Rockette

alkaline.

^{& formatting is not mobile friendly, be advised.}

〚 A C T I V I S T S O P P O S E T H E A E O N A G E N D A I N T H E Y E A R 2 0 5 0 〛

_{O V E R T U R E}

The Agenda was a blueprint for the 21st century. It was the plan to inventory and control all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, information, energy, and human beings in the world. The Agenda was implemented by the Council of International Relations (CIR) in the year 2001. It was the official response to synthetic climate change caused by planetary pollution. However, climate change was only the public lightning rod with which special interests could introduce the Agenda to the public. Governments from all around the world that were present at the executive summit legally agreed to the plan to control the way people live, eat, learn, move, and communicate. All of this was masked by the noble banner of saving the planet from destructive climate change, spurred on by the secretive discovery of Aeon Craters and the death of life that surrounded their impact and the shift in the conceptual law of nature that bent to their will. In reality, the Agenda outlined the justification for a centralized world government; it built itself off of the fear of the unknown and the possibility of life outside of the realm, solidified when the Aeons fell from their seat of the heavens and violently tore through the atmosphere of our planet and drastically influenced the climate. The Agenda was a comprehensive framework for extreme environmentalism, social engineering, global political control, and groundwork for the development of Artificial Aeon Intelligence, creating a new pantheon of worship for the ever-appealing mantle to be known as God in man's somewhat demented image. Aeons were studied to near obsession, their vast powers carefully extracted, manipulated, made to the government's needs and desires, and carefully woven into the everyday production of pharmaceuticals. The Agenda sailed under the pretense of ‘sustainable development for mankind.’ The phrase means little more than ‘population control.’ It was the systematic program for de-population, enslavement, habitational control, social distribution of commonwealth, and complete deconstruction of national integrity. The Agenda exalted the wealth and living standards of a select few within the upper echelons of society. Everyone else became the subject of technological and totalitarian control. Over the course of fifty years since the Agenda’s inception, people around the world have been relocated to designated urban regions where they are effectively prisoners unless they have the assets to choose their fate. Such subjects have been used for Aeon Experimentation purposes- known as Crown Apocolypse in the earlier stages when mentioned subjects died from a queer crystallization process that completely invaded and later killed their hosts.

The Agenda was fully realized in 2050. Everything is under mass surveillance. The state-sanctioned corporations control all aspects of production and consumerism. All information is relentlessly premeditated and censored. Privacy is a forgotten memory within the residential regions. Freedom of expression has since long been removed from legislative protection. Individualism and independence are actively countered and discouraged. A Central Operating System connects and controls all aspects of technological life, which is pervasive. Medical science is obsessed with throttling senescence. Technological science is obsessed with Augmentations. The military is obsessed with creating the ultimate and perfect Soldiers made from the infusion of Aeon and Man. A Social Credit System segregates the masses. The presence of this oppressive system has inspired some citizens to vigilantism. Its activity has been sporadic over the past twenty years but has lately surged into the public view again. The actions are conducted by brave men and women who take measures into their own hands by breaking and manipulating the system in favor of the people. They spread the truth about government, the truth about the Aeons and the tale of other forms of intelligence and life forms, the experimentations of the Crown and the people that herald the might of the Aeons in exchange for a short life, and corporate corruption through digital intrusions and physical activism. They help the poor and exposed by commandeering supplies, storage, and housing. They free the wrongfully persecuted and imprisoned. Some rumors are that free and rouge Aeons influence their actions; other rumors are of defected Soldiers from the military attempting to take life back into their own hands and strike back against their former masters. Alas, immorality runs much more profound. Evidence of a cabalistic elite in hidden organizations and councils occasionally surfaces through various means. Their roots appear to reach further than what anyone would ever have suspected. Rumors of sacrificial rituals, pedophilia, medical experiments, and other vile practices circle hidden communications of the Darknet and a long-forgotten means of conversation undertaken by various couriers. Many of these implications are too much for some to stomach, so they eventually vanish.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Ünterland.}

Human #5.073: the daughters.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: in deliverance.

I see her in you.

Mother, maker, keeper. A remarkable thing that all children clung to– that all children were cast from, all of their mothers sown deep into this timeline as woeful beings struggling to contain hope for their wayward spawn.

Betrayer. She thinks and gazes towards the hearth.

Better yet she be born into a house aflame, to know the world as an eternal conflagration and her lungs filled with smoke. Better yet that she be given to the fire, to know only pain, for when was her life ever not set ablaze; to simmer as embers, coals, to bide time and patience until it was struck anew to rise as a beast of magmatic wrath?

