the flood on earth again

[neverpromised]

In the past few days, Estella has watched something brew and then sort of explode from hundreds of miles away - nestled safely on her favorite island in Hawaii, she probably could have left it alone, but of course when the signs come to you, you don't ignore them. This is part of the gift, and the spirits she spoke with have been marginally

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[campjesus]

It's dark. Pitch-black, actually; the windows are all boarded up, because some of them sleep here, during the day. The inside has been carved out like a jack-o-lantern, leaving walls made from what used to be people; some of them are carved out so skillfully they look like concrete painted patchy beige shades, some of them thrown up quickly, full of bumps and bones, sticking out like coathangers.

It's hard to pick out one consciousness considering some of these--not the walls, mostly, but some of the "furniture", some half-dead, half-starved corpses upstairs--are still alive, but... lobotomized. There's nothing there to save. The first three stories, there's nothing

[neverpromised]

Estella has, in her line of work, seen enough real-life horror movies to not turn back, to not even consider it - but at the same time, this is a new kind of deeply goddamn wrong. The echoing nothingness is like looking into a funhouse mirror, of what's left of the human "spirits" in the building. One of the dogs snarls at that nothing in particular, increasingly discomfited by the illness spreading across the building as strong as the stench, and she shushes him.

She almost passes by the flesh wall that holds Brody behind it, but then she spots him - and takes a moment to squint, narrow-eyed, to discern whether it is the boy himself behind all of that blood. The dogs she will have to leave behind (huge and lethal, trembling with the desire to destroy something), since there's only space enough for her, and she's already praying the walls have no surprises and won't move against her. It feels like she's moving in slow motion, like something is going to creep out and come at her at any moment, but she can't tell whether that's her

[campjesus]

The walls are blessedly still--all but the furthest one, but she (because she was a she, once) isn't going anywhere. Her face is barely identifiable now, anyway, her spirit only a little stronger than the others, but a lot more recent. This is what happens to traitors.

He doesn't know how long he's been here or how long he's just laid there, listening to nothing but the quiet shuffle of things moving that shouldn't be, how long since they left. He feels like he ought to know, if someone's going to come, but for a while he didn't believe they would.

The smell stopped bothering him.

The noise hurts (everything hurts). His eyes move, in her direction. They're red. Not like he's been crying, but like he burst a blood vessel. He opens his mouth but all that comes out is blood and rocks; it smells like myrrh. Those holes were there before they ever touched him, but for an outsider looking in, it probably looks a lot worse.