Rockette

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.059: never there.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: awaken.

Amma hissed. Her reactions were instinctual swaths of anger that pooled against her tongue, warmed by blood, and a rush of more adrenaline hitched her breath in the limited space allowed. Her right hand snatched up to cinch around the muscled arm that bunched beneath her slick palm, tightening around her throat. She choked, lips parting around a gasp and a curse as she raked her bloodied nails and blackened fingers against his skin and jerked her body back, wrapped feet scraping through dirt even as ebony fog fled to the edges of her vision and clouded the expanse betwixt her ears.

“Let me go.” She demanded, lashes fluttering shut as the pressure increased; his hand was all-encompassing on her neck, a mortal frailty she refused to acknowledge, sundering all manner of breath as she struggled. A snarl surrounded her, followed by barks and whimpers, a cacophony that yipped and crowded from the shadows and nipped around her heels; she felt hot breath and tongues against her legs, thighs, more that scraped against her back and waist and yanked against the remains of silk wed to her heated body. Amma used his arm as an anchor and attempted to move out of their reach; leathery noses pressed heavily against her flesh and wet. Her weight pulled against him, but he barely budged. He merely held her there as an amalgamation of teeth, claw, and fur nearly swept her under, harsh eyes aglow in hazed-out yellows as ebony pupils narrowed and slivered. He hoisted her forward, fingers manacled beneath the line of her jaw as he inhaled, swift and deep, powerful as he took in her scent and glanced down the quivering lines of her body as she shook in his grasp- they were as fleeing quakes of rage, scorned by the hopeless endeavor of trying to remove herself from his grasp. Foolish. Brave.

Compared to him, she was merely an adolescent, minuscule, frail- but what he felt from her was entirely different, something that was other, unknown, and something else that he knew well from his aged life. Witches blood. An interwoven conjunction of it, a half-breed, he mused: Hexenbrüt and something else, something tainted with flickering kernels of loss and pain.

She smelled like… death. Destruction. Empty. A void, perhaps, as the abyss of life that once was and had ever been. Insatiable for whatever remained hidden and yet unbound in those blue eyes.

“What are you?”

Amma wheezed at the inquiry; wasn’t that entirely ironic? A question that stalked through her life, what, who, an interrogation of self that sown itself deep into the vestiges of her heart and soul of souls. No one, nothing, and everything, she thought. Never known and constantly desired– never chosen. So, she laughed with a husked and drawn-out breath, nails sinking deep into his skin as the wolves frenzied around her. One flanked to her side to tear away at the silk knotted over her thigh, blunted canines brushed against her flesh, and she welcomed the bite that never came; let them tear her to pieces, she envisioned, let the torment begin anew in the hell unsought.

“That thing has been asleep for years, and now it has suddenly woken up and come here, to this island. And here you are. Climbing up from the Wailing Cliffs at that. So I’ll ask again, what are you? Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” came her honest answer. All the names she bore through life fell into the fractured shadows, leaving a mere husk of a girl in a tattered gown. A swift bark followed, and Amma winced, gritting around the burning pain in her leg as another wolf whimpered shrilly; a growl heaved from a massive maw thereafter, as if speaking amongst each other. They blended as a solitary unit of sheer power with various pelts of grey, brown, and muddied white. Some were donned in black and coppery reds, a myriad of colors blended perfectly into the sanguine darkness. Amma counted at least eight of them that she could see, all many heads taller than her, some even crested at his shoulder that flexed under her searching gaze. Not just wolves, she thought; they presented too-human mannerisms in how they chuffed and shook, powerful muscles coiling beneath their pelts as they paced in tight circles around them, her wounded leg now exposed.

Nostrils flared, and those piercing eyes glanced down in response. There were more clamoring barks and whines, warnings trills as fresh blood wept and oozed, and Amma nearly screamed from the burning sensation that lanced through her veins, a familiar agony that she had felt once before in the eternal darkness.

“You were in Limbo. I can smell it on you. And the thing that attacked you.”

“Limbo? That means what to me?” She challenged in a rasp, her fingers clutching at the rough-hewn skin of his hands, feeling the raised purchase of scars. He still refused to release her, and a frustrated call slithered from her lips and teeth, bone against her pout as she twisted her body; she was not accustomed to feeling so helpless, so powerless. Within and without, Amma felt at a loss from the manifest that made her up in its entirety, to be so intertwined with the leagues of chaos and destruction, and then bitterly denied their droning resonation at her weakest moment. She couldn’t decipher what emotion brewed betwixt her ribs and stuck to the rungs that shuddered around her exhales, but the void of once frightening symphonies of nihilism was blissfully vacant.

“It means you don’t belong here, yet you have witch blood in you. Perhaps that is why the Wendigo’s bite hasn’t taken you.” He paused, a quizzical cant to his head, studying her in sincerity as he finally lowered her and relinquished his hold on her throat. “Yet something is missing, something taken. Witch and something… else.” Amma drew in her great gasps as she fought to breathe, a frigid glare slanted through her lashes as ice floes adrift in the sea, paling with her exhaustion as she heavily said:

“I’m not a witch.”

“Not entirely, no.” A wolf of muddied, pale fur fit its massive, wedge-shaped head beneath his free arm, a soft whine and a growl directed at her for the tiniest slivers of her nails had raked through. She is reminded of another and swiftly looks away. “But you will be dead.”

“What?” Amma snapped, teeth clacking together and her brow plummeting low over her glare. “I’m already dead; you can’t kill me.”

“You’re not dead. Though if I wanted, you already would be.” He responded, matter-of-fact, sounding almost bored as he stroked through the white pelt of the wolf still nestled against his side, a delicate tail swishing to and fro; it was surreal to witness him caress and dote on such a creature that she had to look up at. He towered over her even, causing her to crane her neck back to fully meet the golden ochre of his gaze that pierced right through her as a predator would.

“Is this not hell?”

“There is no such place. You’re in Ünterland.”

And it is at that very mention of a place that Amma stills; everything is leeched entirely away from her, replaced by acrid realization as rusted keys twist achingly slow and click with finality, locks once more falling away into the chasm of her despairing memory, the white veil of her mother poised delicately across a mirror of mirrors, lips moving soundlessly as her voice whispers through the darkness of her wavering thoughts:

There is a place
As if the roots of a great tree
A Tree of Life, if you will
And in such a place is where I was born

It is like this world, and yet not.
Twisted, maybe, fallen to some
Many things and creatures live there
For the monsters are very much real

And it is called Ünterland.

The weight of remembrance plummets low onto her heart, dragging with it an unforeseen wealth of damning evocation for many things forgotten and locked away. A whispering chant accompanies the trauma endured as she falls, her ashes fanned and peeled wide as she suddenly lists and faints, caught within golden arms twined in scars.

A warbling growl mutters against his side, and he carefully shifts, hoisting Amma’s weight with ease. He glances at the pale yellows amassed before him, eagerly awaiting the direction of their master.

The Jarl will want her.
Yes, he’s been searching for thralls and concubines.

But would he want a witch?
She’s not a witch.

Do we take her to the coven?
Would they even want her?

What is she?!

“Silence,” he barks, once mundane features shifting eerily to something more lupine and feral, a transitional phase as muscles quivered and bunched, a coiling need spiraling through as he glances down to the girl in his grasp. He needed answers, and what’s more, with the dragon having returned, the island was fated to suffer the storm of its wrath should it be provoked. This girl was connected; only he could not fathom how or why; with an unwavering hold, he glanced down to the bite festering on her pale thigh and turned to face the treeline where a trembling roar shook through the forest and great wings once more took to the red-hued sky, heralding a massive cloud of black imbued with crackling crimson light.

“We’re taking her to the witches.”

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

^{| A few weeks from now.}

She follows the chittering moths into the gloom, lured and seduced by demented yellows and shades of grey. Darkness wavers and undulates with every step she takes, as they told her it would, for they told her to keep going even if she could not see. Something pulls her forward, something connected to the void of self, and she searches in vain for fragments of power splintered and lost. The further she travels, a blackened blade in hand with its jeweled pommel nestled against her scars, the more her path slowly descends as gentle slopes into the shadows. Wailing howls sound at her back, warning drones that pitch and claw against her lobes, she had managed to get away, but at what cost as she ventured onto this plane unknown with no direction other than the strings of fate that wavered and spooled away from her chest?

She caresses white petals that have curiously remained, coiling tendrils bidden to and by her touch.

She hears her name, a desperate and pleading summons, a voice she recognizes but cannot believe. Not here in this cresting black, for nothing here could be trusted, for though it was not hell, it still twisted and malformed her desires and plagued her heart with the manifest of her dreams and shattering nightmares. Visions that she has suffered for weeks with more fiendish memories cantering through rusted hinges and bleeding chasms of hate.

In the distance, she can see them, hazed out in pools of ink. They reach for her with desperate hands, crying out her name—her true name. She reaches for them, fingers splayed and clawing through the dark. She is almost there and so close that she can finally see them as they say her name repeatedly as a mantra, a prayer falling and tumbling from their lips.

It was almost too good to be true.

And so it was as from the pitch of black came a viperish maw rent open, hollowed fangs aimed for her- for them- as from its bite came a sudden eddy of a swirling vortex of familiar scarlet power with faded edges of silver.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

She meets the eyes of her reflection in the mirror.

– a mirror of mirrors.

Inverted eyes and inverted smiles, glimmering shadows of crystalline blue framed in curling lashes of black painted matte, she has garbed herself in finishes of red and silver, liken to warpaint, all harsh lines and feathered out colors with darkened undertones and glimmering shards of ruby. Her gaze feels heavy, slumberous, intentional, slick scarlet smiles perched over glistening bone to answer her observation before some unknown emotion compels her to look away. It’s with a devastating finesse that Amma Cahors inspires, and it’s with brutal efficiency that she performs as she cinches her waist and bodice in latex, a corsetted garment rigged with ebony, bone, and silver metals. Gossamer fabrics spill down her supple shoulders, bisected through ebony materials of mesh and nylon to expose inked skin and embossed scarring. A canvas of terror and the macabre beauty of torment undone under the might of life and power now harnessed into the weaponized woman that was Tiamat. It was the exterior of the beast, the facade, the donned mask of cruelty with barbed snatches of teeth and waggling tongues of malice; viperish annotations curled into French brooding, whispers of a lover endured and forlorn– lamented over in her passing graces.