And this woman, who claimed kinship to her, beheld those trembling gestures that dug nails into the damp wood and bled, nails splintered with the force of her disbelief: the convenience, the timing, the place. To be brought here, in this realm of unknown hell that tormented her dreams and warped them into the nightmarish reflections of other-selves and could-be’s that left her barren in all manners of heart and soul. Had she her powers, Amma would’ve tasted the ashen sorrows of hidden lies and truths, the viperish maw that would sluice through her pores and fixate on the lingering emotes of the world that subjugated to her vengeance, the pooling of hate on her wicked tongue stricken with the need to lash out and tear everything asunder. Water-spiked lashes drift closed on a withering sigh; the silence stretches on into a drone of flame and stuttering breath.

She thinks of the only other families she knew of to compare this revelation to, the name of Roth so well known on the island and deeply ingrained into the foundations of the school, even interwoven upon the seas of the Atlantic with their renown spoken into the waves. She cannot help but equate the disparity of her ancestral claims to the near royalty of such a lineage. The prince, she inwardly shudders, so blessedly charmed with life and home, whereas the name Cahors is a specter, a remnant of time fleeting and sorrows eternal. It is a shroud, an eclipse, a lament of death, destiny, and fate as she knows it to be. The name Baxter so delicately aligned with their downfall, the whispers once uttered by Sierra and the sister she both loved and hated and needed all the same. She sees Harper's pleading face in her mind and those eyes that saw everything they could not. Her Grandmother stands there so readily and maternally, a glimpse that fractures through her porcelain reserves to be faced with her kin and knowing such to be true. It does something to Amma as she remains there, still and silent, and dares this woman, dares herself, to deny such convenient dominations. To be brought here to this world so violently, accosted, thrown into the chasm of the dark that surfaced her latent fear of it, to be brought here, rested, and healed. It remains like some grandiose tale of fortune, a written prophecy of the forsaken child placated with familial contingencies; little did this woman know that she harbored a monster in her home. If her Grandmother knew of her sins, would she carelessly absolve them and bless her whole?

Amma had to speculate if she actually wore her mother’s face– if she was easily deciphered through Charlotte’s likeness. Her memory often remained shadowed in a veil of white, difficult to discern, clothed as if a maiden that wept over her misdeeds for the life she had given away. Even her dreams were haphazardly assembled to present that woman of pale skin and blue eyes, midnight hair likened to her own and donned in the mother's warmth yet so dissociated from what Amma thought she knew of the grace of god. She could not help but reflect on when another had looked at her as if a ghost, as an embodiment of someone else, and now she wondered, what had he seen? Who? Was her visage such a haunting shadow of the woman she thought she knew?

A mirror of mirrors reveals the truths of this world but conveniently conceals the lies of life in its embedded reflections, which bear all manner of self and other in this world and the next.

In the shadows of her mind's eyes lies a vacant spot on a hospital wall, ceramic remains, and the lingering confession of weakness to never face oneself again. Not for a while. Perhaps not ever. The bitter fear and self-hatred that lingered as stale and still coffee would in a perpetual ring of spiraling madness. Would she, too, be cursed, unable to face herself ever again and not see what they all saw? To witness the face of the one who had betrayed her more than anyone ever had? The raven-haired transfer written as an enigma, the paradox of who and what she was.

The water has now gone lukewarm and clouded with blackened swirls of detritus, and Amma finally wills herself to look up and lock eyes with her– her grandmother. Her pale hands wring together, and when she steps forward, taking that gaze as acceptance, something inside her swells and snaps and pierces through the rungs of bone that cage a grieving heart.

“Don’t.” She bites, teeth snapped against her tongue, lips paling in violet bruises, a split of flesh that peels against the constraints of a wound that begins to weep, blood washes against her hated mouth anointed as the kiss of death. “Don’t touch me.”

Kylmie looks almost perplexed, a shade of hurt crossing over her features, and Amma immediately loathes how the scrunch of her brows and the purse of her lips remind her of a shadowed face in the darkest corners of her mind. A dark, depraved voice slithers against her lobe and breathes aloud: how much would she look like Mother Dearest if she plucked those blue eyes from her head? She almost trembles from her cruelty envisioned, but would it entirely be out of character from what she knew of herself? What she could remember from sins gone past.

Since when did she care?

“I only want to look at your wounds.”

“Oh,” Amma deflates, a weariness threaded through every pulsating vein. She merely lifts her hand, fingers bruised and marred, and ignores the silvery line of scars that flicker in the hazed light of the fire; how many has she gained anew over the last few months? Did it matter anymore? Would she be fated to walk eternally donned in these laces of hate? Water splashes over the basin as she stands, wet strands of her hair sobbed and wed to her figure, like tentacles of darkness warped against the black lines raised against her skin. She gestures down to her thigh, the bandage now a shade darker.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Are you always this…”

“Defensive.” Dain lists, curiously tacking down his raised fingers. “Abrasive.”

“Difficult.”

Amma could entertain the banter; a quip danced along the edges of carmine-washed teeth, copper wetted against the fullness of her mouth as she merely glared through the casted shadow of her lashes and willed her stare to answer for her.

