Decided to do another meme ask. This one is a combination between 5 (ancient god refuses to let their only worshipper/lover still alive age or die) and 20 (secretly ancient being betrays everyone to perform an ancient ritual to bring lover back) w/ Rhack. 

Tried something a little new. 

There’s been a hole inside of Rhys, ripping at his heart and insides and making itself a nest of putrid, bloated offal, from the moment hands of fire had ripped his lover’s life from its skull and set it to smoke on the desert winds.

The sky had been blood red that day, stinking and streaked with smoke from the wreckage of Jack’s altar, his ambition lying broken and strewn about like drops of rain that refuse to come and wash away the festering stench of Rhys’ loss.

Jack had been so close—so close to finally crossing that last gap between mortality and where Rhys sat, had always sat, had always waited—but the humans had lashed out like dying dogs, had wrenched the final step out from under him and sent him tumbling down upon the blasted earth.

In his sorrow, the humans had escaped, and if Rhys had been a far more foolish deity he might have considered following them, hunting them down and razing their homes into the pits of the earth with the ghost of Jack’s vengeance heavy in the sickle of his hand.

Instead, Rhys drops his arms, and chooses to walk.

Rhys suffers without thirst, cries with no hunger as he wanders through the desert, nourishing the last, scintillating piece of azure hope inside of him. His conscious mind knows little of where he is heading, but his body moves, his spirit drives him forward, guided by the steady blue star in the sky— one that burns bright even with the sun, guiding him towards a place that forces even the hardiest desert plants to shrivel and wither where the purple earth cracks like a rotting hide.

The sky here is heavy, heather, the husky, oppressive violent broken only by the light of the star that shines down upon a massive, stone arch, floating off the ground in a supernatural force that even has the deity nearly forced to his knees. The tattoos lining Rhys’ right arm pulse in tune with the energy flickering through the arch, flesh and stone chattering together as if they were old friends.

Rhys steps closer, the universe humming in his bones as he reaches out with his right hand, eyebrows knit together, determined. The space inside the arch is clear, deceptive, yet still with a vicious yell he plunges his arm into its depths.

Screams tears from his throat as fire throbs in the pattern of his tattoos, slicing to the bone as Rhys’ fingers grasp desperately beyond the arch. It burns hot, like the belly of a forge as he pushes deeper, to the shoulder. Voices surge with the pain in his head, flooding his brain even as he forces it at bay, hand finally clenching around something cool and solid as he yanks it back with an agonized cry, falling hard onto his spine against the craggy purple earth.

Pain blinds him, flesh seared from his arm and dripping off his blackened bones and melted joints in huge, syrupy slabs. He squeezes his eyes shut, screaming his lungs raw with horror when suddenly, something mercifully cold touches the stump of his ruined shoulder.

Rhys’ eyes slowly flutter open as his pain begins to receded, drawing from his shoulder to his elbow to his fingers like a draining tide, though never to return again. He looks down to his arm to see it rewriting itself, strands of cerulean sinew threading themselves back together over bright, crystalline bone. His arm plumps with flesh, tattoos mapping like constellations back over the dawning sky of his skin.

“Figured you deserved a reward for that, kiddo.”

The hole deep inside of Rhys lurches inside out at the sound of that voice. He sits up straight, brand new arm clutched against his chest as he looks up with awe, amazement—

Jack glows bright, wreathed in immortal blue flame, eyes shining like stars, smile flashing like the crack of lightning

—adoration.

Jack kisses him, lips shimmering as they press against Rhys’ eyelid, and when he opens it it shines with the same fire as his arm, as Jack, the pair irrevocably bound to each other through this newborn divinity.

“Now,” the god murmurs, tongue crackling with power as his deep, golden eyes fix upon the face of his lover like a compass, “where are the bastards who killed me?”