โ
โ โ simple joys of life.
you have a fascinatingly calming effect on living things, miss lauma. animals. children. stray creatures with no survival instincts.
I donสผt believe this sight will ever lose its novelty to me.
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โ
โ โ with deliberate slowness, he raises his lantern.
a gust of azure flames surges forth, striking a sharp silver glint across its ribs. the somber glare casts distorted shadows across his surroundings and sweeps a path through the swallowing deep.
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โ
โ โ Fโ๊ฏญlinโ๊ฏญsโ turns to face the keening, his gaze lifting imperturbably from his thoughts. following a brief search, his eyes lock onto the rhodolite wisps prowling the pallid mist.
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โ
โ โ their vigil has ended. they have earned their peaceful slumber, freed at last to lie unburdened and unafraid โ knowing their embers have outlived the carnage; and another has taken up the lantern to light the way forward.
โ
โ
โ โ however, pity is wasted on the damned. to mourn these howling abominations is to dishonor the memory of the proud lightkeepers they once were. a swift end is their last remaining grace.
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โ
โ โ their final agony lingers still in the sluggish dragging of their feet through ashen grass, masked only by the low mangled cries echoing through the empty โ half-lament, half-torment.
the abyss preserved just enough humanity to perpetuate the horror.
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โ
โ โ others wandered too deep into defiled territories and returned hollowed into creatures wearing familiar, tattered clothing. they clawed their own skin to shreds in delirious agony, shrieking as the abyss gnawed from within.
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โ
โ โ some perished in trenches overtaken by abyssal seepage, their screams smothered beneath wet sounds of tearing flesh, jagged teeth scraping against bloodied bones โ until silence eclipsed the valleyโฆ a grim warning to their comrades that their turn, too, had come.
โ