EVENT: TRUTH BOMB

[faderifting]

WHO: Anyone
WHAT: TRUTH BOMB
WHEN: Bloomingtide 15-17
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: OOC information. Use appropriate content warnings in your subject lines, please.

It’s an ordinary day—so not a very pleasant one. The weather is dreary and muggy, and the day’s lunch is a soup that’s a little too watery and bland. The griffons are being their usual level of noisy and swoopy. The work is its usual level of urgent and difficult.

But in the storage rooms, something wiggles. Then it hums. Then it pops.

Outside of the storage room, there’s no actual sound, no shift in the wind, and no visible sign of a change. But the pop might be felt—like the moment something finally clicks, or two ideas suddenly fit together, except the opposite. In the heads of everyone in the fortress, something is suddenly not connected quite right.

The first sign of what’s gone wrong is that someone immediately stands up and tells the cook how bad the soup is.

A lot of people’s days are about to get exponentially worse.

Comments

[libratus]

[ Forever.

The fingers curling at his neck feel like slipping under. How many times has Leander spoken to him in these impossible absolutes? Promises no one but the Maker himself could keep, and it took so much blood to make Ilias finally begin to doubt them, but this — after everything they've done to each other, these words are as true now (truer) as every time they've been spoken, tucked away in their makeshift tents and locked rooms and the not-so-hidden alcoves where it had first occurred to Ilias he could want something only for himself. (Want and have.)

The movement is barely one at all. The inevitable rotation of the planes of a two frontal bones, the cresting of the ridge of one nose past another, air held in his lungs for a bare few degrees tilt of the chin

—balked from in the same motion, like swinging out over the abyss. Fuck. Breath looses in a barely-voiced curse; closed hand set to shoulder, as much to push himself back as Leander. Fuck fuck fuck. The recoil is worse than the lead-in, the opening of space a ragged pull of a bird in a snare. ]

That wasn't— [ but wasn't it, almost? ] I didn't mean— [ but didn't he? ]

[sarcophage]

[—But the snare slips upon realizing what it's done.

Leander is moving, too, leaning back even before Ilias's hand reaches him, likewise dissuading his own impulses with a light and steady push. Even though the world beyond them had begun to shrink down to the soft tunnel vision of intimacy, of no time, of nothing but breath and pulse and anticipation—still, reluctantly, he takes his hand away. Gently, he clears his throat.]

I know. [An obvious pang behind his smile. (There's no perhaps in its transparency; not for him.)] I'm— [sorry. He isn't. It's what you say, what he tries to say, but.] I can't even blame the spell for it, can I.

[No, he can't. Neither of them can, any more than you can blame the smoke for burning down your house.

That same hand reconnects with Ilias, the lightest guiding touch at the small of his back, and Lea turns to stand more alongside him. Softly,]

Here—let's go inside. You can tell me about him on the way.