03 . boat log!

[necrolord]

Who: necrolord and existing CR. If your character has met the Emperor and would respond positively to an invite, jump on in. (If you're not sure, ask me at ochrona!)
What: A voyage out to sea! This is a mingle log; feel free to toplevel and tag around.
When: Ambiguously around New Year's.
Where: The Pthumerian Ocean.

Content Warnings: Undead sailors, flesh-eating crabs, tentacles, corpses; Deer-standard levels of inherent fleshy horror. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

[ See John's toplevel for prompts, and feel free to tag in brackets or prose! ]

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

Paul drinks in the gentleness like sand does rain, and in its wake an awful hope blooms, a dark-petaled flower. He looks back to the storm, and finds salt-spray in his eyes that he brushes away with the back of one hand as he grips the gunwale with the other.

"I hope you're right," he says, and then, "I hope there's still someone who loves god."

There's a difference between love and reverence, and Paul has watched the change in too many pairs of eyes already not to know that. All he wants to tell them is be not afraid, but how can he say that when they should be? The messiah cannot say he is lost. They'd tear him apart.

If power is a kind of gravity, so is love, the steadying moons that balance the pull of the sun. What happens to your orbit without them?

"It must be a wise man who came up with the saying," Paul says, somehow finding the words, his voice as bloodless as his troubled face, "What does it mean?"

[necrolord]

I hope there's still someone who loves god.

This breaks it. God looks at the boy as though Paul just walked into his house and shot him. He looks at Paul as though genuinely astonished someone just said that to his face.

Then he tries again to smile. It doesn't quite work.

"Mostly that it's a rough deal, being God," he says. His eyes are dark and inhuman and very, very old. "People will die. It's your job to make sure it's worth it."

And that is firmly enough of that. He claps his hands once on the gunwale, decisively, and turns to fully regard his navigator.

"Still," he says, and tips his head like he's sharing a secret, "I like to think I've been managing well enough."

[terriblepurpose]

A trained memory can be a strange thing, at times. Every word that Paul has ever exchanged with the captain (that's not what he is, who he is, Paul was closer the first time and farther away) seems to come to him at once, and yet he comprehends none of them. All he can seem to focus on are black eyes, truly black, and the way they've watched him all this time while he talked.

"No," Paul says, and then, his voice breaking, "No -"

The way he falls to his knees is less like obeisance and more like despair, but it bruises the same way. His palms hit the deck next, his head bowed, his eyes staring blankly down and still seeing nothing but black.

"Your Divine Imperial Majesty," Paul says, and he's never prayed before. He cannot find the words, and even if he did, he wouldn't be able to heave them from his mouth.

[necrolord]

It is satisfying, to watch the distance rush back in. It is deeply exhausting. It hurts in a way that ought to be pity, though he must have scraped out the last shards of that millennia ago, like bits of broken teeth. Somehow he keeps digging and digging for remnants.

He is very used to it.

"It's alright, Paul," he says, and his tone is terribly gentle. "Really, let's go with 'Captain' for now. I put on the coat and everything."

[terriblepurpose]

"All of it was me. No one else."

Even on his knees, Paul doesn't know how to beg. He's never been in a position where it would have made any difference.

"I never said any of this to them, not any of them, or anyone else, it was me," he says, uselessly repeating, and his voice should tremble, he should shake, but his desperation is a fierce thing, his fear always too close to fury. "Hold me accountable, but not -"

He lifts his head, and Paul's eyes are incandescent with pale moonlight and terror.

"Don't," you dare, "Please."

[necrolord]

"Paul," he says, "No one is in trouble. I'm not angry. You make some well-thought points, you know."

His expression twists a shade deeper into pity, at the look in the boy's eyes. God exhales a slow sigh through his nose.

"If I were that readily offended," he says, "I would be an absolute nightmare, can you imagine? After ten thousand years. Give me a bit of credit."

[terriblepurpose]

If the future is an ocean, points like this are the hurricanes. Paul can see ten thousand possibilities unfolding from this one, a churning chaos that obscures more than it illuminates. (He's never done this while he was awake here, a fact that would be a horror all its own if it wasn't so overshadowed.)

Some things are clear. Every time he flicks a knife into his hand and lunges, it's a wave crashing against a cliff, dissolving into a violent, terminal salt-spray. Others are not, or clear in ways that make no sense, would never happen: a wordless howl as answer to being called by his name, or falling at the captain's feet and crying help me, please, tell me how to-, from which make it stop and do this branch away from it on their own untraceable paths.

None of it helps him choose. What drives his next action is a thought that might be best translated as Thou shalt not vomit on God's shoes as the taste of bitter, rotten lime and sea-brine flood his mouth. Paul scrambles to the gunwale and up its side, retching, his bag discarded on the deck beside him, and leans over the railing bringing up nothing but sour spit and hot, thin bile.