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eldritchamoungstthestars · 1 year

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RESURGAM (Arthur Harrow x F!Reader) Chapter 1: "Humility is a Christian grace"

"'My dear children...it becomes my duty to warn you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is a little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien.'" -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WARNING: Child abuse (verbal, emotional)

Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15

AO3

Reader, I present to you a story of love, justice, and the night sky; of a man who has no conscience and a woman who never learned to listen to hers. Her name is unimportant to me; I have known many countless thousands of human names in my time watching over them, and I simply cannot be expected to keep track of every single one. It's not as if she is anything special to begin with, not to a god, at least. In the interest of simplicity, I will refer to her as precisely what she is to me: a Thorn in the side if ever there was one.

As for the man with no conscience, I do know his name, and in the interest of your well-being, reader, I tell it to you in the hope that this knowledge will help you to avoid any possible encounter with him. This man's name is Arthur Harrow.

I, the unfortunate creature tasked with recording and narrating this godless nightmare of a love story, am the god Khonshu, master of the night sky and self-appointed distributor of righteous vengeance on humanity's behalf.

The Thorn's story, for our purposes at least, begins about sixteen years before Harrow entered her life. Harrow, at this time, was still a novice criminal prosecutor with brown hair and glass-free shoes. He was also my avatar, the Fist of Vengeance. In a different part of the same country, the Thorn was a sullen, watchful ten-year-old girl wearing a school uniform designed for a child several years her junior, and standing on top of a plastic chair. Her weak legs crossed awkwardly, she tugged with fumbling tiny fingers on the edge of her pleated skirt, the skirt that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

No, it wasn't the skirt's fault. Even the Thorn herself knew that. It was her mother's fault for making her wear it, for not having the money to replace it with a more comfortably fitting copy. Or it was Marc Spector's fault for snatching her lucky hat, the one just like the hat Bessie wore in Tomb Buster, and putting it on his own stupid, dumb, big baby face head and laughing at her until her indignation graduated into rage and then into the wild fury that sent her careening, monkeylike, over both their desks and ripping it from his dumb curly hair and shrieking that he was the meanest person ever and that she hated him and never wanted to play at his house ever again, and also gave him quite the pathetic (albeit passionate) swat across the face.

Or it was the Teacher's fault for choosing this last moment to stride into the classroom and let his eyes fall immediately on the Thorn, half-squatting and half-straddling over Marc's desk with a rather impressive disregard for her own dignity. Luckily, he didn't see the slap. Unluckily, what he did see was the way the back of her tiny plaid skirt had flipped carelessly inside out, revealing just the slightest glimpse of the garment underneath.

He didn't yell. He wasn't that kind of man.

He was worse.

First, he said her name. She hated the sound of it in his mouth, his soft voice dripping with benevolent disappoinment that a stranger might easily mistake for genuine care.

The torture was underway.

"I assume you brought something to change into?" he said placidly, knowing perfectly well what her answer would be.

She shook her head.

"And what made you think that was an acceptable thing to wear to school?" he inquired innocently, surveying the frayed edge of the unholy garment with the cool contempt of an Academic (something the Teacher erroneously considered himself to be).

She doesn't remember what she said next, as the world around her had by now begun to adopt a kind of surreal sheen. There was a vague awareness of the students around her, but whether they were laughing, contemptuous, or simply dumbstruck, she could not have said. Somewhere very far away, Marc offered his sweater: "She can just tie it around her, then the skirt's not a problem anymore, right?" (Always the chivalrous defender, even in childhood—most humans would call this a great virtue, but I can only see it as Marc's most fatal flaw.) The hotly contested hat lay forgotten in the cold linoleum shadow under the desk.

Then all she knew was the closeness of the Teacher's body to hers, the simmering malice with which his claw of a hand gripped her shoulder, the invisible column of shame that sucked the air from around her, and the frail, unprotected nakedness of her thighs. The agonizing screech of metal on linoleum—a chair, adult-sized, chipped vomit-pink plastic, dragged to the center of the classroom just for her. She found herself on top of it, a martyr at the stake, her executioner poised to light the kindling.

Words. Not flames.

"Do you know why you're standing here?" the Teacher asked. "Why I've had to interrupt your classmates' education this morning?"

She thought of the climactic final showdown in Tomb Buster: Bessie tied to the stone altar, the undead Aztec priest preparing her for sacrifice. The harsh grin of moonlight glinting against the knife. A sneering voice from nowhere: "You see? This is where it has to end. There is no other way. No tree can ascend to the light of Heaven if it doesn't descend to the depths of hell!"

Again the Teacher said her name, the degradation of it scorching her back to the present.

