head still buzzing about the wn lovecraftian entities au, specifically how everyone else fits into it :
Lilith here's just like, an absolute force of nature, wild and furious and serpentine. The kind of visceral terror of unmitigable natural apocalypse, and the creature that arises tangled in it, almost indistinguishable from the tsunami itself. Melting and rippling seemingly between states of matter, sometimes viscous liquid and miscible with the water, and sometimes suddenly solidifying and churning into shore; eating up into solid land. That sort of monster. But for Lilith I'm especially reminded of a haunting, twisted version of Peace Like a River. The dread comes from watching the cool still surface of the lake or the ocean, having the knowledge that there's something terrible down there, and yet being entirely helpless, against that calculated invisibility and silence, to do anything.
In a way it does fit her: hard, and fierce, and loves like an ocean. & eventually, I think she does also find a kind of peace like a river.
Camila’s kind of at the other end of this. The mindsick illusions that stretches of (seemingly) open, empty land cast on the psyche. It’s foggy, it’s overcast, and Camila’s there, laughing, molecules thrashing in concert with the atmosphere. It’s nighttime, but the sky is awful bright. She has no wing-analogous anatomy but she flies, translucent and half-tangible in this form, settling over the plains like a shudder. Every electronic device in the vicinity goes dead. Not at all hidden – but that’s worse; this is the kind of experience that draws you into endless spirals when you lie awake sleepless afterwards, bone-rigid, questioning and dizzy. Like a physicist kept awake at night by visions of an expanding universe. Something once whispered things to the back of Camila's neck and now it whispers things to everyone too.
Mary and Shannon haunt a beautiful mountainous region with sharp suspended caves and snowcapped brown-orange peaks jabbing through lower cloud layers. They are a little older and settled a little earlier and so have ended up inadvertently integrated deeply into the mythology of the region. At the base of one of the mountains resides a town some way away, where Mary actually leads ghost tours on the weekends and holidays. They own fridge magnets and ceramic bowls as well as other traditional crafts and artwork made by the residents, partially because Shannon believes in supporting small local businesses, and partially because some of it is based loosely on them and it’s very pleasing.
It is, in any case, something of a rarity for a town to be paralyzed and plagued so faithfully – by blood-curdling noises carried on winter wind, and familiar spectral glimpses that always precede the inevitable discovery of the drained-dry husks of the previously reported missing – and yet remain so protective of their own monsters. Many an enterprising paranormal investigator has been turned away unceremoniously, and vandalizing hikers are made unwelcome. Respect what you do not understand, the locals insist, and Shannon and Mary find that even monsters are not immune to growing fond.
Then Shannon disappears on a dry summer’s day.
Mary throws herself into finding her and rips up earth and sky for it. She refuses to accept, for a long time, that the most dreaded phenomena has taken place – not death, because unnatural creatures are less susceptible to typical natural reckonings, but simply: abrupt, unexplained, indefinite Departure. From which one may still return, but which one cannot predict or theorize in any way. When finally, it becomes apparent that all she can do is wait and hope, she throws herself into the town.
After the council votes against a new contractor who wants to develop up in the direction of the Creatures, there’s reports of a falling boulder, originally headed towards the laundromat on the edge of town, arrested mid-descent. It rolls laterally and fuses with an outcropping. A fierce fire, spreading from the west, stops at the town’s threshold, the grass at the foot of the Welcome! sign unsinged. When the townspeople go out to survey the damage, piecing together what’s been lost and what’s salvageable, they lay out the carcasses of larger game across the charred trail – for disposal, or, well, just in case. They’re gone the following morning and the trees, overnight, have screwed themselves upright, scarred bark plastered over in ropes of dirty silver. A team from a major studio comes to town, researching for a documentary on local horror oral traditions, and is shooed away. The next day, a rock splits open and spews out a broad, too-sparkling stream that curls and joins the river downstream.
Sometime down the line, Lilith comes by and has coffee with Mary on the edge of a cliff. From up here the town is blocked from their view, and even if it were not, it would be so small as to be insignificant. Lilith had loitered in the town earlier, claiming boredom, although Mary knows the sleepy place hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the last twenty years, and she has no idea what form of interest anyone could take in it.
She stands on the edge now, looks out into the clouds at a view that still prompts sharp pangs of loneliness when regarded without a familiar grin by her side, a head tilted into her shoulder mouthing at her ear playfully in an attempt to appease her for buying ‘just one more cup. And it’s so quaint, too!’
And then when Mary, just for show, would shrug and huff, ‘You know, the shopkeeper’s mom is sick and his kid needs to go to school. How can you be so heartless, Mary, honestly’.
Lilith puts her cup to her mouth and takes a silent sip. “Well,” she says drily, interrupting Mary’s thoughts. Nods down in the general direction of below. “I see you have a cult now.”
Mary, tired and hungry, strong but so lost, bristles with anger and launches herself at Lilith, who lets her. She thinks that to the townspeople this must look like a condensed volcanic explosion, going on and on and blackening a corner of the sky into red-veined hellfire and thunder. She wonders what they think – what they believe.
They tear at each other's throats for what’s probably hours, sending rock scraping down the cliffside and smashing into the ground below. Somehow avoiding the mouth of the little cave network that is Mary’s home – Mary and Shannon’s home, lovingly studded with knickknacks and mismatched cutlery, the shape of rooms cut carefully out of rock, linen sets they’d hauled back from the big city three hours out and carried up the slopes.
Eventually they let up, and end up sitting quietly at the dining table inside, nursing freshly brewed coffee in miraculously intact cups. Neither of them apologize. (There is an aching hole in Lilith’s scaly, serrated chest, too.) When the stars rise to their zenith, Lilith gets up to leave and squeezes Mary’s forearm so tightly it would sever if truly only flesh and blood.
“She will come back,” her eyes are black spires pulling light inwards into indistinguishable points far within. “She will.” Then Mary watches Lilith leave, not in a thunderclap but a whisper.
Mother Superion is really not a part of such kinetic drama. She resides, in almost perfect stillness, enmeshed in her glacial home. You could say she is her glacial home: splayed out barely visibly in sensitive, trembling threads snaking through ice. She is ice because the ice has frozen up along with her. In this form she’s so distant from what people think of as a living organism – presence, and the faint transmission of murmurs and vibrations from the way snow falls and shifts around. She’s the overwhelmingly ancient unwordable sense of surrounding in research bases late at night, the thrumming in the engine not attributable to anything mechanical, or even physical. The slightest probe, or reaching-out, and the minutest responding hum, followed by immediate waves of sweating, nausea, nosebleeds. Disintegration and desquamation of the mucus membranes. If she chooses to truly act; if she moves, there will be a magnitudinous shattering, as there once was before.
The others come to seek her and talk to her, of course, careful not to disturb too much of the snow and ice for fear of accidentally setting off some kind of reflex. Which is how it’s ascertained that, despite her lack of perceptible movement, Mother Superion is eminently capable of conveying a range of complex responses and emotions (mostly centering on unimpressed, sometimes chiding and disapproving, proud, more often than you'd expect, and on the rarest of times, overrun with grief).
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