logs | — i'll say a prayer, as i cast it to the flame

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— i'll say a prayer, as i cast it to the flame

WHO: set & others
WHERE: around the netherworld
WHEN: check headers for specific dates/times
WHAT: a catch-all for everything during his time in-game
WARNINGS: physical violence, mentions of sexual abuse, hanahaki syndrome, etc.

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[ This is the opposite of how he'd wished for the day to go; the insatiable appetite he had for all things, good and bad, lead him often to peaks and valleys from which there would be no escape for a long time. ( You're always too emotional, Isis had told him, her hands holding the comb that had carded through his hair. Her tone was chiding, but sharp. Be less so, she meant. Be calmer, it is unlike a god to feel things so wildly. ) His highs and lows were powerful, stronger than those of a human, and so the order imposed upon him by the fabric of existence had to be firmer; a god was not allowed to be at the whim of their own feelings, the way a human might be.

So, when he enters the room at D's permit, it is with the prickling of that morose sentiment still upon him. His eyes look along the length of the floor, until the juncture of the wall; then up, higher still, he rakes them even over the ceiling above. Eternally curious, attentive. There are many things in the room, some large and some small, and he gazes across them all. There's no yearning to touch them. There is a repressed shiver that rips down his spine, the unsavory urge to push something fragile over and watch it scatter into pieces.

It's too cold, too austere, and he finds himself wondering if tying himself to this man's soul will leave a chill upon his sun-warmed core as well. ]

I don't like how he looks down upon you.

[ The first thing he comes to say, as he turns at the waist - framed by the too-large, too-present portrait upon the wall. His expression is sour, a little petulant in some ways; the narrowing of his eyes suggestive more of his concern for D, than personal distaste. ]

This would be the image of your father, wouldn't it.

[Set is extremely valid in this assessment of the man in the portrait.

D does not answer the unasked inquiry with any kind of affirmation, though perhaps the lack of answer is an answer within itself. That Set is correct. The being in the painting is more than likely some kind of equivalent to a father, whether born directly from the loins, or whether, worse, experimentally altered on a genetic level.

The life-like burning eyes of flame peer down at Set below, bestowing upon him some strange kind of Divine Judgment understandable to Set, yet different all the same. There is an odd sort of sadness, however, lingering at the edges of the placid expression the longer Set looks at the man's face. The lonely ostracizing of godhood, of a being with immense power and societal hold everyone treats separately.]

I have been searching for that Noble for a long time.

[D looks at the portrait for a moment, and then he turns his eyes away from it, down under the lowering of his lashes.]

...He was the vampire who made all other vampires.

[ The eternal quality of divinity is ostracizing, truly. The Ennead had to fashion bonds that acted in permanence -- bonds of family, of love, of parent-and-child and -- because without them, they would have no need to come together; they were made to be independent, alone, almighty without any requirement or need for one another. It was hell, and Ra would never see it as such, for she was the epitome of divinity -- the first, who crawled forth from the sea of the cosmos and from whom generations of gods came.

So, to look upon the portrait of this - Noble, as D refers to him as - Set feels cold. Alone. Infernally lost in the gaze of someone who did not have anyone. Even he, with siblings, had been apart from them. Alone, strange in his ways, a traveler with few things to bind him. Yet, the eyes also remind him of the abject loneliness of the former king of Egypt, the one who had held the throne of the gods before he'd usurped it.

( Osiris, he'd said one day, leaning in to his brother's ear during a wide, bountiful festival of celebration: you seem distracted.

I'm fine. The answer had been, with more warmth than Osiris had shown all day, even with the praise and adulation sung in his name, Better for your concern, I'd say. )

The Noble must have had no one like that, then. He also turns his face from it, from the eyes that remind him of his own kin. Instead, he crosses back to D, to where the dhampir remains just within the interior of his own room, and slides his hand into that dark hair. The familiarity of the motion is born not of knowing D, but of that super-imposed frame of reference that ghosts through his mind ( Anubis; beautiful as a god, dark and pale and severe ). Set is not a tactile god, without reason. ]

I don't doubt he was complex. Anyone can be lonely and tyrannical. Cover him, if you want; I don't wish for you to feel as though you've been made smaller right now.

[The hair is surprisingly more soft than it looks in its orderly chaos; long over the chest and down the back, slightly wavy, and as dark as the night’s sky. The cheek it hangs on is warm like the oddity of his hands despite the ashy tone.

He doesn’t lean into the touch, but he stands there without pulling away which is the most form of acceptance expected of him.]

It doesn’t bother me.

[It does perhaps, though not badly enough to conceal.]

