"I have the right to remain silent, but not the ability."
@writingwithoutconfidence
"You told me I was the problem," Finn said, the words tumbling out between sobs, messy and uncontrolled. "That's how it all started, didn't it? You said people are scared of my power, scared I was going to one day lose control. But wasn't it the people who sent me to fight danger that came our way? Wasn't it them, Soren? Every monster I killed, every threat I faced—they chose to send me. They put me in front of claws and fangs and death, and then they were surprised when I came back with power on my skin?"
AO3
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This blog is mostly where I share writing — snippets, stories, drafts, anything really. I'm not going to openly tell anyone my age, so please respect my boundaries. That’s about it. Welcome, and thanks for being here.
Current pfp: Alex Grant from my WIP ‘Disguised’
Current banner: Created by @alexazucchie for my WIP 'Paper Fangs'. I LOVE IT SO MUCHH
✨ MY WRITING ✨
Original Works on AO3 that I 110% recommend:
Unremembered
Dimidia by @ponderingpen
Stolen Sunlight (such a shame it's gone. I loved it so muchh)
Ashcombe by @housemasterwilkes
This is a post full of Writing Things I've written... hopefully they're useful.
An original quote: Being bad is temporary. Never letting yourself try isn’t - me!
And because I love my OC's so much here's a list of a few of their names and where they're from (out of every WIP there is only like two to three characters who I LOVE despite there being like ten in every story lol):
Marcus Hemming - Disguised
Alex Grant - Disguised
Finn Rook - Unchosen
Soren Vane - Unchosen
Ayla and Veyru - Foundlings
Jay Devell - Paper Fangs
Jun Park - Paper Fangs
Eddie and Ryan - WHUMP
Kyle Taylor - The Lighter In His Pocket
Luke Taylor - The Lighter In His Pocket
Things I'm posting once school FINALLY finishes:
- Paper Fangs -> Chapter 13, 14 and 15
- Whump -> I've been sent lovely prompts for Eddie and Ryan...
- The Tale of The Brave Ones -> Chapter 23 and 24
- Give Him This -> Chapter 9, 10 and maybe 11 (?)
To be clear, I have written everything but I just haven't edited or reread over them, so once I've done that I'll post!! CAN'T WAIT FOR SUMMER AHHHHHH
if you receive this, you make somebody happy! go on anon and send this to ten of your followers who make you happy or somebody you think needs cheering up. if you get one back, even better!!! (❀❛ ֊ ❛„)♡
if you receive this, you make somebody happy! go on anon and send this to ten of your followers who make you happy or somebody you think needs cheering up. if you get one back, even better!!! (❀❛ ֊ ❛„)♡
The transfer order lands on your locker shelf sometime during third round. You don't see who leaves it. You just finish your sweep of C-Block, return to the stale fluorescent hum of the locker room, and there it is: white paper, black type, your name at the bottom.
Assigned by: Captain E. Grey.
You hold it up to the light, checking for watermark, for texture, for anything that would mark it as different from the ten thousand other forms this place generates daily. Nothing. Standard issue. Standard procedure.
Except Grey doesn't assign transfers. That's Ko's detail, or the shift sergeant, or the automated system spitting out names from a rotation. Grey approves budgets. Grey attends meetings with people whose suits cost more than your annual salary. Grey watches.
He doesn't assign.
You fold the slip into your pocket and finish changing. The uniform settles over your shoulders, the same cheap fabric, the same tight sleeves, the same badge that says Jay because James was too long and you never bothered to correct them. The snake tattoo winds beneath the fabric, wrist to shoulder, patient as ever.
You don't wonder why Grey chose you for this. You've learned that wondering costs more than it pays.
Rourke is waiting in the intake cage when you arrive.
You've seen his file — not because you sought it out, but because it's pinned to the transfer board in Admin, available to anyone with eyes and time. Daryl Rourke. Forty-three. Two consecutive sentences for armed robbery and aggravated assault. Six years into a twelve-year stretch. Three weeks solitary for breaking a corrections officer's jaw in the laundry detail — officer's name redacted, but you can guess. Briggs has been walking with his mouth wired shut for a week, drinking his meals through a straw, glaring at anyone who looks at him too long.
Rourke is bigger than his file suggests. Six-four, maybe two-forty, muscle gone soft around the edges from too much time horizontal, too little movement. His face is a topography of old violence: flattened nose, scar tissue webbing one eyebrow, a missing front tooth that gives his grin a jagged asymmetry.
His hands hang at his sides, cuffed behind him, but you can read them anyway — knuckles swollen and misaligned, the hands of a man who's been hitting things his whole life, walls and people and whatever else got in his way.
He grins when he sees you.
"Fresh meat in a badge," he says. His voice is gravel in a rusted can, rough and deliberate. "They sendin' babies to do men's work now."
You don't answer. You unlock the cage, check his ankle restraints, take his arm above the elbow. The protocol is simple: walk him to the elevator, down to sub-level three, through the airlock, into the solitary cell. Twelve minutes, door to door. You've done it before. You've done worse.
Rourke leans into you as you walk, testing your weight, your balance, the give in your stance. You let him. Let him think you're soft, new, the kind of guard who flinches when inmates get close. He's wrong, but you've been wrong before too. You've been a lot of things.
"You smell like fear, badge," he murmurs, close enough that his breath warms your ear, sour with the institutional breakfast they serve at 0500 — powdered eggs, stale bread, something approximating coffee. "I know that smell. I make men smell like that."
You keep walking. The corridor stretches ahead, concrete and flickering light, the same corridor you've walked a hundred times since you started. You know the cameras here: one at the junction, blind spot for three seconds as it pans left; one outside the elevator, fixed, covering the approach; one in the elevator itself, watching, recording, indifferent.
You know the timing of the doors — seven seconds from button-press to opening, four seconds to close, two seconds of vulnerability when they meet. You know the weight of the keys in your pocket, the exact distance to the emergency alarm, the location of the fire extinguisher that hasn't been inspected in eight months.
