Thundamoo

A/N: Here it is. The last chapter of Vigor Mortis. I'll leave the main author's note for the end, but I feel like I should note that I wrote literally the entirety of this chapter to a single song on loop: Travelers, from the Outer Wilds soundtrack. If you haven't played Outer Wilds, I do feel like

A/N: Well. Here it is. The penultimate chapter. There's only one more after this, my fellow beasts and creatures. ...Uh, unless it ends up way too fucking long and I have to split it, but I might just write a super long chapter. We'll see. But... yeah. We're almost there. Thank you all for sticking

A/N: Hey everybody. Sorry for the wait. I did my best to crank this out before the end of the month for you all, and I'm glad I managed it. It's the beginning of the end now, and I hope you all enjoy the final ride. Thank you all for sticking with me. It means more to me than you can know. Enjoy the

A/N: Hello! I'm back! My wrist is still a bit damaged but I got my old speech to text program working and I'm back to the grindstone. Also, content warning for suicidal ideation. Enjoy the chapter! The delicious scent of a dying meal wafts through me. It's close. I dash towards it, no longer having

I feel… bloated. My tendrils slither through the shattered streets, twisting under rubble to provide lifesaving touches to the crushed and dying… as well as collecting the dead. So much for no casualties, but I never really thought we'd manage to pull that off. I don't doubt that everywhere else on

A/N: Ah, it feels good to be back. Sorry for the wait, everyone, and enjoy the chapter. "I have an urgent message for the Progenitor," Vita snaps, and the soldiers stand aside. What incredible social power. They don't question her, they don't inspect her, they simply obey, because she is Athanatos.

A/N: Sorry for the excessive delay, everyone. This chapter fought the hell out of me and I'm still quite disappointed in it, but perfect is the enemy of good and all that. We're back now. Enjoy. "Well, the game doesn't sound too difficult," Penelope muses, rubbing her chin. "Rather straightforward r

"Explain what you mean," Queen Galrotta hisses furiously, "by 'related.'" "She's my sister," I answer, shrugging, "in the same way that The One Below All is my brother. I didn't just fuse with any old soul, I fused with a sapient portal to the universe mana comes from." I release some of that mana f

A/N: It's me! Hi! Gosh, my chapters keep getting later and later. But I'll have you know I didn't take a break for this one, I actually worked through my scheduled day off to get it out and it STILL ended up late because fuck this arc, it's so hard to write god damnit. I think it's worth it, though.

A/N: Haha! Hey! You thought I missed this week, didn't you? Thankfully not this time. I actually "finished" this chapter last night, but my beta readers encouraged me to add more so I ended up delaying and writing more on my day off. I think it's worth it, though! Gosh, can you remember back when Vi

A/N: Hey everyone! Thundamoo here. This was supposed to be yesterday's chapter but of course it took another day, so I probably won't have a chapter tomorrow. Hopefully this one huge one is worth the wait. Enjoy! I turn out of the hallway and into the medical room, taking care that the long, sinuous

A/N: Hey everyone! Sorry about this one being reaaaaaaaally late, but... well I already did the big explanation in a prior post, but yeah! Here's this week's Vigor Mortis. Took way too long to make. No change in schedule, expect Bioshifter on Monday. Thanks for reading! "Are you sure you weirdos don

"...So that's the plan, then," Lady Vesuvius concludes. "We replace the compulsion to love Ars with a compulsion to dislike him, set that to cascade, then return later to wipe the slate clean. We'll have to carefully select propagation points and keep a careful eye on the epidemic, but as of right n

"Jelisaveta, are you sure you should be doing this alone with her?" I look away from the notes and ideas I've been collecting, glancing up towards the voice. Then I twist my neck to glance even further up, because Lady Vesuvius is absolutely ridiculously tall. Her radiant scales pulse with blob-like

A/N: Hello, everyone! I'm starting another break. There will not be a chapter on Friday, and there will not be a chapter on Wednesday. There also won't be a Bioshifter chapter on Monday. The next chapter will be on Friday the 5th! Thank you for your patience! It takes a split-second to reorient myse

A/N: Hey everyone! Thundamoo here. This was supposed to be yesterday's chapter, but I was late and struggling to write it so I wanted to finish it today and then also start tomorrow's chapter, but... well, now it's almost 11pm and I haven't even started tomorrow's chapter, so I'll probably end up mi

