deercountry | As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

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As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

Who: Everyone in the Leviathan player plot. The plot is open! See the ooc post here
What: A mysterious call makes those return to the beach...
When: Early April.
Where: Throughout the trench but mostly the beach.

Content Warnings: Possession, hallucinations, being consumed by another, lack of control.

A Call From a Lost Beloved

Sleepers will start to hear the voice of someone they left behind urging them to come back. The voice (or voices, depending on the Sleeper and their connections) all repeat words along the same refrain, altered to fit however the Sleeper remembers those they left behind in their worlds:

They are missed. They are needed back home. The promise of freedom from time in the Trench is a lie. Return to the sea.

At first, the call is subtle. Sleepers can ignore it as a manifestation of their own subconscious regrets or anxieties, or treat it as another strange phenomenon of the sea. Over the course of a week or so, however, those being called will begin to suffer from inexplicable malaise, sapping their physical and mental strength to resist the call. At the same time, life in the Trench seems increasingly meaningless: nothing but a stop gap, purgatory.

Return Home

Sleepers will find themselves at the edge of the beach with no memory of walking there. Instinctual fear conflicts with a strange familiarity. They’re happier at the beach than anywhere else in the Trench.

It’s safe there. A place where they feel understood and accepted for any wrongdoings of their past.

If a Sleeper is pulled away from the beach, thoughts of returning will consume them. The more time they spend away from the beach the more exhausted they become, building on the first stage of compulsion. They hear the ocean and the call of their lost loved one beyond the sound of crashing waves. They dream of the ocean. Sometimes they even spit up seawater, the ocean forcing itself onto their lives on dry land.

Do you fight this alien feeling taking over? Or is it comforting? Does it soothe a secret ache that’s been buried? Or is it even alien? Is some of it… could most of it… just be… you?

Part 1: Quick Summary

Sleepers hear the call of their lost beloved which eventually grows to hallucinations

Life in the Trench feels increasingly meaningless. It keeps them from their loved ones

Sleepers may fight the feeling or find it comforting. They might even not feel it is alien, but a manifestation of their true feelings.

A Welcoming

As the call intensifies, those afflicted by it will start to not only hear their lost loved one, but to see them in crowded places. The lost loved will smile, frown, look confused, or otherwise express whatever the Sleeper would be most affected by before turning their backs and heading towards the Farther Shores.

But no one else seems to see them.

If a Sleeper resists the beckoning of their beloved, they will suffer an intensified version of the call’s strength sapping power. Those who succumb to the call will find their well-being returning to them with every step they come closer to the sea, and total relief will suffuse them if they step into the water. Every woe and worry that afflicted them, supernatural or not, fades away, leaving only a sense of peace and completeness.

This is the trap of the call sprung. Sleepers who surrender to the call of the Leviathan will be subsumed by it, turning into puppets for the Leviathan’s insistent compulsion to return to the shore.

Those who become puppets will cluster by the water’s edge and with each other. Contact between the afflicted comforts them, and these waylaid Sleepers will often be found huddled together, holding hands, or otherwise making contact. They will also attempt to lure any as yet unpossessed Sleepers closer, even going so far as to ambush and seize lone Sleepers to drag them into the water in an attempt to force them to give into the Leviathan’s call.

Unheimlich

Finally, the Leviathan’s ghost rises. In the Waking World, the borders between life, death, and other states of being can become blurred, and the remnants of the Leviathan carried in the memories and souls of those it affected boil back to the surface.

This manifestation is a pale shadow of the mighty Beast, but a pale shadow of such a monstrosity is still a terrible thing. Mutated, rotten echoes of the Leviathan’s amorphous form bubble up in the surf, writhing masses of tentacles, carapaces, teeth, and the seabed itself lashing out at any who approach them.

