deercountry | let me look at the sun

Entry tags:

let me look at the sun | open

Who: Paul Atreides, open
What: Event catch-all
When: Month of December
Where: Archaic Archives, streets of Trench, the forest's edge, memories
Notes: Go ahead and contact me at

terriblepurpose or by PM if you'd like to discuss any starters or suggest new ones! For tagging in your character's memories to Paul, feel free to start with whatever your preference is.

Content Warnings: Violence, body horror (lockjoint), death, religious extremism, extensive Dune spoilers, suicidal ideation, funerals, grief

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( Something has become aware of the young man there in the labyrinth of books.

Something perhaps nearly as ancient as some of these tomes, and like many of them, it's coated in the dust of time, a layering that it struggles to see through, to remember itself through; the creature is a lost thing. Something that's been broken over time: forced in and out of human hosts through intensive ritual, bound to Earth's plane and held caged there. A bird with mutilated wings, shred like paper.

Once, it wasn't so. Of all the great goetic entities, King Paimon is one of the greatest. So close to Lucifer himself and one of the four Cardinal rulers of Hell, a being of knowledge, truths, and secrets. Such a place as this, with its arcane insights and plethora of knowledge, would be an ideal for the great king. And Paimon has been drawn here ever since he woke in this new place: still trapped within a vessel but no longer trapped in the dreamscape that was Deerington. In this place, his powers are slowly returning, and he's slowly remembering and re-learning. He comes here often, to the Arcane Archives. He moves through the rows of books and trails them softly with his fingertips, leafs through page after page, absorbing. It's here that he feels his spirit sparking to life within him, a brilliant golden cacophony, impossibly loud and even more impossibly bright.

Even in the state that Corruption has twisted him into (a snarling thing, progressively more and more aggressive), the demon comes here to this important place. Only right now it's like a starving animal following some instinct back to a place it was once fed. His frayed mental state has no capacity to actually utilise this space right now; he can only prowl it like a ghost haunting the endless rows of books. Long-limbed, tall, and silent as a shadow, the energy of him is a painfully-taut wire ready to snap.

When he sees the boy tucked away into a quiet little space of his own, the demon freezes, every fibre of his essence locked on, watching through a small gap in a nearby row of books. At this point in Corruption, "Peter" no longer exists. There is no memory of him — no memory of the fact that this body is Peter. But there is the memory of other things, feelings and direction, what the demon's goal was for so long. To break down the designated male host so that he could successfully inhabit his body. To make him vulnerable.

The boy is youthful-faced and lean — on the cusp of adulthood, head full of thick dark curls. These surface features remind Paimon of Peter even if he doesn't explicitly know it. It triggers something in him. Gives the lost thing something to focus on, a goal to accomplish again.

Break him down, hollow him out. Get inside.

Peter was sixteen years old when the possession was finalised. And perhaps, on some level, the demon of knowledge knows that the young man he's staring unblinkingly at is of the exact same age.

The final thing that hollowed his vessel out was the act of terrorising him while wearing his mother's skin. Like an animal, he'd chased and snarled and screamed and thrashed and cut through Annie Graham's skin, and let the boy watch his mother kill herself.

In the silence of Paul's solitude comes a sudden interruption — a sharp cluck-sound as the entity flicks its tongue against the roof of its mouth. The seconds after that are few but they stretch out, tense, strained...... and then the demon abruptly starts shoving books through the bookshelf it's hiding behind, sending them violently flying outwards as it starts forcing its way through that shelf like something bursting from a wall, a madman snarling, pupils blown wide, turning the eyes of this body from warm chocolate browns to inky black.

It's the boy in the secluded nook that he's locked onto, clearly ripping his way right through the bookshelf towards him, fingers curved like claws as they scrabble and grip and force their way through. There's an anger that's animalistic, wild — and most of all, hungry. )

[Paul has been told that the Archives belong to Never Mind. They have refused to call this a temple, but it's what he's begun to see it as. The shifting walls and bookshelves, a mandala; the archivists, the priesthood; the act of learning, offering and prayer at once. It's soothing, cloistered, peaceful. If he believed in any kind of fairness, he'd curse that he was chosen by her and not the raven-shaped god of knowledge.

But still. He's found something here that has been the closest to a sense of safety yet. Being here allows him to feel as though he's capable of taking control of the situation, of himself. When in doubt, he has always reached for knowledge, and he is full of such doubt these days. He is distracted with it, revolving around the questions of how and why of dozens of things. He is rushed with it, his blood thrumming with the recklessness of the Bone Moon.