“Dain.” Kylmie snaps and hands Amma a thick wrap of grey cotton to conceal herself, which she lazily pulls from her familiar hands; she stares at those sapphire jewels adorned on her fingers and remembers a curious red jewel her mother possessed once. She deliberately wraps the material around her body with a feigned slowness and snaps the wet whips of her hair down her back before stepping out from the basin and settling back onto the blanket of furs. Dain growls but looks away, muscles and scars thick and taut, bunched under tan skin that gleams golden under the bathing of firelight before he snarls. It rips through the space that strikes at her bravado. She shivered from the fury she felt.

“You certainly have her eyes,” Kylmie muses offhandedly while kneeling beside her, and something in Amma crumbles beneath those words.

“Don’t do that. Don’t compare me to her.” She drags heavy pieces of her hair over her shoulder. “The woman you’re talking about…”

“I don’t know her.”

Silence resumes, and Amma pulls her fingers through her hair, knots snagging against every tug as she merely yanks through them, wetted pieces of black coming away through her fists, sharp pricks against her scalp that detonate the ringing betwixt her ears, the pain at least cements her to the now with the lingering fog of her nightmare gradually fading away. Though Kylmie doesn’t say anything, she can feel every flinch at the quiet brutality she displays and silently moves to unwrap Amma’s thigh, exposing blackened lines and finely pin-holed wounds of jagged teeth, but also the peculiar scarring that lay beneath and the thick lines of ink beside them. Beautiful, strange, and macabre.

“What happened to you?”

Had anyone ever asked her so blatantly before? There had been rumors and traded stories of things The Foundation had done to her over the years. Ghosts that bore an unknown face and name until they came for her once again. Speculated whispers tossed out over the sea carelessly abandoned, all confirmed during the trials when the simulation had cruelly displayed bits and pieces of truth and lies and spoken her name into the wavering spirit of her dread.

I know that what they did to you - the ghastly, abyssal things they must have done to you, to bring forth what you are now.

It’s a delicate inquiry, spoken carefully, almost in a whisper. Still, she hears it all the same as if a shout into the void of her past, every annunciation ricocheted off the rungs of her bones that splinter with every breath she takes. Amma goes entirely too still. And with her stillness comes the eerily silent reaper of her pain, the ache in her muscles, the fissures in the flesh of her scarred palms and battered feet, the weight of everything endured and lost and forgotten that manifests as more than just the paled crown that bleeds over her brow. She could have meant the markings on her skin, the tattoos she wore as a shield against the hated fragments of her past, to gain ownership of her body once more that had been plied apart over and over again, the violation of her sanctity of heart and the touches of chaos she bore through her trembling hands. She had said yes. The scars she had gritted her teeth against every time needles had graced the silver membrane of her malcontent, the burden she had to bear, the decimation of self. She had said yes.

Kylmie could have meant her time spent within this Limbo they spoke of; she could have meant anything really as she delicately worked and redressed her wounded leg with a cooling salve, a gentleness that she had never known, or perhaps forgotten, mesmerizing as she looked down and then back towards the hearth that swelled and burned.

“Crushed chrysanthemums,” she said, merely to fill the silence. “It’ll help fight back the lingering toxins. You’ll be just fine in a manner of days.”

“Days. Weeks.” It was slowly settling in, like a stone plunked into the recesses of her heart. “I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” It was a simple whisper, dragged over shards of glass, her throat convulsing with thirst and weariness.

“There are… ways to cross realms. But we no longer possess them. She was the last ever to cross over.”

“My mother.” Amma clarified and pulled through her hair again and again.

“Yes. The council forbade us from using that power, but not before she crawled through a conjunction to seek out Midyeden. She always claimed to see things, feel them, and whatever was happening in your world was fated to spill into our own.”

“But…”

“She never came back, and we never heard from her again. The dragon woke up right before she left, and she claimed she’d find a way to send it back wherever it came from. It came, fed, gorged, and slaughtered before it went back to sleep on the neighboring island. She sought answers, answers we would be constantly denied here. Some still remember what happened long ago, and some still whisper our old name.”

Kylmie raised her hand, almost as if she intended to touch Amma’s shoulder, but she quickly lowered it and asked instead: “Do you know what happened to her? Did she ever talk about her home? Did she- is she…?”

“I don’t know,” Amma confessed in a whisper, flinching instinctively at the mention of home. The rapid-fire questions that rang hollow with her Grandmother’s concerns, the sort of affections she envied at that moment, because when had anyone ever thought the same about her? “Bits and pieces come and go; it’s all jagged shards and a ringing that won’t stop.”

Dain stalked closer along the edges of the wall, hearing her uttered whispers and the lulling draw of her voice, the accent that fell off the edge of her words as she spoke.

“I can’t remember many things; I can’t even remember her face. But I hear her voice sometimes, in the dark, and it speaks about a red moon and a Tree of Life. Sometimes, I hear another voice, a roar, a screech, a wail. Something that taunts me constantly, reminding me of what I’ve done. What she did.”

