Basso Loco, 'l Sol Tace

[Matsu Xiangu]

[SIZE=28pt]Basso loco ‘l sol tace.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=16pt]A dark place where the sun is silent.[/SIZE]


She'd heard it said that killing with a weapon was more personal, that the Force alone was to erase from the experience the sensation of resistance - the split second confirmation you were taking limbs (it feels light now, doesn't it? so light, i know) or making new holes. There was something lost in the casual push, in rending someone from afar. You couldn't watch their face.

She had distinct memories of watching others expire, seen the finale of thousands of lives and by necessity some had died in seconds with a symphonic spinal snap - war gave her none of the time to savor, to wonder, that she usually took for herself. By choice she would take the time to see something in one's eyes as she crushed its skull in around the sockets, a durasteel fist destroying gray matter with ivory collapsing. (The arm, the arm...where once it had seemed a hindrance she now couldn't imagine being without it. Powerful, stronger than she ever could have been before.)

But there was watching, and there was experiencing.

Death had always been a fascination but had never been personal until she'd been there herself. At first she'd spectated in a dying man's mind because she'd wanted a reason she'd lived when anyone else in the same situation would have frozen in the snow. (Revenge. Cold, hard, quiet hate. She was strong without the fuel of watching him die but with it not even a blizzard would have stopped her that day.)

Now she did it because THAT was the most personal of all.

There were rarely boundaries in the face of extreme pain or the gasping desperation of death and Matsu always slipped in to a victim's head at that moment like a second skin, taking a backseat to biology and their throes.

The first time she'd pressed, a direct application that took an icy stab of concentration resulting in a tear across his neck so glorious - his skin snapping back in hard, cracking shreds - she'd lost herself in his fear. The pain had been there but terror overrode, primal instinct as his windpipe closed in on itself with every bid for air. It was too much, the kind of damage a human body was never meant to withstand and he lasted maybe half a minute, sustained even that long entirely by her will to empty him before he gave in to a gurgling spasm of his trachea and slumped in to the grass.

(You gave up. I wanted to live.)​

She dreamt of them every night.​

Her eyes flicker open when she hears something, feels someone, and she rolls on to her side under her blankets - watches him fill the doorway from behind them, just eyes like a crocodile sizing him from beneath the water. (He shouldn't be here.) Though she isn't sure where to leave her eyes she settles for his shoulders, the way his tattoos wind up the slope of his neck, and thinks for a moment on what she'd just woken up from - how good he'd look bleeding out on her carpet. (Not to be confused with anger or disinterest. And really, hadn't he just left? She could have sworn the night was over...)

When the hot, piercing pain of a knife slid between her ribs she let out a snarl, confused by the sudden move, the weight of him on top of her.

(Fool, fool, fool!​

I would have been on your side!)​

She shot her left arm up to grab at him, closing metal claws in muscle and pulling, letting out a scream as she dug craters in him - if she was dying like this, so was he.


[SIZE=12pt]When her eyes snapped open (real this time, really awake) she felt out in to the dark of her room to find she was alone as she'd thought, letting out her breath as the urge to protect herself quieted. As her eyes adjusted she looked down to the half a 'crown' she'd fallen asleep with wrapped in her fingers, a relic that - while unfinished - had tugged and urged to be completed since she'd first come to possess it. It wanted to be whole.[/SIZE]

________________________________​

Dromund Kaas
Late Night
Swamps – Uninhabited(…)

[SIZE=12pt]And that was how she found herself in his company once again.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]It had been a month – the scene in the throne room didn’t count, both attending to their own business though she’d allowed the light buzz of distraction once Junra had fallen – since she’d last seen him, though not since she’d last heard of him. He’d made moves and she would have to be deaf not to hear about them. Since then, the rebuilding of a good portion of Annaj’s capital city had gotten under way. (And she, considering the rest of that night thorough recompense for listening to Ovmar as she watched him look over the path of destruction she and Gabriel had left behind, just pressed her fingers to her lips in an attempt to look chastened.) [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]She’d contacted him the morning after turning the Ravager over and over in her hands, imagining what it would take to get the rest, remembering streets turned to red rivers when they were finished. The conclusion had seemed natural. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]The trip itself would be worth it – she liked the earthy smell, a little bit clean and a little bit like rot. She doesn’t speak to him, hesitant to break the chorus of insects singing to each other. She was picking her way over what passed for solid ground, running her natural hand over the bark of trees as she passed and catching glimpses of him – shadows, a silhouette like right before he’d… – as they followed her gut. She was no prophetess, no voo-doo queen to be reborn from the belly of a crocodile somewhere around them, but she was in her head enough to let instinct (a feeling) take her where it would. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]And the trees were thinning.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt][member="Reverance"][/SIZE]​

 

[Reverance]

The fires licked and they bellowed and they kissed the snow in steamy charred nips. Whiteness turned to black and sizzled as the wood moaned in abhorrence of the sin, crackling and spitting out embers as the smoke rose into the sky. Signals for the villages, signals to see things done, wrongs complacently committed. Family destroyed, house burned to cinder, such were his deeds, materials produced and rightfully removed. Naked and cold, his gaze remained transfixed behind the crystalline red socket. It had always been fated to be so, he thought, though his thoughts drifted visually across the night like aurora strips of blue and green synesthesia. He fell upon shaking knees, darkness overwhelming him as he found placement amidst the outskirts of the flame, forsaken from its gaze, removed from the warmth. Shivering, he looked up to find a figure he had not seen before, one of umber eyes and ravishing hunger. He...he could feel her lust upon his skin. Even clothed, he could see beyond the fabrics and into the metal that sprouted from shoulder and descended into arms and fingers. No, he had seen her before, and she did not belong to this memory. He tried, with everything he had, to crush the woman with an outstretched arm.

SNAP! CRACK! A shoulder, an elbow, a wrist, a leg. With each bone withering within his grasp, the last break healed itself as the woman moved slowly towards him, in a jagged and sharp sporadic gait that gave notions of a reanimated corpse struggling against it's own rigor mortis. As she neared, she pulled him towards her, his head felt the warm embrace of her abdomen. A hug...Something undeserved. And yet, he felt the comfort turn into pain as she pushed him to arms length. Not scarred skin, nor eye, nor ocular cavity, could withhold the unlocking capacity of the keys that where her thumbs, driving deep into his skull through the entrance most easy, where the eyes once resided. With a single jarring spring of the hands, skull opened like cracked coconut upon knee. Out from the skull, the mind was finally hers to consume, and to consume her in turn as it jumped from the skull in fleshy ropes and hooks, wrapping cords upon limbs and torso. Such was their way, he thought, oddly capable in his time of turmoil and death. Their bodies intermingled in physical affliction, blurring the line between pain and pleasure. Something lost, something gained. It was the natural order of things. No screams, no tears, just silence and her embrace of the oldness that poured out from him, devouring her in sickly suffocating pulsations.

His eye opened, sheets pulled from the bed as he plunged to the floor in his own awoken distress. He had received word from [member="Matsu Xiangu"], efforts towards the Ravager, and had been given the grace of her voice in pure brevity. He had been busy, taking aim on Zeltros, on Alderaan, within the throne room, amidst the facilities of the Sith Academy, on numerous endeavors on Coruscant, and even upon Barab I. But he was willing to take time out for the one who currently interested him most, who drew skipping breath in that room of death and power transfer. Even if the jump in beat was but a mummer, swiftly set aside for more regal purpose, it still drew the mind towards the ash and smoldering ruin left in their wake on Annaj.


Dromund Kaas
Late Night- Swamp

I found myself within a forest dark, ​

For the straight forward pathway had been lost. ​

Ah me! How hard a thing is to say,​

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern, ​

Where in the very thought renews the fear. ​

So bitter is it, death is little more...​

​

​

The swamp wasn't a typical forested wetland, met with bounds associated with normal physical necessity. No, this place was different, a darkness that crept into the vegetation and gave it vigor beyond the abilities of simple nutrient uptake. The land was but unevenly cooked dough, undulating in rises and falls as the peat and muck provided both hollows and hummocks for the treacherous night step. Roots laid bare against the ground, shallow to avoid the water, as if sessile snakes frozen in their endeavors to consume. Fires ran amok through the swamp, burning what didn't lie drenched. Such pockets of fibrous mulch that provided protection from interior patches were but bull's-eye marks for lightning, a thing set ablaze to burn down to the water table. It would spread, the fires, consuming those that hadn't taken of the water, leaving others scarred in the waves of calamity. Some trees found their roots laid bare, hardwood blackened crowns turned upside down to elevate the trunk far above the ground as feet and feet of peat burned away in smoke and ash. The swamp was an ever changing thing, consistently dynamic and shifting to meet the water that controlled it. Rains came in deluge and constant thumps as clouds drifted across the closed forest canopy of interlocking hardwoods and wretched undying snags, not truly prepared for their death. Those that gave in to senescence quickly found themselves uprooted by their own soaking weight, unburied roots pulled out from the sponge of the earth to come crashing to the soft floor. The hard rains cut deep paths through the peat and silt, sometimes violent in their tempo, as they carried debris across the waters surface and found lodgement between closely occupied trees, quickly becoming obstacles and walls of their own. Lack of sunlight, and the lack of natural cycles of succession, produced a place of ancientness and untold depth. When things died, in this place, others became big from the release of nutrients and space, consuming the dead in interwoven and strangling vines. Vines latched on to everything: branches, trunks, standing dead. Some trees, echoing their mournful cracking song of death, found support in these vegetative runners that sprouted from one tree and bounced to another, shading out light where the forest canopy once appeared broken. And the trees grew into gargantuan states, leaves from the branches climbed to the size of small starfighters while the trunks could span hundreds of feet across.

Oxygen removed, decomposition drew to a slow crawl. Logs fallen thousands of years ago remained beneath the earth, intact, and tunnels for which water surged. Accompanying them, sentient bodies of those long gone remain preserved, their life force drawing in protest and lingering nearly as unblemished as the bodies they once occupied. From the soil, the trees of old grow knees of rounded roots in an effort to retain oxygen, forever suffocating in the slow dissolution of air into water. Trees form riffles upon their bark and buttress and bloat to preserve life, sprouting adventitious roots above the water level like small decrepit branches reaching for help. Desolation, even things that were accustomed to such conditions, appeared desolate. But in the silence of night, the world nurtures life in the form of sound. Noise of the splatter of insects against one another, bats taken to screeching flight in search of flying food, and even the croak of toads and frogs could become deafening. The sporadic snap of carnivorous plants could be heard on the rare occasion, echoing within the wooden halls of the monstrous swamp, as insects and small animals found themselves trapped within the sharp hydraulic teeth of the vegetation. As the water of the swamp turned from shallow to deep, monsters lied in wait. Reptiles and mammalian, it mattered not, as Bogan had augmented them into a level of prowess to which fables were formed. A single misstep, that was all that was required of these travelers, to turn this adventure into a one way trip.

Gabriel was but a shade moving through the swamp, silently devouring the world with all of his senses. Through his time on Dagobah, he had cultivated an affection for the swamps and the deathly and dark connotations often associated with them. A thing misunderstood, he drew his hand against the peeling and hairy bark of a cedar currently victim to crows nesting (bunching of needles only on the top), a surefire sign of death to come. The armorweave robe bore little of his identity to his partner in pain and torment and gave little information as to what lied beneath. But she would know all too well of such things, of the havoc of which his hands were capable. And he would know of her mind, ever vigilant towards it's strength and it's affinity to dive deep, and of her hands and what pain they could promise. And the lust and attraction that it could produce.

