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

[acidjail]

The Saint of Woe witnesses the shuddering, wrenching transition of not to being around the axis of the thing in front of her with a pulsing twitch in her left lower eyelid, her raised palm unwavering. The dead, alien anatomy assembles itself under her view in a frothing churn of spiritual torque, crunching the nerves of her teeth just to look at it.

She listens to it speak impassively, even while the person working behind her falters and tenses, his breathing gone shallow as his adrenal response kicks in. She flicks her gaze over the creature once more, lancing, incisive, and pronounces her first judgment:

"Yuck," she says, clinically.

"And whether or not you're lucky depends on what you came here to bother me about," she goes on, hand still raised, inert, "I don't like repeating questions. They really ought to have mentioned that."

[unsheathedfromreality]

Yuck is such a strange thing to hear that Illarion laughs aloud--a humorless bark that's as much relief as anything. From her words and her manner he doesn't know her, even in the slightest; she isn't a mirror of anyone he remembers, and therefore--might even be real, for all he knows.

(He has argued with himself whether this is real, or spun out of him like Nephele-that-isn't. He's kept away from every conversation that might give him evidence to decide. For what if he grew fond of them, only to learn they were doomed to vanish as the world collapsed? What if they weren't real?)

"To ask you why." He gestures more broadly this time--at the cairn, at her uncomfortable accomplice. Was it all mere charity in the face of madness? Or something else?

[acidjail]

It - he, potentially - doesn't do anything stupid, which earns him a temporary reprieve from having his rearranged organs once again disarranged. The question of why provokes a peeved twitch of her mouth, but it also appears to not displease her more than she already is.

"Because I resent imposition," Woe says, dropping her palm and stepping forward (and slightly diagonal, as if she can effectively conceal much of anything behind herself), "And I have very little patience for being told what to do."

It's not a very altruistic answer, and a person might expect her accomplice to flinch at it, but the effect is paradoxical: he relaxes, responding to some unknown pattern of behavior or hidden cue, and gets back to the task at hand.

"Why do you ask?"