Take part in our April 2019 prompts!

Take a step back from the cliff The view is better this way And your feet Can't slip off the edge But they stay on the solid ground

Don't go too deep Into the ocean Go back to the surface Where you can see the sky And breath in fresh air

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@writeblrs April prompts, day 1

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Everything was heavy, at odds with the distinct floating sensation that had enveloped him. Quiet, cotton-filled darkness had him ensnared, consciousness always brushing teasingly at the very fringe of what little awareness he managed to gather, allowing him only the vaguest occasional glimpses of the outside world before nothingness ensnared him once more. During such brief periods voices, muffled and indistinct, would reach his ears from time to time. Of them, there was only one he recognised, and it summoned anger and the faintest touch of fear. The tone was almost always gloating or an irate hiss from that bastard. Fucking coward should let him out of here and kill him already like he kept proclaiming he would. K’ might just welcome it wholeheartedly; it would be a mercy at this point. He was just so, so tired...

A voice tickled at his foggy awareness, younger and quieter than any other he usually picked up on. The speaker was still unfamiliar, though he’d seen them before a good handful of times; an infrequent visiter to his little clear prison. But this one didn’t gloat. The tone was always soft, laced with curiosity.

He grappled harder for consciousness, eyes scrunching. Prying them open was a monumental effort that took much time. And when they finally did, fluttering and drooping, everything was a vague, green tinted blur. Every sluggish blink to sharpen his focus was a gamble, the cottony darkness of the heavy sedatives in his system threatening to drag him back under again for another indeterminate stretch of unconsciousness. But he was winning so far, now able to pick out a figure on the other side of the glass. A mirror of his own face - younger, without all the scars and the scruff - peered back through a thick mop of white hair. Through the haze of green and the occasional bubble floating by, he watched the boy’s expression light up a tad.

Oh. It was that clone again.

His lips were moving, but the content of the words was lost to K’; he was too quiet, the thick glass between them, and the vat fluid he was afloat in, only serving to muffle the boy’s voice further. He strained his ears anyway, hoping to pick up even one word over the shifting of the artificial current around him. If he wasn’t so damn groggy he might have been able to attempt lip reading. As it stood, all he could do was keep blinking slowly, keeping the creeping darkness at bay as best he could, and watching the clone carry on a one-sided conversation.

Christ, he felt like some sort of zoo display; a tiger staring through the glass cage for the masses to point at and coo or jeer over. Being rendered unable to talk back fed into that image, his jaw obscured by an oxygen mask, and too damn heavy to move properly anyway. It was frustrating. Dehumanising. But he wasn’t even afforded the luxury to dwell on his festering hatred for NESTS and their methods as, inevitably, the next dose of drugs was depressed into his system like clockwork.

A panel set off to the side of the tank lit up, and the shackle-like contraption around his neck chirped in response. The needles within stabbed at him, making him jolt visibly, which in turn startled the clone. Coldness washed through him, quashing the flames in his blood from a rankling buzz under his skin to aimless, sluggish static. Though uncoordinated as all hell and fading fast, he managed to curl his right hand into a fist and slam the scuffed metal plating against the glass. It thunked dully, sending a larger cluster of bubbles flurrying to the top of the tank. K’ could feel himself slipping again, the cotton smothering his brain. The face on the other side of the tank blurred to an incomprehensible smear. Black slithered in through the corners of his vision, eating up the boy bit by bit.

Not.... again.......

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“Ah...!” Fragor hurried up to the glass, gauntleted palms clicking as they were pressed against it. But it was no use. The scruffy old guy on the other side had gone limp again, eyes closed.

He bit down on his lip in disappointment. This had been the first time in a while his source had woken up. The last time - and the first he’d ever witnessed it - he’d been far more lively, and Frag had hoped to see him as such again. He also wanted to know more about him; to figure out what about this battered human being was so enamouring that he kept sneaking into this lab. Then again, how could he get such answers if the man behind the glass was forced into a drugged slumber every hour of every day?