Peeling away the bark, he turned his sanguine gaze to the small woman. She wore suitable clothing, he thought, but the top might be a bit pricey for the sort of dirty work they would find in such swampy circumstances. His attention turned towards the thinning, a burnt hill within the forest, shrouded by thick and scorched vines. It would be an uphill walk for them, an odd thing for those unaccustomed to such topographic changes in a place often, and incorrectly, considered flat.

"So...the Ravager..." Gabriel spoke quietly, as he approached the clearing. He wondered: would these circumstance draw the attention of the fauna of this world? Bleeding wounds tended to bring about the hunters, attracted to the scent of blood. Vine cats, Gundark, and Jurgorans. Such creatures were truly nothing alone, but in large numbers, they had the potential to be far more fearsome than a pack of mercenaries with their jet-packs and mechanized suits. Clicking his tongue against teeth, he cracked his neck. "I was surprised to see you there..." In the throne room, he would have continued. But he paused, knowing full well that she understood the exact moment to which he was referring.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

[SIZE=12pt]So...the Ravager.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] It had been years since she'd come in to possession of the first half, collected it as a gift to her old Master that she'd ended up keeping for herself. (And this is where she'd make a quip about best laid plans, but she'd wrapped delicate fingers around its sharp edges and known it was hers – it spoke to her, promised her things she'd never seen.) A temple on Korriban, the tomb of a Sith who's name she hadn't bothered to remember, passages filled with monsters. And she'd had a mercenary by her side, a man that clung to her side for purpose...faithful, hopeful. Sometimes she still heard the sound of his face shattering, bones jigsawing out of place in hairline puzzle pieces, the piercing crack of his jaw as he took a hit meant for her. The tomb had been so quiet, but the moment she took the Ravager for her own the statues lining the room had animated, determined to guard that which belonged to an owner long dead. She'd let him suffer in her stead, knelt down when she'd taken care of all the statues to watch him try and work his mouth with all his strings cut – like snakes under leaves she'd thought, the edges of his skull rolling unnaturally in the cage of his skin. He had cried.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] If there was one thing Matsu despised it was weakness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] At first she'd fashioned a mask-like brace for him, a dangerous thing that had originally been temporary but found lasting significance in its ability to make him look like an animal. It was what he'd become: an experiment, a study in changing his sense of self without forcing him to as she already knew she could, of undermining his foundation until he broke and she rebuilt him as a tool to use against her enemies – fearless, devoted fodder. In the end however, he had proven unstable and she decided he wasn't worth the trouble.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] It spoke to her character that she could dismiss him so easily when he'd sacrificed himself for her. She simply hadn't cared. There were people in the galaxy that she cared for, and some deeply. For those select few she would move mountains, part the seas. It was a strange quality, but certainly limited to a percentage of the galaxy so small as to be insignificant, a grain of sand in the Tatooine desert. But there was no one better to have at your side than Matsu Xiangu if you’d gained her affection…and no one worse if one was suicidal enough to garner the opposite.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] “I found it a few years ago. When I hold it, it shows me what it was made for. All the secrets, everything in someone’s mind revealed without any effort on my part.” She paused as she picked her way between raised roots, evidence of fire passed through, before cutting between two smaller trunks to join his path. “Admittedly its creator failed to use it properly. But I think a thousand years of progress and some ingenuity will serve to right that.” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She rarely thought of her size but next to him she felt dwarfed, the advantage of his height only bolstered by the sheer muscle of him. Not to mention the armor, a thing that Matsu had often thought of for herself but simply hadn’t gotten around to yet – something she’d perhaps regret, and maybe soon, but she wasn’t too bothered. It was clear by her choice of attire that while she had a firm handle on appropriate garb for certain situations there was still a streak of femininity in a shirt she’d most likely be scowling about ruining by the end of the night. She was still thinking of her dream when he spoke again.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] “I didn’t expect to be there. I aid the Sith when I can, but your inner workings don’t mean much to me. My old Master asked me to be there. It was nice to see you work again though,” she mentioned in passing, looking up to watch two Mailocs hum by, apparently too preoccupied with something else to notice the demon-woman and her companion.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The questions she’d had on Annaj hadn’t left, and if anything had multiplied with the passage of time, a hydra of curiosity that grew two questions for every theory. She would like, one day, to get behind the walls for more than the few moments he’d gifted in the middle of their destruction but now was hardly the time.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] However, he had time to sever a few of the hydra’s heads if he felt so inclined.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] “So…” she started, mimicking him. “That man I saw in your head?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She realized she might be treading in dangerous territory, opening doors best left closed, but she found she didn’t care. Knowing was more important. She could remember the flavor or something like fear – not of that man specifically, but perhaps of his existence, of the sense of forever, a knot of emotion she couldn’t untie in the brief glimpse she’d been granted – and it made her ravenously curious. She couldn’t imagine him being afraid.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] It was only a few more minutes before they reached the edge where the trees thinned to open to a glade illuminated by an orange light – the last thing she expected this deep in what was supposedly unoccupied territory. It wasn’t until she’d come up against one of the trees at the edge and looked out in to the clearing that she realized exactly what she was seeing: a village of some kind, laid out both over the ground and up in to the trees. The latter here were taller than anything they’d come across so far in their travels inward, fat trunks skyscraper-wide rooted as sturdily as anything she’d seen yet. The entire area, lower and upper sections, was lit by torches placed haphazardly in some places, organized rows in others, all casting a massive, flickering glow over the clearing. Low bridges spanned over parts of the ground overtaken by stagnant water nearly hidden it was so choked by moss, all leading inwards towards the trees sporting about a dozen houses by her count built between and through their branches. Some of them glowed with the same firelight, others dark and seemingly vacant. The trunks could be scaled both by wood fastened to them as a ladder or ropes descending from the canopy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Off to either side were smaller houses built back towards the trees, all more fortified than their lofty counterparts and surrounded by wooden fences woven together to hold in more than livestock. Matsu didn’t need to open her mind, feel the fear and pain that ran rampant here, to know that. Blood was splattered in rorschach patterns large enough for her to see even from that distance. Terror, agony…and ecstasy. There was a distinct taste of something crossed between pleasure and sick joy crawling over the basin. And despite it all, the live torches and the thick imprint of emotion, there was no movement. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Or at least she hadn’t seen any until just as she’d thought of it, the shadow of someone laid large against one of the trunks, hidden from sight somewhere past the enormous complex of treehouses rising as if answer to her question.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She turned her head to look at Gabriel, giving him something of a smile before slowly venturing out in to the clearing. Ladies first.[/SIZE]

[member="Reverance"]​

 

