#oracle.wip

[kaatiba]

flash fiction challenge with @ragewrites | prompt 01

a scene which takes place in a temple, or other site of worship. (500 words or less.)

The sunlight is soft here, dust-laden, filtered through high windows into slanted pillars against the mosaic floors. Your mother looks beautiful and very young, her hair as long and as vibrantly red as your own, her face soft and unlined and full-cheeked, not hollow or careworn.

You’ve never seen her like this before; she had no history in your world, and so no photographs documenting her youth. For you, she’d always been short-haired and too thin, deep lines carved into her brow and around her mouth, dressed perpetually in jeans and a soft and oversized t-shirt.

You recognize her anyway. You would know your mother anywhere, in any world.

She walks now, dressed in elegant blue and purple, gold threaded through her hair and adorning her hands, towards the raised altar in the center of the circular room.

The altar that will be, in the future, your prison. Where you once were (or will be) chained by magic, there is a towering mass of melted candles, a little city in and of itself arcing around the gold and marble rune-tiles that channel the offerings the worshippers give their god. Your mother kneels before one such tile with remarkable grace, considering the swell of her belly, and places her palms over the tiles, breathing in once, long and slow.

On her exhale, the runes glow, fed by the essence of magic she’s poured into it. The offerings keep the city safe, because the city is built from the bones of a god, and though the god is dead, the vitality in the bones are not—not after hundreds of years of offerings. The bones are strong and unassailable, and so the city is strong and unassailable.

And in return, sometimes, when the god deigns to, the worshippers are gifted something in return.

It happens now, with your mother. She stiffens, her eyes flying open and then rolling back until all you can see are the whites. She doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move, for a small eternity. And then all at once she gasps and jerks away with a shudder and half-aborted cry, curling over on herself.

When she straightens, she looks more like the woman you remember, the beginnings of worry lines touching her face, her eyes dark and sad like they were all the days of her life that you knew of.

“No,” she says, to herself or to something you can’t see or maybe to the god’s bones, voice strained and broken. “No. You can’t have him. I’ll take him away—somewhere you can’t reach. Even if I have to break the world to do it.”

And then she looks straight at you, even though this is a memory preserved, even though you aren’t really there, even though it isn’t possible. “I’ll keep you safe,” she swears to you, fervent. “The gods can’t have you. You’re mine.”

technically this fits my wip oracle but is likely to get jossed as I write it further. I'm very happy with this scene though and it's got me thinking thoughts about my plot

taglist (ask to be +/-): @muddshadow, @lockejhaven, @tracle0, @anonymousfoz, @hyba

#oracle.wip #kaatibawrites #this was fun! #thank u so much for reaching out and setting this up #im excited to do more prompts!

[kaatiba]

pheonix, wizard, and villain from the fantasy asks!

Thanks for asking!

Phoenix: Have you invented any fantasy creatures?

I have! I talked about fantasy creatures in LofM here, but there's another creature I once intended for LofM and am now transplanting into Oracle: soot dragons! They are little dragons which can vary from a few inches long to three feet at maximum, and they love heat and generate light when warm. They don't breathe fire, really, but they can cough sparks (like the kind you get when you flick a lighter) when they're sufficiently heated so they are a fire hazard. You can also feed them lit coal to get them to generate heat and light, if you don't have a fire or something hot for them to crawl into. They get their name because the littlest ones (wild) can often be found in ovens and fireplaces and firepits, covered in soot. When they're lit up, though, they're very beautiful, and so the larger ones have been domesticated and bred for purpose, and provide lighting for those who can afford them. I love them a lot.

Wizard: Who is your favourite character in this WIP? Describe them!

Well, since we're talking about Oracle, my favourite character is...Sage. He's my POV character and he is a mess. His ex-girlfriend locked him inside his body and set him up as a fake oracle, and he spent about a year basically in solitary confinement in his own head, paralyzed and conscious the entire time. He is full of rage and revenge plans and pain. He is very much unwell. I love it >:}

Villain: Do you prefer creating heroes or villains?

Both are so fun and delicious tbh! I especially love (again, in Oracle) that I have a hero, a chosen one, who decided to become a worse villain than the one she was meant to defeat!

send me fantasy writer asks!

#replies #kaatiba.speaks #oracle.wip #omg referenced the wrong wip! its not glitch its oracle!

