2019-11-04 - The Misty Realm of Lost and Broken Toys

Lullaby of Woe

Lilith tries to turn and go back toward the treehouses with the broken collective of creepy, animated toys and dolls and other objects. But through the mist, she can't quite find where she was after the other version of herself disappeared from view for her to play Hide and Seek with. She's not looking for little Lily Rose Winslow now, she found her, she morphed her, maybe she should have broken her free instead of trying to blossom her into light and health inside the chrysalis she found in the misty butterfly garden because now...

Now she's on a long hunt, she knows it, and it's the only way to break free, to confront what was, what still lingers inside, the source of all the first damages and the place where all the new damage goes. She's looking for the wounded, teenage version of herself that knows how to do nothing but hide and shut down and run scared and tear down everything good. And she knows, she knows, she knows it will be no short or easy task.

Lilith knows what she was, who she is deep down, and that part of her is where every ounce of trouble comes from. It will be trouble. All she can do is turn and walk and try to find her way back. And she walks so long, so blindly, white dress skirt drifting along, heels ticking cobblestones she can't see for all the mist, sinking into soil and deadfall through mottled greenery when she tries to take short cuts. The short cuts were a bad idea. Just when her bones and muscles start to ache from fatigue (how long has she been here?) and she thinks she can't walk anymore, there's a large mossy tree trunk to lean against and music begins to seep through the mist to lull her.

It's creepy. It's soothing. It reminds her how lost and alone she is. It reminds her that she has to go on. It reminds her of the Lost and Broken. Her lashes start to fall as her head falls back against the tree. The feathered and silvered swan mask finally pushes free to rest atop her head so she can try to rub at her eyes and look around more fully. But staying awake is a battle. What happens if you fall asleep inside a dream?

Lilith is so tempted. So tired. It'd be so easy...

But she will not abide here in the land of the Broken and the Lost. After resting and struggling to straighten and get herself back on path somewhere, anywhere, she sees a shape coalescing in the Mists.

Lilith rolls 1d3: [3]

The three figures form from the mist and it takes Lilith a moment to recognize that there's more than one and... that the figures are familiar. It's difficult at first to parse that, but more than anything, she senses threat and the feel of being hunted and found, herself, in a different brand of hide and seek. There's three wraithlike figures formed from the fog with different plays of shadows and light shifting them into constant motion while in form.

The first one is a woman with darkened misty tendrils of hair and pitch black holes where the eyes are supposed to go. And though she has no settled face, the figure is so familial and familiar, graceful and slight and... no. It's her mother. She can't place the face because she's never seen it, but she knows who this monster of woe represents with the creepy lullaby tinking like a music box on wind-down as it slows to gradual cacophony. And this one, this one, this one...

The longing. The hole she left.

The second one is a wraithlike version of Hank Winslow, her dead father, and he's shifting between charismatic youth and the broken down mess he became in older years, or maybe the mess he always was. The lines aren't clean on him like the ghastly image of woman, he's constantly shifting like a haze, representative of the altered state of mind he used to hide away from life and the responsibility that was Lilith.

The negligence, the resentment, the guilt.

The third figure is herself and she has no age, no anything, it's just a ghost of rage that's darker than the other two and constantly shifting between states of uncontrolled fury and a constant need to destroy and tear things apart. It's the form she mentally recognizes and places as the real danger above these other two, the one she lashes out at first as the head of the three-headed threat that comes for her. It's not a picturesque family moment. These are her damages, these are her ghosts, these are her downfalls.

Rage and turbulence, everything unfair.

It's all real fast, but it's not over. Naturally, Lilith is left facing the most dangerous of the trio, or at least, what seems to be the most dangerous of the trio. Her flame bursts and dissolves the wraithlike representations of her mother and father, but not before that fog rolls off of them. And while her reflexes and movement allow her to dodge most of her doppleganger's flame attack, she gets a singing burn of dark flame licking her right arm right when she plows into some of that dark fog. Instantly, all the fight goes out of her and all she can hear is...

