A/N: I decided to just make this longer rather than have the vol3 final be a minichapter
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In mentally placing herself before the sword and staring into its mirror-like surface, she could witness any of her eidolons, or even “step through” into their vaults, all spaces suited perfectly to hold them.
The Chthonian Eels’ vaults were nearly identical to their natural environment, resembling enormous volcanic funnels ab...
2025-10-05 18:58:13 +0000 UTC
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The King of Many Colours continued chiseling until, simultaneously, his finger-chisel wore away and his antler-hammer crumbled to dust. It was a few minutes, a few centuries, and an instant, but by the time it was over, the timespan only registered as “long enough to embed one’s entire identity into carvings.” Krahe genuinely couldn’t conceive of a way to quantify it in linear time, beyond describing it as terribly long, yet far too short.
“It is done. SAKAR. ACHRA. DA...
2025-10-05 18:55:47 +0000 UTC
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“Behold, the stele upon which your cycle shall be inscribed, and let us hope that it is merely the first of many; this is your own Binding Obelisk, and from this day forth it shall be the anchor-stone of your theurgy, granted weight and solidity by the history inscribed upon it.”
The King beckoned with his fingers; both his torn-off finger and antler flew into his grasp, and he leapt from the throne alcove, halting in mid-air in front of the Binding Obelisk. He wiel...
2025-10-01 06:30:21 +0000 UTC
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A/N: At least one more today. Maybe two more.
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Krahe felt her life flash before her eyes. This path, which she had painstakingly and far-too-often walked in the near past, simply zipped by her now. There was neither doubt, nor confusion to speak of. This outpouring of what she deemed to be “Liquid Identity” from her palm was nothing more than a reaffirmation, a recitation of a hymn she knew by heart, and its...
2025-09-30 22:54:56 +0000 UTC
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“So it was no fluke after all,” the King uttered, his spirits visibly lifted as unworldly hues and five or six different outfits pulsed over his form.
“For hollow vessels to be this vivid… You must admit, dear, the snake-mouthed sorcerer was right once again,” the Queen said. Irritation twitched through the King’s face at the positive mention of the Wizard, but this time, it wasn’t enough to break his good mood.
“Int...
2025-09-30 05:05:02 +0000 UTC
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At this point, Krahe had completely surpassed any form of surprise or disbelief, finding it both easiest and safest to simply move with the flow of events unless something unprecedented or obviously dangerous presented itself. So, she simply nodded in agreement.
“Now, then,” the Queen said, trailing off. Then came the barest crack, the subtlest parting of her lips, for she had spoken until this point without even having distinguishable lips, and from her mouth issu...
2025-09-27 04:46:30 +0000 UTC
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No verbal response came; not for quite some time. The King of Many Colours, his high brow furrowed, stared at the vessel. His gaze shifted to Krahe, then back to the vessel, and he rose up from his throne. An enormous weight smashed down upon Krahe’s shoulders, as though a waterfall striking her all at once, but she remained upright. Krahe instinctively drew on the Adamas Organ, without even thinking, and for reasons unbeknownst to her, it worked, albeit in a manner unlike material reality....
2025-09-25 03:56:20 +0000 UTC
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It was here that she diverged from the pure path of changing the name to change the vessel. As she saw it, there was no need. If the name of something informed its manifestation, and if looking upon something instantly conferred an idea of its nature, then it stood to reason that remaking the vessel’s form more directly would result in being able to glean an appropriate name for it. She could tell the royal couple were not entirely comfortable with her plainly-obvious intentions, but they m...
2025-09-21 00:12:55 +0000 UTC
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The two royals observed Barzai with a bearing best reserved for the aftermath of head-on train collision. Somehow, for reasons that evaded Krahe, the faux-eidolon's manifestation seemed to be utterly repellant to the two; perhaps it was a sort of uncanny valley effect.
“That's enough. Put... Put it away, quickly,” the King said. Krahe looked up at Barzai, and Barzai looked down at her, holding her gaze for a moment before he melted into her shadow once more. Only on...
2025-09-20 00:30:33 +0000 UTC
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“Is it not dangerous to allow my thoughts to roam too freely in Zor’Aguhastra?” Krahe questioned, expecting this to be a catch of some sort.
