Who told you so, dilly dilly, Who told you so? ‘Twas my own heart, dilly dilly, That told me so.
ouch is one of the most intimate, romantic ways to be close to someone else. The Town knows this very well -- the Town wants everyone to be as close as possible.
Perhaps that's why this bonding is so...aggressive.
Because you're in for quite the shock on this otherwise peaceful day when you brush against the next person on your path.
Maybe you're going out of your way to touch people. Maybe you've got a terrible urge to just see what's lurking in someone's heart. Maybe you trip over a conveniently placed rock -- whatever the cause, you're getting an up close and personal look into someone else's heart.
Welcome to Awash's eighteenth event log, everyone! Further information on this event can be found here at the OOC post. You are welcome to make your own logs and posts for this event!
If there are any questions, please ask them here. Thank you!
[ It happens as if in slow motion. He feels himself pushed. He hears the unmistakable sound of an arrow hitting flesh. He whirls around. It takes him a moment to understand what happened, mostly because his mind, at first, refuses to believe it. No. Oh, no no no.
He reaches out, to cradle her in his arms. ]
Pyra!
[ He gazes at her, his lips trembling. Back then, he'd felt a sharp pain and looked down, surprised to see an arrow sticking out of his chest. Now it's sticking out of hers.
He did this. It's completely his fault. I wish it had been you with me, that day. He'd actually thought that. His heart made it happen. That day, his sister had sacrificed herself to save him. She'd pushed him out of the way, taking the sword meant for him. Now, Pyra is the one who pushed him, Pyra is the one hurt for his sake. Is there no end to this? In his past life, everyone he cared about suffered or died because of him. This life... of course it will be the same.
More than anything, he wants Pyra to love herself, to love her life, to want to live. He never dreamed that he'd be the one to kill her.
He knows what he has to do. He reaches into his sleeve, and isn't at all surprised to find two halves of a seal tucked away in his qiankun bag. He joins them together. All around them, hands shoot out of the ground, followed by arms, followed by the bodies of corpses, their skin grey and rotting. They immediately begin to attack the mass of cultivators. ]
[ To those of her world, they would identify her as a being known as a Blade-- a living weapon. And that is an appropriate term for someone like her, as she's come to accept herself be known as. The Aegis, the heavenly holy grail, something belonging to their Creator. But she is not actually a Blade, and she truly never was.
A wound like this would have been lethal to a Blade, making them abandon their forms and return to their crystal, to forfeit all of their memories until they would awaken again. For Pyra, that is not the case. She was made to look human, she was made to behave like one, to imitate how they appeared, to feel pain like they do, to need to feel like she would need air to breathe, to be the most human out of her trinity of personalities; the softest, the... weakest.
It hurts, of course. The arrow sinking into her skin, piercing through her, and it is enough to make her vision go completely dark as she collapses into his arms, to shudder and then grow still as the world erupts into chaos around her, as the ground gives birth of death that seeks to usher in more death.
Some time will pass before she actually beings to stir once more. And then he might find that she is still... breathing and that there is a pulse at her neck. The tail end of the arrow juts out from her breast, blood pouring forth-- but not a copious amount. And should he actually inspect the puncture wound that has torn through the fabric of her shirt, beyond the skin and superficial tissue there is nothing but... a cauldron of light and energy within, where lungs should be to actually need to breathe, where a heart ought to be to actually have a pulse. ]
W-...Wei Ying....? [ She murmurs his name between breaths. Yes, breaths. Her appearance is but an aesthetic, almost like a facade, but it is one that remains convincing although the curtain has been pulled: the rise and fall of her chest is stil shallow, her pulse is still rapid. All the signs of an injured person, as if something has told her that this is what a human should feel when injured, that these are their symptoms.
...Her mind is still in a daze, however, because this all actually does feel terrible to her. She can't heal rapidly as her other self; it takes time for her. She hears... commotion around her. Screams? Roars? The sound of fighting, chaos. She can't be sure. Blinking, she opens her eyes. ]
[ What she'll see, when she's finally able to open her eyes, is a scene of unimaginable chaos. The black-and-white cultivators are being massacred by the corpses; brilliant red blood streams out of their wounds. Every slain cultivator then rises up, as a corpse, and begins to attack the survivors. Wei Wuxian himself has lost all color. He is entirely black and white himself, except for the eerie red glow in his eyes. He doesn't seem to hear her or notice her stirring, so caught up is he with controlling the corpses—and destroying his own wretched heart.
In the background, amid all the screams and the fighting, Pyra might be able to hear the sounds of a zither playing. Lan Wangji, forgotten, is trying to make his way towards the two of them, but a wall of corpses blocks him. A strum of his zither strings knocks them down, destroying them, but there are always more to take their place. ]
[ She pushes herself up from the ground, groggy as she struggles to push herself up; it feels like she's been run over by a lesser Titan. Hands shaking, she brings a hand to the arrow at her chest, wincing as she pries it out of her and tosses it to the side. And with that done with...
