![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
IC INBOX ( KENOS ).
|
█ To Commune with Set is to stand barefoot in an endless, scorching desert. The sun illuminates all, scalding the shadows themselves out from underneath whomever enters his dominion; the arch of gentle, distant, waves of sand mask the precarious chasms, towering dunes akin to mountains. The sense of vastness, timelessness, is of particular notice, lending itself to the alien, eldritch quality of his mind. There is a dark storm in the distance, and you know intimately that this divine being is far from benign. You cannot bargain with a force of nature. You can only survive it. |
no subject
Beats me. How my world could be unmade without Ra's say-so is what I am more intrigued by.
[ He has a handful of her existence in his palm; her cold memory. Patting at it, shaping it into something not unlike how clay could be. ]
I was demoted, anyways. I'm more of a demigod, with my power separated from me as it is. What about you? You seem to have a grudge against that demon - was it what unmade your world, then?
no subject
It wasn't unmade.
[That response is quick as a lash, and just as stinging. She refuses to believe that's true. There's not a single bit of proof other than the Regent, now that Yima woman, claiming so. And what could unmake a world? Not even in the tale of the gods did they unmake, not on that scale. It was their homes as much as their worshipers.
... A demi-god, fine. She can accept they could trap a demi-god. As for the demon...]
As if a demon could do the same. [A whole world? Hah-] No. That thing took my eye.
[Her grudge against him, what had gotten him killed... was far more petty than the fate of an entire world. But to an archer... perhaps it was world enough. And she's still not satisfied... not after the dryad had undone his death.]
no subject
[ The question might be mocking, from anyone else. From Set, there is honest curiosity. He desires to know hearts and minds, even in his diminished state there is a raw, plucked nerve that makes him who and what he is - god of foreign lands, vagrant god, god of foreign lives, wanderer. Somewhere in their communion, he begins to emerge and take shape, rather than exist as scenery and land. The desert, in this place, remains draped along his shoulders and arms as one might wear a traveling cloak, a gauzy wrap wound around his body, gleaming in the dim light.
He finds his way to her, dragging his domain with him. She looks much the same, albeit less bloody in the mouth. Fierce, war-like and angry. Whatever she is, at her heart, those elements call to him, even demoted as he is. ]
That's no good, [ he is so careless with his body, when he reaches towards her face; the gesture is slow and methodical, captured in their minds, as he traces the shape of her injury without really touching her. ] Though, I've known maimed warriors. Their drive to remain lethal and successful in battle carries them, no matter the injury. I expect you're the same?
[ A low laugh. ]
What a rotten demon, to pick something so vital to you.
Cw: eye stuff
They must still be there. We have simply been ripped away… or fallen through the cracks.
[That much she can believe, over entire worlds full of life simply unmade for no discernible rhyme or reason than some woman who masqueraded as her mother claiming that “all things die”.
The world of shared hearts and minds is… strange. Hayame had hardly noticed, somehow, that he had not been a man before… and yet now when he coalesces before her he undoubtably is. Had she been a woman, or just the cold, lonely peaks of snowy mountains she would never see again? He comes closer to her clad in heat and sand and sun and she stands at the barrier between them, wrapped in cold and ice and stone like armor that hides any sort of warmth and longing beneath it.
In actual life… she would never let him close enough to her to do what he does. She would break his wrist for even trying, but one moment he is apart and then he was there, she can almost feel the trace of his fingertips over the curve of her face, and beneath the blizzard she clads herself in… She shivers.
Hayame conceptualizes herself without the eye, because she cannot lie to herself that it is there. But it had not been exposed, because she cannot bear its loss. When Set speaks of it, though… there is a moment when it is, when his fingers almost caress the line of her socket beside an empty hole, raw and exposed with the shriveled remains of her optic nerve bloody and inflamed deep in her skull, her eyelids and lashes framing only a gaping, painful emptiness. An eyeball plucked out so cleanly and cruelly it hadn’t left a single trace of scrape or cut behind on her face.
The eye that remains to her burns, hateful and pathetic and strong in contrast to the cold.
She does not respond to the question of whether she will become more vicious to overcome the shortcomings of her new lack, because it should be obvious. She will. But as for the rest-]
All demons are rotten.
[She doesn’t view the one she’d had the misfortune to encounter as more or less vicious than another.
That was just what they were.]
no subject
And he, god of war, former protector-god of Egypt, would do his own duty -- and battle the end of all things. He would resist, for the land that did not love him.
Hayame seems an unloved creature, as well. Severe women were not loveable women, though he had never cared for the quality of one's personality over the strength of their heart. She is a cold thing, where he scalds with dry heat. He ghosts his touch around the image of her face, held between them in the mind's eye. A demon did this to her. A demon marred a woman of battle prowess, and he hisses between his teeth at the thought of what has been done to her. ]
I believe the same as you. The Ennead cannot be destroyed, we will forever reincarnate into ourselves -- worlds are always under threat, but the stalwart will stand against it. Are you that warrior, for your own world? How far would you go, to bring it back?
no subject
He would still be there, inside of her, in so intimate a realm.
He would still be reminding her of what mockery she found in that clean, gaping wound. If it had been a burn, a slash... the eye could be excused. Just a wound. Collateral damage. But the prettiness of the removal not only marks it as the work of someone (no, a demon) that had managed to gain complete mastery over her for a precious moment in the heat of battle... but it marked her for the humiliation it was meant to be. The target had been her eye from the beginning, so that she might live on obviously crippled instead of granted the dignity of death.
