[P] is the blood on your hands dry

[Ipomoea]

every flower must grow

The last time he was here, the meadow had been on the cusp of winter. There had been smoke rising from the blackened stone chimney, gray smoke rising into an already gray-sky darkened by storm clouds. Snow had been falling slowly on the garden rows, hiding away the hard-frozen earth, chilling him with each cold flake that settled upon his skin.

But inside - inside it had been warm. Inside had been filled with life and vines and artistry, lulling him into what he now knew to be a false security.

It was always easiest to see one’s mistakes when looking back, never forward.

There had been a single tree standing by the cottage, bare branches clicking and humming quietly to one another as he passed beneath them. Ipomoea had always thought there was something foreboding in the blunt buds of a winter tree, something disquieting in their death-gray colors. He had ignored it then, had brushed off the disquieted way they shook as nothing more than another sign of winter, had mistaken Emersyn’s distance as a sign of soul-searching rather than the signal of a guilty conscience.

He asks himself now, how had he not seen it then?

And he wonders, had anything she said been true?

He thinks the questions might hurt more than the answers. But today - today he has no intentions of turning from the pain.

Today he stalks down that meadow path like a sheep pretending to be a wolf, singing promises of blood in every step. Today he is equally savage as the crystal-crowned stag walking beside him, who taps his antlers like a warning against every tree, every rock, every fencepost they pass. And today, the wildflowers growing beneath his heels do not wither or wilt in the late-summer heat - they lift their heads and stare at the cottage in the meadow with all the judgement of the earth.

The flowers are angry. Rhoeas is angry. He, too, is angry.

Each beat of his heart reminds him of the blood he has seen watering the forest. Every step he takes is reminiscent of the thousand times he went running between the trees. Ipomoea can not breathe without remembering the fallen stag in the forest, the one he gave his breath to so that he might live. Rhoeas huffs and drags his antlers through the corn yellow grass, until the stalks rattle as they rake against the crystal. A hundred deaths are in his eyes and in his heart, and all of them he has pinned over the head of one gray-colored girl.

Emersyn may not have been the one who killed him - but she has killed others just like him. And the forest remembers each one.

So with the morning sun just beginning to turn the sky blue, and the flowers in the meadows only just beginning to lift their heads and shake the sleep from their petals, Ipomoea approaches the Emissary’s small cottage at the edge of Illuster. And as he stands there, just across from the garden, searching the dirt and the windows for signs of life, he can feel the rage coiled in the pit of his belly begin to unwind.

His bonded knocks on the wooden gate, tap tap tapping, announcing their arrival.

@Emersyn here we go !
”here am i!“

⚘

[Emersyn]

The Situation:

(tw:  Some imagery can be disturbing)

The Elderdeer situation has gone from critical to endangered, only a small handful of the deer remain and their numbers shrink every week.  The monster that continues to harvest them is still at large.   Despite the efforts of Delumine’s citizens, it is rare to see the lights of the Elderdeer heralding the arrival of morning’s eve.  Dawn citizens have learned to accept the deep and fathomless black of night and the empty reflections of transparent crystal stars.  They try to replace the natural magic with synthetic light - it does nothing but deepen the sorrow of all that has been lost.

Patrols have blotted out the last seeds of peace and quiet when it was agreed upon that it would be smart to light the way through the forest with enchanted torches.  It is expensive - it requires many mages,  and results are too inconclusive to maintain salaries.  Not only that, but there simply is not enough men and women trusted to illuminate the paths of carnage that have been mapped out.  The fires only drive the poachers deeper into the relentless growth of the woods.  Most of them travel the routes that have been handed to them in the form of a map.  That same map handed out to concerned Delumine citizens and the resident patrol.  Not everyone has a map and not everyone uses the pathways.  While Delumine runs its circuit over and over again, killers continue to hunt the magnificent beast to the ends of the Novus soil.  It is possible that they are on the verge of extinction.  Soon, they will be nothing but fables.

One plus one equals two things; suspicion and curiosity.  While the Emissary continues to make her appearances and spit her feelings into the air, there are shortcomings in her guise that are inadmissible.  She is a phantom within the city itself, she appears on the occasion but never on the off-day.  Her home is like a distant and far away land, she likes to act as if her home is not placed directly on the belt of death where all the Elderdeer have disappeared.  Her rap sheet is long and unforgiving despite the repentance she claims to have made.  While she seems convincing when she is mad - or even sad - there is an eerie quiet in her eyes that can make a travel ed (possibly broken) mind know - or understand - a similar madness.

