From Wrap, power. But power alone is nothing without form or purpose. From desire, will. But will alone is pointless without the power to make those desires real. Only by melding the two can one find freedom from this cloying, stagnant reality.
-Excerpt from Book IX of the Sibylline Incitements, Black Crusade Core Rulebook pg. 212
__________
Have you ever wondered if you might one day die in your sleep?
I imagine many of you have felt that same curiosity. It is only human, after all, to picture death as a gentle escape—slipping away quietly, alone, yet wrapped in peace.
But for me, those idle thoughts became something more than passing shadows at the edge of my mind.
Because now?
Now, I have lived it.
Even though I have no idea why or how, I KNEW that I died.
It was a certainty that reached down to my very soul.
I died in my sleep because those were the last of my memories.
So when I awoke in a body that was not my own, unease crept in, whispering that something was terribly amiss.
A question pressed itself into my mind.
How am I here, alive and well?
In fact, where the hell am I!?
The darkness here was so thick I could barely make out anything at all.
Worse still, a strange sensation churned inside me, as if trying to warn me.
The feeling of something being wrong.
It pressed down on me, heavy yet elusive, like the ghost of a feeling you cannot quite name in a dream.
The world itself felt out of place, as if it had slipped through the cracks of reality, yet it was undeniably real.
When I looked up, I glimpsed a structure stretching overhead, its outline just clear enough to hint at its presence.
"A bridge?"
I was beneath a bridge, but no matter where I looked, its beginning and end were swallowed by darkness. It felt as if a dome of shadow sealed me off from the world.
"Kekekekeke!!"
A laugh.
A laugh that sent chills crawling down my spine.
"Well, ain't you one ugly thing."
From my place beneath the bridge, I spotted a creature crouched above. Its form imitated a human, but every detail betrayed its inhumanity. Corpse-pale skin stretched over its frame, the tips of its fingers and toes dipped in blood red. A lone strip of cloth dangled from its waist, almost mundane, save for the finger-sized hole yawning at the centre of its chest.
But what stood out the most was certainly its face.
Its mouth was frozen in a perpetual grin, while four black lines—part seaweed, part finger—ran from its face to the back of its head, merging into a bizarre tangle of hair and organ.
Two pairs of round eyes sat atop the central black lines, unblinking and alien.
Everything about this thing was fundamentally wrong.
A being that should not exist.
But also...
I could sense it too...
The thing in front of me was dangerous.
Very dangerous.
And yet...
Perhaps it was because I had already crossed death's threshold once before.
Yet fear never came. Instead, my body quivered with a strange exhilaration, a thrill that drowned out any terror.
"Why...?"
"Why am I feeling like this...?"
Danger in front of him, the thread of death was personified right in front of him; a second death was imminent and would come for him soon.
And yet...
I couldn't help but smile.
"Just what the hell is wrong with me?"
The creature continued to laugh; its laughter echoed throughout the empty night. The sound seemed to crawl into my ears, burrowing toward my mind.
My eyes never left the creature, and in a single moment, its two pairs of eyes locked onto my own pair, and despite the distance between the beast and me, I could feel, or I supposed sensed, the emotion behind those eyes of its.
It was mocking me, confident of its superiority, as if I were nothing more than an ant to be toyed with until it tired or I finally broke.
It moved faster than I could comprehend. One moment, I was standing; the next, I found myself upside down.
With the creature standing where I was, its arm extended in a pose as if it had hit something with it.
Or I guess, in this case, someone.
It was a blink of an eye, from standing to now lying down, upside down, back against the wall, head on the floor, everything happened so fast that my brain couldn't even keep up with what just happened. The first thing that registered in my mind was confusion; the strange situation I somehow found myself in left me scrambling to understand what had just happened.
The next thing to register in my brain was a single sensation.
Pain
First, it was the pain on the left side of my face, the feeling of something impacting that side, then something running along the side of my face, the feeling of liquid flowing downward, dripping onto the ground for my eyes to see.
Blood
But the pain didn't stop there, for the next thing I felt was the pain coming from my back, as I impacted the wall, there was a possibility that some of my bones were broken, and if they weren't, then it's at least already been cracked from the impact alone, not to mention my internal organs, they were definitly some internal bleeding along side of that.
With everything registering in my brain, my body dropped to the floor. I tried to stand up, but no matter how hard I tried, all I could do was kneel on the ground. My whole body trembled in pain, and before I knew it, something was rushing up from my throat before it was forcefully coming out of my mouth, revealing more of the crimson liquid that had come out from my body.
Amid the sensations overwhelming my body, a third registered in my brain.
The feeling of something flowing, no, overflowing, from the inside of the body, a disgusting feeling as if I was submerged in water that was filled with nothing but blood and flesh.
It was disgusting.
But it was also intoxicating.
The moment that this disgusting feeling washed over me, everything suddenly became so clear in my eyes, all my senses seemingly enhanced to the point that I felt like I could take on the very world itself.
