who's seen jezebel? | september catch-all

[acidjail]

Who: Mercymorn the First, Paul Atreides, Ortus Nigenad, and you
What: September catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: Throughout September
Where: Trench and other Trench

Content Warnings: Cults, body horror, psychological horror, violence, death, marked by thread

Comments

Mercymorn the First

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open

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shelter | open | cw: body horror, cults

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In the roiling fog that blankets the other city, the shattered husks of buildings punctuate the murk like jutting broken teeth. Their roofs are caved in, their walls tumbled down, and the wreckage of devastation moulders in the seething humidity.

Except for here, which may be anywhere in the city - a huddled half-demolished apothecary in the Lumenwood, or a ruined covered market in Willful Machine, or a slumped warehouse in the Docks, or any other place and structure that might be briefly claimed - where one of the remaining mostly standing structures is webbed over with a fibrous, dark-colored membrane in the open gaps, one shot through with curved ribs to give it shape.

If approached, nothing stirs from inside of it, but resistance will be found in the form of a crackling ward set meters from the building, one that temporarily withers anything living that crosses it and renders to greasy dust anything unliving. If the hand or foot or limb that crosses the boundary is withdrawn, it will be as good as it was when it crossed, but the memory of the burning agony will surely linger.

When the ward is breached, or if a wanderer calls out in greeting, a cloth strung across a window twitches. Within a minute, three cloaked figures emerge from the mysterious dwelling, two of them (one tall and broad, one less so) armed with rather business-like looking knives, and one of them, the evident leader and the smallest of the three by far, empty-handed.

The leader pushes back her hood and looks over the newcomer, her mouth pursed in a bloodless scissor-slash line. Her pale, peach-colored hair floats around her oval face in a rough-cut bob, bangs blunt above her stormy bloodclot eyes as she props a fist on her hip and evaluates the newest deposit on her doorstep.

"Well," she says, without preamble, "Aren't you a sorry sight?"

[hauntedsavior]

The thing that fucking sucks the most about this is knowing that she's right.

When Anna had found herself falling into this weird, messed up alternate reality, it had felt familiar, almost. Like the steps she'd taken to enter the sixth layer so many years ago. Hostile and oppressive, the air made her acutely notice that this was a place in which she did not belong. She'd only felt like that one other time before, outside of her reality dives.

When she comes to the most important-looking building in the district, her blade is covered in the deep red blood of beasts. It's coating her hair and face in patches, too, a visage she's used to wearing but had hoped she could go a little longer without putting back on. They had attacked her, she insisted. And she knew that she would never raise her blade but in defense, so it had to be the right choice, what she'd done. It needed to be.

As she approached the webbed-up shop and reached her hand across some invisible line, she found herself crying out in pain and pulling her hand back as quickly as she could. One look down at what remained of her left hand showed a stub, a nothing slowly knitting itself back together into metal and bone and blood and wires. Each agonizing moment lived like an eternity in her head, and if anyone had told her to imagine being flayed and then unflayed, she never would have gotten the level of pain right. She wished, wishes, that she never had to learn how wrong she had been.

So—when she sees figures approaching and one of them lowers her hood, Anna does not seem very given to charity. She drops her hands to her sides now that they're both back in place, and there's still a sharp ache in the back of her mind that she can't shake off. "Cute trick. I know someone topside who pulled something similar."

She tries to say something more vicious, but it's possible that the people flanking the woman talking to her are doing a good job intimidating her. That, plus the hand thing. "But I bet he made the kid beg to get it sewn back together. What made you so charitable?"

succor | open | cw: body horror, cults

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The streets of the other world are stalked by nightmares.

It may be a towering column of eyes and teeth, grinding in a pulpy mass as it pursues you - or a chitinous admixture of wolf and stag and insect, its armor plates shivering around it as it lopes after its prey - or a swooping, cadaverous chiropteran abomination with poison-dripping jaws - or something even stranger and more hideous, but whatever form it takes, it is a Beast of hunger and purpose hot on your feet.