You know these things the way you know your own heartbeat. Present. Unremarkable. Simply there.
You stopped asking why weeks ago.
At the junction, Rourke spits.
Not at the floor. At you. The phlegm hits your cheek, warm and wet, sliding down toward your jaw in a slow trail that you feel more than you see. It sits there, a badge of contempt, a test you didn't ask for and don't have to answer.
You could keep walking. Should keep walking. The protocol is clear: don't engage, don't escalate, document and report. You're a prison guard, not a combatant.
The spit is technically assault on an officer, but not worth the paperwork, not worth the risk, not worth the fifteen minutes it would take to process the incident and explain to the sergeant why you let a prisoner provoke you into a situation.
You stop.
Rourke feels the change in your grip — not tighter, not rougher, just different. Settled. Centered. He looks at you, still grinning, but something flickers behind his eyes. Uncertainty. The first crack in his performance.
You turn to face him. The corridor is empty. The camera at the junction is panning left, away, blind for three seconds.
You step close.
Close enough that your chest almost touches his, that you can smell the sourness of his skin beneath the institutional soap, the copper tang of old sweat in his hair, the faint chemical sweetness of contraband tobacco on his breath. Close enough that your mouth is near his ear, your voice dropping to something just above a whisper, intimate, almost tender.
"Three weeks," you say. "That's your sentence in solitary. Three weeks of no light, no sound, no human contact except the slot in the door where they push your meals. You'll count the minutes. You'll talk to yourself. You'll forget what your own voice sounds like."
You pause. Let him feel your breath against his ear. Let him feel the weight of your presence, the stillness of your body, the absolute absence of threat that is itself a threat.
"And when you come out," you continue, "you'll still be here. In my unit. On my block. Eating when I say you eat. Moving when I say you move. Breathing because I haven't found a reason to stop you yet."
You pull back, just enough to see his face. The grin is gone. The jagged tooth is hidden behind lips pressed tight, bloodless. His eyes — brown, bloodshot, older than the rest of him — find yours and don't look away, because looking away would be surrender, and he's not ready to surrender yet.
"You think that scares me?" he says, but his voice is wrong, the bluster of a man who has already lost something he can't name.
You don't answer. You don't need to. You reach up — slowly, deliberately, giving him every opportunity to flinch, to pull away, to demonstrate that he still controls his own body — and wipe the spit from your cheek with the back of your hand. You look at it, glistening on your knuckles, then wipe it on his shoulder, his uniform, his property now, his mark.
"You broke a man's jaw," you say. "Briggs. He's been drinking his meals through a straw for a week. You think that makes you hard. You think violence is a language you speak better than the people around you."
You lean in again. The camera is still panning. Two seconds left.
"I've broken more jaws than you've seen. I've ended more lives than you've met. And I did it without spitting, without shouting, without needing to prove anything to anyone. Because the difference between you and me, Rourke, isn't what we've done. It's that you need people to know. And I need them not to."
You step back. Smooth your uniform. The camera has panned back — you feel its mechanical eye returning, indifferent, recording nothing but two men standing in a corridor.
"Now," you say, and your voice is normal now, conversational, the voice of a man discussing weather or sports or the quality of the coffee in the break room. "We're going to walk to that elevator. You're going to behave. And in three weeks, when you come back to my block, you're going to remember this moment. You're going to remember that you spent your one chance to matter on spit, and that the man you spat on didn't even need to raise his voice to take it from you."
You take his arm again. Your grip is gentle, almost supportive, the grip of a man helping an elderly relative across a street.
Rourke moves. He doesn't speak. He doesn't resist. He walks beside you to the elevator, his footsteps echoing in the empty corridor, and you can feel the tremor in his arm, the fine vibration of a man who has just discovered that the ground beneath his feet was never as solid as he believed.
The elevator doors open. You guide him inside. The camera watches from the corner, red light blinking, and Rourke stares at it with something like longing, like he wishes it had seen what happened, wishes there were proof, wishes he could point to a recording and say: there, that man, he threatened me, he broke rules, he did something wrong.
But the camera only sees what it sees. Two men in a metal box, descending.
"You're not a guard," Rourke whispers, not looking at you. "Guards don't — you're something else."
You watch the numbers descend. Sub-level one. Sub-level two.
"I'm whatever you need me to be," you say. "Right now, you need me to be the man who walks you to your cell. Tomorrow, you might need me to be something else. The day after that, you might need me to forget you exist."
The elevator stops. The doors open on sub-level three, the airlock, the transition between the world above and the world below.
"The question," you say, guiding him forward, "is what you do to make sure I stay the man who walks you to your cell."
The solitary wing is different from the main population. The air is colder, filtered through systems that recycle it too efficiently, stripping out sound and smell and the subtle human cues that make a place feel inhabited. The cells are smaller, the doors solid instead of barred, the lights on timers that the occupants can't control. Some men go mad here. Others find a stillness they never knew they had.
You process Rourke in silence. Remove the ankle restraints, replace them with the cell's internal cuffs. He doesn't look at you. His eyes are fixed on the floor, on the wall, on anything that isn't your face. You can see his jaw working, the muscle jumping beneath the skin, the effort of holding something in.
"Three weeks," you say, stepping back. "Eat your meals. Sleep when the lights go out. Don't bang on the door — it doesn't open any faster, and it annoys the people who decide when it opens at all."
You don't know why you give him advice. You don't know why you care whether he survives solitary intact. Maybe it's strategy — a broken man is unpredictable, and you prefer your variables controlled. Maybe it's something else, something older, something that doesn't have a name in the vocabulary you've recovered.
Maybe it's just habit. The Serpent was efficient, and efficiency sometimes looked like mercy.
You step out. The door closes behind you, pneumatic hiss and heavy clunk, the sound of a world sealing itself away. You don't look back. You walk through the airlock, wait for the cycle, emerge into the corridor beyond.
