#legionstarter

[catalystunbound]

location: LUCIFER’S MANOR, HOLDING ROOM date & time: NOV 8, 5:30 PM availability: OPEN

It had been a game of their own device the last time they all had been locked in this room; Adelaide remembered as if it had been yesterday, crouching down by the door in fabric much less restrictive than what she wore at present, fiddling with the lock while the room looked on. Now, however, there were no angels to find - for they were all here. And for what? Such pretense had been exercised before, but this was different; the guards had ghosted away, wordless and certain in their intent, as if marching toward some doom-bound purpose, leaving the rest of them to wait - behind fortified locks and barred windows. Adelaide stood at the head of the room, crouched even in her binding dress, to peer through the keyhole, looking for anything - anything - that could provide some answers. Were they all to sit about a dinner table in a false show of cooperation and normalcy a second time? Were they to sit, captive, and listen to their captor soliloquize until he’d had his fill? 

She hoped that were the case - but something told her otherwise. 

There were so many bodies so close, for the room was not a large one, that she could feel heat pressing in on either side of her as she sank to her knees, fully leaning against the door with palms pressed to the wood. She screwed up her face, squinting closed one eye and pressing the other to the keyhole; this was no time for grace and pretense - even squeezed into a binding dress, with tall heels slipped from bruised toes, she’d go entirely mad without even the slightest hint of an escape plan. There was always an escape - surely she could find one here, too, should they need it. Except this time, much unlike the last time she had been trapped in this room, Adelaide had no plans to leave its other occupants behind. 

“This has ‘ritual sacrifice’ written all over it,” she hissed, voice muffled as her lips were smashed against the wood of the door; with hard eyes, she pulled away from the door but for a moment, gaze darting about at all the bodies that filled the uncertain space. For a moment, she considered asking the obvious - if this had something to do with Stella and Abel’s disappearance. But somehow saying it aloud would be to put more weight upon the uncertainty than she wanted; perhaps that would make it true. 

She opened her mouth to ask for a pin, for anything sharp, anything small, but her eyes fell upon Gale and Rowan in the corner, monitoring, waiting. Adelaide closed her mouth once more and, with nervous chagrin, turned to peer into the darkened keyhole once more. 

“Nothing.”

[divinum-venenum-blog]

Location: Lucifer’s Mansion Closed: with @rowanofwar Time: October 2nd, 1:30am

There was a stillness between her ribs that most often occurred at night. She wore the shadows like a hat, like a cloak, like a crown. There was a viciousness to the quiet that occurred after midnight that ran down her spine in a caress, and it was most often the time she felt most at home. She’d slept half the day away in waiting for it, for the time before dawn-light where she felt safest. Any earlier, and she might have felt overly raw, her heart an exposed and fleshy thing in her chest.

Eve had beaten her at her own game. Seduction, in its cruelest sense. How wicked she was, to offer Lilith any kind of respite, to make her think for a moment that someone who didn’t share her beloved black wings might see the workings of her mind without recoiling. Eve was a dream of the past, but her friends allies? They were the future. They were her eternity. If she was to move forward, she would need to shed the sallow skin that held the memory of Eve’s passion, of her touch. Banish it, stomp it to pieces, tear it apart until nothing of her awful weakness remained.

It was a keening sort of pain, to realize she’d loved wanted someone a over two thousand years and it wasn’t going to be enough. Not to bridge the somehow insurmountable gap that stood between them.

Now, Lilith was retreating to lick her wounds. There were very few people she would deign to be around when she did, and even fewer she might seek out. But always, she seemed to be reaching out to Rowan. Eve, she’d once thought, was born to mother humanity, as fierce and protective as any; Lilith hadn’t been created with those capabilities. Or rather, she hadn’t thought so. Who would want to distort their body and give away valuable years of their life to raising a defenseless creature into something passable?

