deercountry | there'll be only a hole in the soil (closed)

[ in which a bird and God discuss terms, and there's a dispute over champions. ]

[ in which a bird fights God to first blood, and it goes badly. ]

First blood's been drawn and neither combatant's called a halt. It is debatable if Illarion even can, lost in the grip of unliving hunger and growing increasingly warped by his efforts to inflict suffering on the fallen Monarch who'd had the temerity to lie to him. The Emperor's only too happy to encourage the bloodthirsty display, goading the shrike on into further rage, until one suspended moment,

one gesture from God,

and Illarion freezes in his tracks, every dead muscle locking and every eye visible and invisible widening in evident horror.

Then he is gone in a splitting of skin and eruption of feathers, and something else takes his place.

It unfolds into air like a loop of gut spilled from an opened belly; it glitters as wet and horrible in the bloody light of the full moon. Ten (twenty--thirty--ten again) meters of it gyre in and out of the visible world beneath a mail-coat of mirror and razor. Acid-etched false eyes mar its scales at random. No eyes peer from the horned viper's head it lifts high off the ground to survey the assembled.

The air around it fractures with unreal colors and gibberish whispers. It sits wreathed in its own corruption for five seconds, still as a thing dead.

Then it lunges out of reality, laced through four dimensions and one in stomach-turning stripes. Fangs long as a man erupt from empty air (~~from the thing submerged beneath the River's surface~~) around where John stands.

(( ooc: The Beast can use its reality-warping to isolate Sleepers in different pockets to fight it alone and will do so throughout the running battle to get it to the Salt Lake--so multiple smaller threads are possible and players are welcome to NPC the Beast's responses if it's easier for the flow of a thread. Its tactic is to pick one Sleeper to be the "hero" of the encounter while menacing anyone else in the area, especially those the "hero" cares for. There is a subtle aura around it that encourages feats of selfless recklessness.

It can vanish in and out of three dimensions to attack from odd angles and avoid attacks directed it at it, though its hide turns blades and reflect magic. Performing a truly heroic act will make it reveal its weakness: The eyes studding the mess of meat and viscera and bone beneath its scales. Rupturing one of these eyes will drive it away and (hopefully) in the direction of the lake. ))

[ in which the Salt Lake works its restorative magic, and some are left to swim out of it, and others regroup. ]

Somewhere on the way to the Salt Lake, the Beast vanishes to the sight of all but its Lyctoral pursuers and veers deeper into Trench.

It's caught ((scent)) of something aching-familiar and means to seek it out and play(/prove/protect/devour).

Worming beneath the skin of reality, it gives no sign of its presence (except whatever an AT field might touch; except whatever warning may chime in Deku's head) before it erupts from a pile of old rubble to lunge at the two young men seeking their missing third. It does not lead with its awful head, its hideous fangs, but strives to throw a loop of its great rotting body around them and cut them off from the world and isolate them in a maze of mirrors.

Illarion is on the lawn well before the time set. He paces out boundaries and surveys the lay of the terrain; now and again, he stops to turf up a buried bone or stone and set them respectfully aside for later reburial. Should anyone arrive to observe the process, or find their own place to watch the duel, he leaves them well enough alone unless approached directly. Only then will he raise his sightless gaze from whatever he's doing--digging up bones, sharpening his weapons, checking his kit--and offer his respectful attention to whoever's come to speak.

Later, when the Emperor has made his appearance, the shrike is to the point: "Will you have a champion stand for you instead? If so, declare them, so we may set terms."

He expects to be disappointed in the Emperor's choice. He offers his hope not to be in tribute to his Patron.

( tbw )

After, once it's clear no one's come to permanent harm, Illarion sits damp and salt-crusted on the lake's edge, head in hands. A slight tremor in his shoulders mars his customary corpselike stillness. (He could walk back down onto the lakebed. He could lie there until the moon wanes and the water becomes corrosive and strips the flesh from his bones. He could flee into death.)

His Omen sits at his back, huge and reassuringly solid in her changed shape. She's the first--the only--one to respond if someone should approach, lifting her head and bristling the feathers on her neck in mute warning.

Big Bird is taking this very seriously. God isn't, because the idea of anybody dueling God is kind of embarrassing to everyone present. He looks perpetually awkward and annoyed, off-kilter. He looks like a man a breath away from just starting a shouting match and having done with it, frustrated that they have to draw things out.

Even so. He is largely quiet, his daughter at his side, until the moment comes. John steps forward, crown of fern fronds pale against his dark hair, and makes his choice. It comes as no surprise to the one called; they talked about this.

"Prince Kiriona Gaia stands as my champion."

He's aware it won't be a popular call.

