(no subject)
Okay, so. Hope, I revised a bit with the novel and added like 740348304 more scenes, so yeah. I feel like the beginning's TOO overloaded now, and I'll cut some of it later when I'm not, like...really late for work. O.o
Anyway, yeah. Enjoy?
The Eighth Day
Part One - Purgatory:
A Crown Of Thorns
Dominick DiAngelo had a strange dream.
He sat upright in bed, clutching at the middle of his chest, breathing hard with his long hair tangled and sweaty around his face, and the first thing he did upon waking was to move his fingers, feeling the solidity of the skin over his sternum and the reassuring strength of the bone underneath. He was certain that the hole had been there, torn flesh and the beating of his exposed heart, but as he sat awake in bed with only the silence of his single-bedroom studio apartment wrapping around him, he felt suddenly stupid, and closed his eyes. A dream. And a moronic one at that - one remembered in shadows instead of shapes, and echoes instead of sound - yet it was one that seemed strangely familiar to him, despite all its unoriginal dramaticism and predictable outcomes.
He dreamed, and often of the end of the world: a great fire descending from on high, and the shrieking neighs of the horsemen four; there was the sound of thunderous laughter that he supposed was the laughter of God (or perhaps, more accurately, the devil), and then there was nothing, other than a flash, a scream, and the endless finality of white noise. And then it always came, boundless and true, from the darkest depths of his surfacing conscious: the ominous sound of his beating heart.
Dominick scowled, and ran a hand through his knotted black hair. It was pointless to worry about those sorts of things. He was an art student, and a successful one at that, soaring through his middle years at Corcoran with a bare yet suitable apartment in downtown D.C., quickly gaining popularity amongst his professors and peers. He had no family, but he had a fiancee - beautiful Ashley, an interior decorator who was currently under an internship to the bustling Lenane Corporation - and he had his friends, no matter how raucous and uncouth they might have been; so the young man hated the fact that he would wake up on most nights, sitting stiff and prone, and listen fearfully to the sound of his thudding pulse, laughing obnoxiously to the tune of a thousand might-have-beens in his tortured head.
He looked down at the other side of the bed, and was relieved to see that his movement hadn't awoken Ashley, who slumbered on with her hazel-colored eyes still closed, rich chocolate hair fanning across the Egyptian cotton sheets. The sheets were a gift from her mother, Dominick remembered: Sandra Ark, who worked as a nurse for the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The Ark family lived closer to Baltimore, and were often busy with work, so Dominick had rarely seen them, but he knew them enough to know that they accepted him as their future son-in-law, even as young and as inexperienced as he was, and that was all that mattered. They even supported the pair, his beloved's father being a top executive for Ford Motors, and it was that, among the countless other ways they showed their acceptance, that made the young man love them, as well as call them "family".
Ashley's eyelids fluttered once, in her sleep, and she let out a soft sigh, one that made the DiAngelo smile. He remembered how he and Ashley, shy and soft-spoken and intimidated by his intellectual good looks (wire-rimmed glasses, sweater, slacks, and all) had first met: she had spilled her drink on him at the club STEP, unable to control her shaking hands at being seated next to such a handsome and well-liked man. He had laughed it off, bought her another drink, and asked her out for coffee the next day (which she had accepted, stutteringly, for she was ever-nervous around anyone who asked her out, no matter how friendly they seemed).
She hadn't changed much, since then. She was still as klutzy and earnest as she had always been, but if she knew that her future husband was having such bizarre and unseemly dreams, she'd surely fly into panic about it in an instant. He didn't want to worry her. Ashley was frail - her parents had babied her, somewhat, until she had finally moved to D.C. on her own - and Dominick feared that burdening her with his own petty problems could have an ill effect on her already-fragile health.
He slid out of bed, the rustling covers sounding too-loud in the silence of the room, the click of his bedroom door sounding too-loud in the silence of the building, and stepped out into the hall. Something crunched underneath his foot, painfully, and he looked down with a curse at the broken case of some mainstream punk album Ashley had been raving about: PRPC, the latest in preteen obsession, and he kicked the battered case aside with a grunt.
Various other rock albums lay scattered across the floor, and though he loved Ashley dearly, he sometimes found himself exasperated that his mild-mannered fiancee could have such a poor taste in scene. Rockers were either stoners or Goths, two types of people he hated to be associated with, and though he could have fit the latter stereotype with his pale skin and dark eyes, the artist had always preferred to keep his black locks short, and cropped neatly around his head in a sensible manner. He generally preferred browns and neutral grays to black, and wore his clothes loosely, instead of clinging to his body in an indecent fashion. His own collection of easy listening and classical remained stacked and ordered atop the stereo system, but Ashley had always been somewhat of a pack rat: PRPC had been a one-hit wonder, if the young man could recall correctly, and his somewhat scatter-brained fiancee would likely forget about them in a week or two. Shaking his head, Dominick stepped out into the living room.
His apartment was empty, as he knew it would be, and the only footsteps that padded softly across the cluttered hardwood floor were his own. The curtains were drawn back, and a solid bar of moonlight provided an intrusive glare that stretched from the unkempt sofa in the living room to the half-open wooden cabinets in the kitchen, messy and lived-in. It was chilly, most likely from the open window in the studio, and the threadbare curtains cast a flickering light upon the single canvas that was toppled over on the floor, facedown with about five or so broken paint jars spreading stains around it.
Dominick froze.
"Shit!" Not caring about the noise anymore, he thudded across the studio to the corner of the room, where the easel lay, and heaved the canvas to an upright position, accidentally flinging some spare paint onto his face. He cursed, he prayed, he held his breath for a moment or two that seemed like an impossibly long time. He gaped, for another moment or two, breathing hard, flicking his eyes from one corner of the canvas to another with a desperation reserved only for the dying, then...he relaxed, letting out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, before tensing up a bit again when he understood what had happened, when the impracticality of the situation was brought to his mind.
The portrait was untouched.
Dominick looked at the floor, at the myriad of paints that were strewn there, and looked back again at the impeccable canvas, eyes wary. What the hell is this? This thing should have been ruined, but here it is, same as it was the day I stopped painting it. He couldn't figure it out. The wind had blown it over, that much was certain, but how the hell had it stayed so clean? There were no sheets around it to prevent a mess, because he'd left in a rush for his engagement party at STEP last night, and though it seemed unlikely that those solid jars of paint would break from something as small as a fall onto the floor, they had broken, and that goddamned easel had toppled directly onto it. Yet the portrait was untouched, as unusual and inexplicable as it had always been, and sadly, it wasn't the first time that something like this had happened to Dominick DiAngelo, something that he couldn't explain.
For a fact, the young man had no idea what made him start that portrait, either, that unfinished portrait of a strangely ethereal girl hanging in the gloom, her one completed eye strangely disapproving, her maple-colored hair short yet sweeping around her face in a manner that could only be described as 'charming', her lips smooth and scowling, just as he...remembered her? No, envisioned her, as all artists did, as all true artists supposedly dipped their brushes and mixed their paints and received their gifts from above, seeing their works in their heads before they had even finished them - because honestly, how was it possible for him to remember a girl he had never seen? Dominick was a realist; he believed in calls from art dealers and the envelope with the electric bill; he wasn't the type to think twice of reincarnation or poltergeists. And yet...