Little more than a tool, a sword, a spear perhaps, little less than human.
Just the means to the end.

Through darkened tunnels and blackened halls, she was guided on rattling chains, some black and some rusted, some silvered and some purely decorative to be scalloped along her figure and through the deep plunge at her front where an inked moth pulsated with tendrils of red over skull donned wings. Freshly embedded yellows accentuated grays and whites, and she delicately traced over it in idle musings as she walked with an alluring swagger, her usual diminutive height exaggerated by the heeled boots belted over her legs with cinched, crisscrossing leather done all the way up to her thighs, buckled in silver. They lead her through a door and then another before introducing her onto the official set where a photo shoot has been scheduled; it is an initiation, a welcoming affair to the newest addition to The Foundation Force.

To welcome the experiment, the product, the one Made to be All, Amma Cahors, dubbed Tiamat as a goddess of chaos and destruction. A single moniker to embalm the fear she commands in crackling crimson and the void of death and renown eternally endowed. Everything is deliberate; everything is purposely undone; everything is permitted in the artful display of curling black that frames her elaborate pretenses, volumized to lengthen her intimidating stature to capture onto film and later displayed in banners to herald her inclusion into these infamous ranks. Here, she is a doll, a porcelain figure, a catered-over thing that hands fuss and brush and pluck over, head tilted here, arms positioned there, a curling lash to flutter then, and brushed lock of hair done too. A line of imposing heroes stand in her peripheral, guarded eyes awash in mute detachment, familiar with the procedures and now silently acknowledging the girl before them to be as one of them.

She is so young, one utters.

We were once young too.

The Amma that is not Amma flashes her eyes through slanting black, a glow that pours down her carefully done features, a dusting of blue that shimmers in silver as they talk until a hand guides her face back, a cruel smile donned and slid through her rouged cheeks that she bites around, literally snapping her teeth as a feral animal.

“Don’t touch me.” She calmly speaks, but there is a tremor through her hands, a subtle twitch in her brow, as she procures a darling smile and focuses back onto the camera, poised to perfection and not permitted to be anything less.

One. Two. Three.

She is instructed to turn, to bend, to summon those whipping red tendrils into a frenzy. Arcing lines of chaos glisten against her skin and writhe through her hair, plumes of black spiraling up and out. A show. A demonstration. It’s all for the camera, it’s all for the stories spun through the world, it’s all for the –

What is it all for?

One. Two. Three.

She smiles. She dances. She even sings.

Through it all, no one notices the tears that go unshed or the brittle soul that screams from within; the child she was facing against a mirror shattered and lost, reflecting all that was broken and what little shards of humanity remained.

A mirror of mirrors.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.047: awaken.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: éternité.

It’s all so familiar. Perhaps it is too familiar to be anything but a coincidence.

The howling sounds, the eerily alluring echoes of wind-song that billow through the damp rock, all of it alludes back to a time that seems so far away, what feels like months ago is only maybe a handful of weeks, but in her weighted bones, it feels… longer. It is a sensation that she cannot explain, but as she glances over the edge once more and regards the spires of rock below, everything feels reflected somehow. Switched. Where up is down and left is right. On shaking limbs, Amma lowers her body to sit with legs swinging over the edge, exhaustion allowing for little else as she leans against the yawning mouth of the aperture and sighs out a heavy breath that pulls her shoulders down and her eyes to close with them.

Death was so, so tiring.

Though now, Amma had to venture if that is what truly happened to her, for the pain that continued to pulse through her wounded legs and body numbingly, it all felt entirely too natural. Too real. Far too aware of being anything but life that spilled crimson rivulets down her flesh from needle-like punctures through her thigh and the old bruising and marks to be as faded as they were, recent injuries that should not have been so advanced or deep. She tried to decipher why and how—relying on recent memories that resurfaced with the vague recollection of her mother’s stories. They were too disjointed, hazing in and out as fragmented pieces of truth, lies, and shattered frames of red that burned through her venture as she tried. More locks were found in the layers of her mind, and more fractured remains floated unbound between her ears and phased into shadow, forgotten and forsaken.

Amma cradles her head within her scarred and bloodied palms.

This was not death, no, and it was not even an actual hell.

It was something, far, far worse, something unknown. Perhaps it was the realm meant for the beast that was her calling card, the prophesied creature worn through time and hate that reigned here as an almighty being of eternal demote.

And if this was such a place, and the cavern she crawled through was possibly an entryway to this realm, could she return?

Did she want to?

She glanced back into the darkness. Perhaps what attacked her, what horrible things she had seen, were watchers of a gate, of the pit she had languished in, unleashed to feed upon her remains so that she may never attempt to go back. Perhaps it was all meant to appease her into that possibility, to dream and brood over this afterlife of all she could have been under the passionate revelations found in a kiss and softened words whispered into a dance.

What good did it do now to think about it when he was dead?

Amma sunk nails into her temples and raked through her tangled hair, pulling through the strands to temper her sudden grief. She allowed no tears to fall, for no sorrow could encompass the well of sadness that burst to life betwixt her heaving ribs as she gazed up to a blooded moon and wished with all the power she once possessed to cleave through this shaded torment and rend it all asunder. For him. For her. For all the lost and forlorn souls of life, for all of Blackjack. Rage festered there and overtook her misery, sharpened it into a blade that cauterized her dejection and filled her lungs with a frenzy of harsh anger, of a blackness that fell into the familiar depths of her soul of souls, flitted to the fragments of self and wed to the brim of her hate. Amma grits her teeth and pulls at the tattered remains of her dress; she shreds through silks with a grunt and a hiss, wrapped pieces of obsidian skirts over her palms and the bruised soles of her feet. With a scream of pain, she took more swatches of fabric and bunched it over her bleeding wound, ignoring the webs of black that splintered underneath her flesh and breathed through her nose as she fitted another tear of chiffon through her teeth and bit down. A wail bubbled from her throat as she quickly knotted silk together and pulled, applying pressure to the bite and lapped at the warmth of blood through her mouth and spat it out, red awash over her teeth as she dragged the back of her hand against her violet-hued lips and glared into the dark of this perpetual night.

She couldn’t stay here, she knew that.

Adrenaline flooded her mouth in bitter saliva and sluiced through her veins as she craned her neck and looked up the cliff face, quickly surveying purchases in the rock before she stood and swung out her trembling hands and clutched over jutted pieces of earth. The wind promptly tore through her hair and the jagged pieces of silk that clung to her figure, determined to send her below where waves crashed against the uneven spires. Still, Amma was tired of falling, and the howling symphony that arose compelled her ever higher, reminiscent of a night she had scaled a similar musical edge to the depths of a much calmer ocean. A storm appeared to be brewing, the bitter cold spearing through her arms and legs, a clap of thunder booming as a quivering roar that sounded like something she had heard before. Once, maybe, in a nightmare long ago, where in the dark of sleep, a continuous bellow fell into the gloom, a screeching call of something ancient.

Of something angry.

Amma bit down against the answering cry of pain as the sharp rock fell away against her scars, but she ignored the well of warmth through her fingers, of the blood she now dragged and drenched through the silk wrapped around her hands as she continued to climb. Lightning flashed and struck far out into the void of the raging sea, and the great boom of wings sounded soon after, followed by another deep roar that shuddered through her bones. She was sure the gargoyle was now coming for her, determined to drag her even lower or carry her off to their creator. Amma dug her bloody nails in deeper, pushed herself that much harder, and relished in the pain of this peculiar life after death to see the edge of this plateau and face her would-be reaper.

A massive shadow passed overhead as she finally crested the cliff, arms trembling with the weight of her body as she dug and pulled and heaved herself up and over, clawing through dirt and grass and rolling onto her back with shuddering breath sawing through her lungs. She gazed up at the passing shadow above, blanketed in black clouds, lightning crackling overhead with crimson-membraned wings puncturing through the billowing storm with blackened scales that gleamed red, likened to blood with a jagged crown of silver horns.

Was that a fucking dragon?

Amma laughed as it flew overhead; it was utterly gargantuan! More extensive than any fantastical story could conjure as she witnessed such a fabled creature fade away into the dark with only seconds maybe that passed before a powerful tremor fell through the earth as it landed with a shattering wail of other beings that abruptly arose and clamored through the treeline that surrounded her. A smattering of golden eyes suddenly bloomed, glaring at her through scarlet shadows as the moon above seemed to glow even brighter in the blood-red gloom.

“Shit,” she was too weak to run and could only roll over to her hands and knees before she stood on trembling legs and faced the massive beast that crept from the darkness cloaked in pale fur with undertones of brown and grey. Harsh features fell into a snarling face as another figure shadowed and adorned in fur, but lesser, stepped beside the wolf and stroked through its muddled coat, for that is what it was that towered over her. She gazed at the massive claws that scraped through the dirt before the man, she noted, loomed over her next with a swift hand that latched onto her pale throat and snarled.

“Look what woke up the dragon.”

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Foundation Institute - Atlantic Ocean}

Human #5.046: and for no today.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &.}

Previously: for no tomorrow.

Scylla stood trembling, naked and wet, with tears streaming down her face from green eyes peeled wide—afraid and ashamed. Within her curled palms, she clutched at tan cloth, nails bitterly snatching against the fabric, feeling the ply scratch and irritate her drenched skin. It was a test (because, of course, it was!); it was all a test, from the branding to those who faced it without flinching, fear, or reservations of self to those who shuddered, cried, and hesitated. To be forced into quarantine and to endure the endless dark with eternal silence that rang and pulsated with sobs and whispers, intermingling with quieted screams of those that fractured in the thick shadows. The banging, the pounding of fists into shattered whispers that pleaded. Had it been hours or days, only minutes perhaps since doors had been shut?

How did they endure it? How did she survive it? If she had been molded and crafted in the black of unknown uncertainty, then what was to become of them? What shred of humanity was to be left when she had to crouch in the corner, barely able to bend her legs, and palmed her hand against her quivering lips with mortification coloring her face in crimson splotches as she struggled to relieve herself from suffocating fear. Humiliation settled further in her bones, stripped unceremoniously, arms banded over her breasts, body hunched to conceal the lines of her body from the rush of water targeted at the most sensitive positions of her skin. From across the sterile hall, Stephen called for her, face flush with rage, pinkish-hued arcs igniting across his trembling limbs, and violet wrath wreathed through his eyes, black cloth shoved finally into his hands, displaying such accumulation of power before more armed officials pushed him into the line of others too bequeathed with black.

