by a route obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only...

[ushered]

[Open to threadhopping, but no Roderick tags, please!]

The Kashtta is deteriorating. The signs are everywhere, and have been-in the way the walls seem to be cracking more each day, the paint fading and flaking; in the floors that creak and moan; in the air itself, so dank and foul, just hanging in every open space

Comments

[princerat]

Steel grey walls boxing him in, dripping with blood. The bloody wall becomes a red velvet curtain, pulled aside. Out there is the audience-- blank-faced human-shaped automatons dressed in Victorian clothing. He lunges into the aisle between the seats, tries to run out the fire exit. Metal hands grab him, drag him down through the floor, strap him onto a table. Robot doctors using early 19th-century medical instruments tear him apart and replace his various pieces with metal limbs. He feels every cut and tear. Through an orange portal he's tossed, onto a hamster wheel, and he runs and runs and runs while her voice plays overhead. He coughs up blood from his mouth onto the wheel and he just can't seem to stop slipping on it

[shiftylockhart]

Come morning, Kashtta residents may find a familiar tiger sprawled out on one of the couches in the lounge, looking rather like he's upset with the world.

Probably because he is.

Gilderoy spent the night dreaming of his days in Hogwarts, except the whole setting was some grim amalgamation of his own memories and what Harry told him, about You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters and even the memory loss incident. He woke up in such a frenzy that for a few seconds, he wasn't sure he did know who he was or where he was.

And it scared the shit out of him.

He shifted immediately. He's been a tiger for hours, apparently unable to shift back because he's still utterly freaked out and the state of the building around him is not helping.

Since he's still not comfortable with the paws-and-tail thing, he's going to stay here until he feels another shift coming on, at which point he'll fumble back to his room before anyone else gets an eyeful.

For now, though? Couch.

[mademychoices]

The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

It's always water.

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.

The streets of London are filled with it, rippling and silver-bright, lapping softly at the third-story windows of the perfect, empty buildings. A small wind blows across the surface, stirring and shattering the reflections; mirrored glass in mirrored water, endlessly repeating, steel-bright and colorless and perfectly dead.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.She knows this, for all she can't see it; the water is black around her, closed worlds-deep above her head. Her hair fans out, a fine white cloud just visible from the corner of her eye; her limbs are weightless, immobile, but she can turn her head and blink her eyes and see the bubbles trailing silvery up from her mouth when she