Why had he started that portrait, to begin with? He was most likely going to fail the semester at Corcoran because of it - the final project was a still life, of all things, which he had admittedly started but never gotten very far with - and though he hated to believe that he was possibly being compelled by something other than will, at the same time, he still breathed a sigh of relief at the painting's immaculate surface, and still reset the easel shakily, green eyes dark in the shadows of the night. He was a gifted artist, and his art gave him scholarships that he shouldn't be wasting, yet he still didn't stop painting this girl, though he knew he should. Something about her, something about her single blue eye (and the other green, yes, the other was green) chastizing him silently from her unfinished canvas drove him, made him look up from the craft-store feathers and tangled bedsheet that made up his still-life and turn back to that portrait again, breathing artificial life into a girl who only existed in the back of his mind.
She stank suspiciously of predestination, and he wouldn't have any of it. Subconsciously, Dominick brought his hand to his chest again, and sank his fingernails into his skin, just to confirm that the thing was whole.
"Are you the cause of this?" he wondered aloud, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb his beloved in the other room. "These...dreams, nightwares, whatever it is you want to call them? Am I...?"
He wouldn't say it, though, not aloud. He had far too much going for him in his life to even think about using the word cursed.
Dominick cleaned the mess, for a while, keeping his beloved raison d'etre far away from the danger of leaky paints, and though the floor was hardly scrubbed to anything that could be called 'clean', he was too tired to deal with it any more, and so the young man simply threw some newspaper atop the entire rubbish and made a note to himself to finish the whole thing later. (He never would, and it would come out of his security deposit, but that was hardly the sort of thing he was inclined to think about at around 3:30 AM.)
"I'm throwing away my scholarship for you," he muttered, to the unresponsive canvas, and as he knelt there on that freezing hardwood floor, he realized the stupidity of the entire mess, and stood, padding unsteadily in the direction of the hall. He cast one last look back at the easel. "You'd better be grateful for it."
That done, Dominick plodded back to his bedroom, burrowed himself back under his covers, and swore fiercely to himself that he'd stop this nonsense, and round out his semester like any sensible human being should. He would burn that damned portrait, finish his portfolio, and remember to pick up some milk on the way home, because his was about to expire. No longer would he work for and wonder about a girl whom he had never given a name.
As he slipped back under the covers, Ashley shifted a little, and murmured something into the pillow, something that sounded suspiciously like his name. Dominick offered up another fond smile, brushed back a strand of hair that was clinging stubbornly to his lover's lips, and settled down next to her, taking comfort in the smooth curves of her body, the warmth of her breath on his neck, and yes, even...the steady beating of her beautiful heart.
If there was one thing that the youth hated about his life, it was this: the fact that as of late, he had been thinking more about that goddamned mystery girl than he had about his own future wife. He closed his eyes, and offered up for a moment a plea.
That girl... I wish she'd just...disappear.
And so saying, Dominick DiAngelo had another strange dream.
i.) hallelujah, la miserable
There was a girl on the bus.
She was a beautiful girl, in that strangely unoutstanding way: her hair was a simple brunette, but upon closer inspection it was revealed to be naturally streaked with shades of gold and red, thus giving it the overtone of stunning amber. It was cut short, yet swooped behind her ears in feathery layers that framed her face and brought her adorable unblemished ears into sight. It seemed strange to say that one of her best assets were her ears, but it was true: she had the sort of ears that were made for earrings; small and round and shapely, with small lobes and hollow shells. It made her face seem younger, which was just as well since her sharp chin and long neck made it seem older...much older. The girl was unable to hide her button nose, though, nor her long-lashed eyes; perhaps she was beautiful because she was that strange combination of innocent and wise, of doll-like features yet sagely presence.
She was dressed poorly, in a tank top that was too small, hanging loosely over her narrow chest and exposing more of her skinny stomach than what was decent. Her cutoff shorts, however, were too long, sagging all the way down to her knees and being belted at the waist with what appeared to be a shoestring, as opposed to a proper belt. Her dainty feet were clad in sandals that were also a tad too large, from the way about an inch of the shoe was left sticking out from behind her dirty heels. Her clothes took away from her beauty, the once-white tank top and paint-stained shorts making her pallor seem sickly, and the ill-fitting shoes making her look just plain silly.
She sat in her uncomfortable bus chair reading, occassionally pushing her wispy-looking bangs out of her eyes, or lifting a tiny hand to rub at the nape of her bent neck. Her long legs thumped against the seat in front of her out of habit, and her small shoulders hitched as the bus moved, jolting unwillingly from place to place because of the poor terrain. From the way she squinted at the pages, it was possible that she was in need of an occular adjustment, however, the road was also bouncy, and the lighting poor, so that might not have been the case. Either way, the girl seemed so absorbed in her reading that the veteranarian was surprised when she looked up, sharply, before the other woman had even managed to move her seat.
It wasn't in Tabatha Wilson's nature to pry, but a young girl on a cross-country bus in the middle of the night was an uncommon occurrence, and so she had stood hesitantly from her original position, stumbled her way up the aisle, and stood a single seat away from the girl: close enough to speak, but far enough to keep her distance, as well.
As soon as the the girl had looked up, Tabatha received another surprise: her eyes were discolored; one blue, one green. It was something she had only seen on animals, due to her profession - and even then it was something rare - so she blinked at the unusual revelation, inadvertently leaning back. "A-Ah, miss, I didn't mean to startle you..."
The girl folded her book closed with a resigned air, and gently set it away. "Can I help you?" Her eyes leaked annoyance, and she cast her gaze away from the woman's own to look at the book she had just set aside with unadulterated longing.
Tabatha blinked again, and made a show of sweeping her errant brown hair back inside her baseball cap to conceal her annoyance. What a rude child. Where are her parents? "I was just curious, what with you sitting here all alone and all...where are your parents?"
The woman almost felt bad as the girl made a stifled noise, then, and brought her thumb to her mouth to gnaw habitually on the nail. "Dead," she said curtly, eyes giving away her pain, and cast her gaze to the roof of the bus. "Is that all?"
Dead. Tabatha leaned back even farther, unsure of how to deal with this next surprise. She thought, briefly, that it wasn't proper for this little girl to be taking the bus by herself on such a long and tiresome route, even if she was going to live with relatives or in a foster home or such, but she didn't say so aloud. She didn't know what to say: children reacted differently to trauma, and she had an ominous suspicious that this young lady was hardly like any normal child, anyway. Still wary, she attempted to make base conversation.
"What's your name?" she asked slowly, as though dealing with a wild animal, but the other seemed as calm as she had always been, save her eyes, which were still looking raw and untamed. At first, there was no answer - there was only the two of them facing off with each other, as though at war - so Tabatha cleared her throat, and asked the question again. In their wordless battle, she was the first to look away. "Maybe...you didn't hear me. Wh... What's your name?"
