#igni astros

[summonsofink]

I'll be away for a bit. We Are on our way out now. I'll be back when I Am. wish me luck 🩷🩷

[summonsofink]

[Look Back]

[All you have left are your thoughts.

Maybe I deserve this.

Was it always going to go like this? I thought You loved Me, Ackaru Bi. Why did it come to this? Why did You do this to Me? Why Are You doing this to Me? Is this where I die? Is it how I die?

Nothing splits beside you, and you get a look outside.

Outside. That means I'm inside.

Your limbs are sphaghettified, your neck, your torso. All you have is your mind. you close your eyes. You don't want to think about what your face must look like, what the shape of you must be. You cannot laugh when you think of Amigara Fault; your lungs are too far from your mouth. It hurts.

When you were young, before Hunger left, you were close with him. You don't remember him looking like this. You can't remember what he looked like. You were...socially awkward, poorly constructed. You were fed, but it was hard, and your powers were still developing. You starved sometimes, but never like you did when you were trapped in your Domain. Hunger would come, and He would keep you fed when you couldn't feed yourself. Never fed enough, but...well, it is his nature.

.

.

.

"Hy, you're thin."

"And a fine morning to you, too, Kar," you grouse, digging with one hand at your scalp, where you have been trying to encourage hair to grow, another at the dirt, and the others fiddle and weave.

"Don't show your anger to me. Come and eat."

"Eat what? You said that the people must want me, but they don't. And look at me! I am strange to them. I am strange to all of you. Why did my body turn out like this, when yours and Kyh an Ri and Nia and Rume all got the, the main bodyplan? What about this form of mine is 'Lustful'?!" You sweep one of your hands to indicate yourself; huge, corroded, an unmoving face like a mask. You whip away from him in shame. Ackaru Bi's presence moves nearer. You feel their cold body, their ribs, and eventually their hips but not their belly, press against the tatters of your back.

"...I think you're beautiful. Rume does, too."

"Rume does not," you scoff. "Rume thinks I am unique. He would see me sit in his halls. You know how he is."

Ackaru Bi's hands drift. "What fine halls you would make them. Think kindly on him, little beauty; it is in his nature. Come, Hylois. Come and eat with me."

You soften. "With you? And what of you?"

"I'm ever hungry, but you're feeding me now. Don't worry."

.

.

.

"Where's Nia? Do you know at all?" you ask.

"You know Byrnia kol Vra. He follows his passions," Ackaru Bi mumbles, washing his shirt and concentrating hard as he scrubs.

"Don't we all," you mumble. "It's just. He's been gone for months. Usually he's sent me a trinket, or a letter, or caught up."

"Do you know what he was fixated on before?"

"No, that's part of what worries me...I don't remember him talking up anything in particular." You feel sick. Kar senses your discomfort, and he pulls his soaking shirt in from the river. He sits quietly and looks at you fidget for a long time. You've come a long way, as far as your Shape goes.

"What will you do?" he asks quietly. Everyone knows that Nia is as close to your heart as can be. It caused some jealousy and some arguments between you and your boyfriend. He's barely over it.

"Talk to...talk to Morar, maybe?I wouldn't wanna accuse him, but..." Kar nods, and crosses his arms, mouth a firm line.

"I could stand with you?" he suggests, and you nod and hug your arms.

.

.

.

"I'll always love you, you know." Even though it's Tarkaros Voy - what he's going by now - and not Morar, it turns your stomach. You're too fresh off of what Morar's done to you.

"...I know you mean well, Kar, but don't say that. Please."

"I just mean..." His voice is a little desperate. "I just mean, I wouldn't ever want anything to happen to you."

Your lip curls. "Like you wouldn't want to let Rume do anything like that to me?"

"Aitar..." You wave him off sharply, and turn your sapphire face away from him. "Aitar, come on...."

"Come on and what, Tarkaros Voy?? You told me give him a chance, that it couldn't be so bad! He'd treasure me...it's in his nature. His damn nature...damn you!" you shout, the words tasting poisonous even as you say them. You're not really as mad at him as you are at yourself. You should have left so much sooner. Thousands of years ago. This is your own fault. You hold your head in your hands.

Arms wrap around you. Ribs press against you. Kar's pelvis. Never his belly in his life. But it is his nature. You don't hug him back, but you press your eyes into his neck. His hands rub up and down your back.

