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a lil intro for moon-and-seraph's words into potions event this march! definitely check it out if you can; they've put so much work into making such a cute, motivating challenge for us!
WILT AND BLOOM .
GENRE・Dark fantasy
WARNINGS・Body horror and plant-related body horror, mild gore, physical/emotional abuse, violence, torture, nonconsensual experimentation, abductions/kidnapping.
SUMMARY・Sworn to serve the Blooming Court and its fickle queen, Alejandro has resigned himself to the cruelty of the fae and their patronage contracts—binding agreements drawn in blood, and in the flowers that sprout from his bones. But everything changes when his apprentice is cursed to die.
A cursed mage only adds fuel to the fires that slumber behind the pageantry of the Ascendancy. Treachery undercuts the celebrations like the tightening of a noose: the Blooming Queen and her Withering half-sister have been battling for centuries, the Flowering Lord is as ruthless of a patron as he is a lover, and a deadly new enemy has emerged from the underbelly of the world, Corrupted with the bloody incandescence of the stars. Alejandro and Genevieve are merely pawns as the embers of an ancient war flare back to life, and as Genevieve grows weaker, Alejandro must fan those embers into a blaze, betraying everything he knows to save her.
The stars are awakening for the first time since the Storm. In the end, it will come down to Alejandro to fight a battle between the forces of life and death and wilt and bloom: a battle that may just be the end of the world as he knows it.
[aesthetics + court info under the cut]
COLOR PALETTE .
The Blooming Queen’s hair as it is when the story starts: a rotting, brown-sweetened gold, like a bruised persimmon, pale orange undertones mottled with the hues of overripe peach flesh.
All the reds of an autumn forest, but especially the deep, bloody reds that certain trees produce—crimson with a cool tinge to it, a violet-indigo like shadows blooming at twilight.
The dry, wilted brown of fallen leaves; the papery chestnut of dying grass; the goldenrod that adorns fields in sways and swirls until first frost.
Dusk-light that pours like honey, a sighed warmth that pools into all the places where you have gone hollow.
The depthless dark of the Withering Queen’s eyes, like earth black with everything once-bloomed and dying; the burnished gleam of the wilt-prince’s eyes, dark like his mother’s until the light hits right. Then, they’re veined in the softness of mercy.
The orange ember-brilliance of Tselvya’s flames, of Genevieve’s hair, of chrysanthemums and marigolds throwing flamboyant blooms into the slow subside of midsummer sunshine.
THE BLOOMING COURT .
Butterflies and moths and beetles have domain over this land, where the flowers are bright and the berries overripe, sweet and heady and repugnant. The Blooming Queen dotes upon them, and they grow larger than they have any right to be.
The fae sworn to the blossom-queen adorn themselves in red, red jewels and red flowers and red life, carnage bloodied down the tips of sharp teeth and talon-pointed nails. They pluck the eyeballs out of freshly slaughtered game and feast on fruit bruised to the point of bursting, and all the flowers they touch bloom big and bright and radiant, incandescent—almost frighteningly alive.
Death will always be much too slow to come, here where life rots to the very core.
THE WITHERING THRONE .
The wilt-queen rules from a throne of bones and moonflowers, and her flesh is so brittle that she appears to be no more than a dead body propped up in a borrowed imitation of life. A single touch of her finger leaves spiderwebs of pale mold behind, dozens of white moths fluttering about her shoulders and settling atop the crown of fresh roses adorning her hair. As the moon rises and falls and rises again, the moths drop all around her, and the roses lose their bright sweetness, rotting into a slow, violet-brown mass, until the Withering Queen is draped in nothing but corpses.
The wilt-queen offers her white-clad followers all manner of delicacies over the course of their midnight banquets, and she eagerly partakes in the festivities herself, her dainty corpse-mouth red with the hearts of small, dead creatures. She caresses bony fingers—spindly like the stems of wilted flowers—down the edges of dewy blossoms and trapped prey animals before she drains all the life out of them, her face going from dead-eyed translucence to pink and flushed in the space between one exhale and the next.
Birds and insects and rodents die at the hands of the Withering Throne, laid to rest in the soil, and the Withering Queen feasts. She feasts.
for @flashfictionfridayofficial ‘across a field’! takes place during a fight/chase scene :D full text under the cut.
