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poorlytunedukulele · 3 years

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Day 12 - Roses and Thorns

The Black Garden is stunning in more ways than one. It’s gorgeous, if just slightly alien. It makes sense, Azra supposes. This place was not crafted with an eye for Human ideals of beauty. Or perhaps Humans were not properly raised to enjoy this place.

In any case, it is still beautiful. There is greenery everywhere. The fertile plains of flowers give way in the distance to untamed crags. The air is clean and sweet, with hardly a breeze to rustle the plants.

The plants rustle anyway. Azra stares down at the rolling hills and watches. The ripples in the flowers form patterns, ones that she recognizes. She’s seen those same patterns time and again on the trembling surface of Radiolaria. They echo and split and combine with themselves in an eternal dance.

If that weren’t odd enough, the sky isn’t the right color. It’s not quite a color at all. Instead of Rayleigh-scattered blues and purples, it’s the rainbow-edged gray of sun refracted through water.

And the light is weird. Spark takes a spectral analysis and finds not only that it’s not from Sol, but the wavelengths present couldn’t be produced by the simple blackbody radiation of any star. It lends itself to the otherworldliness of this place. Azra can’t tell if anything is the actual color it is, or if the light casts different hues. Her green gear should blend in with the plants, but it doesn’t.

The ground follows the worrying trend. Though Azra knows it should be rich, full of Carbon and Nitrogen and Phosphorus, the scans Spark takes are all contradictory. She can smell the decaying organics, feel the loam between her fingers, but when viewed with a cold, hard eye, the illusion falls apart. There are things that are not beetles and ants crawling through the dirt.

Azra dusts the soil from her fingers and turns her attention to the flowers. They’re absolutely everywhere. They’re unlike quite any she’s seen on Earth (or Venus or Io, for that matter). But they’re not some alien plant, spawned for different conditions, they’re flowers. Red-petaled, black-throated, with stems and leaves-

And thorns, Azra learns. She draws her hand back and watches in fascination as a drop of blood wells from the thick pad of her thumb. She sticks the offended finger in her mouth, but the wound is already closed. The pain fades quickly, but the iron tang on her tongue persists.

With a shrug, Guardian and Ghost leave behind the intensive scanning. All it will tell them is that this place is not what it seems, and they already know that. It’s the Black Garden. Besides, for all the Warlocks back in the City would kill for data, Azra is not here to study this place; she’s here to scout it.

She stows her helmet and gloves, picks a mountain peak on the horizon, and sets off.

She’s not stupid. She leaves a trail of beacons behind her. Spark hovers high above, keeping watch for any wandering Vex. He takes video of the flowers rippling in the nonexistent breeze, noting how the patterns change in the wake of his Guardian’s passage. He charts the imperceptibly slow movements of the unfamiliar planets in the sky.

They make their way through the flower-fields, across straight pathways of Vex bronze (unpowered, disconnected), over a few small canals and down into and across some larger ones. The fields quickly become monotonous. The mountains in the distance don’t appear to be getting any closer.

Then they come to someplace interesting.

Azra skirts a stone ridge and comes across a cavern in the rock face- more like a crevice. It seems out-of-place, too real. Like a broken bit of scenery, a tear in the curtain. She takes a few steps inside and finds the space lit by an odd fungus that glows like foxfire.

Spark had pinged radar, giving them a vague map of the terrain for miles. But outside of the Vex-heavy areas, away from the center where the Heart had been killed, the Garden is incredibly boring. Rolling hill after rolling hill, canal after canal. This is something new, something worthy of exploration.

She is prepared to mark the walls and make cave-maps to keep track of the branching pathways, but the tunnel only has one channel. It twists, dips, and climbs, but offers no alternate avenues to choose from. The walls are the same whitish granite-looking stone, but in the dark and illuminated by the eerie light of the fungus, they look green and slick.

She’s lost track of how long it’s been-

No.

Azra stops dead in her tracks. Some part of her urges her to brush off the creeping discomfort and keep going, but she knows that part isn’t real. She has spent far too long wandering Vex installations, fell too far in the Vault, suffered too much in her climb back out to not know her own thoughts. Azra Jax does not lose track of time easily.

Or rather, she has, so deeply and keenly, that she holds on with an iron grip.