Whatever this was, Scylla knew she had ultimately failed.

She wept still, but her brow sundered harshly over her eyes, mute glimmers of her shame captured on quivering lashes that bespoke of a silent rage. Her frame was on display as she stood before a reflective surface that illustrated her utterly drenched figure before she pulled her arms through the tan fabric and spilled into ill-fitting trousers that hung awkwardly on her hips and shoulders, a uniform sort of medical scrub that ballooned in peculiar cuts and haphazard stitching that irritated her joints as she was herded into another procession. Lambs, she thought, as Amma herself had once uttered in cruel whispers that whipped through her mind and compelled her to stare down at her feet and the linoleum below that was hued yellow and brown and green from their accumulated miseries and indignities. To be nearly forced to trudge through it was another notch onto the demented and harsh intention to assault their ignominy– to be faced with the injustice they saw as a curtailing to luxuries they once possessed.

Scylla’s nails sliced stinging figures into her palms.

You chose this, a voice slunk across her mind, fixated on the corners of her consciousness, and brewed there, just as everyone who has ever walked through these halls.

You chose this.
Just as she did.

The pounding of fists and clanking of silverware immediately pulled Scylla from her thoughts, her uniform damp still in some areas, her white-blonde hair tangled in its braid down her back; she felt bruised and exhausted, unable to dispel the weight that had settled through her body. Crude remarks lanced down her spine, cackling laughter that heightened her sensitivity and anger; they were to be treated as lesser, little more than fodder, shuffled into place and fitted as bait for their peers who did not hesitate to haze their inauguration. Such an initiation found Scylla staring up at Stephen, who was seated high above her, fitted in a uniform that was far more flattering to him, the black of his hair and the black of the threads that conformed to his muscled frame blending him into the backdrop of other students that seated themselves in formality—a ceremony, she thought, similar in some ways they had been inducted through P.R.C.U with the ochre emblem of House Gulo. No wolverine proudly stood before a shield here, just monochromatic refinement shorn under the distilled quiet of their shared gaze, separated with her as the fallen and he as the risen.

She feels almost betrayed. Stephen would’ve fought to be at her side. Instead, he seated himself and looked away.

Perhaps the following procession, she told herself, captured his attention and stole it away from her. It is a placating story she convinces herself of, trembling in the wrought accumulation of shame, regret, and anger, bisected by the quakes of fear that continuously rob her of warmth no matter how hard she might rub her palms together or over her shaking arms. Everything fell into the background, muddled together into a swarm of blackened words and tan-hued lashes of regret, all crushed under the suffocating weight of their new reality and acceptance of the fate revealed in the mocking praises of Dr. William Montgomery himself, false platitudes to the degradation of their individuality. To be mindless faces in swarms of black and white, greyed shadows on the canvas of power.

The rest of you, have a lot more to overcome.

Mindlessly, almost robotic and instinctual, Scylla twirls her fork through the noodles, catching pieces of meat that crumble under the pressure of her utensils, slicing through the meatballs to spear on the tines before she takes a bite. She did not participate in the toast, eyeing the flute of sparkling liquid, chewing thoroughly, and savoring the flavors that settled over her tongue. Near famished, she attempted to place the texture of the meat, the lemon sauce settled against her teeth that she ran her finger against, oil-drenched noodles, the lingering taste of garlic that accentuated the dish with garnishments of some green herb she could not place.

It’s on her third bite, and finally, a sip of juice to wash some of it down, that she noticed some are purposely not eating and staring mindlessly down at their plated food with abject horror and disdain. Others had pushed their plates to the side whilst their companions ate still; Scylla glanced up, finding Stephen eating almost as mindlessly as she had been, his amber gaze meeting her own with a glimpse of yearning that caused her to look away this time. The person to her right was one of those refusing to eat, and she couldn’t help but ponder if this, too, was some degree of a test, another level to gauge their reception to food and drink, to be easily appeased after hours and hours locked within a room no better than a cell.

“It’s horse meat.” They whispered, finally, almost indiscernible above the clamor of conversation that spiraled from those dressed in black. Scylla blanched. “What?”

“It’s horse meat,” they emphasized, raising their voices a few increments higher, silencing those chattering amongst themselves. Forks and knives halted and scraped against China as a result.

“So?” Another launched back after a momentary silence, resuming their meal with enthusiasm. Scylla did not follow suit, unable to decide between repulsion and intrigue. The flute in her grasp trembled under the pressure of her fingers pinched around the crystal stem. Her eyes studied the remainder of the meat and noodles, the citrus aroma continuing to spiral up to tempt her hunger despite the truth of its recipe.

“Where do you think they got the meat for it? ‘Due in part to a generous donation from the incoming P.R.C.U’?” They mocked.

“I don’t exactly expect them to keep horses out in the middle of the fucking ocean.”

Just one horse. A familiar voice clarified, tinged in humor, laced with luring notations where onyx eyes flashed in her mind, his voice carrying on unhurried and unbothered as it sluiced through membrane and nerves and settled as a blanketing barb of shadow.

One of the students thought of trying to bring their precious pony.

The final night on the beach, there had been such a pony tied further down the coast to a post, one she had paused to admire and pet, velvet smooth nose to push into her palm, course-haired lips to brush against her fingers before Stephen tugged her away to where Raindance waited.

Scylla turned, heaved, and fought to contain the bile that suddenly burned through her throat; saliva pooled in her mouth and spread past her lips that she gated her hand against. She breathed through her nose, body bowed up with another retch that tore through her stomach and swallowed, churned sickness coiling down to the pit of her insides that burned as acid against the back of her teeth and brought fresh tears to her eyes that welled and fell. If she lost her composure here for the second time, she would not be surprised if they dragged them back to those cells to hose them down again as animals, no more than dogs leashed and sprayed and to be caged away on their festering temperaments.

From above, Stephen watched her, his own plate half-eaten and flute drained to smother the disgust he felt at having actually enjoyed the meal despite knowing what it consisted of. He could see how it tormented her, and there was nothing that could be done, a divide formed in the garb of black and tan that pried them apart. He swore to find a way back to her side, but eyes fell onto them and watched and observed, indeed a test of sorts to further nurture the separation of their peers from the ‘Force’ and the lesser that, from this seating arrangement, forced them to look down upon them. In his hand, the stem snapped and arced with violet and pink, and he merely dusted off the shards, earning a low whistle from above. He could do little in the means of acknowledgment as he witnessed Scylla continue to eat, with more strength than necessary, her fork beheld so stiffly as she speared into the mess of sauce, noodles, and meat and ate great mouthfuls around the tears that bedeviled her expression as she quite literally forced herself to eat.

She gagged, the texture settled on her tongue repulsive, but she swallowed nonetheless and gasped around the finality of this derangement and tossed back the sparkling juice with little ceremony and wiped her shaking hand against her lips. Another heave worked through her stomach, gone cramped and pained, but she bit down against the burning sensation that clamored up her throat. Scylla swallowed back saliva and bile and trembled with the tremendous effort to contain what little composure remained. Be it a test of will, fortitude, and compliance, she cared little for it and glared up at those all donned in leagues of black, ignoring the laughter and the conspiring whispers that cloaked her– for whatever it was, Scylla would pass it, she would.

If she could do it, then so could they.

Right?

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

He’s coming, mon petit – he is coming. He’s coming for you; you have to run!

Wake up!

“What?”

“Your father, he’s coming, don’t you remember?” A sweet voice chastised, delicate intonations of French slightly dampened under English practice. It plucked at the fringes of her mind where a filtering haze had blanketed her in fog, ministrations stilling as she lowered dainty hands from her mane of hair and beheld their smooth gestures- she had scars here, once, ones harshly shadowed under swirls of black ink.

Right?

“Ammaranthe?” Her gaze flashed and snapped up through oblique lashes, a shadow cast in memorial of a name unspoken and unknown but felt through the leagues of unbidden tremors as she beheld her mother before her, garbed in a cream sweater that offset the warm undertone of her skin and hair tucked and braided with delicate curls against the high set of her flushed cheeks.

She looked so motherly. Maternal. And yet… Misplaced.

Charlotte Cahors was always different, spoken as an oddity on the island, with hair spun of midnight likeness, bright blue eyes, and donned in precious jewels that glimmered with peculiar lights therein of rough cut crystals and gems. A relatively young mother but endearing nonetheless to the residents and locale with brief excursions onto campus. She tended to the greenhouse occasionally, plots of roses tended to by her delicate hands, beset with allium with their dainty white petals, sea holly, and yarrow nestled beside. Other plots of marigolds and wormwood and then draping scarlet blooms of amaranth– the everlasting, the immortal meaning concealed behind the conceptual eternalism of love-lies-bleeding.

Jonas… He brought them here. A letter sent to her mother after the cathedral in Rouen was set ablaze, a series of mysterious fires devoid of pattern or reason through France, just rumored vandalism and theft to shadowed misdeeds of a darkened past.

Her father… A fuzzy profile, dark hair, dark eyes, a perpetual stain marring the impression that came and went with a stuttering sigh. She couldn’t remember. Even the kitchen where she stood wavered in and out of familiarity as if a painting illustrated in all the wrong colors, mutilated shadows, and shades of peculiar hues that fluttered as moth wings at the edge of her vision. She studied the cabinetry, the marble countertops, the lines marking through the tiles at her feet; it was all relatively quaint and mundane trimmings, all the comforts of a home that fell askew through her fanning lashes as she glanced back to her mother. Comforting hands brushed against her brow, the gesture so consoling that it set her back with immediate tension willing away through her arms as subtle contingents fell into place.

She had only ever wanted to go home.
A place to call her own.
This was her home.

“You’ve been so out of it lately. It’s your Senior year très cher, attention à la dentelle.”

“A lot has happened, been happening. The Trials-”Amma cut off, paused, and continued. “The dance, too. I just can’t…” She laughed.

Remember.

“I know there are numerous expectations with H.E.A.T and all,” Charlotte sympathized, stepping back to address the potted plants set aside, tiny buds decorating lax branches tied off in pale ribbons of blue. “Your father thought it best to return to help with the training. There has been unsettling news and developments on the mainland.” She busied herself next with an arrangement, binding sunset lilies together with green twine.