The girl sat back, as though satisfied with her victory, and pushed a strand of her maple-colored bangs behind her ears again. Her eyes were calm now, far too mysterious for those of a child, and she looked at the veterinarian with them, through lowered sienna lashes. "Lorelei. Lorelei...DiAngelo."
Lore...lei? What a bizarre name. I certainly hope she goes by a nickname, otherwise she'll be picked on in school, no doubt. Tabatha recalled the story of the Lorelei, famous sirens who lured sailors to their deaths, and wondered what sort of parents would name their child after such a hideous thing. She was nervous, alarmingly so, feeling as though a wrong step would somehow catch her on a landmine; a feeling that wasn't right, given the fact that she was only dealing with a little girl, and a solitary one, at that. She swallowed her unease and tried her best winning smile, though admittedly, it was wan. "All right, then. May I call you Lori, sweetheart?"
But the girl just looked at her solemnly, never missing a beat. "No." Her face didn't change, still an impenetrable mask, and the woman hesitated, before giving a deep nod, obviously shaken by yet another blunt rebuff.
"All right. I'm sorry for troubling you, miss. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask."
But though the Lorelei girl smiled at her, then, and changed her entire persona - she was young again, alone and shy, yet grateful for the kindness of a stranger - it was that smile that frightened the woman more than anything else: it seemed unnatural, with it's sudden vulnerability, seemed as though everything that meant anything was teetering on the edge of this terrifying girl's pysche, and Tabatha pushed herself back off the seat so hard that she fell out of it completely, landing with a painful jolt on the floor.
Ignoring the now-impassve look she was receiving from the girl, her poker face back on as though the smile had just been a trick of someone's imagination, the veteranarian stood, and cursed as a sudden bump in the road nearly pitched her over onto her rear again. She managed to grab hold of a spare seat before getting back to her original spot as quickly as she could: the Greyhound was going through the Appalachians now, mountainous territory that was going to be a rough ride. She started to lower herself into the chair, before casting a look forward again. The girl was still watching her, as coolly and as distantly as ever, and against that foreboding gaze, Tabatha changed her mind, and took a seat directly in the back, as far away from that awful little Lorelei as she could get.
When at last the child looked away, Tabatha heaved an inward sigh of relief and looked out of the window for a while, catching the shadows of a rugged nightscape, mountains tall and the stars blotted from view, trees on all sides and only two headlights through that winding road in the dark. She daydreamed for a bit, then thought for a while about her work at hand - an Arabian on a Maryland racehorse farm had broken it's leg last week, and she was the renowned vet whom they had called out to handle it - and while she was thinking about sedatives and hairline fractures, she saw it.
Something unusual from the unfriendliness of the sky caught her eye, and she froze for a moment, before whipping straight forward in her seat and feeling suddenly paralyzed by fear, afraid to turn around again, afraid to look. There was something out there. Something unwanted. Something out of place. Something...
That had scared her much in the same way as that little girl had.
Trying to convince herself that there was absolutely nothing wrong with neither her companion nor the darkness, Tabatha beat down her terror and looked out of the window again; stopped, shuddered, and twisted around in her seat to do a double-take. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. But I could have sworn...
It had seemed, for a moment, that something out of the dark had been watching that Lorelei girl with inhuman, yellow eyes.
---
Hidden behind the branches of a tall fir tree, the creature watched the flashing lights of the Greyhound bus as it wound it's way through the midnight trail of the Appalachian Mountains, vigilant and swift. His yellow eyes flashed, once, caught in the light as the bus went rumbling past, and it seemed for a second as though the other female on the train - a doe-eyed pet whom he had watched closely before deeming her not a threat - had noticed him, in that strange way that humans did, labeling him as some sort of unseen terror. The thought made him grin.
When the bus had passed, he leapt with it, darting from treetop to treetop with inhuman strength and grace, hands like claws latching onto the bark to keep his balance. It was late twilight, the darkest sort of night before dawn, and the creature breathed a little bit easier at the timing of that fact. Demons had little reason to venture out in the total dark, and their powerlessness on the nights of the new moon were only heightened by the fact that only the highest-ranking among them could see without even the smallest bit of light.
Still...still. It was unlikely that any of the Seven High Lords of hell would venture this far out into nowhere over a girl who possessed virtually no remarkable talents to speak of, yet... The creature knew, as well, that the High Lords had been interested in his own activity as of late - very interested - and enough so that they might pursue him even this far out into the mountains. He wasn't willing to run the risk of his only potential savior being destroyed because of a careless slip in his personal vendetta, he wasn't willing at all.
Keeping his eyes and his ears sharp, he looked down at the bus again. What was it that man had said?
Wreckage everywhere, raining down from the sky like hail. Amidst the twisted metal and smoking rubber, a child lay, crying pitifully, the body of a dead woman pressed down upon her, blank eyes staring permanently into the child's own, emotionless and terrifying. The child, a girl, was shrieking hysterically, and over the body of a bloody, yet still breathing boy, the man - presumeably their father - stretched out his hand.
"Little...Lori..." he groaned, coughed up an unhealthy amount of blood, and grasped her hand, ignoring the flaming metal of the car frame that had just crashed down upon his back, and grasped the girl's hand. At the sight of her burning, dying father, the girl only screamed louder, and struggled to escape the weight of her mother's corpse, tiny limbs flailing.
"Little Lori..." the man said again, in too much pain to adequately smile, but there was something fatherly in his eyes, and the girl ceased her struggling, narrowly missing a falling car seat by degrees. "Don't...worry...help will be here soon... So...be a good girl, all right, and...hold on... Daddy will be...disappointed...if you let go of his hand...okay...?"
It was a sound most mortal ears could not hear, but both the creature and the girl heard it, too - when the man's body spasmed, and his hand went limp, there had been a sound slicing through the air that sounded suspiciously like the snip of infinitely sharp shears.
So...it had been their doing. It wasn't much of a surprise, given their only purpose and task, but ah...it was simply so much fun to mess with his dear sisters, especially when they were so certain of the threads that they spun, so certain of the threads that they cut. When a sound came like the scissors were opening up again, the creature saw his chance. He was no sentimentalist, but he wasn't one to let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity go to waste, either. When the shears closed a second time, he made sure that they slid shut over absolutely nothing more than empty air, the battered body of that little girl, as well as her considerably older brother, nestled securely in his arms. He heard a trio of angry screams from the farthest reaches of Nowhere, and knew that he had won.
He had never done such a thing before, something so unpredictable and rash, and yet...he knew, as well, what those sisters of his had in store for him, what their pride and greed and inevitable envy would drive them to do, and he knew that somehow, he had to prevent it. No human had ever been able to escape their grasp, had been able to run from that solemn and sudden shink that pronounced the end of their mortal lives...no one, that was, until now.