“Under normal circumstances, yes. You can sense the solidity of this place, no? Your thoughts, weighty though they may be, shan’t distort the fabric of our realm unless we permit them to.”
With permission given, Krahe began considering what to say, where to start. It was one thing to be asked to identify oneself, but she ...
2025-09-19 01:00:06 +0000 UTC
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In accordance with the ritual secrets, she raised the guidestone fragment, reaching with it forward, while performing the Gesture of the Hollow Spire - known also as the Sign of Closing - with her right hand, keeping it close to her chest. In this manner she approached, with the guidestone’s scrawl swirling above her.
Time, for once, flowed normally. The walk towards the throne proceeded entirely mundanely, with nary a sound issuing from anywhere as she approached. It wasn’t until s...
2025-09-16 16:46:41 +0000 UTC
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As she approached, more and more detail emerged. Zor’Aguhastra’s upper half consisted of countless spires, all of whom were at once black and iridescent, just as the Wizard’s notes had said they would be. She spied among them the shapes of skyscrapers and megabuildings, of the towers of Neo Babylonia, but also the organic towers of Jas’raba and the art-nouveau and art-deco architectural sensibilities of church-adjacent Calbian architecture. All these towers varied to an unbelievable d...
2025-09-15 20:27:54 +0000 UTC
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The two titans’ struggle continued on for what felt like at once seconds and hours. Before long, the wheel on Talos’ back had come to revolve so wildly as to appear as a static circle of light, stirring up an immense maelstrom within the astral gulf. Similarly, Rahu had somehow grown a hundred times over, as had its flames, giving the impression of a moving mountain range, despite the absence of any landmarks to compare its size against. Simply seeing it was enough. Howling in the midst o...
2025-09-14 19:40:06 +0000 UTC
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Krahe opened an array of mouths down the length of her left arm and on every other surface of charred skin, even including her neck the side of her face, and with them she invoked the names of ancient deities and kings, those who had reigned over the world in times when great men rose and fell by the virtue of their own strength. She compared the dwellers of the city in the deep, the Chained Ones, to the likes of Gilgamesh and Solomon and Ashurbanipal, and further still to the pioneers of cyb...
2025-09-12 20:07:03 +0000 UTC
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The Sorcerer’s Hand effectively played the role of a substitute in a “rehearsal” of the ritual proper. After imprinting her thauma upon it, she placed it where she would begin, and spurred it into motion by pouring thauma into it. The corpse hand twitched to life, barely managing to stand up on its fingers, and, with some struggle to control this quasi-graftbeast, Krahe went through the motions of the dive ritual using it as a substitute body, muttering the incantation under her breath....
2025-09-08 08:16:49 +0000 UTC
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Once the Sorcerer’s Hand was done smoking, the hand needed to be left to rest until it stiffened to a stone-like hardness. Krahe took this opportunity to take a break, moving to the bedroom on the upper floor, as it had the nicest sunlight at this time of day and overlooked a nothing-street without any good sightlines to speak of. She sketched up a few protective talismans, pasted ...
2025-09-07 06:13:41 +0000 UTC
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"I hope, for your sake, that you didn’t eat all of Calvus’ souldregs,” Krahe thought as she walked, directing it towards Barzai. If the eidolon had indeed devoured them, she would need to source another hand and souldreg pair. Not difficult, but an irritating detour.
“I had a taste. Bland, detached. Accepted his fate without emotion. He had anticipated it far in advance. Half-repentance through acceptance at fate’s end. N...
2025-09-04 04:28:29 +0000 UTC
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melo-arts
2025-09-01 20:28:03 +0000 UTC
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comm for personal side project
artist herbyfox
2025-09-01 20:26:57 +0000 UTC
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comm from kozmos/kozzz_y
2025-09-01 20:25:37 +0000 UTC
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Krahe stared into the middle-distance for a moment, steeling herself for the great struggle to come. A few minutes later, with only some grimacing, she had choked down the rest of the decoction and returned to Firminus with the glassware. She immediately rinsed and refilled the glass in the sink, emptying it in the vain attempt to get the decoction’s aftertaste out of her mouth. From behind came a cackle of cruel schadenfreude.
