second lives in a stolen world

the second part of a lifepath for a Stolen World

holy fuck y'all holy fuck holy fuck i am just now finding out about Ljubomir Popović and im gonna lose it this is so fucking sick i have a new artcrush!!!!!

 

 

 

 

the body, its death and its adornments

1.  If your body is used to something, it takes half as much food to do that thing. 
   
   —  for months you are held in the mouth of the Lord of Smooth Stone, a Holy Coward whose lies have swollen him to mountainous size. He leached nutrition from you and the tongue-mates nestled beside you in the warm damp. You are emaciated and your skin has been worn smooth and shining as burnished wood. Your body is used to providing sustenance without being swallowed; someone suckling on a part of your body counts as having eaten half of your most recently eaten meal. 
2. An impressive and specific enough disguise can grant the wearer the qualities (both positive and negative) and abilities of the thing they are disguised as. 
1. Such a disguise must be made with materials gathered from the thing it's imitating. to sleep in such a disguise is to risk forgetting the truth of who you are. 
   
   —  You steal cast-off skins of a gigantic lizard and fashion them into a disguise, frilled and rainbowed. For a time, you live as a god, protecting a family of idiots from nonexistent predators in return for the game they drive into your own mouth and down your throat. At night you shed your skin and bathe in pools of cool water. This lasts until their youngest drugs you into itchy slumber and flees with his siblings. Now you're just a big fat lizard, and unused to fending for yourself. 
2. A mask of river clay wipes away the stable identity of the wearer and grants them the suggestibility of water, always following the path of least resistance. 
   
   —  Starving, your village comes apart. The able leave to seek some kind of deathless oblivion in the mouth of the Lord of Smooth Stone, the unable sit and wait to rot. in desperation, masks of mud are daubed over the faces of the few who cannot bear to abandon their dependents. You are among them, trusted by your mother to gather food for her, though you will not recognize her face. Alas! Alas! The mud comes from stagnant pools, not the living river. It imparts the secret of poisoned incubation, and nothing more. Foul and harmful thoughts have no effect on you, but in your mind they multiply, grow thick and strong as rope. Within a month, they will grow large enough to ooze out of your nose and ears like leeches. 
3.  the body is a pliable, plastic thing and can, by stretching or contorting it continually over the course of a year, be persuaded to distort or alter its shape dramatically and impossibly. A jaw could be unhinged and widened, ribs stretched and expanded into a tent, etc. 
   
    —  your veins stand rigid, bulging your skin topographic. She's jammed your jaws open with a block of wood. Your tongue points straight ahead, quivering like an arrow. She pulls the hurricane egg out of the ootheca she fashioned for it. It drips amniotic fluid into the rug, still placid with the lie (her craftsmanship was near-perfect, the egg-sac entirely believable). The pearl rolls down your throat. It's all very erotic. The hurricane stirs in you that night. Over the next year, your flesh makes space for the gale within you until your body is a whirlwind rosette from the belly upwards. your features are distributed in spiral with a wet little mouth in the middle. She adores it. 
4. Incorporating something into your body such that it remains whole and allowing your body to heal around it over the course of year imbues that body part with the qualities of the thing inserted appropriate to that body part.  
   
    — he wrenches the teeth from your head, replaces them with opal. he pierces your tongue with sapphire. for a year of wine, pulped fruit and ice, the two of you stay away from the salons, the whirlwind-rose orgies. you let his rival have her victory. but finally, when your tongue stirs and speech returns to you, your words drop precious and shining as jewels. everyone values you speaking to them, and only them, as though you were gifting them a gem the size of a tooth. 
5. Twins count as the same person with two bodies when it is helpful to them, and as separate people when it is helpful to them.
   
   — your twin bites down hard on your arm and your sweaty fingers cramp around the shears and your ear - their ear - peels away from their skull and falls onto the moss. You are twins. each of you wears one of the other's ears around your neck on a thin golden chain and when you speak into it, the other hears you.
   
6. It is quite possible to live with holes in your skull 
   
   —  your tour on the funeral parade (ugly, treasonous work, leading beasts to devour the infirm and old before they can become host to an Id-Hound or eaten by Angbora) is rewarded with a trepanned alligator of your own. Two of its thoughts have been fed to the exclusion of all others; hunger and grief. They squirm like reins out through its skull, and by grasping them you can direct their focus and intensity. 
7. If the dying do not run deathless with the Hounds, and do, in fact, die, they are finally eaten by Angbora. After 1d4 days, his servants; emaciated, double jointed and rubbery, crawl from cracks in the ground or holes in trees, fold up their corpses and take them away.
   —  everyone hates your father, the man who waits by the dead until Angbora's servants come for them. He wrings their gristly necks, cooks their oily flesh, and eats it with his hands. Nobody else knows why the Ash-Tongued Curse has not made a home in him yet. Only you. The emperor's servants are not of this earth. Their flesh can be eaten freely. This knowledge must never reach anyone with Ash-Tongue. Even if they do not betray you, their curse will. 
   
   

   

   like???????? he and i are a match made in a flowery fleshy heaven i fear...