o4 . february catchall

[necrolord]

Who: necrolord and you!
What: Local necromancer is networking. Archives research, healing for lockjoint and self-mutilation, and more.
When: February.
Where: Archives, Lumenwood, streets of Trench.

Content Warnings: Skeletons and mentions of the self-mutilation curse. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

(1) research.

You've probably seen him around, by now. The man is something of a fixture in the Archives: he settles at an unremarkable table and proceeds to drown it in open books, scattered pages, notes, journals. He seems intent on skimming his way through half the library. Sometimes there's a girl, scrawny and dour with her face painted up like a skull, hovering at his elbow. Today, he's on his own.

He doesn't look like much. Simple clothes; bare hands, which suggests he's either confident or reckless, in a town that will titter at anyone who doesn't wear gloves; he looks fortyish and plain. Only one thing about him is remarkable: his eyes, black as oil from edge to unpleasant edge.

Today, he's amassed an odd collection of vials, bloodstones, and shards of bone. You might catch the sudden reek of Beast blood, which is alarmingly toxic to handle even with gloves; you might catch him weighing a huge, inhuman bone in the palm of his hand, looking thoughtful. If he notices your attention, he'll speak without looking up.

"Six months, and I'm still trying to puzzle out the basics."

(2) the skeleton plow.

[ On the 9th, a blizzard blows in. It leaves the town blanketed in a heavy weight of snow, and Trenchies come out with shovels and resigned expressions to scrape the streets clear.

God, who has places to be, finds this a touch inconvenient. He's meant to be in Lumenwood just now, playing Jesus on everyone's frostbite and having a generally pleasant morning. So he claps his hands, watches a dozen skeletons claw their way free of the frozen earth and pop out of the snow ("like daisies," he says to whoever is nearest) and then sets off across town with his helpful new posse.

Each skeleton moves as smoothly and politely as a human servant, with a speck of red light in each empty eye. God makes a little gesture, like a conductor with an orchestra; his servants' fingerbones fuse and spread. Their arms distort and lengthen. They each now wield a broad bone scoop, which looks somewhere between silly and horrifying.

The skeleton army sets to work shoveling snow, heedless of appalled bystanders. ]

(3) healing.

[ Maybe you're still suffering from Lockjoint, Sleeper. Maybe you've begun scraping your own skin away under this month's curse, trying to resist temptation, trying to resist the urge to confess.

It doesn't matter whether all the damage is hidden by your clothing, or whether you think you're doing a good job of masking your pain. Today you're near the gates of Lumenwood - maybe to get help for your own issues, maybe not - and there is a man here, who has just waved away a grateful Trenchie making conversation. He turns, tips his head in hello, and considers you. ]

Want a hand with that?

(4) wildcard.

[ Happy to match formatting! ]

Comments

not here. cw: gore, extreme violence, self-harm via bug monster

[necrolord]

It builds and builds and builds.

John spends a lot of time thinking, this month. He thinks about sea monsters and the familiar weight of a ticking clock. He thinks about his scant handful of faithful, if anyone could still bother to call them that, waiting out on the bare sand; he thinks about a teenager's order to stop fucking with them. No one's come to beg salvation, not even Harrow. He's a fact of the universe to them, the cosmic backdrop to their shitty lives; he's a reliable deadbeat.

He thinks about the look of yellow eyes under fizzy Drearburh lights. He thinks about the little flower ritual everyone held back in September, the one where he was told to leave the past behind.

He hopes some whimsical little elder god comes up to tell him all about second chances. He'd take its tongue out piece by piece.

"Do you know what I want?" says John aloud, one day, to no one in particular. Well, no: there's someone he could talk at. He used to talk at her all the time. "Humor me, here, it'll help me gets my thoughts in order."

He's in his study. It's the same dull, paper-cluttered little room as ever, but today he can't bear to look at the chair: it tangles some foreign agony in his throat, in his chest, and it's becoming a genuine nuisance to pry the pain out with every breath he takes. So he paces, instead, and lets a throbbing ache settle into his sternum.

He wonders which god sent this one. Mother Mercy, right? Hell of a name. He should chat with her, sometime. They've got a lot in common.

"We're being asked to confess," he says, to the smoke that has started to simmer in his footprints. It bubbles and drips upwards, like the tell of those parasites, the ones that embed in the soul. "Bless me, squid gods, for I have sinned."

The smoke coalesces. It takes a shape.

"I want," he says, his back turned to the shape, "to stop fucking pretending. Wouldn't that be wild?"

His Omen settles into the air with the dull thrum of insect wings. She hangs spindly and unnatural behind him, so tall she has to fold in on herself or else her bony antennae would scrape the ceiling.

"Beloved," he murmurs, and it's the worst thing he's said since arrival. He is eons past caring. "Let me tell you about it."

He tells her:

"It's all coming apart."

He tells her:

"I still can't believe they pulled it off."

He tells her:

"I miss you."

And then she kills him. Not really, because she just puts her sharpened phalanges through the wet cavity of his chest, and whatever, that's nothing. That's foreplay. He removes her arm, but she's got three more of them, today. She puts another through his throat, and he makes a sound around it. It's a bad one.

More gurgle than voice, he tells her:

"I can't just walk away."

She tries to carve upwards through his face to his brain. The sound he makes is not related to a laugh. It is not exactly a scream. He wants to say: Ha ha, time to safeword.

He takes her apart. It's not easy; she gets mad when he does this. Back in your Pokeball, he tells her, but not with his tongue because she's already mostly pulped that.

It takes a little while. None of it kills him.

When his shadow is shoved back into the place where he keeps her, he sinks to crouch back on his heels. The room is painted up like galaxies. Blood hangs in the air like glitter. Kill God, throw a rave, he wants to say to nobody. He even has enough working tongue for it, now.

But he says nothing.

He makes the mess go away. It collapses to colorless dust, and this he rubs out of his eyes, absently, alone in the rumpled office. The chair— the bad one— has fallen over, which is very funny. He almost laughs.

"I am sorry for these and all my sins," he says aloud, in the rote way of a man with a script. No one answers.