l'hymne noire.

𝑙'ℎ𝑦𝑚𝑛𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒 𝑒𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑦𝑔𝑛𝑒𝑠 𝑑𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡.

[hymnoire]

HYMNOIRE ⸻ GAYANE and KAELEENA and the sisterhood of misericorde, spiritual daughters of Libitina, raised at the Swans of Misericorde, an orphanage of dangerous religious beliefs with the goal of raising daughters to infiltrate the powerful families of tomorrow and bend the world to a superior will. a canvas of crimes, cults, revenge, transhumanism, mutants, dimension crossing, time travel and a rising war between humans and the Sisterhood of Miséricorde. 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐞 𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐭, 𝐩𝐨𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐦𝐢𝐝𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫.

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⁰¹ 𝐑𝐔𝐋𝐄𝐒. ⁰² 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐃. ⁰³ 𝐋𝐈𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐑𝐘. ⁰⁴ 𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐋. ⁰⁵ 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐒. ⁰⁶ 𝐖𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓. ⁰⁷ 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑.

[hymnoire]

Hey, I know you don't mention it in your inspirations, but some of the names and details seem very familiar to me. Libitina and Elyssa, a religious cult, transhumanism...

Are you, by any chance, a fan of Doki Doki Literature Club?

HI ANON. I resurrect for this ask, I am Happy someone sees eye to eye with me on this one, yes, I love Doki Doki Literature Club to the death, always wanted to rp something related to it but my roleplay style was never too compatible with the DDLC rp community on tumblr so I just made secret references to it in my lores, mostly for myself hahaha but you are right :)

[hymnoire]

"I am aware Mother Supreme Libitina has summoned you, Father. It is an honor, truly, to be in the presence of a man of your standing. My sisters are delighted by your stay, as well, we cherish every guest we ever get to welcome here at the Church of Misericorde." Kaeleena’s voice is its usual soft honey, sweet. Indeed, Mother Libitina had requested a Priest ( @crue11 ) , for her. A desperate measure, perhaps, or a final test. With Kaeleena, it was always a gamble : the intervention might heal her… or it might awaken something far worse. "But I must ask," she continues, her gaze locking with his. "For you and I to have to spend all this time together... Have I been so bad, Father?"

[hymnoire]

Sometimes Kaeleena wonders if Relta likes her as much as she likes Relta. Well. They are two women of excellency, but with vastly different reputations. Kaeleena, Dr. Lockwood, is known to be one of the best, if not the best, in her field. Someone other doctors seek out for advice, though always with caution. Her presence is cold, exacting. Some say the genius in her has eaten her soul out, made her cruel. She’s aware of that and usually smiles a little wider, which makes her smiles even more chilling. Kaeleena often comes down from her neurosurgery ward to visit Relta's. Their conversations, or rather, their occasional collaborations around coffee, are typically the type of intellectual friction Kaeleena openly savors : it’s challenging. They trade theories, dissect cases, press each other’s thinking beyond the bounds of specialty. Yes it’s : Enriching. But if she’s honest, perhaps it’s not all the cases she finds interesting, perhaps it’s Relta herself that catches her attention the most.  To lack empathy as a doctor is more common than people like to admit. Many of the best are performers, efficient and brilliant, who get results. Some don’t see people in pain but puzzles, corpses, broken systems to fix. It is ethically debatable but someone like Kaeleena would say it’s delusional to think it’s unusual - being like that herself. Still, Relta is not made of that cloth, the woman is sovereign in her compassion, regal in her care. She tends to her patients like a queen would her subjects : not for power, not for praise but because she truly cares. And Kaeleena... Kaeleena mimics emotions when she must, slips into empathy like a well-tailored coat when comforting grieving families. She watches Relta care as if it costs her nothing. As if it is simply who she is. And part of Kaeleena wants to understand that. Part of her wants to touch that warm fire. “Of course,” Kaeleena answers, softly, as Relta insists again that she will not give up on her patient. Kaeleena’s tone is calm, perfectly even but her eyes are animated with curiosity as her eyes never leave Relta’s every facial expression, while her smile, that ever-thin, enigmatic thing, lingers like a scalpel resting just above flesh and ready to cut. They’ve spoken about similar cases before and Kaeleena knows the limitations : the allergies to NSAIDs and opioids, the way the patient’s system is folding in on itself. She tilts her head slightly and her voice, as always, is smooth when she speaks.

