Wade Garrett
Just trying to do the right thing
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
According to the wiki, that pink flower kimono he wears 90% of the time is women's formal wear so...
Now You Feel Like Number None [Bleach Arrancar Quest]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
According to the wiki, that pink flower kimono he wears 90% of the time is women's formal wear so...
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
why this
first @EarthScorpion puts the idea of nemo looking like rei behind her mask in my head
now you do this
update delayed forever
NexysDhyArchen
Throne Breaker
Never forget. Di Roy died (again) for our sins.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Ambigiously Hedonistic, perhaps?
Kinruush
Who?
- Location
- USA
Luppi's hedonism isn't ambiguous at all.
- Location
- Should be a bit higher
The kimono was literally a momento from Nanao's mother who he was very close to. So are the hairpins he wears.
There are other reasons for a guy to have unorthodox articles of clothing.
XCVI. Just Like Sleep
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
XCVI. Just Like Sleep
You enter the cavernous chamber in which dwells the Noveno. The air is damp, but the dampness is rich and coppery. What might be decorating these walls? There are no windows here, no lamps, no light, and you feel fear crawl along your spine. Your eyes scan the darkness for a sign of motion, something you can identify, and instead it is your mind that feels. The darkness ahead is deeper than it should be, thick and liquid and alive with malicious intent.
It steps towards you and in the gloom you can at least see the outline of a white uniform, a tall cylindrical mask, puffed sleeves.
"Marvelous! A Numero at last! And here I feared no one would answer my requests."
You stare at the creature, eyes wide, hands shaking, the weight of its reiatsu coiling around you, smothering you, crushing your lungs. You feel it smile hungrily under this mask, and now that you never want to see its face.
"No need to be a-scared, little button, hm? I swear, you Numeros are all the same. I only got a lil' request for you. Nothing much. You see, there is this Hollow…"
***
A long gash adorns your skull, making your hair even more of a mess than it usually is, matted with blood and sand. Your vision is hazy no matter how much you blink. But Polilla holds firm in your grip. You take another step forward, bare foot touching red-wet sand, and the Hollow cowers in horror even as its stumps bubble with unseemly flesh to recreate its arms.
"Please! Please!" it begs in a shrill, pathetic voice. "You can't take me back! He will eat me alive - you have no idea - I beg you, please."
You pause, panting, and check the bruises on your left flank, where the fabric of the uniform was torn. Even as weak as you are, you are still Adjuchas; no base Hollow should ever have given you this much trouble. His reiatsu is twisted, aberrant…
...is he begging you? Your stomach twists. It's not like you want to do this. But one of the Espada gave you an order, and there is no survival in disobeying their whims.
"He doesn't have to know… Please… Just tell him you failed..." the Hollow begs, no longer trying to fight you but bowing and scraping, spindly arms scraping at the sands.
Where does he get off, asking for mercy? He is Hollow; out there in the sands, he would live an existence of hunger, killing his kin to feed himself. It is not that you resent it - you were like this, once. But such creatures as you do not deserve mercy. They live, or die, as chance wills it. That is all.
The Hollow raises its face to you, eyes wide and gleaming with tears, uttering please you no longer hear.
Perhaps it's the horror of its face that made it so hard for you to fight. It's a bone-white Hollow mask, all right - one carved to look exactly like a living human face, with human eyes set in it.
If you let him go and tell the Noveno you didn't find your target, will he punish you for your failure? No. You don't think he has that imperious streak in him.
He would eat you not out of anger, but simply because that way at least he gets something out of this failure. He wouldn't even be angry with you.
Your Bala shatters the thing's bones, and you drag its squirming mass back to Las Noches.
***
"No, no, this isn't enough, what a disappointment…"
The double-toned voice echoes from the chamber as you stare, paralyzed in terror. The Noveno has removed his mask and is turned away from you, the Hollow prostrate at its feet, and you hear the sick wet noises of tearing, snapping, gnawing. Aaroniero lifts an entire, still-writhing arm to his face and chews on it as if it were a breadstick.
And then he turns to you.
His face is that of a man. It terrifies you more than anything else it could have been, because you know, you know this is a mask of skin ripped from the soul of a hapless victim, concealing the horrors within the Espada's body.
"Do you want a taste?" he says with a grin, and the spasm overtakes you. You retch for a solid minute, on your knees, hands on the floor.
When you lift your head again, tears in your eyes, Aaroniero is standing over you, still smiling, still dragging the Hollow in one hand. The body quivers still. Alive.
"It's a serious offer, you know? This thing was supposed to be a modified Hollow which integrated each soul it ate, so that it could grow into a sentient Gillian simply by eating enough base Hollows, without going through the interdevouring or the risk of mindlessness. Turns out you need hundreds of base Hollows to make a Gillian, so he's useless on any functional time table. I thought eating him would reinforce my own abilities, but it does nothing. I already have what it gives me. So…"
He drags the broken, human-masked body ahead of him, in front of you, taller than you are, half-lidded eyes seeing nothing but their own pain.
"C'mon. I want to find out what happens when an Arrancar eats him. Maybe it'll fix what's wrong with your soul, hm? An Adjuchas shouldn't be this weak."
Your face shakes, your eyelids tremble as you stare up at the Noveno, who smiles still.
He would eat you not out of anger, but simply because that way at least he gets something out of this failure.
Maybe if you as he asks, maybe if you make yourself interesting, something to observe and ponder about, maybe you can live through today…
You swallow your tears and bile, close your eyes, and dig in.
***
You are porcelain and shadow and hunger and the sea is at your feet. The crab-lobster-warrior-thing, broken and bleeding. He smells of brine and flesh. You do not know why he is at your feet; you have never offended him nor his king, and do not remember fighting him.
But who cares? It is a meal freely given.
You crouch at his side and open your mouth wide, so wide, wide enough to swallow the whole of the sea, and then you consume. Far from you, a princess calls out in fear and incomprehension, but you do not care; storms just fly above the sea, they do not change it, and storms cast shadows, they do not it.
You drink and you drink and the water tastes like blood.
***
You hear them scream inside your soul. They've never been so clear before, never in so much pain.
When you sank into your soul, you always found them. You could escape them, but not silence them. Only making yourself blind and deaf to their existence gave you peace.
But now you hear them, and now you can silence them too. You do so screaming back, louder than them, full of rage and pain. You strangle the broken things inside you, and devour them.
You howl in the real world too, throwing yourself at the Espada in mad hunger, and he laughs and knocks you back with a casual gesture of his palm. Your back hits stone and cracks it, pulling your consciousness out of your sea of souls, and you gasp in horror.
"Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. We will have to do something with you, little Numero."
You can still hear them.
And you can bring them to heel now.
***
"...and that concludes our lesson," the Privaron says, proud of herself for teaching you how to address your betters.
You thank her, even though you don't think Aaronerio would appreciate these courtesies. No, he would feel like he is being mocked - all these aristocratic niceties exist to set people like the Thunder-Witch apart from people like him. No matter his Espada status, no matter his greater strength, she still considers herself above him.
As if on cue, the black-haired smiling man appears in the shadows of the corridor - you do not see him walking; one instant he was there, then he was not.
"I think she likes you," Aaroniero's human face says with a smirk. You cast your eyes to the ground. "Aw, chin up, lass. It's a good thing. Makes our plan easier, yes?"
You clutch your hands. It was nothing - a simple gift of clothes from the tailor's workshop. She sees nothing in you but a lesser who has served well, and has been repaid in propriety lessons.
"Nah, it's an in. All we need is for you to come back, a little moth to her fire, that'll flatter her - awkwardly trying to get her to teach you to be strong and great like she is, yeah? That way - when a Hollow from the desert breaks into the fortress, reaches her pillar fort, and she dies horribly in battle with it before it drags itself back into the sands severely wounded… We'll have the gal who spent her last couple weeks hanging around her as a distraught witness."
It takes all your willpower, but you shake your head. You can't do this - you can't fake that interest, lie about your true motives, give false testimony when the terrifying Exequias pressures you. You're just one weak Numero…
"Strength has nothing to do with it. Forget her lessons in how to bow, kneel and plead. I will teach you how to say anything, how to be anyone, how to lie so well you even believe it yourself. You won't even have to lie when you cry in horror at the Thunder-Witch's fate - your sadness will be real. And then…"
And he touches you, sending shivers of horror down your spine, cold sweat in your neck, one finger touching your chin, lifting your head up to meet his, these simple human eyes behind which lie fathomless pits of alien hunger.
"...you'll doff that sadness like a cloak, and you will never have cared."