“What-”

“She gave me away.” Amma stares into the fire, the flames that she can feel burrowing deep into her pores, lancing away through her veins and marrow, boiling within and without; hidden within the depths of this contained malice lies the maw of her personal hell that roars, so loudly, so keenly, it vibrates against the heaving cage of her ribs, threatened to rend her asunder as her powers would, and she welcomed the distraction of the panic and pain as she said:

“She keeps telling me to run away. She keeps telling me she’s sorry. She keeps crying, and she won’t stop. She looks out over the sea and says his name, but I can never hear her. She weeps and screams and begs for something, but I can’t remember what it was, what it is. She tells me she’s sorry. She still gave me away to them.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorrysorrysorrysorry.” Her heart beats faster and faster; her heart pounds louder, over and over; it hammers at her ribs ruthlessly as she breathes unsteadily.

Forgive me, dove. They said you had to go; they said they could help you!

“But they didn’t help me– ”

“- They hurt me.”

Amma’s eyes flicker to where the flower remains, glittering with red shards, tiny fragments of who she was, of what she lost.

“I wanted to find her. I said yes. I wanted to find him. I said yes. I only wanted to go home. And here I am, in her home, trapped. Just when I thought maybe I could belong with them. I wanted to try.”

I said yes.

“I wanted the name they took away from me. The name she gave me. I just wanted to mean something to someone, and he promised me…”

Dain moves closer, and Kylmie only stares, unable to speak as Amma begins to shake. It starts as small tremors in her hands, her arms, her shoulders hunched inward, and her head bowed, pieces of her hair shaded over a quivering mouth as she grits her teeth and hisses with the weight of the life of lies that smother her in a choked shadow of dismay and anger. Her rage is a felt and thriving thing that pulsates with her broken heart, her soul shredded into ribbons of wasted remains brutally picked clean and left for naught, the only thing in life that she knew to be her own, something she chose in the darkest pits of gleaming needles and ringing voids, the only thing she could claim as her only means of purpose. She begins to whisper, lost to the toils of her sorrows:

“My name is–”

An exploding wail is there to answer her, a screech that shatters through Ünterland with the powerful thunder of wings that pierce through the shaded clouds of black and red as the dragon begins its attack on the blackwood coven.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Ünterland.}

Human #5.065: in deliverance.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: never there.

She was dreaming again. Or was this truth, a premonition, a retelling, or a taunting perspective to perceive such circumstances from the outside looking in? She was a spectator to her own misconstrued reality and was helpless to wake, forced then to endure the prophecy.

It's all carefully defined and sharpened, the clarity flawless and simultaneously damning as Amma experiences the dance anew, scarlet drapery accentuated in gold, blood ran through in rivulets on patterned floors of black and white, ichor glimmering in its splendor liken to cruel paint. Decorative resplendence of death and a smattering of corpses thrown askew and bedeviled in crimson convergences of her wrath, it’s all frozen in time, facades now agape in eternal screams and nevermore. In this, the gargoyle lays slain, and it is she that has risen above it, a crown of silver bone impaled over her brow, a queen of the ashes heralded and risen on wings of leathery malice that churn lazily through the fires of a forged netherworld. She is as she was made to be: rage, pain, death, destruction. A weapon. Less than human. Chaos sown betwixt heart, body, and soul– a void of omnipotence, the final answer to all things unknown, the foundations of all lain in her blood.

The key is in your blood.

Tiamat, perhaps, or the other that rises as the harbinger of this immediate ruin and despair. A name that lists through on gargled whispers and pleading cries of those fallen under her might. A name that was given through the convergence of amber-yellow and crimson sparks of passion and heated desires, burdened by shared pain and sorrows, amplified tendrils of fear that wove even still through her malformed gestures as she stepped over the stone beast that now lay at her feet in pieces. In the sphere of dread, she is Made and sullen, eyes of blue forlorn and decrepit with smudged tears of black and gold, and in her manacled grip lies a pale throat torn asunder by wicked fingers stained rusted-dark. Her bones crack, fingers splayed, torrents of carmine bidden through the crumbling barriers of this world suspended on her emotional throes as she completes her mission (one of many, but it was this one that had begun her descent) and postures under the moonlight with a terrifying wail of anguish plied from her bloodied lips.

Ummu-Hubur.
Mother of monsters.

None of it matters anyhow, for everyone is dead.

Rory’s inadequacies, Haven's cries, Harper's pleading voice, and her sister’s lament. Banjo's inability to act. Lorcán and Aurora were gone, simply vanished, never there. Katja, too, is missing, perhaps locked and lost in a prison of ice.

Even the lullaby one had pulled from the depths of her mind. All for naught and hummed prettily from her quivering mouth, ribbons of flesh webbed betwixt her teeth.

And there… Gil’s body.
His death. His murder.

