indig0trolls - Tumblr blog

indig0trolls · 20 hours

Text

Devils and Deals

Don’t expect this kind of sustained output as finals approach. Man, I sure do love when things start making some sense around here! [Doc]

—

The dreamer snaps out of her sleep with a start, drowsy eyes begin to scan the room she awoke in with a dull sense of urgency beating in her chest. A small part of her hoped to wake in her room, surrounded by the comfort of her sheets and righteous anger against Cylion. Instead, she finds herself in the same dreary living room she’d fallen asleep in. Her eyes quickly adjust to the darkness of the room and she finds that they are drawn to movement in an area she thinks might be the kitchen.

A bad taste creeps its way into her mouth as she pieces more of the interaction she’d had before falling asleep together. She’d made it to the House of Restoration, there was a bad man, she couldn’t move her legs. He said Cylion sent him, that couldn’t be true.

Just as the thought enters her mind, she lets her gaze fall to her hands, open and palms facing upward.

One…Two…Three…Four…

He wouldn’t send the source of so many daymares after her.

Five…Six…Seven…

What would such a bad man be doing outside the House of Restoration otherwise?

Eight…Nine…

If Cylion knew she were going out, he would have followed her himself. There wouldn’t be a need for a third party.

Ten…

Her runaway thoughts are interrupted by soft footsteps entering from the direction of the kitchen. The purple blood enters the room with two small cups in his hands, stripped of his vest and face dressings, and sporting the same teeth-baring grin as when he loomed over her outside of the church.

“Ah, little goddess. Awake at last? I trust you slept well.”

Nymira lifts her gaze from the cups to the man's face and then lets it continue to drift upward. The smell of peppermint digs its teeth into her and grounds her further into this reality that she wishes was untrue. “I didn’t.” She mumbles absently.

Persep sits at a chair in front of her and sets the cup down on a glass table with an audible clink! that draws her attention back to him.

Once again she counts her fingers, this time when she arrives at ten she puffs her chest up, filling it with her own indignation.

“I would like to leave now.”

Persep lifts his cup from the table and takes a sip before he replies, the picture of serenity in front of her. Nymira envisions a calm ocean front just before a storm breaks out and beats the shore in its fury. She would be lying if she said it did not poke a few holes in her resolve.

He wouldn’t show up in all of those daymares if this was the extent of whatever ire she’d earned from him.

“I am sure that you would,” he says simply, setting the cup down again. “Not yet though.”

A stubborn, childish huff escapes her and her indignance crosses her arms over her chest. “I want to leave.” She repeats, enunciating clearly.

“I heard. Look, this is all very simple,” he starts, leaning toward her in a way that indicates her resolve has very little effect on him. He practically looms. “Do what I ask, then you get to go home to your brother.”

Nymira’s face screws up, first into a frown, but quickly morphs into a glare levied up at the purple blood. “Maybe I don’t want to be sent home to my brother.” She says with another huff. Then, finally, her expression softens. “What do you want me to do?”

Persep sits back in his chair, obviously satisfied with how easy it was to see that the godling acquiesced. As upset as she might have been with her brother, being angry at him while locked away in her tower like a forgotten princess sounds infinitely more appealing than having tea in a depressing living room with a bad man, with unclear intentions, who leers and looms. She deflates a bit beneath his full attention.

“I only need you to help me retrieve some lost items.”

She blinks and tilts her head, letting her confusion spell itself out in furrowed brows and a helpless pout. “I can’t do that.” She says firmly. “I can’t take things from this world.”

He smiles, one that she thinks might be a little too eager for how he carries himself the way it borders on ecstatic, and tilts his head very slightly.

“We don’t know the extent to what you can do. I’d like to find out.”

Nymira looks down at her hands and begins to counter her fingers again.

—

This time when Cylion visits Persep, it is much more expected. Gone is the forest of the puppet master’s youth, replaced by a vague approximation of the gardens just outside of the prophet’s own church.

A flutter of annoyance sends a small ruffle through his wings. Dreams are his domain, why should Persep get to flex mastery over it so brazenly? It is a small mercy that such lucidity is limited only to his own dreams.

Imagine the trouble he would cause.

Cylion finds him sitting near the fountain, focused on the door he can’t possibly know is only used by the prophet’s hulk of an ancestor. At the thought of that man, phantom claws clasp around his skull in memory of a threat. If given much more though, they’d manifest right then. He sighs and shakes the nightmare from his mind, then he seats himself by the man he intrudes on.

