Joroboros

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 70: Euphoria

The first part of Nyx’s plan progressed better than she could have hoped.

Solan and her retinue made no effort of discretion. Nyx didn’t even need to poke her head out from where she hid to know they’d blown apart a volcano on their descent to the Dark Star’s core.

She’d waited a few gongs to be sure the monstrous cultists were well and truly gone before she acted. Thankfully, as tall as their fortress now rose, those that remained didn’t notice her. The massive chains...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 69: Unwelcome Rescuer

Nyx was exhausted.

She’d been exhausted for almost as long as she could remember. The time before the Dark Star felt like a lifetime ago. In all that time, sleep was fleeting. The moment she drifted off, swarms struck like the very idea of her relief was antipathy. Only the reliance on her third eye kept her moving, but it didn’t allow her mind to rest.

With a brutal swing from Pushy, the edge of her rapier cleaved a shark in such a way that it could not regenerate. It had tak...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 68: Years

K’Thorn was in a bad mood.

He’d been in a bad mood for a long time now. It was hard not to be when any progress they made to carve themselves a stranglehold in this hostile environment was, time after time, ripped away.

Angling his rifle, he fired. Despite the projectile’s constant, rapid acceleration, it still took a few seconds to cross the immense distance and blow the head off the great white where it carved a gouge through the landscape. Not that it killed the beast. K�...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 67: Dan-yae-soov

Dan slumped into his seat as the trolley rolled into motion. He wasn’t the only one. All around him, acolytes like himself moaned in exhaustion.

One would think that the simple act of staring to the sky could never be draining. They weren’t using their body. They weren’t even meant to actively use their mind, so by all means they should still have energy at the end of the day, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Kneeling beneath the Great Iris and chanting for hou...

[KoJ] Chapter 81: Fish Feast

The car ride was a unique experience. Unlike the train, it was much smaller — only able to fit five average-sized sapients rather than hundr

The car ride was a unique experience. Unlike the train, it was much smaller — only able to fit five average-sized sapients rather than hundreds — and moved far slower. Between Ceph and I, we could outpace it easily. But being able to lay down and exert no energy while still moving around remained fascinating.

What’s more, the seat cus...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 66: Endure

With the opening to the furnace growing ever closer, and the flow of boiling flesh impossible to fight against, there was only one path for Nyx. She leapt. Crashing both her legs and the stiffened tentacles into the surface below her, she broke free of the waves. Her wings beat — or as much as she could force them — and gave her enough speed to reach the roof of the great white’s mouth.

Everything hurt. All of her skin was red and bubbling from burns. Her feathers had grown frail,...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 65: Great White Furnace

Nyx snapped her wings wide. She fell into a glide far above the churning sea of flesh. Despite the sudden translocation, she was well equipped to survive the fall and keep away from the fleshforged ridden waves.

The cultists… not so much.

All around her — not so close as to see their faces, but enough that they were more than dots — Fleshsmiths fell to the burning ocean. The screams of a woman rang in Nyx’s ears for only a moment before it petered out and died. Just as its...

[KoJ] Chapter 80: An Impossible Future

I don’t find the ocean to be beautiful, as Ceph said, but the vast structures spanning the length of the coast certainly are. Unlike the nes

I don’t find the ocean to be beautiful, as Ceph said, but the vast structures spanning the length of the coast certainly are. Unlike the nests near the Pit, these buildings are like a never ending wall bordering water riled up in a thunderous storm.

Great waves crash against the long chain of buildings, rattling the heavy board windows an...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 64: Teeth

An hour later, those few sharks grew to an undeniable swarm. No matter where Nyx looked on the surface, there were more of the small creatures spearing towards the gathering of cultists that slaughtered them in waves.

If Nyx had to guess, it was the number of cultists themselves that attracted them.

In the short time Nyx had sat here, watching, a small army of cultists congregated to this point. Likely because they considered the open space a better place to defend than near a riv...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 63: Perspective

While the differences in the environments were numerous, the sheer vastness remained the same. In the pipe labyrinth, that manifested in an endless maze with brief glimpses of infinity. Here, it was as if that infinity was everywhere except her immediate vicinity.

She glanced over the ledge of the fissure — briefly, in case K’Thorn was tracking her — and found the volcanic forge a thousand times further than it should. It had only taken her minutes to fly down to the border of thi...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 62: Stuck with the Cult

Nyx had been seen.

She stood at the summit of a forge — or what it had become — and looked down over what was once the revered Fleshforge of the Fleshsmiths. The massive industrial hammer, once a centrepiece, was gone. Lost to the twin seas of flesh and steel. In its place was a sky of broken rails. A thousand arms, as much flesh and steel as the rest of this horrorscape, hung from a dark sky and held what remained of the ceiling of rails in place. The heavy beams all angled toward ...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 61: K'Th̳ǫ̅rn͗-t̲a͋̏a̍̕l̺

“K'C͗a̮i̖e̻s, forget her. She’s already dead,” K’Thorn shouted through the twisted husk of the Fleshforge… or what had become of it.

As his junior grunted her assent and ripped her staff from the spine of the lost cause, he fired off a volley of pot-shots, obliterating a dozen sharks in an instant. K’Caies leapt away from the smith she’d been keeping on life-support. And not too soon. A spear — one of their cult’s own creations — swooped through the air she’d j...

