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there's always time to take a moment

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This is Dendrocephalus proeliator, the rare fairy shrimp that I co-discovered in 2019. This is a mature male in a 1/4 teaspoon. They are found only in certain soils in central Florida and they refuse to hatch unless they have their special soil chemistry intact

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#sky's art #hi i literally cant tell you what i was doing #this entire thing was an experiment

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30 min comic challenge based on something that happened yesterday.

#animal death #animal death tw #sky's art

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having a super fun time with these pixel comms!

#sky's art

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Feywild

a gift for a friend!

#sky's art

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#sky's art #twwm #echo

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hey. person on my dash. come here

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TW: SUICIDAL IDEATION, RELIGIOUS TRAUMA, BLOOD, DEATH, GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF TRAUMATIZING SITUATIONS

    I have seen the Day of Death with my own eyes. I saw the twisting coils of the universe, contained in the body of that creature, and the hubris of the ones who created us. I am the bastard child of the minds of many, and the world I have been forcefully brought into has cursed me.

    I once thought, in my young, foolish, pup-hood, that the moon we lived under at night was beautiful. I was blind to the death Orpheus brought when his hunger grew - I am no longer. The moon is nothing but the home of the creature who wishes to use us as livestock.

-- 6 months ago --

    I creep from the house of my owner with trepidation filling my paws - my small tail shakes slightly as I follow the same hallways I have been in all of my life. Past the food preparation room, through the sitting room, into the doorway. The door, something I have known all of my life, seems unfamiliar - it unnerves me. I bite the handle, a hot, metallic taste fills my mouth, and I grimace. Blood, but I pull down the handle anyway - I need to go outside.

    It has only been a few moments since the sounds outside stopped, and I close my eyes once the door swings open. The world outside smells like ash, dirt, death. The earth is barren, scorched, when I finally allow my eyes to open. The cropland to the left of my home is grey and dusty, the small sprouts I had seen just yesterday obliterated. My home is torn to shreds at the top level. 

    The building looks like it has been torn open from the top, like a soft baked pastry, or a pie crust. I shudder - that must've been where some of the sounds had come from. I swallow a choked whimper in my throat. My owner had told me to go into her room, to lay in my bed like I always did - a position I had learned in my pup-hood, to be by her side, to protect her. Then the sounds started. There were screams, first. Loud, throat-ripping, with jagged edges like their vocal cords were snapping. 

    Huge cracks like a bull-whip echoed through my ears, and punched through our walls. Dust shook down from the ceiling, and I had buried my face into my bed - to no avail. Then everything stopped. There was a loud screech, metallic sounding, like steel rending from itself.

    Now I am here, and everyone else is gone. I walk back inside, for one final time. I return to my owner's room, and look around. I wasn't like some of the other vexxils, I know that. I wasn't a luxury item, I wasn't a guard. I was a 'pet'. I loved them; and they loved me. I nuzzled my favorite toys - pressed my nose to the sheep one, as it let out a mournful "baaaa," - and then left. 

    There was nothing left for me here anymore.

-- A day later --

    Food has been surprisingly plentiful, along with water. Yesterday destroyed the livestock pens, and now they run wild. I was taught never to eat something I was not given, but this...this is not the world in which I was born into. I wander, and I am alone with my thoughts, forced to relive the final moments of my comfortable life. I think about the last look my owner gave me, her eyes sad, and I have to stop walking and sit down.

    My paws lay heavy on the grass below me, singed, but still a yellow-green. Towering bodies of mahogany trees fall into the sky above me, and large mushrooms sprout between them, spongy caps and lined gills glistening with cold morning dew. I curl below one, for the shade, and the smell of damp earth comforts me - it reminds me of the first day I came home. It was raining, that day, and I had gotten muddy, slick with earth up to my ears. My owner laughed when she saw me, mottled with brown.

    I bury my face in my paws, inhale the loam again. My body shudders with sobs that I want to let myself feel - I am hopeless, in the dark of this new world. What am I expected to do? Why should I go on without those I care for and love? Why did they leave me behind, and why have I found no one else?

    I have never cried before in my life, and I would later learn the word for it - at the time, all I knew is that the overwhelming desperation of my sadness echoed into this empty forest, as I sat beneath the shade of a mushroom and let silvery droplets fall from my eyes.

    They matted my fur and turned my stomach with the force of my tears - it took much longer than I would've liked for them to stop. I sniffled, rolled over, and fell asleep.

