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10 days ago
Current Oh, look. A new sentence.
1 like
2 mos ago
I keep forgetting you were ever here
1 like
2 mos ago
@Zeroth Make the cool thing your PC did fundamentally impossible without someone else's PCs. Like someone with super strength throwing your pc at a giant monster to fuck it up at point blank range.
3 likes
3 mos ago
Mahz has a desk?
1 like
3 mos ago
no

Bio



I invented necromancy and the windmill. I beat the sun in a poker match during the summer of 1273 and God hasn't felt the same since.


Most Recent Posts




Location: She-Hulk's Apartment
Skills: N/A


Leah wasn’t paying much attention right now. When Coulson had said what he wanted, everyone seemed a little pissed off in one way or another, even the ones who weren’t. Mainly because the room felt like it was just a blanket mess of noise to Leah. She tuned everything out after the mention of therapy and didn’t hear anything meaningful about teams or even what Sabine had to say. Victoria’s rant didn’t register to her, she was too damn tired to deal with this right now.

There were too many voices, in a room that was too small. Leah just slowly blinked and got sick of this shit quicker than she normally got sick of things.

”This… Is a fucking joke.”

Leah sat up in her seat, and glared daggers at Coulson. ”The Avengers didn’t do a fucking thing. For months. Did any of you ever stop and think that maybe it was a little weird that Arcade was holed up in there long enough to do something like that? Or did you just conveniently never notice, even though this place is full of dumb fucking idiots who call themselves superheroes?”

If Arcade had just threw this scheme together overnight, she could believe it if the school was just caught off guard. That sort of thing happened, but the amount of shit he had loaded into the computer had to take weeks or even longer to get organized, even for him. There was no reality where they could look good or come up with an excuse for that.

”You don’t get to ignore all of that and pretend you give a damn about any of us,” Leah continued. ”And you’re not sticking me in “therapy” for it, either. The last guy who tried to make me do something I wasn’t willing to do was buried alive.”

Leah wasn’t the sort of people who got shaky when stressed. She was used to fighting for her life, getting hurt badly and dealing with awful shit. But right now, sitting in this office with all these noisy people and staring down a guy who didn’t matter nearly enough for her to care, while running on a fuck-you amount of sleep? Yeah, she was about to explode if she didn’t get the fuck out.

So Leah stood up and swung the door open.

”I don’t care about the contest, I never did. I only went along with it because it mattered to everyone else. It means nothing. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, but everyone keeps pretending it’s the only way you get to be superhero. Do whatever you want with the teams. I don’t care.”

She slammed through the door shut behind her, not even trying to hold back all that inhuman strength she had for the door’s sake.

BANG.
”No. it does not.”

Jack walked into the kitchen and returned with a small knife. He sat it down on a table in front of a couch, sitting down himself with the book. ”Draw the shadows inwards, however slow and difficult it may be for you, and show me your ability to learn.” He held his hand over the table, and it cast a shadow far too dark for it to make rational sense. That shadow bubbles up and then collapsed.

It became a rectangle, and bits and pieces of it fell onwards, as a shape slowly coalesced into something tangle. A vantablack kitchen knife.

”Do not feel the need to rush your attempt. Use patience.”
"You and I have influence over a force that so many others cannot understand." Jack stood, and held the book in one hand. "That is the way of any sorcerer, wizard or magician you meet in life. What we do is the same, insofar as it can be considered magic. To question what you see is to accept you do not know everything. And as someone who can wield such power, that is something you must acknowledge."

He stepped out of the room, beckoning Annika to follow. Only it wasn't the same hallway she had come through. No, the living room downstairs was on the other side of that door. And when they walked through, the door simply wasn't there.

"Some mysteries are meant to be solved, others are not."
”These shadows we live in amount to a fickle thing, Annika.” he traced a circle in the air, and a black ring of smoke appeared there. ”They grant us safe passage into this world between all other worlds, and make our ruin otherwise. We cannot truly know it, for that is what it means to be hidden in the dark. But in what we do understand, we find that the darkness, even here, does not truly want anything.”

It was a paradox, in a way. They worked with supernatural darkness and studied what it could do, yet that very darkness was something they could only understand in passing. The Everdark was an entire universe all its own, with endless secrets- Far too many to learn in one lifetime.

”Such questions will often have no answer, but they are importantly nonetheless.”
Jack did have standards for a child raised by him. That was true, but Annika was a child no less. She was not meant to be a mirror to the things he did, even if she learned every single mystic technique he ever invented. Jack peered down at the page, and recognized what Annika was looking for: A simple conjuring. Nothing particularly difficult, in fact, manifesting things from the shadows was something of a foundation for Umbramancy. Jack waved his hand, and the shadows cast by his fingers became something solid. Along the page manifested a black bookmark, and he turned a few pages towards the back of the book.

He recalled writing down methods in the back of it, once.