[Reverance]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

Since you wish to know, I will tell you this much, ​

Briefly, of why I do not fear to enter here. ​

Those things that have the power to hurt are to be feared: ​

Not those other things that are not fearful. ​

I am made such, by God's grace, ​

That your suffering does not touch me, ​

Nor does the fire of this burning scorch me.​

~~~~~~~~~~~~​

"Interesting...they don't mean much to me either." He stated in a matter-of-fact tone, equipped with a slight smile, in reference to the One Sith and the inner machinations that drove it's movement. Truth be told, he felt very little in terms of loyalty to the group, only truly finding purpose within the guise of blindly following the Dark Lord of the Sith. Such a figure was power, was the apex, and was something that Gabriel strove for more than anything else. He wanted to be the instrument of change that he felt he could be, capable of changing the surface of the universe to his will, brimstone and fire raining down from the skies. But who took over in the interim, who grasped at the throne with slippery fingers, mattered very little to him. He was merely putting down a rabid dog, a thing that had lost it's way and would be freed from it's tethers. Everything else, besides the feel of [member="Matsu Xiangu"]'s mental embrace flowing freely through the room, served as nothing of consequence to him.

Then he remembered it, the moment when he opened up, just for that instant on Annaj, to reveal the darkness within him and place upon Matsu the revelation that even a man such as himself could fear, could dread, could grow cold in anticipation of things unwanted. Yet, that was all he felt capable of telling her, in reference to Reverance, a man that he wasn't willing to identify just yet. It was an entity of weakness, something to be manipulated towards advantage being taken over Gabriel. It was a notion that he couldn't quite stomach yet, but that didn't mean that he couldn't be somewhat forthcoming. As Gabriel looked out into the night, to the torches and the houses and the bridges that overlapped the wet depressional isolated wetlands within the greater complex, he pulled the cowl from his head and suddenly felt contradictory tones of emotion. He had long been alone in this universe, since the losses that marred his past, and was merely recognized for his potential in the battlefield. It was difficult to find complaint in such virtue, it was a desired outcome, but he had grown far colder in his recent days, so far removed from the passion that was so characteristic of the Sith. Now, he was just angry and unrepentant and violent and masochistic and sadistic. And yet, his own corruption was mirrored in Matsu, he could feel her desires and could sense the depth of her depravities that extended even beyond his own. The way she watched him mutilate those men on Annaj, how she consumed every moment of the denouement. His merciless beating to death of that son was something she hungered for, a satiation that was filled with gallons of blood and chunks of skeleton. Perhaps, one day, Gabriel would tell her of the one that plagued him and be forced to resist her efforts to cut the thing from skull, just to see what it looked like.

"I...didn't have the kindest childhood." He said with another half smile, favoring the right side of his face, as he looked up into the night sky. With the simple gesture of a memory released, she would find something if she looked, images and movement of memories hung from the parapets of his fortress for only her reception.


~~A child remained fixed to a chair, limbs and torso strapped against orange leather with black nylon wraps that buckled in silver locks. The man, brandishing what looked to be a vegetable peeler, flayed tanned skin from bone in strips that curved about themselves like the brown skin pulled from potatoes. Blood welled up, only to deliver the pain that such an instrument promised. Fingers, arms, torso, legs, back, all such locations fell victim to the acts that created the man, one of many. The boy didn't cry, he had become accustomed to such things, and only stared in crimson hate towards the doctor who committed the sins. The man looked back, white eyes of the Arkanian, with the slightest hint of fatherly love that could only be given, in such circumstances, by an absolute lunatic.~~


Gabriel blinked steadily and coughed, catching his breath as he surveyed the torch lit location that now found his attention. He quietly wondered, given the chance, if Matsu would have taken part in such violations of innocence. In earnest, Gabriel would likely have done so, metal forged into something strong, given the hindsight to know that the weapon could be created from such cruel depravity. In his own musings, he had decided that she would have taken part with an almost innocent form of curiosity.

The lights were strewn about in ceremonial detail, and the smell of blood mixed with the hints of rotten wood and freshly burning fuel in the night air. "My father used to say, while he continued his business, that we all have demons buried within us. For some, it lies near the surface. For others, it requires...excavation." It was one of his fathers favorite phrases, in one form or another, always feeling that he knew Gabriel far better than the boy himself. "And he was right..." After all, it wasn't until later in life that Reverance revealed himself as the nuisance that would stay, a raccoon consuming the food and finding coverage in the trees above. Perhaps, if Gabriel hadn't committed patricide, the darkness within would have been unveiled at an earlier date. And the sudden thought that Gabriel had become exactly like his father, the instrument of paternal and scientific creation, was but a notion he had considered numerous times before. A mental shrug towards things one couldn't control, especially in the absence of a desire to do so.

Gabriel trailed behind Matsu, following in soft steps upon open woods and cleared basin as he admired her in only ways that he could. Despite her stature, her understanding and curiosity of pain was magnanimous, a thing beholden to the Sith Lord. He wanted to see her dance once more, to see the cracking gestures of men afflicted with the sort of fear that only she could deliver, a twisting and breaking sort of ability that tore hopes and dreams away from the mind to leave only despair. He had seen it, felt it, and cherished the idea that in the near future, he would gaze upon it's implementation once more. But for now, sudden distraction took over as he approached a tree, twice as wide as he was, and covered in the child like finger paintings of blood, and sinew nailed to the trunk in the shape of a man. It was almost artful, he thought, as he placed his hand against the blood and smeared the tacky residue across the bark, flicking the tout sinew tied between two nails. Whaaaam! As if plucking the string to a guitar, Gabriel turned his head to Matsu...and then to the world around her. The trees stood solemn around them and were but canvas for ritualistic arts and crafts in the night. Some trees only had blood, others had remains, tied with vines or nails or a combination of both. The blood feels warm, Gabriel thought, as he smeared the red tones between index finger, middle finger, and thumb. As he looked upon Matsu, rubbing fingers together, his crimson eye found itself fixed...

Stationary torches attached to stationary trees had suddenly become mobile and the light was too bright to see. To see the robed figures that carried them, now converging upon the duo to the chorus of drum beats in the backdrop. Thump! Thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump! THUMP! Or perhaps it was just the beat of his heart in his eardrum, suddenly excited by the prospects of the night.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

[SIZE=10pt]For the beast that moves you to cry out,[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]her greedy appetite is never sated.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]After she feeds, she is hungrier than ever.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=12pt]She wasn't actively searching, but the feeling of something other than the blank, gray expanse of the wall around his mind was enough to catch her attention anyway.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Despite what she saw she felt almost nothing. It was a memory, a thing past and done - what use would feeling anything pose? There was no particular anger attached to it from Gabriel, only what she thought might have been a flitting curiosity, contemplation when things were quiet. She watches until the memory fades away in wisps, echoes of other attempts at excision promised but unseen. It was more than she had expected to be given. She'd asked to see what she might receive without too much hope of the whole truth, and as she'd guessed what she HAD been shown raised more questions than it settled. From her perspective the excision seemed removed, a means to an end where the red-eyed man from the shadows came for the finale. His eyes weren't lost on her - Gabriel in another time? And what was that sense of forever pulled by dread? It was okay. Matsu was very, very patient and was in no rush. When he saw fit to share, she would be waiting. (She imagines it as sitting in the grass outside his fortress, cross-legged and low, patient and predatory and waiting for the moment the door starts coming down. She would be inside before it touched ground, sinking in everywhere - she would know everything, turn every room upside down, finally get the answers she was screaming for.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She didn’t say anything. Platitudes were empty both in purpose and intention – she wasn’t sorry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The crime he'd shown her brought her no horror; she'd done exactly the same. Her thoughts drifted to Gurasame, a slave she'd freed in exchange for using his family as test subjects. (Of course, he hadn't agreed to those terms exactly but it hadn't mattered to Matsu.) Perhaps her sin was muddier - Gabriel's Father had borne his reasons for tempering what his son had become, right or wrong. Matsu had seen innocence burned solely in the name of her knowledge. It's the thought of how he must have lost his eye that consumes her as they both move forward, trekking in to a silence too total for her to pass off as normal. (Nothing here at all – no insect songs, no flap of wings, no avian calls. Like a breath held.) She wondered if his Father had taken it early, or if it had been one of the last things to go – if he had waited until Gabriel would truly miss it, the depth of vision.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She ducked her head through an opening in the fence, something like a doorway, and was greeted by the stench of rot so strong it made her eyes water. She had to wait for her eyes to adjust, the darkness much thicker here due to the overgrowth of the canopy, thick branches used as a natural barrier (something bigger here, not livestock, not something to live off of – a cage for something smarter). Her choice to peek instead of edge her way in slowly was fortuitous; the entire floor of the fenced-in area was moss soaked fat with remains, bodies far past bloat, split open and spilling sewage. She raised her eyes from the carpet of soft sinew, dragging her gaze along the pen for what she could see in the near pitch black until she landed on the outline of the enclosure far in the back…a pair of eyes peeking over the half-door, blazing night-white in the light from the torches streaming in…watching her, waiting.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She took a step back and turned to look at Gabriel, catch his attention, only to find he was already looking, watching her with the press of blood between his fingers. Her eyes flash amber, a reaction quick enough to miss in the half-dark perhaps, gone fast enough to believe it’s a trick of the light – but then the lights start to move, her heart pounding in her ears giving way to the rhythm of footsteps rattling across the boards of the platforms overhead, dozens converging. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] They slid down ropes, monkeyed down their makeshift ladders – and some leapt from the canopy, landing delicately with the aid of the Force. Masks – metal, shining and pitted in the light of their torches, rose from beneath their hoods…leopards, lions, and she-wolfs, their eyes dark pits sunk in to skulls. They collected around the pair of Sith in a wide circle, arranged around wide roots and wet patches, some taking the high-ground and others slightly lower, all sweeping in silence to surround. Matsu just watched at first, gathering her power but otherwise as silent as their newfound company as she kept herself relatively close to Gabriel - close enough to work with him, far enough to keep them two seperate targets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] When they had settled – staring, just watching – Matsu reached out and brushed against their minds. She bounced, a sound like rapping fingertips against rubber pulled tight when she tried to read their minds. And again as she applied more pressure, a ripple of movement shuddering through the gathering – she, the wind in their dead leaves. Impressive, she thought idly. They were all reinforcing each other's defense, building a bubble and siphoning power to each other. Like this and keeping her distracted she couldn't get through, but if they could subtract from the ranks, snap a few links from their chain…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She rolled her shoulders as they rippled again, opening to let two of their rank identical in height pass. It wasn't until they approached Gabriel, dropping their cloaks along the way, that it became apparent they were man and woman, lion's faces and armor as stylized as their masks glinting in the torchlight as they approached. They split – ritualistic, treating a future offering with the appropriate reverence – and circled him counter-clockwise out of reach, quarterstaffs with sharpened stake ends spinning slowly between practiced fingers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Matsu could hear her heartbeat in her ears again, the unfolding in her brainstem as she curled, uncurled, curled, uncurled her fists.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Fluid, timed exactly as one, the pair circling Gabriel made their move, each taking a sudden step inwards with their left leg to close the distance. The woman came from behind, throwing her weight in to the left side of her body as she swept the lower end of her staff towards the back of the Sith’s knees, her partner doing the same in the opposite direction – he threw his weight towards Gabriel’s chest, a broad target to push against. If the Sith were stupid or clumsy he might fall on his back, caught between two blows designed to fell him so they could make quick work, armor or no. (But Matsu could feel their craving, if nothing else – they knew he wasn’t stupid. They couldn’t wait for the fight. It had been far too long since someone had tested them.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] As their dance began so did Matsu’s, the crowd rippling first before breaking to swarm her – just as the power she’d been collecting snapped, a force-blast exploding from between her hands, strong enough to shear apart the first line of disciples in a tearing, ripping sound of muscle cording backwards on itself. Careening over their brothers the rest kept coming, though Matsu was already punching her way through their defenses, grappling for control of their minds.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]Fight him.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=12pt]At first they resisted, pushing her back before she put a hole through another’s throat with Tianzun.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=12pt]Tear him apart.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=12pt]A flicker, a pause, a considering.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=12pt] She prodded at lust, awakened images of skin on skin, flesh in clenched fistfuls mixed with rituals she pulled from their minds – ribs pulled outwards and pushed back like wings, butterfly-spread, pinned to trees. (He’ll come, he’ll come if we give him enough, if we show him devotion. He demands blood.) Backroom desires, the sick and the depraved, a sudden release of the undisclosed A frenzy, a grappling insanity she built until she stole their control. Mine![/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] They turned on each other all around her, tearing each other’s throats out (just like my dreams) as she read through them all for whomever led them.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt][member="Reverance"][/SIZE]​

 