The possessed Sleepers join in its attacks on the living, now seeking to force Sleepers into one of the Leviathan’s many maws. Some may use violence to do this, while others will try persuasion of a less physical kind - but the majority will do both, if capable of it, beseeching their fellow Sleepers to give into the Leviathan’s pull even as they wrestle them towards their dire fate.

Further complicating the fight are the hallucinatory projections the Leviathan’s remnants force on to anyone who comes close. These projections take many forms: some appear as visions of the Sleepers’ lost homes as they left them, while others take the form of their worlds distorted and ruined by their absence, their plans laid to waste, disasters unaverted, and their loved ones suffering without them.

Other projections are smaller, once more appearing as their lost loved ones, but this time, as corpses or monsters - corpses that can be resurrected and monsters that can be restored if only the Sleeper gives in, or so they claim. The increased power of the Fated Beast means that the illusions are now visible to everyone.

Worse yet, some of these illusions are made of flesh, no less an extension of the Leviathan than its teeth and claws, and no less capable of doing real harm. A false friend may have the very real power to attack a Sleeper, or pull them into a cold but loving embrace, and the crumbled walls of a forgotten home may hem a Sleeper in and impede their progress.

Those who fall victim to the Leviathan (or those brave and foolish enough to seek to communicate with it) will be drawn into communion with the restless dead mind of the creature. They may catch glimpses of their own pasts and imagined futures while entombed in a digestive polyp or linked to a biting tendril at the base of their neck, and stranger still, they might catch glimpses of the Leviathan’s memories and feelings. There is no rhyme or reason in these visions, which are shaped by the Sleeper’s own mind as much as the Beast itself.

The Sleepers who resist the Leviathan will struggle with some or all of these aspects as they fight to return the Beast to its grave and retrieve the Sleepers it has already captured. Segments of the Beast can be destroyed with sufficient force, making it a battle of gradually whittling away parts of the Beast’s corpse. Concerted attacks, like in the original fight, will be more effective than individuals working alone.

Rescuing the taken Sleepers will take more than mere violence. The possessed Sleepers must be reminded of their ties to themselves and others within Trench by someone known to them, someone willing to reveal a vulnerability of their own - the depths of their feelings for the possessed Sleeper, a confession about other Sleeper no longer with them that they miss, or some other anchoring truth stronger than the Leviathan’s draw.

The strategy of revealing emotional truths will also help combat the Leviathan’s illusions in the rest of the fight, something Sleepers may discover when their words not only remind their possessed companions who they are, but dispel parts of the Leviathan’s power along with its control. Clever Sleepers can leverage this outside of freeing their fellows from possession, rebuking the Leviathan’s projections with affirmations of their selfhood and the things they care for in Trench.

Part 2 Summary

Those who have submitted to the Leviathan’s will are called to the beach. It is comforting to hold hands and be with others that are possessed. They will also attempt to drag non-possessed sleepers into the sea.

The corpse of the beast is resurrected. Its powers cause the walls of reality to start to break. Pockets of Sleepers homeworlds, as they are or destroyed in the Sleepers absence, start to appear as do corpses of loved ones (alive or dead).

Those eaten will have similar hallucinations or even see some of the Leviathan’s own memories

It is possible to fight off the corpse with coordinated attacks.

Rescuing a Sleeper from possession requires said Sleeper to be reminded of their ties to the Trench. Revealing emotional truths to a possessed Sleeper will weaken the Leviathan’s hold and confessing their own emotional truth will break them free and weaken the Leviathan’s power.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Feel free to ask any questions!

terriblepurpose may also jump in to answer.

