wolves in the middle of town | october catch-all

[acidjail]

Who: Mercymorn the First, Paul Atreides, and you
What: October catch-all, open and closed prompts
When: Throughout October
Where: Various locations in Trench

Content Warnings: Depression, suicidal ideation (passive), body horror, memory loss

Comments

you came over me like some holy rite | cytherea the first

[acidjail]

Mercymorn hardly ever goes out.

There are no wards on the doors or the windows, no locks or bars. No terrible construct will uproot itself to chase her down if she steps across the threshold. God might even let her go, for a while, now that he's made his point, and it's the point that pins her still to the shoddy cardpaper illusion of this house.

So she curls up on it, numb, dumb thing that she is. She lines her nest with pilfered quilts atop a mattress she keeps hospital cornered by rote. She fusses, now and then, with the furniture she set aside when she claimed this dusty, secret place, all of it gone to ruin and wreck, now knit into an intricate geometric puzzle at one end of the attic. When base needs compel her, she descends the narrow dropping stairs and attends to them in the cloistered dark of the hours after midnight. She sleeps. She scratches paint from the blinded window and sets her eye at it, sometimes, when she cannot.

So when she find herself at the edge of the woods that creep up on the house like a sieging army, it is almost as strange as what drew her out to these trees, the pale and gleaming fey thing that had come to stand at the farthest lunar shadow of the house.

The fey thing wears a tattered sheet stained with the whole reeking rainbow of human biological function. She has fawn coloured curls sizzling close to her scalp, delicate cheekbones under skin so fine it might split open upon them, and blood all about her slack mouth. She has eyes so blue and luminous they hardly seem real, even clouded and sightless as they are, and from her sagging, nerveless fist she trails a rapier.

"Oh, my poor dead darling," Mercymorn says to Cytherea the First, traitor to God, killer of children, as she reaches forth to cradle her chill face in tender hands, "Look what they did to you."

It doesn't surprise her at all to find the sword in her belly. She would never have expected any less.

The fight is a quiet one. All their fights were always quiet ones. They could tear strips off each other in whispers, flense each other in near silence, all at their best, and Cytherea is far from her best. It could make Mercy weep, if she hadn't already wept more than enough over her dear little fool.

When they return to the house, Mercy's fingers tight laced to hers, Mercy is still knitting her fractured liver, and Cytherea wears a ghost ward of the most vicious rebuking kind on her wide, sensitive looking forehead. She wobbles and stumbles into Mercy more than once, her limbs all at odds, and they have to stop a while when she coughs. (She stabs Mercy again there, for her troubles. Mercy adds another ring to the ward.)

It's through the door and up the stairs, Cytherea wilted senselessly against her shoulder until Mercy may settle her on the edge of her mattress. She slips down to collect her supplies, hushed and quickened with purpose, and when she returns, setting her burden aside, she finds Cytherea has toppled over and back, breathing in a wet, agonal rasp.

Mercy hushes her solicitiously as she draws her back up, unwinding the ruin of her shroud to bare her wasted little frame. She dips a sponge into warm, soapy water and begins to clean her, with utmost meticulous care, this horror of a corpse she knows almost as well as her own.

"I never missed you when you were alive," she says, with a gentle ache, to the thing that is not her sister and her friend and her playmate, "However long we were apart, wherever you went...I never thought I'd miss you so horribly when you were dead."

Cytherea spits up a gobbet of mutant lung tissue. It's almost like being home.