[kaatiba]

heads up seven up

thanks for the tag @zmwrites!

here are the last seven lines sentences (...roughly) from my oracle wip, an alice in wonderland retelling & isekai novel!

Alyss didn’t march prisoners through the temple proper; she preferred to sneak them in with the help of her Spymaster and head torturer through a hidden door and passage that led from the prison. You walk over to where the latch is disguised as an engraving in the wall, press it, and watch as the door opens and reveals the passageway behind. “Convenient,” Ro says. “Where does this lead?” You tell her. “Less convenient,” she hums. “But…hm, better than taking the main doors. Alright then, gents first.” You cast her an uncertain look but obediently duck through.

tagging (no pressure): @thelittlestspider, @chauceryfairytales, @fayeiswriting and whoever else would like to play, just @ me!

taglist (ask to be +/-): @muddshadow, @lockejhaven, @tracle0, @anonymousfoz

#kaatibawrites #oracle.wip #isekai #portal fantasy #writeblr #wip excerpt #alice in wonderland #alice in wonderland retelling #tag meme

[kaatiba]

oracle wip - an opening snippet

There’s a new guard.

You notice her because she looks you in the eyes, and that’s something no one does any more, not even Alyss. You flinch, but only on the inside.

One moment you’re not focusing on anything, in that foggy space where you’re almost-asleep and everything’s far away and dreamlike, and the next you’re aware, with a jolt like a shock, of what’s happening, what she’s doing.

She has green eyes, this guard. A dark, deep green that’s almost black. She looks into your eyes and you look back because you quite literally can’t not, even as you brace yourself—

But nothing happens.

She doesn’t start screaming or shaking, doesn’t start gibbering or clawing at her face, doesn’t collapse. She just looks at you, and after an endless moment her eyes drift away, trailing over your face, your body, suspended before her. Her stare is as tangible as a touch, leaving phantom prickles in its wake that linger even after she looks away, turning her back on you as the other guard—Menik—shifts with a sigh.

She seems as sane as ever. Whatever it is that’s wrong with your eyes hasn’t driven her mad.

Maybe she’s already insane, you think. Or maybe she has some way to protect herself.

You don’t know. You can’t ask her. You can’t do anything.

You don’t like remembering that.

You let yourself drift off again.

*

The guard’s name is Ro. She’s new to the palace. She talks easily, lightly, with Menik. You listen. You could tune her out, but she’s far more interesting than the inside of your head or anything else in this horrible gilded room. She’s made you curious, and you haven’t felt anything besides numb despair and seething hatred for so long.

So you listen, all your attention fixed on her.

She says she’s in her twenty-fifth year and her father was a soldier and her mother a farrier. She says she has a sister Menik’s age, who’s married with three children. She says she was so excited to become the oracle’s guard, but it’s actually kind of boring, and is it always like this?

You wonder if you’re imagining the wrongness in her tone. (You spend a lot of time imagining things, after all. It helps the time pass.) When Ro talks she sounds almost, but not quite, genuine. Her tone is just a little too airy…or maybe you’re just too wretched to be able to take someone who seems so cheerful seriously.

Menik laughs. “Everyone gets disappointed,” he says, leaning on his spear. All you can see of them are their backs, since they’re facing away from you. “They expect to see wonders while guarding the oracle, given he’s…well. An oracle.”

“So this is really all he does?” Ro asks, nodding her head toward you and glancing at you over her shoulder, looking you in the eye again for a brief moment. It’s electric. Electric that she does it, electric that doing so doesn’t affect her at all. “He just…floats there?”

“Mhm,” Menik hums. “Unless her majesty’s visiting, but we’re to wait outside when that happens.”

“Oh,” Ro says, sounding disappointed. “But—so does something happen when the queen visits then?”

“Doors’ spelled silent,” says Menik. “I’m sure plenty happens, but we don’t hear none of it.”

Nobody…nobody hears you?

That shouldn’t hit you like a blow, but it does.

Nobody hears you. Nobody hears what happens in this room. Nobody hears the prisoners, Alyss’s enemies, be driven mad as they’re forced to make eye contact with you. Nobody hears your screaming or your begging or the dull answers you give Alyss for her interrogations or the tantrums she throws when your answers aren’t useful enough.

Soon you won’t have anything at all to tell her. Maybe then she’ll finally kill you. If you die here, will you finally go home? Or will it just be the end of everything you are?

