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[wildbeautifuldamned]

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[urgonnaneedabiggership]

Could you make a fic where Miguel gets the female reader pregnant and they're happy but he's worried about her safety? Maybe have a villain find out? Cause some angst?

Risk Something (You're Losing Me)

Pairing: Miguel O'Hara (Spiderman: Across The Spiderverse) x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Language. Spoilers (Miguel's backstory is mentioned). Angst! Alert!, Unplanned pregnancy!Alert.

Word count: 4.3K

A/N: Since I had already established some background and emotional intimacy, I thought I could write this as a sort-of-sequel to my previous one-shot Host of a Ghost. I was so excited to write this, especially because I don't usually write angst but I like to push my boundaries and leave my confort zone. Hope that it pays off and, of course dear anon, that you like it <3

Part III

You’d never really believed in long-distance relationships. After being witness to so many unsuccessful ones, you’d cataloged the entire concept into a box labeled “certain failure” and tucked it away in the back of your head. And yet, with an inconsistency worthy of your friend Hobie, you’d gone and gotten yourself involved in no less than an interdimensional relationship.

How? Well, that was a good question.

All it took was five simple steps:

Step one: Live a regular life. Go to school, graduate, and try to go for a Ph.D. that gets you working near genetically modified insects for just the right amount of time for you to become careless enough to let one crawl onto your backpack, take it to your apartment, and let it sting you. Throw in some negligence, forfeit going to the hospital, and go on about your afternoon. Warning, some side effects like loss of consciousness or intense headaches can be expected.

Step two: Congratulations! You’ve now become a super-powered person with abilities that range from climbing walls and performing gravity-challenging parkour to creating a sticky web-like element that helped you swing from one building to another. Toy around with your new talents, and grow comfortable with them before realizing that you can actually use them to be the much-needed help your city needs.

Step three: Turns out you’re not the only one with this kind of ability out there. There’s a whole Spider-Society full of similarly enhanced people who try and do their best to keep their own dimensions safe, and you’ve not only caught their eye but have actually been invited to join them. Let your new guide Jess Drews show you around, and explain all the benefits that come from joining a team such as theirs. If you decline, you can go back home and that’ll be all.

If you’re interested, it’ll be necessary to convince the leader but they could use some extra help so it shouldn’t be particularly hard. It sounds like an amazing chance. Information you wouldn’t have access to otherwise, mind-blowing facilities where you can polish your newly acquired abilities, possible new friends that actually know what you’re going through…Say you’ll think about it. Right as you’re about to leave, the most fucking gorgeous man you’ve ever seen in your entire life walks past without paying either of you any mind, busy while speaking to another Spider-Person. You ask who that is, turns out he’s the aforementioned leader, “will I ever have to work with him?”, you ask. “Probably, eventually” Replies Jess. Ask when you can start.

Step four: Do your best to earn your place in this elite group. Successfully improve your fighting skills, read everything available on interdimensional traveling and the multiverse. Understand it almost instantly because that’s how smart you are, kudos to you. Realize that for some reason, despite never actually interacting with you, Spider-Society leader Miguel O’Hara tends to stare. A lot. Is it because you’re progressing as fast as Jessica says or because she’s a complete liar and you’re actually doing it all wrong? No idea. All you know is that even during mundane scenarios like laughing in the hall with all the newest additions to the team or in line at the cafeteria, you feel a certain tingle in the back of your head that makes you turn around. Of course, the moment your eyes meet, he turns around and leaves. An odd one, yes. But you’ve also heard things. Rumors, here and there about his life before creating the Society. Whispers about a lost family and some video archives being the only evidence that they even existed in the first place. And, of course, the fault he had in the destruction of their dimension. You sympathize with him, despite his apathetic attitude towards you. You’ve seen him interact with those he’s closer to, and you know there’s more to him than he lets on. You’d be elated if he ever let you take just one look at the smidge of his old self that sometimes peeked out from behind the iron curtain. Well, not really. One look wouldn’t be enough. If anything, it would only cement your feelings for the man.

Step five: Curiosity killed the cat. We all know that. You know that. And yet, you decided to go snooping around Miguel O’Hara’s computer and personal files until you accidentally switch his computer on for long enough to let the videos he’s always watching start playing. He…his daughter…an entire lost life gone before his eyes. Then, before you could do the right thing and turn the computer off, an eerily familiar voice called at him from behind the camera. So, of course, you had to keep watching. Long story short? All those oddly constant stares, that coldness towards you, unwillingness to look you in the eye, was because of two reasons: first, you were a nearly identical interdimensional variant of the wife he’d lost in the dimension he unwittingly erased from existence. Two, as he’d confessed after realizing you’d found out about the truth, Miguel had come to terms with the fact that he was in love with you, not as a replacement for somebody from his past but as a new presence in his life that he’d been struggling to watch from afar, unwilling to let all his repressed feelings spill out like water from a broken dam. Until that night, of course.

Now, eight months later, you’d come to realize there was actually a sixth step you’d never actually considered until now that you were in this…situationship.

Step six: Uncomfortably avoid every and all circumstances in which interdimensional disparities and canon consistency regarding your relationship could come up. Don’t say anything like “Well, it’s been nice but I’ve got to go back to my own dimension” because that would remind him that his dimension was not yours too. That you were after all still a stranger in a strange land. Which of course also meant never inviting him to stay in your dimension.

Deep inside, you knew that all those details would eventually cause problems, especially regarding the inner conflict Miguel was always dealing with knowing what he was doing…what you were both doing, went against his strongest principle. But by God he was happy. Happier than he’d thought he could ever feel again. More than he deserved. So he just ignored those intrusive thoughts and focused on whatever task was at hand. And you were too. Even after just eight months, life without him already seemed unimaginable. He was your first thought in the morning and your last before you went to sleep, and more than once his presence beside you had been not just a figment of your imagination, but a part of your reality as you felt his strong arms wrap around your waist and pull you closer whenever you strayed too far from him in bed as he groggily whispered, “¿Y a dónde crees que vas, preciosa?”, Or when he buried his nose in the crook of your neck, lining it up with soft kisses that sometimes ended up in both of you being late for your assigned tasks. With so much on the line, you were more than happy to avoid those spiky subjects. It seemed like such a small price to pay with all you were getting in return.  

You weren’t sure of where all this was going, but none of that mattered. Right now, you were together. Inside the Spider-Society you were a great team and each one was a valuable asset. Outside, every second spent in your arms was enough to make him forget Spider-Man. To you, he was Miguel and nothing more. And that was all you needed.

Life was good. You were happy with the way things were. Until, as it usually happens, a necessary disruption came quite literally crashing into your life in the shape of a fifteen-year-old that carelessly swung around a corner and crashed into you after you’d been chasing him like the rest of the Spider-People after receiving Miguel’s message.

“Miles?” You asked, recalling his name, which you’d actually been hearing for quite some time since the circumstances of his existence started being a problem for your boyfriend. The boy didn’t answer. He just looked at you, his eyes filled with confusion and fear until you hesitantly took a step aside to leave the escape route open for him. If anything he looked even more baffled, but when the noise of his pursuers reached your ears he rushed down the hall and you lost him after he took a sharp turn.

Before you could be spotted, you ran in the opposite direction and hid around a corner as you tried to call Miguel on your watch. Of course, it was in vain. Well, Plan B. Fortunately, this time you did get a reply.

“(Y/N)?”

“Peter! Yes, it’s me! Where are you?”

“Where do you think? I’m going after him like everybody else. I need to get to him before…sweetie, please just get back in there, Daddy’s on the phone right now…I need to get to him before- “

“He’s already left the headquarters,” You informed him.

“Wait, you saw him?”

“About a minute ago. He was on his way to the North exit.”

“(Y/N), are you sure you should be a part of this chase right now?”

“Why not? Jessica is there, isn’t she?” You replied, smiling to yourself. Good old Peter B., looking out for you like some sort of self-appointed brother figure.

“Well yeah, but she’s not running, kid. Although I don’t think she should be on one of those death machines either, I don’t what she’s…”

While he kept on rambling for a bit, you looked around and wondered if you’d ever seen the building this empty.

Empty.

Your eyes slowly ran along the pearly white walls until they landed on the hallway that led to the room where the Go Home Machine was kept. Practically unchecked, if Spider-Byte had joined the pursuit.

“P.B., I’ll talk to you later,” You absent-mindedly replied, hanging up on him without waiting for an answer as you dashed down the hallway.

You kept thinking about that poor kid’s eyes. After having all that information unloaded onto him, instead being given enough time to somewhat process everything he now had to escape from the very people he was supposed to feel safe amongst. When he sat on the floor right in front of you right after the crash, he was sure you would immediately hand him over. Maybe a few months ago you would’ve done it without hesitation but now…things had changed.

There it was. The Go-Home Machine. You thought you saw a purple blast inside that let you know Byte was still there. However, if your theory was correct, Miles would have to go through that hall and therefore, you. A few minutes later, a sudden voice booming from your watch startled you.

“(Y/N)!”

“Miguel? Where are you? I’ve been trying to…”

“(Y/N), listen to me! Miles lured everybody out on purpose, he’s trying to get to the machine. I can see your location back at the headquarters and he should be coming your way in less than a minute!”

“Alright. I’ll handle it.” You replied, ending the call before he could ask you to elaborate on that.

Sure enough, light footsteps came in your direction shortly after. Right as Miles entered your field of view, an alert issued by your watch made your stomach drop and a dreadful feeling fill your chest. However, you’d made up your mind. There was no going back now.

Mile spotted you at the end of the hall and stopped in his tracks. His eyes were determined, not as afraid as a few moments earlier. If he was there that meant he’d somehow gotten past Miguel. You fought back a smile when you wondered how pissed he’d be about it. Having his ass kicked by a teenager was something that, maybe under different circumstances, you could tease him about.

“He’s a delight, isn’t he?” You finally spoke, trying to somewhat lighten the mood while taking a step toward the kid. However, he got in a defensive stance, furrowing his eyebrows in distrust.

“It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to talk.” You assured, showing him both your hands, “Miles, listen very carefully. This is exactly what Miguel was talking about a while ago. At this very moment. Right now, I’m supposed to stop you from getting to that machine and handing you over,”

Of course, he took another step back.

“Miles I’m not going to do that,” You assured him.

“Why not?” He immediately asked, constantly looking behind him, wondering if this was just you trying to stall him like, unbeknownst to you, he thought Peter had tried to do a while ago.

“Because I’m sure there’s a better way to go about all this. I love him so much, I do, but he’s so afraid that I don’t think he’s willing to see other possibilities and by the time he does, it might be too late for you. Now go before anybody else gets here.”

You didn’t have to tell him twice. Miles darted past you as soon as you finished talking, taking a second to look back before reaching the dimly lit room where his ticket home was. His eyes scanned your face and darted down for one second before he looked up at you, a new worry in his eyes that had you wondering whether his spider-sense was strong enough to perceive something you’d just found out yourself.  

“Are you going to be okay?” Miles asked, his eyes looking down for a moment once again. Did he know? Did he mean “you” as in just you or as in…?

“Yes, don’t worry. Now get out of here.” You insisted. With one last hasty “thanks”, he ran into the room as your left in the opposite direction. You weren’t worried about Spider-Byte. She was a good kid, and she’d do the right thing.

The right thing. What did that even mean anymore?

You’d deal with the moral implications later. For now, as you found yourself on the other side of the headquarters, your mind was set on finding Miguel. Maybe you could try and talk some sense into him, make him reconsider whether this was…

“What the hell was that?”

By now you’d gotten used to Miguel’s habit of sneaking up on you. Usually, hearing his voice coming out of nowhere brought a smile to your face. This time, you closed your eyes and winced as you felt his presence behind you.

“Don’t even try lying. I know that voice you used in the call. The one for when you’re about to ignore whatever order I’m about to give you, so I checked the cameras.”

“Miguel, I…” You began to explain yourself just to be harshly cut off.

“(Y/N), what were you thinking? Do you realize what you just did? Do you have the slightest idea of the consequences…?”

“I do realize that you just asked a fifteen-year-old child to stand by and let his father get killed right before calling his existence a mistake, Miguel. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking of our safety, and that includes Miles’. You’re right, he’s a kid and that means he’s selfish and immature enough to endanger everything we’ve all been risking our lives to protect for years.”

“Miguel, listen to me,” You insisted, “You’re scared. I know. I am, too, but have you ever considered that maybe there’s another solution? Do we even know for sure that allowing the kid to go and try to save his father is going to cause any real damage?”

“What if it does? Are you just going to tell me “Sorry, Miguel, you were right” and that’s all? (Y/N), Dios mío, piensa. Gwen said the same thing but we couldn’t trust her with being objective because he’s her friend,”

“Wait, what do you mean couldn’t?” You asked. Miguel clenched his jaw and turned away, unable or unwilling to look at you.

“Miguel, please tell me you didn’t send her back. Not with how she left things back there,”

His absolute silence told you everything. Shaken, you took a step back.

“What is wrong with you?” You hissed the disappointed look in your eyes hurting like a sharp dagger to his chest.

“(Y/N), mi amor, I’m just trying to…”

“You’re such a hypocrite,” You angrily spat out, “You go around preaching about how important sticking to your stupid canon is and the delicate balance of the multiverse when you know damn well that what we’re doing goes against every single one of those things,”

“No, no, that’s very different,” Miguel disputed,

“How is it different?” You argued back, boldly moving closer to him wishing you were taller so you could face him, “I’m from another dimension, there is no way that we were supposed to meet from the beginning. You had your world, this world, and when you tried to live another life in a different one, an entire dimension was destroyed. I had my world, and for all I know maybe there was somebody there that I was supposed to meet but thankfully I ended up here first so I could meet you. But you know what? My universe is fine, yours is too and I swear I had never been happier in my entire life.”

“You’re right.” He muttered in deep thought.

“Yes, I am. And maybe…” You started to say, a relieved smile tugging at the edges of your mouth until he looked up and the expression in his eyes made your throat dry up.

“We’ve been messing with fire all this time. There is probably somebody you can be with without endangering your entire dimension. And this…this is the hand I was dealt and I should just accept it and live with it. You’re right. Maybe this was all a mistake from the beginning.”

“No. No, come on, you don’t mean that.” You shook your head in denial, lifting both your hands to cup his face in your hands, to bring him close like he had done the night you finally could let all the love you felt for him escape its confinement in your chest.

Miguel grabbed your hands before you could touch him and moved away from you before releasing them as he finally built up the courage to look you in the eye.

“Are you serious?” You asked, your voice quivering with anger as you felt tears begin to dwell in your eyes, “So that’s it? You’d rather sacrifice us than find a different way to solve this?”

“Well, what did you think was going to happen, (Y/N)? That this would go on forever and we’d keep pretending everything is fine and that you don’t have to wear a fucking machine on your wrist every time you come to see me because even the cells in your body know you were never supposed to be here?”  

“Oh, right, so you expect me to believe that you always knew this was going to be temporary? Then what was this? Something to take the edge off after a rough day until you decided it was time to stop fooling around and just be done with it?”

Deep inside, you knew what his response was going to be, but every inch of your heart silently pleaded for you to be wrong. To pull you into his arms and apologize for trying to send you away and promise that you’d get through this because you loved each other and that was all that mattered.

“I don’t know why you thought it was anything else,”

For a minute, you wondered if this was all actually happening. Maybe this was all a nightmare fueled by all the training simulations you’d gone over lately, and you’d wake up crying just to find Miguel asleep next to you, his wide back slowly rising and sinking with every calm breath he took. Your crying would wake him up and he’d furrow his eyebrows and ask what had happened.

“I had a nightmare, that’s all,” You’d say, wiping your tears off and trying to downplay it. But he knew better. He always knew better. He would pull you close and bury your head in his chest, placing a kiss on top of your head while warning you that he was the only one allowed to have nightmares because otherwise he’d have to start comforting you too and neither would get a full night of rest. And you would laugh softly as you drifted off, lulled by the warmth of his chest and his smell of sage lotion and cheap fabric softener.

But no. You were very much awake, and instead of comforting you with promises and reassurances, he was walking away from you after delivering the final blow to your heart.

Since he had his back turned to you, you felt free to let the repressed tears freely fall down your face as you helplessly watch him go until he disappeared around a corner. All of a sudden, you felt as if the walls of the headquarters had begun to close around you to asphyxiate you, and the sound of the returning Spider-People made you realize you didn’t want to be there for one more second.

Thanks to your watch, you were back “home” in a few seconds.

“Home”. Your empty apartment where you’d lived alone for years. Where he’d never set foot, and at least in that way it was free of his memory. Or so you thought until you looked over your shoulder at the ajar bathroom door. Inside, atop the porcelain sink, still rested the positive pregnancy test you’d left there before having to rush over to the headquarters to help with the latest anomaly.

That memory felt so distant now. As if it had happened years ago, in a different life. You suppose in a way, it did belong to another life. A life that was over now.

Numbly, you made your way toward the ragged sofa, collapsing on top of it as soon as you were close enough. It was only then that the full weight of the last day and a half sank in and, as you gently wrapped your arms around your stomach, you let the tears fall until your throat burned, the dusty cushions muffling your broken sobs.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard correctly, you did what?”

The seriousness of the situation was enough for Peter to fasten a small strap in Mayday’s baby carrier to make sure she won’t go anywhere for a few minutes as he waited for his friend’s platform to reach ground level. He couldn’t be chasing his toddler around and ripping Miguel a new one at the same time.

“I did what I had to do. It’s for her own good,”

“Right, because you’re such an arrogant…” He paused to carefully place his hands over Mayday’s tiny ears, “…such an arrogant dick that you think you know what’s best for everyone, including a fully grown, intelligent, woman like (Y/N)”

“Shit, Parker, do you think it was easy for me?” Miguel uttered, pinching the bridge of his nose before resting his face against the palm of his hand, “What I said about this being the hand I was dealt…I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with that. Hell, I don’t even know how I’m going to keep myself from showing up at her dimension to try and get her back here the first chance I get.”

“And why would you have to keep yourself from doing that?” Peter asked patiently. It sounded like a better alternative to “Miguel, I love you man but I swear you’ve got the emotional availability of a tree stump. Beats me how (Y/N) was able to get you to admit your feelings without prying your chest open with a jigsaw to see your pounding heart for herself.”