***
"I don't… I don't understand," the Privaron says, gasping for her, clutching her bleeding flank. The Noveno laughs as he advances, but she is not looking at you, she's always feared him, always known him to be a monster, the only thing keeping him from going after the weak former Espada his fear that those stronger than him might notice his ambition.
"I helped you… You came to me in need… I trained you…"
You stand in the shadow of her pillars, still and quiet. You have nothing to say. The tears won't even come, because you hate yourself so much you don't allow yourself the hypocrisy of regret.
"Poor, deluded little princess. The old spinster in her castle, who thought she'd found someone who cared. She never needed your help, Cirucci," the smiling fake man says with gentle cruelty. "She was always mine."
The Privaron screams in fury and unleashes her wings of steel, and the devourer laughs like a madman, and he becomes a horror of misshapen flesh and squirming tentacles. She makes him bleed over and over and in the end it doesn't matter.
She dies betrayed. You fall to your knees, and the giant looms over you, the vast chambers of its stomach rumbling, its many mouths sighing in satisfaction.
"Look into yourself," say a thousand voices, "and find that piece of you which is regret."
You don't question it. You don't refuse. You would do anything to avoid confronting what you've done. You sink in, and find her in the dark, a broken shadow shaped like a girl, weeping.
You devour her, and when you open your eyes, there is no more regret. Behind your mask your face is cold and hard as steel.
"Arise, Nemo Elcorbuzier, Fraccion to the Novena Espada."
***
You sit on a plastic chair at a metal table in a world where the sun is real. There are are people around you, and they do not see you. There is a glass before you filled with cold cream and fizzing liquid, and you do not remember ever being brought it, or why you are sitting here.
You touch the glass, and found out that you were wrong; the fizzing liquid is just blood, and the cold cream just scoops of torn flesh. It still looks tasty, though - but you should probably chase the bugs before you drink it; there are dozens of tiny little mantises scurrying over the table, drinking at the red spots where the blood has dripped.
You look up from your glass and the princess with the purple hair is staring at you. Her face is a cracked porcelain mask, rotting flesh beneath, her eyes molded in a sad look.
"What are you?" she asks mournfully.
You have no answer.
***
You hear them in your dreams now.
It used to be agonizing. Now it's comforting.
Every night when you sleep, they whisper and hide and howl and lash out and weep and spit curses. And every night, one by one, you devour them. Each time you do, the core of your self becomes a little stronger. You grasp memories of a Hollow you consumed long ago, when you were beautiful and strong and had wings with which to sail the night. They become more you, and you become a little stronger.
Sometimes, rarely, the figment will taste different, the memories will be sweeter, sadder, more nostalgic. Some fragment of a human soul, which was consumed before it could twist into a Hollow. When that happens you find the part of yourself that screams in horror at this reminder of your monstrosity, and slay it. Again and again.
One by one you will bring this teeming cohort of thousands into the fold of one perfect self.
***
"I don't think I recognize you anymore, Nemo," Esmeralda says softly, casting her eyes to the ground. You are not hungry here; the thick smell of chemicals takes away the appetite, the alcohol numbs the thought. Only the glint of blades and metal tools reminds you of a butcher's workshop, or perhaps a kitchen.
You're still the same, you shrug. Or… mostly the same. The souls you hear at night (and sometimes when you're awake now) were always part of you, you were just deaf to them. You haven't changed; you've just opened your mind.
"You used to be shy," she insists, "now you're secretive. You used to be afraid, now you're sneaky. You do the same things but they feel different. I don't like… I don't like what the Noveno is doing to you, you know?"
You do. You understand her fears. But it's making you stronger, making it easier for you to survive. You need a master, someone with power to save you from the deadly whims of the Espada. It's the only way to make it. No matter what you have to do to yourself to get there.
At least you'll still be yourself.
"Nemo…" Esmeralda says, taking your hand, a sad fold to her eyes. "What if we left? Just the two of us, to the living world. You don't have to follow his orders anymore, you don't have to change yourself. We could just be together, free."
You look at her hand, and feel a pang of pain in your heart. An ache, a longing. But she can't give it to you. What awaits you in the living world? The fear again, the need to hide always as Shinigami prowl the streets, the aimlessness… And yet, you want it.
You know you shouldn't. So you find that part of you that aches, and you eat it too.
You push Esmeralda's hand away.
You have to see this through.
***
You shatter the pillar of ice before it has the time to fully encase Di Roy, and grab the Arrancar's wrist to pull him away. The woman below spits out a curse and hurls a spell at you, but you are too fast for her. You dodge the blast and land on a rooftop, and Di Roy pulls himself from you.
"The freaking tricksy-"
You shake your head. No time, you have to run.
"Run? That was a dirty sneak attack! Now that I've seen it, I'll just release and-"
And die, because even if he can kill the Shinigami woman, Kurosaki Ichigo is standing right next to her, and the both of you aren't strong enough to fight the both of them. You tug on Di Roy's sleeve as the Shinigami's reiatsu intensifies and she rises into the air. Got to go.
"Goddammit… Fine!" he shouts in anger, and the both of you take off, hurling Ceros to keep the woman at bay. It is easy to escape, for you are not in any sensible city but in a maze of broken skyscrapers and white stone towers reaching to infinity, streets bending upon themselves like space has gone mad.
You land again on another rooftop, far from whatever it is you were running from.
"Thanks," the thing, the boy says with scorn. "I wasn't sure when you dropped in on us and asked to be let in on our plan, but I guess… I guess you just saved my life."
You smile. You're very sorry.
"What, about making me miss out on my fight? Well, Grimmjow and the others will give me shit for it until the end of days, but it's better than being dead."
No… No, it really isn't.
You stab him the way the fish-mask-man-jar taught you to, a clean precise thrust to the heart. His eyes go wide, his mouth gape as he stares at you, trying to mutter your name in shock. When the heart stops it takes a few seconds for the power to fade, for the soul to die.
It is in these seconds which you must feed.
Your master told you how it would feel many times before tonight, preparing you for this initiation, this rite of passing, the consumption of one of your own kin. He could not prepare you for the truth of it.
It is so much better than you ever expected.
***
"You have done so well," the false man coos, pacing around his dark chamber. Walls of stone stretch above you without seeming to ever end; you think there are patterns on them, and refuse to look. You just sit, listless and empty, echoes in your ears. "I knew I was right to choose you. I knew you had the potential."
You shake your head. You can feel the taste of Arrancar flesh on your tongue even days the feast. When you came home he greeted you with open arms and embraced you as one might a daughter, filled with pride in your accomplishments. Now he watches you with a paternalistic smile, satisfied with you as one is with a pet learning a new trick. Which of these is truth? Perhaps both, or neither. The one you betrayed is inside you now, crying out in pain. You will find him soul inside the sea, and then he will finally be one with you.
What horrifies you is how it doesn't horrify you anymore.
"You sit there, moping sadly, ashamed and guilty," Aaroniero sighs, "when I tell you - this world is a lie. These things you have bound yourself into, they are chains holding you back. But I suppose it's natural you wouldn't understand… I have only been a mentor and a master to you, haven't I? I have allowed you so little leisure, given you so few gifts that are not power for power's own sake. I made you strong, but that is not enough, is it? You have been a good servant. You deserve rewards."
He circles your bench, nodding his head, smiling.
"You have never liked this face, have you?" he says through the dead Shinigami's lips.
You feel the shift, and then the hand laying gently on your shoulder, graceful and small and strong. Wavy tails of purple-black hair dangle around your face. Her voice says:
"I can be anyone you want, anything you want, just for you. You know how much I value you."
You run out of the chamber with her laughter at your back, heart racing and drenched in cold sweat, away, away as fast and as far as you can.
Gone.
***
You are walking in nothing. The sands stretch out around you forever, flat as a windless sea, and the starless moonless sky is the matte black of an immense, painted dome.
"Yes," says a distant voice, sighing in relief. "Please. Please don't go back. Please walk away…"
Ah. You see now. You see they were never sands at all; just the bones of countless beasts ground down and down and down forever since the first living thing took its breath. Bones ground into the thinnest of white dusts and now it is the sand of your world.
Your world is death. You live in it, and so you too are death. Death is what you eat, what you breathe, what you drink.
Where will you escape it? You can't - it is with you always, whatever worlds you tread. It is you.
***
"You bastard," Grimmjow hisses through clenched teeth, his eyes two murderous stars, his reiatsu a whole jungle of predators about to strike. "You think just because my Fraccions are gone, you can take a shot at me? You, the fucking Nine? Come at me. Come at me, and I will rip you to shreds!"
"You poor, idiot beast," Aaroniero says with a grin. "The Nine? Oh, you have no idea. I am no longer just the Nine - I am Shinigami and Privaron and Fraccion and another Espada as well. I've always liked you better than those with pretenses of nobility, Grimmjow - but it's time you stopped looking down at me."