And it has caught you in a corner, one formed by the collapse of a broad tower that has blocked the path forward. There's no choice but to face it, to attempt to escape past the Beast - or perhaps this is exactly where you intended to be, and the Beast has fallen into your trap. Either way, it closes on you, terrible maw wide and slavering -

- and from one side, a pale lance shoots from a broken window, almost faster than the eye can see, pinning the Beast's mouth (or equivalent) shut with a massive splinter of bone.

"Contact!" Someone calls, loud and clear and ringing, and from the other side of the street a shower of smaller projectiles rains down - roughly fashioned spears, hunks of masonry, jars of some caustic substance that bursts and steams on the Beast's exterior.

From the first window, the Saint of Woe steps forth, slicing towards the ground below without a cry. She trails something slick from her feet that seems to slow her descent, landing lightly on the cobblestones and glaring up at the Beast like it owes her a groveling apology, a large sum of money, and a chat with its manager.

"If you're going to do anything useful, you should start!" She snaps in your direction, flicking her wrist to form a wad of undifferentiated tissue in her palm she works like dough between her fingers as a pink butterfly the size of a kite swoops down behind her. "Or don't!! Take your time! Honestly - second barrage on my mark, and if I see you waste another jar I will be terribly cross -"

[onekindsoul]

Ruby had been convinced that she had the beast right where she wanted it. Only for a completely different assault to be brought upon the creature. She takes a quick glance around and manages to catch sight of the Saint of Woe before she notices any of the others.

"Okay- Okay! Jeez. I was getting to it before I got distracted." Ruby manages to snap back at the distraction. Still. That was a good sign, more people around made it easier for her to do this.

She focused on the creature. Thought of the people who in danger and that they could be hurt if this thing got away. Focused on a desire to protect them. Her good eye shone bright for a second before it lit up the alley way with a bright flash of blue. Her powers from home had mixed with her cold blood here. Causing a quick flash freeze of the area around the beast.

It was too strong to kill out right like this. But it should slow it down for another assault.

salvation | open | cw: body horror, cults

[acidjail]

On the outskirts of the ruin that was once Sleepytown, in some other, kinder world, there are a series of cairns. There are not many, and those that exists are destroyed by the devout of Riteoir whenever they come across them, but those left intact are a carefully laid enclosure of charred bricks around a curiously shimmering stasis field outlined in a painted border of saliva and marrow.

The contents of this field are all that's needed to enact the ritual to carry you back to the Trench you came from, down to the preserved rose as fresh as if just cut from the cult's garden. Beside them lies a note written in a precise, elegant hand.

HOW TO MAKE THE CROSSING BACK TO THE OTHER TRENCH

1. Proceed into the wasteland before you with the provided items (claw, rubble, bowl, rose, knife), attempting not to die
2. Once a minimum of ten metres inside the boundary, grind down the claw inside the silver bowl with the rubble provided; set aside the rubble
3. Pluck the rose petals (carefully!! do not tear them) and lay them on top of the powdered claw
4. Use the knife provided to cut yourself and mingle your blood with the rose petals, claw, and the blood of a Sleeper with a different blood type than your own - if you didn't bother to read even this far, and are therefore devoid of an appropriate partner, let that be a lesson to you about reading the full instructions before starting a project
5. Wait for the mixture to achieve a slippery aqueous consistency (slime, for the uneducated)
6. Dip your hands into the bowl and apply the mixture above the heart (or equivalent organ) of your partner
7. Proceed immediately through the portal that appears - do not waste time gawping
8. And stay out!

Most of the time, these cairns are unattended, with no obvious sign of who placed them there, but if you are lucky enough (or, perhaps, unlucky) you may come across a small huddle of two cloaked figures building one anew or repairing one that has been toppled. The smallest of the figures straightens up at your approach, raising her bare palm in your direction like a ward.