After, when the shouting has settled and everyone's had a chance to lick their wounds, John makes his way along the lakeshore. In the light of the full moon, reflected pink and luminous off the waters, the barring of Augustine's fingers over his eye glow like paint under blacklight. Pyrrha's handprint is clasped steady over his shoulder, laid bare for all to see. He's abandoned what was left of his shirt.

Iskierka— or whoever she is now— looks to him in open wariness, and John comes obediently to a stop. That's the first peace offering: that he stands there, awkward, with the water just lapping at his feet, and moves no closer.

He clears his throat.

"I think this is where I say 'well, it could've gone worse.'"

Lord knows how. But no one's dead— well, not deader than before.

Midoriya ducks out from behind Kaworu's A.T. Field and goes on the offensive once again. He looks much the way he did The Lonely Island sank, save for not being Corrupted. He's furious it's come to this, and the excess energy of his super strength sparks a little too wildly around him. Like then, he uses Float to fly and Blackwhip to grab the Beast and gain extra mobility in the air.

The Leviathan gave him some practice fighting impossibly changing anatomy. When something slithy bursts into this dimension intending to hit him, Danger Sense alerts him faster than any reflex. At far range, he's quick enough to dodge or deflect attacks. Close range proves a challenge.

"SMASH!!" is his (perfectly legitimate) war cry bellowed with the rage of a berserker. It accompanies a flying roundhouse kick strong enough to send a shockwave across the yard that flattens the grass--but deals no damage to the house. Along with calling out moves whenever possible, avoiding property damage is part of his training.

There is no time to shout look out!, when he suddenly needs to move instead. He can only answer the prescient stab of Danger Sense and prevent Kaworu from being hit. His armored shoe bashes scale and sinew, but that body loops impossibly around and wallops him from behind.

He falls unconscious through the air like a doll, droplets of blood buffeted on the wind.

spectators | ota

It is rare for the lady of the attic to deign to descend to the lower floors, let alone disembark to the exterior of the house. That she does so at all is an occasion. That she does so with company is nearly an event. That is precisely why this is the moment she chooses to do so, before anyone else, and in the long, early shadow of the spectacle about to unfold. She doesn't want anyone making a fuss over it.

Mercymorn wears clean, fresh, next to colourless clothes in a slightly mismatched series of layers: sweater, loose cotton shirt, leggings, soft slipper-like boots. Her still damp hair lies in a simple bruised peach braid over her shoulder. Her face is scrubbed bare and there is an uncanny peace to her as she sets out plain folding chairs on the lawn in her first descent to the outdoors.

On her second, she comes with two guests.

The first of two is a wilting, emaciated woman with a waxen face who leans against Mercy's shoulder and totters like a newborn lamb as she is led, a mosaic of dried green blood daubed upon her wide, unlined forehead. Her mouth is slack, but perfectly lipsticked in a dark, dusty rose shade, her eyelashes curled and blackened, her short cap of fawn-coloured curls precisely and lovingly set, held back by a broad seafoam green ribbon tied in a charming offset bow. Her pinafore dress that drops down to her ankles is coloured to match, save its white bib and petticoats, and from beneath her full skirts peek black patent leather flats as she takes painful, trembling steps to her seat.

Mercy settles her with extremities of care, folding her limp hands in her lap with the delicacy of a curator. She brushes back a stray curl and daubs away a line of bloody drool with unMercy-like tenderness before she steps back to consider the effect of her composition, and with a slight nod to herself, deems it good.

The second guest is harder to notice. It is a flash of blackened hide at the corner of your eye, the sudden and inexplicable reek of decay, and unlike the corpse slumping in the lawn chair it needs no assistance to stay close to Mercy. The draugr follows her like a macabre puppy, and Mercy ignores it with the same forbearance.

favour | illarion

After Cytherea is arranged, Mercy crosses the lawn to where the dead bird is digging up stones. When he lifts his head to met her gaze, he will find her stormy, bloody eyes peculiarly serene as she fingers the end of her braid. The draugr twitches at her back.

"This is the one of the most ridiculous, melodramatic affairs I've ever seen," she announces, without preamble, "And she won't thank you for it, you know. There's not a scrap of gratitude in that detestable infant."

She twists off the pale yarn-tied tip of the braid with a surgical slice of thanergy, tossing it to him with the clear expectation he will catch it.

"Break a leg," she says, her quiet tone impossible to decipher.

Edited 2022-10-15 22:20 (UTC)

After the silence breaks and conversations multiple in waves of emotion, all bright and hot and burning in the chill air, after the proposed champion and another around her age split off for their own argument, Pyrrha remains near the center of it all: Heartnest and John.

Her heart beats steady among the chaos. She turns to John, quiet and close. "No matter the outcome, Kiriona obfuscates it," Pyrrha says, "Some will say the shrike could not fairly fight the duel he called in her name. Some could question whether you take it seriously, for the same reason or because you could have a stronger fighter."