Character Name: Paul Atreides
Called and/or Possessed By Leviathan?: Called
Character Actions: Paul is deeply troubled by the apparent return of the Fated Beast, and relentless in seeking out answers. With his prophetic vision disrupted and altered by his blood change from Paleblood to Darkblood, that's a more complicated issue than he'd prefer. He is especially agitated by the impacts on those he cares about, which he relies on as fuel to resist the growing malaise inflicted by the call.
What They May Have Been Seen Doing: Performing blood magic rituals on the beach, attempting to retrieve wayward Sleepers, researching at the Archives

Character Name: Paul Atreides
Called and/or Possessed By Leviathan?: Called
Character Actions/Emotional Confession: Paul arrives early to the clustering of the possessed, but manages to resist succumbing. Instead, he redoubles his efforts to drag people away from the shoreline, with minimal success due to being heavily outnumbered and simultaneously trying to avoid capture.

When the Leviathan begins to manifests, Paul responds with determined violence. He resorts to his new Darkblood time looping powers early in the confrontation, and uses them recklessly as more and more of his loved ones are pulled into harm's way.

[Emotional confessions to be edited in as they occur.]
What They May Have Been Seen Doing: Almost comical if not so dire efforts to rescue waiting possessed Sleepers, two knives worth of anti-Leviathan violence, growing increasingly sickly and Corrupted as the fight wears on

Character Name: Gideon Nav / Kiriona Gaia
Called and/or Possessed By Leviathan?: Called
Character Actions: Gideon is less concerned about the return of the Beast as a threat to Trench, and more concerned about the Beast consuming her friends and loved ones. She'll heed the Leviathan's call willingly, and will stay on the beach throughout the duration of the event.
What They May Have Been Seen Doing: Initially, Gideon will spend her time checking in on others and trying to keep corruption at bay through relatively optimistic or humorous conversation. As the event continues, Gideon will begin to feel more and more possessed by the Leviathan, and the conversation will turn from humorous to downright dark or unsettling. Think of her jokes as getting worse and worse!

Character Name: Gideon Nav / Kiriona Gaia
Called and/or Possessed By Leviathan?: Mostly called, somewhat possessed

Character Actions/Emotional Confession: Gideon will be "called" to the shoreline by three figures: Jeannemary Chatur, a teenager who Gideon failed to save; Ortus Nigenad, her brother and brother-in-arms, who has been lost to sea; and Cytherea the First, a Lyctor of the Nine Houses. She will resist their call primarily thanks to the strength of the bonds she has made with her CR in Trench. This will facilitate any emotional confessions she has.

Gideon will experience the "Morning" memory fragment. Following that, she will participate in the battle as a fighter, using her two-handed sword to cut down whatever part of the Beast she can. Meanwhile, as the battle rages on, the call will grow stronger, and Gideon will come to empathize with the Leviathan. She will walk into the sea, believing that she'll be able to take a piece of the Beast along with her.

What They May Have Been Seen Doing: Fighting the Leviathan, becoming increasingly distraught over visions, confessing with her CR, walking into the sea.

part I - bloody beach
[cw: ritual self-harm, psychological distress]

A year ago, this part of the beach had finally been washed clean of the gory residue of a terrible battle. Nothing remains of the camp that once stood here save a scattering of buried minor artifacts - a metal spoon, bent and lost, the buckle of a boot torn off unnoticed, a fragment of glass already dulled to harmlessly by the polish of the waves - and the memories of those who, for a brief span of time, occupied it.

Paul can still see the tents, if he tries. The training rings and the engineering yards, the roughed out communal square, the flags and their emblems unfurling in the wind. He can see the faces of the people who came to answer the call to arms, so many of them gone, and he can hear their voices in the water.

That's why he came back. That's why, where there was nothing, there now stands a black line of fire-cured driftwood carved thin and murderous, jutting out of the sand as the scaffolding for pale threads strung with a confusion of esoteric charms and sigils. They form a jagged spiralling guide, not quite a circle, and at its terminus Paul kneels, facing out towards the sea.

His eyes are half-lidded and vacant, flicking this way and that as he breathes in a deep, dredging rhythm, his fingers twitching where they're folded on top of his thighs. A cone of incense burns at his left hand side, and on his right a thin fish-knife whose blade is worn down to almost impossible seeming narrowness rests on a plain red cloth. The wind drags his unkempt hair across his pallid forehead in fits, as unnoticed as the approach of any nearing footsteps.

