[He was on Ensō when the shadow fell over the sky, blotting out the sun - and the wrench in the pit of his stomach almost had him reeling, remembering the way the sun's rays faded into splotched orange, and then milk-white, and then nothing but pitch-dark, the sound of shadows coming swarming out from the ocean depths. But it's not that, not at all; it's just something else looming overhead.]
[What the fuck else is new.]
[He slings his pack over his shoulder and starts hiking to the projected point of impact. The island's speeding up, now, close enough for him to realize what it is: it's one of those things, those floating pieces of rock and disconnected...stuff, shifting near-constantly like play-dough or mind-clay. As it careens closer to the ground, he starts moving quicker. There's no way this would just happen without there being some kind of impetus behind it, meaning that something terrible is liable to happen, and soon.]
[The ground rumbles beneath his feet; the island's collision into the section of Ensō has wider effects than he'd predicted. It slips him off an incline and sends him rolling fast, half-falling and half-stumbling down across the grass until he slams into a tree with enough force to pepper his vision with a confetti of popping stars.]
[The sky swims overhead.]
[He doesn't know how long he lies there.]
[He doesn't know how long it takes for him to realize that the lethargy in his bones isn't really fatigue at all, or even the result of potential head trauma.]
[It's the decay that's begun to bubble up his insides, squeezing a swell of black blood out from between parted lips. His vision fuzzes when he blinks, looks down - and notes dazedly that one of his arms seems to have had quite a large chunk carved out of it, shorn to the glistening bone. A fat pink coil of intestine peers out from beneath the arches of his ribs, the flesh apparently moldered away to lay his freshly jellied organs bare to the sunlight. And here he thought he had to be on Ziziphus to be sitting in the fetid stink of rot.]
[He cups his undamaged arm around his middle, and is rewarded with a searing fucking agony that's really only comparable to the sort he's experienced exclusively in the cranial region.]
[Tim doesn't scream, but it's a near thing. His eyes blur with heat as he tries to grit his teeth and pull himself to his feet, try to make his way...somewhere, fuck if he knows where. Just - just away from this, away from all of this, somewhere he can piece himself back together.]
[If that's even possible.]
[He should be dead, some part of him realizes fuzzily. He should be dead. Mangled by some force that's practically eaten him away, that's shredded him into something approximating raw hamburger meat, that's pulverized his guts into wet garbage sacks of seeping mush.]
tim wright | ota | cw: body horror
[What the fuck else is new.]
[He slings his pack over his shoulder and starts hiking to the projected point of impact. The island's speeding up, now, close enough for him to realize what it is: it's one of those things, those floating pieces of rock and disconnected...stuff, shifting near-constantly like play-dough or mind-clay. As it careens closer to the ground, he starts moving quicker. There's no way this would just happen without there being some kind of impetus behind it, meaning that something terrible is liable to happen, and soon.]
[The ground rumbles beneath his feet; the island's collision into the section of Ensō has wider effects than he'd predicted. It slips him off an incline and sends him rolling fast, half-falling and half-stumbling down across the grass until he slams into a tree with enough force to pepper his vision with a confetti of popping stars.]
[The sky swims overhead.]
[He doesn't know how long he lies there.]
[He doesn't know how long it takes for him to realize that the lethargy in his bones isn't really fatigue at all, or even the result of potential head trauma.]
[It's the decay that's begun to bubble up his insides, squeezing a swell of black blood out from between parted lips. His vision fuzzes when he blinks, looks down - and notes dazedly that one of his arms seems to have had quite a large chunk carved out of it, shorn to the glistening bone. A fat pink coil of intestine peers out from beneath the arches of his ribs, the flesh apparently moldered away to lay his freshly jellied organs bare to the sunlight. And here he thought he had to be on Ziziphus to be sitting in the fetid stink of rot.]
[He cups his undamaged arm around his middle, and is rewarded with a searing fucking agony that's really only comparable to the sort he's experienced exclusively in the cranial region.]
[Tim doesn't scream, but it's a near thing. His eyes blur with heat as he tries to grit his teeth and pull himself to his feet, try to make his way...somewhere, fuck if he knows where. Just - just away from this, away from all of this, somewhere he can piece himself back together.]
[If that's even possible.]
[He should be dead, some part of him realizes fuzzily. He should be dead. Mangled by some force that's practically eaten him away, that's shredded him into something approximating raw hamburger meat, that's pulverized his guts into wet garbage sacks of seeping mush.]
[He should be dead.]
[He always should be, and never is.]