The elevator ride up is longer than the ride down. You watch the numbers change, feeling the pressure shift in your ears, the subtle disorientation of moving between levels of a building that was designed to contain rather than comfort.
You don't go to the break room. You don't file the report — you'll do it later, or tomorrow, or never, the paperwork is a fiction that maintains a fiction, and you've lost interest in maintaining fictions you didn't create. You walk to the staff bathroom on the second tier, the one with the broken lock that no one fixes because no one uses it, the one with the mirror that cracked last month during a plumbing incident and hasn't been replaced.
You push the door shut behind you. It doesn't latch. You don't care.
The fluorescent light is unforgiving. It shows you everything: the dark circles under your eyes that sleep doesn't fix, the tension in your jaw that relaxation doesn't release, the snake tattoo half-visible where your sleeve has ridden up, the ink seeming darker in this light, the scales more defined, the open jaws closer to your pulse than you remember.
You look at your hands.
They're steady. They always are.
You remember the USB footage — yourself in the sleek suit, counting money while a woman's hand rested on your shoulder, dark red nails against black fabric. You remember the warehouse video, the trunk, Zeke's shaking hands scrubbing blood from rubber lining while your own held a phone, scrolling, bored. You remember the conference room, the men going still when you entered, the way fear moved through them like a current you could almost feel.
You remember Rourke's face in the corridor, the way the certainty drained out of him like water from a cracked vessel, the way he looked at you afterward like you were a door he hadn't noticed, leading somewhere he didn't want to go.
They should be shaking.
You wait for it. Stand in front of the cracked mirror with your hands held palm-down at waist height, the way a doctor might hold them for examination, and you wait for the tremor, the spasm, the body's honest rebellion against what you've become, what you've always been, what the USB drive proved beyond the possibility of doubt.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Two minutes.
Nothing.
Your hands hang in the air, still as held breath, and you feel the absence of reaction more acutely than you would feel the reaction itself. The man in the videos didn't shake. The man in the ditch, waking with a shattered skull and no name, didn't shake either — not when the nurses touched him, not when the doctors asked questions he couldn't answer, not when the emptiness inside him yawned wider than any wound.
You've never shaken. You've never flinched. You've never been anything but steady, and the steadiness is not courage. It's not discipline. It's not training, though Elena would claim it is, though Dr. Thorne would document it, though the files would attribute it to conditioning and selection and the careful construction of a weapon.
The steadiness is emptiness. The steadiness is a well so deep it has no bottom, no echo, no measure of its own depth.
You lower your hands. Look up at your reflection in the cracked glass.
The man looking back is not the man from the hospital, confused and grateful for a name that wasn't his, clinging to James because it was the only thing offered, the only thing that stuck. He's not the man from the videos either — not quite, not yet. Something in between. Something still forming in the crucible of this place and these choices and this slow, inevitable remembering.
"What do I do with this?" you ask.
The man in the mirror doesn't answer. He never does. But his eyes — your eyes, dark amber, almost black in this light — hold something you haven't seen before. Not confusion. Not fear. Not the desperate searching of a man trying to find himself in empty rooms.
Something harder. Older. More familiar than you want to admit.
You turn on the tap. The water is cold, shocking, grounding. You cup it in your hands, splash it against your face, feel the droplets run down your neck beneath your collar, tracing paths across your skin. You wash your hands methodically, the way you were taught in the hospital, the way you've seen surgeons do it in movies, working the soap between your fingers, under your nails, around your wrists where the snake's tail disappears beneath the bone.
You dry your hands on rough brown paper towels that shred against your calluses. You adjust your uniform, smooth the fabric over the scars that map your torso — chest, abdomen, the long jagged line down your back that the nurse said was glass from the crash but that you now suspect is older, deeper, from something you don't remember and maybe don't want to. The snake tattoo disappears beneath your sleeve, coiled and waiting, patient as it has always been.
When you step back into the corridor, the prison is the same. The same fluorescent hum that never stops, the same concrete chill that seeps through your boots, the same weight of watching eyes from cameras and inmates and guards who know more than they say or less than they pretend.
But you are different.
You feel it in the way you move — not faster, not slower, just more deliberate, more aware of the space you occupy and the space you don't. You feel it in the way you breathe, deep and even, the breath of a man who has stopped running from something he can't outrun.
You feel it in the way you catalogue exits and cameras and threats, not as discovery but as habit, as language, as the native tongue of a country you never chose to be born in but can't stop being citizen of.
You know who you were. You know what you did. The files showed you, Laila confirmed it, Marco's scar and Zeke's loyalty and the warden's sweat-damp fear all pointed to the same shape, the same silhouette, the same man moving through rooms and leaving stillness behind him.
The question that remains — the only question — is what you do with the knowing.
You walk toward the unit. Toward Marco, who will be bouncing his rubber ball against the wall, thump-catch-thump-catch, who will look at you with something like satisfaction when he sees whatever has changed in your face. Toward Grey, who is watching from somewhere, always watching, whose assignment of this transfer was a test or a message or both.
Toward the next shift, the next confrontation, the next moment when you will have to choose between the man you were and the man you're trying to become, assuming there is a difference, assuming the trying itself isn't just another performance, another mask, another way of being what you were made to be while pretending to struggle against it.
The serpent stirs beneath your skin. Not striking. Not sleeping. Just present. A reminder that you are marked, always marked, that the ink was laid down when you were young and the skin has grown around it, incorporated it, made it part of the architecture of yourself.
You don't ask who you are anymore.
You already know.
The only question left is whether you'll let yourself become it again, or whether the man who woke up in a ditch with no name and no memory still has enough weight to pull you in another direction.
You don't have the answer. You don't know if you'll have it before the choice is made for you, before the momentum of this place and these people and this past that won't stay buried carries you past the point where choosing is possible.
But you walk anyway. Because stopping is surrender, and surrender is death, and whatever else you are, whatever else you've been, you've never been good at dying.
