#hunters are fucking terrifying
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1.02 / 4.09
#mayatalks#black sails#this show is on another fucking level#the CONTRASTS!#silver being hunted vs silver being the hunter#flint in the role of the terrifying captain vs flint visibly hurt by his closest friend#screaming for one thousand years.
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there was a post about daiba nana as a body snatcher horror from junna’s pov and it has me in a fucking chokehold.
imagine being roommates with somebody you haven't gotten to know yet, and it's a little awkward but you're both polite and she seems like a nice girl. she's kind and open and warm, ready with a helping hand or a listening ear, beloved quickly by your classmates in a way you never quite managed to convince people to love you. you could be friends with her, given time. you think she might want to be friends with you, too.
you go to sleep as hoshimi-san and wake as hoshimi-san and walk to school as hoshimi-san, but, without warning, you cross the threshold of the classroom and suddenly you're junna-chan.
suddenly, the friendly interest in daiba-san's eyes has deepened with an intensity that unnerves you, even when it manifests in entirely benign ways—an uncanny familiarity with your schedule, a fond glimmer for your quotations, an offering of your favourite snack food with a side of dishonesty in the way she claims it was a lucky guess.
you feel seen. the way prey does when a predator reveals itself upwind. exposed and unprotected.
but daiba-san is easy to like, easy to love, easy to forgive. you forget your unease in the face of her sincerity. she takes care of everybody as though it were her sole purpose on this earth, so you take care of her.
when daiba-san becomes nana and you become junna-chan, willingly this time, you wonder if you imagined the anticipatory gleam in her eyes when you served her your first name, as though it were a favourite dish she'd long been craving.
#revue starlight#hoshimi junna#daiba nana#junnana#mine#bc banana is SO intense. she's got no fucking chill. she's gotta be some kind of indescribably terrifying after 60 years of playing god#even if all god wanted to do was live blissfully with her blorbos for all of eternity#how does banana get when one of her ultimate favourite most precious moments is coming up. what kind of expectant zeal sets her eyes alight#sets off some primal sense for the unsettling that bids you be wary of the girl tracking time like a hunter leading its prize#until it hits her sights#daiba nana on her own is already so insane. i just think we can make her worse#im on mobile rn so i can't find the post but iykyk
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Merry Christmas
Today is christmas and its a reason for christians to celebrate, but a day to mourn as the birthplace of christ is being bombed and his people genocided. Please pray for palestine and stay informed on what's happening to them. They need your voices right now more than ever. You are free to enjoy this hisoillu edit i made but I ask you to check out the reblogs on my account after. Please. Educating yourselves is the least you could do.
#the fact that its static silence in the hisoillu fandom on tumblr terrifies me#please pay attention to whats happening to my people#if youve even given an ounce of a fuck over kurapikas backstory and the massacre of his clan#then please look at whats happening in gaza and support them in any way you can#whether through sharing posts#boycotting#or buying them e-sims/donating to care for gaza#genuinely not asking for much here. a reblog on an informative post takes u 1 second out of your entire day#and their genocide has been going on for 75 years#hisoillu#hisoka#hisoka morow#illumi#illumi zoldyck#hisoka x illumi#hunter x hunter#hxh#my edit#hxh edit
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🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄
#the owl house#toh#toh fanart#hunter toh#hunter golden guard#hunter possessed#hunter noceda#belos toh#emperor belos#luz toh#luz noceda#art?#camila: hey what the FUCK is that?#vee: decay is an extant part of life#camila: thats a terrifying answer eat baseball bat
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yanno i think a lot of people don't appreciate how truly horrifying Pebbles' fate is when it comes to the rot. which is absolutely fair, i didn't quite Get It either until i had a nightmare that felt too real in which i was standing next to a dog that was infected with the rot. everything was fine, it was a golden retriever so it had its breed signature smile on its face as it panted
but then it started spasming. its breath became rasping and gurgling. it fell on its side, at least Trying to whine but it couldn't even communicate its pain to the world. then the rot started forcing itself out. it forced an eyeball out of its socket from the inside, all so a sticky tentacle could start feeling around itself. it started coming out of the mouth. the dog couldn't breathe. the stench of death was oppressive even though it was still alive
all i could do was look at it while trying not to throw up. my throat burned just from seeing it
the fact that Pebbles has gone through that- all Alone, for who knows how fucking long... good gods above
pieces of his body are chipping away, falling to the ground- those which don't rebel against the rest, eating away at it. it's hard to breathe, his heart is beating faster, he's gasping after it, desperately trying to clean his lungs. it's burning, it's freezing, it's a doom he knows he cannot stop now even if some kind of help arrived. he will fall apart, cog after cog. he will slowly rot away, neuron after neuron. all that suffering prolonged by his sheer size. damned by his past grace
how does one cope with such suffering, how can one stand against it without their spirit breaking? i'd say- only when they don't have the option to just die. the rot makes a sickly jungle of his guts, where only the end of fate is certain. he is but just a paralyzed, Painfully Aware prey as his predator tears his flesh apart
the track Not Your Rain captures all of these feelings so damningly well. we can literally hear the sheer agony Pebbles is going through
#Spot says stuff#rw#// animal death //#the rot is basically a zombie virus except it. really doesn't have the mercy in it to Kill the host until both it and the host can't-#-go on anymore. at least with the iterators. -looks at HLL and the blessedly dead Hunter in the middle of it-#the fact that Pebbles *survived* this whole thing- that we see him still weakly kickin in saint- is probably the most terrifying thing-#-out of all of this. he went through so fucking much and hes *still here*#he still has to fucking live even when he doesn't have the energy or really even the Means to do so#'do you forgive Pebbles for killing Moon?' yes. yes i do. i couldn't live with myself if i didn't
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back to thinking about that worst timeline princess AU concept where luz and hunter end up with camila in the human realm when camila hasn't met vee and doesn't know about the isles. & so camila thinks that the two of them have just been held captive together for years.
