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fridaypls · 1 month

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Grove Guardian's Revenge: A Gif Analysis

Pissing him off so you don't have to.

Obligatory slowed version of The Walk to get us started. If you haven't seen it before, you're welcome.

He's so angry and so right to be angry. For a hundred years, he has defended the Grove at great personal cost. Before it was established, he saw the deaths of his friends, peers, mentor; his support circle crumbled in a single day.

Not only did his mentor fall, he had to slay his mentor's shade in the aftermath in order to lay him to rest. This is the final release canon origin for the Sorrow glaive, but the early-access version is even more heart-wrenching. Either version, the mantle of first druid / arch-druid is thrust upon his unprepared shoulders; alone and without confidantes or peers, he shouldered the load and kept going.

In his diary, we see that he thought he'd found hope of a cure for the Shadow Curse, which was what he was pursuing when the goblins captured him. "The first hope in a century" if I'm remembering correctly.

From there, he meets you - a second hope of salvation. And then... this. The ultimate betrayal and the end of the Grove, of everything he's protected for so long.

We rarely see Halsin using his size to intimidate; even when he rips Kagha a new one in the conversation about the Rite of Thorns, regardless of whether or not he throws her out.

He uses his size as threat now... as he should. He's here to kill you.

And if it's not active intimidation, then what we might be seeing here is him reining in his temper - choosing to have a conversation before acting.

He's facing Tav when he storms up; as he starts to talk, he angles himself a little away from them. We'll see that more in a second.

"I thought you'd help me. I thought we'd help eachother - instead you chose this."

Controlled calm slipping into justified anger. Again, that blink-and-you'll miss it detail of an emotion, just amazing work by Larian.

"The grove stood for generations. It was our link to Silvanus. Not, it’s nothing but blood and ashes - thanks to you."

Let's slow it down and get closer, really soak in the tiny details embedded in this scene.

Watch the first part below at half speed, watch his face twist into disgust and pain. Watch him physically turn away from you in anger and loathing. He's not looking at Tav anymore, he's seeing something else instead. Some memory of the Grove, whether a happy one or a more recent, bloodstained one, we're left to guess.

Anger turns into sorrow - he lifts his eyes in a silent prayer as he speaks, then hangs his head in heavy, tired despair. It doesn't drag his features down yet; he's still too angry under all that pain.

A tiny, miserable moment of memory and suffering....

...before sorrow turns back into anger, when he comes back to the present. That second blink of anger when he comes back to himself, out of whatever memory he was replaying in that moment. He turns back to you and rage crowds back into his face.

He's already made his choice... but he's about to give Tav a chance to speak for their actions anyway. While the role of arch-druid might have been thrust onto his unprepared shoulders unexpectedly a hundred years before, he has grown immensely since then. Despite his justified rage, he reacts wisely, seeking to understand before seeking vengeance.

Tell me… was it worth it?

He's furious, rightfully so, but there's still a genuine question under that rage. The split-second look of curiousity before the rage takes over his features once more.

Was there a meaning to this sacrifice? Was it done for a purpose or was it all just as cruel and wanton of a betrayal as it seemed?

Even as anger and hatred take over his face once more, he gives you a chance to speak for yourself.

There are four options.

Option 1: Of course - I did what I had to do. Your grove was in the way.

"You have no idea what you’ve done, do you? Or perhaps you simply don’t care?"

First, the genuine sadness and disbelief as he says "You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?"

Then, the anger of "Or perhaps you simply don’t care?"

Sadness and sorrow into fucking rage. Both are so poignant and beautifully done. Round of applause for Larian, god(s)damn.

The first three options all end the same way, so we'll cut right to Option 2 and save that glorious closing gif for the end.

Option 2: "I’m sorry. I had no choice."

"There’s always a choice - but you have made yours. Now I make mine."

Look at the disgust... the way he squeezes his eyes shut as he says "There’s always a choice". He knows. He's made hard choices, at great personal cost.

The way he says it with his head down, his nostrils flared in disgust and anger, and doesn't open his eyes as he turns his head to face Tav. He doesn't open his eyes until the last instant, both saddened and repulsed by Tav and their actions.