"Do you know why we have a dress code? Who can tell me?" He addressed the class this time, his voice glittering with self-satisfaction. "No one?" Reader, not since the days of the "Great" Alexander himself have I witnessed such a grotesque display of misplaced cocksuredness (and coming from me, that is saying quite a lot).

"This classroom is a place for learning," he explained, "and we can't learn when there are distractions present, can we? For the same reason we don't bring footballs and electronic handheld gaming devices to school, we don't allow certain students to wear clothing that may draw the attention of other students away from their classwork and cause them to have thoughts and feelings that are not appropriate in a school environment."

"That doesn't make any sense," Bessie retorted, her glamorous curls pasted to her face with sweat. "Heaven, hell, why does it have to be one or the other? What ever happened to the good old-fashioned middle ground?"

Silence pounded against the impersonal grayish walls of the classroom. She couldn't speak. It was as if her voice had been ripped away by the iron tongs of humiliation. She tried to imagine how it would feel not to have legs. It would look pretty strange, a little girl's torso floating overtop the chair, plaid pleated skirt shivering in the naked air like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

"Wait a sec," Marc Spector interjected. "Did you just say her legs are the same thing as a video game? 'Cause, no offense, but that's kind of wack, man."

Oh, dear reader, you have never heard such a silence.

"Marc," the Teacher smiled coolly, "go to the principal's office."

Marc shrugged, and did as he was told.

"Where's your friend Dr. Grant now, when you need him the most?" the voice surrounding Bessie taunted.

As he was leaving, Marc turned to look the Thorn straight in the eye. He winked, gave an almost imperceptibly quick thumbs-up, and disappeared into the black hallway to seek out his fate in the principal's office.

"Well, Dr. Grant may have me beat for brawn, you've got me there," Bessie conceded. "It's true, I may not be a swashbuckling hunk with superpowers temporarily granted to him by the lunar god of the Aztecs, but I am proud of what I am: I am…an anthropologist!"

Her body was coming back to her. She felt her legs again. They were frail, pathetic little ten-year-old human legs, but they somehow supported her nonetheless. Her mind was returning as well, sane and conscious and billowing with righteous anger. Next would be her voice. She turned to the Teacher, looked him in the face. The glitter of inherent masculine certainty in her eyes wavered, and he came to stand in front of her. Her eyes were almost level with his.

"How dare you make a mockery of my classroom," he said, so softly that only the two of them, and of course, any gods watching silently over the scene, could hear the menace that slicked over his words. "You're disrespectful, immature, a self-serving little s—" his gaze flicked distastefully downward, to just below her cursed skirt, and back up at her, "well, you know what."

He turned back to the other students. "No one is to speak to her for the rest of the day. If I see any of you so much as look at her, it'll be a detention."

The Thorn's voice had clawed its way out of its prison of shame; it was bursting through the surface—

"You're sick." The words poured from her soul before she knew she was saying them. "You're a horrible teacher, and an evil, sick, perverted man. I will never, ever forget what you did to me today, even after I'm dead."

The teacher's face darkened. (No tree can ascend to the light of Heaven if it doesn't descend to the depths of hell.) "Well," he said, all pretenses abandoned, no longer the well-meaning teacher, but an adult man confronting an equal. "Is that all?"

It was not. "You'll get what's coming to you," she spat, speaking from somewhere outside of herself, "even if it takes a million years, you'll get what you deserve. All evil people do. God or the universe, whatever's out there, because you know there's something, they'll make sure you pay for how you treated people like me." She stepped down from the chair and walked out of the classroom. No one followed.

The school hallway stretched before her like a liminal nightmare. Somewhere down at the end, Marc was receiving gods-know-what kind of punishment for standing up for her. A throb of remorse went through the Thorn's heart as her earlier words came back to her like the aftershock of an earthquake: You're the meanest person ever, I hate you, I never want to play at your house ever again! Then the anticlimactic phip of her palm against his cheek.

The thrill of her victory over the Teacher had all but drained away. In its place was the ripe, purplish stickiness of shame, soaking and dripping over her insides. She felt it oozing from her heart, down her lungs, trickling over her ribs one by one, and at last laying to fester and congeal at the bottom of her chest cavity.

"You'll get what's coming to you," she had said to the Teacher, "even if it takes a million years, you'll get what you deserve." And she was no better than him, really. Marc was her friend. He had been joking with her, trying to make her laugh, and she had screamed abuse and attacked him. And even after that, he had defended her when she had no voice to defend herself.

In the end, she was no different from the Teacher. A person who hurt other people for no reason.

She turned back to the door of the classroom. It gaped, vacuous, a silent challenge. Behind her was the cryptlike hallway to the principal's office. To her left, a window was open just wide enough for a small body to slip through and escape into the beckoning woods.

