The Cabinet of Curious Cosmos

greyeagle2007

Evelyn:

Evelyn has absolutely no idea where the book came from.  For all she can tell, it appeared out of thin air, lying in the middle of the little table in her favorite cafe.  She had been scrolling through messages on her phone, a bit sidetracked, certainly, but one would think she would have noticed someone coming along and plunking a massive leatherbound tome on her table.  She isn't that out of it.

The book is elegantly bound, and very old, with brittle, yellowing pages and crumbling edges.  It looks so ancient and fragile she’s almost afraid to try to open it.  Strange symbols are etched into the front, an intricate bloom of spirals.  There are letters, but not in any language she recognizes.

It is familiar, a familiarity like a knife in the heart.  She passes a hand over the cover.  She has a nonsensical fleeting image of herself with book in hand, brushing ghostlike past the table, not really there but not really here either, somewhere Between, releasing her grip on the tome to let it slip to the tabletop.  It feels like a memory, but of course, she knows that didn’t actually happen.

“Where on Earth did you come from?” she murmurs, gently lifting the cover of the book, grimacing as it creaks with age.


( Read more... )

kimber_mcleod

Evelyn:

Heavy puffs of frost-tinged breath betrayed Evelyn’s winded state as she clambered behind Kimber along the winding mountain trail.  She shrugged the heavy pack higher on her shoulders and wiped a trickle of sweat from her forehead with a somewhat sun-pinkened arm.

“Only half?” Evelyn murmured, slowing to a stop beside the other woman and unslinging her water canister from a loop at her belt.  “Don’t get me wrong, I love it.  It’s beautiful.  Just….”  She took a swallow of the water.  “All uphill.  I live in Flatville, Louisiana.  Not used to all this… elevation.”  Another small gulp of water, and she returned the canister to her belt.  “What’s so interesting about this ruin at the top anyway?  Some sort of… I don’t know… storehouse of mystical energy or something?”  She was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, though given some of the things she’d seen in her lifetime, she wouldn’t be overwhelmingly surprised if it turned out to be true.

10th_13thdoctor

( Trigger Warnings: PTSD, gore )

10th_13thdoctor

Evelyn:

“What have they done to you?”

The Doctor:

The Doctor found it hard to focus. He could see Evelyn when he looked up at her from where he sat on the ground, but her outer edges looked…blurry. Her image kept shifting and changing from blurry to clear and back to blurry again. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to try to fix it, but it was no use. And on top of it, sheets of sweat kept falling into his eyes and making them sting.

‘Eb-bel-en,” he slurred. “M’I glad t’see you.”

10th_13thdoctor

The Doctor:

The night was crisp and black; to the Doctor, it felt mildly crystalline. The stars like crushed diamonds smeared themselves across the clear sky above his head; high in the inky blackness, the moon hung as a single pale baleful eye glowing, phosphorescent.

He liked nights like this, on Earth. Other places certainly had their own nighttime charms. He thought of the last sunset he’d on Vendi IV which was absolutely glorious – a spectacular gradient of indigo fading upwards into violet and black, its deep juicy colors glimmering and coruscating off the leaves.

But he loved the clear crispness of Earth nights. Especially near rivers or lakes. The water served as a glittery, wrinkled mirror of the sky above. And tonight, he sat at the water’s edge, watching the river undulate and ripple its nighttime reflections.



He’d begun to meditate, his eyes still open, drinking in the scene around him. Suddenly, he heard a strange noise from some trees to his left, shattering him out of his reverie.

He rose from his spot in the grass and walked over to the trees to investigate.