[color=gray][indent][indent][center][i][color=#978184]Do you think they'll just simply let you go.[/color][/i]
[color=#978184][i]The world outside of this perfect little bubble is cruel and it is dark and it is afraid. Afraid of you. [/i][/color][i][b][color=#978184]Afraid of me.[/color][/b][/i]
[color=#978184][i]They lie in wait to take everything you hold dear. And they will. [/i][/color]

[i][color=#978184]They always do.[/color][/i]

[color=#978184][i]But no matter what, this world will never accept you. They won't forget. [/i][/color]
[i][color=#978184]They haven't forgotten. I doubt they will ever forgive.[/color][/i][/center]

[i]Many years ago, in the darkest of pits of a netherworld embedded with agony and despair, where no light could reach, and the symphony of the lost and forsaken reigned true, a little girl was left alone, lost and bound, and chained and broken. She no longer cried or screamed or begged; at barely thirteen, she had been peeled apart over and over, sinew and flesh and bone maimed and scarred, wounds so deep they festered as conceptual cesspools wrought with her hate. The depraved that were sheared of their humanity and left as mere tools, as a means to an end, weapons forged under the machinations of immortality and eternal renown of a man who challenged the might of the universe on the whims of madness and horror – thickly drenched in blood, the shedding of innocence found in the hateful eyes of blue that glared through tears and anguish and swore to destroy everything in her path.[/i]

[i]She cursed them that day when the needles pierced her skin, when phosphorescent hate took hold of her very heart and pumped it full of sin forged of wrath, the burning, the pain, the glowing fire that wrent through every nerve and summoned the creature within that wailed and roared with the sorrow of loss; for all the wrong done unto her for many years to come. He took her name out of spite the next day. He breathed life anew through flayed bones and blood, marking her as the mother, the creator, the one Made for All, the epitaph of a bestial goddess that took the form of a dragon, a great winged serpent that made the world as it was and would later be fated to destroy it.[/i]

[i]On her nape, the first marks to lay, a brand that would forever go unnoticed, even years later, as she stood as the harbinger of ruin, lain with black and red and silver, marked with scars and horrid creatures and eerily beautiful moths adorned with the face of death. A mask reminiscent of a sorrowful beauty, the most devastating with bared teeth and feral smiles as the devourer for all the world to reap and sow. [/i]

[i]And though vengeance she swore, there was no denying the acceptance of the price that she had paid, the choices made for all the power in the world to find those in life known as mother and father, keeper and creator, the laments of God and love and hope that she was bitterly denied because the world saw her as she was and forged chaos through her soul of souls when she was born. The unification of all sundered under the might of the sun the day the Earth stood still.  [/i]

[i]There in the dark she had laid, a cell within a cell, the end to a long hallway strewn with corpses and flickering light that fell in tandem with a shattering heart, every plink of glass and stone as she swore then and there never to yield herself to anyone ever again. She took that weighted fear and sharpened the edges to brutal efficiency; marked her broken soul and spirit with it, carved the name taken from her there, left to wonder, lost and forgotten for many years to come until someone she knew naught yet would receive it and speak it aloud to rebuild her want of love anew. To be known as Beloved, taken from the place of the in-between as the creature, the beast, that would sooner tear apart the very fabrications of reality so that she might never know this pain again - held within a cage of bone cracked and splintered, beholden to the crown that would impale the brow of a raven-haired child with scarred palms held high as a sacrificial lamb.[/i]

[i]In the dark, a hand had forged through, a simple offering to the child marred with scars, a beautiful smile that bloomed and held her there. A girl who, too, suffered under the blades and cruelty of life, skin marked and pocketed, likened to chips in mortar and healed over in patches of black. Eyes of a swaying meadow that held hope even in the shadows of their pain, haunted and yet brimming with silver tears as she whispered that she was okay, that she would be alright, and that this would not be her end.[/i]

[i]She gave her name that day, her hand then too, as the first person to reach forth and hold her hand as a scared girl rather than a being to be tamed. Palm to palm, ashes to ashes.[/i]

	[color=000000][i]Hey, what’s your name?[/i][/color]
	[color=#978184][i]Tiamat.[/i][/color]
	[color=000000][i]No, the one they took from you.[/i][/color]

	[color=#978184][i]Ammar –[/i][/color]

	[i]No, someone had said, denied her truth, and whispered into the shadows unbound:[/i]
	[color=ffffff][i]…Ummu-Hubur.[/i][/color]

[i]She gave her life that day, too, as the first person she ever killed.[/i]
[i]Dust to dust.[/i][/indent][/indent]
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[CENTER][url=https://open.spotify.com/track/6XpT6qPH2AH08fEgQU35th?si=e0959a98be6e4941][img]https://i.imgur.com/DxXCQ1u.jpg[/img][/url][/CENTER][indent][sub][COLOR=978184][B]Location:[/B][/COLOR] [I]The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island[/I][/sub][sup][right][COLOR=#978184][b]Dance Monkey #4.085:[/b][/COLOR] [I]tiamat.[/I][/right][/sup][/indent][center][sup][color=#2e2c2c]_____[/color][color=#373534]_____[/color][color=#403d3c]_____[/color][color=#494644]_____[/color][color=#524f4c]_____[/color][color=#5b5754]_____[/color][color=#64605d]_____[/color][color=#6e6965]_____[/color][color=#77716d]_____[/color][color=#807a75]_____[/color][color=#89837d]_____[/color][color=#928b85]_____[/color][/sup][sup][color=#9b948d]_____[/color][/sup][sup][color=#928b85]_____[/color][color=#89837d]_____[/color][color=#807a75]_____[/color][color=#77716d]_____[/color][color=#6e6965]_____[/color][color=#64605d]_____[/color][color=#5b5754]_____[/color][color=#524f4c]_____[/color][color=#494644]_____[/color][color=#403d3c]_____[/color][color=#373534]_____[/color][color=#2e2c2c]_____[/color][/sup][/center][INDENT][sub][color=#978184][B]Interaction(s):[/B][/COLOR]&[/sub][SUP][RIGHT][COLOR=#978184][b]Previously:[/b][/COLOR] [color=gray][I]taste of blood.[/I][/color][/right][/SUP]
[indent][INDENT]
	[i]Please.[/i]