“I’m heading to the school today; I promised Luce I’d help her with the hydrangeas. The loveliest redhead has been coming by, a sweet girl, though incredibly sad. You’re welcome to join me, as always. ”

Voices muttered at the back of her mind, pulling together memories done in an overcast haze.

“Maybe next time, I know, I think, I’m waiting on someone…”

Charlotte hummed quietly, a telltale smile curling over her face with a flicker of knowing in her bright eyes. She moved carefully to gather her arrangements, and a peculiar ring on her finger flickered red in the sunlight with twisted bronze and gold, capturing her attention with the way it gleamed with a hidden flame. It struck Amma with a sensation of loss, of knowing, but she could not place the furor as her mother glanced a kiss upon her cheek and whispered:

“Just don’t let him singe the curtains again. There are only so many times I can replace them; your father has begun to notice.”

“It’s supposed to be unseasonably warm today, ma chérie. I’ll see you later.”

Voices carried on yonder outside, followed quickly by light laughter and a deepened voice that thrummed at a hidden string of yearning. She twisted threads of black around her finger, the charms adorned through her locks with red and silver twinkling on the suspended breath she withheld. She was beholden to the immediate influence that slunk and flitted to her across the threshold, melding entirely with her own in playful flutters of flame.

A towering figure loomed in the doorway, clothed in black, a wealth of sweltering heat tangibly felt from every corded muscle and lit through eyes marveling in resplendence. Golden hues that sparked as fireworks through the gloom of shadows, an unraveling of strength undiluted through shades of vermillion, bisected onto one side with a vicious scar. Despite all manners of severity and impression, a smile still fell with the filtering sunlight of dawn, a darling embellishment of adoration that softened rigid expressions as soon as they marked her given profile.

A crack in the door, shadowed moonlight, slivers of darkness, and a voice that says –

“Hey, Heartbreaker.”

Oh, I remember now…

“My hero,” she rejoined with a feigned swoon, inspiring a darling, belle voice that twittered between them, heightened into a peel of laughter as arms banded around her waist and lifted her, pulled her in tight where immediate warmth bloomed and fled through the entire room on risen waves of heat that glistened over her pale skin. Amma immediately draped her arms over those broad shoulders as he balanced her on the counter, hardly mindful of what remained there, clattering dishes shoved aside immediately for braced palms. Their heights matched as he leaned in just that much closer to decipher the smoldering glimmer in those eternal eyes of blue that swelled like waves against a shoreline.

“I told him, one more touch and he would be-”

“Burned,” Amma finished on a purring trill, tongue against her pout and muttered against his chin; he smirked, a harsh grin that chiseled through and was punctuated with his teeth that snapped close to her mouth.

“I may like to watch you flirt with others, but when they go to touch what is mine…” Hot breath blew over the perch of her lips, every spindling cord of vermillion and scarlet alighted through their shared gaze as she leaned back, palms on his shoulders and spine curved, pushing herself nearly off the counter to hook her thighs on the arch of his hips pressed close.

“And what about these mundane warriors trying to invade the island? They’re determined to end us. They almost succeeded last time.”

“I’ll burn them all too. Send them away to the bottom of the ocean where The Foundation lies, where Daedalus rots. Raze everyone to the ground that dares to threaten you.” He swore with fingers purchased on the revealing span of skin above her waist. She shook, lips parted around the gasp that spun up from her belly, and whispered:

“You can’t just raze everyone. Everything.” She breathed.

“Maybe, but I can certainly try.”

Whatever response was to be had immediately became stolen, sweet breath and fire lancing through their intertwined cores, lips met on harsh gasps and mewling whimpers with an urgency eternally felt and nourished on shared breath through heaving lungs. Calloused palms scorched over pallid thighs that cinched tight against quivering muscles, near bruising force lifting her up with her ankles suddenly crossed at his back. Fire, hot and heavy and ravenous, suddenly burned through her clothes and wreathed through her hair, singeing away threads of black and Canis red; tiny sparks of silver ignited there, too, dancing through the crystalline light of her eyes as she gazed into his –

Strange, she thought; she could’ve sworn her lover’s eyes were –

– blue.

Freedom and bitter uncertainty, blooming passion and hazy arousal, bidden under shadows of resentment, to know him as he was, as he could be, had been, and would ever be. White flowers and crimson sparks converging into one singular construct of a bridge betwixt two souls and the name that floated there–

“Lorcàn?” She inquired, but his heated pants fell against the line of her pale neck, no answer to proffer as she shuddered with open-mouthed kisses descending to devour her rapid pulse. Her gaze dropped to the mirror hung on the opposite wall draped in curling vines of ivy, her body suddenly aglow with scarlet coils as every ounce of power spiraled into a manifest of crackling streaks and ribbons as she looked upon the reflection of…

… herself lying in the dark, bloodied, bruised, and broken. A void of nothingness, a void of death that reigned as truth, even with Lorcán’s voracious appetite against the slick lines of her lithe frame, his clothing burning away on her cries as he pulled her against his flushed body, wed their flesh as one, sensational whorls of red now fled down the muscled lines of his back where faded marks fell under the purchase of her scarlet nails. She met the eyes of her despairing reflection who met her gaze with one of sorrow and immense pain, her expression stricken as those eyes flashed –

Soft dawning filters over resting bodies, lingering caresses with wandering hands, and whispered promises against heated lips.

– they were as one as she had been once upon a time as a reign of true self unknown and sought, realization alighting there as barriers and veils thinned and meshed, as fibers of dawning acknowledgment collided through the mirror of mirrors, of the very fabrics of this world and the next. With outstretched hands, scarred palms of muddled lines of heart, fate, and love–reaching in powerless claims for threads of scarlet that fled onto the vestiges of time eternal through the fabrics of severed realities.

Within and without.

It's time to wake up, my dearest.

He's coming.

Wake up!

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.040: éternité.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: limbo.

She awoke on a painful rasp, near screams lodged somewhere within, unable to escape, with her spine bowing up with the severity of her lungs inflating with the sudden surge of breath.

There was frigid agony through her entire body, bunched tight and rigid as if frozen entirely in place. Severe cramps and muscles locked tight, everything refusing to budge as if she had been laying, twisted, curled, for so many hours without movement. As if dead and suddenly bequeathed with new life, the cruel endeavor of mortality shorn through her hellacious existence. It was a marvel to move her arms, her legs following in sluggish pursuit, her heart pumping lazily as she fought to breathe without pain. Intense bruises with deeply seeded shades of violet curiously faded into bisque edges that covered her in horrid, jaundiced splotches. The inverted light offered just enough for her to catalog such blemishes, her mind gone hazed and fogged, shadowed as she attempted to piece together her dream.

A dream of dreams that had felt so real.

Amma braced her palms beneath her, feeling the cold muck that had dried, chipping away from her skin, flaking as her breath plumed white in front of her, and heaved herself up, arms trembling with the effort. Pieces of her hair fell forward, clumped together, tangled, thick waves congealed with whatever remained of this pit with streaks of color too dark to be anything else but blood. Hers, though, or something else? It took momentous strength to lift her head, the nape of her neck burning with an awareness of something unnamed as she attempted to study the shadows pulsating around her, undulating waves of black that shifted with delicate spots of light heralded from above with every movement she made. There were more chittering whispers through the gloom, some that fell over one another and others that she could make out clearly with the utterance of her name. It interchanged through each, somehow more guttural as it curled over certain syllables and enunciations of her many callings, more noticeable in hissing words on the finality of Ammaranthe.

She was still aware; perhaps that meant something.

Every so often, between those colliding whispers, she heard the plop and drag of something other, something that, too, carved through the thick mud, blanketed in darkness so thick she couldn’t decipher where it came from even with the soft light above. It echoed around her, never seen, but drawing closer, something cumbersome made through the final ditch of hell that contained her. Or, something that lived here and thrived in the shadows, awaiting her arrival, as confessed by the demented serpent that beheld her very eyes. Amma slowly pushed herself to sit upright, her legs refusing to obey and curiously numb. The effort it took was dragging into precious minutes as the whispering words and dragging noises suddenly stopped. The echoing silence immediately sounded off into a keenly felt and heard ringing that fell betwixt her ears, causing her to remain still; she felt as if prey, and whatever else remained here, was hunting her. Suppose it was a loathed beast, an abomination, purposed to feast upon her for eternity, for all the wrong she had committed, for all the wrong she had yet to do and had been created and meant for. Perhaps it was the gargoyle, still half-mad and half-crazed to finish her, as it had foreseen to drag her into the void with it and now despaired over the ruination of hell sought after.

Or, even still, perchance it was the creature she glimpsed in the Trials, the clink of chains and hated scarlet breath, of the looming shadow it cast and the figure nestled within its claws that had dragged her down and down again into that dreaded room. The roaring despair that summoned her nightmares and the wrath of her waking world, the embodiment of vengeance, omnipotence, and purpose, the woefully betrayed left to rot in the depths below. To what still thrived within her soul of souls, bound eternally to the cage of bone and ashen crowns impaled over a sorrowful brow. The fissures of lament swelled and brewed with the encroaching darkness, and Amma glimpsed within herself to reign over that vessel of hate. She had been lost to the dark for so long and had lent herself to the vestiges of night eternal and shadowed relics of abandonment. Hope was fleeting; hope was a lie.

And none would be found here.

The dragging sounds renewed, heaving ever closer, carved through the muck, plopped, swelled, and rolled. She shuddered and looked over her shoulder where awareness bloomed and rose, cresting over her curved shoulders that fell inward, but then she heard it coming left, then right, her head on a swivel as she tried to track its movements. A quaking drone began through the void of nothingness, an esoteric and eldritch resonation that sounded and shook through the chasm now carrying the languishing wails of the damned. They were moans and screams that sounded like her own, a shimmering veil pulled thin and translucent as she looked yonder and saw herself many times over: tormented, tortured, dead, beloved, forlorn, lost, and nevermore.