His blood warm and wet and heavy on her hands, arms, pores sopped and engorged with the death of his wavering strength and defiance in the face of the reaper to bring her home. Dare she weep over his mangled form when it was she who brought this hell upon them? As she cradled a severed limb, a hand that once sought her own in the dark, a simplistic gesture that had invaded deep to the rungs of her heart and plucked at the sorrow she bore.

A quiet, pained voice whispers through the mayhem, her true name a pleading token as she lay there mangled and wingless, feathers clumped and drowned in reds, stuck to her beautiful face plump with youth and drawn in immense pain. Sickening displays of bone and sinew and twitching muscle, tears of anguish melded into the bronze and golds Amma had drawn onto Haven’s eyes earlier that evening as she reached for her, called to her. She left Gil’s broken body to answer her, poised over to gaze unto those eyes of green and melded browns, glistening and brightened by her miseries, her anguish so profoundly felt as Amma kneels, skin stained and wet, crackling energy formed into her palm and she reaches for her and stops as Haven asks:

What name did you choose?

She opens her mouth to speak.

What have you done?

The prince now stands aloft over ice and blood, arrived too late, the floundering hero with his princess at his side, horror-stricken over her mouth and features, twisted with sadness; heated vengeance alighted in the eyes of the prophetic heir bathed in righteous flame at the carnage witnessed and the beast left to languish over it. Amma trills and laughs, a chittering call heaved from a shattered cavity that plunges with a growling timbre, a beast steadfast in the eyes of a would-be savior, rage and hate quickly replacing kindness and acceptance, a once-seen beauty exchanged for the ugliness of what was rooted in her body. Poised over Haven’s battered self, her beautiful wings torn ruthlessly from her back, tawny feathers decorating Amma’s lap as she cradles in her scarred hand a twisting, pulsating wreath of scarlet power that snaps and drags over her arms, coils descending to meld over Haven’s chest that rises and falls unsteadily.

Ammaranthe, she begs, and it falls upon deaf ears.

Lorcán shouts the name that is not her name, descending to appeal to her wavering humanity, hands stilled and trembling as the field of ice begins to melt, the air sweltering with his churning powers that rise, prepared to meet her ascending plumes of red that boil and froth, they lance through the air ripe with death and meet as tangible waves of vermillion and darkened scarlet, near black now, melding as one as they had before. He pushes against her might, and plasma blooms and churns through his hands as blades poised to strike, but they tremble as he calls to her humanity and roars once more.

Why?

She laughs, she cries, body and bones trembling with the loss of her heart. Unable to stop it.
For the role I have to play.

And then she plunges her blackened fingers into Haven’s chest with the droning manifest of her power drowning out their screams.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Her eyes suddenly flash open and flicker with a sheen of tears, but Amma refused to allow them to fall as her body begins to tremble, the lingering visions of her nightmare weighed so heavily in her chest that she cannot breathe around the finality of what could have happened.

Could it have been done so? Had she not been dragged here or taken, would she have lost the war against herself and been reborn as what she feared most?

Beneath her cheek, she feels the bristled fur of an animal with her fingers purchased through the rough pelt of a blackened hide; she smells smoke tinged with something else, an herb perhaps, that billows in her direction as she slowly becomes aware of her surroundings and lifts glassy eyes from her clenched fingers and beholds the roaring flame of a hearth. She rears back almost instantly, the flickering light too familiar, and too soon, she feels worn rock and stone beneath her. She kicks aside the mass of pelts thrown over her and drags herself back on the heels of her palms. Old training and habit have her immediately surveying the space, a small structure of smoothed stone, quaint and ancient, with an entire wall gouged and blackened by flame, creating a warmth that beads sweat on her brow. Amma glances down, her legs askew and bare and tangled in various furs of black and brown, but what she notices then distracts her entirely from her surroundings. She immediately sits up and studies the dressing knotted carefully over her thigh, gone were the makeshift wrappings of her tattered dress to conceal the wound, even her hands and bloodied feet were bare, though still smudged in black muck and dried remains. Pieces flake away from her skin as she twists her body, studying the curious patches of fabric wrapped and fixed to her injuries, her ballroom gown presumably discarded, leaving her nude.

But where was the flower?

Amma’s eyes round out, widened as she struggles to stand and fails, her body weakened and slight as she searches, had they taken it too? Thrown it away? Perhaps into the fire, unaware of its importance? She doesn’t understand the haste in her movements as she searches every inch of her body, even peers through the blanket of pelts tangled around her until a spark of red in the shadows of the fire draws her attention. There’s a small shelf set aside next to various clay pots that she inspects and finds warmed water inside each of them, but what she reaches for on quivering hands and knees is the replicated flower that remains, a soft, hazy shimmer surrounding it with the faintest touches of amber and red melded through every delicate petal. A faint energy pulsated around it, a quieted hum as if hastily beating wings to answer her caressing fingers as she touched it and felt the subtle vibrations. Amma cradles it to her chest, a soft flutter along the ridge of her scar.

“You’re awake.”

She slants her glare over her shoulder; her back turned to an assumed door as he stands there, with tanned skin, and golden eyes, dark brown hair turned umber in the glow of the fire.

