It took Nyx no time at all to lead some vitiate beasts to the corpses of those she’d killed. Each infected animal forgot about her in an instant. The free meals before them were much more appetising than the small human that flew outside their range.
Now that she’d set her mind on it, she wanted to rush down into the depths and punish the Fleshsmiths for coming after her. Despite that, she still felt reluctant to actually ignite another Dark Star. The things were deadly, but wouldn...
2025-03-02 08:06:11 +0000 UTC
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Nyx slumped into the grass with a groan.
Despite benefiting from both the ritual of wellness and the empowerment of a self-sacrifice, she still felt beaten up. All her wounds had closed, yet she was sure her ribs were still broken. Some cartilage in her wings might also not have healed properly, as they were agony to stretch.
She sneered at the dried husk of K’lon where he lay in the burn grass a few metres from her. His name had appeared in her mind despite how little she had c...
2025-02-27 13:08:36 +0000 UTC
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Hey guys, I wasn't intending to post this today - I hadn't thought i would stay up this late to write - but i think you'll see why i did with this chap, ahah. As with the last two chaps, i still need to go back and edit, but I hope you enjoy :D
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K’lon ran for his life.
The mission was supposed to be simple: guide a kid to their main temple, and protect her from any of the other cults. They had a reason to believe the Technocult ...
2025-02-26 12:26:37 +0000 UTC
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Nyx faced down the two Fleshsmiths that stalked towards her.
Both men’s weapons were daunting to face, and she somehow had to take them on together.
A cudgel with cinders channelled along the metal and burning all flesh that clung to it swung through the air. The cultist practising his strikes. Or trying to intimidate her. Unsurprisingly for a weapon designed for such a purpose, while the tissue trembled beneath the fire, it didn’t truly melt away. Flesh burned as it was inten...
2025-02-26 03:08:44 +0000 UTC
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“That’s quite the mess you’ve made,” One of the Fleshsmiths said as he walked from the line of trees. His gaze locked on the headless corpse of a wombat Nyx had just butchered. “You do all that with that tiny knife?”
Nyx stepped back as she watched the four other cultists spread out and surround her. Two of them had guns; a rifle and a side-arm. Both barrels were steel, but the firing mechanisms and chambers had been replaced by flesh and snarling mouths. The three other cul...
2025-02-24 12:57:58 +0000 UTC
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"Nix! You’re later than usual today. Something happen?”
Nyx suppressed the urge to correct the man on her name. It wasn’t something she wanted people to know about, no matter how much her soul desired to be called properly.
“I went to meet with a couple of friends,” she said. “The overseers wouldn’t let me in.”
After almost a week without having seen them, Nyx had finally learnt where Dan and Ari had been relocated. She’d tried to meet with them, but she’...
2025-02-24 04:41:10 +0000 UTC
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Nyx didn’t hesitate.
Before she could spend too much time in her own mind, her wings snapped back, and she rocketed towards the fox. Claws held to her side, ready to rush forward and crush whatever she struck.
The vitiate beast leapt to the side, barely avoiding her first arm, snarling all the while.
Nyx’s wings tried to slow her before she hit the ground, but she’d been too committed to the blow. Her hands and knees struck earth together. Her claws took the blow easil...
2025-02-24 04:06:05 +0000 UTC
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Ceph could hardly believe it.
They’d found the snake.
Or, well, it was more apt to say the serpent found them, but the reason they’d descended into these tunnels was finally before them. Ceph had been sure she would… but with every day they’d spent lost down in the depths, it seemed more and more unlikely.
Under any other circumstances, she would never have pushed on as far as she had — there was far too much danger to an environment that one couldn’t navigate ...
2025-02-22 06:45:33 +0000 UTC
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Fuck.
That was Ep’Nanorschi, wasn’t it? It definitely was.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Of all the people to have seen Nyx, it had to be her.
At least she hadn’t chased her down. That was the only relief Nyx had. If the woman had been determined to capture and punish her for messing around with the Bodytwisters, then she would have done so. Easily.
She’d heard all sorts of things about the woman in her time with the Bodytwisters. Seen ...
2025-02-20 10:51:24 +0000 UTC
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The Dark Star was large enough that it didn’t matter where you stood, as long as you weren’t intentionally trying to ignore the thing, you would notice it.
As Nyx walked down the wide road towards it, long black solar flares struck out at nothing. It had already been a few days since the Event, so there were no longer any buildings in its path to reach for. They’d been broken down and removed. Not by the Dark Star, but by the cultists that feared the devastating corruptive influen...
