Hell is not a place of punishment. Hell is a prison, and if it is a world of suffering it is only because demons in their immorality and their iniquity make it so. Hell is not of the scourge and the whip, the pain that purifies and makes a soul whole; it is the trash heap that burns beyond the City's walls, the crawling hive crushed beneath the heavy stone. Hell is a realm of the damned and deposed, the tyrant-kings of primordial Creation left to wallow in their own anarchy, every instinct turned against every other. Every hand raised against every brother. It is a cage for those things banished by the Sun's almighty fire and the Moon's solemn gaze; by the grace of the stars and the virtue, the valor of the Dragons who serve as their eternal jailers. Hell is a City raised by no human hands, a universe of brass and black basalt where a sickly green sun shines eternally. The raging, agonized heart of a half-mad cosmos, a realm beyond any hope of redemption.
Men are not bound for Hell. Men rise and fall in their spiritual station as the wheel turns, as they walk the path. The moral and just rising to join with the five Immaculate Beasts that ward the known world and safekeep all souls within. The unvirtuous reborn as filth, as vermin, as- hah. As helots. Those things to be trod underfoot by the righteous. The clean.
But...even those wise and holy preachers, those Listeners to Countless Sorrows, wouldn't really know would they? It's not as if they would ever lay eyes upon the place. In all their stories Hell is a place of merciless light, of heat. A place of acid seas and silver deserts and you will not find a drop within its walls that does not scorch the throat or smoke in the stomach. A place of self-made torment, of oppression and torture, of ancient things that destroy and are destroyed in turn. But those are just stories. In a very real sense Malfeas is what you make of it.
Maybe those wise and holy men were wrong then. Maybe Hell is cold. Dark.
Draped all in red.
And what does it say about you, oh what does it say about you that given the choice you would go back? Hah. Maybe they're right about you. Maybe you are a demon king.
The armor you stole doesn't fit you. A grey breastplate and back piece, each section gleaming like a leaden mirror; the hinges clicking and the closed, clamshell thing rocking with every step, the bottom knocking against the tops of your hips. A jacket of heavy, wine-colored cloth beneath it with a cloak to match, and you have to keep shaking back the sleeves, keep brushing back the billowing fabric even as the hem trailing behind you is splattered with mud and melting sleet, soaked through with frigid water. Leather strips about your waist in what's supposed to be a short-skirt -that's really just "a skirt" on you- and boots that you're sure would have seen you stumble at least once if balance wasn't such a trivial thing now. A helm you have to tip back over your brow just so it doesn't slam down over your eyes, but at least the chain veil covers most of your face. In every direction you're just a few, painful inches deficient. In every way you're utterly unsuited for it. Not quite in the territory of a child dressing up in his father's clothes but so distressingly close..
Even with all the gifts your Deathlord gave you, even with that shard of a dead sun breaking you, remaking you, you're still too slight. You're still too short. Your shoulders too narrow, you limbs too thin. Oh you have strength, you have strength out of all proportion to your build, strength in defiance of anatomy and the mechanics of human physiology. There's a kind of obscene, monstrous power contained in your lean frame and when you clench your fist and flex the muscle that stands so stark beneath the skin is dense, defined. But there's only so much any of that can do to make up for childhood malnutrition. Behold the power of a Lord of the Underworld! Power to shake all the foundations of Creation!
No match for not getting enough wheat and meat as a growing boy apparently.
But the fact that you're in a mood to whine about it all, even if it's just in the comfort of your own thoughts- that's a good sign isn't it? You're being petulant. You're being petty. You finally feel something besides that impotence, that anxiety, that surety that you are failing everyone, disappointing everyone, that in time they will see the mistake they have made and cast you out, give you back to the garbage and refuse. And the realization of that...of that missing weight, that absent strain, that alone twitches the corners of your lips up in a small, sincere smile. And- ah, even if you could take or leave the borrowed clothes, you have to admit that this is nice. This is welcome. This was needed. And so you grin to yourself, just to yourself, and savor the sensation. Feeling the curious luxury of those fine features you wear, that dark hair, that tanned skin -so convincingly blanched by the cold!- that once belonged to you, that still belong to you, and you wrap it all around yourself like a warm blanket as you walk through the camp.
This Hell.
This home.