[Reverance]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

But hope was hardly able to prevent​

The fear I felt when I beheld a lion​

His head held high and ravenous with hunger​

Even the air around him seemed to shudder​

This lion seemed to make his way against me.​

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

Had he expected her to remark on the vision afforded, he may have said so. But it wasn't their way to cry about things lost or to lament for what could have been. The two were agents of the change that crafted them, building upon the forced foundation that laid beneath their feet, coerced into existence by the prevailing winds of darkness and twisted vision. He had experienced a life of tenebrous misery, a thing he wouldn't change if he could, because such circumstances had made him into the force of power and destruction that now set foot upon Dromund Kaas. And he wouldn't change anything about Matsu, even if he could, as she was every bit of sadistic perfection and intrigue that he could possibly want in a companion. The pain and misery and mental shearing that had encompassed her past was something that formed the demented being within and had it been a person, he would greet it with a hand shake before he struck it down. Such things were meant for the past, not to be dwelt upon and let loose to form derivatives of sadness and expelled grief. These two were animals in human skin, feeding upon each others suffering and malady like it was water pouring from the mountaintop. He could disappear in those flashes of umber against dark brown, silently musing over all the actions that the body had committed, that it would commit in the future. A canvas that promised of art to come, slithering snakes and lunging spiders against the backdrop of the slain.

His silent pensiveness was one of stubborn resolve, an affliction that allowed him to appreciate when afforded the time and leisure. Every minute, every second, could be spent pondering what depths of power lingered further beneath the soft skin he had known for a time. And it was perhaps the only thing soft about Matsu, a sort of brutality that he imagined he could smell, a raw steak he desired to devour, to taste, and to consume. Hers was every bit as raw as it was refined, an odd paradox that found a capacity for existence in her being. And yet, despite the resilient aptitude of the man to linger upon day dream, it was now broken upon the intrusion of those who sought to overwhelm the couple - was that what they were, a couple, or merely a temporary pairing of those with the predilection to indulge in the intermingling of misery and companionship? Two beings locked in a dynamic state of mutual admiration. Gabriel hadn't realized it yet, but the pungent odors of death filled his nostrils to the brim. Like a good bought of cooking, he couldn't help but feel the oddest sense of nostalgia for a ritual that he had been moments too late to partake in. Having never really enjoyed the consumption of sentient beings, Gabriel wasn't the biggest fan. Drawn memories of a father force feeding the child to himself flashed at the front of his mind before he found himself back again, remembering times on Kashyyyk. He never felt the need to partake in ritualistic cannibalism, though he had known plenty who had done so for both the purpose of fear and the purpose of consumption and sustaining oneself. The fear, that was what he supped upon. There's nothing quite like a face, twisted in fear and knowledge of the things to come, that drew the true nature of the Sith Lord from the recesses of his own mind. A thing locked away found escape on the slightest misstep.

The new individuals descending upon the duo were clad in monstrous metal mask of leopards, lions, and she-wolves. The flickering of the torch lights encapsulated their presence in glowing beacons against the night, vibrant in sunset oranges and old gold. It was good, thought Gabriel, that they would indicate the presences so loudly as it would help in their dispatching. Yet, like ants swarming dropped food, the beings crawled from seemingly every recess available. Lights and shadows flickered overhead in their stomping movement, descending from ropes and ascending from ladders and lunging from the deep depressional wetlands, covered in moss and diffused lard and from things sacrificed and things offered. He then noticed it, that smell from the torches, was the burning of Tallow likely rendered from their sacrifices. The smell was almost overwhelming when noticed, but Gabriel found the means to focus as he braced his mental presence against [member="Matsu Xiangu"]. Approached, from the folds of the massing group, two beings of brazen boldness that depicted upon their person the mantle of Lion, found their way to the Sith Lord.

Gabriel let instinct take hold as the two assumed cultists began to circle him, predators looking to pick apart a more powerful prey. It wouldn't end well for them but he allowed the illusion for the time being. Even as he paid visual heed to the male of the two, depicted by his larger form and broad shoulders, he reached out with the force in a predatory strike back to prevent their endeavors of distraction. He could feel their intentions, laying heavily upon a sort of dedication emboldened by an odd sense of faith. The women struck out with the quarter staff and Gabriel side stepped, lifting the closest leg, to allow it to pass by him with utter ease. In the same movement, Reebas found it's way into his able hand, igniting and blocking the strike against his chest. He could feel the heat of the saber as the male cultist pushed hard on the block, forcing the Sith Lord to step back. Lightsaber proof, he thought with a smile, igniting the second saber and striking forward. The saber tagged fingers against the males forward hand, dropping the staff to the ground. As the woman lunged at him again, Gabriel ducked to a knee, allowing the quarter staff to pass over him and into the diaphragm of the male, just under the armor. Gabriel wrapped his arm around the staff, sitting just on his shoulder, and kicked backwards. The woman tumbled and fell into the fence pit, sinking into the water and limbs and lard and blood. Bubbles came to the top, fast at first and then slow...and then nothing. Gabriel stood up and yanked the staff from the man, who fell to the ground upon knees. Extinguishing sabers in a flash of light, Gabriel flung the staff into another cultists, pinning them to a sinew decorated tree. Springing forward, his hands lurched out as he approached the wounded male cultists. Slamming his hands around the helmet, he brought the force to his aid to give just the level of strength he needed, as he crushed the helmet around the mans head. Blood and bone gushed out with the resounding POP as the body twitched and spasmed, knees performing a stomping and shifty dance before the Sith Lord released the body to fall against the ground.

Keen crimson eye looked back to what remained from the force blast, only a few cultists left now, those who withstood the desire to kill one another from the mental attack were forced to kill in order to survive. Reaching out , Gabriel pinpointed the deformities of those before him, likely the result of inbreeding that often occurred in such enclosed populations. Thin arteries, he thought, a likely genetic congenital disease passed on by the bottlenecking of the populations. With the slightest press of telekinesis, he targeted all but one with an extended hand. First, the serosa, then the tunica externa, then the tunica media, and then the elastic membrane. Everything fell within his view, knowledge obtained in medical research and used to apply his own variant of force wound in mass. He stretched each part of the corresponding circulatory system, until nothing was left to hold the blood pressure back but inner arteries formed by weakened endothelial cells. Veins and arteries began to shift under the skin, worms coming to the soil surface just after a solid rain. And the disease was there to act as the masked figures caved in against their own sickness, thick oozy venous blood erupting from noses and mouths and eyes as they feel upon knees, clawing at their throats and chests in heaving pain before collapsing to the ground with a sudden case of the death. With the final figure left, Gabriel folded his arm back into robes and waited for Matsu to finish her work, to continue that dance. To see her work the magic to which he was so fond, to which he was so easily enraptured. His crimson starred intensely at her, a blood lust and desire that extended in an almost perceptible hunger, and found itself equipped with the slightest gesture of a smile. The last cultist wasn't even running, drunk off of whatever rituals performed and whatever promises that they felt they had incurred. Mortality, omnipotence, ultimate power - such things would be quickly tested.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

it is best for you to follow me, and I will be your guide​

and lead you from here through an eternal space​

where you will hear the desperate shouts, will see the ancient spirits in pain​

so that each one cries for a second death​

[SIZE=12pt]There was a curious otherworldliness to mind-control, a sense of pausing the track and stepping outside before pressing play again. Every mind was open to her, malleable in the way even the strong were in her hands – the strings in delicate fingers, almost boring in their lack of challenge. As they swarmed around her, a crawling wave of darwinistic display, she tilted her head as if listening for something far away. Flitting through their minds, the experience of dozens like finding someone’s private pictures (here on the ground, the white-flash of teeth shatter-spraying out and back up in to the gums after a stomp to the back of the head against rock; there the yellow-green nothingness of sinking in to the swamp, a stranger’s end on end on end that she can’t help herself but watch) before she finds him, staring up through the eyes of the man attacking Gabriel, wounded and pulling himself (herself) backwards one-armed in futile escape.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She’d never been particularly frightened of him though it would have been smart. It wasn’t in her nature to fear, but he’d made her uneasy being so untouchable, before he’d said a word, before he’d let her watch. But there was no fun where things were cut-and-dry, no satisfaction in the things that came without being pushed to a limit first. Where he is concerned she lets go, quiets a mind always attempting to push things in to a certainty – understand it all, have a name for everything. Whatever it is she feels as Gabriel wraps his hands around the cage of a mask surrounding her viewpoint’s head, she likes. And as his (her! mine…) head turns to clay, a blood-porridge slew of refuse leaking through lion-eyes, she lets out a moan lost in the sea of violence. (Don’t worry. I’ll return the favor.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Misery and companionship, mutual admiration, sure – but she’d be lying if she said cutting and being cut had ever been so good, so perfect, before.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She blinks as she snaps back to her own vision, looks around as new-infection crawled under the skin of those who’d tried – a pat on the head, the winners are the drowned, the ones who escaped without feeling their bodies hollow. (It reminds her of time-lapse holovid, active decay after the bloat, the roiling of maggots hungry and starving to lay waste to the flesh; purging fluids as blood pressed outwards to the only place it could go. Wobbly limbs, shaking knees as they crashed to the ground, palms pressed in prayer to moss ripping up between their fingers. A view of dark, thick clots of deep-blood. The end.) They cave all around her to the press of his outstretched hand and were she not so enamored she might have laughed at the metaphor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]M A G N I F I C E N T.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=12pt] There is only one left standing, swaying somewhere between madness and shock as he steps through a wet-squelch patch of his late companion’s remains. He’s far away somewhere in his head until Matsu wraps her metal claws around his neck, a shriek pressing the limits of human expression crawling up from his chest (burning, I’M BURNING!). The durasteel was blazing hot from her force-blast, his skin blistering and snapping, blood hissing in the air against her fingers and she thinks idly of how her stomach twisted in hunger before she read his mind with an ease born of his dying while she crushed him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] At first it meant nothing: the cold, dark expanse of space in purple and black pricked by thousands of stars; planets with no seeming connection in location or environment; rituals performed in the dead of night, tongues on new-dead skin, curled the valley between the ribs, metallic taste, sinking in to something so tight and warm. But then she found the right path, followed it all back…until the wide mouth of the descent they followed yawned to swallow his thoughts, blinking out with his death…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] …as she seared in to his airway, felt him hiss and expire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Dropping him, she tapped the ends of her claws together in a metallic clacking (spider-legs) as she turned to Gabriel and contemplated what she’d just seen. The man she’d used seemed to have no idea what lay within the passage beyond a gauntlet, the kind that a few had tried in the early days of their ‘organization’ only for the left-behinds to realize it was useless effort. None of them ever came back. Instead they spent their days in lazy intoxication, building their lives around a passage to the underworld, offering blood and flesh and pain to a God that had been silent for three thousand years. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] And it moved.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] If he were anyone else she would show him, wrap around his mind and without breaking in press what she’d gathered. But instead she’d have to show him. “Come.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She is listening for the rattling of more boards overhead or a glimpse of movement but it never comes, the insects picking up the raucous singing whos absence had put her on edge initially. The smell of blood dissipated as they left their slaughter behind (this is getting familiar, isn’t it?), giving way to char, the ozone smell of heat, the light lace of sulfur winding through the trees. There was more light here – a place to sit, a place to see, a place to witness if by some miracle they observed ascension, the Lord rising from where he’d been cast – as they pulled to the edge of a slope so steep it nearly made her dizzy. At first glance it might appear as a sinkhole, groundwater pulling downwards until an entire section fell away. But she expected roots of the enormous trees to jut out, left behind to hang in the air over the chasm as their earth fell away, water to flow down towards the opening at the bottom that peered in to a darkness that felt immense, jagged edges where the rift fell away indiscriminately.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] This was perfect. This was placed, a cone cored in to the crust sloping towards the gaping promise of challenge dark and unknown.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Death didn’t frighten her as long as its hand came spectacularly – she intended to go out with a bang, whether it was heard by others or just a supernova between her ears as she left. Whatever lay beneath them now promised such a demise…but that was only if they failed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She glanced up at him, features sharpened by the corruption of recent magic and an expression so reptilian she almost didn’t appear human, considering before turning to run her claws up over the chest of his armor, wrap them around the top of the plate, and drop herself backwards with an unnaturally strong pull fuelled further by a light push off the lip of the crater with the Force, dragging him down to hell with her.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt][member="Reverance"][/SIZE]​

 