2025-02-20 10:16:22 +0000 UTC
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Nyx dove off the bed and immediately began sketching a ritual circle.
Her ethereal touch shifted along the cursed surface of her name. It was intense and fuzzy. The combination of three cursed names having made it much more difficult to feel than before. Yet, her touch moved along the indistinct surface as if guided by some unknown force. A magnet tugging her towards three separate points.
As Nyx fell into her trance again, she sung the hymn of naming. She doubted it would tell mu...
2025-02-20 08:43:43 +0000 UTC
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Nix crashed into the bed she assumed was hers. It wasn’t like there was anyone else here to say otherwise, so for now the room, and this bed, were hers.
This would be the first time she evolved.
The most important event in every Coral resident’s life.
She was giddy… and terrified.
While the naming ceremony for fifteen-year-olds was the starting point of everyone’s lives, an evolution was a mark of achievement. It was a day that their efforts and pain accumulate...
2025-02-17 23:58:07 +0000 UTC
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Nix took off K’tan’s robe to reveal her new mutations. Almost without her input, her wings snapped wide. Having been bound ever since they grew in, they felt amazing to stretch. While the feeling was slightly different, it was similar to the freedom of her arms after days of the fleshchain holding them behind her back.
She tossed the robe to the side. The thing would be burnt later. Or melted, if she was willing to try the acid showerhead. The cloth was decent quality, but she would...
2025-02-17 00:19:07 +0000 UTC
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A little bit of corruption.
That’s what Tarchon said. Only a little bit.
This is not what I would call a little bit.
Nix stood before the supposed safehouse and could only think how unfitting that term was for what she was looking at.
It was one of the ancient refineries with massive pipes criss-crossing everywhere and machines filling the vast open space. Only, it had been modified. Some of the old age refiners had been cut into parts, only to be r...
2025-02-16 12:08:33 +0000 UTC
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They just had to go and ignore my warnings, didn’t they?
I hadn’t intended to let myself be seen; just reveal my presence enough that the group of sapients go running away from the tunnel down to the Magma Ocean. Never have I seen creatures run towards me when trying to flee.
Why is it that the supposed smartest creatures are the most stupid?
Instead of allowing themselves to be guided away from the hole down to the burning sea, they dove right for it. I’d hoped they w...
2025-02-15 07:35:09 +0000 UTC
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“Are you always getting yourself in trouble, or is it only when I’m around?”
Something in his arm hissed as the contraptions clicked and unwound themselves from preparing some attack. Tarchon stepped up to her, took one look through the sacrificial chamber, and hummed.
“Only when you’re around,” she said. “You must be a curse. One worse than all my others.”
The Technocultist stared down at her, and suddenly she felt tiny. He stood two heads taller. With all t...
2025-02-14 21:34:36 +0000 UTC
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Whispers.
Nix could see whispers. Flickers of memories bound in an incomprehensible cluster. They burned in her mind as often as they were fleeting. Each jittery, unclear image flashed in and out of existence and struck Nix with wave after wave of agony.
…or maybe that was the beating of her heart.
Indecipherable knowledge skimmed past her subconscious as she glanced down at the knife in her chest. It was too far to her left to have struck her heart, but fuck...
2025-02-13 02:22:32 +0000 UTC
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Nix tried her best to relax on the alter as her eyes followed the man who intended to sacrifice her. She didn’t fight the chains; whenever she did, they would grow tighter. If they slackened when she wasn’t fighting, then she would take as much length as she could for when the time was right.
K’tan was clearly put-off that she was being this calm. She was tempted to play into that. Maybe grin at him. Or laugh; she remembered that set people on edge back in the future.
But no...
2025-02-13 02:20:22 +0000 UTC
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K’tan-thar had dedicated the past decade of his life for the promise of assisted evolution and a path out of the dregs of the lower creeds.
Life hadn’t been kind to him. While others received useful names or quickly evolved away the bad ones, he’d been stuck with nothing but a half-dozen useless additives and a lousy evolution. The only option he had to reach the heights of those who rose because of some simple luck, was to take on this… foul job.
He’d never particularly...
2025-02-13 02:18:18 +0000 UTC
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A few days passed and there was yet to be any sign the lockdown would end.
Nix couldn’t deny Dan and Ari’s efforts were commendable… but they were ultimately pointless. Between the two of them, they somehow managed to be anywhere K’tan ended up, without alerting the man to their observations. It helped that there were a lot of kids around either being lazy and messing around in the lounge, or moving between their rooms and the ritual hall.
But it didn’t matter how well y...
2025-02-10 21:29:50 +0000 UTC
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Today will be a good day.