Augustine isn't here, and Pyrrha does not mean John should place another person in the middle of this horrid mess. She's there, she's armed, she'd gladly take any injury for Kiriona.

"He won't hold back if it's me."

[Faith looks at John. Not angered, even, not shocked, just... baffled. Every time he calls her that, she feels a chill run down her spine. Not quite anger, not quite fear, not quite hurt. But a mix of all three.

And now he's calling her to fight for him. In defense of her own treatment. It doesn't work. It's not fair, on her, on the weird zombie looking guy. It's not like he doesn't have other options. Others to call. So why?]

John - [She catches herself saying the name, and she's not even sure what to replace it with.] That's insane. Her fighting this duel for you would be insane.

Look just... let me do it. Gideon can just go sit down. [She's trying to help - to give Gideon an out. She's one of his, isn't she? She can be chosen instead?]

While the Salt Lake may still function as it should, albeit at a strange and erratic degree under the height of the Blood Moon, it still feels strange to come here and note an absence of Moon Presence. It's worrying, with her missing. Nothing but the sound of sobbing to fill the streets, Luna frets after her. Things feel sad, lonely.

She comes a couple of days after, after the latest broadcast on the network. Of course they were vague enough details, but she was able to work things out with enough thought. The whole thing puts a damper on her mood to cause another bout of rainclouds to magically form over her head for several hours. The mentions of Beasts is concerning though, and she does her best to clear her head (and clouds) to go searching for Alabaster.

The Salt Lake seems the best place to look, finding him easily enough. To the Omen's silent warning, Luna raises a hand in a defensive gesture: she comes in peace, means no harm. She approaches carefully, cautiously. She suspects it wasn't the Self-Made God who became a Beast, not considering that broadcast.

Without a word, she lowers herself to her knees beside him and then moves to sit. Her hands fidget with the hem of her cloak, brow furrowing a little. For a long moment she says nothing, is just silent — stares out across the surface of the Salt Lake. Silence can be nice, especially when you sit in silence together.

"I thought I might find you here." she says gently. And then, after another long pause. "How bad was it?"

The Beast makes a noise--rattle of razor-wire in the wind--that might be satisfaction. It leans down its great gleaming head in a blur of moonlight, catching Deku in its jaws ere he hits the ground ~~and come to further harm.~~

Then it turns to smugly display its limp prize to Kaworu. Now what? it seems to say.

(It is not altogether unscathed, its scales shattered and hanging from its body here and there where Deku struck it. A sliver of a white empty eye peers from beneath one.)

The first time Kaworu became a beast it was like drowning. He slipped below the surface into darker depths, letting the water fill his lungs, until whatever was left of him was gone.

This time, it's like a dam breaking. Everything that he's felt since that day on the boat pours out of the hole he's been trying to bury them in. Paul stripping his will, Izuku's disappointment, the revelation of Teacher's nature, his inability to save Gideon... The hole in his chest isn't empty, it's simply held so much that it collapsed in on itself.

Only one step towards Illarion and Kaworu is gone. Replaced with a monstrous creature, a distorted shape of a man to match the size of Illarion's snake. In this form, Kaworu makes no threats and does not plead, he simply lunges forward with the intent to kill, trying to bury his teeth in its neck and rip Midoriya from its clutches all at once.

Not a popular call is, perhaps, an understatement.

Illarion sets his jaw as John chooses his daughter--as the Emperor chooses his sword, exactly as threatened. It's a contingency the shrike had planned for, chosen the mode of the duel for, lined up his objections for.

But he does not have to voice those objections first. He turns his head sidelong toward the young woman who does, whatever dim ember of surprise he might feel at the interruption concealed behind his veil. Let them see how this played out, then, as Kiriona made her own reply to the interloper.

Perversely, his first thought on ((feeling)) her draw near is so she is real. It's a testament to his state over the past month that he'd left Riteoir's private hell with that doubt intact--but the twist of hair she tosses him has real heft in his hand, and there is no disputing the strands that separate beneath his pinning thumb.

Her words, louder and quieter, get as much of a smile from him as yuck did. "I expect she will not," he replies. "I don't begrudge her. She must be his loyal sword for now."

Then he closes his hand around the favor, bringing his fist to his chest over his unbeating heart and bowing over the lot. The metaphor's a strange one, but the blood magic offers the apotropaic intent--neither fur nor feather, the hunter's well-wish. "Go to hell," he replies in kind, his own amusement quiet but as unforced as it can be.

Then, as quiet as she, "You are being followed, you know."

From their name to their frame to their diet the draugr were a particular offense to him--but in the quiet space before a duel, the necessary ceasefire, he can't deal with this one as he'd like. (He does not know there will be no time after.)