"What'll I do?" you ask, voice coarse and wet, because it's been a long, long time since you've made any decisions for yourself. Almost half your life.

"...You'll have to decide that for yourself, Hy. But..."

"But...?"

"Let me do something for you. Give me a piece of you. I'll hold onto you. I'll protect you. If anything happens, I'll never let you disappear." You sob quietly. You miss your brother so dearly. You can't believe Morar took him, and lied about it to your fucking face, among everything else he's done to you.

"......you promise? Kar, do you promise?"

"I promise, my beloved." You shiver sickly. "...Sorry. Hold still, though." You do. You trust him.

His hands sink into your back. It burns, and you wail out in pain. It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. You claw at his back, and it's everything that you can do to remain upright; so much so that when it ends, you collapse to your knees and cling to his waist, breathing hard.

In his hands, he holds a beautiful silver star. Something light, blinding, hard to look at. You look weakly up, and boggle at it as much as you can, with no understanding of what it is. You blink and flutter like you're coming to consciousness, or losing it, as Tarkaros Voy, The Emptiness that Needs, plants the heel of his palm against something inside of it, and...pop! Crunk.

The light dims from it. You see a silver star, with five points, and space for a sixth. A rough, broken piece is in Kar's hand.

"What's...?" You slur, you trail off, you don't finish.

"This," he says, lowering the main body, and raising the free shard into the light, "is your Heart. Do as I tell you, now, Hy. Take this, and never put it back in your body. Do what you will with it, but hide it, and hide it well, my beloved. Forever. This piece, I'll keep."

As you fall back onto your bottom, and you take the bulk of your heart in your hand, you watch Tarkaros Voy tip his head back, lift the last piece, and drop it into his wide, deep mouth. It shines like that star again, and disappears slowly down his gullet. He wipes his mouth. You grip your piece in both hands, to your chest. He offers his hand up, and you take it.

.

.

.

You open your eyes, and you see something, a million, billion miles away. It shines white.

Your arm warps as you reach, and reach, and reach.

"..........I'm sorry, Kar. I need this back," you whisper. Your hand closes, and you pull it toward yourself. How could you forget?]

[summonsofink]

[Go Forth]

[Malakyh held you, but was not comforting; Fear is no replacement for warmth and no place to find solace. Now, Ringleader? There's a pair of arms you can count on. Others ignore your reaching out or curb your need to be in their presence, and still others you cannot yet give this piece of yourself to. Some of them wouldn't take it if you tried harder to be honest about it.

It's too late for any of that now, and you have to turn your thoughts to the movements you are making, the moments that you have, arm-in-arm with your pantheon, right now. You drop your borrowed cane through a portal, and it falls with a clatter into Advoca's laundry room, where your ink on her blanket makes a portal-able surface. You can text her and get it when you arrive back. Fear, Vas dei Malakyh, The Thing That Brings Nightmares, stands at your left, and then on your right is Greed, Morar daht Rumen. On his right, Love, and then Rage, Delirium, Mischief, down the line. In the end, for Hunger's gluttony, almost every one of them had been assembled. Those not present, like Obsession, were only absent because they were dead. They fall, one by one, into the portal put there by Greed, each holding the arm of the next, and you hold onto Fear's shirt so that they come out at the same place as you. In the end, they are easily the most important person to have there.

The ground rushes up to meet you. You close your eyes. You are accustomed, but it still makes you flinch. You are falling down, chest first, but also skimming as though going down a slide, but also when you land, you are upright, as though you were never falling at all.

Space. Cold, frigid, empty, wide, enormous space. You cannot see anything, and for a moment, you think you are still in the portal, and something has happened to the traversal. Then, you look around you, at the warped forms of your siblings, and realize that you are exactly where you should be. When you told Ringleader that your brother was a black hole, you were being lighthearted as you could in the moment. You have no memory of Hunger, but as you zoom out and look at what you're dealing with, you realize out right you were, and how familiar your brother really is to you.

The truth is: Hunger has stood at your side for your entire life. Looking up into the event horizon of infinity, you see nothing but the void. With dry mouth and ichor icy and still, you slowly turn your head to a smaller, still hulking, identical form that stands behind you in open space. The Universe, as you have always called it, is much bigger than you remember it. In the presence of Its Self, it towers over you, enveloping you from the other side. Hunger at your front, and The Universe, his other aspect, at your back.