Emersyn has made one connection in all of her travels, no one knows but the girl who met her, and it's quite possible that the girl has already forgotten her name.  Delumine citizens consider her creepy and she has scared children before, these are two of the three things most of them know about her, the third one is that she has no friends.  If she does, no one knows who.  Not even the rabbits she keeps as messengers like her - she cages them when she isn’t using them so that they cannot run away.  And for the ones that have - she hangs their pelts along the sides of their hutch as a reminder.

…

She hunts when she cannot sleep at night.  It is never just for fun (that...is a lie).  It isn’t a sport (that is also a lie).  Somehow it is therapy (unfortunately not a lie).  And, in her own method, a manner of healing (she will never heal).  To everyone else it is a nightmare, possibly even a tragedy.  Dozens of enucleated animals are left littered throughout various parts of the forest and the pattern is so static it almost seemed intentional.  Like a ritual.  Darkness nests in the souls of the damaged. It thrives in the wildest yet most-protected memories of Emersyn.  To understand her, is to be the man that created her.  

And he is dead. 

As the torches dwindle in numbers, the death toll rises.  Later, it will be revealed that a generous benefactor has been the Collector all along, and that the torchlights are planned obsolescence.  The only thing that the Collector fails to do is resist the urge to keep cultivating specimens despite the narrowing of a threshold around them.  When they begin to connect the dots - poachings decline.  No one knows why because no one is talking - not yet - it is almost too disturbing.  

Death plagues Viride like a bad fog.  It lingers from the ground and from the barks of trees, it smells of sulfur and rot, it is heavy with malaligned intentions.  Some minds start to think about who is involved for such bad luck to continue.  What has Dawn done to deserve this devastation? This deterioration? It is a gnawing carcinoma.  The forest they cherish continues to rot and fall apart despite their efforts, even trees carry disease, some get blighted over winter.  Many fall, and beneath them, corpses of the dead reveal themselves beneath the frosts of past-Winter.  Spring comes, it bleeds into Summer, bones emerge from soil beds along the river,  sometimes rib bones end up all the way down river. Sometimes a bird drops one on a roof top hoping to crack it, all the bones are disturbingly fresh.  Emersyn uses the boon from spring to cash in on a new clutch of rare birds that migrate this time of the season - she takes them alive and sells them that way to a private collector.  Someone swears they see her, but for the protection of the witness, no details are discussed.

One rumor speculates that their Emissary is still too stiff and too secretive this far into her term to not be up to something.  Why does she live so far away?  Why does she never visit?  Her assistant has gone missing and no one knows where the girl is.  Subtle changes in the morning market emerge over time, of rash of miracle tonics and elixirs made out of mysterious components - all things that weirdly work with suspicious perfection.  Skeptics want to call it all a hoax but they can’t, so they try to find the secret ingredient by ransacking workshops and shaking dock-boys for information. When no one is looking, Emersyn buys into the whole lot of the elixir herself but even now, no one can track where it has since gone.  Somewhere deep down in Denocte - possibly even the hospital - a glowing blue potion circulates like a quiet serpent.  Once it starts surfacing in high dollar circles, she washes her hands of it and destroys all her ties.  Rather, she buries her delivery boy in the back where the bulbs bloom.  The blooms are so splendid this time of year.  

Someone else knows, though.  It takes three weeks for hive mind effects to take place - everyone knows that Emersyn is a freak.  They are convinced she has buried her assistant in the flower bed, all she thinks about these rumors are; No, I buried my delivery boy in the flower bed.  My assistant is actually still missing!  Acquaintances cancel breakfast plans, brunch and tea plans, dinner plans, planning plans.  Meetings are curved away from her trajectory.  Less and less paperwork comes to her now.  The calls have gone from an endless trilling of birds on her window ledge to motionless radio silence, and  Emersyn feels no shame in that.  She has collected several of the messengers sent to her - in jars.  The silence is understandable (that, and nobody feels comfortable enough to be around her).

And so it should be no surprise that the King himself decides that he should send himself - rather than another bird that she will ultimately just add to her collection.  

~To be continued ~

[Emersyn]

The Confrontation
(tw:  very disturbing imagery)


Tap. Tap. Tap.


