Clang!

The pot hit the ground and the impact sent luke-warm soup flying all over the room. 

Angie froze up only a few feet inside of the doorway to her apartment. She was caught in the shock and the gears in her head raced to comprehend what had been awaiting her in her home.

Jarred back to reality by the sound of the pot denting the stone floor, she spit out a stiff greeting. She wasn't armed. Or prepared for a fight. Much less against something like this. But, could she talk her way out of it?

"H-hello. You're Reggy, aren't you?"

Self-Care?

What a sight. The young cleric curled into a tight ball on the blanket-laden loveseat squeezing the life out of a colorful, plush bee who didn’t really seem to mind all that much. Most of the choked-up sobbing and incoherent babbling had ceased as she tired herself out.

The jester watched from the other end of the loveseat. On one hand, the sound of her own voice distressed and crying was a little unnerving. On the other, her shadows seethed in the presence of such ripe emotion. Only a few weeks ago she would have reveled in this, contributed to it even. But something had changed in their relationship.

At first, it had been Angie’s willingness and excitement to learn. To grasp new magics eagerly and delve into any task placed before her. It filled Adola’s chest with pride. She made this. In some roundabout way, Angie was her creation. A little legacy she had abandoned, only for it to grow and continue on without her. She got to relive the joys of learning vicariously through the cleric.

She couldn’t help but see Angie as family of some sort. Really, she desperately wanted family. Something she had found and lost several times already. To say what their exact relationship was…was hard. Adola wanted to settle on ‘teacher and student’, but there was something deeper than that. They were on many levels the same person.

Adola slowly scooted her way across the loveseat, jingling a little in excess to assure the cleric knew she was getting closer. She reached purple gloved hand out, offering it to her distressed ward.

The cleric’s voice wavered, but managed to produce something like words. “Don’t touch-” She stopped when the hand arrived near instead of grasping at her. After wiping away some tears the cleric took hold of it, squeezing tightly. “It was right… There’s something wrong with me.” 

“Go on.” Adola’s voice rung gently. Curiosity overcame care. In what ways has this fucked Angie up? “I already know everything about you. Tell me what it said.”

“It..it said I was weak.” She choked on the words briefly, pausing to blow her nose into a tissue before continuing, slightly more composed. “I’m a hollow facsimile of a stronger thing. It talked about..you. I think. It called you ‘The Thing I Was’. It knew I wasn’t a whole person. It told me that it was going to kill you.. Or you would die, and I would be free of your sins.”

Adola let out a little sigh. “That’s a very uncharitable way to refer to our circumstances.” A finger tapped against her heavy mask. “It was just pulling from Leshii’s memories. It didn’t know anything special or new. It just picked up on things that *anyone* would have felt insecure and afraid of.”

“It said you were instrumental to its rise.” The words spilled from the cleric’s mouth. A rebuttal in favor of fear and paranoia.

But fear and paranoia were Adola’s domain. Fear, paranoia, the unknown, the depths, dreams. It didn’t get to her. “I may have. Address did a great deal to try to escape from me. Undoubtedly Leshii made some poor choices along the way as well.” She let out a little sigh. She wasn’t helping… “Angie, when I was you. ..At this point. I stood no chance against something like that either. The Admiral poisoned me with darkness, and that was my introduction to the shadow. Life-long fears were cemented into me, plucking at my mind constantly for years. But, we can overcome that.” Angie let out a startled noise as the elven jester yanked her by her hand, pulling her into a tight hug. She let out a wheeze of discomfort, but at the very least she felt…safe. 

Adola’s grip loosened a little bit. A comforting embrace. With herself? How awkward. “In the face of something immortal, what do we have?” She offered no chance for response. “Willpower. We possess the ability to defy the world around us. To bend it to our whim. We have our own will and our own volition. It is bound, forced to serve its master for eternity. It envies us for what it will never have. Freedom. The god it serves is dead or defeated and bound. And without that? It has no purpose. These are its death throes. A desperate final attempt to make itself relevant. Where it is static, we **will** grow. And we can grow together. With the people we trust.”

The cleric didn’t look up at her. But Adola could hear that the cleric’s sobbing has come to a stop, and feel her racing heartbeat had quieted to a gentle thump. She waited for a moment… Before realizing Angie had finally tired herself out and slipped off to sleep.

Without anyone to hear it, Adola offered a tired goodbye. “Good night, Angie.” All before settling the priest back onto the loveseat and slipping away. Angie needed no nightmares of the Abyss. Not tonight, at least.

A little talk.

“It’s been a struggle to get used to the new way of things. There’s so much to learn. So much to see. There’s like five lifetimes of history packed into the last ten years.

People know me. I have no idea who any of them are. They have expectations, fears, baggage, grudges. All related to me, but... I didn’t do anything. Well, not me-me. The other me.