i'm mainly thinking about my 100% certainty that luz would develop a Crippling case of agoraphobia for..... very obvious reasons. double-checked the definition just now because i was like "i'm pretty sure it's no longer referred to as a fear of being outside??" and yeah -- it's a fear of being in environments where you'll be helpless or unable to escape if something goes wrong. which. well. you guys know what she's gone thru.
that combined with the general confusion and sensory overload of the human world.... i think luz would get Very Very Very Upset if she was forced to leave the house. and going anywhere without hunter especially is a non-starter. like one of u guys said a few days ago, the sheer LEVELS that her separation anxiety would ratchet up to.... she's basically following him to the bathroom whenever he gets up and sitting outside the door like a lonely cat. i don't even want to CONSIDER the kind of breakdown she'd have if she was made to go out with camila to, like, a completely normal therapy appointment.
#on hunter's end he isn't afraid of being in the human world by himself but#he IS afraid of luz being in the human world (too many unknown variables) (cannot protect her)#and is terrified of being separated from her. about as terrified as luz is of separation from him.#therefore he has functionally the same restrictions on Not Going Anywhere#mostly just thinking about camila trying to learn very very very fast how to help a daughter who is So Unstable#when obviously letting luz and hunter spend 20 hours a day sleeping and moving as little as possible is not sustainable#but ~traditional~ recovery methods like dragging your kid to doctor and therapy and group therapy appointments are. extremely likely to#retraumatize her. camila's number one priority is luz feeling safe and considering camila a safe trustworthy person#fuck any and all Tough Love advice. shes gonna let luz n hunter breathe & she's gonna fret horribly about it#i dunno. i'm migraine. this means i'm thinking about luz and hunter being clingy and crazy#toh#princess luz au#horrible mindscape trauma pals#princess luz au worst timeline#camila noceda
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whenever i need a laugh or a smile i go back and watch the early bells hells episodes. like pre-bassuras was such an insane vibe for an adventuring party and the shit they got into? unparalleled. truly just a collection of guys doing shit and sometimes experiencing consequences. and then bassuras came down on them like the fucking sword of damocles. i hope that one day, when this is all over, bells hells will still travel, doing dumb shit and fucking around like they once did for lord ariks eshteross. i hope they find that peace once their questions are answered, but i don’t know if a quiet life is for them. i think they’d just continue on, continue to scheme, do incredibly chaotic shit for forever. just let them throw parties, root out government corruption and little shade creepers every once in a while, and pretend to be ghosts, that’s the proper bells hells post-campaign enrichment plan
#cr#cr3#the idea of a level 20 party just doing dumb shit forever rather than accepting places of power in the world is so funny to me#and SO hells. the level 20 cleric is just a fuckin robot who meets up with his gun robot partner and they eat muffins together#and also the level 20 cleric’s best friend level 20 barbarian continues to get into bar fights for some fucking reason#and then their level 20 fighter friend has to go bail him out but also ends up getting drunk but in a fun way#meanwhile this werewolf blood hunter and incredibly terrifying fire druid lady have been cleaning out a local casino#and there have been rumors of a terrifying flower girl haunting the poker floor#a level 20 sorcerer and a level 20 bard have a nice little game of chess together#and all is right in the universe#so in conclusion fuck you ludinus da’leth you’re in the WAY of my HORRIBLE GREMLIN FUTURE
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You know... looking back on this show, it isn't audacious of Amity to call Luz a bully, since the show never actually presents Luz as a victim of bullying.