Persep crosses one leg over the other, choosing for some reason to sit in a way that seems uncomfortably rigid. The fountain bubbles behind him.

“Your sister is quite remarkable, holy one.”

“Everyone certainly seems to think so,” Cylion says with a roll of his eyes. “I trust you are treating her well.”

“As well as I can, though you may well know my current living situation is not conducive to accommodation.” The words fall from his mouth bitterly, his hatred for the apartment palpable in the thick atmosphere Cylion is used to negotiating around in dreams. “She is stubborn.”

“I certainly think so,” Cylion replies perhaps a bit too quickly, for Persep grins at his frustration. “I would like to see her home now.”

“About that,”

He feels the strings of a deal made with the devil constrict around him, because of course there was the issue of repaying the favor. It is just that he did not expect it to come about so soon. The prophet grits his teeth and the sky above them grows heavy with a purple tinted fog that very quickly obscures the moons.

“I am going to hold onto her a moment longer.”

“That wasn’t the deal. I didn’t even send you after her this time.”

“Lucky I was in the neighborhood,” Persep muses, tilting his head upward to acknowledge the change in the atmosphere. He waves the pregnant fog away with a lazy hand, bringing back the clear night he’d originally dreamt up. “Plans change, Cylion. Consider me out of your hair when I get what I want.”

“What exactly do you want--”

“Ah, are our dealings not always a no questions asked sort of arrangement?”

Cylion, a man of his word, balls his hands into fists in his lap and stares now at the ground. “How long?”

“I’ll send for you.”

“How long?” He repeats with more force, a growl he doesn’t expect cutting through him, the fog returned to bathe them in his anger. “When will my sister be home?”

“Testy,” Persep says, smiling around the word, moving as though he means to wave the fog away.

It stays with them this time, Cylion looks up in time to catch the near imperceptible twitch of the purple blood's shoulders under the weight of his anger.

“Persep.”

“A week?” He concedes, raising both hands up to quell Cylion’s growing anger. “You can’t really rush art. I’d hate to push her too quickly.”

The prophet feels his legs begin to bounce as anger blows through his veins burning hot. “Three days.”

“Five.”

“Four.”

Persep rolls his shoulders, possibly to cover up the fact that he is struggling to keep control of his own dream. To hide that the lack of control is getting under his skin. “Deal.”

“And Persep,”

“Mhm?”

“Best that you don’t hurt a hair on her head.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, holy one.”

—

Persep sits on the floor near Nymira, idly leafing through the replica journal that he’d had her pull from her dreams during their first exercise together. The thing itself is unimpressive. Barely a replica, honestly, once the cover is open.

What he was surprised to find was that the words on the page were not any that Orfuse’d ever penned, they danced around on the page, phasing in and out of reality as they deemed fit. The contents of the book moved about in the way that magic runes might in a show meant for wigglers.

It was much better than anything he’d expected.

Beside him the dreamer sits in a sort of trance, once that was like pulling teeth for him to get her in, not quite asleep and not quite awake. Her legs are crossed and her tail fans behind her in a semicircle. Persep thinks that there must be paintings of the little godling that look just so.

Only these paintings would perhaps feature her asleep, maybe in the arms of a prophet or another, glowing in her opulence.

Reality isn’t always so sparkly as it were, this scene only features his drab apartment living room as her backdrop.

Nymira mumbles something under her breath and as she opens her eyes, sparks do actually fly, blue light glowing around her hands and encompassing an object that was not previously there. The object itself was nondescript, save for its smooth glassy facade and the ever shifting iridescent black that swirled just beneath its surface.

“Welcome back, little goddess,” he greets, clearly pleased with the development. “How does it feel to come into your power properly?”

“This is not proper, this is sacrilege.” She holds the stone out to him, which he accepts, setting the book down to get a closer look at the item. “I want to go home.”

“Mhm. In time. And who decided that it was sacrilege? Is it not the God of a religion that decides the rules?” He raises the stone above his eye level, marveling at the way it catches the light. “Why is it that your prophets get to make the rules?”

Nymira opens her mouth to protest, but not finding a satisfactory answer, she just stands abruptly and exits the room.

#this is an art tag #i hate persep so bad i hate himmmm #but also uh #is he.#indirectly encouraging her to question her standing or

25 notes · View notes