the lord will smite thee with madness; daeryssa

[chantale]

my corrupt nature is empty of grace; bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. Monsters slumber, and they rise. She exists in fragments, her life is pieces, stitched together – there are gaps, sometimes years of them, when she slumbered. (Not that the body slumbered. But her mind was not there. Or, not her right one. If there is a right one, in a thing so warped as she.) Chantale was here. Then she was not. Blink, and there was a girl, blood-stained, throwing a heart at her feet. Blink, and there was a foal with wings folded delicate and bones as brittle as a sparrows. Blink, and someone is screaming, and there is blood on her legs, on her lips. Blink, and nothing. Blink, and here she is again. She looks as she always does – a thing of plastic, more sculpted than bred. It’s beautiful and horrifying, the way she’s put together, an ideal come to life and sent to walk among them. (Not that come to life is the right word, not exactly.) She is gray, a color of wet skies, of dishwater. Her skin is cool to the touch, slightly waxen, like a creature dead and waiting for rigor mortis to lay hands upon it. (Perhaps she is.) Nothing brought her here. Only the faint whim of her – a switch thrown, and the monster rises, once more Chantale in the body, once more my corpse masterpiece returning home in this queer gray vessel with eyes that are somehow too bright and too dead all at once. Her eyes rove like spotlights over the meadow because she is not looking, she is hunting. She is hunting for warmth, for things with shy smiles and slim bodies, for those who would fall to their knees before her. There is a stupid kind of animal cunning to my girl, see – perhaps why she has persisted for so long – and the cunning finds them and leeches on, parasitic. Sometimes she convinces herself she loves them. Maybe sometimes she does, but the love that spills from her is something vile, something so twisted and misshapen that to call it love would be laughable. And then, a girl: pale blue like the sky, striped in purple like royalty, and a smile breaks open on her face like a sore. She is graceless as she walks, steps heavy and belying the slow lurch of blood through her veins. But she makes her way, that sore-smile still on her greyed lips. “Hello,” she purrs to the girl, “my name is Chantale.” chantale how original a sin.