Grab the nearest book and flip to these pages for quotes that describe your life and stuff! Then tag people! You are welcome to make people try and guess what book it is :)
17- first word is what your friends call you behind your back
42- third full sentence describes your life right now
67- random thingy for you somewhere on the page
111- last sentence is something from your life
112- first thing a character says describes you
206- first or second full sentence describes your love life
394- first thing a character says describes you
Here’s mine:
17- “Okay” (ouch 😭)
42- “I’ve spent the last few days without much information to go on.” (how does it know)
67- “Good question.” (considering 42 this makes sense)
111- “It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.” (…yeah. yeah that actually works)
112- “Good thing you already made up your mind, then.” (hehe that’s actually quite accurate)
206- “♫♪♫♪” (frick that totally gives the book away doesn’t it)
394- “I won’t do it!” (sounds exactly like me. this goes very well with 112 lol)
17: "Daddy" WOAH. WOAH, WAIT A MINUTE. I'M NOT EVEN A MAN, WHAT--
42: "Then what's that gooooood smell?" Uhh...Mom's peach tree blossom spray? I don't know.
67: "...wiping down the jars..." ...okay then.
111: "But before I could strategize and prepare and announce my plan, Ebo blurted it out...called the bully a minnow, and me a shark..." No comment.
112: "...even ready to tell ANYONE..." Yah, I do yap a lot :P
206: If I share the full sentence, I M I G H T spoil what the book is, so I'll just do the first two lines ( it's in poem format ). "As soon as I get home, I sit at the kitchen table."
394: "Any place is better than this one, and you said as long as we are together, we are all right. So, if you're going, then I'm going. This place is too evil, Nana. Too much badness wrapped up in all the goodness that could be." ...goddamn.
42: 'She doesn't answer.'
The person you are calling is unavailable, please leave a message after the tone BEEEP
67: 'I should order him to go away— he'd still do it'
I mean... yeah, if someone told me to leave I would??
111: 'But the colours are the same...'
Ummm... emotions? Nature? Yeahh no idea.
112: 'I can't help but feel proud of Davy now— you'll think that's funny coming from me, but I can't help but feel proud of him'
Really 🥹🥹 You're... you're proud of me??
206: 'I've just caught my enemy red-handed, breaking into the Mage's office'
SERIOUSLY??? AFTER ALL THE TROPES IN THE WORLD I HAVE THE MOST BASIC CLICHÉ ONE?? A FREAKING ENEMY TO LOVERS?? C'mon mann
394: "Speak for yourself!"
Going to this from an enemies-to-lovers trope on page 206? My life is apparently just a poorly written sitcom
@lixdoesntknow @alexazucchie @orcaraminga @justluchii @cervus-scribe @tip-top-all-right @vulpyabby + open tags
A noble whumpee, after having been held captive and tortured by whumper and then saved, recovers and faces whumper in a fair fight. Whumpee defeats them with no difficulty. Whumper is lying on the ground, whumpee stepping on their chest holding their weapon to whumper’s throat. They have to kill whumper for the cause, not out of revenge. But they can’t bring themselves to do it, because they don’t believe it right to kill another human being. They are not afraid, they do not pity whumper — they simply don’t have so much bitterness inside them as to go against all their beliefs. They hesitate, putting themselves in great danger.
And that’s when caretaker suddenly steps in to make that final blow. And they don’t do it for the cause, no, they don’t care about the cause. They do it out of pure revenge for everything that whumpee has suffered.
DO IT FOR EDDIE AND RYAN. DO IT BITCH I'M WATCHING YOU
okay that's what I saved this as in my drafts and I don't want to delete it. So yes, I did write it for Eddie and Ryan. Here it is @janetm74
Eddie's arms burned.
Not from the fight. That was over. Whumper was on his back in the mud, chest heaving, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth, and Eddie had his boot on his sternum and his sword at his throat and everything was very still.
Very quiet.
"You made such lovely noises," Whumper said. "Did you know that? Most people scream. You—" he coughed, blood flecking his chin, "—you sobbed. Like a child. Like you believed, really believed, that someone would come."
Eddie pressed the blade harder. Felt it bite. A thin line of red appeared beneath the steel.
He should push.
He knew the angle. Knew the resistance of throat-meat, the give of cartilage, the wet finality of it. He'd killed men in battle before. This was no different. This was war. This was justice. This was what you did to men who kept you in rooms that smelled of copper and sweat and made you learn the shape of your own breaking.
His arms burned from holding still. From the thing his body wouldn't let him do.
"You're shaking," Whumper observed. He sounded pleased. "Is it memory, do you think? Or are you simply not man enough to finish what you started?"
Eddie's jaw ached. He was clenching it so hard his teeth hurt. His vision had narrowed to Whumper's face, to the smile, to the blood, and somewhere at the edges he was aware of Ryan standing nearby, close enough to hear every word, close enough to see Eddie's hands tremble where they gripped the hilt.
"Do it," Whumper whispered. "Or don't. But decide. I'm getting bored, and boredom was always bad for you, wasn't it? Boredom meant I had to find new ways to—"
Eddie's arms dropped.
Not a decision. Just a failure. His muscles gave out, the sword tip falling away from Whumper's throat, and he felt the shame of it hot in his chest, felt Whumper's smile widen, felt the moment stretch and stretch and—
Ryan moved.
Eddie didn't see him draw. Didn't see him step forward. Just saw the flash of steel and heard the sound, that wet final sound, and then Ryan's sword was buried to the hilt in Whumper's chest and Ryan's hands were on the grip and Ryan's face was blank, utterly blank, as he twisted the blade once, twice, and pulled it free with a sound like a boot leaving mud.
Whumper made a noise. Small. Surprised. His eyes found Eddie's, still smiling, still fucking smiling, and then the smile faltered, and his chest hitched, and he was still.
Ryan stood over him. Breathing hard. Blood on his hands, his sleeves, his face. He didn't wipe it away. He just looked at Eddie, and his eyes were bright and fierce and something else, something Eddie didn't have a name for.
"I couldn't—" Eddie started.
