RED ROSE.

FOR: @akarablooming DATE/TIME: 09/21 AM 2:30 LOCATION: the Mangled Mermaid

Here he comes. Again.

He’s not surprised when he looks up from the counter to find familiar pretty features weaving through the crowd of sea-roughened face. He would like to be, sure, but alas. By now, this has become the expected. No matter how many times he tells the boy off, trying to warn him to stay home, wherever ‘home’ maybe, he just keeps coming back like some lost ghost let loose from its mausoleum.

Already, there are eyes being drawn to the newest arrival, and more than one pair of hands is reaching out to grab at this fever-haze dream made real. “Alright alright, knock it off!” he intervenes, easily pulling patrons, already unsteady on their feet, away from their prize and out the door. Only after he’s seen the worst of the mob off does he turn back to Akara, disapproval clear even as he pulls the boy behind the counter and into the back hall with him.

“You’ve gotta stop getting lost in here princess, it’s not good for your health.” They’re in the small employee’s room now, door locked and muffling the sound of laughter and breaking glass. “And right during the busiest hour when these idiots are at their drunkest too, are you outta your mind?”

with enough of time’s meddling, all his familiar sensory memories of above seem to dissipate, swallowed up into underland’s umbra. though he does not care to visit any of his old haunts: his family’s estate, nepenthe... not that he’d be welcome, anyway. he finds the hollow echoes of their routes harder and harder to remember and interpret with each passing day he’s left to underland’s damp and dark. 

instead, he heads to the growing familiar, to the nebulous collection of places he wouldn’t have dreamed of visiting when he lived above, rough-hewn, and strange. akara had first stumbled the mangled mermaid following the coastline and onto the docks until he’d turned himself around and sought refuge in a peculiar beacon. filled to the brim with foul-mouthed sailors and dockhands, some of whom he dodges now crossing the threshold before he’s whisked away in a humid billow of petal-sweet redolence, there is reprieve in the foreign becoming recognizable, in a cocktail made by a deft hand.

eyes of mud and moss cling to the edge of akara’s lips — the smile he flashes is a challenge to amos and his monstrous eden, but his little wings are gossamer. they catch in the conflagrant breath of underland’s primal gods, threatening to tear. amos chews his lip and wonders how much further akara’s willing to go, how much further he’s willing to lead him. 

“i don’t hope.” the words are more of a dagger than he intends. “to hope anything would mean i have expectations.” amos can feel the thrum of carlitos’ voice coming from his own throat, the vibration of the void, the hollow ring of unwanted truth. for a moment, he senses that the shaman is looking over his shoulder, bringing the scorch of his desert home with him. “and expectations are the death of anything real.”

he takes the mask into his great hands and finds it’s delicate, prepossessing. roses were long ago deemed wicked for their structure. yet amos knows thorns were never in the original design. 

akara spins, revealing white flesh, the shadow of shoulder blades, the notches of spine like depressions on a bank of snow — in the teeming chaos of his mind, amos recognizes true beauty, untarnished and unequivocal. finding it this deep down in the hollows of the earth is as rare as a vein of gold. his fingers, calloused by his constant assault on the mantle of reality, r e a c h — he touches supple hide and the snake-eyed stone and somehow doesn’t blacken them. his chest wrenches, aching for charcoal and the porous pages of his sketch book.

“my only intention is to experience something real,” he ends his reverie by beginning another, hands working knots into silken strands. when he’s done, he turns akara to face him. “and i wanna do that with you. that’s why i brought you here.” amos retrieves his mask from beneath his trench coat, then takes a knee so akara can reach. “my turn.” 

there is a certain, sure incisiveness to amos that slices rather than cuts, brutal in his frankness, his candor. it stuns him. akara, a product of machiavallians who spoke not of their thoughts but of what they wanted one to think they thought. everything had been a game, even in idleness - so many layers to parse through, traps masking themselves as treasures to be sought through the soil and loam. what was real was only what could shepherd them to lucre, to sprawling ink across their tapestry and onto the walls and anything else that would roll over.

he holds his breath, feeling amos’ gaze raze paths down untouched bounty, skin prickling, and yet - it does not feel like a ruining. perhaps, a ripening, the way it feels as if his flesh raises itself for a waiting hand. this feels real, this bloom. 