Fires burn at every junction, every intersection of paved stone and hard-packed earth. Each one a towering pyre, a radiant beacon, the blazes bound by metal stakes. Embers drifting over the strung wire, between the spikes, each one guttering, dying as the wind moans. As it plucks at raised hoods and travel-worn cloaks like an old beggar-woman, whining, pleading for a coin, just a coin, a piece of paper script; tracing fractals of frost on bronze-gleaming armor with her fingers. Beyond the docks naked trunks rise and fall on unseen swells, a forest of masts in motion. A woodland rising from the river's black waves, moving in time with hidden currents and heaving surf. Above, clouds obscure the stars. Above, clouds occuld the moon. Above, there is nothing but a blackness that seems to slowly swirl, to bulge and recede as it drapes the town below with milk-white sheets. Snow bleeding to frozen rain and back again. Charred logs hissing and spitting; steam curling up from hacked timber, mingling with the plumes of grey smoke. Each inferno a precious halo of warmth in the wet, in the chill. In this miserable fort here on the very edge of Winter. Every line in the sea of tents is drawn razor straight, every segment of the town wall and augmenting palisade perfect in parallel; every boulevard at exactly the correct angle with every other, both sides flanked by buildings, by warehouses and apartment blocs, and sheltered markets that could have been cast from the same mold. The very model of Lookshyan engineering!
Laying here like a corpse, facedown in the mud. Flesh already stuck to the rime.
...You can't see the helot quarters from here of course, they'd be farther away from the center of town. A crescent arc of low barracks-dorms and row houses huddled in the shadow of the walls, surrounded by a moat of empty space. Nothing to impede a soldier's sweep, nowhere to flee should the army come but back into the blades of a waiting talon. But you see them. You see them everywhere: in thin tunics and trousers, the lucky wearing matching jackets stuffed with wool or well worn coats, yet all of it undyed, unadorned. Dozens-strong throngs of people in dun and tan, in ashen whites and charcoal greys. Marched in double-file down the streets by bored soldiers, by men and women too cold to even be cruel. Indifferently shepherded towards one project or another. Some of the slaves have feathers and some scales or fur or simple, soft skin skin, but their eyes are all kept low. Their tongues still. And even the lankiest bone-vulture, the tallest grassland lionness or most sinuous river serpent stays hunched down, huddled upon themselves as if they can hide behind crossed arms and upturned collars. Jaws clenched to keep from chattering. Nails digging into bare skin because the bite of conscious pain is better than the slow gnawing of the night.
And you see her. Of course you see her. She's standing in an alleyway, opposite a ragged line of helots, half shielded by shadow and a wagon at rest. But darkness doesn't mean anything to you and so you notice her, this woman doing so very well at not being noticed. And you're curious -of course you're curious, because what is she intending that she doesn't want her fellow Citizens to see- and so you come closer. One part of the endless crimson ebb forking, flowing away from the rest. Unnoticed by all because he wears the right face and the right clothes and in the flickering firelight that's enough. That's all you really need. Nobody notices. Nobody cares.
But then, you've always been a ghost haven't you?
Observer unobserved, you study her. The woman is pale, but the scales that climb the side of her throat, that back her hands like a lady's fine gloves are the light, sandy brown of sunbaked stone. She is short and she is thin, but the sober cut of her red uniform is tailored a touch too close and you can see the densely wound sinews beneath the leather and cloth. See the strength of mountain bones, of Pasiap's blessing worked her shoulders and down her legs. Her hair is black with dyed curls of white, like milk poured into a cup of strong tea. She is talking.
"-do you understand?" She asks, a conclusion to a speech you didn't catch in time. Her voice is crystalline clear, her enunciation perfect, absent any of the pauses, the "um"'s and "ah"'s of human conversation. It makes the way she talks ever-so-slightly uncanny, as if she's rehearsed all this a hundred times before. As if she's an actor reading lines and your participation, while useful, is not required for the conclusion of this scene.
The replies come in a hesitant chorus, a stutter-stop ripple as one helot speaks then another, voices in an asynchronous murmur. None willing to be the first. None willing to be the last. "Yes Winglord."