I curl my tail in irritation, then immediately become even more irritated at the unconscious movement. Flexing the spine of my tail doesn't have a negative affect on my ability to cast with the many tendrils lining its underside, of course, but both the involuntary movement and the involuntary emoti

Out of all the secret bases Ars could have been hiding in, I can't decide whether or not I very much should have or very much should not have expected the state capital of Baldone. Hundreds of souls, then thousands, then tens of thousands all enter my sensory radius in short order, an almost-blindin

"Well that's just fucking disturbing," Jelisa mutters. "Language," I reply automatically. Jelisa glances at me briefly and smirks, her face a disturbing mutation of what she looked like before. Had I not been told it was her, I'm not sure I would have guessed it. Her dark skin, her long white hair,

"All right! Well Jelisa, while Penelope's making you produce more melanin, I'm gonna inject a new language into your soul, if that's okay?" I take a deep, quick breath, a sharp inhale and exhale. Slower breaths tend to hit me with too many unpleasant smells and tastes, and I think I'm close enough t

I really, really, really want to rush over to where some dumbfuck splice thinks they can mess with my town and relish in the resulting slaughter, but unfortunately I am fighting an opponent with teleportation abilities in a defensive battle. I can't risk fighting like a soldier. It is my duty to fig

"Hello, second favorite mom!" I call out, greeting Altrix cheerfully. The twisty-toothed woman turns to me and glowers, though I can tell there's a jolt of joy in it. "You cheeky little shit," she greets me back. "Ooh, that sounds like Sano!" I decide. "Hi Sano! I'm a cheeky little Princess now, act

"Well," Penta sighs, brushing a goopy lock of faux-hair out from in front of her faux-eyes. "It would seem that Vita is back." I have no idea why she does that. Her 'hair' is just the same substance as the rest of her, so she could move it with pure willpower. Of course, there's no need to, since he

The purple spiderweb cracks erupt all around us, fractal tears in the face of reality which herald the imminent judgment of Interitus' unfathomable talent. It's hard to guess who the woman was before Ars broke her soul into pieces and forged her into a splice, but she must have been legendary even b

A/N: Sorry for the wait! This is yesterday's chapter; tomorrow will also have a chapter like normal. I was just a bit slow! Enjoy! "That's quite a glare you have, little Princess," Dalakana muses. "You wouldn't happen to be holding a grudge, now would you?" I flinch and look away, doing my best to i

"I can't believe your idea of a vacation is to explore a literal, actual sewer system," Tala whines. "This is so disgusting." "Oh, it's not so bad," I protest. "Honestly, this is probably the cleanest sewer I've ever skulked around in." Besides, Tala and I are both flying. We don't even have to walk

"Wow," my mouth says, entirely of its own accord. "This is… unbelievably fucking wild." Right? I think. My life is so messed up I didn't even realize how messed up it was until recently. "Yeah, this is… a lot," my voice agrees. "I can definitely see why you broke up with me. And here I thought you'd

A/N: Hey everyone! Sorry for the slight delay, I just passed out before I could finish editing this last night. Enjoy the chapter! Dead bugs litter the streets. Not one of them so much as twitches anymore. Vesuvius the Inhuman has single-handedly ended the Hiverock invasion. For a while before the e

Power coalesces around me, a terrifying showing of might that, back on Verdantop, I would have assumed was a potentially lethal attack. Not here, though. This is just… fun. A game. It's such a fucking wild concept, I don't know how to handle it. As usual, it's all familiar yet surreal. My Vita side

"So there I am, trying to fight this giant, four-armed monster with nothing but a pointy stick while my teammate figures out how to give it an ulcer or whatever," I ramble, stuffing more delicious food into my mouth. Athanatos can eat and talk at the same time without issue and it's awesome. "You sa

Once again, I find myself walking the halls of the Progenitor's mansion, staring at the ceiling and trying to piece together the image despite the many memories I've lost. Destroying Malrosa's memory core didn't just remove most of the memories from her previous bodies, but it also means that the me

"Really?" Talanika asks with surprise. "You're full?" "I am so terribly sorry, Princesses," the restaurant's greeter says, meaning every word of it. "I believe the recent play is to blame for the abnormally high traffic." "Oh, that makes sense," Tala mutters. "All the Queens must have gotten the sam