“How about...” She leans closer, her gaze drifting to the chart over Relta’s shoulder. “Low-dose ketamine, in controlled pulses. NMDA antagonism could blunt the pain without triggering the usual pathways. Pair it with a mild alpha-2 agonist to suppress the sympathetic nervous response and it might give their system a chance to reset.” Then she pauses, catching on the word magic that Relta had spoken before. Ah, magic. Don’t they all wish for a piece of it?  “Would you use it?” Kaeleena asks as her eyes narrow slowly, serpentine. “If you had a magic wand. Would you really use it to save every single life placed in the palm of your hands?” The answer, of course, is yes. And yet. Her gaze lingers, a shade darker now, and something intimate sits in her voice. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder… ” she murmurs, eyes steady on Relta’s, “if pain isn’t more than an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience to silence? I don’t always see it as something to overcome but sometimes… As a signal. Perhaps easing it too quickly keeps all of our eyes closed on something important. Perhaps suffering is sacred.” She lets the word fall. Yes, Sacred. “Perhaps a patient destined to die shouldn’t be interfered with either. Not always. Is it playing God to save at all cost or is it playing God to decide not to cure? ” She says it with a glint of belief, calm and absolute. It contradicts the very thing they swore to uphold : the Hypocrate oath. And yet here she is, questioning it, in front of someone who wears that oath like a crown.

[hymnoire]

They connect, finally, and they do, deeply. In that moment, Kaeleena feels something old and ancient, wordless and unique, linking their souls. At first, his hand finds her wrist in panic, as if all he wanted was to reject her. She resists, yet with calm. Now she believes it was all meant to happen this way; she believes her body already knew the choreography of their encounter, as if it had all happened before. And then, as if surrendering to something deeper than thought, he releases her wrist and gently draws her hand toward his chest. Was it supposed to happen this way? Was it written before they were ever born? Her palm meets the heat of the fabric over his chest, the wild beat of his heart just beneath the surface, beating out of rhythm, erratic. She can feel the despair inside him, the storm just beneath the skin, and oddly, she welcomes it. There is a wilderness in him, raw and restless, a fury shaped by pain, and something in her responds to it, not with fear, but with recognition. She is calm where he is wild, quiet where he burns, but they are the same: two pieces of a cursed whole. His heartbeat stumbles, hers lags behind. And then, like breath catching up with breath, their rhythms begin to shift. Beat by beat, they begin to align. In the Lockwood family, Kaeleena has always been the strange one, the quiet flame. While her sisters competed for power, for praise, for the favor of their mother’s cold gaze or their father’s silent approval, she was set apart. She was not the oldest, but she was the only one assigned to someone like Xero, a soul so powerful, so fractured, so barely contained, that the very act of bonding him to anyone else would have ended in ruin. The parents knew : only Kaeleena could reach him, only she could carry what he is without breaking. With him, her potential awakens too, with him, she becomes what she was always meant to be: not just human. Crafted. Sharpened. Something born to stand just above the rest. He speaks, low and soft, and the words don’t just reach her ears. They seem to resonate somewhere far deeper. “Yes, you hear it. You feel it. We are one.” He has been taught obedience, groomed through agony to kneel when commanded. But Kaeleena doesn’t know this yet, she doesn’t remember, either, that she too was shaped through pain, through silence, through hours and hours of being made into something worthy of the Lockwood name. “You will obey me,” she says, not cruelly, but with quiet certainty. “But I will honor your obedience. I will treat your submission not as weakness, but as a gift and the beauty of our bond.” She thinks of her sister Cressida, the firstborn, the one who wears her authority like a blade, the one who sees power only as something to dominate, to control. Cressida’s bond with her familiar has always been one of control. Kaeleena never wanted that. What she wants is something else : something rarer. She wants a partner, not a pet. She believes that true strength lies not in how much you take, but in how much you give back. That power, to be real, must be fair. Xero lowers his head, not because he is afraid, but because he chooses to. There is still so much to do. So much unknown waiting for them. But for now, this is enough.

“We need to return to the family estate,” she says. “Mother and Father are expecting us, you should know. You’ll live with us now, live with me. Tonight has been heavy for both of us I believe… It must be best if you get to meet the rest of the family, along with their bonded ones, tomorrow. But tonight... tonight belongs to us. We'll eat, rest, and sleep beneath clean sheets. Would you like that?” She looks at him once more, her eyes soft, and a small smile rises to her lips as she extends her arm for him to catch it. They’re going in, together.