[KoJ] Chapter 79: Speech

“We appreciate the… gift, but where did you find such a massive bird?”

Ceph glances over her shoulder for the eighth time since leaving. The fat breast of the oversized fowl still peeked over the horizon even from here. Of course, I had to make a few holes in space to see it, but the dohrni besides me didn’t have such a problem. The benefits of light-based sight, apparently.

“On the Other Side.”

“The other side of what?” Ceph asked, he...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 60: More Mutations

There was a time in Nyx’s last life where she was suicidal.

Locked away in the depths of the Fleshsmith’s temple, she’d made an attempt on her own life. Cut open her own throat. At the time, it had seemed the better option than allowing herself to wither in her dungeon. It would be an end to her suffering. A way to spite those who wanted to use her.

But she had failed.

The Fleshsmiths were in her cell the instant a single drop of her blood touched the ground. They wove...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 59: Safe Spaces Don't Last

Nyx battered aside a lunging shark as she snapped her claws around the cylinder of metal. She continued moving to not get caught in the burst of its contents. Behind her, the clang of the third long section of severed piping clanged as it tumbled and crashed through its neighbours before getting caught.

In the few minutes she’d spent cleaving the tubes, she’d gone from having to avoid the pipes themselves, to the geysers of their content. It didn’t make her job any easier, but it ...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 58: Pipe Labyrinth

Nyx unsheathed her sword as she hopped down a rung of pipes. When the beasts she faced were as boiling hot as these living fleshforged, the extra reach would be helpful. She wanted to avoid being splashed again.

The claws of her off-hand remained extended. It would be foolish to rely on the sword alone, especially when she was still an amateur. Not that she would remain that way for long. If Nyx’s name was of the type she thought it was, then learning to wield the blade would come nat...

[KoJ] Chapter 78: Feast and Favour

Life is bliss. Never before have I experienced such divine flavour. Each gulped mouthful of warm meat slides down my throat with an ease bey

Life is bliss.

Never before have I experienced such divine flavour. Each gulped mouthful of warm meat slides down my throat with an ease beyond any other. It doesn’t fight me like a living creature, nor does it taste horrid like most corpses. Somehow, they’ve made eating an experience in itself.

Dozens of platters had been brought b...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 57: Dark Star II

He can’t be dead, surely? Nyx thought. If I’m not dead, then there’s no way a god — even if little — could have found his end here.

The anger of the Eidolon god. The shifting attitude of her little companion. It was obvious she had not been the focus of the immense being’s wrath.

Something had happened in the weeks since the last Dark Star Event. Little God did something to infuriate the greater god. If Nyx had to guess from his words only moments ago, her Eyeball had ...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 56: Molten Flesh in a Dark Star

Darkness engulfed the chamber in an instant. A physical wall of blackness shot out of Nyx, yet it clawed through metal and ripped into space like an industrial grinder took to the soft flesh of fruit.

Nyx carefully kept her name open as the ungodly amount of corruption flowed freely outwards. Unlike the last time she’d done so, it felt far more precise. She couldn’t just rip open her name without control and allow the Dark Star to form itself. No, all her curses were bound now. If s...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 55: Fleshforge

Sweat rolled down her back and slid between her feathers. The feeling was horrid. It made her feel grimy and in need of an immediate bath.

Nyx had noticed she didn’t sweat beneath her feathers even in the immense heat of these metal halls. With the growth of her wings, she’d lost the glands in her lower back. She’d felt warm beneath her feathers, but not sticky like the rest of her robe. At least until the sweat spread.

Now, she only felt clammy and hot. Worse where her feat...

[KoJ] Chapter 77: Split

The gathered warrior caste back away as I come in to land. In an attempt not to crumble the earth as I touch down, I catch myself in a serie

The gathered warrior caste back away as I come in to land. In an attempt not to crumble the earth as I touch down, I catch myself in a series of bends and slowly work them down my length before they dissipate naturally. None of the sapients seem to notice the finesse required… but they’re also too busy gawking up at me, so I don’t hold it aga...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 54: Witnessing the Forbidden

Nyx glanced back at the swarm of bots for the fifth time as she swung from pole to pole. It had only been a few moments, but the machines already had a logistic order in place where the larger carried materials in from who-knows-where and the smaller ones did all the repair work on the massive antenna.

It left Nyx feeling disoriented to have what she thought would be her enemies show no hostility towards her.

Little God led her between a forest of inverted metal spikes. Unfortunat...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 53: Bellyside

If not for her wings, Nyx would be flailing around uncontrollably as she tumbled towards the black hole. They snapped wide, keeping her steady, but they couldn’t stop her descent.

Nyx had tried to beat her wings. She’d attempted to pull herself out of this fall that would leave her prey to the Eidolon gods once again, but the moment her feathery limbs swept backwards, she felt herself accelerate faster. Slamming her wings forwards felt like fighting a mountain, and yet the effect wa...

[Re:Cursed] Chapter 52: Coral Heart

Nyx took two steps towards where she knew the Fleshsmiths’ territory lay before she realised Little God was moving the other way. Off in a direction completely separate from her goal.

“Where are you going?” she asked, already shifting to follow the small creature.

Little God paused to look back at her. It tilted its body, confused. “You wished the fastest path to their forge? This is the way.” And again, he turned to continue down his original path.

The quickes...