Come home. We can make a home here. Stay with us.

Lilith looks down at her wrist and all the automatic lash out of heat and fire that comes out of her stops as she stands there with her posture overwhelmed into collapse on her knees with inexplicable grief over taking those two wraiths out to leave the last one, her fascimile, standing there alone. And the doppleganger mimics her, dropping onto float of incorporeal knees to hover while looking at a wrist. Suddenly, the dark misty head tilts and the creature's foggy wrist splits vertical up the forearm before she looks at Lilith, clearly expecting her to do the same.

There's no blue eyes where there should be, though, when Lilith looks at the ghastly version of herself leaking silvery mercury drips of blood from the foggy arm onto the forest floor where it's concealed by more mist. Then the drips become a flood.

Like a slow-moving mirror of her wraith's image and actions, Lilith's left arm starts to open up at the inner forearm with slink to her wrist and the artery there. That blood isn't mercury and silver or quiet and painless. It's crimson and dark like fine wine, thick and metallic smelling to the point of being tasted in the thick humidity of the carrying fog. And it feels right, there, to hurt like that for that melancholic, affected moment.

It'd be so easy to let go. She always wanted a family.

Lilith wants to scream and beg for Byron to find her, that's what he does, right? He comes in and makes everything okay. But she's alone. It'd be absolutely futile in a place like this, there's no way she can reach his mind, even, if things were different. Besides, this is all her, all of this, isn't it? She has to fight it herself. But she's not in a hurry to fight it with the vestiges of the melancholic fog still on her and her wraith-version of herself staring at her with those pitch black, waiting and mournful eyes with years of damages and hurts.

Cradling her arm, she kneels lower and hovers over herself while applying pressure and sobbing with pain and exhaustion and grief and fury while her blood runs hot into that beautiful gown. The gown she was supposed to wear at his side, the way they were supposed to stand together, lovely and...

She wasn't supposed to be wearing it yet. She just wanted to show him before the race. She remembers now where it started, it wasn't the opening of the masquerade she was on the way to, it was the Charity... there's gaps, like the fog is clouding time span and real memories. Lilith knows she's been in this Dream far too long and it's becoming a danger. She may never find the way out. Surely there's a point where it all starts to meld and blend and then there's no more solutions, no more doors.

She'll be lost and broken like the toys she encountered on the way. She'll be a wraith like her mother and father, like...

The blood is hot and she's alive and Byron is alive and damnit, he's her safety, he's her family, she's not staying here with ghosts.

The fog starts to lift. Her sobbing abates and calmly she tears her dress to wrap part of her arm to staunch the blood best she can too, just like the tears.

Then she looks at the wraith Lilith and decides they can't both exist. She wills it to be one or the other, and she puts luck and all that stubborn fury on her side.

When she looks at the version of Lilith there with the pitch black eyes and misty pale skin, the whole of the being flies apart into tendrils of mist and shadow just like the other two. Then the brunette woman gets up with jaw trembling and she starts to walk again. Eventually, not long afterwards, she comes to the treehouses where the broken toys and items are all starting to peek out anew. But before any of them can set any traps, she raises her voice and breaks the thick silence that comes with the mist to speak with authority.

She's gone. Come out. You're hiding because you're broken. You can be loved again too.

Lilith might as well be talking to herself, but standing there, she looks like a bloody queen given regalia. Then she replaces her feathered and gilded swan half-mask on her face like a crown before walking the lines that form to hold court. And when she walks the ranks between broken ponies and dolls and bears and all manner of animated creepy toys in the mists, she can only hope this is a means to an end because she can't go any longer.

When she's finished and each toy is complete and restored, they all crowd around her when she collapses in the forest and they take turns laying silver lilies on her prone, unconscious, garishly bloody and lovely form.

Long live the Swan Queen of the Lost and Broken. Long live the protector of the Misty Realm.

Long live Lilith.

Hopefully.