In fact, it's the opposite - Luz was antagonizing her schoolmates and disrupting the learning environment. It got so bad the counselor made Camilla send Luz to a correctional summer camp... And Yesterday's Lie makes it even weirder by saying "If Luz actually toned down her disruptive behavior at school, she could actually make friends. Luz is the problem here, not the system"
It's no wonder why Luz liked Amity and didn't think it was a big deal to crush on her and start dating her before Amity made amends with Willow and Gus LOL
#also - also I still think its funny how Hunter did more to make it up to Gus and Willow than Amity did in two whole seasons#like. it's so funny how they picked fucking LR to address the Amity/Willow elephant in the room... instead of addressing it in S1#or you know... any episode that came before KKKOHD - the one where Amity and Luz started dating#ppl call Amity Dana's self insert and it's like... are you rlly sure it's Amity and not Luz?#bc this show is rlly self indulgent and Luz is a Mary Sue...#I also like how this show talked abt Amity in WBW as if Amity actually like. cared abt people deep down#and the show never actually shows us Amity making it up to Willow or Gus...#and this show framed an episode called Understanding Willow around Amity instead of Willow...#very strange little cartoon tbh. I think we should be grateful it got cancelled because SAI has some terrifying implications
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Welp. The finale has destroyed me as a person.
Here are my thoughts.
I feel so numb but like sad. I feel like I'm actually experiencing a loss of a close friend or relative.
I've always found tech to be the most fascinating out the batch. Just him as a character was a huge contrast to other clones. And my attachment to him grew over time.
The amount of tears I shed after that episode was a lot.
Seeing wrecker so emotionally destroyed when we're used to him being upbeat and having fun is so fucking sad. Him crying and being blatantly depressed hurts me .
Hunter and omega hit me hard too. He only wanted to keep her safe and keep his brothers safe and he couldn't. He lost his brother only to lose his kid right after.
Yeah fuck Cid btw 😊❗️❗️
His death was so abrupt. But I expected it.
However, I don't believe he is dead until I see a body. That's my logic. The empire could have lied as usual.
This brings me to the death trooper theory. I initially thought it'd be cross, but now, I think tech will come back. Which would hurt me, but if it happens, I wouldn't be surprised.
Also, this.
He's going to fucking apeshit looking for his kid omg. I was right about that. I predicted omega getting taken and hunter turning into Joel Miller lmaoo
I can't wait for s3.
Poor echo, omg.
Him looking at an empty seat hurts.
ALSO LIKE WTF?? THE MEDIC GIRL IS RELATED TO OMEGA????
She looks so confused she didn't need to hear that rn..
Something I'm not ready to see is crosshairs reaction to techs death.
Like imagine risking everything to save your brothers. Only to find out he died trying to save you. Because he cared about you and wanted to save you.
The surviors guilt must be terrible for wrecker especially.
I can't function anymore man.
I'm writing this in class.
#tbb#the bad batch#fuck the empire#spoilers#tbb theories#terrified#the bad batch spoilers#crosshair#tech#wrecker tbb#hunter tbb#echo tbb#tbb omega#im crying#sobs and cries#grief/mourning#why him
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AU where Dougal is a Werewolf
(aka, basically everything is the same except Dougal gets a bit fluffier at night)
#father ted#father ted fanart#dougal mcguire#ted crilly#alternate universe#au#doodles#drawing#art#digital art#fanart#werewolf#werewolf au#((everything is the same except dougal turns into a giant wolfman at night which means nothing changes lmao))#((ok so- the blackrock incident is a botched baptism done at a full moon night. dougal transformed midway through the ritual))#((he fucked up cause apparently people aren't really keen with seeing a giant wolf with killer claws and teeth running around))#((father jack is a retired werewolf hunter and dougal is terrified on his first few days. fortunately jack is drunk like 99% of the time))#((then ted comes in and he's like 'oh a werewolf. this is a completely normal parish'))#((he becomes dougal's designated dogwalker. he used to sleep alone but then dougal keeps sneaking in and sleeping on his bed as a wolf))#((so now they sleep in the same room))#((they have a very strict routine where dougal has to go for a walk the second he transforms to burn off extra energy or else kill mode on))#((bonus- whenever he's around. damien becomes dougal's dogsitter cause they're best friends and damo thinks he's cool as a wolf))#((they'd just go to the woods and damo would just smoke from a bong and dougal would run around chasing small critters))
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The sheer Protective Big Brother Energy coming off of this shot—
#as a big brother myself this hits#I always forget Gus is so much younger than all of them too#like when he broke down I was like oh man!! he’s literally baby he’s like 12!!!#and hunter just there like they’re all children out of a horribly traumatizing event in a terrifying new place and his instinct#is to protect the most vulnerable one mannn I love the dynamic of all these kiddos#my sister is 12!! fuck dude#pls I know they only get four episodes (fuck Disney) but s3 I need more big brother hunter for all of them pls#toh#the owl house#toh gus#toh hunter#toh spoilers
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Benny: Thanks for not giving up on me, brother.
Dean: Don't give me a reason to.