Rowan had slunk out of the dark, a black widow so dark she hypnotized. She’d been so new, so fearless, a tempest at the heart of demons who felt little to nothing. Lilith’s passion had waned for so long, the phase seemed to be permanent -- a fixture of the age tethered to her bones like an anchor. The ferocity of Rowan still surprised her. It had been a thousand years, give or take here and there, since she’d seen her, and still, she managed to be vexing. It would have irritated many, but it was a delight for Lilith to find a mind that was as prism-like and puzzling as hers. 

It took nothing to navigate the halls that separated them. She could’ve walked the route in her sleep, though she’d barely been five days in Paradise. It was instinct to know where to find Rowan, when her thoughts buzzed in her ears or her heart felt hollow or she wanted that laugh to spark Lilith’s. She knocked before she entered, but she was certain Rowan wouldn’t refuse her. The girl never slept, her mind on a thousand things at once. 

People always expected Lilith to sleep naked, or in a fancy teddy, and when she was on, that might be her go-to. But tonight she was off, so very thrown off she was spinning, and she wore basic pajamas, a wine bottle in one hand and glasses in the other. If she was going to have any kind of weighty, emotional conversation, she was going to drink. Whether it got her drunk or not.

She closed the door and leaned against the frame, managing to carry her burdens rather gracefully in spite of their awkward weight. The sight of Rowan, looking decidedly un-Rowan-like, was enough to bench her own feelings for the time being. “Looking less than selfish, today, my star.” It was a stranger thing to say between any two people but them. To Lilith, the intent was clear: to care about Rowan was a top priority of hers, and she reminded Rowan that it should be a top priority for Rowan as well. To care about how others felt about her was beneath her, though that didn’t mean Lilith couldn’t understand the sentiment. 

Lilith set her wine down on the nearest surface as she moved closer, settling in beside the girl with almost a smile. “That will always be forgiven. Your tears, however...” her fingers were gentle, careful on Rowan’s jaw as she examined her, a fine, simmering rage in her blood at the sight. “There is no one on Earth I could forgive for those.” 

[praenuntius-blog1]

September 3 Paradise, WA; Lucifer’s Manor 5:40 PM OPEN: all

He’d been hesitant to even leave the room that all the angels had been gathered in, but the thought of just staying made him more uncomfortable than he’d cared to bear.

Elijah found himself wandering the manor, drinking in the details of the building. Everything was so… ornate. Almost to the point of gaudiness, if Elijah were to be truthful. He didn’t have any intention of actually escaping. He didn’t know the layout of the manor, and he certainly wasn’t going to run around blind and potentially run into someone he didn’t want to. Of course, wandering around blind didn’t really lessen his chances of doing that either. It was more that he was operating on the hunch that, if he were just wandering and not looking like he was trying to escape, any demons that he had the misfortune to run into wouldn’t see him as a threat.

Wandering down the unnecessarily detailed hallway, ghosting his fingers over the things that caught his interest, Elijah was so absorbed in trying to memorize the details that he didn’t hear anyone coming up the hallway. When he’d clued in that the steps he was hearing were not his own, he jerked to face the oncoming person.

Retracting his hand as if he’d been burned by the gilded pieces. “I- I wasn’t… doing anything,” the lie stuttered out of his mouth, thoroughly unconvincing, and he looked wide eyed at the person he’d carelessly let find him.

[praenuntius-blog1]

October 3 Paradise, WA, New Utopia Prison Morning, time unspecified CLOSED: @liwyathans

Elijah twisted in his cot, trying to get comfortable and sleep for just a few more minutes. He hit his shoulder just the right way and the shots of pain through him made him jump. He hurt and it wasn’t just from the beating that Rowan had given him. Thankfully his nose wasn’t broken but damn did it hurt, it felt as if it were swiped at in passing just the wrong way it would start bleeding again. His eyes were still black and swollen from the attempted breaking of his nose, and they hurt to keep open for extended periods of time, but they also hurt when he tried to keep out the light. He couldn’t win.