He makes his move, and Grimmjow meets him with Cero, red beam shattering the wall of his tower. Aaroniero gasps as the jaguar pounces on him, catching his throat and slamming him a hundred feet down into the sand.
Aaroniero howls in pain, and his voice splits into two tones as his human face dissolves like mist in the sun, revealing his grotesque true self.
"All of you," the Sexta groans, squeezing the glass tank in which float to tiny, tiny Arrancar masks, spreading cracks across its glass surface, "looked down on me first. I have been here since day one, fishtank! You think I don't know your tricks? You think I don't know sunlight turns you back into a little bitch? Where's the idiot beast now!"
"Hate you," says one mask.
"We had accounted for that possibility," says the other.
"What?" Blink. Surprise.
And then he sees the shadow spreading around him, and turns his head to the sun, and finds the wave of shadow engulfing the tower and the sands around it.
And he sees you, standing on a pillar of stone, looking down with cold dead eyes.
"King of hunts," says the Thunder-Witch's face, "meet the queen of shadows."
Of course you came back.
What else is there for you?
Aaroniero smiles, and erupts into an agony of flesh.
***
You don't hear them anymore. Not unless you want to.
You have consumed again all the pitiful wretches that made up your sea of souls, and in doing so have refined them, refined yourself. You are still a multitude, still one being containing thousands, but now each of these thousands is like a cell in a body: in its place, fulfilling a purpose, connecting to all others, subsumed into one single will. They no longer scream or wail or gnash their teeth. They are quiescent, unless you call upon them.
You often do. Why wouldn't you? You never have to feel lonely anymore. With but a thought you can have someone whisper to you, someone without will or desire that could turn on you, that could fail you. Now you know the boy with the strange teeth was attracted to you, which you find hilarious; and you can have a conversation with the healer whenever you feel like it. You know the other Arrancars shudder when they see you listen to voices no one can hear, and answer them with gestures that hold no meaning to them. It doesn't matter; you don't need them. You have all the friends you need.
Right there inside you.
***
In the end, there are only two of Aizen's loyal servants who realise the game you're playing. Ruddborne, the inqusitor, and Luppi the betrayer. One whose job it is to dig up dissent; the other here to insinuate himself into conspiracy and tear it apart from within.
That must be why you're down here in the depths of Las Noches, where the walls are tiled with moths whose wings whisper your guilt. Luppi must have approached you looking for inclusion, and now he pretends to flee with you. You wish you remembered this, but your head aches. A blow, perhaps.
There are so many calvaras down here, each one bland and flavourless and worthless. But your master knows the taste of them and knows them for the unripe fruit they are. He longs to sink his teeth into the tree.
Filthy, bloody muck squelches around your ankles as you and Luppi flee from your pursuers. There's a calvaras with you, one that Ruddborne wished to kill, and you've saved it. Luppi is shouting at you, accusing you of betraying him. You push past him, discard your outer clothing, shed those things that bind and contain you.
And that's when the calvaras you saved strikes Luppi across the back of the head. He goes down like a sack of potatoes.
Ruddborne stares, confused. He shouts something, but you're not listening. Your hand is on Pollita. You can smell the warm blood over the cold old blood that fills the room.
The calvaras removes its jackal-like mask. The Thunderwitch smiles from underneath, teeth sharp, drooling already.
The Novena wants Ruddborne. The betrayer is your delicacy. Poor Luppi; his mistake was trusting too much. He trusted you'd wait until you got back to the Novena's lair before you turned on him.
You insinuate yourself into his flesh, and tear him apart from within.
***
Las Noches falls, and it is because of you.
Your first miracle was one of deceit. There are many gods in the fortress that is a city, and it is not easy to fool gods. You did it through cunning, planning, and perfect timing. The writhing horror of limbs and hunger that you call master contained its bursting flesh within disguises, as one once called Seven, as one once called Six, and as himself, his most clever and deceitful of guises. By exchanging these masks and appearing in many places at different times, he fooled the gods into believing all these were real people.
Your second miracle was one of subtlety. At the heart of the fortress there is a stone that grants wishes. It was your discretion, your skill, the perfect silence of your muted souls, the whispers of many souls cleverly found and killed, which guided you on the path to its hiding place. You took the stone, stopping for but a moment to admire it, and briefly you were tempted to take it for yourself. But such was not your goal. No, instead you brought it back to the thing you call master, and he devoured it with utmost glee, even as all throughout the fortress the gods learned of the theft and roused themselves to anger.
Your third and last miracle was one of power. You called on the name of your sword, and your wings took you into the sky. You were a speck of shadow racing as all the gods tore through the underground of the fortress looking for your sun-fearing master. They knew what he sought, the bright-eyed thing buried beneath the earth and feared by all; they dreaded what he might do with its power, now that he was strong enough to consume it.
They never looked up, never saw you reach the false sun, and touch it as a moth does the flame.
But you were no longer moth by then. You were shadow, and like all of the world, this sun was a lie.
You consumed it. Not like a predator, but like a disease. You were a speck of darkness on its face, and that speck became a spot, and that spot sprouted veins of shadow across its face until the false light dimmed and guttered out. Then the skies of were ruled by a black star.
The nightmare laughed then, its tentacles bursting like mountain peaks through the underground, black-robed towers marching at its command.
Gods do battle against a thing without name. The walls crumble. As an old king had sentenced your friend to die long ago, now too you have sentenced the old king to death. The poetry of it touches you on an intellectual level, but to be honest, you no longer care about such ancient memories.
You did it.
You killed a world.
You turn away and walk into a dream of shadows.
You see another moth standing before you.
***
You feel the touch of clarity. Shadows part, revealing the mists that surround you.
You know who she is.
She's the weak one. The courtier, the tinkerer, the thief of crowns. Bound in chains of her own making. Relying on others at every turn. Reaching out, opening herself, letting others open in turn. She has the strength of many but none of that strength is hers, except when she steals it in fragments and makes cloth of them.
She is here because she sought another shred of someone else's tatters. Witchcraft. One lesson, one spell, another tool in her bag of tricks. Always afraid to commit, to stick the course, to focus and find strength in purity. Her aura is a mess, lashed to a hundred tethers, spread thin like fraying ropes, a torn dress.
She has hurt herself time and again. That is the issue. Instead of using these ties to advantage herself, she dyes them in her own blood, sacrificing a little of herself at each step. You can count the wounds with which she's paid the loyalty of each new 'friend.' She is hollowing herself out bit by bit, until she is nothing but the ties she can call upon.
And here, she's alone.
You pity and despise her in equal measure.
She looks at you, afraid. She knows she is the lesser of you two.
No… she doesn't. She begins to justify herself even as you watch her. Love, friendship, camaraderie, lessons learned and lessons taught, a betrayer made into an ally, a society forged out of listless monsters.
You tire of this prattle. You draw Polilla and she backs away in panic. Her power surges, a weave of shadows, more powerful than you thought.
You take one step and cut her skin. She backs away and you follow easily, cutting again. Her fists light with moaning ghosts, beating against you, silken wrappings slowing you down. You're still too fast. You hound her blow after blow, hurling ghosts of your own, weaker ones - but you don't need to bind her with magic. You only need to push her off-balance while you catch up and cut again.
There is terrible power again, the Cero of the Espada, and it doesn't matter in the least because she never find the time to summon it. You cut and cut and cut and cut.
In the end she is prone at your feet, broken and bloodied. All this power and no way to call upon it, not without someone else doing the hard work for her. You push the tip of Polilla under her chin and lift her head to stare into her eyes.
Even the power she does have, she is afraid to use. She dreads her true self, locked inside her sword. You do not; you have made yourself into its image, until there is no difference between the two of you, until releasing your blade means nothing but a change in shape and an increase in power.
In her eyes you see acceptance. She knows she is far too weak. She knows she has gone too far. Broke pieces of herself until the whole started to crack.
Then she smiles.
You do not like her smiling; she has no reason to. You push the tip of your sword to her throat, pierce the skin, shed a drop of blood.
She smiles still.
She is weaker, yes.
But your strength means nothing. You have nothing to do with it, save seek more of it. Your strength is born from consumption, and in the end, it has consumed you.
You barely remember who Luppi is. You do not understand what she means when she tells you that his betrayals, at least, had a purpose. A point to prove, however misguided.
You have no purpose. You are pointless. You exist only has a shape which moves through the world, killing and eating that which is in its way.
She has a life.
She grabs the edge of Polilla and your eyes widen. You try to budge the sword, and it does not move, even though you are stronger than her.
You are, after all, only a dream.
