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

[lovethyneighb_or]

Another lightning bolt, another tower of his mind crumbles. It leaves him gasping and twitching, long strings of audible agony pulled from his convulsing lungs as his heart spasms against his chest. There is fire inside his skull, and not until the flames have eaten their share and died down can he remember where he is and the question being asked.

Hospital. The hum. His voice.

Quieter, and yet sharper: "No."

[abhorrently]

"Surely you know escape is impossible."

The curve of the knife knows both sides of his torso, and then through the ribcage, just over one lung, then the other. Deep enough to bleed, but still, so careful in how it refuses to puncture deep enough to asphyxiate or pour him out. He's lovely like this - but still. Too proud. When he breaks, then she will grant him what he must long for. What every syllable of anguish asks for.

If he could even find the strength to move his arms, they aren't going anywhere. She yanks them up, drives the dagger through his palms, and keeps him fixed to the spot.

"Ask me for your life, and I will grant it."

Just. Not in the sense one might think.

cw reference to improper animal butchering

[lovethyneighb_or]

He splits open in four more places. Five more places. The knife splits his hand, driven clean through the gaps between the thin bones. Some part of his mind still receiving information can feel the blood, both warm and cooled, pooling beneath his body. Leaking. Like an improperly stuck pig, left to thrash and dangle and squeal on the hook.

(He must have an IV in him somewhere to keep the blood coming in, to keep him alive while they open him piece by piece by blindingly painful piece. Who knows how much blood will be on the OR floor by the time this is over. Of course, he's slipping beyond thinking in sentences by now; these thoughts occur to him in images and ideas alone, and merely a handful of vocabulary to accompany them.)

It takes him longer and longer to answer each time, but the answer remains the same. "No."

it's gore all the way down

[abhorrently]

He will not break. This infuriates the dead thing. Where the living one would cut her losses, not drag this out and instead vent her anger on the corpse, the dead one feels only the hate within it root deeper, wants to find that one breaking point and shatter him now. She tries. She tries - but the shocks, though they still pain him, though she sends it into his eyes, strikes him, digs her nails into his wounds to force them to pump more, hot on her hands, she wants to rip out defiance from him like some rip the innards out of prey-

And always, that same refrain. No.

It's so-

The floor creaks.

The undead snarls, ripping the knife from her prey and delivering one final blow - deep enough now that he'll bleed the rest of the way, mercifully delivered from the slow and precise torture. And from the shadows, another one steps forth, eyes ablaze with power - but she glances, sees Mulcahy. His condition rapidly deteriorating. He can't heal this on his own, will need to be kept stable, need extra hands, surgery and medicine and everything they had And the time it would take to do that, get him there and see that he was looked for, her other self would be free. Who knows where she'd be. Who or what she'd hurt.

It is a choice from pure practicality. It is something she has to do. But it is a choice she'll keep.

She has to dive forward with her eye on slashing her dead self's tendons, to keep her from running away.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Butterflies caught in the hand, their wings carefully ripped and peeled away; spiders with their legs torn off; pinned to entomologists' boards, incautious taxidermy;

the thick snapping of fibers, breaking of vegetables in the hand, no knife, just strength to tear something that was made to hold together; Father, I need some hands over here, I’m opening the chest;

no, no, a refrain buried deep enough that it can answer for him when he’s left incohate.

I grieve for you, O Mary most sorrowful, in the wounding of your compassionate heart,

(Open. He splits open. Stuck properly, so his blood and innards and all can sluice out.)

when the side of Jesus was struck by the lance before His Body was removed from the Cross. Dear Mother, by your heart thus transfixed, obtain for me the virtue of fraternal charity and the gift of understanding. (Forgive her.)



Mulcahy lies gasping in his own blood, a hole opened down the center of his stomach.

[abhorrently]

A wheezing, anguished shriek as the dead one falls. But Fever knows herself well enough to get this handled. She knows how much she would fight to survive, what exactly would incapacitate her, what works and what doesn't. But it is all of that, and the strength of hatred directed with precision. The full weight of killing intent makes shoulders sag minutely when it falls upon them, and she intends to slay this double, praying that this time she stays down.