He pulled himself off of his cot with stiff limbs. His head felt heavy and it was throbbing in the back - most likely from the connection it had made with the floor a few days previous - and he had sharp pangs from his nose and lip.

It could be worse, he thought to himself, Could have died.

He squatted down and hung his head, trying his hardest to stretch out his sore, tight muscles. There were sickening pops that travelled up his spine when he moved his shoulderblades just the right way.

He went to pull out a crunched piece of parchment and the cracked stub of a pencil that was almost to the point of uselessness when he noticed someone watching him from the other side of the bars. He didn’t recognize them, but his head hadn’t exactly been the clearest in the last few days.

“Hello?” His voice was rough and quiet, rusty from disuse; he hadn’t spoken much since the altercation on the first. “What can I help you with?”

[demimondc]

Closed: @alastairofdivinecruelty Date: August 31st Location: Lucifer’s Mansion 

  Delilah had few homes in this world, though many places where she’d made her bed. Her quarters were spare, undecorated, impersonal. Nothing save for the furnishings provided by Lucifer, decadent as they were. One could scarcely distinguish her room from any other guest’s quarters. It was as if a ghoul lived there, ephemeral, barely present. 

  Her presence was instead impressed upon the expansive archive of books. Fingerprints smudged upon their ancient edges, scraps of paper with scrawled notes inserted in their folds, the occasional strand of hair trapped in new adhesive. 

  The library contained her very heart; in the worn spines was the rhythm of its beating, in the vellum and parchment the rushing of her blood. Literature was the most convenient means of escaping reality -- years ago, when she was a girl, it had been the only way for her to leave her own story and inhabit another, to slip into the skin of a character unlike herself. She was fifteen when she decided she was to be the author of her own story; when she discovered that one life was not enough for her. She was sixteen when she met him, and sixteen, still, when she unleashed him upon her father. 

  The conclusion to a story, but not her own. Diane’s was finished, but Delilah’s was only beginning. Delilah was a woman in motion, a woman hungry for new worlds and foreign experiences. Inhaling the perfume of the luxe mahogany room, she paced slowly, trance-like. A lover of new worlds, but still holding nostalgia for the old. All of her loathed the idea of artificial lighting; despised the harshness of the white-glow, disliked how it flattened one’s features into two dimensions. Poised in her hand, instead, was a single erect candle, and all about her she had lit others, cautiously encased in glass.  

  She was holding Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre -- the name Currer Bell penned in place of the woman’s own -- when the door creaked open behind her; a rich, luxurious sound that resounded in the vast quarters. A short glance behind her yielded the information she needed. 

  “’I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will’,” she said richly, eyes once again tracing the inked pages. Her voice swelled with the quotation, tone mocking and droll. A clip and she slammed the book shut. “How oxymoronic.” Delilah paused for a moment after she had finished, exhaling sharply. And then, formally: “Alastair.” 

[heartofatlas]

October 1st

11:47 P.M.

Lucifer’s Mansion

CLOSED TO: ROWAN

This is what pious sinners must have felt like—burdened with an unsatisfied ache for forgiveness. And here was Gale the sinner, shoulders hunched with guilt and eyes hooded with exhaustion as his feet carried him in the direction of forgiveness. It was ironic, really, to think of Rowan, with her bloodstained lips and hunger for hurricanes, as a granter of forgiveness, a makeshift priestess whose blessing could purge him of guilt. Rowan was, perhaps, the least forgiving creature he knew—and with good reason; no one had ever given her a reason to forgive, to trust—to believe. She’d forgiven Gale, though; forgiven him for sins of ages past that he couldn’t reconcile with himself. She’s trusted him, too—trusted him as much as one demon could trust another. And she’d believed in him; oh, she’d believed in him in a way that made his barren rib cage bloom with life and something that felt very—human. ( Strange, wasn’t it? That one of the most inhuman creatures to ever taint the Earth’s soil with the blood of innocents made him feel almost human. ) 