But she’s lost it now. Though she can start counting seconds and stringing together her thoughts like a chain of daisies, it won’t matter. The difference between zero times and one time is infinite- the needle has already skipped the track. Azra feels a very familiar nausea roiling in her stomach.

Let’s go, Spark thinks, and Azra turns to- only to realize she has no idea which direction she’d come from. It’s as if all of her object permanence has been stripped away- both tunnels (or the same tunnel from different directions) look equally unfamiliar. She is struck with the odd terror that nothing exists outside of her gaze, that the world is in some superposition, collapsing into reality only when she observes it. That she’ll turn away from one pathway only for it to be replaced by another when she’s not looking.

You’re having a panic attack, Spark says.

She is. Her hands are shaking and her heart pounds loud in her ears. It’s so loud it drowns out everything else- or perhaps there is simply nothing left in the universe that makes sound.

Breathe, her Ghost commands. Focus on that and it will get better.

Even though she knows with absolute certainty that it won’t work (that’s how it always is, panic trumps logic every time), she breathes. She closes her eyes and focuses on how her Light echoes off of the walls.

Then-

You are lost. For a brief infinity, you know nothing but this fact. This is not where you belong.

Eventually knowledge drips down to you and you drink it like sweet fructose- you are here, in the vascular tissue of some giant plant. The plant is the universe, or perhaps just the City. You’ve gone adrift from your place and it is vital you find your way back to it. The knowledge that you belong somewhere, that there is a hole tailor-made for your soul, is comforting. It makes it all the more urgent that you find your home.

You wander with a restless, frantic energy. This would be so much easier if you knew where you should go but you’ve forgotten what you are. Are you a petal, bright and alluring, communicating with minds unlike your own through scent and color and shape? Or a piece of the stem, maybe, straining in tension to keep the plant vertical? Perhaps you are a seed, ungrown potential waiting to spring forth.

No, you are the thorn. Hadn’t people always called you sharp? And that is your purpose- to cause harm. Deal damage to any that seek to affect what you guard. You kill Fallen and Vex and Hive and Cabal alike. That is all you do, kill in the sake of preservation.

Azra stops, tasting the old doubts on her tongue like cloying corn syrup. It would be very easy to agree. Some part of her wants to (and this part is her, she knows).

But Spark touches her thoughts, worried, and she knows better. She knows herself. She has been shaken to her core many times, stripped bare from all of her comforts, broken down and down until the universe found something unbreakable in her. She knows this self-defeating worry, she has traced it back to its roots and torn it out.

She knows that things are not so simple. She does kill, and not just to protect, but she does so much more than that. She dances and laughs and learns. She not here in the Garden to kill every threat, but to scout, take the shape of the land and listen to its sounds and know it. If she is indeed a thorn, then she is also the phloem that delivers nutrients and information. She is the roots that test the ground below, the leaves that spread in search of sunlight.

And she knows this, deep down in her core: she is more than the sum of her parts. She is more than what she has done and what has been done to her.

You are dead, a voice whispers. A dead thing walking through a place of life. A migraine is building behind her eyes. The sweet scent on the air has turned into the rich tang of rotting fruit. And still she has no idea which way is out. Her feet have carried her even further, but the walls remain unremarkable. Perhaps there is no ‘out’ anymore.

No. This is not like Earth or Venus or Mars. This is like the Vault of Glass. To adapt to this place is to be lost to it. Azra has to subvert herself, gather her willpower and demand the world change to suit her needs instead of the other way around.

She turns back and forces the word backwards to have meaning. Simple directions will be her way out of this. Her Light burns like a star.

Suddenly, the mouth of the cave yawns before her. She steps out, squinting as her eyes adjust. The not-sunlight is very bright in comparison to the fungus glow. The air is just as stagnant, however. The flowers glitter with a recent rainfall.

She notices immediately that her beacons are gone. Maybe she’ll find a few broken shells on her way back, but their radio signals have fallen silent, leaving her adrift with no GPS. For a gut-wrenching moment, the scenery is unfamiliar.

Then Azra laughs, loud and long. The sound echoes and echoes and echoes until the air rings with it and the flowers ripple to its pattern. It’s going to take a lot more than that to get her lost now that she’s learned. She turns in the direction she instinctually knows the gate is in and fixes a feature on the horizon in her head.