The other Nemo stands up, never letting go of the blade, and you feel yourself grow lighter and lighter, thinner until you contain nothing but air, until you are but mist and vapor.
As you begin to vanish, you cease to feel any point in struggling. You look at her, tilting your head. Maybe what she says is true. Maybe your life was pointless. But at least you didn't die. She might think that if she dies, she will die for something - but she moves through the world as if she were in a haste to make that sacrifice.
That feels very pointless to you.
You die, not really caring much that it happens.
***
You watch as the you that was not disappears.
What a sad, tragic existence it led. As if for every little bit of good you brought to Las Noches, it brought a bit of ill.
And just as the good you tried to do took from you to add to the whole, she took from the world to add to herself.
You brush your torso with a finger, resting it on each spot where you remember the pain of your wounds. They are only the most visible pieces of you to have been taken away. You tore a friend you badly needed from your side, to keep her safe. You threw yourself wholly into the ways of art and music and etiquette, so that there could be life in Hueco Mundo, and all of that study was training you did not have to fight the battles of life and death.
You don't regret these choices. But perhaps there is some measure of what not-you lived through that may be of help.
You take a curl of the mist that was not-you, and weave it into a ring, which you put on your fingers. It grows teeth, bites into the flesh, and buries itself within.
The pain wakes you up.
***
You lurch awake blind from the tears and stars in your eyes, your stomach a churning sea, and throw yourself halfway over the spider's body to make your daily contribution to making Hueco Mundo a better place by giving it your lunch.
"If you stain my carapace, you'll have to clean it!" the spider shouts from ahead of you. You blink blearily. You think you managed to only hit the sand.
"Well," says a horrible, terrible, awful snake lounging behind you like everything is good and fine, "you woke up much earlier than I expected."
You pull out your handkerchief and wipe your mouth, head swimming. Oh, wow. You stare at the stained fabric. That's not just your lunch. It's blood and black clots and it's not your messed-up lungs or stomachs doing this, it's… It's moving. Feeling nausea strike again, you fold the handkerchief and prepare to throw it away, when a voice calls out.
"Stop! Give me that!"
You blink and slowly turn, staring dumbly with your tissue in hand. Sung-Sun imperiously holds out her hand, closing and opening it in a beckoning motion.
Hesitantly, you put the handkerchief in her palm, and it quickly disappears into some hidden pocket of her uniform.
"Reagents," she says with a mysterious smile, and you wrinkle your nose in disgust. "What? Witchcraft isn't pretty or clean. And whatever came out of your mouth after I dosed you with lore-inducing poison will not be anything mundane."
It's still disgusting, but you concede the point and slump into your seat.
"Enjoyed your little trip into dreamland?" she asks, smiling entirely too mischievously. You're about to curse her, and then you remember that you did throw a Gran Rey Cero at her.
You will never get to criticize her ever again, will you? You've basically given her a lifetime's worth of excuse for any torment she inflicts on you in the process of teaching you anything at all.
Well. You deserve it, you suppose.
You sigh in resignation, then look at her curiously.
Was any of what you saw… real?
"Obviously not," Sung-Sun says with a frown, "that's the whole point."
No, you understand that it didn't happen, you just… You saw things… Things you couldn't have any way of knowing. Aaroniero's face, the true nature of the sun above Las Noches -
Sung-Sun raises her hand.
"Don't tell me. We'd be here all night and the day after entangling the meaning of your visions. And, frankly, I don't want to learn what your vision said about you. It has a tendency to bring up the… worse part of us. Parts that exist, within us, in potential, but that we might never have acted upon or even realized we had. I don't want my image of you tainted by learning of some horrible thing you might conceivably have done in the worst and most extenuating of circumstances. It isn't relevant to reality."
Fair enough, you suppose. You reach for a small jug of water in your purse and wash the awful taste off your tongue, then close it again. She didn't answer your question about the things you saw that weren't about you.
She shrugs.
"You might have extrapolated on subconscious thoughts, or things you heard but forgot. To take your example before I cut you off, perhaps an image of Aaroniero's face formed based on an idle comment you heard from someone in a conversation. Others, you will have made up entirely to fit the narrative of the vision. Others still…" She smiles and shrugs again, reclining in the seat, a lascivious motion that makes her look like some decadent prophetess handing out wisdom. "It is witchcraft, after all. It may well be that you caught glimpses of secret truths from it."
You nod slowly and turn away from her. Las Noches looms ahead of you, ever-far, ever-close. It is always difficult to tell how far one is from a fortress that dwarfs some mountains, but you think you will reach it soon.
"So," the spider asks cheerfully, "did you find what you came out there for?"
"I did," Sung-Sun says with her lazy, snake-eyed look. "I very much did. And you, Nemo?"
You lower your eyes, staring at your hand, at the faint redness around one finger of your right hand, where in the dream a ring buried itself under your skin.
You think of threads, and a pattern emerges in your mind. You raise your hand and feel one thread stretching from your finger, waiting for you to weave it in its shape.
You smile.
Yes. Yes you did.
You have taken your first steps on the path of Brujeria, the art of Hollow witchcraft. This is a complex discipline, requiring months of actual study when you already have so many skills to practice, and so your Brujeria skill is not quite equivalent to that of the Tres Bestias; you will not reach the sheer versatility of their art over the timeline of the Quest. This does not make it useless tool by far, however. Through your initiating vision, you have developed one personal, unique form of witch-craft. This starts out weak, and improves with levels.
In addition, Sung-Sun has burned one more advanced spell into your soul, whose power is static but which would normally have taken you a higher level to learn at all. This spell manifests through your own aesthetics and the lens of the vision you endure, and so does not look like Sung-Sun's own version, though its effects are broadly similar.
The Witchworm. Your basic form of witchcraft, born of your previous experience of Shinigami sorcery as a hateful power against which you have no recourse, as well as a hunger-driven dream in which you grew to devour the sun itself.
When someone casts a spell in your presence, you may draw upon the hunger and madness of all Hollows and infuse it into the weaving of the spell. A spell tainted by Hollow power will go awry in some way, bucking to escape your opponent's control and lash out with hunger and spite. Differences in magical skill make this ability less effective, and spells which are properly chanted are much sturdier, but hastily-cast magic is especially vulnerable.
Additionally, pick one spell.
Much like Shinigami Kido and the Bestias's spells, these spells are much more effective if you have the time to "chant" an "incantation" - which in Nemo's case consists of a series of ritualized hand gestures.
[ ] The soul's own hunger. All Hollows have known the pain of their soul chain devouring itself. Even those who forgot can be remembered; even those who have not felt it, can be made to see this bleak fate. If you swallow the blood of an enemy, you may cast a spell which causes their soul to rebel against them, gnawing and biting at their flesh. The spell is more potent against those who contain many souls, but is more terrifying to those who have never felt this pain before.
[ ] The cracked vessel. Aaroniero had a thousand faces to flow in and out when his enemy thought they had him. The Nemo that was not had embraced her sealed self. These are two lessons you can draw upon. At a moment's notice, you may turn your skin to porcelain, and once bound, crack your way out of it, becoming a fleeting shadow before reforming again. Helpful in escaping restraints of all sorts, but regenerating the outer layer of your skin still hurts like hell.
[ ] The corruption of the sun. The last miracle of the you that was not was to be swallowed by the false sun, and turn it to sickness from within. You must hold an eye (where it comes from is irrelevant), and you may turn it into a black star, which you can send into the air where it hovers and casts shadows in much the same way a lamp would cast light, aiding your abilities which rely on darkness.
There is a moratorium of one hour on this vote.
You enter the cavernous chamber in which dwells the Noveno. The air is damp, but the dampness is rich and coppery. What might be decorating these walls? There are no windows here, no lamps, no light, and you feel fear crawl along your spine. Your eyes scan the darkness for a sign of motion, something you can identify, and instead it is your mind that feels. The darkness ahead is deeper than it should be, thick and liquid and alive with malicious intent.
It steps towards you and in the gloom you can at least see the outline of a white uniform, a tall cylindrical mask, puffed sleeves.
"Marvelous! A Numero at last! And here I feared no one would answer my requests."
You stare at the creature, eyes wide, hands shaking, the weight of its reiatsu coiling around you, smothering you, crushing your lungs. You feel it smile hungrily under this mask, and now that you never want to see its face.
"No need to be a-scared, little button, hm? I swear, you Numeros are all the same. I only got a lil' request for you. Nothing much. You see, there is this Hollow…"
***
A long gash adorns your skull, making your hair even more of a mess than it usually is, matted with blood and sand. Your vision is hazy no matter how much you blink. But Polilla holds firm in your grip. You take another step forward, bare foot touching red-wet sand, and the Hollow cowers in horror even as its stumps bubble with unseemly flesh to recreate its arms.
