Grave Revelations

Ishiki was only out here today because late last night Yuki had given her a wrapped present in a bag and told her that it was a gift for an acquaintance of his that would be coming to pick it up tomorrow in the graveyard, and unfortunately he could not find the time to invite his acquaintance to the shop and hand it over himself. Ishiki had snorted with derision and called bullshit, but she agreed to Yuki's request anyway.

Yuki had directed her to spend the night, of course. She'd brought a tent, a generator, a space heater, alcohol, and a lighter. A little bit of food and a sleeping bag as well, but that was on her. She'd found a decent secluded spot on the far side of the graveyard- Yuki helped her set up, since she couldn't do it alone, naturally, having only one hand- and at about eight in the evening Yuki had headed out. It was about three hours past now, and though it wasn't snowing it was still somewhat cold. Dressed in black leggings, insulated winter boots, a fluffy insulated blue jacket, and a white stocking cap, she sat near the space heater and generator in relative heat, enjoying her second bottle (cheap shit she couldn't get a buzz off of, not unless she drank at least a case) and kept to her wondering if today, of all days, was chosen on purpose.

Today, the thirteenth of January, after all, was the anniversary of Lady Scorpion's demise, if rumors of her murder were true. It was also the anniversary of the day her "family" had fallen apart. It had a few other significant connotations as well, but those two came to mind first, along with the request from Yuki to sit around waiting in a graveyard for some unknown acquaintance of his.

She was reflecting on her past and raised her half-full bottle when a familiar smell reached her nose, and she paused with a grin. Lowering the bottle, she called out, "Well, isn't this a coincidence? It's October's handicapped boy toy, Scaly McLizard! If I'd known this thing was for you, I'da chucked it in a river!"

(OOC: the present contains Malek's journal in a box, and it's wrapped, naturally, so Ishiki doesn't know what it is)

Ishiki smirked. "The pleasure is all yours, I assure you." She reached down and grabbed the bag holding the present, and flung it in his direction. "I have too much respect for Yuki and the dead to start a fight here, salamander. As for October...." Ishiki's eyes narrowed and she bared her teeth. "Do you even know who she really is, little boy? I've known her for a long time. I know why she can't remember her past. I know alllll about little October, all the things she wouldn't tell you even if she could. Would you like to know her secrets? Think you can handle them? Think your opinion of her won't change?"

Ishiki laughed, then gestured around the graveyard. "Are you aware that this is the day Amaya died? What you're dating isn't even a living thing. I saw her die with my own two eyes, saw her be killed by our sworn sister. Our sworn sister also died that day. Today is the day I lost my arm to that traitorous bitch. What you call Amaya October Ouroboros isn't either something undead or a magical construct, like a golem or a homunculous. She's the soul of a dead Faerie trapped in mortal form. Still, I won't kill her, you want to know why?" Ishiki grinned and, putting the bottle down for a moment, tapped her forehead. "I know who Amaya really was. I kill the flesh, the soul goes to hell, and I care far too much about Amaya to damn her for eternity. Better she live without memory or reason in an unnatural form than face what awaits her below for the kind of shit she used to pull."

(OOC: naturally she's trying to bait him into asking about/begging to know about Amaya's past, of course. XD)

"Oh? You're a thousand years older than I am? Well, Amaya, she wasn't much older than I was, less than a decade, so what type of pervert does that make you, hmmm?" Ishiki laughed, then tipped back and drank the rest of her bottle. "As for what you've seen.... of course empires are going to fall. That's politics. That's something bigger than any one person, bigger than a life, all about sacrificing some for the greater good of many, or vice-versa, depending on the motivations of those involved. As for friends killing friends over simple material goods? Pfft. Mercy killings, greed, misunderstandings. Live long enough you see everybody make mistakes. Reasons are important there. Your past.... it's a story I've heard from dying men so often it's lost all meaning. And the person who killed those men was, more often than not, Ragnarok the Faerie Reaper, who was originally called Amaya. When she was alive, she was cold-blooded and merciless."