"To create things is to develop influence over the shadows," Jack began. "The dark is often regarded as having no substance, yet for you and I, there is something within that we may reach for. Once you have that something in your grasp, your methods will determine how you shape it, to what length you see it as an extension of yourself."

He pointed at a page where he'd scribbled down precise shapes, and outlined how he'd hew them out of shadows. "Think of a simple, mundane object you are familiar with. A pencil, or perhaps a knife. Treat the dark as if it were that object, and cut it away until the shape becomes clear. Once you have this shape, the trick is to give it substance."

To demonstrate, he held out a hand that was itself made of shadows. He had never told Annika how that came to be. In the palm of his hand, there formed a rose black as oil. He held it out for her, and let her hold the solidified shape between her fingers.

"To make it real."
It was an ominous house they lived in. Once, it had just been an untouched field of land, this place Jack referred to as the Twilight Pass. He had many maps of the Everdark, and chose this area to construct a home for himself through a dizzying amount of spellcraft. That was long before he’d crossed paths with Annika.

Everything in the backdrop of the universe was cast in gloom, yet the house embraced that. Black walls, rows of bookshelves, halls illuminated by purple lights, even a black cat that was probably benign walked up and down the halls like it owned the place. Other magicians had their sanctums, their spires that overlooked a realm. This was Jack’s, and now it was Annika’s as well.

He sat within a room at the top floor, in a reading chair with a book open in his lap. In front of him was another chair, and a fireplace that burned with flames as purple as the evening sky of Earth. He looked over his shoulder as his daughter came running in. The book snapped shut and floated away to a shelf.

”Hmm? What have you found?” He spoke in a quiet voice that made the walls listen. Like a god in a realm of their own creation.





Under Black Stars is a side story set within the Skyrose Multiverse, taking place over a decade after the end of Inferno. This story is based on the lore and worldbuilding of the Skyrose universe, but does not interact with it, as it is separate from other stories in the main timeline.

More than a decade after an army of demons tried to destroy Earth, Annika lives with her foster father, Jack Hawthorne, who has raised her as his own despite the circumstances that brought them together. For years, they have both searched for answers to an unanswerable question: Where did Annika come from? Jack has taught her many of his mystical secrets, but even he does not know everything.

The two have a long road ahead of them, and some questions are best left unanswered…








Far from the bounds of the cosmos, in between the stars and deeper down in a place so few can find, there sits a realm cast in eternal gloom. The backdrop of the universe, a rift between all other places. There have been less than a hundred people to ever set foot there, since the birth of this reality. It has gone by many names, the Void, the Shadow Realm, but most know it was the Everdark. It is the abstract, the place where all things in the material world are deigned to elude. There, the cracks and little forgotten places throughout reality tend to vanish, and fall through a distance without measure. Often, these are physical fragments of other worlds, which eventually "smooth out" and diffuse into their new environment, giving way to forests eternally in bloom and oceans without a floor.

But other times, life slips through the cracks.

Across human history and even further, dating back to the earliest times in which there were living things that could reasonably called intelligent, a small fraction of the already small population that finds this place can draw power on it. When something with a soul enters the Everdark, one of two things can happen. Often, the strange energy that constitutes it "denies" their presence. In this case, they slowly lose themselves in a delirious miasma, as their soul erodes and they become a hollow creature of madness. But the rare few who are "welcomed" by the Everdark feel a presence in their soul, taking a small sliver and replacing it with that magnificent darkness. These people, few as they are, have no academic name to classify themselves, but they can learn to bend the shadows as sorcery.

To find such a person is a rare sight indeed, and the Everdark is a fickle thing. There may very well only be one or two of them alive at this very moment, if even that many...


It is difficult to fathom the Earth when you only study one continent, and more difficult to understand the universe when you only understand one galaxy.

Knowing this, as he knew many things, Jack Hawthorne dedicated his life to the study of reality and the transmundane. Across time, and across the endless sea of realities that most would never see, he wandered on a never-ending journey. He had always been a scholar of the unknown, of the supernatural secrets old and new. Ever since the day he fell into a land of starless skies and autumnal voids, and left the mundane behind, it had been his calling in life to walk an endless road.

And for more than a decade, now, he has taken to a new purpose.

An old friend has grown furious with the world and sought to bring Earth to ruins. And in the aftermath, there may two defenseless children: Ananym of Limbo, and Annika of Earth. It has not been an uneventful time, raising Annika as his own. In the years that followed, the two had found that the shadowy land he called on for power was safe for her, they’d discovered the magical abilities she was capable of, and most of all, they’d spent her lifetime wondering where in all the universe she had originally came from.

For a man who could move across trillions of light years in a single step, it had been an impossible task. But one that they had accepted they might never answer. And so it was that Jack embraced his role as Annika’s guardian for as long as was needed.

In recent times, she’d developed her first spells under his guidance. They were simple, but it was a start of something powerful. They stepped between universes, trespassed into realms unknown and learned what one another was capable of as he shared an unending journey with her.
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