These two, unlucky brats that they were, would forever belong to him. One would be his savior, and the other, his sacrifice: so he had said, with a vicious smile, and therefore, so it would be. Forever and ever, amen.
He set them down not too far from the scene of the crash (the road had been under construction, and the hapless driver hadn't noticed it until it was too late - the car breaking through the guardrail and rolling down the embankment until it had landed in a burst of screeching metal and boiling flames) and when the paramedics arrived some thirty minutes later, they arrived to two dead parents, and their unconcious children, miraculously spared from death by the blessed benevolence of some saintly power from above.
Or, the creature thought as the girl whimpered a bit and stretched out her hand for a grip that was no longer there, perhaps by the proficient pragmatism of a currently earthbound immortal. The thought made him smile, cruelly, as he soared away from the now-uninteresting scene, hands still scorched from where he had lifted those two brats from their cage of fire.
In the present, the creature scowled, and spread his wings, jetting through the air after the Greyhound in an attempt to recover the time he had lost when he had been absorbed in thought. As he grew nearer to his target again, he could see his poor unwitting puppet - dozing now, with the other woman on the bus continuing to watch her warily - and the creature paused, settling atop another tree and folding his wings, an elegant gargoyle keeping watch over any and all creatures of the night.
"Little Lori," he murmured aloud, and was surprised at how easily the name slid off of his tongue, as though he had always known this girl, and had always addressed her that way. He said it again: "Ah...little Lori. Where will you end up now, princess, now that you have started to move?"
With a malicious-looking grin that would have set any mortal's blood to ice, the creature called Rosenkruez took off into the air again, his shadow the only dark splotch against the light of the coming dawn.
---
"She is starting to move." A girl with short black hair toyed idly with her scissors, unwittingly spilling blood.
Another girl, with blonde pigtails and an angelicly round face, looked up from her loom sulkily, a child on the verge of a tantrum. "The Limiter?" she muttered, and spun her threads faster, a habit she had when she was either embarrassed or enraged. "Whoc ares about her? She's a knot in the pattern, sure, but she'll die soon. Even if you can't cut her thread, she'll make sure to it that someone else does."
She looked up from her hands patiently, fingers continuing to weave her countless threads into one giant tapestry even without seeing. She was the last girl, with long, wavy chesnut hair and a kind smile - though something was off, off about her eyes. "You know that is difficult, Clotho," Lachesis warned, though her voice was still as warm as ever, her smile still as sweet. "There's a reason we call her the Limiter, you know."
To demonstrate, Lachesis picked up a silver thread, one that gleamed and glowed until the others, and even in her fingers, it moved of it's own free will, bending and struggling to break itself free. When the girl attempted to spin a devil on a pale horse towards the thread's direction, the tapestry glowed fiercely, and burst into crimson flame, completely burning away the incoming devil, as well as a few other scenes on the all-encompassing tapestry.
Clotho groaned. "Now look what you did, La! The next president of Cambodia just died in infanthood!" She pointed to the scorch marks on the tapestry. "And look, I think you just got an entire village in Brazil, too, oh man..." She snorted, disdainfully, and crossed her arms on her chest, about to have a tantrum again. "I worked hard on those threads, you know. What a pain."
Lachesis' smile never faltered, but it was obvious that it was growing thin. "I was merely proving a point, Clo," she reiterated, mildly, and sat at her loom again, working on restoring the charred pieces with new thread from Clotho's spinner. "She is called the Limiter because she 'limits' our powers: we cannot touch her, not like this."
The blonde 'hmph'ed, and turned her face away. "So, what now? Are you saying there's no way to get rid of that pest?"
Atropos, the eldest sister and the most quiet of the three, chose then to speak up. "Don't forget...we have him," she reminded them, cryptically, and brought the tip of her thumb to her mouth to gnaw on the nail. When she bit down hard enough to draw blood, she didn't even flinch, instead slid the appendage all the way into her mouth and sucked on it, idly.
"Stop that, Po, it's gross!" Clotho declared, snatching her sister's scissors away, but in a puff of silver smoke, the shears returned to the eldest anyway, dangling from her hand like a set of extra fingers. Atropos shrugged.
"My shears are the only thing that can damage me," she said lowly, indifferently. "I use them when I need to remember what it's like to feel pain. An eternity is long, Clo...too long."
Clotho scowled, about to fly into one of her characteristic rages again. For all she had the face of an angel, she had the temper of a devil, and she hated two things the worst: to be proven wrong, and to be talked down to, both of which had just happened in the past five minutes. Her face started to redden.
"I swear," she grumbled, loudly, "you're starting to sound as melodramatic as our lousy bro - "
She cut herself off in a loud shriek as countless tapestries unfurled from nowhere and wrapped themselves around her body, hoisting her up into the air. She struggled to rip them, but the threads of fate were unbreakable, and when she looked down at the ground in frightened disbelief, there stood Lachesis, pretty face contorted in wrath, right hand up in the air and slowly clenching into a fist; as her fingers tightened, so did the bonds around Clotho.
"You know how I feel about him!" the brunette roared, chesnut hair flaring around her, the very vision of a goddess of wrath. Her chocolate eyes burned now with scarlet fire. "You know I want nothing of him, you witch - not his name, nor his relation to us, not even a mentioning of him, do you understand me?!"
Clotho choked, and managed to get an arm free, which she pointed at her sister desperately. "P-Po brought him up f-first, you know!" she gasped, and as she spoke, her fingers began unfurling into lines of scarlet thread, which wound their way down Lachesis' tapestry and up her arm, to close around her throat, sharp enough to draw blood. Even in pain, the middle sister's fury didn't falter.
"Are you saying you deserve to be forgiven?!" she screamed, and balled her manipulating hand into a complete fist. At the same time, Clotho produced a black thread that was hard as steel, and sent it whistling sharply through the air towards her sister's throat -
Shink.
When both of the sisters blinked, they were free to breathe again, and there stood Atropos, her true shears in hand - shears as long as she was tall, thrown over her back like twin swords - and Clotho's thread and Lachesis' tapestries were falling from the sky in pieces like confetti. Atropos looked at them, evenly, before running her thumb along the edge of her blade, and casting her dark eyes in the direction behind her.
"Leaving our quarrel behind," she said somberly, plunging her shears into the dark nothing of Nowhere that lay beneath the sisters' feet, "the Dreamer...she is here."
---
I'll also be elaborating on the last scene at the end, the scene with the Moirae. I just wanted to get the basics of it down before I left for work, but I'll be added more descriptions of the place their in, as well as of the sisters themselves, when I get home. Or tomorrow. Or whenever I feel like it. I just wanted to let you know that yeah, I know that last scene is sort of bare, and yes, I intend on doing something about it.
ANY OTHER INPUT WOULD BE LOVELY? Hope, I super-love you and the fact that you're willing to revise for me. I don't know what I'd do without you - I know it must suck, reading this same shit over and over again, but I just wanted to let you know that yeah, it really does mean a lot to me. ♥
[EDIT]: Reposted, obviously, because the first time I forgot to un-friendslock it. *headdesk* It hasn't been a good day for me AT ALL.
