Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
08-24-2012, 11:24 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
The little sun flared. It was a perfectly natural thing for it to do.
Under the circumstances, it was the most normal act in the Godsworn Valley, barring such mundanities as breathing - which many soldiers were ceasing to do. Dying was always more normal than living; there were thousands of ways to die on a battlefield and only one way to stay alive. Normality lay thick in the trenches, in the branches of the burning forest, in the mass graves for the grave masses that were once each faction's forces' fighting men.
On the other hand, Rachel stood as an antithesis to normality, a stellar hellish valkyrie, chasing stragglers through the burning forest: famous-last-standers, runaway survivors, fear-frozen headlight-gazers alike fell under plumes of lightning and superheated air. Destruction for the sake of a twisted anger and pleasure in seeing the world that hated her, used her, die, crumble, flash into ash...
"Edward? Edward!"
Some said it slithered, others saw it fly, still others claimed in their last cries: 'the shrouds are falling!' as they died. It was a swathe of anonymity that none could agree on, because those burdened with proof found their burdens taken away. It had no hearsay, for there was no one alive to say, and often no one left alive to hear.
"Careful! Laney dear, the cave's awful dark back here. Can you bring the lantern? I think-"
That was going to change.
Everything around her had to burn had to burn, how dared they live a life normal, “How dare you!” she screamed unheard over the sound of the death at her own hands. With the sound of thunder, the air tore apart, unbalanced lances of plasma arcing from tree to tree, metal buttons ringing and singing - stray anions finding their cation partners in a electric dance, sending lightning alighting on the corpses of the fallen. The smell of burning flesh, brown and bittersweet, rose into the air, mingling with the chemical stink of weapons manufacture. And it, in turn, wound about the sad fragrance of conflagrating maple wood, the sharp aroma of decades-old bristlecone pines going up in flames.
"You just said that, you silly! What did you think?"
Behind was the flame; unrestrained, the licking fluttering insubstantial tongues of fire consumed and tore and crushed the harmonies of life for itself, took away the microcosms of melody and countermelody for the harsh dissonant noise of fire’s false life, half-life...
"Can you bring the lantern?"
If the forest was a polyharmonic choir, then the flames were a neverending, heckling caterwaul that rasped against the grain of the universe.
"Oh, all right, dear. I'm coming. Oh, this is f-"
Shapeless black leapt and slid and prowled in between the burning branches, avoiding the heat and glow that cast unhealthy highlights across its sinuous body; a body not built for light nor clarity of being. It searched for the other it had smelled - a familiar smell, from before the forest but after new things had begun to happen, following the fire flanking its sides. Deep within it, something territorial pulled itself from the black miry ooze of instinctual thinking, and formed itself into something new, incomprehensible to a human mind; yet it was akin to a foreign language, falling into familiar shapes and cadences.
"Careful!"
"I'm coming."
It had the shape of anger.
It had the shape of jealousy.
What it did not have the shape of was fear.
Rachel paused, in front of a cairn of corpses dripping with the remains of a Gatling gun. Burst sandbags had devolved into shards, globules of shining glass, with pools of what were once spent cartridges collecting in every depression they could find.
She took a few deep, useless breaths. A little voice in the back of her mind was starting to say, faintly, "Those people had families, you know. They're going to go home pre-cremated. There probably won't even be enough ash found to fill half an urn. There won't be a funeral, or anything to remember Daddy or Mommy by - just an empty space on a mantelpiece where remembrance should be. You're still a machine, Rachel - a war machine..."
"Shut up, shut up!" Anger was a refreshing oblivion compared to the yawning chasm that guilt opened up; it strung a red blindfold across her eyes so she couldn't look down and trip and fall off the tightrope, down into the depths of being weak, weak and helpless and used. It was fine if you didn't think about it don't think about it don't don't-
“Dear God, don’t let the monster find me. Dear God, don’t let the monster find me...”