Your mind races. Why has Hunger been the Thing you have negotiated your freedom with all of your life? Why does he take and take from you, and not from your siblings? Why are you so especially awful that your brother has seen fit to monitor and control you for all eternity? The contracts, the laws, the pain!! What was the fucking point!?

The scraping of a scabbard brings you back to yourself. Your eyes fall on Fear, whose blade just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. You do contracts, and you spread your power unto your Domain, where it is nice to look at; Fear stores his, and has practiced being regular-size, in order to spend time with their siblings. As he draws, he grows larger, and larger, and larger still. You remain still, being pushed away as they take up more and more space, while your siblings dart off. You should be getting into position, but your focus only allows you to take in your brother, growing so large that soon you can't see all of him at once, and still he is nothing compared to Hunger. He outstrips all of you, even ass your siblings engage their powers. Finally, as the scrape becomes less a sound and more a feeling that shakes your whole body at a sub-sound level, you remember your Place in this. You zoom off to try and get under him.

The fight is tremendous - each of your siblings outstrip you in size, some of them solar systems away and yet most of them plainly visible, but you? You can't access your powers, still. No matter how you push, how you strain, how reality warps around you as Panic and Devotion and Supplication all do their part, you remained hindered, silenced.

It makes you so angry. You're so devastated, enraged, betrayed that you can't even help here, at the crux of the issue. Teeth gritted to crack, hands clenched to bleed, you turn on the terrible void of The Universe, on your brother who has bled you and abused you for time uncountable, and you lunge for it, for Him. The Universe, usually so passive, flinches as you launch yourself at it in this void. Your hands close around where its neck should be, though it is bigger than you've been even for Arlequin, and your hands can't possibly touch around it, and it's hard to look at so you don't even know if you have it by the neck. When did you last touch it? Why doesn't it kill you? Why does it feel like anything, but more importantly, why does it feel like clay?

Burning heat sears across your back. When you howl into the silence of the void, it finally fights back. It grabs you around your middle with one hand, and it flings you toward Its Self - Hunger. Your Eyes catch on golden ichor as you tumble ass over teakettle through open space. You think you see the tip of Fear's hard-won sword leaving Hunger's body. You think it whizzes by you, you think it just misses.

You don't know, because you slam like a belly flop from a helicopter into something. You don't have time to understand what, exactly, as your arms and legs string out into infinity. Your fingers are too too far away to see, your head feels tight, your neck twists around and around until you become dizzy, even though all that is around you is colorless, lightless void. The pain is so loud that you don't even understand the horror of what's truly happening to you.]

[summonsofink]

[Hear Back]

[Your brain is fried. You're juggling trying to keep good relatiaonships with eleven kids, four baby mamas, thirteen fuckbuddies, and you still have to make regular trips home to make sure your increasing number of refugee siblings are taken care of. Why did you agree to play host? You think you might be dying.

Vido.

This isn't a text message. It's in your mind, and imprinted on your eyes, and scrolling across your Eyes, and flickering the edges of your vision dark. Your nerves pick up, because on top of everything you've been a nervous wreck about - your body, your relationships, your home, your powers, your dead stalker-sister-ex, the broader implications that she and her meddling have on everything you've done and everything that happens and has happened and will happen to you for maybe the rest of your truly eternal life unless it somehow gets you fucking killed - on top of ALL THAT, you HAAAAAATE how Fear contacts you and how they do everything they do and everything they are. You love them. They're certainly your favorite older brother, maybe your favorite brother period, but they are still Fear and you do hate them.

IgniAstros: I hate that You do that.

I do not care remotely.

IgniAstros: I know You don't.

Hush, Vido, turn your attentions to me and my words.

IgniAstros: 👍👍

It is complete, and we have found Tarkaros Voy. Organize your affairs, Vido, for we strike at him on the morrow. This will soon end. And know that we may end with it.

IgniAstros: no We literally Are not. We literally Are not going to end tomorrow. We have the day after tomorrow after tomorrow and don't You start acting like We don't, fuck you.

Order your affairs, brother.

IgniAstros: order YOUR affairs, Malakyh!!! We will Be keeping going!!! and You'll Be there too!!!!!

Childish.

You'll be ordering nothing. You'll tell them where you're going, and that you'll be back.

Because you will be back. You will be.