What this all comes together to mean is this: Paul has taken off his shield generator to read, because the edge of it was catching on paper, and he was getting annoyed. He set it on a bookshelf close at hand, just in case, but as the hours wore on today he didn't think of it at all.

Paul does think of it when it clatters to the floor and is promptly buried under falling books as someone (not something, he corrects, a flicker of disturbance at his first categorization) bursts through the bookshelf opposite him. His desert mouse disappears into a pocket as he stands up so quickly the chair he was sitting in scrapes on the ground, his hands rising palm up and warding towards the stranger.]

Stop -

[Paul's off-balance from the shock, from trying to read the stranger's face and seeing - seeing what? Another boy, not much older than he is, who's clearly mad with the Hunter's Curse, and anything else is him being shaken. He is not a child, he's not afraid of an unarmed man who's going to end up stuck in a shelf or falling on the floor no matter how wild his eyes are.]

You don't want to hurt me, or yourself, stop this.

[He steps towards the stranger, pitching his voice to a soothing, gentle register. This isn't the first madman he's handled here; there is nothing different but the intensity of it. Nothing.]

( The manner in which the thing makes its presence known seems mindless — frenzied, uncontrolled, blinded by an animalistic desperation. If there were a wiser way to gain what it wants, the entity is certainly far-removed from it.

...But even here, there's tactic involved in the method used. Paimon in this state isn't explicitly capable of being aware of it so much, but it's there even so: there's purpose to scrabbling his way from the bookshelves with reckless abandon, snarling loudly, making quite the show of it.

He wants to terrify the boy. That was part of it, after all, such an essential part. Vulnerability is born from terror, from the feeling of being trapped the way he means to trap the boy in his own secure little corner.

(Make a home a nightmare, and the people inside have nowhere to feel safe in, and they crumble to pieces one by one by one. Peter was the last member of the Graham Family standing, until he wasn't, and in the very end he was terrified of his own home, its very foundations.)

...—But the boy doesn't immediately react the way the demon anticipates. There's no screams, no thrashing wildly away from him, no attempt to escape. There's— instruction, direction ('Stop this') and the young man (host, the male host, it's supposed to be a male host and if he gets inside of the male host then all the things that are wrong in him will be right again, won't they—?) even steps closer. The voice is soothing, placating; the demon finds himself shocked into silence by this for a few long seconds. Everything goes very still, the very energy of himself sucked in and held there.

And then anger floods up and out and he screams, the sound only barely human in the sense that it's forced through human vocal chords. It's some natural reaction to being met with this resistance, one force meeting another and surging brutally in attempt to suppress it. Several of the books on the shelf suddenly fly outwards, not pushed by his scraping hands but by his mind, a whirlwind of pages and thick covers that slam against the opposite wall and floor and possibly the boy himself — unless he manages to dodge them — with dangerously heavy thuds.

It clears the shelf enough that the demon's able to lunge almost all the way through, and then its lean torso twists, turns itself upwards; the figure begins to crawl vertically up the shelf it's finally torn through, long limbs moving spider-like, knocking more books off the higher it goes. When it's up high enough that it has to turn its long, slender neck down all the way to stare at the boy, it bares its teeth at him, the words a reedy hiss. Though it's perhaps unexpectedly comprehensible, there's a coating that surrounds the words, some echo of Other. The rise and fall and rise of multiple voices, whispers, howls: a cacophony of ancient things. What speaks was never meant to be understood by human ears. )

YOU BELONG TO ME

( ...At least buy him dinner first, Paimon

...But perhaps, this isn't simply a person gone crazed with the Hunter's Curse. Perhaps this is something else, something that seems to have personal offense with the young man stood down there. )

YOU WILL SUBMIT, BOY
YOU WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO SUBMIT

[Sometimes, knowledge protects against fear. Knowing the right way to walk on sand, or how to use a knife like an extension of the mind itself. Pair mastery of skills and awareness of threats, and a person can venture out into the world with informed caution instead of naïve terror.

Sometimes knowledge is the whetstone fear sharpens itself on. Paul has spent his life learning how to observe and predict human threats. He has been trained in an exquisite perceptiveness of human motion and the way it can be used to kill. He can read the subtleties of a spoken human threat, and a host of ways to lean on the weaknesses that might underlie it.

So looking at and listening to whatever this thing wearing a human body like a stolen carapace might be is a precise kind of informed horror. Paul's pupils dilate to the edges of his irises as he goes unforgivably still; two heavy books hit him, one glancing off his too slowly raised arm and the other connecting hard with his chest. He staggers back, too easily thrown off balance, but it breaks him from his stupor.