"Please! Please!" it begs in a shrill, pathetic voice. "You can't take me back! He will eat me alive - you have no idea - I beg you, please."
You pause, panting, and check the bruises on your left flank, where the fabric of the uniform was torn. Even as weak as you are, you are still Adjuchas; no base Hollow should ever have given you this much trouble. His reiatsu is twisted, aberrant…
...is he begging you? Your stomach twists. It's not like you want to do this. But one of the Espada gave you an order, and there is no survival in disobeying their whims.
"He doesn't have to know… Please… Just tell him you failed..." the Hollow begs, no longer trying to fight you but bowing and scraping, spindly arms scraping at the sands.
Where does he get off, asking for mercy? He is Hollow; out there in the sands, he would live an existence of hunger, killing his kin to feed himself. It is not that you resent it - you were like this, once. But such creatures as you do not deserve mercy. They live, or die, as chance wills it. That is all.
The Hollow raises its face to you, eyes wide and gleaming with tears, uttering please you no longer hear.
Perhaps it's the horror of its face that made it so hard for you to fight. It's a bone-white Hollow mask, all right - one carved to look exactly like a living human face, with human eyes set in it.
If you let him go and tell the Noveno you didn't find your target, will he punish you for your failure? No. You don't think he has that imperious streak in him.
He would eat you not out of anger, but simply because that way at least he gets something out of this failure. He wouldn't even be angry with you.
Your Bala shatters the thing's bones, and you drag its squirming mass back to Las Noches.
***
"No, no, this isn't enough, what a disappointment…"
The double-toned voice echoes from the chamber as you stare, paralyzed in terror. The Noveno has removed his mask and is turned away from you, the Hollow prostrate at its feet, and you hear the sick wet noises of tearing, snapping, gnawing. Aaroniero lifts an entire, still-writhing arm to his face and chews on it as if it were a breadstick.
And then he turns to you.
His face is that of a man. It terrifies you more than anything else it could have been, because you know, you know this is a mask of skin ripped from the soul of a hapless victim, concealing the horrors within the Espada's body.
"Do you want a taste?" he says with a grin, and the spasm overtakes you. You retch for a solid minute, on your knees, hands on the floor.
When you lift your head again, tears in your eyes, Aaroniero is standing over you, still smiling, still dragging the Hollow in one hand. The body quivers still. Alive.
"It's a serious offer, you know? This thing was supposed to be a modified Hollow which integrated each soul it ate, so that it could grow into a sentient Gillian simply by eating enough base Hollows, without going through the interdevouring or the risk of mindlessness. Turns out you need hundreds of base Hollows to make a Gillian, so he's useless on any functional time table. I thought eating him would reinforce my own abilities, but it does nothing. I already have what it gives me. So…"
He drags the broken, human-masked body ahead of him, in front of you, taller than you are, half-lidded eyes seeing nothing but their own pain.
"C'mon. I want to find out what happens when an Arrancar eats him. Maybe it'll fix what's wrong with your soul, hm? An Adjuchas shouldn't be this weak."
Your face shakes, your eyelids tremble as you stare up at the Noveno, who smiles still.
He would eat you not out of anger, but simply because that way at least he gets something out of this failure.
Maybe if you as he asks, maybe if you make yourself interesting, something to observe and ponder about, maybe you can live through today…
You swallow your tears and bile, close your eyes, and dig in.
***
You are porcelain and shadow and hunger and the sea is at your feet. The crab-lobster-warrior-thing, broken and bleeding. He smells of brine and flesh. You do not know why he is at your feet; you have never offended him nor his king, and do not remember fighting him.
But who cares? It is a meal freely given.
You crouch at his side and open your mouth wide, so wide, wide enough to swallow the whole of the sea, and then you consume. Far from you, a princess calls out in fear and incomprehension, but you do not care; storms just fly above the sea, they do not change it, and storms cast shadows, they do not it.
You drink and you drink and the water tastes like blood.
***
You hear them scream inside your soul. They've never been so clear before, never in so much pain.
When you sank into your soul, you always found them. You could escape them, but not silence them. Only making yourself blind and deaf to their existence gave you peace.
But now you hear them, and now you can silence them too. You do so screaming back, louder than them, full of rage and pain. You strangle the broken things inside you, and devour them.
You howl in the real world too, throwing yourself at the Espada in mad hunger, and he laughs and knocks you back with a casual gesture of his palm. Your back hits stone and cracks it, pulling your consciousness out of your sea of souls, and you gasp in horror.
"Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. We will have to do something with you, little Numero."
You can still hear them.
And you can bring them to heel now.
***
"...and that concludes our lesson," the Privaron says, proud of herself for teaching you how to address your betters.
You thank her, even though you don't think Aaronerio would appreciate these courtesies. No, he would feel like he is being mocked - all these aristocratic niceties exist to set people like the Thunder-Witch apart from people like him. No matter his Espada status, no matter his greater strength, she still considers herself above him.
As if on cue, the black-haired smiling man appears in the shadows of the corridor - you do not see him walking; one instant he was there, then he was not.
"I think she likes you," Aaroniero's human face says with a smirk. You cast your eyes to the ground. "Aw, chin up, lass. It's a good thing. Makes our plan easier, yes?"
You clutch your hands. It was nothing - a simple gift of clothes from the tailor's workshop. She sees nothing in you but a lesser who has served well, and has been repaid in propriety lessons.
"Nah, it's an in. All we need is for you to come back, a little moth to her fire, that'll flatter her - awkwardly trying to get her to teach you to be strong and great like she is, yeah? That way - when a Hollow from the desert breaks into the fortress, reaches her pillar fort, and she dies horribly in battle with it before it drags itself back into the sands severely wounded… We'll have the gal who spent her last couple weeks hanging around her as a distraught witness."
It takes all your willpower, but you shake your head. You can't do this - you can't fake that interest, lie about your true motives, give false testimony when the terrifying Exequias pressures you. You're just one weak Numero…
"Strength has nothing to do with it. Forget her lessons in how to bow, kneel and plead. I will teach you how to say anything, how to be anyone, how to lie so well you even believe it yourself. You won't even have to lie when you cry in horror at the Thunder-Witch's fate - your sadness will be real. And then…"
And he touches you, sending shivers of horror down your spine, cold sweat in your neck, one finger touching your chin, lifting your head up to meet his, these simple human eyes behind which lie fathomless pits of alien hunger.
"...you'll doff that sadness like a cloak, and you will never have cared."
***
"I don't… I don't understand," the Privaron says, gasping for her, clutching her bleeding flank. The Noveno laughs as he advances, but she is not looking at you, she's always feared him, always known him to be a monster, the only thing keeping him from going after the weak former Espada his fear that those stronger than him might notice his ambition.
"I helped you… You came to me in need… I trained you…"
You stand in the shadow of her pillars, still and quiet. You have nothing to say. The tears won't even come, because you hate yourself so much you don't allow yourself the hypocrisy of regret.
"Poor, deluded little princess. The old spinster in her castle, who thought she'd found someone who cared. She never needed your help, Cirucci," the smiling fake man says with gentle cruelty. "She was always mine."
The Privaron screams in fury and unleashes her wings of steel, and the devourer laughs like a madman, and he becomes a horror of misshapen flesh and squirming tentacles. She makes him bleed over and over and in the end it doesn't matter.
She dies betrayed. You fall to your knees, and the giant looms over you, the vast chambers of its stomach rumbling, its many mouths sighing in satisfaction.
"Look into yourself," say a thousand voices, "and find that piece of you which is regret."
You don't question it. You don't refuse. You would do anything to avoid confronting what you've done. You sink in, and find her in the dark, a broken shadow shaped like a girl, weeping.
You devour her, and when you open your eyes, there is no more regret. Behind your mask your face is cold and hard as steel.
"Arise, Nemo Elcorbuzier, Fraccion to the Novena Espada."
***
You sit on a plastic chair at a metal table in a world where the sun is real. There are are people around you, and they do not see you. There is a glass before you filled with cold cream and fizzing liquid, and you do not remember ever being brought it, or why you are sitting here.
You touch the glass, and found out that you were wrong; the fizzing liquid is just blood, and the cold cream just scoops of torn flesh. It still looks tasty, though - but you should probably chase the bugs before you drink it; there are dozens of tiny little mantises scurrying over the table, drinking at the red spots where the blood has dripped.
You look up from your glass and the princess with the purple hair is staring at you. Her face is a cracked porcelain mask, rotting flesh beneath, her eyes molded in a sad look.
"What are you?" she asks mournfully.
