necrolord: <user name="thebutt"> (brick and mortar thick as scripture)
ᴛʜᴇ ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ ᴜɴᴅʏɪɴɢ ([personal profile] necrolord) wrote in [community profile] deercountry2022-03-06 02:02 pm

06 . the sleepy town expedition.

Who: [personal profile] necrolord, Gideon, Harrow, Paul, Kaworu, "Shannon," Mako, Ford, Shiro, Ruby, Luna, Faith, Willow, Ezra, Zhongli, Perell.
What: An intentional family-and-friends roadtrip to a forbidden holy ruin. A less-intentional catacombs adventure.
When: 3/14.
Where: Sleepy Town and the Catacombs.

Content Warnings: Sleepy Town-typical themes of grief, loss, and surreal landscapes. Catacombs-typical horror per the March event. Also, note all the usual warnings of this character.

[ See this doc for info! ]
terriblepurpose: (047)

[personal profile] terriblepurpose 2022-03-14 04:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Once, Paul imagined God was indifferent and unreachable beyond the weight of millennia. He thought that the reason God's own household was in such disarray was a deliberate neglect, a kind of careless, remote cruelty. A punishment inflicted on his own people for their failures of devotion. It had made sense to him, then.

He sweeps his thumb across the pearl of a holy vertebra as God's sole and fragile saint insinuates her shaking self into an embrace that must cost her dearly, presses God close one more time. He slips from the arc of their communion gently, his other hand drifting over Harrow's upper back to guide her into a more stable orbit even as he leaves it.

The sound of God's hitched breath lodges somewhere in Paul's yet-whole chest, a slim and pitiless splinter. He looks at them both with a terrible shade of veiled mournfulness, with a weight beyond his supposed years.

Sometimes God lingers in a doorway, looking in on his undetonated daughter and her half-shattered saint, and all Paul wants to do is reach across that vast and unbridgeable loneliness, and push. But it's not that simple. Nothing that wretched ever is, and there are hideous lacunae between them all that Paul only knows by the shape of the teethed things swimming in them. That he only knows by the look on Gideon's face, when he turns his head to see her, still and hard-faced as the ghost who wears her features like a bitter mask, isolated and betrayed -