“K-20575.9e,” a cold voice growled from somewhere behind him. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

He jolted away from the cloning vat as though he’d been shocked by it, hurriedly folding his hands behind his back as he turned in place to face the speaker. Scarred eyes glaring from the lip of a heavy, feather-shouldered coat greeted him. His heart dropped into his gut even as he stood at rigid attention. As he’d feared, Lord Krizalid had caught him in the act.

“S-sir. I was...”

“Save the excuses.” A claw-tipped glove sliced the air in irate dismissal. Fragor’s mouth immediately clicked back shut, gaze straying to his feet. “Rest assured we will be having words about this later. For now, however, I want you in training room Delta within the next ten minutes.”

Fragor knew better by now than to question why this was. Instead, he bowed to Krizalid, deep and polite, before scurrying past him and into the hall beyond. Training room Delta was a good distance away, so every second counted to ensure he arrived punctually.

The deeper into the base he ventured, the more he saw friendly faces passing by. But even exchanging quick greetings with his fellow clones couldn’t lift the strange dark cloud that had settled over him.

@writeblrs April 2, 2019 prompt: Bird

It was, at first, a slight surprise to the ravens to realize how rarely anyone seemed to notice them. Sure, they made no overt attempts to be seen, but they somewhat expected humans to look around more, take in their environments more, bother to care about what was happening around them. They should have known better, and they very quickly did, but that first time warranted some excitable discussion between them.

The one made some sense, at least. He looked normal, if a bit large; but his companion had a distinct blue tint to her, flowing strips of faintly glowing color just barely perceptible among the black feathers. If nothing else, the idea that people could glance right past a bird with an otherworldly, shifting glow, and never seem to notice was a testament to something buried deep in the minds of mankind.

They were always together, just out of sight. On the night when a single woman first uttered the name of Hekate and a goddess was born, the ravens were there to greet her. When Father Josef Klappenger went scurrying down the side of Hörselberg hill clutching an infant, they were in a tree that he leaned on to catch his breath and resist the urge to look back. When Jackie Veracruz and John Matteson first stood on the fire escape of an apartment in Chicago, the ravens rested on a roof directly ahead of the humans, among a flock resting on its way south. When Father Benedict de Monte walked silently away from the fire outside of Southport, North Carolina, thinking himself the only living soul to know how the blaze began, the ravens were turning their attention to another form moving through the water.

That is not to say they were never seen. The annals of human history record them, sometimes in a manner that would reflect on the species as a whole, sometimes as a singular or dual part of the supernatural world. They were not the archetypes of ravens; whatever ensured that ravens would exist seemed to take little notice of them. But they were the Ravens, the mold by which much of human thought on ravens would be fashioned. As mankind found less and less reason to know every living thing observing them, the ancient witnesses drifted further into the background. Eventually, they were lost to even the most observant eyes, becoming little more than ambiance. The ravens did not seem to mind. They continued to watch, selecting their entertainment with no apparent system or guide that any human would be able to detect. It would be a long time before anything changed much for them. But change was coming, and they had known it for some time.

It was part of the long night in Norway. The ravens were preening when a cleft opened in the side of a mountain and three figures stumbled out into the snow. Benedict and Daniel were on either side of Matteson, his arms over their shoulders and his left eye bleeding. The black raven turned away. The other leaned over to him.

“It’s nearly time,” she whispered. Voices carry in this place, she knew, and it was not suitable for the humans, or near-humans, to hear her now. “Are you ready for this?” There was a long pause.

“Yes.” Benedict, Daniel, and Matteson passed under the ravens and managed to find the car they had left waiting. Benedict was urgently explaining the dangers Matteson faced with his wound exposed to this weather. Daniel was trying to offer comfort. Matteson did not seem to hear either of them.

“You don’t seem ready,” she said as the car started and then drove away.

“I...I’ll be fine. It’s just hard.”

“We’re not trapped in this flow yet. We can go somewhere else for a while if you need.”

“No. It’s nearly time. We move forward.”

“You mean I move forward.”

“I’m with you a little while longer, yet.” As the car vanished into the long night, she sighed.

