I have sank into the shadows for awhile, I always do. Like a vampire closing the door on his red satin-filled coffin. And every time I sink into the abyss, I come back a little more ambitious, and a little more annoyed.
Evergreen trees overhang the pathway, like methodical arch ways into an undiscovered utopia. Except this place is discovered, horribly so. And it is no utopia or home sweet home. It is the kingdom of ash, and pine. It is my family tree, blossomed into one big chaotic mess. I have come to clean said mess.
I will deal with father another time. For now, I have come to brush up my fiery family name.
Grass blooms around me, shades of vivid emerald and lime-like green. I like to think it always looked like this, but I remember her in a dimmer filter. I remember snow cold to the touch, and the feel of nervous sweat creeping along my chest like a ghost stalking amongst the shadows.
My tail flicks in annoyance as Turkish rearranges himself into a more comfortable position along my back, the curve of his tail raveled in my mane. His pink tongue sleeks out, “is this her famous ‘chamber’?”
My eyes narrow, and instinctively my muscles tense into fits of anger as flashes of dear daddy Warship erupt into my head and I let out a rushed whisper, “her famous chamber indeed.” Though I am most certain he feels my anger, and suppressing my frustration isn’t necessary. He is, after all, the other part of my soul in physical form.
I do not wait to be greeted at the border. Once a chamber slave, always a chamber slave. It welcomes me with freshly fallen pine needles across my rump, and an irritating hole in the pit of my stomach. Every stride is another vivid imagine of my last memory here.
Every step.
And that is when I am suddenly interrupted with a foul smell of rotting flesh. Something so disgraceful I now understand why I eat after I kill.
He holds himself with an obvious statement of arrogance (fairly cocky for a king already previously dead), and his body is a disgusting mess of corpse verses zombie covered in flesh eating maggots and rotting flaps of skin.
Of course something so hideous cannot go unseen for long, and while I meandered to his company another curious female did the same. I almost feel sad for the little doe-like mare, taken back by the atrocious view of death coming back to life, but this is Beqanna.
The land of ridiculousness.
Oh but arrives his royal highness rushing to her aid (or not really, I don’t care). Hallelujah, someone to guide this abomination back to the grave before he infects the entire kingdom with whatever disease(s) he carries.
I am amused by the trio, so amused it would be unfair to just linger at the sidelines. I feel Turkish slink down my back hind leg and coil himself into a more sustainable, secure position. He knows me too well.
“You say the Chamber wakes who she wants most… I say she kills who she no longer needs, and then fools who cheat and toy with black magic somehow rise again,” Killdare doesn’t know me, he doesn’t need to. I like him. Not in attraction, but in respect. Well, anyone looks respectable standing beside a risen corpse from the grave, “even when no one called them back in the first place.”
Blue eyes, a Kindling trademark, settle on the zombie before her, “now. I am sorry, who are you?”