Depending on who you asked, they would tell you different versions of him. Some humans owe him their lives, and some vampire’s lives he stole as punishment for their bloodthirst. I’ve never figured out why he seemed to be such a morose bastard.

[The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… His eyes lift over Set’s head briefly and then lower again.

Aside from the wooden box, miniature horse, strange scroll, and photograph on the desk, there is something else a little more eye catching than the portrait: the holograph on the pedestal sitting atop the bedside table.]

Haa, that mouth of yours sometimes echoes that little creature residing in your body. It's endearing.

[ What he does not say, is that when D swears, it is like a lash; a thing that reminds him this is not his towering, dark son before him, but someone else entirely. Someone unique, unto himself, who may look similar but will never be the one he misses most. Every inch of his existence desired a child, his Anubis, and D is not him. He is himself, and Set could never ask him to be anything but. ]

We are all just versions of the truth, seen through one another's eyes. I doubt you'll ever fully understand him, nor should you have to.

[ The thin smile that stretches across his face suggests he speaks from experience. History was rewritten in regards to Egypt's god of war, after all. No more meritorious tales, no knowledge of his good deeds in the past; all gone now. Finally, he tears his own eyes from D's haunting beauty and pushes himself away, in order to go and examine the other items within the room. Other tethers.

The photograph draws him in, notably; his terse smile softening at the seams as he hovers his fingers near the youthful faces. Yet, it is the holograph he stands nearest to - the woman with the gentle eyes. There, his hand hovers, as he asks his question. ]

Are you letting me pick which part of you I reach for?

[Once in a while, the manners disappear, and he is momentarily grumpy, it's true. One person can only be nice for so long before wanting to go ape shit, start throwing rocks. Dads do that to you sometimes.

The lashes lift, and he watches Set move about the room to inspect the other tethers like sculpted red clay. He waits for curious questions which never come. The young woman and boy look out of the photograph at Set, smiling, waving. A big sister and a little brother.

The woman's eyes are rounder than D's, but the demure, human look within them are familiar. The hair is the same, long and beautiful, but lacking the subtle wave. Life is full and warm in her fair skin, the slight flush under her cheeks. The miracle of her beauty is in the idea she seems to be a completely normal, ordinary human woman. By the expression she wears, it looks as if she might laugh happily about Set's company, like they are friends.]

You are free to decide.

[ If Set were to ask questions, they would be there for hours upon hours as he poured through every inch of D's soul and got to know it all. They still must travel to Set's own door, to the tethers within that he will allow D to examine and question. He must still assist the hunter, too. The hunger within him must be soothed, so that his shadow does not overtake him. That he does not do what he dreads.

Besides, there are some things one must not rush, though; learning of others being one of them. The woman is the one he focuses on, though he badly wants to point to all things and ask -- who? who are they to you? what does it mean that this is the form your tether takes? which items make you the most nervous, the most happy to see? ]

She is beautiful.

[ The woman, the one his hands hovers near to, as if it is this tether he is most strongly called to. Slowly, his fingers curl away from her, as he regards the warmth of her mortality. What right does a slaughterer of women have to choose her as the tether he will touch? Isis would scorn him, claw the flesh from his fingers for how presumptuous it would be of him to ever lay hand upon a woman again. ]

Is she -- your mother?

[ If so, he can see where D gets the sweetness in his heart.

Even as he asks the question, his feet carry him back - to the uncovered, cold portrait of D's ancestor. The cold-eyed, infinitely inhuman Noble. He'd made his choice, the moment he'd laid eyes upon it; this thing that could be covered politely, should D wish to hide the tie that will be forged between them. The similarity between himself and the creature that could be his father -- it calls, mournfully and sternly, to him. ]

[His eyes watch Set hesitate at the woman's hologram, drinking in the response to it with a clinical kind of fascination. He wonders too what makes Set repulsed by the idea of going through with touching it.]

She was.

[Though he still refuses to clarify whether or not the portraitSet returns to once more is his father. It isn't difficult to put together by any means, but D won't acknowledge it.

Like before, he watches Set linger in front of the carnelian-eyed man. This time, strangely, even with Set flush before him, the man seems almost like his gaze is turned toward the woman Set had left. Longing, sad.

It's difficult to tell exactly how D moves so quietly with so much cape and armor and with spurs on his boots, but he is very suddenly at Set's side. His bare fingers slip beneath Set's wrist and lift the hand up without capturing it. D places Set's hand gently on the elegant, elaborate frame of the portrait.

It's only a little different than the time Set had been in D's body. Set must accept the chaotic weight if him first, and vice versa, before all of it levels out. In reality, only a minute probably passes by.