Everything that had just happened, all of the sensations that I was feeling, all of it came crashing down on me like a tidal wave, washing over me all at once.
So, in response, my body let out a sound instinctively, without my control.
My laughter.
With it echoing throughout the empty darkness. The creature looked on, showing no emotions behind those eyes of its, while I continued to laugh on and on.
Each laugh sent fresh pain lancing through my battered body. That single blow had left me so broken I could barely stand, my vision swimming, my lungs burning with every breath.
But I couldn't stop
And I didn't want to.
"What the hell did you do?!" It was painful to laugh, even more to speak, but I couldn't help but say out loud toward the creature in front of me, "Not that I'm gonna complain about it!"
As the energy flowed through me, it enveloped me like a cold blanket, leaving me nothing but discomfort. At the same time, I could feel it leaking away from me, going somewhere, and loosening the power I felt.
With me not wanting to lose the strength I was feeling, I simply acted and did something very simple.
I stop the energy from leaking.
Such a simple thing I did: simply stopping the energy my body was leaking. In that very moment, everything became even clearer in my mind, like a man in a desert tasting water for the first time: I need more of this water.
I needed to feel it more.
The exhilaration was overwhelming.
Yet the energy inside me was too vast to contain. Some still slipped away, but now, instead of vanishing, it began to twist and shape itself, forming patterns on the ground and in the air.
First, it was the ground, out of dirt that had no life, life was born. First, it was a simple field of grass; then, from the grass, more and more flowers sprouted, creating a flower field around me as I knelt.
But it did not end there. The next thing that caught my eye was something crawling across the ground.
It was small—a row of black circles in a line, with tiny triangles at their sides, giving the impression of legs. Together, the shapes moved as one, forming an insect's image in my mind.
A centipede
A pure black centipede, matching the grass and flowers around me. Only the flower petals broke the darkness with their white. But the centipede was not alone—spiders, ants, and all manner of arthropods joined it.
Then, in the air, dragonflies and butterflies swarmed, their wings beating softly. The sight carried a strange melancholy, as if nothing in the world could be wrong.
Even though I tried to stop the energy inside my body from leaking out, it was still not enough; more and more energy kept leaking, forming more of these flowers and insects around me, spreading them like a plague.
Plague?
Yes, plague.
I didn't know why, but that word certainly fit all the things around me. Despite being a field of garden that was filled with nothing but life, all I could think about was this garden being wrong, something that shouldn't exist, something that would bring death more than life that it represented.
Even more started to form, more flowers on the ground, more butterflies and dragonflies in the air, more insects crawling on the ground. The radius kept increasing until it reached the spot where the creature was standing.
The creature, which grinned, had vanished and was standing still, cautious, observing the scene unfolding right in front of it, like some twisted experience, as if it knew that rushing in right now would be bad for its being.
But the moment the flower field reached its position, the creature leapt back, widening the distance between us. Yet it was not the flowers that touched it, but a single butterfly that drifted gently to its arm and landed without a care.
The moment that happened, all hell broke loose for the creature.
For out of its arm sprouted black plant vines all over the arm of the creature; at the same time, all sorts of flowers also grew out of the creature's arm.
But it didn't stop there.
The plants spread from its arm to its face, more and more sprouting from its body. Insects crawled from its mouth, others bursting from its pale skin, revealing that its blood ran purple.
The creature screamed, the sound piercing my ears, and I could not help but laugh harder. It clawed at the plants and insects, desperately trying to tear them away, fighting to save itself from the nightmare overtaking it.
And me?
I was ecstatic. My wounds began to heal at an unnatural speed—I watched them close in real time. The burning in my lungs vanished, the pain in my back faded, and the crack in my bones seemed to mend, leaving me whole.
If anything, I felt better than I ever had, even before the injuries. All the strength I had lost returned—and then some.
I had no idea how this was happening, but I knew it was tied to the plants and insects surrounding me. I stopped questioning and focused all my attention on the creature before me.
With the thing still struggling to get all of the plants and insects off of its body, but before long, it stopped its own struggling before crossing its arm in front of its chest, and with one single motion, the creature let out a scream filled with nothing but pure desperation and released, what was to my eyes, similar energy to the one that I have, releasing all around its body like an explosion, destroying all the plants and killing all of the insect in the area. At the same time, I get pushed back due to the sheer force alone.
However, my grin never left my face, and, out of pure instinct, seemingly etched into my very soul, I raised my hand and pointed my index and middle fingers at the creature. By doing so, a pair of black ink-like wings sprout from my arms, a pair of wings that were recognised as the wings of one of the insects that I saw earlier.
The insect that was-
"Dragonfly"
__________
A/N
Hello, welcome to another JJk fic. This one is a crossover with another series, a series that most of you probably already heard about.
Anyway, I have nothing much to say here for now, so I hope you enjoyed this first chapter of mine, and if you didn't, give it a chance after five chapters at least.
Ciao~