Anyway, yeah. Enjoy?
The Eighth Day
Part One - Purgatory:
A Crown Of Thorns
Dominick DiAngelo had a strange dream.
He sat upright in bed, clutching at the middle of his chest, breathing hard with his long hair tangled and sweaty around his face, and the first thing he did upon waking was to move his fingers, feeling the solidity of the skin over his sternum and the reassuring strength of the bone underneath. He was certain that the hole had been there, torn flesh and the beating of his exposed heart, but as he sat awake in bed with only the silence of his single-bedroom studio apartment wrapping around him, he felt suddenly stupid, and closed his eyes. A dream. And a moronic one at that - one remembered in shadows instead of shapes, and echoes instead of sound - yet it was one that seemed strangely familiar to him, despite all its unoriginal dramaticism and predictable outcomes.
He dreamed, and often of the end of the world: a great fire descending from on high, and the shrieking neighs of the horsemen four; there was the sound of thunderous laughter that he supposed was the laughter of God (or perhaps, more accurately, the devil), and then there was nothing, other than a flash, a scream, and the endless finality of white noise. And then it always came, boundless and true, from the darkest depths of his surfacing conscious: the ominous sound of his beating heart.
Dominick scowled, and ran a hand through his knotted black hair. It was pointless to worry about those sorts of things. He was an art student, and a successful one at that, soaring through his middle years at Corcoran with a bare yet suitable apartment in downtown D.C., quickly gaining popularity amongst his professors and peers. He had no family, but he had a fiancee - beautiful Ashley, an interior decorator who was currently under an internship to the bustling Lenane Corporation - and he had his friends, no matter how raucous and uncouth they might have been; so the young man hated the fact that he would wake up on most nights, sitting stiff and prone, and listen fearfully to the sound of his thudding pulse, laughing obnoxiously to the tune of a thousand might-have-beens in his tortured head.
He looked down at the other side of the bed, and was relieved to see that his movement hadn't awoken Ashley, who slumbered on with her hazel-colored eyes still closed, rich chocolate hair fanning across the Egyptian cotton sheets. The sheets were a gift from her mother, Dominick remembered: Sandra Ark, who worked as a nurse for the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The Ark family lived closer to Baltimore, and were often busy with work, so Dominick had rarely seen them, but he knew them enough to know that they accepted him as their future son-in-law, even as young and as inexperienced as he was, and that was all that mattered. They even supported the pair, his beloved's father being a top executive for Ford Motors, and it was that, among the countless other ways they showed their acceptance, that made the young man love them, as well as call them "family".
Ashley's eyelids fluttered once, in her sleep, and she let out a soft sigh, one that made the DiAngelo smile. He remembered how he and Ashley, shy and soft-spoken and intimidated by his intellectual good looks (wire-rimmed glasses, sweater, slacks, and all) had first met: she had spilled her drink on him at the club STEP, unable to control her shaking hands at being seated next to such a handsome and well-liked man. He had laughed it off, bought her another drink, and asked her out for coffee the next day (which she had accepted, stutteringly, for she was ever-nervous around anyone who asked her out, no matter how friendly they seemed).
She hadn't changed much, since then. She was still as klutzy and earnest as she had always been, but if she knew that her future husband was having such bizarre and unseemly dreams, she'd surely fly into panic about it in an instant. He didn't want to worry her. Ashley was frail - her parents had babied her, somewhat, until she had finally moved to D.C. on her own - and Dominick feared that burdening her with his own petty problems could have an ill effect on her already-fragile health.
He slid out of bed, the rustling covers sounding too-loud in the silence of the room, the click of his bedroom door sounding too-loud in the silence of the building, and stepped out into the hall. Something crunched underneath his foot, painfully, and he looked down with a curse at the broken case of some mainstream punk album Ashley had been raving about: PRPC, the latest in preteen obsession, and he kicked the battered case aside with a grunt.
Various other rock albums lay scattered across the floor, and though he loved Ashley dearly, he sometimes found himself exasperated that his mild-mannered fiancee could have such a poor taste in scene. Rockers were either stoners or Goths, two types of people he hated to be associated with, and though he could have fit the latter stereotype with his pale skin and dark eyes, the artist had always preferred to keep his black locks short, and cropped neatly around his head in a sensible manner. He generally preferred browns and neutral grays to black, and wore his clothes loosely, instead of clinging to his body in an indecent fashion. His own collection of easy listening and classical remained stacked and ordered atop the stereo system, but Ashley had always been somewhat of a pack rat: PRPC had been a one-hit wonder, if the young man could recall correctly, and his somewhat scatter-brained fiancee would likely forget about them in a week or two. Shaking his head, Dominick stepped out into the living room.
His apartment was empty, as he knew it would be, and the only footsteps that padded softly across the cluttered hardwood floor were his own. The curtains were drawn back, and a solid bar of moonlight provided an intrusive glare that stretched from the unkempt sofa in the living room to the half-open wooden cabinets in the kitchen, messy and lived-in. It was chilly, most likely from the open window in the studio, and the threadbare curtains cast a flickering light upon the single canvas that was toppled over on the floor, facedown with about five or so broken paint jars spreading stains around it.
Dominick froze.
"Shit!" Not caring about the noise anymore, he thudded across the studio to the corner of the room, where the easel lay, and heaved the canvas to an upright position, accidentally flinging some spare paint onto his face. He cursed, he prayed, he held his breath for a moment or two that seemed like an impossibly long time. He gaped, for another moment or two, breathing hard, flicking his eyes from one corner of the canvas to another with a desperation reserved only for the dying, then...he relaxed, letting out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, before tensing up a bit again when he understood what had happened, when the impracticality of the situation was brought to his mind.
The portrait was untouched.
Dominick looked at the floor, at the myriad of paints that were strewn there, and looked back again at the impeccable canvas, eyes wary. What the hell is this? This thing should have been ruined, but here it is, same as it was the day I stopped painting it. He couldn't figure it out. The wind had blown it over, that much was certain, but how the hell had it stayed so clean? There were no sheets around it to prevent a mess, because he'd left in a rush for his engagement party at STEP last night, and though it seemed unlikely that those solid jars of paint would break from something as small as a fall onto the floor, they had broken, and that goddamned easel had toppled directly onto it. Yet the portrait was untouched, as unusual and inexplicable as it had always been, and sadly, it wasn't the first time that something like this had happened to Dominick DiAngelo, something that he couldn't explain.
For a fact, the young man had no idea what made him start that portrait, either, that unfinished portrait of a strangely ethereal girl hanging in the gloom, her one completed eye strangely disapproving, her maple-colored hair short yet sweeping around her face in a manner that could only be described as 'charming', her lips smooth and scowling, just as he...remembered her? No, envisioned her, as all artists did, as all true artists supposedly dipped their brushes and mixed their paints and received their gifts from above, seeing their works in their heads before they had even finished them - because honestly, how was it possible for him to remember a girl he had never seen? Dominick was a realist; he believed in calls from art dealers and the envelope with the electric bill; he wasn't the type to think twice of reincarnation or poltergeists. And yet...