It’s just so complicated. I wish I could take my mind off of it and just be anonymous. The random priestess wandering around Stormwind, making friends, doing what I want.

This new life though. It comes packed with a friend. You met him. Archelaos. He’s been holding my hand through a lot of this. He’s someone I think I can trust. Someone who has proved multiple times he...cares about me? We’re like family or something.”

Angie let loose a sigh.

“I have trust issues. But, thanks to you I can put it all to the test. All at once.”

Anxiety buzzed behind Angie's eyes. Paranoia, discomfort, confusion.

It helped to tell herself that this wasn't even so different than a few weeks ago. She still didn't know much of anyone, even having lost everyone she knew.

At least no one from the Abbey was probably still looking for her. And she had someone to help. Someone who seemed to want to take care of her. What a weird feeling.

Her fingers gripped at the reassuring weight of the metal laid across her lap. Archelaos' gun. To curb that annoying buzz at the back of her head she applied her attention to the weapon, looking it over. Taking stock of the parts, imagining how they fit together.

She was tempted to start taking it apart, just to find out how it really worked, but she knew her lack of experience had a strong chance to leave her with a damaged or dismantled weapon. Potentially when she truly needed one.

She eventually fell asleep curled up in one of the heavy wooden chairs near the fire.

@archelaos-redright

The Collection

CW: Blood, gore, body horror, implied murder, guns, implied people death, briefly implied animal death.

Watching.

It is what she did. It is all she could do.

At first, every day was a new experience. She would watch from her small place, wedged into the corner of this grey stone wall. And she would watch the room around her change and grow, not in size but in complexity.

Simple, bare furniture and dusty walls were soon covered in all manner of instruments and objects she didn't understand. 

Just as the room changed, she did as well. Her life was enriched with many different things. Taste. Smell. Hearing. Touch. Sometimes these senses were taken from her. Sometimes they were given in such abundance the stimulus lost all meaning.

She soaked in everything she could about the room around her. She counted the stones in the walls. She tasted the ground, felt the air, listened to the creaking of the wood above. It took her a long time to realize the sounds were other people moving through another room above this one. People she would never see. Except for one.

A small human, with red hair. The singular force of chaos in her quiet life. The reason everything changed, including her.

The human was always busy, always talking to herself, always focused on something new. But the human always had time to visit her. She would give her new things. New faces and eyes. New noses and mouths. Hearts and livers and lungs.

Seeing the human work brought to mind an artist at first and the many projects strewn around the room were her pieces of art. Rather than paint, she rendered forms in flesh and bone.

She did not have the pleasure of being art though. She was simply the palette. She was where the colors were held and combined, where they would remain until the human needed them.

It took a great deal of watching and listening to truly understand though, the human was not a painter. The human did her work for understanding. Understanding how flesh fit with other flesh. How bone could be made stronger and sharper. How a heart could be made to pump gallons of blood, rather than a few pints. The human did not value the artistic merit of her works. The human never even spoke of the concept of art in her long-winded muttering and speaking with the numerous shadows in the corners of the room.

That left her with only one question… In all of her life here in her corner, how had she ever learned what art is? How did she know what a human was? How did she know she was a she? Why did her eyes feel so wet when she pondered these things?

Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.  Crack.

The treasure in the chest was laid bare.  Angie had opened it with all of the deftness of a skilled safecracker, but where pins might have been set in a lock, ribs had been skillfully removed to prevent the damage of the riches within.

Lungs and heart and liver, all on display.  A sharp blade made quick work of anything else that was in the way.  She rolled her sleeve up, feeling a familiar tug at the corners of her mouth as she laid a finger on the liver.  It was almost enough that she could ignore the SKITTERING.

Her fingers pressed down around the organ, wanting to assure it’s safety as she lifted it from it’s former home.  She felt something else, something moving.  With a curiosity, she pulled the liver upwards, just enough to see what it could be.

A black mass of writhing creatures filled the gap.  Maggots.  Roaches.  Beetles.  A living pestilence that fed upon corpses.  This body was infested.

Angie wrenched her arm back, but it would not come.  Something clamped around her fingers, dragging her arm further in.  Her fingers.  Her wrist.  Her elbow.  Bit by bit, her face was drawn closer towards the vivisected body.

The mass of horrible insects burrowed into her skin.  Under her fingernails, between her bones.  It moved further and further up her arm as she was dragged deeper and deeper in.

Try as she might, there was no escaping it.  She needed help, but no one was here but her and the cadaver.  As her shoulder approached the gaping maw of the infestation, she could only hold her head aloft to prolong it reaching her face.

Desperation set in.  She cried for the Light.  A prayer at the top of her lungs.

“LIGHT-”