I cannot help but see my father in every glance and shift in attention. I smell him oozing off the ebony bark, hardly masked by the persistent smell of death rolling into my nostrils. I am angry. Angry that I smell him. More angry that this monstrosity is trying to hide him.
Heat sets in around, the thick roof of pine attempting to shade our positions, but I feel her seep in. Turkish coils tighter, I feel his frustration with the corpse in how my leg begins to numb under his grasp. I can see him, I can see his bones break, Smother. I want to break his leg.
Hush, Turkish. He is already broken.
“She must be tough, her heart is still beating unlike yours,” I am nonchalant in my response; he talks enough for everyone. Speaks like he is of some sort of importance: no one of Beqanna is important. We are all chess pieces in her dangerous game. At the end of our match, we all will fall.
My dear friend slithers up my leg, vibrant albino yellow tones slithering aboard my coat, all twelve feet of him coiling as he moves with gracefulness before wrapping himself around my neck like a tacky scarf. His head rises, yellow eyes focusing on his surroundings, a pink tongue darting in and out analyzing his senses.
“You’re right, death is rock bottom and I have no need to dig you deeper. Certainly you will stay, like that fly persistently circling your skull, oh holyness,” he wants to appear intimidating, godly, untouchable, but he is no more than a bag of bones come to wake; one whom talks too much of nothing at all. “However, your annoying banters will become irrelevant, ignored, and much like before, you will become forgotten again. No one cares to listen.”
Turkish lets out a violent hiss, the noise so loud a few ravens trick from the trees with his fangs protruding from his jaw. Regardless of the obvious fact the monster will remain unfazed, I applaud my co-half his warning. Turkish is my guardian, my shield, my right hand, my hunting friend. Together we kill, and together we die. Everyone is aware this creature craves a reaction, longs for panic, anger, fear—he comes back seeking what I can only assume to be power, and what a fool he is to think he will earn it. No one cares of your past, what you’ve done, it gets washed away with time like the tide washes away footprints along the sand.
Wash away, let the bones float into water and be fed on by sea life.
“Now stop talking, you’ve given me a headache,” my attention completely changes, for this intruder is far beyond entertaining by now, solidifying my statement with a frank flick of my tail. Killdare and the blue female is who I wish to focus on, my own frozen eyes settling on their strong frames, seeing their aggravated pupils focused on the creature from the ground.
“I am Smother, and this is Turkish. We are here to pledge ourselves to the Chamber,” a passive tone, as if the grim reaper is not actually reeking up the kingdom and as if images of my dying father are not on replay. Oh, how I love imagining that one. “I would like to be placed wherever you need me, however I would like to give you the knowledge that I am here to earn my roll of High Priestess, and I will earn it in whatever way you seem fit.”
My agenda is unclear, not yet written. I am a stranger, an outsider, a women with a murderous history and a habit of falling into blackness.
Let me show you what happens when I run to light.
I am at her service.
We, are at her service.