Then, when he's looking into Tav's eyes, the anger and hatred set in again.

Let's cut to Option 3.

Option 3: "Calm down. Come sit by the fire and we can talk this over."

"There’s nothing left to be said. My mercy died when I saw the grove."

Pretty much directly into the rage with this one.

And honestly, I don't think anyone could blame him? The balls to aid in the massacre of everyone he cares about, then to hit him with "Calm down. Come sit by the fire and we can talk this over" once he confronts you and gives you a chance to explain yourself?

Nope. Game over, buddy. (Well...)

The four option is simply to attack; all four options lead to a fight to the death. The first three options all end the same way;

"You have upended nature’s balance. Only your death can restore it!"

Slower? Okay.

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avaritia-apotheosis · 3 years

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Welcome to my table (bring your hunger)

Going Angst Week 2021 | Day 1 - Birth/Creation

Ft. Ghost Hunger, not too graphic depictions of violence, pre-Clockwork Clockwork, and obligatory song lyric fanfic title.

[AO3]

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When a ghost wakes, it is with nothing. Not a name, not an identity, nothing that can speak of a mind beyond a sense of awareness of being— and for the lucky few, a feeling. It is this feeling, great and blistering, that forms the framework of a ghost’s core. Many are made from anger, from anguish. Loneliness or envy or something banal like childlike joy. It is the last emotion before death, and the first thing felt in the afterlife.

Yours is hunger.

Lucky for you, then, that the majority of the Ghost Zone think little of the moral quandaries of cannibalism. It is, at the very least, a minor inconvenience to have to grow back an entire limb. At most, the victim feels humiliation for being beaten and the cannibalism but another symbol of their subjugation. Ghosts are more spiritual manifestations than they are physical. Their bodies ageless and immortal, made from the aqua vita of the Infinite Realms. They will never die as long as the core remains and the ectoplasm bountiful.

This rather blase attitude makes it much easier for you to indulge your desires. And after a while, the other ghosts don’t even notice that you don’t even need to be hungry to rip the arms off your prey and pick clean the faux flesh with your teeth.

But the feeling of hunger does not only encompass the consumption of food. Hunger, at its core, is the most primitive form of desire. Of want.

You learned this the first time you defeated another ghost. Truly defeated one. A funny little thing, all teeth and claws, hemming and hawing of becoming the strongest being in the Zone. The next ghost king, of all things. You found its ambition cute. For a while. The monologues were entertaining the first ten times it tried to defeat you. But after a while it only got more grating and annoying and ancients can this ghost just shut up—

And before you knew it, the creature stopped talking. Its mouth finally shut in favor of looking down at the arm that tore a hole through his abdomen. He disappeared in an anticlimactic poof with a squeeze of your hand, leaving behind his bright red core that glowed dimly in your palm.

It reminded you of an apple.

And you were so very hungry.

(Ghosts don’t have set hierarchies, in the traditional sense.. Such things don’t matter to the dead or Never-Lived. What they do understand is power. The more ghosts you defeat, the more powerful you are, the more feared you are.)

(Fear and power are such delicious things, are they not?)

It is a slippery slope after that. Cannibalism may be excusable, but eating a core? The height of taboo. To destroy or consume a core is to eradicate a ghost from existence. No reforming, no coming back. They are merely— gone.

Many ghosts give you a wide berth where you tread. They are the smart ones. The weak ones. The ones who still remember a time where they were nothing more than prey, and even today are still prey. There are others who seek to challenge you. Whether for prestige or revenge or some misguided sense of heroism, you do not know and frankly you do not care.

They are but another meal to satisfy your new found appetites. Each ghost that throws themselves atop your table serves as but another sacrifice to make you stronger.

To consume is to become. And you have become so, so strong.

One day, you are visited by an Observer. Two of them, in fact. Great big eyes that seek to judge you of your sins and— well, you weren’t really paying attention to their monologuing. But you were annoyed enough at the thought that these things assumed that they were stronger than you. That they could defeat you. You.

