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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Dec 17, 2008 0:35:38 GMT -5
The metal of the handrail was cold on the pads of her feet. That was the first thing she noticed when she climbed up onto it, legs trembling so hard that she had to keep herself low, hands and paws gripping for a hold on the metal. Her fluffy tail thrashed behind her in an effort to keep her standing, and she shivered in the cold. She didn't know how high up she was, didn't know if it would be high enough, but she pushed those thoughts from her head as she slowly let her arms fall to her sides. She could feel the wind blowing and it cut her to the bone, far deeper than the jeering shouts of the few Cards that had begun to gather. She'd heard one person begin to tell her to stop, but that voice had quieted partway through its plea, then laughed and joined the rest of the cruel voices. She could only guess that the owner of the voice had seen the black marking on her breast, decided that it would be more amusing to see her die than try to live. There was a moment in which terror gripped her and she considered crawling back onto the nice solid ground, running home with her tail between her legs and climbing into her bed. It would be warm for her. She moved as if to bring herself down from her perch, and a rock hurled by some nameless Card cracked her solidly between the ears. She let out a sharp cry of pain and alarm as she lost her balance, one of her feet slipping and nearly sending her toppling over completely. Her hands scrabbled for purchase on the bar and she pulled herself up again, shaking hard as she felt the hot blood well up around the cut, dripping into her eyes and across her muzzle. The few people that had gathered around cheered when she fell, and began to snarl impatiently when she caught herself, begining the chant. Jump. The single syllable was impossible to drown out, and Asha could feel herself letting go. It wasn't a jump. She just stopped standing, just let herself fall. There was the feeling of wind rushing past her, tears stinging at her unseeing eyes, the sharp crack when her body hit the rocks that lined the river. There was a moment of deep regret. Then nothing. |
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Post by The Jenn on Dec 17, 2008 0:50:42 GMT -5
Lior didn't especially want to be on the road, traveling back to the Capital City after leaving it only weeks before, but he was on orders. In accepting Xiven's condition and becoming her King, he became a sort of puppet. She could tell him to do anything and he had to do it, or risk angering her and threatening his place in the Court with Rhi and his children. It completely escaped him that she would have preferred to see a challenge or two. He simply did as he'd been told and tried to stay away from her as often as was feasible. Unfortunately, it wasn't all that often. She had ordered him to attend therapy sessions in the heart of the city, to visit a psychiatrist that had been recommended to her, a man by the name of Rosewood. He was nervous and on edge about the whole thing. How much should he reveal? How much would the man get away with letting him keep to himself? He didn't know how these sorts of things worked, and he couldn't imagine an especially good reaction when he walked into the man's office with the cold, chill presence of death looming over everyone inside. The Queen didn't really understand what going to the city meant to him. It meant constant periods of memory loss, waking up next to random corpses, and frightening passerby with his every step. People never knew what to make of him, and he didn't blame them. With so many people packed into the capital, there were deaths all the time, and a good chance that they were within the radius of his cloak. He still didn't know the precise distance and didn't really care to find out. He just knew that it was always worse in the city, and that he was extraordinarily unlikely to leave this visit without seeing at least one corpse. Not far out of the city limits, that prediction came to fruition. He stiffened, eyes going blank and cold, and reached for the handle of the carriage he was traveling in, throwing open the door and jumping out. He rolled for a second and then stood, completely oblivious to any scrapes or bruises. He just started walking. After about fifteen minutes, he came to the edge of a river and continued along its shore, not even seeing the landscape. He eventually walked down to the banks and a few feet into the water, stopping next to a soaked corpse that was bobbing listlessly in the shallows, the current not strong enough to pull it over the wider, shallower band of rocks that made up this part of the waterway. The body was still warm, but just barely, the life crushed out of it by numerous broken bones and a fractured skull. He noted this absently as he knelt beside the body and concentrated. The rush of unnatural pleasure that flooded through his body was like a drug, the best high he'd ever had, and it only got better with every dose. He slumped in the water, eyes half-lidded but still entirely vacant, and then slowly began to come back to himself as he felt life warm the body beneath him. |
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Dec 17, 2008 1:10:31 GMT -5
The croud disappated when the corpse of the Ace floated out of sight, river carrying what used to be Asha slowly along, bumping into rocks and branches until it met a wide section of much larger rocks, almost a naturally-formed dam. The waterlogged body bumped up against the rocks and then settled, water lapping at the lifeless form as if trying to urge it on. It didn't move, just floated there, still partially-submerged.
