maskormenacelogs | (no subject)

WHO: Abduxel & Nysrog
WHERE: De Chima, in the woods
WHEN: Night of the swear-in (BACKDATE CITYYYY)
WHAT: fun buddy time
WARNINGS: Body horror.

The trail is both easy and difficult to discover, follow.

Trees have had their bark flayed in her passing, skins peeled back, gouges deep in their flesh, and in those hollows peer bits of her, too, that have come off: streaks of ichor with eyes and teeth, grasping, fading. In the humidity of Virginia, every streak of dew she's touched has turned to miasm, and so the path is marked by these offshoots, children of sludge who reach into the air, towards each other, towards nothing.

Memory for Nysrog is a mirror, and there are more than a few cracks tonight. Entire pieces are missing: what remains is still little more than a reflection, light errant and caught, and even as her seeping body lurches through the undergrowth she is turning inwards. Looking for more of herself. But tonight, her brains addled, what passes for veins still pulsing with Crane's poison, she is especially illusive.

There are more fragmented things, on this night, than her mind. Her trail is troublesome because it meanders, and because her anatomy is not stable. First tentacles, then legs, then human hands and fingers at absurd angles make impressions in the soil, soft with the night's condensation. Fifteen yards go by without trace of where she stepped foot—or claw, or hand, or sucker.

Is the foul ichor left in her wake simply the miasm she creates on touching liquid, or something more intimate? Something having to do with destruction, rather than creation.

She has come to rest, at length, in the smallest of clearings, her great body shuddering with its limbs submerged in a stream. Her form has changed, and changes while the night birds watch: the great aquatic head and jaw, but giving way to chest and shoulders, and four thick limbs on each side ending with clawed hands, her body behind turning to eel.

Something drips from her jaw, and the many eyes flutter.

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As he left his apartment and fled down the street, he wondered what drove him to hurry this much. Sure, he and Nysrog got along, but would he dash out like this for someone else he got along with? Did he rush for her because she had helped him before, because he liked her, or simply because she was a demon? What was he getting from this? He'd spent a century hating other demons, judging them, but the moment he left their company he clung desperately to those occasional stragglers who fit the label well enough, a well-cloaked bid to his own insecurity. And now someone he regarded as his demonic kin called for help. He reflected, too, about when he came to her injured and seeking refuge, and Nysrog let him into her dark kitchen, with that quiet voice and those delicate features and intent but far-away eyes. Her hard questions, her staccato shift in mood, the sudden creepy laugh. She was so different than the demons he knew, really, more poised when put-together and much, much more wild when let-loose. Not feral, not the humans turned to monsters of his own Hellscape, but truly wild, a merger of some other essence and humanity rather than just humanity corrupted.

Or that's what he thinks, anyway.

His thought is interrupted as he rather ungracefully sends his step down into a pit her shifting body had carved out of sight, tucked behind a tuft of grass; his foot finds nothing and he stumbles, falls hard onto his hands and knees in wet mud, cursing.

He looks up, suddenly, his eye caught by the movement of writhing colonies of something so wholly unlike himself but given the same name. He recoils from it by instinct, the blood-magic coating his currently-invisible horns pulling it towards him, and he knows the hunger that leads them without needing it explained. He feels it somehow, in his gut or his horns or his balls, and accordingly he springs to his feet to leap away.

He loses the trail once or twice, but only briefly; he strays off the path to avoid the grasping, growing inchor, feeling an uncomfortable clench like cold fingers on his spine when he comes too close.

And then he sees it. Her. It?

He stops with eyes wide, like a person who's never been to Hell.

He's seen her before, and so the awe doesn't root him; further, he's seen great monstrosities in his own past, and so he isn't horrified. But still, she's different, and the way her nightmarish body shudders and shakes the small waters she interrupts is...

unsettling?

He remains about twenty feet away. With her size, it still feels close. But he musters the voice:

"Nysrog," he says loudly. It's like a command, spoken as though he intended to summon a demon like himself through a mirror. In his world, his reality, the name of a demon is a pull at the core of its being, and his tone would say something figurative like, Come here. Pay attention. Wake up. He doesn't know that Nysrog's name is so linked to her experience, but even humans jerk their gaze towards the source of their name.

Crane’s poison remains fresh enough in her scent-memory that she keeps remembering being back there, among wreckage and bodies moving and still, and she snaps her jaws with a feeble movement. Remembering specific figures, specific movements. A piercing sensation. Her phantom limbs shudder, from a certain adrenaline or from tiredness she could not say, has hardly the brain to say—but even her regeneration has limits, and though her body is trying to piece itself back together it’s clear, up close, that there’s far more of it dripping down from her various limbs and facsimiles than being rebuilt.