[Reverance]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

Broke the deep lethargy within my head​

A heavy thunder, so that I upstarted​

Like to a person who by force is wakened​

And around about I moved my rested eyes​

Uprisen erect, and steadfastly I gazed​

To recognize the place wherein I was​

True is it, that upon the verge I found me​

Of the abysmal valley dolorous,​

That gathers thunder of infinite ululations​

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

A spark of jealousy found it's way to the forefront of his mind as he watched Matsu deliver the killing blow to the last of the cultists. With the squint of the eye and sensing of her powers, he desired nothing more than to feel that burning touch against skin. A blow for blow recollection of times passed, shared pain and shared pleasure and the confusion that come from such things. And all she said, as she turned and clicked her metal phalanges together, was enough to convince the Sith Lord to follow her all the way to hell.

As they approached the steep decline into the pit, Gabriel felt the sudden and indescribable sense of vertigo, as if the conical cut out extended far deeper into the earth than what was currently implied. There was something ritualistic about it, something visceral, as if offerings had been made to such a yawning feature. And yet, he felt the nuances of it's presence, the odd notion that perhaps this wasn't something permanent. Even as the duo gazed upon it, it seemed to move beneath them, a sarlacc pit grumbling in anticipation. Before he could think, distracted by the feeling of the thing and the ceremonial environment around it, he felt those hands upon chest. Tracing up his armor, she gripped the plate tight and yanked and for a moment, he had thought that she grabbed the clavicle and pulled skeleton from shell to fall deep into the opening, leaving slumped flesh and worldly possessions behind.

It wasn't his instinct to stop her, precedence had shown that she was capable of delivering the goods. Perhaps she had seen something he hadn't, that gave her confidence when he more closely resembled diffidence. Nevertheless, as they fell, Gabriel had the irrevocable perception of traveling through something of another dimension. Indescribable in it's turns and pivots and shifts, something that the mind couldn't translate to a being trapped in the lower levels. The tunnel spun about them as he felt Matsu's grip torn from his embrace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PvZGVPiJU​

Gabriel found himself within a grove of stunted trees, leafless upon branches and leafless upon crown. It had almost appeared as if the tops had been chopped down to level them in a consistent height. Like hairs upon dogs back, the trees covered the distance of an open plain, leading to mountains in the west and a river to the east. Sap poured out from branches and from trunk, trickling down the furrowed bark and against the leaf covered ground in the sound of slow steady rainfall. Beneath, worms moved about the leaves, soaking in the fluid, washing in it. The trees were all shapes, fat and thin, gnarled and straight. And in the distance, upon the most subtle of winds, Gabriel looked out to view the snow top mountains. A certain serenity accompanied such a majestic picture, one quickly cut loose as the insects arrived.

For the pollen, for the sap, Gabriel thought their arrival signaled the beginning of spring. But the paradise painted so eloquently for his viewing began to wash away, like a painting doused in alcohol and left to drip. Snakes crawled from within the leaves, encircling his legs as he lost the drive to move them. They presented no threat, he reassured himself, as they clutched his knees and began to squeeze. As their mouths open agape, bark spit out from their venom sacks, crawling up his legs like bread carried by ants. Solidifying around his legs, pushing them together and entrapping them, he turned to the trees that surrounded him and stumbled upon the most obvious of revelations. These weren't trees, they were people. These weren't branches, they were arms. That wasn't sap, it was blood. And the slow trickle turned to a deluge of blood, up-welling against the ground as the flying insects turned to pestilence, creating wounds upon the hardened skin of those cursed by this place. As he titled his head, he made out the faces of those who had been scrunched and stretched and twisted to meet the consistent height. From within, he tasted their sins, the indifference they suffered in life, the inability to make change, was suddenly their torment. Cemented here, in this place, to be forever tormented by the changing winds. But this was a Sith Lord of change, of movement, and he wasn't going to accept his fate.

Growling, he struggled to move against the tightening grip of the snakes that had turned to roots, diving deep into the soil beneath him. Lightning bolted out, the hellscape endeavored to punish the man for his stubbornness. Catching the lightning, he absorbed the power in the palm of his hand and flung his arm back. From the crevices of his being, he redirected all the energy, his crimson eye bleeding from the overwhelming power surging through him. A whip extended out from his hand, blue and sparking and violent. In a helicopter motion, the energy whipped out towards the pestilence that now looked to swing upon him with a hunger and taste for blood that the Sith Lord could understand. CRACK! He whipped back, sparking at the insects, a chain reaction of explosions lit the sky as hundreds of thousands of insects ignited in the fire. What sound of blood rain there was suddenly became deafening as the exoskeletons fell upon the trees and Gabriel as he leaned down and beat his hands against the bark. Pulling the dagger from back, he sliced open the roots to reveal a pulsing artery that spit blood upon the ground. Jumping forward, he broke free of the foot hold and leaped atop one of the trees. Below, he could hear the soul within yelp out in muttered wails from their rigid pain. They spoke of efforts to repent, to repent for the sins that couldn't be forgiven. He had no time for the fence sitters, no pity for their torture, they had earned everything they now received. No, he needed to find Matsu, and so he surveyed.

The mountains were not mountains. They were star destroyers and colossal ships freed of their hull armor to reveal the skeleton of the ship within. An interconnected frame of metal and ornamented with the souls attached to them, clinging to the beams and screaming in moans that echoed from ship to ship. Fire braced the ground, where the nose of the ships were buried deep into the soil. Those who couldn't cling on anymore or were pushed by other forsaken souls were plunged deep into the fire pits below, to begin their cycle of anguish over again.

The river, long and winding in it's expanse, wasn't made of water but instead composed of gelatinous and star specked tar, upon which waves broke against one another in a heady brown foam of slow motion. Those damned in their fate to attempt crossing such a thing found themselves frozen in their endeavors for passage, limbs and pain-stricken faces emerging from waves of pitch to show their torment and misery. Their screams were nearly overwhelming as lightning struck across the rust colored sky in soundless arcs, like an explosion in the depths of space. The tenebrous fluid bounced and oscillated in normalized rhythms, enveloping flesh revealed in the temporary recession of current, a wash of the burning and steaming substance that epitomized the hellfire. For those who sought to emerge with a strength of will that they had failed to posses in life, fire cracked out from the sky like a cascading waterfall, encompassing the clawing hands against stone shore in an orange and black pillar of flame that bolted from blackened clouds. Rectified of their errors, the tar would swallow them, in all their wallowing and wailing, for the rest of eternity, until they attempted escape once more. Cycles repeated for all eternity, Gabriel felt the odd sense that this thing was older than any presence or thing he had known. And beyond the River, he felt the oddest tinge that their path would lead there, despite the veiled image of the sky, masked by the dirt stained fog above the moving river.

Craning his head, he began to run, bouncing and leaping from tree to tree, using cemented and tormented souls as stepping stones until he could lay eye upon Matsu. The force, it beckoned to him and revealed her presence at the distance, but the connection felt molested and wrong. Something wasn't right and for just the time being, he truly felt that [member="Matsu Xiangu"] had dragged him down into the depths of hell. And who better to experience it with, then the one who would precede the End.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

And lo! toward us in a bark​

Comes on an old man, hoary white with eld,​

Crying, "Woe to you, wicked spirits! hope not​

Ever to see the sky again. I come​

To take you to the other shore across,​

Into eternal darkness, there to dwell​

In fierce heat and in ice. And thou, who there​

Standest, live spirit! get thee hence, and leave​

These who are dead." But soon as he beheld​

I left them not, "By other way," said he,​

"By other haven shalt thou come to shore,​

Not by this passage; thee a nimbler boat​

Must carry." Then to him thus spake my guide:​

"Charon! thyself torment not: so 'tis will'd,​

Where will and power are one: ask thou no more."​

[SIZE=12pt]She couldn't move.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Somewhere along the way she'd lost her grip on him, the nails-on-chalkboard sound and the split second of anger the last thing she remembers before the cut-out. Unreality...a dreamlike thing, snippets taken from between one scene and the next until she couldn't say how one thing had ended and another began. It was disorienting, and as her eyes flutter open she gets the distinct impression that wherever she's landed is far outside her space and time.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] On her stomach, whatever she's lying on is cool and hard beneath her cheek, her left arm hanging off the side to dangle in emptiness. She blinks, groggy and trying to clear her vision as a gust of wind whips through her hair. Her body feels heavy and reluctant, sluggish to her commands as she lets out a groan and manages to lift her head from the sheet of metal.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] And it's then she realizes that's all it is, a broken-off section of flooring holding her thousands of feet off the ground - a broken rib in the corpse of a ship that looks buried in the ground, the earth torn open by its impact to leave hungry, grasping fires (like the mouth of hell) far beneath her. The pit cast a hot glow along the lower half of the ship, illuminating as far as it could before the sheer height of the beast allowed shadow to take over. From her position at almost the top, what could first be mistaken for refuse became bodies as she dragged her eyes up the skeleton of the ship - endless, all wailing for help, all writhing and worming to pull themselves up over flooring or around the bones they clung to. Not an inch of space between them, swaying in the wind, roiling against each other, clinging to anything that another sufferer hadn't already claimed. (Just holding on. Not so miserable - no punishment beyond an inability to do anything but stay in one place and hold on for the rest. of. eternity.) She can feel her body screaming in protest as she puts all her strength in to craning her neck to look farther up, see the rest of the ship just as crawling with bodies as below her. Her eyes catch on one woman, almost directly above Matsu as the body of the ship curves inwards, struggling far more than the rest of her counterparts - her already tenuous grip is slipping, and even above the sounds of the damned in symphony around her Matsu can hear her screaming. (And she wants to reach up and take the girl's vision, watch as her fingers lost hold three, two, one, and she tumbled towards the bottom, wondering if it would hurt to burn at all, or if the impact of the bottom of the pit would come before her flesh had time to melt.) But the Force is just as sluggish as her body, there but ineffectual.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] But before she has time to lament having the spectator's view stolen from her the woman loses her grip, screaming as she drops and starts tumbling end over end. (I can't move...) It's only a split second before Matsu realizes she's right in the path of the woman. (I can't move!) Anger courses through her as she tries move her arms, anything, a twitch of her body (not like this, REFUSING to go like this, rage burning) but the snapping sound of the woman's clothes whipped in the air is too close and then she's there, her head snapping open like overripe fruit as her body careens into Matsu's perch - a perch which is suddenly sliding underneath her, cracked and bending downwards from the jarring, tipping Matsu towards the edge. Finally her body returns to her, the newborn wobble of a limb after falling asleep but better than nothing as her lower half slips off the metal. She has just enough time to pierce her claws through the durasteel and hold on by one arm as the entire slab clips backwards to slam against the spine of the ship, hanging on by tubing and wire - a breath caught - before it snapped entirely and she found herself flying. The sound of the damned screaming mixed with the wind in her ears as she tumbled past them, the heat and light of the pits below approaching faster than she would have thought possible.