You’ve lost track of the conversation, of the world. When you tune back in, Menik and Ro are gone, replaced by Talma and Rafe.

They’re boring. They never do anything but play cards or read books or have naps. They’ve been guarding you since the beginning, however long it’s been, which means they don’t really guard you at all anymore. Nothing ever happens. There’s nothing to guard you from.

They don’t realize that they’re here to guard against you.

Theoretically, anyway—after all, you can’t move. Can’t even control your blinks or your breaths. You just float there, trapped inside yourself, until Alyss deigns to let you out.

But she likes to be prepared. If you do manage to break out somehow—it would take a miracle—the guards are there to stop you. Your only weapons against them are your eyes, and they have strict instructions not to meet your gaze, lest they be driven mad…so none of them do.

Except Ro.

Why does she do that? Why does she look at you? Did she somehow know she’d be safe? How is she safe? Is it something about her, or is it something done to her, or is it something about you and her that’s different from you and everybody else? Even Alyss doesn’t look you in the eye anymore. No, before she releases you, she blindfolds you and ties your hands so you can’t rip the blindfold off and try and make her look at you.

You chew on these questions until the frustration of not knowing, of not being able to ever know, unless someone says something where you can hear it, starts to make you want to scream.

For a little while, you do. Scream that is.

Just silently, inside your own head.

It’s not as satisfying.

*

You eventually lose interest in Ro too. She stops talking so much, settling into her position as a guard. She doesn’t look at you all that often anymore either. You miss it. Miss being seen. Miss being interested in what’s happening around you. You spend more and more time lost in your head. That should probably frighten you, but the capacity to be frightened has been worn out of you.

Nowadays you’re either frothing with pointless rage or numb.

So it’s a shock, a complete and utter shock, when one night, indistinguishable from the countless nights you’ve spent in your prison, Ro pulls a gimlet blade of a knife from her belt, turns to Menik, and slits his throat in one swift movement.

Menik doesn't even have a chance to make a sound before he's crumpling into Ro's waiting arms and being lowered slowly to the floor.

She pats his cheek with a solem expression at odds with the crow-brightness of her eyes. “This is a better ending for you than letting you be found by the Queen," she says. "She'd have made you suffer. This is quick and painless—look, you're already gone."

While you’re still reeling from the murder, she begins doffing her armour, until all she’s left wearing are the clothes underneath and the leather armguards. As she undresses, she stares down at your spell circle, brows furrowed, an expression of intense concentration on her face.

Heart pounding double time in the hollow of your throat, giddy anticipation thrumming through your veins, you wonder what she’s going to do next. Or attempt to do, anyway.

She must be an assassin.

Those tapered off a while ago, though you’re not sure how long ‘a while’ actually was. It doesn’t matter; other assassins have tried to kill you. Seven, at last count, but there could have been more that never even made it into your room.

Unfortunately and obviously, none of them have been successful. None of them have even gotten close to being successful. Your prison is too well-formed—the three concentric rings of spells keep you unable to move or speak.

The outer ring is all about security. That’s the section that prevents anybody from crossing its bounds and acts as a shield against projectiles both mundane and magical in nature: the only things allowed through are air, light, and Alyss.

The middle ring maintains your body, preserving your physical health and mobility, placing you in stasis so that you don’t need nourishment as often and no waste is excreted.

The inner ring is all flashy sigils that make you float and cause a breeze that makes your hair move for added ambience. It's a complete waste of magic, in your opinion, but it adds to the mystical effect, and Alyss always did have a tendency towards spectacle.

She'd explained your prison to you in painstaking, gloating detail, while you'd had no choice but to listen, paralyzed and terrified and devastated.

You’re curious to see how far Ro gets. What she’ll try next. How much she knows about your trap. Being a guard, she’s had ample time to study it, if she can see it. To the unmagical, you just look like you’re floating on an altar. Anyone with enough magical ability will see the glow of the sigils. Anyone studied would be able to decode the spell. Only a master of magic would be able to unmake it, and not without alerting Alyss that her spell is being tampered with.

But she shocks you again. She doesn't try to unravel the spell. Doesn't test it with magic or weapons.

She just walks right through the circles, unimpeded and casual, until she’s only a foot away from you. It takes her all of three steps. The sigils flicker like electricity shorting out beneath her feet and then resume their steady glow once she’s no longer touching them.