Despite all things it is a beautiful summer day when Ipomoea decides to pay a visit to his Emissary.  Everything is in bloom - outside it is quite cheerful.  There is nothing his anger can do to stop the air from being fragrant and delicious - the tree next to the cottage is in full bloom now  - it is now working towards growing pears. All of the flowers, however, seem to respond to him.  The birds take to higher perches and insects prepare their graves in silence.  From the front, it is hard to see inside the small cottage - and that is intentional.

The door opening when Ipomoea knocks - is not intentional.  The door is slow to open but it does.  Wider and wider until the darkness within melts away from the daylight pouring in.  She is not there to gossamer and glamour it into something he might prefer to see. He has entered a raw space.  Something natural, when her mind is not reaching - is not searching - looking for ways to pull shadows over all of her secrets and to render it into something he would want to see (rather than what he needs to see).  

The King loves plants, does he not?  The King prefers no conflict, does he not?  Ipomoea may not know what to expect when he enters, because she does not anticipate his arrival. In the beginning she chose  to cultivate the philodendron; easy to live with, easy to cultivate, love, affection, health, abundance, life.   All things relatable.  All things fruitful.  Plants with a promise.  Easy distractions.

Beneath it all, terrible lies.  Perhaps - perhaps Ipomoea had seen it in the beginning.  Maybe he was more than she figured him to be.  They had such an invigorating conversation that night they met in the temple - it is too bad that in the end, Emersyn was convinced she was lying to herself almost as much as she was at lying to others.  

In all of her botany and brilliance, the darkness shines through most, when in the end Emersyn achieved a strange hybrid - one that she had set free in her home to roam unrestrained within her household.  One that sought flesh, one that sought the life blood which kept the flesh warm, one that possessed paralyzing  thorns that could render a warrior into a plank of wood in one sting.  This was the same poison found in most of the remains that had been recovered from Viride.

 The firepit was always thought of as a warm and friendly place, a place where Emersyn had served her wing-footed friend a strange and wonderful tea. One that softened the senses and comforted the mind.  Lavender, chamomile, and poppy root to keep wandering eyes from looking too far.  Never once did she intend to show Ipomoea the horrors that lined her shelves (it certainly wasn't books). It must have felt like a mistake to visit the Emissary in a strange, dark, and eerily quiet place.  A place so silent that it seemed haunted.  Even after winter had already gone.

Now, entering the space without the Emissary to shift and shape it for Ipomoea to feel comfortable, he could now see that the plants were dead now, wilted and rotting in their pots.  The magnificent vine she once praised was broken, and all the pieces of it were brown - already dead.  The fire had been cold for so long that the King might recognize similar scenes of his previous visit if his memory was sharp enough.  Emersyn only lit a fire because she knew he would come.  After that, she never lit it again.

The two cups they sipped last visit from sat half full.  The batches of herbs now rotted, a green mold growing in a velvety sweep over the stoneware.  Somehow all of the verdant growth did not represent life at all.  All of the dead soil seemed more valid than the concoction Emersyn had fed him so long ago.  Never the less, there was still the ever present question:  Where is she?; and that is where one proceeds into the house of horrors with utmost caution.

Jars and jars and jars filled with fluid glow eerie and horrible in the sun light peeking through boarded side windows.  Eyes float, suspended in lissamine green solution.  Rows and rows of them.  Jaws full of teeth too.  Feet and tongues and organs remain suspended in rose-Bengal fluorescence dye.  A grimy gray light illuminates the vague shapes of all these terrible things, they glow ominously like phantoms in the night.  Lost souls.  Lost memories.  Pieces of Viride forever gone, and no one knows why.


 The smell of death (that rotten fog) is thicker here, it creeps in through every interstice within the rotting foundations of her home.  It slithers in beneath every door sweep and window jamb.  It seeps around Ipomoea’s heels and clings to his skin.  The air is damp, the presence of salt water can be scented in the air.  The ocean is no where near here.

Drip, drip, drip...

Rotting hides remain draped all over her work table.  It was once filled with notations about her magical flying machine but has since then been replaced with diagrams about how to dissect a young scribe known by the name of Mateo.  It seems she has taken an interest in his voice.  Water drips from strange places (it hasn't been raining?), the smell of the sea lingers amongst all of the rot.  Lighting from one dying candle near the hearth reveals skulls and skeletons instead.  Discarded pieces that aren’t needed for the magic, the ritual, the money, lay forgotten - left carelessly without being remembered.