“Where am I?”

He ignored her question with a flickering pass over her figure, a slow perusal she could feel flitting down her body and scars, lingering over the intense tattoos on her skin. Amma does not hide, for it's not in her nature, but she does her best to conceal her modesty. She reaches for a discarded hide and pulls it over her shoulders; the flower still clutched against her heart. A sigh answers her finally before he steps away from the entrance, a massive basin suddenly carried in, constructed of wood and stone. A woman accompanies it, aged and silent, her impression a curious strength with ebony hair braided over her shoulder and streaked with silver. Blue eyes pause and look at Amma curiously before she turns to the man and says,

“Thank you, Dain.”

Dain, now appropriately named, merely nods and takes guard against the wall, arms crossed, and the intensity of his eyes flashes yellow as he continues to stare Amma down. She meets such a gaze with her own, brow furrowed and plummeted low over her eyes. Before she can even challenge him, the woman approaches Amma carefully and studies her intently. Familiarity is found there, along with hesitation, before she reaches past and takes hold of one of the clay pots, the basin brought close to the fire now. She notices the others that carry it, eyes of gold and yellow and blue before they depart on a softened growl from Dain still leaned against the wall, his eyes still refuse to leave her and Amma scoffs with the brazen action.

“I apologize for him. He’s wary of you. We all are.” The woman confesses and dumps the water from the pot into what she recognizes now as a bath, an archaic method, but steam coils, and Amma cannot deny its temptation. She is accustomed to distrust and says nothing to convince them otherwise, whether in this realm or another; she is eternally destined to be suspected. The remaining pots are dumped into the basin, and a cloying perfume wafted by curious hands adorned in sapphires. “Bathe, cleanse. Then we can resume healing your wounds.”

“Who are you?” Amma says instead, pulling the furs tighter around her shoulders. “And where am I?”

“I’m Kylmie. You’re with my coven in the blackwood.”

“I told him I’m not a witch,” she snaps with gritted teeth; Dain merely growls in response with a roll of his eyes that Amma makes a face at.

“Not entirely, but you are… something. Someone” The latter is muttered almost as an afterthought, Kylmie’s eyes unable to meet her peering gaze. She was avoiding her. Why?

“What is your name?” Dain speaks up, glaring at her through the bath’s steam. It is her turn to look away, the inquiry finding its mark, too close in phrase, reminding her of the winged girl who asked similar things. Just as she could not answer in her nightmares, Amma could not find the truth here either: too many names, too many faces, too much to sift through in hazed-out images and epitaphs scored against the obsidian walls of her heart. She merely breathes, and the silence stretches thin in the crackling of flames before she drops the pelt from her shoulders and sets the flower carefully on the shelf where she had found it, her back given to them.

Dain immediately looks away, and Kylmie holds out her hands, palms up, to guide her into the waters, which Amma ignores. She submerges herself into the scented bath graciously. She was glad for the lack of a mirror in this instance as the taint of (what did he call it, Limbo?) began to fall away from her in rolling clouds of black. As a creature of vanity, it was instinctual to graze her scarred palms over her body, ridding her skin of dried blood and filth; her mass of hair was a different challenge as she worked through the knots with her fingers. Kylmie stood beside her, silent in a queer vigil before she spoke.

“You’ve been asleep for about three days.” Amma stills, a quiet shock rolling through her. “We treated the Wendigo bite. Any longer, and eventually, it would’ve killed you. Dain thankfully found us when he did.”

Did she say thank you in this instance?

“You were in Limbo for a while, judging by the healing rate in your other wounds. I’d wager a few weeks, almost some months if I had to guess.”

“What?”
“Time… is different here. Different there. Any longer and you would’ve aged and died. Fallen away to dust.”
“You’re telling me that I’ve been here for weeks?”
“Just a few, yes.”

Amma laughed at the lunacy of it all; so much time had passed that it hardly made any sense. What of (dare she think it) home? What happened after the attack? Gil was dead- her breath caught, hitched, and she shuddered in her grief and sank deep into the waters. Did the rest of Blackjack perish, too? Was her nightmare really just a nightmare? Her hands begin their trembling as she completely submerges herself in the bath, her hair wreathed around her figure in a cloud of midnight black, it did seem longer now…

With a gasp, she came for air and found Kylmie leaning over her, those blue eyes peering into her own, a smattering glitter of silver in her intense stare that Amma recognized. Who was she really?

“I know you must be exhausted. But… I have to ask. Does the name Cahors mean anything to you?” She could deny to answer, she could deny the truth of it all entirely, she owed nothing to this woman, but there was no ignoring the immediate knowing that wavered betwixt them, a clarification of self that Amma felt in the utterance of her last name.

“Yes.”

Kylmie lurches back, her pale hand rising to her throat where a sapphire jewel glimmers, capturing the flame in the hearth that swells and roars.

