#and now isolates himself and is fermenting in preparing to destroy~

[tothesolarium]

Astaroth, a rotting star

Aka. My beloved violent man

#when a god who had to be challenged by her worst self to stop being violent is now a demon? who witnesses his family become worse #and now isolates himself and is fermenting in preparing to destroy~ #but also Ishtar is the goddess of love too so not fully madness just very unwell #and the goddess was a woman but had a very queer cult and in demonization is always called a man so #trans #while I draw Mad Astaroth I wanna draw him in a Prime as well #my art #art #demon #astaroth #hell story #concept #tw trypophobia #trypophobia #monster #bodyhorror

[nekojitachan]

Okay, so this is... IDK what this is. I guess this is the bare bones of my take on The Old Guard with the Monsters/AFTG.

Uhm, warning for people dying/violence, not in very nice ways, some of them (Nicky’s is vaguely tied to canon if you think about it).

*******

Somehow, it didn’t come as a big surprise to Anders when he and his twin came back to life after being killed by the raiders who’d stormed their longhouse, along with everyone else. The strangers had sneered at him and Aron, the ‘living’ vessels of their people’s twin gods, then invoked the name of their own unknown god as they shoved their bronze swords repeatedly into their flesh. Anders had a small knife he’d hidden beneath his robes, but he hadn’t been able to put up much of a fight against trained warriors.

(He’d repeatedly asked to be taught to fight, but Tilda had just laughed and ignored him, too busy soaking up the attention she garnished as the mother of a god’s vessels. Too busy drinking fermented berries and milk to care about how Knut, the elder, mistreated them.)

No, unlike Aron, Anders considered being unable to die (well, to remain dead) a curse instead of another sign of the twin gods’ favor, proof that the Fates took great pleasure in tormenting them. They didn’t age and they healed no matter how badly they were hurt, yet they weren’t immune to starvation, cold temperatures or other things which made life difficult.

They had no choice but to constantly move on, with no family to take them in and strangers suspicious of them if they remained in one place too long. Aron soon grew bitter when he realized that no woman would want him anymore once she continued to age and he didn’t, and it was much the same for Anders if he felt an attraction for another man.

It went on that way for almost eighty years, the two of them isolated from the rest of the world by some terrible curse, until they were driven from sleep one night by the image of a teenaged boy with long, dark auburn hair and pale blue eyes, beaten and bloodied, being held down by two men while an older man with similar pale eyes and red hair cut close to his scalp grinned as he slit the boy’s throat.

Only the boy didn’t remain dead, because the next image showed him alive (and covered in blood) as he stood by a pyre with a woman’s body on it, then as he scavenged through the ransacked sheep farm for anything useful he could find before he took off running. Anders stared at his twin as the images faded away, at the shock in hazel eyes the same color as his own, and knew they shared the same thought as well as appearance; it wasn’t just a dream, and they were no longer alone.

They set out to find the redhead, but the young man proved as elusive as a dream. Anders took to calling him the rabbit, because it felt as if they were chasing such a creature through a forest during the night, fumbling along like a bunch of clumsy fools while it vanished with ease into the thick foliage. The occasional dreams were of little help, because as soon as they figured out the redhead’s location in the dream, he always was gone by the time they finally got there.

Anders was going to cut his tendons a few dozen times when they finally caught up to the flighty bastard.

So six hundred years later, when they had another dream of a tall youth with black hair and green eyes being killed in battle, they wasted no time tracking him down to the island of the Celts. Caoimhín wasn’t a runner like the rabbit and refused to leave until he (along with Anders and Aron) almost ended up as a solstice sacrifice.

Funny how almost being set on fire while alive motivated one to see the world.

Anders began to regret the whole ‘let’s save a fellow immortal’ thing after a decade or two, when Caoimhín proved to be an annoying know-it-all. If the tall bastard wasn’t so good at fighting… he did come in handy whenever Anders managed to ‘upset’ the locals for interfering whenever the assholes were selling slaves (especially children) or mistreating servants – which was often. Aron yelled at him for having the subtlety of a raging bull, but the Persians got on his nerves, as did the Romans, and the Huns and the Franks, and… well, any bastards who thought because they had a bit of land and enough people with pointy weapons that they could boss everyone around.