"I know." Ryan's voice was flat. Not unkind. Just flat. "I watched."
"You didn't have to—"
"Yes I did." Ryan looked down at the body. At the blood spreading dark and thick into the mud. "He was going to get up. He was going to walk away. And you were going to let him."
Eddie didn't answer. He couldn't. His arms still burned, and his hands were shaking worse now, and he wanted to say something about principles, about the line he wouldn't cross, about the person he was trying to remain despite everything, but the words wouldn't come. They felt small. They felt like excuses.
Ryan stepped closer. Close enough that Eddie could smell the blood on him, the sweat, the iron tang of violence. He reached out and took Eddie's sword hand in both of his own, pressing their palms together, feeling the tremor there.
"I don't care about your honour," Ryan said quietly. "I don't care about the cause. I care that you're alive. That he's not. That's all."
Eddie's fingers curled around Ryan's. The hilt of his sword was still warm. Ryan's hands were warmer.
"I'm not—" Eddie stopped. Swallowed. "I'm not sorry he's dead."
"Good."
"I'm sorry you had to be the one."
Ryan's grip tightened. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to ground him.
"I'm not," Ryan said. "I'd do it again. I'll do it again, for anyone who tries. You don't have to carry this. You don't have to carry any of it. Just—" his voice cracked, just slightly, just enough, "—just stay here. Stay with me. That's all I need."
Eddie looked at him. At the blood on his face, the ferocity in his eyes, the tremor in his hands that matched Eddie's own. He thought about the room that smelled of copper and sweat. He thought about the sounds Whumper had described. He thought about Ryan, sitting in a chair, zip-tied and helpless, watching.
He pulled Ryan closer.
Their foreheads touched. Their breath mingled, sharp and fast. Eddie could feel Ryan's heartbeat through their joined hands, frantic and alive and real.
"I'm here," Eddie whispered.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
Behind them, the battlefield groaned and stirred, the war remembering them, demanding more. But for this moment, this small bloody moment, they were still. They were together. The dead man at their feet said nothing, and that was enough.
Ayla noticed it first in the fish—the glowing ones in the underground river, the ones she and Veyru had named together until some of them had something to be called.
They had pressed against the far bank, clustering where the current slowed, their luminescence dimmed to a sickly green she had never seen before.
She had watched them for a long moment, reed mat forgotten in her hands, and told herself it was the season. The river rose. The fish changed. There were explanations that did not involve the weight in her chest, the sudden wrongness of air that had settled too still against her skin.
Veyru had left at dawn to check the deep passages. The albino crabs had been migrating, he said, their blind scuttling a sign that the lower caves were flooding. "Two hours," he had promised, pressing his forehead to hers in the gesture that meant I will return. "Three, if the water has risen past the stone bridge."
That was six hours ago.
She had waited through the morning, sorting moss, braiding reeds, singing the new words to the old song under her breath. She had waited through the afternoon, when the fire needed banking and she built it herself, the way he had taught her, flint striking until the sparks caught.
She had waited into the evening, when the fish began their strange clustering and the air began its strange stillness, and she understood—without knowing how she understood—that waiting was no longer a choice but a preparation.
She took the knife.
He had given it to her three weeks past, pressing the bone handle into her palm with the gravity of something ceremonial. "Not for hunting," he had said. "Hunting requires patience you are still learning. This is for—" He had paused, claws clicking that nervous habit. "For when I am not here. For when the dark has teeth that are not mine."
She had laughed, then. She had thought it was metaphor, the way he sometimes spoke, translating concepts from a language that had no words for possession or property. Now she strapped it to her thigh, the way he had shown her, and felt the weight of it as something between promise and threat.
The passage he had taken was one he had widened himself over decades, claw-marks scoring the limestone in parallel lines she had learned to read like handwriting. She followed them now, her own footsteps loud in the silence, her breathing too fast, too human, too much. The glowing fish had not followed. The river behind her was dark.
She found the stone bridge first.
It was intact, dry, untouched by flood. On its far side, the passage continued into blackness she had never entered—Veyru's territory, the deep caves he spoke of only in fragments, the places where he had been lonely before she existed. She stood at the threshold, the knife cold against her leg, and called his name.
"Veyru."
She stepped onto the bridge.
The sound reached her from the passage ahead—not footsteps, not the dragging tail she knew, but a rhythm she couldn't parse. Something heavy and light at once, moving with a speed that left no room for patience, no room for the careful deliberation of anything that had learned to measure time in decades.
Ayla stopped. Her hand found the knife. She had not drawn it yet—she remembered his teaching, the patience of the hunter, the fatal error of showing a weapon before you could use it—but her fingers closed around the bone handle and held.
It emerged from the dark.
She had never seen anything like it. That was the first horror, and it was total: proportions that served violence rather than gentleness, bulk that filled the space between stone walls with a presence that had nothing to do with anything she knew.
The fur was dark, matted with something that might have been water or might have been saliva, spines rigid along a spine that bent at angles no backbone should allow. The eyes—she looked for anything she could read and found only hunger, only appetite, only the flat reflection of distant glow-fish in surfaces that held no light, no consciousness, nothing she could call a person looking back.
It saw her.
She ran.
Not toward the cave—that would lead it home, to the sleeping shelf, to the fire she had built with her own hands. She ran sideways, down a passage she had seen once in passing, narrow and steep, her shoulder scraping stone, her breath ragged in her own ears.
Behind her, the thing followed with a speed that should have been impossible for something that size, that mass, that wrongness. It did not tire. It did not hesitate at junctions.
The passage opened into a chamber she did not know. Low ceiling, wet stone, the sound of dripping water from somewhere above. She pressed herself against the wall, knife drawn now.
Her hands shook. She remembered his teaching: the grip, the stance, the moment before the strike when everything was still possible. She had practiced on dead wood, on moss, on nothing that moved or wanted her dead.
It entered.
The chamber was too small for its size. It moved poorly here, shoulders hunching, spines scraping the ceiling in showers of dust and stone.
