Bride Of All Unquiet Things // [Cricket vs Nakom]

bride of
a l l u n q u i e t t h i n g s
bride of quiet
bride of
h e l l

The butterflies come for me, consuming the air with a deadly swarm of color that speaks of intent. They are the ravenous beauty of greed. They are the palm-wide demand-winged we were not born to say please bearers of devastation and tragedy. They are nightmares guised in daydreams... but I am the spit-fire child of morning, burning brighter than their wings. My exhalation ignites the air a n d t h e y f a l l, bodies burned to ash and carried away by the breeze.

Soaring through the air, they are a tornado of dangerous color and they are daring me to join them. As the last wisp of smoke drifts from my lips, I throw myself into them, flipping into the air with arms spread wide in an attempt to scatter them. Something gashes across the back of my head — teeth, claws, or the unimaginable... who's to say what the Capitol has armed these creatures with — and my pride burns with the taste of my own spilt blood. It is deep, but not nearly enough to stop me.

The roof of the temple disappears from beneath me as my body somersaults past the edge and suddenly we are both suspended in midair with no promise of earth or sky, just elsewhere. Their wings flutter against my skin and for this moment, arms outstretched, I am one of them. We fly together, their antennae braided into the spaces between my splayed fingers as we keep each other aloft and I can't help myself:

I laugh.

The sound is as sweet as our performance must be, but just as deceptive. Exactly as this scene is infinitely more beautiful than the unsuspecting wounds it inflicts, I am not so doomed as I seem, falling towards the hard ground as if I were one of their ashen kin. My hand reaches out for the rope that dangles off the side of the temple, legs kicking out to tangle my body into the safety of its hold. The rope burns against my palms, but my callouses from years of practice swear no harm will come to me and suddenly the world is no longer rushing up at me, but spinning.

Around and around, the rope turns with the momentum of my arrival until I am whirling in a dizzy spin, the proud mistress of a deadly web. Call me Arachne. Call me spider-heart. Call me blood-thirst predator. Call me the last silken memory of a butterfly's life. Dagger in hand, the blade reaches out for the blood of my most exquisite enemies, slashing at the hurricane that surrounds me as cyclonic force blurs us together, and I close my eyes. Not for the blinding riot of neon that assaults me or the rush of blood from my head, but for the giddy rabbit-heart pounding within my chest, an echo of my earlier laughter that promises: Onetwoyes, threeCricketfour, thisfiveis sixsevenreal.

[Cricket Attacks With Her Dagger]

[dice=200+2000]

[Two Severed Fingers on Right Hand Severed Wings? XD — 9.0 Damage]

this is why we fight, why we lie awake
this is why we fight and when we die
we will die with our arms unbound
this is why we fight
come hell

Dying butterflies become a halo surrounding the tornado of my rope-spun body. Severed wings and the slain flesh of their fragile defeat swirl around me, as caught up in the momentum as I am. They are tangled in my hair, stuck to the sweat upon my skin, and still the air is so dense with them that the remainders sneak into my lungs with each breath, sticking between my teeth. I become so filled with them that the space between us blurs until we are brethren of a sort.

Yet, as my blade cuts them down — severing the invisible life-strings that suspend them in the sky — I feel no remorse. This is simply a means of claiming them for my own. My dagger says: Come children! My sons. My daughters. Gather round and round and round. This blade shall put you to sleep. Dream sweet; dream of me.

Butterfly blood shimmers transparent in the air as they click-cry-scream, a murderous choir of neon angels who wish to raze my eardrums as much as my skin. Uncurling my body from the safety of the rope, I release myself until I am hanging by one arm, upside-down and just beyond the worst of their vicious song-screeching. My other hand tosses my dagger into the air as my foot swoops up to catch the hilt between my toes. Knees bent at flawless angles as my legs twist above me into something more like contortionist-poetry than a fighter's stance, my foot kicks out to slash at my relentless attackers. Yet my free hand —

My hand can't help reaching out for them, fondly pressing my fingerprints into the patterns of their wings as we soar together, because I have always been honest, even in my most undefinable moments. Belong to me, my greedy touch demands, be mine.

[Cricket Attacks With Her Dagger]

[dice=200+2000]

[Miss]

so come to me
come to me now
lay your arms around me
this is why we fight
come hell

Just as we are growing too close, the distance of missing reminds us of our divide. We are not the same. Meant for each other, perhaps, but not meant to be. The rope I swing from is a tick-tok pendulum of time, counting down the seconds of our lives together, because it knows that this was never a beginning. Ours is a fate of end times, of airborne quicksand drowning, of ricochet bullet heartbeats that will fire freely until we discover one another's most unguarded moment of quiet lunged stillness.