...She gasps as she's given front-row seats to the merciless carnage. But why-- or, how? Her eyes dart to the back of man conjuring and controlling up the mass of walking corpses like they were puppets upon strings, weapons in the worst sort of way to incur fear and hate, to intentionally make others cower and kneel and beg, to obliterate, to pain with blood. She hardly recognizes him. And yet, he can be mistaken for no other.
She's always thought him to be brilliant. But to have that brilliance expressed in such a nihilistic fashion makes her call out to him to stop die upon her tongue. What can she say to him-- she chose wrong. They chose wrong, to not take the risk to have Mythra appear. Yes, it seems like nihilism is the theme for now, because no matter what she had chosen, it would resulted in his heart being damaged. By her hand or his own...
Then a melody cuts through the screams, arresting the air and energy about each note in a way she's never seen before. She gapes in awe as the only other recognizable figure attempts to make his way through the battle-- and it's then that she realizes that not all hope has been lost. There is still someone fighting for him, there, in his heart.
Can't she do the same? Doesn't she owe him that much, at least? Owe it to the people who are in his heart who care for him-- owe it to those here in Chroma that feel the same? To each and every person he has impacted in either of his lives? ]
[ She slowly pushes herself up. ] Wei--... Wei Ying.
[ And takes a step forward. Will the corpses attack her? She doesn't feel like dealing with them right now. All she wants to do is try to get to him-- to try to stop him from hurting himself any further.
[ There's very little left of the man she knows. Devoid of color, he is also beyond caring. He controls the corpses and continues the slaughter, because it's something to do. When she speaks, pleading with him to stop, it's as if she's speaking to a wall. He doesn't react with joy that she's alive. He doesn't even seem to know who she is. He simply stares at her with eyes that are dead, despite their red glow.
At the same time, a hand juts forth, grabbing onto his wrist with enormous strength. It's Lan Wangji, who has finally broken through the wall of corpses, as a result of Pyra's distraction. He echoes her words. Wei Ying! Stop!
The strength of Lan Wangji's grip is enough to make Wei Wuxian drop the Stygian Tiger seal. It falls from his hand and breaks into two pieces. The corpses stop moving and fall, like marionettes with their strings cut. Everything goes quiet.
[ She freezes when she sees his expression. It can't even be described as cold, it simply is devoid of all emotion, as if artist had failed to paint a mask.
At least his other self who she had seen with red eyes in his mirror had seemed... well, alive. This one looks as if he has lost everything just short of his own life.
This one looks... like her, at times. Like he wouldn't mind losing that life. Out of all of the emotions she's seen from him so far, of his smiles, his frowns, his laughs, his annoyed scowls,this total lack of anything in his eyes is by far the one she finds she... fears for him. ]
[ (She watches the object drop from Wei Wuxian's hand and split in two, and all the corpses falling like flies in smoke immediately after. Was that the mechanism that controlled it? Why would he have such a thing?
[ .....................No. This isn't about her. And besides, didn't she promise to protect him? ]
No.
[ She can speak for herself, at least. As for Lan Zhan... she hopes that him being here functions as Wei Wuxian's last subconcious effort to bring him back from ruin.
She take a couple more steps towards him. ] We're not going to leave you.
[ Lan Wangji, at Wei Wuxian's other side, keeps gripping his wrist. He echoes Pyra's words: Not leaving you. The object of these entreaties, however, remains obdurate. ]
Go away.
[ He gazes out across the carnage: broken corpses, some fresh and some long dead, amid survivors leaning on their swords, breathing hard, their faces twisted in horror. He stares at all this with eyes that are beyond caring. Bit by bit, the landscape begins to break up. The arrow through Pyra's chest disintegrates. The black and white cultivators, spattered with red blood, begin to look less like people and more like paintings... then inked line drawings... then charcoal sketches... and then they fade away entirely. Lan Wangji is the last to disappear, his pale eyes widening, his grip spasming—as if by holding on more tightly, he might be able to stay. Hoarsely he says, Wei Ying, I .... ...
His last words are muffled. It's impossible to hear them. And then he's gone.
Wei Wuxian's heart has sustained too much damage; it can no longer sustain the illusion, nor keep its occupants trapped. The world of Chroma returns: greyscale picked out with color. Pyra is her usual color: flame red with blue-green lights. Wei Wuxian is still entirely without color. The world around him has changed, but the look in his eyes has not. He regards Pyra without interest. And then says, with finality: ]
[ Pyra has only seen him so emotionless once before, but that was when he had literally been frozen in the setting of the ice castle. She wonders if that the solution to his state right now is something as simple as crying over him or giving him a kiss.... Well, she has the former covered already as her eyes begin to mist as the battlefield fades, as the blood and bodies become nothing more than wisps of ink upon pages of his heart and then all of that, too, gives way to monochrome reality, highlighted with splashes of color here and there.