For a moment, less than a breath, the eyes changed. Something flickered in them, something that did not belong to the hunger, something that looked at her and knew her and was gone before she could name it.
Then the eyes went dark again, and it lunged.
She moved without thinking. The knife came up, not in the arc he had taught her—too slow, too formal for this space—but in a wild, desperate thrust that caught something soft, something that gave, something that made a sound like tearing silk. Hot liquid sprayed her forearm. The thing reared back, not in pain but in surprise, as if it had not expected her to fight, as if the concept of resistance was foreign to whatever drove it.
She had cut low, across what might have been a thigh or a forelimb, she could not tell in the dark. The wound was not deep—she had not committed fully, had not stepped into the strike the way he had shown her, too afraid of the closing distance, too afraid of what those claws would do if she came within reach. It bled, but it did not slow.
It came again.
This time she was ready, or readier, her body remembering fragments of lessons she had thought theoretical. She sidestepped, not gracefully, not efficiently, but enough that the claws that would have opened her chest instead scored the wall beside her head, stone powdering where they struck.
She struck back, a wild slash that opened a line across what might have been a shoulder, and heard herself making a sound—not a scream, not a battle cry, but something closer to the wet click she had made when she learned her family did not want her back.
The thing paused.
Not from injury. The wounds she had dealt were shallow, embarrassing, the work of someone who had not understood that a knife was not a promise but a commitment. The body twitched, spines relaxing, claws retracting halfway before snapping out again, as if whatever held it had tightened its grip in response.
She saw the opening and took it.
It lunged.
She threw herself sideways, rolled across wet stone, felt claws rake her back—not deep, not killing, but enough to tear cloth and skin, enough to leave hot lines of pain that told her she was alive and would not be for long if she kept this up. The knife was still in her hand. She had not dropped it, which surprised her. She had not learned enough to use it properly, which did not.
The chamber had a slope. She had not noticed in the dark, but her roll carried her downward, toward a lower shelf of stone where water pooled, where the glowing fish sometimes strayed when the current shifted. She slid, the knife clutched against her chest, and came up against something hard—a protrusion of rock, a natural pillar, something she could put her back against.
The thing followed more slowly now. The wounds, shallow as they were, had accumulated: the thigh, the shoulder, a third she did not remember dealing, perhaps from her wild roll through stone that had cut where she had not seen.
It reached the slope. Paused. The eyes flickered—dark, then something else, then dark again, faster now, like a lamp running out of oil.
"Ayla."
The voice was deep, but nothing like his voice. This was her name spoken by something that had learned it from somewhere, that wore it like a taunt, like proof that it knew things about her she had not offered.
It was playing with her. It had learned her name and it was using it to make her afraid, to make her think of the person who had once spoken it gently, to make her hesitate.
She did not hesitate.
She stepped into the strike.
Not well. Not correctly. She did not extend her arm the way he had taught her, did not rotate her hip, did not commit her weight. She simply moved forward, the knife leading, and felt it catch, and catch again, and—
It collapsed.
Not from her blows. She knew that even as it fell, even as the bulk of it struck the stone beside her with a force that shook water from the ceiling. Her knife had done nothing fatal, nothing even seriously damaging.
She stood over it, knife raised, breathing in gasps that hurt her chest. It did not move. The eyes were closed, or something like closed—the lids, if they were lids, drawn over darkness that no longer reflected anything. She waited for it to rise, to resume, to prove that this was a trick, a pause, a hunter's patience.
It did not.
The change began slowly.
She saw it first in the fur, the dark mass lightening at the edges, grey creeping inward like frost across a window. The spines softened, retracted, became something ragged, familiar, ears she knew from months of waking and sleeping beside them. The bulk shifted, redistributed, bones creaking in ways that made her stomach turn, until what lay before her was no longer monstrous but simply large, simply scarred, simply—
Veyru.
She knew him in the scars.
The grey patches where fur had fallen out and grown back silver. She knew him, and the knowing arrived not as relief but as a second horror, worse than the first because it had a name and a history and a weight she could not set down.
The knife fell from her hand. It struck stone with a sound that was too loud, too final, too much like the shackle slipping down her wrist. "Veyru."
She said it first as question, then as answer, then as something that had no grammar, no syntax, only need. She was moving before she decided to move, her legs carrying her across the space between them, the space she had spent months learning to navigate, to trust, to call home. She fell to her knees beside him, her hands finding his fur, his face, the places where her knife had opened him.
"Veyru. Veyru. Veyru."
Her arms went around him, around the bulk of him, the familiar weight and smell—pine sap and river stone, yes, but underneath it something else, something sour and wrong, the residue of whatever had worn him like a cloak. She did not care. She pressed her face to his chest, felt the slow thunder of his heart, the rhythm she had learned to measure time by, and held on as if the holding could undo what she had seen, what she had done, what she had failed to recognise until it was almost too late.
He woke slowly.
She felt it in the tension of his body, the gradual return of consciousness that moved through him like water filling a vessel. His heart stuttered, steadied.
His breath, when it came, was ragged, wet, nothing like his usual measured rhythm. He did not move at first. He simply lay beneath her, frozen, and she understood—before he spoke, before he opened his eyes—that he remembered.
Flashes, perhaps. Fragments. Her face, terrified. Her voice, screaming. His own claws reaching for her, his own teeth, his own body moving with an intention that had never been his.
He did not speak. He did not press his forehead to hers, did not ask if she was warm enough, if she was hurt, if the knife had cut her as well. He lay still, and in his stillness she felt the weight of his shame, his expectation, his preparation for the moment when she would let go and step back and see him for what he had almost become.
She did not let go.
"Little light." His voice, when it came, was barely audible, barely his. The river-ice sound cracked around the edges, melting, broken. "Little light, I—"
"Don't." She tightened her hold, her arms insufficient for his bulk but stubborn, present, refusing the distance he was preparing for. "Don't you apologise for something that wore you. Don't you dare make this your fault."