Drip, drip, drip...

Death surrounds this home, it is sour and suffocating - sulfuric. Nothing grows here anymore.  How can things change so fast?  How do we ever know that something might not seem right?  How do we know when we are being lied to?  It would not be betrayal if we were aware of it creeping in.  This makes no sense.  There are live animals tied to a post out back, they bleat and bray outside.  They are restless and noisy and never stop when they hear activity in the house.  Emersyn has been missing for days.  This is unlike her.  Especially because she is not one to leave this kind of a mess behind.

Drip, drip, dri--

Something is very wrong. 


He is met halfway by a creature that responds to the name of Emersyn, but certainly does not look like Emersyn.  Blood drips down her neck from an awful gash across her throat - but she is not in pain.  Her skin is slippery and wet with seawater, but her hair is dry - just wild and lively even without the wind.  Something feral has seeded itself within her - and a metamorphosis has begun .  She is at a sickening stage of change where her teeth have begun to rot out of her mouth (to make way for something far more terrible and punishing).  When she smiles at him, it is wrong.  

"Ipomoea. What an unpleasant surprise."  

@Ipomoea  We are mid-transitioning into a Kelpie (we took the grotesque slow-melting road/time to gather money for passive magic) Feel free to play on that as much as you like.  Also, please feel free to powerplay/hurt/maim/control her however you need to!  She is in yours and @Andras 's hands (hooves?) now.

[Thana]

TW: also some disturbing imagery

Killing has only awoken her hunger instead of feeding it. The drops of blood have all dissolved to dust in her belly and the rage only banked by the furious fire of passion is remembering how to eat.  And as she follows Ipomoea to the cottage in the woods, it stretches and purrs like a thing waking up from the winter.

Perhaps it has never been awake before now-- before she stepped through the rotten grave-gardens, with the meek bleating fear of livestock, and the jars of organs purring for the bitter holiness in her gaze as they beg for her to look, look, look at them.

Perhaps it is only awake now because the mold, and the dust, and the skins draped across the furniture like silk all realize that for the first time (unlike all the others) their god has stepped across the threshold.

And their god smiles for the way they all tremble down to dust, and weep tears of sulfur at the sight of her. And her smile has teeth, and fury, and warfare dripping from it like spit, and blood, and a million different endings falling like rain. Their god brushes her shoulder against the wood, and the roots trailing down the walls, and the blood dusted across the walls like careless art, and she laughs as it all starts to pull apart, cell by cell until the walls are weeping sap as they start to fold towards her like sinners brought to heel.

Below it, above it, inside it all there is the smell of brine, and sea-rot, and tide-water. She remembers the taste of it as she swallows the air, and that awoken thing in her belly starts to clamor and screech and flap its black wings against the sky of her rib-cage.  This is the smell of the of the feeding ocean, of the marshland as it slithers from freedom to land, and of her mother-and-father-water as it circled between this world and all the others like a snake without mouth or tail and only a belly that does not know how to bloat.

That black-winged beast smiles at the smell in the air, and it nickers like a wolf as it says, come home, come home, come home. And when Thana opens her jaws and starts to grind her teeth it says in the language of bone on bone and hunger upon hunger-- I am the way home.

When the beast comes, the shape-changer in a form that she did not care to learn (not until now, not until the walls started to curl like peeled off bark eager to kiss her skin), Thana does not feel anything but the steady thrum of a drumbeat heading into the belly of a battlefield. She does not do more than smile her look that says come home as the creature drips her water into the floor and looks at them with her mouth full of rooting teeth that have not learned yet all the ways in which they much come to heel at Thana's hooves like the weeping walls, and the roots, and the horror.

But then between the drip of blood, and salt, and rot, and sap that rotten mouth starts to shape the name Ipomoea. Her drumbeat heart turns to a bellow.

Eligos snarls from the doorway, the sound of it an echo of thunder that catches on the falling and weeping walls.

Thana snarls too. Her own is not thunder but promise freshly forged and still molten with the furious fire that has remembered there is still dead-bone to char and flesh to eat. In the sound her teeth ache to pull out the creature's bones through the gaping wound in her neck.

There is no surprise in the way she steps forward to block the thing pretending to be death. The movement is all threat, all promise that Thana will tear her apart organ by organ and hour by hour if the half-dead creature takes another step closer.