He looks, at this point, impatient; beneath that, exhausted. Pyrrha knows him well enough to see it, the way he crawled out of the ocean buoyed on Annabel's presence at her side, and the way that brief flare of eager energy has dropped from him since. He's worse now than he'd been back in August, hiding in the dark and languishing alone in his rooms. This is the downslope: there's a crash coming. Probably a bad one.

"I get it," says God. "Seriously, great effort, but that isn't the point."

The point is that she's his, now, and she wants to be. She wants the chance to prove it. He wants to let her. He's past caring how it looks; he'll double down into bad optics for the spectacle of it, for him-and-her as a team. Pyrrha can understand that. She's clever.

Great parenting, Pyrrha bites back in the recesses of her mind. John and Kiriona shouldn't be a team, not this way, not as parent and child. John wouldn't need to do that. Only God, fresh from tossing this undead tennis ball for himself as the last toy in his chest, feels the need to run around showing it off.

"Everyone can see you have her," Pyrrha says. His network post said it. Naming her champion and Kiriona throwing a pissing contest not far away with one of the only kids even to show her face says it. She motions at the chaos around them, at the Cohort whites that read like the First House here in Trench.

"We're partners, a team, you and me," Pyrrha says, even through shit like this, the bad, painful, embarrassing days, "It's not you and Kiriona against the world, against everyone." Sending the one person clearly in hand makes a weak case for God that he is or has anything or anyone else.

Even Mercymorn's set up in the audience with Cytherea like all the rest. No sides like a wedding, for a challenger and the challenged. Just the John "God" Gaius show, episode 10,001.

The salt cleanses him. It feels like fire and his beastly form is falling to ash around him, leaving only embers of boy left. He's never liked the lake. It's smelly and unnerving but here it's washed away his sins.

His arm still hurts. The salt on the burn stinging like a thousand wasps. Kaworu tries to open his eyes but the salt stings them and he forces them shut. He's deep enough that the light from the surface is minimal through his closed eyelids. He tries to move his limbs but finds them weighed down by exhaustion and injury.

A few kicks propel him upwards (?) before his strength leaves him. He's so tired. He shouldn't stop, Mariana won't find him if he gets lost here. Ah, another part of his mind says softly, but he'll return to the sea regardless. And things will be alright for the moments he's there because he won't know of anything but the sea. And right now, things being right seems impossible.

Kaworu's lungs burn and he inhales a mouthful of water. It won't hurt hurt for long, he thinks, as he goes still in the water.

The thin tilt of one full corner of Mercymorn's mouth might suffice as a smile for someone else, but there is a set of exhausted satisfaction to it that renders it something other, and more terrible. She plucks at the run in her sleeve's elbow to collect another length of yarn, severing the natural fibres as she did her hair before she raises her hands up to bind the braid once again.

"What courtesy," she says, to the wish or the warning, or both, "Small wonder my siblings seem so nauseatingly fond of you."

She glances over her shoulder, her eyes gliding like a drop of old blood in whites lightly flecked by green at their edges, to where the draugr quivers and lurks, ever hungry. It took another century overnight, she thinks. She wrote it in her journal in the cipher she has yet to lose.

"It's an interesting subject," she says, knotting the yarn simply, a few strands escaped to hang loosely in framing her oval face, "Novel. Maybe that's what we'll do next, to fill our time - open a menagerie of the varied undead. My companion here - you - the infant someone really ought to begrudge, at least the once - charge a shiny pebble to do the tour. What do you think of that?"

It's the right thing to say— that he has her, that he still has her even now— but it doesn't go down as easy, after the past six months. After whatever the fuck Duty's been up to on old shepherd planets. Is that her or Gideon? Are they catching up with the in-laws, smoothing things over with BOE? Playing both sides seems like her kind of game. He almost can't fault her for it.

Almost.

"You said it yourself, right?" This energy in him is the toxic kind, the jittery impulse towards anything that hurts or distracts, the last dregs of hideous intensity dimming towards a low and heavy depression. "You're not my cavalier."

Annabel was here. So close he could touch her, could hold her, could clean black sand from her skin with the pad of his thumb. She would've fought the bird for him and they all could've stood back to marvel at the frenzy of it. She's always been his champion.

She walked back into the sea and left him, just like everyone does.

Behind them, the girls are still arguing: Faith is openly hurt and aching, her wounds raw; Kiriona has gone steely and closed-off, but she's struggling through it. He doesn't want to look at anybody's hurts, today. He'd rather get this over with.

"Changed my mind," he declares, voice raised loud enough for the bird to hear— for the kids to hear— for everyone to move along. John Gaius steps forward to face his challenger. "I'll have to give you somebody else to smoke, kiddo. I think I have to take this one."

