incoming

[arcade405]

Finnegan had tried to explain to Amy and Atara over a crowded dinner the other night; every object had a vibrational frequency, and Amy said yes I think I know about that, and Finnegan explained how there was also an existential frequency, and one could cause a substance to oscillate between its past and future states. Therefore to rewet dry cement, or reheat cooled asphalt, one could use a spell that would oscillate the object back to its past state. Amy had asked, could it oscillate cement too far to the point it became a bag of dry powder again? And Finnegan had reached for some potatoes and said ideally the amplitude would never peak that far, however if it did you would not only end up with the pile of dry powder but also the two gallons or so of water needed to mix it, separated into two ingredients, and at the point it was more likely to tip the momentum out of oscillation and instead in only one direction towards further disassembling the water into its past as fog or dew or rain and the cement into shale and limestone and what-have-you. Once the material reverts to its individual parts, you’re usually fucked, because now each of those parts has its own frequency. Thankfully the future of cement is so long and constant that you have to oscillate very hard to reach the peak amplitude of completely crumbled ruins. So you mean this spell is basically time travel? No, because once the spell is over the object will always revert to its resting state; the present. The trick was holding the spell when it reached the wet stage, or whatever was the most malleable time period for the resource you were manipulating, and to keep it there until you could let it go to settle back into the resting phase. It sounds like a lot of moving parts to make this spell work. Oh, yes! Yes, it’s very complicated. But there’s not a lot of resources where we’re from. The ancient rule of magic; reduce, reuse, recycle. -Arcade 405, NJP

[arcade405]

“If you’re really good you don’t sink at all. If god chooses you, you just walk across the top like it’s frozen solid, and you get to skip all that suffering and penance at the bottom.” “And then what?” “I guess god does whatever it planned to do with you.” -Arcade 405, NJP

[croc-odette]

"Reality could wait until dawn. Sometimes the mountain that has loomed over you for so long is what shades you in the valley. Sometimes the night falls on you like a shield and not a blade. Sometimes the clouds that stand in front of the moon understand you better than the moon. The body across from her, perhaps beloved or still a stranger until the next life, stirred and shifted, sighing but not yet awake."

-Arcade 405, NJP

[arcade405]

"How did she sign believe? She remembered Cherry’s hands. It was a combination of think and marry. Thinking had never done her any good. Marrying had never done her any good. Except, okay, that wasn’t true. They’d both saved and doomed her, but mostly saved her. She brought her index finger down from her forehead and into an invisible second palm she didn’t have.  “I don’t believe you."" -Arcade 405, NJP

[croc-odette]

atara

[croc-odette]

atoll

[arcade405]

There is certainly something deeply, immediately wrong about any heaven reliant on the existence of any hell. And all heavens, no matter how pleasing, have something to do with all hells. There is no world unconnected to any other world. -Arcade 405, NJP

[arcade405]

All she had to do in this moment was sleep. Something snored from an armchair. Someone was lying near her, their bodies spaced apart like mountains with a valley between, enough space for a river or a freeway to pass through, but all she had to do was reach across and it wouldn’t be so far at all. The space between was necessary, to create the two mountains, to create the valley. In order to love someone there has to remain some part of them you can never touch or know or understand or be; or else you’d just be loving yourself. There has to be a time and space between each other that one attempts, however futile, to cross. -Arcade 405, NJP

[arcade405]

"A

ship fell out of heaven from the dark sea.

A comet became a box, the crew was free.

The box became a coffin, the crew had fled,

The coffin rattled and jumped–

I was not dead.

The seeds of two worlds blew in like dust,

and turned on the lights

in these empty houses of mine–

greed, flame, torment,

contagion, terror, pride, 

murder, the dead, 

mischief, the exile.

And for a long time,

all worshiped I who was alive.

But with no moon left to wane

daylight wore on in agony,

and the knight on its red horse came

beyond an Earthly

         shaking pain

         to me."

