Marie M. Bennett

Like was just fully like "yeah those seem bad 🤔"

Hey guys! So I've made a community here on tumblr called "The Fantasy & Folk Collective".

I'd love if you guys joined!! Its a space for writers (indie, trad, fanfic even), readers and beta readers.

It focuses on fantasy, romantasy and thrillers. All inclusive zone.

So, little self promo. Might make a group on FB? Idk, Idk how to do that yet.

@lyricpen @dewaleprose @weendyreads @softread

Shout out to these lovely people who've offered to help me with this project!! <3

Chapter One

Jumpsuits 

Clancy sat stiffly in the passenger seat, hands curled loosely in his lap as Nico guided the car along the narrow road that circled the outer border of Dema. The city wall rose beside them, an unbroken expanse of pale stone stretching so high it seemed to scrape the gray morning sky. From this distance, it looked less like a barrier and more like a monument to control.

He’d imagined this drive for years. He wasn’t sure what he expected to feel, excitement, dread, awe, but what settled in his chest was something quieter, heavier. A kind of recognition.

“You said you wanted to see the perimeter,” Nico said in his mind, eyes fixed on the road ahead. His voice was smooth, careful, every word measured. “Is this enough?”

Clancy nodded, though his gaze never left the wall. “I just wanted to know what it looks like from here.”

Sometimes Nico loosened the leash, sometimes he was holding him by the collar.

“From here,” Nico repeated, as if testing the phrase. “Most people never ask.”

Most people never challenged the boundaries the bishops set. But Clancy wasn’t most people, and they both knew it.

The car hummed over uneven asphalt. Beyond the wall, the world was muted, thin fog hung over the fields, softening the horizon. Inside the wall, Dema’s spires rose like jagged shadows, clustered tightly, watching.

Clancy leaned closer to the window, forehead nearly touching the glass. Up close, the wall wasn’t smooth at all. Tiny fractures ran like lightning beneath the surface, nearly invisible unless you were looking for them. He wondered how long they’d been there. Wondered why no one talked about them.

Nico noticed his focus. “It’s stronger than it looks.”

“Is it?” Clancy asked.

A beat of silence. “Yes.”

Clancy wasn’t convinced. Something about the wall unsettled him, not its height or width, but the way it seemed to hum with a quiet strain, as if holding back more than just the outside world.

“Why do you want to see it?” Nico asked without turning his head. “I’d like to understand your intention.”

Clancy shrugged, playing it off, though a small storm churned under his ribs. “Curiosity, I guess. Everyone talks about the walls like they’re perfect. I wanted to see for myself.”

Nico’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. “They are perfect.”

Clancy let the comment hang, neither agreeing nor challenging. Outside, the road curved, offering a new angle on the endless stone. A crow sat on top of the wall, small against the massive structure, but there nonetheless.

If a bird could perch there, he thought, breathing air on both sides… then the wall wasn’t truly unreachable.

“You’ve seen it now,” Nico said, his voice calm but edged with something colder. “We can head back.”

Clancy didn’t respond. He pressed his fingertips to the cool window, eyes tracing a subtle but unmistakable crack running diagonally across the stone. His heart jumped, just a small, sharp flutter that told him he was right to be suspicious.

There was a flaw in the walls of Dema.

And for the first time, Clancy felt something other than fear.

He felt possibility.

Clancy shifted in his seat, pulse quickening. Something or someone, had flickered at the edge of his vision near the last bend in the road. A cluster of shapes in the fog, too still and too deliberate to be anything natural. He didn’t turn his head. Didn’t risk letting Nico see the spark of interest in his expression.

Instead, he cleared his throat softly. “Could we stop for a minute?”

Nico’s fingers paused on the steering wheel, just for a fraction of a second. “Stop?” he repeated, as though the word were strange coming from Clancy’s mouth.

“Yeah,” Clancy said, keeping his tone even. “I’ve never been out here before. I just want to take it in. It seems different than I imagined.”

Nico glanced at him then, quick, assessing, searching for the lie. Clancy let his shoulders settle back into the seat, deliberately relaxed. He didn’t blink.

After a moment, Nico eased the car toward the shoulder of the road and brought it to a slow stop. The engine clicked softly as it cooled.

“You may look,” Nico said. “But do not wander.”

Clancy nodded, already unbuckling. “Of course.”