You would goggle at her if you could manage anything but the resting placid expression your face has settled into.

She looks up at you. She’s standing too close for you to be able to make out more than the top of her head at about chin level with you. This is it, then. For all of Alyss's efforts, someone's beat her.

An assassin has made it through. You wonder, with staggering relief, just how Ro's going to kill you. You're not even afraid as you once were about dying. Not anymore. Not now that it means this is over.

Ro will kill you and you’ll either be free or dead, but either way, you won’t be trapped anymore, locked inside of yourself, inside of this room, inside of this world.

You feel a twinge of regret that you won’t be able to make Alyss suffer worse than she’s made you suffer, but you know your loss will hit her where it hurts the most. And if there's any justice in the world, your death will mean a reset.

Alyss will be dead along with you and she'll lose everything. You wonder if she'll even have time to know when she loses it all.

Ro shifts. If you could brace yourself you would.

But death doesn't come. Instead, her hand wraps around your wrist.

You register the searing sensation of her skin only after you’ve plummeted to the ground, suddenly and fully in yourself.

For a second you don’t remember how to breathe or move or even hold yourself up, assaulted by sensation—her hand still on your wrist, all calloused palms and long fingers and warmth, your knees smarting from their collision with the stones, the weight of your overgrown hair, of your clothes, of your limbs, of gravity bearing you down, down, down.

You make a horrible gurgling choking noise and your whole body jerks wildly—trying to get away, trying to get ahold of yourself, trying to look up at her, trying to breathe.

“Woah, woah, take it easy,” Ro says, crouching down in front of you and grabbing you by the shoulder with her free hand, grip firm to the point of bruising, forcing you still, holding you upright.

You've never been so aware of anyone’s touch before in your whole life—

You inhale harshly, exhale brokenly, stop flailing, though you can’t stop trembling. “L-let go,” you croak, trying to break free of her hold on you.

Her touch burns. Not in any magical way, no, just in being too much.

She’s very strong, or you’re very weak; all you really accomplish is an exaggerated twitch rather than anything effective.

“If I let you go the spell will take you again,” Ro says, brow arched high. “And I want to talk to you.”

You twitch again, but towards her rather than away, the base instinct to grasp tightly to what will keep you safe driving you to twist your hands in the material of her shirt and cling. Weakly, sure, but fervently. She looks down at your grip on her and then up at you, and obviously, clearly, allows it to happen.

“How—why—what is this?” you ask, stumbling over the words, your tongue, your teeth.

“A temporarily suspended assassination,” Ro replies, smiling cheerily. Her eyes crinkle up with the force of it. There are droplets of blood on her cheek.

“If I kill the oracle, I’ll make a fortune from two different contracts. I haven’t decided if that means I have to kill you yet, though.” Then her gaze goes sharp, her smile razor-edged. “But shouldn’t you already know that?”

You blink at her, mind rapidly spinning, twisting, turning over itself. Oracle, right. You’re the oracle. Alyss’s oracle.

Except you’re not. Alyss is a liar in this as in all things.

What do you do now? You only have more questions, but asking them is admitting to not knowing, and if you don't know then you’re not an oracle, and if you’re not an oracle, will Ro still kill you?

The possibility of surviving, of escaping—

Death is better than being trapped, but living free is better than being dead. After all, you can always die later. If you get out of here, you can torment Alyss the way she’s tormented you. You can take everything from her, the way she’s taken everything from you.

Ro is staring at you, expectant. You make a decision. It’s ironic, or maybe self-destructive, proof that you’ve lost it completely, that it’s the same decision that ruined you—to tell the truth.

“'M not,” you rasp. “'M not the oracle.”

#oracle.wip #>:] #everyone is terrible in this wip btw #except maybe sage but only for now #murder cw #death cw #uhhhh my mc has been driven insane via torture and the weirdest form of longterm solitary confinement #everything is bad and everything hurts on purpose ❤️ #let me know what triggers to tag for #torture cw #imprisonment cw #kaatibawrites #i love writing 2nd person its so fun and screwy #long post #my feral baby sage and my amoral darling ro first meeting uwu #dissociation cw

[kaatiba]

OC Weaknesses

tagged by @faytelumos​ (who also made this meme!)

Rules: Quick, name a bunch of your OCs and their weaknesses, but it has to be funny.

