☆ sickly sweet poison
{☆} characters tsaritsa, harbingers [ mentioned ]
{☆} notes cult au, imposter au, drabble, gender neutral reader
{☆} warnings isolation, starvation
{☆} word count 0.6k
You lose track of time so easily in the suffocating walls of your room. You can only guess, generally, how long has passed by how the logs burn in the grand centerpiece of a fireplace, drowning the entire room in vibrant hues of orange at all times. Servants come every few hours to stoke the flames and add more, should it be needed, but they do not listen to your pleas, hurriedly scurrying out of your room as if they had never been there at all.
It was..surprisingly lonely, despite how often the Harbingers visited.
You did not even know what the hall outside your door looked like, beyond the brief glances you managed to steal when it was opened. They showered you in affection and gift, your closet bursting at the seams with new clothes and the bowl of imported fruit sitting untouched - they claimed to love you, to adore you, to worship the very ground you walked upon..so why, then, did you feel more like a bird, trapped within a cage of it's own making?
You should have never trusted them to protect you from the other Acolytes. Death, you think, would have been sweeter then the poison they feed you with every pretty lie they tell you.
We're just protecting you, Most Divine.
The others cannot be trusted. They have failed you once already, what's to say they shall not do so again?
You are safe with us, Divine One.
You no longer believed a word of it. Not since they locked you in the palace, in the room you once viewed as a safe haven from the cruelties of the world. You were blind to their own cruelty, as they made it your prison.
"Divine One?"
Heels clicked against the floorboards, the door shutting softly behind her, as the cold that followed her like her own shadow swept over you. Even beneath the heavy blankets and despite the freshly stoked fire burning every so brightly, you could not help but shiver. You felt sick, dread clawing at your throat as the bed dipped, calloused, gentle hands brushing your hair away from your eyes.
You wish she would at least pretend, just like the rest, that your isolation was for the greater good. It was so very easy to hate them. But she would not hide her intentions behind falsities - she was simply selfish.
"My Harbingers tell me you refuse to eat," Her voice is uncharacteristically soft, but you sense the dull threat offered beneath her honeyed words, "Must I remind you, Divine One, that I am not above forcing you, if I have to?" Her tone turns bitter, fangs peaking from beneath plump lips as you tearfully meet her eyes, shivering beneath her cold hands and even colder eyes, dissecting you and pulling apart your defenses until you become pliant.
"It truly pains me to do so, Divine one, so let us not make this any harder then it has to be for either of us." You tense, freezing like a deer in headlights as her hand slips to the back of your neck, nails digging into your throat enough to make a point, the bed dipping even further as she leans down, "I hope I will not have to ask you again."
"..Okay."
You barely hear your own voice over your heartbeat, your hands still trembling as she takes them in her own, "There we are. I knew you'd see reason." As if waiting for your eventual compliance, the door opens again, the overwhelming smell of food filling your room as multiple servants shift in and out, lining the table in the far corner of your room with more food you would eat even on a good day.
You are sure she senses your uneasiness, but she peels the layers of your bedding away all the same, hands shifting beneath your knees as she lifts you away from your last remaining comforts, cradling you against her chest.
Had you known love could be so cruel, you never would have stepped foot into the wolves den - death was a mercy, now.
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I've been thinking about your fake cryptids AU. Especially the reveal. Danny helping out the bats one night and one of them gets shot but Danny isn’t worried, It was a normal gun no magic or enhancements. So It shouldn’t hurt something like them too much. Only for him to realize that the bat is really hurt and have that “You’re human…” moment. Que Danny trying desperately to 1) get the human to the hospital and 2) backtrack on all the ghost Secrets he told a bunch of humans. 
And now you've activated my trap card.
Now, Danny knows that human inventions can still hurt those like Them. (He knows this intimately. He's heard that Hood came back once. That he came back screaming. Danny knows.)
Imagine the following:
You're a young teenager who lost your home, your friends and family aside from your sister and cousin-clone. You had to escape to Gotham of all places and you meet beings you think understand. Who accept the ghostly tendencies that are so unsettling to the Living, who ask halting questions in strange voices in attempts to understand, to knowledge privy only to the Dead but that's okay because they are Other, and who have always tried to offer their Haunt (their home) if he needed it. Maybe you're already counting them as yours. Your allies, your friends, your maybe-could-be-family.
You are a part of a species you can count on one hand and still have leftover fingers and you are the one who has the protect the ghosts because no one else will.
You are a teenager who's suddenly faced with a friend who's dying and at first you think may just become like Red Hood (Who is great don't get him wrong but Hood who vaguely spoke of the toll it took makes him worry.) This person before you from your understanding may go for a while and they will c̸o̸m̷e̶ ̶b̶a̶c̷k̶ but the blood is red-red-red and their heartbeat is there and suddenly you Look and you find the Living beneath your hands and what is one thing they all have in common?
They die.
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Someone made a post about how another way for Caleb to have gone evil was for essek to have drawn him over to the evil side when they met and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I want this au so bad...
It starts with some oblique and deniable conversations over spell work. The comes the invitation to have dinner and see essek's library "for you alone, of course". There he could drop some knowledge about the potential of the beacons, then right before getting into something particularly juicy, cut himself of with something like "my apologies, this is already more than I should be telling an outsider" or "my apologies, I'm sure you don't care to hear the rambling complaints of an academic" so Caleb will then push him for more information. Make Caleb think he's winning a victory by getting this info. Once essek has him interested in the theoretical potential of the beacons, move on to slowly dropping in complaints about how he hasn't been able to study them. Make sure they're spending more time alone. Have Caleb agreeing with him about untapped potential, about the wondrous possibilities. And sure, Caleb might guess at what's going on, but maybe he doesn't care, maybe he's too invested in the potential in those beacons to change time.
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