed into his head every day in greater numbers: of space and time and colors he didn’t even have names for. That was all bad, and he was having trouble finding anything good. There was a lot of pain, that was for sure, and while he was knitting himself back together, he was struggling to move. Occasionally noises from the streets sounded closer than usual, and he screwed himself up with fear like a beaten dog; he knew that if anyone came down here, they’d skewer him worse than he was already skewered. Did he even want to live? He wasn’t sure what kind of life he’d have, but he couldn’t say no; he, or rather Florens, or whoever the two of them were now, had never said no to that question, not even when he’d ended his own life. Even then, he’d thought of Phoebe and wanted to live as the last breath ebbed out of him. Strangely, the dimness and all the little sounds of the sewers calmed and pleased him. It was a place he’d never been in life, though he’d always wondered what crept around down here -- every time he stepped over a grating and heard the subtle rush, he’d entertained a great deal of silly thoughts about exploring the catacombs beneath even the sewers. Presently he heard footsteps -- loud footsteps that splashed as if they were in the sewers themselves. His body, though it still looked like a seething mass of whipping limbs and bones and saprophyte and awful mouths, was healed, to an extent; wincing, he moved back, trying to discern where the sound was coming from. There was no point in hiding; the corridor came to an end where he was, and he knew that the light from the grating above washed over each and every bit of him in its pale, filtering way. He forced one of his mouths into a form that was nearly human, drooling with pain and effort: “Who’s... there...? Go away...” Edited by Belkonas, Jul 25 2017, 07:23 PM.
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| Lilieth | Jul 30 2017, 04:20 AM Post #2 |
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Now the war was over, Lilieth had time to herself. And it also meant she had time to search for traces of her own era. A quick trip to the library and comparaison of current topology with what she remembered of her own time lead to a direct conclusion : There was like NOTHING she could remotely recognize. She had been made prisonner for way too long, even the ground had moved, what was once staring at the sky may very well be deep underground now. And that was what she was hoping for. There was little to no chance any remain of her civilization, or or any civilization of her era, could have make it to present days on the surface. At most she may be able to find some scrap and some stones that were once part of a great structure, but she was not that interested in archeology considering she had been there to live this said events. Underground was another matter. From the great Madrid library (or what remained of it), she found that Madrid had been raised over the ruin of an old city, using the olds tunnels as basis for its sewer. And here she was, exploring the said sewer in the hope to see some entrance to a deeper level. Thank to madrid current lack of citizen, and to the occasional summer floods, the only think streaming in the channel was clear water and not human filth. Lilieth look at the running water with hope : Since it was not stagnating, there was high hope for the tunnels to go way deeper, meaning she was likely in the good direction. She raised her torch to get a look at the murals : At this point it was still "modern" sotoan architecture, so she was still above the old suken ruin. Lilieth caught some from the corner of her eye at an intersection. You know the mad instinctive jump cat make when they see something that should be here? That's more or less what happened too. Casting a side glance at Belkonas Lilieth jumped out in genuine scared surprised, and end up falling on her ass in the water, extinguishing her torch. That was not like she actually need it to see, but the presence of light made the underground exploration a bit less creepy. Seeing how she wouldn't be able to light it again, she let it go and stood up, casting a good look at the living pool of barf that just talked to her. Since it seem pretty harmless, she calmed herself and walk toward it. She squat next to it and started poking it with a stick, while asking with a thoughtfull voice : " Hmmm hello there ... who ... what are you exactly ? " |
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| Belkonas | Oct 25 2017, 12:41 PM Post #3 |
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ὁ θυμὸς ἀλγῶν ἀσφάλειαν οὐκ ἔχει.
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He kept squeezing himself into his little corner, spidery limbs and whipping appendages bracing themselves against the moist sewer walls. He didn’t know what was about to come around the bend, but he knew he wouldn’t like it – or, more accurately, it wouldn’t like him. There was nothing he could use as a weapon except for himself, but he knew that, if push came to shove, he could do some damage; it might even be enough to stun whatever was after him and get away, to scuttle off down the corridors of this gods-forsaken place. Get away to where, though? For a terrified blink of the eyes – as it were – he was unmanned, hung like a squirming mouse over a big abyss. He saw ever-deepening cracks in the earth, ever-lonelier hideaways, ever-angrier pursuers; he saw pitchforks ushering him into coffins deep in the earth. Then he saw Phoebe – I can go to her, he thought, she’ll understand, she’ll love me – Phoebe whom he had to send off to gods-knew-where, Phoebe who was going to leave him anyway? There was more resentment than love there. And she wouldn’t harbor whatever the hell he was now, if she even believed it was him. Then the blindfolded girl came around the corner and promptly fell on her ass in the water. Florens couldn’t help it; a few of his mouths gurgled with laughter, dripping spittle, and his limbs tumbled and tangled away from the wall in a spasm of amusement. Every spine and appendage of his body shook for a few seconds. He didn’t know what was funniest about the situation, honestly, but the torch was in the running. Why did a blind girl need a torch? When she stood up, he could feel her looking at him. It was damned uncanny, and his laughter died off suddenly, guttering like a doused candle. As she started toward him, he began to tense again, quivering with fear. You want to corner me, you go right ahead, he wanted to say, but a cornered animal is a dangerous thing – Instead, “Hnnngggrrrrrgghlllgghh,” was all one of his mouths could manage, drooling. She squatted and began poking him with a stick. His tender, fibrous flesh moved, cringing back from the touch. He didn’t like being poked like a caged curiosity, and he especially didn’t like the looks of the girl – pale as death, and somehow she could see through that blindfold – but he was grateful that she wasn’t screaming or trying to kill him. Florens didn’t know what to do. He’d never been deprived of his voice before; he’d always been able to make himself heard and understood in one way or another. With this form, just spitting out a phrase took what felt like a day’s labor, and there weren’t any pens or paper down here. Still, he had to try, and try he did: with all his focus, he began trying to recall how he’d become the man Florens Belkonas in the first place. He began thinking hard on what it was like to have the mouth and throat and voice of a human being, and, with frustrating sluggishness, began imposing that feeling on himself, shaping a mouth like clay. And it wasn’t much, but he did it. There was a human mouth amid the others, perfectly average, with reasonable (if a little crooked) teeth and a normal human tongue. “Hellooo,” he shot back in his old voice, drawling with irritation. A spiny tentacle whipped out, curling with surprising strength around the stick in the girl’s hand and attempting to wrench it away. “I don’t know, madam – what are you? That’s a rude thing to ask, and I’m not going to answer it. As for ‘who’, my name is Florens Belkonas, once a ranking member of Auberon’s Destiny, now... retired.” As they say, he thought, keep calm and carry on. “Besides, I told you to go away.” A pause, then a sigh. “Who are you, anyway? Why are you down here? The only thing worth looking at down here is shit and mold – pardon my language. And me. And I’m not really myself right now, so I wasn’t expecting visitors.” |
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