And she smiles and how is it that that smile, that smile oh that smile is the thing that at last makes the corners of your mouth twitch down in a frown. That makes your skin crawl and your fingers slowly curl, tanned flesh standing stark over your knuckles. Joints pop-pop-popping with a sound like wet twigs crunched underfoot. Because that smile is so sincere. Because that smile is almost sweet, almost kind and it is wrong. Perverse. She is a Winglord. She is a senior officer of a state army, one of the exorbitant beasts, Nerius said, that are cast in the Shogunate's own image, mirror to the Realm's design. An obscenity, fashioned to best make use of Lookshy's elemental divinity, its own legions of holy dragons. And you have never seen one but you have felt them before, passing in the distance, stilling the world in their wake. Felt them in your aching bones and sweat-soaked shivering and hands that crack and bleed. Felt them as a hollowness in your stomach, little flickers of famine worming, squirming through your settlement's storerooms, your homes, your beds draping themselves heavily over you as you sleep.
She has eaten of you. She has drunk of you. She has plucked little red pieces of meat from between the helotry's ribs and popped them in her mouth like cherries, spitting out the gristle and cartilage like a pit. What right does a person like that have to smile in such a way? What right does a person like that have to feign consideration, care? She reaches out a hand. You tilt your head.
She rests it on a slave's shoulder. The leopard, hardly older than you, the teeth on the right side of his mouth jagged and chipped, corner of his mouth quirked up by scar tissue in a perpetual fear-grimace. Pink-stained eyes darting back and forth, caught somewhere between paralysis and recoil; assumed obedience and the expectation of being struck. Nails that could scoop furrows through granite like so much mud resting lightly on his tunic. She hasn't stopped smiling.
"It's alright," she says, "I understand the fear, why wouldn't you be afraid? Fear has ruled you, every waking moment of your life. Don't worry. I'm not asking you to be bold, or brave, to sacrifice yourself or die for me. All I request -and it is a request- is for you lend me your eyes and your ears as you go about your duties. And if you should come into any kind of trouble? Simply say that you are carrying a task assigned by Winglord Thalia Tomaria Meletia on behalf of the Logistics Division and they will leave you be. And in turn...Zipher? It is Zipher isn't it?"
The young man blinks, bleary exhaustion and heady daze weighing his eyelids down. You almost don't catch the mumble. Hopeful. Halting as he leans into her touch ever so slightly, ever so minutely. Obediently parroting back an earlier part of the exchange. "(E-extra rations? From the soldier's stores?)"
"Extra rations," she, Thalia, echoes, patting his cheek before letting her hand fall. "From the soldier's stores. Because exceptional work deserves exceptional rewards, you are suited for more than digging trenches Zipher. All of you are."
Smoked meat dripping with grease and hot juices; green things, growing things, and oil from olives. Dried fruit and fresh-caught fish for the officers. Wine that isn't so acidic it sometimes seems as if it stings the soft tissues of your throat. Tea that isn't so thick it's almost pitch-
There's a rustle of crimson cloth, a creak of leather. Cold metal clinks on metal. Look down, your palm is pressed to your concave belly. Thumb along the line of your sinewy stomach, probing the shallow valley between the planes of muscle, feeling the set of four flex and clench on either side. Squeezing against a memory ache. Smothering a wet growl. Look up. Zipher's head is turned, the man looking over her shoulder. Amber eyes drifting because he doesn't dare hold her gaze, smiling, smiling despite himself because this is the dream isn't it? This is what so many yearn for, long for. For a Chosen of the Dragons, so wise and so holy, to speak to them with gentle words and deliver mercy.
His eyes meet yours.
You can see it, see the emotions that flash across his feline face; see the fur bristle as his hackles go up, his tail down against a leg. A mute, snapped back snarl shifting into confusion, into apprehension, instincts clashing, crashing, grinding against one another. Ah look there, half of him seems to say, you can see it behind those pretty amber irises. There is a Lookshyan soldier. A man in red, here to hurt you, here to harm you. Can you not see the violence about him? Can you not feel the touch of death? Only for the rest to answer But look, there, the shackle scars on his wrist where the sleeve has fallen to the elbow. Look there, have you ever seen a soldier so slight? He is one of you. He is a helot too. What must it be like for him, you wonder? To see something, someone that looks so very much like himself and yet so fundamentally, frictionally at odds with what he is, staring back at him in silence. White mantles your shoulders. The sleet staining your stolen cloak a darker shade of scarlet. You stand motionless, shadowed, unshivering despite the chill.
You understand, you think. This must be how it feels to see a corpse for the first time. Something like and unlike. Known and unknown. The fine difference between fear and dread.
