May Event - All Too Familiar

[pumpkinhollow]

May Event - All Too Familiar

Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh

It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.

She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.

Elsie,

River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.

Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.

River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.

Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.

Fond regards,
A friend

Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.

It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!

It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.

Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.

When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.

The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.

Much newer.

Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.

Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!

In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.

Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.

Comments

Edgar | Snowpiercer (2013) | OTA

[hate_gettin_older]

Home

The dead are out there, but like during the plague, they mostly aren't coming out as far as the farms. Baker Ranch has a sturdy fence, a new and even sturdier guardian, enough food and drink stored to wait out a good long while, and enough space for people to bunk down all over. It's as safe as anywhere right now, and Edgar's determined to keep it safe.

Find him walking the perimeter, looking after the animals, getting communal meals together in the kitchen, or sitting awake when he ought to be sleeping.

Away

Sooner or later the word gets around: the dead will stop walking if they can just re-kill enough of them. And that means keeping a hiding place safe isn't enough anymore.

Edgar will gladly take a partner to go out corpse-hunting with him, or might run into anyone else while hunting alone. Or, for that matter, might run into anyone's walking corpse. That's what he's there for, after all.

Gone

And of course, at least one corpse of his own -- burned all over, eyes wild and white in a blackened face -- is out there walking too. Hunting, the same as he is.

He may not look like much of a threat, even with the heavy stick in his hand, but maybe don't get too close.

[Want a starter that isn't up here? Drop me a line!]

gone

[yournewsidekick]

...Oh.

Oh, that isn't good.

(She thinks: did something else get him besides the bugs? If he died some other time and didn't tell her, she's gonna bite his ankles so hard and then go murder whatever murdered him.)

Tentatively, as she steps toward the path of the charred zombie, she says, "Ed?"

[hate_gettin_older]

He turns toward the sound of her voice, swaying slightly, and his eye fixes on her.

"Hey." The voice is his, but it crackles and scrapes as though the burns are all through him.

The smile is his too, but too slow, too stiff, wrong. "Bug."

[yournewsidekick]

If that were any other face, any other voice, Nimona would've been a whole lot more gleeful over how gruesome it is. Seriously, it's like something straight out of that horror movie she watched with Ballister the one time.

Except it's not a movie, it's Ed, calling her that affectionate nickname he's used for years, oblivious to how it scrapes and cracks against his burned throat. It's wrong. Everyone can see it except him. It yanks at Nimona's heart even as it makes her want to scream.

"You, uh." She tries for a grin of her own. It probably looks just as wrong as his. "You wanna get some water? You kinda look like you need it, buddy."

(It's not really Ed. It's not. It's not. Humans don't survive things like this.)

[hate_gettin_older]

"Fine," the corpse says, taking a step toward her. "C'mere."

[yournewsidekick]

Unconsciously, Nimona takes a step back in tandem.

"Why? You gonna eat my brains?"

It's not him, it's not him --

[hate_gettin_older]

"Heh."

Another step. The smile widens unevenly and cracks the edge of its cheek, char flaking away.

"Might."

[yournewsidekick]

A deep breath. Ugh, ugh, so gross and in a deeply upsetting way instead of a cool way. She hates this so much.

Hates, almost as much, what she knows she's gonna have to do.

"You gotta catch me first," she says -- and in a snap, transforms into a rabbit and bolts. (Get him away from anybody else: that's step one.)

[hate_gettin_older]

And he's after her, faster than it looks like he should be able to move with those dragging steps, that uneven posture.

(The reason for the burns may still not be clear to her -- Edgar never told her exactly how he was mercy-killed on that floating hive -- but what is clear by now is that he moves like the infested sailors.)

Home

[cyansoldier]

She watches him pace through fringes of scrub grass until the sun dips below the horizon. The moon depletes the fields of color. Amber blades savor what little light still creeps over the hills, then turns depressive blue in its absence.

He's been at it for a while.

Carolina leans on her rifle stock, considering, then slings it over her shoulder to tread through the grass. It parts for her, a cropped and whispering sea that signals her approach long before she's reached him.