Yes, she’d given him all of those things when he’d deserved none of them. And what had he done? He’d forsaken them—her forgiveness, her trust, her belief; he’d forsaken all of her gifts. He forsook her forgiveness when he’d discarded some of the dark parts of himself ( the parts she’d accepted and embraced and made wickedly beautiful ) in favor of the more human parts of himself. He forsook her trust when he crossed a line she’d been taunting him to cross for years and tasted her lips—only to abandon her in the next breath. And he forsook her belief in him when he’d let her down; when he’d traded his spot next to her on the battlefield for a spot in Adelaide’s bedroom. He’d forsaken her in every way that mattered, and remorse ate at him like a parasite. There was a part of him, though, the human part of him—the part that she, ironically, had resurrected—that didn’t feel so guilty; there was a part of him, in fact, that felt what he imagined peace felt like ( he’d been so long estranged with the feeling of serenity that he no longer remembered its taste ). 

He was of two minds, really; half of him was full of guilt and remorse for having let down the woman that had held him up and made him feel weightless and free; the woman that had eased the insufferable weight of the black wings that swallowed up his scarred back like the dark folds of nightmares; the woman that had saved him and damned him all at once. And then there was the part of him that felt relief; relief for having finally, blessedly taken temporary leave from his post as soldier; for having finally, blessedly reprised his role as man and relinquished his role as machine—if only for a single night. He was so tired of fighting; so tired of fighting in a war he had no real stake in for people he cared little for and against people he was starting to care very much for. He’d fought all his life, been a soldier bought and sold and commanded all his life; and it was nice to, for one night, live in this pocket of fantasy wherein he didn’t have to fight. But an unholy goddess of war wouldn’t understand that, would she?

A resounding NO clawed at his ears like manicured nails against a chalkboard when, after rounding a corner that put him at the end of the hallway that contained each of the Kill Club members’ quarters, he came face to face with the priestess he’d been been seeking. For a creature of stone who didn’t much like feeling, it was unbearably overwhelming to, in that moment, feel so much all at once. Guilt. He felt the scale of his two halves of self tip drastically in favor of guilt, for every drop of blood that fell from her lips and every bruise that littered her skin might as well have been wrought by his own two hands. He should’ve been there; should’ve been there to fight at her side. Anger. How could he have so stupidly begun to care for these vile creatures who had so carelessly marred so divine a treasure? The darker parts of him—the parts that made him a talented torturer—immediately demanded vengeance. ( But the rational parts of him—the parts that made him a poor demon—pleaded with him to see reason, to consider the context and circumstances of whatever situation she’d been in when she’d gotten those battle wounds. ) Sorrow. He felt her pain keenly, as if the two were symbiotically joined by invisible strings, and his heart sank and broke each time his eyes fixed on a new bruise, a new cut, a new patch of dried blood. More anger—this time at himself. He was angry that he wasn’t there; angry that he didn’t share exactly one half of her injuries as he should have ( instead, all he wore was a pink pair of scratch marks on his neck that looked more like a result of the bedroom than the battlefield ). His eyes travelled from the crown of her head to her toes and back up to her face ( bloody and bruised ) again, and a string of Russian curses spilled from his lips—lips that were parted slightly with horrified awe and strangled apologies. 

“Ro...” The single syllable sounded hoarse and strained and horribly inadequate. What could he say? I’m sorry I wasn’t there? I’m sorry I wasn’t fighting at your side? I’m sorry that, while you were in the midst of battle, I was in the midst of a very human love affair with a very human blonde? There was nothing he could say that would make anything better and a whole lot of everything he could say that would make it all worse. “Chto sluchilos, solnishko?” he asked simply ( pathetically ). “What happened to you?”

[possessedclaire-blog]

Date: October 4th. Location: Paradise, WA Availability: Open to Demons & Humans (sorry wingless beauties!!)

