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#people either got encased in the ice or had a ditto disguised as their arm for some reason
brutal-nemesis · 3 years
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Ice Day 2021: Cool-stys
Hoo boy my fingers are cold. Happy Ice Day! I hope y’all are staying chilly, and here’s to more pain! And as for this one...it’s a lot of pain (⊙ˍ⊙)
Oh also because I don’t have a place for this information but I feel like you should know before you read so when it comes up you get what I mean: I imagine a Quibhassian accent sounds quite similar to an Icelandic one.
Castys Masterlist
Ingredients: self-amputation, suicide for convenience (immortal), self-harm to escape danger, stabbing, body horror, implied suffocation
Why was Castys somehow always in the wrong place at the wrong time? Seriously, he had the worst luck. Unless you counted accidentally witnessing a murder as lucky. Well, maybe it was lucky for the person getting murdered because then they could get justice or whatever. Except Castys didn’t really care about justice and never reported that sort of thing to the authorities. So, in conclusion, Castys witnessing your murder was unlucky for you and for him. Unlucky for you because he wasn’t going to tattle on the murderer, and unlucky for him because he was currently being chased through a forest by some murderer lady.
He was never a fan of running, and certainly not running through the snow while all bundled up because it was cold but running makes you hot so there’s no temperature happiness there. He was debating just giving up and trying to reason with the lady when he tripped over some hidden mystery object and landed face first in the snow, making that decision for him. A boot kicked his shoulder and turned him over before planting itself firmly on his chest. The woman attached to it was glaring down at him, holding a large icy spear-type-thing to his neck, which would be threatening if he could actually die. Well, maybe he could talk his way out before she decided to hurt him. Because he’d rather she didn’t.
“I would just like to inform you: I really don’t care about what I saw back there. I kill people all the time; it happens. So, if you’ll just let me go on my merry way, I promise not to tell anyone about the whole, uh, murder thing. We good?” He flashed her his most convincing smile, but all she did was narrow her eyes.
“I don’t know if I can trust the word of a man like you.” She had a strong Quibhassian accent, which wasn’t surprising as they were in fact in the frozen wastes of Quibhass. 
“A man like-wha-we just met?! You don’t even know me! You’d be totally justified in your whatever criticisms after, like, talking to me for more than five minutes, but it hasn’t been that long.”
“You give the impression of a wiry little mustela, saying anything to save your own skin.” She jabbed the sharp end of her giant icicle into his neck. Well, into his scarf. Still threat-y, though.
“I-I don’t even know what that is. Look,” he finally held up his hands, which he probably should have done initially, but he found it incredibly hard not to wave them around when he talked, “is there any way I can convince you not to stab me in the throat? Because if so I’d love to hear it.” Not that he was afraid she’d kill him, being that he couldn’t die, but if she did that, she’d find out that he was immortal, which...well, people didn’t typically react well to that information. Something about him being immortal made people really want to tie him up and hurt him, which was not a pastime he enjoyed. The woman seemed to think for a moment before setting her jaw and raising her spear. 
“No. Goodbye, little mustela.” Castys opened his mouth to protest, he didn’t want to get blood all over his clothes, but the sudden agony and the usual blackness told him it was too late.
When he came back to life, he was displeased to find that she had not just left his corpse lying in the snow. No, she had to be dragging him to wherever by the ankle. Great, he’d have to play dead and pray she didn’t notice that he was very much not dead. He supposed he could just wiggle free and rely on the element of surprise to give him a head start, but it hadn’t exactly gone well the last time she chased him. Better to just wait and hope that she didn’t set him on fire. No, she wouldn’t, because ice wizards don’t set people on fire. They set them on...cold. Holy shit where was she dragging him this was taking forever and he was starting to have incredibly stupid thoughts.
By the time she’d stopped dragging him, Castys’s thoughts had wandered into dangerous territory. Not in a “thinking about Bad things” way, but in a “thinking about funny things” way. Specifically that one time Eris got so excited about fried bread that she hit her head on the ceiling. He tried to keep quiet, he really tried. But before he knew it he was laughing uncontrollably, betrayed by the ridiculously low ceilings at that one tavern all those years ago. Why the hell did that have to be so funny? Hopefully she couldn’t hear him, didn’t see his allegedly dead body shaking with restrained chuckles. 
The very cold spear now stabbed into his stomach told him otherwise. 
His eyes snapped open, and once again, she was standing over him. She ripped the bloodied scarf from his neck and examined his neck that now had no hole in it. “Killing me again will accomplish nothing,” Castys said tiredly. “So if you would please-” he had to pause to cough up blood, “accept the fact that I cannot in fact be silenced and permit to run off into the woods, I would appreciate it.” The woman responded by shoving his scarf into his mouth.
“It seems you can be silenced, tricky little mustela.” Castys reached up to pull the bloodied scarf out of his mouth, but a muttered spell from the woman caused shackles of ice to appear on his wrists. She grabbed the chain now connecting his wrists and pulled it up, preventing him from removing the gag. “Any vermin that cannot be killed must be kept. It is the only way.” She snapped the shaft of the spear, leaving the frozen head embedded in his stomach, and began to drag him by the chain between his wrists into the nearby cabin. Castys was marginally grateful that he was at least being brought inside, but that gratefulness disappeared when she flung him down a flight of stairs. 
He was too dazed to resist as the woman started slicing through his coat, reducing almost all of his layers to shreds, which was incredibly rude of her. He’d really liked that coat, and now he had nothing to protect him from her frigid basement. “The cold will keep you trapped in here. Do some of my work for me,” the woman muttered, but Castys hardly heard her over the pounding in his head. And by the time said pounding went away, all he could hear was the door slamming shut and the click of a lock.