Paul's eyes narrow, his pupils contracting to a murderous looking focus, but when he darts to the side and kneels behind the back of the chair he was sitting in he reaches for the open lapels of his coat, not the knife strapped to his right wrist. He shucks the long, heavy black garment, turning it inside out and then gathering it up in his hands like a fishing net.]

Is that so?

[His voice is fiercely controlled, the ripple of fear underneath it sublimated into cold fury. But it's there anyway, in the slight shift of his breathing, in the involuntary sweat slicking his palms.]

( He's really launched right into it. But there's no time for hesitating, for stalking from afar before moving in for the kill — he's already done that, for so long now.

...At least, he believes he has, for he fully believes this person to be Peter (not that he remembers the name in his current state, only the feel of him). Peter, whom he'd watched from afar after being ripped from his temporary host, existing only as what could be perceived as light: spectral, formless, a cacophony of flashing light and alien colours. Dancing across Earth's plane like a visitor, never meant to be there for so long. Desperate to be found, made whole again.

It's time for the final act. He will have the boy, become him. He will be reborn.

The voice that answers him is hard and controlled: not soft, not pliable the way he remembers Peter's being. It confuses him, enrages him (the boy resists him; he's not supposed to resist him) and the demon visibly bristles from where he's still stuck high up on a shelf, clinging to it with some impossible supernatural capability.

But something in him can sense that fear underneath the layer of ice below, like a shark smelling blood. The demon, so sensitive to energy, knows fear very well. He latches on. And imitates what The People had done and said to Peter, voice changing for a moment in attempt to match someone else's, coming out oddly human now. Like a parrot repeating— )

Satony... Degony... Eparigon.

( ...The words might seem like nonsense, or perhaps the boy would be able to decipher them as ancient things. Either way, there's something ritualistic to the words, the way they're spoken: with intention. The demon continues speaking in that stolen human voice, shaking with stolen human emotion. )

I expel you...! I expel you! Get out!

[The meaning of the words eludes Paul, but he recognizes an invocation when he hears one, he knows the power a voice can wield, and who knows what further force a voice might bring to bear here? So he has to move quickly, and he does, rising from behind his chair and facing towards the thing in a ready stance, coat in hand, prepared to entangle.

It's the voice's contortion that spurs him on to his next action. (Not fear. Not wanting it to be silenced, so he doesn't have to listen to this unholy mimicry and the devouring fury behind it.) Two can play at that game.

Whatever rides this body, the body itself is human. Paul centers himself, draws a line of focus up through his spine and then into his throat, preparing inflection, pitch, resonance. He is the rock from which authority flows, he is the instrument of command, and he speaks in a Voice that lashes out like a heavy chain:]

Stop.

[It would sound like any other word to anyone it wasn't directed at, but Paul is trained to hear himself, and he knows he has found the right register. The Voice acts on a level deeper than conscious will, the profound ancestral weight of it bypassing thought to access immediate response. The thing will fall from the bookshelf, and Paul will contain it, pacify it, see what he can do to banish it.

That's what will happen. What else could?]

( Truly, the words aren't for him to say — for all his great powers of conjuration, he is not a magician or a witch. Spellwork is not his to engage in but the means through which he is called to, summoned and utilised. But he doesn't have any understanding of that in the moment; he simply imitates the voice of the magician, the witch, who would be using such words. The voice grows louder and more impassioned, and shifts further still to something that becomes a woman's voice. His bird's tongue perfectly copies the woman who spoke those words, and like before, they're used as a weapon now. EXPEL EXPEL EXPEL

The boy comes out to face him. This, too, is disconcertingly unlike Peter (Peter, who hid and hid and hid until the end and wouldn't look at him, screamed and cried and ran and slapped his own face and begged himself to wake up, it's just a nightmare—) The demon is speaking still, repeating the words in some frenzied jabbering, harsh and loud and with the woman's stolen voice, until—

Stop.

And it does. Like a candle's light immediately snuffed out, the thing clinging to the bookshelf abruptly falls silent. He's surprised, disturbed, affected by the voice that came from the young man's throat. Something important, the right strand of command — and perhaps ordinarily, the demon would be enthralled by this capability; it's how he's meant to be handled, after all. With a roar of direction and intention to match his own, energy aligned in perfect harmony.

