I'M NOOOOT OKAY!Username: Ruriska
Prompt Response:
16. You feed the Stump a memory of when you were scared.
She couldn’t help herself.
Despite having decided she wouldn’t dredge up old memories or let the precious market ruin her experience, Illuminating returned to the maze. Or rather, where the maze had been. The scorched earth. A place where she had overridden her own instincts to please another, had returned again and again despite her fears.
What for? She wasn’t even sure. Nothing had come over it except a new distaste for certain insects and too many nightmares.
But Illuminating had always been drawn to introspection, to moving on. She’d had a bad few weeks, she was missing the sun, she was worried about the future, she regretted her part in it all. So she came to where the maze had been.
And she found the stump instead.
And the darkness.
It didn’t change her much, not as far as she could tell. But she could feel the weight of it, all the turmoil in her heart, the loneliness, the fear, the desire. She had chased the maze because it made her feel something exciting, it had made her feel wanted and needed. Oh how terrible she was.
The stump opened wide, hungry.
And so she offered those memories of fear that had been cluttering around her head.
So many to choose from.
When the sun disappeared, the maze, the dangerous trek from caves to swamp.
Fear, fear, fear.
She’d just arrived at the swamp, she wasn’t used to it yet. She didn’t understand how the ground could be so wet, so unstable. It was nothing like the earth, like rock. So she wasn’t expecting the sinkhole.
Suddenly up to her neck in mud, slowly sinking. Chest constricted, breathing laboured. A terrible way to die.
She was alone. Not even an animal companion. Nobody would notice her absence.
And she’d cried, thinking of how hard she’d worked to get here, how all she had wanted was the sun. The sun on her back and maybe a friend to rest beside. But now she would be consumed by the earth. The caves didn’t want her to leave. This was her destiny.
Without the vine, she would have died.
Without her determination, she would have perished.
But she’d found both.
But the fear lingered, now a piece of her soul.
She gave this to the stump and it ate well.
Magnolia had listened to the rules, of course, but she wasn't one to carry pebbles with her. It was instead fairly typical to have some type of teeth or bones tucked into her hair. She reached her nose into her waterfall of locks and plucked out a curved bone, dropping it into the stump.
Artisan hadn't exactly made a conscious decision to attend the Winter Market. He was still reeling from a lifetime of memories turned to elusive curling smoke trails that he could never quite catch for long enough to remember much of anything. It made it hard to converse with kin who may have met him when he knew who he was, or had been, or at least why he was the way he was. Now, it was like being reborn and trying to tug out strings to find out anything about who he was or what he liked.
Malevolent chomped on the stick, webbing and feathers be damned. She pounced forward and trotted happily towards the kin who watched with a bored, bordering on annoyed, look. The stick was spat out before the other doe's feet and the dragon grinned.
Bite of Passage was slowly becoming acclimated to the pools of Other-space as the strange effects of the stolen light shifted and flowed around the swamp. Stepping through them at least was preferable to traveling through the obelisks to the dark buck. Maybe that was because he'd been marked? Or maybe that's just why he thought it was so. In the past year he'd slipped in and out of his own mind so many times that it was like he'd not actually existed in it at all prior to the Harbinger calling him down into the mist-shrouded caverns. It had terrified him at first but after freeing the light, stepping into a blurred fog and coming out with strange emotions or fuzzy memories hardly felt threatening at all anymore. 
In all her years in the swamp, Dark Caster had never really attended any of the winter markets. She'd never felt the urge or need, content to simply keep to her usual haunts and the company she's always known. But after the Sun disappeared, after these strange pockets of darkness (that she had no connections with) appeared, something pushed the doe out to see how 
Heart and Home had only heard of the Stump from last year. She didn't have the chance (or time) to visit it but there was still time before the trek to the caves for her to take a quick look and-