Asha herself was unaware of this. All she had was darkness. It was not unfamiliar to her, just a continuation of every day of her life. The disconnect from herself made her feel rather uneasy, but it was something that she had also experienced on a smaller scale for a long time now. She could feel something tugging, urging her on. It was not a nice feeling and she tried to shrug it off, mentally curling away from it. No, no. She didn't want to move. She wanted to rest, she wanted to just sleep, and she pushed at the feeling with her mind. There was something else she needed, something much stronger and much more urgent. Slowly, she turned towards the calling...
But someone was touching her, someone with warm and soft paws.
There was cold water, too, flowing along merrily around her body. There were rocks behind her, partially supporting her and she could hear the sound of someone breathing heavily. She could remember that there had been a pain, but it wasn't there anymore. It took a moment for her to register it, but there was something else. When the feeling sunk in fully, the skunk felt as though her heart would stop, and for a moment it might have actually done so. She felt... Death.
The Ace screamed, moving away from the feeling in a horrified frenzy and falling back against the rocks again, sightless eyes rolling in complete terror as every hair on her drenched tail did its best to stand out completely.
She needed to get away from whoever it was that she had felt touching her.
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Post by The Jenn on Dec 17, 2008 1:23:28 GMT -5
Lior jerked at the scream, still panting in the aftermath of the insanely pleasurable sensation. It had been almost a pleasant lull, laying on top of the wet but warming body, mind everywhere and nowhere, but now he was going to be forced to deal with the reality of the situation.
She had once been a corpse, hadn't she? But... he hadn't killed her. Had he? Would someone who'd been alive already be that wet? The situation was confusing. He didn't have any spare body parts in his hands or pockets, either, not that he could tell. He always took a piece from the people that he brought back to life. What was going on?
The girl had moved several feet away from him, still in the water but closer now to the shore. He stared at her for a moment, and then felt something pull at his consciousness. It was both a familiar and a new feeling, similar to the unconscious need for a trophy from the body of the resurrected... but different. He was fully aware now, not lost in the haze of the cloak-induced reaper. Still, it tugged and pulled at his mind. Compelled, he slowly waded towards her jerking body. Her eyes were strange, almost sightless, and rolling around crazily.
A part of his mind knew what to do, the same part that knew when death occurred, but this time it granted him the 'gift' of consciousness in his natural state of mind. Confused and unwilling to challenge the feeling, he reached down to pin her shoulder to the rocks and stabbed his thumb and forefinger into her left eye. Slowly he removed it, covered in blood and juices best not thought about. Trailing along with all the mess, however, was a thin orb. It shone oddly in the light, half-translucent. He stared at it in fascination and took a few steps back from the body. "Sorry about that..." he mumbled, still staring at the object in his hand. "It was... necessary."
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Dec 17, 2008 1:36:19 GMT -5
Asha shook with a kind of desperate terror as her sensitive ears caught the sound of the person - whoever they were - who had been draped atop her when she had begun to wake up. She could hear them moving closer to her, and it was accompanied by that terrible feeling, that fear that had driven her away in the first place. She could feel herself gag on her own fear, barely keeping the meager contents of her stomach in place. It was as if Death himself was standing next to her. The events of the minutes before she blacked out returned to her slowly, and when she connected the two feelings she began to whimper.
She had fallen. She had fallen, there had been a crack and then nothing - and now she was here, surrounded by this suffocating feeling. This person... This person was death. It was the only explanation.
