3. Bite Down on This
The fire elemental has nowhere to go. The narrow mountain trail passes through sheer granite walls, and the crack in one side leads to a dead end. The ledges above are accessible only to local goats.
The faceless stalks their cornered prey; an easy hit. The elemental hisses. Pravde knows better than to throw their cindamite powder at it. An explosion here would be mutually fatal.
They crouch and swipe their foot through the gravel, sending a spray over the elemental. Its rippling flames flicker. Again. Again. The fire is nearly banked, the elemental unable to do more than pop and crackle… but Pravde is nearly out of easily kickable material. They backtrack carefully, mask never leaving the fire elemental.
Here, near the mouth of the cavern - thick piles of dirt, churned by those goats. Pravde removes their boots and scoops handful after handful inside. They reach for a final load and knock - a metal pin?
Iron teeth clamp around their leg before they register what’s happened. A trap, designed for large predators. Pravde’s rangy calf is no match. They go down with an aborted yell.
The elemental in the cavern shrieks, snapping Pravde out of the haze of pain. Right. They have a job to do. Quickly, quickly, before the elemental regains strength… They unearth the trap, as wide in diameter as the handle of their mace. Its teeth shred further into their muscle with their efforts. The jaws won’t open easily. Their hands shake and falter with every lightning-lance of pain. They don’t have time for this.
Pravde shakes out one rubble-filled boot. The leather is thin, cracked in places. This is fine. They draw a small knife and hack a strip from the mouth of the boot. Fold, place between teeth… pull.
The iron teeth strip flesh, scrape bone - but with a clack of the spring-loaded hinges, the jaws snap shut empty. Adrenaline carries the faceless through sawing more strips from their tunic, winding them tightly around their blood-wet leg, pulling that boot on and lacing it for stability. No time, they’ll fix their leg later. They spit the leather strip from their mouth, bitten clean in two. Their good foot presses bare into gravel as they hop back to put the elemental out of its misery.
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i absolutely cannot believe people are trying to start discourse about whether nex benedict was actually nonbinary / whether it was okay for him to describe himself as nonbinary to some people if he didn’t actually identify that way as if he isn’t literally DEAD because he was KILLED. this is a MURDERED CHILD and these monsters are so busy getting mad at the possibility that he might have been a trans boy who described himself as nonbinary to his family because that was easier for them to take that they’re turning a CHILD who was MURDERED into fucking discourse. even when we die at the hands of cis people’s violence, our own community finds a way to make us the villains of the story.
and all of this bullshit on top of the ways that cis people are already trying to say our grief over his death is unjustified. all of this on top of people claiming he wasn’t murdered and speculating on other causes of death (i literally saw someone say he “clearly went home and took the coward’s way out” and i have never been more disgusted) or claiming that he started the fight as if any action on his part could’ve been enough to justify his death. i am haunted by the sound of his father screaming that his child was not filth because that is what people have been saying about this poor kid, that’s how cruelly his memory is being treated, and even the trans community can’t get it’s shit together enough to look past the stupid discourse and see the tragedy in front of us. did you all forget that it was supposed to be up to us to grieve him in the way he deserves when the rest of the world fails to care if people like him live or die? did you all forget that this child was our sibling, the future of our community, a life that we should have had the chance to know and treasure while he was still here but that we now have a responsibility to hold close to our hearts in his absence? nex’s life was precious and it was ended far too soon and if you truly believe that anything is more important than mourning his life and fighting for a world where no more trans people have to meet such an awful fate, you’re a traitor to this community and you do not deserve the place you occupy within it.
i’m so tired. i can’t even imagine how tired his family must be, to see the public treat the child they’re grieving so horribly, to see the world fail their baby again. leave him alone. he was already robbed of peace in life; the least you can do is let him finally have it in death.
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I love how in PJO Percy makes such a point of trying to spare the enemy demigods because they're just being tricked or brainwashed and he couldn't possibly let them die (because killing your enemies is for the bad guys), and then in HoO we finally get to see the POV of Nico "as long as it's not technically murder it can go in a kids' book" di Angelo, and he just does not hesitate. You're hurting his friends? You're a threat that can't be dealt with via a stern talking to? Okay. Goodbye.
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okay but we can all agree that annabeth is hella ripped right? because this girl has been training to be a soldier since she was seven. i'm just convinced her biceps become so prominent when she so much as grips a doorknob. i'm just convinced she has incredible upper body strength. i'm just convinced she could snap me like a twig.
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