grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4

gamemaker kelsier
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last seen Nov 22, 2024 1:53:01 GMT -5

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck

grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4 Mar 22, 2022 2:50:55 GMT -5

Quote

Post by gamemaker kelsier on Mar 22, 2022 2:50:55 GMT -5

♫♩♪♬

The world ends every few hundred years but you've gotten used to it by now.

Civilization is wiped off the face of the map in a single breath and starts again in the next. At the beginning of your existence, an hour felt like a lifetime, now a year passes in moments. You've come to realize that time can be unruly and it often slips out of your grasp. It runs through the caverns before you can catch it, it gets away from you.

It blends together.

The walking ones disappeared long ago and you haven't seen them since. Their shelters have crumbled, their graves fallen into ruin. Even the fountain stopped flowing. Still the sound of the river grows louder every day, the current that you will one day return to.

But not yet.

The only constant in all of this time has been the other one. In the dark, your companion bobs along beside you, bright as ever. Their wings click together every now and then and it sounds like the wind chimes the walking ones made to try to communicate with you so many years ago.

You chime back, fly a little closer until the glow of your two contrasting lights meld for a moment and then you move away again.

It is rare for one of you to be seen without the other. As far back as you remember, your darker glow has kept the other grounded. Rare in your colouring, it was difficult for you to fit in with your own kind, but your companion never seemed to mind. While they flew up towards the sun, you preferred the darkness near the floor of the cavern.

And once you tasted the walking one's flesh, your light only grew warmer until you hardly looked like a Nakom at all.

Even then, your companion didn't leave you. You have always been like this, together.

There's something in the cavern ahead, you know this by the stutter in your partner's otherwise rhythmic flying. It is rare these days to find a new prize, rare to see any change at all in the caverns except for the slow march of moss across walkways and stone monuments.

But there, in the clearing ahead, standing among the glass ponds, is a walking one.

The two of you fly closer, breaking away from each other to fly laps around the walking one's head. He seems weary, you smell the iron on his skin.

Maybe he is dying.

Your companion flies upwards a little so you fly down. Then you meet again in front of his face and for a brief moment your two lights meet again. Your wings chime together and the sound echoes through the cavern.

Hello.

compendium / avriel
clown car / pietro
2022 tracker / 2023 tracker / 2024 tracker

napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.
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last seen Nov 19, 2024 3:17:51 GMT -5

grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4 Mar 23, 2022 12:43:46 GMT -5

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Post by napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Mar 23, 2022 12:43:46 GMT -5

The storm howls louder at night.

It’s singed-hot, hard, and so wickedly dry that his skin feels like sandpaper and his throat is ragged with invisible glass shards in every swallow. He tests it out by taking in a gulp of air, winces. It hurts; everything does. His bones only remembers the ache, so intense it seems they were built around it, and his skin couldn’t recall coolness, days where it wasn’t sweat-slick.

It isn’t supposed to be like this.

It isn’t supposed to be this hopeless, the act of sleeping in a metal tin as his breathing grows shallower, shallower, and shallower. His lungs burn on the next intake of air; the scorch tells him of how he misses being back home.

It’s weak to confess but he does it to himself regardless.

He misses the shadowy haze of trees, the way the forest mist would hold onto you, leaves underfoot. He misses the Salazar mansion, all the halls seemingly endless and decked out in full glory. He misses silk, velvet, luxury, the taste of fire-whiskey, a good plate of steak tartare …

His stomach growls.

“If they make me starve, I swear I’ll kill them,” he growls around the dryness. His mind is already churning, filled with disgusting thoughts like is it even possible to tartare flesh other than a cow’s? but Rafael cuts it short with a groan, forcing it to shut it.

He needs to think. To scheme, to strategize, to see the game from all angles and find out his next path.

It’s tenuous with Nowles and Fatima, a rubber band pulled taut, and he doesn’t want it to hurt him when it gets released. Nowles’ fidgety, Fatima’s strong, and together they’re a combo that can take out him if they wanted. They should have sooner. If it was Rafael in their places, he would have removed himself from the board long ago. Valentino would approve. Cut your losses, move onto the next bid, that's the way of the Salazars.

He needs to escape. Quickly. He has left Fatima behind in their quest for a wandering Nowles, feigning cluelessness as he went astray, and now he scours the land around him.

The land: picked carcass-clean, absent of anything except sand, wind, and blood. But there must be something. A place, a den where the coyotes had spawned from, anywhere that isn’t endless sand and endless suffering …

“What?” he murmurs, squinting his eyes at it.

There, ahead, a shape arranges itself from the haze and bares it to him: a riven in the earth, open for entry.

He looks back.

No sign of Fatima.

He looks forward.

And he enters, a wayward step forth, and it’s a moment he’ll pore back over for days, weeks, years even as his foot finds open air.

His heart chokes his throat, his cry goes unheeded.

Thank god for the mech.

Because it saves him, wraps him up in its iron embrace as he makes impact on rock, the metal denting from the landing. Stars. Everything swims, the world a sea of shapes. Rafael hisses as pain bursts from where he’d fallen. Stupid. Foolish. Unwise. In the folly of his own plan he lay: broken, abandoned, and alone.

And it’s almost peaceful. The mech’s helmet has come undone and his head lolls back, making him catch the ceiling above and glimpse its beauty. He sees ivies, mottled by sun, and … are those birds? They don’t look dangerous, not sharp-clawed, and even if they are, let him pick at his fucking corpse. At least he’s dressed aptly for a funeral.

