Shrike's Heart (#2)

[idolpro]

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

Comments

Re: > START

[constellationprize]

[ 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. ]

Re: > START

[handpuppets]

[ 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. ]

Re: > START

[constellationprize]

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...?

Re: > START

[handpuppets]

[ 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— ]