Formless yet with purpose, hemmed in by walls of spitting, hissing, burning biomass, it came. Branches shoved aside, splinters flying, seeking the epicenter of the flaming chaos that held the forest in its incandescent grip. It tore open a gash in the trees and found its mark standing in the center of the flaming debris, in a clearing filled with wood ash, like decades’ worth of slash-and-burn agriculture compacted into the space of a minute.
“I’ll be a good girl and clean my room and brush my teeth and be polite to Mum and Dad and...”
”be a good girl”
The little girl’s voice carried across the sound of the flames - off guard, Rachel turned on her heel, driven by a force maternal, more elemental than even the white-hot anger. But there was only a darkness in the gap between two flames, a living darkness deeper than what could be achieved by mere absence of light.
It took the moment to leap...
Rachel’s hand rose of its own accord, issuing a plume of flame that spat from her palm and rose into the dry air, a mushroom of infrared radiation carrying entropy in its wake, illuminating for a moment flashes of black furred flesh teasing the light.
“Stay back. Don’t you come near me. I am heat, and light, and life. You are cold, and darkness, and death. You fear me - Sonora - you fear me.” She sought to resolve details of the form behind the fire, but all she saw was vague movement and no shape as it circled her, leaping from shadow to shadow.
It felt no fear. Fire could hurt it, flames could scorch its flesh, but it could kill its rival before its rival could burn it. It feared fire. It did not fear this flaming form who so proudly thought it could keep it at bay.
Yet something did keep it from leaping forward to eviscerate that metal neck. That arched sheath of vertebrae, chromed, silvered, perfect. If it moved this way, it could see its own reflection in the unmarred gloss. Necks - it had torn apart so many others but yet this one was different, not only familiar from that which was outside - another emotion crystallized from a heart used only for the hunt for countless generation and it burned, just like an inner fire, but one that didn’t hurt.
It put that from its mind. Perhaps it could eviscerate her later. But this one was brave. Too brave. The courage of those utterly without the fear that stopped them from, say, banzai charges.
All the soldiers who learned that banzai charges didn’t work died in banzai charges.
“The Outsider said we could leave when one of us...ceased.” Rachel looked around, taking in the cessation all around them. “Who are you?”
<font color="#314248">”the monster”
“You are Sonora.”
A cultured voice, of some long-dead society woman, came from somewhere in the shadows. Its source lithely slid from velvet dark to velvet dark, moving about, surrounding its prey, “For my part, I don’t think such ghastly apparitions exist.”
“You exist...The Outsider brought you...it...it said-” An arc of electricity jetted from her right palm as the little sun hiccuped, its output spasming, the flare now on its last dregs. “No! No no no no no!”
“Lady Betchey, whatever is the matter? You look as if you’ve seen a ghosaaaarrrrrgghhhh” The woman’s voice ended in a long low gristled scream, intermingled with the living screech of the presumed Lady Betchey; which in turn terminated in loving surround-sound detail. It was such a shame to start a quote and not follow it to its conclusion.
The stink of death in the air: how could she not have noticed it before? They were dead, they were all dead, she killed them, like - “no no no” - like she killed everyone in the facility but they had used her, treated her like a machine! Everyone had to pay they should all burn, they should all burn she had to get away, she couldn’t look at the bodies anymore she couldn’t
She wanted to crawl into a hole and hide until everything was just a bad memory - but the sound of gunfire in the air, far away, close by, masked by the licking of hungry flames - it would never be a bad memory it would never stop they would never get away-
With a touch, an effort of will, the ground crystallized and evaporated under an onslaught of heat and flame, it moved out of the way as Rachel dug her way into the ground, escapism at its best; she was so sorry so sorry she’d bury some of these she’d do right she’d stop cations spurting from a sun winding down...
Her plan hit a snag, however, when her makeshift grave opened up into a tunnel and she fell through with a heavy clunk.</font>
A shadow in the crook of ever-enroaching fire looked around, at the blaze closing in, and leapt after her.
And in Malhaven, the Goddess of Subterfuge felt Her Temple’s Labyrinth invaded. It was impossible to read emotion in the set of Her thin lips and in the dark glass of Her eyes, but her footfalls were dangerously light as she swept from the meeting hall of the gods.