Those who might come across this strange tableau have a choice: interrupt, or observe.

part I - intervention
[cw: mind influence, mind control]

Other times, the spiral lies empty.

Anyone who comes to this stretch of beach has a chance of encountering Paul sitting on the sand or a jutting piece of natural scenery, legs crossed and cradling his knife sharpening kit as he works on one of two wickedly sharp, long knives, the pair of swords strapped to his back apparently in need of new companions. He raises his hand to catch the attention of newcomers, and if they heed it, he waits for them to come to him. If they don't, he levers himself up and makes his way to them with short, cutting strides, a set of determination over his sharply drawn features. He doesn't look like he's been sleeping well.

Whether you come to him or he goes to you, his words are the same.

"What are you doing out here?" He asks, softly, with an odd burr of roughness in his usually so well-tempered voice. It's not anger, or fear, or anything so easily intelligible.

His knives hang from his hands over his knees or at his sides like he's forgotten they're there, a child's careless dangling of their toys.

part II - echo
[cw: body horror, oceanic horror, corpses, psychological distress]

It's funny how so many things come in cycles. Paul said it himself.

The beach is churned up by the claws and flippers of monsters, littered with bodies and wreckage. The water froths with blood in all its colours. Paul fights on light, sure feet over the sand, his long twin knives weaving death with uncanny swiftness, his eyes flat and murderous above the bridge of his protective mask.

The image could be a remnant of the past, dragged forward into the future by the strange tides of saltwater time, if not for the stranger who trails Paul across the beach wielding the swords whose sheaths hang empty at Paul's hips. He fights like a demon, and he nearly looks like one, too, his hair strung through with kelp and the warmth of his complexion lost to the mottled pallor of a drowned corpse. His armour is pierced and rent in a dozen places, but he does not bleed, and he does not falter in his pursuit.

Whenever Paul is staggered, whenever he is on the cusp of being overwhelmed, the stranger strikes. He does not have Paul's speed, but he makes up for it with strength, hewing through defences and forcing back his opponent with ferocious might and skill.

A blow comes down. Paul stumbles in the surf, going down to one knee, and he raises his knives above his head in a desperate attempt to block a crushing strike. It's useless. The stranger, for once, moves faster.

The distorted crab's claw is sheered off into the water, and the stranger finishes it with a hewing chop that cracks its shell like a gunshot. He kicks it away from Paul and turns to him, his hands outstretched, blades held up and away in pacification. His mouth moves, words lost in the tumult of battle.

Paul wrenches himself to his feet and jerks back, bringing his knives up in a defensive ward. His shoulders shake, the once, his head tilting down like a bull at bay, everything in him aligned on the cusp of something terrible, irrevocable.

He twists himself away, and he keeps moving.

private message | un: younghuman

Do you remember where the old camp was on the beach?

private message | un: lothrat

Of course.

...are you having weird but oddly familiar dreams too, or is there something else?

Nothing else yet.

But wouldn't that be something.

When can you meet me there?

So is that you *are* having dreams too?

Let me wrap up some chores here at the farm. Say, two hours?

Gideon fights in tandem with Paul, when she's able. It keeps her focused on something other than the young girl and young-for-the-Ninth man, who stand arm-in-arm behind the beast and wave. If she cuts down the creature, they'll go away. (If she cuts down the creature, she can reach them again.)

God once called Kiriona the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses, and for once, he wasn't lying. She fights even more dangerously this time, now that she cannot tire, or hurt, or bleed.

She ignores Paul's stranger, too. It's only fair. She has a suspicion as to who he is, but to say his name aloud would cut worse than any knife, and Kiriona needs Paul alive, especially since she can't be.

The stranger offers Paul a hand. Behind them both stands a frail woman, in a dress that matches the color of the churning sea. She points at the corpse of Paul's cavalier and winks.

