rule of fire

she has been wandering too much, lately. it is hard to sit still. beneath her skin her magic hums and shifts like a restless beast and she has noticed those around her using just one or two more spells, or bearing a gleaming new weapon at their hip, and it is--throwing her off. psychosomatic, certainly, but the symptoms are jarring enough to send her roaming the streets of spirale, looking for--

see, it’s like this. magic wells up and spills over and floods. parley is a finite thing and she is very steadily becoming waterlogged, capsizing, going under. her fingers tremble and the corners of her vision are clouded with stars and her thoughts catch and tangle and disappear. she is desperate for an outlet, going wild for the want of it.

parley had always assumed that anyone who said they could smell magic was lying. magic smells like dusty old tomes and dustier old wizards, if anything, the wearying fragrance of libraries and archives and shelves at the back of someone’s office stacked with moth-gnawed scrolls. magic itself smells like nothing; it’s the effects, the lingering consequences (ash and the reek of burnt flesh).

they are not lying, it turns out. not specifically. simplifying, perhaps, reducing the experience to the barest descriptors, but maybe there is nothing to describe the sensation of brushing up against a leyline, skimming the surface of a well spilling over. even parley falters, now, trying to define it. like being submerged, like swallowing quicksilver, like collapsing inward and reaching out out out all at once.

the onslaught is a convenient excuse to stumble, stagger and catch her tiny frame on the folds of the man’s robes, breathe deep of incense and gold. “i--sorry, i don’t--quite know what’s come over me--!”

He stops in front of her. Back slouch and his freaky zombie face staring down at her like some horror movie come to life. Which technically he is. The firstborn of the sun merely stares down, unable to comprehend what she was doing. Did she forget something. Of course he meant no harm, but without the need of a voice, he finds it hard to voice that. So he tries the next best thing which is to raise his hand in a gesture of hello. 

@ignicracy

“Oh baby,” Pembroke paused, setting down his beer bottle and rubbing his arms as if he were cold, looking rather uncomfortable. “You’re makin’ my blood boil. Don’t think I like that.”

@ignicracy

The undead, were a liability in every way. The chances of them becoming insane, hollow, mindless were high when purpose was taken away. And so the nameless king found himself like a specter, roaming the streets of wherever at night. and scaring the locals as well. 

It was unsettling to say the least.A being who was twice as tall…. doing that. 

she’d known from the start that coming this deep into the towering cyberpunk structures of fibonacci was a mistake. she put up a brave front, sure, but when it came down to it anything that could even maybe do her harm sent her skittering--so down here, in the gloom, she’s jumping at every shadow.

A smirk decorates his face for a moment. Seems like the message got through. 

“ Yes. “

The sinister look on his face lightens. If not for the circumstances one might even mistake it for a friendly one. With a short, self-content huff and a quick press of fingers Ogata lets his grip go. He’s content with this result.

“ That was all there was, right? “

against all better judgment she considers flicking through her camera roll thoughtfully just to tease him, but--but the way his face can storm and clear over in the span of a heartbeat has set her on edge, and toying with him like that would be foolish in the extreme. instead she fumbles with her phone, shoves it in the pocket of her jeans.

one step, two step back. deep breaths. “that’s it. i’d only just seen you. or i would have known to take the flash off.” parley sighs, turns as if to leave, then pauses.

—✕ █ ▌❝So, I take it you’re SUICIDAL then? Fine by me. Don’t even have to clean up your body — just kick it down the hole and be done with it.❞ He shrugs, making it known that he can see her PLAIN as day. Having once scavenged to survive, the sheer audacity of behaving as if one is INVINCIBLE is enough to earn his cutting tongue. Is she so ARROGANT to believe that a lack of a police force would guarantee her survival?

@ignicracy ❤’d for an itty bitty starter

—✕ █ ▌❝What are you doing?❞ He can’t quite tell in this city whether someone is a looter or not, what with all the rubble everywhere. Besides, is there really ANYTHING to loot? ❝If you’re trying to steal, you could be a bit more SUBTLE.❞

fever dream.

the thing parley never quite learned about magic is that a body is a vessel, not a conduit. it wells up from within, seeps insidious through veins and pools in fingertips. she knew–that if she used too much, it would turn her lips blue and her breath would come ragged, that if she pulled too hard at the source it would wrench itself free at the roots and she would be set adrift, too. that was why she borrowed the magic of others, after all. loop a handful of students into some greater working and let them exhaust themselves building it, step in later and twine your workings with theirs like choking ivy and revel in the way your heart still beats strong.

(she did not have many friends in college.)

but magic clamors to be used. it comes in a trickle and a river and a tide and overflows, fills you up and spills over. this is something she is only now beginning to learn. parley still knows the words to all her spells, can still scratch out the runes in the air and whisper driftwood-spark incantations and shape the summon in her mind but–but she has forgotten how to turn word and will into something physical and her magic is running over.

this is where she ends up. stars clouding the edge of her vision and a copper-iron tang from biting her tongue and her hands shaking, shaking, shaking. she is by the great yawning pit at the center of spirale, searching ink black for answers or reprieve and finding neither. instead--instead her eyes cross and out of the hollow crawls something towering, burning red and driftwood blue, lashed around with chains that wither and rust and crumble away as she watches. on the nape of her neck, the brand sparks to life, burning a fierce trail down her spine with its own inner heat.

“i have never taken a life, and the thought of it scares me half to death, or--” she fans out her fingers in front of her, curls them one by one into her palm until there are four left stretched out, trembling with peculiar weakness. “or i spent my time in study drawing so much magic from my classmates that i pulled the beat right out of their heart, too. this many dead,” she says, twitching the curled up fingers just so, “and the rest...”