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#the 'heard' and 'snare' parts are set close together too it's when kon squad meets yuleui for the first time hehe
muddshadow · 2 years
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find the word tag
my procrastination has rewarded me a small legion of words to find! i guess i should probably write more to keep up! thank you dearly @pinespittinink and @aninkwellofnectar​ for these word sets <3 tagging @jess-p-edits , @theskeletonprior , @sentfromwolves , @dandelion-tea, @dramaticvoiceover , and viewers like YOU.
your words ; clear , cold , crisp , crush , carry
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ROSE // at the bottom of the waterfall
Louis cringed, convinced this was a polished performance, and he really didn’t want to chat with two shopping bags crooked in his elbows. “Magi Lavonde is available through appointment only,” he tediously recited. “And she’s never interested in political solicitations, so if that’s your angle…”
“No, you misunderstand! I’ve a query for you.”
“Well, I don’t talk to strangers. Go away.”
The stranger chuckled. He removed his tall, pointed hat and swept it to his chest in a bow. Louis thought it was sarcastic until the stranger rose and gave himself a proper name and prestigious magician title.
“Fabian Daye?” Louis echoed. He narrowed his eyes. “Why does that sound familiar?”
BLUE // trystan
“The universe fucking hates me today,” I say, mostly to myself.
Magdalena still graces me with an answer. “Don’t be rude, Trystan.” She wears a yellow dress and sunhat, coiled hair a black cloud beneath it. A cigarette fits between her fingers, nails perfectly manicured and painted nighttime blue. They’re always a different color. She bores quickly. I’m hoping I can bore her out of a conversation, because I already have a horrible one planned.
Magdalena lowers her designer sunglasses and glimpses me over. “You look terrible.”
SHADOW // at the bottom of the waterfall
“Your self-pity does not taste very good.”
“That’s all I can manage at the moment.” Ysabelle contemplated letting it erode her a few minutes more, and her shoulders collapsed with a sigh.
“Attempt some dignity.” Lo’s voice prickled suddenly. “There is a guest.”
Rousing from her mope, Ysabelle studied the trees. Between the willow fronds and inside the safety of shadows, something flickered like soft candlelight. But there was nothing soft about the hidden creature.
Ysabelle held herself very still.
“Now,” she said delicately, “I know what you might be thinking…”
And instantly, the eavesdropping wisp cackled at her, shrill and utterly rude—and the willow fronds rippled as they escaped.
Bright anger turned her veins molten, and the instinct for violence came with the ease of breathing.
FADE // trystan
Chemistry set forgotten, sprawled on the couch beside me, Sebastien releases his own world-weary sigh. “Doesn’t matter if the Moon is weak or strong. They try every cycle to crown them emperor, and it never takes. Our magic belongs to us.”
“It does matter,” I say.
“When did you start giving a shit?”
“Because the Moon is a bulwark. And if they’re weak, then…” I falter. I can’t help it. “Then the Veil is strong.”
Sebastien turns his head on the couch. I see every faded freckle, the pine and hickory in his eyes, and I can’t help glimpsing the edge of his thoughts. When he asks me this time, I know what he really means. “Did something happen?”
HEARD // to forget a prince
Together, they peered over the edge. And then from behind, Kon heard shifting gravel.
“Hello! Don’t be alarmed!”
Quite alarmed, all four of them swiveled to face the forest.
A woman stood a mere few paces behind them. Built small and square, she dressed in layered grey with a sword buckled to her waist and a satchel slung across her chest, and she glowed with a lopsided grin so bizarre it momentarily removed Kon from his senses.
But only momentarily. Kon strummed an arrow from its quiver and pulled the bow from his back. As he aimed, the woman staggered back a step.
“Whoa! Let’s not make any permanent decisions…”
“Who are you?” Kon demanded.
DARK // bloodhounds
Meisha pulled her nose from her journal long after dusk collapsed into darkness, and only because her flashlight began to drain. She flicked it off for a minute, tilting her head back. Crooked, bare branches cobwebbed the sky, distant facility lights shifting through the dark, and beyond the trees and stale white glare yawned the deep indigo night. Meisha scanned for her six favorite stars.
