Reverb~D1431B2C2V46L34~2645
[ Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair an illusion of the mind. ]
Patreon Draft 297 - It was easy to see the snake in them. All the harder to remember they were men, watching them from across the street day in and day out pretending he had a reason to be here.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 298 - Mortality was a cage that he was slowly wearing his way through the bars of. Each procedure, each augmentation, was just another step towards a perfection he knew not yet how to achieve.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 299 - An ending had to come for him sooner or later. Didn't mean he had to make it easy for them. As long as his blood was pumping, he had a chance to make it out still. Probably.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 300 - A dense cloud of dust rolled through, spilling into the cracks of his shack's wall and coating everything inside with old reddened dirt and heaven only knew what else.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 301 - Everything but the jars, bottles, tins, and other sealed bits in his home were functionally ruined merely by the storms rolled through. At least that's how it felt to him every time.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 302 - He patched the gaps every time, but it was never enough, and by the time he went outside the world had already moved on from its small hell. He saw her riding by in the fading dust cloud.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 303 - Through the lens he could only wonder what it is she did for a living. He knew very little of her, other than noticing her on her moped. The only one of her gang he could pick out.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 304 - That roll could have bought a lot of different things. Rent, fuel, food. But, having ammunition was a security all of its own. The wildcats he was trading for meant he could work again.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 305 - Old honour, reputation, trust, and the weight behind a wallet only get a traitor so far. If they weren't capable of protecting themselves, then they were on the chopping block.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 306 - Through the shimmering neon haze sweeping through his mind, disorienting him and fogging his vision. He could almost very nearly recognise a face among the outlines of people passing by.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 307 - Sure, she could have had it the honest way. But, there wouldn't be anywhere near the payout if she stayed loyal to her gang. They weren't worth her loyalty though. They'd proven that.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 308 - Every thrashing little moment at the end was a question of whether or not he'd had enough yet. Enough life. Enough rage pumping through to pull himself out of his own death.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 309 - Sifting through the debris along roads was rarely profitable for him. His time and effort could've been spent on better things. But, on occasion he found a glimmer amongst the filth.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 310 - Cincinnati was a place of opportunity. It could be cruel, or painful, but it could also be a place of wonder. You could see incredible things. Glamourous and horrible in equal measure.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 311 - If she was quiet enough. Subtle enough. Plain enough. She could drift through the crowds like a ghost. She could escape anything. Hide from anyone. She hoped that's how it would be.//carpe-diem
Steam Draft 312 - Sleep? The eyes can flutter in weakness But, who can trust the world long enough to shut their eyes long enough to dream anymore? It'd just be another chance for them to sneak up on you.//carpe-diem
Patreon Draft 313 - Just because she couldn't recognise her face in the mirror, didn't mean she was completely out of the game just yet. Hell, a little confusion made it easier to pull the trigger now.
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Wire Draft 241 - Never underestimate the mildly insane in being utter irritants. There's a guy outside who's been shot twice and yet keeps coming back to bang this trash bag full of cans against things. At least he isn't the singing guy who's as tone deaf as he is blind. That guy would just keep singing like he thought he was Teddy giving a speech.//wire-MannyMarko-2624
Wire Draft 242 - People say Cinci's a rotten cesspit. They ain't wrong in that. But I say they're little bitches that wouldn't know gold if they got hit over the head with it.//wire-MamaBear-2626
Wire Draft 243 - All we know is temporary, ephemeral, transient. All that is living exists to one day decay and fall, as do the works of the living even if perhaps they'll take longer to degrade. We need to make peace with that, accept it. Realise it's to our benefit.//wire-Transience-26214
Wire Draft 244 - Would you truly want a world where systems never break down? Where corruption festers and spreads eternally? Where immortal oppressors have the opportunity to hold their boots on our neck until the end of time? Where resistance or revolution are impossible?//wire-Transience-26214
Wire Draft 245 - Should've bolted outta Cinci when my boss bit the dust. Thought I could make something out of my life, turn it around. Fat load of good it did me. Screw it. If I'm going out, might as well have a body count to my name.//wire-Triple-26219
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Steam Rewrite 296 - Felt like the dust was picking up again. 'Nother storm would be blowing through soon enough, and the lot of them'd be trapped inside for however long it took to settle again. Cost of living 'round here.//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 297 - If you can make it past the border. Past the patrols, the mines, the fences, the waste, and one could only imagine what else was laying in wait. If you can make it past, opportunity awaited for you.//carpe-diem
