01-30-2022, 09:17 PM
Let's be better strangers
Choking. Drowning. Dying. Healing. Drowning. Dying. If he were not already half-mad from whatever the Mountain's magic did to him, he would go mad now.Whose magic sent him back here? Carnage's? The Fairies? Others might resign themselves or find forgiveness in accepting their fate, but Wherewolf chokes on the saltwater in his throat and thrashes in vain.
How much time has passed? His wings remain dislocated, the pink scars that trace his skin like lightning sometimes tear and bleed and the tears heal quickly yet the scars do not. The Mountain's magic tore him to pieces and its vengeance heals slowly. He drowns a thousand times but the broken fang still remains.
Every time his bloodshot eyes open up on the watery grave he's been buried in, every time he's ripped back from the edge of death, he brings shadows with him and they curl around him in the water, useless things that follow no instruction, perform no tasks, but seem to match his frenetic emotions with their whipping and pulsing. The creatures living here seem to avoid the shadows. The drowned man prefers this.
It never occurs to him to ask for help, so he drowns, and he dies, and he heals and he chokes, trapped beneath seaweed and rubble. He suffers and he does not find forgiveness. He does not seek it, either. Wherewolf nurses the bubble of hatred and anger that grows like cold fire in his breast, and waits for the day that he reaches for the magic well that contains his multitudes, and the duplicates leap forward again. When that day finally comes, the broken, drowning, half-mad, half-dead stallion uses the weak backs of the two hairless doubles he manages to summon to free him from the toppled stone and derelict, and to thrust himself toward land.
The shadows rise first, excited, poorly constrained, still useless. Wherewolf comes shortly after, tangled with seaweed, with red algae turning his coat the color of old blood and barnacles clinging to his skin. He comes in a rage, wings dragging, shadows wild, and his anger sets itself on the first thing that catches his eye. The red girl shies away from him, but she's too slow. He rushes her, catching her up in his fangs like a rag doll, her slight body thrown backward beneath him. The flotsam she snatches up and throws at him only fuels his anger, he wants to crush her, to bleed his own pains onto someone else, anyone else, and so clenches his jaw, waiting for the rush of blood to spill across his tongue.
He wants her to die, but something else happens when that broken fang punctures her jugular. There's no tide of blood, something surges out of him, instead, so forcefully that he stumbles forward and filly and stallion crash together in the muddy earth, his teeth still embedded deep in her neck, his own convulsing.
