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 Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 10:36 pm
shadows dwellxxxquest response: 500 words in which thorne crosses over into the other side on purpose and realizes that things he moves in the otherworld have an effect on the real world as well The maw of Other Ashdown is unrelenting and all-consuming, and before Thorne takes a breath, he is in. He is through.
Only this time he had been searching, and this time he was prepared.
The world blinks out around him like a star going dark. In the span of a heartbeat it reappears, gray and grizzly. The rain mists his face as though to whisper: welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.
And Thorne lowers his head, eyes grazing out over the mist and rain, the dark growth of forest that surrounds Ashdown on all sides and shelters it from the world beyond. Hello again, he thinks. His stomach drops with adrenaline. He can taste it like ash in the back of his throat.
He doesn’t know how long he walks for. He trails the archaic landscape of Other Ashdown, his hands ghosting over all of the things wet and misted with rain. It looks like an oil painting gone wrong. Something that is not quite complete but wants to be. It rots with stagnancy, only showing the aftermath of things that have gone wrong. Gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Thorne walks until he is staring up at the building that used to house his own apartment. He tastes that familiar ash in the back of his mouth. The adrenaline. Beneath it, something raw and scratching and powerful. Something he had been swallowing down for weeks. Something bitter and acrid, like a bad pull of smoke or city smog.
He doesn’t know how Other Ashdown operates. He only knows that he is here now, and why not visit the places he’d once haunted before deciding to leave?
The apartment is a perfect replica of his own. It is in a state half-ready to be abandoned entirely. Only a few boxes litter the floors. The furniture is still there. And at the very edge of it all, where plants used to frame windowsills and shape the world around his workspace, a number of easels and unfinished paintings. Art from another place, another time.
There is a swell in him and it grows, it builds, until Thorne can feel its talons against his mind digging in, burning fresh. Whispering and shouting and –
There is a crash. A sound like wreckage, like everything finally coming down. Wood splinters, windows shatter, and it must sound like a storm, but no – it is only him. And he tastes that word in his mouth and it is every sleepless night he’d endured, every nightmare that he’d swallowed down. No, it was no ones fault but his own that he’d trapped himself, that he had let himself become two-dimensional for the benefit of anyone else. But still – but still.
The self-loathing tastes like gasoline on his tongue. He thinks of the eyes of others on him. The blindness in them, or the anger and the pretense of understanding what the surface looked like without bothering to search what was underneath.
And the concept that he was something to be fixed. Something for someone else to put back together.
Thorne throws the final easel across the room, and the wood breaks apart on a solid concrete beam, every part of it clattering to the floor in a shower of splinters, of things unfinished. Things that had never meant to be finished. Things that had been made beneath the weight of a cage.
There was no part of him that had not broken. No part of him that had not healed wrong. He could feel the rattle of his demons, his ghosts. Whispers in the cracks. But he was not someone else’s project. He wasn’t a poem or a piece of art.
Thorne snarls at the trashed space, the rain misting the jagged fractures of the high-arching windows. There was something liberating about the destruction. Something that chorded in him, pleased and chaotic, in this wasted place, in this cage that mirrored the world outside. Thorne rolls his shoulders back, staring down at the carnage, considering it with wild, wild eyes.
And then he shuts down. His arms fall to his sides and he tilts his head back, exhaling into the mist and rain that falls through the broken panels of glass. His hands are raw and bruised, knuckles split. The scent of blood spills in the air. <******** you,” Thorne says.
And it’s to this place, to this past. To his old self, who had tried so hard to fit into someone else’s image of him. His breath ghosts up in puffs of soft white mist. <******** you.”
He sleeps the entire night through without a nightmare, dreaming in the inky blackness of half-formed worlds. When he takes the drive from the warehouse at Coalsmoke to the old apartment building where he’d gotten off to a disastrous start in Ashdown, he is surprised by the greeting he gets.
“Someone might have broken in,” the woman from next door tells him. “I was out but I heard from the guy upstairs – the one with that dog, yeah? – that there was a bunch of banging around. He just thought it was the move.”
Thorne waits until she is gone, taking in the mirror image of the trashed apartment he’d created in Other Ashdown. He looks at his hands, still bruised. He looks at the splinters, the artwork destroyed. His mouth curves into a half-smile, rueful and embarrassed and so very, very amused.