“You’re her daughter. I see her in you.”
Amma did not answer or confirm; she dared this woman to say her name, her hands clutched against the basin’s rim and her nails digging into the wood and stone. Dared her to claim what she felt was true in their shared eyes of blue.

“And that makes you my granddaughter.”

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

In the dark, though there was life sown, there also lingered an aphotic dread, the conceptual design of everlasting energy correlated into the fabric of reality that listed through the unwavering rule of time and all subjugated beneath its reign of inevitability. The void therein that churned and collided against unforeseen energies as wars raged above and below. Roots wove, and deep into the sphere of abyss did something stir and wake, prisoned since the beginning, where chaos was a malformed pit of unknown power; it was many things of an awakening disorder that slumbered still before the One took seed into the chasm of the deep, something that the world would never forget, but would refuse to acknowledge its truth lain far into the void of the in-between, where bedlam heralded through the eldrith roar of resonating malice and want of despair. The reaping desire of revenge for its imprisonment and the want of life and the Vis that fed its hate just as it breathed life through the creations of its once-upon-a-time keepers, now forsaken and cast aside for their greed and want of freedom now denied to it as time unwound through the mighty limbs of The Tree of Life and sowed deep into the roots impaled through the darkness of the endless void.

Until finally, it broke free.

Once as an undulating pit of appetence, it arose as a terrifying, winged wyrm with eyes of loathed blue that sheered through the world and fed upon the energies of life and vestiges of death, relics of eternity and rebirth, denying souls repentance and instead bequeathing punishment of damnation. A serpentine creature once before that fled through the gardens of serenity and gluttonized itself upon the intrigues of immortality before plummeting far below into the chasm of a shattered looking glass and lay waste to lands bathed in a hated red glow. Wrought with insatiable hunger, such a beast fell far from reasoning, listing through the wiles of the world in nightmarish visions of glimmering, crystalline blue eyes peering back from the darkness, its roar shattering through bones and blood, flesh and even stricken unto the souls of many and all as it cried for the netherworld of all life owed to it.

All the wrongs of the world done unto it.

For all the power in the world until naught remained but ash in its grasp.

_{Location: unknown.}

Human #5.064: ancestral trauma.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &.}

Previously: &

^{| Many Years Ago.}

Long ago, a red moon rose. Through the sanguine splendor, there bloomed a fissure through the fabrics of the worlds, from root to branch, to be as above and so below, the equivalent exchange for life and death as Charlotte Cahors dragged herself through a conjunction, wrought with the vile remains of Limbo and putrid creatures that sought to carry through her likeness to feast upon the souls of life astride through the energy particles that infected Midyeden by the might of an undying star. Through sand and surf, she crawled, tides of an ocean heralded under the mighty influence of lunar rays donned in crimson shadows, roaring with their whorl of froth and churning void that ebbed and flowed against her trembling form. Clutched against her palm glimmered the remaining ember of precious jewels, now drained conduits of power lost of their luster, and in her opposite, a soiled blade of black no longer than her forearm. She fought for massive gasps of air, a lingering taint of smog instantly coating her throat, the firmament here embedded with industrial claims of iron and smoke, even the waters here slick with oil and tinged black into their depths as she looked yonder to the realm she had studied through scrying silver-glass of mirrors. Charlotte leaned back onto her heels, the grit of sand harsh on her knees and scoured through her palms that she cleansed with water, the salt of the sea stinging her flesh but further cementing her intentions as the rift at her back wavered and swelled before finally sealing shut at the rush of molecules that flitted through this time and many others, lingering caresses of magic threaded into the leylines burrowed here into the surf that connected to the edges of this world and the next.

And there at her side, as had been for years and would be for many to come as always and meant-to-be, stood a towering beast of black and white, its coat tainted just as she was, laden heavily with the remnants of Limbo and the abysmal creatures that haunted it. Exhausted and spent, bound together in a tangibly felt fragment of a soul of souls, the wavering spools of magic struggled to contain their manifest in either body as this world was unknown for it and instead coiled with the vivacity of celestial endowment. Charlotte dug trembling fingers into its pelt and heaved herself up, burrowing into a heaving flank as the scarlet moon above began to pale and flicker, silver drowning them and painting the beach aglow with it, shimmering lamplight of starlight that reflected in her eyes of blue, burdened to see and witness all, the eyes of eternal sorrows that glistened with every drop of her lashes. A soft canine growl of concern purred through her bones, and Charlotte finally stepped back, carved hands through her midnight-black hair, and looked onto the shoreline, then back over rolling fields of deadened reeds and the cresting dunes of rock.

Are you sure about this?

“No,” she admitted quietly, soft hands whispering over perked ears. “But I saw something, felt something.” Charlotte amended, her Familiar for many years now so attuned with her voice and mannerisms, an intelligence that alighted in too-keen eyes that studied the landscape just as she did. “And whatever happens here could happen in Ünterland. Too many holes for things to crawl through, too many eyes wandering into the shadows, too few guardians to keep them at bay.”