You go and tell Filly and Cookie that you'll be back in an hour, and you return to your Domain to yell at Fear and cry your eyes out. ...At least he holds you.]

[summonsofink]

[Come Back]

[It's like waking up, when you didn't realize you were asleep. Jumping to a start, disoriented, you look down at your hands. Golden, normal-sized. Whole. Your breathing picks up, dizzying yourself with your shock. You're alive.

And you're staying that way.

You turn with a snap into a serpent, and you jet out through the wound Fear made in Hunger's body. You twist around as he comes back for another slash, euphoric with the Truth of your existence, with the reality of being Whole. You explode, a firework of joy, popping and cracking and lighting the way up Hunger's concave belly, growing as you whizz upward. You scream with laughter, spreading out, and up, and down, and around. It takes years to do it, like anything that's happened in this fight, but when it's done, you grab your hands together, and you pull tight. You feel Hunger struggle against you, but you? You're stronger than you've been in your memory. You thought you were powerful before, but now you feel like you have the sun inside of you, powering you. It burns, but it's joyful.

You ARE the sun. You turn into light itself, and you burn. You burn, and you hold him, and you feel him scream. It's...horrible. It's horrible, and you hate it. Even at this size, you feel his ribs, and his pelvis, and the way he rumbles the fabric of reality with his pain. You don't have organs right now, much less the kind that make tears, or you would cry with him.

You kept Me safe, Kar. It's. It's over now. You squeeze your Eyes shut against the truth, and you snap away, flinging into space, as Fear's sword cuts down again from Hunger's shoulder. It makes such a specific sound as it bites into him. Aitar would never know how to describe it. It's like burning, like paper ripping, like cables snapping. You can't look.

Trumpets blare, and light burns your body, and ichor splatters across you, burning. When you're brave enough to resume sensory organ function, you look, and your breath catches. Ribbons of light, of clouds, of dust and gas, wreathing the broken, shadowy, impossibly huge body of the eldest of your pantheon. He lies broken, split, bleeding, and leaking everything he ever ate into the ether. In the wreckage, which you zip to in a blink, you see the bodies of some of your siblings, and a familiar pocket of space. A rosy-pink, twisting tree; scattered droplets of water. Your wailing shakes the dust around you as you carefully pocket your things before they're consumed in fiery gasses, and you speed to the sides of your siblings, pulling them together like the pieces of a raft.

Love lies broken, one of their heads blown completely off; Devotion is mangled and chewed. Panic, Fear's closest, is sundered, and Curiosity is simply hollow, like the very inside of them was sucked out, empty like a soda cup. And then there is Hunger.

Knowing what you know now, you expected to stay angrier, and perhaps it will return, but now? Now, as you end a year of mourning thee four with your living siblings, you let yourself be pulled in by Hunger's terrible gravity. Your body warps as you get close, but when you let it, it doesn't hurt so bad. It's comforting, in a way.

Your hands touch the corner of his eye, and you lean your face against a crease. He lies with his eye dazedly open. You see the water of his tears frozen in his eyes. This place will support life, next time you return. You spread your arms out as wide as you can, and with a lot of stretching, you can almost hug the curve of his cheekbone. There is a silence here like you have never known in all of your memory. He's truly gone, dead. When you reach out for the universe, you meet only silence.

"Oh, Kar," you sob. "What will I do? Brother, what will I do??" You feel Morar's hands on your shoulders, and you grieve, shrugging him off. You don't want him. You feel so lost.

It has been a long time - your entire life - since you have made your own decisions. Now, there is no one to make them for you.

[summonsofink]

you know something? I think we're close to finishing this.

[summonsofink]

so i'm feeling incredibly good for having my Heart ripped pieces pieces.

don't mind that i haven't been able reconstitute phone i lose articles sometimes.

mmy body still hurts quite bad and it makes beingpositive challenging.

[summonsofink]

Sit Up.

[Sparks and Advoca have been at it for hours. Between their hard work and an outpouring of love and memory and worship, Aitar feel almost like an identity again. They certainly have a humanoid form. No face, but their Eyes have turned back on. Too many legs, but roughly the right amount of arms for them. No hair, but horns.

The nature of how they were disassembled, bite by focused bite, leaves them covered in white scars of void that look like waves etched into their body, swooping over nearly every inch of them. They get their palms under them while Advoca and Artiifex take a short coffee break, and they push themselves upright. Feels good, compared to before.]