She is no stranger to defeat and loss, but this only feels... worse somehow. He may be looking at her apathetically, but all the sorrow in the world fills within her eyes. She must have missed something when the arrow struck her, and her vision went dark. What had happened while she was passed out? She only remembers awakening to the chaos of it all. And if he was the one who had brought those corpses up from the ground, then-- why? ]
[ Was it because of her? Did he feel the need to attack all of those cultivators within his heart... did he feel like he had to hurt his own heart... because...
....Why? If he was truly pushed over some edge because of her--
She doesn't know what it means, but suddenly her guilt feels all the more unbearable. ]
[ She tells him, softly, even if he might not know what it is that she's apologizing for, or even care.
She did this to him... Her choice caused this to happen. She had only wanted to be careful, but it seems no matter what she decides, ruin lies at the bottom of both paths. ]
[ There's always a way to restore color, she tells herself. There is always a way-- that's the purpose of why they're here within this world in the first place, after all. So, she believes-- no, she has to believe that his color, too, will also be restored over time. She may not know how long it might take, she may not know how difficult it will be...
Perhaps they've had enough for one day.
So even if he continues to tell her to leave, she'll at least take him by the hand and lead him back to him home, where he might at least be safe. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ouch is one of the most intimate, romantic ways to be close to someone else. The Town knows this very well -- the Town wants everyone to be as close as possible.
no subject
He reaches out, to cradle her in his arms. ]
Pyra!
[ He gazes at her, his lips trembling. Back then, he'd felt a sharp pain and looked down, surprised to see an arrow sticking out of his chest. Now it's sticking out of hers.
He did this. It's completely his fault. I wish it had been you with me, that day. He'd actually thought that. His heart made it happen. That day, his sister had sacrificed herself to save him. She'd pushed him out of the way, taking the sword meant for him. Now, Pyra is the one who pushed him, Pyra is the one hurt for his sake. Is there no end to this? In his past life, everyone he cared about suffered or died because of him. This life... of course it will be the same.
More than anything, he wants Pyra to love herself, to love her life, to want to live. He never dreamed that he'd be the one to kill her.
He knows what he has to do. He reaches into his sleeve, and isn't at all surprised to find two halves of a seal tucked away in his qiankun bag. He joins them together. All around them, hands shoot out of the ground, followed by arms, followed by the bodies of corpses, their skin grey and rotting. They immediately begin to attack the mass of cultivators. ]
no subject
A wound like this would have been lethal to a Blade, making them abandon their forms and return to their crystal, to forfeit all of their memories until they would awaken again. For Pyra, that is not the case. She was made to look human, she was made to behave like one, to imitate how they appeared, to feel pain like they do, to need to feel like she would need air to breathe, to be the most human out of her trinity of personalities; the softest, the... weakest.
It hurts, of course. The arrow sinking into her skin, piercing through her, and it is enough to make her vision go completely dark as she collapses into his arms, to shudder and then grow still as the world erupts into chaos around her, as the ground gives birth of death that seeks to usher in more death.
Some time will pass before she actually beings to stir once more. And then he might find that she is still... breathing and that there is a pulse at her neck. The tail end of the arrow juts out from her breast, blood pouring forth-- but not a copious amount. And should he actually inspect the puncture wound that has torn through the fabric of her shirt, beyond the skin and superficial tissue there is nothing but... a cauldron of light and energy within, where lungs should be to actually need to breathe, where a heart ought to be to actually have a pulse. ]
W-...Wei Ying....? [ She murmurs his name between breaths. Yes, breaths. Her appearance is but an aesthetic, almost like a facade, but it is one that remains convincing although the curtain has been pulled: the rise and fall of her chest is stil shallow, her pulse is still rapid. All the signs of an injured person, as if something has told her that this is what a human should feel when injured, that these are their symptoms.
...Her mind is still in a daze, however, because this all actually does feel terrible to her. She can't heal rapidly as her other self; it takes time for her. She hears... commotion around her. Screams? Roars? The sound of fighting, chaos. She can't be sure. Blinking, she opens her eyes. ]
no subject
In the background, amid all the screams and the fighting, Pyra might be able to hear the sounds of a zither playing. Lan Wangji, forgotten, is trying to make his way towards the two of them, but a wall of corpses blocks him. A strum of his zither strings knocks them down, destroying them, but there are always more to take their place. ]
1/2
...She gasps as she's given front-row seats to the merciless carnage. But why-- or, how? Her eyes dart to the back of man conjuring and controlling up the mass of walking corpses like they were puppets upon strings, weapons in the worst sort of way to incur fear and hate, to intentionally make others cower and kneel and beg, to obliterate, to pain with blood. She hardly recognizes him. And yet, he can be mistaken for no other.