"Having fun?"

[hate_gettin_older]

"Oh, buckets," he says easily, with only the faintest light dryness suggesting sarcasm. "Getting a little bored of the dancing though, might try the party games next. How about you?"

[cyansoldier]

"Yeah, I don't think these things are up for a round of Go-Fish. I already tried."

She shifts her weight from one foot to the next.

"You care if I sit?"

[hate_gettin_older]

"Nah, go ahead." He gives her a slightly longer look. "Seen you around, haven't I? Don't think I know your name though. I'm Edgar."

[cyansoldier]

"Wouldn't be surprised. I'm just up the hill, by the strawberry fields. I run by yours sometimes." She retires her rifle to her back and takes a seat on an old stump. It protests weakly. "I'm Carolina."

Something like a boom— upheaval of noise— sounds a great distance away. Lightening and magic-traces she wouldn't know how to place. Smoke trails. Carolina turns her head toward it the way one regards a spilt glass. Movement in the tree-line, like something disturbed from sleep.

"Think we should check it out? We might be missing the party."

[hate_gettin_older]

Edgar follows her glance, then reflexively turns to look the other way before keeping his eyes on that movement.

"How far off's that, you reckon?"

[cyansoldier]

Carolina squints. Her knees brace, pre-movement to standing.

"Sixty, maybe sixty-five yards to the tree line. Too close."

[hate_gettin_older]

He takes a moment to translate that in his head into train car lengths, and his mouth tightens. "Too close," he agrees. "Yeah, let's check it out."

cw: violence/eye gore

[lordoftheozarks]

There's one walking corpse that seems determined to go the distance, all the way out to Baker Ranch. The creature carries itself on slim pale limbs that sprout feathers at odd angles. His face is a chimerical mismatch of Lord Osborne's sharp features and the even sharper edges of a hawk's curved beak. He snarls as he sprints toward the fence, but he's intercepted before he reaches it.

The air is filled with a feral howl. "RAAAAH!!" Erik appears from nothing, roaring a battle cry and slamming both his fists into the birdman's eyes with enough force to pulverize his head into so much meat. Now, he stands with bloody hands over the slain monster, muscles pulled tight, and nostrils flared. He is not yet aware that he may have had an audience.

[hate_gettin_older]

Edgar sees the creature coming from his guard position, braces himself, readies a burst of fire first and a vicious swing of the axe second. For a moment he wonders if it's Cerrit, but no -- that disturbing blend of bird and human features would be as wrong for him as for anyone else. The fact that the human features are weirdly familiar is even more disturbing.

It isn't until he sees Erik that he realizes why it looks familiar.

[lordoftheozarks]

His head snaps around so suddenly that it makes him look like an owl turning its head backwards. But no owl has ever had such a manic look in its eyes. At first, Erik doesn't even seem to recognize the young man. Until, all at once, recognition lands and his posture stiffens.

Shit. Fuck. How much of that did Edgar just see? He has a terrible suspicion that the answer might be: all of. For a few more shocked seconds, all he can do is stand there, locked in place, watching Edgar's face for any sign of what he might do now that he's seen this.

[hate_gettin_older]

Edgar's face is ... blank. Not horrified, not judgmental, not vindicated.

It's several more seconds before he says, almost expressionless: "You the live one, then?"

[lordoftheozarks]

This is so much worse. The boy's face is a blank as a sheet of ice, who knows what's going on in there.

"In a manner of speaking," he answers tersly. "Yes."

[hate_gettin_older]

"Good," he says.

And his mouth works for a moment like something's sticking in his teeth, or his craw.

It comes out, though, as "Need anything?"

[lordoftheozarks]

Erik is quiet for so long that it almost seems he isn't going to answer. Then, haltingly, the words come.

"If I were to ask you not to tell anyone what you saw here, would you honor that?"

[hate_gettin_older]

(Say please, he almost says, and bites it back hard.)

"What the fuck would I tell anyone? Saw you kill an undead bird monster is all, who's gonna care?"