Prompt: caged

@writeblrs

Be a rebel, they said. Overthrow the government, they said. It'll be fun, they said. What they didn't say is that they put you on cages after you're captured. And they reek.

After hours of daily interrogation and torture, they threw Caleb and I in a small five by six enclosure for the night. Today was different. We had been locked in there all day, and the smell was beginning to get to my head.

The government, unfortunately, did not take kindly to our attempted coup. As further punishment, they fed us rotten food, gave us a bucket of dirty lake water to drink out of, and failed to supply us a waste bucket. We were forced to "go" in a corner of the cage, giving whatever guard happened to be on duty quite a show.

"They're playing mind games." I decided. I had had an epiphany. It was the most genius thing anyone had ever thought of. They were trying to break us down and make us talk.

"No shit, Sherlock." Caleb responded in an irritated tone. Maybe the smell was getting to him, too. Or maybe it was the heat.

Either way, the heat and stink weren't bothering us for long, not after they started putting the gallows up. I couldn't see very well without my glasses, which had been confiscated, but Caleb assured me that's what they were doing.

An armed guard that we were too busy to notice opened the squeaky door of the cage, and motioned for us to get out.

When we weren't going fast enough, they yanked us out and threw us against the metal caging, pressing our already scarred and beaten our faces into it while they put our cuffs on. Then we were immediately separated and led into different entrances of the building where they did their interrogations. It was the same old routine, and I was getting bored of it, to be honest. Probably not a sane thought from someone who was most certainly going to die by sunset, but oh well.

My interrogation room was always the same. Grey walls, a one way mirror in the back, a wooden table set in the center, and the same interrogation man sitting behind it. But today something was different. Today there was food.

Burgers, pizza, fruit, salad (who would want salad after a month of near starvation?), and an assortment of other foods now considered delicacies by most of the public.

"Hello, Joshua." The man always used my full first name, but it made me wince every time. No one ever called me that.

"Hello, man in black suit." I sat down in the chair across from him, trying with all my might not to look at the food in front of me.

The man's lips twitched into a smile. "You must be hungry, after a month of eating week old leftovers, huh?"

"Hungry? No, rotten leftovers is child's play. You should see what some of the kids back home have to eat."

If my words bothered him, he showed no sign of it.

"Joshua," stop calling me that, asshat, "surely you heard the gallows go up. Doesn't that scare you?" He didn't wait for a response. "I can make all the fear go away, if you just sign our little contract.

Ah, yes, the contract. I basically agree to 50 lashes, the selling out of my friends, -- and my morals -- and life imprisonment. I'm sure the food was just there to make me break. I'd never get any like it as long as I lived if I agreed to their little deal.

The food did look delicious... and made my mouth water uncontrollably. Maybe life in prison wouldn't be so bad....

No. I didn't spend the last month of my life in complete hell just to be undone by a few pieces of meat.

Signing my death warrant, I leaned across the table and spit at the man. It landed on his lip, though I was aiming for his eye. And that was the end of that.

The guard hauled me from my seat and walked me to the gallows, where Caleb and death awaited me.

His noose was already placed carefully around his neck, and I waited for the executioner to do the same for mine. He freed our hands while he was at it.

If this were some kind of cheesy or inspirational movie, there would be a beautiful scene for us to die before. A lake, maybe, and a sunset.

But this wasn't a movie, so there was no lake, no sunset, only a hundred troop barracks and a desolate mountain range sat before us.

Of an old book

I look for all the things

People once knew

The ideas that now

Exist in no one's mind

And survive only

Thanks to those few,

Smudged words

Printed down

A long time ago

Giving warmth to the world

In a invitation to smile

Drops of rain shower down

With that unmistakable smell

that hugs everything

Clouds cover the sun,

Letting a small shadow linger on earth

For a brief moment

But still,

There isn't such a freedom

As when the moon is shining

But it's fine That's how I write, How I convince myself that Writing down a word Will make the page less scary And after the first one, Others will follow And then a full sentence And then a full page.

Will I rewrite it All over again? Yes, of course. But for now, It's written.