Well, that’s new.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2016 8:45 pm
ashes remainxxxquest response: 500 words in which he uses this to benefit himself or others Most people assume that those three months in Melany’s care were gone, just a void – a night in a Court full of stars and blood. For most it was a few final hours of terror and mystery and intrigue. A moment came for saviors – but they saved the wrong person, and left the rest to rot.
Most people just assume those three months were nothing. And you do not know what they were yourself. They were something. Fragments, slippages, timelines that didn’t add together and add up. Shiloh on the floor, beaten. Blue fists above him, stretching, testing, curious and intrigued. Sometimes those fists are yours and you cannot stomach it. Sometimes you wake up vomiting because you remember her orders –
Do this, or he dies.
Sometimes, you wake up and you cannot sleep for days because of the weight of it, those three months, like the weight of the world has come down on you like the boot of her heel, the marble of her floor. You had tried to run, once. Not away. But just –
To Shiloh. To Lady. To someone – anyone.
The easiest way to cripple someone was to cut the tendons in their legs. Melany hadn’t gone that far, but your ankles had scars now, and sometimes you ran until you were heaving up air and spit just to know that you still could.
Most people just assume.
The first time you step through the door of the garden shop and find yourself in Other Ashdown, you think your heart might actually claw its way from your chest and leave you dead on the ground. It’s possible to die from fright, someone told you that once, and you are crippled by it for a blindingly long time before realizing that it is just the other side. That it is not her house, her Court, her world.
It is nothing but gray drizzle and soft wet noise, the emptiness of a world made to contain a single beating soul. You look up at the sky. Three months have passes since you’ve seen this place, felt the hum of soft electric energy. The loneliness of a hollow world. You press your hands to the corners of your neck, dig your nails in until you are bleeding, the rain licking away at the wounds.
How do you walk away from it, someone had asked him once, how do you walk away from all everything so easily?
You remember laughing, the alcohol burning your throat. You remember smiling and joking, and you told them that it was one foot in front of the other. It was something easy for you to walk.
Three months trembles in the edges of your fingers and you remember how they’d looked at you, not in pity but in an atrophy of understanding, as though you were unknowable now to them.
You want to tell them that you are a liar, that saying you can walk forward is easier than admitting the truth. The truth of those three months. The truth of everything.
You don’t, you want to say, shout, whisper, scream. And the words cut at you like something sharp. The memory is faded but the remembrance burns alongside the lie.
You don’t.
*
The next time the rain and mist of Other Ashdown swallow you, it is because you’ve willed it to. The ugly grey drizzle catches against the fur of your stiff collar, but you’re immune to the hungry chill of the space.
You’ve come here out of some sort of removed desperation. Ashdown was too loud, too close, too bright and hungry and full of life. On most days it grates at you, a nail tapping against a cluster of raw nerve endings. On some days it is impossible to go outside. And on days like these –
The panic settles and dissipates into your stomach at the preternatural silence surrounding you. The soft wet dripping marks the only sounds apart from wind, the deep hollow echo of emptiness.
You wander, hungrily, aimlessly, like a dog without a leash. You wonder what you could do here, apart from hide. So you visit old haunts. You leave a message on the corkboard in the warehouse for Chris.
Go to sleep, it says.
You drop a basket of lemon tarts off at the empty front desk of the book shop you know Algie runs. You do menial chores. Leave soft messages in places you think might be overlooked. You are restless and hungry for something more, a comfort in the hands of another person. But here it’s quiet. And here, in this grey drizzle, you aren’t cornered the same way you are when Ashdown gets too loud.
You think that a part of you was always meant for this place. For it’s quiet and its monsters. You think you might be one of them. Corr’s bloodless death still sits like a steel wire around your throat, and every day it feels like it tightens. You hadn’t been born into violence. You hadn’t been born violent. You remember lawns and swamp summers and singing in the night and the soft sweet lips of boys and girls from a memory you can’t quite place. But violence had found you, one way or another, in your fathers fists and Melany’s care and the war. Oh, the war.
Violence found you, raked its claws through you. You were someone else, once. You were someone else. But violence found you, and made you something new. Just like this cage. Just like the creatures in this cage.
So you stay.
You wander.
You wait.
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Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 11:56 pm
what the light does not touchxxx750 words detailing thorne's first experience with his new power
Ashdown is quiet.