The little sun flared. It was a perfectly natural thing for it to do.
Under the circumstances, it was the most normal act in the Godsworn Valley, barring such mundanities as breathing - which many soldiers were ceasing to do. Dying was always more normal than living; there were thousands of ways to die on a battlefield and only one way to stay alive. Normality lay thick in the trenches, in the branches of the burning forest, in the mass graves for the grave masses that were once each faction's forces' fighting men.
On the other hand, Rachel stood as an antithesis to normality, a stellar hellish valkyrie, chasing stragglers through the burning forest: famous-last-standers, runaway survivors, fear-frozen headlight-gazers alike fell under plumes of lightning and superheated air. Destruction for the sake of a twisted anger and pleasure in seeing the world that hated her, used her, die, crumble, flash into ash...
"Edward? Edward!"
Some said it slithered, others saw it fly, still others claimed in their last cries: 'the shrouds are falling!' as they died. It was a swathe of anonymity that none could agree on, because those burdened with proof found their burdens taken away. It had no hearsay, for there was no one alive to say, and often no one left alive to hear.
"Careful! Laney dear, the cave's awful dark back here. Can you bring the lantern? I think-"
That was going to change.
Everything around her had to burn had to burn, how dared they live a life normal, “How dare you!” she screamed unheard over the sound of the death at her own hands. With the sound of thunder, the air tore apart, unbalanced lances of plasma arcing from tree to tree, metal buttons ringing and singing - stray anions finding their cation partners in a electric dance, sending lightning alighting on the corpses of the fallen. The smell of burning flesh, brown and bittersweet, rose into the air, mingling with the chemical stink of weapons manufacture. And it, in turn, wound about the sad fragrance of conflagrating maple wood, the sharp aroma of decades-old bristlecone pines going up in flames.
"You just said that, you silly! What did you think?"
Behind was the flame; unrestrained, the licking fluttering insubstantial tongues of fire consumed and tore and crushed the harmonies of life for itself, took away the microcosms of melody and countermelody for the harsh dissonant noise of fire’s false life, half-life...
"Can you bring the lantern?"
If the forest was a polyharmonic choir, then the flames were a neverending, heckling caterwaul that rasped against the grain of the universe.
"Oh, all right, dear. I'm coming. Oh, this is f-"
Shapeless black leapt and slid and prowled in between the burning branches, avoiding the heat and glow that cast unhealthy highlights across its sinuous body; a body not built for light nor clarity of being. It searched for the other it had smelled - a familiar smell, from before the forest but after new things had begun to happen, following the fire flanking its sides. Deep within it, something territorial pulled itself from the black miry ooze of instinctual thinking, and formed itself into something new, incomprehensible to a human mind; yet it was akin to a foreign language, falling into familiar shapes and cadences.
"Careful!"
"I'm coming."
It had the shape of anger.
It had the shape of jealousy.
What it did not have the shape of was fear.
Rachel paused, in front of a cairn of corpses dripping with the remains of a Gatling gun. Burst sandbags had devolved into shards, globules of shining glass, with pools of what were once spent cartridges collecting in every depression they could find.
She took a few deep, useless breaths. A little voice in the back of her mind was starting to say, faintly, "Those people had families, you know. They're going to go home pre-cremated. There probably won't even be enough ash found to fill half an urn. There won't be a funeral, or anything to remember Daddy or Mommy by - just an empty space on a mantelpiece where remembrance should be. You're still a machine, Rachel - a war machine..."
"Shut up, shut up!" Anger was a refreshing oblivion compared to the yawning chasm that guilt opened up; it strung a red blindfold across her eyes so she couldn't look down and trip and fall off the tightrope, down into the depths of being weak, weak and helpless and used. It was fine if you didn't think about it don't think about it don't don't-
“Dear God, don’t let the monster find me. Dear God, don’t let the monster find me...”
Formless yet with purpose, hemmed in by walls of spitting, hissing, burning biomass, it came. Branches shoved aside, splinters flying, seeking the epicenter of the flaming chaos that held the forest in its incandescent grip. It tore open a gash in the trees and found its mark standing in the center of the flaming debris, in a clearing filled with wood ash, like decades’ worth of slash-and-burn agriculture compacted into the space of a minute.