The Winglord is half-turned away and talking still, running through her script, pulling those levers that are so very much the same on every single helot, working with all the industriousness of a mouse. But one by one, the other helots notice the direction Zipher's looking and in a moment, maybe two, she falls silent, her speech trailing off. She looks too.
The Winglord steps away from the helots in an instant, a sudden, violent fissure. Hands at her side, whatever feigned vulnerability, affection there was closed off in that instant, crushed beneath curtain walls of grinding stone. Her faint bewilderment, her subtle surprise, obliterated in that instant by sheer ire. "You should be on duty soldier or are we so well defended that General Navona is letting whole scales loose at their leisure," she says, voice cold enough to crack marrow.
Hah. She's angry. But she hasn't asked for your fang-lieutenant. She hasn't asked your name. She hasn't punished you herself for interrupting her so. She's just trying to sever this strand, end this scene; she's just trying to cow you, a furious reflex. But it's a brutal tool, another lever that always works, this one for soldiers as much as slaves. But you're neither now.
And you've killed Chosen before.
You consider your reply. You consider not bothering and moving directly to the second part, the more exciting part, before striking a sort of compromise. A long-odds lie with little conviction and less actual concern because the stakes are...low, truthfully. What of it if she doesn't believe you? Oh no. What horror.
You might have to bloody your hands again.
Slowly, almost insolently, you press your palm to your chest, lowering your head in a salute. "Hail Winglord," you say softly, her nostrils flare as she draws in a sharp breath, there's a tremor beneath your feet, a kind of leaden weight in the air. As if gravity's chains were rattling through holes in the earth, threatening to drag down the sky. Your spine creaks. Behind her the helots have thrown themselves to their knees, in the cold, in the muck, hiding their faces as the Chosen grits her teeth. You continue, unperturbed, "Your presence is requested at the command tent."
The shuddering stops. You blink, bemused but...she's not glaring at you now, not anymore. Her pale eyes are burning holes somewhere between Mercury and blue Venus; singers pinched to the bridge of her nose as she exhales, long and low. "Fuck," she mutturs and there's more honesty in that single syllable, more tell of hours of work and tedium and reports unfiled and demands unmet, than there was in thewhole melodrama. She points a stone claw at you. "You, wait by the road, I need to discipline these helots for-"
"Of course, Winglord," you say simply.
There is a long. Long pause. Thalia's jaw bulges as she processes the temerity of what you just did, your own petty rudeness and the look- ah the look she shoots you is pure murder. But still, she turns her back on you after a moment and begins stalking back towards the slaves, dismissing you utterly from existence. Rejecting her from her sight. A grave blow to the piety and pride of any loyal Lookshyan son you're sure. But you? What care does a deathknight have such such ugly, unlovely things? Zipher is looking up at you from the mud. A question in his stare.. Yearning. Wondering.
You slowly lift a single finger to your lips, and turn and to go wait by the road as you were told.
Why are you doing this? Walking to this place with this...person, with her, where there will be more Chosen waiting. When she already suspects you on some level; the two of you walking yet the Winglord never so near that you could reach her with an outstretched hand and a quick lunge, so that she can but tilt her head over her shoulder and see you there, following along. Her lips pursed now and then, as if to accuse, to initiate, to break this chilled silence between you, this icy note beneath the ambient babble of a thousand soldiers and the keen of the wind. But she doesn't. And you have nothing to say so the silence remains.
Perhaps she can smell it on you. The absence of that crucial factor, that ingrained deference, that devotion. Do you think she can smell the crimson that pools in your footsteps too? Do you think she can smell the way you're wrong? Obscenity. Filth. Anathema. What is good and righteous exists where you are not. Your very presence wounds every world. And yet all you can feel is a kind of eager flutter in your heart, your pulse beating a tattoo against your throat. Your tongue licks the back of your teeth, tracing too-sharp enamel. Is that why you're doing this? That hunger? That need? You who have lived all your life so afraid of being seen, here poised on the precipice. Lungs filling, fingers crooked into claws: scream and let all of Creation scream with you.