You have no answer.
***
You hear them in your dreams now.
It used to be agonizing. Now it's comforting.
Every night when you sleep, they whisper and hide and howl and lash out and weep and spit curses. And every night, one by one, you devour them. Each time you do, the core of your self becomes a little stronger. You grasp memories of a Hollow you consumed long ago, when you were beautiful and strong and had wings with which to sail the night. They become more you, and you become a little stronger.
Sometimes, rarely, the figment will taste different, the memories will be sweeter, sadder, more nostalgic. Some fragment of a human soul, which was consumed before it could twist into a Hollow. When that happens you find the part of yourself that screams in horror at this reminder of your monstrosity, and slay it. Again and again.
One by one you will bring this teeming cohort of thousands into the fold of one perfect self.
***
"I don't think I recognize you anymore, Nemo," Esmeralda says softly, casting her eyes to the ground. You are not hungry here; the thick smell of chemicals takes away the appetite, the alcohol numbs the thought. Only the glint of blades and metal tools reminds you of a butcher's workshop, or perhaps a kitchen.
You're still the same, you shrug. Or… mostly the same. The souls you hear at night (and sometimes when you're awake now) were always part of you, you were just deaf to them. You haven't changed; you've just opened your mind.
"You used to be shy," she insists, "now you're secretive. You used to be afraid, now you're sneaky. You do the same things but they feel different. I don't like… I don't like what the Noveno is doing to you, you know?"
You do. You understand her fears. But it's making you stronger, making it easier for you to survive. You need a master, someone with power to save you from the deadly whims of the Espada. It's the only way to make it. No matter what you have to do to yourself to get there.
At least you'll still be yourself.
"Nemo…" Esmeralda says, taking your hand, a sad fold to her eyes. "What if we left? Just the two of us, to the living world. You don't have to follow his orders anymore, you don't have to change yourself. We could just be together, free."
You look at her hand, and feel a pang of pain in your heart. An ache, a longing. But she can't give it to you. What awaits you in the living world? The fear again, the need to hide always as Shinigami prowl the streets, the aimlessness… And yet, you want it.
You know you shouldn't. So you find that part of you that aches, and you eat it too.
You push Esmeralda's hand away.
You have to see this through.
***
You shatter the pillar of ice before it has the time to fully encase Di Roy, and grab the Arrancar's wrist to pull him away. The woman below spits out a curse and hurls a spell at you, but you are too fast for her. You dodge the blast and land on a rooftop, and Di Roy pulls himself from you.
"The freaking tricksy-"
You shake your head. No time, you have to run.
"Run? That was a dirty sneak attack! Now that I've seen it, I'll just release and-"
And die, because even if he can kill the Shinigami woman, Kurosaki Ichigo is standing right next to her, and the both of you aren't strong enough to fight the both of them. You tug on Di Roy's sleeve as the Shinigami's reiatsu intensifies and she rises into the air. Got to go.
"Goddammit… Fine!" he shouts in anger, and the both of you take off, hurling Ceros to keep the woman at bay. It is easy to escape, for you are not in any sensible city but in a maze of broken skyscrapers and white stone towers reaching to infinity, streets bending upon themselves like space has gone mad.
You land again on another rooftop, far from whatever it is you were running from.
"Thanks," the thing, the boy says with scorn. "I wasn't sure when you dropped in on us and asked to be let in on our plan, but I guess… I guess you just saved my life."
You smile. You're very sorry.
"What, about making me miss out on my fight? Well, Grimmjow and the others will give me shit for it until the end of days, but it's better than being dead."
No… No, it really isn't.
You stab him the way the fish-mask-man-jar taught you to, a clean precise thrust to the heart. His eyes go wide, his mouth gape as he stares at you, trying to mutter your name in shock. When the heart stops it takes a few seconds for the power to fade, for the soul to die.
It is in these seconds which you must feed.
Your master told you how it would feel many times before tonight, preparing you for this initiation, this rite of passing, the consumption of one of your own kin. He could not prepare you for the truth of it.
It is so much better than you ever expected.
***
"You have done so well," the false man coos, pacing around his dark chamber. Walls of stone stretch above you without seeming to ever end; you think there are patterns on them, and refuse to look. You just sit, listless and empty, echoes in your ears. "I knew I was right to choose you. I knew you had the potential."
You shake your head. You can feel the taste of Arrancar flesh on your tongue even days the feast. When you came home he greeted you with open arms and embraced you as one might a daughter, filled with pride in your accomplishments. Now he watches you with a paternalistic smile, satisfied with you as one is with a pet learning a new trick. Which of these is truth? Perhaps both, or neither. The one you betrayed is inside you now, crying out in pain. You will find him soul inside the sea, and then he will finally be one with you.
What horrifies you is how it doesn't horrify you anymore.
"You sit there, moping sadly, ashamed and guilty," Aaroniero sighs, "when I tell you - this world is a lie. These things you have bound yourself into, they are chains holding you back. But I suppose it's natural you wouldn't understand… I have only been a mentor and a master to you, haven't I? I have allowed you so little leisure, given you so few gifts that are not power for power's own sake. I made you strong, but that is not enough, is it? You have been a good servant. You deserve rewards."
He circles your bench, nodding his head, smiling.
"You have never liked this face, have you?" he says through the dead Shinigami's lips.
You feel the shift, and then the hand laying gently on your shoulder, graceful and small and strong. Wavy tails of purple-black hair dangle around your face. Her voice says:
"I can be anyone you want, anything you want, just for you. You know how much I value you."
You run out of the chamber with her laughter at your back, heart racing and drenched in cold sweat, away, away as fast and as far as you can.
Gone.
***
You are walking in nothing. The sands stretch out around you forever, flat as a windless sea, and the starless moonless sky is the matte black of an immense, painted dome.
"Yes," says a distant voice, sighing in relief. "Please. Please don't go back. Please walk away…"
Ah. You see now. You see they were never sands at all; just the bones of countless beasts ground down and down and down forever since the first living thing took its breath. Bones ground into the thinnest of white dusts and now it is the sand of your world.
Your world is death. You live in it, and so you too are death. Death is what you eat, what you breathe, what you drink.
Where will you escape it? You can't - it is with you always, whatever worlds you tread. It is you.
***
"You bastard," Grimmjow hisses through clenched teeth, his eyes two murderous stars, his reiatsu a whole jungle of predators about to strike. "You think just because my Fraccions are gone, you can take a shot at me? You, the fucking Nine? Come at me. Come at me, and I will rip you to shreds!"
"You poor, idiot beast," Aaroniero says with a grin. "The Nine? Oh, you have no idea. I am no longer just the Nine - I am Shinigami and Privaron and Fraccion and another Espada as well. I've always liked you better than those with pretenses of nobility, Grimmjow - but it's time you stopped looking down at me."
He makes his move, and Grimmjow meets him with Cero, red beam shattering the wall of his tower. Aaroniero gasps as the jaguar pounces on him, catching his throat and slamming him a hundred feet down into the sand.
Aaroniero howls in pain, and his voice splits into two tones as his human face dissolves like mist in the sun, revealing his grotesque true self.
"All of you," the Sexta groans, squeezing the glass tank in which float to tiny, tiny Arrancar masks, spreading cracks across its glass surface, "looked down on me first. I have been here since day one, fishtank! You think I don't know your tricks? You think I don't know sunlight turns you back into a little bitch? Where's the idiot beast now!"
"Hate you," says one mask.
"We had accounted for that possibility," says the other.
"What?" Blink. Surprise.
And then he sees the shadow spreading around him, and turns his head to the sun, and finds the wave of shadow engulfing the tower and the sands around it.
And he sees you, standing on a pillar of stone, looking down with cold dead eyes.
"King of hunts," says the Thunder-Witch's face, "meet the queen of shadows."
Of course you came back.
What else is there for you?
Aaroniero smiles, and erupts into an agony of flesh.
***
You don't hear them anymore. Not unless you want to.
You have consumed again all the pitiful wretches that made up your sea of souls, and in doing so have refined them, refined yourself. You are still a multitude, still one being containing thousands, but now each of these thousands is like a cell in a body: in its place, fulfilling a purpose, connecting to all others, subsumed into one single will. They no longer scream or wail or gnash their teeth. They are quiescent, unless you call upon them.
You often do. Why wouldn't you? You never have to feel lonely anymore. With but a thought you can have someone whisper to you, someone without will or desire that could turn on you, that could fail you. Now you know the boy with the strange teeth was attracted to you, which you find hilarious; and you can have a conversation with the healer whenever you feel like it. You know the other Arrancars shudder when they see you listen to voices no one can hear, and answer them with gestures that hold no meaning to them. It doesn't matter; you don't need them. You have all the friends you need.