She's right about one thing: it's not him and Kiriona against the world. It's just him.

Despite all the emotional tumult and wrecking ball John's taken to relationships today, he calls back to one of the central tenets of their bond, of their partnership. Pyrrha will not undercut that. Today will be a shit show. It always was going to be. They need those boundaries and agreements kept and affirmed more than ever.

The next moment is slow as molasses, a terrible sighing stretch of breath.

John declares for himself, and Pyrrha could swear in joyful amazement. It's what Heartnest wants. It's what she wants, far more than doing it herself. She steals this memory for herself, no matter how terrible the reasons John tells himself. Going through the right motions is still a step in the right direction.

Ignoring the world around them, Pyrrha steps close to place her hand on his shoulder, over its reflection revealed by moonlight. She leans her forehead down against his for a moment. "Partners," she whispers fondly. Even when he doesn't understand it, even when he doesn't believe it, even when everyone cannot understand it, Pyrrha made her decision and stands by it.

She steps back toward the edges to stand near Kiriona and Faith. The immediate matter is settled but not the crux of their conflict. What a spectacle for Augustine to miss, she thinks.

Well, you won, so there's that.

[Chara seems to appear from nowhere, but a sharper eye will know they've been here all along, carefully far enough away that the chances of them being drawn in are miniscule to none.

They're not sure if they could have helped. They're not even sure they wanted to. Illarion's beast form had been a sight to behold. It had been... inspiring, in it's way, to see someone else who will go this far to win.

Perhaps it's just a product of the emptiness they both feel.]

[ Crown Prince Kiriona Gaia steps forward, adorned in her finest gilded whites, bearing an intricate and razor-sharp rapier at her side. She draws her sword in a single fluid, practiced motion. Her jaw is set, expression cold. She's ready to fight. She's not even breathing, like this.

And then someone has to come in and ruin it.

Kiriona Gaia wheels around, sword still drawn, which she points directly at the intruder. Faith knows, maybe better than anyone, how much she wants this. But Faith has always said she's a monster, and now, Kiriona understands why. It's because Faith is trying to steal what is rightfully hers. ]

Back off, bitch.

[ Her tone is the steel of her sword, and nothing except threatening. ]

It's neatly done, Pyrrha's little coup over John. She'd finessed the outcome he'd intended--with dread and hope both attending--and now it remains for him to perform his part.

How well that will go, he thinks, comes down to how in control John Gaius believes himself to be. (As Duty had warned.) The Emperor's already lost his choice of champion and seen his meager Court dissolve to bickering--atop his beloved vanishing again, atop Trench's bitter reception of his recognized heir.

To say nothing of how little control the Waking World permitted him to begin with.

"We are then agreed on combatants," the shrike acknowledges, as John makes his declaration.

"We fight to first blood. Should you lose, you will acknowledge to all Trench the evil you have committed against Gideon Nav, now called Kiriona Gaia. Should you win, my rebuke is without effect--the gods justify you.

"It is proposed this be a duel of talon and blade--bare hand and edged weapon, no magic but that learned for either. Do you accept this, or counter?"

He expects the counter; he expects necromancy. There is truly no even footing between them, but it would give back the illusion of control--the opportunity to play indulgent godling to a gnat of a challenger.

The way she smiles at him breaks his heart. He sees it in her eyes, written across Gideon's face, and he wants to hold that look forever; he wants to break at the pain of it and run. But he only shudders out a low breath when she touches her forehead to his.

It takes him a moment to fall back out of the embrace and turn to the dead guy trying to fight him.

"If I'm swinging a sword, it'll be sad to watch," says John. "Wizards' duel. You can throw everything at me, and just throw me a bone." He couldn't resist. The stupid joke seems to hearten him; he cracks a smile, and raises a hand in demonstration, so that he can pull the tip off one of his own fingers. The bone comes away bloodless in his hand, regrown in an instant, and he holds it up to the light like a pearl. "No cheap shots: this is what I've got. Deal?"

He could drop the bird in an instant, otherwise. He could drop the bird in three seconds even constrained to constructs. Still; it looks less shitty, this way. It looks like more of a fight.

What closes over his wrist isn't a skeleton's hand: it's a human palm, hot through the chilly water. Its grip is fumbling, then insistent. Another hand catches a fistful of Kaworu's shirt, and someone begins to haul him up.

It's funny. John hasn't gone swimming in such a long time. Not aside getting thrown in the sea, slammed down by waves that dislike him specifically; this isn't like that. He isn't thinking of some vast and terrible presence with its hand around his throat, out here, not as he breaks the surface with an arm hooked clumsy around Kaworu. He isn't thinking of the churning shore, of floodwaters.

The saltwater tastes clean, under the moonlight. It's not the sweet cold of Tomb water, but it's the nearest thing.

