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713 POSTS
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ʡ 45
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Genderless
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63 Cycles
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Kaiju
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bunny
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May 11 2021, 12:31 AM
(This post was last modified: May 11 2021, 12:46 AM by Orthoclase-Alpha.)
MAGICKA LEVEL 100%
RESTORED TO 100%
Content Warning
This thread contains sensitive material:
A garnet lay amid the sand.
A garnet so small and so polished-smooth that it could have been mistaken for being the remnant of something long-dead, waiting to see another torturous existence called being alive. Pilfered and squirreled away in these collapsing alcoves and dune-filled atriums. It would be a good place to hide things, this Warren—settled into its solitude with nary a Gembound to disturb it. Unrelenting wind and sweltering heat drove any reasonable beast away. Just beyond it was a wild blue sky, and beneath was a brutal expanse.
Only ghosts haunted these grounds, now.
Dim eyes slid off and away from the chrysalis, situated at the heart of the Warren. Their owner paid little mind to the shards interspersed here and there. It hardly sniffed the air past the initial, fruitless cant of a head. Any scent of living had long been purged, replaced by cobwebs and a never-ending stream of sand from outside (and that breeze swept too high, interestingly, to do anything for the uneven set of footprints as the apparent ghost stumbled in.)
Saliva foamed at the corners of the orthoclase's mouth as it just… stood there. Lost in tracing the curvature of a formative ground it could barely recall. The memory slipped through its conscience as sand did through its claws, as Oil from its framework of a decaying body. A muddy haze lay where there should have been at least an inkling of kindness, before a time where it'd sunk its teeth in and torn a hole through the foundation; where it'd formed a grand divide between itself and those that it had come saddled with. It knew the tang of blood, the faint feeling of it bleeding hot hot HOT down its fractured skull and all its vile vulnerabilities crawling out, but it did not know of clutchmates nestling into its mane of quills as a clownfish did in an anemone.
It hobbled toward the largest of the dens scratched into the earth, and even still, it was hardly large enough to suit it. A miasma of scent should have been, but there was nothing. A year had passed, it should have known, but—
Time. Time. It was a relentless thing. The orthoclase didn't contemplate time because it didn't know time. Days smeared together. A palette knife scraped the weeks into disorderly piles. New memories jostled for a spot all the same as the old. They danced around, more often than not falling into the wrong places. Almost always the wrong places. Except for the new. Always except for the new. The new and the panicked. They burned hot—a brand always hovering just above its thigh, a mantra sung over and over again.
Hooked claws scraped at the soft stone of the old den's edges.
The cat's voice hammered in its eardrums. A death knell. A funeral dirge before the blow was even struck. It wasn't ready yet. It wasn't ready. It could not look the prospect of an end and go into it swinging, biting, snarling, hissing—
Its frantic pace slowed with alarming quickness.
—so, it would hide, and it would go… home? And was this it? The closest approximation to it? A place of birth and formation? Where it'd first conceptualized all that it was and promptly shunted it aside; where it'd been str— where it had conquered and eaten ground? Reigned superior in nearly every regard and climbed ranks that may have taken centuries? Witnessed the recreation of a Master and his rise to the top? Where it barely remembered a single thing relevant to any part of its childhood because it never did find that sweet spot of repression and coping?
It was too exhausted to acknowledge how terrible following this impulse was, as it crammed itself into the claustrophobic little den and squirmed so that its head sat in the rather short tunnel from it to the Warren at large. Faced with death, and it ran to home. Ran to home to cower and hide and—
It should've been better. It was better, and now—
Putrescent eyes shut tight as soon as they began to burn, but it was too late to stop the onslaught of fire down its cheeks. The orthoclase contorted to tuck its chin against its chest, but it was futile. Quills rattled and its entire body shivered in a space just too small for it; but, it wouldn't move from it. Here was fine.
Here, no one but that garnet could witness as its throat rubbed itself raw with cotton and gasping sobs.
As it lay twisted and mangled and had barely enough there to even mull over what it believed were its last few days.
As it fell into a pitch-black, dreamless sleep, undisturbed by even the world's ending around it.
As its stomach twisted and gnarled over itself, self-cannibalizing for not the first time.
As it lay there less than halfway to alive—shaking with terror and starvation—and alone.
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