Why had he started that portrait, to begin with? He was most likely going to fail the semester at Corcoran because of it - the final project was a still life, of all things, which he had admittedly started but never gotten very far with - and though he hated to believe that he was possibly being compelled by something other than will, at the same time, he still breathed a sigh of relief at the painting's immaculate surface, and still reset the easel shakily, green eyes dark in the shadows of the night. He was a gifted artist, and his art gave him scholarships that he shouldn't be wasting, yet he still didn't stop painting this girl, though he knew he should. Something about her, something about her single blue eye (and the other green, yes, the other was green) chastizing him silently from her unfinished canvas drove him, made him look up from the craft-store feathers and tangled bedsheet that made up his still-life and turn back to that portrait again, breathing artificial life into a girl who only existed in the back of his mind.
She stank suspiciously of predestination, and he wouldn't have any of it. Subconsciously, Dominick brought his hand to his chest again, and sank his fingernails into his skin, just to confirm that the thing was whole.
"Are you the cause of this?" he wondered aloud, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb his beloved in the other room. "These...dreams, nightwares, whatever it is you want to call them? Am I...?"
He wouldn't say it, though, not aloud. He had far too much going for him in his life to even think about using the word cursed.
Dominick cleaned the mess, for a while, keeping his beloved raison d'etre far away from the danger of leaky paints, and though the floor was hardly scrubbed to anything that could be called 'clean', he was too tired to deal with it any more, and so the young man simply threw some newspaper atop the entire rubbish and made a note to himself to finish the whole thing later. (He never would, and it would come out of his security deposit, but that was hardly the sort of thing he was inclined to think about at around 3:30 AM.)
"I'm throwing away my scholarship for you," he muttered, to the unresponsive canvas, and as he knelt there on that freezing hardwood floor, he realized the stupidity of the entire mess, and stood, padding unsteadily in the direction of the hall. He cast one last look back at the easel. "You'd better be grateful for it."
That done, Dominick plodded back to his bedroom, burrowed himself back under his covers, and swore fiercely to himself that he'd stop this nonsense, and round out his semester like any sensible human being should. He would burn that damned portrait, finish his portfolio, and remember to pick up some milk on the way home, because his was about to expire. No longer would he work for and wonder about a girl whom he had never given a name.
As he slipped back under the covers, Ashley shifted a little, and murmured something into the pillow, something that sounded suspiciously like his name. Dominick offered up another fond smile, brushed back a strand of hair that was clinging stubbornly to his lover's lips, and settled down next to her, taking comfort in the smooth curves of her body, the warmth of her breath on his neck, and yes, even...the steady beating of her beautiful heart.
If there was one thing that the youth hated about his life, it was this: the fact that as of late, he had been thinking more about that goddamned mystery girl than he had about his own future wife. He closed his eyes, and offered up for a moment a plea.
That girl... I wish she'd just...disappear.
And so saying, Dominick DiAngelo had another strange dream.
i.) hallelujah, la miserable
There was a girl on the bus.
She was a beautiful girl, in that strangely unoutstanding way: her hair was a simple brunette, but upon closer inspection it was revealed to be naturally streaked with shades of gold and red, thus giving it the overtone of stunning amber. It was cut short, yet swooped behind her ears in feathery layers that framed her face and brought her adorable unblemished ears into sight. It seemed strange to say that one of her best assets were her ears, but it was true: she had the sort of ears that were made for earrings; small and round and shapely, with small lobes and hollow shells. It made her face seem younger, which was just as well since her sharp chin and long neck made it seem older...much older. The girl was unable to hide her button nose, though, nor her long-lashed eyes; perhaps she was beautiful because she was that strange combination of innocent and wise, of doll-like features yet sagely presence.
She was dressed poorly, in a tank top that was too small, hanging loosely over her narrow chest and exposing more of her skinny stomach than what was decent. Her cutoff shorts, however, were too long, sagging all the way down to her knees and being belted at the waist with what appeared to be a shoestring, as opposed to a proper belt. Her dainty feet were clad in sandals that were also a tad too large, from the way about an inch of the shoe was left sticking out from behind her dirty heels. Her clothes took away from her beauty, the once-white tank top and paint-stained shorts making her pallor seem sickly, and the ill-fitting shoes making her look just plain silly.
She sat in her uncomfortable bus chair reading, occassionally pushing her wispy-looking bangs out of her eyes, or lifting a tiny hand to rub at the nape of her bent neck. Her long legs thumped against the seat in front of her out of habit, and her small shoulders hitched as the bus moved, jolting unwillingly from place to place because of the poor terrain. From the way she squinted at the pages, it was possible that she was in need of an occular adjustment, however, the road was also bouncy, and the lighting poor, so that might not have been the case. Either way, the girl seemed so absorbed in her reading that the veteranarian was surprised when she looked up, sharply, before the other woman had even managed to move her seat.
It wasn't in Tabatha Wilson's nature to pry, but a young girl on a cross-country bus in the middle of the night was an uncommon occurrence, and so she had stood hesitantly from her original position, stumbled her way up the aisle, and stood a single seat away from the girl: close enough to speak, but far enough to keep her distance, as well.
As soon as the the girl had looked up, Tabatha received another surprise: her eyes were discolored; one blue, one green. It was something she had only seen on animals, due to her profession - and even then it was something rare - so she blinked at the unusual revelation, inadvertently leaning back. "A-Ah, miss, I didn't mean to startle you..."
The girl folded her book closed with a resigned air, and gently set it away. "Can I help you?" Her eyes leaked annoyance, and she cast her gaze away from the woman's own to look at the book she had just set aside with unadulterated longing.
Tabatha blinked again, and made a show of sweeping her errant brown hair back inside her baseball cap to conceal her annoyance. What a rude child. Where are her parents? "I was just curious, what with you sitting here all alone and all...where are your parents?"
The woman almost felt bad as the girl made a stifled noise, then, and brought her thumb to her mouth to gnaw habitually on the nail. "Dead," she said curtly, eyes giving away her pain, and cast her gaze to the roof of the bus. "Is that all?"
Dead. Tabatha leaned back even farther, unsure of how to deal with this next surprise. She thought, briefly, that it wasn't proper for this little girl to be taking the bus by herself on such a long and tiresome route, even if she was going to live with relatives or in a foster home or such, but she didn't say so aloud. She didn't know what to say: children reacted differently to trauma, and she had an ominous suspicious that this young lady was hardly like any normal child, anyway. Still wary, she attempted to make base conversation.
"What's your name?" she asked slowly, as though dealing with a wild animal, but the other seemed as calm as she had always been, save her eyes, which were still looking raw and untamed. At first, there was no answer - there was only the two of them facing off with each other, as though at war - so Tabatha cleared her throat, and asked the question again. In their wordless battle, she was the first to look away. "Maybe...you didn't hear me. Wh... What's your name?"
