Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
Skin falls, bells toll,
(do they?)
and the stallion reigns. There are shouts – ones of victory, ones of pain – and some horses notice her. Some do not. Another piece of her skin sloughs off, and she thinks: I am being remade.
She almost laughs, but her lips no longer remember what to do.
The seal begins to melt in her mouth like a piece of sugar-spun candy. It feels cool and metallic on her tongue, and she feels the seal sinking through her skin, through her veins.
It feels hot, like fire.
It feels cold, like ice.
It feels like everything and nothing and she realizes what the exact flavor of it is: power. The power of the seal, whatever ancient magic had created it now resides in her as much as any organ.
She is the seal – or, at least, part of it.
Someone screams, and she realizes it is the stallion, furious at being denied. Some have risen up against him, including Hickory.
(And have their own seal pieces melted into them, merged? She thinks they have.)
Blink, and the world changes.
Blank, and the warrior who had raked her teeth across Hickory’s back is gone, vanished from existence.
Blink, and there is the lamb.
(The abyss stares back into you.)
As before, she is transfixed and terrified both when she looks upon the horned being.
It touches another seal, almost delicately. The resulting sound is like a bomb, the pieces of the stone flying through the air. But she is ready; now, ready to hunt down the next piece. She can already taste it on her tongue.
But before she can move the sound of hoofbeats echoes in the now-still air, a new harbinger approaches under the deadening sky. The strange mutated creatures begin to draw close to Conquest, whose eyes are alight again with anticipation.
She knows a creature that he anticipates cannot be a good creature at all.
She tries to move before the next harbinger comes, begins her search anew. She focuses on the stone’s power inside of her, as if it could call out for its brethren, but feels only silence in her veins.
Another name comes apropos of nothing: War.
(The darkness is like a song.)
She tries to block him - it - out. Tries to listen for the stone.
I am the seal, she tells herself, and whether this comforts or frightens, she doesn’t know.
War comes closer, his breath too-loud in the stillness. She scrambles forward. The blood on her back has begun to dry under the dull light of the sickle sun, and her skin does not seem to be dropping off in such large pieces.
The seal is healing me, she thinks, but whether this is a thing real or imagined, we cannot say.
Maybe it’s the seal in her blood or maybe it’s luck, but she finds another piece, quicker this time. She does not hesitate, takes it between her lips again, and this once melts, too, a taste like pennies in her mouth.
She feels stronger, imbued with ancient magic she should never have touched.
She sees a hellhound emerge; try to take its meal in the form of a stallion. There is screaming, now, and a gibbous howling that makes her skin prickle in gooseflesh. She runs away from it, tries to taste the power in her throat.
She sees a girl – a child, really. Blink, and the girl is gone. For a moment she thinks it’s one of them, one of the minions, but when the girl flickers back into existence she sees just how much blood there is, sees the skin in tatters, and realizes that the girl is like the rest of them – pawns in a larger game.
It shouldn’t matter, that War would do this to a child. It especially shouldn’t matter to her; Hickory has long lived a life of nothingness, of anhedonia. She has no children, no siblings; she is the only one who persists in a dismal lineage.
It shouldn’t matter, yet her feet are drawing her forward, and she swears when she lays eyes on War the seals inside her light up and she gasps.
“You can’t,” she tells him as he recoils like a snake for another bite of the bloody, flickering girl, and maybe her voice shakes and maybe it doesn’t, maybe the abyss stares back or maybe she blinks.
“You can’t,” she says again, this time stronger. He’s stopped, and watches her now, his gaze like a lead weight. She wonders how long before she’d crumble, under such a gaze.
“Say it again,” he says, and his voice is like slaughter, something gravelly and pitted, rasping.
“You can’t.”
You should know this – Hickory is not a fighter.
But the woman who stands now has an old magic in her blood and swears she can feel it. The woman who stands now sheds anhedonia as she once had skin.
The woman who stands now stares into the abyss, and if it stares back, so be it.
They meet like a waves crashing on the shore, his body barreling into hers. Something snaps inside her, dry and brittle, and for a moment she wonders at the sound until the pain of her broken ribs sings – screams – out.
But it doesn’t matter – pain has never mattered – because she has a piece of his flesh in her mouth. It doesn’t melt as the seals did, instead it tastes of rot and decay, but she chews and swallows nonetheless.
It will make it sick, likely, but she finds she doesn’t care.
“You can’t,” she says again, a taunt, and War comes forth once more to lay ruin upon her. His hooves find her shoulders, her withers. His teeth rake railways across her softened skin and it curls in his teeth like ribbons.
She is laughing. Or screaming. Some noise pours from her lips, something high and wicked, so far gone that the precise nature of the sound no longer matters.
Another comes. Or maybe War grows bored with her. She doesn’t know, only knows that he does leave, eventually.
(Time’s grown strange. Was it an hour? A minute?)
She is left half-broken. It hurts to inhale. She is left bloody, scrapes along much of her body.
But she is also left with the taste of putrid flesh in her mouth and an incomprehensible smile.
She looks at the girl. She’d tried to protect her, but she isn’t sure the girl will make it anyway.
“I’m Hickory,” she says, and a tooth spills from between her lips when she says it, knocked loose by War.
She looks at it on the ground, white and gleaming, and wonders if she will leave all her bones here on this desolate purgatorial wasteland.
The woman who stands now knows sickness, knows war, and knows a part of her loves it.
hickory
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hickory finds another seal piece, sees war attack elve, sort of tries to protect her by taunting War, gets beat up by war. feel free to use her, just don't like murder her or anything :///
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