He was silent. His body trembled beneath her, a vibration she felt in her ribs, her teeth, the hollow of her throat where her own voice lived.
"I didn't know," she said, and the words came out fierce, almost angry, directed at herself, at the dark, at whatever had made this necessary. "I looked at you and I saw a monster. I fought a monster. I didn't know it was you."
"You could not have known." His voice was barely above a whisper, the words forced through a throat that had been used for something else, something that had not wanted language. "I did not know. I could not reach myself. I could not—"
She touched the wound on his shoulder, the one she had made. "I hurt you."
"You survived."
"I hurt you," she repeated, and her voice cracked, not with grief but with something harder, something that had been building since the first moment she saw the wrongness in the fish. "You taught me to use this knife and I used it on you. I stepped into the strike the way you showed me and I—"
"Ayla." He said her name the way he said it when he was worried, when the gentleness fell away and left only the weight of his concern. "Look at me."
She looked. His eyes were open now, the colour she knew, the particular shade that held light instead of merely reflecting it.
"What was it?" she asked at last. The question came quietly, as though speaking too loudly might call it back. "What happened to you?"
Veyru was quiet for so long that she wondered whether he had fallen asleep again. "When the old monsters speak of the deep places," he said eventually, "they are not always speaking of the caves."
She looked up at him.
"There are creatures that live below even those passages. They are called Whisperers. They are small enough to hide beneath loose stone, too weak to hunt anything larger than cave insects. Most monsters never see them. They only hear stories, the same way human children hear stories about ghosts in the forest."
"The thing that chased me was not small."
"No."
His voice was gentle. "The Whisperer was."
She frowned. "I don't understand."
"It could not have harmed you by itself." He searched for words she would understand. "Imagine a vine growing around a tree. The vine cannot become the tree. It cannot make wood where there was none. It only climbs what is already standing until, after long enough, you can no longer see where one ends and the other begins."
She listened without speaking.
"A Whisperer does the same thing to the mind. It cannot create hunger where there is none. It cannot invent fear, or grief, or anger. It only finds what already lives there and feeds it, whisper after whisper, until every other thought is quieter."
His gaze drifted towards the tunnel where she had first seen him.
"I knew you. I knew who you were. I remembered every path in these caves. I remembered your voice." His claws flexed once against the stone. "None of that was taken from me."
"But you couldn't stop."
"No."
Ayla looked at the wounds scattered across his shoulder. "How did it end?"
"It left."
She blinked. "...Left?"
"It had what it wanted."
His ears lowered. "It simply grew tired of wearing me. And it just... went looking for another monster."
Silence settled between them.
"So all those stories..."
"The villagers think monsters wake one morning and choose to become monsters."
He shook his head slowly. "Sometimes that is true. Hunger is real. Cruelty is real. There are monsters who need no Whisperer."
He looked at her then, his eyes steady despite their weariness.
"But there are others who disappear while still breathing. Their bodies remain. Their voices remain. They walk and hunt and kill." His voice became quieter. "The Whisperer leaves eventually. By then the villagers have already done what frightened people have always done."
"They kill the monster."
"Yes."
"And no one ever knows."
"No."
Another silence, longer this time.
"The old monsters know they exist. We teach the signs. We avoid the deepest places when we can. We sing the old songs because remembering is all we have."
He looked down at the blood drying in the fur across his shoulder.
I'm getting back into making covers and having fun with fanfic for inspiration. Came across this one and thought it looked fun and instantly had an idea!
"The sun. Not because it's pretty but because one day, it's probably going to explode. We won't be here to see it, right? But still, the thing that gives us life will take it away. The light will fade. So right now is the time you have to fucking hold on. Apologies for the swear, but I'm not kidding. I attempted. Twice. The first time I was too scared to continue, I tried to purposefully overdose. I got halfway through what was considered dangerous and started to cry so hard I threw up. More recently, I tried again. Tried to overdose again, because I was scared my parents would find out otherwise. You wanna know what stopped me? The sun. I looked up, when I thought it was going to be my last day on earth and said goodbye to it like I was in a literal movie. I laughed, and I laughed so hard that someone saw me driving past, while I was sitting on the ground and pulled into my driveway, and he got out of the car and asked if I was okay. And I laughed and told him the sun was pretty, while I laid on the ground. He laid down with me. When I got up later and went to head inside, he just left. I've never seen him again, but every day I think back to him and think that he was like the sun. Can't change much. Doesn't really have a single say in what I do. Yet he made me smile, made me pause and think of the world as beautiful again. I wrote a journal entry for the first time that day since I stopped after getting bullied for it. I wrote that I wanted to meet him in the future, again and thank him. Because him stopping made me realize that maybe one day I could be the sun in somebody's life like he was. I'm still waiting for that day. But now I look at the sky and think that I survived because a person in this world stopped for five minutes to just breathe with me, and that it'll be okay."
If you're a writer or a teenage writer especially, give this a read. It doesn't matter if you write fanfics or novels or whatever, this is advice for anyone and everyone.
(Bear in mind, I am a teenage writer myself so I may be wrong too)
Okay. You know how everyone's going on about using less "said" and more of other synonyms? I feel like if you actually take that advice literally it makes your writing seem less advanced, not more. People who use "said" a lot? Adults, who have decided to go "fuck that rule, I like said." People who try very hard not to use it? Teenagers, and it's very obvious. "Said" is invisible. Readers don't notice it. They notice "he ejaculated" and "she murmured." So use it. Don't be scared of it. Let it do its job and get out of the way.
Another problem: making adulthood look easy. I'm not an adult but I know from the people around me that it definitely isn't. And I'm not talking about the glamorised version either — the unwashed clothes and bills and takeout containers. That's still a look. Real adulthood is quieter than that. It's waking up and knowing the responsibility is there before your feet hit the floor. It's the days that don't go wrong, they just... go. Nothing happens and you're still tired. You sit down to rest and you can't actually rest because some part of you is always braced for the next thing. You don't even know what the next thing is. You just know it's coming. If you're writing adults, write that. The quiet weight of it. Not the performance of being overwhelmed.