(Some part of him still wonders, shocked numb, if it would've been this easy to pull Gideon out.)

[It stings, the contempt that comes from Gideon of all people. Her eyes are cold, her voice is cold, her body is - cold. She's shoving Faith off to the side, having embraced being the only child, the only fighter he has left.

That sting turns into anger quickly. She was trying to help, and unlike everyone else, she's not just going to sit back and take it. She's not being the second fiddle again.

So she smiles a tight lipped smile and glances at the little stick that Gideon's calling a sword and she talks, her words laced with practiced cruelty.]

Why? Only one of us lost a fight with a pre-teen. [She doesn't say, "Only one of us couldn't survive the boat." It's a near thing.]

I don't know what changed to make you so convinced you're hot shit, but you can quit showing off any day now.

Kaworu doesn't fight the grip around him. He doesn't have any energy left. He barely has the energy to expel the water that seeped into his lungs. All he can manage are pitiful and inefficient coughs as water drips from his nose and mouth.

His first reaction should be to pull away. Like pulling one's hand away from flames, it's natural to recoil from something or someone that hurts you. But instead he collapses against the form keeping him afloat (keeping him alive) because it's familiar. He still cannot set aside a memory of being picked up in gentle arms, saving him from drowning in the depths. A hand brushing his face and muttering soft words that he didn't understand but he liked hearing as his body remembered what it was like to hear it all.

He had few gentle memories before the trench. He can't let any of them go, despite himself. He wants to know why. But he chooses silence.

This gives John a chance to fumble them back towards shore. This isn't his first time swimming with another body crowded in against him, but she'd always taken to the water like a fish; she hadn't needed him for that. Not after that first, worst scramble to shore. He thinks of it all the same.

It's awkward, climbing free into the air. John sloshes up into the shallows with Kaworu in his arms, and he doesn't bother to pull them both to dry ground proper: he just sinks down to sit with the glowing water lapping up around his hips, and claps the kid on the back to keep him coughing. His spread palm lingers there, warm against Kaworu's clammy and hitching back.

"There we go," he says, which is the same kind of gentle nonsense. "Easy does it. Let's not add to the casualties, here. I'm already mourning my shirt."

The bird's talons did a number on him: his clothes are a mess. No better now that they're waterlogged and dripping saltwater. Around them, others are scrambling up out of the lake or crowding around the shore— things finally seem to be quieting down.

Kaworu doesn't even flinch at the hand on his back. He used to lean into that very same touch, given easily as a way to encourage him to move one way or another in the house.

He's tired of coughing. He was already tired. He has no idea where his body has found the energy to do even such a primal thing. He doesn't understand it. He doesn't understand so many things.

"Why...?" He sputters, the word forced out of his core like the salt water.

One word that means so many things. Why did you save me? Why did you leave? Why didn't you save Gideon? Why did you take us on that boat? Why did you take us from the beach? Why did you watch over us? Why weren't we enough?

This is unexpected.

This is exciting.

The man who'd been the Beast would be distraught to see Kaworu dragged into Beasthood after him--but the great serpent's mind is fractured and bent beyond retrieval. It isn't a fleck of the shrike's awareness that makes it freeze as the other Beast lunges for it, scales fanned to reveal opaline eyes beneath; it is the thing's own twisted imperatives that say an act of heroic desperation must be rewarded.

Kaworu's teeth sink deep into the sinew and bone beneath the serpent's scales. Where an eye's caught between them it bursts in a spray of mist and unearthly sparks. It yanks its head--and Midoriya--out of reach with a horrible screeching noise, winding over itself and around the humanoid Beast to protect its prize... And, it rapidly becomes apparent, try to escape back into another dimension with him and flee.

There's a handprint of a size and shape to match the one on John's face wound around Illarion's right wrist. It's lurid in the full moon and still it almost flickers out of sight with its bearer as the shrike starts outward at the sound of his erstwhile opponent's voice.

He masters himself at the last moment, settling in and back down to a seat on the ground. He folds his hands in his lap, chin tucked toward his chest like he could contemplate his clenched fingers. (No paler than they were, no more bloodless; his knuckles are already white as they can be.)

The dragon at his back keeps her eyes on John and her feathers on-end, but does not move.

"Yes. With great irony, even. Then we both laugh, o Lord, and put it behind us."

He sounds miserable through the echoes, doubled and redoubled; an earnest misery that doesn't need pretending.

"That is the script, not so?"

Luna, gentle Luna, is well-known to Illarion's Omen--and the instant it comes clear the young witch is only here to sit with him, she smooths her feathers and blows out her breath in a huff of greeting. Companionable silence is the exact prescription for what ails her Sleeper now; having a real person to share the watch with is a relief on her. She puts her great head down on the ground and closes her eyes, as if needing the rest.