And the look in her eyes seems half prayer, half holy summons.

Come home. Come home.



"Death hath no dominion"

@Ipomoea @Andras @Emersyn

[Andras]

rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.

At long last, his heart sings, beating like the heart of a giant, loud enough that he hears it when he closes his eyes. At long last, it has come to this: the meadow, a cottage rimmed in clumps of orange and blue wildflowers, a lawn dabbed with fallen petals from a pear tree fighting tooth and nail to stay in bloom. 

The first tap, tap, tap, was the door he swung open to meet the king's eyes, when the devil in Andras met the devil in Ipomoea and they smiled at each other with rows of sharp, yellow teeth. He had not needed to be told. Andras has not slept, has not eaten, has not thought for the day or so since their last meeting; his hunger is too vivid and red, his rage is too sticky and black. For the moment there is nothing in Andras but what he has always meant to be: blind anger, clawing pain, and bones that ache to take something apart, be it them, or him.

--Then, as he follows above, the silhouette of some large vulture against the sun that still warms his back though he's burning away as he flies. Tap, as Andras ticks his hooves against the trunks of old trees; tap, when two branches clack together as his wings fold and open; and a tap, that turns to a loud crack of thunder, when Andras sees the king slow and then stop at the gate to the cottage and the warden's anger eats him alive.

He had known Emersyn, he thought. Had stood with her in the war chamber that rang like churchbells with every syllable, still except for flecks of dust floating diagonally through each shaft of cold, gray light. He had looked her in the eye and thought her to be like him--angry, always; pragmatic at her best, bitter and callous at her worst-- but he had not seen it, the thing in her just as black as his anger but three times as vile.

He had not seen that she was a cesspool, of sorts. Something rotten. Something crass.
Something really and truly evil.

Thana and Ipomoea enter the cottage but Andras stands still at its threshold, crackling so loud he can't hear the creak of the floorboards underneath. It is dark inside, at stark contrast to the summer day perched just past the porch. It's fitting he thinks before he forgets to think through the rising hum of his magic that hurts when it pops on his back, his shoulders, his wings--that it should be so calm, almost peaceful, without, and this bloody, black hole from within. There is a song in him now, drums as loud as their booming thunder when Eligos rolls its black spine in time with the loud clatter of Thana moving to block Ipomoea from--

Andras feels his mouth twitch but he is not part of it. He feels his wings flex over his back but they aren't his wings. He hears himself call her "Traitor," but it is not his mouth, not his body, not his blood singing for blood and the snap of broken bone and vindictive, gnashing teeth. When he grits his teeth they spark.

andras

@ipomoea @thana @Emersyn

[Ipomoea]

every flower must grow

The door comes open as they knock, with a dismal creak to match its measured swing. Ipomoea waits, as inch by inch the darkness devours the sunlight that tries to enter. He waits, as the smell of rotten and sodden things creeps thickly across the opening.

There are echoes here, in all that drip, drip, dripping coming from the shadows. When he blinks he can see the trailing heartleaf shining in the window, turning the sunlight coming through green; he blinks again, and that same window turns black with mold, and a single leaf-less black stick taps against the glass. Atop the table sit two lonely cups, one knocked carelessly to the side, contents turned to sludge. Ipomoea steps inside, and his wings stir a layer of dust into the air so thick, and choked with rot, it makes him cough.

It is in this moment, when something that does not look like his Emissary peels away from the shadows, and Thana steps from behind him, that he knows which of the two is the monster. It is not the one that was made.

When she speaks, his magic is begging him to grow roots and thorns in this place, to lay a yew branch against her lips and command her to eat. He thinks he could command the long-dead vines and herbs to go to seed and live again, if he wanted, or coax the roots of the beech tree standing as a sentinel by the gate to come and tear the floor apart. He could make this place a garden, to bury the bones and the rot and what remains of a dozen lives beneath a wildflower meadow. There’s blood enough to water them through the winter, he knows.

But he only looks around the small cottage with dull eyes that have almost forgotten how to see beauty. At the organs floating in their yellow solutions, and the eyeless skulls gazing back at him, and the still-bloody pelts draped across the table. He stares long enough to forget what the room once looked like bathed in sun- and fire-light, long enough to convince himself he has never known anything but the chill that now permeates the wall despite the summer just beyond them.