[hymnoire]

Kaeleena watches him with the kind of stillness that’s almost inhuman. Inhuman, human, machine, or god? She doesn’t blink, she doesn’t move, she just watches with those obscene brown eyes of hers, eyes that don’t reflect light so much as they devour it.  “Indifferent.” She repeats the word, every single syllable rolling off her serpent tongue, as if it’s something rare, still warm in her palm from the tree. Her fingers rest lightly against her lower lip. She leans back into the curve of her leather chair, dissecting him with something between malice, reverence and obsession. Kaeleena has been with Project Titanomachy - Titan for friends - since the beginning of Phase Three. Top of her class, recruited before she defended her second thesis. Her name passed from one gloved hand to another in red-stamped folders, circled in ink, annotated with words like : prodigy, promising, unflinching. She didn’t fight for this place no, she was born with it and Professor Hamsmith, the puppetmaster of the entire operation, had known that for a long time. But he also knew something else, that she needed to be watched as he added his own personal note :  cruel, unstable, personality disorder. As promising as she was threatening. In the end, the interns like Kaeleena, to Professor Hamsmith also were treated like prototypes, observed, but none of them has truly grasped on that yet, convinced only the agents were the only rats in the maze. “Mild camaraderie among agents you say,” she echoes now, tilting her head slightly, the corners of her mouth not quite smiling. “Mm. I would have guessed.” She speaks without needing to explain the design, it’s built into every line of protocol : the agents emotional responses and ability to connect haven’t been eliminated entirely. That would defeat the purpose right? A dull knife can’t make clean cuts. No, the empathy’s been sanded down just enough : to distinguish ally from enemy, asset from threat but to obey orders and kill each other if told.  “In a way,” she murmurs, “the interconnection between the agents non-so-surprisingly reflects the ones between us, your handlers. There’s also mild camaraderie among us and so, I as well engage when necessary.” She mirrors his words, like pressing a fingerprint into wet plaster. She knows Clementia like other handlers wouldn’t share any detail of their routines, nor their thoughts with their assigned Agent but Kaeleena wants something different, a connection. “Would you say you and I should only engage when necessary?”

Yes, the mirroring is accurate. Most of the selected interns had been selected for their absence of reflexive empathy. As young doctors, they were encouraged to walk past trauma like it was furniture, also rare were the ones who weren’t naturally born this way. Screams through the corridor? Ignore them. Blood soaking through surgical tarps? Keep moving. Bodies dragged past the mess hall? Eat faster. They were these cold, elegant things in white coats, future neurosurgeons for classified warfare meant to serve military purposes without sentiment. But Kaeleena? Kaeleena was not like them and found every single one of them incredibly boring. She was not insensitive, she was hyper-sensitive. The screams? They thrilled her. The blood? Fascinated her. The future such an ambitious project could birth? Aroused her. She remembers watching Agent 24 seize for thirty-seven minutes when the neural-lattice refused to integrate. It had been, honestly, entertaining. Agent 16 had wept blood when his occipital cortex misfired : she’d paused her note-taking just to watch his tears drip down his hospital gown. None of these eliminated products were failures to her, they were keys, keys to something greater and she would have cherished every one of them if the Professor didn’t order to chemically terminate them. And then, there was him : Agent 7 with this something divine about him. She saw him before the steroids and the combat neuromaps. He moved differently, even unaltered, almost ike someone had already done the breaking long before Titan touched him. She watched his first seventy-two hours post-integration twelve times. On the thirteenth, she muted the sound as she wanted to see what silence looked like on him. A machine waiting for calibration. That moment had branded itself across her, seared into her hippocampus like something she cherishes. “I’ve watched everything,” she says now, voice softer. “I’ve memorized the heat maps of your neural activity under live combat stimuli. The spike in dopamine when you're within three feet of an armed threat. The moment your body rejects exhaustion and replaces it with instinct.” She smiles. Small. Chilling. “Your hippocampus restructured itself during week two. Your reflex arc latency is faster than any previous subject. Your muscle density climbed twelve percent in thirty-one days.” A pause. “And yet… ” Her eyes narrow like the reptile she is. “You have been designed to remain indifferent to the fact that you are our best element. You are indifferent to the fact you might…”  She leans forward now, elbows on the desk, spine a perfect line of control. The posture of a surgeon but the eyes of a demon. “Become a God.” A pause. A thought. The agents should not know their own value, it's dangerous for them to have egos or any self perception but all Kaeleena wants is to play around that. Who is the God when one truly thinks about it? Many would say The Handler. “Professor Hamsmith designed you,” she continues. “Yes. I know the architecture of your mind map was pre-approved. But I’ve seen the hidden gaps. I do have… suggestions, refinements. And now, being your handler, I can apply them. We can go furthur.” If her tongue could roll over her lower lip out of delight to match the ever mania in her eyes, it would. “Will you try and kill me, when you become it...