Even with his Omen giving every sign of comfort and assurance, it takes Illarion a little longer to adjust to the new presence; and a little longer still to reply to her quiet question.

"I regret having no hospitality to offer you." His own voice is so low it nearly doesn't echo; the sounds of another space, more closed-in than the woods, are almost lost beneath the lapping of the waves. "What I was previously reclaiming from the wild--it was all destroyed in the fighting."

So: Bad, and made worse by his once-refuge being a refuge no longer.

"I have that, and I have what is said--that no one died or took permanent hurt--but otherwise I am not remembering what it was to be a Beast. Perhaps this is a mercy."

Though he doesn't sound as if he believes that.

[If Illarion had noticed Chara's presence at the duel--before everything went wrong--he'd not remarked on it then, and can't remember it now. His Omen clearly does not know what to make of their sudden appearance; they are a sort-of friend, but not an easy one, and she stares at them warily until her Sleeper can formulate a response.

It takes him a half-minute.]

There is that, [he echoes, voice dull. It isn't his usual dullness; it's not the affective flattening of undeath but something nearer a living being in deep depression. He isn't acting.]

In a week or two it may even feel like a victory.

[He had not meant to say that, from the expression that crosses his face and the way his fingers dig deeper in his hair. But he doesn't take it back, either.]

You were here the whole time?

Somehow I doubt that it will. [There is something different about the old man now, something closer to living. They remember how different they felt between the end of the pacifist route and the end of the no mercy route, when they had a soul.

It's not living. But it's enough that they could almost fool themselves, for half a minute, if they allowed it.]

I was. [They feel no shame or guilt for not having helped. Though they do hum in consideration.] I'm not sure what outcome I expected, but it wasn't this.

Having acted as bait, Pyrrha's close to Heartnest when he returns from beast form (Heartmess?). She swims for him, cutting through the salty water quickly with cephalopod legs. Her arms wrap around the thin elf and hold him to her chest. Her legs do the work, able to buoy her close enough to the surface to keep their heads above water. The rush and hurry is gone. Their companions are many, surely already looking to their wounds.

Pyrrha has him.

When her tentacles touch the silt at the bottom of the lake, she pauses. Breathing carefully, she calms herself and calms herself until the legs merge together, sealing themselves around bone, the muscle changing shape and bending, first for knees, then for feet. Pyrrha wriggles her toes in the water. Then she walks them out, both dripping wet, to the lake shore.

In a spot, within sight but slightly removed from the rest, Pyrrha sits, continuing to support Heartnest. Whether he needs it physically, she deems he needs it emotionally. Messing with him like that; Pyrrha knew the risk. Heartnest knew the risk. It's a cost they both considered worth it, but she won't leave him to pay it alone, even if he must bear the brunt of it.

He will not accept this. He will not. He cannot. He cannot lose Midoriya. Even though now he doesn't know why because he doesn't remember himself, Kaworu knows Midoriya is his.

Kaworu reaches hands, somewhere between human and beast, towards the serpent and digs his claws into as much of the flesh as he can grab. Like trying to hold dirt as it flows between gaps in his fingers.

Ouch. He wishes he could take that as more of a surprise, but why would God jump in for a dying kid? Why now and not then? He gets it. He really does.

He settles them on the bank, anyway, rocking back off his heels and onto his ass in the grimy salt-scum at the water's edge.

"Better late than never, right?" He mutters it like it's not a particularly good joke. "It's been a long day. Let's not end it like that."

While Kaworu catches his breath, God rubs at his salt-wet face with the callused brown palms of his hands. There is no blood on him, no wounds, no mark of the hideous protracted battle. He's tired. He'll stay here a long while, to catch his breath, or something like it.

He eyes the handprint ringed around Illarion's wrist, and the dinosaur which stares at him openly as a threat. She's beautiful. He hasn't had a lot of still and quiet moments to really get a look at her: he keeps doing stupid shit, instead, and then things get loud.

"Sounds right. Let's tell everyone we did that."

It's a bad quiet, the disturbed lake still lapping by their feet. But it's not like John is going to kill him, after all that; the horror show is done. No casualties. They should get some credit for that, honestly. When gods and monsters start swinging, there are always casualties.

He can't help but think about the difference between o Lord and Vanya, six months or a lifetime ago. He gestures to the soggy patch of lakeside.

"Can I sit?"

Here's the thing: the God of Necromancers never fights.

It's the entire premise, the foundational paired archetypes. He works magic from a distance while she cuts down anything that might try to annoy him. Nothing ever stood up to his beloved, and in the lifetimes of her absence, he's had his Lyctors; he's had his fleet; he has had an empire to stand ahead of him and rain hell on everybody he'd call an enemy. The King Undying never raises his hand to anyone. He hasn't killed anyone personally in millennia, except for the few he's let in close enough to burn out his naked heart.