Steam Rewrite 298 - He could trust his men. He could trust 'em as long as he never turned his back on them, gave 'em an opportunity to grab his stuff, or let himself be alone in a room with them. Same as anyone else.//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 299 - He could trust his men. He could trust 'em as long as he never turned his back on them, gave 'em an opportunity to grab his stuff, or let himself be alone in a room with them. Same as anyone else.//carpe-diem
Steam Rewrite 300 - The boss had forgotten the sacrifices that had gotten them here in the first place. Forgotten the rules. Forgotten the price of transgression. Now, he was to be their next sacrifice. He'd be an example.//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 301 - Where do you think you belong? It could be the spires nestled in the Core, the clean shaven PZ, the lively Projects, the grit of the Slums, or the hard living beyond the Borders. Could just be.//carpe-diem
Steam Rewrite 302 - Hard to say how the lot of them ended up down there. Not so much that it was complicated, so much as they'd forgotten. They spent months in corridors and couldn't contemplate leaving them anymore.//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 303 - Cold blue light filtered through the flickering darkness, briefly illuminating the writhing bodies. He knew now the source of the insectile chitters around him as he walked through their tunnels.//carpe-diem
Steam Rewrite 304 - Only an hour out here and the dust was already clogging his filters. Boss was rambling his head off. 'Competition wasn't getting in line. And, he knew the next part of the job before the order came.//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 305 - Trying to see what she'd seen as the best, or the worst of humanity, was faulty. Brief moments of kindness or horror couldn't wipe away the knowledge that the depths always got deeper. In both ways.//carpe-diem
Steam Rewrite 306 - The target kept repeating the same cycle of actions, day in and day out. The notes painted their schedule as nearly exact, every single day. Repetitive down to the last detail. What did they do to them?//carpe-diem
Patreon Rewrite 307 - Imagine if you became lost down there. If you forgot where the way in or out was. How long do you think you'd be trapped? Aimlessly wandering in the maze. How many people down there are like that?//carpe-diem
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Wire Rewrite 270 - Wisdom is pain, knowledge is suffering, and ignorance is nearly bliss. Pouring your blood, sweat, and tears onto the earth is the natural course of life. Beginning with that first scrape and ending in darkness. But, knowledge is its flavour.//wire-Sweetness-26129
Wire Rewrite 271 -intrusion underway. Technicals breached outer gate. Position overrun with unknown hostiles. Requesting immediate reinforcements and broken arrow on the north hut. They've carving up the other guards outside and are cutting through the radio door now.//wire-Autumn-26129
Wire Rewrite 272 - There's nothing more dangerous in this city like having a Good Idea. I swear, Cinci's named for Consequences In City.//wire-Maraca-26129
Wire Rewrite 273 - Paradise lays intertwined with the inferno. Thorns of misery cutting through our fingers as we grasp the rose of progress. Man is like tobacco, growing only in the ashes of what came before. Growth cannot come without tearing down the forest.//wire-Thorn-26129
Wire Rewrite 274 - The wires pushing into the back of mankind's skull is a choice. A razor we're putting ourselves under, pushing the flesh aside while we numbly ignore the sensation. Surgeon and patient at once, while we strip ourselves and supplement with otherness.//wire-Razor-26213
Wire Rewrite 275 - Local person realising that gettin' some ripping is a choice and putting it in fancy words. More at 11. P.S. Legalise combat implants. Second amendment clearly should extend to pop-up gunnas.//wire-Ripshot-26213
Wire Rewrite 276 - Welcome to the path of bone and wire, where mortality no longer matters and your chances of escaping the end is a matter of your wallet. Switch blood for oil and sinew for steel. Each implant is a step closer to shedding your weakness. Nearly there.//wire-Ivory-26213
Wire Rewrite 277 - I love the Christmas cheer! Today I found a bunch of half-skinned up corpses, but they were all left wearing a Santa hat. Jolly!//wire-Ripshot-26213
Wire Rewrite 278 - Some jerkwad just boosted my ride soon as I got it back from the shop. On CHRISTMAS. God, I hate this shitty city sometimes. Got even though.//wire-Maraca-26214
Wire Rewrite 279 - Someone's gotta explain to me who the fuck Chris Miss is. I'm tired of hearing about this dude for real, I don't need handouts from nobody.//wire-MazeRunner-26214
Wire Rewrite 280 - Win or lose, at the end of the day things'll just go back to how they were before. We are dancing puppets who can almost, just almost, perceive our strings. But, the moment we try to slice them we get a fresh set of strings on our backs just as always.//wire-EYE-26214
Wire Rewrite 281 - Regret nothing. Simple way to live and die. Death becomes meaningless if life ends without a hint of regret sifting through your skull. It means you can throw yourself at anything you want without fear of disappointment. Just live without regret.//wire-Regret-26214
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[ Shattered banners and broken blades. You can hear the banshee’s cry under the chimarae moon... ]
A shadowy and curling intonation began. In time, your mind was drawn back to memories of your childhood and the stories your grandfather taught you. A disembodied whisper saying those ancient words and spreading through the back of your mind, like hounds scratching at the door, "shattered banners, and broken blades. You can hear the banshee's cry under the chimarae moon..."
Everything went dark for you in that moment. Your eyes freezing over in the inky and overwhelming abyss of shadow and silence. Strange whispers of pain coming and going from nowhere. The old words from that story beginning and ending the same way as they came and went in the moment. You could hear the sobs of distant banshees. Every little sensation mingling with static noises and bleeding pain flowing through your being.