...a God?”

[katgecs]

Christophe Jacrot, from White Iceland

edited by me

[anyataylorjoy]

EMMA 2020, dir. Autumn de Wilde

[filmreveries]

The Crow (1994) dir. Alex Proyas

[hymnoire]

Gaya watched the illusion fade, piece by piece, until the real presence beneath Kairo’s mask emerged. The silver hair. These powerful eyes of hers. And in that moment, something shifted, small, but deeply felt. Respect. Intimidation, as well. Gaya is fierce and she stands strong but truly, she feels intimidated by what Kairo might be able to do, as if she right now truly realizes what it is to Not be Human. To be Human for Gaya is a pride but also a weakness. Being human means she wouldn't even be able to pull up a fight, yes, at the end of the day, humans are known to be cruel but they are weak. “I appreciate that,” Gaya said quietly, her voice stripped of performance now. “Your words. And, to be believed.” She let silence settle for a breath. “I’m not asking for a miracle, but the simple fact you say you witnesses impossible situations somehow, fuels my faith.” she continued, eyes steady on Kairo’s now-revealed form, captivated. “I know what indoctrination does, you are right. I’ve lived it. It rewrites you slowly, like rot beneath the skin. You don’t see it until it’s part of your foundation. And by then... tearing it out means tearing yourself apart too.” She looked down briefly, fingers curling against one another in her lap. Her posture was composed, but her voice held the quiet tremor of memory. Gaya has been one of the girls she's trying to rescue now, she has been part of the experiment when she was a child but escaped before being turned into a mutant like they all have been now. Growing up with that trauma, that scar, it broke up but built her as well.

“These girls, they were trained not just to obey, but to believe. To love the pain, to crave the power. And my sister… she’s brilliant. She was always brilliant. But brilliance without limits becomes tyranny dressed in logic. She doesn’t think she’s doing harm. She thinks she’s saving the world while sculpting it in her image. Which is ironic since, she's about to destroy it.” Her eyes lifted again, sharper now. “Kaeleena is turning them all into weapons. And once they're positioned, they’ll be impossible to reach. They’ll smile in boardrooms, in embassies, in military halls and they will use their hypnosis to control the world, to slowly undo all executive power in place and plunge us all into a chaos, an apocalypse. They think they’re making history, and maybe they are. But it won’t be ours anymore. We, simple humans, will extinct in aproximatively 10 years from now and after one last War, after they're done with us, after they're more powerful than ever, they will come for you and your people. I can predict that. ” She reached over and retrieved the tablet again, pulled up another screen. “This is all I have,” she said. “Names. Faces. Patterns. Some of them are already too far gone. But others... others might still feel the pull of what we once were. Human. Not superior. Not divine. Just us.” She leaned forward now, her tone cooling to something firmer. “I often fantasize about getting inside that House of Horrors again, believing I might be able to make it all stop without using force. I’ve spent my life playing by systems. Government. Protocol. Sadly, this will require something else than my poor convincing skills...” Her gaze locked onto Kairo’s. “Do I have to kill them?" The question is bold, almost cruel. To someone like Kairo who seems to have at heart the interest of keeping her people safe and alive, one would think : Is Gaya truly interested in saving those girls or killing them all to solve the problem? No. Right now, she is asking that very question to Kairo to hear from her experience, her wisedom. " I know, I know, that's Not what you expect to hear from me. I promise I do not want to kill anybody, I want to save them and stop it all but." Her emotions are hearable in her voice, they seize her Guts. "If they are too far gone, endoctrinated, if the worst case scenario unfold like I believe it will : Do I need to kill these girls before it's too late? " Those girls and Kaeleena, too. "Have you ever had somebody from your people, from your realms, who used their powers to destroy and hurt? What do you do..." It's a question of ethics and deontology, a humanist debate. "Do you try and save them or do you end them?"