The forest ahead of them is drenched in late afternoon sunshine, vivid and vibrant and red—like a new scar, a fresh wound, colored with the hues of slaughter. He watches the agents disappear between the leaves; as if they’re being drowned, swallowed up in a sea of carnage.
Elias signals for them to leave, and they plunge into the trees. They keep pace with Isabella, because she’s a human mage and therefore isn’t afforded the enhanced speed and stamina he and Elias can draw from. Alejandro follows her lead, and it isn’t too long before his eyes can pick out the blur of the vampire’s figure between the branches, a black silhouette racing steadily away from them.
If they can see the vampire, the vampire can see them too. All the more reason to get this over with as quickly as they can. He inhales, focusing on the smell of autumn-sweet air and copper-tinged rot, the tangled maze of roots and brambles underfoot, the dry rustle of foliage as they whip past crimson-orange leaves. The life-essence of the forest and all that lies within is a low thrum scraped along his senses and echoing at the edge of his hearing, eclipsed by the beat of his heart in his ears. His hands flex and close around nothing: anticipation and urgency in equal measure, the first sparks of it simmering over his palms.
They burst out of a dense knot of brush, only to find that they’ve lost sight of the vampire. “Keep going,” Elias hisses, nostrils twitching, and Alejandro doesn’t object—he can still smell her too, the faint scent of dead flowers and rotted blood floating in the gaps between the leaves.
They press on. Alejandro’s footfalls are nimble and sure as he dodges thorny bushes and felled tree trunks. Branches threaten to snag at his hair and clothes, and he avoids them as best as he can, weaving around the gnarled ends that reach out like claws. The world narrows down to his breathing, the expansion and contraction of his lungs and chest, and his pulse seems to pound more loudly as they get closer—like the first muted rumbles of thunder gathering into a storm.
The forest ends a few minutes later. The sky spills down in light, and a vast field spreads out in front of them, brilliant with the gold of dying grass. The vampire is standing in the middle of the field, and Alejandro can pick out the boy’s unconscious form in her arms. It’s clear why she isn’t running: OMS agents are fanned out in a semicircle at the other end of the field, blocking her escape back toward the trees and roadway.
A flicker of movement, then—
The vampire jags to the left. “Get down!” Isabella shouts.
The chill of frost sharpens against his senses. Magic lances out from Isabella’s hands, ice-spears streaking toward the vampire with an almost preternatural accuracy.
Alejandro doesn’t stop to think. He dives for the grass, watching the boy in the vampire’s arms drop at the same time he does. Raw magic rips above him in a crash of pressurized power.
The magic is—a silver mountain, a tsunami, enormous, lightning smashing into impact point and erupting like a volcano. It surges over him and floods his senses and roars into oblivion, sucking all the air away and devouring the oxygen down to suffocation. Alejandro tumbles over the grass and slams himself into the dirt. The wave of magic flies overhead in a scream of pure energy—the concussive force of a bomb compressed into a single blast.
The magic collides into the ground behind him. The earth heaves, and his vision lights up in red. “Elias!” Alejandro calls blindly, scrabbling at the grass as he tries to see past the ringing in his ears and the throbbing in his head. There’s a meteor shower raining behind his eyelids, crushing him apart—a dead weight bashing his sternum with every gasp.
What the hell was that? The explosion of energy leaves him reeling, his magical senses shredded all at once, sliced and slashed and shattered like flesh flayed open to expose nerve endings. He coughs, chest heaving as the vampire’s magic pours down his lungs and fills his nostrils. It’s overwhelming, all-consuming, too much, choking out his defenses like the bludgeon of a typhoon against a single ember.
“Alejandro!”
He lifts his head at the sound of Elias’s voice, eyes swerving wildly. “Over here!”
The red swimming through his vision clears enough for him to pick out Elias’s face some ten feet away. He watches the agent’s mouth spasm, his face contorting beneath the strain of the magic, and wonders if this is what it feels like when humans drown, when the weight of the water above crushes until their ribs give out.
He coughs again. His head is still throbbing, heart pounding pounding pounding, and there’s no time. He stays down and zeroes in on where the vampire is preparing to launch another blast. She’s blonde, he realizes as more magic—not his own—prickles over his senses in warning. She’s blonde. Wearing all black, and huge sunglasses that obscure her face.
The field smells like rot and viscera, like a festering wound going rancid. Alejandro spits out a stream of his own blood, from where his pointed canines cut into his lip. The pain barely registers. His mouth burns sour, tasting of bile. No time.