(im going to throw up)
#DONT GIVE ME A REASON TO. DONT GIVE ME A REASON#'benny's the only one who has never let me down'#HE DOESN'T EVEN GET THE CHANCE TO HUH#BENNY IS DEAN'S MANIC PIXIE DREAM VAMPIRE WHO NEVER DISAGREES WITH HIM OR DOES THE WRONG THING#its sooo. its so pointed. its. this whole parallel sam to benny is so. im think i hauve covid#dean constantly hammering in to sam's head that He Failed. He Failed. He Let Him Down. He Failed. He Broke Everything Between Them.#and benny. benny. oh my god.#don't give me a reason to...#oh to live in the alternate reality where benny does fuck up and fucks up bad#what does dean do then. if his vampire friend was put up against the wall by hunger or a hunter#if he had to lash out. even if he didn't want to. is dean gonna stand by him then?#or does benny go join the long list of people who have let him down. and dean pulls a machete.#how quickly does that trust bleed out huh? how easily do you break a bond that hasn't been tested beyond battle and clandestine meetings#maybe it does happen and im just not remembering that it does. god i hope so. i need to see them get messed up.#dean/benny is so good and messy to me actually.#benny doesn't even know these expectations are being hoisted on him. he's never there when dean talks about how everyone else in his life#failed him. benny just thinks this is a normal (well. 'normal'. they were in purgatory. and probably had wild bloody sex in those woods)#but a normal friendship. and has no idea he's on any kind of pedestal. god. terrifying. imagine being pushed off a cliff you didn't know yo#were on the edge of. that's the situation benny is in rn#anyway! fun normal show for normal people!#benny lafitte#dean winchester#spn
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i’m so fucking scared of whole cake island hurting me i’m rewatching hunter x hunter for the 6th time
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How competent is Luz with her artificial staff/glyphs in princess AU? Like if she were to for some reason spar with someone like Hunter/Amity/Willow ever, or if she were to ever get into a situation where Hunter either couldn’t protect her outright or it was unobjectionably the best play for him and Luz to fight together instead of hiding her away in the corner while he took care of everything, how would she do?
luz is pretty competent with her staff and Wildly competent with glyphs, despite the fact that she can't use them in public. glyph magic to luz is like having a hyperfixation on a language you can't actually speak with anyone around u but you listen to immersion podcasts anyway and write in it to learn the grammar and it's a completely useless skill until it randomly helps u kill ur dad one day
luz is pretty good at protecting herself with her staff and at using her staff to make up for human-related disabilities. but she's a lot better with defensive artificial magic than offensive. most of what she's been officially taught is related to keeping herself safe and letting other people take care of threats. if she sparred with amity or hunter or willow going their hardest without being able to use glyphs, she'd lose For Sureee and she knows it.
she could level a place with what she knows about glyph magic tho. it's just that she'd have to believe everybody's fucked (or possibly see hunter get horrifically injured) to let loose. bc she only has the element of surprise Once.
#at least in my onion.#u know i love me some drama though. luz reacting to hunter having like gotten stabbed thru the chest and collapsed...#she would be. Fucking Terrifying Actually.#replies#toh#princess luz au#luz noceda
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object memories
A fic I wrote as part of my D&D druid’s backstory that I’m in the mood to share. Do you ever write something for the sole purpose of splashing around in your own prose like a dog in a kiddie pool?
TLDR: POV character Hush and her father were held prisoner by a cult for 10 years in solitary confinement, before being ritually sacrificed. Unbeknownst to the cult, Hush wasn’t quite dead and woke up later in the mass grave mortally wounded but alive. As a druid, Hush can shapeshift into animals if she’s seen and studied them before. This fic is about how she 'discovered’ her first four wildshapes in the aftermath of her ordeal, while learning to survive alone in the wilderness and fend off the hunger that threatened to consume her.
~4,600 words; CWs: gore, animal death, take ‘em seriously I’m not kidding around. I feel like there’s also something going on here with the hunger stuff, but I truly don’t know what the fuck to even call that CW. If somebody knows, let me know lol.
The rat was the first.
She doesn’t know exactly when she reached the tipping point, but she grew intimately acquainted with the ways of the rats over the years. She spent an eternity in that dungeon, curled in the corner among her clinking chains, feeling them scurry over her in her sleep. Grew acquainted with how they move, how they think, grew used to fighting them away from what little she had to eat, bartering with them for the space, for help to stay clean, teaching them to bring her things. She watched them for generations, while they nested in the dirty little pallet that she slept on, until they were closer friends than she’d ever had among humans.
She knew them, inside and out, long before she knew how to change into anything. When she awoke in the aftermath and the wildshapes came, the rat was like a second skin. She slipped into the shape like a shield, slick with blood, and slithered out with the last of her breath.
The world outside was big.