“perhaps that’s why nothing’s ever felt real for me,” he murmurs, facing amos now, a tinge of shame coloring his voice wispy and taut, “i’ve only ever done either.” expected because this is all he’s been taught, hoped because he’d been too much of a coward to do more than yearn. the veil is lifted, and, as if to recoup his loss ( but is it a loss if you don’t mind losing it? ), ivory becomes silk, becomes honey and drips into waiting curves. he watches amos lower himself onto bended knee with peculiar hallowed intrigue, does not move to stand behind him, but presses himself to graze faintly against amos’ cheek, as if to invite him to know him greater than he already has. “and why do you want to experience something real with me? because you can tell that i haven’t known anything real at all? i think you’re rather adept at fathoming those things out about a person - your natural divination.” 

the mask settles, but slender fingers thread through silk and rough-hewn hair. “do you pity me, amos?”

veils cleaved by a calloused hand. he ought to feel exposed - and he does. but it is not an indignity, this - perhaps a darkling knowing. 

˙O⅁ ƎM ‘NMOᗡ — with @akarablooming​ 

// “the saturnalia” in underland @ approximately 12:23 AM on september 25th …

a true sorcerer simply wills himself a different shape and then his skin and bones will go to work: shoulder-blades will sprout diaphanous wings, cracked flesh will yield to the suggestion of new birth, and suddenly, an image of a man you once perceived is but a vestige in your memory. shift the assemblage point! carlitos had demanded, serving a swift smack to the back of amos’ head for good measure. it had seemed so difficult then to perceive of being anything other than himself, to stalk the world from a place of anonymity and shadow. to be rootless, without meaning, without the vizard of ego. 

but when amos wilder recognized he was everything and nothing all at once, it was then that he could choose to become anything in between.

— the mansion leers, an irreverent host to underland’s most sordid players. beyond a labyrinth of iron trellis and gate, sentinel caryatids watch them with sightless eyes. amos opens his arms in greeting to the behemoth, and it heaves a neon symphony in response. “here it is, sacred ground,” he announces, grinning wide. it’s quite obvious he’s pleased with himself — with this fearsome, sprawling beast and its wicked gardens. when he turns around, his great arms are woven over his chest, and the joint between his teeth sizzles. “didn’t believe it was here, did ya?” he wants to feel indifferent — bringing a bloom like him here, forcing well-kempt roots into the soil of bosch’s hedonistic garden — but he can’t. at what point will the nebulous black that lives here sink into him? or has it already?

“this place might get the better of you, akara,” amos warns lazily. he stamps out his dying joint underfoot, and the gravel of the earth inhales. “but not before i do.” his laugh is guttural, born of smoke and ash, and perhaps the rest of him is, too. 

“show me the mask.” fingers twitch once over an open palm.

sacred, indeed. perhaps, so unholy in all its hallowed ground spilling with illicit and infinite indulgences, that it becomes sanctified again - a serpent consuming itself. the mansion promises sprawling, ripe devilry in all its twisted, profligate hedonism. akara strains his ears, tries to hear anything beyond the burning joint consuming itself in between amos’ teeth, but saturnalia shutters itself, keeps its secrets close, and all he can do is watch the smoke leave the man’s mouth. 

perhaps amos is bringing him here as a trial, to see if he can withstand all that underland has to offer, to let him see what writhes in the shadow, wet and waxing. to see if akara will undergo some blood-slicked apotheosis. or perhaps he simply wants to watch him tremble, a thing caught in a maelstrom who refused to run when it first rained. but he is not absent of the same dark undercurrent threading the seams of this evening - someone deplete of it would not send poison to an innocent person. their own flesh and blood wouldn’t be used to create toxins if it weren’t already wretched. 

“is that what you’re hoping for?” he throws amos a look from over his shoulder, smile brazen and cardinal. nothing to betray his trembling awe, his waltzing nerves. “that this place will use me up after you’ve had your fill, as long as you get to watch?”

