#thread: walter.

[charyka]

closed starter for @peddling.

Sticky dark. All teeth, all bite: dark yawned below a bloodlet moon, exsanguinated. Pale like the eye of the world. From the shadows comes a Beast, Creature.

His eyes shine in that dark like the tip of a cigarette. Winked out of existence by that sharp gibbet grin of his. When he moves away from the streetcorner wall the shadow follows him, crowding at his feet. Stuck to the heel of his boot. Humming softly: the streetlights squirm against the asphalt so they don't have to illuminate his face.

"Jonah," he says. Just a word, and now the boy is named. "Hallo, Jonah. Long time no see."

[charyka-a]

@conquestforged | closed starter.

There is a crack where conquest is forged, locked and tied underneath the brink of Hel, beneath the rot and ruin, beneath the dirty waters of consumption. He lives there, has carved the nest with bone and brittle blood, universes trapped as he devoured them. Were this anything but a story, he would have no name to use for himself, no reason to be here. But he has both: a name, and a reason. One bears his bloody teeth, the other carries charms like fractured eyes. Call them his Ravens. Call them his half-rotten children. Call them what they are: the shape of the story he’s chosen. Here he is Walter. His reason is Curiosity.

This is not the same tale his tight-lipped skinned counterpart may come from, Loptr as abomination, as devouring flame. This is all the tale there is, still he knows every bit of it, has learned the tune by heart. Tricksters always need to know the world they’ll break: Loki may not be the Loki he knows exists, nor Thor is the creature of might. Different tunes, different vibrations in the pattern (she is not the flame’s daughter, she is their sister, notes changed and shaped to fit) but all the same, they lead to the same fruit: Death. He knows Death well, he Is It.

“How did it feel, then? When your father died?”

How does it feel to know blood made you free?

[charyka-a]

@whatwakes​. | cont.

“Hello, Karen.”

The shadows around him breathe blackness in the air. He moves and the world follows with him, an instant of an imprint on Karen’s retinas. The tree doubled and then back where it was. The world slipping and cracking open like a bone and its marrow that leaks, snapping back into place with an ease nothing real should have.

His hands behind his back, his steps careful along the line between the worlds. The tree beside them, ashen and torn, the spade lying against it, the roots that mark a crossroads. No roads that intersect, branches instead of dirt, sap against sap beneath the bark. A gallows-tree is as good as a crossroads when ancient words are to be exchanged.

He brushes a finger, taloned pale-white, against a leaf. It dries up and crumples and turns to dust, fall contained in a fraction of space. It takes him a while, finally, to turn and look at Karen. His smile is a small, absent one.

“Since when am I not allowed to walk where I please? Hm?”

[charyka-a]

@gutyou. | closed starter.

He assumes he’ll think he’s lingered far enough. He took the money, left the body where he was told, and now he’s just standing there, eyes fixed on the doctor, eyes burning, curious. Certainly, he must have overstayed his welcome.

But he cannot simply walk away now, can he? Can he?

Curiosity’s a pesky little mistress. He loves her perhaps almost more than he loves himself. He certainly lets her control him often enough: no love, however, for science in  his thoughts. No admiration for the perfectly flawed design of a God he’s never thought of, never cared for, barely seen. (Or should he call it Turtle, perhaps, ain’t he keen?)

His curious love is simple: push and see where the pushed thing falls. Nothing more, nothing less, everything solitary and destructive.

He blinks. He stares. He wonders how long until the good doctor shoos him away.

[charyka-a]

@cajuncur | cont. from here.

The bayou has its quiet ways of dancing with its crows. There’s a murder of them up ahead, above them, whiplash like wings, oil on the watery surface of the sky. It floats to the top.

He watches them fly. Then he looks back to her.

“It is in their nature. Sooner or later, the cruelty always bubbles to the surface.”

[charyka-a]

@mordreddeschain | starter call. | closed.

A soft drop of blood falls. A soft cut. A soft suspension of soft darkness. It has fallen from above. It has fallen from below.

It has fallen from a world that cannot stop turning. It falls in a circle. There is little to be done about it. Walter watches it hover, from the spot he is sitting in, from the spot somewhere else someone else (still him) is sitting in, they both are. He smiles at the child. The child that isn’t a child at all. The child that is Armageddon walking.

In his fabric, beneath him, he hears himself scream. Walter blinks. Walter blinks. Oh, sometimes it is as delicious as the apocalypse: to be the only one to know. 

(as you resume your quest, worlds rotate above your head).

No stars in Fedic, he tore those stars away as he had it built. He made sure of it. No mad dance to watch: just concrete, dusty, burning, dark concrete. Decrepit, deceitful, deceiving, d, d, d--

“Delightful.”

He grins a dirty grin.

“Shall we begin, little savior god?”

[charyka-a]

@gladofwar. | cont. from here.

He has seen gods rise and fall. He has seen them dance. He knows, intimately well, what it takes to make a good god die, and a lesser one take its place.

He has built his realm on the bones of fallen gods, after all. Walter lets the pinprick of his sharp nails trace patterns on the wood of the table they’re sitting at. The air’s heavy: heavy with storm, with wine, with the peculiar deafening energy that lies beneath the surface of all great wars.

He grins his peddler’s grin. Murderer’s grin. Shank-you-for-a-dime grin.

“I don’t know. They’re your enemies, not mine.”

“Who do you want ‘em to be?”

[charyka-a]

@diimm​ | starter call (accepting).

“He comes to bedsides, icy bridges, battlefronts, and crumbling ridges.”

There is dust on his boots, on his hands. There is dust in the space in his teeth.

“When he comes, he comes alone.”

There is a tradition, it is old as time: words are replaced and marred, burned new, shaped like the darkness burning. They are troves, tight taunt little spaces, that keep their nature inside.

They are riddles.

“Taps a shoulder, then is gone.”