Shrike's Heart (#3)

[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

[handpuppets]

[ There's a moment of... almost a pause, somehow, in the voices, as that memory (half-memory? dream?) floats to the surface of your mind, but even so you find yourself still frozen in place by the pressure of... maybe it's the enormity of this place, the vastness of nothing on the other side of the hole, or the pressure of... a feeling of being watched by something very large, all around you.

There's something surrounding you, in a ring around the hole—impossibly large, maybe they're... buildings, or—faces? But it's unsettling, uncomfortable, in a visceral way, to contemplate for too long.

The voices fill your ears, and then there's just one, and a moment of silence around it—a woman's voice, or maybe a girl's.

Give your name. ]

Re: > START

[unbr8kable]

[Instantly, before she can help herself:]

Which one?

Re: > START

[handpuppets]

[ Several voices speak up in fits and spurts—cutting in over each other—

The one—

—that—

—is you— ]

Re: > START

[unbr8kable]

...I dunno what I expected.

[Pauses, then:]

Nemesis. Who are you all?

[Assuming there's nothing new to see]

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 rise around you, saying things that... is that a response? It's unclear.

thread broken and unwinding

Entombed Heart's Desire—

Throne that Lies Below

But then... ]