And last: sweating. Stinking. Why don't characters ever? They run around, they fight, they go to school, they come home — and they just... act normal? Like? No. Same way "said" gets replaced with fancy words and adulthood gets replaced with a performance, bodies get replaced with nothing. They're sticky. Their shirt is clinging to their back. They can smell themselves and they're hoping no one else can. They want a shower but they're feeling lazy. They know they need perfume but they haven't got any with them at the moment. That's a person. That's a body. Write it.
i've been trying to get that situation (the one that's been playing on repeat in my head) out onto the page, and i finally tried to write it. there are parts of it that never change no matter how many times i replay it, so i picked one of those fixed moments and decided to write that scene. and when I sat down to do it, it came out in third person.
---
He stumbles through the school gates late, the world tilting at the edges, and he doesn't know how he got here, only that he had to move, had to run, and now his legs are giving out.
The reception desk swims into view. He reaches for it and misses, fingers scraping empty air, and then he's on his knees on the hard floor, and something is wrong, something is very wrong, there's a crushing weight on his chest and he can't get it off, he can't—
His vision blurs. Tears, maybe. Or something else. He doesn't know. He can't see properly, can't think, his head full of static and a single screaming thought that loops and loops and loops—
Where is she where is she where is she
"Hey—hey, are you alright?"
A voice, distant, underwater. He shakes his head, or tries to, but his whole body is shaking now, trembling so hard his teeth chatter. The weight on his chest tightens, squeezing, and he gasps but no air comes, or not enough, never enough, and his hands fly to his chest, clawing at his shirt like he can tear through skin and bone and make a hole for the air to get in.
"What's your name? Can you tell me what happened?"
He can't. He can't speak. His throat is locked shut around the panic, around the name that is the only word left, and he needs to know, he needs to know if she's safe, if she's here, if the thing that found him found her too—
Where is she where is she where is she
The words tear out of him, broken, barely coherent, each one punched out on a jagged breath that doesn't fill his lungs. "Where—" A sob chokes him, violent, his whole body convulsing with it. "Where is—" He can't finish. He gasps again and it sounds wrong, high and thin and terrified, and his vision narrows to a tunnel, grey at the edges, and he thinks he might actually die here, on this floor, without knowing.
"Who? Who are you looking for?"
He shakes his head, wild, desperate. Tears stream down his face, hot and relentless, and he doesn't wipe them, can't, his hands still clawing at his chest, at his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt because the pain is the only thing keeping him here, the only thing cutting through the roaring in his ears.
Where is she where is she where is she
He manages it. Her name. Cracked open, bleeding, barely a whisper and then a wail, torn from somewhere deep in his gut, raw and endless and hers.
The receptionist moves. Someone else moves. Voices overlap, urgent, but he doesn't hear them, doesn't see them, the world reduced to the crushing weight on his chest and the name looping in his skull and the tears that won't stop, that keep coming, hot and shameful and he can't make them stop—
The history teacher stops mid-sentence.
A slip of paper. Urgent. Medical room.
She packs her bag without thinking, hands clumsy, dropping a pen, not stopping to pick it up. She runs.
The corridor blurs. The stairs tilt under her feet and she takes them too fast, nearly falls, catches herself on the railing and keeps going. Her chest burns. She doesn't feel it.
She throws open the medical room door.
He's on the floor.
Curled in on himself, knees to chest, whole body shuddering with sobs that sound like they're being ripped out of him. His hands are fisted in his hair, pulling, and his breath comes in those awful shallow gasps, too fast, too sharp, each one catching on a hitch that makes her own chest tighten in sympathy.
"Bean."
His head snaps up. His face—
Swollen eyes, blotched skin, tears still streaming, and the bruise, dark and livid on his cheek. He looks at her and something in him breaks, a sound tearing out of him that isn't words, isn't anything human, and then he's stumbling up, almost falling, and she's there, arms open, catching him as he crashes into her.
His arms crush around her waist. His face presses into her neck, hot and wet, and he's still gasping, still making those terrible sounds against her skin, his whole body convulsing with the force of it.
She holds him. Tight. One hand on the back of his head, the other arm locked around his shoulders.
"Breathe with me, darling." Her voice is low, fierce, right against his ear. "Come on. In through your nose. I've got you."
She pulls back, just enough, hands framing his face, forcing him to look at her. His eyes are glassy, unfocused, tears still spilling, and his breath hitches, stutters, catches on another sob.
"Hold your breath," she commands, soft but firm, and she demonstrates, inhaling deep, holding it, her eyes locked on his. "Yeah? With me."
He tries. His chest hitches. For a second she thinks he'll fail, thinks the panic is too big—
He holds it.
One second. Two.
"Good," she breathes out, and he follows, shaky and wet and there. "Again."
They breathe together. In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out.
She keeps her hands on his face, thumbs brushing the tears away as fast as they fall, pressing her forehead to his, close enough to feel his breath on her lips.
"You're okay," she whispers. "You're safe. I've got you. I'm not going anywhere."
His breathing slows, still catching, still ragged, but slower. The gasping fades into quieter sobs. His grip on her shirt loosens, then tightens again, afraid.
She doesn't let go.
She wraps her arms around him, guides his head back to her shoulder, and whispers against his hair.
"Well done, darling. Well done. I've got you."
And it helps.
God, it helps so much.
He buries his face in the curve of her neck, and finally, finally, breathes.
soo, put 2 truths about yourself and 1 lie. Put the answer under a cut. People can guess in the comments, just don't reveal the answer. And most importantly, have fun!
I once came 1st place in the 100m, 200m, and 400m races at school.
Once a Macaw landed on my shoulder when I was in a walk-through aviary.
I once managed to do four cartwheels in a row and haven't been able to do more than two since.
the lie is...
3!
I've never been able to do a cartwheel because I was always scared I'd break a bone or something trying lol. But on the bright side, I've never broken a bone before!