(Caoimhín said he had a problem with authority. Aron said he was an asshole.)

And through it all, the rabbit. Kept. Running. And. Running.

They finally ran into another immortal who’d been ‘reborn’ a couple decades before when in Damascus, of all places, as Salah ad-Din fought Europe’s Crusaders, and learned that perhaps there was a reason why the rabbit kept his distance. Riko was a viper in human form, and after he did his best to dismember Caoimhín, Anders ‘killed’ him in front of some of Salah ad-Din’s men, leaving them to believe that the other immortal was a djinn when he ‘came back’ to life.

The three of them had no problem abandoning Riko in Damascus, wrapped in iron chains and sealed in a cave.

They kept wandering and fighting what seemed to be hopeless battles, especially with the rise of the Catholic Church. There were times when Anders (now Andrew) wanted to retreat from the world, to find an isolated, empty island and never leave it, but there was Aron (Aaron) and Caoimhín (Kevin), who weren’t quite ready to give up, and a damn rabbit with the clearest blue eyes he’d (sort of) seen who haunted his dreams and taunted him by always being just out of reach.

Then in the 1600s, the three of them dreamed of a new immortal born in the New World, one beaten and starved to death by monks. Unhappy about the thought of the long voyage, Andrew and his fellow ‘monsters’, as he’d come to think of three of them, headed across the Atlantic. It took them almost four years to find Nico, the son of a native woman and a conquistador, who’d been killed because of his attraction to men. The young immortal broke into tears to finally be with his ‘own’ kind, to be safe at last, and was a cheerful presence.

He was even more annoying than Kevin.

They spent a few years wandering the New World, but were drawn back to chasing the rabbit once again; he’d gone to ground in China, leading Andrew to hope that for once he’d stand out and be easy to find, but the damn bastard had developed an almost inhuman skill for learning the local language and blending in wherever he went. Kevin grumbled about him being a damn chameleon, while Aaron wondered if perhaps he’d truly died and they were hunting a ghost.

For some reason… that thought bothered Andrew.

Things carried on as they had before, only it seemed that every time Andrew turned around, the world had changed in some manner. A new country had formed, an old government had been overthrown, a new religion had been invented, yet another senseless war broke out, someone created an invention that upended things in a startling way…. He still remembered how for so long everyone had used bronze swords until someone had figured out how to smelt iron, how there’d only been longhouses and small farms until all of a sudden towns and then cities began to appear.

Change was inevitable, as was the fact that humans would twist some of those changes into something bad.

Still, he never thought that those changes would lead to things that would enable him and his monsters to travel the world in days (and then hours) instead of months or weeks, that wars would break out that spanned continents and could destroy entire cities in minutes. The four of them saved what they could, but soon it became impossible to keep up, not just because there were so many lives in danger and so much being destroyed, but because they could no longer fade into the shadows with ease with things like digital records and cameras in existence.

They learned as much as they could about modern technology; Nico (Nicky) and Aaron took to social media without any problems, while Andrew and Kevin picked up some hacking skills. They bought the best fake IDs possible and did everything they could to leave no trace online.

Yet they couldn’t stay in one place very long, not when they kept working, when they used the skills they’d honed over centuries to help people in need. Which was why they were traveling from France to England via the Chunnel; Andrew refused to give up his customized Maserati just yet, so they’d take the car with them on the train.

They didn’t expect any issue with their papers, especially since they’d used them a few days ago, so it was a surprise when a customs official in Calais frowned when he scanned Aaron’s while the machine beeped several times. Then the same thing happened with Nicky’s. Andrew tensed and tugged the cap on his head further down as he prepared to fight while Kevin did the same; their weapons were hidden in the special compartment in the Maserati, but they were good at improvising.