-- Two weeks after the Day of Death --

    I am not the vexxil I once was. I have been broken and have been forced to rebuild myself, or die otherwise. Dying was an option I wanted to give into for too long - I considered too many times what it would be like to let myself lay down, and dream of what I had in the past. But I have never given up easily. I had continued to wander after the forest, and seen life for the first time since the destruction. I had seen death, as well. A fellow vexxil, caught under rubble. I had shuddered and turned my eyes away.

Now, the blue grasses of an ephemeral field glow under my paws, lit my eyes from below. I was a haunting, in this dead world, and I walked, like a ghost without a purpose. I am searching for others, for more vexxils. There is so little left of me; and it will disappear completely if I cannot find anyone else. I've heard the calls of others, from the ruins of the city. I went there, once, and never again. I do not know the way - so I follow the remnants of their trails.

Scraps of food, pieces of cloth, a few small stuffed toys from pets like myself. The ground has begun to turn hard under my pawpads, and I wince - I am not used to this. I am used to the plush comforts of grassland and soft cloth and carpet, of moss and blankets. The earth here has blackened and died, covered with long streaks of soot. A smell rises up from the soil - decay.

I pass a bone, yellowed-white branch sticking from the earth. A rib, a remnant of the center of a vexxil - where the heart lies. I give it a glance, and nothing more. Grief is not an ability I have the strength for anymore - and I keep walking. Night has fallen by the time my paws are too weary to keep going, and I stare up at the accursed moon. 

She looks down at me; a saint with the sign of holiness surrounding her in the halo around her - a halo made of the serpentine, muscular form of Orpheus. He twirls, seemingly slow, like sand slipping through an hourglass. 

I wish I could watch him with the beauty I used to think he had. He used to be a creature of beauty to me; a wide open ocean to explore with a smoky, starry body. The light of the destroyed city glows ahead of me, and I sleep with it in my vision. 

In the morning, I continue. My head low to the ground, I plod along. My body hurts, my heart hurts. I could be so close to losing myself, if the light of the city was not growing closer by every footstep. 

Before I knew it, I had stepped inside the city itself; light still flickered in some areas, but the buildings here were still tall, reaching. Debris crumbled into the streets, but the city had fared far better than the farmlands. 

I closed my eyes, breathed in deep. The smell of others. Fresh, warm, alive. I followed the streets, wound around corners and wove through doorways and alleys. It went cold for a few moments, I couldn't find it. I moved into a building where I had found it again, and sniffed around.

I flared my nostrils, shoved them into a corner, and drew in a deep breath. Following the scent…I found a stairwell, leading downwards. I followed it, nails clicking on concrete and metal, and stepped into a foyer, with a closed iron door at its end. I carefully bit the handle - hoping the metallic taste of blood would not fill my mouth again - and turned it.

In the room behind the door, it was warm and full of life. Vexxils chattered, ate, and took naps. I stared at them, owlishly. I had finally found others. I was finally with my own kind again.

#sky's words #vexxils arpg

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yeah we all love werewolves as an unintentional trans allegory but what about fallen angels

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olive in her favourite spot having a ponder

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Twine: Green River

Prologue: Starting With an End

Chapter One: You are here!

The marketplace echoes with yells, shouts. There is a child throwing a tantrum, a mother sighing, two men bickering over wares and who has the right to the spaces they occupy. There is a group of younger people who wander by, sneaking glances at me, snickering in what they think is a hidden way.

I am tired; so tired I have forgotten how to speak. Have you ever been so tired you've forgotten how to move in any way that is not mechanic, automatic, robotic? I want to ask my dad this.

He stands next to me, smiling at a woman and her small son. Her son stares at me, gesturing with his muzzle at my face - I turn away quickly from him, so his mother will not see, and take her business elsewhere. Instead, I busy myself with organizing already-piled up fruits, vegetables, checking the stock to see if it has grown soft in the noontime sun. The family duo leaves, thanking my dad - he has sold them a week's worth of fresh food, and sent the tot off with a handful of berries.

I am allowed to turn back around now. I lean in closer to my dad - "Can I go take a break? Just down by the river. I'll come back with some water?" My last words are a peace offering, a chance for business to get just a bit better while I am away. I've seen my family's jar of gold in the house; I know we have been getting closer and closer to the bottom because I've been working at the market stall.

My dad gruffly nods - I know he has refused to look at me once I started coming to help him here. He does not want to be associated with me, and I know that. It feels, in some way, just like I deserve. The market stalls I pass on my bad side quiet to a buzzing hum when I walk by, their patrons falling silent, horribly silent. I duck my head and keep walking, walking, walking - until I finally reach the river. All of the sounds have faded to nothing, and I finally feel like I can breathe again.