“Shut up.” Amma hissed, voice roughly strung over bloodied remains, throat convulsing with the effort. She felt aged somehow, different, wizened by the pain endured as she dug blackened fingers into the mud and hauled herself forward, away from where she assumed the dragging continued to slink and close in on her. The glowing sphere above did not move with her this time. Still, the inverted ribbons of light continued to blaze and descend, casting demented shadows and mocking radiance as she heaved, panted, and fought to quiet her movements as the dragging grew louder. And louder. Puncautated by rasping metal and now warbling snarls. It was taunting her now, loosey unleashing waves of sound as she continued to drag and pull herself through the gloom; she would not make it easy. For if damned to this pit, Amma would not go without a fight. She had lain for however long, and it had not set upon her, for whatever reason, it deemed her unworthy of pursuit until now, and so be it, she thought. Let it give chase. Vague and rusted hinges creaked and moved, keys turning to unlock more of her memories spurred by the image of her mother before her as home. The mirror of mirrors of one garbed in a white gown, veiled and bloodied and weeping, and the other smiling, arms encased in ruby roses and glistening ivy, a crown of thorns and one of bone.

If you find yourself lost in the chasm
For whatever reason, you got there
Follow the lights, for they will guide
You out. Some things lost are left
As guides, some come to others
As familiars. And some that appear
As spheres of light eternally lost
Death is only the beginning, mon cœur

I just pray you never have to see it
As I have.

A wailing screech sounded, and she recognized it then and there as an echo of hunger that she had heard before, one that had claimed the ruined soul of another—a sound of death. In the shadowed moonlight during the haunting hour, where Amma Cahors had saved Lorcán Roth and admitted to the encompassing heart of her humanity, it called to her with fiendish whorls of rot that spread through the ground; she could feel it encroaching rapidly as she dragged and heaved and pulled, feeling her nails crack and bend and splinter. It demanded what ragged remains there were of her soul, her heart, her spirit malformed and tantalizing in the desperation that compounded it. Darkness finally descended as she came away from the ring of inverted light, allowing the blanket of the unknown to envelop her as she struggled to breathe through the cold that speared through her lungs, an ache found there as ice stabbed through her very marrow. Amma curled her palm against her chest, feeling every rung of her ribs as she fought to contain her harsh, panting breaths. Why fight, she thought despairingly, why struggle through this eternal pit? She was lost, thrown, and tossed into the dark once again, where she had been molded and formed as a forsaken child of power undone. Where years had bled away into nothing, and time become unknowing and cruel. Why? There was nothing and no one; she was lost once again, and there would be no hand to reach through to provide her solace. There would be no hand to flit across crisp bed sheets to enmesh with her own.

Yet still, she fought, her legs finally complying as she shoved and pulled herself into the dark, her muscles screaming as she stood to her full height, her dress heels lost and forgotten, her soles cracked and bloodied as muck sopped and yanked at her ankles. Amma nearly fell as she began to move, a heightened sense of adrenaline fueling her blood. She looked through the dark and saw the figure dragging through the shadows, hunting after her sorrows and taunting her anguish. Somehow, she knew it and yet did not, but the yellow eyes that fell upon her promised nothing but eternal pain, and when a viperish maw split open and wailed, Amma ran.

If this was her eternal hell, then she had to navigate it on her own, for even if there was no redemption in sight and she was forever lost to purgatory, she would not let the farthest depths of hell forget her name just as the world had been beholden to her power elsewhere. Through a mirror of mirrors, she had seen herself lost to the wiles of love and lust, as she had seen once before through a glimpse of screens onto another life. Somewhere, she as herself had been and never was; she had been happy and wanted, beloved, a sacred term felt through a heart seen and known.

Amma fell once, twice, and screamed on the impact of both palms and knees as another keening wail of appetence peeled through the void and fled through her bones. Still, it only spurred her on, even as she half dragged herself through the cold, black, swampish remains and fled further into the abyss, knowing not what awaited her. Somewhere in the pitch of black before her, she glimpsed a singular thread of crimson unspooling through shadow, leading to nowhere as a glimmering coil of scarlet and then a delicate sphere of orange that tailed after it, pulsating as a heart would, rapid and fleeting.

Keep running!
They’re coming for you.
Just a little more!

“Who?!” Amma cried, pain heralding through her limbs as she struggled to keep moving, falling once again and unable to catch her fall, the impact splitting her lip and tongue as she bit down. A soft scream feathered from her throat as blood filled her mouth, coppery and warm. Why was death so painful? Why could she not just languish for eternity and lament over life and love lost?

Because this is only the beginning, we still have so much more to do.
“Shut the fuck up!”

That damned voice that haunted her every day and every night that now followed her unto death and continued to taunt her with both truth and lies. Amma screamed, blood trickling freely over the pout of her lip as she pushed off from the ground and ran after that fleeting tendril of red, after that orange light that had slowly begun to fade with that delicate chime of a young girl blooming through her heart to lead her yonder into the dark. Another splitting screech sounded, now more than one, fueled by the scent of her blood as deep chuffing sounds erupted through the shadows and frenzied themselves on the potential of her downfall as she fled. The fated string suddenly spun off to the left, and Amma chased after it with all that remained of her strength. But then it suddenly winked out, but she would not be undone as she clamored after it, fingers arched, splayed, clawing through the void as one of the pursuing creatures leaped. Horrid, white-hot agony lanced down her leg suddenly, and she cried, the putrid scent of decay surrounding her in a fog of rot. It was death once more coming to drag her away, but Amma kicked out, screaming as needles punctured into her thigh, bleeding over ink and scars and piercing deep beyond flesh and into muscle. She had endured endless torture under the hands of another; this was nothing compared to the thousand upon a thousand needles Amma had been subjected to in the true pit of despair. She tore her nails through taut flesh, sinew, and blood and bone giving way beneath her assault as she pulled her leg free; she did not dare look upon her mangled limb and limped away as the creature screeched after her, renewed in its hunt as it stalked after her flailing retreat.

She did not dare stop even as she fell once more, dragging herself through the muck again, a ridge of bone clamping down upon the pout of her split lip, her screams of pain clawing through her throat before plummeting into the depths of her heart where they festered. She did not dare…

… hope.

Hope to make it out.

She saw the orange light flicker and dip into a crevice in the dark where a small crack formed and swelled with crimson light, beckoning her, calling for her in a sweet voice. Amma lunged for it and met hard glass and rock that chipped away under her palms as she clawed through it, wedging herself through the hole and further into the unknown darkness. The compressing walls shuddered and quaked around her as the dreaded creatures lost sight and smell of her, howling and wailing with their prey suddenly taken from them. She could feel her body growing slick and heavy, cumbersome as exhaustion pulled away at her with blood loss, her leg flaring madly with pain. She dared not stop, though, and pulled her body through, crawling on her belly, sharp edges of stone burrowing deep into her sides as she gasped, fighting for breath and against the claustrophobia that fell in and threatened to crush her along with her eternal fear of the dark.

But there, she finally saw a glimmer of red, more than that fated string, an all-encompassing herald of light that shone upon her and compelled her forward. Amma nearly wept as it became easier to move, rising to her hands and knees as the hole expanded and allowing more room, but the more she crawled and ventured, the slower she moved as a sliver in the obsidian rock yawned ahead, permitting her to stand finally. On shaking, bleeding legs, Amma stood, lost somewhere in the face of a cliff that howled with a demented tune, a song of loss and forlorn life as she looked yonder to crashing waves, a sea suspended into turmoil and donned a shade of dark crimson. She looked down; massive spires of rock were held below, familiar and yet jagged as if the fangs of a fossilized beast were carved into the sediment as a yawning maw. Everything was beholden to a sanguine hue, and Amma trembled as she looked up and beheld the scarlet moon above her, her mother’s voice whispering through her mind.

Just remember, mon cœur, should you ever see a red moon…
...Run far, far away.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

There was no warmth to shield her in the death of night awoken, no soft breath to soothe the netherworld of her waking fears.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.032: limbo.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: the essence.

She plummets as a wisp lost and flickering as fragmented red slivers spindle away from her still body as she falls through the world beholden to her whims. Through a world of worlds, likened to shards of glass –a mirror– before Amma draws in a ragged breath, lungs inflating with smog, her body suspended onto throes of descension as blackened clouds finally part. Below, a churning pit of despair awaits with a writhing mass of limbs, coiling palms, talon-forged gestures poised to embrace, and her name a fractured, guttural roar rapt with appetence. Her impact is jarring, a quake felt through the confines of the universal plane of hell unknown, a swelling influence and realm of finality that has long awaited her arrival and salivates with her potential lain there in a tugging, pulling, pushing amalgamation of grappling figures. Her fingers clasp over her heart, nails against a pulsating scar, palms caressed against white petals that represent a delicate touch of purity against the forsaken realm– symbolism wrought through its make that she protects with what strength she has left.

Down the lines of her figure, Amma can feel every drag and pull, every penetrating curve that scrapes against her flesh, down the planes of her back where abstract lines bleed away from her spine, flayed open anew with her awakening sobs. Gasps and gritted teeth awash in red sunk deep into the pout of her lip as she lashes out with a shaking hand, desperately perched on the precipice of the void above and below, but they continue to haul and yank her down and down and down–where no light can reach you, where no one can hear you scream. Talons carve against her neck, caressing up the line of her jaw, writhing against her face, fingers shoved betwixt her lips on a scream of defiance that she chokes around, sputtering against the assault as more limbs weave through her mass of hair and pull, she feels sharp pricks at the corner of her eyes, needles that nearly sink deep beyond her lashes peeled wide in horror. Agony alchemizes into adrenaline, her body convulsing with every groping palm that shreds away at silk and chiffon tangled around her trembling legs; another roar belches out her name in a gurgling call, and something wet and horrid slithers its way up her back, crushes against her spine bowed and taut, threatening to snap. And then Amma sees it, a great serpent with her eyes staring back into the depths of fractured remains, coiling around her body. A forked tongue lashes away at her scars, flickering with the taste of her life spooling away, pieces of a soul broken beyond recognition, writhing hisses that compile as a voice of both feminine and non, a whisper that pings with familiarity as it damns her to the awaiting abyss.

We’ve been waiting for you.

