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]

"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.