He forgets the smell of chamomile and lavender - and in their absence, there is only death. And he looks it in the face not to convince himself of what Emersyn has become, but to tell the dead and dying things that rest has come at last. And as Thana’s and Eligos’ snarls begin to fade, Rhoeas sets his teeth together and rumbles alongside them. And he sweeps the rotten herbs from the hearth with one crystal antler.

”What happened to you, Emersyn?” The seawater bleeding from the wound in her neck and the rotting skin hanging from her sides makes a part of his magic rejoice. It sings to see her falling apart already, and begs for him to let it finish the job - but he does not. Not yet. The cottage groans as the roots it is built upon begin to turn over.

”What happened to the girl who sought forgiveness?”

From the doorway Andras names her for the thing she now is - and while a part of Ipomoea is striking a match to his magic and his rage, the other part of him is drowning in the sorrow of it.  

@Emersyn @thana @Andras
”here am i!“

⚘

[Emersyn]

Dying is easy.  It is the act of drowning that is hard.  Ever since that day, she dreams in blue.  She doesn’t know if she is alive or dead - all she knows is that she is hungry.  Maybe that is what it feels like to be trapped between two worlds.  Is she coming or going?  It has been a rush of delusions and fever dreams.  She keeps thinking she is looking up at the stars, only to realize she has been staring down into the deep, wild, black-blue of the sea.  What she sees there are jellyfish and other glowing things.  

It is coming.  She can feel it swimming in her blood.  A shark circling in her consciousness.  Some big feather black shadow that has as many eyes as it has teeth.  It has barbed tendrils for hair and a cavernous mouth which leads to certain death. She thinks of this when she cannot think of anything else - she often dreams about it too.  In the corners of her eyes, Fate drifts towards her with its electric yellow eyes.  Even now she can hear the rushing water between her ears as the Leviathan creeps closer.  

Death arrives,

Thana, who smells like wet soil, dead cedar, and river water - all things that she once craved, now no longer inviting when Emersyn can still feel the sea churning in her waterlogged soul.  Death loses its meaning to those that forego it (at least she is forced to believe this).  She spends more time gazing deep into the void of Thana's eyes than she does to the first one to throw stones.  I waited for you.  I waited for you at the bottom of the sea and you never came! she wants to confess to Thana, but never does.  Death did not want her - something else did.  

If Emersyn were anticipating the regent to corner her in her home, she does not look it.  The utter lack of disbelief that this is happening to her, is particularly notable in how unresponsive she appears to be.  Perhaps diseased and rabid is a better way to describe the state of her being.  To remain somewhat alert is a greater task than to appear disappointed, angry, or even shameful.  Magic sneaks in through all the cracks - and there are many - too eager to take back what was lost.  Every fiber of the cottage vibrates the same way the blood in her veins does.  

Ipomoea’s magic leaps! (so do the sand fleas that flick-a-flack) across the dirty floorboards, frantic to escape the beast they mistakenly hitched a ride on. Sunlight claws at the edges of a thick and tangible darkness inside of the wasted Emissary’s now-dilapidated home.  What has become of it is a cesspool of death and derangement.   Dozens of sets of eyes gaze back at the regime in the jars that contain them.  Andras is utterly inflamed with lightning, static pops off the edges of his glasses.  The change of energy in the room scares all of the crabs and other tidepool fauna out from her leafy gray hair.  One crab slips off of her shoulder and tumbles down, down, down -- Emersyn stomps it out too quickly.

Traitor.  He hurls it like a bolt of lightning at her - she wonders what it feels like to be hurt by his words.  What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

What the warden says is true, she knows it. But what can she do about that? What can she possibly do?  She did what she wanted to do. 

What happened to you?

She cannot answer King Ipomoea's question.

Emersyn never wanted to torment or traumatize the man.  Yet now that she has done just that (the horrors are suffused in his red - red eyes) --and she feels no shame from having done so.  Pride? Yes.  There is no sadness or sorrow for betraying his trust - their trust - she will gloat later when she can remember how.  

What happened to the girl who sought forgiveness?

Life pauses for a moment, as if the world is listening for her answer - maybe even God.  

“I lied.”  It is as easy as that.  For such a wide grin, she finds that her jaw is painfully tight and whatever manages to smile back at the king is so far beyond the woman who dared to kneel in Delumine’s temple and lie to him.  All for the sake of her own agenda.  She is remorseless.  She gives him nothing. She has nothing.  She is nothing.  