You who have consumed the souls of hundreds. You who are feared more than dusty old Pariah Dark, stuck forever in his forever-sleep. You who have been given no name, for names hold power and the entirety of the Infinite Realms shudders in fear at the thought of you gaining more.

That two eyeballs thought they could defeat you was laughable.

You tore their cores out from their pupils and swallowed their arrogance like candy. Though perhaps apples would be a better comparison. The knowledge they held in their millenia of observing was forbidden for such ‘lowly’ ghosts like you.

The knowledge of your future demise settles on your tongue like overly ripe fruit.

You have no interest in changing your current diet, but you know that you need to do something to divert the current trajectory of the timestream. To die at the hands of the future ghost king—and a little brat on top of that—is rather distasteful. But according to the Observers' knowledge, it was either you or the rest of the Ghost Zone.

And when presented with two options you did not like, you simply made a third one.

The best way to defeat time is to be the one controlling it.

You bared your teeth in anticipation.

What would the core of a god taste like?

#going angst week 2021 #dp fic #danny phantom #clockwork #ghost hunger #my writing.txt

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unnameablethings · 4 years

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sunlight and allegiance

The bone-king, tall and shadowed, comes to the knight and asks, “Will you aid me?”

The answer is no, of course, will always be no, should always be no. Sunflor is the last shining bastion of what came before the god-king, and she will not bow her head. Her sun-king is dead, and the bone-king killed him, and only his seat on the throne and her oaths prevent her from taking his head off. She stands in the doorway of her quarters (inside the bone-king’s castle, inside the home that has been conquered,) and she knows that “no” is not an answer she can give, so instead she says nothing. Her face, however, betrays her.

The bone-king winces, just the slightest twitch of his sharp-angled face.

“Please. Lady Knight. They will listen to you, if they listen to none other, and I am so weary of bloodshed. Are you not weary?”

“There would be no bloodshed,” she says, very carefully, “If you had never come here.”

The bone-king’s expression is… tired. Old, and drawn. She doesn’t know how old he is - he seems ageless, ancient and young all at once. “Of course there would be. Why else did you exist? A king doesn’t keep a land-blessed knight of sunlight and death unless he intends to use her for the slaughter. Are you telling me you had never killed before I came from the west?”

Sunflor says nothing, again, stubbornly silent. It’s not the same, she wants to say. That was keeping the peace, not war. I only slaughtered things like you. Threats. Monsters. Instead she drops her gaze to the floor, avoiding his old, dark eyes.

“Need I make this an order?” the bone-king asks, very gently. Sunflor’s jaw clenches, works in a convulsive scowl. She is sworn to the throne, not the man who sits on it. It was meant to make her a peerless, unbiased warrior, but it feels, now, like a weakness. She wants to throttle him, wants to reach down his throat and tear out the way things used to be, as though he had swallowed it whole and unharmed. But she cannot disobey an order from her king, however little he has earned the title.

“No. What do you need?”

“Thank you,” the bone-king says. He sounds relieved. She does not look at him, though the oath-bond pings with the righteous satisfaction of her fealty. It used to be one of her favorite feelings - it makes her sick, now. “Some parts of my land are still restless under my touch, and the kingdom loves you so much it burns. Come and help me coax it? Let us settle this gently, and with peace. I dislike the thought of having to stamp it down into fearful submission.”

“As you wish, my lord,” says Sunflor, because she is bound, and because she recognizes, through the haze of her rage and her grief, that it is better this way. Her king is dead, and a part of her is dead along with him, but no one else need die unnecessarily.

He brings her first of all down into the labyrinths of the castle, where Sunflor would follow her sun-king when he did his rituals and his prayers. She knelt by his side, gave him her strength when he faltered, let him pull draughts of power from her like blood. She is almost nostalgic for the dizzy, giddy emptiness of being drained, of being filled instead with sunlight and the slow earth-love of a country. Not enough to want the bone-king to do it, though. She has no choice.

The bone-king exhales, when they’re down in the wide, circular ritual-room, with the map of the kingdom stretched over the floor. There’s sunlight shining into the room from a window in the ceiling, though they’re dozens of feet below ground. The bone-king looks up at the sunlit window, inquisitive.