The girl sat back, as though satisfied with her victory, and pushed a strand of her maple-colored bangs behind her ears again. Her eyes were calm now, far too mysterious for those of a child, and she looked at the veterinarian with them, through lowered sienna lashes. "Lorelei. Lorelei...DiAngelo."
Lore...lei? What a bizarre name. I certainly hope she goes by a nickname, otherwise she'll be picked on in school, no doubt. Tabatha recalled the story of the Lorelei, famous sirens who lured sailors to their deaths, and wondered what sort of parents would name their child after such a hideous thing. She was nervous, alarmingly so, feeling as though a wrong step would somehow catch her on a landmine; a feeling that wasn't right, given the fact that she was only dealing with a little girl, and a solitary one, at that. She swallowed her unease and tried her best winning smile, though admittedly, it was wan. "All right, then. May I call you Lori, sweetheart?"
But the girl just looked at her solemnly, never missing a beat. "No." Her face didn't change, still an impenetrable mask, and the woman hesitated, before giving a deep nod, obviously shaken by yet another blunt rebuff.
"All right. I'm sorry for troubling you, miss. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask."
But though the Lorelei girl smiled at her, then, and changed her entire persona - she was young again, alone and shy, yet grateful for the kindness of a stranger - it was that smile that frightened the woman more than anything else: it seemed unnatural, with it's sudden vulnerability, seemed as though everything that meant anything was teetering on the edge of this terrifying girl's pysche, and Tabatha pushed herself back off the seat so hard that she fell out of it completely, landing with a painful jolt on the floor.
Ignoring the now-impassve look she was receiving from the girl, her poker face back on as though the smile had just been a trick of someone's imagination, the veteranarian stood, and cursed as a sudden bump in the road nearly pitched her over onto her rear again. She managed to grab hold of a spare seat before getting back to her original spot as quickly as she could: the Greyhound was going through the Appalachians now, mountainous territory that was going to be a rough ride. She started to lower herself into the chair, before casting a look forward again. The girl was still watching her, as coolly and as distantly as ever, and against that foreboding gaze, Tabatha changed her mind, and took a seat directly in the back, as far away from that awful little Lorelei as she could get.
When at last the child looked away, Tabatha heaved an inward sigh of relief and looked out of the window for a while, catching the shadows of a rugged nightscape, mountains tall and the stars blotted from view, trees on all sides and only two headlights through that winding road in the dark. She daydreamed for a bit, then thought for a while about her work at hand - an Arabian on a Maryland racehorse farm had broken it's leg last week, and she was the renowned vet whom they had called out to handle it - and while she was thinking about sedatives and hairline fractures, she saw it.
Something unusual from the unfriendliness of the sky caught her eye, and she froze for a moment, before whipping straight forward in her seat and feeling suddenly paralyzed by fear, afraid to turn around again, afraid to look. There was something out there. Something unwanted. Something out of place. Something...
That had scared her much in the same way as that little girl had.
Trying to convince herself that there was absolutely nothing wrong with neither her companion nor the darkness, Tabatha beat down her terror and looked out of the window again; stopped, shuddered, and twisted around in her seat to do a double-take. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary. But I could have sworn...
It had seemed, for a moment, that something out of the dark had been watching that Lorelei girl with inhuman, yellow eyes.
---
Hidden behind the branches of a tall fir tree, the creature watched the flashing lights of the Greyhound bus as it wound it's way through the midnight trail of the Appalachian Mountains, vigilant and swift. His yellow eyes flashed, once, caught in the light as the bus went rumbling past, and it seemed for a second as though the other female on the train - a doe-eyed pet whom he had watched closely before deeming her not a threat - had noticed him, in that strange way that humans did, labeling him as some sort of unseen terror. The thought made him grin.
When the bus had passed, he leapt with it, darting from treetop to treetop with inhuman strength and grace, hands like claws latching onto the bark to keep his balance. It was late twilight, the darkest sort of night before dawn, and the creature breathed a little bit easier at the timing of that fact. Demons had little reason to venture out in the total dark, and their powerlessness on the nights of the new moon were only heightened by the fact that only the highest-ranking among them could see without even the smallest bit of light.
Still...still. It was unlikely that any of the Seven High Lords of hell would venture this far out into nowhere over a girl who possessed virtually no remarkable talents to speak of, yet... The creature knew, as well, that the High Lords had been interested in his own activity as of late - very interested - and enough so that they might pursue him even this far out into the mountains. He wasn't willing to run the risk of his only potential savior being destroyed because of a careless slip in his personal vendetta, he wasn't willing at all.
Keeping his eyes and his ears sharp, he looked down at the bus again. What was it that man had said?
Wreckage everywhere, raining down from the sky like hail. Amidst the twisted metal and smoking rubber, a child lay, crying pitifully, the body of a dead woman pressed down upon her, blank eyes staring permanently into the child's own, emotionless and terrifying. The child, a girl, was shrieking hysterically, and over the body of a bloody, yet still breathing boy, the man - presumeably their father - stretched out his hand.
"Little...Lori..." he groaned, coughed up an unhealthy amount of blood, and grasped her hand, ignoring the flaming metal of the car frame that had just crashed down upon his back, and grasped the girl's hand. At the sight of her burning, dying father, the girl only screamed louder, and struggled to escape the weight of her mother's corpse, tiny limbs flailing.
"Little Lori..." the man said again, in too much pain to adequately smile, but there was something fatherly in his eyes, and the girl ceased her struggling, narrowly missing a falling car seat by degrees. "Don't...worry...help will be here soon... So...be a good girl, all right, and...hold on... Daddy will be...disappointed...if you let go of his hand...okay...?"
It was a sound most mortal ears could not hear, but both the creature and the girl heard it, too - when the man's body spasmed, and his hand went limp, there had been a sound slicing through the air that sounded suspiciously like the snip of infinitely sharp shears.
So...it had been their doing. It wasn't much of a surprise, given their only purpose and task, but ah...it was simply so much fun to mess with his dear sisters, especially when they were so certain of the threads that they spun, so certain of the threads that they cut. When a sound came like the scissors were opening up again, the creature saw his chance. He was no sentimentalist, but he wasn't one to let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity go to waste, either. When the shears closed a second time, he made sure that they slid shut over absolutely nothing more than empty air, the battered body of that little girl, as well as her considerably older brother, nestled securely in his arms. He heard a trio of angry screams from the farthest reaches of Nowhere, and knew that he had won.
He had never done such a thing before, something so unpredictable and rash, and yet...he knew, as well, what those sisters of his had in store for him, what their pride and greed and inevitable envy would drive them to do, and he knew that somehow, he had to prevent it. No human had ever been able to escape their grasp, had been able to run from that solemn and sudden shink that pronounced the end of their mortal lives...no one, that was, until now.
These two, unlucky brats that they were, would forever belong to him. One would be his savior, and the other, his sacrifice: so he had said, with a vicious smile, and therefore, so it would be. Forever and ever, amen.