Oracle

Sage: broke the world by being a giant nerd and creating a self-insert for his favourite book series. also his long, luscious, totally impractical-for-someone-on-the-run hair. 

Ro: magic doesn’t work on or through her. she literally nullifies it. no magic healing for her if she gets stabbed. good thing she never gets stabbed, huh. 👀 eventually sage becomes a weakness too; unfortunately she likes the feral, helpless little loser. 

Alyss: her total inability to be chill, the ex-boyfriend she imprisoned and tortured, and her nothing-matters-and-I’m-about-to-make-that-everybody’s-problem philosophy on life. 

Fintan: literally can’t be on time if his life depended on it. carries a pocket-watch everywhere and is still always late. also has a chronic case of Snooty Bastard disease in both the literal and figurative sense. unfortunately it’s incurable, RIP.

Jax: best worst dad. saved an orphaned street kid from getting experimented on by an unethical magi-scientist. raised said kid to murder people for profit. is so proud of her. it might kill him to express that though. 

LofM

Halah: wanted to have a fun adventure. got trauma instead. doesn’t learn her lesson, goes on another adventure. trauma x2: electric boogaloo, but this time for a good cause. 

Raoul: intolerable Noble Asshole, in love with his married cousin, thinks Halah’s evil, maybe.

Ilyas: likes Raoul, who’s kind of a jerk, and is in denial about it. in love with Halah, convinced she’ll never see him that way. totally ignorant of the fact that he’s the Best Boy.

Nilam: literally none, she’s the coolest person ever. down to fight Raoul at the slightest provocation though, which can be inconvenient.

Sirin: doesn’t realize her cousin’s in love with her. has no idea what she’s getting into when she goes on a cross-country treasonous road-trip to rescue her kid or die trying. 

Nur-al-Hayat: unfortunately, mommy and daddy issues. soon to be brother issues too. 

Glitch

Cipher: might get himself killed with his need to make a quip at every (in)opportune moment. his entire identity is wrapped up in his brother-who-isn’t-really-his-brother, and without him, who is he even?

Sasha: so busy angsting over whether she’s a person that she completely misses that she is the coolest ever, actually. also thinks cipher’s funny. might crack her face if she smiles though. 

Etienne: rich white boy realizes too late his parents are Evil, his money comes from Evil, and that he’s Evil by association if he doesn’t do anything about it. tries to run away from it all, fails successfully, and then accidentally triggers a civil war. 

Rivener

Wren: could break everything and herself if she thinks about anything for too long.

Kai: that is my precious darling angel baby boy and i love him. some might side-eye him for giving his former slaver one single chance to redeem herself and then falling in love with her, but actually his heart is just huge and enormous and you wouldn’t get it.

Cormac: Area Man In a Stupid Hat Ruins Everything. critical failure to consider other people as people.

*

tagging: @tracle0, @hyba, @athemarina, @zmwrites, and @sculpture-in-a-period-drama

#tag meme #rivener* #lofm.wip #oracle.wip #glitch.wip #kaatibawrites #this was SO FUN

[kaatiba]

oracle wip - snippet

@tracle0​ im directly @ing you because i know in my marrow you’ll appreciate this

You let out a half-hysterical bark of a laugh. Oh, to be disbelieved now. "'M tellin' the truth," you swear. "This is just one of Alyss's lies." You grimace, shake your head, correct yourself. "One of my lies but I only told it because I had to, to save them, to save her, but then she stole it and spun it because she's a spider, just paralyzing people with her poison so she can eat them—"

Fingers snap under your nose, startling you out of the vitriolic rant you've tripped into. 

"Alright sweetheart, it's clear you're completely off your rocker," Ro says. "But if you don't stop babbling nonsense I'm going to get bored and kill you and sleep easy with the certainty that the floating pretty boy on the altar at the centre of the palace—guarded under lock, key, and spell—is exactly the oracle he looks like. So go on—convince me you aren't. We've got a couple hours before the change of the guards, but my attention span isn't gonna hold that long."

the taglist for this wip is open! lmk in whichever way you prefer if you wanna be added to it! 

general writing taglist (open!): @muddshadow​, @lockejhaven

#oracle.wip #kaatibawrites #my boy sage and my murderous girl ro #love them #murder threats is her love language....and also regular language #ableism cw #just in case tbh #spiders are chill and cool sage is just a hater

[kaatiba]

what if dragons but the dragons eat magic

#also soot dragons would fit wonderfully in oracle wip #into it they go #was thinking ifnu have big predator what do they eat??? #option 1: like blue whales they eat the euivalent of krill #option 2: they eat magic #and thats how they can possibly exist #i like both #oracle.wip #kaatibawrites

[kaatiba]

Hiiii can you talk about 3 4 and 5 from the icebreaker asks for Oracle pls?