But he isn't how he should be, and the voice of command elicits only one response in him. After a tense, silent pause, the creature springs. With no warning at all, no convulsive twitches and no sounds, so awfully sudden. It's some bizarre mixture of falling and flying, the way he suddenly drops like a spider from its perch, but it's aimed at the boy — scraping his way through the air, coming right for him. It's all very fast, a matter of seconds. )

[It's as if the command rebounds: Paul is still, rigid, staring as the thing plummets impossibly towards him. For nearly anyone else (like the boy this is meant for, the one already consumed) the span of time would seem instant, the lapse of motion forgivable.

There is little magic, if any, in Paul's world. They've compensated in other ways. Paul is one of them, crafted from before birth and honed to the killing edge of human capacity. And still, he stands there like a dumb animal as the trap falls and thinks, stupefied by a horror so vast it obliterates all other thought, how?

But all of that sharpening still counts for something, because where the mind fails, the body reacts, and Paul twists like a matador as he unfurls his coat, spins it out like a net, and dives towards instead of away.]

Enough!

[This is shouted in a voice only his own, one tinged by what is frustration, offense, affront, and not fear. He's not afraid. He's furious. There is still a difference, however much they feel the same.]

( He can't damage the body too much. That thought still lingers in him, despite his crazed fury. Even with Peter, they were so meticulously careful with the final shove. He fell out the right window, the one with the soft flowerbed below it. No bones even broke in the fall. The vessel's physical form was damaged, but not broken. Paimon was able to stand after, to move and walk and function.

No, physically, he must not break the body too much. It was mentally that the word broken applied to. The most important piece of it all. If any remnant of the mind remained unbroken, the possession would not hold. Like those failed hosts of the past — part of him still remembers. There was another sixteen-year-old, one who had survived the attempts, and taken his own life to escape the agony of it all. That vessel was lost forever, until so many years later when another would finally be made viable.

He will not lose this one.

But suddenly he's trapped, covered up, and the demon screams, not like the way it feels to be suppressed, contained somewhere black and tight. Wings kept painfully bound. He thrashes where he's all bundled up against the boy, rams against him as much as he possibly can. In the struggle, he lifts — and the boy with him, if he's still hanging on — right up off of the ground for a moment, then slams sideways, hitting something solid and hard — the chair. )

[Paul's breath is knocked out of him by the collision, the chair collapsing under their weight. Nothing punctures him, so there's that, but it will bruise, and when he tears his breath back in he realizes that a lower rib on the right side is slightly cracked.

But they're on the ground, and having a surface to pin the thing to is something. Paul twists to try to get it on its stomach, doing his earnest best to keep the thing entangled. He's been trained to stay on his feet as much as he can, but the grapple is one of the most dangerous clashes of body against body, and he's as good at is as anything else. Pain or no pain. Fear or no fear.]

I will hurt you, is that what you want?

[His voice is ratcheted with frustration and ache, breath coming in hot pants as he struggles with a thing that is too strong for its body.]

( The boy — with his unexpected resilience and firm command, with his strength that seems out of place for his willowy frame (is he even really A Boy, or Something Else?) — has captured him. The demon realises this as he's forced onto his stomach, arms trapped, all tangled up in the suffocating material. He's snapping his teeth animal-like and flailing, but it does no good.

The question is not only a question, but also a proclamation, a dual-sided concept to absorb. Is that what you want? but also I will hurt you — the demon tries to scream again, and it sounds more like Peter now, the vocal chords rubbed raw and ragged from the ancient thing that's been scraping against them. The scream breaks like a human's, emotional in its upset.

No, no, no, it isn't what he wants. What he wants is the body he was given, and while it isn't true freedom to be contained within a human form, it's at least an escape from another, worse prison. The male host will be right, correct—

There are a few bursts of flame, some catching a book or two on fire, others just manifesting in the air itself: bright, dangerous sparks. But they disappear quickly, leaving behind a singed smell; it's as if the demon is puttering out.

He resists less, and less, and then he's not struggling at all but just breathing against the floor, moaning like a wounded animal. He was wrong; it isn't time yet. The host hasn't been worn down enough, and so he can't get into him. )

Hate..... hate.... ( He breathes, and it sounds only human now, the voice of a boy around Paul's age. Though the words themselves are almost like something a child would say. ) Hate you....

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let me look at the sun | open

(cw: unnecessarily wordy introspection, demons, possession, mention of "suicide", and terrorising!)

"unnecessarily wordy introspection" no all necessary

free 2 RAMBLE (•̀o•́)ง

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cw: nondescriptive suicide mention

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making my way through these delicious backtags, apologies for the delay!!