Listen. I know logically that Day 8 was prompting for Black Garden stuff and today really suits Shin Malphur/Jaren Ward/Dredgen Yor's story. But listen. I do what I want. You can't stop me.

AO3 Link

#destcember #destcember2020 #destiny #destiny the game #shhhh #it's still the twelfth somewhere #also #do you think ghosts make good trip sitters?#these are important questions

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yi-dashi-a · 7 years

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Whispers from Ionia - News from the Front Lines

Perhaps, at least outwardly, it may have appeared that things had returned to monotony.

The cold of Snowdown fell away, and warmer weather slowly crept in over the land of Demacia. Time and soft meditation healed the wound to his torso, but in mind it still pained him as much as the day ballistics had struck him through his core. Even his small grievances felt amplified when left to dwell on them, and most notably in his current moment was stiffness. His old flexibility wasn’t to be found when he outstretched his arms above his head and arched his back.

At least not yet. Muscles had healed taut, but that didn’t stop him from working on the injury every moment he could. Stretches were done regardless of ills upon awaking from a nap, and he tested his sword arm every evening to ensure it still could charge a blade. Unlike the other spats of melancholy in his life, this one was underlined by a subtle sort of determination the likes of which he had yet to experience. In his mind he was still doing this for someone, somewhere. Whether she was a living woman, a corpse full of worms, or a ghost by now.

It was not explosive revenge. It was calculated purpose.

One less abstract concept he couldn’t help but dwell on was the insomnia, however. Terrible burning sensations had rid him of proper sleep, and even when they subsided the night time hours had become his new prowling ground. It had practically become ritual to watch the sun set in the reflection of a hand mirror to the soft snipping of sheers. Yi made sure the fullness of his beard complimented, in some way, the rope like length that already hung from his chin... though the real intent was to keep it short enough to scratch when his nerves wished for the sound of stubble. In the beginning it had been a painful venture to even think about cutting his whiskers regularly, but Wuju was far from his mind in the face of simply persisting in the moment. For the time being the style gave him some semblance of self-worth, and the want to continue his existence prevailed.

Even so, the sun would set in his mirror eventually, and his lenses would glow under the moonlight. While others intended to sleep, the Ionian saw it as his opportunity to rise. Adjusting the shawl of his Demacian civvies about his shoulders, and checking his swords on his boots, he let the night consume his wanderlust addled bones.

But outings were less an exercise in exploration and more one of endurance. He had lived in the same area for so long now that the streets were no longer unknown from corner to corner. Even at night he could easily note where he was by the dim candlelight in windows, or by the odd late hour individuals like he who gave him their polite waves. If he’d learned anything by now, it was that the place was resistant to change. At the very least no one had anything new to say when they regarded him in the street, so when the routine of his strolling was broken by a call,

“Excuse me, monsieur?”

Yi certainly wasn’t fussed, and continued listening to the ping of loose cobblestone upon his boots with his lenses turned downwards. Along with the night owls, it wasn’t uncommon for his wanderings to entice the attention of those with complaints. Guardfolk were often attracted to the glow of his lenses like moths to a flame, and Yi burned their wings with a curt,

“If you question the lights upon my face, you will find I need these to see, thank you very much.”

Some took more explanation than others. Some even contended that his techmaturgy was some sort of cultural faux pas. To them all he gave was strained patience, and eventually they would depart as he would. This one, however, seemed keen to speak,

“Aha! No, I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on there, Master Yi. I even called you Master Yi this time. I’m learning.”

His lenses didn’t even need to focus on the features of this guard as he stopped dead and turned. Yi saw completely past blond waves tied tightly back behind a head, a smug spring to his step as he approached, and the heft of a bow over a shoulder. There were those archer eyes again, their piercing emerald hue visible to his night vision over all things, “… I wish I could grow a beard like that--”

A duck and a weave to swords on his heels would have culminated in a strike if the act hadn’t ripped through his injury. Before he could possibly steel himself against the instinctual gritting of his teeth a soft clunk sounded to the head of his helmet. With the strained sounds of a bowstring that followed soon after, the only response immediately apparent to the Ionian was to let his gloved knuckles fall to the ground where he stooped.

“… Why should I not gut you where it is you stand?” He growled to the pavement, though the weight of a threat was nowhere to be heard, “What of your face? Should I punch you once more? Why do you approach me so unprovoked in my moment of quiet?”