“She was right. We were never supposed to meet in the first place. Not like this. It’s not…”

“Miguel, I swear if I hear the word ‘canon’ even once in this conversation I’m going to drive my head through a wall,”

“Just because you don’t take anything seriously doesn’t mean everybody’s the same,” Miguel hissed back.

“That’s where you’re wrong. Last time I didn’t take something seriously, I ended up just like you will unless you get your priorities sorted out. Alone, and regretting not focusing on what was important,”

“This is important,” Miguel stubbornly argued.

“More important than what you had? Look at yourself. Just forty-eight hours ago you were as happy with (Y/N) as you’d been for the past eight months. And as happy as I’ve been with Mayday and my wife who, by the way, wouldn’t even be with me if it wasn’t for that kid you just called a mistake. And do you see my dimension going up in flames? Or yours? Or hers?”

Unable to find an argument against that, Miguel remained silent, his eyes fixed on an empty spot on the wall in front of him.

“Listen, I know you’re afraid. You don’t want her to get hurt, but if you love her as much as you claim to, then you’re taking the choice of a coward right now. And you can’t afford to be one, especially now.”

“Especially now?” Miguel inquired, turning to look at his friend who, much to his surprise, pressed his lips together as if he’d made a mistake and instead focused on getting Mayday’s hair out of her face.

“My point is; I know you well enough to know you worship that woman. And she thinks you’re pretty decent too. And I can tell you from experience that you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life if you let this come between you.”

Not knowing what else to add, Peter gently patted Miguel’s shoulder before leaving the room, hoping he’d given him enough to think about. Hopefully, enough to make him change his mind.

Meanwhile, Miguel hadn’t moved since Peter left the room, mulling his words over.

Two, particularly, had stuck with him for some reason.

Especially now.

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[lanitalay]

At sea 

Rhysand x reader

a/n: Hi my loves!!!! I wrote this to break the ice after winter break. It will likely have one or two more parts. Wanted to write some Rhysand fluff after destroying his character in Before I say goodnight lol.

word count: 1k

warnings: none

Summary: reader returns home after months at sea.

Part 2

Salt coated the railings you clung to while walking down the stairs to the main deck. The summer sun had dried up the water that had crashed against the ship all night long. Now small crystals blanket every surface on board. You make it down the wonky steps, map rolled and tucked under your arm. It had been a rough passage last night, the shaking had kept most of the crew on board hugging buckets, unable to control the bile. It was the most dangerous part of the voyage, the captain had to watch out for jagged rocks that were mostly covered by water or mist, towering waves and fog overhead that prevented the guiding stars to be visible. 

It would be a matter of days now. If you squinted you could swear the shoreline of Velaris was on the horizon. This time it had been an entire season. The trek had started the day after the last of the snow melted and you would be back just shy of the summer solstice. You had never been gone this long from your home. The salt air was starting to stink, you yearned for green fields and pine scented breezes. 

You had collected more samples than ever before. The botany in the foreign lands you visited was truly magnificent and different to what you were accustomed to in the Night Court. In your private quarter you had managed to fit around one thousand dried samples of leaves, roots, flowers and a few insects along with some living plants, placed carefully near the port hole and a plethora of seeds. Your favorite treasure was an exceptional plant that you had meticulously looked after because the bright violet color of the flowers reminded you of a pair of matching eyes back home. Rhysand. You tried not to think of him. You really really did. But in the flowers you saw his eyes. In the stars you saw his smile. In dark waters you saw his fury. In the sea shanties you heard his drunken laugh. A sigh escapes your frowning mouth. 

He might have married or mated by the time you return. Not that anything romantic existed outside of your wildest dreams. But he was your friend. You had known him since the head researcher of the priestesses had sent for a field researcher, since she did not feel ready to be outside of the sacred library walls. You had been recruited because your father was a renowned explorer and you had grown up by his side. Every shore in Prythian and the Continent was familiar to your family. Every shore unknown called your name. 

Rhysand was the one who brought you to the library the first time. He had wanted to be present and even gave you a tour himself of the massive sanctuary. Since then, each time you return he flies you to the library and you tell him an abridged version of what you saw on your travels. Sometimes you think that he holds you a little tighter than the last time he saw you and you stop yourself before even thinking that there is a glint in his eyes that indicates something more than polite interest. 

The days pass slowly. Eventually, the familiar cliff sides and hilly landscape come into view. Relief floods your chest. You would be staying a while this time. Cataloging all of the new materials would take at least until the end of summer. Flapping sounds from above and you look up expecting to see the mast ripped but instead a gliding shadow figure high above. An inevitable smile forms on your face. 

It feels like docking the boat took forever. But once all the ropes are tied and the masts lowered, the bridge gets lowered and you all but leap to the wooden platform and to the young High Lord that’s waiting for you. Sprinting you pounce on him, wrapping your arms around his neck and relishing the feeling of being on solid ground. “Welcome home, explorer” his smooth voice soothes your racing heart. Seconds pass before you let go and look at him. He’s beaming, his hair has gotten longer since you’d gone,  his face is clean shaven and he smells of home. You open your mouth to speak but his smile- his smile is making it impossible for you to concentrate on anything other than his mouth. So you stall. Your hands ruffle his hair in the way you knew would annoy him and he laughs. 

“I’m so glad to be back” you finally say. 

Flying to the House of Wind was routine at this point in your career. You would land and immediately go debrief with your head researcher. But today Rhys had asked you if you were hungry. The grumble in your stomach told him you were. So now you were eating a lovely lunch prepared by the house. It felt decadent to eat anything other than fish and potatoes. You moan as you bite and the High Lord in front of you chuckles. 

“What else did you find?” 

“Besides the plants there were incredible creatures there. Some had fur and some had scales. I drew them in my books” you point towards the bag you had brought with you most precious items. He reaches for it and begins to flip through the pages of your findings. 

“This is fascinating” he breathes. 

“What about you? Is there anything new in the Court?” You notice his jaw clench for a fraction of a second.  “Is something wrong?” 

He shakes his head and closes the book “there are whispers of war”. Your blood drains from your face. “What do you mean?” 

His face is now the face of a High Lord, relaying important information to a court member “Hybern has been making some advances, Prythian is too fragmented to stand a chance”. The war that had put the wall between the human realm and the seven courts had ended not one hundred years ago. Villages were still recovering. The Courts were still shifting in new power dynamics. 

“What can I do?” You were no warrior. The amount of times you’d trained with the Inner Circle you could count on one hand and it had always been to appease Cassian. Rhys looks away “nothing, we are trying our best to unify and organize our armies”. Something akin to a thorn nestles itself in your heart “and how are you going to do that?” 

He swallows and looks straight through your eyes “I’m marrying the Princess of Autumn”. 

#acosf #acowar #azriel shadowsinger #acotar fanfiction #acotar #acofas #acomaf #rhysand #lucien vanserra #rhys acotar #rhysand x reader #rhysand x y/n #fluff #light angst #angst #angst with a happy ending

[bailey-dreamfoot]

‼️‼️THE GRAMPA SQUAD COMIC IS DONE‼️‼️

Ok so, wee explanation + headcannons under the cut.

Ok so assuming you've stuck around for my insane ramblings, heres the gist:

This comic is very much inspired by Factual Fantasy's Comics about Marsh, Natquick, and Calico Jack. And while my personal head cannon does share in the idea of the group working together- I thought it would be hilariously fun to include Inkling, and tbh it focuses more on him than the others anyway.

In the show, inkling doesn't really get out much. There are really only a few episodes where he has a significant role, and even less when he actually participates in missions outside of *insert knowledgeable insight*.

I believe this is for 2 reasons:

He just prefers the comfortable vibe of his library. The book-worm role fits his personality well - enjoying studying or cataloging species alongside Shellington - and he likes spending time with the Vegimals.

His Mobility issues. While he can very easily traverse the watery environments in the base show- in a&b, he doesn't really show much interest in exploring the land until he's told an old friend was the one in need of help. He has the ability, its just difficult- and he knows his limitations.

Inkling has his hover chair, that allows him to move around the octopod relatively easily. However - in the Min episode - they make it a point that he cant take it with him on land, or use it over rough terrain.

My version of Inkling uses an actual wheelchair, so I thought it'd be a neat idea that after that adventure- he'd want to try joining missions more often. And to deal with said mobility issues and limitations- say they got specialized tires for his wheelchair- so he could go join up on land missions more often.

After going on a few more missions with the other Octonauts, he hears about Octoagents Calico Jack, and Professor Natquick joining up with Ranger Marsh to help out in the Everglades- you best bet he jumped at the opportunity to tag along. Think of all the species he could ad to his personal catalogue. They might even discover a few new ones! Leaving the Octopod for so long after being basically the one constant to the place was a bit scary sure - and the other Octonauts were certainly emotional ab him leaving (especially Barnacles) - but maybe a change of scenery would do him good.

Sooo He does that! Professor Inkling meets up with the others on a dock near Marsh's Ranger station and get to work! One of the coolest things they did was collecting egg samples and catching an adult specimen of a newly discovered trapdoor spider! the Pine Rockland Trapdoor. Marsh Has a nursery where he cares for tons of snakes, lizards, insects and birds to make sure they have the best chance for survival. Thats where these eggs are going- to hatch in safety and then be released back into the ecosystem. On top of that, they take samples of the adults venom for study, and inkling is sure to make a detailed report of the arachnid in his many journals brought along with him!

As you may expect, Kwazzi takes after his grandad in his fear of spiders. Jack has seen worse, but It doesnt make it any easier to be close to them. Natquick on the other hand- In all his time in the arctic hes never seen anything as freaky as a spider bigger than a quarter.

Aaand that's it! I'm hoping to do some more comics with the lads in the future, although probably not as detailed as this one. It took more than 2 weeks- please.

Also, I find it kinda goofy that the panels get more detailed as you go along. Thats what happens when the first and last panel were made almost a month apart from each other. 💚

Also also- yes I did do actual research for the animals in the last comic. It was going to be a funnel web spider they're researching, but then I looked it up and found out Funnelwebs don't live in the Everglades. :']

#bailey’s art #octonauts #octonauts fanart #octonauts grampa squad #arachnaphobia tw #arachnophobia

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

Satisfaction

Summary:

Selina had not been a little girl who dreamed of white dresses. The marriage of Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne, from Selina's POV. For @audreycritter and @frownyalfred

Selina had not been a little girl who dreamed of white dresses. She had not filled her idle musings with bouquets of flowers and tiny cakes. Her interest in diamonds had always been professional, not personal, waxing and waning in sync with whatever artificial value the De Beers were enforcing in the moment. A wedding had never been on her list of goals, a marriage even less so. She had craved luxury, security, independence, autonomy. Nothing she had seen as a child, watching forgotten in a corner, nor as an adult, peering through the windows of strangers, had indicated that marriage could be anything more than a gilded cage at best, an end to all she guarded fiercely at worst.

And yet here she was.

Selina had been determined to be present and fully engaged in the consequences of her decision. She had made this choice, herself, fully and of her own free will, and yet the muscle memory of her soul twitched, threatening flight at the first suggestion of a trap. If she detached herself, she risked reacting instinctively, spirit engaging in the gaps where the will faltered. So she had cataloged each moment, each sensation, carefully, a discreet notation in her mental dossier, a bespoke placard hung alongside the framed piece—the feel of her dress being zipped into place, velvet and lace pressed to skin; the clouded smell of the roses in the bower over her head, their blossoms full and heavy; the whirr of insects beneath the stringed quartet that beckoned her down the aisle.

It still felt like a dream. Selina felt herself doubled, reverberant in mind and body. She was present, present, present, and yet outside herself, forever echoing outward with a ringing ripple of awe. She smiled at all the right moments, true and real, and noted the faces that reflected their joy back from the seats on the lawn. She marveled at herself from afar. She spoke her vows, repeating solemn phrases of partnership, devotion, binding loyalty, and meant them even as her insides quivered. She heard them as if from someone else’s lips.

She was getting married.

She was getting married.

She was married.

Selina Renée Kyle, the Wayne silent but wrapped around her heart like silk, a band on her left hand and a kiss pressed to her lips. Married.

Bruce, as always, was her bolt, her fixed point as she swung through space. He had taken her hand in his at the altar and kept it through the ceremony, the vows, the walk back down the aisle, and the final round of photos that followed, letting go only briefly to sign the license. The prolonged touch might have felt restrictive, but instead it felt like the final check on her lines before rappelling through a skylight, that superstitious tug and the feedback of an anchor point that would not fail. He held her aloft.

Their rehearsal dinner had been small, intimate, restricted to the cherished few that knew who was truly getting married the following evening. Bruce, to Selina’s surprise, had chafed against the wedding pageantry his status demanded and had made a bid for the ceremony to mirror the dinner, held before no more than a handful of witnesses.

“You and me,” he had said, words breathed into the side of her neck. “The kids. Alfred. That’s all we need.”

Selina knew better.

Read the full fic on AO3

#batfic #my fic #fanfic #batcat #selina kyle #bruce wayne #batfam #my first and probably only ship fic #(tbh I don't have a DC fic but I do have Opinions on allowing Bruce Wayne to love and be loved dagnabit)

[usnatarchives]

Paws and Claws for the Cause - American WWII Propaganda Posters Featuring Animals 🐕‍🦺🦅

During World War II, U.S. propaganda posters wielded not just patriotic fervor but also a diverse array of animal symbolism to rally the public. Faithful dogs, regal eagles, and even the humble wildlife of American forests became emblems of the home front's dedication to victory. Let's take a leap into the past and examine the role these animals played in U.S. wartime propaganda.

Dogs: Loyal Companions in the Fight for Freedom 🐶

Dogs in WWII posters often represented trustworthiness and the protective instincts crucial to American security. A notable poster from the National Archives shows a vigilant dog alongside a call to action for war bond contributions, encapsulating the role of dogs as both companions and defenders.

Eagles: The Winged Warriors of American Ideals 🦅

The American eagle soared across numerous posters, its powerful wingspan casting a shadow over threats to liberty, and its sharp gaze fixed on aerial superiority and victory.

Wildlife: Symbols of Conservation and the Nation's Resolve 🦉

Bears, squirrels, and other native animals symbolized the conservation efforts on the home front. These posters encouraged citizens to collect and contribute materials critical to the war effort, equating everyday actions with the strength and resourcefulness of America's wildlife.

Enemies as Pests: Propaganda's Vermin 🐁

Enemy forces were often portrayed as vermin, such as rats or insects, to emphasize the threat and repugnance of their ideologies. This stark animal imagery served to dehumanize the enemy.

These posters from the National Archives Catalog remind us of the power of imagery and metaphor in rallying a nation to unite against a common foe. As we explore these historical artifacts, we gain insight into the era's cultural mindset and the enduring impact of visual persuasion.

Read more:

#national archives #wwii #history #air force #army #military

[tyrelpinnegar]

Rabbit Hole by Tyrel Pinnegar

Paranormal Horror - 14,800 Words

This is the story of a lonely girl with an affinity for the macabre. Although she had never been the type to believe in ghosts, she couldn’t help but indulge fantasies of romance beyond the veil. However, when a cocksure spirit with a dangerous infatuation drags her deep into a private purgatory of blood and decay, what was once an innocent fantasy quickly becomes a precarious negotiation that could cost the girl her life.

Download Rabbit Hole for free at TyrelPinnegar.com, or read the full story under the cut:

Chapter 1

This story begins in a cemetery. A proper cemetery.

Nowadays, proper cemeteries are vanishingly rare. A proper cemetery is old enough to have been forgotten. At least, to a degree.

The last time you visited a cemetery, it was likely to pay respects to the recently deceased. Someone whose memory is still fresh enough to spark pain. You may have noticed, while you were there, that the cemetery was not entirely dissimilar from a suburban backyard. A neatly manicured, monocultured lawn, devoid of any weeds, or insects, or interest. Sterile, wasted space.

The only thing that set it apart were the grave markers. Little, x by x inch polished granite slabs that lie flush with the ground, and weigh so little you could pick them up and carry them away, if you were so inclined. Each one computer-engraved with a stock image chosen from a catalog. Some may have even been engraved with a customer-supplied digital photograph, as if they were some sort of mall kiosk knick-knack.

There’s a reason these grave markers lie flush with the ground. It’s so the groundskeeper can run a lawnmower over them. A matter of convenience. It’s easier, and therefore cheaper, to trim the grass when the stones that mark the graves are easy to ignore. Isn’t it something, that the lawn seems to take precedence over the dead?

Cemeteries like these serve their purpose I suppose, in a dull, soulless sort of way. But they hardly instill reverence.

This cemetery instilled reverence. It was overgrown. Unkempt. The tall, dried autumn grasses had gone to seed, forming not a lawn, but a meadow. The fallen leaves that littered the earth had already decayed down to the veins, reclaimed by detritivores and fungal mycelium, leaving the old, gnarled oaks that had shed them as skeletal silhouettes against an overcast sky.

None of this is what makes a cemetery a cemetery, of course. Only graves can do that, and this cemetery had no shortage.

This cemetery contained hundreds of graves, some older than the oaks themselves. A person could have spent a lifetime studying the lives of the people buried in that soil, and still barely have scratched the surface.

And save for a few that had crumbled to nothing over the centuries, each of these graves had a marker. Some were towering mausoleums, elaborate sculptural monuments to a life of privilege and means. Others were simple headstones, heartfelt labors of love, chiseled from whatever stone could be found.

Neither the rich nor the poor are immune to the rasp of time, however. Many of the older markers had been rendered nigh unreadable by lichens and erosion. Identities wiped away, leaving only death’s heads and other memento mori.

One of the deceased had chosen a more practical memorial. A dark, heavy, granite bench. Perhaps they themselves had once found comfort in visiting the cemetery, and wanted to make it easier for those that came after.

It was clear that their gesture did not go unappreciated, as there was someone sitting on the granite bench. A girl, with dusty, cornflower-blue hair, loosely braided into twin pigtails with white twine, and a short, feather-duster of a ponytail in the back.

She wore a thick, pale, turtleneck sweater just a few shades lighter than the color of her hair, and a pair of oversized, circular, white-rimmed glasses. The lenses were fake, for if they’d been prescription, they’d have been far too heavy to remain on her face. Secretly, her amber eyes functioned perfectly well.