Right there inside you.
***
In the end, there are only two of Aizen's loyal servants who realise the game you're playing. Ruddborne, the inqusitor, and Luppi the betrayer. One whose job it is to dig up dissent; the other here to insinuate himself into conspiracy and tear it apart from within.
That must be why you're down here in the depths of Las Noches, where the walls are tiled with moths whose wings whisper your guilt. Luppi must have approached you looking for inclusion, and now he pretends to flee with you. You wish you remembered this, but your head aches. A blow, perhaps.
There are so many calvaras down here, each one bland and flavourless and worthless. But your master knows the taste of them and knows them for the unripe fruit they are. He longs to sink his teeth into the tree.
Filthy, bloody muck squelches around your ankles as you and Luppi flee from your pursuers. There's a calvaras with you, one that Ruddborne wished to kill, and you've saved it. Luppi is shouting at you, accusing you of betraying him. You push past him, discard your outer clothing, shed those things that bind and contain you.
And that's when the calvaras you saved strikes Luppi across the back of the head. He goes down like a sack of potatoes.
Ruddborne stares, confused. He shouts something, but you're not listening. Your hand is on Pollita. You can smell the warm blood over the cold old blood that fills the room.
The calvaras removes its jackal-like mask. The Thunderwitch smiles from underneath, teeth sharp, drooling already.
The Novena wants Ruddborne. The betrayer is your delicacy. Poor Luppi; his mistake was trusting too much. He trusted you'd wait until you got back to the Novena's lair before you turned on him.
You insinuate yourself into his flesh, and tear him apart from within.
***
Las Noches falls, and it is because of you.
Your first miracle was one of deceit. There are many gods in the fortress that is a city, and it is not easy to fool gods. You did it through cunning, planning, and perfect timing. The writhing horror of limbs and hunger that you call master contained its bursting flesh within disguises, as one once called Seven, as one once called Six, and as himself, his most clever and deceitful of guises. By exchanging these masks and appearing in many places at different times, he fooled the gods into believing all these were real people.
Your second miracle was one of subtlety. At the heart of the fortress there is a stone that grants wishes. It was your discretion, your skill, the perfect silence of your muted souls, the whispers of many souls cleverly found and killed, which guided you on the path to its hiding place. You took the stone, stopping for but a moment to admire it, and briefly you were tempted to take it for yourself. But such was not your goal. No, instead you brought it back to the thing you call master, and he devoured it with utmost glee, even as all throughout the fortress the gods learned of the theft and roused themselves to anger.
Your third and last miracle was one of power. You called on the name of your sword, and your wings took you into the sky. You were a speck of shadow racing as all the gods tore through the underground of the fortress looking for your sun-fearing master. They knew what he sought, the bright-eyed thing buried beneath the earth and feared by all; they dreaded what he might do with its power, now that he was strong enough to consume it.
They never looked up, never saw you reach the false sun, and touch it as a moth does the flame.
But you were no longer moth by then. You were shadow, and like all of the world, this sun was a lie.
You consumed it. Not like a predator, but like a disease. You were a speck of darkness on its face, and that speck became a spot, and that spot sprouted veins of shadow across its face until the false light dimmed and guttered out. Then the skies of were ruled by a black star.
The nightmare laughed then, its tentacles bursting like mountain peaks through the underground, black-robed towers marching at its command.
Gods do battle against a thing without name. The walls crumble. As an old king had sentenced your friend to die long ago, now too you have sentenced the old king to death. The poetry of it touches you on an intellectual level, but to be honest, you no longer care about such ancient memories.
You did it.
You killed a world.
You turn away and walk into a dream of shadows.
You see another moth standing before you.
***
You feel the touch of clarity. Shadows part, revealing the mists that surround you.
You know who she is.
She's the weak one. The courtier, the tinkerer, the thief of crowns. Bound in chains of her own making. Relying on others at every turn. Reaching out, opening herself, letting others open in turn. She has the strength of many but none of that strength is hers, except when she steals it in fragments and makes cloth of them.
She is here because she sought another shred of someone else's tatters. Witchcraft. One lesson, one spell, another tool in her bag of tricks. Always afraid to commit, to stick the course, to focus and find strength in purity. Her aura is a mess, lashed to a hundred tethers, spread thin like fraying ropes, a torn dress.
She has hurt herself time and again. That is the issue. Instead of using these ties to advantage herself, she dyes them in her own blood, sacrificing a little of herself at each step. You can count the wounds with which she's paid the loyalty of each new 'friend.' She is hollowing herself out bit by bit, until she is nothing but the ties she can call upon.
And here, she's alone.
You pity and despise her in equal measure.
She looks at you, afraid. She knows she is the lesser of you two.
No… she doesn't. She begins to justify herself even as you watch her. Love, friendship, camaraderie, lessons learned and lessons taught, a betrayer made into an ally, a society forged out of listless monsters.
You tire of this prattle. You draw Polilla and she backs away in panic. Her power surges, a weave of shadows, more powerful than you thought.
You take one step and cut her skin. She backs away and you follow easily, cutting again. Her fists light with moaning ghosts, beating against you, silken wrappings slowing you down. You're still too fast. You hound her blow after blow, hurling ghosts of your own, weaker ones - but you don't need to bind her with magic. You only need to push her off-balance while you catch up and cut again.
There is terrible power again, the Cero of the Espada, and it doesn't matter in the least because she never find the time to summon it. You cut and cut and cut and cut.
In the end she is prone at your feet, broken and bloodied. All this power and no way to call upon it, not without someone else doing the hard work for her. You push the tip of Polilla under her chin and lift her head to stare into her eyes.
Even the power she does have, she is afraid to use. She dreads her true self, locked inside her sword. You do not; you have made yourself into its image, until there is no difference between the two of you, until releasing your blade means nothing but a change in shape and an increase in power.
In her eyes you see acceptance. She knows she is far too weak. She knows she has gone too far. Broke pieces of herself until the whole started to crack.
Then she smiles.
You do not like her smiling; she has no reason to. You push the tip of your sword to her throat, pierce the skin, shed a drop of blood.
She smiles still.
She is weaker, yes.
But your strength means nothing. You have nothing to do with it, save seek more of it. Your strength is born from consumption, and in the end, it has consumed you.
You barely remember who Luppi is. You do not understand what she means when she tells you that his betrayals, at least, had a purpose. A point to prove, however misguided.
You have no purpose. You are pointless. You exist only has a shape which moves through the world, killing and eating that which is in its way.
She has a life.
She grabs the edge of Polilla and your eyes widen. You try to budge the sword, and it does not move, even though you are stronger than her.
You are, after all, only a dream.
The other Nemo stands up, never letting go of the blade, and you feel yourself grow lighter and lighter, thinner until you contain nothing but air, until you are but mist and vapor.
As you begin to vanish, you cease to feel any point in struggling. You look at her, tilting your head. Maybe what she says is true. Maybe your life was pointless. But at least you didn't die. She might think that if she dies, she will die for something - but she moves through the world as if she were in a haste to make that sacrifice.
That feels very pointless to you.
You die, not really caring much that it happens.
***
You watch as the you that was not disappears.
What a sad, tragic existence it led. As if for every little bit of good you brought to Las Noches, it brought a bit of ill.
And just as the good you tried to do took from you to add to the whole, she took from the world to add to herself.
You brush your torso with a finger, resting it on each spot where you remember the pain of your wounds. They are only the most visible pieces of you to have been taken away. You tore a friend you badly needed from your side, to keep her safe. You threw yourself wholly into the ways of art and music and etiquette, so that there could be life in Hueco Mundo, and all of that study was training you did not have to fight the battles of life and death.
You don't regret these choices. But perhaps there is some measure of what not-you lived through that may be of help.
You take a curl of the mist that was not-you, and weave it into a ring, which you put on your fingers. It grows teeth, bites into the flesh, and buries itself within.
The pain wakes you up.
***
You lurch awake blind from the tears and stars in your eyes, your stomach a churning sea, and throw yourself halfway over the spider's body to make your daily contribution to making Hueco Mundo a better place by giving it your lunch.
"If you stain my carapace, you'll have to clean it!" the spider shouts from ahead of you. You blink blearily. You think you managed to only hit the sand.
"Well," says a horrible, terrible, awful snake lounging behind you like everything is good and fine, "you woke up much earlier than I expected."
You pull out your handkerchief and wipe your mouth, head swimming. Oh, wow. You stare at the stained fabric. That's not just your lunch. It's blood and black clots and it's not your messed-up lungs or stomachs doing this, it's… It's moving. Feeling nausea strike again, you fold the handkerchief and prepare to throw it away, when a voice calls out.