So that she might seek revenge, have it, appearing before this demi-god bloodied and beautiful in her savagery... only to have the dryad be the next one to humiliate her, and take it away, leaving only this curse behind. But he asks her if she is the stalwart, the one who will struggle against a threat to her world and suddenly-
Hayame seizes his wrist, so that she might hold him there in the intensity of what remained of her gaze. (In the process, his fingertips do brush her skin.)]
There can be no end to the places I would go to return to my world.
[He speaks to a woman who had helped to enslave her own kind, all for the sake of trying to improve her own standing. To a woman who had struggled and fought and clawed to be recognized in a world stacked against her from birth. To a woman who knew saving her world would mean that at the end of the very day she returned... she would die. But all things (not worlds) do die. ... And that is where she wants to meet hers, the rest be damned.]
Now tell me your name. And if you are truly the god of war... Give me your blessing.
no subject
Good.
[ What he gleans from her mind is monstrosity. A damnable soul that continues her path forward no matter the cost to herself; in a sense, he finds a kindred spirit in this woman. That she bears the body of a mare as well is, remarkably, of no importance to him. The gods of Egypt are born in human shape, in half-human shape, as animals, as the elements. He, too, wears the form of a beast from time to time and she is no more or less for it.
When she seizes him, he is a river of red. The cascade of fresh blood and the clash of weapons, fingers digging into the sands of the desert and voices ragged from crying in pain, anguish, conquest. He is the hands that curl across the backs of her own, the arms that follow the pull of her draw, the eyes that track her kills -- be they her own, or those she chooses anew. Tugging at a long strand of hair with his other hand, the one she has not captured and joined herself too, he rips it free from his head -- a lock of carmine that bleeds at the end, into sands.
That, he tucks into the raven-black silk of her high ponytail. A shock of red against the dark. ]
I am Set, the mightiest of the Ennead. Carry my favor, starless warrior, if you are resolved to this path. You may find me no better than your hated demon, yet I will stand at your side and go to those wretched ends with you for as long as I am able.
no subject
Eye.
When she wakes, she will wonder if there is a strand of her hair that retains that crimson stain even in the true world. Through their touch she feels… everything of him- or rather, vague impressions of everything, both disorienting and grounding… and… she lets go of his wrist, though not before she squeezes it in her grip as if to remind him that she had taken it in the first place. From there… she bows her head just slightly to accept his boon. It is difficult, in this place where their essences are bare… to deny his divinity, no matter how she might have doubted elsewhere.
The blizzard still rages in her “lands”. But as if they have passed into the eye of the storm, the bitter wind and whip of ice is eerily still around only them and the line where cold snow bleeds into hot sand.]
I am Hayame.
[Someone who has never prayed. The gods of men never answered jinba, and she had been raised ignorant of her own kind’s natural worship. But now… she finds enough experience to cobble together her own version of worship.]
If you desire battle, then the violence I do in this world may be yours. If there is an offering you desire more… I would have you name it.
[She could be the woman he had met in the dryad roots, half feral with the surge to fight and a demon’s blood in her mouth, but she could also be this. And if she finds irony in the fact that she who feels so lonely in these foreign worlds might finally find someone willing to stand by her side only for that person to be War…
Perhaps that is what she deserves.]
no subject
This world, this realm, could return him to that glory. He'd felt the connection to his divinity while staying faithful to his duty, the reparations he was required to make. She was not the only soul who had been cruel; she, to her people, and he to the mortals who had looked to the gods for aid, not slaughter.
In the eye of the storm, he feels her wash over him as they make their agreement. Perhaps for the two of them it would be a dangerous thing, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder ( shoulder-to-withers? ) against the unknown requirements that would be imposed upon them, but she -- she vows her violence is for him. It is as honest a devotion as he thinks he'll get. ]
I will accept, Hayame. Dedicate your violence and sins to me, and I will repay you in kind.
[ Though he may only have the might of a demigod, his mind is still that of an inhuman thing -- he does not truly desire blood and flesh, nor mountains of bodies. He was a protector, once. Not a slaughterer, but a slaughterer he now is. And he will absolve her of anything she does from henceforth, if only she names him in that act. ]
no subject
[Later, Hayame will realize that she never asked exactly how this god liked his prayers. She will have to come up with something by herself, and settle for running a comb through the long, dark locks that now contain a single strand of crimson. But until then…
The deal seems complete.
She steps back… and turns as if to go, to head deeper into the blizzard that was her hearts. Where she could ice her resolve and cool the temper that had been inflamed so easily by the demon that now encroached in the other side of the “mountain”, bound temporarily with both men who she had tangled with in the dryad’s roots. Both scenes had been violent… but only one had been driven by hatred, by a desperate need for revenge. And if this god would aid her, if she might use that power or blessing to best the other now that his powers had returned in full…]
… I would ask you not to wander far.
[She is a private person. Just the presence of the two in her mind or hearts or shard or wherever they were… it put her on edge, ever wary for prying or attempts to break down walls. But if she is to have truce with him…
Hayame turns back to regard the god of deserts and wars and protection and all sorts of things she feels in the forced connection between, a sudden gust blowing her long mane and tale across her body and then away, like black pennants above the snow.]
The territory is treacherous and cold.
[And those little hidden caves where she stashed her precious remaining warmth and tenderness…
She wasn’t ready to guide anyone there. … She shouldn’t. Not again.]