tequila_sunset: (mirror mirror)
Harry Du Bois ([personal profile] tequila_sunset) wrote in [community profile] cultmirror2026-05-13 12:54 pm

04. (end of week two) cw: mass murder, apocalypse, atomic bombs, grieving

Despair permeates the murmur. Pain. The effort of crying has his eyes burning, his chest heaving. His lips are cracked, and taste of iron.

A familiar voice rasps out. Rawer even more than usual, hoarse from the kind of crying that simply doesn’t stop. He slurs, stutters, and it’s hard to tell if he’s drunk or simply too exhausted to fight against his bad jaw.


“I saw my world end in fire.”

“I am. I am the first crack in the sheer face of god. It spread from me. It…this is my confession. I confess. I must confess.”

“I couldn’t stop it. I woke up like this. I was already broken. The city was already doomed.”

“He was already on the radio. The first atomic weapons had already been built by the Moralintern. And the church...it…”

He trails off into silence for about three solid minutes.

“I let the city die…as surely as if I pressed the button myself. It’s my fault but I couldn’t stop it.”

He chokes, fights his spasming throat to keep going.

“This is not a contradiction. Two truths may occupy the same space. I failed her. I was never going to be able to stop it. This is not guiltspeak. It’s the real truth.”

“The only ones who may absolve me are dead. Will be dead. Are dead.”

“And I’m here.”

“Let me tell you about her. The former capital of the world. Revachol was a city on the sea, on Le Caillou, the largest island in the Insulinde Isola. She was where the first interisolary expedition landed nearly four hundred years ago.”

“It was a colony. Under the suzerainty it was the skua. A big cruel bird stealing fish from other birds. It fell. It rose as a commune for only a few years and fell again. The world buried Revachol in rubble. They moved on. She was supposed to solve the great riddle of history. In twenty two years she will be leveled by an atomic bomb. This is the start of the end of the world.”

“Her voice was the wind! She told me that she didn’t want to die. She told me that she loved me. She thought I could save her.”
merged: (𝗄𝗂𝗅𝗅𝗂𝗇𝗀 π–½π—‹π–Ύπ–Ίπ—†π—Œ)

[personal profile] merged 2026-05-14 04:59 pm (UTC)(link)
[ This is what is so hard about the Murmur. You come across someone struggling, and you feel pieces of that struggle, and it lodges itself in your throat and your chest. It makes Sharon feel rattled. Undone.

She swallows it. ]
Do you think every city speaks to someone? Or was she special?