Ishiki stood up and cranked the space heater up a little. "Her story, of course, begins in Europe, where most of the Dark Faeries come from. More accurately, primarily Europe, although their gypsy lifestyle has them traveling through northern Africa and western Asia on occasion as well. Dark Faeries, I'm sure you know, look closer to human kids when they're fully grown, teenagers or younger. It keeps them more attractive, easier to lure in the unsuspecting boys and girls away from their homes. That's the idea: trick a moron away from their homes, lead them back to their family, and then use them as a sex toy until they die or torture them until their mind is broken, then carve them up and eat the flesh. Amaya was a part of that lifestyle for the first eight years of her life. Her tribe had to keep moving because there are hunters who still practice vigilante justice, the kind that often ends with heads removed from shoulders." Ishiki shot a nasty look at Malek. "I'm sure you know the type, if you're even half as old as you say. Amaya's group wasn't as bad as some, but they were hunted all the same just because they were Faeries. Their wings, their antennae, their blood, their eyes, their bones, and I imagine a few of their organs as well might even be sold on the black market here on this very island. Both Faerie and Dragon remains, I mean."

She put another bottle between her feet so she could twist the cap off with her hands as she continued. "Amaya was with them for eight years, remember, which means she's not an innocent. She's killed humans for sport the way children kill insects for their own amusement: pulling off the legs, setting them on fire, with her bare hands- that's the type of tribes Dark Faeries run in. Of course, when she was eight, a visitor who'd been traveling with her tribe after saving her life a few months prior and slipping it to her mother behind her father's back all the while decided to rip her father into pieces and kidnap Amaya, spiriting her away from her father's tribe. He was the one who raised her and turned her into Ragnarok. We called him 'Darkness'; he raised me, too, from when I was young." After taking a swig, she smirked at Malek. "And yes, it was her father's tribe, or at least he was the leader of it. I suppose you might consider Amaya to be a Faerie Princess then. It would certainly explain your unhealthy attentions toward such a young little corpse. Amaya's dead, remember? That's just her undead remnants. Or a construct from some obsessed nutjob. Sorry, dragon boy, you might eat princesses, but this one's a phony. Still going to eat her eventually?"

(OOC: I'm taking breaks in the telling so Malek can respond a little; don't want to write a whole novel in one go. Naturally Ishiki is going to bait Malek, but I am trying to avoid a fight by toning it down; hope it helps 0.0 )

(OOC: and that was actually an unexpected perfect opening to the next post. 0.0 )

"Oh? You think the reason I'm telling you any of this is because people die? Of course they do. That was never the point. Most people would assume it ends there, but it doesn't, either. Not for people killed by the Faerie Reaper. Imprisonment of the soul isn't the point of all this, either. People don't care about things they have no personal stake in. The things I'm telling you? They're about the girl you claim to love, the one you think is Amaya, the corpse that you know nothing about! This is about who Ragnarok really is. You think you love her? You don't even know any of her skeletons. That is my point. You know nothing about the true Ragnarok!"

Ishiki sighed, then sat down, eyes closed. "I need a moment, hang on." She pulled out a pack of marijuana-based cigarettes, took one out, and then popped it in her mouth. It took her a moment to get the pack put away again and a lighter out. When it was lit and the lighter was away, she sighed as she blew a smoke ring in the air. She didn't smoke very often- just when it helped to calm her nerves. From there, more peacefully, she began to let the memories flow more freely.

"I only heard about this part secondhand. From Darkness, because Amaya didn't talk about the past when she could help it. Darkness was a Soul Thief. See, imagine, you're a butterfly in a display case, and you're pinned through by a needle. The pain never ends. You don't get used to it. You can't scream, and you can't move. Now, every now and again, somebody twists that needle, so they can steal your soul's essence. It's incredibly painful. You can recover, and you will, of course, but that just means they can do it over and over and over again. Darkness, when he killed somebody, would bind their souls into his arm in the form of tattoos so he could tap into their souls and use their magic, one from each soul, magic he didn't possess naturally. It's basically a quick and nasty way of cheating in learning multiple types of magic. Pierce had over a hundred souls imprisoned that way, feeling just like that butterfly, when I last saw him. That means over a hundred types of magic at his disposal. I don't know what he used them for or what they did. I rarely saw him fight using any visible kind of magic.