She recoiled slightly when she felt the man - it had to be male, from the tone of the breathing and the weight of his steps - move close, then cried out again when she was suddenly pinned against the rock. She choked on her own tears, so hard was her trembling.
"Please! What do you want from me? I-I can give you money, anything..![/b]" she cried out in a moment, raising blind eyes to the unknown figure. Her desperate pleas continued to bubble out of her mouth up until she felt the pressure on her eye. The events that followed seemed to the Ace to take an eternity - the sharp pressure of nails against her skin, then the violent tearing of skin and muscle. Her body tensed and she screamed again, this time a note of pain as she felt him groping around in her skull, and when he finally pulled out, the wrenching of her eye popping free first of the socket, and then of the optic nerve that had held it there. Asha recoiled, wretching and coughing as her stomach rejected the nothing that was inside of it, covering her face with her hands and feeling the blood gush from the open hole where an eye had once been.
But there was more than her eye gone. There was something deeper than that, and she curled around herself, continuing to heave at the paralyzing pain that coursed through her head. "WHY?![/b]" she wailed, choking on the word. "Who are you?![/b]"
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Post by The Jenn on Dec 17, 2008 1:52:02 GMT -5
Lior slowly lowered his hand into the water, letting the water wash away the gore of the popped eye and blood from the whole ordeal off of his hand. At the same time, he brought the other hand down to cradle the oddly glowing orb, keeping it within the safe grasp of his fingers. It was too beautiful. Too precious. Some part of him had a small idea of what it was that he had taken and it filled him with a sort of horrified awe.
He looked back over at the girl a few feet away, her face covered in blood and her fur touched with bile. She looked a terrified mess and some part of him was horrified that another part of him couldn't muster the surprise to care very much. He moved back over to her and sat on the shore a few feet away, staring over at her. His hands still cradled the precious glowing thing close to his chest. It was a moment before he spoke.
"I don't really know who I am sometimes," he told her in a tired-sounding voice. "But I know that you were dead a minute ago, and that you aren't now. Hopefully you wanted to be alive. You look young enough. I think I took a part of your soul, though. I'm sorry about your eye. It was the only way I could get to it. I just knew that I couldn't leave without it." He glanced down at the thing and stroked one thumb along it. The sensation made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, but not in a bad way. "You have a very pretty soul."
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Dec 17, 2008 2:08:03 GMT -5
Though she couldn't see it, Asha felt herself continuing to bleed, damaged eyelids closing over her mangled socket. The way she was hunched forward left her hair hanging limply over her face, hiding the damage ever so slightly. She pawed at the rocks that she was leaning against, struggling to pull herself up again. She was shaking too hard, she was too cold, and her mind seemed to be slipping out of her own fingers. It was like she was retreating to some dark part of her head, but she was relieved to find that as the rest of the world dimmed, so did her pain and the cold feeling that was washing over her. She could feel her own blood on the rock, warm and slick, but the pain of her eye was so far away.
When Lior spoke, it sounded to the Ace's ears as if he was speaking through a packaging tube from across a room, oddly hollow and far away. Her dull claws scraped at the surface of the rock as she pulled her legs and tail up out of the water. As she attempted to settle herself, her stomach gave one last feeble protest, and her body quivered.
Then she leaned back, holding onto her tail as if it was a safety blanket, pressing the fluffy appendage against the gruesome ruin of her face.
"I'm blind,[/b]" she heard herself say. Her voice sounded weird to her own ears. "Never... never needed my eyes. You... you must be Death. Are you going to take my soul... to heaven? Is there a heaven?[/b]" her voice trailed off, and she shuddered slightly. Some part of her was protesting all of this. There was no logic in it. She must have dreamed her own suicide and somehow sleepwalked to the river, only to be found by some... madman.
But there was that feeling that something /more/ had happened, that urging sensation in the dark and the profound loss when her eye had slid out, and now he was talking about taking her soul. Just a part of it, but her soul all the same.
"Thank you,[/b]" she whispered in reply to his final comment, and the tunnel she had been falling into seemed to close. When she fell, she slipped into her animal form, unable to maintain biped in unconsciousness.
