Ficlets

[icarus_chained]

For today's comment_fic theme, Lovecraftian. Various fandoms.

Title: Eaters of Souls
Rating: R
Fandom: Highlander
Prompt: If they knew what the Prize really was, no immortal would fight for it
Wordcount: 254

Eaters of Souls

They are the Eaters of Souls, the dark servants of a necromantic god, cursed eternally to a life of predation, of blood and glee and the throes of endless death. Who fall upon each other, and embrace each other, and devour each other without end. Led through dark aeons with the promise of eternal reward, incited to an endless orgy of death by the promise of some brighter thing, they move through time untouchable, and increasingly maddened. In this grip, in this quest, all virtue is madness, all hope the gibbering throes of lunacy. They are led, inexorably, through passages of blood and death and the eating of souls, towards some distant Prize.

And he, or she, who reaches it? They who devour most perfectly of all, who kill most sweetly, who live most ruthlessly, who the mad vagaries of blind fortune favour? They who survive, glutted on the souls of their brothers and the blood of their victims? What shall they see? What shall they gain? What purpose, this perfect Eater of Souls?

In death, power. In sacrifice, power. In the summoning cries of a thousand tormented souls laid in the altar of one breast, one throat, in their severing, in their death ... There shall they meet their god. There shall they see its face. There, in extremity, in perfect savagery, shall they call it forth, and know its nature. There, screaming, they shall be devoured, as once they themselves devoured.

And all the earth behind them shall quake in the terror of their passing.

Title: Soft Chains of Dreaming
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Inception
Prompt: I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams
Wordcount: 368

Soft Chains of Dreaming

One slipped free. In mad despair, in desperate hope, she laid her head upon the rail, her foot upon the ledge. She slipped my chains, and spun herself free into the abyss. Not mine. No more mine. Begging for her love to follow her.

But he, but he. Ah, he. Not so easy, for him. Not so wise, so fierce, so desperate. Not so free. He gave to her the key, doubting in the dreaming, and she used it. But in giving to her, he was left with nothing. Though he clung to her, and held her hand, and gave to her whispering doubts, he could not hold her, and she could not tear him free.

And now. Oh, now. Ask a man about his dreaming. Ask a man what cities he builds, lost Carcosa, inside his head. Ask a man what strangers, what masks, what puppets, he makes to fill their empty streets, when she who loved him is gone, and all that is left to him are nameless cities, and the whispering echoes of my voice. Ask men what they dream. Ask me who they dream of.

The partner, the man, the totem clung to as the world falls shattered past, the false idol of reality that can never, that will never, leave him. The woman, the muse, the whisperer and the maker of mazes, she who leaves him shining threads, and convinces him which world is real, upon whom he places desperate and falsing hope. The potioner, the poisoner, the soft dripping of endless dreaming, the dark eyes in which he sees his endless slide to a limbo he cannot escape. The shapeshifter, the forger, the maker of faces, the dancing kaleidoscope that reminds him that every face is a mask, and every mask a face.

And her, and her. In every corner, in every level. Her echo, her form, her face. The chains, his children, the promise of freedom, her cry. Ever twisted, now. Ever false. Ever echoing.

She slipped her bonds, the woman. She slipped my chains. But he, but he. He never shall.

I never ask a man his business. I ask a man his dreams. And one and the same, regardless ... they fall to me.