In her construction, fate had dubbed her a piece of irony. He gave her a guardian named Eden, sent her to a place called Paradise, made her the daughter of the man who sent Lucifer to hell, the daughter who could not fight, Lucifer’s prisoner, his soldier and servant, bound and gagged. Fate gave with one hand what it took away with the other. It gave her a decade’s worth of happiness, lavender infused tea parties on the lawn, a storybook world, laughter that never ceased. Then, in sixty seconds, it took it all away - it took him all away. Once, she would have argued that the pain of losing her Father was the worst, that nothing after could compare to having your one constant torn, for no good reason (or so it had appeared). Now, she realized she had played herself as a fool. There was a fate wore. Far worse. 

Indeed, it was her life.

The world was hers to look at, but never to touch. It was hers to scream at but her mouth never opened. She was but a mere observer, a shadow of the girl she had once been. Fate made a cruel mistress - chipping away and putting darkness where brightness had once stood. They took a freedom fighter and made her a soldier, draped in a cloak of red - hands tainted by the deed done in her name. And all the while, that voice laughed - to the captive audience of simply one. A mere solider in an Empire, but in her mind, they ruled supreme. Words of power, of agency, of control - they held no meaning for her now. Her mind was a prison and she the chained mute.

Autumn had fallen quickly, leaves tumbling to the floor - no one around to rake them up. As a child, her Father would enlist her in the all day task of piling them up, pretending that they weren’t going to honour their age old tradition, not this year. But, sure as not, at the end of each day, he caught her eye, picked her up and tossed her in. It had been the feeling of flight, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of living. Now, she only had memories to sustain her, a poor comparison for the real thing. Once, she had been alive, now, she was a mere memory of the girl she had once been. 

To her sides, red Xs lined the doors - marking out the victims that would fall in the days yet to come. Somewhere, deep inside, she felt herself shudder, the movement never translating in reality. She could think, but she could not do.  Sliced and diced open, Leviathan would make monsters of them all, enslave them, pollute their minds with the presence of an other. She had glimpsed them, fair hair and youthful locks, the marks of civilians, not soldiers. Claire wanted to help them, they wanted to laugh, to welcome new comrades to their ranks, to relish in her misery. They thought her sorrow made her weak. They were wrong. It made her strong. 

A gust of wind, footsteps at her side and suddenly, she knew she was not alone. Altering her position and turning her head, blue iris’s settled upon the approaching figure. Claire willed herself into process, into the light. It was a gamble, never a question of when she would speak, but who. “It happened quickly. The Xs. They’re not messing around.”

[ofgenerosity-blog]

Genesis Starter: 02

Closed To: @stellapryce ( stella ) Time: Oct 1st, 6:00 am Location: New Utopia, Susanna’s Cell

“I don’t know if you can hear me.. or even if you’re there.” A flash of wings, of dark skin and hazel eyes that stayed pointedly away from her cell. Her hands grasped each other more tightly, her head resting back between her arms.

                   “But your people are suffering. Those who spent their lives devoted to you are crumbling, those who worshiped your name are torn down while your opposer has shown himself and plays the part you were supposed to.” A cruel laugh in the distance, an angel whimpers, a scream echoes from beyond the fence.

      “Please. If you’re there, if you’re looking after your children, help them.” A face appears before her vision, then another, then another and she hastily adds, “All of them, even if their faith is lost.”

                     A tear running down her nose that she quickly wipes away, her voice catching in her throat. “I can’t.. I can’t do this alone. I can’t protect them, protect him without..”

A cough, a yawn, and she breaks out of her trance, opening her eyes and lifting her head from the makeshift bed she had laid it on. Was she really speaking so loud she had bothered someone? She hadn’t realized. A quick scan of her surroundings and she spotted the source - Stella was stirring, then raised her eyes to hers. “I’m so sorry Stella, I didn’t mean to wake you.”