She couldn’t heal. The first word she spoke when she took her given shape again was a rattling, empty gasp that sent sticky gore oozing through the feeble scabs over the gash in her neck. It didn’t matter how desperately she grasped for the language, how well she knew the incantation, how crisp and adamant the gestures were that should have saved her. There was no magic without sound. And her angelic heritage did little to help when whatever the source of her limited innate healing, it simply didn’t respond.
She spent the first week or so in the glade on the edge of the forest where she collapsed after running out of time as the rat. The summer heat broiled her skin, even through the shield of the canopy, leaving her parched and aching and crisp like a dead leaf. In the haze of exhaustion, she began to treat her wounds.
The sacrificial shift they’d dressed her in shredded easily. She wound long strips of it carefully around her waist and chest, stomach churning at the horrid sight of the injuries, and tied the rest as tightly as she could across her ragged neck before the pressure made her choke. Every motion left her dizzy and sick. She might have laid there on and off for hours or days or a month, languishing in the softest patch of moss she managed to find and dragging herself back and forth from the clear little stream that burbled a few yards away. As many moments as she could, she hid behind the rat again. The rat wasn’t bleeding. The rat was safe. The rat could forage, devouring whatever it could find, just enough to sustain her.
She learned the rabbits next.
Timid creatures, cautious and quick, they watched her with their wide beaded-bright eyes and darted to safety at the sound of her rattling breaths. While she waited to recover her strength between wildshapes, she watched them back, tracking the little families back and forth among the wild grasses. They were solitary, but not alone—never truly alone.
There was a nest not far from her resting place. She stumbled across the babies on her way to the stream. Their tiny forms huddled together in a depression in the grass and she looked one in the eyes and its little ears trembled, it tucked itself deeper in the shadows, bracing, and a sudden knife twisted in the center left of her stomach.
It took too long to realize it wasn’t the wound this time.
Her sunburnt skin ached desperately, throbbing to the rhythm of a heart that wasn’t hers. She fumbled past to the edge of the water and dipped her face below the surface, where the chill could bring her to her senses, but the soft curves of the current brushed their way along her cheeks like the perfect ghosts of her father’s hands.
Her lungs burned before she came back up for air.
The next time she changed, the new shape was a rescue. She was a stranger but she smelled like the glade, and the other rabbits allowed her there. In the shadowed night they huddled together, warmed by each other’s skin, and her tiny rabbit’s heart began to calm as it hadn’t before in a very long time.
She couldn’t remain forever. She was keenly aware, the longer she lingered, that she was far too close to the cult. Any member could stumble across her here, out on a forage or traveling to the compound, and she wouldn’t get another chance at freedom. She couldn’t risk it. When her stomach sealed enough that the insides of her abdomen didn’t spill to the outside after any major movement, she staggered to her feet like a newborn fawn and began the journey.
She stuck to the woods. Waterdeep was a death trap, anyone could be cult-aligned, anyone could see her and they thought she was dead but she couldn’t know who might know her face. The roads were too much of a risk, populated as they were. Stealth was her only option. The angels guided her when she slept, teaching her how to find north and south in the stars, how to know clean water from stagnant, how to name the leaves and berries around her and tell which ones were safe. She treated her aches with willow bark and bandaged herself with buffers of soft clean leaves. She passed the days in the shelter of her animal forms or huddled in the shade, thinking of anything but the black spots that swarmed intermittent in her vision and the weakness in her limbs. She stayed alive. It was a near thing.
When the berry season faded, and the leaves began to turn, the hunger snarled in her like a wild beast.
She stumbled to the nearest town under cover of night, shielding her body with her arms, following the smell of something delicious she couldn’t name that made her gut twist with starving, nauseous desperation. It was too open, the streets too broad, but every building’s door loomed and narrowed and filled her mouth with the suffocating taste of molding earth until her heart pattered the way it did in the rabbit’s body and the outlines of the structures blurred and blackened before her eyes. A too-cold breeze swirled through the streets and she shuddered from head to toe.
There was a man ahead in dark robes that swirled and her heart moved like rabbit’s feet fleeing in her ribcage. She forced herself to the alley, forced herself back, and bolted into the safety of the sacred darkness.
It was like that at the next few towns, too. There were kind people, here and there. One gave her a soft dark shirt and soft dark pants when she met him in the night, thrust them at her and skittered off when she tried through rattling gasps to ask if he wanted payment; a few innkeepers let her stay the night and gave her meals in the morning that softened the hunger’s brutal edge. But it couldn’t last, because the figures in the alleyways always came back, and names that she remembered from another life haunted her until she fled back to the safety of the trees.
The days grew colder.
The woods were safer further south, deep and dark, filled with birdsong and the golden colors of the waning year, the colors bright as life. She’d taken a sharp rock and cut a stick to hold her weight, easing the pressure on the days when walking was too much. Her breathing was growing easier, and her neck didn’t bleed anymore. But the words that would call magic to her side still couldn’t find their way from her mind out through her lips.