The starving darkness Set felt before has been partially satiated even if it pours again through Set's bones. The energy snaking through is so powerful and sultry, it feels wicked. A genetic, natural aura, primordial, ageless. It's raw and sensual; pooling hot above Set's knees into the thighs, rushing up through the stomach, over the chest and into the neck. He is aware of how beautiful and seductive he is, how much power this holds over others. Hungry and dominate.

But following that is a tired, lonely wash of age. The sorrow which comes from seeing thousands and thousands of years of existence, and change, and loss. The shaping of a planet through civilizations, countless battles, leaving behind a person and returning later to find several generations down of their family instead. D's soul is old, and too is it human. As it fits itself into the nook of Set's own soul, the emotions D rarely shows are there: happiness, and fear, and anger, and sadness. It's all there in droves, being felt in silence.

The composed, quiet presence nestles in the pit of Set's body like a little ember, warm and bright enough to calm the ripples of Set's Shadow.]

Even you're capable of such audacity --

[ In the wake of all he experiences, Set strangles the words out of his own mouth. His skin prickles into gooseflesh, below the guidance of D's warm hand, and something sour sits in the back of his throat at the flush of power that laps at him - a tide that rises, until he must tip his head back or be drowned by it. It leaves him dizzy, his head spinning as it rapidly begins to coordinate what is D's presence within him, allowing it purchase where he can stomach it, and urging it to be polite and not tread where Set cannot bear to permit it.

For a creature of Egypt, he is remarkably pale, and thus the warmness of his face is stark against his skin; he flushes red, fingers curling into half-fists as D's impatience leads to the knowledge of his sweetness, his loneliness, the kind of thing that perhaps only a fellow immortal may understand. Set has been apart from humans in ways that D never was, and so he does not track generations born of someone once beloved, though now - he knows that bittersweet agony.

When he blushes, it is straight to his collarbones, as though drunk upon heady wine - mindless for a long moment afterwards, half-sagged against D's body while he blinks and blinks and tries to swim out of the heat. It is both a natural thing, and a shocking one, to find any part of D that is capable of capitalizing upon his innate beauty and sensuality. Having been told of his own desirability by many, he does not imagine that it is an ill-placed sensation. The redness of his soul continues to paw through the new thing there, the echoes of D's own, as if a little animal playing with another beast - similar but unlike it.

He hates that his knees do wobble, that he is sensitive to these things when he ought to be resolute and manly, that he has to put a hand back to steady himself and rasp: ]

I feel you. There is so much more to you than you show, I knew it -- but to feel it as though it were a piece of myself, it is... you are a very overwhelming person, D.

[ But, a person nonetheless, he decides. Ancient and sad, but as beautiful as human as he thinks Jonas to be. ]

[While Set goes through all that he is, D keeps a gentle hold on him for support. It isn’t a vice clamping Set in place, but the anchor is there.

It’s bizarre to him… to fit so perfectly into the whole of someone else. The way he can feel Set in whatever equivalent he must have of his heart, or his soul, or his spirit. The regal, ancient power of the sands are there in him, filling a space he didn’t know he had at all.

Someone else knowing him, feeling him. It makes his skin prickle with worry and caution. His thought float in, choppy and erratic: it’s too much, probably; it’s too consuming; it’s too sexual and starving. It’ll make Set a monster. He should not have rushed it, thinking Set was hesitating, thinking Set had been unsure.]

Are you going to be alright?

[There isn’t any way he knows of to reverse it. He’d have to immediately run to do research—no, if he breaks the tether, would that break the bond between them? he wonders.

The Shadow in him is eerily quiet for once, and yet, this feels for the moment as if it may have been the worst thing he could have agreed to do.]

[ Very obviously, Set does not like what they have set in motion. He does not enjoy the idea that they must entwine their souls to survive this land, to maintain their independence and secure the fate of their spirits -- but, he is resolved to it. D's presence within him is so effortless, it is as though it has always been there; it nestles more readily in the spaces made for it than the memory of his own son, and far more comfortably than the flowering, red vines that hold him like briars, like manacles. ( Osiris would love this, he thinks of the soulbonding, before putting the thought away. D must never know of it. ) ]

Look to me.

[ Slowly, he turns himself around. Away from the towering portrait and into D's space, where he can rest his hands into the dark fall of his hair again, this time cradling the other man's somber face between his palms entirely. He jerks him forth, a little, animated and vicious in the motion. ]

If nothing else, you know now that I will survive you.

