#gtpatcreatober

Creatober 2020!

Rules: -Traditional: One prompt per day, either drawn or written! -Alternative: Pick 3 or more prompts and take the week to draw or write! -Note: The last three days are scenes rather than single word prompts.

October 1st- 7th: (note that the week starts on a Thursday) -Disinterest     -Presence     -Flight     -Dawn     -Drown     -Melancholy -Fracture

October 8th- 14th: -Awareness    -Pressure      -Fight      -Sunrise   -Burn       -Intrigue        -Bruise

October 15th- 21st: -Focus      -Overwhelm      -Freeze      -Sunset       -Trauma   -Surprise -Gash

October 22nd- 28th: -Obsession     -Become     -Repress     -Dusk     -Exsanguination      -Righteousness     -Break

October 29th: A cave with a grove hidden deep within it. Pinpricks of light cast the area in a low haze. There is the smell of loamy soil and copper. A step inside causes a low, almost unnoticeable at first, hum.

October 30th: A party at a stranger’s house. A night of barhopping led here and the world had started tilting on its own hours ago. There is a constant tickle on the back of their neck. Their heart beats speed up.

October 31st: Meeting up with friends in a cemetery, chatting among the tombstones. But someone is missing. Who is it? They count the heads but come up one number more than they had originally. They count again.

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During the month of October I will be looking at the tag #gtpatcreatober so be sure to post your various works under that hashtag! 

Pairing: Arthur Conan Doyle x MC/Reader

Summary: It’s just a sprain, she told herself for the ninth time that morning. One look at it though and the writer is already carrying her off.

They were once worshiped widely across the land. Thanked when parents held their long awaited newborn in their arms for the first time. Asked for blessings when they wanted the will to control and harness the energy around them. Prayed too when the shadows grew long as the sun kissed the ocean and when all that remained of a person was ashes.

Slowly over millennia the welcome visits to their Altar began to dwindle. Where thousands would make the journey to pray for a blessing at the main Altar, to tend to the Altar and keep it clean, only hundreds came, then a few handful, then only trickle every few years until they stopped coming all together. They ventured out to see what kind of dam the people had built and what they had stopped visiting, only to see what had become of their Altars.

They lie in shambles and disrepair. Every flourishing villages and towns that housed an Altar was nothing more than smoldered wood and crumbling stone, the streets and pathways lined with their charred remains.

They watched as their worshipers were burned alive, begging, crying out for their captors to set them free, for them to do something. They could do nothing but watch in abject horror.

They could rage against them, like many others have done when they saw their ilk being targeted. Could give them so much power they break and become twisted under its weight or make all of their women unable to give life to the heirs they so desperately crave.  

But they did nothing, could do nothing. And so they lay at their main Altar as the world forgot about them and grew around them, the only words repeatedly playing at their lips

“You are not a god.”

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They wheeled me into the operation room. They hadn’t sedated me, and they weren’t going to. They had only paralyzed me. I would be awake, for all of it.

People weren’t forced to join the military anymore; there was no draft. But they had to get disposable bodies somehow. They called it a “procedure”, they acted like it was going to help. In reality they broke you into little pieces, put your pieces in metal skins and sent you off to wherever they needed you. They told us, “You will only have to give an hour of your time to save the country!” They told us, “No real people will have to get hurt anymore!” They presented it like a miracle. It wasn’t.

I had to be awake for it, mentally at least. Some fancy jargon about brain synapses and conciousness. Not stuff I understand. It was only going to be an hour. Surely I could last an hour? But it didn’t feel like an hour, it felt like days, or weeks, I honestly couldn’t tell. They found pieces of me- in memories and dreams- and took them out, giving them their own life. A six year old me crying about a broken toy: the memory was suddenly gone but I could still hear the crying. Twelve years old, getting my first kiss: gone- but I could still feel the butterflies. One me came from a dream, this one was clad in purple armor, ready to fight sea monsters (it was a weird dream) and then I couldn’t remember it anymore but I could still feel the adrenaline. This went on for a timeless length. Each one getting closer to the me I am now, and the closer to me it got the more painful it became. Until I was in agony, unable to cry out, unable to clench my jaw, unable to shed tears of pain, unable to do anything but lie there.

Then it was over. I wish I could say that was the worst of it but that was just the beginning. After the procedure I thought it was all done with, I gave so much of myself- literally- to protect my country. But then I was deployed. Well, not me, but the other me’s, the-the pieces, or memories, with their metal skins; were deployed. Have you ever been to war? Have you ever known somebody who has? I used to be able to answer no to those questions. But now I don’t only live my life as me, I live as that six year old, that twelve year old, and every other version they took from me. In my dreams I see myself battling and cries from the real people I fight echo in my mind. They carnage and the empty pain that comes with a fallen comrade, all became seared in my real memory. Then it started happening while I was awake, I would suddenly not be at work or school or home anymore; I would be on the battlefield. Although I saw myself moving through my eyes as the other me, the real me would be paralyzed as I was during the procedure. Stuck between two realities, two timelines, two lives but unable to control either one. The longest “episode” , they called them, had lasted an hour. It was terrifying.

Then one of me died. Or was lost. Or stopped working. I don’t know what you want to call it but it wasn’t there anymore. And when it stopped, that version of myself I had been was taken with it. I forgot that part of who I am. And I changed- how can we know who we are or who we want to be unless we know and understand who we used to be? I began to feel lost. Then another one of me stopped and it only got worse. I can’t even remember most of my life now. I don’t know who I was and I don’t know who I am. It’s impossible to live life fractured.

A longer prompt to start off on our catch-up. While we do this, I’ll post the first one earlier in the day (11-1ish?) and the other at the normal time (3-5ish).

This is my first time writing a child and I don’t think I did horribly, which is nice. Warnings for mention of family death, funeral, demon, possession.

*****

Laura doesn’t cry at her family’s funeral.

Other people — strangers, her mother’s hairdresser, her little brother's friend’s parents, the neighbors from the blue house down the street on the opposite side — shed tears, but Laura stands stoic.

They are buried in the same coffin (there were no bodies) and the ease of it feels haggling. She knows what remains of her family. She was there to see them die.

She saw.

Disinterest is a state of mind

That can be reached easily

I just sit still for thrity seconds

And simulate a bit of coolness

Then I stop feeling, caring, tasting

like my mind left my body conscious

I could stare at the wall for hours

not moved even by muscle sourness

Or I could lay on a warm, soft bed

And not aroused by pretty men I like

Sometimes I think I could slit my wrist

And not flinch, but the image breaks this

Still I know I need no drug or drink

Drauven hated when he had to kill anything, let alone another sentient being. Vampires had evolved to be a living - well mostly living- species hundreds of years ago, they didn’t need blood anymore. Some still drank it on occasion yes, but it was no longer the source of nightly meals.

So when he had to completely drain another creature he felt horrible. The guilt and shame would nag at him all night and into the morning. He was of clan S’urit’quée he knew better than to commit such beastly atrocities.

Still, he did not feel as bad when having to kill those things. They did not taste like anything he had ever had before. They tasted mainly human, but something about them was off. He also felt nauseous after eating one, so that probably wasn’t good.

No one in the clan could explain anything about them, so they were definitely a new threat. They’ll just have to be more careful on their nightly flights from now on.

While the others had traveled far to make the most of their limited hours, Drauven found him sticking close to the castle for comfort.

Whatever these things are they’re not good, and more of them have started appearing lately. They seem to be particularly focused on hunting the witch that had entered into The Empire territory about a week prior.