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The Force had returned at the same time as her body, strange but just as powerful, and she pressed outwards in in a force-push with her right arm to tilt her body mid-air to face the front of the ship, to where she could see land not opening to pits of fire outside. More ribs, jutting pieces of metal like the one she'd woken up on, came in to view. Covered by more of the damned, they'd become last-ditch platforms for those who'd managed to land on them without 'dying' and starting all over again. But Matsu saw an opportunity and used another push to angle herself towards them, shielding herself for a split-second as she slammed in to the metal and then leapt off it towards the outside, the sheet buckling and spilling its damned behind her as she landed on the grass outside, mostly breaking her fall with the Force but stumbling to her knees.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The misting rain was cool on her face, the sounds of the wood stark contrast to what she'd just escaped – though not entirely peaceful, it was still there at its edge, the sounds of the flame behind her crackling with fuel from the fat of those Matsu had let fall. Catching her breath she looked back over her shoulder, up and up and up at the shelled-out stardestroyer that had almost been her grave and the dozens of its kind that had rocked the ground along with it – a half-circle, almost a wall. Had she not been so intent on piecing together the puzzle of this place, she might have sat there forever and watched them fall over and over.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Pushing herself to her feet she headed towards the woods. Her connection to Gabriel felt like static, almost unreadable compared to what she hadn’t realized was ease before, but he was alive and she needed to find him. As she sprints through the trees, it takes her a moment to realize the branches she expects to reach down for a swipe at her, to skin her and leave her raw on the forest floor, aren’t branches at all. (People. The buzz of nothing but suffering, immobile as in life, as for a few moments she had been. Not her circle.) It smells like ozone as she keeps moving, boots crunching over piles of dead insects floating in shallow puddles of blood that ripple with the movement of roots that chase her up in to the ‘tree-tops’.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She catches up with him at the edge of the wood, joining him where those who could not escape their shackles end to give way to a soft, sloping expanse of dead grass lolling towards the River. A cursory glance is enough to satisfy her that he remains unscathed before directing her attention downwards. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] As she leaps from her post the tar grows more violent, frothing waves seething over the edges of the riverbed. The ground is soft beneath her feet – rotted, threatening to peel away like flesh in decay. The land from the woods to the river is nearly featureless, flat and perfect despite its muck, with seemingly the same on the other side – it would seem nothing stood in the way between them and that path, the one she can’t help but feel is the Way, but the river itself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Perhaps it could hear her insolence, or simply did not like her proximity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] In the middle of the expanse bubbles rose to the surface in fat, viscous pops. Something lurched beneath the tar’s surface, a hillock of black sludge rolling with movement as a – creature, monster, harbinger, guide – moved towards them. Its arm came first, enormous, towering up in to the sky as it pulled itself from the thick grease, ending in a club made of the same star-specked tar it came from, hundreds of those condemned to its black depths looking out from within, like being stuck in cement. The second arm shook the ground, shoved down in the muck as the beast lifted itself from the course, dripping rivulets of tar as it rose. The main of its body hung low between four legs at each corner, the elbows jutting up unnaturally. Its head hung slightly beneath the front of its body, angled down towards those that did not belong here, eyes luminescent with a gathering of the star-specks floating within the dark. A mouth opened wide as it lumbered over them in one step, filled with more of those cast to its depths crawling along the edges, shoving their arms through only to be swallowed back in – a vortex of sorts, she could feel its pull, the way it tugged. (Come. Sink in. Eternity.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The beast lowered itself, a sweeping move as if to make its magnetic pull more effective. Reaching up, Matsu compressed the air above herself and Reverance in a disk, a hard flat that she’d seen others use as a perch, poured her strength in to it, let it grow and pressed until it was sharp before turning it sideways and flinging it upwards – a chakram of hardened air. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Thick globs of tar flew to the side as it hit, a section of the beast’s head sheared from its body to splatter over the ground as it let out a roar that shook the ‘trees’ farther up the hill, sent the ground quaking underneath her feet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The top of its head grew back almost immediately as its opened its mouth wider, lowering itself towards them as if she’d done nothing at all.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt][member="Reverance"][/SIZE]​

 

[Reverance]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

To the curst strand, that every man must pass​

Who fears not God. Charon, demoniac form, ​

With eyes of burning coal, collects them all, ​

Beckoning, and each, that lingers, with his oar ​

Strikes. As fall off the light autumnal leaves ​

One still another following, till the bough​

Strews all its honours on the earth beneath​

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

​

Gabriel stood idle and unflinching beneath the veil of [member="Matsu Xiangu"]'s power, watching with a sort of juvenile curiosity. The flash of black and the pain caused was quickly removed, as the monster formed a new head as quickly as the first was destroyed. They had both experienced their own form of this hell, but now they stood at a standstill, enormous obstacle standing vigilant in their way. Such things would need to change and very soon, as the darkness would soon be upon them once more.

The Arkanian hybrid approached Matsu with a sort of intimate proximity that they had not known since that day, and corresponding night, on Annaj. With an almost fleeting change in attention, star specked tar monster churning violently in the background, Gabriel turned towards his counterpart and placed a low left hand upon her clothes, just on top of where belly button presided below - he knew it was there, he had seen it. Thumb turning over middle finger, his hand walked up her torso, small spider crawling up the cephalothorax of a much more prominent widow, until it rested directly on top of her sternum, gently touching against the manubrium. He smiled as he tilted his head, staring into those eyes, so often tinted in umber and focus, and watched the reflection of fire within them, corresponding with the lick of space ships and tumbled corvettes in the melted canvas backdrop. In any other situation, this may have led to something else, as he often felt the urge to consume of her after she revealed her mental prowess. But this was hardly the time or place for such lustful and carnal temptations.

Drumming his fingers against her clavicle, he exhaled and shoved her hard, propelling her out of the way as he knelt down and culled the force to him. A starfighter blasting it's thrusters would not have known the power he knew, in that moment, as he jumped upwards at a 45 degree angle, the mouth of the tar beast slamming down upon him and splashing against the ground where he once stood.

As he rocketed through the monster, he felt the heat of the black substance but the burn left only lingering black residue upon fingers as his right hand jumped out, digging canals into the throat of the monster as he moved. But that would only help so much, as he pushed through the soft palette and penetrated the blackness, the substance taking him with a personified glee in a single gulp. Hands of the damned reached out, snagging slippery limbs and clothes as he moved through the midnight taken form. When one acts, the world takes note, especially when hands reach for things they shouldn't. Clouds above the monster formed in diametric waves, static pulses jumping across the dirty cumulonimbus as sparks formed and jumped from stretch to stretch, condensation showering from the physical nature of such things. Then it happened, a static spark that lingered, as fire vomited from a gaping and scorched wound in the clouds, and struck the skin of the tar monster. The target was precisely where Gabriel had halted his forward progression, taken by the inertia and viscosity of the beast. As the fire hit the exterior, an explosion of white phosphorous lit the world in ash and smoke that billowed from the overextended elbows of the monster like smoke from industrial stacks. The monster wailed as blackness turned to whites and yellows and oranges and reds, darkened steel thrown hard into the forge and left to burn. As it raised it's head up, the waves of tar around it lunged forward like hands plunged through water, trying to extinguish the flame in a sort of cosmic effort. It was an immediate failure as the flames towered even higher into the iron oxide sky, offering the slightest bit of visual contrast to what was previously a world of drab indifference.

The fire roared as the beast lumbered and stumbled against the shore, coughing bile and ash from it's mouth before succumbing to the wounds, falling forward on to the shore. As it did, the dark substance began to morph, changing from it's tenebrous discoloration to an almost tar hue brown. The elbows wrapped around the body, snakes coiling around an egg, as they transfigured into moving chains of sickly yellow bones, mostly femurs and rib and spines. Extending from the bones, currently unmoved oars of black wood dipped into the tar with a sort of reluctance, bouncing against the fluid with the up and down movement of the slow tide. The torso of the dead beast caved in towards the middle, the back spinning over on itself to form burden boards across the thwart of the vessel currently taking shape. The boards drifted from bow to stern in a sort of meandering groove and tongue, the edges entirely separated by a fire that burned cold beneath, deep in the belly of the beast, in flames of gray and blue. The parts that didn't cave in blasted upwards, forming solid four foot gunwales, painted with what could only be assumed to be blood. The exterior of the monstrous vessel started to take form in jagged grooves composed of bones and bodies and sinew and ligaments, blood dripping from the starboard and portside as it flowed freely through muscular trenches and down into the oil on which it floated. The bodies that littered the vehicle, those not entirely burned by the flames of whatever God controlled this place, screamed in muffled tones through skin burned shut over mouth as eyes hidden within flesh and skeletal socket darted about the hull, an insect of ten million eyes. Against the face of the bow, the skull of the beast had been solidified as a ship ornament, mouth agape in anguish and fire orbs replacing the eyes that once never existed in the first place.

The ship rotated heavily until the starboard side faced shore, a ramp of metal descending from structure to reveal the interior of the ship. As if waking up from a dream he couldn't remember, Gabriel blinked as he descended down the ramp towards the shore. Body smoking steam from the heat of the tar but with no obvious signs of physical damage, he found no energy to question his predicament, and gave an open hand for Matsu, to lead her into the vessel. His expression would have been one of confidence, his eye suggesting that he may have known what he was doing. But he would rely on a single word now.

"Come..." He spoke as he dropped his mental defenses, revealing what she would find inside the ship through the eye of the scarred and tattooed Sith Lord.

As they would enter, upon the stern of the monstrous boat, an unexplainable stack of brass cogs formed an awkward and disheveled tower ten feet into the sky, leaning heavily over the hand rail. The very physical nature of it seemed to provide evidence that it shouldn't exist, as it tilted and bent in ways to make it unusable. Across the floor, the chain of oar laden bones pierced the sinew hull, skin stretched far too tight over the edges, and wrapped around the cogs, before exiting back out of the ship and around the hull once more. And at the bottom, a lever of bone stuck wrenched into the cogs. The gears shifted in time lapse against their current stale predicament, waiting for someone or something to come along and remove the obstacle, allowing it move in rotation once more.

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

So I descended from the first circle to the second,​

that encloses a smaller space and so much more pain it provokes howling.​

There Minos stands, grinning horribly, examines the crimes on entrance,​

judges, and sends the guilty down as far as is signified by his coils.​

[SIZE=12pt] She watches his fingers at first, crawling up her abdomen and drawing the same open-ribbed feeling she associated with him from that first night, a response of the power in her to his that made her feel distinctly predatory – building, a pressure beating against the inside of her sternum to be let out, to press herself in to his palms before she met him in the center of her web. Sliding her eyes up (slowly, taking her time where his jaw slopes back and cuts in a hard line towards his neck, imagining not for the first time curling her claws underneath and piercing through flesh to grip his mandible and pull, a joint-shift resistance before there’d be a pop and scrape and it would come away like a prize, something to take home and cut symbols in to, something to sit in front of the fire and decorate, runes and rituals) she eventually reached his singular gaze. What she likes is that nothing makes him flinch, that he’s smiling under a creature made of constellations and indecisions.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] On the contrary, she thinks this might be the perfect time and place.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The ground is soft underneath her feet and when he pushes her she lets momentum carry her to land flat on her back. Her body creases an imprint in the hill and she makes herself comfortable as she reaches up to push the hair that whips around in the wake of his ascent away from her eyes, tracking his screaming speed until he’s enveloped by the gatekeeper. It feels somewhat like star-gazing as the map of the creature’s surface trembles with Gabriel’s entrance, the inward sucking motion of its face as the force of the intrusion pulls it upwards before distending towards Matsu, slopping torrents of tar from what was left of its maw. Raising one arm, she erected a lazy barrier, thinking little of the viscous pitch as it cascaded over her invisible wall, hardening in domed, criss-cross tributaries overhead. She rolled on to her side as the beast began to fold, a shuddering galaxy collapsing under its own gravity to become something new. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] On her feet! – on her feet as it comes to a standstill, the hissing of the boat’s surface loud in the misting rain, Matsu crawling through the latticework of tar that flash-dried overhead, intent on the man stepping down from the ship that suddenly rests on the River. (And the souls in the water seem to stop their struggle at least for a moment, stop to stare at the THING that should not be there, those that would move as they please, unbound by the very purpose of the place the damned find themselves tethered to.) At first when he offers his hand she does not take it, watching the way heat escapes off his armor, exposed skin, curling in rounds that in her mind coalesce to symbols, portent. But after a moment she takes it, unfazed by the near-searing heat of his skin after such a performance. It’s the inside of his mind, like holding a breath of something in her lungs that would get her high for a heartbeat too long, a dizzying perfection that she tries to grasp and hold on to. In this she is greedy, cutting through scalp and bone and meninges to curl back a prize more valuable than all the others. (Someday she’d have it all, binge on the sense of the ancient, on all the pain he’d ever known to satisfy her need to taste it.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The ship itself was unexpected though on further thought she took it back – star-stuff, the brass of the cogs just an element in every star, in every galaxy, blown outwards by supernovae and star-death, radiating to coalesce back to something new: a planet, a stellar cloud, a tree, these seemingly unreal cogs. Reining herself in (just a taste and she’s floating, hungry) she moved from him to look at the bone stuck jagged from the mechanism that would, presumably, drag them deeper. The sound of metronome-clunking as the gears rolled back an inch before moving forward, trying to devour its obstacle, filled her head and without thinking she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the bone. Under her touch it dissolved, sound like sand in the wind, rough against her remaining arm as it caught in the wind and tossed by her.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] What happened next felt not like sailing or flying, nor like swirling down some sinkhole or traveling great worlds to somewhere equally mysterious. It felt like moving out of time, leaving the flat line of external time as it existed and jumping upwards, fourth dimension, stepping outside for just a moment as everything rearranged and rejoining somewhere completely different. She could have sworn her eyes were open but one moment the ship was flesh pulled taut and skeleton stretched to breaking and the next it was old, rotten, ivory brittle and graying. And the deck no longer rocked beneath her feet, still in the absence of slow-rolling tar waves and thousands of souls battering its hull. Whether it had been seconds, minutes, hours or longer was impossible to tell, a dizzying uncertainty. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] There was little but the sound of their footsteps, echoing off stone towards the cavernous ceiling of the cave the ship was inexplicably moored in, lodged between massive boulders on a ledge made of hundreds of smaller stacked ones. The metal ramp of the vessel had extended halfway down the ledge’s gradually sloping face, a crest that dropped down to a floor covered in dead autumn leaves. The existence of the foliage was seemingly impossible as the entire enormous cavern – the ceiling so high above that its true height was hidden in the darkness that swallowed it – was enclosed, lit weakly by another seemingly nonexistent source. It stank of decay, leaves rotting and covering something far worse. The entire area was longer than it was wide, its far side mostly visible in the weak light though to the left and right darkness took over again. She stopped at the end of the ramp, listening for anything, a whisper of movement in the echo chamber but hearing nothing but her own breathing and him approaching. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] In a series of jumps she picked her way down the ledge, landing lightly in the carpet of dead leaves that spread from wall to wall.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Quiet.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] She waited, a breath held.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] Still quiet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Neither of them had spoken and she turned to face him, opening her mouth to ask him if he felt it when something moved underneath the leaves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] It slithered, a dry rasp – something enormous. It seemed to materialize, pressing up like rodents underground tunneling just beneath the surface and leaving earth convex (something that rested beneath the surface, crawling out of a hiding place that made no sense, bestial creatures) It was just one but then it was two…three…four, gigantic creatures rustling to keep the damned awake. They slithered closer, perhaps feet away before lifting from their cover: snakes, towering dozens of feet above their heads, tongues darting out to taste the air as green eyes cut with vicious black slits studied offerings – two more for the call, two more to answer for their sins. Venom dripped from fangs even larger than her, an estimate confirmed as all four swung in for a better view. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] As they watched her she felt something prodding at her head, trying to rip its way in to her fortress. It rose, a human head of size to match its snakes, sighing out from beneath the leaf cover, blinking as if waking, and Matsu got the feeling the rest of its body extended far, far beneath whatever ground lay beneath autumn blanket, a monster trapped in stone, thriving in the darkness, speaking in to her head.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]‘O you, who come to the house of pain,[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=14pt]take care how you enter and in whom you trust:[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=14pt]do not let the width of the entrance deceive you.’[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=12pt] A sickly feeling, intrusion as whatever sought to judge them looked for sin (but there’s a seat for her most anywhere.) Gabriel’s mind was as well-fortified as hers, if not more so, but she shielded both of them against the caress, sitting outside Gabriel’s mind as well as her own. Her defiance caused a shiver of uncertainty in the snakes, each tilting their head in perfect synchronization to view their subjects at another angle, the face behind them creasing somewhere between annoyance and amusement.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=14pt]‘When an evil-born spirit comes before me, it confesses everything.[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=14pt]and I, Knower of Sins, decide their proper place.
Confess.’[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=12pt] A searing pain wracked her, eating in to her bones as the snake-king attempted to force his due, screaming at the edges of the wall surrounding the crimes he was so desperate to devour. But pain was a simple trick – pain was rudimentary, uncomplicated, easily bypassed when created in the mind only. She tapped back in kind, letting the King feed on her pain and sneaking in past his distraction. (The worst memory: he was burning, his skin sloughing off in sheets, peeling and dripping like something dead wrapped in plastic and left out in the hot sun, water turning red with his wreckage – boiled alive, the end of an era and relegated here – judge of the damned, live in the dark.) She seized on it, tore the memory to the front of his head and in the split second of surprise he showed wrested his control away, flooding his mind with images of how he’d gotten here. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] At first he was wordless, mouth gaping, quailing under the sudden takeover of THINGS WE DO NOT THINK ABOUT, NEVER, I PROMISED NEVER, I WOULDN’T, THINGS WE NEVER THINK ABOUT but eventually what was soundless became anger, snarls, the angry hiss. Anger made things easy for her and all pain was gone as she t00k care of the snakes, their pupils suddenly dilating, surprise, sudden silence with the advent of a new Master.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] They did not hesitate when she turned them on the Knower, the strength of bodies coiled tense slamming against bone, cracks echoing through the cavern as they lay waste, fangs sinking in to eyes popping and spilling vitreous humor, tearing skin from cheeks, lips from mouth, shattering teeth. The smell of blood joined with rot, pouring from nose and mouth, from blind eyes, from wounds torn open. He had stopped screaming long before they finished, long before Matsu turned them on each other, snake skin shedding as they pulled each other apart.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] When they fell, shaking the earth with their collapse, there was no visible sign of her release of power save for the slight relaxation in her shoulders – a breath, regaining her connection. All that destruction and she hadn’t moved at all…[/SIZE]


[SIZE=12pt] She turned her head to him then, something like a smile tugging at her lips. “The House of Pain…I wonder if he knew who was standing behind me.” [/SIZE]

 

[Reverance]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

I came into a place, mute of all light,​

Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest,​

If by opposing winds't is combated​

​

The infernal hurricanes that never rests​

Hurtles the spirits onward in it's rapine;​

Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them.​

​

When they arrive before the precipice,​

There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments,​

There they blaspheme the puissance divine.​

​

I understood that unto such a torment​

The carnal malefactors were condemned,​

Who reason subjugate to appetite.​

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

Her hand wrapped around his, extended out, the devil inviting his most prized companion upon something the seemed far beyond supernatural and oblique, the contortion of the ship upon itself - an indication of it's own indifference towards suspected rules of physics, governing the universe. The ship would cry out, beyond it's machinations and wails of pain, that such things were beneath it - something of calculated manifestations by mice and men had no authority over the gods and minions of hell. As Matsu yanked the bone from the cogs, the ricocheting of brass against one another became a thing long lost in the past, as time was a distinguishing trademark of the land in which they once resided, but no more. Cast into this pit of hell, tumbling down the rabbit hole, everything seemed to merge indiscriminately, the forth dimension becoming something of reversible and foreseeable measurement, time strung across a meter stick and visualized. For the two, incapable of understanding such things, as a flatworlder would fine myopia against the notions of depth - the progression felt odd and unnerving.

The movement of the tar ship, dizzying dissolution of time, was seemingly in pulling and tightrope lunges, the beast tugged to the fray and stretched the distance of the world, while crumbling into the center point of a palm. The young of flesh, taut at the edges and ripping at the seams, turned into something frail and patchy, a microtopography of motley, old and new. Raised and youthful edges surrounded by decrepit and ancient fissures and trenches within, the passage of time pulled more and more life from the ship until it creaked just like wood and metal, the swell of tar resembling the impacts that salt water would have upon common sea faring vessels. Until, like a titan jumping from continent to continent, the image of their passage was just that - a picture taken in time, removed from the shore and now within a deep microcosm of stone and decomposition.

The cavern was unnatural, a world of detritus and dense ominous outstretching of stone and boulder pillars, like chessmen congregating on corners of the board. He felt removed from purpose, his body dancing a marionettes séance without the minds intrusion of permission. Juxtaposed, against the odd transition, he felt surreal, as he clung to the one thing that had brought him here in the first place. Her. Crimson and mindfully derelict vision cast a shadow upon her exquisite form, lit in pale and origin-less light through the cavern, ostensibly without end. He would never deny the physical attraction he held for her, but his passion and obsession laid far beyond that, in her capability to grip his flesh in just the right levels of intensity. There was only one that could bring him to such limits and the reminder of it re-focused him, his vision casting wayward glances across the fabricated cave. Until she turned, and they were met with the view of another warning: the ideal to be measured and turned back was met with obvious rebellion. Apart, each of the Sith Lords were powerful in their own right but together, they were nearly invincible. Even against Gods and their arbiters - this Minos.

Between the movement of the slithering snakes and the face of the large human head upon odd and moving fixture, the combination seemed to serve a purpose that stopped just at the precipice of striking fear. They were in the house of pain now and Gabriel almost laughed at the declaration. What more perfect place could there be, for such a duo? A struggle was met with return fire from Matsu and while Gabriel was capable of fending off such things, the push of power into the mind, he could do nothing but watch, powerless to punch back. Until it was all over, a nearly immediate result. The blood poured out of the large being, the predisposed Minos so particularly hell bent on judgment of those who wouldn't be judged, that it couldn't adequately estimate the capability of the Atrisian before it. For that moment, while Gabriel laid relaxed behind not only his natural mental barriers, but the embrace of Matsu upon the fringes of his mind, he watched with vigilant enthusiasm towards her inner workings and the outcropped jetty of her capabilities. The envoy of hell's will writhed against it's own form, large snake appendages turned against visage to remove flesh and reveal granulated blood beneath. As the thing satiated itself upon it's own flesh, the Lord of Pain relished existing in this house of pain, as he remained fixed on Matsu. The angle of her jaw line, it's rise into the form of her expression, the fall upon delicate neck and it's progression into that thing he craved most. He heard her words, but the mind drifted to the now mobilized blood, thick like over saturated mud and stinking of death that filled the cavern with stagnant aromas of flesh long ago corrupted.

It moved with unsuspected purpose, the drift of it's flesh and blood crawling up the canvas of the caverns, drip drop painting in reverse. As the walls were coated in slickness, grease asphyxiating the world and blotting out the light to reveal and unsubstantiated darkness, Gabriel moved forward and slid his hand along Matsu's neck line, palm just beneath her jaw. Despite the stress of this otherworldly plane, this world itself, and their movement through it relatively resisted, he found a longing for her that nearly crippled his focus. Even as close as they stood, the removal of the light gave way to a comfortable darkness, a feeling of her warmth offered hints towards their proximity.

"I think..." He spoke as the cavern began to peel away, blistered flesh in the darkness churning against the heat of it's inflicted wound, as if held to the flame. "It was right to focus on you, the truer threat." He meant it, now more than ever, the display of her mental powers were something that could carry itself openly across the battlefield and without limit. He required a tactile impact, she thrived on the absence, and that surged any desire he may have had for her far beyond quantifiable reproach.