“A lovely working. Do you know the spell?” he murmurs, and stretches his fingers out to let the sun shine on them. Sunflor wishes for it to burn him, but it doesn’t. Just filters through his scarred fingers, making the webs between them glow faintly red, beams of light in the gaps. His flesh is slightly translucent, only the bones and the scars solid and pale.

“It is a place of the sun,” Sunflor says, shortly, and kneels in the place where she always kneels, where generations before her have knelt. Had they ever knelt here and hated like she hates the bone-king? Stupid question. Of course they have. The kingdom is nothing if not ever besieged by conflict. They hardly go three or four generations without an upset - her own sun-king was only a second-generation dynastic king, and she knows the knight before the knight before her had ended up falling on her own blade, distraught by the loss of her queen. There is a strange comfort in the solidarity of a generational anguish.

Deep breaths. In. Out. The sunlight is warm, golden. The room is ritually hushed, and the scent of old blood and incense and dust fills her nose. It’s familiar, reassuring, down to the faint grooves in the stone from where thousands of years of knights before her have knelt in the same place. She has a duty to her country, not only to her king, and she will fulfill it until she can no longer. The kingdom cradles her in its stone, and she draws strength from it.

The bone-king, watching, turns at last to stand over the map, closes his eyes, holding his hands out like he’s feeling along the top of a table. His hands are not callused in the way of one who wields a weapon, but blackened in forking patterns like lightning, from magic overuse. His fingertips are all scorched to a charcoal black. Those are recent - when she had battled the bone-king merely months ago, he had had much less prominent scarring. They are scars likely acquired in the battle against the sun-king, then. At least they managed to scar him.

“Here,” he murmurs, finally, hands poised above a part of the map like invisible strings tug his fingers down, and he crouches to touch a particular region on the map. He opens his eyes, and studies the landscape painted intricately beneath him. The knight watches him, looking from his face to the map and back. It does not surprise her that that particular demesne is giving him trouble - not when the forest loves its lady so much.

“What are your thoughts, lady knight?” the bone-king asks.

“That is the demesne of Lady Lily-greenery,” the knight says. “Her sister, Violet, was slain at your hand.”

“I see.”

“She was one of the sorceresses in the king’s guard, and they were very close,” the knight says. “Not as close as some-” close as he and I- “but. Close.”

“I see,” the bone-king says again, quieter. “Well. There’s not much I can do about that, now. I’ll play bloodgold to the lady, if you think it will help?”

“She’ll consider it an insult. The gold you bought with her sister’s death? No.”

“Mm. A wise consideration, Sunflor.”

“Do not use my name,” Sunflor snaps, and hears her voice break. “You haven’t earned it. Don’t you dare.”

There’s a long, fraught pause. “Apologies, Lady Knight,” the bone-king breathes, almost a whisper. It’s a concession she hadn’t expected from him, and she breathes in deep, breathes out the anger and sorrow.

“If you want her to support you, then you need to show her respect, and show her forest respect,” she says, as though nothing particularly interesting had happened. “She lost a lot, in the war effort. A lot of her forest’s vitality was drained to shore up the borders and strengthen the soldiers.”

“I’ll send her some of that power back, then. Weakens the remaining military resources that are undoubtedly brewing dissent, and strengthens a possible ally. And helps me fix the absolute mess my predecessor has made of this beautiful thing,” the bone-king says, and runs a gentle hand along the map.

“He didn’t,” Sunflor says, but it sounds like a lie to her own ears, a childish protest. It is not as though she hasn’t lain awake at night for years, hearing the kingdom in discomfort and weakness, knowing that it was stretched too far. She shifts in her kneeling, feeling herself sore to the bone though the kneeling hasn’t bothered her since she was knighted. “He did his best,” she amends.

“His best wasn’t very good,” the bone-king says, and looks steadily at her, eyes dark. His expression is opaque, unreadable. “He sought conquest and glory and didn’t have the means to manage it. I would never have bothered coming if he had not tried to conquer me in the first place, and I never would have succeeded against a kingdom as powerful as this if he had not already overextended it and strained its power and its patience.”