The command pavilion rises from the heart of the town, set up adjacent to the central square. A cleanswept plaza, made to be used as a parade ground, for the evening and morning muster, with a flat slab of raised stone less than a dozen paces away. Anchor points sunk into the rock for the lashing of ropes and pitching of tents, now host to this magnificent behemoth. Guards stand at every drawn flap of the canvas mountain; their armor is a thousand pieces of bloody red jadesteel; a dragon's hide rendered in holy metal, in fine scale and heavy, bronze-edged plates, fur-trimmed cloaks draped over the bodies below. Their visors lowered one and all, masks without mocked-up features or slits or holes. Only a raised emblem in the center, graceful and stark, weeping violet light like a wound. Matched to the flowing, bent over and bowed boughs emblazoned on their their sharp-angled shields. Matched to the glowing, ember-shedding hilts and purple gleam from their hilts. A repeating motif, it takes you a second to realize what it's supposed to be. A wisteria tree. From the moors and windswept plains of Lookshy's North.
Winglord Thalia sweeps ahead, her own clothing drab, subdued against their regalia. You follow in her shadow, one of the helmed heads turning, silently tracking you.
Within the officers you saw earlier have been dismissed, the chalk slate wiped clean. But the heat haze lingers, a ripple in the air. The temperature warm enough from the ambient radiation that the snow melts, trickling down your arms, your spine. The General -Navona- is sitting on a collapsible camp-stool, their elbows resting on the table as they glare with a kind of sullen, abject loathing at the map pinned out before them. At the small carved tokens representing detachments of the state army, the riverine navy, the themes, and their attached airships and sorcerous support. At the seeming sea of blue, wolf-headed chits clustered along the coast, at the varied monsters rendered in miniature. Sheafs of paper in razor-neat stacks sit alongside the painstakingly inked thing's border. Reports and dispatches from the scouts, you assume, from how some are still mud splattered, curled up from being contained in oil-skin tubes. Navona's fingers are laced together, their chin resting on their thumbs as they stare down with slitted, reptilian eyes at a fortune in elemental-shaped icons and painted beauty as if they could light it all ablaze through sheer intensity. A flicker of slit pupils as the pair of you enter. Are noted. Dismissed.
"Winglord Thalia," the General says in a voice like flint striking, kindling catching. Soft, rough, and doing absolutely nothing to belie the inferno within.
"General Navona," the Winglord says, terse, volume visibly forced down to a low, semi-even, nearly-neutral level.
The argument starts immediately.
Ah. You see. You really were lucky, those two have some history and even if you follow...nearly none of the discussion -what you hear only one half, one quarter, one shred of the intention- it's enough that neither has any attention to spare for you. You glance at the map passingly as you take a step back. Another. Retreating to the edge of the tent-
"Oh, don't mind them," a voice says by your elbow, "Old friends you know? Sometimes it really can't be helped."
You don't jump but you do...start, a little. You're startled. A kind of unconscious flinch as you jerk, scanning the space around you warily before you see the upraised hand, following it down the slender arm to the man laying sprawled out, lazily draped, over an austere cot that's been packed with pillows. Recognition slithers, quirks and squirms through your brain, taking long, aching seconds before you remember: you saw him on your way walking through the camp. One of the five Dragonblooded here -a sworn brotherhood? He speaks as if he knows them- the one who was lounging in a commandeered tea house. Now lounging in a semi-occupied command tent, basking in the warmth. The stack of papers from earlier now draped over his face, long locks of pink hair hanging off the edge. His ornate, comfortable looking robes open to the navel, a cup of wine still loosely cradled in one hand. He lifts the parchment up with a finger, smiling at you with a kind of absent, bored exasperation. Talking just to talk. Speaking to you just because you're here- no, not just because you're here, you see the way his eyes trail up your body, wandering back down, taking you in.
"Spend enough time with one another, learn each other well enough, and eventually the boundaries start to erode. You're not one but five. You're not five you're one. Four dear friends living in your head, rent free. Really, who wouldn't go just a little crazy?"
"Mnm," you reply, neutrally. The General and Winglord's voices rising in tandem in the background.
The man rolls a hand, rolls his eyes, "Oh, don't be like that. I don't bite," you doubt that, "And whatever Thalia's furious at you for is hardly my concern."
You doubt that too. There's something about him. Something hard to articulate, harder still to define. Something in his laziness, his lithe and languid motions, that puts you ill at ease. It's not that he's clearly a warrior, a fighter, a bloody brawler. No, for a body that's all graceful lines of muscle and firm definition his skin is fair and unmarred, coupled to a sort of intangible softness, a kind of fragility about him. It has a way of drawing a watcher in, guiding the eye along the tendons of his throat, his bared collarbone, tugging the gaze down along his half-bared stomach. A circlet of green vines curls around his head, the sides flowering into purple-petaled things. There's a faintly glassy tint to his eyes, a pale pink flush to his cheeks, and you can smell the alcohol on his breath but even that makes him seem more harmless, more friendly than anything truly fearsome. You wonder if you asked if he'd offer to share-
Ah. You see now.
