Qebhet (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} coolwaters) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} nevermore_logs,@ 2020-10-27 22:55:00 |
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WHEN Wednesday 28 October, evening
WHERE Chaz’s Jersey City apartment; later Harlem
WHAT We’re going on a bear hunt
WARNINGS TBA
| About four months ago: Once, there were two monsters. One was made in hateful fire, the other in uncaring frost. One was a hulking brute, muscle rippling along its scarred flanks, viscera crusted beneath its great claws. The other was small and insubstantial, a creature that darted between shadows and slid through hairline cracks; cunning, not claws, was its weapon. Both were hunters. One stalked in the bowels of the earth, chained and caged; the other flitted free on the night air, rattling at windows with its spindly fingers. One lived only on its master’s sufferance; the other, long dead, suffered no masters. Both were hungry. It was chance alone that their paths crossed: a door left ajar, a chain secured loosely out of pity, an unexpected freedom, a shifting wind that carried the sharp tang of fresh-spilled blood. Chance brought them face-to-face over the corpse by the river, the one snarling and bristling in open challenge, the other grinning languidly as it licked blood from its fingertips. Both were long accustomed to fighting for their food. The small beast was faster, but the great beast made up the difference with its length of stride and its snapping jaws. In two swift bites, it swallowed the smaller one down. But the smaller one, in the moment of defeat, made a darting grab with its quick clever fingers and snared the filmy grey stuff of its rival’s soul, and it, too, fed. And so it was that the two monsters devoured each other, and this was their remaking. The single beast that emerged from their battle was great and brutish, but with a canny eye that perceived the subtle threads of spirit matter that wound through the streets, and claws that could rend a soul as easily as they could flesh. Contradictory instincts tugged at the beast, knotting at the base of its skull. These would take time to understand. One impulse, however, was not complicated in the least: The beast was ravenous. Tonight: Qebhet was determined not to be caught unawares this time. Their working theory was that the soul eater was repelled, possibly even harmed by purifying agents, so she had equipped herself accordingly: with her pitcher of blessed water; with natron, sacred salt of her homeland; with rich temple incense; with a wand carved from hippopotamus ivory. She had cleansed and anointed herself thrice before leaving her apartment, and she wasn’t sure if that was excessive or paranoid, but she drew some small comfort from the sweet pungent scent of kapet that clung to her skin and from the weight of the amulets that circled her neck and wrists. Artemis went in for offence rather than defence. She had no fewer than eight knives of varying sizes concealed on her person, and the compact black bag slung over her shoulder contained not only her bow and quiver, but also a collapsible hunting spear. Where Qebhet’s silence was taut with gnawing worry, Artemis’ was one of patient anticipation. She was the Hunt, and it had been long years since she had been offered so rich a challenge. The six hunters had met first at the same Starbucks where Hecate had confronted the demon called Chaz not long ago. There, those with scrying talent had swiftly been able to zero in on Chaz’s present location – scarcely a block away, as it turned out, and it had taken them a matter of minutes to find the apartment outside of which they now stood, ready to confront him. Time to get some answers. Chazaqiel was trying something that mortals called ‘self care’. It had been months since he’d been able to properly relax. Every hour of the day, shooting darting glances over his shoulder, positive that at any moment the wrath of Beelzebub and Lucifer and Satan himself would come crashing down on him. And then there was Hecate, the frighteningly powerful Greek woman, who’d promised to come back with friends, to say nothing of the increasingly dire warnings in the sky, and he didn’t even know where his daughter had got to… and just today he’d walked into work and shrieked aloud upon coming face-to-face with what, it eventuated, was nothing more than a plastic Halloween skeleton, and not a particularly realistic-looking one. So yeah. Self care. Chaz was in sore need of it. He’d treated himself to a long, hot bubble bath and was now curled up in front of the Weather Channel in a pair of stripy flannel pyjamas while he waited for his UberEats to arrive. With his hands wrapped around a mug of warm cocoa, he could feel the tension slowly beginning to uncurl from his gut, and it was entirely without trepidation that he stood to answer the rap on the door. He opened it, prepared to thank the delivery person, and promptly stumbled over his own slipper-clad feet when he found himself met with six pairs of expectant eyes. |