Maybe that is what is most fearful about it tonight.
The rain has stopped, the world has stilled, and with only the stir of a breeze, the soft pregnant clouds of grey and black above, it is eerie and forlorn. It is not the other side of the veil that he knows anymore. Something has shifted, something is unbalanced. The weight of it hangs above him, invisible, stagnant and oppressive in the air. He is not afraid, doesn’t have the luxury of terror, but as he wanders through the edges, his hand turns to the ring on his middle finger, his right hand splaying over his left.
Scars and tattoos mix together, like ink and paint in water. He twists the ring and wonders about the glass house, the body, Mina and Noeh and their words combined. It is a haunting he cannot escape. A haunting he can barely breathe when thinking on, as though they’ve left a bullet in him, something unseen. He wants to search his body for exit wounds but knows he’ll come up empty. In the nightmares he is always back there, dreaming in black and white, a body beneath him always cold, cold, cold.
You need only think about being unpresent.
And he does. He thinks about being nothing. A breeze passing through, a thought that goes dismissed in the back of someone’s mind. Fog or smoke, intangible things. He thinks of being alone, lonely, lonesome, and unseen. He thinks about darkness and shadows. All of the things the light passes over and passes through.
He wanders to the edge of Ashdown and further. Into the looming forests where the slope of hills knot together beneath the dusky orange rot and ruin of October. Water slides in the distance, a stream burbling somewhere beyond. If this was Ashdown itself, there would be birds and squirrels and living, breathing things. But here there is nothing. Oh – no. There is something.
A snap cracks through the tree-line. Another, another.
A twig is broken. Leaves are stirred into the air. A wingbeat hits a rhythm through the chilling air. Thorne looks up.
He knows he is not alone, but he cannot help holding his breath, releasing it, only to hold it again because what if it does not work – what if – what if –
Do not find me, he thinks to the world around him, stuttering forward again. Do not see me, do not find me. Do not know me. I don’t want you to know me.
And it is a hideous, selfish thought. He passes through branches and climbs over fallen logs, and the thick moisture in the air makes it feel as though another rainstorm should be coming, but everything is suspended. They have made a move, but without the motion of the rain, the motion of the world turning, it feels less like they have done anything at all, and rather like they have stopped.
Another snap echoes through the forest. Dark shapes slit and cut through the underbrush. Other-things. Creatures. Monsters. Beasts like him. He watches their progression, their shadow march, doesn’t know what they are, doesn’t even know what to guess. They climb and paw their way through the mist, in and out, wavering, always at the peripheral of his vision, and Thorne walks alongside them on the other edge of the uneven trees.
Snap. A branch gives way beneath his boot, and one of them looks up.
There are gold eyes watching him. No.
They are looking through.
Thorne thinks, Do not find me.
And they don’t. They look into an empty portrait. They make soft noises, soft sounds. They move on.
Somehow, it makes him feel lonely. Somehow, it makes him feel safe.
He thinks of Noeh, Mina. He thinks of what they must have been hiding from all this time. Surely worse things than creatures in the woods, in the dark, their quiet waltz uninteresting to the rest of the world, like a truth or a secret shouted into an empty wood.
He comes back to the edge of Ashdown. He wanders through its streets.
Mare sits delicately on a bus-stop seat in the nowhere-parts of the town. She is humming a soft tune, looking out into the empty world, her hands still and quiet in her lap, white as bone and dangerous as the sharpened edge of a knife.
She stares through him, as though he was never there to begin with. Her mouth might have moved once in his presence, to the soft-sweet hymnal of a lullaby or a speech or a question to turn into a discussion greater than both of them knew how to hold in their arms. Her dress might have billowed as she spun and twirled and danced and told him things about herself from another life. He knew she was something else, inhuman, her mortality burned away beneath flesh and sinew and bone and magic.
Dangerous. She is dangerous. She is strong and brutal and could destroy anything she wanted, if only he asked her to.
But here, now, she is only a girl. She is just a girl, and she looks through him, and her eyes are lonely.
Her eyes are a mirror image of his.
He closes his eyes and exhales, and opens them again.
“Mare,” he says, and she looks up at him and blinks, her hands reaching out, and he lets her take hold of his hand.
“You’re late,” she says. “Where were you?”
He hums, a soft-sweet melody.
“Gone,” he says, and leads her home.
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