“Really, Rafael?” he scoffs disgustedly. “You survived three whole days in the hunger games and you’re giving up from a fall?”

No. He hisses as he scrambles up onto his feet, soldiering through the pain that strikes him like a bolt of fire, and attempts for his bearings. Nostrils flare; the scent of earth and water ebbs through his senses. Subterranean. He looks up and the sight affirms it: stone where there should be sky, pocketed by dents of daylight.

“Now what in the world are they planning?” And what in the world they planned? The arena is larger than any he’s read about, a sprawling mass of wreckage and debri and there are caves underneath it?

A flutter of light catches his interest. There, two twin wings in the dark, drifting towards him, and his hand creeps down to the knife he has stolen from the cornucopia.

But he doesn’t slash them. Not yet at least, not when the creatures that appear to be butterflies now breeze around his head in a murmuring and … speaks?

Not with words, but a sound, a humming that he feels in his bones and through the cavern walls.

“What,” he breathes, a child for once in his marvel,

“are you?”

Last Edit: Mar 23, 2022 12:54:08 GMT -5 by napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.

堕落天使

gamemaker kelsier
Graphics

6,093 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Nov 22, 2024 1:53:01 GMT -5

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck

grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4 Mar 24, 2022 0:12:43 GMT -5

Quote

Post by gamemaker kelsier on Mar 24, 2022 0:12:43 GMT -5

♫♩♪♬

The question is too large to answer.

The walking ones had a name for you once but there have been many variations over the years. At first, they thought you gods or pieces of one. For a while there was a story that you were the stars in the sky, come down to earth to guide the lonely wanderer home. Other myths say that you arrive only when most needed, they say that you are a messenger sent by a creator.

They gave you a name, called you Nakom and there was reverence in their sound making as they lay flowers on an altar built for you.

They called you Death once too but that was a very long time ago.

Your companion chimes softly and begins to fly towards the sloping path that will lead this walking one back to the surface and to the family he left there.

You don't move to follow at first, studying the walking one as you move around him. His kind has been arriving in the caverns recently, all in different shape. This one is weakened, you can tell by the sweat glistening on his forehead. He cannot return yet.

Besides, there is the prize.

It's the last one left, the last one that you have that you and your companion marked as yours. There is no longer an interest for you in finding more, your time in the caverns is ending.

Your time together is ending and you both know it. One of you is more prepared than the other.

You fly in the opposite direction, back from where you emerged earlier. The trail here slopes a little downwards, goes deeper into the dark.

This is the way. You fly in circles at the mouth of the trail, insisting even as your companion tugs at the Walking One's hair, trying to pull him their way.

compendium / avriel
clown car / pietro
2022 tracker / 2023 tracker / 2024 tracker

napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.
Retired Staff

3,108 POSTS

Pronouns: he/him
last seen Nov 19, 2024 3:17:51 GMT -5

grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4 Mar 24, 2022 13:17:32 GMT -5

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Post by napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ. on Mar 24, 2022 13:17:32 GMT -5

The first creature's wing-path tugs his gaze heavenward. Towards the surface. Fatima is there, wandering alone, caught in a storm, dead for all he knows.

And he has fallen a long way from grace. The climb, once his, has now abandoned him in the depths of some unknown hell possibly waiting to unleash itself.

That leaves him utterly alone, broken, and out of schemes.

Out of his plans, out of everything that makes him, more a husk and less a boy. He’s exhausted, bone-weary. His muscles ache and his joints creak when he moves, but despite it all, Rafael strains to face the other creature. It gluts around the mouth of a cavern now, and the dark beyond it almost seems oddly welcoming for a moment. Like it’s a sanctuary, a place meant for licking his wounds, tucked away from the others.

“You’ve fallen already,” he mutters to himself. “So what’s the harm in exploring what lies at the bottom?”

Thus begrudgingly, with a limp to each step he takes, he trails after the one near the slope, following its scarlet light, letting it paint him red as well.

堕落天使

gamemaker kelsier
Graphics

6,093 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Nov 22, 2024 1:53:01 GMT -5

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck

grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4 Mar 25, 2022 2:52:22 GMT -5

Quote

Post by gamemaker kelsier on Mar 25, 2022 2:52:22 GMT -5

♫♩♪♬

The walking one follows after you and you don't move at first, watching your companion flutter aimlessly near the path upwards, always so stubborn. Too sentimental.

You feint, moving past the walking one back towards your companion briefly before turning sharply to lead him down the slope. You know the way alone but you don't want to go without your companion. You've been together for as long as you can remember and past that.

You circle the walking one's head once, twice, dipping in relief when your companion finally deigns to join you and the walker.

When you reunite, your wings tap against each other in greeting. Together again, you lead the walking one down into the tunnel, to your finality and his new beginning.

It isn't long before you come out into a new cavern once again. This one is a little darker, a little less serene. Statues stand haphazard, illuminated by circles of sunlight from holes in the cavern ceiling. Their features are worn down by time, their stone plinths covered with moss.

You lead the walking one to what appears to be an empty plinth near the back of the room. It's only as you get closer that the treasure upon it becomes distinct. Your companion reaches it first and begins to fly in ponderous circles over it. You circle the walking one once and then join its flight.

Pre-loved, slightly beat-up lion plushie with a collar tag that reads 'Malicat'. A spoof on the Le Roux lions and their rebellion involvement / reference to the 1st Games. Stuffing is coming out of a few ripped seams, his mane is a little matted and dirty, and his beaded eyes have been removed and replaced with embroidered crosses in their place.

*relic concept and description provided by ✨ zozo.