@amasec tagged me in WIP Wednesday but it's not Wednesday anymore so here's WIP WHENEVER. My friends are playing the Arcana for the first time so I've been replaying alongside them and I'm having such a big nostalgia moment lol
also thanks to the encouragement of said friends, I've been putting myself to the task of writing For Real and I've managed to rack up about 25k words (!!) of these two in the last few weeks so here's a little bonus thing:
Lucio was raised as a hunter, but even still, he's not in the habit of remembering individual trees. Yet when the white and grey striped bark of the Scourgelands begins to bleed into the dark pine, when the snow deepens around him and rises past his shins and up to his knees, it becomes hard to miss. The pale limbs overhead press down, bowing and stretching until the edge of his vision resembles a cage more than a forest. The air freezes in his lungs when recognition strikes, a lone tree directly in his path. Everything else grows around him—or perhaps he grows smaller. "Lucio?" "This is…" He wants to stop, but his feet have already carried him right up to it. His fingers are running over the flaking strips of bark before he realizes it. "… My fighting tree." The notches are at waist height now, scattered with hardly any rhyme or reason. No finesse. Only the wild and hacking swings of a child. Just touching the pale wood floods him with memories he hasn't recalled in decades. Memories he told himself he had no need for. Not where he was going. Not with the life he was going to take for himself. He was going to fight bigger things than trees. Real things. Things that would make people remember— Rhenna is beside him now, and the trees shrink, just a little. Faint amusement curls her lips as she takes in the marks. "A fearsome opponent, to be sure." Lucio tries to smile with her, but it wavers. "I used to pretend it was a monster that I had to slay. But… why is it here?" He pulls his fingers away and casts his eyes out into the wood beyond, waiting to see a familiar silhouette emerge from the shadows, or perhaps hear that old familiar screech of an eagle, followed by a blow— Warm fingers slip against his, then trail higher, wrapping around his wrist under his sleeve and stroking his pulse. "Are you all right?"
Not tagging anyone this time but as always, if you see this and wanna share, consider this your tag <33