She's always thought him to be brilliant. But to have that brilliance expressed in such a nihilistic fashion makes her call out to him to stop die upon her tongue. What can she say to him-- she chose wrong. They chose wrong, to not take the risk to have Mythra appear. Yes, it seems like nihilism is the theme for now, because no matter what she had chosen, it would resulted in his heart being damaged. By her hand or his own...
Then a melody cuts through the screams, arresting the air and energy about each note in a way she's never seen before. She gapes in awe as the only other recognizable figure attempts to make his way through the battle-- and it's then that she realizes that not all hope has been lost. There is still someone fighting for him, there, in his heart.
Can't she do the same? Doesn't she owe him that much, at least? Owe it to the people who are in his heart who care for him-- owe it to those here in Chroma that feel the same? To each and every person he has impacted in either of his lives? ]
no subject
[ And takes a step forward. Will the corpses attack her? She doesn't feel like dealing with them right now. All she wants to do is try to get to him-- to try to stop him from hurting himself any further.
Doesn't he see what he's doing?
Is this-- is this because of her? ] Please, stop.
no subject
At the same time, a hand juts forth, grabbing onto his wrist with enormous strength. It's Lan Wangji, who has finally broken through the wall of corpses, as a result of Pyra's distraction. He echoes her words. Wei Ying! Stop!
The strength of Lan Wangji's grip is enough to make Wei Wuxian drop the Stygian Tiger seal. It falls from his hand and breaks into two pieces. The corpses stop moving and fall, like marionettes with their strings cut. Everything goes quiet.
... ]
Get lost.
[ It's unclear whom Wei Wuxian is speaking to. ]
1/4
At least his other self who she had seen with red eyes in his mirror had seemed... well, alive. This one looks as if he has lost everything just short of his own life.
This one looks... like her, at times. Like he wouldn't mind losing that life. Out of all of the emotions she's seen from him so far, of his smiles, his frowns, his laughs, his annoyed scowls,this total lack of anything in his eyes is by far the one she finds she... fears for him. ]
no subject
But these are things to think about later.) ]
no subject
Get lost.
Who? Her? Lan Zhan? ]
no subject
No.
[ She can speak for herself, at least. As for Lan Zhan... she hopes that him being here functions as Wei Wuxian's last subconcious effort to bring him back from ruin.
She take a couple more steps towards him. ] We're not going to leave you.
no subject
Go away.
[ He gazes out across the carnage: broken corpses, some fresh and some long dead, amid survivors leaning on their swords, breathing hard, their faces twisted in horror. He stares at all this with eyes that are beyond caring. Bit by bit, the landscape begins to break up. The arrow through Pyra's chest disintegrates. The black and white cultivators, spattered with red blood, begin to look less like people and more like paintings... then inked line drawings... then charcoal sketches... and then they fade away entirely. Lan Wangji is the last to disappear, his pale eyes widening, his grip spasming—as if by holding on more tightly, he might be able to stay. Hoarsely he says, Wei Ying, I .... ...
His last words are muffled. It's impossible to hear them. And then he's gone.
Wei Wuxian's heart has sustained too much damage; it can no longer sustain the illusion, nor keep its occupants trapped. The world of Chroma returns: greyscale picked out with color. Pyra is her usual color: flame red with blue-green lights. Wei Wuxian is still entirely without color. The world around him has changed, but the look in his eyes has not. He regards Pyra without interest. And then says, with finality: ]
Get lost.
1/4
She is no stranger to defeat and loss, but this only feels... worse somehow. He may be looking at her apathetically, but all the sorrow in the world fills within her eyes. She must have missed something when the arrow struck her, and her vision went dark. What had happened while she was passed out? She only remembers awakening to the chaos of it all. And if he was the one who had brought those corpses up from the ground, then-- why? ]
no subject
....Why? If he was truly pushed over some edge because of her--
She doesn't know what it means, but suddenly her guilt feels all the more unbearable. ]
no subject
[ She tells him, softly, even if he might not know what it is that she's apologizing for, or even care.
She did this to him... Her choice caused this to happen. She had only wanted to be careful, but it seems no matter what she decides, ruin lies at the bottom of both paths. ]
no subject
...Let's take you home.
[ There's always a way to restore color, she tells herself. There is always a way-- that's the purpose of why they're here within this world in the first place, after all. So, she believes-- no, she has to believe that his color, too, will also be restored over time. She may not know how long it might take, she may not know how difficult it will be...
Perhaps they've had enough for one day.
So even if he continues to tell her to leave, she'll at least take him by the hand and lead him back to him home, where he might at least be safe. ]