And although the cemetery was old, this girl was not. Her birth date was decades more recent than any death date on the gravestones that surrounded her. She was not exceedingly young either, however. She was an adult by most definitions, though she rarely felt that way.

This girl was not there to pay her respects, but to surround herself with death. She had an affinity for the macabre. It might not have been immediately obvious from her appearance, but a peek inside her sketchbook would have left no doubt.

It was brimming with the Gothic. The romantic. Ghosts and phantoms, spirits and specters. Skeletons and apparitions. Wilted roses and tender, affectionate embraces. Why she drew such things was a mystery, for she was not the type to share her work with others. Her sketchbook was a place of privacy. A refuge for feelings and thoughts that would have otherwise been bottled up.

And yet, despite her efforts to keep her drawings hidden away, someone was admiring them now. Even as she sketched.

A presence.

Invisible.

Immaterial.

The girl shivered. There had been no wind, but the air around her suddenly felt cold. She shut her sketchbook and held it close to her chest.

If she had turned around in that moment, she might have seen something resembling a pair of eyes. Concave hemispheres, as if someone had dissected the tapeta lucida from behind an animal’s retinas and rendered them intangible. Each one, a reflection without a surface.

But she didn’t turn around, and they vanished as quietly as they had arrived.

The girl had just begun to reopen her sketchbook, when she felt a chill brush her cheek. Not a breeze, but a gentle caress. She let out a small yelp and staggered to her feet, glancing about nervously.

Her breathing became tense. She wasn’t the type to feel uneasy in an empty cemetery, but somehow this cemetery didn’t feel so empty anymore. Eventually, she turned to leave.

It was then that something seemed to tickle her earrings. The feeling of surgical steel against cartilage sent a violent shiver up her spine. She ran.

The girl scrambled her way down an old footpath, clutching her sketchbook tightly. She felt that if she could only reach the entrance gate, she’d be safe.

All of a sudden, she felt something shove her sternum with startling force. She staggered backward and began to lose her balance, only to be caught by unseen hands and tipped back upright. She stumbled forward, then swiveled around in a panic.

Silence.

The girl took a moment to catch her breath.

Then, she felt a sudden, sharp jab at her side. Then another, and another. An incessant jabbing, at her kidneys, her rib cage, her spine. She recoiled, repeatedly and involuntarily. The jabbing became shoving, and the shoving became herding. She shut her eyes tightly and waited for the ordeal to be over.

And then… it was. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

UNKNOWN SKELETON 9-24-62

Those were the words on the headstone the girl found herself standing before, deeply engraved in crystal white granite.

It was a very plain stone. A simple, upright, rectangular slab, slightly wider than it was tall. No grass grew nearby. The ground was bare save for a few stunted weeds, as if the earth surrounding the stone had been salted.

The burial vault had collapsed long ago, leaving a hole in the ground near the base of the stone. The hole was dark, and deep, and just narrow enough to dissuade exploration.

The girl simply stared at the stone a moment, chest heaving.

A sound from behind. Like the snapping of fingers, echoing in a way her surroundings shouldn’t have allowed. She swiveled around and stared into the distance. Listening.

Behind her, something emerged from inside the collapsed burial vault. A snare on a swivel, fashioned from thin, braided steel cable. It flared open slowly, without even the faintest sound, and came to a rest on the ground.

The girl’s heart was racing. She could feel it in her chest. Hear it in her ears. She stood her ground.

But nothing came.

Her heartbeat began to slow. Her breathing, began to calm. Her muscles, loosened. Her jaw, unclenched. And for just a moment, she let herself relax.

Something blew a sudden puff of icy air into her face. She took a step backward.

Deep down in the darkness, bones assembled. The snare zipped tight around the girl’s ankle. With a sharp yank, she was flat on the ground. And with a steady pull, she was

dragged

down

the

hole.

Chapter 2

Hello rabbit.

Those were the first words the girl heard. They were spoken in a raspy, feminine voice that seemed as if it were both breathed into the crook of her neck, and reverberated inside her skull. It was dark, and she couldn’t see their speaker.

The girl uttered a pitiful whimper in response, but there were a set of cold, arachnodactyl fingers wrapped around her face, clasping her jaw shut.

Sh-sh-shhh… Don’t speak.

A moment passed as the presence verified she’d been heard. She had been. She unclasped her fingers from the girl’s face, affectionately stroked one of her cornflower blue braids, then retreated into the darkness.

One by one, crudely formed candles began to light. But they didn’t burn with fire. They burned with something unfamiliar, something that seemed to suck color out of existence.

As each candle was lit, it faintly illuminated a skeletal hand, which then retracted back into the shadows. As if it were setting the candles alight by pinching their wicks.

Eventually, the candle lighting ceased. The girl could just barely make out a figure looming above her. A skeletal silhouette, nearly indiscernible in the dim, unearthly light. She strained her eyes, trying desperately to decipher what she was looking at.

Then, the figure ignited. Forcefully, like an antique propane stove burner, lit a few seconds too late.

And there she was… An uncanny, luminous silhouette in a well-worn sheepskin aviator jacket. The girl simply stared at her a moment, dumbfounded.

The spirit looked as if she had been diaphonized, and immersed in glycerin. A semi-corporeal matrix of decellularized tissue, lit from inside by luminous teal bones.

She moved as if she were immersed in glycerin as well. An inquisitive cock of her head sent her ethereal white hair drifting, like eelgrass.

The girl averted her eyes, trying desperately to wish herself awake. But the spirit placed a finger beneath the girl’s chin, and raised her eyeline to meet her own.

In this state of coerced eye contact, the girl finally peered deeply into the eyes that had stalked her in the graveyard. Concave, hemispherical eyes, mottled with iridescent teals, blues, and golds.

The spirit grinned impishly. Her skull was kinetic. Each bone moved freely, independent of the others. It looked as if the bones of a human skull had been teased apart at the seams, and their edges whittled smooth. Scraps of bone carved into an intricate, emotive mechanism. It was almost piscine, like the skull of some ancient Devonian fish.

The spirit took hold of the girl by the jaw, rotating her head from side to side. Studying her. Finally, she released her grip, affectionately tapping the girl on the nose with a finger.

The spirit laughed. It was a harsh, gravelly laugh, and it rattled the girl’s teeth in their sockets.

The spirit’s cavernous maw contained no teeth. Instead, her jaws formed a bony, jagged, shearing edge. Scissor-like, as if she’d been mindlessly grinding maxilla against mandible for ages.

Her laughing ceased. She stared at the girl expectantly. Almost playfully. The girl remained silent.

You’re a quiet one, aren’t you rabbit?

The girl reminded the spirit that she had told her not to speak. Her words were whispered, and just barely escaped her lips.

A pharyngeal snicker pushed the spirit’s ethereal white tongue from her throat. She pinched it betwixt the cusps of her bladed jaws, but it did little to conceal her amusement.

The girl surveyed her surroundings. She was in a burrow. A spacious burrow, but a burrow nonetheless. Fine, pale roots hung from the ceiling, and the walls were a rich, loamy soil.

The floor of the chamber was a deep, humid layer of finely shredded wood. Tweezed apart fragment by fragment, like a bored parakeet shreds paper. The girl briefly wondered where it had all come from, but her curiosity was quelled by the sight of rusty coffin nails blended into the mulch.

There were holes in the walls of the burrow, just a few inches across. Too narrow for a person to pass through, but wide enough for a human skeleton, if it were done bone by bone. Where they led, she had no way of knowing.

Over her shoulder, the girl spotted a larger tunnel. This one was wide enough for a person to wriggle through, with difficulty. But no wider than that. The girl feared how far it might extend before it reached the surface.

Not that it mattered. It was the only way out of the burrow. The girl side-eyed the spirit surreptitiously. The spirit was distracted by the girl’s sketchbook, admiring her work with a delighted grin. Relishing the eerie, Gothic romance of it all. She licked a finger and turned the page.

This was the girl’s chance. She bolted for the tunnel, and began to scramble inside.

Ah-ah-ah…

She felt the spirit grab hold of her ankles with long, icy fingers, and yank her violently back into the burrow. She gripped the girl tightly by the shoulders, and rolled her onto her back.

What are you running from, rabbit?

The girl shouted at the spirit, demanding that she stop calling her rabbit.

The spirit was taken aback, but only for a moment. She let out a short, harsh laugh. She seemed almost thrilled by the girl’s newfound pluckiness.

Why? I caught you in a snare, didn’t I? You live in a hole.

The girl exclaimed crossly that no, she did not, in fact, live in a hole.

The spirit glanced about the burrow, rather facetiously. She grinned widely and looked the girl directly in the eyes.

You’re sure about that, are you?

The girl gave the spirit an uneasy look.

The spirit extended an arachnodactyl hand. After considerable hesitation, the girl reached out and grasped it. The spirit’s touch was intensely cold against her bare skin.

The spirit hoisted the girl upright, and she found herself seated quietly on the soft, wooden mulch.

The girl rested her head in her hands. She was still very much struggling to process her situation. She raised her head meekly, and asked the spirit, rather bluntly, what she was.

A disquieted expression flitted across the spirit’s face, so subtly as to be nearly imperceptible. She was quick to recover however, flashing a fabricated grin.

That’s a good question, rabbit. If I ever find out, you’ll be the first to know.

The girl then inquired, her tone exceedingly wary, about just what it was the spirit wanted. The spirit’s playful demeanor returned.

I want for naught, rabbit. I have everything I need.

The girl then requested, if the spirit did indeed have everything she needed, that she let her go. She struggled to mask the growing indignation in her voice.

Oh, I can’t do that, rabbit.

The girl stared crossly at the spirit, awaiting an explanation.

If I did that, I’d want for something again.

There was an extended silence. The girl wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next.

So she asked.

The spirit cocked her head just a little further than one might expect possible, and smiled at the girl. Almost sweetly. But she did not speak.

The girl scoffed. Averted her eyes. She didn’t want to give this ghoul the satisfaction.

But the spirit was patient, and eventually, the girl’s eyes wandered back. She found herself staring intently at the spirit’s heart. It was visible through her unzipped aviator jacket, nestled snugly within her rib cage. It beat softly between a pair of nearly imperceptible lungs, visible only by the cartilaginous rings scaffolding their various passageways. Inhaling and exhaling with a surprising tranquility.

The spirit’s heartbeat seemed to have an almost sedative effect on the girl. Her mood became still, and serene.

Would you like to touch it?

The girl looked to the spirit, and to her own surprise, she nodded… she did want to touch it.

The spirit descended from her mid-air perch, and delicately grasped the girl by the wrist. The girl inhaled sharply. She knew the spirit’s touch would be cold, but somehow it still caught her off guard.

The spirit looked the girl in the eye, as if awaiting some sort of signal. The girl’s silence seemed to suffice. The spirit plunged the girl’s hand deep into her abdomen.

The girl gasped, and by reflex, attempted to withdraw her hand. But the spirit was strong, and held steady.

A moment passed, and the girl began to recover from her initial shock. She flexed her fingers experimentally. The spirit’s entrails were so faint as to be nearly invisible, but they could be felt. They were cold, and fluttered with a rhythmic peristalsis.

The girl could feel them intersecting her flesh. Seeping between her cells like syrup through a sieve. To feel something so visually insubstantial provide such tactile resistance was an uncanny sensation.

The spirit slid a hand along the girl’s arm, and braced her elbow with the other, guiding the girl’s hand up and into her rib cage. The girl resisted ever so slightly, but the spirit resisted in return, slowly pulling the girl’s arm deeper into her chest.

Her fingertips intersected the spirit’s lungs, and she could feel a freezing wind within. She could feel the spirit’s heartbeat, sending ripples through the tissues surrounding it. Her breathing began to quicken.

The spirit’s breathing ceased entirely. There was no more freezing wind. Just stillness. Silence.

The girl could see her own curled fingers, just millimeters from the spirit’s softly beating heart.

She extended her fingertips, and the two intersected.

Immediately, the girl felt the warmth vacate her body. It began with the surface of her skin, and crept steadily toward her core. A coldness she never would have thought possible in a body with a pulse. She began to struggle.

The spirit released her grip, and the girl tumbled backward onto the damp mulch, shivering violently. The spirit watched with interest.

Oh rabbit… are you getting cold?

She asked this with an inquisitiveness, as if it were a novel concept to her. She received no immediate response.

The spirit removed her sheepskin aviator jacket, and hung it gingerly over the girl’s shoulders. The girl held the jacket tight to her skin, but it did not warm her. In fact, it only seemed to make her colder.

A few minutes passed. Eventually, the girl had recovered enough to speak. Through chattering teeth, she asked the spirit where the jacket had come from.

I stole it.

The girl quietly examined the worn leather, and aged wool. The jacket appeared well-cared-for, but it was obviously very old.

The girl noticed that her thinking seemed slower than it had before… Sluggish. Strenuous. But eventually, a second question began to percolate through her mind. She asked the spirit who the jacket had been stolen from.

A pilot. Don’t worry… they weren’t using it anymore.

The girl decided not to question any further. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what the spirit had meant by that.

Again, a few minutes passed. The girl found herself focused on the flickering of the candles that lit the burrow, wondering if they might provide some modicum of warmth.

She attempted to reach for the candle nearest to her, only to find her muscles had stiffened. It felt as if her body had become waxy. Every movement, met with a distressing resistance. Yet somehow, she managed to grasp the candle, and bring it close.

But the candle provided no warmth. Passing her fingertips through the uncanny flame felt no different than passing them through thin air. Even touching the burning wick itself provided no sensation.

It took a disquieting amount of effort, but the girl finally managed to form a coherent question in her mind. She asked the spirit where the candles had come from.

I made them.

The girl pondered this a moment, before realizing that the spirit’s answer clarified very little. From what did she make them?

There’s plenty of wax to be found in a graveyard, rabbit.

It was only after the spirit spoke that the girl realized she must have wondered her question aloud. However, she was no longer cognizant enough to decipher what the spirit had meant.

She awoke suddenly. She had only slipped into unconsciousness for a moment, but to regain consciousness without any memory of losing it was jarring. She shook her head.

The girl felt something sickly and wet soaking into her clothing. An opaque, crimson liquid was seeping from the walls of the burrow, and pooling in the mulch beneath her.

Repulsed, she attempted to stagger to her feet, only to find her previously waxy muscles were now rigid, and immovable. She began to panic.

Something the matter, rabbit?

The girl told the spirit that she was stuck. That she couldn’t move. There was a genuine, unmistakable fear in her voice.

The crimson liquid continued to pool beneath her, like an incoming tide on an exceptionally shallow beach.

She pleaded for help. The spirit sank slowly to the floor, and knelt in the pooling liquid. She began to run her fingers through the girl’s cornflower-blue hair.

The girl’s ribs began to seize. It was becoming difficult to breathe. She tried to express this, but her breath was restricted enough that she struggled to form the necessary words.

Nevertheless, the spirit understood. She lovingly brushed the girl’s cheek, staring deeply into her eyes.

Oh rabbit… don’t worry your pretty little lungs about it.

The rising liquid met the girl’s lips, and began to flow down her throat. The spirit embraced the girl tenderly.

You’ll never have to breathe again.

Chapter 3

A thought entered the girl’s mind. A casual inkling that perhaps this was death.

She felt weightless. Adrift in a vast abyss. The barrier between her body and the fluid that surrounded her felt vague. She wondered if perhaps she was dissolving into it… unspooling, like gossamer threads. She couldn’t deduce the position of her limbs, or the temperature of her skin. Or whether her eyes were open or closed. There was no light. No sound. To someone who had always found the world a little too bright, and a little too loud, it was a welcome relief.

With nothing to upset her senses, the girl quietly became aware of her own heartbeat. She could feel it pulsing gently through her veins. Hear it flowing through her ears. If this was death, she thought, perhaps she didn’t mind it so much.

Her lips parted slightly. Fluid seeped between them, caressing the tip of her tongue. It tasted metallic… like a nosebleed.

The taste of blood sent the girl into a panic, fracturing any sense of tranquility as if it were glass. Once again, she felt cold, intact, and desperate to breathe.

She struggled to wake her sleeping limbs. Flexing the pins and needles from her ragged nerves, she swam weakly in a direction she desperately hoped was upward.

Thin air. A gasp for breath. Coughing violently, the girl clambered onto the surface of a vast, crimson lake. Somehow, the lake’s surface bore her weight. As if, despite everything, the lake was only millimeters deep.

The girl simply lay there, in a film of blood, trying desperately to catch her breath.

Shivering and terrified, the girl rose to her feet. Her clothing was saturated with blood, and weighed heavy on her shoulders. She stumbled slightly. Whatever lay beneath the lake’s surface felt almost spongy beneath her feet, like the saturated soil of a peat bog. Eventually, she found her footing.

She surveyed her surroundings. The air was as still as the surface of the lake itself. The vast blood flat might have appeared mirror-like, if there had been a sky to reflect. But there was no sky. There was nothing but a deep, dark, velvet void.

Staring into the distance, she tried to locate the edge of the lake. On the horizon, she saw what appeared to be dead trees. Branchless. Pale. Needle-like. Pointing steadfastly toward that abyssal nothing of a sky. Reflected in the glassy surface of the lake itself, like a grove of cedars, flooded a century ago.

That’s what they looked like to her, at least. They seemed so far away, it was difficult to tell.

She focused carefully.

A pair of arachnodactyl hands clasped the girl’s shoulders from behind, and a facetious whisper in her ear sent a shiver inching up her spine.

You’ve soiled my jacket, rabbit.

With a single swift movement, the spirit yanked her sheepskin aviator jacket from the girl’s shoulders. She slipped her own arms through the sleeves, and shook off the excess blood, like a starling in a birdbath.

Droplets of blood spattered the girl’s face. She felt her hairs bristle, and her temper flare. She snapped. She screamed at the spirit, demanding that she let her go.

For a fleeting moment, the spirit appeared almost startled. A careful observer might even have glimpsed something resembling a second thought flicker across her face. However, it was quickly brushed aside by a cocksure smile.

The spirit circled the girl, so swiftly and smoothly that by the time the girl had noticed, the spirit was already behind her.