“The kingdom loves him,” Sunflor says. Her throat feels swollen and thick, and her hands fist in her lap. “It gave all it could for him because it loved him.”

“The kingdom loves you.” The bone-king’s stare is nameless, uncomfortably tender. “You gave all you could for him.”

“Not enough, clearly.”

“His weakness is not your fault.”

“His death is yours.”

The bone-king acknowledges this with a tilt of his head. “I am sorry.”

She laughs, ugly and shattered. It sounds wrong in the peaceful stillness of the ritual room, like a crow’s broken cackle. “Are you, my lord?”

He stands from the map, shrugs off his cloak and holds his hand out over the ugly seething of the forest’s magic. The trees sprout up from the map, the flat surface rising to give way to infinitely small trees, a mass of greenery. The sunlight in the room goes strange, and she feels magic brewing, simultaneously familiar and repellant. It is the comforting kingdom-magic at the same time as it is the cold, dark grave-magic of an enemy she has been fighting for years, now, and it itches at her like a scabbing wound.

It curls from the god-king’s fingertips, twining into the forest’s magic and settling in it. She feels it resist, struggle, but he does not fight back, even as it reaches for him in violence and fury. She watches his hands - he flinches, barely, when the magic sinks thorns into him, but he does not pull away. He merely offers the gift in open palms until the forest finally swallows it, and settles down.

“My condolences for your loss,” he speaks, into the whispering of the forest. “And my utmost respect and honor for your sister’s battle prowess. She fought well. I regret her death. I hope this goes some small way towards amends.”

The forest takes the message, and subsides back into the map, smoothing out. A discordant note in the kingdom’s magic quiets, turns a little further toward the main body of it.

“I regret that I caused you pain, lady knight,” the bone-king says, without looking at her. “I do not regret the sun-king’s death.”

“What could I possibly matter to you?”

“I underestimated the effect the kingdom’s power would have on me,” the bone-king says, instead of answering.

Perhaps, however, it is an answer after all.

The bone-king’s face is creased, sweat beading on his forehead. There are new pinpricks of red scars on his hands, and this is the point at which Sunflor would usually lend her power and her aid, let her king brace himself against her as the sturdy anchor-point of might and magic. She does not offer. The bone-king does not ask.

“May I go?” Sunflor asks, at last.

“...You may. I will need you again, though.”

“I am aware.”

Though her fealty-bond keens when she turns her back on the bone-king, alerting her he is in need of aid/strength/his knight, she does not listen. She climbs the stairs away from him, and does not look back.

(I FORGOT I HAVE AN @ LIST... it’s from 2018 so it’s very probably outdated rip. sorry if you get mentioned when you did not want to be! @trishaloach @toastyglow @acefruitloop @skye07 @m1sosazai @yoyoendlessstring @blue-tomatoes @catsfeminismandatla @lady-redshield-writes @alhena09 @emanonnosrep, @je11yfish-queen @gingerly-writing @dramaticvoiceover @writingmyselfintoanearlygrave @authorisada @reciclingbin @lushprocrastinatrix @timeenoughforamasterpiece @tedrakitty @haphazardlyparked @kiwisoap @silver56 @pacifiedperoxide @kooncat @severe-fangirl-syndrome @startledserpent @50-shaeds-of-fae @stritte @dorianelle @dhawandyke @churchyardgrim)

#my writing #original fiction #technically like stage 1 of enemies-to-lovers #fealty #hieros gamos #magic #fantasy #TURNS OUT WHEN U SOULBOND TO A CONQUERED KINGDOM IN LOVE WITH ITS LADY KNIGHT #THAT IS SOMETIMES CONTAGIOUS

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gamz · 5 years

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((tw for blood, conceptualizing homicide, bodies and death, kissin’ corpses, and mentions of his actions in murderstuck.))

You needed them to just believe.