Her options were few, and all equally inadvisable, but one was easier than the others by a large degree. Before another thought could invade her head, she swung a leg over the windowsill and struggled through to the sticky outdoors. The trees welcomed her, a lost fugitive desperate for sanctuary, and she vanished into a wall of green.

She walked until the August heat had made a nest of discomfort in her parched throat and her legs, slashed into bloody stripes by the choking undergrowth, screamed for rest. Somewhere to hide, that's all she needed. A special place just for her.

The forest heard her need, and all at once the cave was known to her. The narrow archway of its black mouth howled a soft, mournful promise: Safe here.

After stopping to craft a makeshift slingshot using a lopsided Y-shaped stick and a hair elastic from her wrist (Dr. Grant warned Rosser never to enter a mysterious cavern without a method of self-defense handy), the Thorn plunged into her new home. This, she thought, would work just fine. It was dark, sure, but she would teach herself to make fire by rubbing two sticks together, and besides, that wouldn't be a concern until nighttime. Every home needs a bed, so she gathered a heap of pine needles from the forest floor and spread them in a crude rectangular shape on the damp stone ground of the cave. By the time she was finished with these preliminary moving-in essentials, her throat was a furious desert fire of thirst. When her attempt to use a fallen leaf as a makeshift cup failed, and since no one was around to scold her for bad manners anyway, she dropped to all fours, pressed her face to one of the tepid puddles that dotted the cave's floor, and slurped until the filthy water was nearly gone.

Then she crawled to her pine needle bed, where she fell asleep thinking of her wallpaper at home, a jocular pattern of alternating hippos and crocodiles making an enthusiastic but fruitless attempt to dance ballet. She loved that wallpaper. She would miss it. Perhaps she could recreate it on the walls of her new home, like the cavemen did. But what will I use for paint? was her last thought before sinking away into sleep.

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eldritchamoungstthestars · 2 years

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The Dream Spheres Character Intro Sheet - The Old Gods: Ashude D'erreg.

Age: Estimated to be between 10,00 and 12,000 years old

Other Alias's: Emil

How Dangerous Is This Character: 5 being the least, 1 being you'll be dead on contact, D'erreg easily clocks in around at a 2 on the scale.

Titles: Child of Fate, Keeper of Knowledge, Guardian of Dreams, Horror From The Deep, The Hole at The Center of Everything, That Which is Bottomless

Physical Description:

around 192.5 cm in height, mid back length onyx hair usually kept in a tidy ponytail, hardly ever is seen out of formal dress. wears a variety of different colored dress shirts, indigo blue being his favorite. He has Quartz gray eyes that are almost hypnotic.

True Form:

A black writhing starless fog, that sounds like thousands of hard shelled insects scurrying across stone when it moves. It smells like salt water.

Personality: If hes being manipulative hes supportive, and caring, sometimes a tough love type person if it calls for it but he comes off as a person one can trust and tell their lives and secrets too. Its very easy for people to let their guards down around him. Meanwhile hes turning everyone against you in the background so you are dependent on him, even after you find out what and who he is.

If he isn't masking or pretending to be human around you, he will still have a caring sense to him but this mans the embodiment of an Ace Yandere but on an elder god level. Murder and maiming you aren't off the table if you push him too far, he will make his actions feel like your fault and he is capable of bringing you back from the dead...Sometimes there are things worse than death. don't push him that far.

Abilities and Powers: Prophecy, Dimensional Travel/ awareness, cosmic knowledge, cross dimensional manipulation, resurrection, MultiPresence, teleportation, memory manipulation, Omni- Linguism, Telepathy/ clairsentence (only with physical contact) , Energy Drain, Cosmic Manipulation, and awareness, as well as Real World Manipulation (limited: See The Authors) and Self Awareness (4th wall breaking) Dream Manipulation, Astral manipulation, and traveling

Likes: Red Velvet, nature, hiking, libraries.

Dislikes: Cats, and people that lie or do not honor their words.

Misc facts:

-He is very advanced at playing the piano, and traditional art

- he is seen as a protector of children despite being a Tyrant in his own universe and a Villain within all three of the books and half of the timeline

- On Imoth he has his own faction of followers that are usually categorized as more magically sensitive than the general population, and a majority of this faction have seer capabilities. Some of them are in the Cult, and some are not. Everyone in this faction trains hands on, one on one with D'erreg. not only does it keep a firm grip on them mentally but it helps strengthen each individual where they are lacking.

#That Which Is Bottomless #The DreamSphere #Beings of The DreamSphere #Villains #Villain OC #The Elder Gods #Musings of The Authors

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