#oriseus

[defilerwyrm]

crack hat series 2

2.05 Darknesskiara's Rynseryth and my Oriseus Lastdawn

2.06 Kael'ash Amberwind and Mace's Banticus THIS WAS THE MOST TRAGIC FUCKING THING there was a complete crash JUST AS I WAS SAVING THIS AT THE VERY END and this was all we could salvage from Livestream *cries forever*

[defilerwyrm]

more old stuff

includes what is arguably the most adorable Nathrae ever

[defilerwyrm]

hey Chels

remember that time Khaav was Val Kilmer

and the Barbie Healin' Hearts Belt

I love you and therefore I will never

ever

ever

let you live that down <3

[defilerwyrm]

34. Nightmares. — silverintent

The lights along the walls throw shadows as rough and long as the stone. Men. Women. Tinier things that slither and gyrate on too many or not enough legs. He feels them moving his hairs aside with their footless little steps, their twin-hook claws, their bulbous dry skin that writhes over thousands of muscles too tiny to see. Skin. Clothes. Food. He's never alone, not here.

The dead shuffle idly by like servants; they hover like schoolmarms. The cold of their wake sinks into the bones. The living speak in tongues, oh, just as cheerful as you please, in the twisted language of those self-same walking damned.

Not all the dead walk here. No. There are still the guests of honour.

They lie across the table, head to foot, still in their gleaming arms and standards – black and white and gold, sun's rays over silver fists. Their eyes stare up at nothing. Their cold blue lips whisper blasphemy. And there's a knife in his one hand, a fork in the other, and someone is asking him to serve.

Serve us.

Serve Him.

Serve to the right is only polite.

"It's your turn to serve." Grigor's voice. His eyes, his dark, human eyes that remember fear and hope. "I don't think I can do it this time but you can. You always could, Tarethayel."

All the eyes of the table are on him. The lichfire lights glisten off the scars on his hand and they're looking too long at them, too distinctive, he was warned. The body stretched on the table before him turns its head to stare him fully in the face — staring, but never seeing. Tirion's bloodless lips part and his voice echoes like a frostwyrm's growl: "Serve."

Someone's screaming. Trapped in sheets and panic, sweating, stomach lurching. He's halfway to the bathroom before any part of him registers that he's awake: everything is glacial cold and dark and shades of blue. He empties his stomach, sobbing, choking on the taste of dead men's flesh.

•

[master list]

[defilerwyrm]

Flight. Fly my pretty, fly! — usilionpope

Explaining the mechanics of flight to land mammals, Lyrasz decides with a sigh, is like trying to explain walking to a snake.

Fortunately his pupil is a clever one and an eager study. Unfortunately that eagerness gets the better of him at times and he either overcompensates for something or loses track of his trajectory and crashes into a cliff.

"You're getting better," the sleek red wyrm calls over the wind. "Just remember, if your head gets caught in the crosswind you'll pitch down. Don't jerk back up against it; go with it, follow it, and come back up slow."

"W-what if there's someth-th-th, so-something in the way?" his companion squawks. Alchemy has made a drake of a man, and Lyr still can't quite get over how strange and crude the stone form is, how craggy and heavy-looking compared to his own even scales.

"Then you do this."

A wingover is a manoeuvre the red himself will only be able to pull off for so much longer. Once he's no longer a drake he'll be too ponderous to fly fancy: more of a stork than a swallow. May as well enjoy it while he can.

And does he ever. Their eyes meet in the long seconds in which Lyrasz scoops air, tucks his left wing, and snaps out the right. He zips upward in a steep left bank, up, up– at the very apex when the sinuous length of him points straight up to the sky he lets go of everything, and for a moment he's no longer flying but falling, weightless, two thousand pounds of muscle and magic and bone barely breaking free of gravity's inexorable embrace. As he starts coming down Lyrasz slithers double so his head points the opposite direction (away, presumably, from the hypothetical obstacle), and rights himself back into powered flight.

Oriseus gapes after him, faltering, then wheels in a long circle to follow after. "You've g-GOT to teach m-m-me that."

"Of course," Lyr agrees. "The way you run into trees your fool life might depend on it."

The false drake's noise of outrage is drowned out by Lyr's laughter and the wind.

[defilerwyrm]

ಠnಠ AND FLOWERS. Separately, because I saw what you did there.

Rosa, Chrysanthemum, Jasminum, Calla, these names form in his mind like a prayer. The calluses on his fingers are too thick for such delicate things so he strokes petals and tender sepals with the tops of his fingers, and finds them soft as a lover's lips.