She was losing strength. The angels taught her traps and snares, but her feeble hands couldn’t tie the knots tight enough, and the few beasts she trapped slipped free when she tried to claim them. The herd of deer that once bolted at the sight of her now didn’t even flinch, the great many-pointed stag that led their numbers watching her passively while his mate and children drank at the riverside and foraged from the dying grasses. There was little to forage and less to live by, and some days the wavering mists of exhaustion hardly left her vision.
Sometimes, on the nights the angels didn’t come, she dreamed of the stag instead. Of his glinting eyes in the brush, watching her, unafraid. She murmured prayers in the morning to whatever forces listened.
She met the wolves in the pits of a moonless night, by way of gleaming golden eyes and an uncanny silence sweeping over her resting place, and she knew they’d come for her. She resolved herself to at least go down on her feet.
When the first wolf lunged, she lashed out with her staff, squeezing her eyes shut against the wave of fatigue that swept through her body from head to toe and sent the blood rushing out of her head, and felt herself make contact. The beast yelped, and she blinked spots from her vision just in time to fend off a second, sending it sprawling across the scrubby ground. Her hands shook.
“Please,” she tried to rasp, though nothing but a helpless wheeze came out. The wolves paced. She shifted back, making space, feeling acid adrenaline spread slow like venom down her arms and into her fingertips, biting back the way every motion tore at the scabby flesh of her still-healing abdomen.
The wolves kept pacing. In the dark, they moved like dancers, every footstep intentionally measured. Silent, despite their size, dwarfing her with heavy bodies—direwolves, not just wolves, but their largest and most vicious cousins.
Her stomach growled with a ferocity that nearly sent her to her knees.
The third wolf lunged. She grasped for the little magic she knew, one of the rare spells that remained without her voice, and scared it back with a shard of ice that burst into bitter steam across the pack. Its yelp was piercing and sharp and left her dizzy. Through the haze as she recovered, she watched the wolf pack flee.
She dreamed of the stag that night. She dreamed of blood and the careful steps of hunting beasts, tender in the foliage. She dreamed that she staggered to uncertain feet and the stag was there, his muzzle nudging against her arm, strong and stable, as she found her way upright. She wrapped her arms around him. He was warm and smelled of musk and the gentle decay of the forest floor in fall. He didn’t flee. His fur was soft like the velveteen skin of something whose name she’d forgotten, a precious something she’d loved in another life, beyond her memory, behind the veil of the endless dark. She awoke grasping for it, the name on her lips but not close enough to catch it, even if she’d had the voice to speak.
She dreamed fitfully, in bursts, interrupted by the empty claws of a hollow stomach scratching at the inside of her vessel like nails on slate.
The next day, something whimpered in the bushes when she went to change her bandages at the stream. She braced herself against her staff, and nudged aside the leafy branches, and found the wolf. It was panting, golden eyes glazed grey with pain, curled up defensively with hackles raised. It growled at her approach, but the sound was weak, and tapered to a whimper.
Near its feet, the ground was muddied with black-red blood. She traced the line from its paws to the place in its side where the fur was shaved down to muscle and a thin line of bone. The ghost of a spell and an icy projectile flashed across her memory.
Her hands were shaking again.
She went to the water. This stream ran clear and cold, down from somewhere in the mountains, carrying the mineral taste of glaciers high above. Flakes of mud and blood trailed free from her hands when she dipped them in the current, and she watched them swirl away through the eddies and whorls.
It was all mechanical, in the end. She pried a piece of moss from the bank, hefted it, ran it through the water and watched the dirt run off the roots towards the valley. Washed it clean, squeezed it under the surface and watched it fill with water. Stood and turned back to the forest.
The beast didn’t calm, but it didn’t bite when she pressed the pad of moss as gently as she could against the gash. It snapped, and she looked it in the eye, waiting. Its jaws were wide, teeth yellowed and worn from use. It could tear her to ribbons even now, if it had the nerve. She wouldn’t last long.
She washed the wound, and padded it with clean dry lichen, and flinched when she touched the beast’s side and a warmth filled her fingers that hadn’t answered her since she first returned to consciousness in the grave. She caught it like a soap bubble, soft as a memory. It settled in her chest and the breath that filled her lungs was deeper than she’d had in years.
She’d forgotten how it felt, when the warding darkness at her center answered. When the healing power in her blood responded to her call.
She forgot it again when the hunger returned in a wave of dizzying force, chasing all other thoughts from her mind. The wolf, rising from its rest in the hollow, tilted its head with a calculating glint and watched her. Gold eyes met gold.
It turned to follow the water, limping ever so slightly, and padded off.
She followed.
