|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 10:07 am
Music crawled into his ribs and thrummed with every beat. Rattled the stitches underneath his jaw. Burnt out every particle of pain such that all he felt was a neverending hum. But Eles liked it — it felt new. Different.
Like he was folded into the ground by the sound, by the lights and sights. All around him, bodies in motion. Grown-ups inflicting themselves on each other. Hunting and hunted. And there, in the space between word and gesture and exchanged numbers drifted a shadow from another, darker place. He watched that, too, until a meager pool spray wetted his side.
Snorting softly, he shook his head at the befreckled girl and showed her a half-smile. She tried to press the issue. He wouldn't budge.
Can't speak, he mouthed in time with his signing. Then, like magic, he suddenly wasn't interesting anymore.
Eles looked back at the open page of his sketchbook, where a Ticonderoga pencil stolen from a schoolkid lay in the folds between one leaf and the next. A bug was on the page, landed on the swell of Hybris's hair. Eles tried to shoo it with the back of his hand and it flew up in its characteristic spasm, buzzing in an encoded golden ratio while its back end glowed with a warm orange luster. Then it was back on the page again, this time joined by two friends.
Once again, he brushed the heel of his hand along the sketch. Smeared a dusting of graphite. Then, they were gone — Eles won that little war. Felt smug about it, too.
The bugs — the fireflies — they had landed in his hair.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 10:26 am
THe body behind him began to lean a bit too heavily against his shoulder, and Hybris gave a flick of his hand, something sharp and shining between his fingers. A ghostly disco ball drifted toward, then through, and disappeared. A voice groaned in his ear, "I think it hit...way harder than it shoul...d've.." "You should go get a drink of water," Hybris advised helpfully, while much less helpfully disengaging and not offering any additional support to the stumbling boy in his wake. Searching the rooftop landscape, his eyes went first for the bar, didn't see what he wanted, then moved on, but not too far because there. Yes. Eles bent over his sketchbook, not particularly interested in the party, or even Hybris's soft sort of predation within it. Tsk.Moving closer, he noticed the glowing little specks tangling themselves in the boy's dark locks. With a laugh, he started, "Oh, so these are the friends you've decided to m-" His voice cut-off, and a look of surprise and delight lit up Hybris's features, "Oh! It's you!" And then caution crept in, "Ah...is he...here too?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 10:40 am
Turning up at the sound of that familiar un familiar voice, Eles spotted Hybris standing over him. Looking curious, maybe amused. Eles had a fine view of that neck, shadow and light playing off it like wet marble. Sternocleidomastoid barely a caress until he shifted expressions. Charlatan boy, Eles thought. Making up delight again.
Eles shifted his weight on his elbows, craned his neck to look at the addressee. Expecting anyone, even the girl from before that thought him useless for being unable to speak. His breath caught in his throat.
There were two of Hybris now. One just as devilishly pretty as the other. Did he have a doppelgänger?
He turned back to the first — what he assumed was the first — and signed in his burgeoning confusion. Is this your magic?
"Oh! It's you!" Echoed the falsehood of a diadem-laden prince. Cloaked in velvet and suede and nightfall. Imperceptible to the average ear, perhaps, but his voice carried a touch too much whisper and rasp.
Then the false boy smiled, and a brief imperfection — a glitch — formed around the corners of his mouth. A glitch soon corrected and smoothed away.
"Do you ever see me without him?" It asked, but the voice was altogether different. Higher in pitch. More rasp. Almost burdened by the effort of speaking.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 11:03 am
Moving closer, Hybris place a reassuring hand on Eles's shoulder. Only those fingers were kneading into it like a particularly knobby stress ball. A little shake of the head followed the boy's question. It was all too often the conflict between self-interest and curiosity that got Hybris into trouble. That had, he was fairly sure, killed him on a battlefield not too long ago. Scanning the rooftop for any flickering lights at odds with the electric, strobing ones of the party, for wrongly cast shadows and a warmth that threatened rather than comforted...Hybris didn't see any General Kings ready to melt him against their metal grates, so of course, he let his curiosity take back the lead. With a coy smile, he replied to his copy, "Well I'd like to. And we've only gotten to meet a few times." And here he was a little sulky, the petulant bite of lip clear in his voice. "Is that your real voice?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 11:21 am
That was something — something Eles lacked the skill to read out of Hybris's body language. Eles turned, sitting up, back to Hybris (the real one) so he could better face Hybris (the fake one).
And that second voice — harsh, disciplined, words rent from the back of the throat. Like metal shavings ground into pavement. Where did that come from? It wasn't Hybris's practiced, well-controlled voice. It was something caught between youth interrupted and derision.