Sounds suffocate me, in a way I feel no one else understands. I want to shut the world out, all its cruelty and hatred and mocking. I close my eyes for a moment, let my grey nose settle to the grass by the side of the river. My tall ears finally relax, a bit, and I long to fall asleep here. The green hair of the earth below me is sweet and smells of almost-hay, not-quite acidic weeds. The river, humming to itself pleasantly, is ignorant of my anatomy, of my strangeness. It feels like something I could take for granted, if I allowed myself.

I am only a few moments into allowing the world to slip away when I hear hoofbeats behind me, the transference of sound from cobbled rock to graveled path. I peek open an eye to watch a dark horse, immaculate white patching adorning his body, walk by me. He trots over the bridge spanning the river, and tosses me an inquisitive look - I avert my eyes, in time enough to avoid meeting his gaze, and I hear him walk on.

#sky's words

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Twine: Starting With an End

The beginning of a love story between Alphos and Julius - read and subscribe here to get chapter notifications! (You will have to have a invite code to make an account - which you can get here - because the website is in alpha.)

Graveyards are a place where the dead come to lie, where those who once created, felt, loved, and hurt finally come to feel nothing, in the end. There is not much left of us, once we pass on, really. There is a body, a spark of magic that stays, and to some, a soul. When you come to a graveyard, if you are living you are allowed to leave; but those dead among us who travel to acres of raised stone teeth remain there permanently.

Love can be a sort of graveyard as well, if you let it. When you come to pay your respects to the baggage you carry from old loves, you can remember what they meant to you, what they did to you. Love can be the most heartbreaking graveyard of them all, because no matter how far you let yourself run, it will never truly leave you.

There are two in this story - many more than two, I assure you - who rest in their own graveyards. While not passed on, not even close to it, they rest, top-heavy, on a bed of wet dirt and piled earth. It would not be long for either of them until they were sucked under, eaten by the ground with crackling grass and squirming bugs, left to digest in the belly of the earth, cooked by each their own loneliness.

What happens when two men who have trouble loving themselves come together? Would they, together, destroy each other, or lift each other up?

#sky's words

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A gift art for my good friend Key, of their bepotelkh character Lore <3 I designed the outfit based on the character.

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Baby's Breath [TWWM]

A hot sun echoed overhead as Menri bounced along the desert plains of his home. Passing scrub brush and sage, cactus and rocks with lizards hiding underneath, he made his way towards a large burrow where he had dug himself multiple dens. He plodded into his burrow, noting there was a new passageway to his left, one he had not dug. Always ever curious, he followed the smell of cinnamon and dry desert heat. At first, when he fell down, he didn't notice the feeling of falling. Then Menri tumbled head over heels, trembling as he quickly plummeted through the air and landed- on his feet?

A wide space stretched before him, a place full of his favorite things - rock statues and the spiky lizards he would befriend, a small, cool den underneath a large rock and a large, circular pool in the very center of this new place. There was no sky, Menri noted, simply a large, domed shiny wall that stretched over his head. He craned his neck to see if the wall went everywhere and fell over backwards, coming face to face with a small bird. It chirped and hopped backwards, unalarmed, but friendly! Menri nuzzled the bird and it gladly cozied up to him. After a while, when the sunbeams moved and Menri's patch of dirt was no longer warm, he rose to his feet and began to explore more. The bird gently squawked and skittered into the brush, not bothering to watch him explore. Menri poked his muzzle into a crevice by the den, not a good idea, scorpions! And then he explored the den, a place full of soft moss that smelled like...family, like home. Cinnamon sticks bound in sage branches hung off of the entrance to the den, and there were alcoves in the wall filled with little objects, such as a small tower of rocks, a few pieces of eggshell, and one strange object he had never seen before: a long, straight stick with a pointy tip and feathers at the very end. Menri glanced around, looking for an answer as to what this object could be, instead out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of white. Trotting over cautiously, he nosed at the plant, dried brown leaves and crunchy white petals, all in bunches. There was another just ahead, and another and another. Menri began to pick up speed as he followed the trail of long dead plants, skidding to a stop in front of a towering esk, with trees, bushes, and huge boulders precariously perched upon their back. The esk rumbled, and it sounded like a rockslide, but kind. They leaned down, close to the flowers on the ground, and then met Menri's eyes. A flash of images were suddenly given to Menri, hares, like the ones he raced, a spatter of blood covering his eyes, and then the small, white flowers that lay in front of him. He looked up in wonder at this huge horned friend. *Menhir!* he realized, recognizing the face he had seen for a few moments after his transformation. Menri quickly embraced the older esk, causing them to slightly stiffen, but then relax into the show of affection. Menri tilted his head. *Why are you here?* Menhir made a low, comforting sound, and conveyed the emotion of helpfulness. They were here to help Menri, plus he had called them. The older esk began a story in their usual way: using images, to tell Menri of what they needed to know. The pair settled into the sun warmed sand of Menri's conservatory room, comfortable and safe.