"What do you want?" She asks, sharply, as her assistant continues their work unabated.

[unsheathedfromreality]

The--person might be a generous word for something so skeletal in its lineaments, beneath the Hunter's garb that obscures it head to steel-shod toe--but at least it's not clattering as it approaches, being not so much an ambulatory skeleton as a higher-dimensional monster that's put a lot of his flesh elsewhere--

Anyway.

The individual that approaches the cairn comes to a dead halt on being confronted, standing motionless (no breathing, no fidgeting) for a solid three seconds before cocking its obscured head to one side with birdlike abruptness. A low wheeze, like a lungless laugh, is its first response to the question; then it shakes itself all over like a wet dog and the world around it shifts uncomfortably--or it shifts uncomfortably--and suddenly there's more than a mobile bundle of bones and rags present. There's dead flesh and organs under the cloth, a nonhuman anatomy hung on an almost-human silhouette.

(One with sight into the River and places like it might notice the slight-of-talon that's taken place: It's a rotation, not a transformation, that gives the illusion of flesh appearing suddenly on bone.)

"I am hearing," Illarion says, in his voice with echoes that don't match the place he's standing, "from the Phtumerian's anointed, there is being a thorn in their side--a woman who steals their roses and their would-be converts, to send out of the True World back to the false.

"I came wishing to meet her. I take it I am lucky at last?" He turns his head somewhat toward the other figure, still at work on a cairn, by way of indicating the work underway.

closed

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absolute immersion | vash the stampede

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It has been a trying series of days, and that in and of itself is an unwelcome thing - for her trials to be measured once more in days, not years and decades. That she is abjected so stings, as does her own restlessness, hands ever too idle.

(She is not afraid at night. She long since passed by fear. She is something worse when she flinches at shadows, huddled like a discarded doll in someone else's bed.)

So she frets. She picks. She is wholly and eternally dissatisfied, and makes no pains to conceal it. She doesn't care what anyone has to think about it, not even her chance host - and she does not care, as she trails a nail down the spine of a slender green volume, about what might be inside the pages of this particular book she came across in her intermittent forays outside for information.

(She could ask him - the thing that is not human, or undead, but some secret, third thing - but she discarded asking the instant she put her hand on the book, and that was that. She never commits to a thing without the intent to see it through.)

Mercymorn opens the book, and begins to read.

cw: unethical experimentation, death, attempted suicide, attempted murder

[underbluesky]

Mercymorn The First begins to read, and suddenly she is drawn into halls of steel and chrome, floating in a vast sea of stars. Perhaps it's nostalgic.

Mercymorn reads of two young boys and a woman with kind eyes and a sad smile who took care of them. She reads of how the woman was alone on the ship, keeping watch over the thousands of humans in cryo-sleep, until she found those two as infants and took them in, watching them grow and grow over a year.

She reads of the boys wondering if the humans will be friends with them, when they awaken. Of the first time they met one, after Rem. The hope it brings.

"We can work through a few little differences," Knives says. "If we just talk to each other...we can come to understand one another."

She follows the boys as they sneak in where they're not allowed, and find something they never should've seen.

They don't take it well. One collapses from the shock; the other lingers in consciousness but is absent in spirit, refusing to eat, needing to be physically dragged from the chamber which holds the remnants of Tesla's corpse. The first he speaks is to accuse her of deceit, of raising them only to continue the experiments. She swears up and down that she'd never be involved such a thing again, that she desperately regrets not putting a stop to it the first time.

Kill me, he demands. Just...kill me! This place...there's nothing but humans here!

His face grows gaunt from starvation; he does not speak further until she brings an apple and a knife to cut it with, one day. He saves up his strength for the moment it's left unattended, and steel live in his fingers and aimed at his throat, but she catches the blade midway, staining it crimson with her fingers.

"Is that your answer? You're going to throw everything away so easily?"