“It will linger for a few hours. Nothing that can be do...
2025-09-01 03:48:52 +0000 UTC
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A/N: I got stuck on what to do with Barzai's evolution ability-wise. I had the design worked out months in advance but I hadn't settled on the ability changes so I went in circles working up multiple different versions of his evolved powerset before I eventually settled on the current version. There were much more extreme versions where he got way more that I considered.
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The yellow decoction, astringent and bitter, brought with ...
2025-08-29 02:54:34 +0000 UTC
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A/N: Edited to expand body formation sequence on 26th Aug. 2025
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The diminutive figure of a humanoid raven stood stone-still at the center of the angle-web, meeting its contractor’s gaze with a single eye. To the world, it seemed as if the ritual halted for a mere handful of seconds, enough for perhaps two breaths, only to resume once again with an incomparably greater intensity than before. Out of the angle-web’s lines,...
2025-08-24 02:48:58 +0000 UTC
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Yazata’s bindings came undone, and from within fell a formless mass of smoke and tar, and upon its fall it instantly began coalescing, moving along the angle-web in the only direction permitted to it by the ritual — into the Gate of Metamorphosis, along the Initial Angle, towards the dreg-gem of Joseph Ogura. Slowly, it moved, leaving the unguent in its wake lifeless and spent, enveloping the dreg-gems of the four dead men as it moved. Slowly, it grew into the shape of a raven, and then f...
2025-08-13 18:48:15 +0000 UTC
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A/N: This one is a bit shorter. Next one is a significant bit longer.
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Krahe’s anger didn’t abate; that she understood why Barzai had done what he had done didn’t change anything. She resolved to punish the demonic bird by refusing him any meat for a month. The mere thought of this was enough to cause the ball of Black Bindings containing the spirit to writhe and to emit anguished cawing. Juno and the Red Hood gu...
2025-08-13 18:47:03 +0000 UTC
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A sudden churning and writhing came over her. It was no pain — pain would’ve been easy, a momentary disruption that she could fight head-on with sheer force of will, but this was different. This discomfort was altogether more insidious than mere pain. It was a churning and shuddering comparable only to the transcendental agony she had experienced at Mirzaii 2, when she had attempted to skim with the then-nascent Atomica in hand.
A voiceless thought forced itself into Krahe’s mind,...
2025-08-13 18:45:27 +0000 UTC
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“Oh, Black Trapezohedron, sound forth from the spires of Zor’Aguhastra…” Yazata invoked.
Slowly, the sense of the sublime that already filled the chamber began to grow. The sound of machinery intensified, and one after the next, seven pillars rose up from the floor, each depicting a different saint, eyes ablaze — these were not statues, but automata, so lifelike that, without the gleam of metal, one might mistake them for a living person. Each pillar-saint performed a differen...
2025-08-07 08:20:21 +0000 UTC
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Yazata paused for a moment, waiting for something. That something was the arrival of three further individuals, through a heretofore concealed side door — two of which the four men recognized. The first was none other than the madwoman who had assaulted and captured them. The second was their victim, astride automaton legs that were a bit too long for her, her body concealed by a coat hung loosely about her shoulders. The madwoman, Blackhand, carried in her hands a box of dark, lacquered wo...
2025-08-07 08:19:19 +0000 UTC
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The ground shuddered with the whirring and thumping of distant machinery.
Two kinds of incense hung heavy in the air; a bluish haze just above head-height, and a greyish one at the floor.
Four prisoners waited in their cells. Even these cells were suffused with incense, piped in through the vents, lest the prisoners try to hang themselves on the censer-chains or eat the burning coals. They were dead men, that was beyond all doubt, but their deaths were neither theirs to deci...
2025-08-03 04:35:28 +0000 UTC
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Krahe wasn’t sure what to say to that. On one hand, the statement itself, “Weakness is a sin,” sounded idiotic to the utmost extent, it was the sort of thing she expected to hear as a non-justification from some dehumanized psycho before turning them into a greasy stain. But the sentiment behind the words, as hyperbolic as they were, truly wasn’t wrong.
“That’s the worst way of saying something true I have ever come across,” Krahe eventually said. At the ...
2025-08-03 00:38:27 +0000 UTC
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