Laying on the cold stone floor, Castys yanked his scarf out his mouth and sighed. This was, without a doubt, the worst case scenario. Well, at least his mouth being stuffed full of bloody wool had prevented him from biting his tongue on the way down the stairs, so there was that. Worst case scenario minus tongue pain, but plus everything else pain. But hey, what are magic death rocks for? With frozen fingers, he pulled the pouch around his neck out from under his shirt. He wormed a finger into the pouch, sinking into the sweet release of death at the rock’s touch.
Sadly, dying couldn’t fix all of his problems. He was incredibly cold, for one, and healing himself wasn’t going to fix his coat or get those shackles of his wrists. And he was so, so cold, almost like it was coming from inside him...oh god he was a complete idiot. One of his injuries had been from that icy spear. The broken off point had still been lodged in his abdomen when he died.
And now it was stuck inside him. Fan. Tas. Tic.
Well, unless he was willing to slice himself open and dig it out, which he really wasn’t, that was going to be there for a while. Hopefully it would melt. Stowing away that problem for Later Castys, he sat up and looked around the room, eyes straining to see in the dark. There were shelves along two of the walls, lined with jars containing liquid full of...things. He hoped it was preserved food and not, like, human fingers or something, but it was too dark to tell. Of course, he’d had a lightstone in his pocket before all this happened, but his captor had taken his things while he was dead. Which was honestly fair, he would have done the same. But since he hadn’t actually died, it was rather inconvenient. 
Against the back wall, he found what felt like a table, littered with various tools and-holy shit was that an axe? Further examination proved that yes, that lady had been stupid enough to lock him down here with an axe. He considered breaking down the door right away, but if there was going to be a fight up there, he’d prefer not to have his hands chained together. Trying to break a chain with an axe in the dark wasn’t exactly the safest thing he’d ever done, but it’s not like he could cause any damage to himself that dying wouldn’t fix. He pulled the pouch off of his neck and shook the stone out onto the table, ready for if things went south.
He put the chain of ice against the axe blade and twisted, pulling it taut. Faint crackling noises told him it was working and after a few more moments, the chain snapped under the pressure. He stretched, glad to have his arms free again. Well, they weren’t completely free as those stupid ice shackles were still encircling his wrists. Honestly, he would have preferred metal ones, even if that meant he wouldn’t have been able to break the chain, because, shockingly, these ice ones were incredibly cold. They’d pressed themselves into his bare skin after he’d been relieved of his coat, and their chill felt like it was encasing his arms in ice. He rubbed his hands on his arms, trying to warm them, but the shackles seemed to cover more of his arms than he remembered, almost as if-
The shackles were growing. A layer of ice was creeping out over his skin from where the edges of the shackles used to be. He watched, transfixed in horror for a moment. 
And then panic set in.
He frantically scratched at it to no avail, the ice was starting to cover his hands, he didn’t have any time, and when he remembered the axe, he knew what he had to do. Do I really have to? Trembling fingers wrapped around the axe’s handle as he laid his right arm on the table. I’ve felt this pain before but I’ve never had to do it to myself and I’m not sure if I can- He raised the axe, feeling the ice spread around his fingers, locking them in place. Okay okay I can do this I don’t have time to hesitate I need to stop the ice before it’s too late just do it come on do it do it DO IT-
He did it. The axe buried itself in his arm, right above the elbow. No, no it didn’t go all the way through, he’d need to do it again. Fighting to keep his screams locked behind his teeth, he wrenched the axe out from the notch it had made in his bone and swung it again. This time, it chopped most of the way through with a sickening crack. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he had to get through that last bit of flesh, had to make sure it was completely severed, and then he could die. The axe sliced through the bits of muscle and skin still attaching his arm, and he dove for his rock, pressing what was left of his arm into it.
There was no time to rest after he woke up, because holy balls he was going to have to do that again. Looking at his left arm, he was going to have to cut it off closer to the shoulder at the rate the ice was going. He tried to open his left hand to let go of the axe, but it had completely frozen over, his fingers stuck gripping the handle. Fuck, he didn’t have time for this, the ice was almost to his shoulder and then it would be too late, too late. He wedged the end of the handle under the edge of the table and pulled down with his right hand, hoping he could pry his left hand open. He felt a bolt of elation as he heard the ice start to crack, and pushed down even harder.
The ice, and the fingers within it, cracked and shattered. Castys stilled, his gaze fixed in horror at the jagged stumps where his fingers had been just moments ago. His mind was screaming at him to move, to amputate his other arm before the ice encased it completely, but the fact that his fucking fingers had just snapped off was still setting in. It was only a moment of stillness, a moment of disbelief, but it was a moment too long. 
The axe clattered to the floor. Fingers scratched desperately at the ice now encasing his shoulder, spreading across his chest, creeping up his neck. But it was useless, useless, the ice wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t go away, it was so cold, part of him just wanted to lie down and sleep, succumb to the inevitable frozen cocoon, but part of him was too terrified of the ice growing over his skin, sucking all the heat from his body it was up to his face now was he even going to be able to breathe it’s so cold GET OFF MY EYE GET OUT OF MY MOUTH STOP IT STOP IT PLEASE PLEA-
And then there was silence. There was stillness. And there was cold.
Castys Cult:  @as-a-matter-of-whump​ @blackrosesandwhump​​ @fanmanga1357-blog​​ @poppys-whumping​ @thehopelessopus​ @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi​ @hearse-song​ @muddy-swamp-bitch
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