[hymnoire]

"and you.. who are you?" ( for my boy @homelander-rp-blog for any of your muses! for apocalypse au! )

Six months ago, during the war, Gaya fell and broke. Shot in the stomach, ejected through a window that cracked open, twenty floors high. Her spine shattered, her left arm snapped like glass, and her iliac wings were pulverized. She bled out on the pavement, dead. Technology had advanced in this new chapter of the world, enough to piece her body back together, enough to merge flesh with steel and thread her nerves through circuits. Her left arm and her spine were fully replaced, bionic. Neural pathways were rerouted through a matrix of living code. Her body healed, but she was no longer just human. Half a woman, half a machine. That same technology is what tore the world apart. It began in secrecy, in government labs chasing transcendence, trying to rewrite the limits of the human condition. But the secret didn’t stay buried. Titan, a terrorist syndicate with no face and endless reach, stole the research before the government could even lie about it. By the time Titan was found, it was too late. They were out for blood, and they got it. Gaya always believed humans shouldn’t play God and she was right. Sadly, she still failed to stop what came next. The war that followed wasn’t just civil, it was apocalyptic. Titan’s stolen tech created HumanAIs, hybrids built for war, programmed to kill who inevitably start killing regular humans. What started as a silent war became a global one, spiraling out of control. Now, what's left of humanity hides. Scattered. Starving. The cities belong to the HumanAIs who operate for Titan, soulless, and ruthless. The rest of the world is a crumbling wasteland of rusted skeletons and toxic air. Humans live in exile, in otarcy, a kind of existence where survival is a full-time job and trust is extinct. Many wander the red deserts, where wind doesn’t blow and the sky forgets to rain. Gaya hasn’t awakened yet from her recovery and surgery, she still lies in a bed made of glass, intubated, in a room that’s kept hidden. A room watched over by Kaeleena.

Kaeleena stands like a ghost wrapped in ivory, a vision so pristine it feels offensive. Her dress is immaculate, the color of untouched snow, stitched from something too soft to be real, yet too perfect to be fabric. It clings and drapes with eerie fluidity, a high-collared robe that splits open like a ceremonial blade down the front, revealing thin bands of gold coiled along her ribs. Ornamental and useless, like jewelry meant for gods. Her feet are bare. Clean. Silent. She moves like she’s never touched the ground. The room she inhabits is an aberration in this post-collapse world. A sanctum of impossible luxury carved into the bones of Titan's supremacy. Glass walls rise around her like cathedral windows, refracting artificial light into dancing gold across the marbled floor. A single desk dominates the room, sleek and angular. Behind her, a massive screen displays with schematics, pulse maps, surveillance grids, and living files. One of them is labeled simply: Gayane. Cables slither from the ceiling like lazy serpents, some plugged into her desk, others drifting, whispering data and venom. The air smells of antiseptic and something older, like ozone or blood. Kaeleena leans against the edge of the desk, absurdly at ease in this sanctuary of horrors. Her eyes are pale, too pale to be fully human anymore. She was once, like all of them. When she smiles, it is with the slow satisfaction of someone who has already won. Her presence is cold. Where Gaya burned, Kaeleena freezes. She doesn’t need horns or claws. Her power is in her poise, her intelligence, and the certainty that she knows everything. Every path, every death, every betrayal. She watches John with the look of someone who already knows how the story ends. He is being escorted, not dragged or restrained, merely shadowed by the men who guard Titan’s inner sanctum. She has been expecting him. When he enters, she smiles, the curve of her lips dangerous. He asks who she is. Even if she would love to kill him, she doesn’t. Not yet. For the love of the game. “I do wonder,” she says, voice smooth as oil over glass, “if Gayane ever spoke of me, darling. I sincerely hope she did. If not... I shall be very disappointed. And I do not wear disappointment well.” They look exactly alike, Gaya and Kaeleena. Same eyes, same bone structure. But where Gaya kept the storm in her dark hair, Kaeleena bleached hers into light, so pale, almost white. Their auras, however, could not be more different. Gaya was the flame. Kaeleena, the frost.