This place has changed the rules on him, loudly and insistently. He's taken swings at gods and monsters and uppity vampires, here. He's blown up a half-dozen people and it's getting embarrassing. Instead of standing benevolently aside, he's been getting his hands dirty without a scrap of finesse.

This time, with Kiriona looking on and his loved ones standing by, facing off against a dead man he's sparred with once before, he decides to put a little flourish into it. A necromancer's duel is an artform. He's still a wizard.

John Gaius steps up to face his opponent with one of his own white knucklebones held between his fingers like a pearl. When the call is made to begin, he moves it like it's still a part of his body.

Illarion comes for him, quick and brutal, and John catches his talons with a porous off-white wall of bone. John flicks splintered needles in towards him; the bird dips out and away to dodge; the projectiles crumble to powder before they can skewer the audience, and the sunset lights up eddies of bone-dust around them in clouds of orange and gold.

He doesn't grab Illarion by the bones and body, and he doesn't touch his soul. It's a lost fight, a foregone conclusion, because Illarion can dart out and through every obstacle. It forces John back, surprisingly light on his feet, eyes dark and difficult to read. He ducks away from blows that come from elsewhere, fast as a Lyctor and intuitive as a River native. He catches talons in layers of regenerating bone, lets Illarion shred his way impossibly forward— and again, and again, weaving their way across the lawn like dancers. The sound of talon on bone is horrible, a wet and grinding rasp.

There's a rhythm to it. He can feel secondhand the reverberation of violence into bone, ugly and satisfying. John's expression crystallizes into fascination, dark and drawn.

"Come on," he murmurs, voice low between them. "You promised me a little pain."

He is silent for a very long time at the question--half a minute or more; time enough to make it seem he hadn't heard it, or rudely refuses to answer--

Except that his Omen, lovely and hostile as she is, holds up a single talon as if to say wait. Her eyes still do not leave John's face.

There are a half-dozen replies the shrike could make in variation on I can't stop you; and as many on it is your right. They chime with how John's taunts during the duel itself, when he'd gone past blood to red-taloned vindictive punishment of the object of his helplessness. But duty (and Duty, and Duty's damned expectations) renders those unworthy. He chose the duel with all its foreseeable consequences, for Gideon and Paul and all the others (for Kaworu, whom the Serpent dragged into Beasthood and the lake with it); walking away from that choice, and each before it, is untenable.

"You might, o Lord." He lifts a hand (now taloned, now not, with the difficulty of the gesture) to indicate a space beside him. "And we might speak of what happens now."

"That's alright. There's none needed." she assures gently. This isn't a usual house call, is it? Sitting here is fine enough, and it's nice to sit here when the moon affects it so. But she sits in quiet sympathy, nodding at his words. Maybe she could help fix that, should it be pointed out what needs doing.

"It's quite the conundrum isn't it? What's worse: not knowing, or knowing. If there's bliss in ignorance, or not." Luna doesn't know the answer to it, not truly. If she would feel better not remembering anything at all, or would the mystery of Beasthood hurt her more — not having the truth of what happened?

"I don't remember much of my time as a Beast. Bits and pieces at most. I know I hurt people." And she is still sorry for it. She exhales softly, brow furrowing for a moment. "But the important thing I try to remind myself is I wasn't completely in control of myself."

"Great," he says, even though it plainly isn't. God levers himself awkwardly down onto the mud, which is fine: his clothes are already wrecked. There's lakesalt crusting at his temples from the swim. They look hilariously ruined together, with the unfamiliar dinosaur still bristling between them like an unhappy dog. It'd only be a complete picture if his bug were here to join them, four different kinds of monsters all in a line.

"Well," he starts, in the usual tone of an unwelcome joke, "we probably say sorry for the property damage. Might've clipped a few buildings on the calming forest hike. That's step one."

there'll be only a hole in the soil (closed)

i. prelude

ii. the duel

iii. the beast rises (ota) (cw: body horror, eye gore, mental persuasion)

iv. aftermath

The Beast, for Kaworu and Deku (closed) (cw: MHA spoilers)

Illarion (ota; later closed to the Emperor and his potential champions)

Illarion (closed to the Emperor) (cw: eventual gore, body horror, necromancy)

Illarion (ota) (cw: suicidality)

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goodnight sweet broccoli cav

observe the process | cw: blood, corpses, ghosts

eye of the storm | mid-squabble (Start for John)

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we hardly knew ye 8(

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and last of all, (we'll let the other threads play out a bit and i may add to this)

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Kaworu | Closed to God

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cw: eye gore

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lake --> shore | immediate aftermath (Closed to Illarion)

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