“I’ll be a good girl and clean my room and brush my teeth and be polite to Mum and Dad and...”
”be a good girl”
The little girl’s voice carried across the sound of the flames - off guard, Rachel turned on her heel, driven by a force maternal, more elemental than even the white-hot anger. But there was only a darkness in the gap between two flames, a living darkness deeper than what could be achieved by mere absence of light.
It took the moment to leap...
Rachel’s hand rose of its own accord, issuing a plume of flame that spat from her palm and rose into the dry air, a mushroom of infrared radiation carrying entropy in its wake, illuminating for a moment flashes of black furred flesh teasing the light.
“Stay back. Don’t you come near me. I am heat, and light, and life. You are cold, and darkness, and death. You fear me - Sonora - you fear me.” She sought to resolve details of the form behind the fire, but all she saw was vague movement and no shape as it circled her, leaping from shadow to shadow.
It felt no fear. Fire could hurt it, flames could scorch its flesh, but it could kill its rival before its rival could burn it. It feared fire. It did not fear this flaming form who so proudly thought it could keep it at bay.
Yet something did keep it from leaping forward to eviscerate that metal neck. That arched sheath of vertebrae, chromed, silvered, perfect. If it moved this way, it could see its own reflection in the unmarred gloss. Necks - it had torn apart so many others but yet this one was different, not only familiar from that which was outside - another emotion crystallized from a heart used only for the hunt for countless generation and it burned, just like an inner fire, but one that didn’t hurt.
It put that from its mind. Perhaps it could eviscerate her later. But this one was brave. Too brave. The courage of those utterly without the fear that stopped them from, say, banzai charges.
All the soldiers who learned that banzai charges didn’t work died in banzai charges.
“The Outsider said we could leave when one of us...ceased.” Rachel looked around, taking in the cessation all around them. “Who are you?”
<font color="#314248">”the monster”
“You are Sonora.”
A cultured voice, of some long-dead society woman, came from somewhere in the shadows. Its source lithely slid from velvet dark to velvet dark, moving about, surrounding its prey, “For my part, I don’t think such ghastly apparitions exist.”
“You exist...The Outsider brought you...it...it said-” An arc of electricity jetted from her right palm as the little sun hiccuped, its output spasming, the flare now on its last dregs. “No! No no no no no!”
“Lady Betchey, whatever is the matter? You look as if you’ve seen a ghosaaaarrrrrgghhhh” The woman’s voice ended in a long low gristled scream, intermingled with the living screech of the presumed Lady Betchey; which in turn terminated in loving surround-sound detail. It was such a shame to start a quote and not follow it to its conclusion.
The stink of death in the air: how could she not have noticed it before? They were dead, they were all dead, she killed them, like - “no no no” - like she killed everyone in the facility but they had used her, treated her like a machine! Everyone had to pay they should all burn, they should all burn she had to get away, she couldn’t look at the bodies anymore she couldn’t
She wanted to crawl into a hole and hide until everything was just a bad memory - but the sound of gunfire in the air, far away, close by, masked by the licking of hungry flames - it would never be a bad memory it would never stop they would never get away-
With a touch, an effort of will, the ground crystallized and evaporated under an onslaught of heat and flame, it moved out of the way as Rachel dug her way into the ground, escapism at its best; she was so sorry so sorry she’d bury some of these she’d do right she’d stop cations spurting from a sun winding down...
Her plan hit a snag, however, when her makeshift grave opened up into a tunnel and she fell through with a heavy clunk.</font>
A shadow in the crook of ever-enroaching fire looked around, at the blaze closing in, and leapt after her.
And in Malhaven, the Goddess of Subterfuge felt Her Temple’s Labyrinth invaded. It was impossible to read emotion in the set of Her thin lips and in the dark glass of Her eyes, but her footfalls were dangerously light as she swept from the meeting hall of the gods.
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So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
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Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime