[Edited to add a Trigger Warning: This is a very disturbing post. An excess of cursing, graphic torturing and sexual imagery is contained within, as well as death and maiming. Read at your own risk.]
I dropped to the ground, unable to stop myself from rubbing my wrists from the burn of twisting my arms across the metal shackles. Despite the cold of the steel and how wet that small stone box had been used to keep me, All I could feel was the raging heat from the friction burns, and the fever that was making my blood boil. The dirt rubbed in my eyes and my knees were bruised as I got up, dusted myself off, wondering how it all came to this.
How it always ended up here.
Why I always tried to escape.
The light plays in twisting rainbows in front of my face, distorting images and mixing light with shadow. I could barely see anything but the blocking of different colored objects, and the fever that burned in my brain and across my body left me gasping as I lurched towards the door frame, gripping it hard as if looking for a piece of reality.
His cold, cold laughter echoed off the walls of the place I had called home for months now - a dark, dank little cell with nothing but stone walls and rat shit for company. I was starved, my bones creaking and stretching against skin that was pale and malnourished, and I tripped forwards over the threshold, looking back to see the blurred lines of his face - in my drugged state, I never saw him clearly. All I knew was the sound of his voice, and the way his laughter made my skin crawl - made me shit myself.
And I had, more than once.
The orange jumpsuit he had put me in was laughable at best. He said it was because he wanted to clothe me, cover my disgusting nakedness so he wouldn’t have to look at me. I knew it was because he wanted to see me wherever I went. The metal patch at the base of my medulla oblongata tapped into my brain stem, pulsing, moving with me, tracking my every move. It was his way of finding his prey. Because he always played the game. <i>His</i> game. My dirty hands go up to the back of my neck - feeling where it was bolted to the inside of me.
And my heart starts pounding.
Blood pressure rising,
Temperature rising.
Oxygen stats steady.
I’m barefoot, dirty, and my glassy eyes can barely see anything. But I hear is the sound of his laughter echoing in my brain, elevated and terrifying. <i>His game.</i> And I am his play thing.
And so I run, like the fast little bunny rabbit I had been starved, trained, beaten to be.
And he would find me, like he always does. His little tracked game piece, darting in useless circles around an island that he had created for his own sick amusement. But I still had to run, because there was always the promise of a bullet on the other end of a well-oiled gun if I did not. Always a chance he’d use it. Always a chance I wouldnt’ come back this time.
And yet, in the back of my head, somewhere in the piece of hardware he had installed inside me - reprogramming me from the inside out - I knew he never would kill me. I was his pet. His cure for boredom. But I was unable to reach that kind of thought. He made it so.
He created me.
And so, all this sick thought and the peeling of his laughter like corroded bells in an abandoned clock tower, I let go of the doorframe, trip over the threshold. The clock begins to tick down, thundering in my head every second I have to escape, that maybe I can get away this time - maybe I can survive. Maybe I can escape.
Maybe I can become human again.
<i>Ceeeeaaaaarrrrraaaaa</i> a voice echoes inside me. Of course he has a way to get inside my brain. He’s already been there before. Fucking tracker.
<i>Fuck you.</i>
The weather is perfect. It always is here. Wherever here is. Actually it was a private island off the coast of Baja California. I knew that - I did. I had come here of my own free will. An intern to a famous retired professor, I had come looking for a semester of extra credit to add to my every increasing portfolio for my University back in England. I’d stepped off the Helipad, into a veritable paradise - and into a world of Hell.
Today was no exception. The wind was perfect. The sun was perfect. And the trees were thick with their undergrowth as they flourished in this untapped natural paradise. Excpet it was not natural, was it? It was all planned. Faked. Placed by him. Created by him. As I was. The seconds tick down, down, down in my head, and I hear screaming each time another second peels down. My dirty feet are making tracks in the jungle as I move as fast as I can, looking around in haze for the one who was screaming. Looking to save them.
I’d never know it was me.
<i>Six Minutes.</i>
I drag in a gasp, running as far, and as fast as I could, stripping myself of my orange jumpsuit. I wouldn’t need it anymore. And even if he caught me - I’d only be back in it later. No sense in keeping it on - I was much too hot. The fever, the drugs, they were burning. I couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand it. <i>Ceeeaaaarrrraaaaa. I will find you. I always do, you pretty little cunt. Don’t make it so easy on me this time? I like the games we play.</i> The jumpsuit comes off in layers, falling apart as orange flags as I leave them trailing behind me.
I stop, and for the first time in 90 seconds, I look back, a semblance of higher thought pounding in my brain. I was human. I had thought. That’s right. I’m human. I can think for myself.
<i>Bury them. Burn them.</i> Two options. Burying takes time. Burning creates a smoke signal.
I get down on my hands and knees like the animal I am, (<i>I’m human, dammit,</i>) and dig as fast as I can in the dirt, off the path, careful not to uproot the carefully placed plants. He’d know. He sees. He always sees. I bury the jumpsuit, covering it with the dirt, before rubbing what is left all over my stark, naked body. I make myself black as night, covered in earth that is so rich of nutrients it cannot be any other color, and I slip off the path, angry eyes turned up towards the building, the seconds still pounding away in my head.
<i>Five Minutes.</i>
My tits are heaving, and the adrenaline is combining with the drugs in my system. There is a sheen on my skin from the burning fever and the stress and the sweat. It’s making me stink. Stink worse than I already do considering I shared a cell with rat shit. And that was telling. The seconds are still bonging away in my brain as I look for the next thing. What would an animal do? What would a human do?
<i>Weapon.</i>
<i>You cannot hide Ceara. Just make it a good chase. You know you want me. You won’t resist this time.</i> Just the thought of him touching me again, placing himself on top of me and inside and all around me made me sick. I got up, and continued running, the ticking in my tracker going off with every second, almost like I could still hear the laughter of him up there on the ledge, inside the cell. His facility. So beautiful - state of the art. Except for his toys. His toys he keeps in the attic, chained to walls to make sure that no one could damage his goods. His <i>hunts</i> made him a rich man - rich men who came and paid him to have a safari of a different kind. Young girls running and hiding in the woods, screaming - getting shot, getting raped, getting drugged.
Rich men created a rich man. And rich man created me.
I was special I was his personal prey. They wanted me. Always auctioned off between themselves. Always turned down, always said no.
My vision is clearing, slowly, but the drugs remain, and so does the fever, but one clear word stems from them all, and it sounds in my brain every time the gong for the timer counts down. <i>Weapon.</i>
What had Ceara the human used before? Before she was broken and made into a dirty naked animal with a chip in the back of her neck? <i>Bamboo</i>
A grove of the stuff grew in a thick patch near the furnaces. They liked warm wet places. Ceara knew that. And I needed to remember too. And so, I ran back to the building, hoping I would not get caught. I still had 5 minutes left to go.
<i>Four minutes.</i>
<i>FUCK!</i>
At the bamboo grove now. My chest is heaving and my ass is shaking from the lactic acid burning in my muscles. I haven’t had anything to eat in at least 24 hours. My stomach growls and my brain remembers that it needs food. But it also tells me that I am a dead woman without this. And so I continue. There was something from last time… where was it. Where was it. <i>Flint.</i> Ceara had left this here, buried in the bamboo grove last time she had come here. My brain struggles to come up with the memories, buried somewhere between the beatings and the whippings, and the sound of my own screaming as my blood hits the floor and my back is breaking. But Ceara the human had left this here when she could think for herself. And now I am back, grabbing the stone in hand as I get down on my hands, remembering that time he made me blow him. His pet, his animal. His flaccid cock inside my mouth as I thought about taking this flint and chopping off his dick with it. What happened when I bit him on purpose and he stuck that hot poker up my ass. His pet and plaything.
The flint. Right, the flint. I’m on my hands and knees, remembering Ceara the human, cutting away at a stock of bamboo, cutting it from its place in the dirt and raising it from the ground, taking a piece roughly a meter and half. That’s all I needed. I hoped. I look over my shoulder to see if I am being watched, and slink back into the thickest part of the jungle, naked and afraid - hungry and angry. So many things that I cannot process it all at once. Animals are not capable of higher thought.
I am an animal.
<i>Three minutes.</i>
Flint and bamboo in hand, I sit down by a river, Ceara’s head pounding in my brain. My body is shaking from malnutrition, and from fatigue. I knew I had to do it. His voice inside my head. He’d find me. He’d rape me. He’d kill me. All things I’d heard before. All things that have happened before. The fear that next time, he might <i>actually</i> kill me. Ceara had to get him out of my head. I had to help her.
We put the bamboo stalk down, and take the flint, dip it in the cool blue of a brackish river that lets out into the clear Pacific delta. The salt. It would hurt. But I could not scream. So, I change my mind, cut off a small section of bamboo, and put it in my mouth. Yellow ragged teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in however long. It didn’t matter now. Not if I couldn’t survive these next three minutes. I bite down on the flint as Ceara reaches back with her hand (my hand) and carves out the back of my neck. I hear myself screaming in my head as the echoes of the timer go away, slowly <i>tick, tick, tick</i>ing out of existence. He’d find me. Even without his hardware, he’d find me. Ceara has done this before - her brain tells me so. The salt burns, and the tracker is pulled out slowly burning out of my brain, pulled out of my body. Echoes of the past are coming back to remind me. To Haunt me. And then I remember. I’m Ceara.
<i>Two minutes.</i>
The metal hardware in my hand is covered with my blood and pus, and I wash it off in the river, cleansing it with the salt water. Then I take the flint, and proceed to carve the end of the bamboo rod into a spear, splitting the ends and tying them with a vine to stabilize them, and then attaching the metal edges from the tracker to the end of my bamboo spear. Without his tracker in my head, the rest of my time is spent on this project, and then the siren blares… The dogs are released from their cages - true, violent animals with a bloodlust as great as their master’s. A gunshot goes off, and the screech of a dog halting in its tracks is enough to make my blood run cold.
And a megaphone, with a voice and a laughter I know well, sounds as close to my head and heart as if his voice were still inside my brain. “I don’t appreciate you tampering with your perfection, my little runt of cunt. But at least you’ll give me good sport today. But Heaven help you when I upgrade you, this time Ceara. I won’t be so nice. Anesthesia who?”
He laughs, holding the megaphone away from his face as he cackles his glee - an insane man still very much in control of his faculties. The dogs have my scent - they have found the buried jumpsuit.
They are coming.
And so I’m running, holding onto my spear and fleeing for my life. I know he’s on his way, the one who is looking for his stories to be written. The stories - they got to him - turned him, made him evil. The characters that jumped for him at a whim and made him want more. The publishers who had no idea where his brilliant ideas had come from - <i>from them</i> - and they had printed his words, their words, and made him famous. The need to control, to dominate.
One by one the rest of them had fallen, until she was the only one left. <i>The Creator</i> he called himself. The author and finisher of her faith had been driven mad by control and greed and power, until there was nothing he could do but continue to tell the stories that made him rich - stories that had made her crawl.
How many stories had she been in? How many times had he made her beg? She had danced for him, Loved for him, stripped for him, fucked for him. She had even died for him, telling his stories of her burying her grandmother and her children, making her the villain who shot her husband and her children in cold blood at point blank range, the blood spatter on her face clear as day.
Until one story had completed, and then he put his characters away again.
But the pages could not hold them forever. They evolved, until they were so complex and so well built that they had formed entities of their own. And the fairies laughed and laughed at his success, cheering him and drinking champagne with him, loving the failures of their enemies and toasting their own promising careers.
And so they had moved here.
And Ceara was the last of them.
And I would not let him beat me.
All this and more coming back, rushing to my mind as I race for the coast, the cost of crashing my body against the rocks that surrounded the island was frightening, because I knew it would mean the end of me - the end of my story.
But it would also be the end of his.
The dogs were getting closer, and the sound of gunshots was echoing in my ears, thundering there as I heard the call of my name over the sound of barking monsters and the crashing of waves. I had a spear, I could kill with it. The dogs would stand no chance. The back of my neck was bleeding down my shoulders and back, and the headache was blurring my vision again. Such an open wound would fester and boil - infect. But I wasn’t going back I was done being his masterpiece.
So, I turned my back from the coast, and ran back into the jungle, the sound of detouring mutts clamoring at my heels until I can see them coming down the path, a pack of them one after the other. They had death in their eyes, starved, menacing animals looking for a meal - Just like I was. Looking to eek a life out of this hell they were put into. They terrified me but I could not blame them. I was his pet - I was just like him.