“Who am I?” she repeats, stepping closer. Her voice is steel. “I am the villain in your precious narrative, John. Welcome to Titan. Our empire is sacred, and I…” She smiles again, this time with teeth, deranged and proud. “I am its High Priestess.” She knows exactly how far he’s come. Crossed the red deserts. Walked through cities infested with soulless machines. All for her. “Don’t tell me,” she purrs, circling him now, like the serpent in Eden, “you came all this way simply to meet your sister-in-law.” Her tone turns mocking, cruel in its sweetness. “What is it, then? Have you come to steal my beloved Gayane away from me… instead?” She leans in, eyes wide with exaggerated sorrow, a hand drifting to rest against her heart, as though to calm some violent flutter within. “I have peered into her mind, you know. I have seen the two of you, watched those fivelong years unfold like pages in a sickeningly intimate little novel. The investigations, the dates, the whispered conspiracies, the moments where death breathed down your necks and you clung to each other like lifelines. And then, of course, the sweet, sweet love-making. I love yous in Missionary aren't as cute as you think they are.” Her lips curl with disdain, like the very memory leaves a taste of ash on her tongue. Psychotic and jealous? “She loves you. More than she ever loved me. Can you fathom that?” A low, brittle laugh slips from her throat, somewhere between a sob and a knife dragged across silk. She's deranged. “It shattered me,” she says softly, with a tragic little tilt of her head. “I’m terribly sensitive.” Then, just as quickly, her gaze turns. The softness evaporates, replaced by something cold and merciless, something that cuts. “So tell me, John,” she murmurs, voice tightening. “Do you want her back… or not?” She steps back, just slightly, her hands clasping behind her back, posture impeccable, like a queen awaiting terms of surrender. “Because I am not above bargaining and I always enjoy a good negotiation. That's how we can get to know each other.”

[hymnoire]

“I mean everything I say.” The words land with ease and her smile is quick, casual, gone before it can settle. She’s already stepping into the cold when he questions her, boots crunching against gravel. Her focus is fixed on the warehouse ahead, brown eyes narrowed beneath low brows, locked onto something only she can feel. John watches her in silence but she hasn’t noticed that, not yet. Her instinct isn’t just suspicion anymore : it’s something deeper. She was trained young, sculpted and sharpened to what she is now. Her senses operate outside the range of normal, her mind threads connections faster than breath and so from one glance, she knows the building is empty. Not abandoned, but almost staged. It isn’t what’s inside that questions her the most, it’s the why. The structure, the setup, the silence. It's all too loud. John throws her a wink but she's indeed so focuse that she has missed all this Rizz. It's only when he casually invites her under the sun that she looks at him again. “I’d love to go to Mexico, actually. One of my many nemeses is hiding out there. Missed the shot once and it still pisses me off.” There’s a love for action in her voice, she's vindicative and has a thing for manhunting as a hobby. “Let me know when you’re free. That’d be fun, no? My type of vacations.” When he asks about the boys, she laughs. Really laughs. It’s the kind of question she’ll never answer seriously, not because she’s avoiding it, but because it’s funnier that way. “Many, actually, but see I’ve learned pretty boys are trouble so I’m into ugly old men now.” When he questions her professionnalism, a scoff slips out like smoke from a freshly-fired barrel. “Not professional, you say? Don't you trust me Partner,” She lifts her hand and gestures to the building with her gun, the other arm folding across her chest. “I am. That’s why I can tell you there’s no one inside. No heat signatures. No sound bleed. No motion. Power’s been cut for months. I’d bet the dust hasn’t been disturbed at the entry points, and the security sensors? Still tripped, never reset. That only happens when no one’s been in or out for a long time.” She pauses. “I’ve studied the blueprints of every warehouse we’ve been assigned. They’re all identical, built in the ‘90s. Corrugated steel siding, clerestory windows, flat roofs with gravel ballast, loading bays designed for logistics models nobody uses anymore. All of them are owned by the same ghost company, Titan Holdings. Supposedly import-export, but zero recorded activity since 2011... You don’t think that’s weird?” A moment of silence again. “There are as many vents as I could count, but only two are accessible for me. Zero for you, because…” She tilts her head slightly, the smirk cutting across her face like a slice of mischief. “Your big body and everything.” She’s teasing but her eyes go back to dead serious. “This place is empty sure, but not meaningless. There might be something subtle or not, a tell, inside. If we find it, we’ll know if this case is just smoke screen, a stall tactic from our government or if the enemy’s real, and simply better than us.” Her hair has been short for a while, cropped for the field. She has gone from ponytails and tailored suits to tech wear now. She’s done with office politics and polished smiles, finally, for two years, she’s been boots-on-ground, making herself undeniable. She can fight, she can shoot, she reads a scene fast. She rolls her neck, the vertebrae cracking in sequence : satisfying. “The roof’s our best entry, you’re right. We drop down from there.” She says. “As for me not shooting anyone…” A slow grin. “Mmm. You know I can never promise you that.” He's lucky this place is just empty after all or else she would have gone for it. Can't help to notice John has taken a step back, he does that sometimes, little shifts between cool and awkward that she picks up in her subconscious mind . She watches him and notices the vein in his throat, pulsing at a different pace. “You good?” Her voice softens. “Your heart’s been beating faster.”