Maybe it was already too presumptive of Nix to assume so, but considering their lockdown, there was unlikely to be more horrific scenarios where she would be forced to fight for her life.
Two days in a row is enough.
This third day after returning to the past was going to be quiet. Well, considering her ward-mates could no longer go out into Coral which left the ward busy, quiet was probably not the right word. Uneventful, then. It...
2025-02-10 11:46:32 +0000 UTC
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Nix pulled the bloody, torn robes out from under her bed. She’d tossed them there when she’d returned so nobody would notice, but she would need to take them with her the next time she went for a bath. Not now. There would be too many of her ward-mates wandering around despite the late hour.
She had a needle and thread to sew them together, but first, she needed to fix herself.
Chalk scraped along the floor, candles ignited, and she paused when she went to reopen the wound in ...
2025-02-10 11:44:40 +0000 UTC
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When Nix turned away from K’tan, she found Tarchon’s eyes on her. Those glass lenses flicked to the man she’d been discretely watching, but he revealed no emotion on his face. Though when Nix glanced back, K’tan was sweating.
It was impossible to tell how much Tarchon knew, and while she hoped he’d only looked her way because he’d recognised her, the intensity of his figure was enough that she questioned whether he knew everything. Her overseer must be experiencing a very si...
2025-02-10 11:42:10 +0000 UTC
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He’s not dead.
Why is he not dead!? Nix screamed in her mind. K’tan should have died there with all the other ass-hole Fleshsmiths.
Nix’s return through the streets had been anything but easy, yet she’d found her way back through the secret hole in the floor soon enough. Alarms blared through the ward, and thankfully everyone had already gathered out in the assembly hall; it gave Nix the perfect opportunity to dive into the bath and scrub off all her bloo...
2025-02-08 12:28:24 +0000 UTC
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Hirsh was conflicted.
On one hand, the situation was certainly stressful and beyond what any of them had expected. Not only had they never thought the spatial twisting would ever be this dense, but the idea that a creature would take out their breadcrumb trail seemed ludicrous. They were lost hundreds of kilometres beneath the surface. That was an entirely legitimate reason to be grumpy.
On the other hand, Ceph had taken position as their leader. She really needed to get her shit ...
2025-02-08 01:08:44 +0000 UTC
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Nix dashed forward. Ari, despite being in the depths of slumber, followed close behind. The dream-bug guided her mind to move her body in a state without consciousness.
It would have been nice if she could run around the monsters — maybe use the space warping tunnels around them to lose them — but the creatures were quick, and seemed to know their way through the unnatural bends in the metal floor far better than Nix.
The amalgamations were quick, too. Or at least two of the t...
2025-02-06 23:31:22 +0000 UTC
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A spike of pain rushed through Nix’s back, but she ignored it. Growing pains were nothing.
Beneath her robe, her feathers fluttered involuntarily. Nix grimaced, knowing that to get to the mutation she wanted, she would need to let those stubs at the back of her ribs make their reappearance.
Another spike struck her spine and she nearly collapsed mid-run as her lowermost ribs reshaped themselves. Her spine adjusted to compensate, and soon she had two new nubs pressing her feather...
2025-02-06 23:17:58 +0000 UTC
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The world became a nightmare.
There was no longer a wall. Nor was there the hole, or any sign of the explosion that would have caused it. Darkness consumed everything, but it hardly stifled her sight. It only revealed the morphing of space that twisted and wrung her mind beyond what she could understand.
Nix blinked, trying to reorient herself, but the landscape grew no more comprehensible. Screams, both real and twisted, rang in her ears. The ground gave way beneath her, and she ...
2025-02-06 23:06:05 +0000 UTC
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Nix ducked down an unused side corridor. She didn’t want to stay out in the open where any of the cultists could trip over her on their way through Fleshsmith territory.
She was barely aware of how she got here. The late night whispers and screams echoing up through the depths were haunting, but the validation that K’tan truly had been working with the Fleshsmith cult even this far back — that he’d sacrificed children other than herself — was worse.
Now that she was conv...
2025-02-05 00:55:47 +0000 UTC
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“Do you not intend to follow?”
Nix woke to an eye floating mere inches from her face.
She reacted. Her hand swung forward as a yelp found its way out of her throat, and she dived into the wall bordering her bed. Once again, her fingers slid through Little God’s gaseous form without disrupting its flight.
“Why do you have to be so creepy,” Nix said as she calmed herself and leaned back against the wall. Her mind spinning off the sleep and lingering on the words that...
2025-02-05 00:53:28 +0000 UTC
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