Amma Cahors held Harper Baxter on high, scarred palm against her throat, cinched tight, and trembled with the might of light undone. Her eyes pleaded with the girl in her grasp as tears continued to fall unchecked, smeared and wet and carved betwixt blacks and golds that ran down her face and fell onto the terrifying manifest of her powers that fell around them. Crackling energy within a sphere of thirty-three feet as the world held breath on the awakening monster that carved through flesh and spilled torrents of chaos into the void on a demented throne carved from the chasm of the deep where shadows malformed and brewed, where Amma’s true heart remained forever lost to the tides of fate. A heart maimed and faded, her name lain there for so many years, taken from her, never meant to be her own.

And then he said it: he protected and defended her. He put himself before her as no one had ever done before, reaching within the dark and yanking her forward into the light of hope to be as she was, as she could be: just a girl, a human, instead, to love and be loved in return. To mend, instead of sunder. How he knew, she didn’t know. Within the eclipsing shadow of her rage and depravity, there thrived a whisper of light, as if a holy gleam had broken through the darkness, a shimmering veil of amber-yellow that lingered as a wisp of yearning for the truth hidden deep and yonder obsidian walls that she threw herself against. No one had been there to save her then, no one to reach into the pit of black that frothed and churned as the sea, no one to pull her free from the chanting ruin that had sent her entire body ablaze with sheer agony and memory of all that she had done.

For all that she had yet to do.

None had ever fought for Amma Cahors; none had fought for Ammaranthe, who lingered as a child before the shimmering glass of a window in that church that shined darling twilight upon her – waiting for the one to speak her name. For the one that would step forward in defiance of the world and those that would take her back down into the dark, for the one that would name her friend and know her deepest fears as their own, for the one that would pray to the good that had withered and died long ago and remained as a kernel of lingering secrecy that none could see. To the one who denied she was a monster, to the one who would look upon her and see the beauty of her soul rather than the ugliness it carried through this life.

[i]What did they see? Who?[/i] 

She sobbed his name and yet laughed around the stinging bite of nails into her wrist, so minuscule and insignificant compared to the slivers marked into her back that suddenly [i]burned. [/i]

	[i]Please.[/i]

She throws Harper away from her and throws herself back, too; she stumbles and gasps and struggles to breathe around the terrible weight settled in her ribs; she swears she can hear and feel her bones breaking, every rung jerked forward and cleaving down her front where the scar on her chest writhes with whipping crimson coils that spill shadows of a putrid rot pulled from the depths of a hellish world on the tides of this prophetic summons. She fists trembling hands through her hair and sinks her palms against her eyes that continuously weep where her lips peel wide in a horrid screech of all-consuming fury. She claws against the voices that peel through her head on the cries of her past. For every life she had taken under the moniker of Tiamat, the confines and locks on more of her memories threatened to burst forth on rusted hinges where they had been cruelly contained, eyes of many colors that bleed and blame her with bitter distrust and hate. 

She steps back again, once, twice, slipping over ice and blood until she falls to her knees, the skirts of her dress spread around her as torrents of energy cleave through the world and decay around her body; the sound they make is an obscure droning that drums a funeral tole for the hopelessness witnessed here as Amma struggles against the manifestation of true hate and pain.

She peers through her splayed fingers, eyes cast on high, every tear spilling over as a build-up of the many years that she had been denied, for every facet of life taken from her, the injustice of time so hell-bent on marking her as different and misunderstood. She takes in great gulps of air, panic sluicing away through her veins as fire and ice, knowing she cannot stop it, knowing that her defiance and will would last for only so long. Her hands trembled, her body shook, and her back arched on a sickening crack as every single scar she bore began to glow before her powers slowly turned inward and struck; every pale line snapped open, skin peeled back, every wound and horrible thing she had endured suddenly experienced twice over.

Amma screamed. Her wails of agony pierced through the terrible violence, another gargling screech as she realized it was Gil’s body tossed so viciously, the savagery of his clones destroyed, or was it his actual remains she kneeled in, the sickening warmth staining the paleness of her skin, her own blood seeping down and down, lined over black ink as her scars continued to flay themselves open on whips of scarlet destruction. Her screams turned vicious and horrid, such primal sounds of the human heart that shattered with every beat, the kind that punches up from one's stomach and rips through their chest, the hopeless thought of loss and death that she carried, puncturing through her lungs on every scream torn from the pit of her soul.

Gunshots, metal, bone, and blood all amalgamated into a terrible ringing sound as her powers continued to expel around her. It was too much; it hurt. [i]Everything hurt.[/i] And she just wanted it to [i]stop.[/i] Amma wrapped her arms around herself, cocooned within the screeching sphere of crimson energy that sparked, sputtered, and roared, decaying lines of black and silver that splintered out from her form bent over, cleaving through everything in its path. Fissures broke through the ice wherever her powers touched, random shoots and tendrils of scarlet launching away from her and landing where they willed themselves to go, hissing and screeching with the overwhelming surge of ruin as within the swarming barrier of light and darkness Amma, Ammaranthe and Tiamat waged war.


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