Hi I for sure can, thanks for asking!

3. What’s your favorite thing about your wip and why?

I like that everyone is toxic. It's a wip where I'm not holding back and letting everyone be terrible in their own ways, which is really quite freeing to write and very cathartic. I write it when I'm stressed or angry, which says enough lol. My MC, Sage, wants nothing more than to make Alyss, his ex, suffer like she made him suffer by trapping him in his own body and only letting him free to move a few times. Alyss, meanwhile, had an existential crisis accidentally caused by Sage and decided to make it everyone's problem, starting with him, and became a tyrant. Ro is an unrepentant assassin who enjoys her job and enjoys the money even more and only didn't kill Sage because she thought she'd get more money from keeping him alive. Ro's adoptive dad raised her to be an assassin.

4. How would you explain your wip to someone who knew nothing about it?

Oracle wip is an Alice-in-Wonderland retelling as an isekai novel where one of the characters fell into a fantasy book world and is trapped there. It's told from 2nd person POV so that the reader's forced into the MC's headspace, can really understand that the MC has a v fractured relationship with himself, and to immerse the reader in the isekai experience.

5. What’s the most important thing to know about your wip?

Everyone is terrible to and for each other on purpose, for fun :)

send me writeblr ice-breaking asks!

#replies #oracle.wip #thanks for asking! i love this wip lol

[kaatiba]

What if i give Ro a huge f off impractical anime sword. What then.

#its so impractical and unsubtle #but she loves it #cant take it on her assassinations #bc yknow stealth #gives it to sage #he tears up a little #he loves it so much #Cannot wield it even a little bit #but hes a dweeb so he likes it for the aesthetic #this wip is becoming absolutely unhinged it is SO FUN #i am doing WHATEVER I WANT WITH IT #love this #go me #oracle.wip #kaatibawrites #kaatiba.speaks

[kaatiba]

oracle wip excerpt — in which a phenomena is (not) experienced

❝Magic spills across the skies in ribbons of fiery blue and green and all the shades in between, licking at the velvet black, the stars, the very air. Usually, only kindlers of particular strength or skill or both can see or taste or feel magic, but when the skies are ablaze, everyone can feel it, can see it.

It’s a song, tugging at your heart, sending ripples of sensation down your spine, making all the little hairs on your arms and the back of your neck rise, making your scalp prickle, making your eyes water with pure indefinable emotion. It’s vitality, waking you up more fully than you’ve ever been before, making every breath feel like the first true free breath after long imprisonment, making your blood rush and soar.

It’s awareness, real awareness of Reality, of yourself and the magic inside you and in the earth just as it is above you, paths everywhere, through everything, linking it all together, one great mass of arteries, one great body, one great heart, alive alive alive. It’s entrancing and wondrous and—

—and to Ro, it’s nothing but pretty lights. Magnificently pretty, yes. But only something to look at.❞

general tag list: @lockejhaven

(taglist is open! both for all my writings, and just for this wip!)

#oracle.wip #Ro is Not Sad about this by the way #Ro thinks Being Sad is a silly waste of effort honestly and not very comfortable and why on earth would anyone indulge it #when its so much easier and better and enjoyable to be Not Sad and just...happy #so she chases after and keeps the things that make her Happy #which is usually gold and thus sometimes murder #(she's an assassin i love her) #this was inspire by seeing a video of northern lights btw #there are a few lies in this piece #but are they lies really? #'everyone' can see it and feel it #but do you count if you're a void? #kaatibawrites

[kaatiba]

belatedly genius idea: ro is the cheshire cat >:}

#oracle.wip #should she leave a calling card? #.....just imagine her carrying a buncha business cards along w her murder accoutrements im CACKLING #it's just good business she says to an unimpressed and mildly aghast sage

[kaatiba]

I was trying to figure out a plot thing for my oracle wip, and I've just realized I'm making it way more complicated than it needs to be. If the premise of the story is everything that can be imagined exists as a reality somewhere then how [redacted] knows about [redacted] can be as simple as: it's real in one world and fiction in the other!

which made me think, well then, premise no. 2 is be careful what you wish for

and now I think the power of two mirrored wishes may just be powerful enough to open doorways between worlds, and there is a bit of soul in ink and definitely links in blood and love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe(s).

