I'm rotting inside
My flesh turns to dust
Elysha.
The name is sweet on its lips, honeying its tongue for the first time since they were children. At one point in time, it had a heart with compassion, but only for her. They shared a womb and cradled close to one another for months and months. It remembers that now as its eyes find hers, but its soul is too far gone to remember that meager adoration for her. Although it doesn’t hate her – it couldn’t hate its own womb-mate – it finds itself strung in an odd purgatory between familiarity and strangers. For once, it doesn’t entirely know how to react, how to drink in the long-lost sight of her. ”Where—“ it begins but stops and purses its lips into a thin line. Would it change anything if it knew where she had gone? What if it knew who did it to her, what then?
Their relationship with father is so meager, almost entirely extinct. It remembers the magician faintly. Did he see his son as the monster it is now, or when it was whole and still relatively normal? It has looked like this for so, so long that often it forgets how life was before the blood pooled at its feet and before the hearts were pulled from their cages. Would their father punish his son for its acts, or would he praise it? Would he make it even more a monster like Core had?
It remembers so vividly.
The hooves that fell away and the talons that ripped through flesh. Its screams and groans permeated the air and it crumbled to the ground in its own blood and pain. Bones were shifted and tendons realigned. Its legs broke and cracked then healed together as magic wove through its body and created something much more dangerous and feral. It still remembers the sound of crunching ligaments and bones like it was being destroyed, punished. When its teeth clamped shut to face the pain it tasted a new metallic sensation that became the fuel of its new lifestyle.
Everything changed in those few moments. Infection was no longer Elysha’s ‘Infy.’
It stares at her and hesitates when she calls it by its childhood name (a name shared only between siblings). It hesitates because it doesn’t know how fleeting of a chance this is or how their time apart should affect them. ”I’ve been here,” it finally murmurs, ”I haven’t really left.” It comes and goes, but never truly leaves. Beqanna always finds use for the hellhound. ”And you, where have you been all this time?” She wasn’t there to watch him flourish or to ground him. She simply wasn’t there and often it forgot that a twin existed.
infection
@[hanna]