"Amaya, on the other hand, she was worse. From the way I heard it told, she knew all that shit and she asked to learn the art of it from Darkness. He didn't offer. She demanded it of him. He figured it'd be harmless, he'd give her a soul or two, I guess. That ain't what happened. She learned it pretty well, bound a couple of souls they pulled out of the afterlife on some contract or another, which was how Darkness liked to do it. Nothing forced, all mutual. You remember what I said the Dark Faeries do to humans? Amaya went back to her tribe after learning the art and did the same to them, several times over. Every single member of them killed by her own hand. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, the whole tribe dead. I'll let you imagine some of those implications. And the way I hear it, she did it all without a shred of emotion. No tears, nothing. That's about the time she developed a curse that could keep a person alive for seven days, no matter whatever the hell she did to them. She fully tested its limits on her own flesh and blood. And oh, were the screams they rent horrid and shrill. Way Darkness tells it, she killed half her tribe in an initial strike and kept the others prisoner. She might have shown emotion at first; she wasn't when he found her three days in when half the captives she'd taken should have died but couldn't.

"Have you ever been drawn and quartered and unable to die? Burned alive? Used as a pincussion? Have you ever been left for the vultures and consumed, yet alive for six more days before the curse would release itself? That's Amaya's crime. That's the girl you're in love with. She massacred her tribe, forcing them to suffer in this life, and then bound them to herself to abuse their magic as a Soul Thief, to fuel her own power, making them suffer in the next. Never said why. Never did anything so horrid after that again that I'd heard of. But, that's when Darkness started calling her Ragnarok. She wasn't about murder so much as she was about suffering.

"A couple years after that, I came along. I thought her clothes were odd at first. They were made of skin, tanned and dyed black. I was told she made them herself. I never asked what type, but I've got my suspicions. She took me on like a sister, and after a while we were joined by Lady Scorpion. We traveled around kidnapping people, killing people, stealing things, acting as soldiers for hire, whatever. We've hunted down magical creatures for profit. Humanoids, dragons, and others. Darkness was careful not to let things go as far as Ragnarok had brought them before, but that's still her past. Our past, really, where we tore families apart, or ended them, just as casually as we throw out garbage. Ragnarok was emotionless and efficient; when she was told to kill, she killed without hesitation, but she never went a mission without capturing and torturing at least one poor soul. She started with the forty-three from her tribe, ended with ninety-six when she died."

Ishiki sighed, having smoked her whole joint while talking in minor breaks, dropping the spent bud in the snow and smushing it out with her boot. "There's a lot more stories from her missions, but that's the one you need to hear first. It's her worst crime that I know of. Keep in point: that I know of. Darkness and Ragnarok both are tight-lipped bastards, and I guess whoever made the fake you're dating decided to call her Amaya after who she was before she killed her family and became Ragnarok. She's killed dragons as well, mind. That's who Ragnarok is based on. That's another one of her skeletons you don't know. There's others, but fuck. Those are for a different day."

Ishiki's eyes opened and looked straight at Malek. "The Amaya you know is either undead or a construct. It might be her soul, but it's not who she really was. The Amaya I knew shared her bed with Lady Scorpion."

(OOC: Ishiki's done with storytime for now)

When things started burning, including Ishiki's tent (but somehow not the clothes she was wearing), Ishiki's facial expression turned into a sneer of victory. She opened her mouth to deliver what would be the final blow, but-

"Rose-Lynn. Enough!" A snowball came from behind her and smacked her on the head. A feral snarl emerged as she swung around, ready to rip apart whomever had thrown it. Instead, there, was Yuki, holding a fire extinguisher and looking at her with contempt. "Remember our little talks. Now go do what you're supposed to."

Looking furious, teeth fully exposed, hand twitching in rage, it looked for a second like she was going to disobey. Instead, after a moment's hesitation, Ishiki spit at him and yowled, "Fuck you, Yuki Shiro!" and stormed off and away. Yuki watched her go without remorse.

Then, he went up to Malek and pulled a sealed letter out of his pocket. "The police and a fire squad are on their way. It seems as though I might have accidentally called and mentioned to them off that I was coming here tonight on rumors of an arson here in the graveyard tonight. I will handle things here, but I doubt getting arrested will help you much. I recommend saving that letter to read when you're calm and in a safer place." With a self-satisfied smirk, he moved and began to start putting out fires with his extinguisher.