The green and white scents of his garden, shot through with lurid spice, seep into his clothes, his skin. He kneels on cobblestones and sinks bare hands into the soil – never gloved, never covered, nothing between himself and the damp black earth teeming with life. He can feel the ebb and flow of it as clearly as the currents in a stream. There's so much of it, Light, this place is so alive it makes his heart swell. Pollen clings to his hair, to his sleeves. The gentle drone of bees – even this high up, they have their own colony, fed fat on his garden to make the honey for his lover's mead – is a tickle in his ears.

Most of his flowers are white. He's always preferred them so, day-bloomers and night-bloomers alike, though there's enough red and blue and yellow among them to make a riot of the place. Oriseus pauses and sits back on his knees. His eyes close; a smile plays across his lips. There's nothing that needs be spoken here. In the sanctuary of his gardens he is finally at peace.

[defilerwyrm]

Emptiness.

[[ fuck this one is harder than anticipated ]]

It strikes at the most random damned moments. It's different from when he panics (flashing back to cold tunnels, fire-lit tables, chanting, the stench of rotting meat suffusing even the stone) or when he wakes up screaming (slicked with sweat and clawing at his own throat a if he could tear away the blasphemies he's vomited up or the horrors he's swallowed down). He's identified one trigger after another for those; he's peeled back the skin and laid his pain bare, and he's coming to understand it even if he still turns to the knife, the pipe, and the bottle to try to make it go away.

But this is different. There's neither rhyme nor reason to this. Nothing he can identify (neither scent nor sound, not discussion nor half-familiar face) has brought this on, and that means he can't prevent it. There's no screaming, no jackhammer heartbeat, no vomiting bile from an empty stomach, no.... Just a lack. A lack of everything, even the cold. He stops what he's doing, forgets what he's doing, and just...stares, because what's the fucking point of remembering.

He's shut down in a way his best opium can't approach. The tile beneath his floor may as damn well be the precipice of the yawning chasm of Hell itself. There's a weight on his shoulders that could crush his frail bones if he let it and he can't remember why he should care. All the immensity of his sins, the burden of the monster he's willingly become over and over again, crushes the air from him and he

feels

nothing.

Hell is not a fiery pit. It's a hungering darkness, an ache deeper than bone, a void that sucks away light and devours life. He's staring straight into it, deep inside himself, and he feels

nothing.

. o O o .

In the kitchen of the grand house that floats over Nagrand, glittering like an emerald tossed up above the Spirit Fields, a young man shakes his lover by the shoulders in a panic. He begs, and he's so, so careful not to hurt the smaller man but please come back, you're safe, you're safe, I'm here, and he prays frantically in the back of his mind that someday he can fill the jagged, empty hole that keeps taking his lover Away.

[defilerwyrm]

Music/Song

Their father told them once that one of the hallmarks of a true gentleman was the ability to play.

For just a heartbeat when he sets foot through the doorway of his family estate and hears the slow, plaintive notes of a piano he could imagine it wasOropheius sitting on the bench, and he remembers their father's large hands cruising across ivory keys in reverence, the way his body would rock gently with the notes and rhythm, the click and inhale of soft-shod feet working the pedals that changed the length and voice. But it's not the same ebonwood instrument sitting in the parlour now, and the broad-shouldered man before it has hair the colour of cherrywood rather than wheat. The song, though.

He knows this song.

Decades ago both brothers had wanted to follow in their father's footsteps when asked which instrument they wanted to learn – for it was never a question of if they would learn to play; they were well-bred, and it was a given. He remembers being too awkward in the seat, all gangly limbs and thin fingers that their mother assured him would be perfect for coaxing miracles from the keys, remembers his brow furrowed in concentration as his gaze flicked between sheet and board, remembers his lilac-eyed reflection in its case. He was no natural, but this was their mother's favourite song, and he was determined to learn it.

Second measure. That's when the inexplicable soreness set in. The first time he'd felt his tendons seize and pain lance up his arm, and then a starburst of pin-pricks under his skin and locked bones and panic and he kept trying to coax out another note, another chord, anything, and he couldn't, just couldn't.

He never told them why he suddenly asked to change his focus to violin, nor could they ever get the truth of why he seemed so ashamed to ask. Holding a bow was far easier, and the discomfort in his left hand was little more than an annoying tingle that he could push away.

Without a word, without announcement, he slipped closer and listened as his big brother played. Tharestes was aware of his presence but didn't miss a note: not as the footfalls coming closer, nor at the sound of a case being laid to the ground and opened, nor when Oriseus drew his bow across the violin's strings to join in. Their hands cruised across ivory and against catgut with reverence, and their bodies swayed slightly with the rhythm and the notes.

In the dim wreckage that had been their family's home for centuries, neither speaking a word, the brothers Lastdawn played Lydia's favourite song.