And there she lands with such an impact, shoved deep down into the awaiting black so suddenly, that there is no sound to erupt from lips peeled wide, just an echoing thud that booms away into the darkness, mouth wrenched open and ringed in hellacious marks of malice. Her bones sopped in crimson shadows awash with hate, tongue gnashed against her teeth from the intensity of pain that overwhelms every reasonable thought of humanity. She slowly rolls to her side, the simple motion boiling white-hot through marrow, her body curling inward against the onslaught of agony to preserve what shards of herself remained. An echo of a gasping cry rent deep from within, punching through her shuddering ribs and plummeting stomach; she convulsed, plum-red liquid spewing from her lips, a mingling of blood and saliva and tears as she heaved once more, clawing desperately against the damp ground on which she prostrated on. Bitter cold burrowed underneath blackened fingers, drenched muck squelching betwixt her trembling hands as she raked her palms through the dark, hopeless and reaching in vain for a semblance of self and control that evaded her. A silver globe lurked above, a mocking radiance of white light that fell upon her in pale wreaths of deadened life, for as above and so below, Amma Cahors had finally reached the final pit of her hell.

Who knew dying would be so painful?

Soft light and trilling laughter, followed by pain-fused rasps, shunted from her swollen lips, blemishes immediately darkening and blooming with hues of violet from the stinging purchase of talons and hands. The writhing limbs suddenly disappeared as she looked up, beholden to the sphere looming on high with whips of inverted light coiling through the darkness, but they never fell upon her; instead, they stayed above with a soft glow marking where she lay with nothing but inky shadows to comfort her in this yawning well of despair. A quiet ringing fluttered betwixt her ears, the silence deafening yonder her agonizing gasps and rasping breaths, her throat gone bloodied and raw. Disjointed images filtered through the haze of torment as obscured faces, pleading eyes, and frailty scoured through her trembling hand with biting nails fixated on her wrist. The epicenter of ruin and despair founded on the utterance of a name, every syllable pulsating with frigid hate, the sin of wrath that forged the weapon that was she to destroy all she touched and kill all that stood in her way. The sound of her blood roared through her ears, her pulse hammering so loudly that she could feel it through every juncture of her body where she lay, languishing, deteriorating rapidly as she struggled to breathe, every pull of her lungs protesting against the sudden weight in her chest.

Amma had never feared death before; as a child broken and sundered, she had yearned for it, begged for it. She had treated with the reaper of her nightmares time and time again to relinquish her spirit to a final resting place. Thus, here she was, finally lent to the deepest ditch of an afterlife, but why fresh tears welled and fell, she could not explain. Hot and heavy, her vision blurred, and her lashes fluttered with the silent tracks carved over her temples with relentless sorrow wracking through her battered body.

Her very empty body.

Where an oozing and chaotic influence often swelled around her figure, there was a keen shift of mundane delicacy, the eternal reap of scarlet twine and silver ribbons gone with the blackened rot that usually cantered after her likeness. There was absolutely nothing: no magnetic pull of the world at her constant ebb and flow, no sparks of red to dance through her quaking limbs, and no silver light to swirl upon her eyes with every sluggish drop of her lashes. To be so frail, to be so mortal, was such a reckoning that she could only laugh once again; to be deserted of her powers in death was both a blessing and a curse. To be of the lost and forsaken meant to be free of that which she silently abhorred and feared, an admission she had never spoken of to anyone. Was this fated circumstance or some predetermined notion of life to remove the shackles and burdens of destiny at peace in the chasm of loneliness endured?

Suppose this was the final price she was to pay, she thought, her mind listing to the side of complacency and acceptance, her body weakened, and her heart suppressed beneath the weight of her past. Suppose this was the final curtain call. Her laughter continued there and spiraled into the leagues of mania over the role she had to play, the design of life so cruelly adhered to two letters, and the choice of love.

It came down to a straightforward admission amid her demented exuberance: she did not want to die alone. Not in the dark in which she feared most of all.

You’re already dead, a voice uttered.
You died a long, long time ago.

Oh, she giggled, plum-red lips stained and bruised and bloodied. That’s right.

Amma was dead—the shell of a girl who never lived. Tiamat was dead—the manifestation of pain and wrath for all the wrong the world had done. Revenge woefully bound through each epitaph.

Ammaranthe was dead—the beloved who only ever wanted a place to call home. A child damned, a child lorn and lost and subjugated under the might of self never felt.

And so, who was then that lay there, body broken and battered, heart split open and bleeding torrents of despair and sorrow? Who was it then that lifted a trembling hand to curl over the white flowers pinned to a torn and ruined dress? Who was it then that continued to weep silently, tears unchecked as exhaustion pulled at her relentlessly? Who was it that lent herself to the departed realm and fought to keep her eyes open against the obsidian fog that blanketed her?

No one, just a dead monster, the dragon finally slain, she thought, returning to curl in on herself, body shivering from the sudden and damp cold, scraps and tattered remains of silken skirts draped over her bruising legs. Those crystalline blue eyes finally closed against the shadows, now a decrepit hue of swollen thunderheads dreaded and faded with lingering storms. The ringing in her head gradually tapered off on quieted groans and chittering whispers that repeated her names. One final thought came to her in those moments of absolution, followed by the vague scent of clove smoke, the fogged and hazed memory of an arm thrown across her, and then shredded bodies with shattered limbs, tawny feathers, and blood and death, her hand clasped around a frail throat. Her screams echoing off in the distant dark, causing her to flinch and curl tighter into herself. Her eyes briefly opened on the whisper of red that fled away into the black edges of her tomb, plucked straight from her chest, from the weakening heart within—a string of fate and a trembling hand that tried to grasp hold of it in vain and fell. And did not move again.

Her name isn't Tiamat.
And it's not Ummu-Hubur.
It's Ammaranthe. And she's exactly where she belongs.

Yes, she thought, her mind gradually quieting, hand outstretched, pale, bruised, and cold.
Her eyes fell shut once more.
At least now I can’t hurt anyone ever again.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Foundation Institute - Atlantic Ocean}

Human #5.029: for no tomorrow.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &.}

Previously: the children of sorrow.

She had tried to brave-face the branding; she did.

Stephen had battled at her side to step before her, to be the first, he stressed, held back by officials donned in resilient armor-like clothing as soon as they noticed him. Psionic waves of pinkish anger dashed across his accosted limbs as Scylla was thrust forward, hand out and inserted with little ceremony and tears to map through the freckles speckled over cheeks flushed with pain and pinched tight. It had been instantaneous, but no less damning, the variated lines of thickness and numbers spelled across her skin, a peculiar glow nestled below and held up to the light to gauge efficiency before she was herded along, Stephen calling for her through a sea of haunting white cloth.

This was nothing compared to P.R.C.U: no splotches of color, regaled beasts, or charmingly sculpted castle-like exteriors. It was all fine lines and rigid composure, spartan, military. Imprisonment, frigid, nary a source of warmth, and all submitted under aseptic bright light. Forged into a line of procession, Scylla was nearly bowled over by the urgency spun through them, a myriad of famished gazes raking through her pale hair, meeting her green eyes and wide-drawn expressions with sneers and appetence she could feel coursing through every link of nerve that fired away betwixt her ears as warning signals. Eyes of a grey so dark they glimmered as onyx stones beheld her, he pointedly looked down, gesturing off-handedly nearly, so nonchalantly that she paused as if to regard him before she saw it: the banner of Amma Cahors – Tiamat, as it displayed. Emblazoned in such a fashion that Scylla was taken back for the woman so proudly presented was nothing like the woman she saw on the dancefloor, nor the one she encountered daily so consumed by her bitter rage and sorrow. She hardly had time to discern it properly before a familiar hand clasped her own, fingers woven to lift her now branded wrist to amber eyes slightly brightened with worry.

“I’m sorry, I tried-” Concern creased his brow, soft hands to wipe away her lingering tears as he cursed them all.

“There was nothing to be done, Steph.” She carefully inspected his own in a whisper, delicate nails tracing around the ten-digit number before she ghosted her lips against it, her attempt in branding to dispel the pain before she dropped their intertwined hands to follow the rest of their remaining peers. Those onyx eyes still tracked her; she could feel as much, a hunger purring through the space of the commons, a voice that teased and plucked against the trembling fringes of her mind that uttered:

You know the dragon too, huh?

Scylla ducked her head and shored up the walls within, fortified with the similar violet hues that Stephen commanded. She locked onto those shields with electric barbs to lance against the voice festering there, the only sign now a ghost of laughter that coiled its way down her spine, gone taut and strained.

“Are you okay?” Stephen uttered, pulling her close, barely noticing the banners suspended above them, eyes only for her as she nodded slowly, her opposite gesture coming up to her throat, their necklaces handed over reluctantly when they received their new clothes. She felt incomplete without it, her only solace and remembrance of Raindance and all that was left behind. He noticed, for of course he did, and whispered that he’d get them back for her. Even in The Foundation, there would always be Raindance, and nothing could change that otherwise.

Though she appreciated his sentiments and let him know such with a grateful smile, Scylla could not dismiss the doubt that bunched just underneath her skin, for then they were so rudely torn apart, thrust across opposite sides of a long hallway, his anguished face the last thing she saw before the door was shut with such a drone of finality that immediate panic fled through her limbs. Her breath came in harsh and quick, near pants that faltered from her trembling lips as sudden darkness descended and enveloped her in its gloom. Scylla floundered, the confining space triggering a near-hyperventilated flutter of her lungs that quivered with every inhale, not enough breath to expand- not enough space even to move. She remembers then the tiny confessions of a raven-haired woman, the same one so regaled onto a banner, raised for all of them to see. A woman celebrated in a place that was devoid of any sort of hope—a woman who cursed their very mention.

I don’t like the dark, she once heard her say. A rare occurrence in House Gulo where Amma would linger in the common area, eyes cast off into shadow and lashes panned down low, lost somewhere in a toiling memory. Once, Scylla had braved to inquire why.

The answer given shook her then just as it shook her now, down to the very marrow, arms curled around her middle to stifle the clamoring frenzy of her sudden fears.

Because that is where they made me.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

Charlotte Cahors was always different. Always afraid.
Always alone.

Possessed of a Sight that heralded the might of the stars, twinkling silver suspended on her lashes, glimmering depths of stardust blues and sapphires, walks of life beholden to her stare, and the might of the world in her hands. The wealth of power that thrummed beneath her skin, the once muttered threat that brought torment and chaos to her reign, precious jewels clutched betwixt her trembling hands that ran shades of blood. Something described as otherworldly, something unknown that flitted to and fro in life, a figment of the universe that existed in two planes, her mind in one and her heart in the other. A profoundly saddened soul that stood upon the world's edges, a mirror, a sheet of glass and garbed in white, hair the color of night eternal. She spoke of her home in loosely spun whispers, of a place not unlike this world; she spoke of a chasm there, too, a place of deeply seeded despair and damnation. She spoke of all things felt through the world, all things born unto it, and those that were not.