But the dragon -

“Sleeps.” She muttered and quickly pointed away from them. “Now, scout.”

Her Familiar chuffed, almost with an imperceptible too-human eye roll, before powerful paws carved deep into the wet sand, heaving its massive body quickly over the dunes and into the dark at a galloping pace. With him disappearing finally from sight, Charlotte sighed, her shoulders stooped with effort, her limbs weighted and weary, and her heart plummeted to the depths of a sudden loneliness stranded on this plane. She was not sure, no, because getting here was one thing, but to get back was entirely another, a circumstance she had contemplated in their journey with the moniker of deserter chained to her spirit. Still, there was no turning back when they stepped over the threshold of knowing, to be seekers now that defied the order of here and there to search for an evil that quaked through a mirror of mirrors, for as above and so below, as she was taught and could not ignore that calling that inspired her to leave from Ünterland. Banishment some had uttered, isolation in her curious mind that could not leave this world be, for though a reflection of what she knew, there was fascination in the towering spires of metal and glass she could glean and the inspiring architecture that stood against the ages. Things here were fast, quick; they accelerated far more than any other place she had seen, man and the world in a constant fluctuation of movement and sparing little charm in their daily endeavors.

In the distant gloom, she heard a howl, something soft and careful that pitched low into an echo off the sands and curled over the quieting waves.

Nothing, dawn is some hours away yet. There are houses, I think, farther in. I didn’t get too close; they have their own Familiars.

They’re more like pets, Keiran. They’d likely think you one as well.

I am not a pet.

He returned to her side quickly, paced eagerly, and almost irritable, the sand giving way underneath his considerable weight and size. She studied him carefully, contemplating his guard in silence.

What?

“You’re too big; you’ll attract unwanted attention in this form.”
That’s ridiculous.
“No, animals are far smaller here. Domesticated.”
…What do you suggest then?

Charlotte grinned and procured a small golden trinket, one beset with a polished, clear silver gem. She unspooled the chain from her delicate hand; her blade tucked curiously into the white veils draped over her form, adorned in curious armor and filigree. Keiran, as she called him, settled back onto powerful haunches. A chuff pumped away from a panting maw and growled. A sparkling convergence of magic intertwined between them, shimmering as a kaleidoscope of pale, white threads.

“Like a pet,” she uttered and intricately wove her hands, settling her palm against his furred brow and then pushed. His once immense size began to waver, quivering with their combined souls, pulsating as a heart, as one, as Keiran possessed of bones and fur and muscle bunched and fell, a form of once dominating prowess sundered to something far more mundane. A sharp, swift bark sounded immediately; a simple dog of black and white now sat on her heels, obedient in all manners of a loyal hound with longer, shaggy fur, even if the response was less than pleased and disgruntled.

“There, now you look like a normal dog.”

Great.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Far across the sea, where the tides of fate would later converge on an island, Jonas Lehrer stirred, near panicked, and fell into the fabrics of time unwillingly; suspended within the throes of life as he tried to decipher that sudden shift in the spun threads of reality he had so carefully advised for many years; a once secured future for his family, his adoptive grandchild to be exact, suddenly shifted into uncertainty by the unveiling of an intriguing, pale face. In his many years of living, seeing events unfold, and knowing, he was burdened with everything unraveling from his grasp and unable to intervene, simply being an adviser to those directly affected by the cruelty of life’s eternal clock. Time shifted once more, out of his grasp, and he was thrust forward, he could see the ashen spires of a church lit through with terrifying, crackling wreaths of crimson power and obsidian wraiths born unto death in plumes of darkness. He fell onto a beach and saw this woman he did not know, heard her name, and then was dragged once more by his powers fluctuating madly, and then he saw a man there, one he knew of, and witnessed their meeting bid by the eclipsing matters of fate. He was sent to discover the torn veil she stepped through, to study and inquire about a potential threat heralded by those eyes wreathed of starlight to see All. The birth of a child next and the terrible fate meant for her by the hopeless draw of love, her own destines intertwined through this particular timeline now christened by the power of evil, a madman rose upon a self-given name of all-knowing cruelty and ill intent. Children unborn and unknown and all their lives now changed because, across the seas, there would be a little girl who would come to bear the mantle of pure destruction, born of midnight hair and pale eyes, delicate palms cupped around a shattered heart and held aloft as a sacrifice.

Chaos is then given form and home in waxen skin donned in scars and ink.

He knew he could not interfere, but even so, he grabbed both pen and paper and set to write a letter that would play a part in ultimately deciding her fate many years from now. He had to try something, yes, if only to save the child who had not yet been born, the one who would become his heir. A curious stone sat beside his still and poised pen, glinting in the light, and with a careful glance, he then set to write.

Dear Ms. Cahors,

You don’t know me, but I know you, and I know of your daughter. I have seen what the world has done to her and I have seen the countless lives she will touch…

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.