The spirit hooked an arm around the girl’s neck. The girl tried to protest, but was silenced by the spirit pressing an icy finger to her lips.

Hush now, rabbit… You’re safe with me.

In another context, from another individual, this sentiment might have brought comfort. It was spoken in a calming tone, after all, and with a loving inflection. But this was a very specific individual, in a very particular context, and the girl didn’t find it reassuring at all.

The spirit nestled her chin in the crook of the girl’s neck, nuzzling her blood-stained cheek with an unnerving affection. The girl inhaled sharply. Exhaled with a shudder. The sensation was deeply uncomfortable.

The girl attempted to wriggle free, but the spirit’s vise-like grip only tightened. She felt the spirit’s thigh creeping up her own. She saw an opportunity, and struck.

She reached for the spirit’s femur, plunging her fingers through ghostly layers of muscle and sinew. She gripped the bone tightly in her fist, and attempted to wrench it from its socket.

Startled, the spirit instinctively released her grip. She panicked, and began batting at the girl’s cranium with open palms. The girl, in turn, twisted the spirit’s hip ever more forcefully.

She could feel the joint failing. Gripping the bone tight with both hands, she gave it one final twist.

The bone popped from its socket with such force that the girl lost her balance, falling backwards into the shallow lake and landing on her coccyx.

She winced in anticipation of pain, but the marshy substrate managed to soften the blow. She gave her head a shake, and stared at the bone in her hands.

It was no longer luminous. Outside the confines of the spirit’s ghostly flesh, it resembled any other stray bone. Dull, and dusty, and stained with tannins.

Yet, something felt off. It was weighted oddly… heavier toward the hip than toward the knee. A closer look revealed a tarnished stainless steel hip replacement, cemented tightly to the bone itself.

Give that back! It’s mine!

The spirit’s voice was shrill, and furious. The femur obviously wasn’t hers. It was stolen, and the girl said as much.

Of course I stole it, that means it’s mine!

The girl stumbled to her feet. It was clear from her stance that she had become fed up with the spirit’s games.

She glimpsed a flicker of hesitation in the spirit’s eyes. A fleeting moment of uncertainty, interrupted by a hollow bark of aggression.

I said give it BACK!

Her words were hissed, as if they had been puffed through the throat of a brooding mute swan. Yet the girl stood her ground.

The spirit stared daggers into the girl’s eyes, then glanced briefly at the femur. The girl took notice, tightening her grip on the bone defensively.

The spirit shivered with frustration. She shrieked like a jealous gull, and lunged at the girl.

The girl swung the femur with all her might, wielding the steel implant as a blunt weapon. The spirit dodged the attack, and lunged a second time.

Again, the girl swung her improvised war club. The spirit heard it whistle past her skull, at a proximity she immediately deemed too close for comfort.

The spirit quickly backed off, and held out an open palm, signaling the girl to stand down.

She did, a little.

The spirit began to approach the girl, palm still outstretched. The girl abruptly dropped to one knee, and braced the femur over the other, threatening to snap it in half if the spirit came any closer.

The spirit drew back apprehensively. It was clear she took the girl’s threat seriously.

A moment passed, and a thought crystallized in the spirit’s skull. Its conception was apparent on her face, if only for a split second. She breathed what appeared to be a sigh of relief, then locked eyes with the girl.

Alright rabbit…

She smiled, casually brushing back her ethereal white hair. The girl stared warily, ready to act on her promise.

I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot… let’s take a few steps back.

The spirit began circling the girl, slowly. Deliberately. The girl instinctively rose to her feet and took a step back, unsure what the spirit was playing at.

Not literal steps, rabbit.

The girl scoffed. She knew perfectly well what the spirit had meant, and she knew the spirit knew it as well.

Figurative steps. Let’s figure out where this all went… sour.

A whiff of something rancid prickled at the girl’s olfactory nerves. An oily, iridescent film had begun to form on the lake’s surface. The spirit snapped her fingers, recapturing the girl’s attention.

You do like it here, don’t you?

She could feel the spirit edging imperceptibly closer with each circle she made. A gradual, encroaching spiral.

Of course you do… it’s quiet. Peaceful. Just like that graveyard you spent so much time in, right?

A low-pitched burbling. The girl turned to identify its source, but by the time she saw it, all that was left was a ring of concentric ripples in the lake’s surface, dispersing into nothing.

Right. So what is it that’s upsetting you, rabbit?

Another burbling sound. And another. The girl saw them this time, from the corner of her eye. A pair of large bubbles, rising from the surface and bursting, as if from a volcanic mudpot. It dawned on the girl how thick and dark the blood had become. It was… coagulating.

Spit it out, rabbit. Nothing I’ve done, surely?

The bubbling gradually became more persistent, overlapping frequently enough that the girl quickly lost count. She began to choke, and sputter. The gas rising from the lake smelled of decay. Of putrescine and cadaverine. An anaerobic slurry, breathing rancid puffs of hydrogen sulfide.

Speak up rabbit, I can’t hear you!

The surface of the lake had begun to form a froth. A putrescent scarlet seafoam that shuddered and trembled with each bursting bubble. A feeling was welling up in the girl’s abdomen. An unbearable nausea unlike anything she had ever experienced.

Use your words, rabbit! Enunciate!

The poor girl was retching. Her abdominal muscles contracted rhythmically. Violently. Forcing the feeling up into her chest, into her throat, into the very sinuses of her skull.

The spirit was close now. Close enough that she was practically whispering in the girl’s ear.

Thaaat’s it rabbit… let it out.

The girl doubled over. Vomited. The spirit delicately plucked the femur from the girl’s fingertips as she fell to her knees.

Oh rabbit… It’s the smell, isn’t it?

She popped the femur back into its socket.

Don’t worry. It’ll pass.

The girl simply knelt there. Breathing labored. Staring at the mess. Gradually, the bubbling began to subside, and the sickly stench no longer seemed quite so unbearable. Now that her gut was empty, the endorphins began flowing through her bloodstream, gently quelling her nausea.

Instead, her nausea had been replaced by a burdensome pressure in her ears. The atmosphere felt constricted, as if it were held taut inside a latex balloon. She swallowed, attempting to equalize the pressure inside and outside her skull, but it didn’t seem to work.

The girl felt ten slender fingers slide beneath her arms, along her rib cage, and begin to lift her to her feet.

Alright rabbit. Up up up.

There was effort in the spirit’s voice, as she hoisted the girl’s dead weight. The girl groaned softly. Her abdominal muscles still ached from the strain of retching.

The girl teetered slightly, then stumbled. The spirit gently corrected her balance. She patted the girl affectionately on the head. Began stroking her hair. Comforting her.

The girl lashed out, pushing the spirit away. Warning the spirit not to touch her. To never touch her.

The spirit winced. Noticeably, as if the girl’s words had inflicted a sharp and sudden pain. An ice pick to her chest. For a fleeting moment, there was hurt in the spirit’s uncanny, iridescent eyes.

Her diaphanous muscles tensed. Her arachnodactyl fingers balled into fists. A quivering, guttural growl of frustration forced itself up through her trachea, and she turned her back to the girl.

There was a long, inelegant silence. The girl began massaging her forehead and temples with her fingertips. Her patience was wearing thin, and the pressure in her ears was becoming uncomfortable.

She was interrupted, however. By a sound. A deep, omnipresent hissing, almost too low-frequency to hear. It began quietly, then slowly grew louder, eventually becoming a fleshy, infrasonic sputtering that rattled her core. Both the girl and the spirit alike surveyed the sky apprehensively.

A deafening eruption. A sudden decompression. A violent, stinking windstorm, and a sharp ringing in the girl’s ears. Where once her eardrums had been pressed uncomfortably into her skull, she now felt them bulging outward.

The wind roared like whitewater, and the girl struggled to remain upright on the soft, slippery muck beneath her feet. She leaned into the gale, desperate not to lose her footing.

The spirit watched calmly as the girl struggled. She seemed almost unaffected by the storm, save for her fluttering, ethereal white hair. She nearly found herself reaching out to help the girl. To break her inevitable fall.

But instead, she paused. Let her arm fall to her side. The wind faltered, and the spirit watched as the girl fell face-first into sludgy, clotted blood.

Chapter 4

The velvet black sky had collapsed, crumbling like gold leaf, raining down like ash, and dissolving like candy floss.

In its place was an overcast sky. A featureless, unbroken sheet of mist, diffusing a cold, sterile light.

The girl sat cross-legged in a thick, liver-colored mud of congealed blood. She watched absentmindedly as little somethings scuttled about on its surface. She couldn’t quite call them flies. They moved too erratically to identify, and only seemed to sit still in her peripheral vision. A glance, and they would take to the air, leaving behind tiny clusters of carefully deposited eggs.

At least, she assumed they were eggs. To her, they resembled miniature tapioca pearls, only a millimeter or two across.

Suddenly, the girl piped up. She asked, rather casually, what it would take to convince the spirit to let her go.

The girl looked skyward. Roughly fifteen feet up, directly above her, the spirit hung motionlessly in the air. Balled up. Back to the ground. Hiding ineffectually behind the thick leather of her sheepskin jacket. She spoke drearily into her folded arms.

There’s nothing you can do to convince me, rabbit.

Her voice was coarse, dry, and disillusioned. A prickly static in the girl’s ears.

The girl thought on this a moment, before abruptly proposing a bargain of some sort… a trade, perhaps?

You have nothing to trade, rabbit.

Not on her, the girl admitted. But if the spirit were to let her go, she could retrieve something. Anything the spirit wanted.

The spirit sighed softly. Too softly for the girl to hear. The girl waited patiently for an answer, but she did not receive one.

How about a favor then? A task to carry out? Surely there was something the girl could do in exchange for her freedom?

The spirit balled up tighter, burying her face in her knees. She hung silently in the air, save for the gentle creaking of leather against leather.

Again, the girl prodded. What was it going to take? She was willing to make a deal with the devil.

The spirit uncurled, slowly. She swiveled around. Body first, with her head lagging behind. She squinted at the girl.

I’m not a devil, rabbit!

The spirit’s voice was saturated with incredulity.

I’m not a demon!

I’m not a fiend, or a monster!

I’m not trying to hurt you!

I’m not trying to make you unhappy!

The spirit lurched forward with each statement. She reached out toward the girl with one hand, resisting the urge to touch. Her fingertips hovered mere inches from the girl’s cheek. Her hand trembled with frustration, then snapped into a fist.

Wh…

The spirit inhaled softly, her jaw trembling. She tilted her head in genuine, wounded confusion.

Why do you hate me so much?

Now, this was a question that caught the girl off guard. This spirit really had no idea. She was naive. Completely naive. Naive to the way people work. How they think. How they feel. Naive to pain. To empathy. To human suffering.

This spirit had never conceived of a point of view that ran contrary to her own. Never had any inkling of the existence of an outside perspective. And now that she was face to face with a girl who embodied this concept fully, her worldview and confidence were beginning to corrode.

The girl simply stared at the spirit. In disbelief. In pity. All she could think to do was ask her: What did you expect?

The spirit’s breathing began to hasten, and shallow. Huffing quietly through her open mouth like a dying animal. She averted her eyes. Not in shame, but simply to allow herself time to think. She raked her fingers awkwardly through her drifting, ethereal white hair. Swallowed an uncomfortable lump in her throat.

The spirit began wagging her index finger, as if she were trying to summon a thought from deep in the folds of her brain.

You and I, w-we were supposed to…

She retracted her finger. Bit her lip betwixt her bladed jaws.

We were going to be happy together. I th-th-thought…

The girl squinted narrowly, watching in silence as the spirit, for the first time, struggled to find words.

I-I thought you would fall in love?

This was not worded as a question, but it was certainly spoken as one. It was less of a question for the girl, and more of a question the spirit was asking herself.

The girl answered it nonetheless, with a question of her own. A question that caused the spirit’s diaphanous muscles to tense, and her heart to visibly palpitate: With you?

The spirit appeared reluctant to look the girl in the eye, but the penetrating silence slowly forced her hand.

The girl shook her head in disbelief, uttering a question so blunt and direct as to fracture bone: How could you possibly have thought that?

The spirit remained quiet for a moment. Her thoughts seemed distant, and her psyche fragile. She chattered her mandible rapidly, a strange tic that caught the girl off guard.

She was thinking.

Eventually, the spirit drifted a ways away. She rolled up the sleeve of her sheepskin aviator jacket, reached deep into the congealed blood, retrieved the girl’s sketchbook from the muck with an unpleasant suction noise… and rose silently into the air.

The girl returned to her pondering. The little tapioca pearls peppered the ground now, like tiny hailstones after a brief and gentle storm.

A closer look revealed something moving inside. Nearly imperceptible threads, wriggling about wildly like little stop-motion dancers. The girl watched them intently, for there was little else to do.

Over time, she began to grow almost attached to them. She watched as they turned from a pale, translucent white to a deep, oxygenated crimson, and grew from the width of a silken thread to that of a horsehair plucked from a violin bow. She watched as they grew increasingly snug in their little gelatinous wombs, and wondered what they must be thinking. Or if they thought of anything at all.

One of the pearls burst, splitting along an invisible seam like a wine grape squeezed between two fingertips. Its occupant wriggled free of the deflated pearl, and out onto the vast expanse of gelatinized blood.

Why do you draw these, rabbit?

The girl was yanked suddenly from her thoughts. She apologized. She hadn’t quite heard what the spirit had said.

Why do you draw these?

Again, she asked the spirit to clarify.

The spirit turned a page of the girl’s sketchbook. The pages were delicate, and saturated with blood. Yet the graphite drawings were still clearly visible, and the spirit’s fingers were nimble enough not to tear them.

These… romances.

The spirit’s voice was wistful. She caressed the cheek of one of the figures on the page. It was a girl, not entirely unlike the one who drew it, in a passionate embrace with a spirit, not entirely unlike herself.

The girl briefly pondered why she drew such things, but she quickly brushed those thoughts aside, convincing herself that she didn’t know. In the silence that ensued, she became vaguely aware that she may have whispered her thoughts aloud.

She shook her head dismissively, assuring the spirit that they were just drawings. That they didn’t mean anything.

The spirit tore the page from the sketchbook, wadding it up like a wet paper towel. She squeezed the excess blood from the page, and tossed it into the girl’s lap.

Look again.

The girl uncrumpled the drawing. Stared at it. Reminisced on the feelings that had spurred its creation. If she were being honest with herself, this drawing had come from a place of longing. Of loneliness.

There are a hundred drawings just like that one in this book of yours, rabbit.

The spirit snapped the book shut with a wet slap, brandishing it in one hand as if to draw attention to it.

You spent time making these.

The girl asked the spirit what her point was, in a tone both sheepish and standoffish. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she had failed to mask her embarrassment.

My point is, rabbit, that you’re a liar.

The spirit tossed the book in the girl’s direction, and it landed in the sludge with a sickening splat.

You say these drawings mean nothing. It’s not true.

The girl gathered her sketchbook and held it protectively to her chest. She stared at the spirit, brow furrowed.

They must mean something!

The spirit’s tone was accusatory, that was undeniable. But it betrayed a desperation. The staredown that ensued made it clear that behind the posturing, and the arguing… the spirit was pleading with the girl.

But the girl refused to back down. Her eyes were intense, and their contact, unbroken. How long this lasted, neither could say. But it felt an eternity. The spirit began to squirm.

She shuddered violently, as if she were struggling to tamp down an outburst that was welling up inside her. But instead, she swiveled around, and went silent.

The girl rested her palms on the ground behind her. It was more worms than blood at this point. The tapioca pearl eggs had long since hatched, and their occupants grown, consuming and replacing their curdled blood substrate. All that was left were tangled clots the color of red wine, undulating gently, and contracting suddenly when disturbed.

The girl wondered where the time had gone, and why the sensation of sitting cross-legged in writhing worms didn’t seem to bother her as much as she thought it should.

She closed her eyes, and exhaled.

Do you know why I chose you, rabbit?

The girl inhaled sharply. The spirit’s voice had come from directly over her shoulder, and it startled her.

I’ve watched people wander that graveyard for decades. They’d come with expensive cameras. They’d come with rolls of paper, and colored wax. Occasionally, they’d come with flowers, if they were very old. But not you, rabbit… You came because you were lonely.

The girl began to fidget uncomfortably. She assured the spirit that was not the case. Why would she go to a place so empty if she were lonely?

You’re lying again, rabbit. I know what loneliness looks like.

The girl sighed softly, her lip quivering.

You sat on the same bench, time and time again. Drawing ghosts, and spirits. Each day I’d watch you draw another. Another daydream. Another intimate fantasy.

The girl’s cheeks flushed red with blood, and she turned her face away from the spirit’s voice. The spirit sidled closer. Close enough that the girl could feel her cold breath in the crook of her neck.

When you came to that graveyard each day, you were hoping, secretly, that a phantom would sweep you off your feet… weren’t you, rabbit?

The girl cringed in embarrassment. As silly as it sounded when spoken aloud, the spirit was correct. She had hoped for that. Precisely that, in fact. Of course, she never believed that such a thing might actually happen.

There was a long, lingering silence. The spirit swiveled around, turning her back to the girl’s.

Anyway, rabbit. That’s why I chose you.

The girl muttered under her breath. You can’t just choose someone. They have to choose you back. A nearly imperceptible grimace flitted across the spirit’s face.

So I’ve learned.

And with that, the spirit kicked off the ground, ascending quietly back into the sky.

Had she? The girl wondered this question aloud. The spirit drifted to a halt, and hung in the air. She swiveled around, and gave the girl a quizzical look.

The girl repeated herself: Had the spirit learned?

Are you deaf, rabbit? I’m not going to say it again.

The girl insisted that if that were true, and the spirit really had learned from her mistakes, then she should just let her go! Find someone else, who actually wants all of this!

The spirit began to sink lazily back to the ground, headfirst, like a salted baitfish through glycerin.

In the distance, there was a deep groaning sound, followed by a cracking, and a splintering. The pale, branchless, needle-like trees on the horizon had begun creaking, and toppling, their trunks the last thing to be consumed by the matted expanse of worms.

The spirit snapped her fingers, so as to attract the girl’s attention without touching.