Gideon doesn't know it, but she screams.

"No!"

And Kiriona lunges, hoping that her punch makes direct contact with the dead man's face.

Character Name: anakin skywalker
Called and/or Possessed By Leviathan?: both
Character Actions/Emotional Confession:
anakin will be called and possessed early on and with his darkblood powers and the leviathan's own reality warping powers it'll manifest the darth vader suit around him.

cracking open the mask will reveal anakin as he is now, not the burnt husk he'll become.
What They May Have Been Seen Doing:
darth vader will be seen dragging characters kicking and screaming into the water and interfering in any attempts to save others. the cold presence normally associated with him will be absent, but it doesn't make him any less deadly.

[The last time the Leviathan reared it's ugly head in Trench. It had taken the life of someone Johnny Lawrence cared about deeply. He had been too slow, to weak to do anything about it. That hadn't really changed over the last year, but he had a better idea of what he was doing now.

Which is why the sound of an engine roaring can be heard from across the beach. Johnny's in his 2009 Charger ripping across the sand in Paul's direction. The speaker's belting out a classic tune from his childhood.]

Oh
We're headin' for Venus (Venus)
And still we stand tall
'Cause maybe they've seen us
And welcome us all, yeah
With so many light years to go
And things to be found (to be found)
I'm sure that we all miss her so

[Crab carcasses and what ever other monstrosities Johnny comes across fly over crumple and fly past his bumper as he continues down the path.]

It's the final countdown
The final countdown
The final countdown (final countdown)
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Oh!

[Another crab goes flying through the air as the Charger comes to a skidding stop. Sand kicking up all over the place as it tries to come to a steady stop. When it does, Johnny let's his head and arm pop out the window.]

Paul.

You're not doing this without me.

Not this time.

Edited 2023-04-04 02:28 (UTC)

[There was a buzzing tension at the edges of Oscar's awareness that needled at him with the incessant intensity of a mosquito in the summer. It was a constant, interminable drone of anguish and loneliness that overwhelmed the senses and was enough to drive Oscar into the space of feeling uncomfortable in his own skin. He could feel his bones-- and feel it in his marrow that this was a trial that had come for the town before.

It was inevitable that Oscar made his way to the beach, driven by curiosity and a need to make good on his promise to make Trench better for everyone. Even a creature from beyond the shores and beyond ordinary comprehension. He came only as himself, with Diggs at his side-- and it was impossible to not spot Paul in a quiet alcove along the surf.]

...How can I not be here?

[Oscar asked in reply to Paul's address, holding his own arms as if he were attempting to give himself a hug.]

It won't stop crying. I can't concentrate on anything.

[And, looking up, he regarded Paul and firmly stood his ground.]

...We're a team, aren't we?

I'm here to help, if you'll have it.

~~I'm always having dreams.~~

Yes.

I'll be waiting.

After all: he's already there.

When Ezra arrives, he'll find Paul cross-legged on the sand between two piles of driftwood. One is raw, a collection of scavenged sea-worn wood stacked up in a rough pyramid. The other is a much more orderly stack whittled down into approximate stakes, sharpened at both ends. Wood shavings litter the sand in front of Paul as he hews away at a piece in the process of transferring from one pile to the other, his face blank and his wood-carving knife quick.

He raises his hand to Ezra in greeting with the knife still it in when Paul spots him, and it glints in the thin light.

If there's anyone Paul can trust not to lose their head at ghosts, he wants it to be Gideon. She has been past the threshold herself and come back, and so what could be left to trouble her from the other side?

Rationalization is a stark and sterile word for lying to yourself, bleached bone-white and bloodless. He wants, he needs, he cannot tell her to go, he cannot ask her to stay, he doesn't know what to do to keep her safe, he can't stand not to be able to look through the maelstrom and see bright red hair and dead-treasure eyes behind a sword.