[mournfulroses]

Euripides, transl. by Anne Carson, from "Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides," published in 2006

[sesiondemadrugada]

Monika Gawinowska.

[hymnoire]

Kaeleena has always possessed a mind as sharp as her scalpel : cold, analytical, ruthless in its pursuit of understanding. To her, the world is a puzzle of flesh and bone, a structure to be dissected, examined, and, when necessary, corrected. If there is divinity to be found, it is not in gods or souls but in the perfections / or abnormalities / she intends to create. Perhaps if she had played more with her sisters instead of terrorizing them, instead of making them her test subjects back in the gardens behind their church, she would better grasp what Vine is trying to explain: that souls choose their bodies, that something intangible binds them together. She scoffs at the notion, arms still crossed, her expression shifting from an exaggerated pout before into a smirk as he mentions her cheeks. Her head tilts slightly, amusement in her eyes. "And how, pray tell, did my soul choose this body, then? Is a soul as bendable and breakable as flesh, to you? If my soul decides the connection to my bones should terminate then… Is this how I pathetically die?" Ah. Vine is playing but he isn’t wrong. She does miss him. Not many venture into her hidden laboratories deep in the forest to spend time with her and fewer leave them. Her fingers still hold the scalpel as she starts playing with it, the movement delicate, almost affectionate. She drags its blade absentmindedly through the freshly opened wound on the table before them, the way a maiden would trace patterns in the sand with a flower stem. "Of course, I have missed you," she murmurs, her voice smooth and slow. "Everyone else is so dreadfully dull. They do not wish to play with me anymore, did you know? But I must know, do you watch other girls slice intestines open when you're not with me?" The dead are silent companions, obedient but difficult. The living bend and break so beautifully beneath her hands yet they bore her. And Vine, well, he is neither.

[hymnoire]

“Do I have him by the throat with something?” she muses aloud, more to herself than anyone else, the question curling off her tongue, indulgent and slow. Rhetorical. She already knows the answer. She does. And it pleases her, deeply, obscenely. Her gaze sharpens and the hint of a grin blooms, sinister, private, crawling across her pure yet dirty mouth like ivy. “Dear mother mine, ” she murmurs, voice coated in memory, “dearest deceased mother... She was a member of the Sisterhood.” It had been her only card. The Voice was unexpected, impossible in her mouth : played like a dagger in a sword fight. She had fed it well, with intention, letting it bloom only when it mattered, enough to place the Baron’s mind in the palm of her hand. That one exquisite moment of hesitation, that faltering breath, it was all she needed from him. She wasn’t meant to have it, she wasn’t meant to be anything at all. Just another unwanted bloom in the Harkonnen garden, bastard-born and best forgotten. But Kaeleena had learned to see, like truthsayers, she was guided with perception and intuition. She had never completed a proper training, of course. Her mother had given her only fragments, scraps of sacred things wrapped in the rags of survival. The rest? She had stolen. Learned in blood, absorbed in silence, like licking secrets off the walls and floors. Alone, she knows she isn't powerful enough, at least not yet. And despite her titanic ego, she does not lie to herself, yes she knows. To be wed to Feyd could have been the suffocation of her ambition before it had the chance to cry out. Or he could be something else entirely : her counterpart, her equal, eer accomplice. The arrangement was delicate. The Baron knew that. Perhaps it would bind the House tighter or perhaps, he was already planning to have her carved out and erased. “My mother, she wore the Sisterhood’s mark, but not their affection. No. She was never loved, only tolerated. Briefly. The shadow in their ranks, the wrong note in their sacred song” She exhales slowly. "Rightfully so," she purrs, almost proud. "There’s a fracture in the blood that bore me. Madness, disobedience… Lady Libitina was her name. I carry her like a curse. Like a prayer. The name, the sin, the taste." Her eyes narrow in focus, not unlike a snake flicking its tongue while sharing an old tale near a sacred tree. “She had a misplaced craving for powerful men and a flair for disrespecting her hierarchy. Mmm.” There’s something languid in her voice now. “The affair was heresy. She was never meant to bear a child for the House Harkonnen. She was not meant to birth an heir, I was not meant to be the heir.” Her gaze drips over him, thick and slow. “You were." Son of Lady Thalia Rabban, the one the Sisterhood chose to contribute her womb. “I tried to enter the Sisterhood when I came of age,” she speaks, and it almost sounds like she’s laughing under her breath, yet bitter, her tongue resting against her teeth. “.. you can imagine how that was received. However I’ve never accepted refusal. I make my own invitations so I learned. I took what I needed. The Baron knows that now.” She mumurs, leaning in, like a secret a young girl shares with her older brother in the gardens in the early afternoon.