Their eyes met, and with that, the two were face to face. The girl, right side up, and the spirit, hanging upside down, as if from an invisible thread.

The spirit’s expression was almost tender.

I can’t let you go, rabbit. You’ve been without oxygen for several hours. You don’t have an intact enough brain to go back.

The girl was struggling to understand. The spirit could see it in her eyes. She put it more bluntly.

You’ve begun to decay, rabbit.

The gravity of the situation finally began to dawn on the girl. What had once been an idle thought was now cementing itself in her mind as an irrevocable truth. This really was death.

She began to breathe heavily. Her larynx began to ache. No. The girl repeated herself. No no no no no. This couldn’t be happening. She stumbled to her feet. Began pacing.

Listen, the girl said. Listen. She told the spirit she didn’t need a body. Just let her go. She could live with being a ghost.

The spirit shook her head dismissively.

There’s no such thing as ghosts, rabbit… once a soul dissipates, it’s gone.

The girl couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What was the spirit, if not a ghost?

I’m just me, rabbit.

No. No no no no. She pleaded with the spirit. There must be something she could do to fix this! There had to be some way to undo what she had done! Please!

Listen, rabbit. The hocus-pocus it would take to unrot that brain of yours would literally kill me.

In the distance, another tree began to creak, and fall.

Your program is running on my hardware, rabbit.

The spirit tapped her temple knowingly.

So get used to it.

Chapter 5

A cocoon bounced off the girl’s forehead, and tumbled to the ground, disappearing amongst an endless expanse of others exactly like it.

The blood had long run dry, and the worms had coiled tightly, pupating inside a thick, leathery shell of dried mucus. If the girl had been bothered to look around, she might have compared them to beans in an endless silo.

Here and there, one would split at the tip, with a nearly imperceptible click, and a pale, pulsating ptilinum would peek through the crack.

A second cocoon hit the girl’s face, this time bouncing off her cheek. She flinched, causing the dried blood on her skin to flake off, and drift to the ground, like dandruff.

The air smelled of mold. Of mildew. Of dust and must. It bit sharply at the girl’s nose, but she didn’t seem to care.

A third cocoon, and a fourth.

Cat got your tongue, rabbit?

The spirit hung miserably in the air, flicking cocoons in the girl’s direction.

The girl didn’t respond.

You’re stuck here forever, rabbit. The least you could do is try to hold a conversation.

The cocoons continued to split at the tip with a click, creating a quiet cacophony not unlike the desynchronous ticking of a clockmaker’s workshop. The early risers had already wriggled free of their leathery shells. They were soft, and pale, and their legs flailed wildly as they struggled to find their footing.

The spirit twirled a cocoon in her fingertips while she waited, visually tracing the spiraling imprint left behind by the liquefying worm inside.

She touched the cocoon to the tip of a bony, tooth-like cusp, and applied pressure, impaling it. She sneered distastefully, tonguing it back off the cusp, and spat it at the girl.

The cocoon landed in the girl’s hair, and stuck there. She shuddered involuntarily.

A handful of the pale, scrambling dipterids that peppered the ground around her had begun to harden. To blacken. To pump their crumpled wings full of hemolymph, and air them out to dry.

The spirit watched the girl, waiting for her presence to be acknowledged. But the acknowledgment never came.

The spirit cast her remaining fistful of cocoons at the girl.

Why won’t you speak to me, rabbit?!

The cocoons bounced off the girl’s skin, and rattled as they hit the ground.

You couldn’t keep your mouth shut before!

The girl’s lip quivered. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes, and she was trying desperately to prevent their escape.

I’ve been alone in that hole for sixty years, rabbit! Do you have even the slightest idea what that feels like?! Any idea at all?!

The girl’s breathing became unsteady, and agitated. Yet somehow, she found herself unable to muster the energy to move. To speak. To do anything at all.

The spirit kicked a filthy clod of cocoons at the girl. The handful of flies that were capable of flight took to the air with a pitiful buzzing, settling back to the ground only a few feet away.

Look at you! You can’t even bring yourself to look at me! Am I that repulsive to you, rabbit?! Is the prospect of my company so distasteful to you that you’d rather just wither away?!

The girl was crying now. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. The spirit’s screaming had triggered a paralytic panic attack, and the spirit knew it. Yet somehow, the girl’s upset only seemed to provoke the spirit further.

So she continued. She continued until her voice was hoarse, and the ground had turned to a thick carpet of flies. Crawling on the girl’s skin. Buzzing in her ears. Swarming her nostrils to the point where she could barely breathe.

You can hate me all you want, rabbit! It won’t make a difference! Nothing you do will make a difference!

The spirit’s voice was strained, and her chest tight. And although there were no tears in her eyes, she breathed as if she were sobbing.

You’re never leaving me, understand?!

You’re MINE, rabbit!

The spirit quivered with rage. With frustration. She clenched her fists, and screamed at the girl. It was a primal, guttural scream, that caused vast clouds of flies to take to the air in wild murmurations. A droning, thickening darkness that blackened the sky.

It was in this fleeting moment, after the suffocating carpet had lifted, but before the flies had choked out the last glint of light, that their eyes met. Only then did the spirit finally grasp the depth of the girl’s pain. The weight of her suffering.

And then, everything went black.

Chapter 6

I’m sorry.

That’s what the spirit would have said to the girl, if the lump in her throat hadn’t plugged her larynx like a cork.

The swarming flies had long since dispersed, leaving the two of them sitting silently in an endless expanse of bone, as flat and smooth as a pebbled beach tumbled by the tides.

The girl ran her fingertips along the exposed blade of a pelvis, discolored and stained by blood reduced to soil. It had been halfway buried beneath carpals, and tarsals. Maxillae, and mandibles. Scattered teeth and disarticulated fragments of skull. She wondered if perhaps these were her own bones, repeated to infinity.

To the spirit, the girl seemed strangely at peace. A state of mind that the spirit envied, for her head was absolutely swimming. She felt guilt scratching and scraping at the folds of her brain, and regret prickling at its stem. A frightening and unfamiliar sinking feeling in her chest. A deepening awareness of the unforgivability of what she had done.

Again, the spirit tried to force an apology through her aching trachea, but her tongue stoppered her throat, and all that escaped was a pathetic croak.

The girl looked at the spirit a moment, and sighed softly. It was a sigh of quiet acceptance. It seemed foolish now, that she ever expected anything more from this spirit.

In time, the sun began to peer over the horizon, turning the sky from a paper white to a gentle sky blue.

In the warmth of the sunlight, the bones began to whiten imperceptibly. In time, they became old, and dry. Cracked, and weathered. Chalky, and pale.

And all the while, not a single word was spoken.

From between the sun-bleached bones, tender blades of grass began to emerge, reaching desperately toward the sunlight, and rooting themselves deeply into the soil beneath.

The spirit snuck a furtive glance at the girl, her head bowed meekly. The girl was simply sitting there, watching the grass grow.

It was no wonder the girl hated her. After what she had done, she deserved her hate. She had taken the girl’s freedom. Her life. Without hesitation, or thought. There was no redemption for her.

She was selfish. Ghastly. Loathsome and cruel. The fact that she had ever thought highly of herself now filled her with a stomach-churning embarrassment.

She was unworthy of the girl’s love. Of anyone’s love. She was an unsightly stain on creation, and the world would have been a better place had she not been a part of it.

Eventually, the endless expanse of bone became a verdant meadow that rippled in the breeze like ocean waves, though the spirit failed to notice. She simply picked at the grass, unconsciously. Compulsively.

And thought.

Chapter 7

The girl was not breathing.

Her heart no longer beat. Her skin was cool, and pale. Her muscles, rigid. Her amber eyes had sunken in their sockets, and her corneas had become clouded, and tacky. Like those of a discarded fish head left too long in the open air.

This was the body of a person who was unmistakably, unequivocally dead.

The spirit’s sheepskin aviator jacket was still draped over the girl’s shoulders. Her handmade adipocere candles had long burned down to stumps and snuffed themselves out. All that was left to light her burrow were her own luminescent bones.

And although her bones still radiated a diffuse teal light, it was no longer as vivid as it was before. No longer as intense. It was a dim, sickly light.

One of the spirit’s ribs fell from its cage, landing softly on the mulched coffin wood beneath them.

The spirit shivered and twitched. The nictitating membranes that had shuttered her sleeping eyes trembled momentarily. She was deep in the dream. A dream that had long since ceased to be pleasant.

The spirit, in her unconsciousness, only seemed to squeeze the girl tighter, nuzzling her face deeper into the crook of her neck. As if, for the first time, it was the spirit who was succumbing to the cold.

A second rib fell to the ground. The girl’s index finger twitched, nearly imperceptibly.

Chapter 8

The girl inhaled, sharply and suddenly. As if the tip of an icicle had been run up her bare spine. She turned to the spirit, dumbfounded.

“What did you just do?”

The spirit refused to acknowledge the girl’s question. She simply sat there, and continued to pick at the grass. The sun had slowed to a halt in the sky. Its stillness was too subtle for the girl to perceive, but the spirit knew.

“You’ve changed something. What’s going on?”

The spirit assured the girl that she had changed nothing. That she was being paranoid. The sun began to reverse direction. Again, too slowly for the girl to perceive.

The girl watched the spirit closely. She was up to something, and the girl was determined to find out what it was.

The grass began to retract. The girl could sense that something was off, but she struggled to pinpoint exactly what it was. The girl’s frustration grew, and she needled the spirit further.

“What are you playing at? Tell me. Now.”

The spirit snapped at her. She was up to nothing, and the girl should drop it, rabbit.

What seemed like hours passed, without a word spoken. In time, the girl’s suspicions became obvious. The grass was several inches shorter than it had been before. And not only that, it was speeding up.

But the girl said nothing. She simply watched. She watched the spirit, sulking in her little divot in the grass. She watched the sun as it inched back toward the horizon. And she watched the grasses retreat back into their seeds, and ungerminate.

The bones around them began to darken.

“Tell me what’s happening. Please.”

The spirit averted her eyes.

“I deserve to know.”

The spirit asserted that it was rude to look a gift horse in the mouth, rabbit. The girl briefly pondered the spirit’s slight misunderstanding of this phrase, but it was clear the spirit was offering something she considered a gift.

The girl backed off.

The gentle blue sky above them was long gone now, having faded to a stark paper white. The spirit coughed an ectoplasmic mucus from her lungs, and swallowed it back down her translucent esophagus.

“Okay, no. That’s enough. Explain yourself.”

The spirit struggled to suppress her hacking and sputtering. The girl rose to her feet and approached the spirit. She knelt down and began tapping the spirit’s skull repeatedly, forcing her to pay attention.

The spirit screamed at the girl. She screamed that she was trying to undo her mistake, rabbit! That she should be left alone to concentrate!

A string of mucus was hanging from her mouth. She wiped it from her chin and rose into the air, embarrassed. But it wasn’t long before she fell back to the ground with a bony clatter.

She coughed up a thick wad of mucus onto the ground. The girl approached her from behind, and placed a warm palm on the spirit’s shoulder, gently brushing her hair aside.

“How can you possibly undo your mistake? You told me that if you tried to unrot my brain, you would die…”

The spirit looked the girl in the eye, her jaw quivering. She looked as if she were about to cry.

Chapter 9

The air was black, and thick with flies. A ceaseless, thunderous buzzing battered the girl’s eardrums. There was nothing she could do, except wait for it to pass.

Eventually, the clouds of flies began to thin. Enough, at least, for the girl to stand, and attempt to find her bearings. The swarm was still thick enough to stifle her breathing, and her vision was impaired by the flies that fought incessantly to drink from the corners of her eyes. But the girl remained undeterred, swatting them away as best she could manage.

It took time, but the girl eventually found the spirit, sitting silently on a bed of empty, leathery cocoons. She was carpeted with flies. They drank freely from her open eyes. Lapped the phlegm from her mouth, and throat. The girl could see them, scuttling about deep inside the spirit’s trachea. An intrepid few had even wandered into her lungs themselves.

The spirit’s eyes shifted subtly in their sockets, as she sat, and thought. The end of her life was fast approaching, and she was taking the time to process that thought. She could, of course, have turned back at any time. And yet, for reasons she was still struggling to comprehend, she didn’t.

Was this really what she wanted?

“Is this really what you want?”

The girl’s voice snapped the spirit gently from her stupor. She was suddenly acutely aware of the insects in her chest, and began coughing violently, spewing clouds of flies into the air, followed by another thick, gelatinous wad of mucus.

She attempted to wipe the mucus from her chin using the sleeve of her jacket, with little success.

“You don’t have to go through with this, you know.”

The spirit insisted that yes, rabbit, she did have to go through with this. There was an audible irritation in her voice. A deliberate and precise articulation clearly intended to dissuade the girl from questioning her further.

The flies in the air around them began to fall to the ground, one by one, as their wings softened, and their bodies paled.

“You don’t. Not for me. I can stay here, if I need to. I’ll find a way to manage. Neither of us has to die.”

The spirit reminded the girl that she was already long dead, and rotting in a hole. She had killed her herself, rabbit.

The girl gave the spirit a withering look. That was not what she had meant, and the spirit knew it.

The spirit grinned smugly at the girl. It was a grin meant to taunt. To antagonize. But it was clear that it was masking an intense frustration.

The fact that the girl was willing to throw away her life for her sake was infuriating to the spirit. Somewhere along the line, this girl had got it in her head that her life, and that of the spirit’s, were of equal worth.

She was wrong.

The girl had a full life ahead of her, and she deserved every minute of it. She deserved the love, the hate, the pleasure and the pain. Everything that life had to offer, was hers to experience.

The spirit, though? There was nothing left for her in this world. The time she had spent with the girl had made that fact crystal clear. She had nothing, and deserved nothing.

The flies were dropping, as the colloquialism goes, like flies. Feverishly squeezing their soft, pale bodies back into their cocoons, which snapped shut around them as if they had never split in the first place.

The girl sat among the clicking cocoons, thinking quietly to herself. A very particular thought crossed her mind, and she looked to the spirit.

“You’re the only one, aren’t you?”

The spirit’s neck turned as if on a swivel, and she glared cautiously at the girl.

“You’re the only one of your kind.”

The spirit retorted, rather curtly, that perhaps that was for the best, rabbit. The girl insisted otherwise.

“No. I can’t sit back and let the last of anything die. I refuse to have that on my conscience.”

The girl approached the spirit, and placed a palm on her shoulder. The spirit recoiled from her touch.

“You’re a tiger. A predator. Even if someone dies, you don’t kill the last tiger for doing what comes naturally.”

The spirit became even angrier. A tiger? She wasn’t a tiger, rabbit! She was lonely, and selfish, and stupid! What she is doesn’t excuse what she’s done!

She clutched a fistful of cocoons so tightly they burst, and threw them in the girl’s face. She began to rise into the air, screaming every vicious insult she could muster. The girl was an idiot! An imbecile! A simpleton and a fool!

The girl scrambled backward, before clambering to her feet and retreating into the distance. She heard the spirit hacking, and choking, and the rattling of cocoons as she fell back to the ground.

By the time the girl turned around, the spirit was doubled over on the ground, wheezing, and gasping for air.

The girl simply stood there, watching the spirit struggle.

Eventually she took a seat.

Perhaps she should let the spirit die. As far as the girl could tell, it might be her only chance to do so.

The spirit had told the girl that she had been alone in her burrow for sixty years. So she was at least that old. Probably much older. She wondered if perhaps, once a person reaches that age, it feels like enough?

The spirit had also told the girl that she would be, quote: stuck here forever, rabbit. To the girl, forever seemed like a very long time to live. Too long, to be honest. For a person or a spirit.

Maybe this was for the best.

The last fly clicked back into its cocoon, and the world went utterly still, and utterly silent. The only remaining stimulus of note was the musty, fungal smell left in the wake of decay.

So the girl sat.

And waited.

Chapter 10

The girl stared absentmindedly at the skyline, where wine-red worms touched paper-white sky. She watched as the branchless trunk of an ancient cedar rose from the lake. It rose slowly, like a buoy lifted by an incoming tide.

With time, the tree stood upright, and reattached itself to its stump with an unsplintering, an uncreaking, and an uncracking.

The girl had never heard anything uncrack before, but now that she had, she knew immediately that it wasn’t a sound she’d be able to describe to anyone.

Not that any of this was something she was planning to talk about, once this ordeal was over. She’d witnessed an impossible event, and she knew better than to relay the impossible.

All she would be able to do is forget this ever happened. A task easier said than done, of course, but at the very least, the notion was comforting.

A second tree unsplintered. Uncreaked, and uncracked.

The spirit’s sickness was worsening. Her once drifting, ethereal hair was now knotted and tangled, clinging to her semi-corporeal skin like wet gauze, and her shimmering, concave retinas had become clouded with a sickly bacterial film.

The spirit’s body was not the only thing that had fallen ill. Her mind was sick as well. Sick with doubt. Sick with guilt. Sick with fear. The finality of death, once unfamiliar, was beginning to dawn on her, and she was scared.

In the distance, the trees continued to unsplinter, and uncreak, and uncrack. One by one, like the ticking of a clock.

There was a numbness in the spirit’s fingertips. She could feel her heart fluttering, a tightness in her throat, and an aching in her chest, caused not by the flies that had wandered too deeply into her lungs and passed away, but by a stagnant and suffocating dread.

A tree cracked, and creaked. Splintered and fell. The girl snapped to attention. These were sounds she recognized. But despite their familiarity, she was not happy to hear them. The trees were supposed to be uncracking. Uncreaking. This break in the pattern was, frankly, alarming.

She swiveled to face the spirit.

“What are you doing?”

The spirit didn’t answer. Instead, her breathing became rapid, and shallow. Like a mouse with its pelvis caught in a rat trap.

“Don’t play coy. Tell me what’s going on. Now.”

The spirit began to shake her head. Whisper nonsense into her own ears. Anything to drown out the sharpness in the girl’s voice.

The girl rose impatiently to her feet.

“You promised you’d put me back in my own head! What’s with the backpedaling? Are you toying with me?!”

The girl could hear the spirit’s pitiful whimpering. The way she chattered her jaw, like some sort of idiot toucan.

“You’ve decided to keep me prisoner after all? Is that it? You’ve decided to make me your little pet?!”