She doesn't know what she's talking about, and for a moment everything feels clear and finished when the blade finds its mark in her again; he thinks he may be free of the specter of Tesla's pain until the moment where she collapses by his feet and he suddenly can't stop screaming, tears ripping out of him in wild sobs.

In the story, Mercymorn the First hears one she learned before, from the being who is neither man nor necromancy. The story about the blank ticket which could take you anywhere, if only you lived to fill it in. The woman called Rem implores Vash to live, and he does.

The three of them do, in fact, as Knives awakens. As Rem confesses a second time, and he appears to forgive. They're happy, one might think. It could've stayed this way until it was time to return to cold sleep -- and yet of course, it couldn't at all. The ship malfunctions, and Rem can either save them and herself, or them and the still-sleeping crew.

She doesn't choose herself. It is the last time Vash will ever see her alive.

with black and frozen feet | 2B

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It is as quiet a night as they come in this fallen world, or it is at least so here, under the aegis of a Saint. The ragged followers of the woman they know only as Woe are largely engaged in quiet work around the low light and warmth of lunar orbs, soft murmurs exchanged between them as they toil. The broken furniture that dotted this half-fallen manor house has been used to bar the doors and windows, the gaps between them plugged with solid bone, and there may be no fortification safer than this outside of the strongholds of Riteoir.

Let the storm rage, the sky roil. The youngest of their band still may sit on heaped cushions and listen, enraptured, to the story she is being told by their third oldest as he brushes out her hair and weaves it into a sturdy braid.

The oldest of them stands apart, as she almost always does, preoccupied with thoughts they know better than to trouble her for. She watches the weaving of hair through half-lowered eyelashes, working her lower lip between her teeth, before she addresses their second oldest, perfectly poised at her side.

"You're certain you checked the wards as I instructed?" The Saint of Woe asks Our Lady of Blades, with a querulous note of fretful exhaustion. "To my exact specifications?"

[robussy]

Our Lady of Blades has an impeccably refined posture. It speaks words without her having to part her lips and say it: credence and principle define her. She does not know, entirely, how she's gotten here— 2B only knows that she has a job, and is not a leader. She serves one. She takes orders, and she completes them with precision. Part of that was hardwiring— the rest was desire, and pleasure in doing so. This way, her pledge remains intact.

2B's sights on the curious act of braiding hair (she's never seen this before, never thought of it, and now considers, absentmindedly: should she cut her hair shorter? What a pointless thought.) come to a swift halt when her attention is requested by Woe. It is dropped to her, effortlessly and immediately.

"All are functioning as intended," and a touch lower, no more than the whisp of a balming breeze: "I made sure."

She did check them all herself, put to the test and strengthened if necessary, down to the exact specs Woe has requested. If it could withstand the android, then they were safe— she'll make that a certainty. She's made it one.

under the red sunlight | harrowhark nonagesimus

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Mercymorn the First blows a feckless strand of pink-stained hair from her face (she must remember to trim that one; she never does) as she observes the working of the ward laid out in front of her. She cocks her head to one side, then the other, arms folded tightly across her chest as she scowls down at the spirals of her own painted blood, drawn out of her veins only minutes before.

"This would be much simpler," she says, after a heaved exhale of dissatisfaction, "If you didn't insist on having that dreadful, dusty excuse of a blood type, infant. I don't suppose you do it to spite me - and yet!"

She turns her boiling gaze to the slip of a nunlet at her left hand side, deeply expressive of that and yet - that she would surely have done it on purpose, if she could, and perhaps even now refrains from correcting the situation out of pure stubborn wilfulness.

"Adequate," Mercy pronounces, like a grim diagnosis, "Under the circumstances."

it's a cruel, cruel summer | kaworu nagisa | backdated

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In her ten thousand years of existence, Woe has born witness to more walks of shame than she could hope to count, in varying degrees of tragic, embarrassing, and outright bizarre. She still shudders to recall the particular waddle of a certain overripe cavalier and necromancer pair out of a greenhouse - but that was a very long time ago, and she had never gone in for such things herself.