Calling Abduxel was an enormous feat, he might be able to guess, seeing her like this. Where her communicator is now she hasn’t the faintest.

Nysrog can feel him before she sees him, before he calls out even. The sheen of magic on his horns, they might as well be filled with light, a light she can taste from miles away. Magic taste, witch taste, demon taste. A crooked thought places Abduxel somewhere in a mix, not one or the other or other. She could eat him, she could.

Rearing up, with one pair of limbs sustaining her and her eels’ length, she turns like a Medusa at the call of her name, and her body is a great coil of bleeding and leaking miasma. Her voice when it comes, faint, whispering, is nonetheless like the scraping of old metal on a crypt long flooded.

“Yessss ssss.”

A lurch to the ground, all limbs now, and a lumbering step. Her head is too low to tilt, but something still seems to be alive behind the many eyes. All of it is in fog, of course, but she takes another step, and then, "It hurts s ss."

Moonlight catches on the blood and ichor, of course. And it catches on millions shards and fragments of glass, in her skin, and everything.

Edited 2015-09-18 04:40 (UTC)

The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when she moves, impossibly, and answers him. That long hiss of agreement and the horrific creature it came from. He never saw the things up close, the monsters in hell that drag people into the pit, but he wonders if they look like her, maybe. He hadn't thought about it before; they seem bigger, more frightening. But tonight, she's frightening.

He opens his mouth to speak and at first nothing comes out. What can he say? He briefly regrets coming here; she might still be on Crane's fear toxin, and he might appear to be some threat to her. This could be horrific for him. Is it worth it to try to help her? But then, he rationalizes, she isn't in a frenzy, she isn't thrashing.

He hasn't caught on that the sparkle of glass is the source of pain. Her body is too jumbled, too much like Frankenstein already for him to recognize any one part of it as wrong for her. So he raises his palms out towards her, fingers up, in caution.

"What hurts?" he says finally, too quietly. He clears his throat, and speaks louder. "What do you need me to do?"

Her movement, when it comes, carries in it that curious mix of lightness and immense weight which characterizes big cats, bears. Abduxel the image flickers before her, mixing with a memory of him as a towering, cracked man, flames in his eyes. She lets out a croak of a laugh. ”So small now,” she rumbles. And the movement, that’s what it is, is sudden and brings her probably much too close for his comfort, her great head held just barely above his shoulder, an eye cluster almost level with his own normal-appearing eyes.

She could snap her jaws and break the horns from his skull, sip the magic from his veins. But the thought, fantasy, almost makes her retch. Slowly she is coming to herself. And she doesn’t want to be this version.

”I fell, she says, ”through. Look.” The effort in speaking is clear; she shifts arching her neck to the side, so that a particularly large chunk of glass is visible sticking out from her hide.

Some part of his ego takes the hit of her comment, in a confused sort of way; his expression creases with a slight frown, and in any other circumstance he might say hey, who you calling small? But faced with this behemoth he wisely shuts his weasel-mouth. Briefly. It opens again in order to release an undignified squeal of surprise when she invades his personal space. Much like he does with Lucifer, and anyone else he feels he'd truly lose to, he freezes.

"Uhhhhh," he says, intelligently, before he finally directs his eyes to where she wants him to, and sees the shard.

"Oh," he says, then. "Oh. Do you - do you want me to pull that out?"

Cautiously, he raises his hands, but he won't progress farther until she gives him validation for his understanding.

He wonders if there's some magic he could use to help this. Strains his mind. No illusions could pull glass out of a gigantic body-horror-eel; he'd have to do something physical. But what?

”Yes,” she croaks, ”help me, demon. As I helped you.” Because she’s remembering, now, the details are returning and more than just the general idea that she and Abduxel are kin of a kind, that he could be considered beholden to her. Remember, her voice says, those times you came to me. And now she had called him, and she shifted further, presenting the broad side of her bulk arching what spine must have lurked in her amorphous body so that the moonlight caught on the thousands of slivers of glass, sunk deep into her skin.

If he touches her, her skin will feel clammy, not quite wet—as if she was just dry after emerging from water. Her blood is present, of course, liquid in its own right, and ichor of the dew from her passing through the brush. The ichor is weak enough to only sting his flesh. But her hide has a remarkable amount of give, as if it wishes to absorb and reform around his hands rather than resist their passage.