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Post by The Jenn on Dec 17, 2008 2:26:14 GMT -5
Lior watched her react, soaking wet and bleeding steadily, holding his little bundle. The whole situation felt so surreal. That in and of itself wasn't unusual for some of his little wake-ups, but this time felt different. He had never touched someone's soul before, that he could remember. He'd also never found someone in the middle of a river. The waterlogged feeling wasn't exactly pleasant on top of everything else. "I've been called Death before. I don't really know. Maybe, a little bit. I have another name. You were definitely dead, though, or I wouldn't have been called." He stared down at his hands and the water, which washed away the blood that seeped down from the rocks by the skunk's face. "I don't know if there's a heaven. If there is, I've never been there. I'll keep it safe, though. You should do the same with the rest of it."He looked back over at her in time to see her fall into unconsciousness. Unsteadily, he got to his feet and walked away. She was alive. What else was he supposed to do? After he'd climbed the hill and gotten back to the main road, he walked in the direction of the Capital. It wasn't very far now. Along the way, he ran across a brightly colored canine who was stopping everyone he passed and asking them questions. "Excuse me, but have you seen a Sorgaire skunk anywhere around here? She's an Ace and she... got out."The feline gave him an odd look. A while before, he'd tucked the little orb in the jar he kept on an inside pocket of his cloak, the one that held the now-skeletal thumb joint from his Rhi. "Yes, I saw her. She's on the side of the river, to the right of the bridge and down a ways. She was bleeding but alive." Had she really been an Ace? He hadn't so much as glanced at her marking. He'd been too out of it. Bizarre. A talking Ace? "B-bleeding?" Rogers echoed in horror, taking off down the road and skidding down the hill until he reached the bank of the river. Hopefully she wasn't too far and wasn't too hurt... oh gods... |
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Post by carcinoGeneticist on Dec 17, 2008 2:41:42 GMT -5
The man's words were still fresh in her mind when she let the dark take her fully, and they gave her some small comfort. Her soul was safe, even if Death wasn't sure where it was going, and he wanted her to protect the rest of it. Everything else that he said was forgotten in the wake of that one simple statement.
She had a soul.
The skunk had no idea how long she'd been unconscious for, only that when she woke up the pain was still just as vivid as it had been before. She cringed slightly, letting out a quiet whimper as she curled around herself, shaking hard. She had no idea where she was, no idea of how to get home. How was she supposed to keep the rest of her soul safe when she was lost in the Capital? She attempted to stand, but her legs couldn't quite support her and she lay down again, feeling her head throb.
The sound of footsteps reached her, and she cringed. "W-who's there?[/b]"
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Post by The Jenn on Dec 17, 2008 3:02:55 GMT -5
Rogers had been searching for the girl ever since Theo had put out another alert that she was missing - well and truly gone, without a visible trace. That was okay, though, because the canine could work with other traces. His ridiculously sensitive nose led him to the road out of the Capital and he had been following it ever since. Now it told him that there was blood nearby, and a part of him cringed, both hoping and fearing that it was Asha.
"Asha?!" He caught sight of a dark blue shape and ran, skidding the last few feet as he dropped to his knees next to her. The knees of his trousers were never going to be the same...
...and neither was her face. He stared in horror at the bloody mess that used to be her eye and gingerly reached out to touch her cheek, the one opposite the damage. "Asha, honey, it's me. It's Rogers. God, what happened to you? Your eye..." He moved his hand down to try and get a hold on her. He wasn't the strongest of men, but she was in her animal form and he had his biped. That had to count for something, right? He fleetingly wished for the Club strength ability as he began to heft her up into his arms. "It's okay, Asha, it'll be okay... I'm taking you back to your father right now. Oh, god, your eye."
Someone had to have attacked her. That's all there was to it. Someone who thought that Ace-baiting was fun. It was like tormenting a stray dog in the street, except that this one could understand the pain and the ill will behind the attacks, and this one was their Asha.
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