She brushed delicate hands through midnight locks and whispered against those blue eyes so alike her own, a curious ring that flashed red and gold, the weight of energy that encompassed quivering hands as she spoke to her daughter, hummed a curious lullaby there too, a language lost upon the wiles of time and another place—a mirror of phrases, haunting lyrics of a bygone remembrance.

I’d take you home if I could, my dearest. There, you’d be safe.
There I could teach you so many things.
But you are like your father in so many ways…

You would not be welcome among them.
You have an Einseele, something precious to the monsters of my world.

Just remember, mon cœur, should you ever see a red moon…
...Run far, far away.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Location: Unknown.}

Human #5.026: the essence.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: tiamat.

She has only ever wanted to go home. She has only ever wanted a place to call home.

A forsaken creature in lament of light lost, of splayed gestures clawing in vain for a heaven just out of reach, for a reality that did not defile her want of life with leagues of unjust pain and misery. Her bones continued to crunch and splinter; every rung of her ribs felt as if spread wide through her back as blood-clumped inverted wings of hated red. Her lungs inflated on every shuddering inhale with a gargling scream of fear of the battle that was waged within. Therein, boiling liquid of hellfire sluiced beneath her flesh and peeled through her scars as the hottest of flame known to man to scour through her soul of souls and mark her as nevermore in phosphorescence. Was this how dying felt? Was this how monsters were slain? When every fabric of a manifested spirit suddenly raveled away into nothing, a plucked thread that unwound with every league of descension into a hell unknown but felt through every wave of anguish that sheered through nerves, veins, and reasoning of self. What was self? Who was she? What lingering cusp of a soul was left in the wake of a morbid catalyst and the desperate calling of her name? Her name of names struck thrice over her heart, vicious whips of despair that yawned into the abysmal chasm where her true calling had been dispelled under the cruel branding of her eternal maker.

What was she?

They begged and pleaded and called to her as a friend, and something meant to be other. To mend, instead of sunder. What did it mean, though? What concept did it adhere to and forge through moonlit shadows with nightmares placated into sweet slumber, the night their only sanctuary with lingering encroaches of dawn to touch delicately over furrowed brows? What did it mean when they glanced from yonder masks worn into simpers of falsified life to preserve the authentic remains of their ragged hearts? Pasts forged and heaved through the darkness, shadows worn over gnashing teeth and lips, and blue eyes peering through porcelain shells donned in fissures of self-hatred. To hate what you are, to hate what you’re not. To be as they were under silver light wreathed in red, bound as one in sensation never known before and never to be known like any other. She had heard the soft mutterings and humming breaths, twinkling starlight in the eyes of god, cosmos eternal hidden behind tear-worn lashes in her mind’s eye beside the grueling image of herself, as a child, screaming onto the pit of nihilism for everything that had been stolen from her. It was the melody of her mother, brought forth from hazy memories meant to soothe her crafted and designed rage that bled on the hinges of her mutilated life. For all the power in the world she possessed, she could do nothing but scream his name and roar of how sorry she was, had been, and would ever be as claws clasped around her ankle and dragged her into nothingness.

There was a mantle of bones, her bones, their bones, ivory manacles lain with ashen remains impaled on her crown, tears a shade of crimson that converged on the path of vengeance sworn through memories severed. Obsidian walls and bridges of glass that wore through the unification of her heart and soul, connecting her to each individual she had touched with her leagues of unfettered power, each spun through in a myriad of colors: amber-yellows, sweltering vermillion, darling shades of blue and green, and vicious red intertwined with each to accentuate their bonds. As all are, someone had whispered to her once before about the vastness of herself, within and without, of hyperhumans that were all joined, about her as a vessel of pain and power as the seat of All, Made and a miracle of a love known and then lost because fate was cruel and fate was unkind. The world may have breathed life into the beast's prophecy upon the winter of her birth, but man forged it through and manipulated the beloved of life to be the scion of death.

A name for a name, an eye for an eye – mother for creator and father for maker.

I am the advocate for the depraved and the unhinged.
I am rage; I am pain.
I am the unknown.

I am Amma.
I am Tiamat.

You are Ammaranthe Fien Cahors.

And he, his name is…

If this was death, she welcomed it so with open arms and a heart rent asunder, to know the end as she dreamed of it often and the blissful impact of relinquishing all that was life undone to the comforts of shadow and bygone misery. To see the finality of her existence as a void of howling winds where the abyss awaited. To feel herself as she plummeted through smoke and ruin and blood and ash, her skin marked in it, her veins tainted through with it, and her mind wailing with her soul of souls shattered and splintered as tiny fragments of red. As pieces of a conceptual design beholden to immortal intricacies.

The world has finally grown weary of her malcontent— the would-be almighty has looked upon her and decided she has had enough.

The power to maim is all for naught, and the creature within is finally lent to rest.

How does one kill the likeness of a god?
How does one kill the multifaceted burden of their broken heart?

How does one destroy the manifestation of love? Loss? Heartache?

How does one design and know the meaning of love and the forging of one's heart onto another?

The answer is simple.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Beach - Dundas Islands, Pacific Ocean.}

Human #5.009: the children of sorrow.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): blackjack & eclipse.}

Previously: her remains.

Stephen Anderson didn’t understand why Scylla was so determined to return the belongings of the dead, near-obsessive to obtain personal effects to sign and hand over to family members; answers met with acknowledged fear and hopeless truth; children sent across the ferry to learn, grow, to be safe in like-minded graces away from the world that would never understand them otherwise. When he asked, watching her turn that damned ring through her trembling fingers, she muttered with glassy-lined eyes of silver that she would want someone to do the same for her, to find the remains and allow them to be given a final rest for life undone. Peace, she breathed, that they once had here- it wasn’t always like this, she muttered and curled her palm around the ring once more, holding it close as if cherishing the discovery. He didn’t bother asking her again after that; he couldn’t really blame her for not recognizing that he would follow her onto whatever path and endeavor she forged, only desiring her safety above all else. He had family back on the mainland and offered her his home. His mother would welcome her happily, he said, but Scylla had merely shook her head and denied the comforts proffered; there is more I have to learn, she claimed, more that I can possibly do.

So Stephen decided to go to The Foundation, too; he would not allow her to go alone.

She took that ring and made inquiry attempts to Ryan about Amma’s family, which was met with an eerily drawn-out silence until she admitted quietly that she didn’t have any. All academic records of Amma Cahors had been taken and destroyed and were suddenly missing, plucked so carefully, and done so thoroughly. As if she did not exist, for someone had meticulously seen to extract any trace of her, her room in shambles, her belongings taken, and now any lead into her past suddenly not there. There was no next of kin, Ryan had explained, her mother’s whereabouts lost to time, her father unknown, only the mutterings of spires of a church in Rouen where she was born being the only knowledge they possessed. The Cahors name was so loosely spun through fate and was now suspended over the dregs of never-there and used-to-be—a chasm of both Charlotte and Amma, mystery and wavering shadows betwixt their shared likeness. Torres would’ve been the next person to ask, maybe the one to give such a sentiment to, but news of her death had spread fast, and Scylla (anyone really) didn’t know Amma Cahors well enough to look further into where she had come from.

Giving such to The Foundation just seemed wrong.

And perhaps that was why Stephen and Scylla found themselves on the beach, watching from the edges of browse and sand, the hazed figures of Blackjack and Eclipse set off into the distance with a smothering air of uncertainty and woe worn as a blackened cowl. There was enough chill that Stephen took his jacket and allowed Scylla to slip her trembling hands through and pull taut over her shoulders against the cold; her white-blonde hair pulled up high from her nape, green eyes bruised and troubled, and tired. He knew exhaustion pinched and buzzed through his own amber gaze, black hair crazed and shoved under a baseball cap. They would be leaving tomorrow, and various fires scattered down the beach revealed many who were also enjoying their last nights on the island. Somber music that plucked through the night, bittersweet laughter and cries, Scylla and Stephen had stood on this beach not long ago lost to sand and surf and sunlight. Team Raindance, 08, their brand as a simplified rendering of a water droplet that they wore as necklaces, given that day for all the years they had spent together.

Under the moon, such a once familiar tradition was bathed in the finalities of silver shadow, melancholy that writhed as lamented cloaks of loss attached to every figure she recognized as the infamous team of Blackjack. There were few left of their own team, a couple she spotted further down, waving them over. Most were returning to their homes, and she couldn’t blame them for such a choice, no matter if such wrought her heart through and through—she didn’t want to be alone.

In the pocket of her jeans, the ring weighed like a stone, and every step grew more and more cumbersome as she trekked, Stephen at her heels, an immediate shoring of his guard as she stumbled, listing to one side where the ring burned beneath the fabric and seemed to shudder in the presence of those gathered. The lingering pieces of conversation fell upon her ears as they came closer, Stephen carefully holding Scylla at his side, hand around her elbow, steadying her through the cumbersome sorrow she wore, courtesy of her powers, everything profoundly felt and doubled. His own abilities cried and sang in their electrifying summons, purple hues of energy with pinkish undertones shimmering through his eyes as Scylla greeted those gathered and said:

“We don’t mean to disturb you,” she began in a whisper. “I’m Scylla Fluerane, and this is Stephen Anderson from House Gulo.”

“Team Raindance,” he tacked on carefully, unable to keep himself from studying their profiles, the injuries sustained, and the pain they must’ve felt.

“I—we—I just want to say we don’t believe all the rumors. No one really knows what happened that night.” She shook and trembled but carried on with a soft sigh. “But that’s not why we are here. I’m leaving tomorrow for The Foundation. " Why she felt compelled to admit such, she did not know, but nonetheless, it was out there as a plunked stone.

“We are,” Stephen amended, holding her all the more, and nodded for her to continue even when shock lapsed through her speech– gazes held for a long moment before she returned her silver-lined eyes to the fire and those surrounding it.

“But we found something in the dorms, one last look through; I don’t know if any of you have been there, but everything is gone. I don’t know what happened. No one knows anything about her; there’s no next of kin, nothing that Ryan could find, and –”

“Scylla.”