The thudthudthud is deafening, each beat of their wings a tiny explosion in the air that shakes my aim off course. My knife destroys only the emptiness until there is nothing vacant left. There is only the unceasing twist of my limbs as I curl my body around the rope in search of midair footing and the swoop-wail-screech of their own too close, too far, too eager failure. Our need to consume each other — hunger and pride are not so different here — has made us forget ourselves.

So I wind the rope around myself like armor coiled around my torso, pulling myself up into the height of the fray with each loop. I want to escape this chorus of desperate heartbeats, searching the air not for the click and whir of their voices, but for that of the cameras. I need something that will remind me that I am not here to become the bride of all unquiet things, of butterfly-beasts that seek to devour me until I am so literally in their blood. No.

I am here because people die, but legends live forever.

[Cricket Attacks With Her Dagger]

[dice=200+2000]

[Deep Gash On Right Forearm... Swarm? XD — 8.0 Damage]

come the avarice
come the war
come hell
come attrition
come the reek of bones

The rope promises it will hold me tightly enough that I will not forget who I am and that even if I let go, it will not. With the scratchbitestrangle of it around my waist, ever-constricting as I continue to twist it around and around and around me... I believe it.

So it is a trust-fall when I let go and surrender myself to the violent chaos of unwinding. Limbs outstretched and dagger still gripped between my toes, I crash down upon the swarm of my enemy, a vicious flurry of elbows, sweat-whipped hair, and bladed unpredictability. Their bodies smack against my flesh, hard enough to bruise, and I am blinded by the rush of it all: neon splicing itself into the air into my skin into every bonespun heart-thud of my existence. The whirl of my attack is as dizzying as it is astounding, illogically graceful as each loop is undone in perfect time to the swoop of my weapon.

This tornado-fall is not flight, it is not almost-wings, it is not evidence of invisible angels. Flesh screaming out with rope burn and a feverish demand for the kind of relief that only victory can bring, I give myself over to the twisting momentum of the rope and the way it swings not just my body, but my dagger through the air. It extends my reach wide enough to match my smile and I know this because when I glance at the ground below, it is scattered with ash and the death-bright blooms of a hundred thousand million infinite butterfly corpses.

[Cricket Attacks With Her Dagger]

[dice=200+2000]

[Block]

this is why we fight, why we lie awake
this is why we fight and when we die
we will die with our arms unbound
this is why we fight
come hell

In my downward distraction, the Nakom deflect my attack with enough force that the dagger slips from my foot's grasp, free-falling toward the ground. This is a loss infinitely more dangerous than the blood they swoop in to draw, seizing the opportunity to bite into my right arm. The loss of my weapon is certain death, disarmed deadliness, my muscles stretched too soft to fight with the weaker force of my fists. Options dwindling with every inch it drops, I do the only thing I can: I go after it.

Letting go of the safety of the rope, my body plummets into a flip, a rotation familiar enough that I can tell time by it. My limbs become the tick of seconds, legs turning in a radiant countdown as I reach my arms in opposite directions. One hand grabs for my knife, a five fingered prayer for a hilt (although I would rather catch a blade than the nothingness of my own final breath). The other hand stretches back towards the sky, begging for the end of the lifeline I released in a fit of desperation. Save me, Rope-God. Save me, Mother-Line. Bind to my burning palms, scorch me with your mark, scar me with your memory, but please don't give me up to the butterfly graveyard below. Don't carve my bones into tombstones. Do not write the memoirs of this battle across my broken and splintered shoulder blades. Don't —

Vicious fibers rake their teeth into the pads of my fingers as they curl around cruel salvation. Flesh is rubbed away so forcefully that years of callouses must have disappeared in the skid of a single moment. I am screaming, mouth canyon-wide so that I nearly swallow a butterfly whole, grazing its belly with my teeth. The feral cry sounds like them, tearing at my damaged vocal chords until my voice is rattling the air in a mythic echo of their own devil-tongues. Dangling on the edge of defeat, blood-scorned and slipping, it is time to prove that I am not one of the Reaped so much as I am the Reaper.

[Cricket Attacks With Her Dagger]

[dice=200+2000]

[Shallow Cut On Right Bicep — 3.5 Damage — Death]

[Cricket Uses First Aide]