The pack was waiting in a stony cavern where the stream met a sparkling river. She felt their wary gazes long before she saw them, hidden as they were among the warm grey stone. But they recognized their lost member and pounced on him, tumbling together in a massive joyful bundle over the sandy patch of riverside, and before long it was like they hadn’t even seen her. She found a bright place on a rock by the shore, and waited for the sun to warm her bones more than the hunger chilled them.
Across the river, the bushes rustled. She knew what she’d see there.
The stag disappeared into the brush, and her vision blackened.
She awoke to the hot wet stickiness of a tongue on her face, and flinched, recoiling from the threat. In front of her sat the injured direwolf.
“Hi,” she whispered, bracing herself. “Hi there.” The words stuck in her wound and scraped.
The wolf cocked its head, stood, and licked her face again. It… did not try to bite her head off. This was not a situation she had anticipated. She particularly did not expect to be licked a third time. The wolf’s breath almost made her faint again.
Behind the wounded animal, the packmates slunk forward, watching her. Waiting.
The hunger in their eyes was a mirror of her own, and the shapechange came in its aching wake.
She followed them, that night, in a wolfish skin that matched their own. It wasn’t long before she had to pause, the time limits of her wildshapes forcing her back to rest while the pack moved on, but the howl carried on. They didn’t like to leave their own behind. She learned their faces—the mother the first to lunge, the father the second, the grown pups that followed them with their own faces and minds and hearts. They walked the trails of the forest, and she learned their gait, their stalking dance, their silent patience.
She slept between great warm bodies, and dreamed of blood and meat and the beasts that once wore the bite-marked bones on the floor of the den.
In the days, she jostled with the pups as one of them while she could. When she couldn’t, she rested on the rock by the river, while the echoes gnawing in her stomach dueled the white-hot claws of her bone-deep scars. She scrounged late-season eggs from a duck’s nest and swallowed them raw, on her hands and knees in the riverbank mud, eggshells scraping her gums and spilled yolk staining the ground, and coughed up half what she found when her scarred neck screamed with pain from bending low. It staved off the ache for an hour. She scraped up the spilled remains in her hands and wept.
On the fifth night, she followed the pack to a valley full of marsh-weed, where they found a limping boar. The pack struck in a whirl of fur and fangs, iron-stink staining the water. They fought her back from the bounty until the leaders took their share, but the scraps she claimed sated something, hot and vicious in the pit of her gut.
It was enough for a day.
She dreamed of it after, the blood that dripped from her fangs, the viscera on her tongue, the hot iron taste of it, the texture of muscle rending against her jaw. The heat on her lips and gums, bone crushing and crunching and cracking in her grasp, the relief like a soft warm pelt at the end of a long day’s journey as the soft squishing prey slid down her gullet like a prayer…
She dreamed of it night after night after night, waking with saliva in her mouth, thinking of it between the angels’ words, the ghost of that sensation dancing through her mouth in all her forms. She sat by the river and echoed it, conjuring up the giving resistance of flesh under her teeth, biting her tongue till it bled to remember the taste. She dreamed of nothing but. She dreamed even in her waking hours, as the first autumn frost laced over the land and the pack sat full and happy from the hunt.
She dreamed of it until the dream consumed her, empty of everything but teeth.
She left the den on an ice-bitter evening under ponderous slate skies when the dull weight of the thought hung heavy like an overripe fruit, when she wondered what the wolves would feel like beneath her fangs, if their heavy furs would rip and tear the way that scrap of boar did or if they’d linger in the teeth and scratch and bristle. She slunk up the hill to the north on the pack’s favored trail, filling her muzzle with the scent of heavy musk and petrichor.
The stag was waiting.
His antlers glinted in the cold dead moonlight, graceful as a halo, round as the crescent moon. He turned his head. She met his eyes and lunged.
She tore out the flesh of his neck like pages from a holy book, paper beneath her fangs as his blood ran like wine at a ritual. His stomach opened just as easily, staining the fallen leaves in garish scarlet, and his legs kicked feebly as she tore through the viscera that spilled free, relishing in the iron stench. Mouthful after mouthful, she ate her fill. She tore through muscle and tendon until she finally sank her teeth into his bright-hot heart and swallowed it in shreds. It might have still been beating, or the pulse between her jaws might have been her own, racing and vicious. She felt every piece reach her stomach, filling the void, hot in her chest like a hearthfire, bright as a star, sweet and tangy in the wolf’s senses and prickling in her own.
She hunted the liver down among the mess and swallowed it next, and the kidneys, and parts she knew no name for that glistened red and pink and sickish yellow in the light. She savored the feeling, the soft wet warm of it, the taste of the life that would fuel her own. She pried out the lowest of his ribs and it crackled in her jaws and she chewed out the marrow until there was nothing left of worth.
She didn’t know when he stopped moving, only that eventually, he did. It took too long.