However, before they could react more than that, a familiar voice called out in French to the customs officials, one Andrew recognized with ease from his dreams over the last three millennia; the rabbit, dressed in a customs uniform, his dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail that trailed just past his shoulders, tapped the official who held Aaron’s documents and said he’d check it out, that there was an issue with the scanners. He purposely didn’t look at any of them as he did something to the scanner then ran the passport again, which beeped once in an ‘all clear’. Then he went to do the same for Nicky’s as the fool gaped at him.

As soon as Andrew was cleared, he stalked after his quarry, who to be fair didn’t try to run (for once). He grabbed the other immortal by the wrist and spun him around, part of him noticing that the rabbit was only a couple inches taller (which was a welcome change, considering how for the last few centuries, everyone towered over him). About to curse the bastard out for leading him on a merry chase for over three. Fucking. Millennia, he found himself stunned silent when the rabbit smiled.

(Maybe he should have considered what would happen when he finally caught the redhead.)

*******

Yes, Andrew, what does happen next???

I’ve never taken the Chunnel, so sorry if I messed something up there (I wrote what I did to fit the story). It’s a bit vague, but the twins are Scandinavian Bronze age, Neil is England Bronze Age (around Middle Bronze Age), Kevin is Ireland @ 600 BC, and Nicky is Mexico @ 1600′s. I debated having Andrew and Aaron separated, until I saw the twin gods thing. They were together, but per Tilda’s crappy parenting, they had a very rough childhood with Andrew protecting Aaron.

Mary raised Neil (Ram) to be cautious/wary of strangers. I’m thinking Nathan was a sea raider and... well, he came back years later and that time, he wiped out the farm. Neil heeded his mother’s lesson a little too well, but over time he finally came to learn that Andrew and the others weren’t all bad and finally stepped in to help them (and in a way, protected his own hide).

#aftg #aftg au #the old guard au #neil josten #andrew minyard #aaron minyard #kevin day #nicky hemmick #riko moriyama #the monsters #neil is very very good at running #andrew is very very frustrated by that fact #andrew should have thought about what happens next after catching neil #oh boy

[bonecleaver]

great short story™ (A humans are weird story)