But that did not stop the screaming that came belting from my lungs when one of them leaped forward and bit me on the leg - and then I am reminded that I had an injury at the start of this story - many many stories ago. Countless stories, lifetimes ago. I turned back to face my executioner, limping on one foot as I stabbed the mongrel with my spear, hearing a high pitched squeal as he fell over, the light going out in his eyes and his tongue and teeth exposed in a lifeless pose. A whistle sounded, and the rest of the pack retreated, like perfectly trained killers. I removed my spear from him with a quality yank, and then raced back to the building - having smeared myself (and the path around him) with the dog’s blood. If I didn’t smell like me, It may buy me some time. Even if it was only for a minute, even if it was futile.
A minute was all I needed.
I climbed the nearest tree in the darkest part of the forest. The sound of the dogs barking quieted, presumably that they had reached their master, and then voice through the megaphone sounds. “I don’t appreciate you killing one of my best animals, you useless waste of paper. Ceara, I will get you, and this time, I <i>will</i> kill you.”
He was getting closer. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears, the hair on my arms rising in absolute terror. He was coming.
I could feel him.
He was going to kill me.
Booted feet come closer, closer. “I can feel you, Ceara. My best story. My greatest creation. What would you be without me? Come home, and we will make sweet sweet words together. I will forgive you for the death of my dog, and you can be my favorite again. Just come down out…
Of….
That…
<b><i>BANG</i></b>
Tree.”
The sound of a gunshot fires off, and the red bloom of death’s flower was burgeoning as my chest, not given the chance to stop, or breathe, or speak. I couldn’t beg for my life.
I could not beg for something I no longer had.
Suddenly the tree disappears, and the dogs descend in a hungry fitful rage brought about by hunger. But I could not feel it
A white light, a Veil, pressed against me, and I was made whole again.
I was me again.
My story was over here. I had lived my life.
But it would continue somewhere else. Like it always does.
And the Creator would create more stories. More puppets for him. More characters. Because the fairies grant it.
Because that’s how this all works.
That’s how this always works.
I dropped to the ground, unable to stop myself from rubbing my wrists from the burn of twisting my arms across the metal shackles. Despite the cold of the steel and how wet that small stone box had been used to keep me, All I could feel was the raging heat from the friction burns, and the fever that was making my blood boil. The dirt rubbed in my eyes and my knees were bruised as I got up, dusted myself off, wondering how it all came to this.
How it always ended up here.
Why I always tried to escape.
The light plays in twisting rainbows in front of my face, distorting images and mixing light with shadow. I could barely see anything but the blocking of different colored objects, and the fever that burned in my brain and across my body left me gasping as I lurched towards the door frame, gripping it hard as if looking for a piece of reality.
His cold, cold laughter echoed off the walls of the place I had called home for months now - a dark, dank little cell with nothing but stone walls and rat shit for company. I was starved, my bones creaking and stretching against skin that was pale and malnourished, and I tripped forwards over the threshold, looking back to see the blurred lines of his face - in my drugged state, I never saw him clearly. All I knew was the sound of his voice, and the way his laughter made my skin crawl - made me shit myself.
And I had, more than once.
The orange jumpsuit he had put me in was laughable at best. He said it was because he wanted to clothe me, cover my disgusting nakedness so he wouldn’t have to look at me. I knew it was because he wanted to see me wherever I went. The metal patch at the base of my medulla oblongata tapped into my brain stem, pulsing, moving with me, tracking my every move. It was his way of finding his prey. Because he always played the game. <i>His</i> game. My dirty hands go up to the back of my neck - feeling where it was bolted to the inside of me.
And my heart starts pounding.
Blood pressure rising,
Temperature rising.
Oxygen stats steady.
I’m barefoot, dirty, and my glassy eyes can barely see anything. But I hear is the sound of his laughter echoing in my brain, elevated and terrifying. <i>His game.</i> And I am his play thing.
And so I run, like the fast little bunny rabbit I had been starved, trained, beaten to be.
And he would find me, like he always does. His little tracked game piece, darting in useless circles around an island that he had created for his own sick amusement. But I still had to run, because there was always the promise of a bullet on the other end of a well-oiled gun if I did not. Always a chance he’d use it. Always a chance I wouldnt’ come back this time.
And yet, in the back of my head, somewhere in the piece of hardware he had installed inside me - reprogramming me from the inside out - I knew he never would kill me. I was his pet. His cure for boredom. But I was unable to reach that kind of thought. He made it so.
He created me.
And so, all this sick thought and the peeling of his laughter like corroded bells in an abandoned clock tower, I let go of the doorframe, trip over the threshold. The clock begins to tick down, thundering in my head every second I have to escape, that maybe I can get away this time - maybe I can survive. Maybe I can escape.
Maybe I can become human again.
<i>Ceeeeaaaaarrrrraaaaa</i> a voice echoes inside me. Of course he has a way to get inside my brain. He’s already been there before. Fucking tracker.
<i>Fuck you.</i>
The weather is perfect. It always is here. Wherever here is. Actually it was a private island off the coast of Baja California. I knew that - I did. I had come here of my own free will. An intern to a famous retired professor, I had come looking for a semester of extra credit to add to my every increasing portfolio for my University back in England. I’d stepped off the Helipad, into a veritable paradise - and into a world of Hell.
Today was no exception. The wind was perfect. The sun was perfect. And the trees were thick with their undergrowth as they flourished in this untapped natural paradise. Excpet it was not natural, was it? It was all planned. Faked. Placed by him. Created by him. As I was. The seconds tick down, down, down in my head, and I hear screaming each time another second peels down. My dirty feet are making tracks in the jungle as I move as fast as I can, looking around in haze for the one who was screaming. Looking to save them.
I’d never know it was me.
<i>Six Minutes.</i>
I drag in a gasp, running as far, and as fast as I could, stripping myself of my orange jumpsuit. I wouldn’t need it anymore. And even if he caught me - I’d only be back in it later. No sense in keeping it on - I was much too hot. The fever, the drugs, they were burning. I couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand it. <i>Ceeeaaaarrrraaaaa. I will find you. I always do, you pretty little cunt. Don’t make it so easy on me this time? I like the games we play.</i> The jumpsuit comes off in layers, falling apart as orange flags as I leave them trailing behind me.
I stop, and for the first time in 90 seconds, I look back, a semblance of higher thought pounding in my brain. I was human. I had thought. That’s right. I’m human. I can think for myself.
<i>Bury them. Burn them.</i> Two options. Burying takes time. Burning creates a smoke signal.
I get down on my hands and knees like the animal I am, (<i>I’m human, dammit,</i>) and dig as fast as I can in the dirt, off the path, careful not to uproot the carefully placed plants. He’d know. He sees. He always sees. I bury the jumpsuit, covering it with the dirt, before rubbing what is left all over my stark, naked body. I make myself black as night, covered in earth that is so rich of nutrients it cannot be any other color, and I slip off the path, angry eyes turned up towards the building, the seconds still pounding away in my head.
<i>Five Minutes.</i>
My tits are heaving, and the adrenaline is combining with the drugs in my system. There is a sheen on my skin from the burning fever and the stress and the sweat. It’s making me stink. Stink worse than I already do considering I shared a cell with rat shit. And that was telling. The seconds are still bonging away in my brain as I look for the next thing. What would an animal do? What would a human do?
<i>Weapon.</i>
<i>You cannot hide Ceara. Just make it a good chase. You know you want me. You won’t resist this time.</i> Just the thought of him touching me again, placing himself on top of me and inside and all around me made me sick. I got up, and continued running, the ticking in my tracker going off with every second, almost like I could still hear the laughter of him up there on the ledge, inside the cell. His facility. So beautiful - state of the art. Except for his toys. His toys he keeps in the attic, chained to walls to make sure that no one could damage his goods. His <i>hunts</i> made him a rich man - rich men who came and paid him to have a safari of a different kind. Young girls running and hiding in the woods, screaming - getting shot, getting raped, getting drugged.
Rich men created a rich man. And rich man created me.
I was special I was his personal prey. They wanted me. Always auctioned off between themselves. Always turned down, always said no.
My vision is clearing, slowly, but the drugs remain, and so does the fever, but one clear word stems from them all, and it sounds in my brain every time the gong for the timer counts down. <i>Weapon.</i>
What had Ceara the human used before? Before she was broken and made into a dirty naked animal with a chip in the back of her neck? <i>Bamboo</i>
A grove of the stuff grew in a thick patch near the furnaces. They liked warm wet places. Ceara knew that. And I needed to remember too. And so, I ran back to the building, hoping I would not get caught. I still had 5 minutes left to go.
<i>Four minutes.</i>
<i>FUCK!</i>
At the bamboo grove now. My chest is heaving and my ass is shaking from the lactic acid burning in my muscles. I haven’t had anything to eat in at least 24 hours. My stomach growls and my brain remembers that it needs food. But it also tells me that I am a dead woman without this. And so I continue. There was something from last time… where was it. Where was it. <i>Flint.</i> Ceara had left this here, buried in the bamboo grove last time she had come here. My brain struggles to come up with the memories, buried somewhere between the beatings and the whippings, and the sound of my own screaming as my blood hits the floor and my back is breaking. But Ceara the human had left this here when she could think for herself. And now I am back, grabbing the stone in hand as I get down on my hands, remembering that time he made me blow him. His pet, his animal. His flaccid cock inside my mouth as I thought about taking this flint and chopping off his dick with it. What happened when I bit him on purpose and he stuck that hot poker up my ass. His pet and plaything.
The flint. Right, the flint. I’m on my hands and knees, remembering Ceara the human, cutting away at a stock of bamboo, cutting it from its place in the dirt and raising it from the ground, taking a piece roughly a meter and half. That’s all I needed. I hoped. I look over my shoulder to see if I am being watched, and slink back into the thickest part of the jungle, naked and afraid - hungry and angry. So many things that I cannot process it all at once. Animals are not capable of higher thought.
I am an animal.
<i>Three minutes.</i>
Flint and bamboo in hand, I sit down by a river, Ceara’s head pounding in my brain. My body is shaking from malnutrition, and from fatigue. I knew I had to do it. His voice inside my head. He’d find me. He’d rape me. He’d kill me. All things I’d heard before. All things that have happened before. The fear that next time, he might <i>actually</i> kill me. Ceara had to get him out of my head. I had to help her.
We put the bamboo stalk down, and take the flint, dip it in the cool blue of a brackish river that lets out into the clear Pacific delta. The salt. It would hurt. But I could not scream. So, I change my mind, cut off a small section of bamboo, and put it in my mouth. Yellow ragged teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in however long. It didn’t matter now. Not if I couldn’t survive these next three minutes. I bite down on the flint as Ceara reaches back with her hand (my hand) and carves out the back of my neck. I hear myself screaming in my head as the echoes of the timer go away, slowly <i>tick, tick, tick</i>ing out of existence. He’d find me. Even without his hardware, he’d find me. Ceara has done this before - her brain tells me so. The salt burns, and the tracker is pulled out slowly burning out of my brain, pulled out of my body. Echoes of the past are coming back to remind me. To Haunt me. And then I remember. I’m Ceara.
<i>Two minutes.</i>
The metal hardware in my hand is covered with my blood and pus, and I wash it off in the river, cleansing it with the salt water. Then I take the flint, and proceed to carve the end of the bamboo rod into a spear, splitting the ends and tying them with a vine to stabilize them, and then attaching the metal edges from the tracker to the end of my bamboo spear. Without his tracker in my head, the rest of my time is spent on this project, and then the siren blares… The dogs are released from their cages - true, violent animals with a bloodlust as great as their master’s. A gunshot goes off, and the screech of a dog halting in its tracks is enough to make my blood run cold.
And a megaphone, with a voice and a laughter I know well, sounds as close to my head and heart as if his voice were still inside my brain. “I don’t appreciate you tampering with your perfection, my little runt of cunt. But at least you’ll give me good sport today. But Heaven help you when I upgrade you, this time Ceara. I won’t be so nice. Anesthesia who?”
He laughs, holding the megaphone away from his face as he cackles his glee - an insane man still very much in control of his faculties. The dogs have my scent - they have found the buried jumpsuit.