“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. I don’t like the thought of a messy reunion.”

Carefully Yi inclined his head upwards, feeling the weight of the arrow shift upon his head. With lenses in flurried activity he regarded the young guard once more. The muscle-bound archer had his bow fingers ready to pop, and there almost looked to be a man behind his frown, “… You wanted me to come and find you anyway, when the time was right. I didn’t really know how to, you know, knock on the door of a noble house and ask for you. This is a happy coincidence... as always.”

“What does it matter? Why not just shoot me now?” Yi rolled his eyes behind hextech, raising his arms flippantly, “Try and shoot me through my helmet. Try…”

“I won’t shoot so long as you cooperate. Unlike you, I don’t actually want to gut anyone.”

A twang and a clutter sounded off in quick succession, the arrow seeming to graze right by Yi’s head and almost splinter upon the pathway to his side. The Wuju Master in that moment saw another opportunity to strike, but the man with his hands up was too tired. Yi’s shoulders slumped and his head fell to a slight one side.

“Unlike me...” He scoffed, “You are the only one who has done anyone harm thus far.”

“Are you have made me scuttle one of my arrows. Thanks.” The Demacian’s eyes narrowed, “Now are you going to be peaceful with me? I can draw an arrow faster than you can blink.” Yi could only sound a sad laugh,

“And yet you only managed to shoot me a single time.”

“Just get up. I don’t want to argue with you, and I don’t want to fight you…”

No help was offered to Yi as he struggled to his feet, nor was there any hint of smarmy attitude from the Demacian any more. Perhaps there truly was a man behind all the grins and the quips, but Yi wasn’t about to perform a character study as he finally stumbled back to a standing position. He merely stared down his fellow man and said,

“Talk then.”

“Not here…” The archer replied, looking over his shoulder momentarily, “… People tend to listen for wayward conversations in the night. That’s at least something I’ve learned recently. Funnily enough,” It took the act of Terrius flicking a long knitted scarf over his face for Yi to finally look him up and down. There was not a lick of blue, gold, or white to be found upon his person. Any armour akin to the guardsman garb he had always seemed to wear was replaced by nondescript leather, “the best places are talk are where a lot of people are talking. So what do you say I buy you some food instead of us coming to blows again, hm?”

As if it were an obvious progression to him, the man adjusted his bow, scooped up his abused arrow from the ground, and continued to walk down the street. Yi, however, simply remained where he stood, trying his best to keep his posture firm as he angled himself defensively towards the walking Demacian. It took a second or two before the archer noted the lack of plate boots to stone in the space and he turned quietly on his heels. For a time not even the wind blew the dishevelled pair about as they stood at distance, but it was Yi who softly inquired,

“… Is she alive?” The stubbled blond seemed to wince,

“I can’t talk about that he--”

“--Terry…” Yi let the man chew his cheek for a moment before he sighed to himself, “… I will not follow you just for you to shatter my hopes, Terrius. I have other things and people I must attend to in this life after we have finished speaking, and I wish not for you to play with my emotions so in your secrecy or folly. If she has died, then there is nothing left for me in this endeavour. Tell me so. Just tell me and be done with it.”

“Yi…” Terry too let out a deep sigh, ensuring his scarf was further wrapped tightly around his face, “… I can say she’s breathing. That’s all I can tell you right now, okay? Just follow me, please.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re not going to like anything else I have to say tonight!” Snapped the archer, setting off in his hurried steps once again, “I’ll explain it, just come with me…”

The Master of Wuju clenched his fists as his lenses spat amber fire.

What other choice do I have, you bastard..?

#whispers from ionia 『event』#WUJU THRIVES IN STORY NOW 『Drabbles』#welp #this is like a half drabble and maybe no one remembers what is going on #but i at least want to split things up into parts so i feel like i am not pressured #this event is gonna be vry importanto #yeyeye #feel free to talk to yi in an injured state still though i would like some rps just to make it feel like i'm not fanfic-ing #pffft #but yeah #i am very tired #lots of dramu irl #i crey #also i have only skim read new demacia lore #but if anything is somehow wrong or my preconceptions of the place should change obviously #sum it up for me somewhere because i dont got the time to read dat shit rn #also i am posting this at the dead time of the night #pffft rip me t___t

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