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

[necrolord]

John gentles into the touch, eased with hope by the set of her eyes. He tips his head into the contact, his cheek set whole and warm against her palm. He touches his brow to hers, such that his breath moves the sticky lines of her hair. His palm spreads to feel her heartbeat, gone slow and steady under his hand. If she kills him now, like this, there isn't much he can do about it.

"Yes," he croaks, rough with numbing poison or with the weight of the word. "Yes. We can't do it over— it's not a clean slate— but it could be something. I want you there."

This is the trap he's been led into, the test he's been shown: this is the resignation they've wanted since the start. John shuts his eyes in ugly submission.

He can bear her hatred better than her distance. Annabel always hated him anyway, or would have, if she'd known how.

cw: the body horror is back

[acidjail]

Mercy makes a wordless, soothing sound as John closes his eyes, patting his cheekbone with the pad of her thumb. He is warm wherever he touches her, banishing some of the low, grinding ache that gnaws at her marrow. His hand is an aegis over her heart. She lets her eyes follow his example, and this rain could be the rain on a thousand other worlds.

"I never hated you," she tells him, gentle as sin, "Not once."

Her chest is sticky where his hand lies. Her skin puckers, it parts. She takes a breath like a fist cocked back, and her lips stay half-open, too wet at the corners. The shivering hasn't stopped, doesn't even when she makes more insistent the press of her palm capturing him.

"Before I knew my name, I loved you, and I will love you after I forget it. I loved you terribly...the worst of all, but I loved you." The words have a strange shape in her mouth, too soft. "And I am not coming back."

[necrolord]

John makes a noise, soft and hitching, as though she's put a blade through his belly. His shoulders twitch with it as though he's taken a blow. The heel of his hand sinks into her chest, and he opens his eyes to regard her, the corners scrunched with misery.

The smoke behind him constructs itself up, up, flaring out spindly wet phalanges and the shiver of hideous wings. The sound begins as a low hive drone: it starts in the teeth and the amygdala. There is no mistaking it.

"Mercy," he says. Low and desperate, and listing back towards frustration. "Come on."

[acidjail]

A nightmare rises behind John in awful angles. Someone's voice curdles into a nail on chalk shriek. Someone slumps over a hand that sinks into a chest that suckles at the fingers that splay over the heart. Someone opens corpse-clouded eyes to stare blind into the absence of stars. Someone opens the mouths below their eyes, twin grinning crescents full of teeth like broken seed pearls that hug the arch of someone else's skull.

"Listen to her," this someone pants, a slouching beast run out under the sun, "Listen to you...I want, I want. Nowhere you can go. It kills me. I can't, without you. Mercy."

The precipice, the fall, the revelation. Her teeth (all of them) chatter as she drags herself up, up, one more time, fingers a great, greedy rake in the sodden cloth of his shirt as she brings her mouth (her first one) to drool pale ichor onto his shoulder. The butterfly on John's throat peels away, drifts to touch her lips, their slick-sticky interior, the tip of her tongue.

"Liar," she says, in a slur of teeth and blood and fragmenting wings, and she flings herself apart.

It's almost lovely how she unfolds. Layers of her unravel in shivering waves, fluttering like pennants as they peel away from John. Her organs spiral into translucent fistfuls of gauze and float upward untethered, her bones soften and flow like glass. They coalesce in the air before him, winding around a spindle of paled light to form a slowed whirlwind, a quickened tower, and as they spin the mist begins to draw towards it, then the gore, all the mess that Mercy made of the street undone for the construction of this glistening monument. Even the residue of her left behind on John comes away, leaving him clean.

The thing that was Mercymorn unfolds its own wings, thin as breath, and a storm of them fling themselves towards God. They are as nearly butterflies as the Omen behind him is nearly a wasp.

[necrolord]

"Fuck," says John, and "Shit," and "Don't do this."

He presses the thing behind him down and away, and she shudders out of existence, back to fizzing smoke. He cannot handle that and this at once. He watches her other mouths open; he beholds the little whites of her teeth; God's face is set in wound-tight horror. He clutches her more tightly. His hand spasms in a desperate little clench within the warm and melting ruin of her chest.

She comes apart like ribbon. It's pretty, in a bad way.

The thing that was Mercymorn peels itself away from him, even the blood, even the tacky and dripping discharge. He makes a wounded noise as it goes. He rocks back onto his heels and then onto his ass on the wet cobblestones. Smoke pools and licks up around him like low-lying fog set to boil.

"Mercy," he says again, low and cracked, just noise. Then she's on him. He does not actually try to stop her.

[acidjail]

The thing that was Mercy and now is not, that is both more and less, has no answer for him but the blur of green-tinged pink that breaks and swirls around him, a swarm that engulfs so completely that the vacuous light of the tower is strained through the veined membrane of their wings.

They do not hurt him. They barely graze across his skin, light as the lapping of a kitten at milk, but everywhere they touch, they leave their mark. A pink haze of spores hangs about him, infiltrates through the eye and the lung and the parted mouth, and every secret, interior place they touch, they bloom.

As swiftly as they fell upon him, they depart, called back to the undulating fission of the whirlwind as it opens into a bilateral symmetry of ovaline bone hoops strung through with lashings of tongue and gut, opens into fourths, opens into eighths, a slowly revolving stained glass window at the very annex of hell. It tilts over him vast enough to nearly brush the ruins on either side of the street, whole enough to shelter him from the rain, and all about it the wild pangs of its grief swarm in scintillating clouds. The black-hot foundry of its necromancy pulses in tides.

It sings. When its yearning stretches out to sink hooks into the radiant glory of God's own soul, when divinity boils up in a flare at the transgression, it sings still, low, crooning, inhuman.

[necrolord]

For a horrible moment, he tips back his head and lets them come. They alight on the bared stretch of his throat, on his lips, on his eyelids. John shudders a breath under their gauzy fluttering.

Then they shiver away, and the tower begins to eat.

To consume God's soul is a death sentence, a suicide by existential fire: it is too big. It splits everything open at the seams, hot as thermonuclear fusion. He knows this. The sound he makes is a ragged scream and then it is a laugh, sagging and half-hysterical. He does something very like backhanding the thing that isn't Mercy: there is a surge and snap of thanergy, an ugly punch and tear through the tower's delicate tissues. Lenore crystallizes, humming in the air, to her full iridescent glory. Everything is very bad.

He has a fallback. He has something so humiliating— such pointed mockery— but this is a shitshow. There's still gore at the back of his head and tears in his eyes. A Herald dogs his steps like warped shadow, as God steps forward and draws something from his pocket.

The Moon Drop glows pretty and white, even here: on this fucked-up street, in this fucked-up little world, cupped in the palm of a fucked-up God who cannot bring her back without it. He steps forward with a monster at his back, and a monster ahead of him, and someone else's blessing between his fingers.

Mercymorn will wake later, as herself, in a necromancer's cluttered and well-worn study. She will have dreamt of serenity and sweet white light. They won't talk about it.