He stepped out of the car, the gravel shifting under his boots. The air out here tasted sharper, less filtered than the recycled atmosphere inside the city. He took a long breath, letting the cold seep into his lungs.

The wall loomed overhead like a skyless cliff, but Clancy’s attention slid subtly toward the bend behind them. The people he’d seen were no longer visible. Maybe they’d moved, maybe they were hiding, maybe he’d imagined them, but he doubted that.

Nico stood by the car door, arms folded behind his back in his formal posture, watching Clancy with the same calm vigilance as always.

Clancy turned his back to him, pretending to marvel at the size of the wall. He let his eyes drift along the cracks, the uneven mortar lines, the weathered stone. Every second he stalled was a second to think.

If there were people out here… If what he saw was real… Then he wasn’t the only one who came close to this place.

And not everyone obeyed Nico.

“Strange,” Clancy murmured, still facing the wall.

“What is?” Nico asked.

“It looks different this close. Less…” He hesitated, searching for a word Nico would approve of. “Imposing.”

Nico stepped closer, as though needing to see what Clancy saw. “Its purpose is not to impress you.”

Clancy hid the flicker of a smile. “I know.”

The fog shifted then, just a slight breeze, and Clancy caught another flicker of movement near the bend in the road. Fast. Careful. Intentional.

His heartbeat stuttered. Someone was watching them. Or watching him.

He forced himself to remain still. Act normal. Play the obedient citizen Nico expected.

Clancy brushed dust from his palms and turned toward the car. 

“We should head back,” Nico said quietly, already stepping ahead of him. The fog thickened around them, softening the outlines of the wall and the road.

Clancy followed, trying not to glance toward the place where he’d seen the shadows move. Every instinct screamed that something was wrong, but he kept pace beside Nico, matching his measured stride. 

Then a sound cracked through the air like a snapped wire.

Clancy froze. Nico did too, head lifting sharply.

A split second later, the car erupted. A bloom of fire burst through the windows, swallowing the interior in violent orange light. The explosion’s shockwave hit them like a wall, flinging both backward before they could even scream.

Clancy’s breath was ripped from his lungs as he hit the ground hard. Gravel tore at his cheek, the world spinning in a smear of light and sound. Heat washed over him, then cold, then nothing but ringing inside his skull.

He tried to push himself up, but the ground tilted beneath him. His vision fractured, fire, smoke, Nico’s silhouette crumpling beside him, the sky shattering into white.

Someone was shouting. Maybe his name. Maybe not.

Clancy reached out blindly, fingers scraping dirt, but the weight of the impact dragged him down. His eyes fluttered once, twice.

Then everything went dark.

— 

Clancy woke with a gasp that tore painfully through his chest. 

Cold water rushed past his ears, his neck, his wrists, enough to jolt him fully back into himself.

He sat up fast, coughing, palms slipping against smooth river stones. For a moment he couldn’t tell what was sky and what was water, what was memory and what was dream. But the ache in his ribs, the sting on his cheek, and the raw burn in his throat told him one thing clearly; He was alive.

Clancy blinked hard, pushing wet hair from his eyes. He was sitting in the middle of a shallow stream, water moving around him in a soft, steady current. Dawn light filtered weakly through a thick mist, turning everything washed-out blue.

Then he really saw where he was. Not the roadside. Not Dema. Not anywhere he recognized.

Towering walls of rock rose on either side of him, massive cliffs stretching straight up into the fog. Their surfaces were jagged and uneven, as if the valley had been carved violently open. Moss clung to the stone in thick patches, and thin vines hung like forgotten ropes. Above, narrow strips of sky cut between the cliffs, pale and unreachable.

Clancy’s breath stilled. He was outside. Outside Dema. Outside the walls he’d spent his whole life inside.

He scrambled to his feet, nearly slipping on the stones, heart pounding with confusion and fear and something else, something wild.

“How—” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “Nico?”

Silence echoed back at him, swallowed by the cliffs.

Clancy turned in a slow circle. No road. No smoke. No sign of the explosion. No sign of Nico. Just the valley stretching endlessly in both directions, the creek winding like a path carved by time.

A low breeze moved through, lifting mist from the water’s surface. Clancy wrapped his arms around himself, suddenly aware of how cold he was. He looked down to see himself in a thin jacket not his own, one with yellow patches. Yellow which bishops could not see. 

He didn’t remember how he got here. Someone must’ve moved him. Dragged him. Carried him. Pulled him out of the grass before the flames reached him.