Even the lights above, seeming so perpetual and eternal in all of your hallowed halls, have begun to flicker into moments of rest. The careful tapestry of your heaven of this meteor domain what’s yours is winking out, and your cherished hopes are finding it a more difficult time to find good tidings. One by one your companions find anguish instead of fulfillment, crave escape instead of safety, seek plight instead of making their own purpose. Such was the state of being doomed. There was nothing for them but joining those colorful orbs twinkling brighter in the black above, just as there was nothing for you but eventual solitude no matter how much you had clung onto that ideal of using your anger and abilities to protect instead of harm.

The splinters of bright cracking light splitting across the sky tell that symphony. The pained whispering that sings from far away ghosts and horrorterrors coats your pan like outbursts of jubilee. Your immortal companion passes through another dreambubble, spreading double death to the suffering aimless and shattering the rich trails of light through the miasmic darkness. As was his duty, his cherished right by inheritance and power, righteously decreed so long ago yet so close in the whole scheme of things--like what was right of your blood to do and once, and what your will once inflicted on friends. That was how existence was, all ageless in its fleeting occurrences. What a marvelous thing, life. Miracles. The blessing of experiencing what you’ve seen and done, and future visions of what you will do, or maybe would’ve done, all wrapped around the moments of present and your current sensations... You, His pair, the other, cast aside by ill-fitting time and a failed line of events. Of course you knew the sensations that mirrored His wrought destruction already. The hymns of your blood thrums along with the harshwhimsy tune, beating a slow drum of calm richly in your aural clots and spread colors within the splotches that appear in the black of your closed eyes as you cut the scene from view with a lasting blink.

The Messiahs’ actions past and future declare it: you’re avoiding your destiny, brother. You’ve been delaying your call as descendant to the court of High Subjugglators.

Once, you accepted your duty, your hatchright, your purpose. You saw the falsehoods and the lies through the green sludge that had coated your sponge in all its crannies and veiled your bulbs from true sight. The clarity told you that suffering was such a plague in those that did not and could never know your peace--you thought it was so back then, anyway. Equius approached you, always so turmoiled by his place and worth, and you showed him where he lie and how precious he lived like he always pleaded. Nepeta learned loss, and selfishly thought gaining your blood would ease her sorrows. So you let her, welcomed her, and taught her otherwise. Fates would play cruel on you then, a mess ‘a brown to join earthly to the green and blue that coated your hands, to meld with the stinging purple of your pump biscuit and lips. You didn’t know what feeling was burning within you,so new the sensation was, but you found the culprit, and you found your executing little Legislacerator to relay the justice of your high motherfucking judicial degree. GUILTY.

Once, you denied how much of an idea you had about the timeline’s end, fleeing from the truth of what the lifelessness in the puppet’s eyes meant. You feinted off loneliness and fear when They left you to pretend anything other than doom, suppressing the problems in silence and dark. There was no need to burden your friends with that talk before they even suspected their end was already written. What did they care about your knowledge, anyway, hunting and hating as they were, small thoughts hardly able to conceptualize the grandiose scope of what they played into. You are gods, the holy and merry Messiahs, your ascensions were omnipresent in past, present, and future. You’re higher than them, brother, and your rage played with just how much to send all of you careening on this path, all the closer to becoming savior and death dealer in one. ...But mostly, there was no reason to confess it because making it known was making it fact, and the stories the puppet whispered weren’t something you could throw away after learning of what and who you were. You had a grand calling, you had meaning and shape and purpose, and you couldn’t yet accept that it would call you so important to everything surrounding you then toss you aside without second thought.

Once, you lost sight and let go of what was most precious, and knew its absence only in a rage you couldn’t examine so deep to place understanding to. Emotions are such bright things to one so new at experiencing them in full after being blinded for so many sweeps, sparks of liveliness stealing up the breath of you to act such extraordinary impulses and thoughts. Betrayal was rich and seething, alarm chiming a tight caution to every bone to beat down your spine, the loss of it all hollowing and panicked, but what came to fill it? Sadness? No, the pain of hurt wouldn’t do, and besides, it was never something you could handle alone. Even your joy-desperate youth knew so deep in his pusher sadness was sin for a painted such as yourself to feel. And your loss made you feel that, faulted you for it. The thought instead strummed up suspicion and hate, until a little star sister had the steel resignment to pay attention to your twisted credence. You were walked through your fears, and brought to examine your bared soul for all its worth. In this end, you were nothing to no one anymore, not even the Messiahs that once sung their thanks and worship. Not even the boy who you didn’t think you’d ever do without.