"Stop! Give me that!"
You blink and slowly turn, staring dumbly with your tissue in hand. Sung-Sun imperiously holds out her hand, closing and opening it in a beckoning motion.
Hesitantly, you put the handkerchief in her palm, and it quickly disappears into some hidden pocket of her uniform.
"Reagents," she says with a mysterious smile, and you wrinkle your nose in disgust. "What? Witchcraft isn't pretty or clean. And whatever came out of your mouth after I dosed you with lore-inducing poison will not be anything mundane."
It's still disgusting, but you concede the point and slump into your seat.
"Enjoyed your little trip into dreamland?" she asks, smiling entirely too mischievously. You're about to curse her, and then you remember that you did throw a Gran Rey Cero at her.
You will never get to criticize her ever again, will you? You've basically given her a lifetime's worth of excuse for any torment she inflicts on you in the process of teaching you anything at all.
Well. You deserve it, you suppose.
You sigh in resignation, then look at her curiously.
Was any of what you saw… real?
"Obviously not," Sung-Sun says with a frown, "that's the whole point."
No, you understand that it didn't happen, you just… You saw things… Things you couldn't have any way of knowing. Aaroniero's face, the true nature of the sun above Las Noches -
Sung-Sun raises her hand.
"Don't tell me. We'd be here all night and the day after entangling the meaning of your visions. And, frankly, I don't want to learn what your vision said about you. It has a tendency to bring up the… worse part of us. Parts that exist, within us, in potential, but that we might never have acted upon or even realized we had. I don't want my image of you tainted by learning of some horrible thing you might conceivably have done in the worst and most extenuating of circumstances. It isn't relevant to reality."
Fair enough, you suppose. You reach for a small jug of water in your purse and wash the awful taste off your tongue, then close it again. She didn't answer your question about the things you saw that weren't about you.
She shrugs.
"You might have extrapolated on subconscious thoughts, or things you heard but forgot. To take your example before I cut you off, perhaps an image of Aaroniero's face formed based on an idle comment you heard from someone in a conversation. Others, you will have made up entirely to fit the narrative of the vision. Others still…" She smiles and shrugs again, reclining in the seat, a lascivious motion that makes her look like some decadent prophetess handing out wisdom. "It is witchcraft, after all. It may well be that you caught glimpses of secret truths from it."
You nod slowly and turn away from her. Las Noches looms ahead of you, ever-far, ever-close. It is always difficult to tell how far one is from a fortress that dwarfs some mountains, but you think you will reach it soon.
"So," the spider asks cheerfully, "did you find what you came out there for?"
"I did," Sung-Sun says with her lazy, snake-eyed look. "I very much did. And you, Nemo?"
You lower your eyes, staring at your hand, at the faint redness around one finger of your right hand, where in the dream a ring buried itself under your skin.
You think of threads, and a pattern emerges in your mind. You raise your hand and feel one thread stretching from your finger, waiting for you to weave it in its shape.
You smile.
Yes. Yes you did.
You have taken your first steps on the path of Brujeria, the art of Hollow witchcraft. This is a complex discipline, requiring months of actual study when you already have so many skills to practice, and so your Brujeria skill is not quite equivalent to that of the Tres Bestias; you will not reach the sheer versatility of their art over the timeline of the Quest. This does not make it useless tool by far, however. Through your initiating vision, you have developed one personal, unique form of witch-craft. This starts out weak, and improves with levels.
In addition, Sung-Sun has burned one more advanced spell into your soul, whose power is static but which would normally have taken you a higher level to learn at all. This spell manifests through your own aesthetics and the lens of the vision you endure, and so does not look like Sung-Sun's own version, though its effects are broadly similar.
The Witchworm. Your basic form of witchcraft, born of your previous experience of Shinigami sorcery as a hateful power against which you have no recourse, as well as a hunger-driven dream in which you grew to devour the sun itself.
When someone casts a spell in your presence, you may draw upon the hunger and madness of all Hollows and infuse it into the weaving of the spell. A spell tainted by Hollow power will go awry in some way, bucking to escape your opponent's control and lash out with hunger and spite. Differences in magical skill make this ability less effective, and spells which are properly chanted are much sturdier, but hastily-cast magic is especially vulnerable.
Additionally, pick one spell.
Much like Shinigami Kido and the Bestias's spells, these spells are much more effective if you have the time to "chant" an "incantation" - which in Nemo's case consists of a series of ritualized hand gestures.
[ ] The soul's own hunger. All Hollows have known the pain of their soul chain devouring itself. Even those who forgot can be remembered; even those who have not felt it, can be made to see this bleak fate. If you swallow the blood of an enemy, you may cast a spell which causes their soul to rebel against them, gnawing and biting at their flesh. The spell is more potent against those who contain many souls, but is more terrifying to those who have never felt this pain before.
[ ] The cracked vessel. Aaroniero had a thousand faces to flow in and out when his enemy thought they had him. The Nemo that was not had embraced her sealed self. These are two lessons you can draw upon. At a moment's notice, you may turn your skin to porcelain, and once bound, crack your way out of it, becoming a fleeting shadow before reforming again. Helpful in escaping restraints of all sorts, but regenerating the outer layer of your skin still hurts like hell.
[ ] The corruption of the sun. The last miracle of the you that was not was to be swallowed by the false sun, and turn it to sickness from within. You must hold an eye (where it comes from is irrelevant), and you may turn it into a black star, which you can send into the air where it hovers and casts shadows in much the same way a lamp would cast light, aiding your abilities which rely on darkness.
There is a moratorium of one hour on this vote.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Credit to @EarthScorpion for writing one of the dream bits and @TenfoldShields for giving me the outline of another 
am no good at vision quests.
am no good at vision quests.
So Nemo's now a witch.
Believe it.
Anyway, I think all the spells are cool. But I think I like the corruption of the sun the most. Quite apart from the fact it ensures that Nemo can always have shadow if she needs it, it means she's stolen another one of Ulquiorra's tricks (weird eye magic). And in the end, isn't that what matters?
Plus, it means from Sun-Sung we sung of the sun and learned to turn the eye into a black sun of Sung-Sun, aye.
- Location
- Here & There
Utterly amazing. A wondrous chapter that encapsulates complete rejection of the utterly worthless power fantasy in exchange for something grander than the self.
That...was an unpleasant "What could have been", yikes.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They don't, 'cause I haven't played the game
Chronobreak
Chara Appreciator
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If Nemo becomes a pseudo cannibal out of all of this I will call it a victory.
- Location
- Here & There
- Location
- Being carried off by a crow
Huh... so AAA went all Fleshwall on LN... still using our shadows to assist AAA in combat is something to remember if we happen to work with him in a combat situation.
Also Why is the Las Noches Sun a thing again? or was it purely a measure taken to prevent AAA eating everything?
Also Why is the Las Noches Sun a thing again? or was it purely a measure taken to prevent AAA eating everything?
- Location
- madison
so, now we know what going full Makoto would have looked like. I am very glad we did not go full Makoto.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Location
- Florida
I don't like this timeline very much Omicron
This is the darkest timeli-
Nevermind, we saved Di Roy. Clearly this is-
THIS IS THE DARKEST TIMELINE!!!!!!
Damn, things really escalated.
It figures it was the darkest timeline where Nemo regained the ability to fly without a Marana item.
This is an amazing basic witchcraft to have. And considering most shinigami tend to only shout the name of a Kido spell to make it combat-feasible...
Man, just going all-in on Nemo's horror moth aesthetic, huh?
This is really interesting. How long does it take to break out of the porcelain shell? How long does it take to regenerate the outer layer of Nemo's skin? It also really fits the shadow aesthetic of Nemo's Resureccion. This is a great solution to how annoying it is to break out of Binding Kido without resorting to brute strength. And considering brute strength isn't Nemo's forte...
This is my least favorite option because Nemo would clearly use one of her eyes and I'm not super interested in facilitating Nemo's blaise attitude to self-harm. Is the black star disruptible/destructible?
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Aizen finds eternal night to be depressing.
I still want to know what would have happened if we ended up with the chasing Findor vote.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
For this reason, I'm always amused when these options come up: Whether by accident or intent, for someone who hasn't played the game, you're pretty good at making things that tie into Hollow Knight.They don't, 'cause I haven't played the game
Nemo: *Pleading Dance*
Ulqiorra: "... No, i won't give you my eyes. It doesn't matter that i can regenerate them."
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- Location
- Being carried off by a crow
Wait... If instead of Ulqiorra's we used one of Zommari's Eye's from his Resureccion... would we get some sort of synergy effect with their paralysis effect?