So this cannot be a walk of shame, as she combs out her hair with her fingers and clasps her cloak tightly at her throat, as she slips out a side door of this ridiculous training facility with her boots in hand so she does not cause the floors to creak before she dons them in the alley. She is simply - avoiding discovery by a specific array of parties she does not wish to speak to.

It is going very smoothly, all factors considered, until a slightly familiar, yet truly odd thrumming hum of life intrudes on her awareness, and she is already gritting her teeth when she looks up to behold a recent and perplexing acquaintance.

"Go away," she hisses, sharp but quiet, "Begone - scat!"

[peripheries]

Kaworu is also doing a walk of shame. Except it's more like a walk of sulk. There's no shame in sleeping over at your boyfriend's apartment and doing what you like there.

There is shame in your other boyfriend being so distracted by some moss on the ground that he forgets he promised to cook you food when you get home. How can someone care about moss when he, their beautiful angel boyfriend, is right there and hungry?

A bad boyfriend, that's who. On serious review from the Bone Lesbian Squad. Which is the shirt that Kaworu has. It's the shirt of Terrible Boyfriend(TM) who has not even noticed that his shirt has been stolen.

So instead, Kaworu sulks his way back home. Hands in his pockets, walking deliberately slow to make it clear how unfairly put out he's been over the whole thing. It would be nice if someone took notice so he could explain how cruelly he's been treated but he encounters someone and the immediate response is anything but.

"Me? You're in my way!"

the burned out poets in the hinterland | john gaius

[acidjail]

Mercy hates the rain.

It's tepidly warm, with a greasy, gritty residue that infiltrates at the cuffs of her sleeves and at the closed clasp of her cloak. It lashes in sheets, then slows to a dolorous patter, but either way, it closes off more of the world than even the slinking fog does. The air is too thick in her lungs, and it leaves a muggy dampness in her hacked short hair, which frizzles unwelcome towards the corners of her eyes every so often before she sweeps it away.

It could be a hundred other worlds when it rains. Collapsed cities all begin to look the same, once you've seen enough of them. This is a mouth of broken teeth, steaming with drool, and she has seen enough of those, too, to know them.

But the work is nearly done, their new meagre little outpost skinned over against the waters, what wards as she has found dry space to inscribe established around them in a tighter circle than she would ever accept from a necromancer under her command - but she has none, the infant long departed, and where wards are not, a Lyctor will suffice.

Her arms quiver when she lowers them, shaking off a fine dust of collagen webbing from her hands even as it clots in the sickly moisture.

A flutter of pink at the corner of her eye, nearly as hazy as her hair, and she flicks a glance its away, and to the arch of a dark street behind it, shrouded by the haze.

[necrolord]

Coming up the dark street is a figure, a man alone, and she wouldn't know him by the clothing: he wears a cheap black cloak and hood, secondhand, turned up against the rain. He looks like nobody, blotted out by darkness and the droning curtain of rain. But Mercymorn has known him ten thousand years, has known him longer, and so she knows the way he moves. The man ambles like God.

He draws to a stop to look at the butterfly.

narrative

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Paul Atreides

[terriblepurpose]

closed

[terriblepurpose]

in the woods somewhere | kaworu nagisa and izuku "deku" midoriya

[terriblepurpose]

The first week of the month had been challenging, but a challenge that Paul could compensate for. Losing his sense of taste had made eating more difficult than he’d wanted it to be, his inability to sift food for contamination a buzzing anxiety - but he’d had the food he’d made himself, the cans and jars and dried stocks, and he had Kaworu and Deku to sit with in alternation or together while he ate. It had been bearable.