[ And readily so. Though there is something aching behind his teeth, and his Shadow is so very still -- he knows this is a different difficulty, a new one. One neither of them are prepared for, so they must navigate it both independently and together. ]

I, [ he falters, vision going hazy for a moment, his knees shaking as he fights the wash of D's aura. ] I don't know if I can keep this clinical, right now. Forgive me, if I act -- within my own nature.

[Both rusty-colored eyes lower onto the face which turns around to him again. He doesn’t put up any resistance to the hands in his hair, urging his head forward.

Set surviving the weight of him is most of the reason why he agreed. If anyone made a good test for what all of this was like, it’s Set. If anyone needed an anchor, it’s Set. And, so far, it hasn’t been too terrible.

Minus the eclectic vampire side of him which he has burdened Set with, thirsty and carnal and proud.]

I’m not worried.

[He looks over Set’s face slowly, studying it. The sensuality in him is now unfettered in Set; he can feel it reverberated back to him, doubled. It isn’t unexpected to him. If he had bitten any human, this is not unlike what would have happened.

He brings both hands up to touch Set’s elbows, bracing the other man from giving out.]

Set.

I was made this way, too.

[ ( In what way? Made? ) The words are similar to what he had told Horus, that night not so long ago. His intentions then had been wicked, cruel as could be, monstrous even. Born of a sensual drive and a hunger for power, for dominance. Now, he still feels the drive. He cannot untangle the nature of D's self from his own, hedonistic and eager and ever-given to carnal endeavors. His mind is a storm, a feral thing of heat and tactility that had been driven into corners, primed to revolt against the one thing he'd always sought out.

He wonders, briefly, if his heart will break the way it had when Anubis had brought their mouths together -- that irrevocable moment where his own son had formally admitted he did not know Set for his father, but thought of him in another way. He feels D's need, not only for something to feed upon, but for -- what is it, that he yearns for in the depths of his heart? Is it absolution? Absolution? Acceptance? Set would like to think that it is acceptance, for that is his deepest desire too. ( And unlike D, he will never receive it. )

His heart does not fail him, as he draws the hunter's jaw forth - meeting him halfway. The kiss is far from chaste, for Set is not a creature of withheld passions. It is rough, as much a battle as he would undertake in the field, and he pauses only to whisper across the corner of D's mouth - somewhere between waveringly coy and painfully natural: ] It's alright. I'm very much like you.

Edited 2022-12-29 03:14 (UTC)

[As easily as he could see this coming, it still surprises him to have it done. Not because it’s Set. He has no fears or disgusts with men finding him attractive; plenty of men on the Frontier blushed in his presence.

It’s the idea someone even wants to kiss him at all.

And he isn’t sure how something so simple and soft could take him out at the knees when he is so solid in every other way. With the mistletoe, it’s professional. With this…

The fingers on Set’s arms curl slightly. He doesn’t pull away, but doesn’t try to devour Set’s mouth either. The kiss from his end is such a chivalric, polite thing. His lips hesitate with his breath once Set has pulled away. The churn in him is chaotic, turmoil.

A part of him wants to ravish and drink. Another part has the solid, compassionate resolve to know better.

His eyes hide under the lowered, thick lashes; the muddy color of them has become a soft, carnelian sheen, so deep they almost glow. He draws in a quiet breath, like he’ll speak… but he doesn’t yet, hesitating again.

Carefully, in the strangest assuredly but timid way, he kisses Set again, once. The most kind and gentle thing, fleeting.]

[ The flush of sensation that fills him boils high, as he gathers D's face between his hands and slots their mouths together. Set does not kiss politely, yet there is the barest presence of reservation in the way he digs his fingers into D's jaw as though readying for a lunge, to experience being seized; he has been coveted, as a god and as a man and as many other imaginary things, and some part of him has learned to prepare for it.

As D worries he will incite madness with his dark nature, Set fears the same. When they inevitably reach his room in the Shadowlands, what will happen to D, when he lets Set's soul find purchase within him?

Pushing the thought away, he wills his fingers to relax, to not claw at the pale skin of D's face and to instead focus upon the way -- the way the hunter kisses back, so very gentle and shy. ( A laugh bursts from his throat, incredulous with the acknowledgement of it. How truly tender-hearted of D, to be so hesitant and unsure. ) ]

It's okay, [ he whispers (again) across the seam of D's mouth. ]

Don't be afraid to have what you need.

[ ( Something within the shape of Set's soul curls, like a hand seeking the shape of another's. Needy, too. Bitterly shamed by it, but ever-present. ) ]

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— i'll say a prayer, as i cast it to the flame

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anna,,, listen

👂

we killed the game but im not done tagging this