The girl cocked a middle finger against a stiffened thumb and struck the spirit between her sickly, half-blind eyes with an audible thwack.

“Hey! Answer me, dipsh—!”

The spirit shrieked at the girl. She’s scared, rabbit!

The girl’s aggression withered in an instant.

“What?”

She’s frightened, rabbit! She’s afraid to die!

The spirit’s words hit like a battering ram to the chest. The girl felt a hot wave of guilt wash over her. A surge of embarrassment and shame so searing that she feared the blood flushing her cheeks might cauterize her veins.

The girl began to tremble. Her fists balled, and her lips pursed tight as a thumbscrew. She felt her eyes welling, and her neck bristling, as her emotions wrestled violently with one another.

She growled in frustration. Swiveled around and stormed off. But of course, there was nowhere to hide. She kicked at the sludge beneath her feet, swore fiercely, and fell to her knees.

She braced an elbow against a knee. Her forehead against a thumb and forefinger. She could smell the coppery stink on her skin, and feel the worms dissolving back into coagulated blood and seeping through her knitted leggings.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her turtleneck sweater. In the distance, she heard another tree creak, and splinter, and fall.

The spirit was panicking inside. Her eyes darted about as she struggled to think, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They floundered aimlessly, seeking to grasp at something that simply wasn’t there. Eventually they stumbled upon her mouth, and her breath hissed between her quivering fingers.

Another tree began to creak. The spirit reached out toward it. As if her subconscious mind thought she might be able to tip it back upright, if only she could reach it.

It crashed into the lake.

As the approaching ripples lapped at her shins, the spirit began sobbing. Apologizing tearfully. Profusely. She was so sorry. She was trying, rabbit. She swore she was trying.

The girl buried her face in her knees. Pressed her wrists to her ears. Anything to muffle the spirit’s mournful cries. She was trying, rabbit. She was trying…

“I KNOW you’re trying! I’M SORRY!”

The spirit went quiet, her breath trembling. The girl swiveled to face her, tears streaming down her cheeks. She stared into the spirit’s clouded, sickly eyes.

“I’m sorry…”

The spirit’s jaw began to quiver. She wrapped her spindly fingers around her face, and began to cry.

The girl rose to her feet. She approached the spirit. Took a seat alongside her. And in an act that surprised even herself, she placed her head gently on the spirit’s shoulder.

In time, the coagulated blood began to thin, like oil paint in turpentine. Gradually settling back into a shimmering, mirror-like surface. In the distance, the trunk of an ancient cedar rose from the lake. Stood upright. Unsplintered. Uncreaked. And uncracked.

Chapter 11

The girl sat silently. She stared uneasily at the spirit, lying lifeless in a pool of blood. Her bones no longer luminesced with a diffuse teal light. Her lungs no longer drew breath. Her heart no longer beat.

The spirit was gone.

The girl couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in her gut. The spirit had done this for her. She didn’t like that thought. That the stinking carcass before her was an act of love. She still wasn’t entirely sure she was worth it.

But what was done was done. There was no turning back now. However, as the girl continued to stare, she began to doubt whether there was still a moving forward.

Surely, something was supposed to have happened by now?

The spirit’s mouth hung open like that of a spent salmon, washed up dead on the riverbank after a spawn. Her once ethereal flesh was now sickeningly tangible, and her matted hair clung to it like withered algae to a seaside stone.

The girl could barely bring herself to look the spirit in the eye, although there were no longer eyes to look into. The rot had long since taken them, and where once there had been shimmering teals and golds, there were simply empty pits lined with decaying silverskin.

The girl began to fear that the spirit had not completed the task she had set out to do. Was it possible that the spirit had fallen short of her goal? That her sacrifice had been wasted?

The girl was struggling to shake the awful notion that she might be stuck in this place forever. That at this very moment, her brain was being reclaimed by decay. Its circuitry undone, for a second and final time.

The girl continued to stare at the spirit’s body. Its empty eyes. Its slackened jaw. Her lip began to tremble. Despite her better judgment, the girl was mourning the spirit.

The spirit had truly loved the girl, in her own terrible, misguided way. The proof was lying right in front of her, in an endless pool of blood. And even if that love had remained forever unreciprocated, the girl would have preferred to spend an eternity with someone who loved her, than an eternity alone.

The girl reached out to touch the spirit, but hesitated, just for a moment. Despite her fascinations, she had never encountered death so directly before. At least, not that of a person. She worried that her instinct to touch might not be appropriate.

Yet she did it regardless, touching her fingertips to the crook of the spirit’s neck.

The spirit’s corpse convulsed, like the salted flank of a freshly butchered cod. She gasped for air, but drew no breath.

The girl drew back, startled. She gawked at the spirit, lying limp in blood. As if she were a fish in the bottom of an aluminum boat, trying in vain to flush its gills with water.

The girl watched the spirit struggle soundlessly. Too weary to move. Too ragged to breathe. This was a being teetering between life and death.

The girl approached the spirit cautiously. It was clear to her that the spirit was unaware of her drawing near. How could she have been, with her eyes claimed by decay? For all the spirit knew, she was alone in this place. And despite her vacuous, dead-eyed stare, the girl could tell the spirit was frightened.

“Can you hear me?”

She spoke softly, and calmly.

“Hey, hey. Listen to my voice.”

The spirit twitched in response.

“How are you feeling?”

The spirit flexed her jaw as if she were attempting to form words, but to no avail. Her larynx had long since been reduced to tatters.

The girl couldn’t bear to see the spirit lying in blood.

“I’m going to touch you. Is that okay?”

The spirit’s rib cage expanded breathlessly. The girl reached out and gingerly touched her shoulder. Her mandible chattered.

“You okay?”

The spirit acknowledged the girl’s question with a barely perceptible nod.

The girl took hold of the spirit by the shoulders, and hoisted her upright. The spirit’s entrails spilled from her abdomen, followed by kidneys, liver, heart, and lungs.

Somehow, this didn’t seem to faze the girl. She took a seat across from the spirit, knee to knee, and touched the spirit’s forehead to her own.

The spirit began to shiver.

“Hey, hey. Listen to me. I’m here.”

The girl spoke softly, as if to a frightened child.

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

A fragile silence.

“Oh hey, I just realized. I don’t think we were ever properly introduced.”

The spirit’s face twitched erratically. She seemed confused.

“My name’s Wren. Wren Barrows.”

The spirit’s twitching ceased.

“What’s yours?”

The spirit yawned widely, her jaw distending as if she were a sculpin on a fishhook. The girl coaxed it shut with a gentle finger to the spirit’s chin.

“I’m guessing no one ever gave you one, am I right?”

The spirit’s head quivered back and forth, ever so slightly.

“Would you like me to give you one?”

The spirit’s rib cage expanded, despite there being no lungs with which to inhale. The girl closed her eyes, and took a thoughtful breath.

A moment passed before she opened them again.

“How about Adrienne?”

Something stirred within the spirit. The girl could feel it.

“Adrienne Thistle. How does that sound?”

The spirit smiled weakly. One half of her mandible sloughed off and fell to the ground with a wet clap.

“I think Thistle’s a good name. You want to know why?”

The spirit awaited the girl’s answer with bated breath.

“Because you’re a pain in the ass.”

The spirit’s rib cage began to spasm rhythmically. She was laughing. The girl couldn’t help but crack a cheeky smile.

It wasn’t long before the spirit’s laughter deteriorated into heartbroken sobbing. The girl was swift to comfort the spirit. She placed a hand atop the spirit’s head, softly stroking her tangled, withered hair. The spirit tightened her grip on the girl.

The girl quietly returned the gesture.

Eventually, the spirit loosened her grip, and her arms fell weakly to her sides.

The girl let go of the spirit, hesitantly. Poised to catch her should she happen to fall. But the spirit did not fall. She simply sat there, quietly breathing nothing.

The girl stared at the spirit, with an expression of genuine concern. She had a thought, and nearly spoke it aloud… but fell silent when the spirit rolled up a sleeve and plunged her open hand deep into the marshy substrate beneath the lake.

She began pulling. Struggling to uproot whatever it was she had wrapped her spindly fingers around. When her progress slowed, she began to tug, repeatedly. Again and again, until her tugging became yanking, and her yanking became wrenching, and the girl began to fear that the spirit might literally tear herself apart.

The girl reached out as if to stop the spirit. To plead with her to take it easy. But the moment she did, her sketchbook came unbuckled from the muck and the spirit collapsed to the ground.

The girl stared a moment at the sketchbook in the spirit’s hand. And then, at the spirit herself. She was breathing heavily, although at this point it was more out of instinct than function. The girl found herself at a loss. She didn’t know what to say, or how to proceed.

The spirit began to lift herself from the blood, her hair hanging like a starched curtain around her decaying face. The strain she was exerting upon her increasingly fragile body was, to the girl, distressingly clear.

Again, she found herself reaching out to help the spirit. To keep her tendons from snapping, and her joints from dislocating. But there was a hesitation in her movements, as if she feared her fingers might cleave the spirit’s flesh like wet clay.

By the time the girl had composed her thoughts, the spirit was already sitting upright. The girl retracted her arm sheepishly, and felt a twinge of guilt nip the nerves along her spine.

The spirit placed the sketchbook in the girl’s hands. Her struggle was so pronounced that, to the girl, the book appeared unthinkably heavy. But of course, once it was in her hands, it was revealed to be no heavier than one might expect.

The girl stared at the book. The binding was tattered and frayed, as if it had been exposed to the elements for years, and its blood-saturated pages had become so delicate that they would have torn each other apart had she opened it.

The girl held the book tight to her chest. There was a profound sadness in her eyes, as she watched the spirit’s tactile fingertips probe the lake’s surface, searching blindly for any sign of the girl’s presence.

The girl took the spirit by the hand. First her left hand, and then her right. She held them tight. The spirit chattered what little was left of her jaw.

The spirit traced her fingers along the girl’s arms, and placed a hand upon each of her shoulders. With a remarkable tenderness, the spirit leaned in close, and touched the girl’s forehead to her own.

The girl peered sadly into the spirit’s hollow, empty eyes. Her breath quivered softly. She touched her fingertips to her lips. She nearly touched them to the spirit’s as well… but she stopped short, and her fingers curled.

The spirit arched her back. Braced her shoulders. And without warning, plunged the girl deep beneath the blood.

Chapter 12

The girl awoke.

She tried to draw breath, but her ribs were locked. An attempt to flex her fingers revealed they were rigid, and unfeeling. When she went to open her eyes, they steadfastly refused. And where she expected to feel the anxious beating of her heart, she instead felt nothing.

Although the girl’s mind was beginning to stir, her body was still cold, stiff, and dead.

With each thought that passed through the girls head, a modicum of oxygen was burned, and her brain sunk deeper into a desperate suffocation. An unbearable hypoxia, accompanied by an intense and overwhelming urge to breathe.

Finally, the girl’s lungs began to expand, drawing a sickly, rattling breath. And with that breath came a thump, thump, thump in her chest, as thick and stagnant blood began to pulse through her veins.

The girl opened her eyes, but saw nothing. Either she was shrouded in a near complete darkness, or her retinas had yet to regain their function. Although the girl could not have known it, both of these conclusions were true.

Slowly, the feeling began to return to her fingertips. At first, all she could feel were pins and needles. Prickles and stings. To most, an unpleasant sensation, but to the girl, a welcome relief.

With a repeated and conscious effort, the girl began to flex her slumbering fingers. Through the numbness, she could feel the zipper of the sheepskin jacket that hung over her shoulders. It was a jacket she had forgotten was there. The moment of her death felt so distant now, it had slipped her mind.

The girl extended a stiff, waxen arm to the ground. She felt damp mulch. Rusty nails. And loose bones.

Finally, an unobstructed breath. A gasp, spurred by a sharp and sudden realization: These were the spirit’s bones. She attempted to retract her hand, but was met with a distressing resistance.

With time, the girl’s body began to warm. Warmth was an almost unfamiliar sensation, at this point. It massaged her stiffened muscles, loosening them gradually. Dissolving their tension, until they could no longer support the girl’s frame, and she collapsed to the ground.

And there she remained, for quite some time. Not because she was incapable of rising. She was, within minutes. But simply to rest. To recover.

With newfound warmth, came the sensation of cold. The girl slipped her arms through the sleeves of the spirit’s jacket, and bundled herself tightly within its old and yellowed fleece.

What felt like an hour passed.

The girl extended a hand, and began a cautious and tactile exploration of her surroundings. Immediately, she felt something familiar. Her sketchbook. She picked it up and held it close. It wasn’t weathered, or soaked with blood. As far as her fingertips could surmise, it was just as she remembered it.

The girl explored further. She felt waxen stumps, and burnt-out wicks. Fist-width tunnels dug from loamy soil. Thin, delicate roots that hung from the ceiling. And eventually, the burrow’s entrance.

She ran her hands along its perimeter, measuring it carefully. To her, it seemed frightfully narrow. A nervousness tickled the back of her neck. But of course, she had no choice in the matter.

The girl took one last look over her shoulder. It was not an act of logic, but of instinct. In the darkness of the burrow, there was nothing to see.

But the girl did see something. An atlas, glowing with a faint teal light. A glow so faint that in the light of day, it would have been imperceptible.

The girl paused, and stared silently at the bone. A dull, dusty little vertebra that had once cradled the spirit’s skull. Her eyes shifted subtly. To the floor. To the tunnel. Then back to the bone. A moment passed.

Quietly, the girl plucked the atlas from between axis and occipital, and slipped it into her pocket.

Chapter 13

The girl emerged from the hole on a bright autumn morning. The sky was a pale and delicate blue, and the breeze carried with it an invigorating chill. The cemetery was empty, as it nearly always was. She was thankful for that.

The girl took a moment to assess herself. She seemed healthy. Intact. Perhaps a little tired. She had a sketchbook in her hand. A jacket on her back. A bone in her pocket. She felt as if perhaps she were a different person than she had been before, but there’d be time to evaluate those feelings later.

She felt a little jolt upon hearing the sound of an SUV arriving in the parking lot over the hill, and of indistinct conversation as its doors slammed shut. After taking a moment to compose herself, she shuffled off toward the bike rack near the cemetery’s entrance.

The girl fiddled with the dials on her bike lock, and entered a four-digit code: The date she had buried a pet mouse she’d had as a child. She hopped atop her bike, and rode home.

The girl had been missing for nearly seventy-two hours. It wasn’t long enough for someone to have filed a missing person report. After all, the girl was an adult, though she rarely felt that way. But it was long enough for loved ones to worry, and despite the girl’s loneliness, she did have a handful of loved ones.

She made excuses. Told them that it was no big deal. That the jacket on her back had been found in a ditch, and justified its retrieval with a price check online. Indeed, the price of such a jacket was considerable.

In the days, and months, and years that followed, the girl often left peculiar happenings in her wake. By the time they were noticed, the girl always had an explanation at the ready. Never a truthful one, but always a plausible one. Either that, or she had already slipped away, unseen.

No one ever discovered the atlas the girl carried in her pocket, despite it being on her person at all times. Occasionally, she would wonder if she might be able to pass it off as the bone of an animal, should it come to that. But the girl was clever enough that it never did.

Whatever it was the girl was hiding, it remained a secret to anyone but herself. She had decided long ago that no one would ever know. That no one needed to know. And indeed, no one ever did. Not family. Not friends. Not you, or I.

And in the end, the girl was content with that. Her choices were her own. Perhaps she had made the right choice. Perhaps she should have known better. But one thing can be said for certain:

She was never lonely.

#rabbit hole #tyrel pinnegar #horror #novella #novelette #short story #fiction

[charaznablescanontoyota]

boat for short motherfuckers?

the lake is so quiet that audrey can hear the chirp of every insect, the call of every bird, the sound of her own heart palpitating in her chest. her eyes are squeezed shut so she doesn't have to see how far out in the water she is, but that just makes it worse - each wave that rocks her little rowboat could be someone with a mask and a knife coming up underneath it, tipping it over, dragging her below the surface.

"closing your eyes makes it worse," trish calls, across the water.

"yeah, i kind of noticed," audrey says flatly.

still. she opens her eyes. there are only three of them left on the lake, now; shigeo got his exit a full thirty minutes of mindful meditation ago, and shadow got his soon after. audrey's pretty sure shadow just fell asleep in his paddleboat, but the car must have counted it as enough rest and relaxation for the door to appear.

so it's her, it's trish, and it's al, who technically has a door on his boat already, but volunteered to stay behind until the others did too. maybe he wasn't expecting it to be so hard for them to relax, but he doesn't seem to mind having more time to fish with the improvised rod he put together back on the shore.

audrey sighs and drags her hands down her face. she can feel her genre butting up against the premise of this car, her danger sense pinging off of something she knows isn't there, and it's like bees in her brain. so maybe, actually, fuck the premise. maybe the way she gets through this isn't by being quiet and alone.

"when's the last time you were on a boat?" she asks aloud.

"oh," trish says. she's aimlessly paddling her paddleboat - pink, naturally - around in circles, sending ripples through the water. "in italy, when we split off from fugo. i don't remember a lot of it. i was dying."

audrey silently adds this to her mental catalog of insane trish anecdotes. she's not sure what reply she was expecting but - sure, italy. venice has waterways, right? that makes some kind of sense.

"you were dying?" al asks.

"my dad," trish says, which is all the elaboration she needs to give, because they've all seen her dad firsthand.

"i think the last time i was on a boat was when teacher took on me and brother as her students," al offers - maybe to cut the awkwardness, god bless him. "she stranded us on an island for a month."

"hey," audrey says. "what?"

"that's where i learned to fish," he adds cheerfully, every bit as skilled as trish at not elaborating on the anecdotes he shares from his home world. it's just harder to get annoyed at him for it.

"what about you?" trish asks.

audrey looks to her, squinting against the sun. "what?"

"when were you on a boat last?"

"oh. uh." she has to think about it. "i dunno. lakewood has...a fucked up lake. like, 'a murderer got shot by the cops there' fucked up. kids only go out there on a dare, or to fuck with each other."

the last time she was at the lake was at that party where noah almost drowned, she's pretty sure. audrey grimaces, tries once again to put the idea of outstretched hands under the water, ready to grab her ankles, out of mind.