But once, you asked for help, and your fragile friendships listened. Weren’t no cause for fearing the loneliness no more.

But you’ve been spending plenty of time away on your own again. Last time, it was your knowledge of foreseen doom that hid you. This time, it is your will for pretending to preserve some kind of ignorance that doom was asserting itself more than ever. You promised protection instead of harm with your power, but what were you to do when the threat was their own beliefs? Your halls are quieter, times together rarer, and what you see sends your pump biscuit jumping as existence itself becomes your friends’ pain. Sadness, sinful and infectious. Salvation, your holy duty to deliver them from evil and provide the mercy to end their suffering. For life was the gift they’ve been given, the miracle of living theirs to shape, and they’d forsake that magic to be greedy after something different or more. So spoke your ancient beliefs, the preachings of minstrels and texts of parables. You could save them; in the death you’d provide they’d be free from their hopelessness. This was what you were meant for, your indigo lifeblood prescribed you that right for cleansing their suffering and giving them an end to begin anew.

And you’d guard them still. You’d tend to their deaths and keep them all safe amidst your other friends’ husks. Their blood would drip the miracle of life, and they’d live on in memory, coloring thought like the walls of your murals, living on as they still created something beautiful after death. Their bones would be your special stardust, spinning wishes and prayers to bestow upon you the spectacles of the unexpected, the surprise, the miracle. Powder that now, you slowly felt between your prongs, carefully rolling over every grit of glitter as you allowed your mind and pusher to wander and feel out on the thoughts of what was to come. That was your right to end them, as you had done timelines over by the tales of the Deadlamb and by evidence of none of your ghosts present in your dreams, not that you could even die to join your friends. You’re a god, after all.

Your long fingers glide against each other dryly. The song of the multiverse’s death plays into your ears. Opening your sights, your eyes trace the latticework carved in white across the darkness. You’re a god, partner to Him, guide and servant in one. Your ruminations find no answer that strikes you as right in either your head or your heart. That was your indigo duty, but now it’s been made to be something more, and you don’t know what that means, exactly, but it’s all yours to define. You were indigo, and indigo was only you. What’d you want that to mean now? A prong delves thoughtlessly into your hair as the paint of your smile crinkles with the thought. Your gaze wanders back to view the transportalizer behind you, but you know the sensation of nearness isn’t from physicality, but mentality.

You’ve got some grasp over your voodoos with the extra time to concentrate on their intricacies, and you feel your companions’ nearness in your pan as though they were next to you instead of off in their own little corners of this rock, stewing in need and desperation. You knew enough not to be some plague on their minds anymore. In the past, you fed them your emotions, your sweeps of paranoia that spelled an instinctive need to cast a miasma of psychic haunt to defend yourself, but comfort has dispelled this for the most part. Instead you were just a presence of your own, and for a while that feeling was enough to fool yourself into being in denial about what was developing, or maybe what had been around for a time before you began to feel the stirrings of fearing hesitance to delve back into your heritage deep down in your thorax. Your claws press lightly to where you think the sense of them is through your nugbone, warm like the touches of their brushing prongs. Loneliness wasn’t any kind thing, and in this sense, you kept them safe from really being isolated. Maybe it was just time for you to listen back at your fragile friendships, though. They wanted an end, you could see it and feel it, but decisively, imagining the feel of them extinguished from your mind thrilled a sense of panic that freezes you stiff, cuts your own breath, bares your teeth in a subtle grimacing grin.

The fear that grips your soul inspires its usual turn into a fire of anger that snarls your senses sharply, just because it felt better than any anxiety or depression. You could be angry at whatever was trying to make you feel sin, and it felt like an active force instead of a static one. Claws bite into your scalp and stay there, tense and pulling at the braid Sister showed you how to weave. You’re furious at them for drawing this question into your thoughts, at circumstance that’s bid this all your reality. You all could have been something more, and greater, but what were you now? A guide never given his charge and master, never subversed to revel in the glory of what he nurtured. What did that make you or indigo mean?