#menri #twwm #sky's words

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[TWWM] Seventh Prompt: Ice Death

The child squeezed her eyes shut, thrust her hand into the darkness of the room. She slowly opened her eyes, one bit at a time, fearing what she might witness. Just like the day four years ago, a day which existed in her memory, though the object of the memory was ephemeral. She slowly walked into her room, checking, of course, behind the door as she always did. Running through the normal checks of the room, the child began to think more about the past. She remembered skating with her friends, whoops and shrieks and laughter, the sun setting and goodbyes. The memory called back to mind the frightful feeling of being watched by hatefully curious eyes. Turning in the darkness of her bedroom to check the locks on the windows, she turned in her memories as well. The younger child in her mind saw nothing in the darkness, not a hint of a movement. As she turned back around, she began to hear taps across the pavement behind her, and the rest of the world became muted. She turned again, quicker this time, and blue light blinded her. She let out a yelp, and then fell backwards, feeling a sharp, skull splitting noise pierce her mind like a needle. The girl, done checking the windows and doors, shakily sat on the hardwood floor of her room. The memories were no longer in control; they wouldn't stop now. She saw it all again. She saw the abuse and his maleficent eyes, the bright blue of them mimicking the blue light that had sent her mind into such a frenzy. Worst of all, it was all from the eyes of her child self, the five year-old girl who spent days and nights crying.

These were the memories re-gifted to her from the strange, tapping creature that night. Until then, none of this was in her mind. None of it made any sense. The girl rocked back and forth, thinking. She had looked everywhere, from Roswell to New Guinea for answers about this creature. She had found nothing. Nothing to match the description of this long creature with its probing, knife like glare. Nothing to match the memories given to her. The child shuddered, and, stutteringly, stood from her place on the floor. She logged onto the computer, the clicking of the mouse the only sound inside her noiseless home. She typed into the search bar and waited for the computer to load, gently tapping her fingers against the desk, mimicking the sounds from her memory. She stopped tapping when the screen loaded a blog page, with large, bold letters across the front. "Have You Seen This Creature?" it exclaimed, with a hand drawn image of a slick legged creature and a bright blue eye. The girl's breath caught in her throat. That was it! A cold air began to creep into her room, seeping from the windows and the door. They were all open. Every last window had burst open, the cold air soaking into her bones. The memory of that night came back as her computer flickered off, and the lake outside her home froze over. A howl broke into her mind, stealing her thoughts and her breath, freezing her blood. Again, they played, his eyes, the face, his eyes, the face. The cold came closer and wrapped itself around her throat like a bad dream, and suddenly the memories were more vivid, more colorful, she was living them again. The cold was closer, the howling turning into a shriek. It built and built, louder upon itself like the fireworks on New Year's. She collapsed to the floor, hands over her ears. When she uncurled from her protective position, the room was warm, the windows and door closed, the computer still on. Nothing had happened...it really had been a dream. She stayed on the floor for a very long time, so long that when she got up, the computer needed to be turned back on. The page was still there, but now there was a message box available when she refreshed. She quickly typed a message into the box. It only took a few seconds for the reply to come up, and for her world to be turned upside down. "I know you." the reply said. "We have met before." The girl shut the computer, the fear returning to her bones. Again, the howl echoed into her mind, into her very skin. She shut her eyes and the howl began to subside, to sound familiar. The wailing stopped suddenly, and the girl sat up with a gasp. She was in an ambulance, freezing cold and soaking wet. It was dark outside and there were paramedics around, picking up the stretcher, her mother crying nearby. "Where were you?" she sobbed. "Why didn't you come home?" With a snap of invisible fingers, the girl realized that night had never ended. The night full of the blue eyed creature had ended with her following it into a frozen lake and falling through the ice. Someone kind had found her and called the ambulance, as she later learned through her mother. The night never fully left the girl's memory, and instead followed her throughout her everyday life. Although, she never tried to find out what had nearly killed her that night, no, she left that in her hazy frozen memories, sunken deep.

#seventh wanderer prompt #twwm #sky's words