Losing his ability to hear is another thing. It isn’t that he can’t adapt, between House Sign and his other senses, but it’s a blow to his equilibrium. Relearning how to navigate the world without it, even temporarily, is a struggle - and while there is a definite selfish appeal to the way Kaworu and Izuku have kept him cloistered and cosseted, he has never been good at staying inside and doing nothing.

Negotiating an excursion out to the edge of the woods took all of his wiles, from pleading looks to fervent assurances to yearning sighs, but they were finally able to strike terms. Full daylight, with two chaperones, and an ironclad handclasped vow to stay within reach of at least one of them at all times.

So here they are, dappled in the light of the harvest sun, and Paul has only made them stop seven times so far so he can look at an interesting natural occurrence, which he thinks is a fair compromise.

The inside of these puffballs looks like brain tissue, did you know that? he signs, happily, from where he’s crouched next to a log dotted with fist-sized off-white fungal pods. More parallels. Here -

He readies his specimen collecting knife to slit into the side of one of them, positively glowing with ecological excitement.

[peripheries]

Kaworu isn't paying attention. He only tends to pay attention to Paul when he gets like this for a few seconds before letting his mind wander. Even now, as Paul signs away, the angel's attention is drawn to excited flurry of long-fingered hands and an upward curve of the mouth that can't be held back. That's beautiful. That's a specimen.

He watches Paul, but not what he's doing, as he goes full ecological otaku, with gentle expression of his own. Slowly, he comes to rest his head against Paul as the other works like a cat settling near a lap. Eventually, he has to turn away to yawn and blow his nose on a handkerchief because he's nothing but sluggish and snotty lately.

Then he blows air softly at Paul's cheek to alert him to the bored angel's presence. He's still here and fungus is fungus!

bugge hunt | katsuki bakugou

[terriblepurpose]

Paul treads deeper into the shadowed forest on the lightest of feet, kitted for stealth. A dun-colored cloak obscures his form as he slips between the trees, all of the gear he carries with him bundled and secured so as not to clatter. Even the spear strapped to his back is muffled by wrapped cloth.

It’s more caution than even he would usually take on a hunt, but he also isn’t usually wearing a tightly fitted black blindfold over his unseeing eyes.

He knows that it is a mistake to be out here alone, that it goes against what he’s promised to the people who care for him, but tucked in a velvet lined bag is a promise he made before those promises to someone that he has done as much harm to as any of them, if not more. Someone whose name he’s never heard and face he’s never seen, but who he owes a debt he can only begin to repay if he finds them first, before the vision that drew him to these woods comes to pass.

This time, he won’t fail.

The sea medallion under his leather breastplate crackles with potency as his eyes glow silver, bleeding around the edges of his blindfold despite his best effort to conceal it. The future rolls in waves before him, every step picked out in invisible light as he sifts through them for direction - but now that he’s found the trail, he would hardly even need that. The Bugge has left a broad streak through the forest of trampled earth and broken branches, tufts of its matted fur dangling from the catching crooks of trees. He can smell it, the ancient reek of a forest thing, mingled with the musty spice of pine needles. He is on the right path, the closest one, spiraling closer and closer to its end.

And he is not alone.

Paul stills in place as soon as he senses the other presence, all but vanishing as soon as he does so, a trick of survivalism he learned in these very woods. He turns his head in the direction of whoever it is and breathes, slowly, as he probes the limits of his awareness.

“Oh,” he says, shoulders falling, “It’s y-”

Ahead of them, something trills, high and fluting and terrified, and Paul snaps towards it like a magnet.

“If you’re here for the Bugge,” he says, with chill iron in his voice, and when he looks back to Bakugou his jaw is set in a tensed line as he unshoulders the spear on his back and jerks his chin to the sound, “There it -”

A roar crashes through the branches, from a creature much larger and more furious than the source of the first noise, and Paul spits something untranslatable but plainly vulgar.

“Don’t hurt the little one,” he says, and with that obscure instruction, he takes off along the broken trail.

Ortus Nigenad

[noniad]