Exactly northeast, patrolling the mountains, and crowning Mount Cynhir in the dead of winter. Meisha lifted her hands, hovering the constellation with her thumb and first finger connected to shape diamond jaws. And always, she thought of her dad.
“We called that one the Starving Beast in navigational class,” he used to tell her. “First, it’s great big bite will swallow the mountains… and then the world!” and he’d chomp Meisha with his hands until she laughed.
“It’s actually called Cyn-437,” Meisha would inform her dad again, just in case he’d forgotten. And he always pretended to.
FACE // bloodhounds
Rowan never claimed to be any sort of genius, but he was hardly ignorant to the stares he received. He liked them much better behind his back where they required no acknowledgment. The bravery of those who gawked head-on both impressed and infuriated him; a fragile balance Rowan didn’t always handle like a gentleman.
Today, Rowan needed something, and that required a mostly civilized tableside manner. Strangers like him were a spectacle, after all; tall enough to bump his forehead on door frames, burly enough to shuffle a crowd, skin sun-weathered and marred like he’d been tossed under a farming plough, and a pair of energy weapons strapped to his back. But it was always the full-faced, black-plated mask that caught the eyes. Plenty of folks wore masks for plenty of reasons, and Rowan had worn his long enough to know the faceless language. For him, speaking intimidating came easy.
CURL // to forget a prince
Drifting inside the room, Nara chose a book from the nearest stack. He leafed through pages of dryadic dinner recipes as Esyl quarried the mess. “Are you searching for anything particular?”
“Particularly interesting, maybe.”
“Stuffed inside a closet?”
“I forget things, you see,” Esyl said, tapping his forehead like it might dislodge a memory. “Where I put things, or if I ever really had them at all, and now and again it’s best to take inventory. There’s just so much stuff that comes about over the years.”
The years, at first glance, didn’t appear like much. In body and face, Esyl could generously be described as twelve years old, with doe lashes and hickory dark hair that curled along his brow. Soft-footed, slim-framed and hardly to Nara’s shoulder, no one paid Esyl much attention. He delighted in giving ramshackle advice, but spoke a language consisting entirely of cryptic metaphors and unfiltered gibberish, and he was very talented at dragging people into such conversations, filling them with tangled thoughts and vague feelings of unease.
NAILS // to forget a prince
Deya crossed his arms. “Going after the Shade is a death sentence. That’s just history.”
“Aevana survived the last time.”
“And lost both her legs and an arm, and the Shade escaped to the moors anyway.” Deya scoffed. “Come on, Rosevyn. You’re not really entertaining this?”
Leaning back in her seat, Rosevyn considered the murals above them and clacked her nails along the table. “I imagine that after all this time, Loteri is a weak vessel…” And Nara realized she was absolutely entertaining the prospect.  
Joan noticed it too. “I’m not fucking doing it,” she said.
“Not my fucking job,” Deya agreed.
GRIN // trystan
When the door lurches open, it isn’t Cherry, and it isn’t funny anymore.
“Hullo, Sebastien!”
“What the fuck are you—?”
I hear Sebastien’s nose break. It cracks through my ears just before his shout does, and he staggers backward with blood spilling down his chin and into his hand. I’m on my feet and bolting toward him. A hulking figure ducks under the door frame to meet me.
I look up. I don’t often do that.
“Hullo, Trystan!” Percy says, grinning wide and gap-toothed and with the delighted enthusiasm of encountering an old friend. Then he tries punching me too.
SNARE // to forget a prince
“Shit,” Kon said, because she looked halfway devoured. The last hungered had Yulei pinned and dangling from the cliffside. Claws snared her shoulders, teeth poised her throat, moonlight crested the spines of its barbed hide. Bowstring taut, Kon glanced between flaws in the armor, grateful her corpse made a useful enough distraction – but then Yulei shifted her feet, arched her back, and the hungered’s limp body plummeted over the edge and into the canyon.
Kon hesitated. He advanced a few tentative steps.  
Covered in flakes of bone and rotted leaves, gripping the heartroot in her fists, Yulei released a jolting laugh. Then she snagged his gaze.
“That was really close,” she told him with a grin. 
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