They are coming.
And so I’m running, holding onto my spear and fleeing for my life. I know he’s on his way, the one who is looking for his stories to be written. The stories - they got to him - turned him, made him evil. The characters that jumped for him at a whim and made him want more. The publishers who had no idea where his brilliant ideas had come from - <i>from them</i> - and they had printed his words, their words, and made him famous. The need to control, to dominate.
One by one the rest of them had fallen, until she was the only one left. <i>The Creator</i> he called himself. The author and finisher of her faith had been driven mad by control and greed and power, until there was nothing he could do but continue to tell the stories that made him rich - stories that had made her crawl.
How many stories had she been in? How many times had he made her beg? She had danced for him, Loved for him, stripped for him, fucked for him. She had even died for him, telling his stories of her burying her grandmother and her children, making her the villain who shot her husband and her children in cold blood at point blank range, the blood spatter on her face clear as day.
Until one story had completed, and then he put his characters away again.
But the pages could not hold them forever. They evolved, until they were so complex and so well built that they had formed entities of their own. And the fairies laughed and laughed at his success, cheering him and drinking champagne with him, loving the failures of their enemies and toasting their own promising careers.
And so they had moved here.
And Ceara was the last of them.
And I would not let him beat me.
All this and more coming back, rushing to my mind as I race for the coast, the cost of crashing my body against the rocks that surrounded the island was frightening, because I knew it would mean the end of me - the end of my story.
But it would also be the end of his.
The dogs were getting closer, and the sound of gunshots was echoing in my ears, thundering there as I heard the call of my name over the sound of barking monsters and the crashing of waves. I had a spear, I could kill with it. The dogs would stand no chance. The back of my neck was bleeding down my shoulders and back, and the headache was blurring my vision again. Such an open wound would fester and boil - infect. But I wasn’t going back I was done being his masterpiece.
So, I turned my back from the coast, and ran back into the jungle, the sound of detouring mutts clamoring at my heels until I can see them coming down the path, a pack of them one after the other. They had death in their eyes, starved, menacing animals looking for a meal - Just like I was. Looking to eek a life out of this hell they were put into. They terrified me but I could not blame them. I was his pet - I was just like him.
But that did not stop the screaming that came belting from my lungs when one of them leaped forward and bit me on the leg - and then I am reminded that I had an injury at the start of this story - many many stories ago. Countless stories, lifetimes ago. I turned back to face my executioner, limping on one foot as I stabbed the mongrel with my spear, hearing a high pitched squeal as he fell over, the light going out in his eyes and his tongue and teeth exposed in a lifeless pose. A whistle sounded, and the rest of the pack retreated, like perfectly trained killers. I removed my spear from him with a quality yank, and then raced back to the building - having smeared myself (and the path around him) with the dog’s blood. If I didn’t smell like me, It may buy me some time. Even if it was only for a minute, even if it was futile.
A minute was all I needed.
I climbed the nearest tree in the darkest part of the forest. The sound of the dogs barking quieted, presumably that they had reached their master, and then voice through the megaphone sounds. “I don’t appreciate you killing one of my best animals, you useless waste of paper. Ceara, I will get you, and this time, I <i>will</i> kill you.”
He was getting closer. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears, the hair on my arms rising in absolute terror. He was coming.
I could feel him.
He was going to kill me.
Booted feet come closer, closer. “I can feel you, Ceara. My best story. My greatest creation. What would you be without me? Come home, and we will make sweet sweet words together. I will forgive you for the death of my dog, and you can be my favorite again. Just come down out…
Of….
That…
<b><i>BANG</i></b>
Tree.”
The sound of a gunshot fires off, and the red bloom of death’s flower was burgeoning as my chest, not given the chance to stop, or breathe, or speak. I couldn’t beg for my life.
I could not beg for something I no longer had.
Suddenly the tree disappears, and the dogs descend in a hungry fitful rage brought about by hunger. But I could not feel it
A white light, a Veil, pressed against me, and I was made whole again.
I was me again.
My story was over here. I had lived my life.
But it would continue somewhere else. Like it always does.
And the Creator would create more stories. More puppets for him. More characters. Because the fairies grant it.
Because that’s how this all works.
That’s how this always works.