#|| starters

liked for a starter ;

Mud. It was always a source of irritation on dreary nights like this. The caked texture taking mold around his boots weighted on his attention, resulting in a childish frown. Leaving tracks anywhere was against his well formed practice, so he sat there ignoring the hazy drizzle falling around the post he stood. A few absentminded sweeps of his footwear nudged wood gathered the night prior to dam up the flow of water evading their momentary camp. It was going to be like this all night was it? What a dismal patch of Hell.

@seafever​ is not alone (annie leonhardt starter call)

Medusas and coral live far from here. Our dream bracelets grasp crumbling walls. How many years since someone knocked?

     --        GAZMEND KAPLLANI, FROM “THUS SPOKE THE STRANGER”

      Annie had expected, upon entering this hibernation state, to be, in a sense, dead to the world and its goings on, but it felt to her more like the state between sleep and half-sleep - feeling things slightly but weaving them into dreams, hearing sounds as if in water just for them to fall away from her mind a nebulous thought later. 

      Once, she walked on a cooling lava-bed, the bright-orange light of the heat peeking out of cracks in the black, glassy rock. Hotter, hotter, it whispered, but the person walking beside her scolded it (in a familiar voice), saying "Don't make the fire too hot - it might not do anything to the crystal but the crystal will for sure conduct enough heat to hurt her body!"

      (She didn't pay any of them attention - just focused on stepping over each seam of molten mineral, placing her feet carefully on each patch of sturdy basalt. The glow of the lava lit the insides of her eyelids, though it was already dusk. She kept on walking. One foot. Then another.)

      Another once, she was a hive mind of coral in the ocean, doing nothing except waiting for the night to come, the algae in her to stop producing food from sunlight, and her polyps to emerge and filter plankton from the seawater. An ugly fish or two poked at her, trying to get at some tasty snail hiding itself in the nooks and crannies of her branches. "The acid's not working on it," one huffed in exasperation. "Of course it isn't," the other replied cheerfully (in a familiar voice). "We keep corrosives in bottles made of glass, you know. But it was worth a shot, wasn't it? Given that the mineral might have actually been an organic compound. Sugar's an organic compound, after all. But this material seems more diamond than sugar."

      She forgot them, mostly.

@humanwrath is not alone (snk muse starter call)

imprisoned in a filthy cage a ceiling without sunrise little beetles on the floor in the sink a dark lake she soaked her hands in and now it shines, crowned with the white frost of detergent

   ---  DANAE SIOZIOU, FROM “AROUND THE HOUSE”

      Now that Frieda Reiss is finally free, she can’t be consoled.

      She can’t really be anything, anymore. Look at her! You can’t! She’s not living anymore, just an impulse in a long chain of them, all residing in the nervous system of the monster that ate her.

      But was she really? Anything? Even while she was alive?

      Frieda Reiss used to be someone. A fifteen-year-old girl staring up at her enigmatic, unflinching uncle, his arms chained to the unnatural stalactites of the Reiss Family Cavern, his legs shackled to the great rock outcropping that acted as a sort of titan-sized altar. Uncle-Uri, who had always been Kind-Yet-Distant, always Above-Human, always Seeing-Something-Else, had allowed himself to be strung to die, a Vitruvian martyr, the only time he had ever appeared subservient to the apprehensive, dark-haired girl standing multiple stories below him. In that moment, even as he dwarfed her, even as she grieved and almost hated herself for what she was about to do, she had, for the first time, felt powerful.

      That moment, as she had lowered the needle to the crook of her arm (got to pierce the artery, make it quick) of her - and only her - volition, would be the last time that she had ever felt powerful. From then on, Frieda Reiss still ate and spoke and moved, but the First King of the Walls ruled what she had never before known she’d owned.

      So, now that she has been eaten by someone with no perceivable Reiss blood, is King Fritz gone from her? Frieda can’t tell. King Fritz certainly isn’t active in this titan, which rampages and slaughters and is in general not what you would call self-sacrificingly pacifist.

      Dare she poke the specter of King Fritz? In her grief, she dares.