As the world around them was eaten away, parasitic insides of the Minos crawling and chewing, the stone began to dissolve and float upwards as if ash beneath a high powered fan. Buried deep beneath the stone, rusted wire fencing and chain links revealed themselves to the howl of wind and storms that blasted Gabriels hair free of it's knot. A dome of deteriorated metal extended upwards into the sky without visual limit, and encircled them wildly in a corridor that ran north along the open land. His hand, just beneath her jaw, neither tightened nor lessened, his resolve unmoved and unbroken by the change in the world. As the stone dissolved and sublimated, a twilight and a blood hued world poured in and the landscape around them revealed a barren hellscape filled with famished slaves moving against the lash of whips in macabre scenes. The smell of carnal lust and desires filled the air, that sultry heat that often painted it's own scene in its own implications - past events that laid in the realm of physical altercation and lust temporarily sated.

Gabriels longing to consume Matsu almost overpowered him, the atmosphere of this second step into Hell nearly bewildered his senses. Clenching his teeth, wincing with a turn of his head, he moved to the fencing and pressed his fingers against metal. Despite how humid the world felt, the linked fencing was cold and resisted his assertion with cemented response. His gaze fell upon a pair of crossed lovers that moved through the world slowly, clinging to one another's arms, as dual hurricanes pulled them apart and flung them violently through the sky. Hitting the ground with dusty thumps, phantoms rolled upon them to consume of bruised and suddenly decayed flesh, only to be reborn painfully from decomposing skeletons. The cycle always continued, rolling upon itself. The vision of the progression mimicked time lapsed video, as if time moved differently with the dome - not something outside expectation, given what they had seen already. The dirt beneath his feet, noticed through the drop of his head against the fence, was desiccated and cracked, the blood of those who were whipped and consumed filled the crevices periodically, like the income of tidal influence. Between the sounds of the hurricanes, the sounds of lightning in this much larger cavern - the walls of which were gray backgrounds unseen for the distance between them and it - and the sounds of the whip lash through the night, ambient noise was something more closely resembling white noise, a dull and explosive cacophony. Nothing made sense and Gabriel fought with everything to proceed upon their path, their original purpose becoming a blurry intermingling of what she planned to obtain and what he wanted at this very moment.

"Matsu..." He was strong but he felt weak around her, the heightened sense was brought to an almost froth in the aura that imbued the land. An alcoholic swimming in alcohol, he needed it. He didn't hate that he needed her, he hated that he couldn't have her at this very moment. And it seemed unnatural to him, this renewed carnal lust for the physical, as if the world longed to see - things hidden away from view, but never truly hidden. A Sith Lord denying himself was a like a Jedi giving himself everything, the contrast was almost paralyzing, as he spoke through clenched teeth. "We need to keep moving..." Distractions, distractions! He needed them more than anything at this very moment.

[member="Matsu Xiangu"]

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Cerberus, cruel monster, fierce and strange, ​

Through his wide threefold throat, barks as a dog ​

Over the multitude immersed beneath. ​

​

His eyes glare crimson, black his unctuous beard,​

His belly large, and claw’d the hands, with which ​

He tears the spirits, flays them, and their limbs ​

Piecemeal disparts. ​

​

Howling there spread, as curs, ​

Under the rainy deluge, with one side ​

The other screening, oft they roll them round, ​

A wretched, godless crew. ​

​

When that great worm ​

Descried us, savage Cerberus, he oped ​

His jaws, and the fangs show’d us; not a limb ​

Of him but trembled. ​

​

Then my guide, his palms ​

Expanding on the ground, thence fill’d with earth​

Raised them, and cast it in his ravenous maw. ​

​

E’en as a dog, that yelling bays for food ​

His keeper, when the morsel comes, lets fall ​

His fury, bent alone with eager haste ​

To swallow it; so dropp’d the loathsome cheeks ​

Of demon Cerberus, who thundering stuns ​

​

The spirits, that they for deafness wish in vain. ​

[SIZE=12pt] Words were funny things, sounds she found easily when the time was right but otherwise background noise she forgot to listen to until it really mattered. That her compliment folded backwards was inconsequential – it sounded like his voice through a pillow, something half-awake and still dreaming, hair in her face, everything aching. She tilted her head to look up at him, her pulse ticking against the curl of his fingers. Everything slowed, time ballooning outwards in the center of carnivorous concentration. (Something leathery, sinking downwards to some unknown blackness, sliding against his skin, gliding past him. On and on and on it went, great musculature curling around his own. Just as the sun ceased to reach him he saw it – one amber eye large enough to blot out everything but fear, watching him as he sank. Minutes passed by. Hours. The hum of pressure against his eardrums steadily gave way to n o t h i n g at all. He couldn’t even hear his heartbeat. Hours. Colder. Weightless. When he hit the sand at the bottom he knew silence. It would never end. Here at the bottom he would dissolve – slowly, disintegrating in exactly as much time as it took for her to process him for fuel – and join all the others that made up this sea floor. Back and forth. Back and forth. Little grains of what used to be something looking up and waiting for another pale silhouette to join them.) [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The heat evaporated the ocean of her imagination, a bed of salt laced with blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She might have gladly given in to the purpose of that place, torn against its very nature to reach Gabriel again and again, had he not moved to look out over their new landscape. That she was capable of drifting towards the carnal with him at any given moment was hardly surprising, but control was an attribute she prided herself on. Here it seemed some wispy ideal melting in the humidity before the wind took it away. An expanse of muscle under fabric – trapezius pulling on scapula spine – rolled, whether by chance or design, at the moment of the omnipresent sounding of a whip deep in the dome’s core, pushing some thought free from the windblown slideshow in her head. (It was in her hands, a fiberglass rod giving way to one long, leather whip. She imagined that he had no choice but to be pressed against the fence, bound instead of contemplating the heat by choice. How many lashes until his muscles gave way, until they separated from bone and rendered limbs useless? And when she had an answer she would run fingers along the curl of something part toy and part weapon, slicking blood off before a flick of her fingers tossed it to the maelstrom, and then have her way.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] We need to keep moving.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Every fiber of her balked at the thought of such denial. There were a thousand things she wanted and all of them could be done right there, right out where any of the millions of souls trapped there could see, would understand. “Why?” It had slipped out before she’d been given the chance to stop it and the moment she heard the sound of her own voice – drugged, single-minded – she snapped out of it. An assault on her mind, however pleasant the contents of the intrusion, was unwelcome. “Okay.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The corridor underneath the dome extended for miles but she was under the impression they didn’t truly need to walk that far. Time and distance were supremely relative here in this world someone had painstakingly created – and it was someone’s world, meant to keep them out but ultimately conquerable with the right application of strength. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Bodies tumbled in the wind, arms outstretched in vain attempts to grab each other, to palm some curve, dig fingers into something sorely missed. She could move at something of a snail’s pace under the force of the wind and the world’s peculiar oppressive weight. The chain link separated Gabriel and Matsu from the majority of those enslaved by flesh and lust but it was paltry delineation, and nothing to keep either of them back. However, she’d underestimated the power of proximity by the time she’d managed to join him at the fence. Suddenly gravity seemed to be tearing at itself, to be light or to strike her down? Her body felt that force’s indecision, at once curiously weightless and yet feeling pulled down to her knees. He was right there, so easy to reach out and grab, to give in. Distractions, distractions. The whole world was a distraction right then, right as she turned her head to look at him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The ground opened on the other side of the fence, rending it as her control disintegrated. Light cut through the dust that clung thick in the air, a brightness somehow unnatural even among all the fantasy surrounding them. It was cut through by movement, foglight strobing in the wake of some massive presence crawling from the great hole in the earth. She might not have noticed it had its arrival not shaken her nearly from her feet, clutching at the fence as one giant paw reached over the fissure’s edge and dug claws in to the sand for purchase. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] When the three-headed beast rose from the canyon Matsu felt amusement somewhere deep down where the rest of her mind – that of higher thinking, a section progressively overtaken by that which said fight, mate, feed – still held sway. A truly massive Tuk’ata seemed apropos considering the setting. It was easy to forget just where they were, or what her end goal was. (Some Sith’s world. You can have him later. But first…)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] As if sensing dissent, the beast turned all three heads to those not completely under its master’s influence and opened three sets of jaws, flattening the fence with a roar approaching something sonic. Matsu had thrown her hands up just in time to erect a barrier – admittedly rudimentary she would admit, cursing her inability to pay attention to Ashin all those years ago – that stopped the two of them from being flattened. The massive gatekeeper blotted out the sun as it took a thundering step towards them, its gaze distracted for the briefest second by a string of the damned floating by, still reaching for each other, completely oblivious to the slavering jaws seeking to crush them. No barrier could stop such an infernal creation and as it drew closer, its paws carving valleys in the sand, she banked on what she’d just seen it do.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Under her influence all the poor souls whipped through the wind or trudging against its force suddenly started drifting towards the Tuk’ata, flocking as if drawn magnetically towards it. With a telekinetic push she offered the beast more food than it would know what to do with and in one way it worked. The creature was distracted enough to turn its focus from them at least momentarily, a success which put her at first in mind of using that inattention to forge their way to victory. But instead the beast lunged, attempting to catch the flailing prey in one great movement which brought one paw down so hard and so close to Gabriel and Matsu that the earth cracked again. Matsu lost her footing, fingers clutching at the rift’s edge. Darkness lay at the bottom.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The Tuk’ata raged above them, drool running from its jaws as damned soul after damned soul attempted to satisfy a never-ending hunger.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] A string of drool broke, caterwauling through the air only to land as if by providence right next to Matsu’s hand, more finding a landing pad all over the rift and within it. It splashed spectacularly after a fall from such a height, leeching in to her eyes. Blinking furiously, she looked over her shoulder to find Gabriel only to find the canyon itself had become a blur of color. No sharp lines indicated the natural dome they’d found themselves under and the only indication she was even in the same place at all was the sound of frustrated separation and the Tuk’ata’s continuing hunt. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Her eyes burned. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] Her hand burned.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] She let go.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]__________________________________________________________[/SIZE]​

​

​

[SIZE=12pt] Consciousness crept up slowly. She could feel that she was on her stomach, cheek pressed to something cold and decidedly slimy. Letting out a groan as she shifted to push herself up, she opened her eyes. Nothing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] A black expanse was all that was left her vision, not even light or shadows left to her.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Blind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] The world around was filled with gurgling sounds, churning, a heavy intake of breath that sounded desperate. It all sounded mindlessly alive, even the ground underneath her fingers seeming to contract and relax, peristaltic movement towards something in the center. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She could feel Gabriel close by though she couldn’t hear him. Pulling herself to her feet, she blinked in another vain attempt to clear her vision. Resigning herself to her predicament, she concentrated on trying to locate Gabriel more precisely only to realize everything was so…loud…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Mine, mine, mine. Must eat, have to eat! Must own, have to own! Covet, covet. All the nice things, all my things. Need to stop anyone from getting all the nice things, all my things.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] My things too, my things are nicer than your things![/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt] Mine, MINE, MIIINNNEE![/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] Screams somewhere. She locked on, driving her consciousness in to that of whomever she’d picked up, suddenly aware of everything as she saw through their eyes. Two of the damned ripped each other apart, stumbling to find each other and kill that which threatened what they considered theirs. She was blind again as soon as they’d beaten each other to death or unconsciousness. The loss of vision seemed to have made her unnaturally attuned to everything else, to the dizzying cacophony of thoughts and feelings she’d taught herself to ignore for all these years in an attempt to maintain her sanity. Now all those thoughts, all that noise, was her only means of navigation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] “Gabriel…” she called, attempting to find a volume enough to be heard over the world’s digestion, but also keep from alerting anything nearby. “Something happened to my eyes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] She paused, marveling at the juxtaposition of being unable to describe even the colors of the world around her, but knowing it’s nature just by listening to the creatures around them in the dark.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] “But I can see everything.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt][member="Reverance"][/SIZE]​