When the wolf’s stomach filled, she lost the shape and scrabbled at the stag with her own weak human-shaped hands, her fingers shaking, nails digging into the slickened meat for purchase and prying up scraps to devour. She shook and shuddered and buried her own face into the stag’s shattered chest, drinking the lifeblood until it dried sticky on the edges of her skin, until she was full, until her aching stomach silenced and stopped and grew bloated with bleeding flesh.
She raised her head and her gaze caught upon his eyes. They were wide, and glassy, and milky with the haze of death.
She turned away from the kill and threw up nothing but bile, choking on the taste of steel.
“Thank you,” she murmured, too hoarse for anyone to hear, shuffling to the side and cradling his head in her lap, the warm blood filling her soft dark pants and seeping through to her skin. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you.”
She leaned over him, wrapped her arms around his neck, curling her fingers into his short soft fur. Velveteen. Buried her face in his, her eyes hot and stinging, she swore she felt the ghosts of hands in her hair as the blood dried sticky on her face and melted down her cheeks. She clutched him tight enough to strain the scabs down her chest and belly, threatening to once again reopen the wounds. And she stayed there, waiting, until nothing came. Her stomach was quiet.
As she rose to her feet, she carefully bent and lifted as much of the stag as her body could manage. He was lighter than seemed fair, even to her haggard limbs.
Her hands didn’t shake.
There were hunters in these woods. The angels had told her, murmurs in the night, between the endless thoughts of hunger. They could help her. She stumbled through the brush, dragging the stag behind her, listening for someone larger than herself.
In the hours before the dawn, she found a young man in the valley, carrying a crossbow and a knife. He stiffened at her approach, and stood there wide-eyed, watching.
The words she spoke to explain herself died in rasping whistles in her throat, but still he watched, rapt, his eyes darting between the stag and her own face.
“You… you killed that?” the man asked, gesturing.
She nodded. Her neck twinged. She felt the man’s gaze skirt over her scarred neck, her hands slick with blood, the wrinkled scabby mess of her stomach where it was visible between the hem of her shirt and her makeshift belt.
“Do you… need to… take it somewhere?” She shook her head. The man swallowed. “That’s a lot of meat for one person. Erm…” He looked around, and she tilted her head. “…Do you know how to treat it? If you’re planning to eat that yourself, you probably want to salt-preserve it, it’ll spoil quickly otherwise. I could… help?”
She shook her head quickly, forcefully, then nodded, please, and the man flinched. But he was true to his word.
He led her to a clearing, his hands fluttering and his soft eyes nervous as she followed like a wraith, and showed her how to lay the stag down and open the rest of its body with a clean sharp knife. How to strip the meat from the bones, careful and keen, and process it into chunks and then lay it in pieces in salt to let it dry. She watched the process with singleminded focus, noting down every last motion, memorizing each flick of the knife.
He let her borrow his blade, so she could clean the carcass and keep that velveteen skin. With a few weeks’ drying and treatment, it would make a good blanket to last the winter through. She stripped the stag to the bones, and kept those as trophies. That night, the angels taught her to sharpen them into knives.
When the man had left, knife and bow in hand, retreating into the shadows, she realized that he never once quite looked her in the eyes.
She kept the skull. Late at night she stared into its face, searching for the glint of the stag’s all-knowing gaze in the depths of his bones, knowing there was nothing on the other side. She stared at him until somewhere deep inside, a part of her became him. Until his eyes became her own.
She took the form of a deer in the morning, wearing the weight of his antlers like a crown. The herd moved by her in the bushes and watched her like a ghost.
She went south. The winter was upon her, and it was time again to travel. The herd had enough to haunt them.
#dnd fic#this is... more gruesome than i usually go in for but it was fun to write#the way this feels like cannibalism when it definitely isn't#but at the same time in some metaphorical sense it kind of is#it's more... killing somebody and then stealing their skin#hush is a creepy forest witch who talks to angels and makes people nervous#and i love that for her#the hunter she met in the woods is just some sad little himbo trying to feed his family and thanking the gods he wasn't murdered by the fey#100% that man thought hush was either a faerie or a demon and feared for his LIFE#i told the DM that someday i would love her to just randomly bump into that guy again#because now that she's healed enough to /talk/ again she wants to thank him and will be all excited to see him#'omg it's my best friend!!!' meanwhile this poor guy is shitting himself 'oh fuck oh no i DID accidentally sell my soul to the fey'#hush is one of those characters i categorize as 'obliviously terrifying'#she is just a gal trying to survive and trying to regain her sense of self after being violently dehumanized for over a decade#she encounters other people and is overwhelmed but tries to be 'normal'#she just... fails to realize that between the aasimar angel traits and the inability to talk and the telepathy she uses to compensate...#she is very scary to other people#but then you talk to her and she is in tears of joy bc she had a fresh baguette this morning and it was really good#and it's like... ah. she's just poorly socialized
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