But who?

His gaze drifted upward, to the cliffs, as if expecting to see someone looking down. Nothing moved.

Clancy stepped out of the stream onto the mossy bank. His legs trembled beneath him, muscles sore from the blast and the fall. He sank to one knee, catching his breath.

Clancy staggered forward, one hand brushing the canyon wall for balance. The stone was cold and slick beneath his fingertips. The valley funneled him into a narrow passage where jagged rocks jutted like broken teeth, forcing him to turn sideways, to duck, to squeeze through dark crevices he could barely see.

Every breath he took echoed unnaturally loud, bouncing down the trench in hollow repetitions. The sound didn’t return to him quite right, it came back warped, stretched thin, as if the canyon were swallowing his presence and spitting out something distorted.

He felt exposed. Seen and hunted.

The walls climbed higher the deeper he went, climbing until the sky was no more than a thin strip of pale morning lodged between black cliffs. Light didn’t fall here; it seeped through reluctantly, staining everything in washed-out gray.

Clancy’s pulse quickened.

A familiar pressure tightened around his chest, subtle at first, then unmistakable. A cold coil sliding inward. A psychic grip.

Nico.

Clancy froze, one hand gripping the rough stone as his knees threatened to buckle. Not a voice. Not words. Just influence, an intrusive weight pressing on his ribs, on his thoughts, like a pair of invisible hands guiding him back into submission.

His breath stuttered. He squeezed his eyes shut. The pressure deepened, making his heartbeat stagger. His legs felt heavier, every step draining strength as though the ground itself pulled at him. Pebbles slid from under his boots in sluggish cascades.

Nico didn’t need to shout. Nico didn’t even need to be present.

His influence seeped through memory, through fear, through the tether Clancy had never been able to sever. It was a cold whisper curling inside his mind, a reminder of obedience, of stillness, of control.

You shouldn’t be here. Turn back. Return.

Clancy gritted his teeth, forcing his foot forward. Another step. Another. Each one a rebellion.

The canyon seemed to tighten around him in response, closing like a throat.

Clancy dragged in a shaky breath and leaned into the stone, anchoring himself with the rough texture biting into his palm. He let the cold seep into his skin, grounding him, not in Nico’s world, but in this one.

The pressure wavered, only slightly, but enough. Clancy took that moment, pushed off the wall, and forced himself deeper into the maze of rock.

He didn’t know where the canyon led. He didn’t know who brought him here. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty; if Nico could still reach him from miles away, then Clancy had to get farther. Fast.

Clancy’s hand pressed to his chest, fingers trembling against the pounding beneath his ribs. It was part prayer, part panic, part muscle memory, the instinctive motion of someone trying to anchor himself before he dissolved.

He tried to force a steady breath, but the air thickened as if the canyon itself had turned viscous. His throat closed tight, a phantom grip tightening around it. His breaths came short, scraping, each one fighting against an invisible hand.

His mind reached desperately for anything solid, anything real, and found stories. Stories whispered in shadows, traded under blankets in Dema’s sleeping quarters, smuggled between notes and half-truths.

The Banditos. Rebels painted in yellow. People who could slip through the Bishops’ influence like light through cracks. People who weren’t afraid. Clancy was afraid. Clancy was a coward.

Clancy had never seen them before. Not truly. Not up close.

His gaze dropped to his own jumpsuit, torn at the knee, stained from the creek, stitched at the shoulders with faded yellow fabric. A color Nico despised. A color that disrupted control.

The yellow suddenly felt heavier. Warmer. Like armor.

Help me, he thought, though he didn’t know who could hear. Someone. Anyone.

The air throbbed. Shadows thickened at the edges of his vision, bending toward him like reaching arms. His steps slowed despite the terror screaming in him; his feet dragged as though someone had hooked strings into his ankles and pulled.

“No—” Clancy choked out, but the word was crushed under the weight in his throat.

His pulse raced, frantic and wild, but his limbs… his limbs felt numb. Foreign and detached from him.

His fingers twitched uselessly at his sides.

A cold voice slid into his mind like a blade pressed against the softest part of him. A voice he knew too well. Too intimately.

Calm and cruel. Absolute, back after one a few moments.

Return.

The command unfurled through him, threading into his bones.

Clancy’s knees buckled. His breath snagged in his chest. The canyon warped, narrowing into a tunnel with no exit.

“Please,” he rasped, barely audible.