-Arcade 405

[arcade405]

"She could sense him trying to bite her, a glimpse of his open mouth as close and looming as a cave as he began to sit up. His canines shone like pearls. She clutched at his chin with thrilling strength and pushed it back, hard. Her other hand scattered itself wherever it needed to be to keep him pinned to the floor. Whenever his hand or arm came near her she would bite at it, and when they were not near she would bite at the closest thing she could find, which might be his neck or his shoulder. Whenever her teeth clicked against clavicle or the knob of his wrist bone, she scraped at it automatically as if cleaning the meat off a rib. She understood what it meant to be frenzied– to have one course of action and to take it all the way in a straight, accelerating line like a car with a brick on the gas. She felt no desire to kill, no desire to eat, no desire to win. These were all far too cerebral. She only knew the physical urge to bite, borne from the burning-comet desire to survive. The sparrow was overcome with the idea to peck the eagle to death. Pain was plowed into her back, dull where he managed to hit her over and over again, sharp where he clawed at her in stripes before she could clack her teeth at his arm until it fell away, but she kept her hand on his jaw as unyielding as a mountain pinning the earth into space." -Arcade 405

[croc-odette]

amy and adrianna // nan

[arcade405]

It failed to affect Adrianna. She sought out the humble tulip poplar and the earnest serviceberry and they meant nothing. Nothing in the white and yellow roses, nothing in the stretch of clouds over the sky like a cape on the sun as it fell in every color. The end of the street was melancholy but without real sentiment, and so it only seemed faintly pathetic. There were no lights in any windows, except for the ones she had forgotten to turn off, wasting energy room by room by room. The first star of the night was rising unseen behind her. There was a beauty to the world that no longer reached her. -Arcade 405

[arcade405]

In sleep, Adrianna saw the red mountain. A green halo hung over it, flat and massive like the ring of a planet. The mountain was steep, and pieces of it periodically slid down, but like a fountain or volcano it replenished its height by constantly pushing out new material from the peak. She saw it from a great distance but also in complete detail, and could have described any of its rocks or arteries as if she was looking through a telescope. Even from where she stood, high on a plateau, she could smell how terrible it was. It hurt the back of her throat to breathe the same air. She wondered if it was the expelled organ of some underground giant, pumping air or waste or blood. The moon was behind her. -Arcade 405

[arcade405]

No other knight had a reputation of making themselves quite so available to both vices, even if the church automatically pardoned them all. Her greenery had worn off after the first few parties, once she had begun to suspect the reason she was invited out more than any other knight was because she could always be counted on as something to judge or indulge in. Like a great juggler, like a loyal hound, like an airheaded bimbo, she did it all! She would often end the night with one of these women, or with their adult children or husbands or fathers, because if not with them, then who? And didn’t it almost feel like winning to be desired by the same people who had laughed at her the very same day? -Arcade 405

[croc-odette]

-Arcade 405

[image ID: white text on black background.

I swore to love the sun, though it burns

I swore to love the sea, though it churns

Foam and blood and flesh and wood–

On dry land but if I could

In the tower, I'd be good

I'd never swear an oath to god, to flea

As long as they swore none to me. end ID]

[arcade405]

Loneliness was like any other organ; one could live with it inside and out of sight all their lives and avoid ever learning the size of it. How big is your large intestine really, your liver, your kidney, and you might contract and stretch your fingers until it seemed right, and say, a little foolishly, I don’t know, this big? What does it do? It filters things, I think. And you might accidentally think without warning, how lonely am I, really? How big is my loneliness, and what has it been doing inside me? Could it at least have a purpose? And you could sit at a stranger’s kitchen table alone and think of something else. -Arcade 405

[arcade405]

Adrianna wakes up to find her isolated suburb completely abandoned, while in another world the exiled knight Atara enters a ruin waiting in the wasteland. The shapeshifter Atoll complicates matters by dragging both of them into a war of succession; the lords of an underground labyrinth are competing to find out who will replace their dying god. Domesticity and brutality alternate and eventually blur together, and three people desperate to escape their pasts are forced to grapple with the fact that there is no way out except through.

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