"trish," she says aloud, grasping for something else to think about. "tell me a story that isn't about a time you almost died."

"i blew up a plane, once," trish says immediately, then pauses, hums to herself. "i think i almost died during that, actually. so - disqualified?"

"uh, no, fuck that. tell me about the plane you blew up," audrey says. it's true that the story might not meet her criteria but once, just once, she wants to hear the full story behind something outlandish that trish has so casually dropped into a conversation.

trish looks taken off guard; there's a beat of silence before she starts to actually tell the story, her voice low and careful, her eyebrows furrowed as she draws on the memory. audrey uses one oar to rotate her boat so she's facing trish, a little closer than before, then closes her eyes again and listens. it's easier to tune out the insects and the birds this time, easier to ignore the waves that rock the boat.

#interstitial infinity #THANK YOU TB #marn writes #the discord message is fully from 2 weeks ago LMAO we were talking in the gc about the kids going fishing #and being in a car that forces them to just stop and chill for a second #and i think the two from high octane scary stories would not take it. well. #and also i like it when they have to talk to each other

[fatehbaz]

Hey I thought you might appreciate a heads up that the yellow-legged hornet (Vespa velutina) has been spotted in Savannah, Georgia. 😞

Nice. Well, not nice news. But glad that you thought of me. Thank you.

(For other people who have yet to fully embrace and explore their innate love of hornets, this Vespa velutina hornet is originally from Southeast Asia. This creature is closely related to Vespa mandarinia, the creature derisively referred to in the US as "murder hornet" or "Asian giant hornet", originally from South/East Asia, which is now apparently established near in the Salish Sea region near Bellingham, Vancouver, and Nanaimo.)

Here's a look at where the giant hornets now live in North America, along with the distribution of some other large hornets which might be mistaken as Vespa manadrinia/velutina:

The map was originally published in 2022 in American Entomologist, displaying distribution range of (non-native) giant hornet; (non-native) European hornet; (native) southern yellowjacket; and (native) eastern cicada killer. The article also identifies a few few other species which might be mistaken for "murder hornets": great golden digger wasp, bald-faced hornet, German yellowjacket, red-legged cannibal fly, and pigeon horntail. (Available to read for free online; article title in the source/caption beneath the map.)

I've had many memorable encounters with large (native) bald-faced hornets in dense cedar-hemlock rainforest-y places. And coincidentally, the Pacific Northwest is also now apparently the North American home/homebase of Vespa mandarinia. So here are some other PNW wasps/hornets in comparison, from Oregon State University Extension Catalog (2022):

From 2020 research on potential dispersal of Vespa mandarinia over a couple of decades (not necessarily a good or realistic representation, not inevitable, kinda just "potential"):

Apparently Vespa mandarinia haven't yet been encountered outside of the general Vancouver area during targeted samples:

I know that you too are fond of wasps/hornets, and are aware of their popular demonization, the way that they're feared, etc. In July 2022, the Entomological Society of America put out an online resource thing that explains why they don't like the name "Asian giant hornet" for Vespa mandarinia and Vespa velutina, instead adopting "northern giant hornet" and "yellow-legged hornet" (which you called the creature, too!) because of the racialized/xenophobic implications. ("Northern Giant Hornet Common Name Toolkit" available at: entsoc.org/publications/common-names/northern-giant-hornet) They say: '"Murder hornet" unnecessarily invokes fear and violence, which impede accurate public understanding of the insect and its biology and behavior. While "Asian" on its own is a neutral descriptor, its association with a pest insect that inspires fear and is targeted for eradication may bolster anti-Asian sentiment in some people - at a time when hate crimes and discrimination against people of Asian descent in the United States are on the rise.'

Which, for me, brings to mind this recent book from Jeannie Shinozuka:

From the publisher's blurb: 'In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a “biological yellow peril” [...]. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. [...] Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today. [...] She shows how the [...] panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century [...] that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated.'

A lot going on at that time with insects, empire, and xenophobia. In the 1890s, the British Empire was desperately searching for a way to halt malaria, and mosquitoes had just been discovered as vectors of malaria. And from Nobel prize podium lectures to popular media newspapers and academic journals, there was all kinds of talk about how "bacteria/viruses/insects are the greatest enemy of the Empire" and whatever. The US was also expanding in the Caribbean, Central America, Pacific islands towards East Asia, etc. Tropical plantations were proliferating, not just in Dutch Java or British India, but also in US administered Central America. And so insects were perceived not just as a threat to the human body of the British soldier or American administrator; insects were also a threat to profits, as insect pests threatened monoculture plantations and agriculture.

That same time period saw the US invasion of the Philippines and exports of products from the islands; the US annexation of Hawai'i, and elevating rivalry with Japan; the 1882 passage of the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act; US control of Cuba and Puerto Rico; expansion of US fruit corporations in Central America and US sugarcane plantations in Cuba/Hawai'i, where insect pests threatened plantation profits; the advent of "Yellow Peril" tropes and fear of invasion in science fiction literature; the detaining of half a million (mostly Chinese) people at the medical quarantine processing center that the US Public Health Service operated at Angel Island in San Francisco; and US insect extermination projects, mosquito control campaigns, and medical policing of local people in Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone (where US authorities detained local people for medical testing).

A lot to consider.

#thank you #:)

[ewesless]

Paint Night Headcanons

Anyone can add on with any character, "duplicates" absolutely welcome. Want to pass around a prompt?

Basic Prompt: "Paint Night" or "Paint and Sip" with the Obey Me Characters! MCs and OCs are welcome, but limit or exclude any romance and ship/self-ship elements please!

Barbatos: If he is in charge of it that is guaranteed to be the Devildom equivalent of the Sistine Chapel quality. He favors realism and hyper-realism, subconscious horror or otherwise unsettling elements are unintentionally included.

Diavolo will do anything he possibly can in order to own Barbatos's paintings of Lucifer or MC to keep in his personal art gallery though. Sometimes he wins, most often he loses.

This got long lmao!

Who Barbatos loves to pair up with:

Diavolo: Everything the Young Master makes is precious to him and he praises him highly. He has an area dedicated to Diavolo's artwork spanning from his youth to his most recent boredom doodle cataloged like a museum. He allows Mephistopheles to tour the "Gallery of Lord Diavolo" in both journalist context or just for leisure. It makes Mephisto so emotional every time which pleases Barbatos greatly and he has gifted pieces to Mephistopheles as thank yous and hush money. He lets MC see "exclusive" artwork though.

MC: He additionally brags and rubs anyone's nose in it that it's his and not theirs ^_^ He has positive feedback, praise and compliments for MC's artwork no matter if it's a stick figure, a "Bold and Brash" or Fine Art. He has a soft spot for sincerity and soulfulness, but he is not opposed to tongue-in-cheek or intentionally bad artwork as long as it's for fun. If MC does him dirty in a mean-spirited way he gets >:( and withholds treats from them as punishment.

Luke: Because Luke is very serious about his quality and technical skills, but it's an adorable trait. Barbatos loves seeing everything he makes in his style is too. Luke is always blown away by Barbatos's skill so he enjoys that it inspires and flatters Luke. He encourages Luke like he does in baking and buys him coloring + sticker books and sketchbooks with cute covers. (This section can apply to MC too if your MC enjoys this)

Who he hates to pair up with:

Beel and Belphie: Everyone hates to get paired with them, there's no way to candy coat that fact. But Barbatos still finds Beel's endearing and the inclusion of food and the personality that both twins imbue in their artwork is cute to him. He was absolutely appalled that the wilted asparagus that Belphegor made was meant to be him.......

Solomon: OM!Barbatos enjoys painting Solomon and they have fun together often challenging one another to use inspiration from artists they are less familiar with. NB!Barbatos resents getting paired with Solomon for obvious reasons, but because Solomon is a good painter who isn't interested in creative interpretation unlike with his "food" he doesn't get insulted by his art as much. Barbatos takes everything he does seriously so he would not create something foul, insulting or mediocre, but NB!Barbatos uses the entire evening to stare at Solomon like he's a wretched insect, or makes Solomon self-conscious from his judgmental glaring and passive aggressive attitude about having Solomon as his subject. Solomon drinks a lot more when it's with NB!Barb...

Asmodeus: He dislikes Asmo-chan as a partner because Asmo will nitpick, criticize and make suggestions even though it's the closest to perfection that can be made. That HURTS HIS SENSITIVE ARTISTIC FEELINGS. Because Asmo likes to add sex appeal in his artwork it's disconcerting, but he appreciates Asmo's glamorous and aesthetic art style. Asmo's focus on beauty means that he'll never make an unflattering image. Asmo gives him big sparkly eyes which amuses Barbatos endlessly.

Leviathan is always a ??? because while Barbatos appreciates his skill, imagination, range and attention to detail it depends completely on what Levi's favorite anime or manga is at the time. He has been stylized in everything from Moe to Anthropomorphic and Mecha, he is often drawn in cosplay. Barbatos adds special things to Levi's pictures by putting stylized Ruri-chan or other characters in with him because he likes to watch him cry his eyes out

#obey me #obey me nightbringer #obey me barbatos #obey me diavolo #obey me solomon #obey me leviathan #obey me asmodeus #obey me mc #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me luke #obey me mephistopheles #useless writing

[ahollowgrave]

sensory prompt: 31. The cold, sharp smell of the first frost

(don't know if you wanted us to specify for which oc so i'm just letting you choose ahahah)

This takes place during one of Odette's earlier adventures. Traveling alone through long abandoned ruins. We're talking about skeletons, boys.

Odette hadn’t expect them to smell… cold. She wasn’t sure what a pile of bones were suppose to smell of. Grave dirt, decay, oldness perhaps? The nun sat back on her haunches and folded her arms across the tops of her knees. They were bare of flesh in a way that suggested time but they were not clean. Dirt clung to them and in the low light she could spy shiny black carapaces of living things crawling among the heap. Moss had stretched over a few of the larger bones, a few of which looked cracked.

She was pretty sure all the bones were there for a complete skeleton… or near enough. Which made their haphazard arrangement on the floor of this abandoned place even more curious. With self-preservation far from her mind, Odette leaned forward to caress the curve of the grinning skull.

“How far from your resting place are you, my friend?” Her voice was soft, hardly above a prayer, but even still it echoed in wide and empty halls.

Frost bloomed where her fingers touched and though she yanked her hand back it stopped nothing. In rippling spirals the frost reached every part of every bone in a matter of moments. And then the skull sighed -- breath pluming before it like a winter morning -- and the pile began to rise.

Odette fell backward and scrambled wildly away from the half-formed skeleton. Watching with horrified fascination as little blue flowers continuously blossomed and withered along the ribs and across the shoulders, as steady as breathing. As the complicated bones of the hands and feet sorted themselves into their proper places it took the early steps of a fawn. Several of the crawling things that had been living among the pile fell and, absently, newly formed hands caught them and pat them back into place. Moss trailed behind it like a ruined veil until gravity reinforced itself.

It never once stopped watching her.

Odette riffled through her catalog of prayers and rites and collection of stories and myths.

And then it stood before her, tall and complete, still shedding dirt and long insects with many legs.

Wordlessly and with a chivalric tip of its head, the skeleton offered the still-prone nun a hand.

Thank you for the ask @oneiroy! ][ Sensory Prompts ][

#answered #Pigeon Writing #hello meet one of the skeleton girlfriends #writing is so hard y'all god lays on the ground #but I like this one too !! #working on the others I've been sent as well as a few other things #“i like this one” i said as if i didn't force myself to post this just so I'd stop staring at it :pensive: #creative hard... #does this meet the prompt? idk #maybe not for some people but!!!!

[pyr0graves]

Thimbleberry Pie Charts!

Hello!! This is a little fic thing I've had in the works for a little while and shared with a few friends, and I decided I should upload it!!

Criticism is much appreciated, I both want to get back into writing and want to get better!!!

Word Count: 896 Words

“-And that’s ten cases of card stock, an entire package of crayons, aand the mail-in day catalog for stamps! That’ll be a thousand smolleons, Mr. Joe!” … “What do you mean you don’t have that kind of money?! I should be charging you extra for wasting my time!! Good day! Sir!”

SLAM!!!

...

"Tough day?"

"You could say that,"

Pascal leaned against the pillows behind them, crossing their arms as they glanced at their ‘coworker’, humming silently.

After some time passed, Pascal started messing with an abacus on their makeshift table, they punched a few numbers into the toy calculator they were provided and finished off by flipping a few papers scattered around their workspace before speaking again,

“Hm, so far, we’ve made about a hundred dabloons from those teddy sales, a thousand and five hundred smoleans from the staplers and pushpins, pfft, aand a couple tens from whatever moolah is supposed to be,”

“Ah! This quarter has been a successful one I see! Maybe we could-” Frank began but was promptly interrupted with a “But!-”

“We’ve also got an order of big boards coming in,” Pascal said as they held up a receipt, “-and then a couple of crayons that are just…blue?” They looked up at Frank, “Do you know anything about this?”

Frank simply shrugged, to which Pascal simply huffed in response and got back to work. Frank set the books he was carrying onto the floor and then propped up the board on the two stacks for a makeshift table. A bit more time passed, Frank finally finished his desk.

“Take a look at that bookworm!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There’s a bookworm on your shoulder,”

Frank looked to his right shoulder, lo and behold, he saw a little green worm staring up at him with comically large glasses atop its eyes.

“Oh! Look at you!” The puppet gently took the bookworm along his hands and showed it off,

“You know, Pascal. The Lumbricus Bibliostris usually appears in situations involving books, number crunching, and any busy work that involves reading! They often come in great handy when-”

“When keeping track of things!” Pascal finished Frank’s sentence for them with a smile.

“See? I pay attention whenever you talk about nifty little insects!”

Frank couldn’t help but smile knowing this fun little fact about their friend. They grabbed some knick knacks scattered around Julie’s house to place on their little makeshift desk while Pascal fiddled with their abacus and wrote a few things in crayon.

“Do you think we could convince Wally and Mr. Dear to join us next time?” “I doubt it, last time Eddie joined Julie and I in this little game, the poor mailman lost his marbles when Julie started wrecking things! As for Wally…I’m not too sure, maybe we could? He could draw those silly fruit-flavored pie charts Julie always needs for the board meetings!” “What flavor was it this time before I got here?” “Strawberry, but then midway through the meeting, she said it was supposed to be thimble-berry,”

“Do we even have that color?” Frank mumbled the question as he took the little bookworm to the open windowsill to let it outside, “I’ve never heard of such berries..” “Heck if I know! I’m only the accountant, Mr. Frankly, I crunch numbers and tell the head honcho about ‘em! Speaking of which, can you buzz in President Joyful? I finished countin' those numbers she was losin’ her marbles about earlier.” Pascal grabbed a stack of papers and set them next to their books. “No need to ring your lovely president in!! I’ve been here the whole time!” Julie spoke suddenly, appearing right in front of the cat puppet like it was nothing, startled by the rainbow monster’s sudden entrance. “Let me see those!” She snatched some of the papers and started rapidly flipping through them, mumbling nonsense to herself as she paced excitedly around the room, “These papers are quite overdue, Mr. Pushpin!” “Mhm..mhm…that looks about right…Wait!! Mr. Pushpin, why does the first hour say we sold fourteen crates of chuckler berries?? We don’t even have them in stock! And why do these papers say our stocks aren’t stocking?!” Julie yelled out as she scrambled to read the rest of the papers from Pascal’s desk.

Pascal looked up at the horned puppet in confusion and quickly grabbed the papers she had dropped, looking through them to check if Julie’s accusations were true. Frank got up on his feet and walked over to Julie, raising his brow in confusion. “What? What’s the matter?” He skimmed over the documents right next to Julie as buttons clacked in the background. Frank’s eyes widened, and they shared a look of horror with Pascal, who was holding the dropped papers as the two puppets wordlessly shared the same realization. “Our backburners aren’t in the back, and these pie charts aren’t blueberry flavored…The cans aren’t canned, and our doubloons aren’t even in doubles! This…all of this…” Julie rambled anxiously, mumbling more incomprehensible nonsense to herself. Pascal quickly dropped the papers they were holding and ran over to Frank to whisper one thing before chaos struck. “Mr. Frankly, it has been an honor working with you.” Without missing another beat. Julie threw the papers up in the air and gripped the sides of her head and cried out in despair,

"THIS COMPANY IS GOING DOWN!!!"

#welcome home #welcome home puppet show #welcome home fanfic #julie joyful #welcome home julie #frank frankly #welcome home frank #pascal pushpin #welcome home oc #writing #pyro has a story to tell

[uwmspeccoll]

And Again -- Another Wood-engraved Feathursday

LESLIE EVANS

The Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) is known to spear many things in our local ponds and waterways -- fish, crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and even some small mammals -- but rarely cards with numbers on them. This wood engraving is by Watertown, Massachusetts artist, printmaker, and letterpress printer Leslie Evans (b. 1953), and it was one of the prints selected for inclusion in the Fourth Triennial Exhibition 2020-2022 of the American wood engravers society, the Wood Engravers’ Network (WEN), and the image is from the catalog for that traveling show.

Evans is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was introduced to letterpress printing on the Vandercook proofing press. After stints working for artists and design studios, she founded her own press, Sea Dog Press, and came to wood engraving through annual workshops sponsored by WEN. So why the heron with the number 59? Because this engraving serves as the cover illustration for Block & Burin No. 59, Spring 2018, the official publication for members of the Wood Engravers' Network.

View more Feathursday posts.

View more posts with women wood engravers.

View other posts with engravings from the WEN Fourth Triennial Exhibition.

View more engravings by members of the Wood Engraver’s Network.

View more posts with wood engravings!

#Feathursday #Women's History Month #wood engravings #wood engravers #women wood engravers #Leslie Evans #Great Blue Heron #Block & Burin #Wood Engravers' Network #WEN #WEN Fourth Triennial Exhibition #exhibitions #exhibition catalogs #uwm special collections #birds #birbs!

[kellterntempest]

@tyrannysaurusfloof i thought maybe sending you 2,500 words in your askbox wasn't the best way to send this lol and apparently tumblr doesn't let you send documents in DMs, so i have it in separate post here for u!