“Right, I’m sorry. I know what it is like to be… unwanted—never seen. And I don’t want that for her. No one deserves that.” She carefully reached for the ring in her pocket. “It seemed only fair to give this to you, her teammates.” In her delicate fingers, the jewel of red centered there seemed to glow as it captured the light of the fire, flames reflecting and licking off the bronze and golds twisted there, shimmering in the malformed and curious make, such a mundane thing that swelled with the profoundness of its discovery, the only token that remained of the infamous girl taken that dreaded night. Scylla glanced at each member of Blackjack before her green eyes landed on Gil, the last person she witnessed with Amma at the dance– would he want such a thing? She pondered who else would accept such before approaching the celebrity and carefully dropping the ring into his palm; if anyone else had reservations about such an action, Scylla ignored them in favor of whispering.

“I’m sorry.”

“We also encountered something else, though I don’t even know how to describe what it exactly was,” Stephen carried on next, glancing down the shoreline where the remainders of their team beckoned. “Something evil; we assume that’s what maybe tore apart her room; they blocked most of it off, though. People are cruel.”

“It’s too bad The Foundation couldn’t find the deed; at least we’d be able to stay here. This place is a home to so many of us.” He carried on, offering his hand to Scylla next as she stepped away from Gil; her body lightened as soon as she passed the ring onto another, a sort of easy calm spread through her to know that those who knew her best would see to its safety now that she was no longer here.

“Maybe we’ll see each other around,” Scylla uttered with a soft farewell hung upon her words as she slid her hand into Stephen’s grasp, held tight, and allowed him to lead them down the shoreline one last time.

At least they’d be together from here on out- for now.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Pacific Royal Collegiate & University - Dundas Islands, Pacific Ocean.}

Human #5.002: her remains.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &}

Previously: &

When Scylla Fluerane had returned to the Gulo Dorms after an unsuccessful convincing of her peers to attend The Foundation with her (for where else could a bastard child such as she return to when all record had been shorn and torn and lent to fire by her father), she had been met with objection and garish yellow tape spun and crisscrossed over the grounds, a smattering of security personal in place that had effectively turned her and many others away, their belongings scattered and haphazardly obtained with a pending investigation over obliterated windows and the entryway shattered from what she could glimpse by pressing inward, struggling, pleading to at least walk through the halls one last time. Six years on the island that she called home destroyed and left for naught, oppression felt in tangible waves as she clutched a flier betwixt her trembling fists and fought against the encroaching loneliness that threatened to take her under.

How did she do it? She pondered, that hated blue-eyed woman who once looked upon Scylla and scoffed, laughed, and tore into her friends when they attempted to befriend her with hateful words curled into French notations. The waspish woman that laughed bitterly into the encroaching dawn when she had been introduced to the dorm, something feral and edged in brutality that garbed her as unworthy to don the Wolverine of their house, that shield undeserving for her graces when she had strutted about the campus in mocking ochre embellishments against those tattoos and scars. That same woman assigned to such an infamous team that the campus was often swept up with, various inquiries regarding what exactly happened left unspoken, and prying eyes and proposed theories hushed or ignored. Scylla wondered how someone so involved could be so alone; every morning and evening met with silence in the last year she had attended, and every passing month more profound until the day she first saw her with such a sad smile.

Stories circulated, and implications sired among them, the transfer student, the looming Foundation heralded on lithesome shoulders and sheared through eyes that Scylla could still feel from when she last spoke to her, their weight so keenly felt, after the trials when she simply asked her if she was okay. (Ryan had designated her to assist in gathering some of her belongings, and had also been tasked with gathering sentiments for families who lost a beloved child in the most recent attack) The haunted look, the despair that feathered around her as horrid shadows of malcontent. Such madness loomed behind blue eyes as a glowing hellfire of demented retribution: she had heard the stories, everyone had in some shape or form of grandeur, but she had seen the truth lain bare that day and the following days with whispers abound. Uttered occurrences of her involvement with her teammates, descension from the most critically acclaimed blackening of her name that some cursed:

I heard she slept with Lorcán Roth and Gil Galahad.
I heard she stepped out right before the Trials late at night; who’s to say she wasn’t a part of that too?
I heard she attacked the hospital staff, and they had to chain her to the bed.
I heard she attacked some of her own teammates!
I heard that the gargoyle came for her and –

Chernobog!

Good riddance! Ever since she came here, everything has gone wrong!

I heard she stole –

I heard she killed –

They say that –

They say she was dragged into Hell.

-Maybe that’s where she belongs.

The rumors and stories had been vicious, but Scylla had seen her on the dancefloor, the way she danced so carefree, wild- so unbothered, and just as she was in that moment: a girl who was simply enjoying life as it was given and taken under moonlight. She had seen her in the arms of Gil (and who didn’t notice him! A celebrity in their midst.), and though she had left early, trapped with some others in caves of frigid ice mere seconds later - she rubbed against the still healing cuts and bruises on her arms - she had seen and felt the crimson waves of wrath and ruin.

She had heard the screams.

No one deserved such a fate.

In the final afternoon that she would spend on the island, Scylla and a few others had been permitted to look through the Gulo Dorms one last time to gather possessions that may have been left behind, and what greeted them was an eerily carved path of destruction through the commons and then above, a clear and designated path of something that reached the third floor, and there she stood with a gasp, palm against the heated breath that she fought to control as she looked upon the remains of Amma Cahors' dorm, eyes rounded out in shock.

The door had been left as nothing but splinters and massive spires of wood lain as spikes littering the carpeted floor. A scrawling of various slurs and profanity had been marked into the walls, scrawled in ink both black and red, lines gouged into the paint to lay blame as a memorial of a cursed wrong and death. People needed someone to blame, and what better method than that girl who walked through life as the harbinger of rage and darkness, as an in-between creature of this woeful life adorned with her agony of fate undone? Scylla fought around the terrible shudder that worked through her nerves; the gruesome defilement of her room was an omen to be sure.

The world is never fair for the different, for the misunderstood. For simply being not-as-we-should.

“That’s fucked,” someone whispered, voice lowered as if afraid to speak aloud, the yawning pit of the shadows that lurked yonder torn and smashed remains seeming to writhe despite the filtering of sunlight through shades torn askew.

“Why would they do such a thing?” Scylla breathed, arms folded around her middle as she stood in the ruined doorway. “She’s dead; can she not rest in peace?”

“People are scared, Scy. Sometimes, it’s easier to take it out on… Well. It’s just easier.”

“They never found a body,” someone else muttered, and Scylla shuddered at the mere though of it. Maybe she was really dragged off to Hell with that thing?

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephen Anderson proclaimed, a Gulo senior who found the sentiment in wandering these halls one last time a balm to the uncertainty of the future ahead. “This is still our House, and someone, many probably, broke in and decided to do something so hateful.”

“It’s not really our House any –”

“Then leave!” Stephen snapped, “Enough is going on here that I doubt anyone would notice you gone anyway.”

“Steph, I didn’t mean–”

Scylla allowed their arguing to fade off, stepping into the destroyed room on whispered steps; the immediate entry suddenly hushed and stilled, as if stepping into Amma Cahors' old room was detached from the reality in which they floundered. Everything within had been shattered or toppled over: drawers ripped open, bedding torn and shredded, a vase of dead flowers thrown and cracked into glittering splinters. All of her possessions had been taken, nothing left in memory of the raven-haired woman and the walls here too defiled and marked, crude illustrations of what appeared as a scaled beast on one side, blackened lines viciously drawn on the other, pools of red left to stain the carpet, still wet and gleaming under the hazed rays of the sun. She shook with the wrongness of it all, the barbarism, the –

Something shifted in the darkest corner.

A writhing and coiling swatch of darkness, of shadows, something black that festered and oozed as a void of nothingness that all manner of light could not penetrate nor touch as it lay there winking in and out of existence, to and fro, as if struggling to remain as it was with sobbing wet edges that bled into reality.

“Scy –”

“Do you see that?”

“What -” Stephen came up beside her, stilling at the pulsating mass, shuddering under the weight of the unseen, a sickly sound of boiling manifest, a squelch of liquid matter that writhed and rose, a gaping maw of a fiendish appetite that yawned forth and suddenly wailed with its appetence. A screeching horror that sounded like the symphony of the lost and the forsaken, eerily reminiscent of the screaming they had heard just a few nights before. Scylla immediately fell to her knees, palms held against the assault on her very senses, ears ringing, bleeding, torn asunder as the shattering cries continued, tumbling over one after the other as a cacophony of deafening hate and ruin. It sluiced forward, crawled, webs of ink peeling forth on membrane-like creation that thinned and snapped and bled, and Scylla looked upon it with desperate fear until hands grasped her shoulders and hauled her back, every inch gained only so much and paling in comparison for the thing that writhed and tried to reach her, inches away from her sneaker-clad foot as she scrambled back and back and back, palms slid and slick with red as she slipped and fell, once, twice.

And then there, a wink of gold, a spark of crimson, something small left alone and forgotten just underneath a shattered bed.

“Scylla!”

She lunged for it, clutching it preciously within her grasp before she scrambled back and ran. The alienated knell of decay and rot was hot and heavy on her heels as they rushed outside the dorms, the world eerily silent and beholden to what they had just witnessed that failed to follow them out into the sun, unable to form it into words or reason as Scylla held out her trembling hand. Her palm cradled around twisted bronze and golds, a malformed design, an all-seeing globe, and the precious red jewel set there.

The only possession known to remain of Amma Cahors–her mother’s ring.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

Do you think they'll just simply let you go.
The world outside of this perfect little bubble is cruel and it is dark and it is afraid. Afraid of you. Afraid of me.
They lie in wait to take everything you hold dear. And they will.

They always do.

But no matter what, this world will never accept you. They won't forget.
They haven't forgotten. I doubt they will ever forgive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hey, what’s your name?
Tiamat.
No, the one they took from you.

Ammar –

No, someone had said, denied her truth, and whispered into the shadows unbound:
…Ummu-Hubur.

She gave her life that day, too, as the first person she ever killed.
Dust to dust.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.085: tiamat.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: taste of blood.

Please.

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.

What did they see? Who?

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 burned.

Please.

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. Everything hurt. And she just wanted it to stop. 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.