04-23-2023, 01:42 PM
His expression registers no shock, no abject horror, though it makes little difference to her. Even if he had turned only to shy away, she would have grinned a bloody grin and followed. (Because she is a one-track minded thing, rotting, wanting. It is not lust, exactly. But it’s not all that different either.)
The ribs heave, though she does not draw breath, like there is some kind of life roiling just beneath the surface of her skin but it does not belong to her. She glances down at the blood that pools and spreads as if reaching for him and tilts her own strange head, blinking. (The blinking, of course, serves only to displace more of the blood that collects along the edge of her bottom eyelids. Serves only to send it more quickly down her gaunt cheeks.)
She smiles, stains her teeth red, and lifts her focus back to his face. “I hadn’t noticed,” she answers. It is merely a fact of life (or death, rather, in her case) at this point. She bleeds because she was designed to do so. She bleeds to remind others what it means to be alive, to remind them that they, too, are always standing at the edge of death.
Niklas. She does not know them by name. She knows them by the unnatural way they bend beneath her pressure. She knows them by the way they either cry out for mercy or don’t. She knows them by the scars of their deaths and the way that their souls have teeth.
“Niklas,” she repeats and the name dissolves on her tongue, comes apart at its edges. “Tell me how he died.”
The ribs heave, though she does not draw breath, like there is some kind of life roiling just beneath the surface of her skin but it does not belong to her. She glances down at the blood that pools and spreads as if reaching for him and tilts her own strange head, blinking. (The blinking, of course, serves only to displace more of the blood that collects along the edge of her bottom eyelids. Serves only to send it more quickly down her gaunt cheeks.)
She smiles, stains her teeth red, and lifts her focus back to his face. “I hadn’t noticed,” she answers. It is merely a fact of life (or death, rather, in her case) at this point. She bleeds because she was designed to do so. She bleeds to remind others what it means to be alive, to remind them that they, too, are always standing at the edge of death.
Niklas. She does not know them by name. She knows them by the unnatural way they bend beneath her pressure. She knows them by the way they either cry out for mercy or don’t. She knows them by the scars of their deaths and the way that their souls have teeth.
“Niklas,” she repeats and the name dissolves on her tongue, comes apart at its edges. “Tell me how he died.”
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Set