Haven’t you been turning your own miracles into creation, though? The karma you inflicted on the fate that turned its back on you was to deny being the executioner of your friends’ ends. You were the last indigo, such was now your sole role to fulfill. You were always both gods, the Messiahs of this line of time to spell the end that would spell a new beginning. Your prong relaxes from its punishing tug, presenting you with the image of a sheen of near black wetness on the tips of your points to mix with the remaining stardust’s pale powder. It fills the small crevices of your fingertips, flowing about the flecks before you mix the two with a small circle of your thumb. Still, anger feels like it’s casting rivulets from you as a sensation of intriguing and enticing burn flows through your horns. You could be frustrated at the situation, sure. You could spill out your virtrol and despise for thinking you ever had to hurt them. It feels rich and hot and thick like blood, a pulse that beats so distant and slow it could just as well be the heart of a universe if any were around to feel again.

Its familiarity should strike you with some caution, considering your record of success. But instead you just coast along with the rolling tides of this sensation that you should recognize as that saccharine harshwhimsy that you’ve been so careful about for the sake of your friends. It isn’t aimed at them, though. Still, you feel their notice and alarm, despite you not wanting to draw up horrors for them now. There was nothing to be scared of, nothing to fear, because you had eternity to watch over them and blossom their happiness again, tend to their bones and grow lives again up from whatever the decay that would take them. For all the bad times did make the good all the more sweeter to behold, and every end began a new start of something greater. All you want to assure them of is your protection.

BELIEVE. I need you to believe.

A curtain of purple shrouds your senses with a split of pain that clatters into your pan. You want to gasp, but the taste of blood chokes you in your nose and the back of your throat. Your palms press to the carefully drawn triangles about your eyes as aimless yet intently your voodoos wander out to shape something new. Through the memories and sensations of your friends, to dreambubbles drifting by and even touching to the vastness of horrorterror’s minds. Somewhere, your reaching finds purchase, a grasp that latches just as firm on you as you do to it as an image is drawn in your mind to cast about your surroundings. Back, far away in reality, someone is pulling on your wrists, you think, but you’re so out of yourself the physical feels so far. You didn’t like that pain of overusing your abilities, anyway, and you’re happy to keep trundling along whatever direction the flow takes you along until your work was finished.

There’s simply an image cast in your sponge, of the meteor so familiar after such time driftig through the Furthest Ring instead nestled amongst a limitless cloud of green and pink. Ancient and vast, those were the trees Sister treasured, and the ones you frequented in dream forests with Karkat just because you’d never seen them on your beach and you think he doesn’t really mind seeing you so enamored with something so dumb. You just knew you told him he’d be able to see them again in life, too, someday, and fate wasn’t about to make you a liar when you had the power to correct their suffering. An ocean glimmers on the horizon of what you picture, and the peace of this place asserts itself with the noise of a simple breeze, at least in your envisioning.

Yet another shocking crack splits your pan, and all at once you’re crashing back into the reality of heaving through the burn in your head, your throat, your chest. Your prongs are coaxed off your eyes, drawing jaggedly at the tops of your triangles, swiping white and purple lines though your immaculate smile. The garish face of a Highblood is first drawn unto your visage as your head lolls back from the weight of your horns to gaze up at the immersive black. Somewhere you think there’s a twinkle or two that don’t have quite the same haze that dreambubbles do...

Your shoulders are scrambled after instead of your wrists, and the closeness makes you spread your palm out on woolly fabric and smear a hand print. You want words, but you can’t think, you can’t convey anything but some tired wheezing. Your touch attempts a pap, but you perhaps manage two fingers abortive raise then fall before the flying spots and colors before your vision overtakes your consciousness. At least he, they, your friends, could behold their new hive in the meantime while you rest.

#plot #long post #the new shit #some of my gamzee psychology for your night enjoi #blood //#murderstuck mention

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