I must admit, the black mana writes to me, I'm particularly surprised that you even exist. I'm quite sure you weren't self-aware just a few decades ago. I squirm with embarrassment, though I'm not sure why that should be embarrassing. I guess I wasn't? I admit. But I still existed, right? Just as li

I wake up in my bed with the horrid, foreboding feeling that I am dead. I almost feel like the experience chills me to my core, but then I recall I do not have one. Right, I remember. I am Vita now. It's quite an odd feeling, to suddenly be someone else. My pleasant life knew nothing of struggle, po

My body twitches and everything is wrong. What happened? I feel like a stranger in my own body. Is this my body!? Of course it is. Of course. What else would it be? This must be a nightmare. "She's coming to!" my sister whom I've never met declares in my birth language that I've never heard before.

I haven't felt this lost since August died. It's not as bad now as it was then, I callously note. I don't really have the option of not recognizing that; time doesn't dull my wounds the way it supposedly does for humans. A simple look backwards is all I need to know that, yes, the death of my father

"Murderer!" the young little vrothizo roars at me, launching herself through the air towards me in a manner I note is not dissimilar to how Vita nearly killed herself by leaping at Galdra. Loyal to a fault, the both of them. Loyalty is a virtue, not a fault. Of course, loyalty is a virtue and not a

"So… so you're sure this is safe?" Lark presses, clutching one of my soul-infused meat rations like it's a dying child. "It's not made out of a person and it's not hurting anyone?" "Well it's made out of me," I say defensively. "But no, I'm not being harmed by this at all. Anima is just a substance,

A/N: This is a Penelope chapter. If you struggled with the last Penelope chapter, read this one with caution. Waiting for Galdra to come back quickly becomes more painful than the knowledge that I have been violated on a fundamental level, though at least half of that is probably the boredom. Being

Somewhat disappointingly, the rest of my squad declines to take the much faster and more efficient travel method of simply riding on top of Ketevan the Worldshaker's back, and we end up trudging through the forest muck like plebeians that don't have tree-felling giants as subjects. I could ride alon

I'm already moving and casting before the attack comes, and it's a good thing I am because otherwise we would have all died. I tackle Xavier and Jelisa as my tendrils weave a repulsion spell to blast the rest of the team out of the way. An instant later, Ketevan's hoof comes crashing down where we h

I feel the tears falling down my face and I just let them. I'd thought I could at least feel good about having kept my entire squad alive, but it turns out I can't even do that. Melik is dead. He wasn't a friend, not really. He was grumpy, mean, and rude, at least around me. But he was getting bette

"You might need to let me handle it," I whisper regretfully. I've thought about it a lot as we slowly approach, and so far as I can tell we have no better option. That Wight is packing the sort of power that could end civilizations if unleashed, which means the first and most important element is to

Walking through the forest with a team is both pleasantly nostalgic and exceptionally frustrating, considering that I have the benefit of good company but the downside of having to be led around by blind people. I used to take pride in how damn good a scout I was, back when I was a hunter. I suppose

I practice sword and shield drills in the barracks yard, frustrated with how my body wars against two sets of competing instincts. Melik knows how this body is supposed to work, but his movements and instincts are struggling to hold their head above water as I fall back into my own habits, designed

My fight-or-flight instinct is still screaming at me to kill as Cassia walks in, my whole body tense with the need for movement, for preemptive action. This is the woman that actually caught me two years ago, after all. The most direct and immediate reason I got locked away in Site 4 and ended up as

Staring down at the calm water of the bath, I find Melik's face staring back up at me, wearing my blank expression. It's both familiar and surreal, as while I've seen this face many times before in two different sets of memories, I don't really see it as mine anymore. It also reminds me a lot of tha

I wake up with an annoying crick in my back, my face resting on the foot of a medical cot soaked with my own drool. It takes a moment to blink the incomprehensible mess of dreams I was having out of my eyes before I can remember how I got here and what I was doing yesterday. Oh, fuck, that's right.

Helpless. That's the emotion that has defined my life for as long as I can remember. Even the beginning, the single most pivotal moment of my life—getting my talent—was just helplessness magnified a thousandfold. Every day I wake up helpless, paralyzed by my own mind. And so I worked as hard as I co

A scream sounds out across the battlefield, the first audible break in the battle-hardened professionalism of the Templar forces. Blood is everywhere, spilling across enough of the ground that even my dulled senses feel the sharp smell clawing up my nostrils. My dragon, weathering countless arrows a