CLOSED: to @akarablooming for event 02 LOCATION: ANÁNKĒ  DATE & TIME: 09/18 @ 4:30PM

a girl grows up on a large estate, amongst well-trimmed hedges, chandelier crystals, and fragrant blooms. she listens to the birds for company, sings to them in soft, quivering notes as she spins—alone, alone—amongst the hallways. this is her world until she is whisked away, a lovers’ tryst that reaches long across the city and away from her gilded cage. she finds herself in a small home, she makes her own castle of it, decorating it with all her favorite things, of smells that remind her of a home no longer hers. her prince comes and goes until one day he is gone and for the first time she are left out in the open, exposed, no more than a naked rose. 

this is the fact of her life: she has always lived in dollhouses, all she knows are walls.

lost again—every time she is allowed outside she goes spinning along, legs taking her this way and that, barely more than a mouse in a maze facing a series of dead ends. the under is particularly tricky, no sun to guide her east or west, not a friendly face in sight to point her this way or that. 

today, she stumbles upon a set of intricate doors, vines threatening to choke the stone beneath. it is alive in that way that draws out a curiosity from within her, its twisting, reaching arms allows her to follow something rather than setting out on a path all her own. she follows the edge of the maze, opening the door before her. another lure, the scent of something warm and nearly human. it reminds her of a place she has missed dearly, of memories long lost, sunbeam smells and waking upon linen after a long night of love. 

moving amongst the bottles, she raises a hand to touch a bottle—does it call out to her? use me, i’m yours.  

-

he thinks he might be dying here. transplanted from the alluvial, promenade soil from above to tainted, fevered grounds, made to be his own prisoner and warden, bits of and pieces of him parceled out into poisons until nothing will be left but marrow to feed the dogs. memories of watching his father’s head gardener fussing over plants that refused to take root in their greenhouse, their wilted leaves and petals looking too much like aureate corpses. this is him, isn’t it? or perhaps, this is what they’d hoped he’d become.

some part of him thinks his roots might have taken. that unbeknownst to him, therein lies an inherent, stygian dusk that only takes shape in the where the sun can’t reach, a bloom made to flourish in the dark. 

but it is a mere consolation he tells himself when underland is bleakest, he thinks. father would never breed ebon shades into his offsprings - not unless he could tame it.

the door chimes tinkle, warning of a client, or a prospect. but by the looks of her, she looks more like a girl out of her depths - perhaps lost, definitely alone - even familiar. she does not have the same irreparable eye for reprisal that besets those often found here, and so he approaches her quietly, and within sight.

“i found a door. inside the church ruins.”

there’s no clever way to ease into anomalies, and so he dives into his findings - he thinks ashley might appreciate the bluntness, with how forthright the man seemed to embrace for himself. 

akara is soot-stained, pale with ashes dark discovery, and covered with remnants of his intrepid exploration. he’s not sure what it is that compelled him to walk straight into the ruins, doesn’t expect to see anything beyond the ragged skeleton of its foundation and smoking pews - but he’s yet to resist when something beckons, and something certainly called him to the back of the ruins, to a door that remained largely unscathed. 

this is where creatures of devilry linger - in the valleys between shadows and heart-rending spectacle, atop the thrumming of pulse-beats and deadly pondering. he’s learning to bloom in the humid dark of underland, far from the light but spilling with ungoverned vices - it suits his thorns more, how they’ve become slick with poison, and he balances the toxin between his fingers, holds them up in the neon light until they look as if they’re imploring to be licked and consumed. 

he’s always been dangerous.

groomed to become the thorn, shunned the moment he became the shrike too. they wanted him beautiful but not bloody, and now he bleeds into a glass bottle with a silk ribbon for their benefit. he holds one in his palm now, rolls it between heart lines and lifelines.

“the fellow in the red,” he says, startling in his softness, as if the back of his throat is a well of honey, “he looks like he’d let us do anything to him so long as we let him beg.”

hello darlings!! k here with no self-restraint and another muse - AKARA, aka red rose!! he’s a thorny lil thing with (i hope) fun potential for plots - i’ve got some bio bullets under the cut as well as some wanted connections, and pls feel free to check out his app here (even if it’s just to see a perfume bottle modeled after his vain ass)! hit me up if you’d like to get something going uwu