#if u have no idea what im talking about thats ok im being vague on purpose for spoiler reasons #anyways im excited #and ive also accepted and am looking forward to writing the prologue story before the one i intended to write #kaatiba.speaks #oracle.wip

[kaatiba]

oracle wip [snippet]

❝ she holds my face gently in her hands. her thumbs rest on the points of my cheekbones. “you’re an awful person,” she breathes. “i see you. i know you. you’re unworthy of life, of love, of me. of anything good. of any peace.”

she pauses. her eyes shift between mine. i can feel the pulse of her heart in her palms. “does it make you feel better, now that i’ve said it aloud?” she asks.

i shake my head minutely. i feel like i’m choking on air.

“i didn’t think it would,” she says, and her smile is cruel, condescending.

she tips forward, kisses me, a gentle press of her lips against mine. she doesn’t pull away, speaks with our skin touching, like she wants to make sure i feel her words as well as hear them. like they’ll sink in more permanently that way. engrave deeper. scar over.

“here’s the thing, sage, sweetheart,” she says, half a whisper. “i don’t care that you’re awful. i don’t care that you’re undeserving. i don’t care how corrupt your soul is. i don’t even really care how much a part of you doesn’t want this, because i know that part of you is full of shit, and it’s just louder than the part of you that wants this so bad you think it might kill you, or ruin you, or make you break. i’m choosing you anyway. i’m keeping you anyway. go ahead and try and run away.

i’ll never stop coming after you.” ❞

#before anyone comes after me this is a toxic relationship on purpose #oracle.wip #kaatibawrites #btw i am not on hiatus but im also not NOT on hiatus but a secret third thing #if that helps :)

[kaatiba]

oracle wip excerpt

❝For a second you don’t remember how to inhale or move or even hold yourself up, assaulted by sensation—her hand still on your wrist, all calloused palms and long fingers and warmth, your knees smarting from their collision with the stones, the weight of your overgrown hair, of your clothes, of your limbs, of gravity bearing you down, down, down.

You make a horrible gurgling choking noise and your whole body jerks wildly—trying to get away, trying to get ahold of yourself, trying to look up at her, trying to breathe.

“Woah, woah, take it easy,” Ro says, crouching down in front of you and grabbing you by the shoulder with her free hand, grip firm to the point of bruising, forcing you still, holding you upright, and you have never been so aware of anyone’s touch before in your whole life—❞

#oracle.wip #if u saw this before under a different url no u didnt #wip excerpt #spilled ink #sage is a mess #i love that for him #kaatibawrites

[kaatiba]

Fictober 2022 | Day 13 | Deep Water Prompt #1807

Photo via Seletti on Instagram

❝My mother’s study was full of porcelain hearts, thousands of them, crafted in stunning anatomical detail.❞

↳ (prompt via @/deepwaterwritingprompts) 

I used to study them all, as a child, in their careful placements on little velvet cushions on the shelves, shining sleekly in the sunlight that poured through the tall windows. They were so beautiful, all unique somehow, and all looking so real. I was entranced by them, by their delicacy as much as by their forbidden nature. I was never allowed to touch any of them. “Once broken, they can’t be mended,” my mother would say. “No matter how skilled the craftsman, how cleverly sealed or joined or glued the fragments, there would always be a fault in them.” “Even with magic?” I’d ask. “Magic can’t fix a broken heart. It can only unmake it, or change it, but then it wouldn’t be the same heart, you understand? And it would always have once been broken.”

[read more]

#fictober #fictober 2022 #fictober 22 #kaatibawrites #alice in wonderland #alice in wonderland retelling #retelling #oracle.wip #backstory for one of my characters :]

[kaatiba]

Ro, enamored and amused, lying on her side with her head propped up on one hand: wtf is wrong with you. i love it. can you get worse?

Sage: *feverishly plotting his ex's demise and how to break the world worse than he did accidentally the first time* what if i mix some of your poisons together and also insult a couple of gods? would that work?

Ro, chaos goblin, delighted Sage can in fact get worse: go for it babes.

#i love them #oracle.wip #kaatibawrites