Bright light, and the scent in the air is Mulcahy's blood and burning storm. Collision and knife wound, and tear into her tear into her. She has to overpower her, rip her open, lay open her throat so she can cast no more. She's longed for a moment like this over and over again. Oh, it won't be nearly sufficient enough to quell her rage, but even the flash of satisfaction is worth it. Destroying herself - striking, burning, rending, to shred that face to ribbons.

No mercy. No bargaining. No forgiveness. Not even a breath of it.

By the time Fever's blade sinks into the other's neck, it will be too late for him. But she must do it regardless, and turn away from the yearning to fully carve apart the corpse in order to go to the soon-to-be. Sinking down to her knees on the floor, hardly feeling whatever blows she could not earlier evade. Her hands red with her own blood, now his blood, identical red on the ground.

Gods. It isn't her fault, she knows - she did not choose to die and leave a corpse to be used - but still. Something with her face did this to him.

(and she has to admit, they were doing a fine job of it. not a helpful observation, though.)

[lovethyneighb_or]

His eyes are burst in his skull, the flesh around them swollen shut. His organs glint through an opening in the stomach, a narrow portal into the impossibly intimate. He freely bleeds and shallowly breathes. His pulse would be weak and unsteady if it was taken. And still—still, he stubbornly clings.

His mind is gone entirely, lost to phantom visions of the past, to pain, and to the dissipation of his faculties. And still, he feels another presence arrive at his side somewhere; and still:

”Ng.”

[abhorrently]

The only cure for this is death. She could slide a knife into the right vertebrae, snap the connection between spine and brain, and she finds her hands already reaching for one. But she feels the brush of that particular handle, and is made to reconsider. Knows that this death brings no pleasure - no dark lust of murder sinking jaws into prey, when one is already so wounded. He cannot even beg to live. There is little in it for her. It would only be mercy.

(Will she still hesitate one day, when it is not her or a victim that might feel this steel? Will it still, in all its beauty, made to strike, made to cut, made to defend, make her reconsider doing harm?)

Mulcahy's hands are ruined, torn open and tacky crimson. There is little on him that would not ache to make contact with, pain so total she doubts he knows where it starts and where it ends. But his cheek is undamaged, and impulse guides Fever to lay a hand on it.

Their blood, scarlet. He's colder than he should be.

(Her hand is empty. If it is not soon, within a pair of moments, she will do what must be done. She's always been able to. She can bloody her hands instead of anyone else.)

"...sleep." The voice is quiet, but carries a hint of assurance. Confidence. "You're safe now."

Let go. Let it all go. He held out long enough, more than earned his rest.

[lovethyneighb_or]

At first, what’s left of his consciousness kicks and thrashes at the suggestion. Like a buck with his antlers entangled with a rival’s, more than mere will or pride drives him at this point; the fight must be had. He is unable. He cannot, as fact, give up or lose faith.

And like a buck with entangled antlers, exhausted and spent, left with no other choice, eventually he will have to die.

He does not think any of this. There are no thoughts left to him. The touch stings, blisteringly hot; he would flinch if he was able. But it is also gentle.

Sleep.

He’ll wake up in the morning. He always does.

Mulcahy’s breathing stutters, then ceases.

wrap.

[abhorrently]

His breathing stops, and she knows, by the silence that descends. Ruined eyes are left alone - it'd be questionable if they'd even stay shut, with the condition he's in. But he has passed, and she knows when she looks away, takes her hand off him, that he'll no longer be there.

"Sorry," she whispers to the corpse. Sorry that she wasn't faster. Sorry that she holds no skill to repair, to heal, and that all of her is destructive. Sorry that he might now flinch when he sees her, another nightmare added to his collection.

But she cannot regret the choice she made, and will not. It had to be done. One just lives with it after.

Rising from his side, she slowly makes her way out of the house, trying to not let the exhaustion she can feel creeping up actually settle over her. Not yet. Not until this is over. She's fought through worse. Fought through less sleep, less downtime, because see what a delay will get you.

(Later, her hands will tremble from how much she's been asking of herself. Moderation was never a virtue she had to learn, when limits were usually kicking in.)

The edge of dawn greets her as she exits the place, and she takes a deep breath. Keep moving.