This is a story about a man whose wealth was so great those who had less looked to him as the true paragon of wealth. But instead of letting his avarice cloud his mind, he instead replaces it with munificent actions in poorer communities. He was also a real debonair individual who always tried to do the right thing. He was so larger than life that all descriptions of him sound like caricatures, but that does not mean that he is a megalomaniac. Now prepare for the amazing story of Steve the Great. Steve started out like most revolutionary inventors with the only thing separating him from them is that he was trained by epitome of researchers and inventors. He was a quick study surpassing even the most grandiose expectations anyone could have had. Eventually he built himself a lab and sealed it off, except to get resources and food. When he finally came out of his hiatus, he looked very disheveled like he had been on three hours of sleep, but when he revealed what his years of self isolation yielded, nobody cared how bad he smelled or how unkempt he was, they would rush to him for interviews he really didn’t want. If one wonders what he built, they could just look at the pictures he snapped from Jupiter. Even though his tech was vastly superior, companies still tried to elicit it from him using force or saying they need it to buttress the human race’s defenses. Over many years he made covert constructions of a space battle fleet to go and live his herculean dream of ruling the galaxy. His ships after completion made themselves known to the world then shortly to all the galaxy. With one simple motion he transcended the abilities of any civilization in the stars in recent millennia. “Engage the FTL drive Sir Memeston.” commanded Steve. “Right away Steve,” responded Sir Memeston. “I thought I told you to refer to me as Supreme Emperor,” berated Steve. “Sorry my Supreme Emperor.” whimpered Sir Memeston. Then the FTL engaged launching Steve’s capital ship the Destiny Manifester and its support fleet into the Alpha Centauri system; spotting a small ship under fire Steve thought, I should help them or at least scare off their attackers. “All hands prepare for combat! We are helping that ship!” “Yes sir!” the crew responded with a mighty clangor. As the command was given shields were thrown up, weapons powered up,  all systems nominal, and targets locked. Then as they were rushing the ships, about to cause mass carnage, the  attackers left, because an entire battle fleet was bearing down on them. The ship they just saved hailed them “I thought I had just meet the most squeamish pirates but apparently I meet the only battle fleet in this quadrant. So which empire are you from?” blurted out the thankful alien. “From what ever I decide to name my empire,” declared Steve realizing he never thought of a name for his space empire. “But only the three empires have a battle fleet that size.” “You could call us the novice fourth empire,” retorted Steve almost sanctimoniously. “Well how many systems do you have in your domain?”asked the alien. “For now just our home world, but soon I will accrue the entire universe!” announced Steve. “A pretty bold aspersion to make towards the great empires.” said the alien with just a little sass in its voice. “You have been talking about these empires like we know about them.” “You really don’t know about the great empires?” “Yup.” “Well each empire controls about one quadrant, except this quadrant which is just referred to as the Expanse of Madness.” “Why is it called that?” “Because there is an aura of madness that keeps the bigger empires out and civilizations from developing past the stone age.” Steve let that ferment before he tried to wheedle more out of the alien. “Then my species must be very bizarre, because we evolved not very far from here.” “That is most anomalous, but there was always a chance that a space faring civilization would develop in the untouched depths of the Expanse,” finished the alien. “Thanks for the short history lesson. If you don’t mind my asking, why were you out here?” “Well rumor has it that there is a natural metal that is stronger than the iron carbon alloy that makes up the armor of every ship in the galaxy.” “I think my ships are made from the metal you are looking for.” “Well then your dream of galactic domination may not be the petulant dreams of a young and anxious empire.” said the alien. Then Steve said goodbye and left to make plans to invade one of the three empires, but he still didn’t think of a name for his empire 5 months later “If our probes are correct, the capital of the Th’rul Empire is the most powerful and technologically advanced empire out of the three.” said Steve’s tactical officer and son Gabe. “Then we will strike at their bulwark and show the might of humanity!” A few weeks later at the main Th’rulian defense station. “Sir I have detected a foreign battle fleet infringing on royal Th’rulian space!” “Nonsense no species would be mad enough to attack our capital. Well all technology is susceptible to malfunctions so we can surmise that is the most logical answer.” “Nonetheless, I will still send the message that interlopers will not be tolerated,” replied the small crab like alien. “Fine.” Back to Steve. “Sir we have just received a transmission saying that we are not welcomed,” said the comms officer. “Reply with ‘we will not stop due to some bovine drivel.’ Then increase speed and go into attack mode.” “Roger that my lord.” We got this, thought Steve, I concocted this perfect strategy that we have been practicing for weeks and their weapons will barely damage us, let alone destroy us. Back on the station “Sir, they replied.” Cue the station master letting loose a string of invectives. “Do we at least know who they are,” sighed the station master. “No, their shields and armor cannot be identified.” “How can their armor not be identified?!?!?” yelled the station master loud enough for it to reverberate. “It may be the metal that some of our scouts went looking for in the Expanse.” “Can we at least determine what kind of ships we are going to fight.” “There seems to be one super dreadnought, several battle ships, and a plethora of much smaller ships.” described the station’s tactical officer. “Anything on the dreadnought?” “Only that it has more weapons than our entire fleet.” “Well then we should take their transgression more seriously, for now we are vulnerable,” the station master with stalwart courage declared to the defenses to ready for the attack. Back to Steve “It seems our reply has expedited their response,” chuckled Steve. “We will dissipate any hope they had and force them to surrender their capital or we will bomb it from orbit!” The two forces were two amorphous blobs, with one bracing for impact while the other charges recklessly into the other, but bracing did not help the blob of stations from being all but obliterated from a distance. “We have just dealt a scathing blow to their entire defense matrix.” Now having orbital supremacy, Steve sent his demands and any caveats they might have. On the planet Th’rul prime. “My liege,” a messenger whimpered to the heavily armored Crab like King. “What is it?” replied the king. “We have been invaded.” “Surely you jest, for I am not that daft,” said the king pretentiously. “I am afraid not, my liege.” “Well, what are their demands.” “All they want is loyalty, resources, and information.” “That’s it? Why no territory?” “The want to have us as a vassal, which is where we would have a lot of autonomy, but still be under their rule. Also they said if we do not comply, they will start bombing the planet.” “We shall agree due to the fact the loss of the capital would put to many of our citizens at risk.” Back to Steve. “They have responded very nicely to our demands.” “Good, Good.” “Invite their king up so we can meet face to face, also make sure to scan for contraband. And make any of the sleazy looking personnel are out of sight.” In a very nice conference room on Steve’s flagship. “Thank you for coming up here so we can discuss your new provincial status in my empire.” “Yes, I hope this enjoining of our empires will go smoothly.” “Do not worry, we will not flout your empire like a corpulent deer killed on a hunt.”  said Steve very calmly. “ We will make sure the transition is very transient.” “You seem like a very astute strategist to be able to defeat us.” “I thank you for you adulation, but I had a full team of strategists to help me.” Said Steve with no hint of betrayal in his voice. “ We want to make sure to enhance our relationship from the very start.” “Thank you for inviting me,” vocalized the ex-emperor impassively. “Now let's eat. I hope none of the food here is heresy for you to eat.” “I don’t even know what that word means.” “Good to know so let’s dig in” After a few hours eating and drinking the two rulers got into a carousel and almost fought each other that no one but the two drunks knew why, but it was blatant the the two were going to kill each other. Even though the alien emperor had size on Steve, Th’rul prime’s gravity is much lower than Earth’s, giving Steve the upper hand. The next morning. “What happened,” groaned Steve. Gabe was there helping his father up with his big strong muscles. “Dad you nearly killed the emperor, but some perceptive guards stopped it from happening.” “Make sure that it does not disseminate throughout the empire.” “Yes, Father.” “I liked his demeanor, for he seemed like a man who really cared for his people, and if they were in another empire he would still protect them. I was going to suggest foisting the work of inculcating the population, but he may just do it willingly.” “As you wish my father,” Gabe left in a hurry to please his father. Hours later on the bridge. “You have permission to deplete some of our missiles for fireworks to signify our victory to all below.” “Sir you should also give a speech to mollify them further.” “I guess I have to do it impromptu.” Steve gives a moving speech on how he is going to treat the citizens. To the relief of many he won’t be a sadistic ruler. After curtailing the speech with a fly over of his elite pilots it was easy to see he has the support of the people. When news on his takeover got to the most extraneous parts of his new empire and beyond. The Garuck Empire and Shr’Tis ascendancy (the other two great empires) all they heard was; there was a shining, invincible, and irresistible fleet out there with plans of galactic domination. So to preserve their cultures and peoples they entered a coalition. After gathering the Th’rulian Navy, Steve sent most back to where they were, but he took some and put them in a fleet under Grand admiral Zak. So he can help lead them to conquering the remaining empires. At the coalition fleet. “We should attack first.” said a Garuckian admiral. “What if the rumors are true?” retorted a Shr’Tis admiral. “If we wait too long we may be attacked first.” “Fine we will do it your way Garuckian.” conceded the Shr’Tis admiral. Back to the Destiny Manifester. As the two fleets are working on moving and fighting as one entity. “The fleets seem to working well together,” said Gabe with some seriousness. Just then the entire coalition fleet jumped in, looking for a fight. “It seems we can get every bird with one stone here,” smugly declared Steve. Now the two composite fleets raced toward each other with no regard for safety. In the middle was a bloodbath so intense the narrator does not have the correct words to describe how brutal it is. In the end Steve’s Ships remained mostly untouched, but the ships under Zak’s control were not as lucky with fifty percent of the original fleet left. Now with both enemy fleets destroyed all that needed to be done was to go to the enemy home worlds and demand their empires, which is exactly what Steve did.

#humans are space orcs #humans in space #humans are weird #short story