Not to Nico. Not to himself.

But whatever force, whatever person, had pulled him from the flames and left him in this valley.

His vision dimmed around the edges.

Return.

The word echoed in his skull, relentless, tightening its grip.

Clancy’s palms slapped against the canyon wall, nails digging into cracks he could barely see. The stone bit back, scraping skin raw, but he didn’t let go. He couldn’t. Every step felt like trudging through water thickened with terror, heavy, dragging, suffocating.

His fingers skittered across cold rock as he dragged himself forward, lungs heaving against the invisible hand squeezing them.

“Cover me!”

The scream ripped out of him, raw and broken. It didn’t even feel like his voice, more like the voice of someone dying, someone pleading with the last breath they had left.

The sound tore up the canyon, bouncing between the walls in jagged echoes.

And something broke.

For a heartbeat, Nico’s grip faltered. The pressure in Clancy’s chest eased. Air rushed back into his lungs in a desperate gasp.

He stumbled, clutching the wall, drinking in the breath like it was life itself. His vision still wavered, but the shadows stopped bending inward. The world steadied, just barely.

Then he saw them.

Up on the ridge above him, half-shrouded by fog and distance, stood silhouettes. Still. Silent. Watching. Yellow fabric caught the light. Banditos.

His heart lurched.

They didn’t talk. They didn’t move closer. They didn’t need to.

Their presence alone slammed into the canyon like a shockwave. The psychic pressure in Clancy’s skull loosened, unraveling, peeling back, cracking apart like rotted plaster. Nico’s cold whisper sputtered, then thinned into a hiss at the edge of his mind.

Clancy blinked up at them, chest rising in uneven bursts. For the first time since waking, the canyon air felt breathable.

The Banditos stood tall against the light, silent guardians perched along the rim of the world. Yellow against gray. Rebellion against the totalitarian.

Clancy sank onto a flat stone, every muscle screaming in protest. His palms were shredded raw from clawing at the canyon walls; the fabric of his jumpsuit was torn, yellow patches smeared with mud and streaked with creek water. His throat burned from the scream that had shattered Nico’s hold, and he coughed, spitting water into the shallow stream at his feet.

He lifted his eyes. The Banditos were gone. No silhouettes on the ridge, no sound of movement, only a faint trail of disturbed dust that shimmered in the pale light. For a long moment, Clancy wondered if they had ever been real, hallucinations born of fear and hope colliding in the canyon’s echoing walls. The yellow on their arms and faces lingered in his mind, warm against the gray rock, like a memory that refused to fade.

Nico had withdrawn, but the cold whisper was not gone entirely. It lingered at the edge of Clancy’s mind, distant but unmistakable, a promise of pursuit rather than defeat. The ravine felt safer now, but only temporarily.

Clancy pushed himself upright, legs trembling, sweat and water dripping into his eyes. The trench stretched ahead, jagged and labyrinthine, a winding corridor carved by time and shadow. Behind him, the lights of Dema glowed on the horizon, sharp and unyielding like predatory eyes.

He swallowed hard, feeling the weight of the yellow on his shoulders. Steadying his breath, he whispered once more, voice firmer now:

“…cover me.”

And with that, he stepped forward into the unknown. Every instinct screamed danger, every nerve quivered with fear, but Clancy walked on, resolute. He knew the Bishops would not stop chasing him. He knew Nico’s influence would return.

The project I'm looking for betas for rn is uncompleted but could reach a word count of 100k.

And yes, I do still need beta readers! However I would liked to be clear that i CANNOT PAY anyone. this is a fun project, not one I'm publishing, so I'm not willing to spend money. I'm a minor and don't have a job, so even if I was, I wouldn't be the one this would go through it would be a guardian.

Specifically I am looking for readers who know the lore behind the Clancy story from the albums by Twenty One Pilots.

I'm writing a short story about the twenty one pilots lore of Clancy for my brother who's a big fan for shits and giggles. Anyone on here know the lore that would be interested in beta reading to make sure I don't mess it up?

guys I come on here so little I forgot to update you; I finished my first draft! and I'm over half way done with simple first go editing

I was wondering if anyone could answer my questions here about beta readers!

I'm interested in having beta readers (if I ever manage to finish a draft) and a sensitivity reader or two because I have poc characters (I'm writing fantasy so its not culture based but I would like to know I'm not subconsciously putting any kind of stereotype into my writing).