She screams and it snaps his heart to his spine, snaps his body into new motion faster than treacherous thought. His turning away whips into a spin on the sand as graceful as flight.

The dead man is still not so fast, but the point would be moot anyway. He takes in Kiriona's fury and her fist rocketing towards his face, and his expression shifts from surprise to uncertainty to abrupt accepting calm. He tilts his head and takes it on the jaw, swords fanning back behind him like swept back wings.

"Hey," he says, after a half-careful, half-stumbling step back, rocked by the force of her blow, the word a soft prelude to a sentence he doesn't have the chance to get around to.

Paul's tackle is as wild as his guttural snarl, but with the dead man already off-balance it still does the trick. He knocks them both down into the surf and rears up over him like a viper, knife raised and dripping, his body shaking in a twitching paroxysm of fury.

"Don't you dare," he hisses, bleak and vicious, "Don't you fucking dare."

The dead man looks up at him, gently. His hands and whatever they might still be holding stay under the water. He blinks salt spray out of eyes that are already full of it. He keeps his mouth closed.

Paul, who makes a wet, rending, ugly sound, something ripped up from a place no noises should come from, doesn't.

[ The triumphant music and roaring engine are sounds first so impossible that Paul does not believe they are real. It's only more hallucinatory chaff, scattering itself across the sensescape of the beach to baffle and deflect him from finding the new heart of hell.

But Johnny Lawrence and his steed are nothing like the oozing, amorphous eruption on this beach. They exist in the stark unbelievable real, and when Paul finally looks their way, the car shines like dawn racing over the horizon. He watches it rocket through the decapod menace with stunned, uncertain wonder, and behind him, his dead stranger skewers the pulsating slug-like things that otherwise might harry the stilled, slight young man where he stands.

The car skids to a stop feet from where Paul waits for it. He doesn't flinch to get out of the way. He knows, without prophecy or calculation, that it won't hit him. ]

Sensei?

[ Paul always has the trick of folding a dozen things into a single word, but this time, it's something any human being could do with a name. It's disbelief and relief entwined, it's a question unasked answered, it's the guilty shaken tremor of reprieve and the fear of what that reprieve has yet to cost.

Something not an engine roars. Paul shudders, and the gauzy shock falls away. He straightens his back and rallies, jerking his head towards the alien sound. ]

No mercy.

[ Paul lifts his hand in gentle forestalling, folding the blade of the knife loosely along his arm by catching its handle with two fingers in his palm, a fluid accommodation to avoid waving a knife at Oscar. That's at least proof Paul remembers he has knives on him, which might be a comfort. ]

I was only asking why you were. [ His tone dips softer, the soothing lap of low waves on a silky shore. ] We're a team. I remember.

[ He lets his hand drop again and smiles, a peculiar, wan half-crescent slant of his mouth. ]

I thought you might have not heard it this time. [ A pause, a tilt of his head. ] It sounds like crying to you?

Kind of?

[Oscar eased his stance and looked up, as if uncertain about how to explain himself or his observations. ]

It's the Paleblood. I can sense it more than actually hear it, and it reminds me of... A swarm of bees. Or, a whale.

Something that's hard for people to understand.

i. wake from your sleep (open)

[ Gideon is one of the first to arrive on the beach, and much like the last time, she doesn't leave. Thankfully, she's not overworking herself this time. Instead, she tends to hover around Kaworu, her brow knitted in concern when she thinks no one is looking.

But she can't hover all the time. When she's not trying to nudge her friends or family into conversation, she's down at the shoreline, looking out at the waves. Her cloudy-gold eyes seem to be focused on something, which is strange, because there's nothing there. It's as if she's waiting for something, and if asked, she'll say she's waiting for you.

The closer you get to the water's edge, the more likely it is she'll snap to attention, turning that watchful gaze on you, instead. ]

You should back off. It's fucked up out there.

ii. the drying of your tears (open; cw: grief, self-harm)

[ Just inside the horizon, there is a skull-painted man and a teenage girl with a bejeweled sword, and both of them are just out of reach.