A triad of cracking moons watching from high above the treetops were the first image to strike you as your senses returned. Your body laying in the flowing glow of cold shimmering veins in the sky. Bathing coldly in the image of moonlight spreading through the eternity of the forest surrounding you. Slow, shuddering glimpses of the eternity eating into your eyes from above.
Your gaze slowly drawn to the stained banners of scraped flesh draped over the cold rotting branches of the willows jutting out from the ground around you. Flags from long ago coated crimson with the blood of your long dead ancestors surrounding you, and hanging over the ancient battlefields of this long abandoned break of this frozen forest you've woken in. The shattered glories of dead men mingling with the ancient cloth of brotherhoods left behind in the frost after untold years in the void. Lost history among the ten thousand shards of blade, glinting bloody shards and glazed memories coating the frost below, all from the long and fruitless battles that led here over the eons.
Cold shafts of pale, lambent moonlight echoed downwards through the tops of eternally rotting trees that grew from the frost like blades of grass, the aura of the pounding veins of an endless sky mirroring the sensations in your chest. The broken and corrupted eternity of this violated place eating at you while you tried to calm. You can hear the drums of old wars beating from your now damned veins the moment the howling began some distance away.
Voices eating your skull, screaming that the hunters can already smell your blood. Long before you could realise that you've been nicked, the drums have warned you to start. Old and rusted bushes of thorns that felt like razor wire damned you in the night, your slow crawl bringing your doom when you tried to be quiet in the dark rather than simply sprint away from the huntsmen.
The howling had already begun, the hunt was on, and you were already trailing behind the hunters in your cold and weary ignorance. The slices along your tired and infected veins spilled your scent onto the ground, making your flesh obvious to the eternal nightmares in the quiet lonely dark. Their hounds know where you are now in their lidless searching gazes. They can hear your ancestors, voices screaming at you to run while you still can. As loud to them as it was to you. And now in the frozen light of the twilight days you've fallen into, they come.
The hunters had no more need for darkness, nor subtlety, here in this abyss of cold and confusion. There was nowhere left you to hide anymore. You will die here, rang the endless and reverberating chorus of the freezing mists and aether feigning at being something else. The wild hunt had come to finish the job their masters began so long ago. The bloodlines that spawned you will be snuffed, one way or another your line and fate was to end here. The fae had decided that long ago when their transgression against your kind first began.
The decaying forest of frost and blood surrounding your flowing form was not truly a forest, nor was the bleeding lambent sky a sky, or your oily rotting blood your blood, nor will your oncoming eternity of fearful death truly a death. Everything would be a twisting torment of unravelling forevermore. It would be worse for you than it was for those who came before. It would be. Your language is lacking for the endless dreamscape you've fallen into. A horror where you find yourself surrounded by ghosts of things that never were or would be. Your living ghost hunted by never-born things from an abyss that god tried to forget. The floor below you of dead leaves lit by a sky of something that wasn't light, in a forest where even the air had become murderous, you bleed your family's history in the frost below, and you already feel yourself unravelling in the non-existence. The void here was always trying to assimilate you into itself, like everything else it once had.
The chaos of this realm continually overwhelms your mind, even as you try over and over to adjust. Vision and thought clouding over in confusion. Your flesh forcing itself further onward. One foot in front of the other. Your legs pulling the rest of you forward despite the confusion fogging you. Your very soul demanding an escape from this fractured corruption pretending to be a forest. Your body sprinting in the frost and glow of moonlight, crashing through old branches where once you merely dreamed of crawling in the hopeful darkness.
The nightmares called fae have come to drag your soul into the pit. Their masters seeking to torment you over a debt you never truly owed. Cruel of them. Always cruel. But, that was their nature at its core. Their hunt was to go on for three days layered under and over three nights. A cyclical madness that will never end, and that truly would never begin in the first place, as was their trick. Their hunt would feel endless, going until they became bored with it. Even though you know they never would with their game. All you had to do at its core now was the impossibility of an escape. Slip the pursuit of their hunts. Slip their hounds.
You know this hell will be the rest of your eternity, if you fail. Even a single misstep, a stumble, a stride out of synch would damn you here. To fall in this eternal escape attempt would be worse than having been born in the first place. They'd do far, far worse than simply kill you if you slipped. One way or another. You knew that deep down from the day your grandfather told you the story of your family's damnation so long before you were even an inkling... It would be the end of more than one story if you fell here.
You were all that stood between day and eternal darkness for those of your blood. If you end here, they'll come for your kids next. One by one, each branch and row at a time... you’re circling the drain now. But, it’s still not over. You have to tell yourself to keep moving at all costs. Never let yourself fall. For them. The world may be a comedy. The punchline may be hell. You may already be flailing in the flames of an endless night, waiting to be torn apart and consumed.
But, your kids still mattered. They did, even if you didn’t truly any more. That was all you need tell yourself to keep the eyes on the impossible task ahead...
[ For the wild hunt draws near, and so too do the end of your years. ]
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