LYCOS | tacet anima mea [Wenclair Omegaverse]

SCALDING | moon | iii.i (2) | 6.8k

| i |

⋆⁺₊⋆ ☼ ⋆⁺₊⋆

| (she drags) |

There is only iron to your nose.

Velvet streams down over your mouth as dry-bed rivers.

You do not bleed. Not for the moment, no.

In your mind's eye, you are walking deep within shadow. As your head rests in wait from where you stand, and there's the stone against your raven hair, the paths come to you. A maze. The intersections are twisting knots until they're the paths, scrawling every which way. There's dirt and grime beneath you. How much of it is bone, you do not know. It'sawfully grey, however. That you've captured to memory.

Had your nose not mistaken itself as a fountain, there would be the dirt..., the grime..., and bone. They come together like a dry, arid grave, up until the scrawling paths corrode, and there's siren water. Plumbing as well. By then, it's a marsh.

You listen to a few candles. There's only so many around you now, and they burn a cider, both in color and taste. Pricks down your throat. The least abrasive to your eyes, which is a blessing to this waned psyche.

It was the best the store had to offer. Down in Jericho. You swore you'd break out into hives from it all.

By your fingertips, you drag down your beltline. You are shed of the cloak and mask. There's some instruments that you've secured for yourself. In the moment, you toy with one. Sinch down its antenna.

"What the fuck...?!" (His whisper snaps you aware.) "This place has mass graves too...?!" (You hilt your jaw for the corner you stand beside.)

The radio is tight in your grasp. You thumb over a button. It is echoed by static. From the right, the left, behind you, forward...

"Don't be so panicked. You've done this before."

Your voice is a blearing crackle past these walls. It snags down the paths, and wriggles through bone.

Because you are within Nevermore's catacomb.

Dolls sit within these graves. They are your own. And you sacrificed them for this. You marred them open, stashed your radios, and sewed them, glued them, mangled them back together.

Most are bisque — some Parian. Others, of wood, or felt, wax, china. There's bizarre amalgamations.

They are all the eternal survivors of your guillotine. Dolls from your early years, where you'd yet to perfect the craft. And they know. They've watched their sisters and brothers drop their heads. Lost the hope, eventually, that there'd ever be another addition to their stagnant pile.

Your dolls are lively here.

And to realize that this impulsion of yours, to invite the very pursuit you prepped out of caution — for just in case he slipped from bindings...

It has them rattle anxiety — excitement —, no matter where they sit. They bloom a tremor in his words:

"The f-fuck I have?! Since when would I have looked at all these— Oh ... my god, why does she—?"

"Do not bastardize my ancestor."

There is one body free in isolation. She was never built into the wall. Never buried.

Because she is Nevermore's lone sentinel. It is her curse. It is legacy.

"Yes, Ajax, that is Goody Addams. Your society's matriarch."