Stobotnik Subnautica AU fic snippet

Out of all the Earth luxuries Robotnik was forced to live without, he missed music the most. His CDs, his mixtapes, his curated playlists. He missed the deafening pulse of industrial drum and bass, the intricate rhythms of funk and jazz, the comforting pop classics, and invigorating rock melodies that he could dance to.

Robotnik never fully realized just how miserable a world without music could be. He began humming to himself, even sang songs he only half remembered the lyrics to in an effort to stay sane in the deserted, depressing isolation he was surviving in.

And here he was, humming a Tears for Fears tune while he piloted his submarine vessel 500 meters down under the sea. The submarine that Robotnik constructed and christened "The Eggmarine" was holding up perfectly, just as planned. He never made mistakes when it came to engineering, it was just like breathing to him. Physics, math, science, electronics, all of it was second nature.

Robotnik was able to harness the near endless power supply of the blue quill and recycle parts of his prototype – as only an extraordinary genius like him could do – and he created something incredible after losing nearly everything.

The Eggmarine was an engineering marvel in and of itself, but he had even bigger blueprints in progress. His ultimate mission: to construct a space shuttle capable of interstellar travel. He was going to make it back to Earth no matter what. He'd make it home by Christmas. He declared it boldly to himself out loud after barely surviving the crash landing of his prototype on one of the many islands of the alien planet.

Another great feat that the doctor took pride in was the detailed cataloging and analysis of every single new thing about this alien planet. Countless unknown species of flora, fauna, megafauna, biomes and climates, lifeless ruins of what seemed to be some kind of ancient civilization with astounding technology… It was all exhilarating.

Robotnik was at heart a brilliant scientist, and though the circumstances bringing him to this planet were absolutely horrid, he often found himself feeling like a kid discovering the wonders of science again. He intensively studied the new alien technology he found in the ruins – He was so close to cracking the code to their written language – and vastly advanced his progress  surviving on the planet. With the alien technology he was able to build a much improved habitat and small laboratory with ease.

It had been 63 days now since Sonic sent him crashing through the ring portal in Green Hills. If there was anything he had now, it was down time. Day 63, and he'd already recorded over two hundred new species, determined multiple theories of their evolution, mapped out the string of islands he crashed on, not to mention narrowly escaping being killed and eaten countless times by the local mega predators – which there were plenty of.

Robotnik had faced an assorted deadly lineup of insects, poisonous animals, scavengers, hunters and predators both on land and under the sea, and the kings at the top of the food chain: Leviathan class mega predators – gargantuan creatures similar to the dinosaurs back in earth's ancient history.

Robotnik learned very quickly he had to create a predator of his own if he ever wanted to get off this planet unscathed. 

So he did what he did best, and built a robotic mech suit designed for combat, capable of both land and marine travel, and resource gathering. With it, he was now able to hold his own against most predators, and even fought a few different leviathans in the depths of the ocean and escaped the battles unharmed. But stealth was always the best policy so far – less damage to his precious machine, and less risk of being drowned or eaten.

Robotnik had not found anything that resembled anything close to a sentient life form yet, and the chances of doing so were growing smaller and smaller. He laughed out thinking, was it really that different here from the 8 billion barely sentient monkeys back on earth?

"Passing 750 meters. Pressure stabilized." The robotic voice of the vessel's artificial intelligence spoke, showing the status of all ship systems in green. "Scanners indicate traces of nickel ore below, south west."

Robotnik was currently in search of rare minerals to craft his escape plan. Minerals that he determined could only be found beneath the sea floor in a thermal, volcanic climate. 

The A.I. spoke again, this time with a warning. "Detecting multiple leviathan class life forms in the region. Doctor, are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?"

Of course the exact biome where he needed to go would be crawling with dangerous monsters. The statistical probability that he calculated before was, again, unfortunately proven correct. Of course he had to be right, every time! He thought with a groan. Sometimes, it was worse to be proved right. Even the warm glow of smug satisfaction wears off quickly when you're chased by savage animals out to make you their next meal.

"Shut your trap and keep scanning. I'm not leaving until I get my hands on that ore." Robotnik continued the descent, passing tall black hydrothermal vents – a good sign that he was heading in the right direction.

There was no sound now but the engine's hum, and the steady ping of the sonar system every 7 seconds.

984 meters. Ping. The sonar mapped out the deep trench he was in, and showed a massive crevice opening further down. He was getting readings of small-scale volcanic eruptions in this region, and hoped that crevice was the entrance to his destination.

A loud, organic screech passed through the dark waters, and Robotnik instinctively rushed to hit silent mode.

The internal and external lights went out, and the engine shifted gears. Robotnik sat in the pilot seat, frozen, waiting for another noise.

It was almost worse that he heard nothing.

The artificial intelligence spoke up quickly, casting information in red in the control screens. "Proximity Alert: Threat Detected. Leviathan class life form."

Robotnik cursed out loud, white knuckling the control wheel. 

"Proximity: 50 meters." The A.I. stated. "25… 10… brace for impact."

The side of the sub was hit by something colossal, and Robotnik was nearly thrown out of the pilot chair.

Then another uncomfortably loud sound – a roar vibrating through the metallic chambers and utterly harrowing.

A leviathan predator. A reaper - he recognized the horrible sound.

He didn't have any weapons mounted on the Eggmarine, and he couldn't launch his mech suit and fight back – he was in completely unknown territory and what looked to be about 400 more meters to the bottom of the trench. His mech suit couldn't make it up 400 meters straight up back to the submarine, and no way could he safely swim back to his Eggmarine without getting snapped up. Nightmare scenario again. He could only sit tight, stay on course, and hope the predator would lose interest and leave, or kick engines in high gear and make a break for it.

The sub was hit again, and the alarms began sounding. "Hull damage imminent."

The leviathan was not going to leave.

Robotnik slammed the switches and revved up the engine to full speed. He had to get the hell out of here. The only way through was down.

He was sure every creature in the region could hear the Eggmarine's engines and the roars of the reaper leviathan.

"New Threat Detected: Another Leviathan class life form. Proximity: 58 meters."

Oh no.

Ping. The sonar sounded, and the red outline of another large shape was dead ahead of the submarine's path of escape.

Ping. The shape grew bigger, and it was coming straight for him.

"Proximity Alert: 25 meters."

Robotnik jumped out of his skin, his heart beating out of his chest. "Fucking hell!" He shoved the control wheel forward to avoid the impact. "Nononono!"

The submarine descended sharply, and the leviathan behind him roared, but it was interrupted halfway from a second massive sound bellowing through the depths. The second leviathan growled – but it was completely different from the first – like a harsh rumbling of thunder ending with rhythmic clicking.

"Danger: Engine overheating." Robotnik heard a blast coming from the engine bay.

Everything was going to hell. He couldn't leave the bridge to attend to the fire he knew had started, not with two giant monsters about to tear his ship apart.

The sonar pinged, and Robotnik could see the two leviathans grappling together. It was hard to make out the image from the red flash that lasted only seconds, but it seemed as if they were fighting – it sounded horrible, with the two huge predators growling, howling, and snapping at each other. Roars pierced through the darkness, and the top of the vessel was hit again, worse this time.

"Hull compromised - storage bay ceiling."

Robotnik was flung forwards from the mighty impact of the leviathans. “Damn it, come on! Go!” He hissed, reorienting himself on the controls and leaning into them as if it would make the sub go faster. He saw a blink of movement in the glass, a blur of 2 long tails and fins swiftly passing the front of the bridge, so fast he could barely make it out in the dark.

Robotnik shoved the wheel as far forward as possible, plummeting the vessel in a rapid descent. "Not today you hungry mongrels! This snack is out of your league!" He taunted through clenched teeth.

If he could only reach the crevice, maybe he could find a place to hide, buy time to repair the hull damage, and stand his ground against the leviathans in the mech suit. The engines had to burn for a little longer, there was no other choice.

But the universe had other plans.

"Engine Damage Critical. Shutting Down."

"AARGH– give me a big, fat break!!" Robotnik yelled in frustration, still pushing the wheel hard.

The Eggmarine's movement slowed to a halt, floating dead in the water.

Ping. The sonar marked the vast, empty space of his location in the ocean, in a trench about 700 kilometers wide with mountainous walls going nearly straight upwards on either side of it.

There was 1 dot left on his display. 1 leviathan.

Threat Proximity: 20 meters. 

There was nothing Robotnik could do. The sub's engine was down, a breach was ripping the hull, and a hungry, territorial leviathan was coming for him.

The creature sounded – a short, clicking rumble. It was the second leviathan, the one Robotnik had never heard before.

It was swimming up from the deep, still chasing him after surviving and presumably winning its deadly fight with the reaper.

The sonar rang out again. Ping.

The creature responded to the sonar with the same short rumble, ending with an ascending trill.

Robotnik leaned forward, brows furrowed at this new behavior. He switched off the sonar and floodlights and watched anxiously for movement.

Something slowly floated up into view of the glass dome of the Eggmarine's bridge.

Robotnik saw scaled and finned limbs coming from the dark, and they gently landed on the glass below him. He counted three, no, four arm-like appendages.

They almost resembled… webbed hands, pressed against the glass. They lifted, and tapped the glass several times, almost experimentally. The bang of the glass nearly gave Robotnik a heart attack.

The creature swam from beneath the glass up until it was directly in front of the pilot's control panel. The leviathan made no noise since the last sonar soundwave, and stayed in its spot facing the front glass of the bridge, its body swishing slowly side to side in the darkness.

Robotnik was almost afraid to turn the exterior flood lights back on, but he had to know what kind of beast was staring him in the face. 

This leviathan was an entirely different species from any other he'd seen. It was slightly smaller in length than the reaper, but its body was much thicker and more mammalian. Its underbelly looked smooth, but its 6 limbs, spine and tail were scaled and armored. Its lower pair of arms were tucked into itself, and the top two arms swayed in front. It had two powerful muscular legs that were treading slowly in the water, and its long, spined tail snaked along with them.

Its head was more frighteningly humanoid than he would ever have expected. In its face were multiple sets of eyes squinting back, blinking rapidly from the bright floodlights. Small clusters of bubbles escaped from gills on either side of its neck, and 2 long, thin rays coming out of either side of its head with bioluminescent bulbs at the end. 

Robotnik turned the sonar back on. A single ping.

The creature rumbled back, and it almost sounded like a whale's call in an attempt to imitate the sonar's frequency. It made no sudden movements, continuing to tread in place with unhurried motions.

Robotnik breathed out a shaken gasp of relief. This creature, whatever it was, didn't seem to see him on its menu right now. However, he had no time to investigate the intentions of the leviathan, he had engine fires to put out and a catastrophic implosion to prevent.

He left the sonar on to keep the creature distracted, switched the internal lights back on and ran full speed into the engine room to extinguish the fires. A thin stream of water was steadily spraying like a fire hydrant from a small breach in the plasteel ceiling that was getting worse every minute from the massive pressure of about 1200 PSI from the outside.

Robotnik yanked the repair tool off the wall, and clipped his harness to the suspension support and hauled himself up into the air to reach the storage bay ceiling.

He focused on welding the breach as best he could through the low visibility of the water flying everywhere and covering his goggles.

"It's just another day!" He shouted above the noise of the welding. "Just another day in the life of Dr. Ivo Robotnik, greatest man on earth AND planet 4546B! Day 63, boldly going! It's Tuesday back home! Stupid blue alien rat and its stupid magic rings!"

A strange, fuzzy sensation suddenly passed through his head. It was like a soft static of a distant radio, organic sounds garbled and unintelligible within. It was growing louder and louder. Robotnik cursed out loud. What the hell was next? Had he developed some new medical or psychological condition from a dangerous stimuli he'd unknowingly interacted with? 

There was a painful pop of pressure in his head, as if the air pressure had climbed steeply in seconds – and the static noise stopped, both his ears started ringing a high pitched drone.

But Robotnik kept welding, he couldn't stop or he'd be dead in minutes, crushed from the impending implosion.

Finally, the water subsided, and the breach was closed.

Robotnik hung suspended in the air in his harness, breathing hard through the adrenaline rush and pain in his ears and head.

He slid down, and landed unsteadily on his feet on the metal floor. Back to the bridge. He was certain that all the noise from the Eggmarine's roaring engines and the leviathan fight would attract other predators.

The leviathan was gone from the view of the glass dome.

The sonar went off, and Robotnik saw the creature was floating in place beside the top of the sub, close to where the hull breach was. And now, it was swimming back into view of the bridge again.

Robotnik swallowed a prickle of fear. What the hell was it doing?

The high pitched ringing was at its loudest now. Robotnik leaned over the console, elbows hitting the metal, and clasped both hands to the side of his head, pushing them hard against his skull in a panicked effort to make the pain stop.

But the agonizing drone faded sharply into nothing, and was replaced with something else – a voice, soft and low pitched, echoing clear inside his head. 

"Who…are…you?"

#subnautica au #stobotnik #my fics #Stone takes the place of sea emperor leviathan woooooo lets gooooo scaly giant telepathic monster boy #leviathan!stone

[muzzleroars]

Bit of a stretch but I like to think that V2 is just chilling in the apartment while all this Michael stuff is happening, disassociating from the issue.

What happens to them anyway?

SO...SO CLEARLY….some development has gone on with v2 lately, but first point is that i do have it living apart from gabe and v1 in its own space, though v2 has more crash points for itself – it likes to change its environment sometimes, but its most lived in spaces are in fraud (for the company – largely it’s getting used to gabriel, but things with v1 are still strained at best...v1 is making an effort at least, so it’s something) and in lust (due to the human influence there – limbo is far too artificial for its liking). v2 is largely coming to terms with the idea that its dream of peace is one that will never be realized, and for now is feeding its studious nature in hopes that maybe there can still be some place for it that won’t see its potential entirely wasted. gabriel does keep it in the loop with anything it needs to know, so it’s made aware of michael and the prime souls as threats which prove to be big headaches – in time, i do like the idea it’s one of the few machines minos won’t engage on sight given v2’s particular attachment to humanity, but at first? it shuffles itself off grudgingly into the uncanny valley of limbo to avoid him. WHICH. is where it meets michael.

i very much like the idea that michael basically tries to fuck around with lust and finds out, not fully realizing how badly he’s injured when he fights against minos as it was meant to be a more fact-finding mission to assess the power of a prime soul. however, since his sensation is completely fucked, minos takes a lot more out of him than he meant to allow (he direly underestimated the amount of damage a prime soul can do in a short amount of time), and he only recognizes that when his wings have difficulty getting him off the ground, his movements becoming far too slow. the good news for him is that he’s still fully capable of teleporting to retreat...he just doesn’t get very far with how drained he is and how limited his light has become. he lands in limbo and almost immediately collapses, though knowing he’s safe even just a layer up since he won’t be pursued. except. when mike is passed out, he basically looks like a forest floor corpse, and that’s pretty much exactly what v2 takes him as upon finding him. it’s instantly utterly fascinated by him, as angelic carcasses aren’t exactly common, and it starts poking around to study his necrobiome which is actually a welcome sight in the artificiality of limbo. it didn’t even KNOW plants like this could grow in hell...but perhaps that speaks to the unique properties of an angel’s body. it delicately begins to catalog the species it can see, careful not to damage the still well-preserved internal anatomy since it’s been tricky finding many sources on the insides of angels, but most of all it sort of just. marvels at him. it’s like an entire little living world in hell, flowers, moss, fungus, and even insects all clinging to the body and nothing around it. much more beautiful than the rest of limbo anyway.

it spends a couple hours like this until it decides to remove his helmet in hopes of finding a decent-looking head beneath it (gabe’s so cagey about it) – unfortunately just the first gentle tug is enough to snap mike awake and instinctively grab at v2’s arm, scaring the living shit out of it!!! YEA there’s plenty of fucked up guys in hell, but this one has a whole ecosystem!!!! he looks like he’s been lying there for weeks!!!! and yet...with a split-second more thought, this is by far more interesting than the alternative, and v2 scuttles to catch up to michael trying (and failing) to drag himself away from it, black, bile-like ichor coughed up from the cracks in his helmet. he needs help. and while michael’s pride and hatred initially dismiss v2’s pestering entirely, i think he gets worn down for a few reasons coupled with a dull, sometimes now faulty mind – v2 speaks and reasons, and it expresses a clear desire to help despite mike being a pretty easy source of blood at the moment (he knows even that is rancid, but apparently the machines can still get something out of it). additionally, it extends that offer into understanding him, into possibly providing him answers that even heaven has failed to produce...and michael wants that more than he wants anything. more than punishing the sinners left, more than reinstating god’s will, more, perhaps, than finding god himself by now. he just wants to know what happened and if anyone can save him. it’s sinful, it’s selfish, but he’s so exhausted and all he feels is the rot infecting every inch of his body inside and out. and so he stops. and it’s an evil thing, looking to answers from something never touched by god. but maybe that’s why he accepts, because while he doesn’t consciously admit to it, god’s kingdom has failed him.

SO v2 gets a great science experiment trying to figure out what happened to michael, which the two are incredibly secretive about for obvious reasons – v2 learns a bit later this is the michael is was supposed to avoid (oops) while michael CLEARLY doesn’t want anyone ever knowing he would be seeing a machine for help and advice. this causes a lot of friction whenever they meet, yet because of everything i mentioned in that earlier ask, they start bonding without recognizing it or fully committing to it. they are both desperately lonely and trying to recover from losing the maker they had been so dedicated to, a dedication so powerful in both of them that they had destroyed themselves for it. AND LISTEN. NOT TO GET TOO LOST IN IT BUT. i think it’s quietly life-altering for mike when v2 expresses genuine belief that he’s beautiful as he is now. everyone is so afraid to look at him. he’s afraid. but v2 isn’t, not in the slightest as it takes in every part of him and freely offers its amazement, touches him without any hesitation. and while v2 basically just meant as an opinion, they both immediately realize how it’s taken and are like uh oh!!!!!!!! oh fuck oh no!!!!!!! they’re in it now and are actually in a little deep!!!!

#SOMETHING ABOUT THEM ABSOLUTELY CAPTIVATES ME #and like they're mostly a huge mess #but i think it's a good way for mike to start coming around tbh #bc this probably all breaks with a 'and what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament???' between him and gabe lmao #cake answers #v2 #michael #rise and fall au