Even the illusion of June is enough to send a stabbing pain through my chest

[butnotyet]

Who: Augustine the First and ____________ (This could be you!)
What: A little bit of everything, including Event threads, and who knows what else
When: Throughout June
Where: All around Trench; specific locations listed in TLs as necessary.

Content warnings for this character: Necromancer with visibility issues (still running a little bit Invisible Man) seeking CR for explicit gore/body horror as a matter-of-fact daily occurrence / being jaded AF about life in Trench and otherwise (look, man, he's older than dirt) / needs more people to be slutty at-or-with (bearing in mind he is, again, currently at-least-mostly Invisible, you/your character's kinks/mileage May Vary, player more interested in vague/FTB/finessing a scene than anything explicit). Also, his omen is his brother, and also a venomous snake, and also really chatty.

Specific warnings for this post: Nightmares featuring a lot of violence, including self-inflicted/suicide; various types of religious imagery/discussions, definitely including "taking the Lord's Name in vain"; invisible nude spying on God (might get spicy).

Comments

[unsheathedfromreality]

All of them.

It is a familiar answer for an elf who grew attached to mortals, or a shrike to the short-lived. Everyone who wasn't one of your own kind would wither and fade within short decades of meeting them, then go the way of all Yav into death and decay. Even immortality wasn't a guarantee one's flock would always be there--war, disease, starvation, and accident always awaited. In a way, it was easier-and-harder to lose an elven peer to violence or corruption, or a mortal one to the ravages of age, for so went all the world. But to lose someone already so painfully short-lived to something one should have foreseen, something one had the power to prevent, if she'd only acted soon enough, or realized--

Once, a dear human friend of his had died in Shroudwood--snatched by some huge pillar-touched beast while traveling through an area the shrikes had known was safe. Worse, she'd been there under his aegis, using his maps, and it had protected her not at all. Illarion hadn't been a direct witness--odds were he would not have survived it--but he had heard, after. The horror that impels a young (bright, optimistic, determined) Augustine out the door and keeps him digging in the rubble until there's nothing more to surface--the horror that fuels a genuine miracle for a half-dozen families, but not the grieving Saint who enacts it--that is familiar from the inside. The lurking suggestion around the nightmare's edge, the pending second shift to a memory of deserved excoriation--that is familiar from the inside.

You are so much more than we are! You walk the border between life and death, Creation and Hell, and hold Hell's powers in your hands! You have lived centuries and seen so much more to life--and you couldn't save her?

He had had a Prince older than human civilization to bring his crushed heart to for mending and instruction; he'd had a Priest (and lover) with her own myriad behind her to shrive him of his guilt, deserved and undeserved. The hurt had still remained, and the lesson with it, until all such hurts lost their bite in death--but it had not festered. It had been expertly cleaned.

Had anyone done that for you, Ava? In Alik's case it seemed not--they were all too young and raw, all caught up in the cascade the First Martyr unleashed, and who then could rightly apportion blame or relieve it when all of them--those others--were suffering?

Memory moves the shrike again from where he's ankle-deep in rubble to lay a paternal hand on the younger Augustine's head; it's like stroking smoke. The older version, witness instead of witnessed, seems far more insubstantial and yet is solid beneath Illarion's palm when he shifts to rest it on his friend's back.

"She was the second?" The dispassionate Disciple-soldier he is, and, "I am sorry," the friend-husband-brother he strives to be.

[butnotyet]

"Yes," he answers blankly, staring down at a face he kissed that morning, skin blackened and peeled, lips pulled back in a grimace, split open, weeping interstitial fluid that boiled off in the heat. There were photographs, on the wall in the apartment where he'd been cleaning up the dishes; there had been those ghostly-flicker memories, even right against the table — cooked through like this, no resemblance is left behind.

(In the wake of this devastation, with so much dust and death and chemical residue in the air, it doesn't really smell like a barbecue; at least they are spared that horror.)

“This was my wife,” says the ghostly-substantial man under his hand, staring down at his solidly-insubstantial self, staring down at the death of his happiness. “My first wife — I could have — I should have told her to stay home, we’d been talking of having a third child — I wanted to ask her to stay home, that day, I remember. Our son — my eldest — he’s gone, was — was gone to the Cohort, and our daughter was going to be at Melia’s sister’s after school that day, so we could have had the flat to ourselves all day, if she’d just stayed home —“

The building still would have collapsed; her grief would have been laced with self-excoriation every bit as sharp as his, if she had been the only one of her team to survive, especially for such a reason as playing hooky; she was already mortal, already bound to die after mere decades with him, and who is to say that such a grief would not have hastened her demise regardless? Who could say that her grief would not have ulcerated and multiplied into the sort of malignancy that destroyed the heart and the mind and the will to live?

But it didn’t matter, because she was dead before the noise reached him; no matter how quickly he might move, even in his future when his red, human blood is replaced by glittering, incomprehensible darkblood, he cannot move — could never move — quickly enough to reverse the course of time, to have been already in the room when the collapse began, or to have padded it and everyone in it through some absurd construct of human flesh, warped and spun from his own body or theirs, that she and everyone else in the building might not have died — for how could she survive her grief, if anyone died in the collapse of the building whose safety she was meant to ensure, and she was not already in that number?

”What kind of Saint are you even supposed to be, Da–— Augustine — if you can’t work a proper miracle and bring her back, anyway?!”

(The noise leaks in from his memory of the hours yet to come, clear enough to be heard aloud in a young woman’s voice, thick with grief and a rage searching for a target; the flinch, the sob, is tangible, under the shrike’s hand.)