It helps to act like a monster,

she often remarks to her reflection,

 when you are as ugly as one.  

There can be no greater truth than this.

What then,

 she wonders,

What happens when I finally become one?

"You should do something soon if you plan to, I'm starting to get very hungry, again."    It is not funny and she is not laughing.  This time when she smiles, it bleeds grotesquely down her too-tight skin which almost appears to be splitting.

Ooc: @Ipomoea @Andras @Thana I'm sorry for this very very late rubbish! From this point forward, please feel free to inflict what you would like on this character - I just ask that she is not executed!  

[Ipomoea]

every flower must grow

He does not have the foretelling to know he is witnessing a transformation — and yet a part of him knew already, from the time he first laid his eyes on the storm-grey girl in the mountaintop chapel, that it was only a matter of when and not if. He had known then that she was a seed waiting to take root, a sprout he could not yet name.

He had hoped for a different kind of transformation.

He had hoped to see a wildflower meadow beginning to bloom again despite the fire that had rendered it to ash days before.

He hoped, he hoped, he hoped —

Sometimes it seemed all he had was a fistful of empty dreams, a thousand wishes for a world he wanted to help create. An earth he wanted to cultivate, a thousand gardens he tended to compulsively every day, as if a single flower could change the course of his fate. And maybe it could — or maybe it might have, if he could learn to be less like a man and more like the earth. But all they ever did was take, and take, and take, and destroy that which they could not take — and he was no exception to his race.

And all that was left after the trees were felled and river was drained was one

big

terrible

scar

spreading across the land like a plague. And still, and still, it was not enough. She had told him that once, in the temple on the mountain, head bowed at Oriens feet. She had told him of the way she destroyed the world for love, and in the end had received neither. She had prayed for forgiveness, and he had believed her. She had talked about deaths in the forest, and he had drank in her words and let them consume him in every way she had intended. And for every body she had left to rot in a shallow grave, she had awakened a monster hungry for blood in him.

Emersyn drips, and talks, and grins. And all of those monsters are coming awake in him again, and his magic is speaking in aches instead of words when it says Let me free. It rises and it burns and it cuts away the parts of him that he had once loved, the soft parts that he had once thought of as strengths but now he knows to be weak.

And what is left, in the holes he cuts into his own heart?

It is not the flowers. It is only a dark pit of rage, and magic, and grief, and the memories of all the things he’s lost spinning around like a whirlpool sinking down into the depths of him.

He does not laugh, or smile, or give in to her nightmare when he says “you are not going to die, Emersyn.” Ipomoea looks over one shoulder — to Thana, dark, and silent, and waiting — to Andras, all blackened rage and sparks and thunder — and he nods.

And when the vines rip through the cottage floor and tear into the Emissary’s skin with their thorns, the magic coiled in his belly starts to purr.

“You are only going to rot.”

More than you already have, the look in his eyes promises.

@Emersyn
was asked to go first, to keep them from killing em!
”here am i!“

⚘

[Ipomoea]

every flower must grow

When he looks back on this moment, he will remember it only in pieces.

He will remember the way the vines that Emersyn had thought long-dead in the planters came suddenly to life again, and how the brightness of Andras' electricity had flashed against their leaves. He will still see the curl of Thana's horn, and how it had promised all the violence he did not know how to form, though oh, how he had thought he did. And he will remember the way the roots of that sentinel tree from her yard had burst through the floor, and dragged the Emissary from the darkness of her home and into the light beyond it. Outside the forest was singing, and weeping, and pressing in like wolves ready for the kill.

He could feel their hunger, and their rage, and the way all of them -- Andras, and Thana, and the forest, and the half-dead vines, and Emersyn herself -- had begged him to turn himself into the weapon to carve out the thing for them to feast on. And when they had wrapped their pleas around his neck like a noose and begged him by tightening it more, and more, and more -- he had wanted to be that weapon for them. Oh, how he wanted to kill Emersyn and leave her there as one final offering.

But sacrifices were meant to be made from things of purity.

Ipomoea remembers every moment of that day, every disjointed piece of it floating like shards of glass in his mind. But the thing that he remembers most, the shard that cuts at him in the middle of the night and wakes him without warning, was how he had turned one last time to look into the cottage --

and seen only a single poppy smiling back at him, its petals still weeping blood.

just a closer to tie up some loose threads.
”here am i!“

⚘