So Eles stood. Slowly. Like making a sudden move might induce it to strike. And in his gut formed a peculiar feeling, not unlike fear, not quite thrill, too mild for uncertainty. In it, buried in its core, was a familiar wrongness that all but banished the pleasant lights and backdrop of the party. They were three, then, two Hybris to one Eles, altogether alone, isolated, detached from that dimension and overlaid like a cloudy veneer.
Eles reached up and clasped his hand over top of the one so gouging his shoulder. He waited, eyes sharp, clear.
"It's his voice," not-Hybris corrected, tongue laden with a disappointment and near loathing. As if Hybris had to be dead from the neck up for failing to recognize it. As if that tongue had been spoken to him so recently as yesterday, despite more than a year lapsing since its master perfumed the boy's shoulders with copper, salt, and burnt sulfur.
"You want to talk? We do it elsewhere." It raised its hand and its clothing followed in a manner impossible. "And I want a starseed." It pointed at Eles's chest.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 11:33 am
"Oh is it?" Hybris felt a little wistful. "There were...circumstances." It hadn't been a particularly nice conversation, and the youma hadn't hit the fondly remembered notes of rage, threat, and disgust; the memory of which still periodically featuring in salacious daydreams. "I'll have to practice more with this." Eles was wise to get up, ready and cautious for whatever may come next. Twisting his around the other boy's he held it firmly. Ready to follow the youma, also ready to run to the nearest mirror if need be. "We can talk elsewhere, but I like his starseed where it is. It's special. And mine, you see? So don't bully him." As if this was a matter of playful high school teasing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 11:52 am
'There were… Circumstances.'
Eles wasn't sure he'd ever heard a weaker line from this boy. Such a way of saying absolutely nothing; would it cost them? Would it cost him?
Eles lacked context for what Hybris could do. Was he powerful? Was he weak? Would he stand a chance against this… shapeshifter? Was it weak, strong, something in-between? Would they start a skirmish up there, in the middle of a party, when they'd started turning glazed eyes and boneless bodies toward them?
Another blink, and looking at not-Hybris was like looking at a distortion. At a curious fractal in the world that the mind couldn't quite comprehend, but it ever recalibrated and refocused and reviewed again with every good intention toward understanding. But understanding only came when someone else stood before them — someone shorter, with eyes ablaze and a corset like a victorian fireplace.
No, not a corset, Eles realized. Fused to a grate.
The falsehoods lay in the lighting. No flicker of flame lit the shadows on Hybris's features. No heatwave barreled over Eles's face and shoulders. They stood before an impossibility.
But that's what magic did, wasn't it? It made the impossible possible.
And Eles was transfixed. Even Hybris was gone to him. What remained was his conscious peering into a peculiar feeling, that fleeting comprehension living under the skin of their reality, as if it beat and boiled and churned in that whirling vortex of fire. Like if he stood on the very cusp of their reality and stretched his arms until the joints popped open, he might brush the shape of it with his fingertips. It felt so maddeningly, tantalizingly, sensually close. Like a whisper of breath on his lips.
Then it vanished in a flurry of fireflies. Fireflies that landed in droves on the boy, who jerked back out of instinct and raised his free arm up to swat them off his face and body.
But they were many, and he was one.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 12:06 pm
The change wasn't as smooth as his own magic, but somehow the twists, the process within it were all the more satisfying. And the result was of course the one that brought that frisson along his spine, thrill and fear merging to something not wholly negative in his anticipation of it. But, it was still a world away from the genuine life and death by burning that Faustite emanated, even when when not actively threatening him. Glancing over at Eles, he saw the boy was likewise transfixed. Understandable really, but maybe...maybe they really...should... The youma dissolved into its manyself and swarmed Eles. Yes, it was time to run. As much as he hated to do it, to be seen doing it, to possibly be expected to do such things later when the need arose, Hybris still found himself picking up Eles with a rather horrible ease and ran to the edge of the rooftop. The leap to the next was also made easily and his speed, as he raced toward the nearest mirror, hidden cleverly near a cluster of solar panels, was not something that would be considered entirely human.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2025 12:14 pm
To have come away with only energy…
What a shame. What a pity.
The shimmering wave of fireflies fell away as dust only in small bursts, where unpracticed hands slapped at that weak body. They could stay on, they could follow, but the moment the Mirror Senshi fled through the looking glass with his property, the youma peeled off like a husk and lingered on the smooth surface.
Not allowed to pass. Waste of a perfectly edible starseed.
In a blink, they were gone. Back to the Rift. Back to waiting for Albite to make good on his word and deed. A hunger like that was no patient thing. lizbot fin~ a boy should be glad he wasn't pushed into the pool instead
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