It doesn't matter how much of the Beast Kiriona cuts down, and she cuts down plenty. Once it makes landfall, she does not stop moving. In her flurry of speed and strength and technique, she looks as alive as her corpse-cooled pallor will allow. Kiriona fights silently, and ruthlessly, and endlessly. She could do this forever, and maybe that would be for the best. Maybe that's what she's meant to do, why she's here.

As the battle wears on, Kiriona grows reckless. A barbed tentacle twists around her ankle; she stumbles and keeps going. The creature throws ink in her face; she wipes it off and presses on. To anyone who tries to get her attention, let alone urge her to stop, she will turn to them, and say in a hollow voice that is both hers and not her own: ]

I'm sorry. I couldn't save them. I'm sorry.

iii. today we escape (closed to close cr; cw: self-sacrifice)

[ Someone must have pulled Gideon to shore. She doesn't remember. She recalls something else, instead.

There is no battle. That is a lie. There is always a battle coming. You are a child of war, and you have known this since you were small. But in the morning, there is someone beside you, and they do not slip a knife through your ribs. You hold them close, and you do not hold them like a spoil of battle, for this is something far holier. Maybe one day, you'll give the holy thing a name.

Gideon kneels on the sand, back to the sea, and she smiles. ]

Step one. Preserve the soul. [ She shakes her head and laughs a little, low and only for herself. ] Obviously.

[ Bless the love that lasts forever and ever, amen. ]

I get it. [ She rises. ] I know this is gonna be really, really messed up, but someone's got to take one for the team.

No. It's not - it isn't that you're wrong.

[ The hitch of hesitation, the substitution for one turn of phrase for another, are the sort of thing Paul tries to avoid. They need clarity of communication if they lack clarity of information. ]

All observations are useful. [ He means that. ] I want to understand. Would you keep explaining it to me?

An opponent that doesn't fight back is infinitely worse than one who does, and Kiriona would consider strangling Duncan for his cockiness, had Paul not gotten to him first.

She watches Paul and Duncan go down, still keeping a tight, albeit single-handed grip on her sword. It was probably stupid to sacrifice a hand to punch the other corpse, but oh well. Still worth it.

From here, it's easy to hear Paul, and even easier to see him, and the sight and sound are both fucking terrifying. She should congratulate him for finally being able to tackle someone larger than Kaworu; she knows it's not that easy when you've got noodle arms. Still, that doesn't mean the sight isn't somewhat sad, and worse, it's still downright dangerous. The whole point was to keep the ghost away from Paul, not this.

Kiriona sets aside her sword, steps forward, and before Paul can make a horrible mistake, grabs him by the torso and tries to pull his smaller body off the corpse's larger one. Thanks to the saltwater, her skin is cooler and clammier than it usually is, but for once, she doesn't shy away from the touch. Why bother? The bandages around her neck have probably come undone anyway, and if he bothers to look, Paul can probably see her wounds.

"Stop it. Stop." Out of the corner of Gideon's eye, the hot cougar in the green dress nods approvingly. The only thing more sure than a choice to stop is a command. "I won't let them steal you. Look at me." Kiriona hates it when people look at her. She's sick of parades. It doesn't matter. "You have to ignore him."

Edited 2023-04-05 01:16 (UTC)

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Page 1 of 6

As above, so below - the Fated Leviathan returns

Questions!

Part I Character action summary

Part II Character action summary

Paul Atreides | Part I

Paul Atreides | Part II

gideon nav / kiriona gaia | part one

gideon nav / kiriona gaia | part two

Paul Atreides | OTA

closed prompts

Ezra Bridger

Private forever

no subject

no subject

echo

anakin skywalker

Echo

Intervention

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

gideon nav / kiriona gaia | open

no subject

no subject