idolpro | Shrike's Heart (#2)

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!heart games

Shrike's Heart (#2)

The woman before you is beautiful—fair of features, with lovely golden skin and luxurious long black hair, petite. You have the immediate and distinct impression that she's just let go of your hand, and she steps back, and smiles.

It's not quite a happy smile.

"I'm sorry," she says. "There's just nothing I can do, as things are. But the way is there; it just needs to be lit."

You open your mouth—maybe to say something, or to express confusion—but you have to cough, and taste something metallic, spattering black blood onto the ground in front of you. Then you realize—blood seeps from opening wounds in your arms, your chest, your stomach, your face. It rims your eyes and trails from your nose and you feel like you're dissolving—

—and you fall through the ground like it's the surface of a lake, and go down, down, down.

> Wake Up

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[ It's hard to find your footing, but you do it. Water might soak into your shoes, but it doesn't feel cold, here.

It doesn't feel like anything.

The corpses stretch for some distance—all real-seeming, distinct faces, still and ashen in complexion. Some seem like total strangers, or perhaps vaguely familiar at best; like they might resemble someone you've met, a little bit.

Mixed in with all of them are the bodies of your fellow idols—you might see your own face mirrored there, though for whatever reason, it seems wholly unfamiliar, if unsettling. ]

[ Please she is trying so hard not to throw up

It's slow in kind, the way that she goes about it, having to pause routinely to catch her breath even as she grows accustomed to them; even being able to convince herself that they (and herself, a familiar face that she can't quite put her finger on) aren't real, or that they are, at least, a fabrication, it's altogether too chilling for her to easily endure.

But, still. She makes her way onward, slowly, carefully, determined to help as much as she can. ]

[ You are kind; you put them to whatever rest you can, even while you try to pick your way across the sea of bodies. The water sounds like it's getting closer, at least. Maybe that means there's an end to this?

[ That's -

Something. Something, yes. She continues onward, ears trained on the sound of the water as she goes. She's happy to imagine that she's granting them some amount of comfort, but it's just as soothing to her to think this might nearly be over - surely when she reaches the source of the sound there won't be any more of them. ]

[ The sea of corpses does, eventually end, leaving you to step down onto what feels like stone under that same thin layer of dark water. There's something, something ahead, you're sure, and the voices grow louder as you attempt to follow the water, occasionally parsable as distinct words in a wide array of uncanny voices—the odd thing is, they feel different and memorable, but trying to describe what sets each one apart feels impossible.

They rise in an overwhelming crescendo, but the louder they get the more impossible it seems to turn from your path. And then you see the hole.

It's only the rush of water that gives it away, in the darkness—a wide, circular hole in the ground ahead, the dark water falling down the edges in sheets, the roar blending with the voices until it's overwhelming. You feel compelled—allured, maybe—to walk up to the edge, and look, frozen in place, at the infinite darkness below. ]

[ That's

Not comforting at all. In fact, she's very emphatically not a fan - of any of it, certainly, but even more than the voices the sight of the water settles on her far too unpleasantly, for reasons she can't quite pin herself.

It's for that reason, she imagines, that she peers into the hole hesitant, breath held, trembling so harshly it's a struggle to remain still and standing. ]

[ It's an arresting sort of horror... but, you don't feel compelled to walk any further, into the night-dark that would wrap around you like a blanket and smother you.

Instead, the voices filling your ears have a single request. Simple, really.

Give us your name. ]

U-Um -

[ If,

If they can speak, then that means they can communicate. She thinks. She hopes. ]

- It's . . . Aradia ... um, I'm sorry - what are your names...?

[ Your voice emerges, but the words are muffled, garbled, warped, and swallowed into the nothingness that surrounds you.

What was your name? You don't remember, anymore.

The voices don't answer your question—exactly, at least. they rise in a babble again, odd phrases, shrieks, bubbling laughter—it's not coming from the pit, but from all around you.

the dream of the dark

—but only if you listen closely. that song. the one no one taught you, not your mother, the one that exists because we made it—

VENGEANCE! VENGEANCE!

—and so on. Maybe those are names, of a sort. Maybe they're insane. But then— ]

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Shrike's Heart (#2)

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