He is...dangerously likable. You've all but forgotten the other two here, you've all but forgotten yourself. He is not a man, he is a snake and now that you look you can see the sly, sardonic quirk to his lips. The baring of pretty, pearl-white teeth. And he sees that recognition behind your eyes you think, because his grin widens a few, minute degrees.
"My name is Opiter Vilikhon Cinnon, and you, dutiful soldier?" He asks as he sips his wine.
One of the three. One of the three. You're going to kill one of the three, right here, right now and you should fear them, fear their power but you don't. You can't. Such sensations have been cauterized, burned out of you. And so you open your mouth to speak in a voice stripped of all affect, flat and even and dead, you open your mouth to tell him your name but then...you hear the rattle of armor. The heavy tread of boots and you're turning, all the tent is turning, as a fourth Chosen enters. A hulking-huge man, as tall as the General with the touch of Daana'd even heavier upon him, a Heavenly Dragon descended, a divine monster distorting the frame of a man. A hero still in his prime, with his stomach gone only slightly to fat and a few traces of stormy grey in his azure mane.
And you know this man. Even though you've never met him before you know.
"I can hear the two of ya worrying at each other from clear 'cross camp, what's the quarrel now?" Asks Damianos Afion Peritaxikhon, the once-pirate, the once-helot, the new-made Master of the Yanaze navy. And it all happens so fast, too fast to follow, too fast to track, you're moving, moving like lightning, moving like the thunder's herald and he isn't even turned to you, he isn't even looking and you see the straps in his armor where they're worn too loose, see the chinks where he didn't bother to draw it tighter and leave it cutting cruelly into his side, and your hand is shifting, your disguise flaying itself, your skin flaying itself-
The blow hits you like a war-god's fist. Outstripping the shrapnel explosion of splinters and smoking wood, the back-blast that casts burning papers into the air and flunks the beautifully carved tokens in every direction. The general's brutal sword, that massive slab of metal slamming into your chest, folding you double over it, as they twist and simply…
Launch you.
Cold night air. Snow. Howling wind. Confused cries. A blur of colors and then impact in twin wings of wet soil and gravel as your body gouges a furrow into a street. As shards of ice and shattered stone tear at your stolen armor, your mask and you slowly, slowly grind to a halt.
Snow falls on the ruin of your up-turned face. Your breath hisses out in a plume of curling steam. Lips peeled back as you grin so, so wide it's as if the corners of your mouth will tear and part.
"Ah," you say.
You have found yourself again.
Vote by plan. Choose one new Charm
[ ] [Daybreak] Scarlet Chrysanthemum Sovereignty: You are of the Abyss but once- once you ruled from on high. Once you commanded the Heavens themselves, Creation's winds and all its storms. You will do so again. Invoke this Charm and bring the gale, the deluge, the lightning to heel. Temporarily usurping control of the weather from these mendacious spirits. Tainting and twisting it in overt image of what lies below.
[ ] [Daybreak] Severing Hydra: Sever and stitch together. Meld into one and melt apart. The utility this has in construction of your necrotech cannot be overstated, but like so many tools it has unique and distinct applications for violence. This ophidian array slithers through the shadows around you, drawing scalpel thin beams of necrotic Essence through the world. Stitching the night around you with bursts of black fire and beams of eldritch light.
Choose one Charm to raise from Basic to Evolved
[ ] [Midnight] Mail-from-the-Marrow: Everything living and Dead draws its nature from the balance of Elements within. Your arsenal-body can already carve past the Chosen's holy defenses, but what of your own regalia? Deathknight. Anoint yourself.
[ ] [Day] On Carrion Wings: Gravity plucks at your wrist, weak as a child; it will restrain you thus. Will yourself a dozen meters into the air and descend with all the force of a comet. Do not fear the plunge. There is not a fall in Creation that could kill you now.
[ ] [Daybreak] Iridescent Nightmare Mantle: Reality artifacts, rippling and distorting as Elemental errors proliferate around you, metastasizing, turning malignant. Threads of Fate snarl and knot and run filthy black as the nightmare intrudes.
s-such girth!