He set them down not too far from the scene of the crash (the road had been under construction, and the hapless driver hadn't noticed it until it was too late - the car breaking through the guardrail and rolling down the embankment until it had landed in a burst of screeching metal and boiling flames) and when the paramedics arrived some thirty minutes later, they arrived to two dead parents, and their unconcious children, miraculously spared from death by the blessed benevolence of some saintly power from above.
Or, the creature thought as the girl whimpered a bit and stretched out her hand for a grip that was no longer there, perhaps by the proficient pragmatism of a currently earthbound immortal. The thought made him smile, cruelly, as he soared away from the now-uninteresting scene, hands still scorched from where he had lifted those two brats from their cage of fire.
In the present, the creature scowled, and spread his wings, jetting through the air after the Greyhound in an attempt to recover the time he had lost when he had been absorbed in thought. As he grew nearer to his target again, he could see his poor unwitting puppet - dozing now, with the other woman on the bus continuing to watch her warily - and the creature paused, settling atop another tree and folding his wings, an elegant gargoyle keeping watch over any and all creatures of the night.
"Little Lori," he murmured aloud, and was surprised at how easily the name slid off of his tongue, as though he had always known this girl, and had always addressed her that way. He said it again: "Ah...little Lori. Where will you end up now, princess, now that you have started to move?"
With a malicious-looking grin that would have set any mortal's blood to ice, the creature called Rosenkruez took off into the air again, his shadow the only dark splotch against the light of the coming dawn.
---
"She is starting to move." A girl with short black hair toyed idly with her scissors, unwittingly spilling blood.
Another girl, with blonde pigtails and an angelicly round face, looked up from her loom sulkily, a child on the verge of a tantrum. "The Limiter?" she muttered, and spun her threads faster, a habit she had when she was either embarrassed or enraged. "Whoc ares about her? She's a knot in the pattern, sure, but she'll die soon. Even if you can't cut her thread, she'll make sure to it that someone else does."
She looked up from her hands patiently, fingers continuing to weave her countless threads into one giant tapestry even without seeing. She was the last girl, with long, wavy chesnut hair and a kind smile - though something was off, off about her eyes. "You know that is difficult, Clotho," Lachesis warned, though her voice was still as warm as ever, her smile still as sweet. "There's a reason we call her the Limiter, you know."
To demonstrate, Lachesis picked up a silver thread, one that gleamed and glowed until the others, and even in her fingers, it moved of it's own free will, bending and struggling to break itself free. When the girl attempted to spin a devil on a pale horse towards the thread's direction, the tapestry glowed fiercely, and burst into crimson flame, completely burning away the incoming devil, as well as a few other scenes on the all-encompassing tapestry.
Clotho groaned. "Now look what you did, La! The next president of Cambodia just died in infanthood!" She pointed to the scorch marks on the tapestry. "And look, I think you just got an entire village in Brazil, too, oh man..." She snorted, disdainfully, and crossed her arms on her chest, about to have a tantrum again. "I worked hard on those threads, you know. What a pain."
Lachesis' smile never faltered, but it was obvious that it was growing thin. "I was merely proving a point, Clo," she reiterated, mildly, and sat at her loom again, working on restoring the charred pieces with new thread from Clotho's spinner. "She is called the Limiter because she 'limits' our powers: we cannot touch her, not like this."
The blonde 'hmph'ed, and turned her face away. "So, what now? Are you saying there's no way to get rid of that pest?"
Atropos, the eldest sister and the most quiet of the three, chose then to speak up. "Don't forget...we have him," she reminded them, cryptically, and brought the tip of her thumb to her mouth to gnaw on the nail. When she bit down hard enough to draw blood, she didn't even flinch, instead slid the appendage all the way into her mouth and sucked on it, idly.
"Stop that, Po, it's gross!" Clotho declared, snatching her sister's scissors away, but in a puff of silver smoke, the shears returned to the eldest anyway, dangling from her hand like a set of extra fingers. Atropos shrugged.
"My shears are the only thing that can damage me," she said lowly, indifferently. "I use them when I need to remember what it's like to feel pain. An eternity is long, Clo...too long."
Clotho scowled, about to fly into one of her characteristic rages again. For all she had the face of an angel, she had the temper of a devil, and she hated two things the worst: to be proven wrong, and to be talked down to, both of which had just happened in the past five minutes. Her face started to redden.
"I swear," she grumbled, loudly, "you're starting to sound as melodramatic as our lousy bro - "
She cut herself off in a loud shriek as countless tapestries unfurled from nowhere and wrapped themselves around her body, hoisting her up into the air. She struggled to rip them, but the threads of fate were unbreakable, and when she looked down at the ground in frightened disbelief, there stood Lachesis, pretty face contorted in wrath, right hand up in the air and slowly clenching into a fist; as her fingers tightened, so did the bonds around Clotho.
"You know how I feel about him!" the brunette roared, chesnut hair flaring around her, the very vision of a goddess of wrath. Her chocolate eyes burned now with scarlet fire. "You know I want nothing of him, you witch - not his name, nor his relation to us, not even a mentioning of him, do you understand me?!"
Clotho choked, and managed to get an arm free, which she pointed at her sister desperately. "P-Po brought him up f-first, you know!" she gasped, and as she spoke, her fingers began unfurling into lines of scarlet thread, which wound their way down Lachesis' tapestry and up her arm, to close around her throat, sharp enough to draw blood. Even in pain, the middle sister's fury didn't falter.
"Are you saying you deserve to be forgiven?!" she screamed, and balled her manipulating hand into a complete fist. At the same time, Clotho produced a black thread that was hard as steel, and sent it whistling sharply through the air towards her sister's throat -
Shink.
When both of the sisters blinked, they were free to breathe again, and there stood Atropos, her true shears in hand - shears as long as she was tall, thrown over her back like twin swords - and Clotho's thread and Lachesis' tapestries were falling from the sky in pieces like confetti. Atropos looked at them, evenly, before running her thumb along the edge of her blade, and casting her dark eyes in the direction behind her.
"Leaving our quarrel behind," she said somberly, plunging her shears into the dark nothing of Nowhere that lay beneath the sisters' feet, "the Dreamer...she is here."
---
I'll also be elaborating on the last scene at the end, the scene with the Moirae. I just wanted to get the basics of it down before I left for work, but I'll be added more descriptions of the place their in, as well as of the sisters themselves, when I get home. Or tomorrow. Or whenever I feel like it. I just wanted to let you know that yeah, I know that last scene is sort of bare, and yes, I intend on doing something about it.
ANY OTHER INPUT WOULD BE LOVELY? Hope, I super-love you and the fact that you're willing to revise for me. I don't know what I'd do without you - I know it must suck, reading this same shit over and over again, but I just wanted to let you know that yeah, it really does mean a lot to me. ♥
[EDIT]: Reposted, obviously, because the first time I forgot to un-friendslock it. *headdesk* It hasn't been a good day for me AT ALL.