“I have it.”

It. Their power. The ability to bend a room to her will. He catches a strand of her hair and God, his touch, even distant, is electric. "You can pull on it." She whispers barely audible, her lips breaking into a side smirk through the seriousness of her storytelling. Her gaze never left him. Not for a second. Feyd-Rutha. Magnificence incarnate He did say divinity doesn’t thrive on Giedi Prime. He is wrong but he musn't be a believer. She is. She sees it in him : He is the divine, Her divine. Divinity, to Kaeleena, is not peace, it is not light or salvation : it is the violence, the raw, the trembling power to unmake what offends and crown what bleeds. It is hunger. It is annihilation.

If Feyd had never known Kaeleena existed, Kaeleena had always known of him. Her mother spoke of Abulurd often, too often, but it was Feyd’s name that curled around her daughter’s dreams like fingers. As a child, she hated them, the Harkonnens. All of them, for what they did to her mother and her. She would picture Feyd, her brother, growing in praise and power while they, she and Lady Libitina, survived in the dirt and blood. Hatred and Envy came first. And then.. fascination. The first time she saw him, from a distance, like a nobody glimpsing royalty from behind rusted gates, she knew. To be invited to the Arena, she had to be someone worthy of the propaganda but she simply ended up forcing her way in there, to watch him, as many times as she could. Feyd was not just what she could have been, he was what she wanted. “Would you have played with me, had we grown up together?” she asks, softly, and it is not really a question. It is a longing. A wound in disguise. Her gaze does not leave him. It clings. It feeds. Her voice is a brushstroke. "Would you have taught me how to fight? How to kill? Will you now?" Brother and sister. Husband and wife. Co-conspirators. Monsters. He offered to kill the Baron together. Will they be allies now? Does he feel it too? They are bonded. Not by choice. By fate. By blood. By something older than both. Her mother had known, perhaps despite her unstable abilities, she could see, after all. She saw what lived in Kaeleena’s mind : the hunger, the heat, the perverse little spark ignited by the mere mention of Feyd-Rautha. A fascination to the idea of him, a fascination that grew, twisted, rooted despite two entire worlds between them. She slapped Kaeleena across the face once. Hard. And again. And again, every time it happened, every time she saw that same glint of rot in her daughter’s eyes. “Abomination ! Demonic Child ! ” she hissed, trembling with horror. “How can you dream of such vile and digusting things. He is your blood.” And Kaeleena had smile with the sting blooming across her cheek like something earned. “He is,” she had said, the filth of her mind glinting in her young eyes. Now, her voice returns to that velvet register. “Uncle has great hopes in you,” she says, slowly. “For the Harkonnen name. He values you, yes, he has plans for you.” Her head tilts. Her gaze studies Feyd the way some study sacred texts, searching for hidden meanings, for contradictions, for divine flaws. She has seen through the Baron, of course she has. A man like that does not hope, he does not believe, he doesn’t dream. He builds. He invests. He uses. He does not feel. Oh she might have admired that but na, it feels hollow when it comes to this type of pathetic little plans : the Baron is powerful yes but his vision is small. No taste, no nourishment. “Yet you wish to kill him.” It is not an accusation. It is a caress. An invitation. She draws the words out gently, as if unspooling thread from between her teeth. “Why?”

[hymnoire]

Kaeleena and, fear is a mind killer.