06-12-2015, 10:55 AM
bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. You know a bit about fathers, don’t you? Your own is this land’s resident dark god, that stormcloud gray magician who transformed himself into something more. And along the way he has littered the earth with his children. You can trace your blood to most of the citizens here, the filthy descents of him. And you added to the group, because your darling dear father (though you didn’t know till after, because the only parent you knew was mother-dearest, and even that was simply a glassy gleam in her eye and a lunatic laugh as she took a long walk off a short cliff. So you never knew dear father, not until he’d finished with you, left you fat and pregnant with the child (your second, but the first live-born, that queer girl who transformed into a skeleton come nightfall, a side effect of the magic. Poor wretched inbred thing, I wonder where she’s at now? My corpse masterpiece, the dishwater gray thing who once drank enough blood she almost died (her body had been less dead then, still so dearly herbivorous and unable to process its richness), smiles encouragingly. She doesn’t care about the stories (she’ll forget them soon enough anyway), but she likes the wash of words, the cadence in their tones as they recount the good times and the bad. “I found it sickening, once” she says, and once it was true, when she knelt down against the swan-girl, weeping and screaming do you love me, do you love me now. (She finds it much sweeter, now, and easier to digest. Corpses take easier to this sort of thing.) “Not anymore, though,” she purrs, dead to the living, cat to the mouse, “now it’s quite fun.” (The last had been a child. Her grandchild, though she doesn’t remember this, only the way the filly’s bird-bones had fractured beneath her hooves and how that woman wouldn’t stop screaming.) “You should ty again,” she says mildly, as if discussing the weather, “take someone’s heart out. It’s almost romantic.” how original a sin. |